Chapter 257 – The Battle for Frontier City Akela (5): Rod of God

Chapter 257

The Battle for Frontier City Akela (5): Rod of God

Date : Day 18 of Firstthaw 1024 Aethellgard Concord Year.

On the wall, Arianna was fighting to stay on her feet.

The second Earth Fissure had taken almost everything she had left. Her Aethell was nearly empty, scraped down to the dregs, and her body was making her pay for it. Sweat drenched her purple robe and plastered strands of crimson hair to her forehead and neck. Her breathing came in ragged, shallow pulls. She leaned on Quadraflux Weaver as if it were a walking stick, and the staff trembled faintly in her grip.

Her eyelids had begun to droop.

Then a voice thundered across the battlefield, louder than any horn.

"ARIANNA! NOW!"

Her head snapped up, and her eyes flew open.

Out on the plain, in the middle of the green tide, a crimson-streaked figure was looking straight back at the wall.

Arianna didn't hesitate. She let go of the battlements and raised her trembling left hand to her throat. Her fingers closed around the pendant hanging from her purple matinee necklace. Noctynara's Lament was cool against her palm, the pitch-black eye-shaped orb with the Goddess's symbol carved at its heart.

She closed her eyes and whispered.

"Please refill my Aethell, Goddess Noctynara."

The artifact pulsed.

For a heartbeat, the orb seemed to drink in every last bit of light around it. The sunlight on the battlements dimmed. The glow of her staff flickered. Even the shadows at her feet seemed to bend toward the small black eye at her throat, as though a tiny piece of the void had opened and swallowed it all.

Then it glowed.

It was only a brief flash of deep, quiet light that rose from somewhere beneath the black surface. And in that instant, Aethell flooded into her.

It didn't trickle back the way it did during rest. It rushed in like a river bursting through a dam, filling every channel in her body all at once. Her Aethell Core, which had been nearly dry a moment ago, brimmed until it almost ached.

Arianna gasped.

Then the light faded. The artifact went still.

When she opened her eyes and looked down, the orb in her palm was only a black stone. It was no longer void-like, and it no longer pulsed or swallowed the light. It was simply a smooth, dark orb with Noctynara's symbol carved into it, inert and quiet.

Thirty days…

For a full month, Noctynara's Lament would sleep. No refill and no regeneration until the Three Moons had come full circle. She had spent it now, in this battle, at this moment.

She had no regrets.

The tremor left her hands. The sweat cooled and dried on her skin. Her breathing slowed and deepened until it was even again. The weight that had dragged at her limbs simply lifted, as if it had never been there.

Arianna straightened. She released the orb, let it settle back against her chest and gripped Quadraflux Weaver firmly in both hands. She looked out across the battlefield toward the white banner.

"I'm ready, Leader."

A smile slowly blossomed on her face.

For a while, the sounds of battle faded away.

They were still there. Spells still streaked from the wall. Bowstrings still sang. Down on the plain, the second wall roared and pushed forward against the goblins pouring off the hill. On the watchtower above, her silver-haired mentor kept loosing arrow after arrow, each one a thin green streak that found a Shaman or an Archer. Somewhere out in the chaos, her Cat-clan Beastkin lover was whooping with joy as he chased after his Big Bro.

But for now, all of it was distant.

Her light-blue eyes were locked on her party leader.

She could see him even from here. His muscles had swelled far beyond their natural size, and crimson streaks ran like veins of fire across his skin. Steam poured off him and twisted together with the dark mist of Mist Dispersion. He laughed as he cut through goblin after goblin, a wild sound that carried even to the wall, almost manic.

It was a grim sight. A battlefield soaked in blood. Hundreds of corpses. Thousands more goblins charging.

And yet the magic-obsessed part of her, the part she had spent years learning to keep hidden, was trembling with excitement.

How can one man be this… this…

She couldn't even find the word.

A laugh escaped her.

"'Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.' Huh…"

She chuckled again, then couldn't stop. It bubbled up from somewhere deep in her chest and spilled out of her.

The refined noble lady she had worked so hard to become, the one she had polished through five long years of study, the one who always minded her posture and her words, was gone. In her place stood the girl she had been before all of that. The brat who had loved magic more than anything, who used to sneak into the library after curfew and stay up all night scribbling runes in the margins of her textbooks. The brat who pestered both elves in Akela City until they were almost traumatized.

"Leader… no…"

She shook her head, still smiling.

"If you said any of that at the academy, every professor would give you a failing mark. Ohoho."

