Chapter 233 - Endless Tide

Nate flicked up a barrier to protect the nearest rune cannon. The spear of ice targeting the undefended rune cannon shattered on impact against the shimmering wall of mana. The remnants of the attack rained down its razor sharp remnants, cascading across his personal barrier.

“How long?” he yelled.

“Ten seconds!” replied Frick, the Familiar frantically repairing the barrier rune on yet another rune cannon.

“Deep Condense!” ordered Nate, the Sound Rune he was maintaining carrying his voice over the battlefield.

The two cohorts of Keepers of the Deep on the battlefield responded to his shouted order, giving ground to the assaulting warriors of The Eternium. The Calikex turtled up just beyond the walls of the rampart, reducing their battlefield footprint.

“Ascendant Launch!” yelled Nate the moment he was confident most of his Keepers were out of the way. Thirty Coiled Ascendants launched their venomous attacks, blanketing the back half of the battlefield in a green haze. The screams of pain began even as the elemental warriors of The Eternium tried to disperse the venomous attack. Waves of water, blasts of flame and bursts of wind all tried to wash away the venom with middling success. Nate could sense a new Concept in the Coiled Ascendants’ Skills. At first he had wondered if it was something like Permanence or Intangibility but the more he saw of it the more he suspected it had something to do with the idea of being slippery, as though it could slip and slide around the spells and skills so intent on dispersing it. Either way, the poisonous attack had given them back the initiative and Nate was already taking full advantage.

“Disciples Attack!” ordered Nate as his rune cannons launched non-elemental attacks in the form of beams of light, gravity bombs, life draining spears and metal cannonballs. The bombardment hit the already poisoned and wounded Eternium warriors, many of them dying to the attacks with those that were left clearly on their way to succumbing to their wounds or the poison. Probably both. At the same time the Disciples of the Dark King struck the now separated frontlines of The Eternium, becoming the hammer to the Keepers of the Deeps’ anvil.

With the screams of the dying, both among the Calikex and The Eternium, the eight rune cannons went silent. Nate’s creations were only able to fire every time the mana gathering arrays they were connected to had enough mana to do so. As a secondary function, Nate had linked them all to a Control Rune Nate had next to him. The rune let him turn them off to conserve their mana for large volleys if needed, which was what he did now that he was confident this wave was handled. As for the types of runes he had created within his cannons, he had intentionally avoided basic elemental cannons as he didn’t want The Eternium to be able to contest control of the cannon attacks.

Over the last three hours Nate had managed to create a new rune cannon roughly every twenty minutes. However, after completing eight he no longer had the time to devote to making any new ones due to being forced to divert time and mana towards protecting the ones he had. He even had Frick working full-time on defence now as The Eternium had the artillery forces to directly assault the walls and Nate’s rune cannons.

On the other side of the battlefield The Eternium’s numbers had been steadily increasing with another five added to every second wave. By Nate’s count, that meant that by the final hour he’d be facing around two-hundred-and-fifty enemies every five minutes. At three hours in, he’d already started losing forces. The Calikex were all decent fighters, but if he was being honest, their skillsets seemed more limited than those of The Eternium. The Calikex used a very small number of Skills and Nate wasn’t sure why, considering the Calikex were clearly, one on one, a match for The Eternium warriors who were all level one-hundred-and-eighty or slightly higher with Mythic Classes. He also noticed that the Calikex were also very physical. The Eternium’s forces were more varied, with the later waves starting to include dedicated mage-type enemies who had functioned as artillery. On Nate’s side, the Calikex’s only magical ranged combatants were the Coiled Ascendants and even they only seemed to have the one ranged attack. Though he did acknowledge how effective it was. Given the abnormality of the Calikex he wondered if it was something the Dungeon had come up with, or if it was related to the movie in the sky of the dragon facing down the supposed Divinities of The Eternium. He wasn’t sure, but he was definitely keeping the question in the back of his mind.

Eyes back on the battlefield he saw that Frick had moved on to repairing the second damaged rune cannon. Then there was Kiri who was intently focused on cleaning up the remnants of the wave. As soon as the poisonous gases had dispersed enough, his sister was amongst those affected who had survived the rune cannon bombardment. She reaped the slowed and injured among the mud and trenches. It was dirty fighting but that was what the farmland outside of the Calikex’s Holy City had turned into. 

