Chapter 27: Abaza Burns

The skirmish between Alessio’s forces and Chekov’s forces seemed to have no end, even after several hours of fighting in and around the buildings of Abaza. While the Inquisition forces were at a disadvantage facing the Janaroian forces head-on, Chekov had his forces divide up into small groups and dart in between buildings as they took potshots at the Janaroians. Alessio’s forces were only really suited to fighting while in formation, so the guerilla actions of the Inquisition infuriated him.

“If that’s how you want to play this, Inquisition, don’t blame me for what actions you force me to take!” His face red with anger, Alessio raised his staff as he chanted. Arrows and projectiles flew from the darkness towards Alessio as he stopped to chant, but his mages combined their efforts and put up a golden shield surrounding their priest-captain.

“Retreat halfway through the village. I don’t want anybody being hit by his spell. Stick to the shadows and hide behind buildings.” Snarling, Chekov signalled for all of his men to move out of Alessio’s line of sight. “All we have to do now is to wear them down by attrition and time. The weakness of fighting in a formation is that once enough people die the formation is broken.” Quickly and silently, the Inquisition forces seemed to vanish as they made their way away from the village square.

His forehead shining with sweat, Alessio finished the last phrase of his chant. Smiling as he raised his staff towards the buildings next to the inn, Alessio unleashed his prepared spell. A golden ball two feet in diameter shot out from the tip of his staff, and drilled a hole through the wooden building. The golden ball travelled halfway through the building before exploding, setting the inside of the building alight with golden flames. Screaming could be heard within, and several villagers who managed to not be directly hit ran out with their clothes on fire.

Motioning with his hand, Alessio had his armored warriors cut down the panicking villagers. Instructing his subordinate mages to set magically demolish the buildings surrounding the square, Alessio stayed back to watch the situation.

“If they choose to hide, then I’ll just these Inquisition bastards out of hiding. The righteous fire of the faithful will always prevail over the heretics.” Gathering the ambient mana from the atmosphere, Alessio started to prepare another spell.

Oksana at the moment had managed to move to the southern side of the square. Climbing to the rooftop of a building, she surveyed the situation. Alessio’s forces were well armored and on guard but their attention was towards the east where Chekov’s main force was and to the north where Alessio’s mages were systematically burning the buildings to the ground. Seeing as how nobody paid her any attention at all, Oksana withdrew a special arrow from her quiver. This arrow was pitch black, with an especially large arrowhead. The arrowhead wasn’t sharp, but was actually a small box containing something. Nocking the arrow onto her longbow, Oksana fired the arrow directly at the Janaroian mages. The arrow arced through the air as it slammed into the mage’s magical projected bubble shield. As soon as the arrow hit the force bubble, it exploded in a black cloud which covered the mage’s force shield. Almost instantly, the magical bubble disintegrated with a distinct pop.

“Shit! That projectile was full of magebane powder! Our magic will continue to fail us as long as we are near it.” Panting, Alessio quickly took control of the situation. “All troops move in formation to the south. We need to stand clear of this black cloud if we want to survive.” Finally facing a real crisis since the fight started, Alessio’s face showed his worry for the first time.

“This is it! All remaining archers, fire at will. Aim for the mages. The rest of us, move to surround the soldiers from the dark.” Peeking at the Janaroian’s from around a building corner, Chekov instructed his forces. Quietly but quickly chanting, Chekov’s face showed total concentration as he prepared his spell. “Jarlov, Brekan. Distract their mages. I authorize the use of Silentium potions. Klaven be with you.”

Jarlov and Brekan nodded and brought out potions, their bottles pitch black except for a single white star decorating the sides. Popping open the bottles, the two commandos downed their contents in an instant. Within seconds, the men’s veins grew more pronounced and their faces turned ashen. Gripping their longswords and, the two men darted out of hiding and charged towards the Janaroian mages.

“Idiots! Getting out of cover is just asking to be killed! Incinerate those fools!” Sneering, Alessio didn’t pay much attention to the two men charging at his soldiers.