She adjusted the brim of her wide hat with two fingers.

"Well… except Headmistress Thavenessia, I suppose. She would take him as her own student in a heartbeat."

Her smile softened.

The academy had strict rules about magic. Learn the spell exactly as it's written. Follow the textbook. Don't deviate, don't experiment, don't ask why. Most professors held to those rules like scripture. But the headmistress had always been different.

"She always did have a soft spot for students who were… unique."

Arianna chuckled once more under her breath.

Then her mind drifted back to the conversation from a few minutes ago.

***

Hyoren had stepped closer to her after Baron Guts agreed to the change of plan. He'd lowered his voice so only she could hear.

"Arianna. You told me before that with Earth Hammer, you can summon a mass of rock several meters high in the sky and drive it down with enough force to crush whatever it hits, right?"

Arianna had tilted her head, thinking for a moment before answering.

"Yes. Typically I summon a block of rock weighing dozens of metric tons, thirty to fifty meters up in the sky. Then I give it enough force to drive it down at about four to five hundred meters per second, Leader."

She'd smiled a little.

"It's a well-known Advanced Earth Magic spell. Unlike Lava Surge and Earth Fissure, which are my own creations, I've kept Earth Hammer standard and simple, so it's easier to deploy. It's only twenty runes instead of thirty, so my channeling time is shorter too. About thirty seconds."

Then her eyebrows had drawn together.

"But that spell is useless against an army… The rock can crush goblins, of course, but only a dozen at most. It's a spell for dealing with a single large enemy."

Hyoren had nodded. Then, slowly, he'd grinned.

"But you can adjust every parameter, can't you?"

Arianna had blinked at him.

"Well… yes. But there's a limit to how big the summoned rock can be, Leader. Earth Fissure or even Lava Surge would be far more effective in this situation…"

Hyoren had raised his index finger to his lips.

"Shh. Just listen to me."

Arianna had wanted to argue. Every instinct from five years of academic debate had wanted to argue. But one glance at the battlefield had stopped her. This wasn't the time.

So she had listened.

He'd told her what to change in the spell's construction. As he spoke, he'd gestured once toward the hill, then toward the plain, then made a rough shape with his hand.

The more she heard, the wider her light-blue eyes had grown. Wider. And wider.

Until he finished.

"And that's the plan. Do you understand?"

Her eyes had been as wide as saucers. For a long moment she'd simply stared at him. Then, slowly, they'd narrowed as her mind raced ahead, rearranging runes and recalculating parameters, testing every piece of what he'd said against everything she knew.

It held.

A smile had spread across her face, so big it almost hurt. It was the smile of someone whose magic-obsessed side had finally been let off the leash.

"That's… Why didn't I, or any other scholar, ever think of that…?"

She'd nodded firmly.

"I can do it, Leader."

***

Arianna came back to the present.

Hyoren's instructions were still fresh in her mind, every word of them. She could already see the shape of the spell.

She nodded to herself, and her grin returned, wide and fierce.

"I'll change the landscape now, Leader."

She raised Quadraflux Weaver high.

Advanced Earth Magic…

As she lifted the staff, she could almost hear the dry voice of a lecturer at Aethellium Arcanum Academy. 

“Every Basic Magic except Dark branches into three once it reaches Level 10. And the concept of those three is always the same.”

The first was always the "Advanced" branch, the creation of an element on a massive scale. Advanced Earth Magic summoned earth in huge quantities from nothing but Aethell. Advanced Fire Magic did the same with flame.

Her gaze drifted along the wall to the man slumped against the battlements in a sweat-soaked black-red robe, his red-orb staff across his knees. Her father's Hellfire was Advanced Fire Magic in its purest form.

The other two branches were variations of the element itself.

For Earth, they were Terraforma Magic, which reshaped the land itself, the very magic that had just carved a kilometer-and-a-half scar across the plain, and Lava Magic, which drew on the power buried deep within the earth and turned it into a force of destruction.

A little farther along the wall, Dennis swayed on his feet, still flicking small explosions into the charging squads. Fire's other branches were Burning Magic, which focused on prolonged combustion, and Explosion Magic, which focused on wide-scale or massively powerful blasts. His Infernal Constellation belonged to the latter.

Oria stood at the battlements beside him, her Azure Wand sweeping blades of water across the plain. Out on the river, Elsylua's shimmering form kept firing. For Water, the branches were Ice Magic, which governed the other states of liquid and temperature, and Liquid Control Magic, which commanded liquid itself. The most famous forms of Liquid Control Magic were puppet magic that controlled other creatures by manipulating their blood and nerves, golems moved with liquid as their medium, and spirits like Oria's.

