Chương 250: Chapter 323 - The Battle of Mayat Shadr - Fight of the Fringe

Xipuatl stood at the edge of the city, trying to make up his mind. For so long, everything that had happened since the 1st of Solem had seemed like a strange dream. One of his classmates was a Prophet? Portals to Uxalak? The Empress was also a Prophet? The moon was going to fall down so they had to plant a big enough garden to stop it? The absurdity was surreal.

But when he'd watched the Ominian's Army airships limp in from their battle a few hours ago, one so badly damaged it crash-landed a mile out, the impending battle had become so much more real. Professor Torres had stumbled off the airship looking like she'd aged a decade. That had scared the shit out of him. He thought of Nicolus. He'd last seen his dumbass friend on the train south to his estates to convince his asshole of a father a bunch of things. He hoped he was alright. Xipuatl looked again west.

The three dreadnoughts glinted bronze in the sun, surrounded by haze from the dust cloud of the army below them. He looked east, where Professor Viridian was communing with another set of plants at the edge of the gardens. He'd been forming and fortifying spirit constructs ever since they'd gotten word of the breakthrough, and looked as tired as Torres. Several of the nagual were doing the same. What it came down to was this: he didn't want to fight. He wanted to be a researcher.

For as long as he could remember, he'd been curious about magic, and then as soon as he'd learned about the discrepancies in Tlaxhuacan and Baracueli magical theory, curious about the intersection of celestial and arcane magic. He'd set himself on a task to understand that. With the dissolution of so many social taboos on soul magic research, he had a lifetime of wonder and discovery to look forward to as nagual and wizards worked together to conquer new frontiers of understanding.

And yet, coming from the west was something that threatened to take that life away. If he fought, he was increasing the risk he would die. But if he didn't fight, they might all die anyways. There was a fury buried in him that defied words. He'd thought that the stupidity of Baracuel's policies on necromancy impeding research had been stupid, but there was a cruelty here that made his blood boil. No one should be forced to fight for their life like this. Every fiber of his being wanted to flee.

There'd be no shame in it; that's what most people were doing. The dust cloud from the city evacuating east was still heavy in the air, though it hardly provided relief from the desert heat. But he could fight. He didn't know many spells. He wasn't as proficient as a proper nagual at reconstituting spirit constructs. He could fire a rifle, but he missed the target more often than not. And yet, if too many people took the option to flee, then they all would die. He walked over to Professor Viridian.

Every fiber in his being told him to run.

"I'm staying," he said. Viridian wiped the sweat from his brow and gave him a hard stare.

"Are you sure?"

"Of course not. But I'm doing it." Viridian considered that for a moment, then nodded.

"Help me with this part of the garden. These catcti need to connect with this ruby yucca and the flamewater agave. Pay special attention to the soul patterns in the roots." Xipuatl focused as best he could. The constructs they were working on would suppress both arcane energy and resist fire. It was important work. But as the minutes ticked by, he found himself distracted. He kept seeing Prophet Zhuan as she levitated above the staging grounds, directing officers and giving speeches.

Her stern gaze and regal bearing could only remind him of Empress Xecatl. He could see the soldiers standing taller after she spoke, but something about her words unnerved him. They felt too perfect, too rehearsed. Which, of course they did. He also caught her looking up at the sky a few times. Not towards the airships, where everyone else kept looking, nor Divir, but between them. Whatever she was looking for, Xipuatl couldn't tell.

He tried to focus back on the spirit constructs, but Viridian had him take a break, which was the kindly professor's way of telling him to fuck off because he wasn't helping. So he found himself staring out at those dreadnoughts. They were approaching fast. The fighting would be starting soon. Prophet Zhuan retreated to wherever the commanders of the defense were inside the city. Someone came around with a spell cart, passing out rifles and wands. Xecatl took a bundle of wands and slung a rifle over his shoulder.