With quick incantations, the Janaroian mages launched several fireballs at the two quickly approaching commandos. With wide grins, the two commandos ran straight into the flames.

“Eh? Did those two lose their minds due to fear? No matter, Mages! Set the every building you can on fire, I want to burn those rats out into the open!” With a shout, Alessio finished his incantation. A ball of white fire flew from the tip of his staff into the air. Pulsating gently above the village for a second, it exploded and rained white flames down onto the village. At this moment, the two Klavan commandos jumped out of the flames and over the shields of Alessio’s fighters.

“What? Why aren’t they dead?” Alessio’s face blanched as the two commandos slammed into his mages. Shocked and without adequate armor, several Janaroian mages were cut down before the steel-clad fighters turned around and sink their swords into the two Klavan commandos.

“Heh...we’ve delayed you for long enough. Inquisitor...Chekov has certainly finished his incantation by now.” Coughing up a mouthful of blood, Brekan’s teeth were bloody as he gave Alessio a savage grin. Seeing Jarlov lying facedown in a pool of his own blood, Brekan sighed as his eyes rolled back and he slumped down.

Looking furiously, Alessio tried to figure out where Chekov was. He didn’t have to look for long, as Chekov’s location was saturated with latent lightning energy.

His face aghast, Alessio quickly started to chant a protective spell. The other mages in white, seeing the panic on their leader’s face, started to chant protective spells of their own.

The Klavan forces at this point seized the opportunity to increase the rate of their attacks against the Janaroian forces. Hidden weapons and arrows were shot at the besieged soldiers in the town center with no regard for personal defense.

Still lurking in the warehouse, Kaz took the opportunity to bind every single mage soul that he could.

“There’s a limit to how many souls I can control at once, and normally I’m not a match for other mages. However, Chekov and his men are killing these mages for free. I’d be a fool to not take advantage of this opportunity.”

Stretching his mana sense to the town center, Kaz quickly cast Soul Enslave whenever a mage died in order to trap their souls.

“Normally the fluctuations of my magic are enough for the mages in the square to be suspicious, but I guess they have other things to worry about at this point. Plus the mana fluctuations of all the other spells that they are trying to cast is covering up the ones made by me.”

Feeling anxious, Kaz hoped that his battle would be over soon. Or at the very least, a path to escape would open up so that he could get out of there. Viewing the center of Abaza from the reaper spirit’s vision, Kaz sent his blood spirit to pick off wounded soldiers.

A badly burned Klavan commando was trying to crawl away from the town center. Limping away with his left arm hanging uselessly at his side, the man’s hand had been burned down to the bone.

“Shit...at least the magical fire stopped the bleeding. I would have bleed out by now if…”

Stopping in his tracks, the man’s eyes bulged out with fear.

The blood spirit had walked through the wall of a nearby building and floated silently in the air, gently glowing blood red. It seemed more immaterial than it previously was, a result of having been magically wounded. Nevertheless, its grinning skull visage caused the commando to shiver involuntarily.

Raising his machete in front of him, the commando gulped as he tried to walk backwards toward the town center. At the very least, dying from the Janaroians is a more honorable death than being ripped apart in an alley by some freak of nature.

Unfortunately for the commando, the blood spirit cackled once, then rushed forwards through the air. Even as he was seizing up with fear, the commando’s battle hardened instincts didn’t fail him. Swinging his blade in a deadly arc, the machete was aimed perfectly at the blood spirit’s neck at an angle. If his opponent was made of flesh and blood, that one strike would have been enough to nearly decapitate the enemy.

In this case, the machete cut through the blood spirit effortlessly, but did not damage the creature in the slightest manner. The blood spirits claws raked the commando’s chest open, and the resulted blood spray painted the walls of the nearby buildings a dark crimson.

Hissing, the blood spirit raised its arms as it willed the fresh blood to flow towards it. Slowly at first, then gathering faster and faster, the blood on the walls and ground began to float and be absorbed into the blood spirit.

