As they charge, the cacophony, that was manageable a moment ago starts to become all-encompassing. That doesn’t distract me from where my attention should be, the people entering the tunnel that the mages have formed. Even if it doesn’t come all the way to the wall, it still brings them much closer. From 150 meters to less than 50.

I lift my hand, in the direction of the tunnels, and with a squeeze, just for dramatic effect, attempt to collapse nearly all of it. I meet resistance in a few spots, and it brings me no joy all the people that will become trapped, maybe even perish there. On the spots I feel a couple of magic users fighting me, I stop my attempts, but that is only a small portion of the tunnel’s length. Seconds tick by as the structural integrity falls, and suddenly the entire thing collapses almost instantly. Only about a meter of earth, but enough to at least trap most of the people under it.

The four or five magic users spread throughout the tunnel are of little consequence. They would need to long to rebuild anything beyond a simple tunnel to escape the collapse.

With a final thought to it, I turn to a more pressing task. The larger throng of enemies barring down on us. A few are already at the wall, but a good amount is instead of dodging the obstacles, are trying to remove them.

Spikes, traps, and barbed are moved aside. But that leaves them really exposed to someone like me. With contemptuous ease, I delay their progress and sometimes manage to tangle a few more of them.

And as each second passes, I grow my reach until the easy actions are much harder given how many simultaneous streams of thought and mana are needed to keep track of it all.

---------------------------------------------

At a random house a Minion of Brad’s:

“So, this is the time when we were supposed to start, but he hasn’t given the signal.” I start speaking, concerned at what may have happened. “He was supposed to be back by now.”

“Don’t worry, some complication must have happened, but we just need to follow the plan. They arrived at the walls, let’s go.”

I don’t care for the nonchalant attitude, but at least he is not sporting defeatist bullshit. Just so everyone is on the same page, I get up and speak to the 10 other people gathered here.

“Well, it looks as if he won’t be joining us, by the time is here. Everyone knows what to do.”

We all file out in a stream. Each headed for the part of the city that we were responsible for sabotaging.

----------------------------------------------------

Control, communication, and battery room.

“Quick, there is a group that just started to roam the city. I recognized a couple of them as Brad’s supporters.”

Hearing the distressing news, I pass it up the chain with my magic transmitter. After a quick look at the other guard stationed there, my intention is clear. With a nod from him, we position ourselves properly.

As I leave the small outer defense post, and he instantly closes the door behind me, and I join this scout. A quick look behind me I stop. There is dirt where there shouldn't. As I turn and run in that direction, someone digging a hole comes into view. With a quick look slightly behind me, I see the scout following me. When a moment later he sees the same as me, the look of shock appears genuine.

Wordlessly we start to charge the remaining distance, as the saboteur notices us. With a mighty heave, he rams the strange digging implement in his hands with all his strength in the ground and the metal noise is worse than the screeching of a banshee.

“You fucking idiot. We need that to defend against the army outside.” I say stating the obvious, without believing his stupidity. What, did he think that if the enemy won they would be better off? As he turns to try and defend himself from me, the scout pulls a pair of daggers, and with unnatural speed, slams both of them to the side of this highly misguided individual.

The milder tone in my head, however, is the result of knowing he won’t be surviving. Not with the two massive gashes on his side.

------------------------------------------------

Minutes later, on the commander's tent atop the wall.

“Shit, this means they managed to cut what, 3 of the battery links?”

“Yeah, we are down to about 40 % mana throughput. Luckily we managed to catch most if not all of Brad's flunkeys, everything should be back to normal in minutes.”

“We just need to hold for these minutes then.”

----------------------------------------------------------

I feel as Merlin and his retinue start to falter, not because they are overwhelmed, but simply because there is not enough mana from the conduit. With twenty-five people, they can probably last 2 or 3 minutes before exhausting their own mana reserves in the process. And that is already counting there is still some mana getting through.

I again split my attention, and start working on multiple mana conduits with my roots. The specific places I have to connect are not ideal from how I grew my root network, but it’s not too great of an impediment.

Evermore familiar with the simple runes needed for the mana conduit, the process almost unfolds by itself, and even Pando's seed helps. But there seems to be some fundamental limitation at play that stops him from doing more. I leave this particular mystery for later and continue with my tasks. First, I connect the few meters from the link of my house directly to the conduit coming up the wall. This increases the meager throughput of 80 mana by 12 mana a second.

Second I link the batteries I’m carrying to the mana conduit atop the wall, and that nearly restores the mana output to normal levels. Last, I grow the tap on the main battery and link it to the main wall mana conduit at the base of the wall.

All that takes me about two minutes, and by the end, I’m mentally exhausted given I still had to keep in mind the myriad of small actions on delaying the advance from the main force of the enemy army. As they attempted to remove the defenses and make wide paths open to transit, I continued to put new obstacles in their path and strategically moving them back in place.

It's almost like we were both playing a game of whack ‘a’ mole with each other. I got to admit, they were clearly winning. But just the enormous amount of manpower dedicated to the task was a victory on my part. Each person fighting me was one less for the others to worry about.

Before putting my attention fully back to my self-assigned tasks, I pay attention for a few moments to the dynamic of Merlin’s team and how they were doing against the enemy mages.

I start to see the signs of exhaustion creeping in on everyone’s faces and how they wield their mana, but given this was actually their second fight in a very short time span, I was still not too concerned. The other enemy mages were showing their inexperience, and I doubted they had the same grit and experience as Merlin and his team.

Merlin was also making much better use of his mana, he was using less than half of the mana compared to the enemy. Too bad they were so outnumbered.

