The horizon. The light bands in the distance were already lighting up in a dark blue—the light of morning.
Rüdiger floated in the air next to him. Below them, the main road led toward the city of Portguard. In the distance, Adarin was aware of the Order’s main forces. They were waiting in a valley, ready to engage in a brutal force march. The zombies, the necromancers, and the musketeers.
Closer by, under a distraction spell, the black skeletons—Rüdiger’s so-called pseudoliches—waited with the cannoneers and musketeers, tense and still as coiled springs. Adarin shook his head.
“I still don’t get it,” he murmured to himself.
Their cannons had disappeared. A ritual circle had been drawn on the ground, and several rings had been used—spatial storage items. That wasn’t right. Gravimetric tech doesn’t scale down like that. And yet—the cannons vanished the moment everyone looked away, himself included. Like a conjuring trick with lethal stakes. Well, I can get to the bottom of this later.
For now, he looked down, toward the battle at the gate of the city.
The outer gatehouse was wrecked, but the long killing field was still held. Behind the gate, he could make out the camp of the Marholdians and Seaguardians, where they had taken the gate and were pushing into the city. Where the injured, civilians, and supplies were waiting.
Orcish reinforcements fought fiercely, trying to push back in, but he and Rüdiger would make that battle pointless.
The little aerial detachment he was now part of would deliver a nasty surprise, after all.
Adarin scanned the air around himself. Rüdiger himself had spread out into a net. He had used Living Wood
- Living Wood
Alteration – middle Tier 1
Transform 2^Alteration Core Tier cubic centimeters of wood into Living Wood per minute.
Control up to 2^Alteration Core Tier cubic meters of Living Wood simultaneously.
and increased his mass to the maximum his body would allow. He was spread out like a grid, a net covering nearly fifteen by fifteen meters: the size of the rearguard encampment below, where unsuspecting orcs were waiting around a campfire, not knowing that doom floated fifty meters above them.
And around him, like a collection of grotesque balloons, drifted the Hollow Ones.
But they were part of Phase Two.
He was Phase One.
Rüdiger looked at him and grinned maniacally. “Ready?”
Adarin sighed internally. Yes. I am.
Rüdiger deactivated the flight spell. Adarin plummeted toward the ground, toward the orcs.
One second. The air started rushing.
Two seconds. He came in close and adjusted his structure, forming holes for the twenty orcs below, targeting their necks, pushing the branches into position where they would strike their shoulders.
The third second did not count down fully.
He crashed into the orcs, catching the heads of all but two perfectly. He constricted—with legs that took painful mental effort as he contracted his entire body—bringing the grid’s weave together like nooses. Surprised yelps were all the orcs managed.
Twenty-three heads fell to the ground, and bloody bodies collapsed.
Adarin cursed as he retracted part of his body from the campfire. The two surviving orcs just stood there, dumbfounded.
One took a breath—
But Adarin was faster.
He focused his energy on Root Whip and channeled it. Two whips detonated from his wooden structure and shot forward like vipers. The throats of both orcs collapsed under the hypersonic strike. Their eyes went wide; they gurgled and spat blood.
They tried to massage air into their destroyed throats, gasping desperately—
A second volley of Root Whip finished them off.
Adarin stood alone. He reconstituted himself into his now-familiar spider form, which took him nearly a minute. A minute of sliding through viscera and over headless corpses.
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The System Tattoo blinked on his wooden skin.
You have defeated Orc Warrior ×25.
Average Normalized Strength Difference: 63%.
You have gained 3 levels.
And then the eye returned to its usual shape—only to blur again.
Living Wood, Middle Tier 1 → Living Wood, Late Tier 1.
It took thirty seconds, during which Adarin smiled at the progress he had made.
If I ever get back, I’ll be treated as a traitor, he thought. I’m enjoying the enemy’s technology. Magic. Well… they’ll probably just revert me to an earlier backup, so no harm done. And if I can gain us some intelligence…
His body reconstituted, the spider now much bigger. Eight-legged, reaching to the belly of a human. A terrifying creature.
He focused and separated the shards, preparing his ten little combat spiders.
Next he contacted Rüdiger and Devon. ‘Artillery advance. Phase One is a go. Initiating Phase Two.’
