Chapter 736: Fruitless Struggle [I / Bonus - ]

Chapter 736: Fruitless Struggle [I / Bonus Chapter]

A violent tremor ran down Elora’s spine as the air felt poisoned just from the draft blowing off the middle of the yard.

"Attack!" Her voice cracked across the silent courtyard... it sounded sharp as it was stripped of every scrap of her usual poise. "Bring it down! Now!"

Behind her, six figures moved at once.

They were her pride and her shield, the six Heroes of the Verinda Garrison, each wearing the silver crest of her territory across their armor and mantles.

The Frost Mage among them, a disciplined woman with an ice-blue braid and tailored scholar robes bearing the garrison’s emblem, had fought beside her in the depths of the Secret Realm, and the others had held her walls against everything the frontier had thrown at them since.

"We stand for the Lady!" the Shield Knight roared from behind his heavy visored helm, his voice booming like rolling thunder.

"To the Lady’s defense!" the Spear Lancer yelled, slamming his boots into the stone as he leveled his weapon.

"Protect Lady Elora!" the Battle Cleric chanted, raising a heavy war-scepter that flared with blinding golden light.

All six of them surged forward together and charged straight at the thing Elora’s wide terrified eyes were locked on.

’What the hell is going on...?!’ Elora screamed inside her head, her nails digging into the leather cover of her spellbook until the hide creaked. ’The wards didn’t trigger! The perimeter bells didn’t ring! How did something like that just appear in the middle of my garrison?!’

Her gaze locked onto the entity and a wave of nausea surged up her throat.

...It looked human.

It had two legs, two arms, a torso and a head held at the height of a grown man, yet calling it human felt like a twisting of the word itself.

Its skin, if it could even be called skin, had a sickly translucent purplish hue, like curdled milk mixed with bruised veins and watered nightshade.

The surface shifted and rippled with a faint oily sheen that caught the sunlight at wrong angles.

’How could anything purple be human?’

Humans were pale or tanned or flushed or dark... Humans bled red and breathed out fog in the winter air but this thing had none of that.

It didn’t breathe and its chest never moved either. Instead its limbs gave sudden jerky twitches, a snap of the wrist, a spasm of the neck that cocked its head at a sharp angle, followed by an eerie statue-like stillness.

’It does not belong to this world...’

Every instinct Elora had sharpened through years of the study of mana screamed that the creature in front of her was a mistake in the world itself.

Its presence felt like a wound torn open in reality... Looking straight at it made her temples throb, and it felt like a crime just to witness it, like trespassing on something no mortal eye was ever meant to see.

The entity didn’t turn to face the charging Heroes.

It simply stood there with its purplish fingers twitching at its sides and its head tilted, staring blankly at the empty flagpole.

The six Heroes closed the distance in a textbook assault wedge with their boots hammering the flagstones in fast movements.

CLANG!

The Shield Knight arrived first.

Nearly seven feet tall in full blackened plate, with the garrison crest polished to a blinding shine on his chest, he slammed his huge iron tower shield into the paving stones.

"Bastion Wall!" he bellowed, his mana igniting like a furnace inside his breastplate!

BOOM!

The base of the tower shield bit deep into the granite and cracked the stone.

A shimmering pale-blue dome of force exploded outward from its edges and spread into a protective shelter over the vanguard, an immovable anchor planted right in front of the entity...

Behind the shield... the Battle Cleric thrust his silver war-scepter into the air, and the prayer ribbons around his wrists snapped in a sudden holy gale.

"Sanctified Aegis!"

SHING!

A cascade of golden runes poured from the scepter’s head and washed over all six warriors at once.

Translucent golden shields settled over their shoulders and breastplates, humming with strength, while their muscles swelled and their boots glowed with holy speed.

From the left flank the Spear Lancer took two lunging strides that cracked the cobbles under his heels and threw his whole weight into a driving sprint.

His long skysteel lance, etched with wind-channeling grooves, spun in his gauntlets like a drill.

"Piercing Comet!"

FWOOSH!

A shrieking cone of spiraling pressurized wind wrapped around the tip of the lance... The weapon became a blurred streak of silver and white light aimed dead center at the entity’s ribcage, a strike heavy enough to punch clean through an armored carriage.

At the same moment, safe beneath the Bastion Wall, the Archer drew his enchanted longbow until the yew creaked.

A single gleaming blue arrow tipped with a frost crystal sat on the string.

THWIP!

"Hailstorm Volley!"

CRACK!

The arrow burst apart in midair the moment it left the bow... One shaft became fifty razor-sharp frost-coated darts that rained down in a whistling downpour, blanketing the space around the entity from three angles at once!

Right beside the Shield Knight, the Swordsman broke into a low blinding sprint.

His twin curved sabers slid from their scabbards with a quiet hiss, and frost mana coiled around the edges like hungry snakes as he closed the last five yards.

"Frostbite Rend!"

SHHHHHHK!

He crossed both blades in a blistering cut, an X-shaped ribbon of freezing white light that left two hanging trails of glittering ice crystals and swept for the entity’s neck and chest in a single stroke.

From the center of the formation the Frost Mage flung open her white-leather spellbook, its pages blazing pale blue, and slammed her free palm toward the ground with her eyes glowing in cold fury.

"Glacial Prison!"

CRASH!

Four thick jagged pillars of glacial blue ice burst up through the flagstones around the entity’s feet.

They rose six feet high and curved inward like the claws of a frozen beast, snapping shut to lock the purple target in a cage of permafrost.

The barrier, the blessing, the volley, the charge, the cross-cut and the cage all arrived in the same heartbeat... Against any Lord, beast or rogue Awakened, it would have been over before the dust settled.

