The Greatest Archmage To Have Ever Lived [OP MC, LitRPG]

The bells of Enariel rang and they had not stopped, not once, through all of it. They rang now as they had rung then: steady, rhythmic, each peal threaded with wind-magic that carried Sael's name across the countryside in tones only those with the sensitivity to hear could parse.

The sound grew louder as the city came into view, its white walls catching the late afternoon sun in a way that made them glow bright. From this distance, Enariel looked almost untouched. But the illusion broke when you looked at the gates.

Or rather, at the space where the gates had been.

Sael floated at the head of the procession, if you could call it that. Behind and below him, six hundred orcs drifted through the air in clusters of twenty and thirty, held aloft by overlapping fields of gravitational manipulation that kept them suspended at a comfortable altitude while moving them forward at a pace that wouldn't make anyone else throw up.

The orcs, to their credit, were handling the experience better than they'd handled the teleportation. Most had gone rigid the moment their feet left the ground, hands gripping weapons or each other or simply clenching at their sides, but the initial panic had settled into a kind of numb, wide-eyed acceptance. A few had even managed to look down without immediately looking back up again.

Barek floated beside Sael at the front, arms crossed, jaw set, staring at the approaching city and bearing a stern expression. He was very likely cataloguing every piece of damage he'd done and filing it somewhere painful. The four generals drifted in a loose formation behind him, still unsteady, their newly uncorrupted eyes taking in the world with bewildered clarity.

And then Sael saw Oz.

The chicken was standing on a pile.

It was, Sael noted with a detached kind of observation, a very large pile. Perhaps a hundred orcs, stacked and layered and tangled together in a mound that rose a good four meters off the churned earth outside the ruined gates. Arms draped over legs, torsos pressed against backs, heads lolling at various angles. Weapons lay scattered around the base like shed scales, abandoned or knocked free during whatever had transpired here.

Oz stood at the summit, perfectly still, his small body silhouetted against the sky. He wasn't looking at anything in particular, or making any sound. He simply stood there, one beady eye fixed on the middle distance with an expression that conveyed, somehow, both total satisfaction and profound boredom.

Sael began his descent.

Behind him, the orc army, already tense, saw the pile. The murmuring started in the rear ranks and moved forward like a wave, growing louder and more agitated as each cluster of floating warriors got a clear view of what awaited them below.

Barek went very still and the generals stared.

Sael touched down thirty meters from the pile, his boots meeting the torn earth with barely a whisper. Behind him, the gravitational fields eased their holds in sequence, lowering clusters of orcs to the ground in careful, measured descents. The moment their feet touched solid earth, most of them dropped to their knees as their legs had been reminded their own function.

Barek landed beside him and stayed upright through what appeared to be pure stubbornness.

Sael walked toward the pile.

The ground here was a mess of churned dirt and scattered equipment. Deep gouges scored the earth in patterns that suggested a very fast chicken had moved through the area with considerable violence. Scorch marks blackened the soil in places, and several trees at the edge of the road had been snapped clean in half, their upper portions lying in the road like fallen sentinels.

He reached the base of the pile and looked up as Oz looked down.

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

Sael studied the orcs. Their chests moved shallowly, but it was present. Breathing. Bruised, battered, scorched in places, and arranged with absolutely no regard for comfort or dignity, but breathing. He could hear heartbeats, dozens of them layered over each other in an irregular chorus that confirmed what his eyes were telling him.

They were alive.

"Thank you," Sael said quietly, "for not killing them."

Oz's head tilted fractionally, one eye rotating to fix on Sael.

"Killing them would have been a mercy," Oz said. "The suffering is the point."

"...I see."

Well, him not killing them was a win, he supposed, though he wasn't sure if that would last long.

"Some of the ones near the bottom might suffocate," Sael said. "The compression on their chests, combined with the weight above them—"

"Then let them, Archmage. They fought," Oz continued. "They lost. The terms of combat do not include comfortable post-defeat accommodations. If their lungs cannot manage the modest burden of a few comrades pressing down on them, then their lungs are as weak as their sword arms, and the world will not miss either."

Sael looked at him for a moment longer, then reached out with a thread of telekinetic force and gently shifted the three orcs at the bottom of the pile whose breathing had grown the most labored.

Oz watched this happen and said nothing, which was, Sael had learned, the dragon's way of permitting something he didn't want to openly endorse.

Then Sael heard the horses.

The sound came from beyond the ruined gates: hooves on cobblestone, the jingle of harness and tack, the creak of wheels. He turned and saw a small procession emerging through the shattered entrance of Enariel. Two horses pulling a cart, flanked by a handful of people on foot. Civilians, not soldiers. Their clothes were dust-covered and their faces were drawn with exhaustion.

They were heading toward a spot just outside the gates, to the left of the entrance where the road widened into a flat stretch of packed earth, where the body lay.

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Sael had seen it on his first approach: the crumpled form outside the gates, headless, the matter spilled around it... he'd noted it and moved past it then, because there had been an army to confront and a corrupted elf to destroy. There hadn't been time to stop.

Now, though, there was.

The people from the cart had reached the body. An older woman knelt beside it and her movements were careful and reverent. Others stood nearby, some holding cloth, some holding nothing at all. Someone had draped a sheet over the body at some point: white fabric, now stained dark at the edges where it touched the ground.

The woman kneeling was arranging the cloth, adjusting it to cover the body more fully, tucking the edges underneath with tenderness. Her hands lingered at the neck, at the place where the fabric met the absence of what should have been above it.