Chapter 661: Cut the Head
Noah was heading back to the pass when Shade’s blast came at him from the left.
Not aimed at him. Aimed at the dragon that had been tracking his descent from above, a black scaled Arthur dragon that had locked onto the moving shape dropping through the cloud layer and had made the reasonable assumption that anything falling that fast from that direction was worth intercepting. Shade had seen it before Noah had and the corroding burst that came from the black dragon’s mouth caught Arthur’s dragon across the wing joint and the animal peeled away from the pursuit with its membrane dissolving at the edges.
Noah went through the dissipating mist of it and kept falling.
’Thirty seconds to ground level,’ he thought, reading the battlefield below him the way he had learned to read it from altitude, the whole shape of it visible in a way that it never was from inside it. ’The harbor line is gone. They’ve been pushed back to the village’s eastern edge. The one horns are spread through the formation doing what one horns do which is make the work of keeping people alive very difficult very fast.’
He could see the craters from here.
Not the ones from his fight on the mountain. The ones on the battlefield below. Scattered across the approach road and the field and the harbor square in a pattern that told the story of what had been happening while he was on the mountain with the four horn. Each crater marked a place where something had hit the ground with enough force to rearrange it, and craters that size did not come from human fighters regardless of their ability level.
One horns made craters like that when they were annoyed.
BOOM!!
He hit the ground at the field’s eastern edge and the E.N.D armor absorbed the landing through the Harbinger Skin passive and the void energy in the channels climbed by a number that felt like drawing a full breath after too long underwater.
Three things happened in the two seconds after his boots found the earth.
A one horn twenty feet to his left registered his arrival and turned toward him with the reorientation of something that had found a new priority. A knight to his right who had been backpedaling from a two horn stumbled over the edge of a crater and went down. And somewhere above him Ares’s chest began glowing that deep volcanic red that meant the Inferno Storm was building.
Noah threw Egor’s hammer at the one horn.
Not a combat throw. A calculated redirect, the golden enhancement energy trailing off the spinning weapon as it crossed the twenty feet between them and connected with the one horn’s chest, and the one horn took the hit and stumbled back one step which was one step more than most things could claim, and Noah was already across the distance with Gorrauth’s sword coming around at the junction of the creature’s neck and shoulder.
The red mist ran into the wound.
The one horn’s healing factor hit the Gorrauth energy and stuttered, the tissue at the wound site losing its rhythm, and Noah’s left hand recalled the hammer from where it had bounced and drove it into the same point in a single continuous motion.
KRACK!!
The one horn went down.
It started getting up.
He hit it again, same point, the VPT compression loading through the hammer’s face and driving through the disrupted tissue, and this time it stayed down long enough for three dragon knights who had been watching from eight feet away with expressions that had not yet resolved into words to close in and add their own output to the problem.
"THE HEAD AND CHEST!" Noah’s voice went over the field. "VPT OR NOTHING! GROUPS OF THREE MINIMUM!"
A knight he did not recognize grabbed his arm as he was already moving. "That sword," the knight said. His face was carrying something between recognition and alarm. "That is Gorrauth’s weapon. That is the warden’s sword from the second floor of the gate. How do you—"
"Later," Noah said, and pulled his arm free.
The two horn that had sent the knight stumbling was still in the field twenty feet ahead, and it was currently engaged with four dragon knights who were learning in real time what it meant to fight something that healed faster than they could damage it. One of them had a blessed blade that crackled with electricity, the same type as the knight from earlier, and he was hitting the two horn across the chest with everything the weapon could generate and the two horn was absorbing it and turning toward him with the expression of something that had registered the attack as a minor inconvenience.
"THEY HEAL!" someone was screaming from deeper in the formation. "WHY DO THEY KEEP HEALING! WHAT ARE THESE THINGS!"
Noah went in from the two horn’s blindside.
Gorrauth’s sword found the base of its skull and the red mist ran deep and Noah felt the blade’s energy engage with the two horn’s biology the way it had engaged with the four horn’s, disrupting the healing rhythm at the wound site, and the two horn’s head dropped forward six inches before it caught itself.
The four dragon knights hit it simultaneously.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Four strikes at the disrupted point in four consecutive seconds and the two horn went to one knee and the electric blade knight hit it across the skull at full output while it was down and it hit the ground and did not immediately begin the process of standing back up.
