Rise of the Horde - Chapter 765 - 764

The shamans cracked at the fifth hour, and the cracking did not matter because the thundermakers did not crack with them.

One hundred and twenty junior Threian practitioners cast simultaneously. The technique was Caelith’s design, the Fifth Circle battlemage’s solution to the shamanic field’s redirection capability: overwhelm the field’s regeneration rate with volume rather than power. One hundred and twenty Third Circle spells, each individually insignificant, each a frost bolt or fire lance that the field would normally absorb without effort. One hundred and twenty spells hitting the shamanic field at the same moment.

The field absorbed the first volley. The field redirected the first volley. One hundred and twenty redirected spells struck the Threian rear areas. Frost bolts froze supply crates. Fire lances ignited a medical tent. Force projections scattered a reserve formation. Three soldiers in the reserve formation were killed by the redirected spells that the Threian practitioners had cast. The technique’s cost was the cost that the Threian force paid to degrade the enemy’s magical capability: friendly casualties from friendly magic redirected by enemy magic.

“Again!” Caelith shouted. “Don’t wait for recovery! Again!”

The second volley. One hundred and twenty spells. The field absorbed. The field redirected. But the absorption consumed energy and the regeneration did not replace the consumed energy before the next volley arrived. The field thinned. The thinning was imperceptible to the junior practitioners but visible to Caelith’s Fifth Circle perception, the field’s density dropping from the opaque wall to the translucent barrier.

“Again! Pour everything in!”

The third volley penetrated. Fourth Circle frost bolts pushed through the thinned field and struck two shamans. Both shamans staggered. One fell to his knees. His chanting broke. The section of the field his chanting sustained flickered. Five more spells penetrated through the flickered section and struck the ground around the kneeling shaman, scattering the ritual materials that the chanting required.

“They’re breaking!” A Fourth Circle battlemage screamed the observation with the elation of a practitioner who had spent three weeks watching her spells return to sender.

The shamans cracked. Fourteen of the twenty-two lesser shamans were disrupted, their chanting broken by the spell volume that the one hundred and twenty practitioners delivered. The ground liquefaction stopped. The root entanglement ceased. The atmospheric humidity that had been producing boomstick misfires in the Threian line dissipated.

The shamanic field’s degradation was real.

* * * * *

The thundermakers’ response was immediate.

The barbarian sub-chieftains, the Fifth Realm warriors commanding the battery positions, recognized the battlemage formation’s clustered position and redirected eight thundermakers from the general bombardment to the specific targeting of the battlemage concentration. The battlemages needed to be close together to synchronize their casting volleys. The thundermaker crews needed the battlemages to be close together to aim at them.

Eight thundermaker balls struck the battlemage formation in a two-second window.

The first ball hit the ground four paces from Caelith’s position. The impact’s shockwave threw the Fifth Circle practitioner sideways, her body tumbling across the churned, burning earth. Her left tibia snapped below the knee, the clean fracture that concussive force produced in bone that was not Realm-enhanced. She was Fifth Circle, not Fifth Realm. Her body was the body of a fifty-year-old woman whose career had developed magical capability rather than physical durability.

The second ball passed through the battlemage formation’s center at waist height. Eleven practitioners were in the ball’s path. The ball struck the first practitioner in the hip and the hip disintegrated, the pelvic bone shattering under the forty-pound sphere’s impact, the practitioner’s body folding around the ball’s curvature as the ball continued through the second practitioner’s abdomen and the third practitioner’s shield arm and into the fourth practitioner’s chest. Four practitioners down from one ball. The remaining seven in the ball’s path were struck by the fragments of armor and bone that the ball’s passage through the first four bodies produced, the fragments becoming secondary projectiles that the ball’s violence created from the materials it encountered.

The third ball struck a practitioner directly. The ball hit the woman in the center of her chest and the body ceased to exist as a recognizable human form. The impact’s energy exceeded the body’s structural capacity by the margin that a forty-pound iron sphere at three hundred paces produced. The soldiers within five paces of the impact were sprayed with what the impact produced.

The remaining five balls carved their paths through the battlemage formation’s width. Each path a line of destroyed practitioners, shattered casting circles, scattered ritual components. The specific sound of the impacts was the sound that defined the thundermakers’ contribution to the battle: the deep, concussive boom followed by the wet, splintering aftermath of iron striking flesh and bone and the earth beneath them.

