Ruthless V6Ch2-The Battle of Orlando Part 1

“All right,” James said as the strategy meeting broke up. “In ten minutes, we hit Orlando. Everyone get ready.”

The meeting broke up, and leaders began moving toward their respective groups.

Mina walked off to go be with Mitzi. The older woman had not been speaking much to James since Alan was captured, but she and Mina had been coordinating closely in recent weeks to take the Kingdom’s Mage Corps from a semi-theoretical strategic concept to a deadly reality.

There were hundreds of Mages in the Fisher Kingdom. Half of them were here, part of the Army. Half of those had qualified for the Mage Corps. Out of those, only thirty-nine had experienced Class Evolution and improved their powers to the degree that James considered them a major destructive power—including, after spending much of the last two weeks in the Dungeon, Mitzi.

She was now an Archmage, which meant she should be able to wield phenomenal elemental powers on a scale even larger than James could.

Now Mitzi, Mina, and the rest of the evolved members of the Mage Corps would serve as the tip of the spear.

James watched them convene in the distance, standing nearer the city’s edge than the rest of the Army. Mina explained the plan to them. There were nods, looks of nervous excitement, and then the thirty-nine people in the Corps joined hands and began chanting, each person using their own words—all speaking in languages unknown to James, in several cases clearly different languages.

After a minute, the group floated into the air. James wasn’t sure whose power that was. It could easily have been Mina’s; she had Basic Elemental Magic: Gravity from James. But probably more than one person had Skills that lent themselves to flight.

It looked effortless in any case.

The ring of Mages flew up into the sky and began advancing toward the city. To James, who knew something of the destructive power on tap, they looked ominous.

James looked back toward his ground forces. The rest of the Army was ready and waiting.

“Go ahead,” James said, looking to Dave Matsumoto.

The Captain nodded and snapped to attention.

“Forward march!” Dave called, his voice crisp and strong.

The other subordinate commanders followed suit, the Panther Queen commanding her troops, Samuel commanding the alligators, Duncan leading the Goblins, and so on. A wave of soldiers of all Races, thousands strong, surged forward behind the levitating Mages.

Even before they crossed the threshold into the city, the new inhabitants of Orlando took notice.

The giant pigeons that had attacked James’s monsters before and torn them apart appeared in the sky, as if drawn by some unseen beacon. Probably their Ruler had been alerted to the presence of intruders. The pigeons began to assemble in the distance.

James couldn’t keep himself from smiling slightly at the sight of them. He wasn’t above a bit of petty revenge, and he felt fairly certain the birds would be aggressive enough to become one of the Mage Corps’ first targets.

Above and slightly ahead of the Army, the Mages began conjuring a number of projectiles in the air over their heads. James saw balls of fire and lightning, ice and stone, wind and mud, several of which were larger than he would be able to create so quickly.

Then James saw something he had never witnessed before.

Around the edges of the ring of Mages, a half-dozen ethereal beings came into existence, partially translucent things of light and color and air and fire. There was at least one Summoner in the group, and it appeared she had brought forth these strange apparitions.

A few other members of the Mage Corps began glowing in eerie colors that reminded James of his Soul Magic, but he felt something different from them. Rather than a threat to souls, he sensed that these few people were actually drawing souls to them, gathering them around their bodies—weaponizing them somehow? He would need to ask Mina about what those Mages were doing after the battle was over.

But mostly, he was just pleased and excited by what he saw.

These are people of mass destruction, James thought, stuck between being proud that he had this force at his command and slightly nervous at the thought of what might happen if they ever turned against him and Mina. The Mages, united, possessed the kind of raw power that was absolutely a threat to a Ruler.

At last, the Mage Corps released the first batch of their projectiles, aiming at the tallest nearby buildings. Giant balls of fire and ice smashed into a skyscraper, completely destroying one of the middle floors.

The building teetered, and then the top half tilted and began to fall.

