I clicked the button once in response.
I looked around. “We'll need three Grevas at our back, we need to buy enough time for the rest to evacuate into the forest beyond the fields, their conveyances would be hard pressed to follow in the dense forest. Keep to the East as much as possible, away from the impending battle.”
I glanced around at the apprehensive Cristea. “The rest of the Grevas, make sure your people get to safety, that is paramount. They are your charges. We'll follow when we can!”
The mustang could feel my own anticipation of battle as my magic picked up on my emotions, and it reared up as I drew Anadele and thrust her into the sky. Thunder rolled from some far off lightning that was trying to reach me, and the crowd cheered, their angst being replaced with determination.
Then my new makeshift Greva and I were thundering down the cobbled road toward the north of the village past the people making a second Cristea Exodus and into the band of the wooded area around the village.
What was I doing? I was no warrior. But these people needed someone to convince them we had a chance to survive this, and that fell upon me, a chicken farmer playing knight and princess. But I knew who I was now, after the Masquerade, and I would bring brimstone and fire down upon the enemy for as long as I had breath in my body. I owed it to the herder girl deep inside me, I owed it to the woman I have become. I owed it to the people I loved.
I urged the Mustang, it was more nimble than my Goliath and wove through the paths through the band of forest with ease, though it didn't have the power nor speed I was used to. I glanced back to see the other three Grevas following us, they had scraped up enough mounts. I was both proud and disheartened. I was leading farmers to war.
We burst into the fields yelling, “Bear east!” To the string of villagers stretching the mile of grain to the green forest beyond, the Ringed Range far off in the distance looming over all.
I turned to one side and called to Elaine, “With me!”
Verna and Bowyn automatically split off to give multiple targets as we bore West separating by a hundred yards, our training automatic.
I could hear Bowyn shouting orders to the three other Grevas to spread out and stay at our backs, two hundred yards off. The effective range of most bowmen, but we saw first hand these... guns, could reach beyond that. I wondered how much our training would be worth when facing a technologically superior foe?
I thrust my arms forward, and two possible futures exploded from me in bursts of misty magik, riding off in different directions. I would shoulder any harm they ran into while finding the best way to... I gasped, and my Mustang faltered as I lived a violent death to the north. A tank burst had struck between Elaine and me, throwing us and our mounts into the air in a torrent of pain and heat.
I pointed South for the others then veered South ourselves just as the first tank blast struck thirty yards from us, right where we would have been. As it was, we were peppered with heated shrapnel and a shockwave of heat and air.
I drew Anadele once again and pointed her at the tanks cresting the rise with those smaller two-wheeled conveyances rocketing across the field in front of them, guns flashing and metal pellets hitting all around. Their aim was atrocious trying to manage the metal mounts between their legs and point the guns at us.
The tanks all started firing from over four hundred yards away! Explosions rocked the world, and I could hear the villagers behind us screaming in fear as they fled. The time had arrived. The vision was upon us. I noted the tanks were careful to fire far ahead of their compatriots who were swooping in.
I heard a guttural roar and glanced over to see Verna, with her ungodly huge split broadsword leveled in front of her, charging toward one of the incoming mechanical contraptions which was spewing that black caustic smoke behind it. She was going to joust the rider.
I grinned and rasped out my own battle cry and charged the other, Anadele pointing at the rider to signal my intent. The closer we got to them, the safer we were from those tanks. I could feel Elaine riding in my wake as I blurred like a banshee taking the field.
I think it was because she rode in the mists rolling off of me that I could somehow taste her resolve, her rage, her intent. I knew that a warrior was about to be born upon these fields, and I mourned for the loss of her innocence.
I screamed out, reaching for the two-wheeled beast, tasting all the metal in it, probing it with my magic as I caught volley after volley of the lead pellets being spewed at us, sending them into orbit around me. I found what I needed, the littlest thing, and yanked the air with my hand, pulling the thin metal spokes I could taste in the wheels of the oncoming contraption.