What had once been beautiful and neat farmland was now nothing more than muddy holes and trenches. The damage caused as much by Nate’s rune cannons as it was by their enemies' elemental attacks. He was just glad that the corpses disappeared or the field would look like a mass grave by now. The fallen included a number of the Calikex. 

Nate estimated he had lost roughly twenty percent of his initial forces, though the majority of that had been among the Disciples of the Dark King and the Coiled Ascendants. The former were just not particularly defensive, though they were brutal in their efficiency and had killed far more than they had lost. As for the Coiled Ascendants, the same bombardment that had damaged two of his rune cannons had also killed twenty of the venom wielders. Nate was annoyed at the failure, but it simply couldn’t be helped. 

The Calikex were staunch and obedient, which Nate chalked up to the Dungeon scenario, but the totemic warriors still grew tired. Coupled with the ever increasing number of enemies, their opponents had grown to be too many for Nate and Kiri to handle on their own and the Calikex forces were bearing the brunt of the damage now. The rune cannons had a recharge time, Kiri was burning Soul Energy every time she sallied forth, and Nate’s own runes and Skills had been focused on defense and construction. 

With the towers set up now able to bombard half the field, and Frick keeping them running, Nate was finally free to start making use of his mana for Conceptual Automated Existence. He had held off on using his supply of materials till now so that he would have enough for the later waves. Now that they were into the end-game for the Challenge, he was ready to start throwing his preparations at the problem. He immediately ruled out the elemental affinity materials he had prepared. While they would work, the cost-benefit just wasn’t there. They would be more easily resisted by The Eternium and would also likely be contested leading to a shorter lifespan, while still costing the same amount of mana to create. Better to save them for later in case The Eternium had other non-elemental forces. That left him with the affinities he considered physical rules, such as Sound, Gravity and Time, along with the more esoteric affinities, like Shadow, Drain and Life. Those were just a few examples of each, but he had gone for a very diverse set of affinities, making no more than three of each type. Once upon a time that would’ve likely limited him to only a few dozen materials, but that time was long past.Nate’s number of known Sigils was over a hundred at this point. Some of those Sigils weren’t really useful for combat, like the Sigil for Bridge. But he could find combat uses for most. So, he had prepared a truly diverse set of materials.

After a minute of consideration while Kiri finished mopping up the last of the wave, Nate settled on starting with the esoteric affinities. Drain and Shadow specifically. Shouting orders to the Calikex he prepared for the next wave as Kiri appeared next to him, sitting down to recover her Soul Energy as she pocketed an Orb. Every second wave had provided a single one, which might have seemed low, but considering that meant by the end they would have received thirty Orbs, it was hard to accuse the Dungeon of being skint.

“How are you doing?” Nate asked Kiri as he set out six materials in front of him.

“About half,” she replied. “Just can’t drain enough soul energy from them. They each only have a fraction of what a real person would so I am constantly running at a loss. If it wasn’t for my enhanced soul energy regeneration I would probably be done after five more waves. As it is, I likely need to sit the next one out. Is that okay?”

Nate could hear the concern in Kiri’s voice and quickly considered what would be the results of holding her back for every second wave going forward.

“It should be fine. We’ll likely start losing more of the Calikex, but that was always going to happen. For the next few waves my Constructs will offset some of the losses, but I think that’s our best bet for passing the Challenge. It might even be worthwhile holding you back for the next five waves. I think for the last six to ten waves you might need to be in every single one and not just on clean up.”

Kiri grunted in annoyance, though clearly not directed at him, “Alright. Anything I can do? I don’t want to just sit here.”

“Bring me any wounded Calikex you can. I’ll use the Life Constructs to heal them if I can. It’ll reduce our losses.”

Kiri nodded, standing and brushing herself off as Eternium forces exited the forest onto the muddy, killing fields. With a focused gaze Nate activated Conceptual Automated Existence and began preparing his Calikex forces and cannons. They had another two hours of this and he had no intention of failing the Dungeon Challenge.

*************

“HOLD!” Nate screamed as the rune cannons launched their payloads into the back line.

Screams of pain filled the battlefield as a rainbow of elemental shields tried to limit the damage of his cannons.

