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Siege

SIEGE

Book Six of the Eternal Journey, by C.J. Carella

Prologue: The End of the Beginning

Jake Duchamp (a.k.a. Archmage Jacobus of the Council of the Wise) reigned in his Fire Drake and tried to ignore the hopelessness of his situation..

The state of his adopted land reminded him of the end of the war he’d served in before being brought to the realms. The way the Krauts had been in 1945, specifically – Soviets pouring in from the East, Allies grinding steadily from the west. The Germans had been outnumbered, outgunned, factories bombed into wreckage, their manpower so desperately short they’d thrown children and old men into battle, sacrificing their lives to buy a little extra time to do… nothing. In the end, all they had accomplished had been to prolong their suffering.

The Nazi bastards had deserved every last bit of it; Jake couldn’t feel sorry for them. But the people of the First Realm didn’t deserve what was about to befall them. And there was precious little that he could do about it.

<Stop fretting, wizard,> Fire Drake Fred told him. <Your dour thoughts are distracting me. If I fly into a mountain, it will be on your head.>

“Sorry,” Jake muttered to his old companion.

Fred had been in a lousy mood since Jake had been murdered not too long ago. Since Jake was an Eternal, death hadn’t lasted long, but the Fire Drake was still fuming about it. Draconids, at least the sentient ones, tended to be temperamental. Jake envied Hawke Lightseeker for many things, but his companionable Drakofox was near the top of the list. Not that Jake would trade Fred for the world; his mount and ally had long been a fixture in his life. They were both set in their ways and hated to be separated for any length of time.

Jake only wished that things could go back to normal; his life had been pleasant enough. Politicking among the Council of the Wise could become tiresome, but like Fred’s moodiness, it was something Jake had gotten used to. But then a new batch of Eternals had arrived, upsetting applecarts throughout the Common Realm. And they had been but the harbingers of worse things to come.

<Staring at the cursed fog will not change its existence,> Fred went on.

Jake nodded, grimacing. He averted his eyes from the sky-high column of purple-black smoke that filled a diameter of fifteen miles. He could sense that it was still expanding towards Akila, gaining a foot or two every day. To even approach the fog meant a messy death for anyone without heavy-duty magical protection. Jacobus had seen a wing of Imperial cavalrymen stray too close to it and simply dissolve, men and mounts both. Pools of reddish sludge was all that remained of them. The mist was an ongoing Chaos and Undeath effect, incredibly powerful and lethal. Only the network of ward stones protecting the city and its environs were slowing its advance. Jake didn’t know how long that would last.

The Council was working overtime trying to come up with countermeasures, but Jake didn’t feel hopeful. Even before the Nerf Herder Guild had massacred most of its leaders, the Council had been dominated by placid, unambitious practitioners who had gently coasted to a stop on the Path to Power after reaching level twenty or so, choosing to enjoy a few centuries of wealth and comfort in Akila, a peaceful city in the eastern flank of the Ruby Empire.

Admittedly, most of the surviving Council members had been above average, or at least paranoid enough to pay the exorbitant prices Soul Jars required. They were more than willing to do their best now that their city – and a good-sized chunk of the continent around it – had been transported to a higher Realm.

The problem was that their best might not be good enough.

The Feral Lands were a level 30 to 45 Realm. The surviving Councilors’ average level was twenty-four, and they were the most powerful mages of the city. The lowliest denizens of the Feral Lands could pose a deadly threat to any one of them, Jake included. A single elite monster would wipe the floor with the whole Council. The power discrepancy was too great. As it was, Akila had been fortunate to be bounded on the north by a swampy coastline, and by friendly lands to the south and west. Said lands would bear the brunt of the initial contacts with the locals.

The deadly Chaos fog to the east was the main threat facing Akila. The creatures within weren’t native to the Feral Lands, but their levels were nearly as high, according to the reports brought back by the survivors of the last disastrous delve into the Malleus Mallum. The city would likely fall to the forces of Chaos long before the denizens of the Feral Lands became a problem.

“Let’s veer to the north,” he told Fred. “I want to check the coastline there on our way to Ostas.”

He was on the way to deliver help to the city of Ostas, an Imperial port to the northeast of the rising fog. Ostas was in a bad way; the Chaos Mists had effectively cut it off from Akila. Even worse, the ocean to the east had been replaced by a monster-infested sea. Even the smallest fish in the area were lethal, something the local fishermen had discovered the hard way. Now their boats had at least a few Adventurers aboard to help them bring the catch home without too many casualties.

