Heretic Spellblade 6 - Ch2 v2

Chapter 2

With a great scream, a gash into reality tore into the world. It hovered hundreds of feet high above the mound in the clearing, appearing as a black and white rip in the world. Looking at it always gave Nathan a crippling headache and—

“It doesn’t hurt,” he mumbled, shocked as he stared directly at the horrendous demonic rip in the world.

“The hell it doesn’t,” Sunstorm snapped. “This is a pain in the ass. Why couldn’t this have been a portal with windy cliffs so we don’t have to look at the damn thing?”

“Maybe it’s like this to force us to look at the portal,” Fei said, tilting her head to one side.

“Weaponized migraines. Truly a greater threat than Messengers capable of blowing apart walls with a wave of their arm or armies of behemoths,” Sen drawled.

“Nice that you think so highly of us,” Laura said.

Sen shot Laura an annoyed look, as she clearly hadn’t intended to compliment the Twins. But she had a point. Even during the Twins’ failed invasion, they’d posed an immense threat with their spatial magic.

By contrast, what began to appear before them seemed more ordinary. Or maybe Nathan had just become inured to the danger posed by demonic invasions.

Said danger made itself well known in the coming minutes.

Where a vast wasteland stood, bereft of foes, a seemingly limitless horde of demons appeared. Whole battalions of them, crushed together so close that they seemed to blend together. Thousands. Tens of thousands.

“Aren’t there too many of them?” Sen asked.

Muttering and restlessness among the defenders suggested Sen’s thoughts were shared by everyone. Catapult and ballista operators froze alongside the mass of archers lining the battlements.

The horde remained stationary and still for the first few seconds. None of the demons appeared aware of their surroundings and they even seemed unarmed. Slowly but surely, they awakened.

Their roars rippled across the clearing, bouncing off the tall rocky walls that hemmed everyone in. The sound practically deafened Nathan. Fei and other nearby beastkin clamped their hands over their ears and their tails lashed the ground in surprise.

“That’s a lot of heavies,” Nathan muttered.

While the vast bulk of the horde appeared to be a mass of nearly naked bipedal beasts, wielding little more than oversized swords, axes, and maces, an elite guard formed around the portal rift. A solid thousand or more demons covered in heavy armor, each wielding halberds with blades the size of a person.

Demons came in roughly three varieties: common lesser demons that made up the vast majority of the horde and were little more than fodder for powerful Champions; greater demons such as manticores and behemoths, each capable of threatening a monogem Champion or shattering ordinary armies; and elite demons with equipment and abilities superior to the lesser demons.

Heavies fell into the category of elite demons. Their name belied their purpose. They wore heavy armor, wielding massive weapons, and were the shock troops of demonic invasions. Arrows bounced off their defenses. Only magic and siege weaponry could hope to stop a charge of this size.

“No greater demons yet,” Fei said. “Are we staying up here? Janice said the barrier lets projectiles through from this side.”

“That means her Bastion knows his stuff. Unsurprising given the summons he’s using to defend the place and the scale of the defenses,” Nathan said. “I don’t know Bastion Herman, but you don’t get a trigem by being a pushover. We’ll let his defenses act before we step in.”

As if to punctuate his point, something burst overhead. Nathan looked over to see Janice holding a broad sword aloft, and bright white fireworks exploding overhead.

The next instant, dozens of siege weapons let loose. Flaming boulders burst among the demons. Huge bolts plowed through a half-dozen demons with each shot from a ballista. Hundreds of demons fell in a single fell swoop.

Yet the horde seemed unfazed. Whatever gaps the weapons produced in their numbers seem to fill with new demons within seconds. Like water flowing into a hole.

Next came the battle mages. Their ritual circles glowed, and the towers they stood on emanated in sympathy. A lead sorcerer at each ritual cast his staff toward the horde, although the rituals fired out of sync. Spells roared forth.

Lava gushed forth from one tower, barreling downhill at a pace the real thing could never manage and swallowing hundreds of demons in fiery death. A chasm split open for hundreds of feet. One tower even spewed a beam of light that vaporized every demon caught in it.

“Holy…” Sunstorm gasped out.

