I Want To Go Home - 27

War and Politics

The battle started the next afternoon. The defenders of Lanara needed time to prepare for an offensive, having been pushed so close to their breaking point. Even if the core strategy of the battle was the same as most of my other fights: I flew into the middle of the enemy and started throwing around simple spells made potent by pouring absurd amounts of magicka into them. It was a winning ‘tactic’, and there seemed no reason to mess with what worked.

So, when I was given the order, it’s what I did.

Going into specifics of what followed, as I fended off wave after wave of ghouls, skeletons, zombies, trolls, and so forth would become repetitive. The undead dragons and few Janzori I encountered changed things up a bit, true, but I knew enough to deal with the former reliably by now. The latter, meanwhile, had not been armed with blades of Discordance, and so were not as much of a threat. Apparently that dark matter was truly as rare as others had made it seem, and I’d only had a skewed impression due to it being essential for those trying to specifically fight me.

By the time the fighting stopped, the sun was rising and I was exhausted. The countryside around the city was covered in craters and the skies above had cleared of supernatural clouds. Whether that was a result of the dark forces retreating or shockwaves of all the explosions I kept tossing about, I didn’t know. It would probably make sense to find out later, though. If we were going deeper into the cloud cover.

I ended up slumping down into the mud, once I felt the enemy forces had retreated far enough not to be an immediate threat, and wondered about taking a nap. I had just decided that that did indeed sound good when Aara leaned over into my line of sight.

She was rather far up, though, which caused me to turn… and discover she seemed to be riding a dinosaur.

A non-bird one too, for those sticklers out there.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, sitting up to stare at the… ankylosaurus, I was pretty sure?

“I can summon animals now!” she announced, smiling wide. “It takes a lot of effort, but it lets me feel much more useful in places like this.”

“Mhm, it’s definitely a cooler Divine Heroine power than I got,” Ne’avo said, walking over as a small unit of well armoured soldiers followed her. She stopped and turned to them. “Do you really have to follow me so closely?”

“Of course, your majesty,” one said.

She let out a tired groan. “If I can ask for any extra holy powers, I’d like invisibility.”

“What did you get?” I asked, though I continued to eye the large club of Aara’s dinosaur with apprehension.

That would probably hurt to be hit with.

“I think I just got a charisma boost or something,” Ne’avo muttered, crossing her thick arms with a soft clank of plate armour. “Everyone seems to be acting like everything I say is genius. I know I’m a babe now, but I’m not that good with words.”

“Pretty sure that’s just you being their chosen claimant to the throne,” Aara replied, hopping down from her dinosaur mount.

She whispered a few quiet words and the creature vanished.

Uké’el and Sukura arrived a few minutes later, having their own opinions on the effects of becoming divine champions. Adjusting her ponytail back onto her shoulder, Uké’el explained that she was fairly certain her mana reserves had deepened significantly, while the recharging rate had roughly doubled. Sukura was fairly certain her new armour offered magical protection beyond what it physically covered, while also feeling as if her strength and energy had increased.

-

While the enemy army had been pushed back, the defenders still chose to fall back to the city walls for the time being. They lacked the manpower to start a counteroffensive, but were glad their priests and mages would now have the breathing room to call for aid in place of focusing on countering enemy magic.

Which was all very nice and good, but I wasn’t sure how to respond to the way the generals panicked when I said it was time for us to move on.

“We need you here,” General Zan said, eyes full of concern.

“My mission is to deal with Nemza,” I replied, before feeling dirty about the way ‘deal with’ was far too sanitized a statement for what was really an assassination mission. Divinely ordered or not.

“Once reinforcements arrive, perhaps,” General Galan said. “Until then it is simply too risky.”

“I’m a target. If I stay here, Nemza will throw everything she can spare at the city… Ne’avo, you can back me up, ri—” I stopped as I turned and found her trying to balance the sword of Loj by the pommel in one hand.

She realised the generals and I were looking at her, before flustered, and nearly dropped the greatsword, having to fumble to grab at it with proper grips.

“Your highness?” General Zen asked, as a polite substitute for asking what in the world she was doing.

“I’m, uh… still trying to work out what divine champion benefits I got, other than the new digs,” she replied with a strained grimace. “I—I was trying to see if my sense of touch or balance improved.”

The three of us took a moment to process that before I cleared my throat.

“You can confirm that Nemza keeps sending elite strike forces after me, though, right?” I asked.

“Oh? I—yeah. Demon krakens and whole squads of Jan—thingies,” she replied. “The evil lich dudes. With those fancy dark blades.”

“Very well, but what will we do if the Lady of Surgess sends an attack force meant to defeat you after you leave?” General Zan asked, turning his attention back to me.

I opened my mouth, but found myself coming up blank. “I don’t… I can try to do enough damage to her forces elsewhere to keep them from committing for long enough to take the city, I suppose?”

“Reinforcements should hopefully only take a few weeks to arrive,” General Galan said. “The war has raged for long enough that surely you can wait that?”

Feeling I was losing the argument, I decided to give my own call for reinforcements. “I shall discuss the options with my party.”

