The monsters flooded Raagu’s arrays in such numbers that the mana that was supposed to last minutes was quickly drained in order to kill them before they escaped the magical circle’s boundaries.
Unlike the Lich King, Raagu had come prepared for the fight. Yet even with many arrays at the ready forming a wide trench of light between her and the enemies, only a fraction of them were forced to step into the magical formations.
The rest of them just ran around the arrays since not even someone as skilled as Raagu could cover a battlefront that extended as far as her enhanced eye could see.
She had killed hundreds of monsters in the first seconds of the conflict and kept killing more, but the Black Tide swallowed her light without suffering significant losses.
‘Now I understand why even the whole Jiera Council failed to vanquish a single monster tide. Anything but long-range attacks is useless and I can’t stop for a second to catch my breath.’ Raagu thought.
‘And I’m still currently fighting the dregs of the tide. They are just mindless brutes whereas their leaders are bound to know magic. Even with a rudimentary mastery over the elements, they can make up for quality with quant-‘
A burst of light from the Black Tide snapped her out of her plans for the future and forced her to focus on the present.
Raagu hoped that it was one of her allies but Life Vision failed to recognize any magical rune or energy signature that she knew. A Clarity Field array showed her what was too far for her Awakened eyes to see.
Lanky creatures she had never seen before stood taller than the rest of the tide, their bodies covered by a white chitinous shell while their limbs ended with three-fingered claws.
The source of the light was their heads which were supported by a neck as long as half of the rest of their bodies. They were Wormlings, a fallen race of Jiera born from a failed attempt of a now-extinct Lesser Dragon species to attain the full power of Leegaain’s pure bloodline.
‘What are those things?’ Raagu noticed that the “heads” had no visible sensory organ, just a wide mouth filled with fangs that opened on a cavity as large as the neck.
The light came out of the open mouths in the form of a highly compressed projectile comprised of mana mixed with world energy. A single energy burst was nothing to Raagu’s tempered body that was further protected by multiple layers of enchanted artifacts.
Hundreds of them firing at the same time, however, produced a power above a tier five spell and covered an area several times wider. She Blinked to safety just to find a second volley of light rushing toward her.
A quick barrier blocked the threat but it also offered a luminous target that was soon reached by a third and a fourth barrage. Raagu used the Spirit Barrier of her cloak to endure the attack while studying the situation.
‘Son of a bastard!’ She thought as her detection arrays analyzed the battlefront. ‘The waves of tall creatures aren’t positioned at random. They have been arranged so that no matter where I go, I can’t escape their fire.’
The nearest monsters were just food for the Wormlings who feed upon their comrades to restore their strength. A monster’s accelerated metabolism shortened their lives but it also made them recover from fatigue and replenished their mana reserves just as quickly.
They only needed a steady supply of food.
Raagu weaved one tier five array for each wave of Wormlings and unleashed them with deadly precision. The lanky creatures curled up into opalescent spheres while the smaller, weaker monsters around them piled up on the Wormlings, covering them from every side.
The arrays released their fury on the meat shields, killing them in droves. Yet once Raagu’s mana was spent, the Wormlings stood up unscathed. The mangled bodies became food for the monster tide, allowing the most powerful of them to recover from the strain of the march.
Raagu could see with Life Vision that the corpses were carried to specific members of the tide whose life force and mana surged by the second.
The barrage of light hammering on her shield never waned, forcing her to Blink in retreat before the power core of her robe exhausted its energy.
At the same time, Bodya ran below the monster army. He planned every move with caution, setting as many domino tiles as he could before making them fall. His personal tier five spell, Rotting Swamp, kept the earth soft even after his passage.
The water element of the spell controlled every drop of his acidic breath, mixing it with the ground. The resulting mud was laden with toxic substances without being affected by them, their properties spread wide with minimal loss of their potency.
The Nidhogg disseminated more and more spells as he advanced, mindful only of the time he had left before the first spell he had cast would fade into nothingness. When only ten seconds to spare remained, Bodya triggered Pitfall.
The area of effects of the various spells he had placed overlapped so one was enough to trigger a chain reaction that spread far, wide, and away from the Nidhogg. Pitfall opened deep barbed holes into the ground that ended in stone lances immersed in acid.
The barbs made it impossible to get a grip on the hole’s wall, sending their prey to the spikes below. Even if the victim survived, the acid corroded their flesh, killing them and freeing the space for another.
This way, no matter how many monsters fell into the trap, they would all die in due time. Fracture Line, instead, opened under the marching monster army deep trenches whose surface was smooth and whose bottom was filled with magma.
Bodya had given the mystical violet flames enough time to melt the stones and form incandescent pools of lava. After their activation, the traps lost their effect of surprise, and avoiding them was easy.
At least until the Nidhogg emerged vertically from below, his towering form spilling acidic spit in a painful drizzle before diving down again. Trenches and pitfalls created forced pathways that disrupted the monsters’ teamwork and worked as kill boxes.
Bodya waited in the safety of his underground tunnels until his arrays spotted enough enemies grouped together to deserve another strike. Nidhoggs were born to avoid direct confrontation and employ hit-and-run tactics that gave them plenty of time to strategize or use their breathing technique.
That until the monsters combined their limited magical powers to close the holes shut and used the bodies of the dead to form pathways across the magma. Bodya’s plan was perfect, but there were just too many and he was alone.
An orc shaman used his crystal to spot the Nidhogg and harden the ground, negating Bodya’s bloodline ability. Mogar’s soil turned from a shield into a deadly trap.
Stranded amid the enemy lines and with no way to communicate his position to his allies without making it easier for the monsters to reach him, Bodya had only a handful of seconds to find a solution before the tide dug its way to him.