He was already wearing a myrvite-wood cuirass, so he looked like a solider now. He sure as hells didn't feel like one. Alarm bells rang throughout the city, echoing across the dunes. A spell cart pulled up near them and dropped off a middle-aged man with dark hair and olive skin. By his dress, he was a Luminate priest, though he wore a stole of a style Xipuatl had never seen.

"Right, is this the seventeenth garden defense unit? Yes? Oh good, I got turned around and thought the driver might have gone the wrong way. Can't stand this city. Can't even use the moon to navigate because it's straight above! I'm Lecne, no titles if you please. You'll be running out of the fortified trench to repair spirit constructs, and then I get to repair you if you get too badly injured!" Xipuatl nodded, then checked that the wands he'd just gotten were secure on his belt.

His other hand still clutched his jade focus. He thought of his family, waiting back in Tlaxhuaco. He heard there'd been fighting along the coast. The family estates were there. He still didn't know if they were safe. Lecne examined them, then shrugged. They headed for the covered part of the nearby trench that had been hastily excavated just that morning. The priest was, apparently, a mutterer. In a low voice, Xipuatl overheard him saying, "—said we'd be safe, but I suppose she didn't foresee this, hm?

Dire theological implications, I tell you. Wonder if the Fourth…" Great, Xipuatl thought. If he accidentally sat next to a mutterer in class, he moved immediately. He wasn't exactly going to be moving out of this trench any time soon, though. The fortified trenches that were arranged around Mayat Shadr in a crescent linked up to shallower zig-zag trenches that led back towards the city.

Orders were to take them when the position was lost—either through total destruction of the defensive gardens or if they were being overrun by attackers. Roots from the gardens had been grown in interlacing patterns along the walls of the trench to prevent earthshaker artillery—or just explosions—from collapsing them. Overhead were a mix of steel plates and slabs of stone. Workers had just taken whatever was left over from construction and looked sturdy enough to take a hit.

In the exposed areas of the trench, iron rebar had been bent into U-shapes and embedded in the trench walls, allowing them to climb up quickly. The western walls of the trench also had a long shelf along that side so that they could stand on it and fire. Xipuatl assumed one of the Prophets must have come up with most of the innovations. They sat on bench and waited. Lecne mumbled something unintelligible to himself while he looked at some sort of device scribed with runes.

There was a distant rumble that sounded like thunder. At first it came in intervals, and then it was constant. The bells in Mayat Shadr stopped ringing. There was a nerve-wracking silence between rumbles. The same breathing exercises useful for embracing a focus were useful for calming one's nerves. Xipuatl tried to use them, but he still felt the anticipation squeezing him from every direction, still felt like he had a ball of lightning waiting to escape in his belly. Professor Viridian nudged him.

"There's still time to leave with the other refugees," he said. Xipuatl swallowed, but shook his head.

"Would it comfort you to know how the battle is progressing?" He hesitated, then nodded. Viridian opened up his spellbook and cast remote eye, quickly sending it higher up where the spell resistance field of the gardens wouldn't affect it so much.

"Our skiffs just launched. They're moving to intercept the Akanan skiffs, while the dreadnoughts move through the center. There's… Gods that's a lot of spell carts. The dust is blocking a lot of what I can see, but there must be thousands of them! Ahem. They're spread out, taking heavy fire from our artillery. Oh, there's mages flying off the decks of those big airships. They're flying out in formation… well I'll be damned, is that Professor Olban? Oh, that's right, he is an archmage now. Hmm…

I don't know that I ever replied that invitation to his ceremony. Or sent him a letter. Well, I'm certainly not sending him one now. Really, I thought he had a brain on his shoulders. He ought to know better than this. I must say, he looks absolutely ridiculous in that uniform. Blue was never his color. Now—oh wow." Around the zig-zag of the trench was the nearest opening and ladder up. The bend would ensure a shell didn't explode farther down the trench and hit them.

Xipuatl could see now that bend was flickering with light. Whatever was happening in the sky was bright.