After a short while, the blood spirit finished absorbing all of the blood from the commando’s body. His once bloody body was now a dried husk, his face still frozen in a mask of fear.

At this moment, Chekov finished gathering enough mana for his spell. With a glint in his eye, he raised his arms high into the air to unleash his masterwork spell. With a shout, the inquisitor emptied nearly all of his prepared mana in a single go.

“Obliterate my enemies! WRATH OF THE LIGHTNING DRAKE”

Thick ropes of purple lightning shot out of Chekov’s hands into the air directly above the village. Within seconds, they coalesced into the shape of a dragon’s head and neck. The dragon’s head formed of pure lightning gazed down upon the Janaroian group in the middle of the town square.

“Not good! Finish your spells quickly!” Alessio was clearly panicking at this point. “There’s not time to activate the Gate right now, put all of your effort into casting defensive spells!”

“Ahaha, it’s too late you old bag.” Coughing up some blood, Chekov’s face lit up with excitement as he watched the Janaroian mages scramble to finish their spells. “The Lightning Drake waits for no man.”

With a roar that shook the sky, the Lightning Drake dived headfirst towards Alessio’s mages.

Despair was written on the faces of the Janaroian warriors. They had no magical protection and relied on the defensive measures provided by the mages. With such a keen threat so close, the mages might not even be able to protect themselves, much less have breathing room to think about their cannon fodder.

Slamming the butt of his staff into the ground, Alessio finished his spell as the Lightning Drake approached.

“NULL FIELD! MAGES CHANNEL YOUR MANA TO ME!”

The Null Field casted by Alessio materialized as a sort of grey bubble that covered Alessio’s mages and some of the closer soldiers.

Seeing a spark of hope, the Janaroian mages all drove their staves into the ground and started to feed their mana into Alessio’s spell. With his control as the base, the Null Field that Alessio desperately casted started to stabilize, growing wider and covering more soldiers as it solidified.

However, it was too little, too late.

The Lightning Drake slammed into the Null Field, destabilizing it.

“Put more mana into the Field! If it fails, then we all die here!” Screaming at his subordinates, Alessio lost all of his previous calm. “How did this little bastard manage to learn how to cast the Lightning Drake? Could it be he’s at the Grand Mage stage as well?”

Their faces grim, the mages continuously channelled mana from their bodies into the Null Field. If they didn’t manage to disperse the Lightning Drake here, then they would all end up being fried to a crisp.

The Lightning Drake started to grind down the Null Field, but the Null Field was not so easily broken. It started to disperse some of the lightning within the Drake, slowly at first, then increasing in speed as time went on.

Within seconds, the Lightning Drake split apart. However, the Null Field popped at the same time.

“BANG”

With a tremendous explosion, the Null Field exploded as the Lightning Drake’s wild energy splashed the area not covered by the Null Field.

Unfortunately for the half of Alessio’s armored soldiers not covered by the Null Field took the full brunt of the Lightning Drake’s discharge. Wearing full metal suits of armor, the soldiers made ideal lightning rods for the chaotic escaping lightning energies.

Miserable screams and the stench of burning flesh permeated the air as the lightning caused half of the Janaroian forces to be fused into their armor.

However, the Null Field’s explosion was not any safer than the discharge of lightning energies. A massive shockwave blasted into to village’s buildings from the center of the Null Field that levelled buildings left and right and caused the stray lightning energies to light far more buildings on fire than before.

“Retreat!” His face ashen, Chekov withdrew quickly from where he was previously.

“All forces regroup at the East Gate!”

Leaping from rooftop to rooftop, Oksana lept down next to the East Gate. She had already anticipated that the clash of magical energies would not end well for either side and bolted as soon as she could.

“Damn mages. Why don’t you ever think about the normal soldiers serving under you?” Muttering under her breath, Oksana hid behind a nearby tree with her longbow ready in case any Janaroian soldiers ran her way.

