“No.” Farg sighed while walking away. “Kick those undead’s asses, come out of there alive, and then I’ll give you a lesson about how to deliver a pep-talk without treating your subordinates like idiots.”
As soon as the various units confirmed to have reached their respective positions and conjured the battle arrays, Lith repeated the same strategy as the previous branch.
He half-opened the ancient Gate and left Solus behind to keep it from revealing their arrival while he soared in the sky. Then, he dived down and she let him in before going for cover.
Despite the depth at which the branch of the Dawn Court was located and its distance from the Gates, the assembled soldiers managed to perceive a vibration running through their feet at the moment of the impact.
That coupled with the vision of the flaming black meteor falling down the sky raised a question in their minds.
“What kind of spell would be needed to produce this kind of shockwave?” Lantam asked Farg, voicing everyone’s curiosity.
“One capable of destroying a city.” She replied curtly. “Now get ready. If this goes like the last time, the fattest rats will be the fastest to abandon the sinking ship.”
Almost as if answering her command, one of the nearby Gates lit up. A richly dressed gorgeous woman came out of it, followed by men and women dressed like butlers and maids.
The group of people proved to be capable mages, using air and darkness magic to cover the quickest path to the nearby woods from sunlight. The members of the army had no idea who was human and who was undead and even if they did, their orders were clear. Leave no one alive.
The soldiers in the front line raised their shields, each conjuring a small energy field that fused with those on either side, forming a tall wall. Those right behind them used the shoulders of the shield-bearers to support their staves as they unleashed a barrage of fire.
At the same time, the solid ground around the Gate turned into a muddy field.
The mages on the third line only had one spell at the ready and needed to identify the threat at hand in order to weave more and not waste precious mana. The cover fire would either get rid of the enemies or force them to step into the light.
The gorgeous woman snarled, waving her hand to conjure a Warp Steps and get away. Dimensional magic took a great toll on a blood core but undead could still use it. Temporary weakness always beat eternal sleep.
Great was her surprise when her mana faded without producing any effect. She had no time for hand signs and magic words so she used true magic to cast a darkness-based tier four spell.
A thick black mist advanced toward the troops and disappeared as soon as it entered the darkness-sealing arrays around them. The undead woman couldn’t fly due to the sun and tried to run along the safe path she had created.
Yet even with the inhuman speed of an undead, she was an easy target as the knee-deep mud slowed her down and the soldiers used the veil of darkness to predict her movements.
‘That’s why those bastards aren’t using darkness magic.’ She thought as her servants were ripped apart by the fireballs and damage kept piling up on her body faster than she could heal it.
‘Not because they were afraid that I would dodge them but because they sealed my best weapons!’ The fact that all undead could conjure darkness magic “out of thin air” was public knowledge.
The Baroness put everything she had to enhance her physique and charged at the soldiers. She preferred to die after inflicting as many losses as she could to the human army than as a cornered rat.
‘I still have a slim chance of survival. If I break through their ranks, the soldiers will pile up on me and shield me from sunlight with their bodies.’ Her last-ditch plan fell apart when her face crashed against the shield wall.
One soldier alone was nothing compared to her, but once linked in the formation, each one of them was as sturdy as a pillar of stone. The Wardens cast another darkness-sealing array, dispelling the safe path to the woods she had conjured earlier and leaving her no place where to hide.
The Baroness of the Dawn Court clawed at the nearest soldier in desperation, but the sun robbed her of her life before she could reach him.
She died while cursing the humans for their cowardly ambush in the middle of the day, just like humans cursed the undead for attacking them in the middle of the night when they were alone.
“Incoming!” Farg used chore magic to light up two Gates.
Thanks to Life Vision, she could see the dimensional energies building up before the Gate opened, giving the soldiers the time to prepare and catching the undead by surprise.
Meanwhile, inside the Court, Lith’s strategy was working like clockwork. His human meteor strike strained the first line of defenses and misaligned the arrays. Then came the Demons, Solus, and the Golems.
She was now wearing the Hands, using the emerald gemstone in the middle of the palm to convert the world energy coming from the mana geyser below into mana and recharge both the Demons and the constructs.
Even with that, it wasn’t enough to bring everyone back at 100% but it hastened their recovery rate without increasing the burden on Lith. They split in three directions, with Lith and Trouble going in different directions while Solus rode Raptor.
The Demons spread like a black tide, their mass blotting out the lights in the corridors as they advanced. Thralls and undead alike didn’t realize what was happening until the Demons split at the crossroads enough times for their individual forms to become recognizable.
Lith walked briskly behind them, using the souls to test the defenses and trigger the traps from a safe distance. Thanks to his bright violet core, each step he took conjured more runes.
The movement of his muscles, blood, and organs generated a constant stream of spells that he unleashed the moment the Demons encountered any form of resistance. The chains connecting him to the shadows allowed him to share their senses and them to receive his spells.
Emerald-streaked hard-light weapons appeared in the hands of the unarmed Demons on the frontlines while those behind them unleashed jets of black flames from several Final Eclipses at the same time.
All the Demons shared the same energy signature so the spells of their allies could do them no harm. The undead locked in combat with them had no choice but to hold their ground and die by Final Eclipse or flee and die by backstabbing.
Whenever the army of shadows encountered an enchanted wall or a golem guard, they lined up and took a deep breath. Thousand Flames took care of unmoving obstacles while Origin Flames seeped inside the golems and burned their cores.
The strength of the Demons dwindled with each spark of Lith’s life force they consumed but so did the enemy numbers.