The mantra I had adopted over the years, pounded into me by those much wiser than myself, was that the littlest thing can have the biggest impact on the outcome of any battle when it is not expected.
Then like a horse whose legs had been taken out by a low rope between trees, the front of the conveyance slammed into the ground, and it flipped through the air with a noisy clatter, sending the knight riding it spinning and tumbling across the ground.
I prepared to politely return his lead pellets to him, after all, they were his, when I glanced over to see Verna, blood streaming down her leg from a wound from one of those guns as she stood on the back of her mount. She leapt off as she passed the other Avalonian, diving through the air, her Gertrude outstretched as she snarled like a wildcat.
In a great collision, her blade almost bisected the rider, pulling him off his mount and they rolled across the ground as the conveyance continued on to fall over. Verna came up on top, a knee on the chest of the dead Avalon knight. She bellowed her bloodlust as she yanked her now crimson blade free. Mother Luna!
I turned my attention back to my target and an instant before I could hurl the lead back at him, fire and sound erupted around me. My mustang whinnied and reared at the explosion as we were peppered with shrapnel, which my spelled leathers absorbed the brunt of. My mustang wasn't as lucky, and I tumbled from my saddle and rolled with my impact with the ground as the horse fell. I came up in a crouch, Anadele at the ready, my free arm stretched along her length as I sighted down her gleaming blade.
I blinked at the realization that the man's own tank had taken a shot at us with him just twenty yards away. My ears were still ringing, and I saw a little blood on my chest, but I knew it was nothing major. I had been hurt before, and this was not it. The man before me yanked off his helmet and pulled a small gun from his hip.
I hesitated when I recognized who it was as I made a fist with my free hand, the tube of the gun crushing with the motion. I gasped. I was using so much power already, I had to save some for the tanks if I could.
It was Martin standing before us, Commander Stein's second. As he drew a knife, Elaine pushed past me. I noted she was bleeding from some minor wounds as she growled at me in an icy tone devoid of emotion, devoid of all compassion, “He is mine.”
I swallowed. He was a man of war, she not, but I would not take her honor from her as she advanced, Home Sword glowing and singing in her grip. It was over before it began. Her blade ghosted as the man chuckled and said, “I'll do you again bitch,” while he slashed his knife at her.
He lived just long enough to get a confused look on his face after Sabie Acasa, singing with power at a deafening pitch and the intent of her owner, sliced cleanly through the steel of his knife, his arm, and his chest. The two parts of his body slumped to the ground, his unseeing gaze on the sky. Elaine stood above him, tears in her eyes and a fierce look on her face, blood dripping from her blade. Justice had been served.
I was snapped back to the battle as I heard more Cristea screaming. I looked back, the tanks were targeting the unarmed villagers as they streamed toward the safety of the forest. And one of the three Grevas at our backs lay in mangled bits, strewn across the grain. I steeled my churning stomach and tried not to lose my breakfast over the gruesome scene. These tanks were so inhumanly cruel and powerful, even more s
o than our battle catapults back home, which we were loath to use.
The other two Grevas started roaring in anger and charging toward the mechanations. I blinked. They stood no chance against the enemy, surely they saw that, but yet they charged.
They stood in fives and braved the fire.
I screamed out as I started running toward the tanks, my mount too wounded to ride. Bowyn was out front, his horse laying out in a zigzagging course, hooves thrumming, and Verna followed, on her charger again.
I pulled as much magik to me as I could, tasting the world, tasting nature. I had done something like this once before, only after seeing Rain do it on a much bigger scale. But I needed to protect the civilians who were being picked off like scared deer running from a pack of wolves.
I thrust my hands forward, screaming with the pain of the effort of channeling so much through me in a single burst. The air between us and the tanks chilled suddenly, and fog billowed in a band almost three hundred yards wide and deep between us, effectively blinding them. They could not hit what they could not see.