Then there was Reinora, leaning heavily on her staff. For Wind, the branches were Lightning Magic, which ruled thunder and electricity, and Storm Magic, which embodied wind's raging side. Her Tempest Storm had been Storm Magic.

Light branched into Healing Magic, for healing, curing and the like, and Sacred Magic, for purification and spells that dealt devastating damage to undead and demons.

And Dark…

Her eyes found the black mist swirling around the crimson-streaked figure out on the plain.

Dark was the exception. It had no "Advanced" branch at all, and it branched into four instead of three: Curse Magic, originally called Reality Magic because it altered the real state of its target; Necromancy Magic, originally Soul Magic; Gravity Magic; and Time Magic. 

Why it was different, Arianna didn't know. Headmistress Thavenessia had taught her little of Light and almost nothing of Dark.

“Focus on the four elements you can use, Arianna.”

That was what the headmistress had told her.

Arianna smiled faintly.

Then that's exactly what I'll do. Advanced Earth Magic. Earth Hammer.

She closed her eyes.

Branch Magic demanded absolute concentration, and this time even more than usual. She wasn't simply casting a familiar spell. She was taking one she had cast more times than she could count and pulling it apart, piece by piece.

The world began to fade. The clash of steel. The roar of the second wall. The thunder of spells along the battlements. All of it sank away until only silence remained.

She turned her awareness inward, toward the Aethell Core deep within her. It brimmed full, fresh from the Lament's refill. She drew on it and began converting it—pure Aethell turning heavy, solid and patient as it became Earth.

Only after the conversion was complete did she begin building the spell image.

Earth Hammer. A mass of rock suspended high above, driven downward by the spell's force and pulled by its own weight, crushing whatever lies beneath.

A transparent brown magic circle bloomed before the tip of her staff. The Runic Array was completely blank.

Arianna raised her left hand. Her fingertip traced through empty air.

Earth.

The circle flashed. The first rune locked into place at its center, the foundation of the spell and the element itself.

Her finger moved again, faster now.

Create Earth. Create Earth. Create Earth. Create Earth.

Five runes. The element, and what the spell would do with it: create earth.

Shape. Size. Diameter. Length.

Normally she would settle these without a thought. A rough sphere, a few meters across, a few dozen metric tons of rock.

But not this time.

Hyoren's voice echoed in her memory.

"Arianna. Don't make a sphere. Make a stake. As narrow as you can. One meter in diameter. Focus on the length. Ten meters."

The image shifted in her mind. The sphere stretched and thinned into a long, slender spike. The runes settled into the array to match.

Formation. Mass. Density.

These were the runes that defined what the rock was made of. Usually it was thirty to forty metric tons of ordinary stone, its density matching its size.

"And this time, make it as heavy as you possibly can without making it any bigger. Condense it."

When he had first said that, she couldn't believe it. Why condense the material? Why would more mass in the same size matter so much? Then he had explained the relationship between mass, density and energy, and for a few moments, standing on a wall in the middle of a battlefield, she had almost forgotten there was a battle at all.

Her lips curved.

The image solidified. Fifty metric tons of stone, packed so densely that it barely seemed like rock anymore, compressed into a stake one meter across and ten meters long.

Her finger moved on.

Height. Vector.

These runes set how high the rock would be summoned and in which direction it would be launched. Usually it was thirty meters up, aimed straight down. At that height, its mass and shape were enough to shatter fortifications.

"Don't summon it at thirty meters. What's the limit, Arianna?"

She had told him the truth. The rune itself had no theoretical limit. But nobody summoned the rock higher than a hundred meters. Going higher didn't make it hit any harder, and the longer fall only made the spell less accurate.

Hyoren had smiled at that.

"That's why I told you to condense it into a thin pole. Air friction is what slows the rock down. Summon it two and a half kilometers up."

Her eyes had gone as wide as saucers.

Now, with her eyes closed and the array glowing before her, she smiled.

Leader is so creative…

She set the rune. Two and a half kilometers.

Control. Movement.

These runes would hold the rock steady in the air before she released it.

Then came the last four runes, the ones that drove the rock downward. Normally, she poured everything into a single moment. One explosive push at the very start, enough to hurl the rock down at four or five hundred meters per second, and then the spell let go and gravity did the rest.

She had expected Hyoren to tell her to push even harder.

He hadn't.