At the bottom, James saw a vast quantity of giant brown insects he did not recognize. They flooded out of the building, which they had apparently been making their home.

Then the next volley of projectiles flew.

A ball of condensed stone and earth smashed into another skyscraper, toppling it just like the first one, while a lightning ball tore through pavement, exploded the concrete, and smashed into the sewer.

More creatures were shaken loose from their homes, a group of giant lizards that had been living in the skyscraper and a mass of overly large rats that seemed to move in coordination with each other, as if they shared a single mind and wanted to remain in physical contact at all times.

This was familiar to James. He used Identify to verify the creatures’ identity.

Ruby-Eyed Rat King Frederico, Lv. 34

The Skill still worked to pinpoint the nature of the beast, despite the fact that the Rat King was in the form of thousands of semi-conjoined rats rather than his fused giant rat shape.

It had only gained a single level since James’s last, indirect encounter with the creature—when the Rat King had torn his wyvern limb from limb. Perhaps it was hard for such a monster to find appropriate challenges, or maybe the city was simply a difficult place to gain levels. With so many different Rulers keeping each other on edge, any decision to fight could lead to being dogpiled by passers by. If one wasn’t willing to constantly risk one’s life, stagnation was almost inevitable in such an environment.

James was tempted to split from the group and go after the Rat King as it emerged from the sewer into the open air, but he restrained himself.

The pigeons were visibly soaring closer, the entire Royal Fisher Army was here at his disposal, and the city was a powder keg that might cause vast numbers of casualties starting at any moment. James was disrupting the delicate ecosystem that had formed there over the last few months. It was important to stick to the plan unless there was good reason to deviate.

Luna, any sign of the smell of our friends? James asked his subordinate Ruler telepathically.

No, my King, came the reply instantly.

Not even from the Rat King? James sent.

No hint of it, Luna confirmed in a tone of certainty.

Well, there it was. James trusted her nose. Therefore, the Rat King did not have Alan and the others. Not unless it was somehow holding them while keeping its distance from them. Otherwise it would carry their odor.

Going after him is just a distraction, then, James thought.

As he watched, the ruby-eyed mass of semi-conjoined monsters slipped up the street and around a group of buildings into an alley. Then it was too late.

James had a slight sense of missed opportunity, but fortunately, he got to see the pigeons enter the Mage Corps’ airspace next. The birds surged into closer quarters with the seemingly delicate magic users, flying within ten feet of the human, largely physically weak, group.

Then the ethereal presences at the periphery of the Corps’ space—those partially translucent things of light and color and air and fire that the Summoner had brought forth—made their move. The giant semi-humanoid shapes swept forward and intercepted the pigeons before they could physically reach the Mage Corps.

The entire little formation of bird monsters struck the summoned creatures. The pigeons’ momentum was too great to be stopped or diverted, and the summons appeared to move differently from creatures that had to obey the normal laws of physics. They did not seem to need to push off of anything to gain leverage, and their motion was too sudden and swift to be predicted or avoided by ordinary monsters.

As the pigeons made contact, they actually penetrated into the bodies of the summons and then slowed down until they reached the middle of the ethereal creatures’ forms. It was as if the summons were made of some sort of gelatin that slowed down anything that entered their forms, bringing it gradually to a stop. The pigeons stayed within the shapes for a few seconds, apparently immobilized in the center regions. Within those spaces, the pigeons’ bodies began to twist and writhe.

At first, James did not understand what he was seeing. The monstrous pigeons were clearly in great pain, but the mechanism was a mystery. Then he saw smoke begin to form around the pigeons’ feathers, and finally, their bodies burst into flame.

The summons’ internal space was apparently some sort of plane of fire. The pigeons were being roasted alive.

This went on for thirty seconds—longer than James would have thought necessary to take them out of the fight, but he had no objections to making certain they were dead—and then the pigeons popped out of the ethereal creatures’ midsections, flung forward and toward the ground like extremely blackened and misshapen hunks of toast popping out of several massive levitating toasters.