Acknowledgment sprang back instantly.
Adarin scurried forward, securing the final ridge in front of the city gates. The battle raged just 300 meters from their position, and he had a perfect view from the small grove.
He could feel Rüdiger still floating above him, surrounded by his macabre balloons of rot gas.
Then—something rustled in the trees.
Green-clad Order musketeers and cannoneers appeared. Devon and Gavin among them—one wearing a surly frown, the other a manic grin.
They led the unit.
“Now, now!” Devon whispered, leaning in far too close to Adarin. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! Explosions!”
His voice teetered at the edge of mania.
The cannoneers with the spatial rings drew ritual circles on the ground—and everyone obligingly looked away.
It took thirty seconds.
Then—suddenly—the cannons were there.
I would have loved to check if I can figure this out, Adarin thought. But that would be risking the mission. Later.
Adarin frowned in doubt as one strabge cannon emerged from Gavin’s ring.
It stood apart—rune-scored, triple-barreled, and tethered by ghostly threads to the spirit of a mule. Adarin wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or horrified.
“Oh, oh, oh!” Gavin giggled. “Devon, would you do the honors? Introduce Gisela?”
Devon rolled his eyes. “Adarin, meet Gisela. She’s our cannon.”
The first smile Adarin had ever seen on the kobold’s face bloomed.
“She is my baby. My weapon,” Devon said, grinning fiercely—matching the goblin for the first time.
Devon and Gavin began loading the cannons—Gisela included—alongside the other cannoneers. They positioned them carefully. Three wizards scurried around the setup.
“Time is running. You’ve been here for two minutes,” Adarin said, his voice carefully neutral.
Adarin studied the situation. Rüdiger was already floating forward. The din of battle roared from just ahead. A thousand orcs faced off against hundreds of humans in the dim light of torches and lamps.
Rüdiger was invisible in the sky.
Devon and Gavin bickered. Apparently, they couldn’t agree on which type of incendiary to use.
Adarin waved one of his wooden legs. “Just use something. Speed matters,” he hissed at them.
Gavin opened his mouth to argue, but Devon smacked him silent and rammed three shells home. The goblin seethed, but the cannon spoke louder than words.
“Do you understand what happens if we’re caught? The skeleton cordon will stall them, but if these cannons fail—we all die in a pit.”
No. Failure was not an option.
The incendiaries were loaded.
Cannoneers laid out canister for the second wave—shards of rock and metal dusted with lime, a recipe to blind eyes and shred flesh. Brutal. Efficient. Ready.
Even that would be meaningless if Phase Two failed.
Adarin ran one final check.
The army with Liora was already advancing. The chaotic fighting in the enemy lines—ready. And their backs were turned to them.
The cannons. He threw a look at the mages. They were finishing some final adjustments, bringing in pieces of wood to adjust angles and rotation.
After what felt like an eternity, he received the go-ahead from them.
Adarin took a deep breath, letting the tension in the air wash over him.
“And so it begins,” he murmured. He knew the truth—he was addicted to this. The heartbeat before carnage, when the world sharpened into perfect focus.
He shook himself out of it and contacted Rüdiger. ‘Initiate Phase Two.’
‘Okidoki,’ Rüdiger replied—cheerful as if ordering lunch, even as death waited below. Adarin ground his teeth. Only that lunatic can sound flippant on the edge of massacre.
But he was doing his part, he felt the man float forward via the noospheric links connection. Using Thousand Eyes, which had now created a much larger spyglass, he made out the shapes of the floating Hollow Ones in the air.
He studied the enemy.
Pikemen. Musketeers. Tribal warriors. All targets.
“In position,” Rüdiger’s voice reached him over the new spheric link.
Adarin nodded—and raised an arm.
“Everyone fires on my command.”
He waited until every cannoneer—each holding a burning lute, ready to ignite the cannons—had acknowledged his signal.
Gavin was bouncing up and down like a toddler on cocaine.
He leaned over Gisela, one eye squeezed shut, the other staring the enemy down—as if his gaze alone could kill.
Phase Two was a go.
“Drop them,” Adarin ordered. And the sky answered—stitched skins tumbling earthward, each one a gas-filled abomination. Horror descended with the inevitability of rain.
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