Fei and Sen shared in her surprise, their jaws dropping. While they might be used to Nathan’s defenses and the explosive fare he frequently utilized, Waier’s defenders had unleashed a level of magic usually reserved for Champions or Nathan’s strongest spells.

“Those are fifth rank spells, aren’t they?” Sen asked, her eyes glowing with excitement. Literally glowing, as the power of Ifrit seemed to exude from her body. “I never see those used except by you.”

“Rituals allow mages to cast vastly more powerful spells than they otherwise could,” Nathan said, realizing he was explaining the obvious to Sen.

But Fei nodded along, and he noticed some of the other defenders listening in. The archers appeared to be waiting for an order from Janice. Presumably those fireworks meant something.

“Yeah, but this is still super impressive. At the Battle of Aleich, the sorcerers who came to help us mostly stuck to fourth rank spells. They only started using the big ones when we had to besiege Castle Aleich due to…” Sen bit her lip, realizing she’d trodden on a sensitive topic. “You know.”

“I do,” Nathan said drily. “Whatever I might think of the former archduke, he spared no expense in fortifying Waier against invasion. Although I do wonder how many of the battle mages here hurled fire at me at Aleich.”

The rebelling Bastions who had attempted to overthrow the Emperor last year had brought a mass of battle mages, most of whom had escaped unscathed. The power of Nathan’s Champions and his own mages had prevented the enemy sorcerers from doing too much damage, but the fact he stood in formerly enemy territory stood out.

Given the grim expressions on the eavesdropping defenders, he suspected they knew it as well.

Or perhaps those expressions were due to the unstoppable horde descending on them.

“Impressive spells or not, they’re not doing much,” Sunstorm said, her expression hard. “Are we still going to watch and wait? For that matter, where’s the almighty Bastion guarding this place? I haven’t seen even a hair of him.”

“Most Bastions don’t fight on the front lines of invasions,” Nathan said. “Not unless they’re a trained spellblade or sorcerer. Even more so once they have multiple duogems or a trigem. They’re a liability at that point, as a Messenger can assassinate them and win the invasion by default.”

Sunstorm and Sen winced and rubbed their heads, as if struck by simultaneous headaches. Fei simply tilted her head.

“But Leopold always fought on the frontline,” the catgirl chirped.

“Leopold had a reputation. Plus, he possessed more binding stones than most Bastions.”

Sen nodded slowly. “I… vaguely remember something about how you used to steer clear of fighting, Nathan. Back… you know.”

He returned the nod.

In his old world, he had been convinced by Vala and Narime to avoid front line fighting after the disaster of defending the Gharrick Mountains. Too many Bastions fell in the defense, and Fei’s Bastion at the time had been executed despite winning due to being exposed to a succubus. It had been for that reason he’d remained in the control room when Kadria invaded.

The first demons slammed into the barrier in front of the wall. Light shimmered along its length as a thousand furious fists and weapons attempted to break through the magical wall. No cracks formed, but Nathan knew from experience this barrier wouldn’t last long. It was far too long to maintain without expending the Bastion’s entire reserves.

Bastion Herman, who controlled this fortress and commanded Janice, only held three binding stones. He’d exhaust himself trying to power the barrier within minutes.

More fireworks went off above, and the archers finally loosed their volleys into the sea of demons below. The arrows did little despite the amount of defenders, which was probably why they’d held off for so long. They needed as much power as possible to harm the demons at all. A single demon took dozens of arrows before falling.

The heavies would be impervious to the archers once they closed. For now, they remained behind the sea of fodder.

“No, we’re not waiting,” Nathan replied as he drew his sword. “If we wait much longer then the barrier will fall and the wall will be in danger.”

As if they’d been waiting for this, his three Champions readied their weapons. A scimitar leaped into Fei’s hands while Sunstorm twirled her dual blades. Sen eyed the heavies in the distance, as if assessing how easily she could take them out with spells.

But the Twins simply crossed their arms behind their heads.

“Can’t you pretend to be useful?” Sunstorm asked them.

“Hey, this should be a joke for you guys. Don’t pretend you didn’t fend off an undead army just as huge, but twice as dangerous,” Maura said. “We’re still pretty fucking beat from trying to absorb this damn cascade.”