"The lights—amazing! Starburst shells. They're targeting the archmages and the lead dreadnought. The archmages are falling back. The dreadnoughts are turning away! Oh, wait, no, they're just exposing their broadside to the—oh fiddlesticks." There was an ear-splitting explosion and the ground shook. Xipuatl squeezed his eyes shut and prayed to Xylatarvia. He smelled smoke, and when he embraced his focus, he could feel the spirit constructs had been disrupted. He stood to move, but a soldier grabbed his arm.

"Hold on. Wait until the bombardment moves on." A moment after he said that, the earth shook again, then again. Sand and soil trickled through the roots along the walls of the trench. Viridan's face grew dark, and he cast a quickened shield around the group. There was another explosion, though this time it was muffled. The ground shook hard enough that sand sloughed out from one of the walls of the trench, and Xipuatl realized that one of the stone slabs a bit further down was cracked.

"Balls," Lecne said.

"Everyone okay?" The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. There were murmurs of "yes" in three different languages. Xipuatl locked eyes with one of the nagual, who gave him a steady nod. That heartened him. The Yanez family had a mixed reputation. It would be good to redeem his family. He had to remember—he was here for his people. Even if I die… Professor Viridian said, "The bombardment is moving north.

It looks like the next dreadnought is circling around to fire in a similar pattern, and the bombardment is moving from south to north. We have a few minutes to heal as much of the construct as we can."

"Then let's go!" the nagual said, jumping to his feet. Xipuatl followed, quickly scrambling up the ladder. Smoke assailed him; the gardens were burning in several nearby places, and several craters had churned up the earth, leaving nothing behind. Xipuatl quickly pulled out the wand of heat displacement, using it to sap all the heat from the fires and stop the chemical reaction. Then he used the wand of manipulate particles to move the smoke away from them and up into the air.

They needed to breath, but they also needed to keep the location obscured from the air. By the time Viridian made it up, breathing hard, Xipuatl was lugging rock fragments over to dump on the roof to their part of the trench and using meld stone to smooth over the cracks and pits in it. The nagual was done reconnecting his first spirit construct and was rebuilding a second—though many of the plants were dead or injured. He and Viridian talked quickly, coming up with improvised connections.

"It's coming around!" the soldier who was on lookout said. Xipuatl helped Viridian down the ladder, heart pounding as the explosions grew louder and the shaking worse with each passing moment. Viridian put up his shield, and again, the ceiling shook. This time, one of the metal plates deformed as a shell landed nearby. For the next hour, they repeated their excursions. Each time they went up top, more of the garden was burnt or buried.

As the spell resistance faded, the explosions near them got louder and the ground shook more. The next time a dreadnought did a firing run, they'd stopped using incineration shells and had swapped to earthshaker. Xipuatl used a force wall spell from his assortment of wands to brace the trench wall, then meld stone to cement the sand into something more sturdy. However, he was only able to do that to a small section. Viridian was quite tired by then, and had stopped moving up top.

He would occasionally use a remote eye to survey the battlefield.

"Oh dear. Those spell carts are getting closer. There's people running around too—I think 'infantry' is the term, isn't it?" Xipuatl nodded and unslung his rifle. His heart was pounding, hands trembling, and once again he felt the urge to run, to be anywhere but here. Instead, he stood on the inner shelf of the trench, propped his rifle up on the edge, and aimed down the sights. By now, dust and smoke was everywhere. A mage ran down the trench.

"Hold your fire! Our own infantry are retreating to this position!" he called. Xipuatl could see them—running low across the ground, weaving in between craters, glancing behind them. Soon enough, dozens of them were hopping down into the trench, covered in bloody bandages and ash-covered faces, breathing hard, looking like they'd taken some time to visit the first hell.

"How many of you are there?" one of the officers asked. Her pale hair had clumps of dirt and ash in it.

"Seven," Xipuatl said.