Seeing one last giant 5-foot boulder, deflected to the base of the wall, the strongest part, and shielded, just to take the worse of the brunt off. I’m reassured, they can handle whatever on their own for the time being.

With my full attention, the clear-cut advantage they were demonstrating against me on my main task becomes a little less clear-cut. I grab the dismantled and torn apart traps and space deniers with my roots and pulled them in the directions I think will achieve the maximum level of nuisance.

Everyone that wants is already at the walls, but keeping a few of them busy, and making any thoughts of tactical retreat much more difficult is reward enough.

I wonder at the amount of mana, and the less than ideal ways I went about it. Even if I had already gone over the 25k mana mark, soon to be approaching the 30k, I somehow was fine. My ten-fold increase in the soul stat was the main culprit, but even with how amazing that was, there had to be some catch or a limit. I thought that at this point I would already be feeling the effects strongly enough, and that could give a good estimate of what my maximum should be.

I was hoping for at least 40k, but behind my battered and exhausted body, plus my tired and overworked mind, the specific mental muscle, with the familiar accompanying burn from handling too much mana still had not reared its ugly head. Not even as a warning.

I could have probably pushed even more of the mana to my runic creations, but it somehow was looking like it wouldn’t be necessary. With a deft touch, I still created the mental images of the runes I wanted to create. With Pando’s seed help, I began to implement some basic control structures, should they be needed. But I still had a strong feeling the only reason they may be needed, was if my attention was need elsewhere, not from mana exhaustion.

To my side, thousands of the fights that until this moment were more sporadic, become a near-continuous occurrence. We still had the advantage, but all along the wall a few of the enemy find bigger footholds.

I form under my clothes and thin leather jacket the strongest mesh of roots I can. It ends up taking me a couple of minutes to get it just how I want. That is almost not enough time, and soon after I’m finished, one amongst the throng of enemies manages to break through in a spot near me.

The clarity with which I observe him is eerie, given my eyes are closed. A pair of people look back at the leather-clad, mace-wielding warrior. But as he stands against me, they know he doesn’t stand a chance.

He stands for only a moment, covered in blood, and with singed armor and flesh from multiple fireballs, probably glancing strikes. He grins and charges in my direction.

Getting up, with three mana points in a single movement, I spin my staff and hit the handle of his mace head-on. He looks down at his weapon, now with a cracked wooden handle, and grimaces, unaware of the next strike that hits his head. The second strike is more gentle, but it is still strong enough to disorientate him. As I entangle him in my roots, I file him away as another person out of the fight.

A strange mesh, that the enemy was not having any luck in disentangling. Thin, flexible, and sticky roots cover him constricting all his moves, and he is pulled to the ground stiff. Anyone approaching someone entangled joins them. Even if they are strong enough to simply rip through the bindings, they don’t have tools appropriate to take the armor off people and cut the roots, without also cutting who they are trying to save.

By now around 400 were taken off the board by my roots, and even if I was taken off the board next, I made sure they would have immense trouble coming back to the fight.

Before I can fully dedicate my attention to the roots all over the battleground, something concerning happens. A light red glow surrounds a big warrior wielding a greatsword. Someone relatively familiar given his distinctness. Covered in armor only a few strategic spots, he fits the barbarism look to a T.

But his actions are what concern me. Before, I hadn’t even noticed Lord Max was fighting so close. But as soon as his berserk mode was activated, Greg and the other two-level fifty that were fighting him directly start being pushed back aggressively.

I start to grow my roots all around me and let go of nearly all endeavors. I’m thankful I have set up the control network to continue moving the roots around with only minimum inputs from me. though the movements, will be quite repetitive and not very suitable to continue for a long time.

As adrenaline hits my veins, and my focus sharpens even further, the physical exhaustion I was feeling until a month ago is gone. Or rather I can’t feel it anymore.

Greg and the other two levels 50 activate their own class skills. All three wield spears, and while the specifics are slightly different, the visual effect is the same. Glowing white light starts to emanate from their spears. Too bad, that it doesn’t look to be enough.

They are now much faster and more nimble in their movements. Everyone around that before was poking occasionally at Lord Max takes a couple of steps back to give them space to fight.

Even the enemy concentrate their efforts elsewhere, not wanting to be taken out in a single blow from these monsters.

Amongst all that, a shiver runs through my spine as, despite the supposed irrational thinking of berserker, he stares straight at me. The eyes behind that gaze are not the eyes of a wild and uncontrolled animal, they are measured and calculating.

As he starts to take his next step, every smidge of Aether in my body starts cycling at the same time. All my resources are exerted to the full extent, I let go of absolutely every concern that doesn't directly aid me in this fight, for this was a fight for my life.

The certainty of this though is overwhelming, and I take this more seriously than ever before. Red, green, and bluish faint lights surround me. The space around me that before only came to my perception as sonar or an electron microscope image, is replaced by something like a 3d scan with color, distance, weight, and texture measurements.

The roots, which were growing at a fast rate before exploding in growth in a way I never thought possible, 10 mana, stamina, and health points are weaved together with my vigor and infuse in my body in an entirely new process. Something I never even dreamed of before. Every leftover smidge of mana goes into my mana shield. I drew from all the sources I can at the same time and even Pando’s seed sends mana my way.

We both explode in motion. Faster than a blink of an eye the result is obvious. His sword is run through me. As the strong flash of red light fades, and his grim comes into full bloom, conscience starts trying to slip my grasp.

All my Aether listens to me as I state simply.

“I will live.”