Fishing boats still set off into those deadly waters because the city needed all the food it could get; its farmland was being steadily swallowed by the rolling mists, and their wards weren’t up to the job. Jake had filled his Bonded Vault with several tons of supplies, including ward stones, spell scrolls, enchanted weapons and potions. It was all that Akila could spare, and it was probably not going to be enough.

What they needed was a way to evacuate all thirty thousand inhabitants in the city – and three times as many living in the countryside around it, scattered in farming and fishing villages. Portals were a possibility, but the ley line that ran directly between Akila and Ostas also went through the Chaos Mists. Trying to teleport through that conduit would be suicidal.

There was an alternate ley line, one that ran straight south where it intersected an east-west line that touched upon the Stronghold of Serenity in the Sunset Valley. Because two ley lines were involved, the energy costs involved were high, and someone would need to set up one or more portals. Jake planned on asking Hawke Lightseeker, Lord of the Sunset Valley, to do just that. Hawke would most likely help, or try to. He was that kind of guy.

But all of that could wait. Fred’s flight path had taken them over the swamps that reached all the way to the sea. Salt and fresh water combined into a brackish mix that only specialized plants and animals thrived in. Few people lived in the swamp, the Green Coven among them. The hundred or so witches and their families controlled the swamplands, allowing a few trappers and smugglers in and scaring off everyone else. Now they would be the first line of defense against any enemies coming from the north.

The vast blue-green ocean beyond the swamplands filled his sight all the way to the horizon. Jake could see a few islands in the distance, islands that hadn’t been on the maps before. At some point, someone should visit them to see if there were resources to be had there. Not until any would-be explorers gained several levels, however. Such trips would be suicidally dangerous otherwise.

Something was off with one of the islands. It took Jake a moment to realize that it was moving.

A spell magnified his vision a hundredfold, allowing him to see something shaped like a hybrid of a turtle and a squid, among other things. The portion above the water was over two thousand feet long, and a closer look made it clear that was just the tip of the iceberg. The monster moved slowly, and thankfully not on a southerly direction. Jake tried to imagine battling such a creature. He had fought giant monsters before, but they were puppies in comparison to that behemoth.

The Feral Lands was their new home. Or perhaps only their grave.

“I’ve seen enough,” Jake told Fred. “Let’s go to Ostas and deliver the supplies.”

He tried to overcome the feeling that all he’d accomplish was to delay the inevitable.

* * *

“We lost another one,” Arbiter Nonaginta announced.

Arbiter Vicesimo had been watching a scuffle between two Great Beasts that was likely going to spill into the Containment Zone, to the detriment of all. A part of his consciousness continued to watch the skyscraper-sized monsters as they tore through the landscape and each other with wild abandon. The rest focused on his colleague.

“Show me.”

The view shifted and Vice found himself staring at a burning village. Small green-skinned figures – Goblins – ran among the smoldering buildings; large, scaly humanoids with sharklike heads chased them down one by one. The Arbiter had seen enough massacres to know that it was all over for the poor Goblin bastards: he couldn’t spot any organized resistance, just helpless victims kicking and screaming before their inevitable end.

“That was the last of the Goblin villages on the southeast quadrant,” Nonaginta explained.

Vice was disappointed but not surprised. The coastal settlements on the south were isolated from the rest of the Zone by nearly impassable mountains. The few Adventurers that rose among the Goblins quickly left for greener pastures. Farmers and fishermen for the most part, the villagers had little magic, few weapons, and depended mostly on their tribal Shamans (most of them below level 10) for defense.

They were like children dropped into the deep end of the pool before learning to swim. Their stretch of coast was now connected to the Merciless Sea, where Tritonian city-states vied for power with Merfolk tribes and the Cult of the Depths. The Cult’s mutates included the Shark Folk who had begun raiding the Goblins’ fishing villages within hours of the Containment Zone’s arrival.

It had taken nine days for the small communities to be wiped out.

“It could have been worse,” Vice commented. “The Goblins could have been corrupted by The Court of Thorns.”

“A handful of Chaos missionaries made it to that village two days ago,” Nona said. “They recruited a few dozen Goblins, but the rest refused their offers and cast them out, missionaries and followers both.”

“Good for them.”

“They are dead, Vice. The Chaos followers are still alive.”

“Not really,” Vice replied. “You know what happens to everyone who turns to that particular brand of Chaos. Death is a better outcome.”

“I know.” Nona paused for a moment. “Doesn’t it get to you, sometimes?”

Vice and Nona had witnessed the end of all life on Earth. That should have rendered them immune to being upset by lesser massacres, and yet there they were. Vice figured there were things you never got used to, even with immortality and millennia of perspective thrown in.