Nathan winced. They had warned him that any attempt to absorb the cascade would fail, but he’d ordered them to try anyway. The Twins might show no tiredness, but he suspected Maura wasn’t lying.

Unlike himself, who had expended relatively little power while fighting off Artemis.

“Sen, focus on the heavies and be ready for greater demons to appear,” he ordered. “Sunstorm, check with Janice to see if she’s concerned about any part of the wall and help her. Fei… well, I think you know what to do.”

Fei smirked and her entire body burst into blue flames. Squeals of surprise escaped the nearby soldiers, but the catgirl remained unharmed.

Nathan nodded at her, then turned to his side. “Ciana, I need you to…”

He cut off as he saw the empty space beside him. Immediately, he ran a hand over his face as a chill set into his body. The other Champions gazed at him with a mix of sympathy and grimness.

For years now, Ciana had been an ever-present companion who refused to leave him alone, even when he rested at night. She’d chosen to dedicate her life to his protection.

And while fighting Artemis, she’d nearly given her life. Ciana lay in a field hospital back in Prophet’s Hope, now missing an arm and clinging to life. Nathan’s unicorn knight had become a reminder of how close he’d come to failure.

At least she was alive, he told himself, as flashes of her corpse from his original world rose to his mind.

“You know what to do,” he grunted, voice deeper than usual.

“Got it,” Fei said and shot the Twins a look.

Then she and Sunstorm vanished, although the explosions of blue flame rippling through the demons made Fei’s new location evident.

“Why is the kitty giving us the stink eye?” Maura whined.

“Because the two of you have no tact,” Sen said. “If you’re not going to fight, make yourselves useful by waving your tits at Nathan to cheer him up or something.”

“We can do that,” Maura and Laura said together.

“Not now,” Nathan said.

But he appreciated the attempt at levity. Perhaps it looked silly to onlookers, given the danger around them, but if he faced every danger with the attitude that the world might end, he’d have gone gray by now.

A torrent of blue flames tore through entire ranks of the demonic horde below them. Fei danced along the length of the barrier, hurling blasts of fire using her sapphires. With how closely packed the demons were, a single plume of flame took out as many as the siege weapons collectively slew. The beasts melted like wax.

Terror seemed to grip the ranks of the demons near the growing inferno. Yet the constant summoning of new demons pressed them forward. Whenever a demon touched one already ablaze, he lit up like a candle as well.

Soon, Fei had lit a raging wildfire among the enemies. The battlefield burned an incandescent blue. Awe spread across the faces of the defenders, many of whom stopped firing arrows or siege weapons out of shock.

More fireworks reminded them that the battle had only begun. Swarms of arrows descended on the dying demons.

“I really do think the kitty could defeat this Messenger by herself,” Laura said.

Except Maura guffawed. “As if. You’re just saying that because she cut you in half once. There are so many ways to defeat her. She runs dry in like a minute if she’s not melting people and absorbing their magic, so just stop throwing fodder at her. And that regen ability in her third sapphire won’t stop me from slicing her in half.”

“She can absorb magic,” Laura said.

“Yeah, and Siv nearly blew her up anyway. The kitty can absorb magic the same way we can, and there’s a limit to her capacity.”

Nathan had to admit he appreciated the assessment. Fei’s immense power had become a crutch for him lately. Her magic-eating flames cut through barriers, absorbed offensive spells, and melted entire armies. Her second sapphire allowed her to absorb magic with them, making her a nigh-unstoppable power, and her third granted her regeneration and immunity to non-magical attacks.

At a glance, one might assume Fei was invulnerable. If Maura felt otherwise, that meant Nathan needed to keep Fei’s ego in check. He liked his catgirl in one piece.

Unfortunately, while this side of the battle went well, that only increased the pressure on the side of the barrier farthest from Fei. The horde grew lopsided as Fei consumed one half of the battle front. A thousand fists and weapons still beat down on the weakening barrier. Nathan saw the silver glow dim. Soon it would crack, then shatter.

“Sen, help me support the other flank,” Nathan said.

