Chapter 207 - A Single Mistake

Author’s Note: This chapter contains some of the most brutal and graphic combat I have written so far, so please proceed with caution.

I felt this level of brutality was necessary to portray the reality of the battle and for the development of the characters involved, but I still wanted to give everyone a fair warning before reading.

I wanted to stand there and grieve for Oren, yet by then, I had spent enough time in combat to know better.

The battlefield was not the place to pause and grieve.

While the militia’s shield wall on the right took up position again, I gave the battlefield a quick glance, trying to understand how this had happened.

Where was Barry?

He was responsible for handling agile-type enemies.

Then I noticed two climbing wires running from the assault staircases, one to the top of the right tower and the other to the top of the left tower.

On the left tower stood the archer who had just killed Oren.

On the right stood Barry, with a bloodied knife in his hand and an arrow protruding from his shoulder.

That gave me the answer I needed.

Without wasting any time, Barry threw a hooked knife attached to a wire—a tool he had designed specifically for climbing buildings—toward the left tower. The knife embedded itself in the tower wall, and he tied the other end of the wire to the top of the right tower.

Before Barry could start sliding across, the archer fired an arrow at him.

But now that my squad had my full attention, a few arrows were not going to harm them.

I defended Barry with mana shields as he slid across the wire connecting the two towers.

But while I was doing that, the first two rows of the shield wall on the right were pushed back by flying spears made of earth.

Then I sensed soldiers rapidly climbing toward us, this time from the left. Among them, I felt one dense mana signature, probably belonging to a Tier-3 mage or a peak Tier-3 knight, along with three more ordinary Tier-3 mana signatures.

Seeing the disturbance, Brakk left Oren and rushed toward the incoming enemies.

“Brakk! Stop!” I shouted.

Yet it seemed as though he had lost his ability to think.

Pushing through the soldiers standing in front of him, he charged at the enemy. But his sprint was cut short when earth rose from the tower wall and locked around his left leg, causing him to lose his balance.

A high-speed spear attack followed.

I created a mana shield to stop it, but my shield shattered, and even Brakk, with his shield and armor, was pushed back.

In quick succession, another spear made of earth struck him, knocking him onto his back.

With that, an earth mage climbed onto the wall. A floating quiver made of earth and filled with earthen spears hovered behind his back.

Three Tier-3 soldiers in full-plate armor followed him.

Garran tried to attack the mage, but one of the Tier-3 soldiers following him stepped forward and stopped Garran. Similarly, Kael and Varric were blocked by the other Tier-3 soldiers.

Then the mage looked into my eyes and smirked, making my heart rate climb.

He walked toward Brakk as shackles made of earth took shape around his arms and legs. Then he took a spear from the quiver and thrust it toward Brakk’s heart with enormous force.

I created a thick shield over Brakk’s chest, stopping the attack.

At the same time, the archer launched multiple attacks at Barry.

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Both the mage and the archer were moving in sync, making it clear that a single mistake would cost me either Barry or Brakk—or perhaps both.

But I was not ready to accept that.

I maintained the shield over Brakk and kept moving shields around Barry.

As soon as Barry reached the left tower, I increased the strength of the shield protecting Brakk.

Unfortunately, the moment I did, the mage’s smirk widened.

Earth mana gathered around Brakk’s neck. In a desperate attempt to stop it, I sent a mana arc at the mage, but he simply blocked it with a floating earthen spear.

Then, right before my eyes, an earthen pike pierced through Brakk’s throat, causing a huge amount of blood to spill from his mouth.

My first instinct was to use [Adaptive Vital Restoration (A)], but when I sensed Brakk’s wound, I realized that his cervical spine was crushed and his windpipe had large holes in it.

On this battlefield, healing such a severe wound was almost impossible.

Using my skill to heal him would only prolong his suffering.

Reluctantly, I slowly retracted my mana.

I realized then that Brakk had been as good as dead from the moment he fell onto his back. The mage could have killed him whenever he wanted. Brakk had remained alive only because the mage wanted to play with me, or perhaps because he wanted to take Barry down in the process.

Without showing any emotion, I looked at the mage.