The generals gave a nod, and let an officer lead Ne’avo and myself out towards the newly raised ‘royal residence’. Which was a tent that used to hold food supplies, moved up to the citadel. The supplies it had held were easily moved to other storage tents, none of them being exactly close to full at this stage of the siege.

The others were waiting for us on the assembled cots. I explained the situation, and the way I’d felt unable to argue against the generals’ position. To my surprise, Uké’el ended up agreeing that the position made sense. Aara sided with me about not liking it, but also had to agree to not having any good counter arguments.

-

So we stayed.

We stayed and after a week a new army of Nemza’s arrived.

The skies above the city turned dark first with clouds and then darker still with the number of flying beasts that arrived. There were more dragons than I wanted to count and they were supported by winged ghouls, shadow creatures, red-eyed undead birds and… other things I didn’t have time to identify.

I was in the air as soon as I could manage, attempting to put a dent in the aerial assault. The bulk of the army had been forced to use the half ruined buildings of the city as cover, leaving the walls all but unguarded as zombies and ghouls clambered up ladders and poured into the city.

Not that I had much time to spare on paying attention to the ground below, dodging dragon fire and shadow beasts. Blasts of magic were starting to thin out the chaotic swarm of enemies at least a bit, but their barrages of attacks (putting more weight on hurting me than their own survival) left me wondering how long I was going to last.

Dark dragon fire blasted at me once again, from multiple directions. It had cut through flying ghouls with no regard for friendly fire, and had nearly caught me off guard before I could raise a shield.

“The clouds!” I heard Aara’s voice call out. “Clear the clouds!”

Hearing her voice, when she was nowhere near my location the last I’d checked was confusing, until I tried to focus. It felt as if a small sliver of myself had followed the spiritual thread connecting us, and I found her hidden within ruins, her hands clasped in a sort of prayer.

Right. It was a prayer to me. That was a strange concept.

I looked up, towards a swirling mass of undead dragons and demonic birds. And I figured it was worth a shot.

Pushing with a flap of my wings, I launched myself into the air while keeping the shield of magicka around me. Pushing up through the crowded skies, effectively an indestructible sphere for as long as I could maintain the shield, I bounced between a number of dragons tossed about by their tails and wings. Despite it, I still managed to maintain a generally upward trajectory, and was moving enough to cause chaos when some of the dragons accidentally blasted one another.

The dragons proving to dislike being attacked by one another even if they were ready to fight to the death, and began to battle amongst themselves. With that distraction, I broke free into the clouds above. Free to drop my shield, I then drew forth a pool of mana to send out a blast over fields outside of the city.

The sphere of mana exploded, blasting the clouds away for kilometres in every direction. The light of the sun caused new disorientation and shrieking below. The shadow creatures dissolved as it hit them, while lesser beasts were blinded and confused.

-

The dragons had taken a while to slice through, even with the sunlight, but it turned out there were fewer ground forces than the previous battle, let alone the amount I’d feared. It had been a rapid mobile response unit of mostly flying creatures.

My job was also made easier as clearing the unnatural clouds of dark magic reopened the air to natural spirits, which Aara proved able to sic onto various enemies. It seemed divine champion druids were not to be messed with.

When it was finally done, I let myself collapse in a field of dried out grass that had once probably been a fairly nice park.

-

Another dark army arrived a little over a week later. This one was mostly ground forces, which we were able to keep out of the city walls. There was what was clearly a full unit of Janzori warriors in this force, armed with blades of discordance.

With the magically enhanced fortifications of the city walls, however, we were able to repel their attempts to launch any raids up the walls. In the end it turned into a tit for tat of magical barrages between our side and theirs.

After two days of back and forth, the generals pulled me into one of the towers of the city walls, keeping themselves safe and myself ready to respond to another raid quickly.

“Can’t you go out and fight them?” General Zan asked.

“Not easily, and not with a whole other army out there,” I replied. “Those Janzori have blades forged from—”

“I know that, but you fought their kind before,” the General said, cutting me off.

“Just one of them, with a kraken as support, was a threat. Even if those aren’t the cream of the crop, I’m not going to try to focus on them while dark mages take potshots at me,” I replied. “I’m definitely not dragging the others out into that either. And I would need their support.”

“So we have a stalemate?” Zan asked.

“If you let me and the rest of my party leave, we will likely draw the elite forces away from the army, which would take pressure off of you,” I replied.

“And we would be back where we started, under siege… after having taken losses,” General Zan countered.

I shrugged. “I’m not all powerful. At least you’ll know the enemy took losses too?”

Zan narrowed his eyes, seeming ready to complain further, when a messenger burst into the room, panting and gasping after running up the stairs from ground level.

“What is it!?” Zan shouted, concern in his voice.

“Dwarves… Ignobians,” the thin elf managed to reply, between desperate gulps of oxygen. She waved a hand towards the port. “Ships… a fleet, sir.”

“Reinforcements!” the general proclaimed, eyes lighting up, before he turned to me. “We might be able to distract that army for you, Vazehr.”