Now, they were dealing with a lot more fortifications than before, thrown up by Casters during the night, meaning more layers of walls to get past. That meant their mounds of multi-armed, over-muscled, magic-wielding, metal-skinned, multi-legged, and so on and so forth mutant servants had an uphill fight all the way, into withering arrow fire and lots of ready Spears.

They had their own archers, of course. These were prime for getting ridden down from behind by charmed leaders of cavalry units, or for Cleave Trains through their mass.

They also didn’t have near the accuracy of our own archers, which was also a thing.

There was more magic used on our end than on any other fight, as far as formally Cast spells, as if our spellcasters were caught up in the idea of proving themselves superior to this alien god of magic and his minions. The skies were roiling, thunder was booming, lightning was coming down, and rains, rays, cones, clouds, storms, bolts, meteors, comets, walls, disks, blasts, bursts, bombs, geysers, lances, streams, flocks, fogs, flurries, flames, floods, hedges, spikes, thorns, circles, and multi-dimensional incantational nonsense was coming down in colors from both the visual and thaumaspectrum that made it hard to see what was actually real and what wasn’t.

They had a lot of Casters, and the Brothers were only catching the strongest pure Casters. The armored fellows who were only good with one or two spells often got past them, unleashing their own little magical tricks as if they were something special, before having to follow after the beastmen, blow apart the walls in the way, and make their way towards the Obelisk.

Oh, yeah, they were definitely focused on the Obelisk. Forces going after the savage races were clearly minor players meant to occupy them and make sure they didn’t come to our aid, containment forces more than anything, happy to bombard the savages from range and contemptuously take cover against their ranged attacks.

They were also clearly angered at being relegated to minor roles, which Wayfair was more than happy to prey on as we swept by occasionally. The fights that broke out, and the units that went to abandon their positions to join in the greater fighting, were remarkably frequent, and didn’t really seem to alarm the Razzers at all.

Which was cool. The savages were more than pleased to take advantage of their lack of aggressiveness to swarm over the walls and finally get to attack THEM. Much fun ensued, and new forces coming in had to be allocated against the tide of orcs, goblins, Jotuns, anthros, tauren, and all their friends and pets taking this opportunity to let the Warp know how much they hated being on the defensive.

On our side, we fell back and back and back as the day wore on, the bodies piled up, and burned down en vivus. The long-range exchange of magic died down after a couple hours, although the lightning kept coming down from above regularly, and short-range magic was still common. There were hundreds of Warp Warlocks with this force, their Wrath a decent and visible weapon that earned them a lot of Baned arrows in reply.

Still, they advanced, magic blowing apart the defenses, swarming over the defenders with numbers and forcing them to withdraw in good order. I could read their surprise at the killing power and tenacity of the troops on our side, which should not have been able to handle the mutated strength and ferocity of the Warped mutates on theirs so easily, but that’s what arrogance will get you.

Here and there, I winced as my Ironblood and Marked died, bodies hauled away if possible, knowing all those magic swords and skinplate these bastards were waving around was going to be used to catalyze the magic to return them to life.

They got up to striking range of the main walls, putting up shields to defy the unceasing ranged fire coming down, doubtless impressed at the fact we weren’t running out of ammunition. Their target was the Obelisk, it was plain to everyone by now, and they were making a run for it in force.

When all the Warp dragons and drakes breached the Rift, there were too many for even the Brothers to intercept them all, and they swarmed forward rapidly with their two heads breathing black and pink fires towards the Obelisk, whose whiteness was rapidly approaching its peak.

Out came the ExLites on our side to take them on.

They were not pleased when a whole bunch of twelve-foot chakon slammed into their shield line and breached it, while Captains Fido and Shirley did a One-Two and opened them up from behind at each flank. The champa-ka’s sticks and stones pounded a channel, and the Kings and Five Dragons came racing through to drive into the incoming Warp lizards with style and fury, really making a tangle of things. The Lion’s Guard was moving in support of their King, the Wolf Guard was in support of theirs, and a brand new Ivory Guard of urkhar and ogryn from the lands of the Children, also plying long Spears and Glaives, was now fighting in support of their King, stymieing the advance of the Wyrms.

It was time for the champions who hadn’t been Brother-Gibbed to put out their best fighting efforts, and they sallied forth, enduring the hail of ranged fire and getting up to the walls. Stone blew into the air, fire came down from above; earth melted and decayed and blew to ash, disintegrated, and washed away; stone shattered into rubble, split, and fell.

It was a lot of concentrated magic, both to defend those casting it and inflicted on the walls, and it worked. The primary walls along that entire section ruptured in four broad places, and the screaming mutant hordes sallied forth for the Obelisk beyond.

The amount of fire they took at close range was impressive, but they ate it and kept swarming, thousands of them flooding through the openings and tying up everyone. Bombardments became cover fire for careful retreats, the kind of precision marching and maneuvering to make an imperial band blush, as units pinned between hordes of mutants had to fight their way free, link up, and extract themselves from envelopment. More magic was deployed to blow holes in the masses just for this reason, arrow fire to suppress and support, as the enraged and victorious mutants pressed, heaping dead upon dead as they did so.