He raised his sword before pointing it toward the far side of the barrier. A pair of green squares snapped into existence along the blade’s length, bursting with magical power. Nathan prepared a supercharged fourth rank wind spell.

Following his lead, Sen shouldered her greatsword and held her arms out. A matching spell frame appeared around each arm, as she cast two supercharged fourth rank spells. Fire ones, naturally. Sen was capable of nothing else.

“You’re showing me up.” Nathan chuckled as he finished his spell.

“Ifrit wants me to hold off on using stronger spells,” Sen said, exhaustion seeping into her tone.

“What, tired already, pipsqueak?” Maura asked. “What happened to your shittalk from earlier?”

“I’m still helping, unlike you two. Do you have any idea how fucking hard it was to cast spells strong enough to even hurt Artemis? I needed to…” Sen trailed off with a glance at Nathan.

“We’ll talk about this later, once things settle down,” he said.

Then he unleashed his spell. The air shimmered along the line between his sword and the demons. Then that shimmer reached the monsters, only for dozens of them to be blown apart instantly. As chunks of their bodies rained down, the spell exploded on the ground, and a gaping hole formed in the horde.

For only a second, as yet more demons splashed through the blood of gore of their supposed comrades.

Sen’s spell fired off a moment later, sending a pair of molten lava orbs hurtling across the battlefield. They crushed demons on impact, then burst apart into a sea of lava that consumed dozens of demons each. The lava remained in place.

Ordinarily, this would deny the demons the use of that ground and give the barrier a reprieve. Yet the horde merely pushed forward. A thousand demons perished in an attempt to swallow the lava with their very bodies.

“This is insane,” Sen muttered. “I’ve never seen anything this crazy.”

“I have,” Nathan said, expression hardening.

Kadria. The succubus Messenger who had defeated him in his original world, only to bring him here to save Doumahr.

So far, the tactics matched to an eerie extent. A vast battlefield, an endless sea of demons, including many heavies.

Two things differentiated the assault. First, Kadria had used three portal rifts in her assault. Second, a sea of greater demons like behemoths had accompanied the waves.

As if somebody had read his mind, the portal rift shimmered. Nathan tensed, as this often dictated something was changing in the invasion.

Hulking blue beasts, each fifty feet tall with a thick shell of steel and a single black horn. Enormous claws replaced its hands, and each talon was the length of a tall man.

“Well, there’s the behemoths,” he muttered. “Is there a reason this Messenger is copying Kadria’s attack style?”

“Uh…” Maura bit her lip. “I dunno. Didn’t think the idiot behind this portal had the strength to summon a horde like this. Sis?”

“Our former employer is lending a hand. He’s less restrained now that the slut-goddess is back, so I bet he’s handing out power like candy,” Laura said. “The Messenger should still be a pushover, but…”

“Will this affect ordinary invasions?” Nathan asked, worry gripping his mind.

“Maybe? We don’t know too much about this.”

Maura shook her head however. “Portals are basically automatic. If the boss could direct his power through them by himself, he’d trigger invasions constantly and wouldn’t need to rely on stuff like cascades. Why would he need Messengers?”

“Good,” Nathan grunted out.

He’d been worried that this battle might be the least of his worries.

“Um, this is all well and good, but there are like twenty of those things,” Sen said. “Killing one of these things takes one of us to focus it down. They’ll crack the barrier like an egg.”

She leaned back and took up a pose, as if she was throwing a javelin. A fifth rank spell glowed around her arm.

“Sen…” Nathan warned, then shook his head.

The time to hold back had long since passed. He understood Sen’s actions, even if they endangered her.

A golden pentagon surrounded his sword as he prepared his own fifth rank spell. That of a spatial slash capable of cutting through steel columns.

Sen reared back as her spell finished, then hurled what appeared to be air. A flaming lance, a good six feet long, hurtled through the air in front of her. Harmless embers trailed after it.

It slammed right into a behemoth, penetrating its armored hide. The monstrous beast screeched in pain as it beat at its own chest with its claws. Deafening bangs shook Nathan as the talons slammed into steel.

Then lava exploded from the lance. The behemoth’s many beady black eyes bulged and it collapsed to the ground, crushing hundreds.

