Chapter 54: 54. The Harvester
Captain Helena was a square-shouldered knight with the look of someone who had been running on insufficient sleep and excessive urgency for three days straight.
She was managing the outer defense line with the precise, harried authority of a person who was genuinely competent and had simply been given a situation that exceeded what competence alone could solve.
When she saw Lucian’s party coming up the road, the relief on her face was so visible that it crossed straight through hope and came out the other side looking almost painful.
"Three SSS warriors," she said. "Thank the gods."
"Four actually," Octavia said in a nice way.
Helena looked at the four of them, then at her defenses, and did some quick math. "Your party beat mythic-class beings?"
"One so far," Lucian said. "A Harvester in the village area north of here."
"So... what’s going on right now?"
Helena’s short relief turned back into the look she had before they got there. She took them to the command position of the defense line and spread out a map while she talked, making sure to keep her voice clear.
The eastern front was holding on at a high cost. Corvus’s dragon legion had more people than the defenders, who had been able to hold them off with chokepoint tactics and fortified positions.
However, after three days of constant pressure, they had lost five hundred people. The Western behemoth cavalry had been slower to move forward because the terrain made it harder for them to do so, but they had broken through the outer wall twice, and each time it took time and men to fix it.
Helena looked the way she did because of the southern front.
"At least three mythic-tier entities confirmed," she said in a flat voice, like people do when they talk about something that scared them so much that they couldn’t feel anything. "We’re calling them the Harvester, the Devourer, and the Corruptor."
"They take turns attacking, and... every time we strengthen our defenses against one, another attacks from a different direction." She pointed to the southern approach on the map. "The Corruptor has been turning defenders into corrupted people."
"It spreads a magical disease through contact that slowly changes living people into the same corrupted state as Corvus’s raised soldiers. Our casualty count effectively doubles because every person we lose to the Corruptor could become a combatant on the wrong side."
"How long can the southern wall stay up?" asked Marshal.
"Without help...? Probably... until tonight," Helena said it simply, without any drama, which somehow made it worse. "We’ve been holding the other fronts partly because people think reinforcements are coming for the south."
"If the south wall breaks, that hope goes away, and it becomes much harder to defend the other fronts together."
Lucian looked at the map. It was easy to see how it was shaped.
Corvus knew that the south was the key point, so he put his most important assets there.
"We’ll take the southern front," Lucian said. "My party and I... we’re going to use everything we have to stop the mythics for this world."
Helena looked at him. "Four warriors fighting three mythic-tier beings at the same time..."
Lucian said, "If we can help it, we won’t fight them all at once."
"We’ll take them one at a time and use the wall’s chokepoints to keep them from working together." He looked at Marshal to make sure he was right, and she nodded once to show that he was. "If we can kill the Harvester first, we can stop Corvus from bringing in reinforcements through whatever portal he’s using."
"That changes the pressure on all three fronts."
For a moment, Helena was quiet. She looked at him as if to say, "That makes sense in the military."
She said, "The Harvester is most active around the south gate," and then she started to explain how the wall was set up.
The fifty-foot wall on the southern approach to the capital didn’t look at all like the fortifications Lucian had imagined when he thought about what a city under siege would look like.
He expected soldiers to be organized and disciplined, and there were still signs of that, but they were wrapped in a kind of controlled desperation that made its own sound. People displayed clipped voices, fast movements, and specific expressions when they were performing their duties to the best of their abilities.
The defenders who saw the party moving toward the south gate had the same look on their faces as Helena: the look of someone who had stopped expecting reinforcements and then gotten them.
The Harvester came two minutes after they got to the south gate, and it was everything the survivors said it would be and more: forty feet of something that was clearly built to easily break through human defenses.
As it moved, the four heads changed positions, sometimes two, sometimes six, but none of the arrangements stayed in place long enough to become anything recognizable. The six arms were as wide as a big tree, and the mouths that opened in the palms as it moved were broad enough to match what the Hesten survivor said.
The purple energy crackled across its body in uneven arcs, which were the same color as Corvus’s seals. When it hit the wall, the stone forty feet away felt the impact as a vibration.
"Ah shit... it’s another battle again, huh?" Lucian thought. "Well, as long as I can get stronger and be better, then... that’s what I needed!"
"Defensive formation," Lucian said, and he was surprised that his voice was steady. "Octavia, you hold the center barrier."
"Marshal, we need you at the range until we find the weak point."
"Glacielle, crowd control on the heads—whatever you can reach."
"Got it!" the three of them said simultaneously.
The Harvester’s first charge hit Octavia’s water barrier with full force, and even though Octavia had been excited about pain in a very different way, the impact pushed her back twenty feet, leaving two furrows in the flagstones with her boots.
The barrier held, but the water surface became dark and turbulent, showing that it was under a lot of stress.
"That’s STRONG," she shouted in a way that sounded more honest than excited.
She used all six tentacles to hold her body in place, turning it into a distributed anchor system. The barrier wasn’t breaking, but it wasn’t comfortable.
Lucian watched the creature while Glacielle drove ice into two of its heads, and Marshal’s solar strikes tested the hide from a distance, burning it but not breaking through. He saw how the purple energy moved through its body, where it built up, and where it came from.
Lucian furrows his eyebrows. "I see it..."
"The chest... and not the heads, which were the clear target...!" Lucian held his sword tight. "A central mass in the chest where the energy was strongest and spread out in threads!"
"The core was in the middle!" he shouted. "The heads are for protection, and it’s not their power!"
"Marshal, we need to clear the heads before you can get to it."
"Alright! Just give me the opening," said Marshal.
"Glacielle, I need you to freeze both front heads at the same time!" He said, pointing at the heads.
"Use all your maximum output."