I was staggering from the amount of energy it took to change the temperatures on the field so quickly. But I ran on and could taste Home Sword behind me to my left as Elaine charged toward the sound of the big noisy motors of the tanks roaring to life again and I could almost see their movement as the metal they were constructed of started moving forward toward us.
Chapter 20 – Endgame
We saw flashes in the fog ahead of us followed by the rapid cracks of multiple guns and people screaming. The two Grevas sped past us on their mustangs, and we burst from the fog and into chaos.
I took in the whole scene in an instant. More than a dozen Avalon knights fired long guns at the incoming mounted Grevas, and their mounts were taken down like leaves carried away in the fury of a windstorm. Horses were whinnying in pain and tumbling down onto the ground, carrying their riders with them, some injured and some already lifeless under the barrage of lead.
Bowyn was on foot, his dual blades gleaming. A wicked smile on his face as he slashed at four men who surrounded him. Again and again, his blades were clanging against the guns as the men tried to aim them at him. Two went down in a spinning and whirling cross cut motion of one of Master Kanton's multi-opponent forms. It was a thing of macabre beauty seeing someone at a master level executing their craft as blood sloughed off his blades in long plumes of spray.
A scream pulled my attention as the constant clatter of gunfire on the Grevas ceased. I saw Verna, blood staining a new wound on her chest-plate and the leg wound from her first engagement, standing on one of the tanks, her Gertrude slashing across the chest of a man who had been firing one of those heavier guns from a spot on top of the metal beast.
She slashed at a metal door on the monstrosity to no avail. Then she turned to the battlefield and leapt off the Tank, executing a flip and disappearing behind it.
Avalonian Knights were advancing on the Grevas, only six Cristea were left, staggering on their feet, raising their makeshift weapons. I raised a hand and strained and caught the incoming fire from the guns of the Avalonians running to flank them. I tossed it all back, and one woman was thrown off her feet at the mass impact, her death rattle reaching my ears as Elaine and I arrived.
I could see raising high into the sky far off to the west, the Condor as it started sailing toward the battle. It would be long over, one way or another, before it arrived. It was an hour's journey, and we didn't have that long... I didn't have that long.
I sent my love to Celeste and then growled out a challenge to the nearest enemy. They actually hesitated as I blurred across the field toward them. They were ill-equipped to deal with magic, they didn't need to know I had about exhausted myself of it already.
My eyes widened as my skin started to burn when a new weapon was turned on me, it was as if I had fallen into the fires of Father Sol himself. I snapped back to the present, screaming from the pain of the burns I had experienced just seconds in my future and then grabbed the edge of my hunting cloak and whipped it around me and crouched.
The Avalonian man turned his weapon on me, and I was doused by a stream of fire. I growled defiance as my spelled cloak did all it could to shield me. I could feel dozens if not hundreds of the charms burning themselves out in an attempt to combat the onslaught of an enemy that was made to consume. The heat was unbearable.
But as quickly as it came, it was gone, I stood, the chilled air of my prior magic causing condensing moisture in the air to sizzle into puffs of steam from my singed cloak. I dove over the second stream of heat and fury as he renewed his onslaught. I rolled to my feet and charged him, dodging left and right quickly, leaving doppelganger images of mist, confusing the man as he targeted thin air.
I ducked and skidded as I moved past him, parrying the flame nozzle with Anadele as he tried to strike me with it. I slid up behind him, severing the hose attached to the tank on his back and dove away as whatever was fueling the streams of fire he could throw sprayed out all around the man, dousing him, the flame at the tip of his weapon igniting it all.
His screams echoed in my head, and I took the black mark on my soul while the fire consumed the man as his arms pinwheeled as he ran. Why was he running? The mind does odd things in desperation, and I sickened at the thought of a demise like that. I had been consumed by a heat like that which burned me from the insides at the battle of the Monolith. The same battle that left the burn scars on my arm and face.
