Chapter 263 – A Test of Power

The artillery waited a dozen heartbeats while the Akanas passed through the pre-sighted areas. Then they opened fire, airburst shells spitting out lightning, fire, and magnetic pulses that thundered across the sky. Shields lit up all around. Two battleskiffs plummeted to the ground, trailing smoke and bursting with multicolored fire, but most of the attackers absorbed the opening barrage.

Mirian was already in the dervish form of the Dusk Waves to speed up her casting. She sent an illusionary army up above her, casting total camouflage as she did.

The Akanan retaliation happened a moment later: skiffs opened up with their own light artillery, while the Sorcerer Elite and archmages sent out beams of fire, streaks of lightning, and massive force blades. Some of them targeted the artillery positions that had just been revealed, but many of them aimed at the illusions.

As I suspected. I am the primary operational target.

With their overwhelming numbers, the Akanans would be able to absorb the artillery fire—even at heavy losses—and simply directly target Baracuel’s remaining guns. Once those were wiped out, Mirian wouldn’t have any support, and she could be isolated.

That meant she needed to introduce as much friction as she could so that their battle plan became more and more difficult to follow. If they had the advantage of firepower, then she needed to take advantage of her mobility.

Mirian sped forward with supreme levitation, keeping low to the ground. There were small gaps in the pre-sighted artillery boxes where her own guns wouldn’t be firing, and that was where she headed now. As dispel light spells ate up her illusion spell, Mirian released it and made her way beneath the central squadron of airships and sorcerers.

Her attack would not be unexpected. Already, the Akanans had learned to use divination to detect her lightning sorties, so there was only a brief moment between when she charged forward and when the Sorcerer Elite began to form up in a defensive posture, new layers of shields forming.

She cast black shield a moment before the skiffs above started peppering the shattered farmlands below with shells in an attempt to saturate the area. They’d be best prepared for her lightning spells, but they’d have every energy type covered—except one.

She’d seen orichalcum armor on the Sorcerer Elite, but not on the archmages or the airship crews. She started with them, casting mental fog in quick succession on the single archmage in the group, as well as the pilots and gunners. Her shield absorbed a direct hit from one of the smaller artillery shells, turning the shell black momentarily. As shrapnel and blast waves hit it again and again, arcane energy built up around her, which she used to blink right up into the midst of the formation.

There was a brief moment of disorientation as the Akanans looked around wildly for her.

Mirian started by using magnetic detonation on a nearby airship, targeting the spell engine. Then, as the skiff’s shield failed, she grabbed onto it with lift object and hurled it right at the formation of Sorcerer Elite.

Force barriers flared and cracked as the airship smashed into the group, but even as they broke, the airship’s course was deflected so that it only hit two of the Akanans. The two it did hit crumpled immediately, and Mirian saw their auras burst apart as their souls began to dissolve. They’d died instantly.

Mirian wrapped the souls of the dead sorcerers and crew in bindings, siphoning the soul energy so that she could cast black line. The spear of shadow ripped into two more of the Sorcerer Elites, though with the orichalcum protecting them, it didn’t kill them, just deadened and sheared off chunks of soul energy that would make them wish they were dead.

With the pilots and gunners disoriented by her curse, she only had to contend with eight of the elites and whatever battlemages were on the skiffs. As the formation broke apart, they retaliated, sending dozens of high intensity spells at her. She heard the crack of magebane rifles as orichalcum bullets ripped through the sky.

Mirian’s black shield held, though she could feel the drain of it intensifying. She used the arcane energy she was peeling off their spells to create a major illusion—a replica of one of their own airships, crew included. She focused, adding an illusionary speech component.

“She’s mind controlled the other crews!” the illusionary captain shouted in Eskinar, and then it opened fire. Miran used glyphs to move her spells through the fourth dimension so that they appeared to originate from that airship and had it shoot down one of the battleskiffs.

Then she blinked away, dismissing her shield and using total camouflage to hide again.

Not all the Akanans she’d cursed were fooled, but enough of them were. Cursing their thoughts made them more prone to embrace strong emotions like fear before their rational minds could catch up, and several crew members started firing not just at the illusionary airship, but at each other, interpreting the gunfire that was passing right through the construction of light as attacks from other skiffs.

Mirian sent a remote speech message to her own nearby gun batteries: “Swap from target group one to target group two. Now.”

There wouldn’t be an acknowledgment; she was too distant and moving too fast for the relatively weaker mages to reply.