"Keep the speed at the minimum, like you usually do. Don't push it any harder. But don't apply the force only at the start." 

He had drawn a line straight down through the air with his finger. 

"Keep applying it to the rod. All the way down, until it hits the ground."

She had opened her mouth to object, then closed it again.

A gentle push held the whole way, instead of a violent shove that faded at once. From thirty meters, it would make almost no difference.

From two and a half kilometers…

Her mind had raced through the numbers, and the answer had sent a shiver down her spine.

Every meter of that fall would be another meter of the spell pushing. Two and a half kilometers of it. And thanks to that thin, condensed shape, the air would barely be able to slow it down.

It was such a small change. Not a new rune. Not more power. Just letting the spell keep doing what it already did, for longer than anyone had ever thought to let it.

Why didn't anyone ever think of this…?

Now, standing on the wall, she traced the last runes with steady fingers. 

Origin. Energy. Force. Speed. 

She set the speed to her usual minimum, then bound the force to the rod itself so it would never let go.

The moment the binding took hold, she felt the cost.

Aethell surged out of her core and into the array all at once, far more than Earth Hammer had ever demanded. A single push at the start was cheap. A push bound to the rod for two and a half kilometers had to be paid for in full, right now, before the spell would even take shape.

Arianna drew a slow breath as the drain settled.

Normally I could cast Earth Hammer three times in a day… With this, two will be my limit…

Her grip on Quadraflux Weaver tightened.

Then two will have to be enough…

The twentieth rune locked into place.

The Runic Array flared. The orb atop Quadraflux Weaver shifted to a deep earthen brown, glowing in time with the circle.

Normally, a duplicate array would appear in the sky above the target, hanging thirty meters overhead for everyone on the battlefield to see.

This time, no one saw anything.

Somewhere two and a half kilometers above the plain, far beyond the reach of any eye, a brown circle had opened in the sky.

***

Along the battlements, heads began to turn.

Baron Guts was the first to notice. He had pushed himself upright against the stone to watch his daughter cast, the way he had watched her cast a hundred times before. His gaze followed the brown circle before her staff, then lifted to the plain where its twin should have appeared.

There was nothing there.

His brow furrowed. He scanned the sky above the goblin army, left, then right.

Nothing.

A few paces away, Dennis lowered his wand mid-swing. His calm, reserved face had gone blank. Reinora stopped halfway through a spell, her staff still raised, her pointed ears twitching. Beside them, Oria stood frozen with her mouth slightly open.

"Hoo…? Where…?"

All four of them were mages, and all four of them knew it.

What made Branch Magic predictable, despite all its devastation, was that final step. The duplicate array. A giant circle appeared over the target, and in that moment everyone on the battlefield, friend and foe, knew exactly where the destruction would fall. Allies could clear the area. Enemies could scatter, if they were quick. The duplicate array was the warning. It was as much a part of Branch Magic as the chant itself.

A Branch Magic spell without one shouldn't exist.

Arianna opened her eyes.

She leveled Quadraflux Weaver toward the sky.

"Earth Hammer!"

The brown circle before her staff flared once and faded.

Nothing happened.

No rock appeared. No shadow fell over the plain. The goblins kept charging, a sea of green rolling across the churned earth toward the second wall.

Murmurs spread along the battlements. Archers glanced at one another between shots. A young mage near the gatehouse craned his neck at the empty sky as if he'd missed something.

Baron Guts turned toward his daughter, his sweat-streaked face creased with concern.

"Arianna… where is your spell? Why didn't it materialize?"

Arianna didn't answer.

All along the wall, the other mages and archers kept firing. Fireballs still arced. Arrows still flew. Whatever was happening with the Baron's daughter, the goblins weren't waiting for anyone to understand it.

Arianna simply looked at the battlefield again, already thinking about where the second one would fall. The corner of her mouth curled upward.

"Just wait… esteemed father."

Meanwhile, on the watchtower above, Elise had already stopped drawing her bow.

She had felt the change in the air around Arianna, the surge of Aethell, the spell completing, and then nothing where the duplicate array should have been. Instinctively, she had lifted her gaze to the sky.

Her vision was magnified, smooth and steady. The pale blue sky rushed toward her.

There…

High above the plain, so high that no one else on the wall could possibly have seen it yet, a single pinprick of light had appeared. It was a faint orange spark against the blue. As she watched, it began to stretch into a thin, burning thread.

She pushed her sight further.

At the head of the thread, wrapped in fire, she could see it. A long, dark shape, narrow and straight like a spear thrown point-first from the heavens. Its tip glowed white-hot. Flames peeled back along its length and streamed behind it in a ribbon of fire and smoke.