“I wish I could save them all, Nona. But that’s not our job. We protect the Realms, not individuals within them.”

Removing the Chaos outbreak from the First Realm had taken a big bite out of Vice’s discretionary energy budget. The job had involved transferring an area a little under half the size of old Earth’s Australia to a different Realm. Following that, he had to fill up the resulting subcontinental-sized hole with an ecologically-balanced replacement of the same size. The process had required millions of Structural Mana and Quintessence, the densest forms of energy the Arbiters could manipulate.

An entire pantheon of gods working together might have been able to pull off the same trick, at the cost of becoming too weak to defend themselves for decades if not centuries. In Vice’s case, his team didn’t have enough power to perform major miracles for months, not unless they asked for assistance.

Which we won’t, he thought. The Arbiters are stretched thin as it is.

The Court of Thorns was making its move, and the repercussions were being felt across the Realms. The Fae Wars were just beginning to ramp up, the Dark Pantheons were on the move, and rumors of unspeakable things stirring in forgotten corners of the Realms were growing in number. Everyone had their hands full and not even the Makers had infinite power.

Removing the Chaos outbreak had been worth the expense, of course. The First Realm was generally viewed with contempt, little more than the ‘noob zone’ version of the pocket universe the Prime Mover had created. Vice knew better, though. The First Realm was the anchor that held the whole thing together, the root system supporting the Tree of Worlds.

It was also the primary source of the most important resource the System produced: Adventurers. Those born in the Common Realm had limitless potential, while natives of the higher planes found it more difficult to advance beyond certain limits. They were born with a set level, determined by the local ambient Mana, and could progress to some degree (usually five to ten levels above the base), but beyond that, further progress was impossible for all but a tiny minority. If the Common Realm’s Mana levels were raised too much for too long, they would not only kill most of the population but strip the survivors of that potential.

Vice had sat through a few lectures enumerating the reasons behind those limitations, but he’d barely understood them. All he knew was that those born in the Common Realm or brought there from other realities had the best chance to follow the Path to Power to its ultimate conclusion. Mass migration – kidnappings, not to parse words – from parallel universes had been implemented before, but the last one had taken place centuries ago, not counting Laughing Man’s great Eternal round-up.

Vice had done what he had to, isolating and displacing the outbreak before it could ruin the entire Realm. If a few thousand Goblin villagers – or the five and a half million other sophonts in the Containment Zone, for that matter – perished, it was worth it to safeguard the billion or so residents of the rest of the planet.

It was worth it, but he didn’t have to like it, just learn to live with it.

The third member of the team joined the meeting. Sexaginta-Novem was the third Arbiter assigned to dealing with the current crisis. Assigning three Arbiters to a given problem was rare. There were fewer than a hundred of them in the entire universe, and half of them were holding the Breach.

“I am picking up chatter from Olympus, the Wild Sidhe, and the Lords of Dwergar,” Sex announced. “Since a lot of their worshipers are in the Zone, they have decided to get involved.”

“Good for them. I was hoping they’d step in. They’ve got a lot more leeway than us when it comes to intervening.”

“True,” Nona said. “But they don’t have a soft touch.”

“We’ll let them know that destroying the Containment Zone or depopulating it are not allowed. Anything else they want to do can’t make things worse. Hopefully.”

“Speaking of making things worse, Hawke Lightseeker is about to pick another fight.”

Vice sighed. “It’s what he does. Will he get something good if he lives?”

“I did nudge the loot system in that direction, yes.”

“Good. He’s going to need all the help he can get.”

One

“That’s something you don’t see every day,” Hawke Lightseeker said, watching the advancing war band through the sights of his sniper rifle.

“My worry is that this actually is something you see every day. Here, in this Realm, I mean,” Grognard replied, aiming his own rifle.

Hawke was only using his rifle as an impromptu telescope. They had twelve rounds between the two of them, all the ammo that the Orom’s crafters had been able to make before this impromptu trip to the western edge of the Containment Zone, the chunk of territory that had been transplanted to the Feral Lands.

Some of the local inhabitants were treating the Zone like an open buffet. Hawke and his team were there to teach them better.

Through the magical sights of the Dragunov Mark One, Hawke could see the invaders as closely as if he was standing in front of them instead of being hidden behind a hill three quarters of a mile away. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Stone Trolls were vaguely humanoid, but their features looked like they had been carved out of granite by a low-talent sculptor. Their misshapen faces still managed to convey gleeful malevolence, mouths open in wide grins that revealed rows of jagged obsidian teeth; the black teeth were in marked contrast to their gray skins and glowing red eyes.

