Nathan’s spell slammed into place around the borders of his mental world.
He held his breath and waited. His muscles tensed. Any moment now, and she would whisper in his ear or stroke his body.
Nothing happened.
A minute passed, and still nothing happened.
Nathan nearly collapsed. Somehow, he had erected a mental ward around himself strong enough to keep her out. He didn’t know how she had infiltrated his mind like that or bypassed the time dilation effect of the binding stone.
Kadria’s tether had vanished, he noticed. He still felt it in the back of his mind, like always, but it was no longer visible.
Had she helped him? Was that what he had felt while casting?
Deciding it didn’t matter, he returned to reality.
“—I think you need to retreat, right now,” Seraph finished. She blinked. “You used binding stone magic, didn’t you?”
“You can tell?” Nathan asked.
“I am connected to you. It’s a subtle change, but it’s there.” Seraph shrugged. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you what it’s like to monitor your mental state through the gem when you’re screwing other Champions.”
“Maybe don’t do that,” Nathan muttered.
He looked out into the distance. The horde continued to charge forth, unceasing in its efforts to overwhelm his defenses.
Floating above it all, the Twin—Laura, she had said her name was—glared at him with crossed arms. She shouted again, but no whispers entered his mind.
Nathan glanced behind him and noticed that none of his soldiers were affected. While he had a lot of women in his private army and knights, most of the soldiers from the county were men. If Laura was targeting them, they should be showing signs of it. But they weren’t.
“She’s only after me, and I’ve cast a mental ward,” Nathan said.
“You’ve what?” Seraph asked.
“I’ve protected myself against her succubus magic,” Nathan simplified.
“… I’m not going to ask how you even know such a spell,” Seraph said. “We need to get the demons off the wall.”
He opened his mouth to reply, but then froze. Something was wrong. Looking around, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. The battle hadn’t changed. Laura hadn’t moved. Spells and boulders continued to fly overhead. No great explosions had sounded from the other valley, so Nathan wasn’t worried about Leopold yet.
Then it clicked. The drums had changed. Their tempo had increased several notches. Now they sounded like a dance number. And a fast one at that.
“I don’t know if we’ll get the chance,” Nathan said. “The drums are beating too fast.”
“What does that matter?” Seraph asked.
“Because I think she’s controlling the demons with them,” Nathan said slowly, as he pieced together what he knew. “She has suggestion powers, but she’s not controlling our soldiers. She targeted me, but only me. Why?” He had a bad feeling why, after seeing that strange tendril connecting him to Kadria. “But every time the drums have changed intensity, the horde has changed tactics, and these demons are far too smart.”
Seraph remained silent. They watched as the demons began to move faster, swing harder, and try to climb the walls through the rain of oil even as their bodies collapsed. Laura was converting them into berserkers.
“I might be able to take out the drums,” Seraph suggested.
“How? They’re behind countless thousands of demons. The Twins probably left behind several greater demons to protect them, and it’s not like she’ll let you get past her.” Nathan nodded at the Messenger floating above the horde.
“The Twins?” Seraph asked.
“… let’s just say I found out her name while trying to get her out of my head. It’s Laura,” Nathan said. “I don’t know what her sister’s name is.”
“That explains the two valleys,” Seraph muttered. “Do we retreat?”
“Have everybody ready to do so,” Nathan ordered.
The onslaught continued. Slowly but surely, the demons began to whittle down Nathan’s automatons.
But he wasn’t idle during this time. He began to slowly cast his own spell, weaving them into the stone wall as a pentagon glowed over his hands. Laura hovered in the distance, watching him work. She smirked.
What made her feel so confident, he wondered. It didn’t matter. He now knew that Laura and Kadria did have a few similarities. Kadria was highly capable with spatial magic. That meant Laura probably was, as well.
Idly, Nathan realized that meant Kadria had suggestion abilities she hadn’t used on him yet.
The drums slowed to an almost glacial pace, and the demons their advance. They remained over a hundred meters from the wall. That was as sure a sign as any that Laura was controlling the demons using the drums.
Nathan finished casting his fifth rank spell. Along the entire length of the wall, trickles of a bright blue water seeped from between the stones. Blue light shined from the foundation of the wall. Moments later, the trickling became a rush, then a tidal wave.
Not that it was a massive wave. The rocky terrain turned the water choppy, creating foam as the water churned down the valley toward the demons. The dumb red brutes stared at the water, stupefied.
Nathan continued casting, another pentagon glowing between his palms. Power from the binding stone trickled into his body, as he couldn’t cast back-to-back fifth rank spells without exhausting himself.
While he watched, Laura let out a triumphant yell. One of her arms appeared to become consumed by darkness. Then she made a cutting motion across the length of the valley in front of the incoming wave of water.
Nothing happened. Nathan felt a tremendous surge of magic enter the world, and it remained present, but he couldn’t see anything. Laura’s arm continued to glow, and she maintained a rather ridiculous pose in midair, with one arm crossed over her body. Her dress waved more actively in a wind that still didn’t exist, and she flashed the entire battlefield more than once.
