Chapter 22: The Battle
The path led to a tight lane that slithered from beside the chaotic mess, seperated from the thick of the battle by a long wall that stretched across the cave. It created a corridor of its own where dozens of Skeleton Soldiers clad in broken plates and wielding weapons of rust and worn metal pressed into the men in shining armors.
From what Valens could see, the two sides were in a deadlock even though the humans were clearly the stronger side. The Skeleton Soldiers made up for their lack of strength with numbers and a fervent state of mindless fury. They didn’t hiss when carved by a sword. They didn’t stagger when an axe chopped halfway into their chests. They fought, and thrashed, and clawed at whatever living tissue they could see before their eyes.
They were a terrible bunch, Valens had to say, but at least they didn’t have any of those Wards and hideous monsters in the lane. Most of them were too large to fit into the small corridor anyway, which was probably why there was only a constant line of Skeletons being directed there to keep the numbers up.
Still dangerous.
Apathy settled hard over his mind, and he started thinking about the ways with which he could provide himself and the group some relief in this grand endeavor. There was a terrifying line of animated corpses waiting a few paces ahead, and a constant trickle from the main horde that fed into their ranks.
Cut the lifeline.
Valens nodded as Apathy forced the reek of rot and the din of chaos away. What he left with was a cold detachment from the surroundings that allowed him to focus on the path ahead. There was a tight gap on the corridor wall through which the Skeletons had to pass to join their stubborn companions.
“I’ll patch that hole,” he said as Nomad and Celme bounded ahead. When they looked at him he pointed a finger to the hole. “That’ll cut their supply line. It’ll probably turn a few eyes toward here, so we have to act fast if we don’t want to be bombarded by that Necromancer’s foul magic.”
“You can do that?” Celme’s rasped, face blotchy pink with ungodly amounts of blood underneath the skin. The Resonance told Valens that everything in the woman's body was boiling like a broth cooked in a human-shaped cauldron.
A simple nod was the answer he decided to go with. He hadn’t the time to tell the woman that the act of magical healing wasn’t something even an accomplished Magus could easily perform. One had to go through years of specific study and practice to even get the much-respected title of Healer in this field. Compared to that, performing a few spells wasn’t something worth a mention.
They had gods here, though, with ways to grant humans their blessings. I wonder how that works?
He shook off the nauseating notion that anyone could become a Healer through some godly ritual in this world, and instead focused on the spell formulae for the Gravitating Earth waiting at the edge of his mind. Unlike Earth Magi who had to imprint the shape or the dimensions of the piece they wanted to move into the spell diagram with perfect detail, he only had to project the vacancy in the long wall’s Resonance which aligned seamlessly with the real gap in his vision into the spell diagram, and move the earth mana to patch that hole in the Resonance.