Chương 148: Chapter 147 – The Mother of All Storms

The storm hit before anyone had time to brace for it. Lightning came down in a dozen places at once, forking bright enough to turn the whole stretch of camp white for a second, and the sound that followed wasn't the crack of a single strike but a rolling series of them, one after another, close enough together that they blurred into a single continuous roar. Each impact threw up its own burst of dust and loose debris, scorched craters opening across ground that had been solid a moment before.

Ant felt the mana leave him in one clean pull, a hundred points gone in an instant, and then he was watching it land rather than casting it, no longer in control of where any single bolt actually struck. It didn't come from a Kithren. Everyone on that field knew what a Kithren's lightning looked like, and knew it always traced back to a source standing somewhere obvious. This didn't trace back to anything.

It came down out of clear air with nothing above it and nothing beside it, and Marigolds' ranks understood that faster than Ant expected them to. This wasn't panic from taking damage. It was panic from watching something happen that shouldn't have been possible at all. Fighters broke off mid-swing to stare upward. A few dropped their weapons entirely and simply ran, no direction to it at all, just away from wherever the last bolt had landed.

Kithren caught in the open took the worst of it, several of them going down without ever getting the chance to shield the handler standing beside them, and those handlers went down a moment later regardless, caught in the same strike that had already killed what they were bonded to. One man dropped to his knees in the open, weapon forgotten at his feet, both hands pressed over his head as though that would do anything against what was falling. Even on Ant's own side, nobody stayed calm through it.

Kalsar's head snapped up toward the sky mid-swing, sword still buried in the fighter he'd been finishing off, his focus breaking for half a second before he finished the motion anyway. Garrick shouted something at Ashclaw that Ant couldn't make out over the noise, both of them ducking instinctively even though nothing had come anywhere near their position.

Natalia was the only one who didn't so much as look up, already shouting new positions to the people nearest her, using the chaos rather than pausing to take it in.

"MOVE," someone shouted from deep in the Marigolds line, a voice with enough command in it to cut through the noise. A second voice joined it a moment later, then a third, none of them close enough for Ant to make out faces, just people with enough rank to drag others back into a fight their own bodies were trying to run from. It worked. Not everywhere, not all at once, but pockets of the panic started closing back up into a line that could hold again.

Whoever was giving those orders wasn't the clan leader, Ant was fairly sure of that much. Just someone with enough rank and enough nerve to stand in the open shouting while lightning was still falling. Ant stood in the middle of what he'd made, and it unsettled him more than he expected it to. Mahkir's fire had always come with teeth and claws and a temper behind it, something familiar. None of it looked or felt like anything that belonged to either of them.

Whole stretches of ground had gone black and smoking with no single visible source standing over any of them. He'd known the number on the cost screen going in. He hadn't known what it would actually look like once it landed. His legs felt unsteady under him for a moment, more from the size of what he'd just done than from the mana cost itself, and it took a conscious effort to plant his feet properly and keep moving rather than stand there staring at the damage.

Maren caught his eye from twenty feet off, sword still in her hand, alarm crossing her face for half a second before she turned back to the fighter in front of her without a word. She didn't call anything across the distance between them. There wasn't time, and she'd clearly decided whatever question she had could wait.

Ant watched the storm keep falling for another few seconds after that, and somewhere in the middle of it he noticed the thing that should have worried him more than it did: not one bolt had touched anyone wearing Oath of Defiance's colours. Duncan stood less than ten feet from where a strike had come down, Shelly's shell throwing sparks off one edge, and neither of them had so much as flinched.

Rebekah kept loosing arrows from her perch on the collapsed wall the entire time, lightning falling close enough to light her up between shots, never once landing on her. Petra's chokepoint took a direct hit less than a stride from where she stood, and the bolt found the Marigolds fighter trying to force his way past her instead, leaving her untouched in the middle of it. He had no idea how it was choosing. He hadn't told it anything.

He'd learned to stop expecting an explanation for that trick after Group Buff had done the same thing at the Marigolds ambush, reaching every friendly Kithren on a field it had never seen before without anyone telling it who counted. He didn't know what rules it was using to judge friend from foe, and for now all he could do was trust that it kept working. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. It was working. That much was undeniable.

OoD's line, which had been holding at best for the fifteen minutes or so since the charge began, started pushing forward instead, gaining ground in places it hadn't managed to gain any before the storm came down. Fighters who'd been fully committed elsewhere found openings where a Marigolds line had thinned out from panic alone, and took them. Bastian's Kithren pressed a full six feet further than it had all night while its opponent was still recovering its footing from a near miss.