It was falling. Straight down, toward the heart of the goblin army.

Elise's emerald eyes widened. Her breath caught in her throat.

"A stake… of stone…?"

Her gaze flicked down to the wall below, to the crimson-haired mage standing with her staff raised and a small, knowing smile on her lips. Then back up to the burning spear in the sky.

“Arianna… what did Hyoren tell you to do…?”

Then someone pointed at the sky.

"What is that…?"

Heads tilted back all along the wall. Archers froze with arrows half-drawn. Even a few defenders on the second wall glanced up between strikes.

High above the plain, a single streak of orange fire was crawling down the sky. It didn't look fast. From that distance, it looked almost lazy—just a burning thread being drawn across the heavens, its tail stretching longer and longer behind it.

The streak grew brighter. Then brighter still. 

The orange turned white at its tip, so bright it hurt to look at.

And it made no sound at all.

That was the strangest part. Something so bright, falling so far, and the sky above the battlefield was utterly silent.

Then the streak vanished.

In the space of a single blink, the fire was simply gone from the sky—and the heart of the goblin army turned white.

Where the streak had ended, a dome of earth heaved upward, swelling as if something enormous had taken a breath beneath the plain. Then it split open. Soil and shattered stone burst outward in every direction, slow and soundless from where the wall stood, as though the whole world had been dropped underwater.

The goblins at the center didn't fall. They simply ceased to exist. One moment there was a dense mass of green, and the next there was only red mist hanging in the air.

A little farther out, the goblins were still running.

For a heartbeat—no more—they didn't know. 

Their legs still carried them forward. Their mouths were still open mid-howl. A few had turned their heads toward the flash, blinking, confused.

Then the ring reached them.

It raced outward across the plain, visible only as a ripple through the dust, as if the ground itself had turned to water. Wherever it passed, goblins were lifted off their feet. Dozens of small green bodies tumbled through the air like dry leaves in a storm, limbs flailing, turning end over end.

Behind the ring came the debris. Fist-sized stones, chunks of bedrock and shards of what had once been the stake scythed across the plain. They tore through the charging squads rank after rank, punching through, cutting down, shredding, far out across the field, until they finally lost their strength and pattered down like hail.

Then the city wall shook.

The tremor came up through the stone before anything else. The battlements shuddered underfoot. Archers grabbed at the parapet. Down on the second wall, shields wavered as the ground rolled beneath the defenders' feet.

And only then did the sound arrive.

KREEEAAAKKK!

It came down from the sky all at once and far too late—the scream of air torn open along the entire path the stake had traveled, two and a half kilometers of it, crashing down in a single deafening wave. It was as if the sky itself had been slashed open.

Right behind it came the ground's answer.

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!!!

The roar slammed into the wall like a physical blow. Someone near the gatehouse dropped to his knees with his hands clamped over his ears.

Then the dust rose.

A great column of earth and smoke climbed into the sky above the impact, boiling upward, spreading at the top until it billowed out into a vast, mushroom-shaped cloud. It towered over the battlefield, gray and brown, and slowly began to drift and settle.

When the edges of the dust finally thinned enough to see through, the plain where the heart of the goblin charge had been was unrecognizable.

At the center lay a crater twelve to fifteen meters across, raw and smoking, its walls still glowing red in places where the earth had melted and fused. Around it spread a wide ring of scorched, flattened ground scattered with rubble and broken bodies. Beyond that, the destruction thinned into a field of goblins who had been cut down by the debris mid-stride. There were hundreds of them. More. Green bodies sprawled in every direction, lying in a vast rough circle around the crater, still and torn.

The charge had been punched through as if a giant fist had come down from heaven.

For a long moment, no one on the wall moved.

No one cast. No one loosed an arrow. Even the goblins at the far edges of the blast had stopped, staring at the smoking crater where their kin had been. On the second wall, defenders stood with their weapons half-raised, slack-jawed, their breath fogging in the sudden stillness.

The devastation was so absolute that, for a few heartbeats, everyone almost forgot they were in the middle of a battle.

***

No one on the wall said a word.

The dust was still settling over the plain. A faint rain of pebbles and soil pattered down across the battlefield, ticking against helmets and shields. The mushroom cloud drifted slowly toward the river, thinning at its edges. Beneath it, the smoking crater glowed red in the gray haze like an open wound.

Baron Guts stood with one hand braced against the battlements, his mouth slightly open. 