Nathan’s spell proved less impressive. He simple swung his sword toward a behemoth in a cutting motion. Then the beast split in two. Its eyes blinked as it crashed to the rocky wasteland, as if the monster didn’t understand it was dead.

Another behemoth split apart in the distance. Sunstorm’s work, as her second onyx granted her the same spatial slash ability. Fei’s flames lashed toward the behemoths but fell short, instead incinerating a hundred demons or more.

A beam of light shot out from a ritual circle, slamming into a beast. Yet the behemoth roared and began to charge forward.

“They need to use penetrating spells. Haven’t they fought behemoths before?” Nathan snapped.

The terror spreading among the defenders suggested the answer was no. Or at least, they hadn’t seen more than one or two.

“Bastion Nathan, what do we do?” one of the archer captains yelped, her bow shaking in her arms.

He nearly barked out orders for the archers to pull back, then remembered where he was and who was in command. While cutting down the charging behemoth with a spatial slash, he looked around for Janice.

In the distance, he saw her standing with the two other Champions responsible for defending the fortress. Her sword pointed toward a behemoth as a sixth rank spell glowed around it.

Unlike most Champions, Janice was a trained sorceress who had accepted the position for reasons unknown. Her spellwork likely made her a match for Narime in terms of raw destruction.

Or at least the Narime from his old world.

But none of the defenders seemed to know what to do. Ballista bolts and flaming boulders shattered harmlessly on the metal shells protecting the behemoths as they thundered toward the barrier.

Even as Nathan and his Champions took down a third of the behemoths within a minute, far more remained. Even two or three might bring down the barrier and let the demons rush through.

“Shit. I need to get to Janice and—”

“The fuck are you talking about? Just order the damn soldiers around,” Maura snapped. “Why are you waiting for some old bint to realize the wall is lost?”

Not the words he needed the defenders to hear. Especially because Nathan knew that the moment he ordered anyone to retreat, panic would set in.

The order needed to come from Janice. She controlled the defenders, and presumably had a retreat signal among her fireworks.

Rather than try to run over to Janice, he played things smart. Using mental magic, he prodded Sunstorm.

In a puff of darkness, she appeared beside him.

“Nathan?” she asked.

“Tell Janice that she needs to pull the soldiers back to the next layer of walls,” he said. “The moment the behemoths shatter the barrier, thousands of demons will start climbing this wall. To say nothing of what the behemoths will do.”

“Got it.” Then Sunstorm vanished in another burst of darkness.

He glanced over to see Janice’s spell finally reach its apex. The glow from the spell frame seemed blinding.

A rushing sound, like that of the sea, greeted his ears. Nathan looked back at the battlefield.

Amid an entire quadrant of the clearing, a swirling darkness appeared.

No, not darkness. The sea itself opened up where the ground had been in a gargantuan whirlpool. Mud and rock swirled around its circumference. Demons screamed in terror and surprise as the current gripped them and pulled them around, their bodies bashing into one another.

Even the behemoths stumbled. One slammed into the ground and began to spin with the demons. The spell tore at its armor and body, shredding it utterly. Then the spinning beast slammed into another. And another.

Soon, the battlefield had been split in two. On one half, an inferno of blue fire consumed everything in sight, including the one behemoth foolish enough to enter it. And the other half tumbled into Janice’s great whirlpool, their bodies being torn asunder before they reached the center, whereupon the pressure of the spell utterly crushed them.

“Holy shit. Is that the water version of Inferno Tornado?” Sen asked, jaw agape.

“You didn’t think fire magic was the only element capable of mass destruction, did you?” Nathan asked.

Even so, he had to admit that the scale of devastation vastly outclassed what he expected of most magic-users. Janice reminded him of the power of trigems, and that they possessed both immense power and experience. While he had more trigems than anyone else on Doumahr, possibly in history, none of them held the same experience as the current veterans, many of whom had fought in Kurai.

Janice had even defeated a Messenger, presumably with weaker defenses than currently present.

“Shame she can’t do that much and is so slow at casting,” Maura said. “The old warhorse can nuke an entire army, but she needs too much windup.”

“Not now,” Nathan grunted out.