Ben cut down a man who'd frozen mid-swing, weapon still raised, eyes fixed on the sky instead of the blade coming for him. Even Rowan, further back with his bag of supplies, found two more people to pull clear in the gap the panic had opened, work he wouldn't have had the room to do a few minutes earlier. We should go all out, Mahkir said, close enough on the bond that Ant felt it as much as heard it. Group Buff, Attribute Sharing, everything we've got. This is the moment for it. Ant didn't answer right away.

Every part of him agreed with the instinct behind it, and every part of him also knew exactly what Attribute Sharing cost once it was spent: not mana, not really, but the reserve itself, nothing left behind it if something worse showed up in an hour. He thought of the tournament finals, of the fight for Nessa, both times he'd only reached for the skill once nothing else was working. Neither Kris nor whoever actually led Marigolds had shown themselves yet tonight.

He didn't know if that meant they weren't coming, or if they were exactly like him right now, holding something back and waiting to see whether it was needed. Not yet, Ant sent back. People are dying while we wait. People are dying either way. I know that. He didn't have a better answer than that, and he hated that he didn't.

If he burned everything now and Kris walked onto this field in twenty minutes with nothing left in reserve to meet him, that could be the difference between winning and losing this whole fight. Using a skill before it was actually needed could cost them more than waiting would. He had no way to know which choice he'd regret more until it was already too late to pick the other one. The fighting stayed the same for a while, OoD's line still gaining, still slow, still costing lives for every yard of it.

Ant lost track of how many separate exchanges he caught pieces of and how many he missed entirely, too busy holding his own ground to watch anyone else's for long. Sunclaw was still somewhere out there against Andy and Hexa. Natalia and Cindermaw hadn't broken their grinding stalemate. The fourth Epic was out there somewhere doing whatever damage it wanted, the best anyone had standing against it a handful of Rares.

Ant had known that since the moment Appraisal first picked it out, and there was nothing he could do about it right now beyond fighting what was actually in front of him. Natalia's opponent took a bolt square across its armoured back, the impact staggering it sideways with its legs no longer answering properly beneath it. Cindermaw didn't wait for it to recover.

He drove into it while it was still reeling, weight and momentum enough to put it down flat against the scorched ground, and then poured fire over the length of it without pause, the armour plating doing nothing against flame delivered at point-blank range into a body that could no longer flinch away from it. It didn't get back up. Marigolds had lost their first Epic of the night.

Xylock caught a spell meant for Kalsar and threw it back doubled, same as before, and somewhere further along the line Nadia's Stinger finally found a real opening against whatever had been holding her and Bastian in place for so long. Small gains, but Cindermaw's kill mattered more than any of them, and for the first time all night OoD was actually gaining ground instead of just holding it.

Ant checked the ground around him without meaning to, an old habit from every fight before this one, and found less of it than he wanted to. The dead from both sides lay closer together now than they had at the start, no longer separated by which uniform they wore. He made himself stop counting after the fourth one he recognised. He couldn't afford to think about that right now, not with a fight still going on in front of him that needed every part of his attention it could get.

The first change was the battlefield going quiet. The roaring crash of the lightning finally faded out, having done tremendous damage to Marigolds' lines the whole time it fell. It was quickly followed by a very different noise, coming from the back of Marigolds' own defensive line. It began as shouting, the kind that could have meant anything in the middle of a battle this size, except it kept building instead of settling, spreading fast through the Marigolds ranks in a way that meant real trouble.

Ant turned toward it in time to see people scattering out of a path that hadn't existed a moment before, shoved or simply flung clear, both OoD fighters and Marigolds' own caught up in it without distinction. A heavy, rhythmic impact reached him through his own boots before his eyes found what was making it. Something was cutting straight through the middle of the field, indifferent to which side stood in its way. It cleared the last cluster of bodies and Ant saw what it was.

An elephant, grey and massive, shouldered through the fight without slowing for any of it, knocking a grown man clean off his feet without appearing to notice it had happened at all. A woman went down under one foreleg and rolled clear only by luck, scrambling backward before the next stride could finish what the first had started. It wasn't slowing down. It wasn't turning aside for anything in its path, friend or enemy, wall or body. It was coming straight across the field, and it was coming straight for him.