Earth's Greatest Magus

Chapter 2982: Baeldum Battle 9

The trap at Maren had not been an act of desperation.

It had been planned from the very beginning.

When the Alliance first drew up the defense, they had understood one thing with cold clarity: against the scourge, a head-on war was a fool’s war.

The infection alone turned every battle into a gamble. A single mistake, a single breach in one’s defenses, a single moment of contact could transform even a Grand Magus into another soldier within the enemy’s ranks. Worse still, the swarm’s numbers were beyond anything a traditional army could hope to grind down through attrition.

So they had never planned to win at Maren.

The hundred Grand Magus dangled across Maren’s walls were bait, nothing more. The question had never been whether the city could hold. It was whether the thing directing the swarm would commit, would pour its forces through those gates to crush a tempting bait — and whether, when it did, the jaws beneath Maren could close.

The jaws had closed. Hundreds of thousands of the infected now lay writhing in phantom streets. The defenders had slipped through their own teleportation array and were already a thousand miles away.

The real battle had always been Dravos.

The Alliance’s entire strategy depended on buying enough time for the main reinforcements to arrive.

Unfortunately, the parasite had shattered those calculations by launching its offensive nearly a half a day earlier than any projection had predicted.

Eight hours.

That was all they needed.

Eight more hours.

###

Meanwhile, along the triple walls of Dravos, the Four Pillars continued their desperate defense.

Crimson Marshal Selene anchored the southern gate, her twin sabers weaving curtains of scarlet light through the advancing horde. At the western wall, Stone Constable Garen repeatedly raised mountains of earth and stone, only for them to be smashed apart beneath the relentless pressure of the swarm. Storm Constable Orion held the eastern front amid constant thunder, arcs of lightning leaping across the battlefield as hundreds of infected exploded into ash.

The northern gate was faring far worse.

Iron General Varros was being overwhelmed.

The fused abominations were concentrated there in the greatest numbers. Massive mountains of merged flesh and bone rolled toward the walls, shrugging off ballista bolts and siege weapons alike. Every time one of the colossal horrors fell apart, several more emerged from the tide behind it.

Among Varros’s forces fought Fjolnir and the Void Wolf Company.

The northern warrior stood atop a mountain of corpses, his enormous axe sweeping through the battlefield with enough force to split the fused horrors clean in half. Every strike sent flesh and corruption flying across the walls.

Yet it wasn’t enough.

For every abomination destroyed, several more crawled forward to take its place.

The walls still held.

Barely.

And every minute they held cost lives the city could not afford to lose.

Above the battlefield floated the reason for all of it.

The true Parasite X drifted through the violet sky, its grotesque, swollen head suspended high above the city while its big yellow eyes gazed down upon the defenders below.

Purple mist erupted from its small frame in a rolling tide that swallowed the heavens for kilometers. To Grand Magus the haze was dangerous, but their cultivation could suppress it before it took root.

To the millions of ordinary civilians sheltering behind the walls, however, the mist was something else entirely.

It was death descending from the sky.

Dravos had no Arctus and no second city to flee to. Supreme Dunadan’s spatial-world artifact had already done all the work it could — its pocket realm was full, packed with the thirty million of Maren and the millions more from the surrounding cities saved before the battle had even begun. There was no longer room for a single soul inside it, much less a hundred million.

The walls of Dravos had to hold. There was nothing else.

And in the sky above those walls, the seven left to hold the line were running out of everything at once.

The five Grand Magus Cassian had chosen as reserve circled the small creature in a tight orbit, the Sword Demoness and the Star Tower Lord wheeling above and below them. Hubert hung farther back, the half-conscious Duke Damien cradled against his shoulder; not far from them, on dessert sand, lay the body of Saint Stephen, already beginning to be consumed by the corruption it had died fighting.

The absence of those two had cost the team more than anyone had wanted to admit.

Without Stephen, there was no holy law in the air to scour the haze from their lungs. Without Damien, there was no spirit champion shielding their minds.

The fight was now ten times as hard as it had been an hour ago, and the team had foreseen — at least in part — that it might be.

