Chapter 989

Arslan led the charge. Not from behind. Not after sending others ahead to test the enemy’s teeth. He moved first.

Flame Overdrive burned around him like the rain had personally offended it. Fire mana crawled over his shoulders, down his arms, along the edge of his sword, hissing and spitting each time the storm tried to smother it. The aura was not wild like a torch caught in wind. It was tighter than that. Denser. A controlled furnace wrapped around a man who had spent too many years learning exactly how much violence a body could hold before it turned stupid.

Then he accelerated. The front line followed. Shields up. Spears forward. Froststeel gleamed beneath the rain, pale and cold against the fire at Arslan’s back. The shields were broad enough to lock together when needed, reinforced to endure arrows, bolts, and the first ugly clash of bodies. The spears were long, balanced, and edged with the rare labyrinth metal that drank the chill and held its bite.

They were not identical soldiers. That was obvious in the way they moved. Some fought like former street rats, low and mean. Some had learned in noble yards, shoulders square and footwork clean. Some had northern influence in their stance, heavier on the forward step, eager to meet force with force. Others were pure Lionsguard now, practical, adaptive, not pretty unless pretty happened to work.

Alone, they were uneven. Together, they became something much better. The shield-bearers absorbed the first arrows. Spearmen struck through the openings. The second line shifted to cover gaps before they became wounds. No one charged ahead of Arslan. No one broke formation to chase a kill. They moved as a wall with teeth, and the rain-slick field shook beneath their boots.

The imperial front line braced. Heavy armor. Tower shields. Polished helmets. Men trained to stand beneath banners and believe the Empire had already won because it usually had.

Then Arslan hit them. His sword flashed once. The first imperial shield split from rim to center. The man behind it followed. Arslan did not stop to admire the result. He stepped through the opening he had made, flame snapping around him as his aura surged brighter. The rain became steam in a circle around his body. Mud dried beneath his leading foot before the next step crushed it apart.

An imperial spearman thrust toward his ribs. Arslan parried with a turn of the wrist, knocking the spear aside hard enough to break the man’s grip. His counter came instantly.

One cut. Shoulder to hip. Armor failed like wet bark beneath an axe. Another soldier swung from the right, heavy blade aimed for Arslan’s neck. Arslan ducked half a breath before the strike arrived, flame trailing from his shoulders like a beast’s mane. His own sword rose from below and split the man open through the breastplate.

A third tried to tackle him with a shield. Arslan stepped in instead of away. His shoulder smashed into the shield with enough force to stagger the man, and his flaming sword punched through the exposed gap under the helmet before withdrawing in the same motion.

The front line crashed in behind him.

Froststeel spears punched through imperial armor where ordinary iron would have skidded away. Shields slammed into shields. Boots churned mud into blood-slick sludge. The Lionsguard formation did not try to overpower the entire army at once. It followed Arslan’s path, widening the wound he carved into the imperial line.

And Arslan kept cutting.

A heavily armored warrior, larger than most, stepped in with a two-handed mace and a breastplate thick enough to stop most battlefield blades. Mana reinforcement shimmered over the armor as he roared and brought the weapon down.

Arslan looked up at him. Just looked. Then his aura flared.

The fire around his sword compressed along the edge until it burned almost white-orange. He met the mace mid-swing, not by blocking the full force, but by angling the blade and letting the weapon slide away to his left.

The mace buried itself in the mud. Arslan’s counter took the warrior across the waist. For a fraction of a second, the armor held. Then the flame inside the cut bloomed. The man came apart in two pieces.

Another imperial knight drove forward from behind, spear aimed for Arslan’s back. One of the Lionsguard shield-bearers intercepted, froststeel shield ringing under the hit. A spearman beside him stabbed through the knight’s visor before he could withdraw.

Arslan did not even need to look. That was why the formation mattered. He could be the blade because they were the hand behind it. The Empire had sent heavily armored warriors expecting to grind through a frontier guild with weight, discipline, and numbers. Instead, they found Arslan. Fire wrapped around him in roaring layers now, turning him into a burning gap in the rain. His eyes were steady, almost calm, as he moved through the imperial vanguard. Every time someone came close enough to threaten him, they died. Every time a weapon reached him, he parried. Every parry became a counter. Every counter became a corpse.

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A sword came low. He caught it on his own blade, twisted, and cut the attacker’s hands away before opening his throat. A halberd came high. He stepped inside the arc and drove his knee into the wielder’s stomach hard enough to fold the armor inward, then split the helmet down the middle.

Two soldiers attacked together. One shield. One spear. Arslan kicked the shield aside, let the spear scrape past his shoulder, grabbed the shaft with his free hand, and pulled the spearman into the path of his sword. The same swing continued through the first man and bit deep into the shield-bearer’s collar. Both fell. The imperial line began to understand. Too late, naturally.

