The Lacert offense crashed into the Anwansi defense with a thunderous noise that shook the air.
Metal clanged against metal. Screams tangled with war cries. Bodies collided in a churning mass of scales, fur, and flesh as the two forces ground against each other at the base of the first wall. The sound was unlike anything Grub had ever heard, a single continuous roar of violence that made the timbers of the third wall vibrate beneath his feet.
Despite being outnumbered, the Anwansi defenders held their ground. The first wall's fortifications channeled the Lacert charge into narrow approach corridors where their numerical advantage counted for less. Volunteers with spears stabbed over the barricades while Guardians fought in the gaps, their Anima-enhanced strikes carrying a weight that the Prosaic Lacerts struggled to match.
Grub sat atop the third wall beside Luthiel, his pale eyes tracking the battlefield with unnerving calm. His fingers rested idly against the handle of his newly forged morningstar, resisting the temptation to jump into the fray.
Not yet.
Morrigan's orders had been clear. He was only to move if the first two layers broke. So instead, he watched.
The second wall's archers continued raining volleys down on the Lacert rear, thinning the reinforcements before they could reach the front line. Without Morrigan's Current to guide them the arrows flew on skill alone, but the archers of Anwansi had been drilling for days and their accuracy was serviceable.
Morrigan, however, was not focused on the wall.
The old kappa wove through the melee with a speed that belied her hunched frame, her staff sweeping soldiers aside as she pushed toward the tree line. She barely acknowledged the ordinary soldiers around her. Every swing of her staff knocked Lacerts sprawling. Every kick sent another body tumeling across the blood-soaked earth. Around her, Guardians capitalized on every opening she created, dragging isolated enemies down beneath flashing blades.
She trusted them. They were exactly where they needed to be.
Instead, her eyes were locked on one target. Saander.
High above the fighting, Lieutenant Colonel Saander remained atop the broad branch of a towering jungle tree. His scarlet scales gleamed beneath shafts of sunlight as he watched the engagement unfold. The Simurgh bird balanced on his outstretched arm. He had just finished whispering his urgent message and released the creature into the smoky sky.
The bird spread its iridescent wings and pushed upward. It went higher on each beat of its wings. Until suddenly, it stopped climbing.
Every stroke of the Simurgh's wings pushed it forward, but an invisible force dragged it backward with equal strength. The bird flapped harder, its feathers flaring with agitation, but gained no altitude and no distance. It hung in the air like a kite caught in a headwind, except there was no wind.
Only a current.
Saander's yellow eyes widened as he watched his messenger struggle against nothing. His head snapped downward just in time to see Morrigan launch herself from the ground and land on his branch in a single bound. The limb cracked under the sudden weight, but held firm.
Before the crimson Lacert could react, Morrigan's fist connected with his jaw with a nauseating crack.
The punch sent Saander rocketing off the branch and tumbling through the air before crashing into the bloody melee below. His body bounced once against the scorched earth and disappeared into a tangle of fighting soldiers.
Morrigan turned to the Simurgh. The bird was still beating its wings uselessly, trapped in her redirected flow. She reached out with one clawed hand and the creature had no choice but to drift backward into her grasp. Its talons scratched at her fingers while its beak snapped at the air.
A swift twist of her wrist and the bird went limp.
She dropped it from the branch without thinking. The iridescent body tumbled through the smoke and landed somewhere in the undergrowth below.
"No more messages."
Morrigan's gaze swept the battlefield beneath her. The fighting had consumed the area where Saander had fallen, and the crimson Lacert was lost in the maelstrom of blades and bodies. She could not make him out visually.
Her eyes closed in concentration. The water in her basin went perfectly still.
For a single heartbeat, everything about the old kappa became motionless. Then her eyes snapped open and her head turned with precise certainty toward a spot roughly forty paces southeast. Her Anima sense had located him instantly, pinpointing his signature through the chaos of a hundred clashing bodies with the ease of finding a candle in a dark room.
Saander was in the middle of a protective cluster of his own soldiers, dazed and bleeding, struggling to stand while his men held back the surrounding Anwansi fighters.