There was a pause in the Baracueli guns as the crews worked to redirect them, and then they started shooting airbursts at the area Mirian had just attacked. More skiffs and sorcerers fell from the sky. Meanwhile, she was already heading to the next group, levitating fast just above the ground.

Once more, Mirian repeated the tactics, sending the attacking companies into chaos, using curses and illusions in place of direct attacks. Two more battleskiffs plummeted, trailing smoke, and she was able to kill or grievously curse four more Sorcerer Elites.

By then, whoever was directing the Akanan strategy had directed two companies to assist the center. Mirian sped away—this time high in the sky so that their guns they’d directed to fire towards the ground were hitting nothing—but her disruptions weren’t as effective. Two companies worth of intensified shield spells wrapped around the group, deadening the artillery barrage from the ground.

Meanwhile, two Baracueli strongpoints had been devastated by precision fire at close range, and the artillery pieces were now wrecks, the crews dead. Several more groups had moved unopposed, and the battleskiffs were now hovering over Bainrose Castle as the Sorcerer Elite groups and archmages made short work of the remaining defenders.

Their second objective, Mirian knew.

The defense was crumbling too fast. She needed to hold them longer while the preparations on the other side of the Gate finalized. She’d put up barricades and collapsed passages in the underground so that the Gate was harder to get to, but the Akanans had enough spellpower that such obstructions wouldn’t last long.

Mirian sped back to the castle, recasting black shield as she dropped her camouflage, then assumed her own dervish form, Burning Tempest. The foray into the Akanan ranks had given her a new burst of soul energy to work with. She coated her next spell with it, then sent a full power greater chain lightning at the battleskiffs above the castle.

If anyone on the battlefield hadn’t known where she was, they did now. If they didn’t, it was because they were temporarily blinded. The bolts lit up the sky and the earth shook with the thunder as the lightning smashed into the lead airship. It leapt from ship to ship, cutting right through the spell engine-projected grounding and force shields, igniting fossilized myrvite as the engines were shattered so that bursts of arcane energy sizzled above Bainrose. The spell was specifically targeted at the airships, but the electrical energy unleashed, once escaped from its arcane origin, followed mundane laws. It forked in every direction. Some of it stabbed into the parapets of the castle, but other bolts found their way down into the Akanan assault teams—and through them, into the defenders.

Mirian didn’t wait, she rushed forward towards the castle, levitating fast enough she left currents in the air behind her, visible by the way it swirled the columns of smoke. As she entered Bainrose through a hole in some of the rubble, the burning husks of the airships started impacting the ground, and the earth trembled.

With her soul sight, she looked back through the solid stone. Another wave of attackers were coming, this one including the archmages. However, while the Akanans might have maps of the maze-like castle and its underground passages, Mirian knew them like she knew the 1st of Solem, knew them like she knew those first flakes falling on the 12th, knew them like she knew the magical wave of Divir shattering on the planet.

These old catacombs would become these Akanans’ graves.

She landed among a group of surviving Baracueli defenders. “Retreat to the second line of defenses,” she commanded, then turned to prepare for the next phase of the assault.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

*** ***** ***

Archmage Tyrcast blinked away the afterimage of the lighting spell he’d just seen, then abruptly realized his mouth was hanging open and closed it.

“Ominian’s blood,” he swore, then levitated over to the nearby airship. He wondered if the Sorcerer Elite were reconsidering their decision not to hand over the orichalcum to the archmages.

Whatever. He wouldn’t be one of the archmages leading the suicidal assault into the death trap below the castle. He had other instructions.

“Tell me you got myr readings on those spells,” he said to one of the crew members.

The man was looking pale. “S-sir archmage, ah, w-we did, only… only…”

“Spit it out.”

“The detector seems to have hit its maximum t-threshold at 125 myr. B-but…”

Magnus Tyrcast ground his teeth and flew away, muttering, “Idiot.” Obviously a reading hitting the maximum threshold couldn’t be trusted. They’d been advised that the Heretic Prophet would be casting beyond standard myr detector range. Tyrcast had then explained to the military artificers how to make an open-ended myr detector. It wasn’t that bloody hard. Of course they hadn’t listened. If you want a job done right…

Fortunately, Tyrcast had access to artificers that were actually competent at his own company, and had mandated double-shifts for a week in order to make sure this expedition was properly prepared.

He landed on his own skiff, maintaining a grounding and force shield spell just as an extra precaution. They had shield engines running, but he’d seen just how effective those were. His assistant looked up. “Sir Archmage,” he said, standing.

“I assume my device fared better than that military dreck. What are the readouts?”