Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

Their lines were probably not as clean as they wanted as they rumbled into position just after the dawn, drawing themselves up in a long line before the walls of Mayoi. Briggs pulled down his Mask of Clarity, pumping it with the surfeit of Soul he had and magnified his forward view.

Picking out the living from the Summoned wasn’t hard. Summoned had next to no facial expressions until they got into a fight, when programmed instincts stirred things up and the normal grimacing and baring of teeth and such posturing naturally came to the fore.

The living, now, they couldn’t help looking up at the clouds rumbling melodically overhead, flashes of too-Silver lightning toning and chiming from within them, no natural Thunder at all, and, his lugian subordinates, associates, and paramounts had assured him, raising the equivalent of hackles on the skin as they anticipated the awful lightning coming down to punish them.

Lugians didn’t like lightning very much. Their bodies were dense and seemed to attract the voltage internally instead of over the skin, like it did most creatures. It overloaded their nervous systems and could fry out their brains, cause instant heart attacks, and generally bypassed all their perceived strengths to strike at the core of what they were.

As a result, they feared lightning and electricity in general, peals of thunder instinctively sent them scrambling for cover, and they had next to no science or alchemy that did anything with it, save for resisting its damnable power and the pain it brought them.

That was just fine by him. Every edge in a fight was good, and this was basically an area-effect Intimidation check against the whole damn Gotrok army out there.

They would have been absolutely mortified to know that Kris was playing the clouds, using Ryin’s Control Weather spell like an orchestral guide. The vastly amused Lady Magos was going right along with it, Call Lightning spells inside the clouds going off in chimes and peals and rumbles that broke like the most stirring battlefield magic over the army, and they were plainly unnerving the piss out of the Gotrok and the Summons out there.

Zealous Holy magic could affect all of the non-Good. Even the Neutrals on their side were finding the clouds above awesome and intimidating, but not hostile, which was the difference between them and their enemies. Neutral allies were looking up and realizing there was something great and Good up there they had missed, something they had touched on at the best moments in their lives, and it was waiting for them to embrace it.

Mitharn recruitment drive tactics, he mused, studying the lines out there, just as Kris and the other officers were.

“They are lining up for a traditional exchange of boulders,” Kopf rumbled next to him, the taller and broader lugian somehow looking smaller next to the Ancient standing next to him. The deep voice of the lugian was scornful and dismissive as he glared at the Gotrok’s forces out there.

He was very much a traditionalist lugian, the human equivalent of a knight sworn to his beloved King Kresovus. In better times he would have been awarded the rank of Tukora, and lauded as a great and knowledgeable warrior among the lugians.

The Gotrok’s fervent acclamation of Tukoras among their number, particularly the leaders who had attacked the allied races during the Fall, had turned what had once been an honorable and acclaimed status into a reviled and hated word that was more likely to draw spit than admiration from any who heard it, even among the younger lugians.

For the traditionalist lugians, that insult to their heritage, the mockery of their great and noble traditions, was a hammer to the skull that they just could not tolerate. Kopf was fully ready to go out there in his modern, Rantha-made armor, bearing his moving wall of a shield, wielding a Heavy Large Moonaxe that was also not of lugian design, and give all of those Gotrok bastards a lesson on who to ally with, and who to not!

“Can’t they tell this is a mana-supported wall?” the Lord Mick asked from the other side of his Fellowship’s Vanguard.

“It is how things were done, and so they shall be again,” Kopf intoned ritually, and you had to know lugians to sense the mocking sarcasm beneath his words. The lugian had been introduced to soooo many things that were above and beyond what lugians knew, seen the effect of them, and was becoming something greater than any of the paramounts who had survived as a result.

Kris was breaking him down from a student of lugian history to a student of war, and war didn’t care what your ancestry or race was. You adapted, you evolved, or you died.

Died, as so many had during the Fall. It was a mighty spike in the hearts of the lugians, and even the diehards had agreed that something like it could not be allowed to happen again. It was just… there had been nothing in their histories to fall back on, and those histories the rebels and traitors could use as well.

Ki, though, and Soul Essence! Simple, powerful, easy to understand, and capable of doing far more than anything in the lugian traditions of war!

“Mind your heads, and trust the battlements,” Briggs’ Warlord Voice rang out over the whole line. There had been a lot of questions among the troops here about him coming in and giving orders, which Kris had bit off, browbeat, and sometimes pummeled into silence. There had been one lugian paramount who had taken it upon himself to stand up for everyone in the face of this outsider, and had made himself a fine example of what not to do and be for the rest of them when Briggs pounded him repeatedly and almost effortlessly into the dirt, then tossed him a hundred feet through the air into the local stream to cool off.

There hadn’t been any challenges to him after that. The gurogs staying close by his side had all chortled knowingly when they saw it, and couldn’t keep the delight out of their crimson eyes when the lugians muttered behind his back.