Morrigan raised her staff, and the wooden shaft began to glow, a deep amber light radiating from the grain like embers waking inside a log. The glow intensified until the staff hummed with stored energy, and vibrated in her grip.
Then she left of the tree as the branch snapped from the force.
The old kappa sailed from the tree with her staff raised overhead, both hands gripping the shaft, the amber glow trailing behind her like a comet's tail. She crossed the distance in an arc that carried her directly over the battlefield. Every Lacert beneath instinctively looked up.
Saander barely managed to lift his head before—
BOOM!!
The impact was catastrophic.
A shockwave of concentrated Anima erupted from the point of contact and rippled outward in a dome of force. The nearest Lacerts simply ceased to be intact. Soldiers several paces out were launched into the air like ragdolls, their weapons spiraling away from their hands. The ground itself cratered, chunks of scorched earth flying upward as a circle of devastation expanded from where Morrigan stood.
From the third wall, Grub's eyes went wide. The blast had cleared a radius of at least fifteen paces, leaving a shallow crater littered with broken bodies and shattered weapons. In the center stood Morrigan, her staff planted in the ground, smoke curling around her feet.
Grub tore his gaze away from the battlefield and turned to El. "Huh?"
"What was that?"
El's expression hadn't changed. Her hidden gaze remained fixed on the battlefield with the same analytical calm she brought to everything.
"That is Master's staff. Konkushu." Her flat voice carried a hint of something that might have been pride. "It has an imbued Forte called Outburst. It is a Conductor type, similar to your morning star. It stores Anima effectively and functions primarily by flowing Anima through it."
She tilted her head.
"Unlike yours, however, Konkushu has a Forte attached to it. The concept of the ability is not complicated. It allows the user to store Anima within the weapon over time, then release it in a concentrated burst of amplified volatility." She paused. "Master has been feeding Anima into that staff since the battle began. Every second she spent standing still at the first wall, she was charging Konkushu."
Grub shook his head slowly. The tactical layers of Morrigan's approach continued to reveal themselves. She hadn't been idle while waiting at the wall, rather she had been loading a weapon.
Below, the crater had disrupted the Lacert formation badly. The defenders on the first wall seized the opening, pressing forward into the gaps left by the blast. For a brief moment, the tide shifted.
Morrigan stood over a bloody figure at the center of the crater. Saander lay on his back, his crimson scales cracked and dirtied, his yellow eyes unfocused from the blast. He coughed and tried to raise himself on one elbow.
Morrigan promptly stomped on his chest and drove him back into the dirt causing blood to spurt from his mouth.
She lifted her foot and kicked him across the crater floor. The Lieutenant Colonel rolled helplessly across the scorched earth, his limbs flailing as he tumbled through debris and shattered weapons. He came to a stop against a mound of dirt twenty paces away.
Morrigan closed the distance before he could blink. She grabbed him by the collar, lifted him off the ground, and backhanded him across the face with her open palm. Teeth and blood flew from his jaw in a crimson arc.
On the walls, the battle raged on around them. The first wall was holding but the cost was climbing. Several Guardians from Morrigan's patrol unit lay motionless in the dirt, their white vestments stained red. The volunteers who remained fought with desperate energy, their Prosaic blades clashing against Lacert steel in exchanges that left both sides bleeding.
Arrows continued falling from the second wall, each volley claiming a handful of Lacerts, but the flood of soldiers pushing through the burned corridor seemed relentless. For every lizard that fell, two more clambered over the body.
Some of the Lacerts had reached the base of the first wall and begun climbing. Their clawed feet and hands found purchase in the timber and stone with reptilian ease, scaling the barrier with a speed that the defenders on top struggled to counter. Soldiers stationed at the wall's crest jabbed downward with spears and poured boiling water, knocking climbers loose or sending them plummeting back to the ground. But there were simply so many.
Through the chaos, Grub spotted Pazuzu.