As the demonic horde finally halted, a series of green fireworks burst overhead. Over and over again.

Sighs of relief escaped the nearby defenders. The captains began barking orders to pull back from the wall, and masses of uniformed soldiers rushed down stairs and across the gap between this wall and the one behind it. An orderly retreat.

Nathan remained, as did Janice and the other Champions. By the time the whirlpool died down, only the greatest warriors stood atop the walls.

Plus the Twins, he supposed.

“Oi,” Maura muttered in response to his joke.

“I didn’t say anything,” he said.

“Yeah, but I can tell when you’re making fun of us. Your emotions and surface thoughts are still super easy to read.”

Annoying. He thought he’d vastly improved his mental defenses, yet the succubi still read him like a book.

The portal shimmered again. Presumably, the attacking Messenger knew she’d lost her best weapon with the deaths of her behemoths.

Nothing seemed to appear. But, finally, the mass of heavies moved forward.

“She’s here, isn’t she?” Nathan asked.

“Oh, yeah. You should—” Maura began to say.

Her words cut off as a thwump rose up from beneath them. Plumes of dirt, rock, and dust swallowed Nathan’s vision, at least beyond the barrier.

Then light followed, turning the far side of the barrier into a miniature sun. A roaring sound prevented him from hearing anything. Flames burst from the light, rising hundreds of feet into the air in a distinctive mushroom shape.

Deep in his soul, Nathan knew they were in tremendous danger. Cracks shot across the entire barrier like a pane of glass shattering.

In a moment like this, Ciana would hold her shield out to summon her impervious barrier.

Without her, Nathan needed to do the dirty work. He roared with power, pulled from his many binding stones across the Empire. Magic surged through his veins as he drew on ascended magic in the domain of another Bastion, which sapped his reserves at a terrifying speed.

No time for a spell frame, he realized. He needed to summon a barrier around them within an instant, purely on instinct.

The barrier collapsed without a sound, consumed utterly by the sound and fury of the explosion beyond it. That light overtook Nathan and the others. Around them, the wall vanished. Any defender who hadn’t reached the second layer of walls was done for.

Sen clung to him, although he struggled to see her amid the light. His raw power pushed against the immense explosive force pressing down on them. Maybe the Twins were nearby, maybe they weren’t.

Nathan prayed that Fei had been nowhere nearby. Or that her gem abilities allowed her to shrug this off. Given the explosion hadn’t shattered the barrier instantly, perhaps Fei was fine.

Seconds passed. Violent seconds, given the force pressing down on him.

Eventually, it passed. He regained his vision, although he blinked spots out of his eyes. Voices began to reach him. Those of Sen, the Twins, and even Fei.

“Nathan!” Fei wailed, shaking him.

“I’m fine,” he said.

At some point, he’d fallen to his knees. When had Fei gotten here?

For that matter, when had Fei stripped? A moment passed as Nathan stared at her naked body, which remained coated in her blue fire, before he realized that the explosive force had likely shredded her armor and uniform. Only her regenerative ability allowed her to survive.

“I think we need to get off this wall,” Sen said, looking around at the emptiness surrounding them.

The entire stretch of wall for hundreds of feet around them had vanished. A crater replaced it, even as this strange world filled in the earth. Nathan and the others stood on a small platform that he’d protected.

Janice, Sunstorm, and the other two Champions gawked at them from an untouched patch of wall.

Below them stood a single woman, wearing some sort of lacquered wooden armor and wielding a long spear. A familiar Messenger that Nathan had defeated once before.

Yet he never saw her display this level of power, even outside of the portal.

Roars rose from the demonic horde, which rushed behind their demonic general. Nathan came back to his senses.

The Messenger had struck, vaporizing the outer wall, and letting the demons through.

 - - - - -

Commentary: Again, we're right into the action. Let me know if there's stuff you think needs more explanation.

A big part here is covering and reminding people of major plot threads from the previous book, but ideally in ways that don't feel like recaps or infodumps. The Messengers are more dangerous, the boss is taking the gloves off, and invasions are more dangerous. This isn't intended to be a climactic battle or anything, but notably more threatening than typical invasions have been depicted for a few books.