The Demi-Elementals moved with shambling steps, balanced precariously on their stubby legs, but they still covered a surprising distance with every stride. They were eight feet tall on average, and their war leaders stood at least two feet higher than that, but their thick torsos, oversized heads and short legs gave them a squat appearance. They were armed with iron clubs that seemed to have been molded by hand; Hawke could see fingerprints on the long metal rods, as if they had been pressed into shape while they were hot enough to be malleable. The weapons glowed with a faint reddish light; from the panicked reports Hawke had gotten from the Dwarven survivors of the first encounter with the Trolls, their enchantments not only enhanced their damage but allowed them to fire off magical stone missiles.

The creatures weren’t alone; they had brought their pets along. Their version of hunting dogs looked like miniature T-Rexes, merely eight or nine feet tall, with massive lower legs and a thick tail to balance their bodies, and clawed arms that were longer and more useful than the classical T-Rex’s upper limbs; theirs heads were close enough to the star from Jurassic Park, with massive jaws that would tear and rend flesh and bone. The only discordant elements were the colorful feathers that covered much of their bodies. The biological killing machines matched their owners’ speed with an ease that suggested they could easily surpass it.

“I count sixty-something, give or take,” Grognard said. “Plus twenty-odd dinos.”

“Seventy-one,” Tava Kintes Lightseeker corrected. “And twenty-five Terror Lizards.”

The Ranger-Slayer – and Hawke’s wife – didn’t have a rifle with magical telescopic sights, but her Perception was superhumanly high. If one of the Stone Trolls had been holding a newspaper, she could probably read the headlines from where they were. Maybe even the small print.

“War leaders? Mages?” Hawke asked her.

“A dozen Champions and one Warlord. Eight Witch Doctors. I cannot see their level or characteristics at this distance, but they are bound to be high, Trolls and Pets both.”

“Yeah. We got moved to a level thirty to forty-five Realm. Those guys are probably in their thirties.”

Hawke glanced at his own party. Besides the three on top of the hill and the Drakofoxes lurking behind it, he had brought eight other Adventurers along, all Eternals. Most of them were below level twenty. His party was underpowered and outnumbered. They had to do the job at hand, nonetheless. And in doing so, they would probably pick the maximum five levels you could earn from a single encounter, not to mention some valuable loot. Doing well by doing good; that was the way of the Realms. Assuming you survived.

The Stone Trolls were headed for the Dwarven city of Dun-Takah. The Dwarves had sent an army against the war band. Almost a thousand doughty Dwarves and a hundred Adventurers of diverse species had met the invaders – and gotten slaughtered. Only a handful of them had been level twenty and nearly half had been normal non-Adventurers. Against the Trolls, it had been as futile as sending a troop of Boy Scouts to fight a tiger. Hawke had arrived at the city just in time to see a handful of survivors on fast mounts arrive with news of the disaster. Dun-Takah had three thousand more troops, but they weren’t likely to fare any better.

Hawke’s diplomatic visit had turned into a Quest: Stop the Stone Troll Invasion. The tangible rewards (5,000 XP, 80 gold, a random Masterwork Quality item) paled in comparison with the Reputation gain with the King and the Royal Board of Directors. Dun-Takah was a corporate monarchy, a messy political structure that was highly suspicious of outsiders. Back in the First Realm, the Kingdom had accepted the Ruby Empire’s suzerainty grudgingly, and as far as anybody in the Zone was concerned, the Ruby Empire no longer mattered.

Getting the Dwarves to cooperate with Hawke’s Domain and the handful of Imperial cities that had been swept away into the Feral Lands was going to be difficult. Stopping the incursion would ease things up considerably. And it would save tens of thousands of lives along the way. Hawke always liked plans that saved lives, the more the better. He was a big softie that way.

<None of those lives include the Stone Trolls’,> Saturnyx noted in her typically dry tone.

Nobody told them to invade the new neighbors.

Hawke grinned at the analogy. It’s going to be a bad day for the sharks.

The miniature horde kept advancing at a steady pace that horsemen would not have been able to match. From the reports of the battle, the Dwarves’ small cavalry contingent had managed to escape only because the Stone Trolls had been too busy catching – and eating – the infantry. The mages in the army had used battle spells, but their damage output hadn’t been enough to kill the enemy, except for an unlucky handful of Trolls caught at the epicenter of multiple blasts. Then the monsters had steamrolled over the armored infantry trying to block their path and gone on to crush the ranged troops and spellcasters. After that, it had been a massacre.