The men at the front had expected resistance. Courage. Maybe clever tactics from a border guild desperate to survive. They had not expected a guildmaster who cut through their best armored warriors like he had been waiting years for them to stand close enough. Behind Arslan, Lionsguard roared and pushed.

“Forward!”

The shield wall slammed into the staggered imperial front. Froststeel spears thrust in disciplined bursts. Rain struck metal. Fire struck flesh. Mud sucked at boots. Men screamed and fell.

Arslan raised his burning sword again and carved open another path. The Empire had brought numbers. That only meant there would be more of them to learn why Lionfang had not bowed. Arslan noticed the shift immediately. Their side had momentum.

Not the pretty kind sung about by idiots who had never stood in mud while men died screaming around them. Real momentum. The ugly, practical kind. The imperial front line had lost its first clean shape. Their shield wall had gaps. Their heavy warriors had been cut down too quickly. Their officers were shouting over one another, trying to force order back into men who had just watched Arslan split armored elites apart like training posts.

Lionsguard felt it too. The front line pushed harder. Spears stabbed faster. Shields slammed with more confidence. Even the newer members had started breathing differently, not calm, not fearless, but awake. Alive. Beginning to understand that the enemy in front of them could bleed.

That was dangerous. For both sides. Momentum made soldiers brave. Too brave, if left unchecked. Arslan did not drop his guard.

He saw the imperial second line already adjusting behind the first. Saw mages shifting through the rain. Saw shield captains trying to brace the broken sections. Saw mercenaries on the flanks waiting for the moment Lionsguard overextended and gave them a soft side to bite.

So he raised his sword and shouted.

“Blast them away!”

The order cut through the rain and battle like a hammer through glass. The frontline reacted as one. Froststeel spears drove into the ground. Not thrown. Not braced. Stabbed down.

The entire first line planted their weapons into the soaked earth, shields angling forward as they shifted their free hands outward. Palms opened toward the enemy. Mana surged through the formation, not perfectly even, not elegant, but synchronized enough that the air in front of them began to distort.

Water gathered. The rain helped. The mud helped. The soaked battlefield itself answered. Massive spinning water spheres formed in front of the Lionsguard line, each one rotating faster and faster until they looked like churning boulders made of stormwater. They were not smooth. Not gentle. Each sphere held violent internal currents, twisting layers of pressure, water, and mana packed together into a blunt projectile.

Then the frontline fired. The first wave slammed into the imperial soldiers with brutal force. Shields buckled. Men were lifted off their feet. The impact did not cut or burn. It smashed. Heavy water struck like siege stones wrapped in a storm, blasting into the enemy line and sending whole clusters staggering backward. Some were thrown directly into the troops behind them. Others were knocked flat into the mud, armor dragging them down as they tried to breathe through rain, blood, and panic.

The imperial formation bent. Arslan’s eyes narrowed.

“Again!”

The frontline pulled more water from the field. More spheres formed. This time the enemy tried to brace. It didn’t help enough. The second barrage crashed into them before they could properly reset. Spinning water hammered shields aside, crushed breath from lungs, and turned careful ranks into stumbling heaps. A captain tried to rally his unit and caught one sphere directly in the chest. His breastplate held. His body didn’t. He flew backward and disappeared beneath three of his own men. ℯℯ𝑙.

“Again!”

The third wave struck the left side of the imperial front, where mercenaries had started moving in to exploit what they thought was an opening. They found no opening. They found a wall of water rotating with enough force to throw them into each other like dolls tossed down stairs.

Screams mixed with the rain. Mud exploded under the impacts. The battlefield became chaos in front of Lionsguard.

Again and again, the frontline used the same spell, each volley timed with enough discipline that the enemy never fully recovered between impacts. Froststeel spears anchored the formation. Shields kept the line protected. Palms fired the spell. Then reset. Then fired again.

It was simple. That was why it worked.

A good chunk of the enemy’s forward forces were on the ground now. Some tried to rise and were trampled by those behind them. Others had lost weapons, shields, or the will to keep pushing forward first. Their formation, already wounded by Arslan’s charge, had now been shattered by the combined assault.

Not defeated. Not routed. But broken enough. Arslan saw it. The exact moment. He raised his flaming sword high, fire roaring brighter along the blade despite the rain.

“Attack again!”

Lionsguard answered with a roar. The spears ripped free from the ground. Shields lifted. The frontline surged forward into the wreckage they had made, boots hammering through mud and rain, froststeel points descending enemies still struggling to regain their feet.

Arslan moved with them, flame burning around him like a banner no storm could drown. The Empire had lost its shape. Now Lionfang would make them pay for it.