Extra crispy, James thought. He didn’t need to wonder if those pigeons were dead. If he’d had any doubts, the birds disintegrated on contact with the ground.

Unfortunately, once the pigeons were dispatched, one of the summons disappeared as well. They were an excellent defense, but with very apparent limits on their staying power.

On the ground, a separate set of skirmishes began as those who were not members of the Mage Corps made their first contact with the enemy—the enemy being, potentially, everything that lived within the city that was not part of the Fisher Kingdom.

A wave of brown chitinous flesh struck against the human component of James’s army first, hitting a flank distant from James’s central position. The monsters were probably cognizant of the fact that he was the Ruler, and thus too deadly to be approached directly by such low level creatures.

James’s fellow humans did not seem to take the insect monsters very seriously. They batted the giant bugs away with booted feet, thrown rocks, sticks, and other assorted objects they found lying around, not bothering to use their actual weapons for the most part. It was almost like how they would have treated pre-System insects.

The few soldiers who did use their swords or staffs on the giant bugs found that they died easily. But each person, once he had repelled the bug nearest to him, stopped focusing on it and instead looked around cautiously, as if waiting for a real enemy to emerge.

James found himself slightly annoyed with this response.

Have we learned nothing from Orientation—and from repeated battles!—about underestimating our opponents?

“Kill them!” he yelled loudly, not bothering to contain his annoyance. “Don’t just let them scurry off. Everything here is smarter and deadlier than it looks! Kill anything that attacks you, even if it seems harmless! And kill anything that even looks like it might be dangerous unless it’s familiar to you. Pursue enemies if you can unless it will split you from the group!”

The soldiers shouted obedience back, and they started skewering the bugs, smashing the creatures’ heads on the ground, and generally making a mess of the asphalt. Only then did the insects decide to start running away rather than simply throwing themselves back at the humans. The surviving bugs raced down the street and through the hole the Mage Corps had opened, into the sewer system, where the Army did not follow them, per James’s instructions.

We move out, my King, Luna sent telepathically. Thank you for creating such an excellent distraction. There will be many creatures heading your way.

Thank you for the warning, James replied. Go on and find our friends, and let me know as soon as you do. If the Army does not need my help, I may join your search.

Luna nodded, howled, and then charged forward. She and her pack rushed down the street, instantly and easily outpacing the slow but steady progress of the Army’s other on the ground soldiers.

The flying squirrels and bats quickly followed Luna’s pack by air, in keeping with the plan.

Then the second wave of clashes began.

A group of giant lizards suddenly came crawling over and through the wreckage of a building in front of them. The creatures, roughly the size of a pre-System human man, moved over every surface as they rushed at the Army’s lines. James recognized the creatures as the reptiles that the Mage Corps had rendered homeless with one of their skyscraper attacks.

This time, Samuel and his alligators were the point of first contact.

They instantly started ripping the lizards apart with their teeth and claws, and the lizards immediately pivoted left—right into the Goblins under Duncan’s command.

A Goblin-hurled barrage of small projectiles shot from slingshots instantly peppered the creatures, and then the magic gunman under Dave—a group of veterans and former policemen specifically under Dave’s tutelage—began unloading magic bullets into their bodies.

Under the fierce fire, the lizards quickly grasped the situation they had run headlong into.

The reptiles attempted a retreat.

Following James’s direction, however, a mass of Goblins gave chase, drawing tiny daggers to poke small holes in the creatures, jumping on the lizards’ backs and jabbing them in their necks with peculiar spiked knuckles—generally wreaking bloody havoc in a way that almost made James feel sorry for the lizards. The experience for them would be first annoying, then painful, and slowly turn to an unpleasant death by a thousand cuts. The Goblins had them outnumbered.

He didn’t really have time for pity, though.

In the distance, James could hear a much more significant threat coming.

With each footstep closer the creature in the distance took, he felt the ground shake slightly. This thing was big.