“PUSH!” he yelled at his remaining Calikex forces.

The constant waves of enemies had whittled down his army, the defending natives less than a third of what he had started with. It had gotten so bad that for the last four waves he hadn’t managed to clear the preceding wave before the next one began. Kiri was already in the backline and had been going for twenty minutes, evading and regrouping with each new wave. She was focused on flanking or assassinating, depending on your view, the Eternium’s mages. Still, she was tiring and had already lost two of her Soul Twins. The Divine Energy for each being granted to her pool but utterly unusable given their agreement to seal their Divine Energy away so they could reap the Dungeon rewards. Nate had his own epiphany and had realised that the Concept inherent in the Coiled Ascendants attack was Avoidance. The Divine Energy it had granted him had been beautiful, his Status informing him he’d received ten units of the precious energy, but the sense of victory was utterly overshadowed by the constant threat of failing the Dungeon Challenge.

His ordered lines of Calikex were gone, with Keepers and Disciples interspersed along the ramparts and fighting furiously to keep The Eternium from gaining a foothold. They had broken through more than once and the few remaining Coiled Ascendants along with the Sky Wardens were constantly in the Holy City, hunting down the few enemies that had broken through. 

With the penultimate wave now on the field he was outnumbered. More than a hundred combatants from The Eternium were still on the field, with another three hundred joining them from the latest wave, and his own forces now sub two-hundred, he was into the endgame. Which meant he no longer had a reason to hold back. If they could keep most of The Eternium on the field when the last wave arrived he could sweep the field in one final explosion. He would’ve hated it if these were real people, but since they were just figments of the Dungeon’s creation he was willing to do something he never would have done otherwise. Perhaps that made him a bad Commander, but the idea of intentionally sacrificing people didn’t sit right with him. It was naive, he knew that, but he was an idealist. In other circumstances he might have looked for other ways, any way, that didn’t involve sacrificing the Calikex forces. But, this was basically just a game, and the only lives truly on the line were his and Kiri’s.

“Linkage completed, Boss,” Frick said as he appeared next to them.

Nate nodded, watching as the Calikex were slowly slaughtered. The Keepers holding off four at a time while the Disciples took two or three lives before they lost their own. Nate’s forces dwindled before his eyes and the only reason there weren’t more breaches of the wall was because Kiri was keeping half of the Eternium Mages busy. Even as he watched she lost a third Soul Twin as over twenty of the mages managed to pin her down for a second.

A moment later Kiri was back in the thick of it.

“Kiri!” Nate called using his Sound Rune, the only way he could be heard over the battle now.

A moment later his sister was next to him, looking ragged and covered in blood.

“What?!”

He could see the wildness in her eyes from the frenetic fighting.

“Swap to City clearing.”

He tried to make sure it sounded more like a request than an order, but given the pace of the battle and the chaos unfolding before them he wasn’t sure whether he managed it. Thankfully she didn’t question him and vanished into Holy City to hunt down the Eternium warriors who were breaking through at a greater and greater rate. As his forces dissolved the final wave broke through the trees. At their head walked a towering warrior wielding a glaive that was cloaked in shadow. 

Nate sighed. Of course the wave challenge had a final boss. Why wouldn’t it? Conceptual Sight of the Runic Artist activated.

Sub-Commander Korl Farma
Eternal Dark Judge (M) (85) / Eternal Juggernaut (L) (75) / Eternal Shadow Mage (E) (60)

With a wave of his glaive, the Sub-Commander cut a line across the field. Where his polearm sliced, a wave of shadow followed, separating the battlefield in two as the inky sheet cut through his own forces, the Calikex and finally the wall. As the warriors of The Eternium rushed the field, heading for the breach, Nate unleashed his parting gift. Six rune cannons vanished as Nate used Conceptual Spatial Manipulation. The six rune cannons appeared in the centre of the field, bound together into a single runic configuration. Then, as one, the runes began to interact, catastrophically collapsing upon each other until finally, they exploded. Nate teleported away at the last moment, appearing next to Kiri within the Holy City itself. Watching the plume of fire, smoke and dust that was launched into the sky, he considered that one of these days he really needed to come up with a solution to a problem that didn’t involve ‘blowing it up’.