“If we had enough ammo, we could start picking them off right now,” Grognard noted.

Hawke shook his head. “It wouldn’t work, even if we had all the rounds that Kaiser Wrecker managed to turn out before his decline and fall. Those magic bullets were hell on level twenty targets, but against those bruisers, we’d have to literally pump them full of lead to get a kill.”

“I can see their characteristics now,” Tava said. “And my husband is right.”

I notice she didn’t add ‘is right, as usual,’ Hawke thought.

<She does not like to lie,> his other wife commented.

Hey, my track record is pretty good, he started to say – and reality came crashing down on him. His last major quest had ended in disaster. The only way things could have gone worse would have been suffering a party wipe.

Thanks. I appreciate that.

I don’t like that term. You and Tava took it out of my head and now keep using it against me.

You got it, Auntie Nyx.

“So Kaiser’s bright idea turned out to be garbage,” Glorificus said from downslope. The Elf had been a member of the Nerf Herders and one of the few things he’d liked about the Guild was its efforts to bring guns into the Realms.

Hawke shook his head. “Not exactly garbage. He did some smart things. The weapon is modular, for one. We can swap up the enchanted components with more powerful ones. And the crafters who did all the work are now with us. Most of them are willing to keep improving guns, as paid contractors rather than slaves, of course. Our big bottleneck is components, but that’s just a matter of time.”

“Sounds good.”

“Their regular warriors are level thirty to thirty-two, with about four thousand Health each,” Tava went on.

She was still the only one able to see the enemy’s stat boxes; even the Drakofoxes’ inhuman senses couldn’t match the Ranger’s. “Champions are level thirty-three to thirty-four – and have twice as much Health as their followers. Eight Witch Doctors, minimum level thirty, two of them at thirty-five. And the Warlord. Level thirty-five Elite, twenty thousand Health. The Terror Lizards are in the thirties.”

“Not as tough as the fight at the M&M, but these guys are not pushovers,” Hawke commented.

“And we have nowhere near the firepower we brought to that dungeon crawl,” Grognard said.

The former Army guy had a point. Hawke had hired a pack of high-powered mercenaries to supplement his team during that excursion. Even worse, he’d left behind two of his high-power mages (Aristobulus and Amelia Blueflame); the two spellcasters were back in Akila, working double shifts to make more (and higher-powered) ward stones, the only thing keeping the death fog emanating from the Undying Land from overrunning Akila and, eventually, the Sunset Valley.

Hawke glanced back at the rest of the team. Blaze’s level matched his own, as did Desmond the Destroyer, level 29 Engraved Master, who kept going back and forth between being friendly or hostile but was always a pain in the ass. Tava and Luna were next in line at level 28, followed by Grognard, who had become a level 27 Battle-Mage/Staltwart/Spellshield after the Labyrinth fiasco, and two former Nerf Herders. Artos (level 26 Rogue-Warrior-Wizard) and Glorificus (level 25 Master Archer).

Everyone else was much worse off: Lady Pew Pew (level 22 Mistress Archer), Don Juan (level 18 Ranger-Sorcerer), Anita Fake (level 16 High Priestess of Tenebra), Howard Strong (level 14 Paladin-Stalwart), and Hoon (level 13 Fighting Druid). His Generalship ability raised their effective level by five, up to his own level of 29, which helped. Whether it would help enough remained a question.

Eighteen of them (including Blaze, Luna, Tava’s pet bear Rabbit and three pets from the other ranger types) against seventy-two giant Demi-Elementals and twenty-odd pets, a force that had wiped out an army. Granted, Hawke’s team might have been able to smack down the same army, if they planned a proper ambush and everything went their way. That was what they needed to do against the Troll war band: hit them by surprise and eliminate their most powerful assets before they could deploy them against his people.

He had a plan. It was a selfish, glory-hound plan, but even if it didn’t work, he would be the one to pay the price, not his people.

Hawke had seen enough. He set the rifle down, pulled all the ammo he had left and placed it by its side. Glorificus would be using his Dragunov when it was time to start shooting.

“Let’s kick some ass.”

Two

Hawke ran.

It wasn’t fun, running full-tilt while wearing full plate armor, but it never failed to amaze him how fast he could go even with over a hundred and fifty pounds of gear weighing him down. His Endurance dropped by the dozens with every step, but he had thousands of ‘points’ available and he could use Transference to replenish his physical reserves with Mana. He ran faster than a galloping horse, pushing himself to fifty miles an hour on level terrain; it took him less than a minute to reach the top of another hill a quarter of a mile away from the position his party had occupied. And he wasn’t pushing himself.