"KEEP HITTING IT!" Noah said, already moving. "IT WILL STAND BACK UP! DO NOT STOP!"
Above the field, Ares released Inferno Storm.
The beam came down at an angle that covered the western approach where the largest cluster of Arthur’s surviving soldiers had reformed after the four horn’s arrival had disrupted everything, and the beam was wide and the soldiers in its path had approximately enough time to understand what was happening before the understanding became irrelevant. The temperature in the field climbed thirty degrees in two seconds, the air itself shimmering in the beam’s wake, and the soldiers who were not in its direct path were backpedaling away from the heat with the instinct of people who had just been given a very clear piece of information about their situation.
Shade came through the cloud layer above the eastern flank.
The Cluster Bubble Salvo went into Arthur’s aerial formation and the small detonations scattered three dragons from their approach angle simultaneously, the riders fighting their mounts rather than directing them, the formation breaking into individual problems rather than a coordinated assault.
Nami was on Shade’s back with the borrowed arrow already drawn back, Soren’s hands on her shoulders, the yellow glow running from his palms through her body and down her arms and into the arrow, and she picked a target from the breaking formation with the same unhurried patience Pip had demonstrated from the tower at Harrowfield.
She released.
The arrow picked up speed at the midpoint of its flight and hit a rider between helmet and gorget and the dragon below him immediately made new decisions about its heading.
Pip’s chakram was already in the air.
It found the wing joint of the nearest grounded dragon with the explosive effect that had rocked Arthur’s aerial formation over the harbor, and the dragon that had been in the process of recovering from Shade’s blast found itself making a much more urgent set of decisions about altitude.
BOOM!!
On the ground, Werner hit a one horn.
His gauntlet’s channel patterns were running at the level they ran when Werner had stopped rationing the output and committed to an exchange, the golden heat shimmer visible in the air around his remaining fist, and the discharge on contact blew through the one horn’s defensive response and found the skull beneath, and the one horn went sideways into the earth and Werner was already turning to the next problem with the expression he wore when he had run out of everything except function.
Brom hit a two horn from behind with his enhancement at full extension, his frame carrying the mass of someone who had made a choice about the current situation and the decision was forward, and the two horn registered the impact as something worth paying attention to and turned away from the three knights it had been dismantling to address the new development.
Which gave the three knights time to recover.
Which was the point.
Noah moved through the field reading it the way he had learned to read fields in another world in another life, the E.N.D armor’s void energy channels lighting up with each impact it absorbed, the Harbinger Skin passive working continuously, storing, building. Three exchanges with one horns that he ended with the Gorrauth sword disrupting and the hammer finishing. Two assists on two horns where his disruption gave other knights the window they needed. One moment where a regular knight in front of him went down and stayed down and Noah stood over the man’s position until the one horn responsible found something more interesting to address.
Then he stopped.
’Now,’ he thought.
[Warden’s Wake: Activated]
Everything the armor had absorbed since the mountain, every impact from the four horn’s fists, every blast from Shade’s path through the air, every hit from the one horns and two horns and the field’s general chaos of kinetic violence, released simultaneously in every direction from the E.N.D armor’s surface.
The burst was not fire and was not lightning and was not void energy in any form that the knights around him would have recognized. It was force, pure accumulated force, radiating outward in a ring that covered thirty feet in every direction and hit everything in that radius at the same moment with the combined weight of everything that had been trying to hurt Noah for the last forty minutes.
The one horns in the radius went down.
The two horn at the ring’s edge went sideways.
The knights in the radius, the friendly ones, felt it as a strong wind, a pressure wave that pushed at them without the force’s teeth because the Harbinger Skin passive had stored the hostile energy and returned the hostile energy and it seemed somehow, the armor knew the difference.
The field around Noah was clear for four seconds.
Four seconds was enough.
Older knights at the battle’s edge were staring. Not at the battle. At Noah. At the armor running purple-black in the morning light with the dragon heart pulsing at its center and Egor’s hammer in one hand and Gorrauth’s sword in the other and the field around him holding the evidence of what the Warden’s Wake had just done to it.
"Is that," one of them said.
"That is Egor’s hammer," another said. "Why does that boy have Egor’s hammer."