I was thrown to the ground by the concussion when the tank on his back exploded in a blast of sound and fury. At least it had ended the man's suffering. I spun to face the enemy, but they were pulling back, and I didn't understand why. They could have... the ground shook as a shockwave hit me, sending me tumbling over the ground.
I rolled onto my stomach and looked on in horror at the bodies of the Cristea strewn about by a small crater. The Avalonians were moving back to allow the tanks to attack.
The big tubes of two tanks were swinging toward a third. I blinked when I saw Sora Elaineia of the Cristea, lost in anguish and rage. She stood on that tank, slashing over and over at the thick armor of it with Sabie Acasa, like a wraith intent on reaping the souls of the enemy. Chunks of metal were being peeled away with each stroke of the sword as its blade glowed brightly, leaving a misty trail in its wake.
Bowyn and Verna had the attention of most of the remaining Avalon knights on foot.
It would take some time to get to whoever was inside, but she had the other tanks spooked. The fourth tank seemed to be pulling back.
Black smoke billowed from the stacks of the two that started turning on the third, I believe they thought I was down. Their mistake. It looked as if they were about to sacrifice their own people to take out Elaineia by firing on their own tank. What kind of monsters were these?
I pulled myself to my knees, then staggered to my feet. I ignored the wet feeling of blood on my arm rolling down to drip off my fingers, my ears were still ringing, and the sounds of battle seemed muffled. I stretched Anadele out in front of me, and I dug deep for whatever trickle of power I had left inside me, as I sought out something, anything I could find on the tanks I could use to disable them.
A sense of vertigo enveloped me, I was pushing too hard, using too much magic, but I had to do something. Then I remembered what I had done in Highland when I fought the rogue Duchess Aelwen's followers. I had exhausted all of my magik but was able to consume the charms the Lupei had placed upon my Masquerade gown. Use their power as mine.
As the tanks leveled their aim, I reached out with my blended magic, letting them envelop my hunting cloak. I could taste the bright and almost overwhelming power there, permeating it, eagerly reaching out to me. The thousands of charms sank into my own magic, and I unraveled all that power, more than I could possibly hold, and I remade it, I consumed it and made it magik I could use.
It built to a raging torrent that I couldn't hope to contain as it started burning me from the inside
out. My hearing sharpened, and I swear I could hear them chambering the large metal rounds into the ungodly huge gun in the tanks.
With a shaking hand, I raised Anadele to the heavens, I could feel all the static in the air, from miles around all rushing to me. As an Adept, I can use electricity, shape it to my will, and with the amount of magik inside me, it was as if the natural electric currents that sweep through the world were all converging upon it, to close an open circuit as Bex would say.
Then I screamed out in pain, in rage, in an ecstasy of power, as dozens of lightning bolts, pulled from the empty sky around us all converged upon Anadele. People speak of her in hushed tones. The blade who split lightning. But they didn't understand. Anadele didn't split lightning, she consumed it, she spit it, she was lightning incarnate.
I thrust my blade forward, my scream an echoing roar over the thunder that shook the crater, and the very ground itself fractured and tore apart between me and the two tanks in the wake of the shockwave of the lightning I threw at the enemy. My cloak fell to ash around me as I consumed every single charm and spell infused within it.
The lightning hit the first tank, picking it up and sending it tumbling into the other one in the chaos of energy release, half the conveyance had vaporized by the extreme power and heat. The other one shuddered and heated under the onslaught. Then I was diving to the ground again as whatever they used to propel the projectiles in the tank ignited, and the tank blew itself apart.
I crawled to my feet, gasping and panting. I could still feel the heat coming off of my Anadele as she glowed white hot, her tip starting to cool to a cherry red. Elaine had been blown off the third tank but was gathering herself to renew her attack. I staggered forward, a detached portion of my mind feeling the cool dampness of the ground beneath my feet. I had lost my boots. Had I been blown out of them somehow?
I saw Verna and Bowyn facing off with a couple remaining Avalon knights each as I started running at the third tank as it swung its giant gun toward me. It was just us four, and there were still two tanks.
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