"Priest?" He pointed. Lecne got to work healing the injured while everyone else spread out along the firing places. A few minutes later, Xipuatl saw more figures coming. And larger forms too—armored spell carts.

"Is that more of us?" The officer shook her head.

"No. Fire away, lad." Xipuatl normally would have bristled at the term, but he was too distracted by the terror gripping him. Just wanted to be a researcher, he thought as he squeezed the trigger. All along the trench, rifles cracked out, sending hails of bullets into the incoming Akanan army. From somewhere behind them, their own artillery rumbled, the shells coming down with splashes of fire and light. Xipuatl fired at anything that moved.

He couldn't tell if he was hitting anything, just that the advance had slowed. Occasionally, a spell would flash out from in front of them, aiming in their direction. Xipuatl cast his own personal force shield, his mana too thin to manage much else. The sky crackled with bursting shells. Here and there, a skiff wheeled past, guns firing, shields flaring. The ground kept erupting, both in front of them and behind them as the artillery of both sides clashed. As far as Xipuatl could see, there were spells detonating.

He fired, reloaded, fired more. Someone thought they saw encroaching Akanans crawling towards them and lobbed a spellbomb. Xipuatl couldn't say if they hit anything, only that he had to blink away the bright spots in his eyes afterward. Shields went up around them, then cracked. An Akanan spell cart lumbered forward through the haze, guns coughing out spells, then something hit it, blowing away its front axle and turning the front into misshapen steel. Xipuatl kept firing.

There was an ammo crate nearby, and someone kept handing him magazines. Occasionally, someone would hand him a waterskin and he would drink, then hand it back. Someone came at them in the fog, shield glowing, and Xipuatl shot at it. The shield vanished; the figure fell. Gods' blood, he thought, but there was no time to process what he'd seen—what he'd done. There were more flashes coming from that direction. He had to keep shooting. Something glanced off his own force shield. Shrapnel, he realized.

His auric mana was nearly depleted. The feeling of wanted to run had never left.

"Incoming!" someone shouted, and they all ducked down. Something exploded nearby.

"Archmages!" another person shouted. Xipuatl's blood chilled. He looked up—there was a formation above them, levitating in their direction. A lightning bolt sliced down towards another part of the trench, then a fireball landed close enough he felt the heat wash over him. Viridian was there, hunched over, having just put up and had one of his shields shattered. We're dead, he realized. There was no running. No defending. A half-strength company couldn't take on that kind of power.

His arcane sense tingled as he felt mana building up. He felt tears leaking from his eyes. He didn't want to die. He'd hoped… Then spells erupted—but not from the west. From the east, bursts of light came in, bright disintegration spells that caused Xipuatl to fling an arm over his eyes. When he could see again, he saw the red and silver of the Prophet's Guard, robes whipping in the wind as they levitated past, their mythril jewelry glittering amidst the flashes of spells.

"FALL BACK!" shouted the officer. As the battle raged above them, spells brighter than the sun, their company scrambled towards the exit trench. Xipuatl started to follow, then realized he didn't see the old myrvite ecology professor anywhere. He looked back. Viridian was slouched down, breathing hard, dirt and debris tangled in his normally well-kept silver beard. Xipuatl ran back.

"I've got you," he said. With a heave, he got Professor Viridian over one of his shoulders. The professor was too weary to complain. Xipuatl's legs burned with the strain as he took heavy steps onward. Even though smoke was veiling the worst of the sun's heat, there was no relief from it, and his sweat mixed with the grime covering him. He blinked it away as it stung his eyes. All there was one step after another. Then they were at the fallback trench.

Someone helped him put Viridian down, and then Lecne was there, checking over him and offering the old man a waterskin. A geomancer collapsed the walls of the trench they'd just come through, then Xipuatl was standing back up, rifle resting on the lip of the trench, firing again. It seemed the Akanans were everywhere. Another spell cart sped towards them, kicking up ash, but despite being burned to a crisp, the myrvite plants were still clinging to life beneath the soil.

