Chapter 350: Bandits, Absolute Bandits!

Sacred incantations echoed within the city walls, and the stars above seemed to tremble.

Caught in the full force of a broad-scale barrage of magic and divine rites, the frontline erupted into a roaring sea of flames stretching for miles.

Monstrous flesh and the severed limbs of Gigantes were blasted high into the air, raining back down in a scattered torrent of gore.

Instinct took over the dazed beasts.

Driven by primal terror, the remaining horde wheeled around and surged toward the gap the demigod heroes had carved open, desperate to flee the blazing inferno below the fortress.

"Facing dead east! Distance two hundred paces! Javelin throwers, harass them, drive those beasts toward the center!"

"Facing southeast! Distance three hundred paces! Archers, volley fire at forty-five degrees!"

"Facing southwest! Distance five hundred paces! Three-tier liturgical chants, unleash!"

Standing before the citadel,

Lorne commanded the entire field.

Through glowing resonance glyphs hovering before him, he issued sharp, precise orders to the mages, temple priests, and common infantry already in position.

United in purpose, the defenders executed his commands with tense efficiency, fanning the flames of chaos within the beast tide and driving them back to crash into the battle lines of the Gigantes.

Watching the tide turn, Lorne nodded in satisfaction.

As a scholar of the Academy of Athens, author of the diversionary strategy, and the primary conduit, along with Medea, holding up the shattered Thessalian line, Lorne had been granted absolute battlefield command by King Admetus before the monarch rode out as bait.

Transferring authority on the eve of battle was normally a grave gamble.

Fortunately, the influence of the Athens Academy spanned far and wide.

Not only were foreign reinforcements familiar with its doctrines, but many of Thessaly’s own native mages and god-blooded warriors were alumni of the institution.

Under their coordination, Lorne achieved his tactical objectives with ease.

As the panicked beast tide charged backward, the crude battle ranks of the Gigantes shattered to pieces.

Starved of direction without their commander Antaeus, the giant horde lost all cohesion, clustering into isolated pockets to fight for themselves.

Seeing the opening, the Dioscuri, trained in the ruthless military discipline of Sparta, exchanged bright glances, as they snapped their reins, unsheathed their golden blades of radiant light and swept them forward.

"Forward! Cut down these earth-burrowing rats!"

Yoked to a bronze chariot engraved with solar motifs, a pair of mythical Griffins, beasts with the heads, talons, and wings of eagles and the bodies of lions, thundered straight into the disorganized Gigantes.

At that moment, Apollo was locked in a contest with Hephaestus across several volcanic islands, vying for authority over fire and light.

Though Thessaly’s patron God was Father Zeus, whose legacy remained formidable, the Sun God could not personally intervene to aid his mortal friend, King Admetus.

Apollo had sent the Dioscuri in his place, but the Spartan trio’s near-disaster in Arcadia had opened the Sun God’s eyes.

He recognized that the disasters plaguing the lands bore the shadow of the Old Gods, and understood the peril ran deeper than it appeared.

So when the Spartan twins concluded their Arcadian campaign and reported back to him, he had not been stingy.

He gave them his newest chariot, his hand-reared Griffins, and two golden blades infused with his own holy essence.

Paired with their sacred armor from Athens, the twins were now fully outfitted in a God’s panoply.

Each wielded power rivaling a lesser deity, making them the most dazzling and conspicuous targets on the entire battlefield.

A few dim-witted Gigantes mistook the gleaming pair for the true King of Thessaly, howling savagely as they swarmed forward to surround them.

Consequently, the pressure on the actual monarch, Admetus, eased considerably.

It wasn’t just the enemy, either.

A few temple priests along the defensive line were so blinded by the golden radiance pouring off the Dioscuri that they instinctively hurled bolts of holy lightning right at them.

So went the age-old rule: he who flaunts divine light draws the storm.

Lorne watched the Spartan twins become the center of hostility, cursing loudly amid the chaos, chuckled softly, shaking his head, and thought of his brother-in-law, whom he had nearly picked clean of treasures once.

As expected of Apollo’s followers, built in his exact image.

’I might as well groom them into professional tanks, taunting the field and drawing aggro.’

Yet fortune and misfortune ever walked hand in hand.

Though the gleaming Spartan twins drew every eye, their brilliance let the surrounding god-blooded heroes easily locate a banner and rally toward their position.

Javelins whistled through the air, arrows split the sky, and broadswords swung in vicious arcs.

Under the chaotic onslaught of the demigods, the isolated Gigantes fell one after another.

"Mind the divine earth-essence in their blood! Cut them clean! Don’t let them regenerate!"

Hearing the warning called down from the citadel, the heroes paused for a brief beat, then turned into absolute butchers, raining ruthless blows on the fallen giants, hacking without pause until the behemoths were reduced to motionless, un-regenerative heaps of red paste.

Only then did they stop, briskly picking valuable trinkets from the bloody mire and storing the spoils in their magic arrays.

Even the stray beasts scattered around the field could not escape the mobbing and looting.

