Chapter 110: Dictatorship of Laws

Count Wayland's castle was located hundreds of miles away from Dornheim.

​The count sat in a massive armchair upholstered in the hide of some exotic beast. Before him, on a carved pedestal, hovered a sphere of rock crystal filled with thick, milky-white mist. In the very center of the mist, opening a window into another world, Dornheim blazed.

​His thin, ring-adorned fingers drummed against the armrest.

​"Fascinating," he murmured into the emptiness. "Look at the trajectories of those projectiles. No magic, no weaves. This man..."

​Beside him, a man in a long purple robe stepped from the shadows. A steel mask concealed his face, and his voice sounded dry and monotonous:

​"My lord, the first wave was merely a test. The infantry is trash. Now my men will put an end to this. We will cast the Seal of Silence upon matter."

​The count only raised an eyebrow slightly.

​"Do what you must. But remember: I need this village intact."

​At that moment, in the village itself, the air grew thick. I felt it on my skin.

​On the horizon, behind the ranks of the retreating infantry, purple lights ignited.

​"Iron!" Noah shouted, leaping down from the barricade. "Something's wrong."

​He was right. Our cannons, which just a minute ago were formidable weapons, had turned into useless junk. When the crew tried to fire the central gun, the powder in the breech simply failed to ignite. The mechanisms of the muskets jammed.

​"It's suppression," I rasped, gripping the hilt of my sword. "They are changing the local constants."

​Lumon flashed red warnings in my head.

​[Warning! External entropy suppression field detected. Technical equipment efficiency: 0.04%. Recommended... error... error...]

​I deactivated Lumon. Right now, he was only in the way.

​I looked at my hands. My internal reservoir was at 99.8% capacity.

​If I don't unleash this right now, we will all die here.

​"Back," I told Noah and Spirit.

​"Iron, you can't..." Spirit flew up to me, her eyes filled with terror. "You'll burn up! Your channels can't handle a flow like this!"

​"Behind the second line of walls. Now!" I practically snarled.

​I stepped into the breach of the gates.

​Before my eyes stretched the field, littered with bodies, and in the distance, behind a forest of pikes, stood the figures in purple.

​The first step. I released my mana, directing it into the structure of space before me.

​"Gravitational shift," I whispered.

​Within a two-hundred-meter radius around me, the acceleration of free fall changed. The gravity constant beneath the feet of the advancing knights instantly skyrocketed from normal to a hundred.

​The count's five hundred heavy cavalrymen, who had only just begun to accelerate, collapsed. Armor crumpled, crushing bone and flesh beneath it. Horses crashed to the ground, turning into shapeless heaps of meat. Those standing further back froze, unable to lift so much as a finger.

​The mages panicked. I watched as they frantically began to weave streams of mana, trying to erect shields.

​I took a second step. My body began to burn. I could feel the skin on my neck and face cracking into tiny fissures, oozing pure white light.

​"Kinetic degradation," I directed my hand toward the mages.

​In a massive sector before the village, everything froze. Arrows loosed by archers hung in midair. The wind stopped blowing. And... the air molecules in the enemies' lungs ground to a halt. The temperature in that sector instantly plummeted to values near absolute zero.

​Their shields simply shattered. They turned into ice statues, covered in frost within seconds.

​"Iron, stop!" Noah's scream reached me as if from underwater.

​But I couldn't stop. The flood of unlocked mana was too immense. If I didn't unleash it all, I would simply explode, wiping Dornheim off the face of the earth.

​The third step. My eyes were completely flooded with white light. I no longer saw faces, no longer saw enemies. I saw only vectors, forces, and the weak bonds between atoms.

​"Molecular bond rupture."

​The steel swords of the infantry turned into gray dust. The shafts of the pikes crumbled into sawdust. Armor disintegrated into rusty rot.

​Count Wayland's army froze in a stupor.

​Meanwhile.

​Count Wayland leaped from his chair. His crystal sphere vibrated so violently that cracks began to spread across it.

​"Incredible..." he whispered. "This is dominion over truth itself! Magnificent!"

​The mage standing beside him fell to his knees, clutching his head in his hands.

​"My men... they are dead. That... bastard, I will kill him myself."

​Wayland quickly recovered his composure.

​"Belay that!" the count barked. "Send the order to all survivors immediately! Sound the retreat!"

​"But, my lord, we can strike with the reserves..."

​"Idiot!" Wayland grabbed the mage by the collar. "If we kill him now, we will be left without new technologies forever! I need this man alive. I need his knowledge. We will turn this village into our trading hub."

​"And besides... they passed the trial; I think they are just like me," the count added quietly.

​A dead silence fell over the field before Dornheim. The enemy horn sounded the retreat, and the remnants of the army fled into the forest in a panic, abandoning their banners and what little remained of their weapons.

​I stood in the center of a scorched circle.

​My prosthetic sparked, throwing off showers of blue discharges. My skin was bright red, blackened in places by thermal burns. I tried to take a breath, but fire seared my lungs.

​"Iron!" it was Spirit's voice.

​I felt someone catch me a fraction of a second before my head hit the stones.

​"Hold him! Noah, hurry!" Spirit panicked, her tiny hands glowing with an emerald light as she tried to close my wounds.

​Noah dropped to his knees beside me, cradling my head. His face was splattered with blood.

​"Breathe, breathe!" he growled, trying to find my pulse. "They're leaving! Do you hear me? They're running!"

​I tried to say something, but only a wheeze escaped my throat. The last thing I remembered was Noah pulling me close, and Spirit wrapping us in her magic, trying to warm my cooling body.

​An hour later, the battlefield was empty. Only the wind drifted between the corpses and piles of gray ash.

​In Wayland's castle, the count slowly sank back into his chair. He stared at the cracked sphere, wherein Dornheim was slowly growing quiet.

​"An interesting village..." he whispered to himself. "Very interesting. Watch them. Become their best friends. I want to know everything about this man."