Being superhuman can be fun, he thought as he looked at the approaching army from his new hiding place. Problem is, I’m not the only one.

The Stone Trolls were moving at a steady twenty miles an hour and they had been maintaining that pace all day long; their only breaks happened when they caught stragglers from Dun-Takah’s doomed army and enjoyed a few minutes of torture and murder. As Hawke prepared for his part in the ambush, the enemy army got close enough for him to see their stats:

Stone Troll (Demi-Elemental)

Level 32 Warrior

Health 4,585 Mana 975 Endurance 3,833/4,560

Stone Troll Champion (Demi-Elemental)

Level 34 Berserker

Health 9,787 Mana 576 Endurance 7,411/8,450

Stone Troll Witch Doctor (Demi-Elemental)

Level 33 Elemental Shaman

Health 3,360 Mana 8,160 Endurance 2,841/4,120

There was some variation among individuals based on their personal level or stats, of course. Unlike Proving Ground creatures that were basically magical clones with rudimentary minds, the Trolls he faced were a collection of individuals. Their ancestors had been natives of some planet or alternate Earth that the Makers had abducted and relocated to the Realms. People, in other words.

Not very nice people, from what they had done to the Dwarves, but they weren’t mindless critters. Hawke would feel bad about killing them, but he’d done it before and would do it again. He had to protect innocents like the citizens of Dun-Takah. The Trolls hadn’t tried to parlay, and attempts by the Dwarves to negotiate had been met with violence. The invaders had earned what they were about to receive.

Hawke’s go-to tactic would have been to ride Blaze and hit the enemy with a double dose of Mind-Fire. The breath attack had an effective range of five hundred feet, and the Drakofox’s speed and agility made him a tough target for most ranged weapons. Unfortunately, the Troll Witch Doctors could create magical mini-tornadoes from up to a thousand feet away, according to the survivors’ reports. The devastating air attacks had savaged the few aerial scouts the Dwarves had deployed, and Hawke had little doubt that they could bring Blaze down as well.

They needed to get the Witch Doctors first, but they were to the rear of the formation, each guarded by a pair of Warriors holding massive metal shields twice as thick as manhole covers and five times as wide. Between that and their magical force fields, taking them out from range was going to be tricky. There was no way that his small group could fight through the giants to reach their magic users. Especially when you added the twelve-foot tall Warlord that led from the front:

Stone Troll Warlord (Demi-Elemental)

Level 35 Elite Warlord

Health 21.4K Mana 8,500 Endurance 19.3K

Beating that tough guy was going to take work, and unless they put down the Witch Doctors, the party would get wiped out in either a ranged or melee engagement. His plan to deal with the impossible odds was simple: he would ‘pull’ the entire warband, making them to shift the force to face him. The rest of the party, concealed on their own hill, would strike the enemy rear and take out their spellcasters.

Simple. All Hawke had to do was catch the attention of the seventy giants and their T-Rex pets long enough to make them shift their formation to face him. Luckily, he had plenty of tools to do just that.

Hawke concentrated for a moment and called the Mantle of Order upon him.

A cold current flowed through his Mana channels, touching each of his Chakras and temporarily altering their alignment. Hawke’s perceptions shifted: the world around him was marked with symbols enumerating the entropy gradient of everything from the molecules filling the air to the ground under his feet. He became aware of all forms of life in the area: bacteria drifting in the wind, small plants fighting for survival in the arid soil, insects scurrying about. He could sense the wasted energy that was present in every process, from life itself to the heat produced by the sun. Disorder, friction, decay. And in his current form, he hated all of it.

His form changed. He grew to seven feet and a half feet, his armor and weapons magically resizing themselves to fit his new shape. A pair of floating wings appeared behind him, not connected to his body but a part of him nonetheless; he could feel them unfurling, feel the warm sunshine on their living metal feathers.

Hawke wasn’t sure what he looked like under his Thanatos suit of armor, because he had only ‘assumed the mantle’ while wearing it, but he was positive that he wasn’t his normal brown-haired Half-Elven self. Besides the visible alterations, his mere presence made everyone around him nervous, or downright panicked in the case or regular people. It wasn’t pleasant for him either; he was glad that he could only use the ability for up to twenty-nine minutes per day. The bennies were great, however; his Characteristic pools doubled, giving him enormous power while the manifestation lasted.