Lorne watched the demigod heroes sweep across the field like a swarm of locusts, not slowing their march in the slightest, and felt an amusing thought.

Now that is what you call professional.

"Our allies are here! Move out, carve a path and join them!"

Seeing the tide fully turn, King Admetus proudly drew his shortsword and rallied his royal guard into a pincer movement alongside the Spartan-led band of demigod bandits, intent on wiping out the remaining Gigantes.

As the roars and shouts across the primary battlefield thinned,

Antaeus, still locked in a furious brawl with Heracles deep in the distant woods, finally realized something was wrong.

The bloodshot rage in his eyes receded, replaced by a flare of sudden anger.

"Treacherous mortals!"

The massive Titan growled and shoved his shoulder into Heracles to force him back.

Stepping wide, he turned and sprinted toward the battlefield, trying to rush back and aid his falling troops.

He was a giant born of the intertwined natures of Poseidon and Gaia.

Though he shared the Titans’ lineage, he did not belong to the traditional Gigantes born of Uranus’s blood, and his authority and following among the giant race were limited.

If he lost his entire force on his very first deployment without a shred of glory to show for it, the power-respecting Gigantes would make him a laughingstock and hound him with ruthless humiliation.

That outcome was something Antaeus could never tolerate.

Yet before he could take more than a few strides, a heavy, iron-like arm clamped around his ankle.

"Leaving so soon? We’re not finished!"

Heracles sneered, his steel-forged muscles bulging as dark red divine runes flickered across his skin. Furious power surged and rose wildly within his frame.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

Gripping Antaeus by the ankle, Heracles swung the Titan in wide, brutal arcs from side to side, thrashing the giant against the earth like an ant thrashing an elephant.

For dozens of breaths, he kept it up before letting go and flinging his opponent away.

Antaeus slammed into the mountain face and lay there with a shattered neck and twisted limbs, barely recognizable as human.

An eyeball the size of a water gourd popped from its socket and rolled into the dirt.

Then dark and ocean-blue glyphs ignited across his body, and the blood spilled across the stone flowed back into his frame on its own.

His broken bones snapped back into alignment with loud cracks, and the eye on the ground rolled back into its socket, fusing seamlessly into the squirming flesh.

"With the blessing of Mother Gaia, you cannot kill me!"

Antaeus cracked his neck with a crunch and pressed his hands against the cliff to pull himself free, as he glared at the hero before him, violent intent boiling in his gaze.

To return to the battlefield and retrieve his giants, he had to break through the monster standing in his way.

What a persistent brute.

Heracles looked at the fully restored giant leader, feeling the nearly bottomless vitality and raw strength surging inside that colossal body, and his brows furrowed slightly.

Since luring Antaeus into these woods, he had been locked in intense combat for hours.

His superior skill and force struck the monster down and killed him time and again, snapping his bones, tearing off his limbs, piercing his skull, crushing his heart, yet the creature revived within seconds, bouncing back to fight anew.

In a war of attrition, Heracles’s demigod body was beginning to feel the strain of repeatedly boiling his divine blood.

If this dragged on, the situation would turn against him.

As the panting Heracles weighed his options, the Gorgon emblem engraved with his name on his chest let out a faint hum and a low, resonant voice echoed directly inside his mind.

"Unbeatable while standing on the earth. So what if you strip away the ground he stands on?"

Hearing the hint, Heracles’s eyes lit up.

As Antaeus charged forward with swinging arms, the hero ducked beneath the blow, boiled his divine blood once more, and drove a devastating uppercut straight into Antaeus’s chin.

The mountain-like giant shot into the sky like a rising star, lifted clean off the ground.

Watching Antaeus flail his limbs in midair, terror washing over his face for the first time,

Heracles knew he had his answer, so he leaped high into the sky and wrapped his arms around Antaeus’s neck, locking it in a vise-like chokehold.

As the overburdened neck bones groaned and cracked, Antaeus realized in horror that his weakness had been exposed.

He struggled madly, trying to force them both back down to the soil.

Worn down by the long battle, Heracles briefly struggled to contain the giant’s wild thrashing.

Just as the monster was about to drag them both back to the dirt, the Gorgon emblem on his chest hummed again, and a beam of starlight descended, wrapping around his body.

The starlight crystallized into golden armor over his frame in an instant, pouring a limitless stream of ether into his veins.

The vast cosmos and infinite heavens above seemed to form a mystic link with him, as if a lion of pure starlight had woken inside his soul and roared with ancient power.

Guided by divine instinct, Heracles poured out his full strength, snapped Antaeus’s neck with a sharp crack, then kicked upward to drive the falling body higher into the sky.

Clearing his mind, he unleashed a lightning-fast flurry of fists.

Crackling thunder and starlight condensed around his knuckles, compressing into dense balls of lightning that flew toward Antaeus’s suspended frame.

Blinding flashes exploded in succession.

The giant was torn apart and pulverized inch by inch, his flesh and limbs losing all vitality before ever touching the earth, turning to drifting ash on the wind.

It worked.

Watching the gray-white flakes drift down from the sky, Heracles let out a long breath of relief, then picked up a dark stone token Antaeus had left behind and turned to stride back toward the battlefield.

