Chapter 300: Testing The Waters

’Twelve hours. Cressida said twelve hours.’

We’d been fighting for maybe forty minutes.

The third wave didn’t come immediately. Instead, there was a pause. Long enough for the silence to crawl back in. Long enough for the nervous kid to start shaking again.

Then the air changed.

It wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t a sight. It was a pressure, like the atmosphere itself had thickened. The hairs on my arms stood. The chains around my wrist, dormant since I’d retracted them, vibrated against my skin.

’Spirit essence.’

A lot of it. Not one source. Dozens. Maybe more.

From beyond the ridge, lights began to appear. Not torches. Glowing shapes, indistinct at this distance, moving through the air above the ridge line. Some were small, darting like insects. Others were large enough that they cast shadows across the broken ground.

"Summons," the wiry woman said, and for the first time her voice carried something other than composure. It carried weight.

The mercenaries saw them too. The line shifted. Men who had been standing firm now looked behind them, as if checking how far it was to the Night Guard’s position. How far it was to the exit.

But the Night Guards were already moving.

Sergeant Kael’s voice rang out, sharp and practiced.

"Shield bearers, step forward! Activate barriers!"

From the Night Guard’s line, five figures stepped ahead of the rest. They were different from the standard guards. Larger, and armored in metals that were heavier and more ornate, with circular plates embedded in their gauntlets that caught the pale blue lantern light.

They raised their hands in unison.

The air in front of them shimmered. Then it solidified. A translucent wall of blue-white energy materialized in a wide arc between the barricade and the ridge, stretching fifty meters to either side. It hummed. The ground beneath it vibrated.

And then the Night Fall Order’s summons arrived.

They came over the ridge in a chaos of scattered light and fury. Beasts of shadow with too many limbs. Things that flew on wings made of what looked like condensed smoke. Creatures of bone and sinew that galloped across the broken ground with the speed of horses and the build of something that had never been alive.

The first of them hit the barrier and the impact sent a shockwave that I felt in my chest. The translucent wall held, but the five shield bearers staggered. Two of them planted their feet harder. One dropped to a knee.

More impacts resounded. The barrier was being hit from multiple points now, and each impact sent cracks of light racing through the surface.

Behind the summons, the third wave of fighters was advancing. Human fighters, but these ones were different. They moved with the fluid certainty of who knew better than they seemed. I could see essence flickering around their hands, their weapons, their bodies. These weren’t gutter rats. These were the Night Fall Order’s real soldiers.

"Vanguard class Summoners, deploy!" Kael shouted.

From the mercenary line, men and women I hadn’t noticed before stepped forward. There weren’t many of them. Maybe fifteen scattered across the entire three-hundred-man line. They raised their hands, summoning circles blooming at their feet, and their own summons manifested.

A man near the center brought forth something like a massive tortoise with a shell made of compacted stone. It crawled forward and positioned itself at a gap in the barricade, its shell expanding outward until it formed a secondary wall.

A woman to my far left summoned a creature that looked like a jellyfish made of translucent light. It floated above the barricade and spread its tendrils wide, and where the tendrils touched, a faint golden film appeared. Defensive. All of them were defensive.

’They’re not here to fight. They’re here to hold.’

That was the strategy. That was the whole point. The Night Guards’ barrier absorbed the initial summon assault. The mercenary summoners reinforced the physical line. And the rest of us, the meat shields, the chaff, we held the ground between.

The barrier was cracking. I could see it failing at the edges where the Night Fall Order’s summons concentrated their attacks. One of the shield bearers collapsed entirely, and the section of barrier he’d been maintaining flickered and died.

A beast of shadow poured through the gap.

It was the size of a large dog but it moved like liquid, flowing over the broken ground and the barricade like the obstacles didn’t exist. Three mercenaries struck at it and their weapons passed through its body without resistance. It reformed behind them and lashed out with tendrils that sent two of them sprawling.

Jose dropped from his pillar.

I hadn’t even seen him move. One moment he was sitting there with his legs dangling. The next, he was on the ground, and a bright green spear was flickering into his hands. He wrapped the spear in essence, which took a dark green color and intercepted the shadow beast mid-lunge, making it shriek in a pitch that set my teeth on edge.

It dissolved. Just... came apart, like smoke in a strong wind.

Jose straightened up and rolled his shoulders. His expression hadn’t changed. He still looked bored.

’Everyone around me is terrifying.’

Sulin’s eyes had sharpened. She was watching the ridge now, watching the shapes moving in the darkness beyond the barrier. Her red eyes tracked something I couldn’t see.

"More are coming," she said. "A lot more."

The barrier cracked again. Another section failed. Two more shadow beasts slipped through, and this time they came with a third creature, something bigger, something with bones visible beneath translucent skin and a mouth that opened wider than its head.

The mercenary summoners were being pushed. The stone tortoise was holding its gap, but the jellyfish creature was taking serious damage and its tendrils were dimming. The woman controlling it had blood running from her nose.

I looked at my hands. At the chains coiled around my wrists. At the fire I could feel banked in my spirit, waiting.

’Not yet.’

That was the calculation. I had two thousand, five hundred points of essence and a terrible habit of burning through it like it was free. If I started using abilities now, I’d be empty within the hour. And there were eleven hours left.

’I really don’t want to have to masturbate again.’

I gripped the sword tighter and stepped back into the line.

The mundane fighting was all I could afford for now. The summons above, the creatures pouring through the barrier’s gaps, the Night Guard summoners locking into desperate defensive stands, all of that would have to continue without me.

Because the real battle hadn’t started yet.

And somewhere, out beyond the ridge, past the shadow beasts and the bone creatures and the gutter rats and the shield formations, the Night Fall Order’s true strength was waiting.

I could feel it.