Chương 84: Chapter 78 - Into the Breach

++It was in Estalia that I was able to properly test myself against other battlemages. The results were satisfying. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. It was quite a relief when the time finally came for us to attack the city. Weeks before then, I had begun my torment. The army was actually somewhat similar to the Winzorth Institute, except it was not as dominated by magician culture.

This was bad for me, as magician culture holds that a person of sufficient talent can do essentially whatever they want, short of an outright murder. As someone who was both the most talented magician in history and fond of doing as she pleased, I found this new lack of freedom to be… jarring. I did not handle it well, that much I must admit. When my superiors gave me orders, I questioned them. When they gave me stupid orders, I pointed out that they were stupid.

I was probably treated quite harshly for daring to be a woman in the army, but I suspect most of the friction I experienced was caused by my deliberately generating it myself. I have never suffered fools well. Not since a tribe of them tried to murder me, in any case. My consequences for foolhardy surroundings now were not quite as severe as that. I was not beaten and shot with slings, at least. No, I was just given a lot of laps and pushups.

While I was given my lot of laps and pushups, I was also forced to deal with attention from Bagran. He seemed to have decided he was even more interested in me after our mission, and his advances were becoming clumsier by the day.

"You won't be young for much longer, you know," he told me one morning.

"Five, maybe ten more years and you'll be getting on in your years, past your best child-bearing days. What then? You'll be begging men like me for a chance to join our families." I almost puked in my mouth, and almost killed him as I did it. Fortunately, my ongoing sexual harassment was interrupted when we finally came within sight of Orapathaqi. The city was located near the delta of the great Varnil, the river bifurcating much of Irucci and all of Estalia.

Long ago, this river had nourished the early civilisations mankind formed in this region. Now it had been blocked off, dammed by boulders and mudslides by Aryqatan a week in advance as she was sent ahead of the main army to begin cutting off our enemies' water and food before we even arrived. The Varnil would be cleared once the siege was over, probably. My part in that siege was irritatingly predetermined and mindless, like everything else in the army.

I watched and waited as the bombardment progressed, diverting my focus only with a brief few words exchanged between myself and Agrian. I barely noticed what they were, seeing such an old thing—almost as old as me—destroyed had me in a peculiar mood. Following that came the assault itself, which I contributed to by forming up blockades of aether to be passed down ahead like everyone else. If mine were different, it was only in being made faster and destroyed slower. Then we reached the walls.

This was where the orders came to hold and fight in unison; warning of Estalian priest-casters and their prepared defences, then visual confirmation as I saw water-cooled machine guns belching out hot lead into the crowds of our bodies as bullets thudded against aether. This was when the personal shieldings of Garamon magicians lit up, all of them humming and spitting out sparks where their edges touched, the world sounding like it had all transformed into some giant beehive as air vibrated against magic.

Smoke wafted over us from explosive shells and the ground became a mess of shrapnel and burning powder. We pressed on. Our first real obstacle, even with the walls already cracked open to permit us through, was the layers of enemy aether draped across them. That was the problem with simple tricks; your enemy knew them too. The infantry cleared a firing line and the magicians began hurling our magics into the blockade, with my own power standing out even among the volley.

Three to six thousand vis, that was the maximum magical output of most battlemages. At that point I was mustering sixteen thousand, performing almost as well as any three of the men firing off their power alongside me. Even with as many of us as there were, I was noticed. Estalian aether held longer than had been anticipated, and while it did, more magic rained down on the magicians trying to break through. Like us, the Estalian priest-casters were unifying their powers and working as a collective.

Unlike us, they had gravity on their side, which removed the need to waste power on propelling whatever spells they mustered. Out of every twenty, nineteen seemed to focus purely on conjuring as much aether as they could. Liquid aether, made for flammability and high energy-storage rather than physical solidity and strength. The remaining magician would put out a spark of fire, and the whole thing would be ablaze as it rained down on us.

We did what we could to fend the flames off, more aether layered between pockets of vacuum to stop the heat from conducting through. Men still died, but relatively few, and all the while we were making more progress in chewing past the barricades. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

From the corner of my eyes, I saw something flash farther along down the battlelines and caught a whole section of wall simply blast apart like an army ten times our size had emptied its artillery into the same place all at once. Nu'chista's work, I wagered. A wind washed over us carrying the touch of divine magic and more or less confirmed my guess. That was one entry point into the city secured, and moments later we finished blowing apart the barricades and making another.

I rushed forwards, personal shield flaring up and magic whipping out of me as men barked orders and commands and the enemy reared up ahead of us like a thousand-headed beast. The world became a chaotic scramble of thrown magic and parried power, sand turning to molten glass underfoot, air to scorching winds overhead. There were warriors ahead of me wielding strange blades and heavy armour.