Hawke Lightseeker (Archon of Order, Half-Elf, Eternal)

Level 29 Twilight Templar, Monster Trainer, Mana Mystic, Tier 1 Entity

Health 7,432 Mana 14,172 Endurance 7,324

The first thing he did with his newfound power was summon another Archon of Order. Having a second angel floating by his side was worth the 500-Mana cost. The summoned Archon wore no armor, just a set of hooded white robes that matched its wings. The Order servant glowed with near-blinding white light. Hawke had tried the spell a few times and discovered the Archon wasn’t talkative but would follow his mental commands to the best of its ability:

Archon of Order (Order Construct)

Level 29 Servitor, Tier 0 Entity

Health 7,250 Mana 7,250 Endurance 7,250

As the invading army came to within 300 yards from the hill, the pair of Archons rose into view, getting the Trolls’ undivided attention. Hawke sent a battlefield-grade Battlefield Fireball soaring at them by way of greeting.

It had taken him a day to learn the tactical version of that spell from Archmage Jacobus. The regular spell inflicted 2-20 points per level of Fire damage to anything without a 30-foot radius and had a range of 100 yards, for the base cost of 50 Mana. What struck the Trolls inflicted 10-100 points per level (435-4,350 counting his Archon damage bonus), had a radius of 100 feet, and a range of 300 yards. All for the basement-level price of 2,500 Mana and a two-hour casting time. The spell had been floating in his aura, contained by an energy matrix that he could maintain for up to 24 hours, ready to be launched at a moment’s notice. Since the spell had been pre-cast, he had been able to fully regenerate his Mana afterward.

Hawke had prepped three of them.

An unlucky Warrior at ground zero ate a critical spell hit, which with Hawke’s other bonuses added up to more than enough damage to vaporize it. A dozen of his closest friends and three Terror Lizards were scattered by the fiery explosion, alive but severely burned. Hawke and his companion flew closer, delivering death as they advanced.

He had gotten their attention. Now all he had to do was survive it.

Three

Hawke’s Major Battlefield Fireball had hit the Trolls from three hundred yards, too far for most regular spells, and long range for ordinary bows and crossbows. The Stone Trolls were anything but ordinary, however.

The Warriors, Champions and Terror Lizards changed their heading and ran toward him, not at a full charge but at maybe twice the speed they had been moving before he attacked. Hawke fired off his second Major Battlefield Fireball, killing a second Warrior and injuring half a dozen more. By then, the leading edge of the formation had covered a hundred yards; they stopped to aim their metal maces at him and return fire. Rocks the size of basketballs appeared in front of their outstretched weapons and flew at speeds that left supersonic cracks in their wake. The Witch Doctors in the rear created four tornadoes that streaked toward him. There were too many attacks to dodge even if he’d tried.

Maybe two thirds of the flying rocks missed him; even at his current size, he wasn’t as big a target as a massed troop formation. The dozen or so that scored a hit were bad enough, each inflicting nine to fifteen hundred points of Physical damage, and magically augmented to bypass fifty percent of the target’s armor or damage reduction.

His Bulwark of Light force field absorbed twenty-nine hundred points of damage before popping like a punctured balloon. The remaining eight rocks smashed into his armor, striking with enough damage to deform the metal plates and transmit some of their energy to him. Each blow was further reduced by 100 points by his new Tier 1 ability; the hits felt like light punches, mitigated to less than a hundred points of damage.

Even without checking his combat logs, Hawke could see red numbers appear wherever the rocks hit. Just like in a game. He had gotten so used to it that he would find it weird if he ever got hurt and floating numbers didn’t appear over the wounded area.

The entire barrage inflicted a mere 583 points of damage, which was applied to his Mana pool instead, thanks to his Mana Shield spell. The summoned Archon didn’t have a Mana Shield, but it weathered a dozen hits with only 722 points of damage, barely ten percent of its Health. A few Light spells healed it back to full.

Funny how things changed as you leveled up. At level fifteen, a single impact by one of those rocks would have dropped his Health or Mana to close to zero. He had become exponentially more powerful as he went up in levels. Things that would have killed him instantly were now annoying at best. And what he could do in return was even more impressive. Unfortunately, his enemies were also much stronger.

The tornadoes arrived a moment later, and they were no joke.

The damage was minimal, but Hawke had to spend several seconds fighting the swirling winds that threatened to spin him around, effectively neutralizing him. Finally, he used Overwhelm Magic to drown them out with Mana; that cost him over 800 Mana per spell, forcing him to use one of the potions in his dispensary before he could neutralize all four of them. It was a bit early to start dipping into potions, but he wasn’t surprised.

