Chapter 1685: Decision
The fortress horns hit first, two long blasts from the ramparts that rolled across the valley and pressed against the chaos already filling it.
Void felt the gates beneath the shattered barrier swing wide, despite her eyelids being closed. Blacksteel infantry poured out in columns four abreast while the cannon batteries above adjusted their aim to the plains and opened fire into the melee.
The plains beyond the tear opened by Kaede had gone past battle into slaughter.
Undead surged through in waves that never thinned, rotting bodies throwing themselves at anything alive with the expendability of things already spent, and behind them thousands of dwarven elite infantry in full blacksteel plate marched in formations so tight the shield wall looked like a single organism, war hymns rising from their throats.
Foxkin scouts slipped through the flanks. Elven Councillors, their high nobles, and their elites managed to push through despite the two foxes wreaking havoc on the other side of the tear and started putting arrows into anything that fought for the Primordial Villain.
Void’s gaze drifted until it found Scar.
The assassin had dropped her from her back long ago and was fighting at the edge of the chaos with a raw ferocity that pulled Void’s attention from everything else, blue skin catching spell-light between strikes as she carved through undead like every cut was personal.
Void turned her head.
Lilith stood thirty meters behind with Bronnya and Jallen at her flanks, all three still, all three watching from the neutral ground they’d held since the fighting started with their weapons sheathed.
The Scarlet Lilies were observers.
Void ’looked’ at her captain, and Lilith looked back, and the second stretched past the point where anyone could mistake it for the mage zoning out.
Then her eyes opened.
Violet eyes found Lilith across the distance, wide and sharp and awake in a way those eyes never were. Whatever Lilith read in them pulled her posture an inch tighter.
Void held the stare without blinking, and the message needed no words between women who had fought beside each other for four centuries: whatever Lilith chose, Void had already chosen, and if that choice broke the Scarlet Lilies apart today, the violet eyes said she’d made peace with the cost before she opened them.
The fortress defenses adjusted their aim to the plains below and fired in sequence, six giant cannons unloading into the melee where Quinlan’s women were fighting, each round trailing smoke in a descending arc toward a different cluster of allies who had no idea what was coming.
Void raised both hands, palms out, and her eyes went wide.
Full violet blazed in her sockets as [Void Maw] ripped six folds in the sky at once, the air splitting along invisible seams in a line that stretched across the width of the battlefield.
Every round hit a crease and vanished. Six smoke trails ended in clean lines where the projectiles had been, and the six detonations that should have painted the earth with allied dead were swallowed into nothing before they arrived.
The turrets reloaded, more got angled and loaded, then they all fired.
Void’s fingers spread wider, the violet in her eyes burning bright enough to cast light on her own cheeks, and [Void Maw] tore another row of folds across the sky.
Twelve rounds this time, twelve clean disappearances, and the mage who spent most of her waking hours asleep on someone’s back was standing with both arms raised and her teeth bared against the strain of protecting people who had been her enemies five minutes ago.
The fortress gunners started aiming at her specifically.
Three rounds converged on Void’s position from different angles, and she caught all three without moving her feet, the folds snapping open in her peripheral vision faster than the eye could track and sealing shut the instant each projectile crossed the threshold.
Just like that, the Void Mage had decided whose side she’d fight on.
A [Warp Gate] split the air fifty meters east, and the man who came through it was already exploding forth.
Seven feet of storm-grey plate hit the ground at a dead sprint, a warhammer wreathed in lightning so dense the air around its head was permanently ionized, and Stormlord crashed into the nearest dwarven shield wall mid-swing.
His first blow sent three dwarves sideways in their locked formation, blacksteel shields crumpling inward against the bodies behind them, and the lightning that followed the impact arced through every piece of connected metal in a five-meter radius and dropped the front rank twitching to the earth.
Elisabeth came through the same gate a heartbeat later in golden armor that blazed with divine radiance, saw the undead, and went straight in. The Dawn Breaker hit the rotting horde at full speed, and the light that erupted from her on contact burned every undead body within ten meters to ash before her boots touched the ground.
The Warrior King was already engaged with the Fujimori elders, the golden longsword sweeping Chizuru’s opening cut aside in a parry that forced her to take a step back.
Felicity came through the gate last, purple hair bouncing and chest pushed out as she landed on the scorched earth with a bright grin and both fingers raised in a V.
"I brought help, girls!"
Her eyes swept the battlefield, the undead tide crashing into shield walls, cannon smoke layering over craters full of bodies, the air thick with spellfire and the screams of the dying.
The grin dropped.
’Oh shit... This is really serious.’
The sword materialized in her grip and the chirpy princess was gone.
The Null Mage sprinted toward the eastern flank where Feng’s black hair was visible between clashing bodies. "I’ll back you up! Fear no more, Little Jiai!"
"This is not a daycare, can’t you go somewhere else?" came the dry grunt from a certain oriental teen’s delicate lips.
"Nope!" she beamed and joined her friends in the mayhem.
...
The shields across the front line changed.
Aurora had been holding barriers over the girls since she unlocked her Essenceweaver class, translucent domes of woven essence that absorbed hits and spread the force across their curved surface.
Broad, reliable, and burning through her mana faster than she wanted to admit, because the domes covered too much empty air and not enough body.
But the Bloodfather’s mark on her womb had been warm since the fighting began, and the ice that answered when she drew from the Reservoir was nothing like the frost she’d studied in textbooks.
It was... ’Quin’s ice...’ she thought, mind racing.
She’d watched him carve a dome over an entire city once, a structure so vast it swallowed everything without cracking, raw elemental authority projected at a scale that made other mages look like children playing with candles.
She’d also watched him shape ice lances no larger than her finger that punched through heavy plate like it wasn’t there, precision and devastation compressed into something absurdly small.
’To make the element fit my style of combat... Yes, that’s it,’ she nodded to herself and her hands moved in controlled circles.
The broad domes contracted.
Ice crystallized along the inner surface of each barrier, thinning the shell from a bubble six inches off the girls’ shoulders to a coating that hugged their armor like a second skin.
The crystalline layer was denser than anything she’d produced before, ice packed into the weave with the kind of precision Quinlan used on his lances, every unnecessary millimeter stripped away and every remaining one reinforced until the barrier was harder than the plate beneath it.
Hits that had been rocking the girls cracked against the ice-laced coating without moving the bodies beneath. The barriers flexed with each motion, reformed between strikes, sealed the joints the domes had left exposed. The cost per target dropped to a fraction of what the bubbles had demanded.
’How beautiful... I love it so much...’ she mused, watching her own handiwork protect Serika. The coating let the Solar Fist ignore a hit coming her way and use the opening to kill three enemies at once.
Aurora, always the girl of support. Quinlan’s ice in anyone else’s hands would have become a weapon. In Aurora’s, it became armor.
...
Thirty meters south, two Fujimori swords met.
Ayame moved like water through a broken dam.
Her katana carved lines through the air so clean that displaced pressure hung visible for a heartbeat after each cut, the steel rotating between grips with a fluidity that made every strike the opening for the next.
She flowed from high guard to low sweep to reverse cut without her feet crossing once, her center of gravity gliding across the scorched earth as if the ground existed only to serve her movement.
The Fujimori soldiers nearest to the duel forgot they were fighting.