A cheer went up from the beastkin knights as they saw the water about to crash into the demons. They had heard what happened in the last invasion, when Nathan unleashed a similar wave of flesh-eating magical water.
Despite their confidence, Nathan finished his spell. There was no visible effect, and he began to cast yet another fifth rank spell while everybody was distracted.
Then the water vanished. The cheers ceased. Nathan blinked. He watched as the tidal wave crashed into an invisible wall only meters in front of the demonic horde, and then the water ceased to exist from that point onward. As if it entered a different dimension.
Spatial magic. There was a wall there, and it sent the water somewhere else. Nathan quickly checked his surroundings, in case the water reappeared behind him. No waves of flesh-eating water poured down on his head. It seemed that Laura wasn’t smart enough to turn his magic against him.
“Is that all you have?” Laura taunted.
The drums roared back to their maximum tempo. The demons let out a furious yell and jeered as they charged the wall again. Manticores leaped forth, bounding closer to the wall than ever before. Was this Laura’s true attempt to overcome Nathan’s defenses without using her true power?
The demons kept running toward the wall. They ran and ran. None of them reached the walls, even as they pushed each other over and stepped over each other’s heads. The manticores screeched as they found themselves stuck, and demons crawled over them. Infighting broke out as the demons began hacking at each other, desperate to reach the walls, and the manticores began slaughtering everything close to themselves.
Slowly, the demons and Laura realized what was happening. But it was too late, as the demons continued to charge headlong into Nathan’s trap. He finished casting his third fifth rank spell, but let it lay dormant as he made further preparations using his binding stone magic.
The demons sank into a hundred meters of mud. Maybe mud wasn’t the right word. Quicksand was the appropr
iate term, if quicksand consumed whatever sank into it. The first demons had found themselves waist-deep in a flesh-eating bog before they even knew what was happening. Then those behind them had killed the front ranks as they kept going, only to find themselves also trapped in the bog.
Even the usual demonic tactic of building a bridge of near-dead demons didn’t work, because the quicksand killed the demons faster than they could cross it.
The quicksand was a constant draw on Nathan’s binding stone, as it partially relied on his ability to control reality to create it. Combined with the increased expense of using the binding stone in the portal, he planned to give up on the spell in only a minute or so.
But he gave no outward signs of doing that. Instead, he winked at Laura and stretched out his arms, as if to say, “Your move.”
Laura screeched. Darkness coated both of her arms this time. Her anger reached boiling point as she made a table-flipping motion and the entire hundred-meter-wide stretch of quicksand in front of the walls vanished instantly. Every demon in the quicksand found themselves hanging in midair, the eerie white light hungry to take them.
The demons screamed as they fell, never to be seen again. Nothing ever came back after falling into whatever lay beneath this world.
Nathan wasn’t done, however. The subterranean rock that had been uncovered by Laura’s magic glittered. The fifth rank spell that Nathan had cast earlier had lain dormant but was now exposed.
All hell broke loose among the demonic horde. Explosions rippled along the front of the horde, where Laura had removed the quicksand. Nathan stopped feeding power from his binding stone into his magic, as his job was done here.
At the same time, the chasm began to close. This world hated voids and closed them, given the chance. More explosions rippled along the entire valley beneath Laura. She looked below herself, arms covering her face out of fear.
Jets of steam burst into the air, higher than the wall. Clouds of vapor drifted away as chunks of mud, rock, and demon fell back to ground. More and more explosions went off, and the overlapping thwooms even drowned out the drums for a brief while.
Nathan’s face burned with the intensity of the heat, even at this distance. He saw most of the defenders cower behind the battlements, unaware of what was happening.
Sen stepped up onto the very edge of the wall, arms outstretched and eyes practically glowing as she stared in wonder at Nathan’s spellwork.
Although it wasn’t really a spell, so much as nature at work. He had modified the ground beneath the demons to contain countless underground pools of water. Except each pool was held at incredibly high pressure and then superheated using his magic. He had also protected each pool using barriers, in order to prevent them from going off early.
Laura’s removal of the quicksand had been unexpected but welcome. The shifting of the ground had disrupted every pool at once. She had vaporized her entire army by accident.
The idea had been based on geysers, which Nathan had run into multiple times while building fortresses in mountainous regions. The idea of using the pressurized water as a weapon had occurred to Nathan after nearly being splattered on a cave ceiling by one.
Finally, the geysers died down. Most of the horde had been blown to pieces, seriously burned, or otherwise injured. Their numbers were greatly depleted. Far fewer demons jeered at Nathan.
Laura remained unharmed, but she was furious.
Her entire body became shrouded in darkness.
Nathan reached for his binding stone and grabbed every scrap of power he could. Laura’s power swelled and swelled.
No time to cast a spell. Nathan slapped his hands onto the stone wall and reached for the barrier woven into it. His arms glowed as he pumped raw power into it. This was a rank one spell, but given he was using power from the binding stone it didn’t matter. It was horrifically inefficient anyway.
Laura thrust her arms at the wall. The entire world seemed to shudder for a moment. Nathan swore he saw afterimages of everything. As if the world split apart, then pulled itself back together a moment later.