"And that sword. That sword is from the gate. The second floor. One of the younger knights told me. That sword belonged to the warden of the second floor and it vanished when the boy touched it and now—"
"What is his blessed item."
Nobody answered that because nobody had an answer that fit any framework they currently possessed.
---
The battle ended the way the harbor battle had ended. By degrees, each degree purchased at a cost, the resistance thinning as the remaining one horns were brought down by groups of three and four working the head and chest in combination, and the two horns fell last, each one requiring sustained coordinated output that left the knights who finished them sitting on the ground afterward with the expression of people who had spent everything they had and were doing an inventory of what remained.
Which was not much.
But it was enough.
Noah stood in the field as the last sounds of active combat faded and looked at what the pass and the approaches around it looked like now. It looked like a place where something very serious had been decided. The kind of serious that took a long time to grow back over.
Pip descended from Shade thirty feet away and walked toward him with his chakram on his belt and his eyes moving across the E.N.D armor with the expression he wore when he was trying to process something through all available channels simultaneously.
Nami came behind him and said nothing for a moment, just looked.
"Is that," Pip said, "your blessed item."
"Yes," Noah said.
Pip looked at the dragon heart pulsing at the chest piece’s center. At the void energy in the seams. At Gorrauth’s sword in Noah’s left hand and the hammer in his right.
"Right," Pip said. He nodded once, slowly, the nod of a man filing an enormous amount of information under later. "Right."
Nami was still looking at him. Her expression had the quality it had when she was deciding between several things she could say and had not yet determined which one was appropriate. She settled on none of them and looked at the field instead.
The senior knight Ser Cott appeared from the direction of the command position at the pass’s entrance. He walked toward Noah with the stride of a man who had been managing a deteriorating situation and had just watched it become a different kind of situation and was not yet sure which kind was better for his blood pressure.
He stopped in front of Noah.
Looked at the armor. At the hammer. At the sword. At the field behind Noah.
"I was told," Ser Cott said carefully, "that you had gone to conduct recon."
"Yes," Noah said.
"I take it," Ser Cott said, "that recon meant winning one side of a war."
"Roughly," Noah said.
Ser Cott looked at the field one more time. At the craters from the Warden’s Wake. At the one horns and two horns down across the approach. At Ares still circling above with the last of the Inferno Storm heat visible in the shimmer around his body and Shade beside him with those violet-rimmed eyes reading the sky for remaining threats.
"Now that you have done that," Ser Cott said, "and now that you apparently have time on your hands. What is the next step."
Noah looked at the pass. At the road coming through it from the north. At the direction Arthur’s forces had been coming from since the harbor, the same bearing, the same origin point, the same army feeding from the same source.
’Securing this route was the first objective,’ he thought. ’Deny Arthur the harbor. Hold the pass. Make the coastal advance expensive. All of that is being done or has been done.’
’And none of it ends the war.’
’Arthur still has his army. Still has his dragons. Still has Harbingers that came from the water creatures and whatever produced them and wherever they came from. And word around is that he has a witch the council was whispering about before any of this started. He has been planning this for years and losing a harbor assault and a pass engagement is a cost he probably budgeted for.’
’You do not end a war by defending well.’
He looked at Ser Cott.
"We have secured the route," Noah said. "That buys time. Time is not victory." He looked at the pass and at the north beyond it. "Arthur has been planning this war for years. His army is large and his assets are considerable and as long as he is alive and directing it, losing pieces of it is just logistics to him." He looked at Ser Cott directly. "The logical move is to keep defending. Build the line. Hold the pass. Make him pay for every mile."
"And the illogical move?" Ser Cott said.
Noah looked at the north.
"Cut off the head," he said. "Stop fighting his army. Go after Arthur himself."
The field was quiet around them, the morning light finding the craters and the evidence of everything that had been decided here, and the knights who were close enough to hear what Noah had just said were looking at him with expressions that ranged from alarm to something that was not yet hope but was standing in hope’s general direction.
Ser Cott looked at him for a long moment.
"You are a recruit," he said.
"Yes," Noah said.
Ser Cott looked at the armor one more time. At the field. At the mountain in the distance where the missing section of ridge marked what Noah had been doing while they were holding the pass without him.
"I will send word to the capital," Ser Cott said.
"Do that," Noah said. "While you do, I need to know everything your scouts have on Arthur’s position."