His follow-up Fireball had been aimed at the rear of the war band. As expected, the Witch Doctors had powerful magical defenses. Spheres of brownish yellow light appeared around each of the Troll casters caught in the blast radius of the spell; the Earth-based defenses were strong enough to absorb the Fire attack, although all of them were flickering uncertainly afterwards. The shield-bearing Warriors were also unscathed. The energy bubbles wouldn’t survive a second hit, but they could always refresh their protective spells.

Which they did just before Hawke threw his last Battlefield Fireball against the same bunch. One of the Witch Doctors was a little slow getting his shield renewed; the flames tore through the weakened shield and his bodyguards; they collapsed with barely a sliver of Health left. Unfortunately, one of the faster ones healed them back to full a moment later.

The Stone Trolls closed in on him, pausing every few paces to fire off another rock missile, which slowed them down a little, but they would still reach his position in under a minute. It wasn’t just an uncontrolled rush, either; the Trolls kept a loose formation, seeking to surround the hill, while more tornadoes hovered above him, ready to pounce if he tried to take to the air.

It was all part of his plan, of course, and it was time to annoy them some more.

When the leading attackers got close enough, he unleashed a Death Cyclone at them. That wasn’t a battlefield spell (he only knew one of those), but his Armor of Thanatos and Mana Mystic bonuses boosted its damage to a whopping 4,964 average damage to any living being unfortunate enough to stumble into the necrotic tornado’s 30-foot radius. A couple of Warriors who hadn’t fully healed from the first Fireball blast collapsed, and several others screamed in agony as their Health dropped to critical levels. The summoned Archon aimed at the first Trolls climbing the hill and fired off Burning Light; the cone of destruction finished off a couple of the wounded.

A moment later, however, the Witch Doctors struck back. Lightning bolts, tornadoes and flying boulders emerged from among the spellcaster’s ranks and hit Hawke and his summoned critter, along with dozens more rock missiles. Hawke had expected that, however. He not only refreshed his Bulwark of Light, but also activated Saturnyx’s Greater Elemental Dome, which reduced all incoming attacks by 2,900 points for three seconds. After the dome dissipated, follow-up spells battered him; he ended up losing over three thousand Mana between taking damage and casting his spells.

He tapped another Master Mana Potions in his Dispensary, which brought him close to full, but he would run out of Mana long before the enemy ran out of warm bodies. Hawke was a badass, but he still wasn’t a ‘take an entire tribe of Stone Trolls’ badass. The summoned Archon was down to half its Health. Hawke told it to concentrate on healing itself. It was there to keep the Trolls focused on them; inflicting damage was secondary.

I can’t beat them, but that’s okay, he thought as he fired off another Death Cyclone. Half of the Witch Doctors switched from attacking to healing the Trolls he savaged with Death magic, while the rest kept hammering him. I just need to keep their attention a little longer.

The leading charging warriors and dinosaurs would reach him in a few seconds. He could fly higher but the tornadoes would likely bring him down.

<The rear of the formation has entered Team B’s range,> Saturnyx announced.

It’s go time, Hawke sent to Tava, and the rest of the party unleashed hell on the unsuspecting Trolls.

The war band had pushed past the hill where the rest of the party was concealed. Their rear ranks, with all their spellcasters, was now two hundred feet from Team B, protected only by the shield-bearing Warriors – who were facing the wrong way.

Blaze and Luna concentrated on one of the Witch Doctors. The white and red Drakofoxes cut loose with their breath weapons: Mind Fire and concentrated Elemental Fire hit the spellcaster’s energy barrier and exploded it before turning her into a screaming pyre that mercifully collapsed and died a second later. Tava and Lady Pew Pew assassinated another with a barrage of high-impact arrows while Grognard and Glorificus used the Dragunov rifles to take out a fourth. Don Juan and Anita injured the Witch Doctor they’d targeted; the Troll turned around just in time to see Desmond the Destroyer coming down on him like a biological meteor.

The Engraved Master covered the two hundred feet separating him from his quarry in a single leap, a move that belonged in an anime movie and ended with a two-handed slash with his oversized sword. The critical hit on the wounded Witch Doctor split him from head to groin, leaving the two separate pieces to collapse in a splash of thick, oily blood. Desmond roared in triumph and slashed at a shield-carrying Warrior who had reacted to the attack too late to protect the Witch Doctors.

Hawke frowned. That hadn’t been part of the plan. Desmond and Howard Strong were supposed to stay with the ranged members of the party and protect them. On the other hand, his arrival served as a distraction, forcing the few bodyguards to engage Desmond as the ranged attackers kept firing on the rest of the Witch Doctors. The remaining enemy casters, low on Mana already, went down one by one.

The fight was well begun but only half done.

cjcarella@cjcarella.com