Earth Hammer. 

He had watched his daughter cast it a few times. Every mage who had passed through the academy knew of it—a boulder dropped from the sky, useful against a single large enemy, useless against an army.

A stone stake no wider than a man's shoulders had just done what his Hellfire couldn't.

Meanwhile, the other mages were also surprised.

Dennis's wand hung forgotten at his side. Reinora had pressed a hand over her heart. Oria simply stared, her small fingers clenched around her Azure Wand, without even a small hoo to break the silence.

Arianna alone was watching the battlefield with sharp, measuring eyes.

Her light-blue gaze swept slowly across the ring of destruction. The crater. The flattened ground around it. The vast scattering of green bodies stretching outward in every direction. She counted the way she'd been taught at the academy, in sections, estimating the density of each one and multiplying it out.

Her eyes narrowed.

That's close to fifteen hundred… No. Maybe about fourteen hundred…

A smile slowly spread across her face.

Leader's prediction was correct…

She turned toward her father.

Baron Guts was still staring at the crater. Slowly, as if it took real effort, he dragged his gaze away from it and met his daughter's eyes. For the first time she could remember, the great Fire mage of Akela looked completely lost for words.

Arianna adjusted the brim of her wide hat. Her smile was almost mischievous.

"Esteemed father. To borrow Leader's words, that is…"

She let the pause hang.

"Rod of God."

Baron Guts blinked.

Along the battlements, the mages close enough to hear exchanged stunned glances. Dennis's eyebrows rose a fraction. Reinora's lips parted. Oria's ears twitched.

Rod of God…?

It was an absurd name. 

And yet, looking at the smoking crater and the hundreds of broken bodies scattered around it, not one of them could argue.

No giant array. No warning. Just a speck of light almost no one could see, and a stone the size of a pillar.

Arianna felt a gaze on her and glanced up.

On the watchtower above, Elise had lowered Moonveil Bow. Her emerald eyes were fixed on Arianna, still wide from what she alone had watched fall from the sky. For a moment, mentor and student simply looked at each other across the height of the wall.

Then Elise let out a slow breath, and a small, wry smile tugged at her lips. She shook her head once, the way she did whenever Hyoren came up with something outrageous and somehow made it work.

Of course it was him…

Arianna's smile widened. She touched two fingers to the brim of her hat in a small, graceful salute.

Elise giggled softly behind her hand.

"Fufu… Truly, you two…"

Then she nocked an arrow, raised her bow and turned her eyes back to the plain.

Arianna turned back toward the battlefield.

Down on the plain, the goblins had begun to move again.

At the edges of the blast, the survivors shook themselves, picked themselves up out of the dirt and resumed their charge. Their numbers had been cut by a staggering margin. A great hole had been punched through the heart of their horde, and they had to stream around the smoking crater on both sides to keep coming.

But they kept coming.

There was no wavering. No panic. No scattering in terror the way ordinary goblins would after a blow like that. On the hill, the Goblin Chieftain's Leadership Aura still held them together, still drove them forward, still kept their morale from crumbling no matter how many of their kin lay dead.

Arianna's eyes hardened.

Then I'll just have to break them again.

She raised Quadraflux Weaver.

"Now… let me cast it again."

She closed her eyes.

The world faded once more. The roar of the second wall, the clash of steel, the thunder of spells resuming along the battlements. All of it sank away into silence.

She drew on her Aethell Core and converted it into Earth. She built the spell image, exactly as before. A stake. One meter wide. Ten meters long. Fifty metric tons of stone, condensed until it barely seemed like rock.

A blank brown circle bloomed before the tip of her staff.

Her left hand rose, and her fingertip began to trace through the air. The runes came faster this time, sure and steady, each one sliding into its place as if her hand already remembered the way.

Earth. Create Earth…

Shape. Size. Diameter. Length…

Formation. Mass. Density…

Height. Vector.

There she paused, just for a breath, and shifted her aim.

Not the same place. Not the crater. The first strike had already done its work there. Her mind's eye moved across the plain to where the goblins were thickest now, the dense mass streaming around the edges of the blast and regrouping as they charged toward the second wall.

There.

The rune settled.

Control. Movement…

Origin. Energy. Force. Speed…

The cost surged out of her core, just as heavy as before. Then it was paid.

The twentieth rune locked into place. The orb atop Quadraflux Weaver glowed a deep earthen brown.

And somewhere two and a half kilometers above the plain, unseen by anyone on the battlefield—goblin, mage or defender—a second brown circle opened in the sky.