Lith summoned and spread out all the souls he could handle without the help of his Golems, having the new Demons monitor the strategic points of the city hall. Then, he looked through their eyes to study each corridor, room, and the number and position of the enemy troops.
Tista reached the second node of runes and neutralized it with True Flames as well.
She also managed to dispose of the Forgotten who came to check on the disturbance without getting caught, but then the nature of the concentric arrays took its course.
With two nodes out of four down, the strength of the main array plummeted, making it evident for those with high mana perception that someone was tampering with it.
To make matters worse, the phenomenon quickly spread throughout the magical formations covering the city, weakening them as well and alerting even the Forgotten stationed on the city walls.
“That’s our cue.” Phloria said. “Attack, now!”
The corps that the Council had put under her command amounted to a few hundred of relatively young Awakened. None of them had reached the violet core nor had been chosen as their respective master’s heir.
Individually, they were considered expendable pawns. Yet after being trained together and under the guidance of a capable leader, they had become a force to be reckoned with.
Phloria split her troops into three groups.
One group would surround the city and form an offensive Spirit array that would hammer at the city defenses, draining them of their power and reducing the advantage that the city guards still had after Tista’s sabotage.
The second group was comprised of Emperor Beasts and represented the main attack force. They had been tasked with combining Spirit Spells and their superior mass to occupy the city walls and destroy the defensive turrets.
On the surface, their goal seemed to be opening gates to let the human army in but it was just a diversion. Their role was to draw as much attention as possible and keep Thrud’s soldiers away from the city hall.
The last and smaller group was comprised of both humans and Fae. They used the cover of the Emperor Beasts to Spirit Blink inside Zehnma and advance toward the Warp Gate.
This way, they would give the impression that the Kingdom was following its usual strategy and blocking the reinforcements the moment they stepped out of the dimensional portal.
Faes were smaller and lighter than Emperor Beasts but they all had bloodline abilities that weren’t hindered by the defensive arrays. Phloria had formed specialized groups for each task that would have an advantage over the units of Forgotten who instead were jacks of all trades but masters of none.
She was in charge of the first group, leading the assault in the flashiest way she could.
The air, earth, and fire elements were sealed but water and darkness were still available. Water magic was needed in the everyday life to drink and put out fires while without darkness magic healers couldn’t do their job.
Phloria had charged Reaver solely with spells that used those two elements to not waste a single iota of her mana. Her estoc was the second piece of the War series that her father Orion had forged.
The blade worked akin to a spell holding ring, allowing its wielder to store inside the pseudo cores spells.
Yet while regular artifacts would hold a single spell for an unlimited time, Reaver could hold an unlimited number of spells for two minutes. It was a weapon that demonstrated its full prowess whenever there was enough time to charge it up, like during an ambush or a siege.
The estoc not only relieved Phloria from the mental burden of keeping many spells at the ready, but it also allowed her to unleash them at will and coordinate them with surgical precision.
As long as Reaver was charged, facing her or an entire platoon of mages was the same thing.
Phloria weaved the tip of her blade in the air like an orchestra conductor with a baton, conjuring a hail of black ice that rained on the soldiers patrolling the walls. At the same time, the water in the moat surrounding the castle froze and rose to the ground level, making it possible for the Kingdom’s foot soldiers to approach the walls.
Wave after wave of ice covered the windows that the guards stationed inside the walls used to fire their wands at the enemy until the cold started to spread inside the room.
Water magic alone would have been just an annoyance since Phloria couldn’t keep focused on everything at the same time and a spell without willpower would quickly turn into a natural element that anyone could control.
The darkness infused in her spells, however, was a different story. It drained life just like the cold drained the heat, making anyone who stood close to the ice for too long faint.
On top of that, the darkness element ate at anything, even mana, keeping external spells from affecting the ice. A single tier five spell was nothing against the enchanted stone and the arrays that protected the city, but Phloria was unleashing dozens of them at the same time.
The Forgotten guarding the walls were worried by the intruder in the city hall weakening the arrays, but there was nothing they could do about it. The Emperor Beasts were slowly gaining the upper hand thanks to Tista’s tampering and to the human Awakened soldiers blasting with Spirit Magic anyone that moved.
The regular troops stationed inside the city outnumbered the Council corps 100 to 1, but they were mostly humans and a few fake mages.
Only an Awakened army could defeat another. It was the reason Thrud had been successful in her military campaign and she had prioritized the conquest of cities with a Warp Gate.
She had only a limited number of reserve troops always available at the Golden Griffon but she could move them around at a moment’s notice thanks to the dimensional network.
Yet the Council’s simultaneous attack forced her to split them on multiple fronts and the few that she dispatched to Zehnma found a bunch of Faes waiting for them, turning the Warp Gate from an advantage into a bottleneck where numbers meant nothing.
The Forgotten already inside the city, instead, stopped patrolling the sky and converged on the city walls to stop the invasion. They believed that whoever had damaged the arrays was already gone and that the key to the battle would be the Gate.
The Forgotten were loyal and fearless, but not brilliant. Without a personality or someone giving them instructions, they would just follow the orders they had already received.
“Stop, dammit!” Xoola the Fenrir said to the few Awakened still in the city hall who were about to abandon their position and join either the battle for the walls or that for the Warp Gate.
There was urgency and worry in her voice, but they merely turned toward her with their usual blank stare.
“There’s something wrong here. The arrays are still on and the control panel is still intact.”
The moment the power had gone down she had rushed to the core of the city hall to stop the saboteur, finding the room empty and everything in perfect condition.
