Chapter 464: Melee Engagement
The orcs burst forth at astonishing speed. Because the void-rifts had opened at random, they had emerged in scattered, unpredictable spots. Within the span of a heartbeat, large numbers of orcish warriors materialized throughout broad swaths of the Alliance ranks.
Expressionless, the orcs swung warhammers and great-axes in brutal arcs, striking down the nearest targets without hesitation. Their fighting spirit boiled over. Specialized circulation techniques let these orc warriors, on par with the best of regular knights in their berserk state, briefly attain the raw power of a grand knight.
A magician who failed to react in time was struck directly by a descending great-axe. The weapon was far too massive to be called a "blade"; when it cleaved through flesh, the blow did not cut so much as tear. The mage's torso split apart at the waist, fragile organs bursting apart even before they struck the ground.
A shield hurled from the side slammed into the haft of another orc's club, forcing the savage strike off course—and saving the spellcaster who would otherwise have been pulped in the next instant.
The magician shredded by the axe was one of the few who were truly unprepared. Most spellcasters, when assaulted by abruptly materializing orcs, had at least some self-preservation instinct—or comrades fast enough to intervene.
No sooner had the orc's swing been deflected by a flying shield than did a knight charge in at full speed, ramming his shoulder into the orc's torso before bringing his hammer-spear down in a crushing arc. Steel met steel as the orc raised its weapon to parry; the two locked in a shuddering stalemate.
Elsewhere, a greatsword swept cleanly toward a magician. Lacking the physical speed to react in time, the magician might well have died—but the instant the blade grazed his robes, a preset spell flared to life. Space warped. His body vanished and reappeared several meters away in a blink.
A surge of void energy pulsed. Another magician, seeing a fist the size of a boulder rushing toward him, reacted too slowly—but a grand wizard from the neighboring unit turned him incorporeal just in time. The orc's punch passed through empty air. Knights surged in at once to intercept the orc, preventing him from harming their spellcasters.
"Stand and fight!"
With ringing battle-cries, knights shot forward crashed forward, blades and shields raised high, hurling themselves at the many orcs now scattered throughout their formation. Only by taking down these infiltrators could they limit the damage wrought by the Utopia's ambush.
With icy calm, Gilbert carved a stroke through the air. His own potential, Spectral Blade, flared, rendering his blade intangible. It slipped straight through the orc's raised weapon and struck his skull, splitting him cleanly in half. The orc died before he could understand what had happened.
But at the same moment, the orc's counterattack struck Gilbert's chest. Razor-like bone spikes burst from the orc's flesh, punching through the outer plates of Gilbert's armor, only to be stopped by its inner composite layers.
Had he not been wearing the Church of Nightfall's premium-issue Dragonscale Armor, Type II, he would have been skewered the instant he cleaved the orc's skull open.
What looked like an effortless kill had, in truth, been perilously close. In these sudden, point-blank clashes, no one could predict an enemy's techniques. There was no time to draw out an opponent's skills. The only feasible answer was to kill swiftly—so swiftly that the enemy never had the chance to unleash their own potentials.
A massive hammer shattered a knight's tower shield like pottery and smashed both his forearms in the process. The impact drove him into the ground; the orc's follow-through crushed his ribcage and pulped his heart. His death was immediate and absolute.
An explosive crack echoed. A metal spear shaft, thick as the orc's own neck, punched straight through the orc's torso with impossible velocity, leaving a gaping void where lungs, spine, and heart had been.
The knight who had fired the alchemical siege-lance lowered the still smoking weapon. Heavy anti-armor bolts like this could shatter a grand knight's defenses with ease, though the recoil and precision demands meant only high-level knights could wield them effectively.
Violet arcs of energy leapt wildly as a spellcaster forced several orcs to the ground with pure gravitational might. No matter how they struggled, they could not escape the crushing force pressing them deeper into the cracking earth.
Their target, a near-legendary spellcaster, had reacted the moment the orcs appeared, instantly binding them before launching into a swift offensive.
Fellow knights and magicians surged in for the kill. Earthen spikes erupted and blades flashed. The pinned orcs were butchered in seconds.