The entity didn’t raise an arm to block or even cast a spell like they expected, it just twitched...

SNAP!

It folded sideways at the waist on a smooth inhuman hinge and swung its upper body ninety degrees out of the way, with no bones and no strain at all.

The Piercing Comet whistled through the empty air where its chest had been half a second earlier.

THUD! THUD! THUD!

The fifty frost darts of the Hailstorm Volley smashed into the ground and the rising ice pillars and burst into showers of frost and broken stone, yet not a single one so much as grazed the creature’s skin... Its limbs jerked in stuttering frames and slipped between the falling arrows like an image skipping on a damaged lens.

The Swordsman’s Frostbite Rend slashed across the center and met no flesh at all.

SKRRRRR!

The twin sabers passed through the edge of the creature’s blurred outline and cut nothing but a cold afterimage of bruised violet light, which scattered into the stale air with the hollow sound of tearing silk.

The entity stood four feet to the left but it hadn’t taken a single step... Its head was tilted sharply toward the sky and its arms dangled at its sides like hanging ropes.

It hadn’t blocked or dodged in any way that made sense... It had simply moved in a manner that broke the shape of the courtyard itself.

Ten paces back on the edge of the stone terrace, Elora watched the whole opening clash with horrified eyes.

Her Heroes were shouting and scrambling across the frosted flags to reset their formation, but Elora could see what they couldn’t.

The entity wasn’t even acknowledging them, it stood in the middle of their crossfire like a grown man in a swarm of harmless midges.

’They can’t touch it,’ Elora realized, and cold dread washed over her skin until her fingertips went numb. ’The formations, the techniques, the tactics... none of it works on something that doesn’t obey space! If we keep fighting its way, they’ll be picked apart!’

She couldn’t win a battle of attrition and she couldn’t wait for a clean opening.

Elora sucked in a sharp freezing breath through her teeth and steadied the tremor in her chest.

She dropped her shoulders, planted her boots in the seam between two granite slabs and closed her eyes.

She shut out the shouting of her Heroes, the clatter of iron shields and the sight of her two hundred fallen people lying silent across the cobbles.

She reached past her surface channels and drove straight down into her deepest reserves.

HUUUUUUUUM!

The air within thirty yards of Elora went rigid.

The temperature plunged so fast that the moisture in the air froze into millions of tiny razor-sharp crystals and fell in a dense shimmering cloud of diamond dust.

The flagstones under her boots turned pale and brittle as sheets of frost raced outward across the stone like striking vipers, climbed the terrace pillars and froze the timber eaves into glass.

The soul-bound spellbook under her arm snapped open on its own... Its pages flipped with frantic fluttering speed and glowed with a blinding cyan light that painted her pale face in hard glacial shadows.

Her blond hair whipped upward in a rising vortex of freezing mana that howled like a mountain blizzard trapped in a narrow canyon.

Her icy blue eyes snapped open, blazing with a lethal resolve that threw away every diplomatic calculation she had ever made.

She locked her sights onto the twitching purplish thing standing in the middle of her ruined garrison.

’I’ll take you out in one go...’

The freezing gale around Elora Verinda rose to an ear-splitting shriek.

She stood locked in place at the edge of the stone terrace with her boots welded to the flagstones by spreading sheets of thick blue rime.

The cold ate into the soles of her feet and crawled up her calves and stiffened her thighs, but she couldn’t give an inch.

She didn’t dare flinch... Deep in her chest her reserves churned under agonizing pressure, dredging up raw mana that rasped through her channels like ground glass.

Above her left arm the soul-bound spellbook hovered on its own, its pages thrashing against the binding in a furious fluttering storm as the glowing cyan script across them burned brighter with every heartbeat.

HUUUUUM!

The air within forty yards was turning brittle, hardening into a vise that made every breath ache.

...Yet she wasn’t ready.

The spell was too vast and it needed too much. If she fired now the charge would scatter into a meaningless flash of frost and waste every second her Heroes were bleeding to buy her.

’Hold it,’ Elora told herself, grinding her teeth so hard her jaw trembled. ’Draw it deeper... Don’t look away... Don’t break focus.’

Down on the frozen parade ground the six Heroes regrouped without a word since they didn’t need orders.

Their breathing fell into one shared rhythm and their weapons hummed with waking rune-lines that filled the courtyard with a sharp iron ring.

"Second formation!" the Shield Knight roared through his visor. "We don’t give it room to breathe!"

THUMP!

His steel boots bit into the frosted stone and threw up showers of blue crystals.

He swung the huge tower shield around and slammed it flat against the ground.

CLANG!

"Bastion Wall!"

The runes on the face of the shield flared vivid blue, and a dense dome of compressed kinetic mana burst into being around the vanguard like a hemisphere of sapphire glass.

It was built to turn siege bolts and take the full stomp of an earth-drake.

’I hold the center,’ the Shield Knight thought, locking his gauntlets onto the inner grips until the leather groaned. ’It doesn’t pass me... As long as the wall stands, Lady Elora has her time!’

Behind the barrier the Battle Cleric lifted his scepter to the sky, and this time he didn’t stop at a single blessing.

"Radiant Litany!"

SHING! SHING! SHING!

Three rings of golden script spun up from the head of the scepter and dropped over the formation one after another.

The first sharpened their eyes... The second hardened their skin... The third lit their blood until every one of them moved half a beat faster than a moment ago!

’May the light hold their marrow,’ the Cleric prayed, feeling the holy channel burn hot against his sternum. ’This thing reeks of rot from outside the world... but our faith is older than its poison.’