The horned Guardian had been forced back into action despite the severe burns covering half his body from the fire corridor. His grey skin was mottled with angry red welts and patches of blackened flesh, and his movements lacked their usual fluid composure. But he fought anyway, his ivory sickle flashing as he cut through Lacerts who had breached the wall's perimeter.
His Forte flickered on and off like a lantern running low on oil. Calm Aura would activate for a few seconds, dulling the combat instincts of nearby enemies just long enough for the Guardians beside him to land killing blows. Then it would fade, and the Lacerts would sharpen again, pressing harder.
Each activation drained Pazuzu visibly. His stance wavered after every use. His strikes grew slower, his breathing heavier. The burns were sapping his stamina and his Anima reserves were running dangerously thin.
But even flickering, his ability remained a lifeline for the defenders around him. Those brief windows of lowered enemy awareness prevented a dozen deaths that would have otherwise occurred. Lacerts who should have dodged a spear thrust stood still for a half-second too long. Soldiers who should have pressed an advantage hesitated for no reason they could identify.
Grub watched the horned Guardian burn through whatever reserves he had left and felt something complicated settle in his chest. Grudging respect layered over lingering hatred, mixed with the tactical awareness that Pazuzu's collapse would open a gap in the defense that nothing else could fill.
He was running out of time down there.
Despite the grim developments at the wall, the line held. Barely, bloodily, but it held. The defenders bent without breaking, their determination fueled by the knowledge that their homes and families were sheltered behind them.
Meanwhile, Morrigan continued her dismantling of Lieutenant Colonel Saander.
The crimson Lacert had managed to regain his footing and attempted to call upon his Forte. The torchbearers who had carried his flames were dead, their bodies crumpled somewhere in the initial charge. But the torches themselves had fallen to the ground during the chaos, their flames spilling across the scorched earth and igniting patches of debris. Fire bloomed around the combat zone in scattered pools of orange and red.
Saander reached for those flames. His body tried to find the rhythm, tried to begin the dance that would bend the fire to his command.
Morrigan punched him in the stomach before he completed the first step.
He doubled over. She grabbed his horn and slammed his face into her knee. When he reeled backward she was already there, closing distance with surgical footwork..
Her elbow smashed into his jaw before the motion finished. Every attempt to build rhythm by the Lacert ended beneath another merciless strike.
Then she showed him what a real dance looked like.
Morrigan's fists flew. Each punch curved mid-flight, redirected by Current into trajectories that defied physics. A straight jab bent sideways and caught his temple. A hook arced downward and struck his ribs from below. An uppercut spiraled around his guard and connected with his chin from an angle that shouldn't have existed.
From the third wall, the effect was mesmerizing and terrible. It looked as though a million fists were flying through the air simultaneously, striking from every direction at once. Saander blocked left and got hit from the right. He guarded high and took a blow to the knee. He tried to retreat and a punch followed him around the corner of his own shoulder.
Grub remembered one of Morrigan's many nicknames, Master of the Million Fists.
The title wasn't a boast. It was a fitting description, and he couldn't help but think, If this woman wanted me dead when we first met... I would never have a chance.
Despite being equalized to Saander's level and carrying the same Anima reserves and the same physical limitations, Morrigan outpaced and outmatched him in every conceivable dimension. Her technique was decades ahead. Her reaction speed was masterful. Her understanding of angles and timing and momentum made his combat training look like a child swinging sticks.
The crimson Lacert's face grew increasingly bloody. Scales cracked and split under the relentless assault. One eye swelled shut. His jaw hung at a slightly wrong angle.
Morrigan finished with a straight kick to the chest that launched Saander into a charred tree trunk. His body folded around the impact and slid to the base, leaving a smear of blood on the blackened bark.
He lay there for a moment, broken and gasping. Then, with a stubbornness that bordered on insanity, his claws dug into the earth and he began pulling himself upright. Fire licked at the ground around him, the scattered flames from the fallen torches casting his bloodied crimson scales in flickering orange light.
Morrigan watched him struggle for a single second. Then she turned her back on him and walked toward the first wall where her people needed her.