One of the nagual raised his focus and tangles of roots shot up in front of the armored cart, snaring the wheels. Someone lobbed a spell bomb at it and lightning crackled through the cart. Xipuatl saw more figures approaching. He hesitated, wondering if they were just retreating like they had a moment ago, then a fire bolt sped over his head and he started firing again. Twice more they fell back, and then they were at the edge of the city.

The old ruins had been repaired then fortified, but they were already back to ruins; Akanan artillery had been busy blowing the western part of the city to pieces.

"Our retreat position's buried!" someone shouted.

"Then we go south. This way!" another person said. Xipuatl glanced back. He caught a glimpse of Zhuan firing spells next to her guard, her breastplate made of adamantium glinting with nacreous black light. They spells they were flinging were terrifying. Lightning bolts the size of tree trunks crackled out while fireballs the size of city blocks erupted. It was blinding to even look at the disintegration spells they were casting back and forth.

The fighting neared another part of the city north of them, and Xipuatl watched as the hollow shell of buildings were blown into rubble just from being near the fight. Someone grabbed his arm, and he let himself be pulled away. He found himself in a bunker at the foot of what had once been a watchtower, and let out a breath of relief when he saw someone had brought Viridian along. People piled, smelling of sweat and blood.

"Too old for this," grumbled Priest Lecne as he worked to heal someone's gushing arm wound. In the distance, he heard shouting—or maybe not. It was all drowned out by the fighting.

"More Akanans!" someone shouted, and soldiers headed to the slitted windows to start firing. Xipuatl checked his gun and realized that his rifle was empty. This time, there was no brimming ammunition crate. The two in the corner he checked were empty. He let the rifle fall and pulled out the combat wand, though he wasn't sure that he could manage even a single firebolt. There was a woman over by a communication engine. A nearby officer asked her something, and the woman just shook her head.

"We're in retreat everywhere. Captain Cassius has already pulled his troops to the south back to the last line of defense."

"Fuck. The artillery?"

"Scattered. A few strong points holding out, and the inner guns are still doing their best to keep those airships back. But they won't last long. Ammunition's almost out." Xipuatl saw another concerning thing out one of the firing ports: Zhuan and the Prophet's Guard were being forced back. The fighting was moving further into the city just north of them. It was hard to make out anything, but he got the sense that they were badly outnumbered. Then he looked west, and his stomach dropped again.

Smoldering armored spell carts lay everywhere, but hundreds more were still moving towards them, infantry charging alongside them, heading towards their position. They had a single spell mortar and a bunch of exhausted soldiers. The reckless desperation that the Akanans threw themselves forward with—it was unnerving. Spell cart guns began firing toward them, and the soldiers who'd been by the firing ports ducked down. A piece of shrapnel sped through the window and embedded itself in Xipuatl's shoulder.

He screamed, and then Lecne was standing over him, cursing softly as he worked. A spellbomb exploded near the bunker. There was no shield engine, and looking around at the mages, no one had much mana left. Lecne tossed aside a bloody rag as Xipuatl's wound closed up. The pain still lingered, but the dread was worse. He'd had hope again, but maybe they were dead after all. He said another prayer to Xylatarvia. Then there was a roar like nothing else Xipuatl had ever heard.

Thunder was a whisper compared to this—it didn't just shake the ground. It shook his soul. Viridian's eyes fluttered open.

"Is that…?" he asked, struggling to move from his sitting position. The building shook, and it didn't stop shaking. Xipuatl caught a glimpse of it: a myrvite the size of a damn whale, dark carapace glinting like oil, tendrils snapping out, each step an earthquake as it charged forward. He'd heard rumors from the people who'd been in Alkazaria when the beast had passed by. The Zhighuan caravans who had come through the Jiandzhi couldn't stop talking about the titan that had cleared the jungle for them.

Now, that beast was charging directly towards the Akanan army. Apophagorga had joined the fight.