They were blown apart as I hurled a magic missile through their ranks, and then I was storming beyond the gap and hearing other magicians of Garamon follow in my wake. For a few minutes I fought and killed without much resistance, just cutting a swathe through the enemy. My first real contest came when one of the caster-priests nearly ambushed me, leaping up from behind a wall I had just walked past to hurl a magic missile that struck my personal shield right where it hung over my head.

Had it not been for the barrier, I would have been decapitated. Instead I was just alerted, and I spun in time to block the next projectile more directly. This one sent me back a step with the force of it, even through my stabilising magic and preparations. I knew in an instant my attacker was strong.

I threw out an angled plane of aether that shattered on their next impact and dispersed the energy as a cloud of supersonic shrapnel sent harmlessly off to the side, before retaliating with a barrier-killer that punched through my enemy's personal shield before sliding off. Wind. He was surrounded by swirling currents of wind, I realised, just enough to knock any magic missiles that stuck against his shield off-kilter.

His own projectile did not have to contend with such dense defences, and with my shield weakened I was forced to fling myself aside to avoid being struck. I went skidding and rolling along the ground, stopping only after a vast distance slid thanks to my near-frictionless aether protection. By then another magic missile was already coming for me. Mine was faster. The projectile hit solid stone under my enemy's feet with a blast much like half a keg of gunpowder, cracking and crumbling the surface.

His foot fell down into the newly-opened hole, ruining his balance and sending his next shot flying wide. Before he readied another I had hit the stone again and left him buried up to both knees. Dust was coiling around him, flung up from my attacks on the stone and now caught in his surrounding winds, obscuring everything from him. He began shooting magic out wildly for a few moments before apparently realising that he would not hit me using luck alone.

The wind currents died down as he cancelled the magic, and as soon as they did my next barrier-killer struck his shield dead centre, punched through and hollowed out the magician's chest. He crumpled back with a surprised expression on his face. I would be shocked too, if a fourteen year-old killed me. I did not dwell on the dead magician, instead looked around to see where else I might find high-profile kills with plenty of surrounding witnesses. My whole purpose in being here was to spread my name after all.

I would not do that without taking down powerful names.

Agrian didn't know what was going on. He thought he'd known chaos before, and now he knew better. This was chaos, everything else he'd experienced before now had been a brief bout of confusion, not really worth considering. But this was chaos. This was living by the reflex and knowing that any whirl of movement at either corner of your eyes might be the one that killed you. It was adrenaline and fear and madness and hate and above all it was magic without end flying in all directions at once.

There were other Garamon magicians around Agrian, which almost made things worse. They kept him from just blasting off randomly at everything he felt threatened by. The Estalian caster-priests were more numerous, he thought, or at least more prominent in making themselves known, and right now Agrian and his own side were all boxed into a single chokepoint and forced to soak up hostile magic with personal shields while they diverted all active magic to pushing their way past. It was not going well.

They were making progress, but that progress was best measured by the step and taking them sluggishly onwards. Every moment's delay was more blood spilled and more mana exhausted. When they finally broke through and flooded the city, it all came at once. So fast Agrian himself almost couldn't react to it before his own body was lurching forwards with everyone else's, then they were out into a space ten times as open as before and attacking whatever came in front of them.

A warrior lunged for him, big and bearded with a sword that looked like it would've taken a bull's head off. Agrian hurled a magic missile into the man's chest, which only sent him stumbling, and followed it up with a gout of lightning. Even that just kept him spasming and frozen for a few moments, buying Agrian time but not dropping his enemy. Like father, almost.

The fear that inspired nearly had him freeze up entirely, and in the time he took to ready his next attack the swordsman closed with that blinding speed to swing again. Agrian felt his personal shield shudder as the sword hit it and went stumbling back with the force of the blow, losing his footing and falling down. The man jumped up, aiming to land on him with a dropping blow that might have cut Agrian right in half through his weakened shield.

But the moment he hung in the air was long enough that Agrian could ready another magic missile, this one sending the man upwards to land hard on his head upon dropping back down. They both lay there panting, then started to rise at once. The man did it with human motions made fast, Agrian by waving an arm and conjuring winds that lifted him up in one go. They were standing at about the same moment. Agrian sent another missile out centre-of-mass, watching as it broke against the warrior's chest.

His body didn't even jerk back from this one, but the illusory spell seeped in past his skin and left him seizing up for a moment, eyes bulging as he choked on his own scream. It was a brief window, just long enough for a more complex magic missile. This one went off explosively, with an aether cap concentrating all its energy to gouging a channel in the target's neck. Even the flesh of a Third Order warrior wasn't infinitely tough, and Agrian had used this attack to drill chunks out of solid granite.

His enemy fell and bled out fast. But there were more. There were always more, an endless flood of men who wanted nothing more than to kill or die. Agrian didn't much care for killing, but he wasn't about to die and he saw only one way to avoid that. Gritting his teeth, gathering his power, he threw magic against magic and set the world on fire.