Every member of Group Nine had been issued mental defenses for precisely this moment. The Sword Demoness wore a soul-anchor pendant beneath her armor. The Star Tower Lord had inscribed a layered mental seal across his own meridians. Hubert carried a small charm in his coat. Even the five reserves had each been handed a single mind-warding talisman.

All of it was holding.

But ”holding” only meant they had not collapsed. The chittering pressure of the creature’s hive-voice still hammered against their every thought; whenever its single great forehead-eye flared wider, a fresh spike drove through their skulls. Even with their wardings, half their concentration was spent on simply staying themselves.

Worse, none of them had a spare resistance pill.

Each of them now fought on a clock written in their own blood.

The five Dravos reserves were a formation team. Picked by Cassian for their long years of fighting together — three Two Cosmos, two One Cosmos, none of them strong enough on their own to threaten a Three Cosmos foe, but knit together in a Five-Element array they had drilled for decades. Earth-bound. Fire scorched. Metal cut. Wood ensnared. Water drowned. Where one element gave way, the next caught the gap, and the whole pattern shifted around the creature in a constantly rotating cage of law.

Together with the Sword Demoness’s killing arcs above and the Star Tower Lord’s stellar fire raining from on high, they had — against every expectation — turned the duel into a stalemate.

But a stalemate was not a victory, and stalemates always favored the side that could afford to wait.

The Sword Demoness was the first to break.

Her last pill had been spent long before. The corruption had been creeping behind her ribs for an hour, and now it reached her throat. She coughed once — a single short sound — and dark blood splashed down the front of her armor. Her next slash came a beat slower than the one before. Then another beat slower.

The creature felt it.

The great forehead-eye on its swollen skull flared open all at once, no longer narrowed, no longer restrained — and the mental pressure exploded outward in a single unrestrained wave.

The Demoness reeled.

The Star Tower Lord staggered in the air. And below, the perfectly-tuned Five-Element formation lost one half-beat — only one — and in that half-beat the cage broke.

The parasite tore through the formation.

”NO!!! RETREAT!”

But they were too late.

The creature’s yellow eyes suddenly fixed upon the two One Cosmos Grand Magus.

Both men froze.

Then they screamed.

The sound was brief.

Agonizing.

Each clutched his head as though something were tearing through his mind from the inside. Blood streamed from their eyes, ears, nose, and mouth as cracks spread beneath their skin.

Then their heads exploded.

Blood and shattered bone sprayed across the sky.

Their headless bodies tumbled from the formation and crashed toward the battlefield below.

Two of Dravos’s lifelong shields, dead in the space of three heartbeats.

The Five-Element formation collapsed entirely. The three surviving Two Cosmos scattered, screaming.

And on the walls below, the mist found its purpose.

A Magus on the North rampart coughed once into the back of his hand and felt his own blood splash hot across his palm. He stared at it for one bewildered second before his legs folded beneath him. Beside him, another guard dropped to one knee, a third reeled into the parapet — the haze had been thickening for too long, and what was a sting at first breath had become a slow knife.

The cultivation that had burned the first hour of poison from their veins finally ran dry. All along the walls, the defenders’ arts faltered together: barriers wavered, cannon volleys broke their rhythm, blade-light dimmed. The fused abominations slammed into a line that suddenly could not hit back, as it had a moment before.

The first breach came at Garen’s West Gate. The second came at Varros’s North.

The walls were going to fall.

In the command spire, Cassian’s hands clenched white around the rail. His city’s gates were buckling beneath him. For the first time in three generations of his line, the City Lord of Dravos was openly considering abandoning his ancestral seat.

Then the very air at the heart of his city tore open.

A great soundless seam unzipping the sky above the central plaza, edged with the unmistakable signature of true spatial mastery.

Cassian’s face changed in a single instant. Panic became something nearer to wild relief.

The dark-cloaked figure, Emery’s dark avatar, had cast the spell.

A massive gate was opened.

The first figure through it was a mountain in dark armor.

Lieutenant General Anderson stepped onto the broken stone of the central plaza, his battered command staff a thicket behind him — and behind them, in a flood that did not stop, came the rest. Grand Magus by the dozen.

Survivors of Maren poured through the gate in a single endless tide.

”HOLD THE WALLS!!”