Runeblade

Kaius watched another man die. It had barely taken an instant. One moment, the man was fifty longstrides down the line from him, just another face holding a spear.

The next a hawk with a wingspan as large as a man’s slammed into his chest. He’d just...fallen; screamed his way down from the wall until he’d hit the street with a wet crack.

Kaius swallowed, driving the image of the man's flattened skull from his mind. He hadn’t been able to do anything. He could have killed the beast in a single cut, but he couldn’t be everywhere.

All it had taken was a moment of distraction — the militiaman being just a little less braced than his fellows on either side.

Another breath quelled the hole inside of him. Was life really so cheap?

Sliding forwards, he cleaved through a buzzing moth as large as his head. His section of the wall was littered with dead beasts. They just didn’t stop coming — apparently just a little too slow, and a little too bestial to realise his gap in the opening was not a weakness.

It almost made it hard to focus on his true target, the black tide of gnashing teeth that crashed towards the walls.

Just a little further. The Tyrant's forces were almost at the dragon’s teeth. Damn the monstrosity that led this army, but its tactics had worked. With their archers and mages tied up with the swarming flock above them, the ground forces had been able to advance almost entirely unhindered.

No matter, they would hit the scattered spikes of stone like they were solid walls. As the front collapsed, the charging creatures behind would only drive their vanguard deeper onto the spikes.

It would be a cascade — a teaming mass of uncoordinated flesh. Perfect for a Starfall.

Or seven of them.

It was a barrage that took almost his entire pool of mana to cast. A preparation he had made to break their initial charge. It would leave him vulnerable, limited to using only a fraction of his normal arsenal of spells. There would be little opportunity to sit down and reinscribe during the fight, but it would be worth it.

Kaius fingers twitched as he watched the army, as if he could cut their number down with blade alone. It was a good thing both he and Porkchop had been placed where they were — it was going to be a slaughter, warmagic or no.

The Tyrant’s forces had formed themselves into a great wedge, headed by beasts so large that they might as well have been siege engines unto themselves.

Irontusks, as well as squat armour-plated bull creatures, and more joined a menagerie that formed a hammer. One that would strike directly at the gate.

If he couldn’t break their charge, that was.

His heart thumped heavy in his chest. Either he slaughtered this advance alone, or hundreds of guards would die.

All around him, men fought, desperately doing what they could to fend off the aerial beasts. Constant bombardment may have held the flock at bay, but even injured, each creature that reached the walls was vicious. Even one took multiple guards to take down, rarely without injury.

Kaius had no eyes for their plight, focused so thoroughly on the steady thump of thousands of feet on the earth.

His heart beat, and the army drew closer. They were bare longstrides from the dragon’s teeth.

Every muscle in his body was tense, like a warbow under full draw. H wrapped his Will around seven inscriptions. Each one was a roiling packet of mana forced into false stability; weapons of destruction to the last, they hungered to be set free.

His heart beat again.

Suicidal and rabid, the vanguard rammed the dragon’s teeth. Angled pikes of stone ripped through hide, scale and flesh alike, driving deep. Blood sprayed wide, a terrible baying call of agony filled the night.

Just another moment! He only needed the ranks to buckle!

Yet to his dread, he watched energy flash through the leading ranks of beasts. Bodies toughened, gleaming shields of a dozen affinities snapped into existence, and charging monstrosities accelerated.

Stone broke. Shaped into deadly traps or not, common granite failed in the path of system-backed might. The vanguard's advance continued, slowed but not broken.

Alarm spiked, a flash of cold that spread down Kaius’s back. He wanted nothing more than to unleash his spells — wipe the threat away.

It would have been folly, he had to wait. Only the first row of teeth had been failed — hundreds more still separated the tyrant's ground forces from the wall.

Focusing his vision, he watched the vanguard of massive creatures drive themselves deeper onto the spikes, widening their wounds. Blood flowed in a great ocean, a bounty of red that watered the parched ground surrounding the city.

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They were slowing!

Behind the vanguard, momentum and rabid fury drove the remaining forces onwards. They slammed into the back of the front line.

An Irontusk buckled — the unexpected crush driving a stone spike deep into its throat.

Momentum died, leaving only a heaving crowd that desperately jostled towards the city. More were coming. Wide, flanking lines that advanced behind the wedge that raced for the eastern gate, but they too would be slowed. Forced to clamber over obstacles that only the most adroit would be able to ignore, they would be helpless against the archers on the walls.

It was exactly the moment Kaius had been waiting for.

