Until a few hours ago, Belius had been a foreign place to Solus. It was where her life and Lith’s had started to diverge, making her feel like an intruder every time she accompanied him to Kamila’s apartment.
Yet now Solus had one good memory of Belius and was eager to make more. To become part of that side of Lith’s life she had been excluded from for so long.
The Tiamat silently pointed at the first line of enemies and the battle began.
The armored Demons spread their wings and took flight while the rest of them seemingly disappeared into thin air. The flying Demons charged at high speed, using their aerial mobility to make their trajectory unpredictable.
They kept themselves just a few meters above the ground, to avoid drawing the attention of the Divine Beasts and not offer the enemy mages an easy target.
The soldiers of the Mad Queen raised their hands, unleashing a volley of fire, ice, and lightning. Much to their surprise, the Demons abandoned their formation and spread around the first battalion.
Most of the spells missed their targets but now each unit of soldiers could focus on a single enemy. The numerical advantage had just gone from huge to overwhelming.
Or so they thought until the Demons threw themselves at the enemies. This way, any high-tiered spell aimed at them would hurt one Demon and several of Thrud’s soldiers at the same time.
The soldiers simply raised their shields, stopping the Demons from breaking their ranks while those right behind them used their long spears to push them back.
‘Interesting but pointless strategy.’ Iata the Sekhmet thought while keeping an eye on both the vanguard and the Tiamat, waiting for the opening that was bound to appear when he joined the fray. ‘All of our soldiers are Awakened.
‘Their cores are yellow at best, but they can still use both Life Vision and Invigoration. Even if the Demons are individually stronger, our soldiers cannot be taken by surprise and it takes them the space of a single breath to heal any injury they might suffer.’
Thrud had emptied the prisons of the regions she had invaded and conscripted the known criminals because she considered them expendable. There was no place for them in her future Kingdom so instead of executing them on the spot, their sentence would be carried on the battlefield.
The Unwavering Loyalty arrays made them slaves to her will and had allowed them to endure her harsh training that would have killed a non-Awakened human. They had become soldiers for just a few months, but their fighting spirit, teamwork, and willingness to sacrifice for the cause made them a force to be reckoned with.
Just as Iata predicted, the majority of the Demons were easily repelled and nailed to the ground by the enchanted weapons. Only a few managed to slip past the shields due to luck yet they were quickly surrounded and disposed of.
It was then that the members of Thrud’s vanguard suddenly screamed and died by the dozens. Three pillars of elemental energy erupted from Trouble’s eyes, piercing through the raised-up shields and tearing the formation apart.
At the same time, Raptor exploited the opening to launch its jagged tail forward. The backline soldiers hastily used earth magic to conjure stone walls, but the Golem maneuvered the tail to move it around the barriers.
Its adamant coated tip pierced through the armor of the first victim and kept moving forward as the different sections of the tails sprung forward, extending it further without losing momentum.
The skewered soldiers used darkness fusion to ignore the pain and their weapons to cut the tail stuck in their bodies, but the moment Raptor realized that it could move no further, the Golem ignited the tail with the tier Five War Mage spell, Final Eclipse.
The dome of black fire and the elemental pillars of the Balor exploded amid the enemy lines, scattering the soldiers to the wind.
‘This is idiotic!’ Iata thought. ‘The attack barely killed one-tenth of the first battalion but also all of his armored Demons. Verhen-‘
Then she saw it. The Demons of Darkness were still alive, standing amid the smoking craters as if nothing had happened. Those who had been injured were healing thanks to the Golems injecting them with new energy.
The Sekhmet was too high in the sky to notice that Lith’s Golems and Demons had his own energy signature. The initial charge’s aim wasn’t to kill, but to make Thrud’s soldiers close their ranks.
This way, once Trouble and Raptor unleashed their attacks, they would have hit as many enemies as possible while leaving the Demons unscathed.
Before the troops could recover from the surprise, black hands erupted from the ground, revealing what had happened to the rest of Lith’s soldiers. They had lain in wait below, outside the range of the enemy’s Life Vision.
As soon as the Golems had provided them cover with the mana of their spells, the Demons of Darkness had come out, taking the equipment and the bodies of the fallen enemies or finishing off those who had been gravely injured before they could recover.
“No, you don’t!” Iata the Sekhmet dived below to keep the Demons from arming themselves at the expense of her army.
At the same time, she kept an eye on the Tiamat, to make sure not to offer her back to him.
Yet Lith remained still, seemingly not interested in the fate of the battle. Iata’s gut told her that something was wrong so she charged herself with Life Maelstrom and conjured the Mage Knight’s tier four spell, Full Guard.
A violet aura spread around her body for dozens of meters, granting her perfect awareness of her surroundings as if she had eyes all over her body.
Then, she unleashed the tier five War Mage spell, Rot and Wither.
The spell used the darkness and earth elements to turn the road below the first battalion into a hungry maw that attacked both the Demons and the corpses, offering Thrud’s soldiers the cover they needed to regroup.
Darkness was the bane of Abominations and could stop even creatures who lacked a physical body. Once infused in the earth, it would offer further protection to the members of the vanguard while also keeping the Demons away from their prize.
Without equipment, their strength would be limited and without bodies to possess, they wouldn’t be capable of evolving into Demons of the Fallen. Yet Rot and Wither lasted for one second before fading away.
In its place shone a six-pointed blue star with two extremities lit. At first, Iata mistook the unknown array for Silverwing’s Hexagram, but then she noticed that something was off.
Not only were the runes different from how she remembered them, but the energy of her spell had been absorbed instead of scattered. While she was still making heads or tails of Yurial’s Hexagram, Lith took a deep breath.
An orange light moved from his neck to his lungs while a yellow radiance reached his heart. Then, they moved respectively back to his mouth and to his feathered wings. Two different kinds of Cursed Flames erupted from the Tiamat’s body, attacking Thrud’s army and her general at the same time.