Twenty-nine practitioners dead from eight balls. Twenty-nine of one hundred and twenty. The battlemage formation’s casting capability reduced by twenty-four percent in two seconds.

Caelith crawled. Her broken leg dragged behind her, the fracture grinding with each movement, the pain a white-hot wire running from ankle to hip. She crawled toward the nearest functional practitioners, her voice emerging as a wheeze from the thoracic injuries the concussion had produced.

“Keep casting. Don’t stop. Every volley thins their field. Keep casting.”

Three practitioners near enough to hear her cast. Three spells into the thinned shamanic field. Two penetrated. A shaman fell.

The thundermakers reloaded. Three minutes. The battlemage formation had three minutes to cast before the next volley arrived. Three minutes of spell volleys against the cracking shamanic field, each volley thinning the field further, each thinning allowing more spells through, each penetrating spell disrupting another shaman.

The thundermaker volley arrived. Six balls this time, the other two weapons redirected to the Threian center where the numerical press was creating the forward momentum that the thundermaker bombardment existed to prevent. Six balls into the battlemage formation that had been casting for three minutes and that now occupied a position that the three minutes’ casualties had reduced from a formation to a cluster to a scattering.

Fourteen more practitioners fell. The battlemage formation was now at seventy-seven of its original one hundred and twenty. The casualties were not evenly distributed across the Circle tiers. The Third Circle practitioners, the junior graduates whose individual power was weakest and whose physical durability was lowest, absorbed the majority of the thundermaker casualties because the Third Circle practitioners occupied the formation’s outer positions where the thundermaker balls’ paths were most likely to intersect their bodies.

The shamanic field continued thinning. The thundermaker fire continued killing the practitioners who were thinning it. The mutual degradation was the degradation that produced the specific battlefield dynamic that Fairfax described to the king between thundermaker impacts: the middle magical tier was collapsing on both sides simultaneously, the shamans broken by spell volume and the battlemages broken by iron velocity.

“The middle tier is mutual annihilation,” Fairfax reported, crouching behind the timber-framed berm that another thundermaker ball had just struck and that the timber’s flexibility had allowed to absorb without collapsing. “Their shamans are cracking. Our mages are dying. Both magical forces are degrading toward ineffectiveness. What remains is the extremes: their Seventh Circle, untouched, and our Sixth Circle, Your Majesty, at thirty-eight percent.”

“And the thundermakers.”

“And the fifty thundermakers. Forty-eight now. Two were destroyed by a Fifth Realm officer’s assault on the eastern battery position before the officer was killed. Forty-eight thundermakers with plenty of ammunition. Forty-eight weapons that do not tire and do not run out and do not require magical energy to fire. The thundermakers are the capability that our numbers cannot overcome because our numbers are being reduced by the thundermakers’ fire at the rate that makes the numbers’ advantage temporary rather than permanent.”

Another thundermaker ball struck the berm. The timber cracked. The berm held. Dirt cascaded over Fairfax’s position.

“The thundermakers are also the capability currently attempting to kill both of us,” Fairfax added, wiping earth from his eyes.

The Seventh Circle shamans continued their atmospheric manipulation, the downdraft pressing the Threian center into the earth. The lesser shamans’ degradation did not diminish the Seventh Circle’s output. The Seventh Circle operated on a scale that the lesser shamans’ collapse did not affect, the way a mountain’s height was not affected by the erosion of the foothills around it.

Caelith’s technique had worked. The shamanic field was cracked. Sixteen of twenty-two lesser shamans were disrupted or destroyed. The ground manipulation and atmospheric humidity and root entanglement effects were gone. The middle magical tier was effectively eliminated from both sides.

The thundermakers remained. The boomstick fire remained. The Seventh Circle remained. And the Threian battlemage corps, reduced from one hundred and twenty to sixty-three functional practitioners by the thundermaker fire that the shamanic field’s degradation had exposed them to, was no longer capable of the sustained casting volleys that the degradation had required.

The magical battle was over. The iron battle continued. And the iron battle favored the side whose iron supply was unlimited.