Across the Alliance's ranks, the same thing was happening over and over: orcs killing soldiers, only for the knights and spellcasters to retaliate and cut the invaders down. The armies assembled to destroy the Utopia were uneven in strength, and so the outcomes varied from unit to unit. Battle, survival, death—such was war.
Gilbert exhaled as a humanoid dragon twisted the neck of the final orc that had breached the Church of Nightfall's sector.
"These orcs' combined abilities are as outrageous as those spellcasting ones we saw earlier."
He hadn't relaxed throughout the entire encounter, not once. The orcs' combat refinement was astonishing. Each fight hammered home how strong and unnatural they were. Even in the short skirmishes Gilbert had personally witnessed, they displayed multiple distinct, highly advanced combat arts. Such mastery took humans decades of training. But these orcs?
"These are supposed to be ordinary citizens of the Bloodfang Empire. How can they possess techniques like these? Just what has the Utopia done to them?"
Orcs were represented among the Alliance's high command. The five-race Alliance, composed of humans, orcs, dwarves, elves, and the Winged, were all represented. In truth, the earliest reports that the Utopia had seized the Bloodfang Empire had come from orc informants; now, several of those same orcs were seated with the commanders, studying the anomalous combatants from the Bloodfang lands.
Their verdict was unambiguous. Physically, the fighters were ordinary Bloodfang citizens, their baseline strength no higher than that of a regular knight, but their minds had been tampered with.
Their souls and wills had been twisted, grafted into a new pattern. Added to those altered minds were unfamiliar techniques that boosted their skill far beyond their nominal rank. In short, the Utopia had seized on some unknown power to reforge their minds.
"These extra techniques have been overlaid directly into their minds using some unknown power," another concluded. "Short of a decisive strategic shift, our field armies risk suffering heavy losses. We should consider moving to the next phase."
Central command reached a consensus quickly. The orcs who had rushed the lines were being mopped up, and the casters were locked in a stalemate with the garrison. Still, this new conclusion served to highlight just how dangerous the Utopia was. Playing with souls was how the ancient gnomes had gone extinct as a race.
The Utopia had to be forced to reveal more of its power. The probing phase was over: it was time to transition into a siege.
"Hold the lines. Prepare to bombard their stronghold!" came the order.
Across the front, the Alliance's casters continued to trade spells with the defending orcs even as knights wrestled the sudden infiltrators to the ground. A bulwark of magic—flames, lightning, wind, and stone—constantly hammered at the defenders.
Unconditional trust in one's comrades was required on the battlefield: the spellcasters trusted the knights to absorb sudden attacks so they could keep casting interrupted.
A huge bolt of lightning cleaved a swath through the orc formation; half the defenders turned to ash.
Strong though the orcs were, numbers still mattered. No matter how many secrets the Utopia possessed, the Alliance outnumbered them manifold thanks to the mobilized contingents of several kingdoms.
Even if all Bloodfang orcs were to rally, only a fraction were true combatants; the Alliance's combined army was simply larger and better prepared.
With almost half the orcs' defensive line disintegrating from the spell, the tenuous equilibrium of the battlefield had finally broken. If the gap were not sealed at once, the defensive ring would collapse like a breached dam.
And the Utopia's trump card was obvious: the void.
A monstrous, warped barrier fashioned of void energy fell through a rift and smashed into the battlefield. It absorbed and dispersed the concentrated spellfire the Alliance hurled at it, and didn't look as if it would go down any time soon.
Using the pause, more Bloodfang defenders poured to the front to replenish the ranks of the dead and dying.
But the Alliance answered with everything it had. Alchemical shells screamed down in torrents. The bombardment did not stop after a single volley; the sky itself rained explosions.
The cannonfire was, in fact, growing more intense as time went by.
The alchemical cannons provided by Skyborne City advanced with the Alliance's formations. They were part of a greater whole: not mere field guns but components of a vast siege construct carried forward in pieces.
With the Alliance's frontlines now relatively stable, the time had come to assemble the engine and begin the true assault.