It was less a case of the champions forcing their way through via force of arms than repeated spells blasting away those in their way to clear a path. Still, they labored heavily, taking fire from all sides, and brightly armored figures fell one after another, despite all their magical defenses, as they fought their way up towards the Obelisk, forcibly blowing away anyone standing in their way.

They probably should have noticed that most of those they were blowing away didn’t actually die, but they had other things on their minds. All that banefire hungry for them was part of it.

And yet, they made it to the Obelisk.

They brought up a Formation pretty quick, bringing out the skull from some Spell Weaver all wrapped up in jewels to power it, and we could only look on as a foul purple and green flame was unleashed upon the Obelisk.

It quaked, it trembled, it vibrated. Unclean cracks stole across it, putrid flames ate away at its structure, and then Rune Circles flared all about it, flashed through it polyspectral unholy flames, and chopped it apart.

There was silence, and then a great roar of triumph from the surviving jRaztl forces, who numbered yet in the tens of thousands.

One guy in an overdone peacock helm strode forward, raising a sword trailing dark rainbows, “You have FAILED! Your little trick to gather power to seal the Rift has FAILED, worms! The armies that follow us you will never be able to withstand! Prepare to offer your souls, and those of this whole doomed world, to the LORDS OF THE WARP!”

Cue maniacal laughter, braying, bleating, burping, croaking, howling, the works. Farts of celebration, sure, why not?

Clap, Clap, Clap, Clap!

He used magic to make it heard. Young Sir Estemar, riding Dawngold, the Griffon he had Called to serve him while he was in Yle Tyorm, perched on top of a wall nearby, slowly and obviously making the clapping motion, the sound ringing out, attracting all eyes for his splendid appearance.

“Well done, well done!” he called out in reply to that grandiose boast. “Tell me, for I should like to know... how does it feel to be so absolutely suckered?”

There was a moment of poignant silence, and then the orcs on the wall far behind him turned, hooting, and smashed into the sides of that crude and garish statue that they had defended so ferociously behind them.

The façade fell away, and the Obelisk within rose another thirty feet into the air as it did so.

Filled to the top with pulsing white vivic power.

Prince Estemar waited just that precious one second necessary for all these clever, committed, ambitious jRaztl fanatics to realize they had been totally screwed.

“Burn!” he stated, snapping his fingers with rather impossible force.

The ground heaved.

We’d been making Exploding Runes and Wardglyphs for months now, a Valence contribution during downtime, putting Caster Slots not used to use. The slates and boards they’d been drawn on had been chain-linked, buried underneath the battlefield, and were waiting for this moment.

Sure, some had been broken by impacts, stray magic and blows and whatnot. But still, there was one buried about every ten feet in a geometric triangle pattern, and they had a blast radius of five feet.

If you had really fast reflexes, you could see them go off, starting behind the fallen walls in the areas that the retreating defenders were all emphatically not standing on, rising up in fire and lightning, acid and cold to cover all the Warped forces there. Then they extended out before the walls and into the battlefield, all the way up to the first trench line, shallow black earth lifting off the ground as they detonated in thumping beats of magical power, and there literally was nowhere to go to escape them.

Their entire advance force was basically encapsulated.

The blasts were enough to basically massacre all their lower-tier troops, anything a Three or less just died outright. The tougher stuff could live, but often was hit from multiple angles, especially the cavalry and oversized stuff, taking horrendous damage and reeling as they did so.

Eighty percent of the attacking force past the last trench was instantly eliminated, in a multi-colored display of magic, no less. Was that a visual pun?

The irony was not lost on the champions who survived, reeling from the blasts, and now looking around as the ExLites they thought they had killed while advancing upon the Obelisk closed in with superhuman speed around them, the grins on their faces visible and mocking the trapped Warped commanders.

It was not a good moment for them.

There was no way the Warped could make it to the real Obelisk. The forces they had over on that side were scant, and were totally being held at bay by the savage tribes, far from the walls.

I skated up to the Obelisk, where dozens of tribal Shamans were already gathered, seated and condensing the power of their gods in their own different ways, building the impetus necessary for the Ritual.

We had done the majority of the fighting, but they had done the majority of the dying. They had earned the right to deliver the final blow.

I dropped off Wayfair and Hazé, who immediately rose up the side of the Obelisk to the top, and began their own chants of power, which seemed to run counter to the dark forces being Called on by the savages. I watched one flow running clockwise, the other counter-clockwise, and smiled despite myself.

Arcs, pentagrams, hexagrams, and other Patterns were starting to fill the sky, joining together in a greater order. Waaaay far away, close to the Ring around this battlefield, the two Obelisks we’d put in place long ago, also topped off and seething with power, conducted their energy through the circle defined by the three points the Obelisks made, and the triangle thus formed just so happened to form a midpoint line to the very heart of the Rift, imagine that.

Death through Geometry. Ah, Chaos must love it.

The haror at those other Obelisks joined in the effort, and the power began to build...

It was time to make a hole.

I was off and running.