When the surviving Gigantes saw only the human hero emerge from the forest, holding the token of their leader Antaeus, their will to fight collapsed entirely and they scrambled to leap into the dark fissures torn open earlier, fleeing into the depths of the earth.

"The subterranean rats are running! After them!"

Exultant, the demigod heroes shouted and dove headlong into the fissures to hunt down the retreating forces.

Watching hero after hero vanish into the pitch-black abyss, Lorne shouted from behind the citadel wall.

"Do not pursue! Fall back!"

This had only been a small detachment of the giant race, and Antaeus was not even a true Gigas of the elder bloodline.

Thessaly’s forces, moreover, were mortal heroes, and mostly second-tier ones at that.

Aside from Telamon, the Dioscuri, Caenis, Heracles, and Medea, few could truly hold a line against a real army.

Even if they had routed this vanguard, the scale of this clash was nowhere near the legendary Gigantomachy.

In myth, the true War of the Giants required the combined might of the Olympian Gods and every mortal hero to win.

To plunge blindly into an unfamiliar abyss straight from the safety of the surface was a suicide run.

But drunk on an easy victory and driven by their wild, unruly natures, the heroes ignored the warning from behind.

Lorne could only watch in frustration as dozens of demigod heroes dove headlong into the dark fissures, chasing the fleeing giants.

Even the Dioscuri and Heracles were swept along by the mob and disappeared into the depths.

Heroic units, always the same problem.

Capable of incredible individual feats, yet arrogant and headstrong, and next to impossible to command.

Worse, Lorne was an outsider who had joined the Thessalian front only days before.

His acquaintance with these heroes from the various city-states ran no deeper than surface-level.

Even backed by his status as an Academy instructor and his brilliant command, it was far from enough to make these stubborn, battle-hardened bandits obey without question.

King Admetus, at least, kept his head.

Knowing his own limits, he heeded the warning at once, leading Telamon and Caenis to hold their own troops back rather than join the descent into the abyss.

Taking some small comfort in this, Lorne called out further instructions.

"This is not the main army of the Gigantes! We do not know what lies below. For safety, hold your positions, gather the mages and priests, repair the walls, and fortify the defensive line!"

Admetus nodded and cleared the field quickly, leading his royal guard and a few sensible heroes back into the city of Thessaly to begin rebuilding the collapsed defenses.

With Heracles and the twins down there, they should at least be able to bring those reckless fools back alive.

Right?

As Lorne turned the thought over, a deep rumble rose from the black abyss ahead.

To his horror, the fissures in the ground began sealing themselves shut.

Worse still, the divine current running through the Athenian armor he had granted was being severed by some ancient power, its link to him fading by the second.

Back inside the city, King Admetus turned and saw the fissures closing.

His face went pale with a dread that would not lift.

Watching the last crack in the earth start to seal, Lorne’s expression darkened, as he vaulted over the citadel wall and dropped straight into the bottomless dark below.

"Hold the line here! I’m going to bring them back!"

On the ramparts, Admetus watched the man who had commanded the entire field vanish into the dark.

An uncanny emptiness washed over him, followed by a rising tide of unease.

He looked at the shattered walls and the severed limbs littering the field outside, swallowed hard, and urgently ordered the mages and priests to speed up the repairs and rebuild the city’s defensive matrix.

Three-quarters of an hour later, the collapsed ramparts stood mostly restored.

Reinforced runic glyphs, carved fresh into the stone, let the royal city’s defensive arrays hold at a basic level.

Watching the faint barrier of light slowly power up, Admetus breathed a sigh of relief, the anxiety in his chest finally easing.

BOOM!

Before he could catch his breath, a familiar thunderous rumble tore through the air on the opposite side of the royal city.

Admetus turned his head stiffly.

Watching the plumes of dust rising hundreds of feet into the air and the towering figures crawling out of the cracked earth along the horizon, his face drained of all color.

Another army of Gigantes.

Two attack forces had been aimed at the city of Thessaly all along.

The force under Antaeus had been bait, just like Admetus’s own royal guard, meant to draw out Thessaly’s main strength and hidden trump cards.

Since when do brainless Titans play human tricks? This makes no sense.

The sight shattered everyone’s understanding of the enemy.

WOOOO. WOOOO!

Desolate, piercing horns sounded across the newly repaired citadel.

Shaking off their exhaustion, the remaining demigod heroes, mages, and priests bit their pale lips and took up their positions once more.

Outside the city, beneath a blood-red setting sun, hundreds of sneering Gigantes marched forward with heavy, earth-shaking steps toward the battered human fortress.

Their towering frames blotted out the sky and blocked the sun, casting long, pitch-black shadows over the royal city of Thessaly.

The air grew thick with the stench of death and horror.

"Don’t panic! Hold out until they return, and we will be safe!"

Admetus shouted to boost morale, swept his notched bronze shortsword against the battlement with a metallic clang and unleashed a desperate, roaring command:

"Form ranks! Engage the enemy!"

(End of Chapter)

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