He saw the cliffs of the world splinter apart, and the entire portal rupture into white light, as if everything was being destroyed at once.
In another afterimage, the darkness slammed into the barrier and did nothing beyond provide an amazing light show.
Nathan barely remembered one, as everything went black after the barrier shattered. But he distinctly remembered the wall beginning to disintegrate around him, and a burning sensation.
But in the real world—the one that he was living in right now—the barrier didn’t quite hold. It glowed so brightly that he couldn’t see anything past it. Cracks formed along it. Then a massive hole formed in it.
A moment later, the barrier vanished, and Laura’s spell ended. Nathan nearly collapsed on the battlements.
Then he saw the result of her tantrum.
A twenty meter long stretch of wall was gone.
Not destroyed. Or ruined. Or assaulted in any way.
Simply gone, as if it had been carved out of reality in the same way that someone would cut slices of a cake.
Nathan’s mind froze as he understood the raw power he was dealing with and what Laura’s spatial magic allowed her to do. He didn’t know how many people had been killed in that instant, as there were no bodies. Seraph had been preparing for the retreat, which meant removing people from inside the wall, but there was no way he had suffered zero deaths from an attack like that.
In the distance, Laura doubled over in midair. She looked exhausted.
Was an attack like that her limit?
Not that it mattered. Something like that would end Nathan instantly. He considered himself lucky that she hadn’t directed it at him.
A small part of his mind remembered those “afterimages” and a pit formed in his stomach. Were they…?
He shook off the thought.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Laura shouted, throwing back her head and flicking her long, white hair behind herself. “This was supposed to be fun! Why aren’t I having sex yet? I bet Maura’s banging somebody over there.”
And with those words, Laura shot toward Nathan like an arrow.
Chapter 22
The impact sent Nathan flying. His body was sturdy, but he pumped magic into it to enhance himself anyway. By the time he hit the ground, he had reinforced himself enough that he barely felt the crash landing.
He pulled himself up from the remains of the earthworks he landed in and looked around.
The battlefield was absolute chaos. His army was in retreat from the outer wall. Demons surged through the hole in the wall, and automatons met them in frenzied battle. Flames of all colors filled the air. Nathan smelled ash, smoke, and charred flesh.
“Bastion!” a beastkin knight shouted at him. Her tail hung low, and her helmet was missing. Blood ran down her face, and she had one eye closed.
“Go,” Nathan shouted, gesturing for her to retreat.
A surge of magic built up above him. Triangles appeared in his hands, and he unleashed a pair of wind blasts at Laura. She batted them aside before dropping down.
The beastkin knight backed away a few steps, then raised her weapon.
The succubus glanced at her, then raised an arm. A sliver of darkness covered it. She curled in her wrist.
Nathan charged her, his sword wreathed in light. His attack distracted Laura, and she smirked at him. She fought him bare-handed, covering her limbs in shadow and deflecting his sword and spells effortlessly.
The gap between them was massive right now. He could match a duogem Champion, but only with preparation and a lot of raw power. But a Messenger fought like a Bastion on steroids. They cast high rank spells faster than he could blink and had a seemingly endless reserve of power.
Laura might be a ridiculously silly woman in many ways, but her power was genuine. Underestimating her because she appeared to be an idiot was the same as underestimating Kadria because she was cons
tantly horny.
What Nathan needed was Champion support, so he could prepare a fifth or sixth rank spell. But right now, all of his Champions were tied up, helping his army retreat.
The beastkin knight fled while he kept Laura busy, and Nathan found himself pushed back.
“You put up a better fight than I thought,” Laura said. “No wonder Kadria claimed you. But she’s always so focused on hiding her toys that she didn’t realize we knew about her hiding spot.” Laura giggled. “I know I promised Maura that I would wait until we met up at the end before I ravaged you, but you’ve been playing hard to get, so nobody can blame me, right?”
“Somebody’s feeling confident,” Nathan said.
“Oh, backtalk. It’s been a while since I’ve met a Bastion who actually spoke to me.” Laura stopped attacking Nathan and pressed a hand against one cheek. “All you Bastions do is scream about your goddess, and heresy, and how they’re going to destroy me if it’s the last thing they do. It’s nice to have a toy that won’t be screaming death threats while I ride them.”
“You misunderstand. There won’t be any riding,” Nathan said.
“Oh, no. There’s going to be lots of riding. Even if I have to give you back later, I’m taking a nice long turn on the Bastion Express,” Laura said with a wicked grin.
“The what?”
“It’s, like, what they used to call trains and—” Laura blinked. “You don’t know what a train is, so why am I bothering? I’m a Messenger. You’re just one Bastion, and you’re losing. Ergo, we fuck.”
One day, Nathan will learn why Messengers seemed to use these strange terms. For now, he had stalled long enough.
“I don’t think my Champions would appreciate it, so I’ll politely refuse,” Nathan said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
He leaped backward. Laura tried to follow him, but waves of energy crashed into her. Her dress fluttered, but nothing happened to it.
That was a bad sign.
Seraph landed in a roll behind Laura and grimaced at the sight of her gem ability having no effect. No quip escaped her mouth, and instead she raised her tonfas in a defensive position.
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