Their flaming Axes had been Infused and altered to Lightningphasing now, crackling arcs of death that had lugians keeping a careful distance from them. The gurog had a programmed hatred of lugians that had been hard for them to recognize and ultimately take control of, turning it instead against the undead who sought to enslave them, but they still delighted in letting their instincts go and being able to go after lugian Summons up in the north.

There were rumbles of shouts and speeches of the lugian lines out there, artfully disrupted and probably sounding ridiculous as Kris countered with plays of Thunder from up above. Briggs tried to hide his amusement and failed at the frustration on the faces of the living Gotrok out there, trying to steel themselves against the warnings from Heaven they were ignoring.

The Summons drew up in lines a bit too perfect to really be living troops, complete obedience, no deviation, models of perfect soldier-dom and readiness to fight.

Across the walls, the Archers smirked and readied their own missiles.

Lugians had arms like Jotuns, their communion with the earth allowing them to hurl stones and metal with gravity-defying range and power, tossing rocks up to the size of a human’s head as easily as tossing baseballs. Once in motion, those rocks could travel for a good long way, and had a lot of kinetic power behind them.

Naturally that would normally result in an ammunition problem. Ideal ammunition wasn’t just laying around, and the stuff was damn heavy and hard to transport. Gathering up all the stones in an area to deny them to attackers was a standard tactic in lugian sieges, forcing any attackers to bring their own, or try to create them from the surrounding mountains, a tedious and lengthy process.

The upside on Dereth was that it was possible to make rocks that magically returned to the hand after striking their targets. All of the living lugians out there had them, as did the ones on his side. Getting them to use slings or atlatls or javelins was a difficult endeavor, as all lugians just wanted to grab a rock and hurl it out like a cannonball, and with great enthusiasm.

The translucent Null Aluminum, or chorozite, rocks appeared in the hands of the Summons at the order of their officers. Booming voices formed a cadence against the disruption of the Thunder, and let fly.

Ryin’s wall around Mayoi was thirty bloody feet tall, and the battlements and crenelations were made with this kind of bombardment in mind. Archers and spotters smoothly rotated into the cover of the battlements as the great volley of rocks arced into the air and came down at them, glinting with hostile intent in the reflected Silver Light coming from above, gray and gritty and lethally magic-inert.

Well, no, not entirely…

The boulders crashed and slammed into the walls, only the most perfectly thrown managing to reach the top at that range. They crashed and rang off the stones, which bounced them without mark or scar, astute defenders stepping aside from most of those, while Shields braced with magic actually withstood the crushing impacts and batted them aside as if they were multi-ton walls themselves.

Two such rocks bounced off Kopf’s upraised Scutum with a sound louder than most of the rocks made bouncing off the parapets. The lugian Vanguard’s lips sneered just a little bit, his massive arm barely moving at the impacts.

The two rocks that were aimed at Briggs and on target hit his Source field and evaporated before they could touch them, visibly eaten away within a couple of feet, like they had been tossed into a fire and abraded into ashes almost instantly.

One came down on Kris, and just vanished as it hit her Null, a raindrop vanishing into a lake.

Those weren’t true chorozite, merely an ectoplasmic reflection that still bore some of the characteristics of the ore and metal. You couldn’t make a true Rock out of chorozite, because it was non-magical and couldn’t be readily Enchanted. Throwing away your true null-magic ammunition was extremely annoying, and Briggs didn’t see the wagonloads of the stuff trailing the lugian army they’d need for even the living lugians to use the stuff for repeated volleys.

“Spotters, mark.” Mages spun around the edges of battlements as the lugians reset, the archers arranging themselves behind them. The lugians were taking some steps forward, setting up a new line just in range of their throwing arms. The next volley would be much more devastating and accurate.

Dozens of Summoned lugians lit up with phantasmal flames in bright colors, each hue attached to a particular mage, each unit of archers behind the Casters looking for it. “Fire.”

Hissing arrows sped out in reply to the volley of the lugians, who were forcibly reminded that there was a goddamn reason people used weapons that magnified leverage and strength. Also, height gave distance.

Flat arcs of arrows from master archers hissed out, each set having a target out there in the field… and Lightningphasing alchemical ammunition meant every single bloody arrow was like a miniature lightning bolt coming in at them.

There were grunts across the field as the dozens of targeted lugians died, pretty much to a one. One Archer in each company had Vivic on their Bow or Crossbow, and so the dead were also Burning and would not be returning to the enslavement of the System.

“Shields up! Mark!” he ordered, stopping the archers and mages from spinning back to cover as the infantry with them raised Infused Shields against the incoming volley. Steeled by his voice, they reloaded calmly as more rocks appeared in the hands of the lugians out there… while a stiff wind began to blow from behind the wall, into the faces of the Gotrok.

“Fire!” he ordered, as the Gotrok out there hurled their conjured chorozite rocks up again.

The stiff wind did its job quite well. Heavy or not, null magic or not, moving air did its job, and the incoming volley basically fell short again.

Dozens more lugians grunted and fell the length of the attacking force, Burning away with great speed as they dropped heavily to the grass and stone.