Kas jumped up in shock as the explosion blew apart the warehouse’s wall and collapsed the roof. Quickly casting Death Warp, Kaz managed to escape to an alley adjacent to the warehouse. Breathing heavily, Kaz continued to monitor the situation with his mana sense as he continued to enslave more magi souls.

As the dust started to settle in the town square, the area was littered with bodies of all kinds. Groans and whimpers of pain could be heard all across the ruined town of Abaza, as a sort of wailing chorus of the damned.

Alessio stood up from the dust, leaning on his staff for support. Looking around at his remaining troops, his face was pale as he realized the scope of his loss.

Nearly three-fourths of his initial men were dead, and some wouldn’t survive the trip back to their base camp. All but one of his mages were lying dead on the ground, some from physical wounds while some succumbed by overdrawing their mana pools.

Sighing, Alessio knew that he had failed in his mission to acquire some of the war secrets of the Klavan Inquisition. Withdrawing a white orb from his robes, Alessio whispered a incantation to it. Tossing the orb a ways away, Alessio signalled for his surviving able bodied men to get ready to follow him.

Observing this through his reaper spirit, Kaz maneuvered his way to behind a ruined building close to Alessio’s location. His blood spirit was continuously feeding off of the blood of the wounded and dead people around the town square. It mattered little to Kaz whether or not the blood spirit was feeding off villagers or soldiers since they were all dead or going to be soon anyway.

With a click, the white orb started to float up into the air as it gathered the latent mana in the atmosphere. Since many spells were used recently in the vicinity of the town square, the orb started to glow a pure white very quickly.

“Devils below, brat! How did this ruination happen?” At this moment, Ahriman’s voice thundered in Kaz’s mind, nearly causing Kaz to jump out of hiding. “I hibernate to stabilize my condition for a bit and this is what happens? You’ve got some explaining to do.”

“Gods, don’t startle me like that. I don’t really know how the situation deteriorated like this either. I was just trying to bait the two opposing forces into fighting each other so I could make my escape. I didn’t know that it would happen like this!” Sweating as he looked around nervously, Kaz was afraid that any of the surviving villagers would recognize him and call him out.

“You baited a magical fight between two Grand Mage level casters? Are you stupid or just ignorant? How did you not realize that this would happen?” Ahriman’s voice was laced with contempt as he ranted. “Enough. That little white orb is a Spatial Gate. Once it activates, those white bastards can just step through it and escape.”

“A..Spatial Gate? Is that some sort of thing that will send me elsewhere in a short time?” Kaz’s interest was piqued, and he commanded his blood spirit to return to him. The blood spirit at this time had absorbed the blood of dozens of people, and was fully restored to its peak potential. In fact, it was temporarily stronger even since it was saturated with so much fresh blood.

“I don’t know if your luck is great or shit. But that’s besides the point now. That Spatial Gate will take you to a previously memorized location. It’s a tool.”

“If it’ll take me to a previously memorized location, wouldn’t there be soldiers waiting for me on the other side? I don’t think this Grand Mage is stupid enough to take all of his forces at once to a battle just because he can.”

“Eh, probably. You can disrupt the previously memorized location with a Mental Spike, but you would have to hit the orb with it just before the Gate opens. That’d be just after it flashes three times with different colors. If you do this it’ll scramble the location that he Gate will send you to. It won’t be exactly the same location, so you’ll have some leeway to escape.”

“Three colors?” Kaz’s face became gloomy. “Why are these tools so complicated? Why wouldn’t it just flash once and be done with it?”

“What, you think these mana tools just come from trees? They’re ancient forms of solidified spells that even I have no idea how to make. You think those monkeys in Janaro or Klavan know how to manufacture these damned things?” His voice dripping with disdain, Ahriman begrudgingly gave Kaz a tip. “I’ll tell you when to approach. Just make sure you’re ready.”

Nodding once, Kaz stood up and started to gather his mana in preparation for his escape.