NOVEL NEXT 229 – Retaking the Fort (Part 1)
“One last check before we go. Everyone remember the plan?” asked Alissa as she looked over the rest of her party as well as the two hundred or so third tiers assigned to support them.
“Get on the walls, take them, then gather together for a final push to the citadel with the others,” replied Joshua curtly, summarizing the key points of the plan in the simplest possible way. There were three strike forces, one for each wall other than the south, which was left open for the demons to run away from. Or at least, that was what it would look like.
In truth, other than three strike forces and the large majority of the army that besieged the fort otherwise, there was a separate, fourth team that set an ambush some distance to the south of the fort. They would take care of the demons that saw the opening left in the south, ran that way, and managed to get past the besieging soldiers.
“You were listening, then. Good. We’ll open a foothold first, then the rest will follow as planned. Gather around me and wait for the signal,” said Alissa with a nod. The siege that day had started a while ago, and her group was hidden amongst the soldiers around the fort, close enough to act in short order, but far enough away that the demons weren’t paying attention to them as of yet.
The signal in question came soon enough, in the blowing of horns that echoed through the battlefield, signaling a general attack as well as for the strike teams to do their thing. The other two strike teams would head up the fort’s walls in their own respective ways, whereas Alissa’s party gathered close around her and held each other while she activated [Living in a Dream] and carried them all through the ethereal, dream-like dimension.
They passed through throngs of their own allies without harming them, closing in to the fort’s walls before Alissa “floated” the group up towards the ramparts with her. It consumed a lot of mana for her to bring a group like that, but it was the most efficient way they had to scale the enchanted walls and make a foothold for those soldiers assigned to support them.
Like before, Alissa chose to hover the group above the heads of the demons instead of directly interspersing them amongst the demons. One reason she did so was because it took a greater toll on her mana to overlap things in her ethereal realm and things in the real world, and with more people, the toll rose exponentially.
Given the potentially tragic outcome of a bad overlap, everyone agreed to just emerge into reality on top of the demons rather than risking an unpleasant accident. Nobody was looking forward to being accidentally merged with a demon due to an unfortunate shift at the very last moment, after all.
Alissa waited for the other strike teams to make the attacks. When they did, the demons assigned to the western wall that her group was attacking noticed the commotion and paid even more attention to the army outside the fort, expecting a similar attack to happen there as well. In doing so, they shifted their attention away from the true direction of the first strike.
As such, the demons were caught by near complete surprise when Alissa and her party materialized in the air directly above them and fell upon them with lethal intent.
Joshua’s spells were the first to land, as he rapidly cast a good dozen or so fireballs – regular, uncharged ones that he could create practically with a flick of his hand – and spread them over the western ramparts. Despite them being basic spells, they were still powered by a third-tier summoned [Hero] and were far beyond what the natives were used to.
The explosions scorched dozens of demons and threw others off the ramparts, though the damage was not even their main purpose. Joshua fired off the spells to further distract the demons from the appearance of Alissa’s party and to make it difficult for them to discern what was going on.
The moment they landed – two of the fireballs were fired directly below them to clear the demons out, the damage from the spells negligible to the [Heroes]’ party – the party split into two groups. Alissa took Nadine, Maribel, Moira, and Ormont to the right, while Ethan took the rest to the left.
Alissa led the way, their group being purposely light on the defense because they intended to rush through the demons ahead of them. Her spear directly pierced through three disoriented demons before her, with none of the demons even able to react to her presence. A fourth demon was teetering near the edge of the walkway, seemingly blinded by the previous blast, so Alissa also sent them off their way by pushing the demon off using a quick swing of her spear’s shaft.
Nadine fought to Alissa’s right, her two-handed blade flashing past as she dispatched one demon after another with measured strikes. Most of the demons they faced were only in their second tier to low third tier, far too weak to pose any sort of challenge to even the weakest members of the party, so the stronger members naturally carved a path through them like a hot knife through butter.
Moira covered Alissa’s left and used her polearm to deadly effect, her strikes swift and powerful, often sending the demons directly off the wall if they were close enough to the edge. One of the reasons why Alissa’s group had more of the party’s offense-oriented members was because there were fewer enemy fourth tiers on their side of the wall, which gave them the opportunity to focus on the offense.
As a matter of fact, one of the two enemy fourth tiers on their side of the wall was not a hundred feet or so away from where the party landed. Alissa and the rest of the group rushed towards that demon fourth tier, a Ragah-Fiq wearing heavy armor that wielded a pair of heavy maces, and swiftly descended upon him with relentless aggression.
Alissa and Nadine took on the demon together, while Moira and Maribel kept the other demons from interfering, with Ormont taking down any ranged demon in his sight. Faced against the two, the demon was quickly overwhelmed, and Nadine exploited an opening Alissa created to slash at the demon’s left elbow, cutting deep into the flesh and practically disabling that arm.
Left with only one hand to defend themselves, the demon stood no chance against the two, and as Nadine pushed away the demon’s remaining weapon, Alissa slipped in and stabbed straight through one of the eye slits on the demon’s helmet, her spearhead firmly embedded inside the demon’s head as they collapsed to their back.
It actually took Alissa more effort to extricate her stuck weapon from the demon’s skull than it had taken to kill the demon fourth tier in question.
On Ethan’s side, the fighting was more steady. He, Bronwen, and Glenn held the front with their shields while Joshua provided the group’s main firepower from behind together with the Leda and Benedictus. The three at the front pushed and shoved aside the weaker demons they ran into, allowing gravity and the fall off the ramparts to take care of them rather than waste energy on them.
When they faced a larger group of demons, that was when Joshua pitched in a spell or two to break apart the group, or to otherwise clear the road. Even when they ran into the first fourth tier demon on their side of the wall, the fight had not lasted long. Glenn and Bronwen worked together to block the demon’s attack, before Ethan rushed in and bashed the demon to temporarily stun them.
Long enough for a blast of magic from Joshua to take care of the demon before it could regain itself, leaving only a smoldering husk behind.