Seven spells, seven promises of obliteration.

His mind ached as mana burned through his glyphs. Never before had he felt such strain, a raging torrent that scoured him with a god’s fury, bucking against his grip as he sought to direct their potency.

Glyphbinding was supposed to make him immune to manaburn, wasn’t it? Yet the natural conduits connected to his glyphs burned. It was liquid acid, a blistering heat that shot through his arms to stab directly into his chest.

He almost lost his grip; the spells surged, threatening an uncontrolled eruption. The very thought of it sent a bolt of stark shock through him. Hundreds would die — none of the guards would stand a chance of surviving so many Starfalls.

Gritting his teeth, Kaius martialled his will, forcing his focus out onto the army that was quagmired in the stone dragon’s teeth. Reaching for his Authority, Kaius wrapped the burgeoning spells in a grip of iron — forcing them to obey his commands.

Seven spells; seven fields layered across the wedge formation. Each one touched edge to edge, covering as little of the remaining dragon’s teeth as he could manage.

His arms shook with the strain; the agony that felt like he had shoved them into a stoked forge. They burned with visible light, glowing a furious orange as the remnants of his spellhymns dissolved into embers.

He cast.

Fields of black opened, invisible against the night sky to all who could not sense the brilliance of the mana wrapped up within their forms.

Kaius staggered, gasping — yet he refused to look away.

Beasts, furiously snapping and clawing as they tried to clamber over their skewered vanguards, suddenly looked up.

Burning light banished the dark. Flaming boulders descended in their dozens, whipping the surrounding air until it screamed.

Gore exploded, mangled flesh and stray limbs thrown free as the first star descended to the earth. Then it happened again, and again. A bombardment that shredded the Tyrant’s forces in a wave unending.

Kaius’s migraine worsened as the system chimed so frequently it might as well have been a single, drawn out note. He grinned, gods it was glorious. Definitely worth feeling like he’d shoved his hands into a meat grinder.

When his spells winked out, there was a single moment of silence. Every guard, and every beast stared at the devastation — a pockmarked field of craters, each filled frothy red mud and broken bodies.

“Hells, save some for me!” Porkchop grumbled, though Kaius could feel his brother was more impressed than anything else.

Kaius just allowed himself to enjoy a moment to breathe.

He knew they still had much to do — his bombardment had only slain a fraction of the Tyrant’s forces, a single contingent making a play at the gates. Beasts still gathered in their many thousands, from the smallest hare to the hulking forms of great monstrosities. Yet they were still — their charge broken against stone fortifications and stellar devastation.

The moment of frozen time ended as a single burning orb cut across the night sky. It was familiar: solar magic wrapped in a barely stable shell. Ianmus’s Preeminent Halo.

It slammed into the beasts, right at the far end of the cratered field his own Starfalls had left in their wake. On impact, it expanded — a burning orb that consumed a dozen beasts with gluttony.

A bare morsel compared to his own fatalities. Kaius laughed, even as roars of fury rippled down the lines of the attacking beasts, and his friend’s spell signaled a return to battle.

“Glyphbinding is such bullshit!” Ianmus said through the artefact in his ear.

“You’re just jealous. I will readily admit I feel like my hands have been flayed, though.” He replied, inspecting the glyphs that wrapped from the back of his hands and up his wrists.

The skin around the black lines of his inscriptions was split and red raw. That didn’t concern him — the physical injuries were almost completely gone. No, what was troublesome was the ache he felt in his circuits. Deep down, he knew that even avoiding another burst like that, casting any spell would worsen the damage. Especially from Drakthar itself.

“How long does it take to recover from manaburn?” he asked.

“Thank the gods, I was ready to throw myself from this if you managed that without backlash. It’s hard to tell — if it's just pain in your circuits, maybe a few hours. I’d hold off on casting or inscribing until then. No mana tonics either.” Ianmus replied.

“Will you be alright on the wall without your magic?” Kenva asked.

“Of course.”

Blade work was such a large part of his class for a reason. He’d do just fine without magic — even if it would be annoying to avoid Mystic’s Rend and Hymnfocus. Inevitably, the beasts would reach the walls — he’d have to work hard to make sure they didn’t take them.

Watching the tyrant's remaining forces pick their way across the dragon's teeth under heavy fire, Kaius caught half a dozen nearby guards staring at him.

One of them gulped as he raised his brow in their direction.

“Can you do that again?”

He shook his head, “It's down to good old steel, now.”

It would have to be enough.