Garran reacted the fastest.

He discarded his heavy shield and stepped forward, closing the gap between himself and his enemy even as the enemy’s spear pierced his unguarded knee.

Then Garran wrapped one arm around the enemy’s neck in a guillotine-like chokehold and used his spear arm to stab the Frosthallow soldier again and again until he stopped breathing.

For the first time, I saw so much anger in someone’s eyes.

His killing intent was so thick that it felt as though it had taken physical form. I could feel its lethality even though it was not directed at me.

In his anger, Garran had used so much force that six spearhead-shaped holes were visible in the Frosthallow soldier’s full-plate armor.

Then, without showing even the slightest limp, he turned toward the soldier fighting Varric.

While Garran was dealing with his first enemy, the mage tried to protect his soldier. He gathered mana around Garran’s feet, but before he could complete the spell, I sent out two mana arcs in quick succession, pushing him away from Brakk’s body.

He sent three spears at me and, at the same time, tried to raise the earth beneath my feet.

Unfortunately for him, I was a sensor.

Using a burst of speed, I left the area he was trying to affect and closed the distance between us. Once I was close enough, I thrust my spear at him. He blocked it by converting one of his spears into an earthen shield.

Then he took another spear from his quiver and attacked me by controlling it with his other hand.

This time, I blocked it using a mana shield.

In the meantime, Varric, with Garran’s help, had finished his opponent.

Once they had lost two Tier-3 soldiers, the situation suddenly changed.

After disengaging from Barry, the archer shot an arrow with a climbing wire attached to it into the wooden staircase and jumped down from the tower.

The soldier engaged with Kael also simply jumped back toward the assault staircase, where the front line had already created space for their retreat.

As for the mage, he clapped his hands in the direction of my squad and me.

The earthen quiver and all the spears inside it shattered into small, shrapnel-like pieces that shot toward us at an extremely high speed, forcing all of us to take cover.

I created a large mana shield that was thickest around me but wide enough to cover Kael, Garran, and Varric as well.

Upon impact with the earthen shards, the mana shield covering my squad shattered, but it reduced the lethality of the shrapnel.

Kael and Varric were unharmed because they had their shields to hide behind. Garran, however, had turned his back to the attack, and a few earthen shards embedded themselves in the joints of his armor.

After creating his earth-shard attack, the mage also jumped toward the staircase.

As the soldiers were about to close the gap in the shield wall and secure their retreat, my mana whip took shape.

While the mage was still in the air, the mana whip wrapped around his left ankle, and I pulled him back.

Without wasting any time, Varric smashed the mage’s knee with his hammer. In the next attack, Garran’s spear pierced the mage’s skull, entering through his left eye and coming out through the back of his head.

After that, Barry and Garran sat down to the side with the other injured soldiers, no longer in any condition to continue fighting.

The battle was also almost over.

The attack continued for another fifteen minutes, but that was only to maintain Frosthallow’s orderly retreat.

Even after getting an opportunity to inflict some damage at the end, I could not do anything.

Mostly because I barely knew what I was doing anymore.

I was simply responding to the input I received from [Operational Cognition (A)] and [Perceptive Instinct (UC)], trying to defend my soldiers.

After fighting three Tier-3 enemies and protecting my squad with mana shields, my mana reserves were too low by the time we finished off the enemy mage.

So I used what little mana I had left to maintain only three skills: [Operational Cognition (A)], [Perceptive Instinct (UC)], and [Battlefield Command (UC)]. Pushing myself any further could have started affecting my sensing skills.

With the possibility of an assassin attack even after the battle, it would have been utterly foolish of me to spend even the last bit of mana I had.

Once the battle was over, I did not call for a casualty report or check how much damage we had inflicted on Frosthallow.

Instead, still wearing our blood-covered armor, my squad carried Oren and Brakk to the burial ground established for the soldiers.

Daren, Rokan, Silas, and I carried Oren on a wooden stretcher, while Peter, Varric, Kael, and another militia member carried Brakk.

Barry and Garran walked slowly behind us, their injured bodies barely holding together.

And we were not the only ones.

Many people from the militia joined us on our way to the burial ground.