General Ulric Stone didn't flinch. As the arcane meteors rained down, he watched his vanguard die with the detached focus of an accountant balancing a ledger.
Shields shattered. Formations dissolved into meat and slag under the Elven artillery. Yet, Ulric kept his gaze locked on the blackened crater between the two armies. Any second now. Just reach the center, Fenn.
Then, the battlefield inverted.
But not in the center of the valley. Twenty yards short. Directly beneath the boots of his own vanguard.
For one terrible heartbeat, the earth swelled upward into a massive, silent blister. Then, the crust shattered.
A pillar of crimson light and vaporized bedrock punched into the sky. The sound wasn't noise—it was a physical blow. Ulric's warhorse screamed, rearing wildly as the shockwave slammed into the command post, shredding canvas tents and throwing aides face-first into the mud.
Ulric fought his mount under control, his ears popping from the sudden pressure drop. He looked for his frontline.
It was gone.
Thousands of men, erased. Swallowed in a roaring typhoon of fire and pulverized bedrock that carved a jagged new canyon into the valley. Ulric wasted no time mourning them. His eyes were already tracking the fault lines ripping outward from the crater's edge.
The payload was massive. Twenty yards was close enough. The seismic tremor sprinted forward, tearing through the scorched earth and undercutting the Elven positions.
He watched the bedrock beneath Carric's hundred high-mages simply dissolve.
Their arcane vortex collapsed instantly as they lost their footing. Dozens of Elven spellcasters slid screaming into the expanding abyss, crushed by the shifting tectonic plates.
Ulric wiped a streak of wet grit from his cheek, staring at the smoking chasm that had just consumed both his vanguard and the enemy's greatest weapon.
Fenn fell short, he thought. But the math stillCarric's sword was still leveled at the human lines when the world tore itself apart.
The cold satisfaction of vengeance died in his throat the second that crimson light erupted. It wasn't Elven magic. It was raw, undiluted destruction, and it bloomed directly beneath the human vanguard.
The shockwave hit him a second later, violently bucking him from his saddle. Carric hit the ash-covered earth hard. His ears rang, a warm trickle of blood sliding down his neck. He scrambled to his knees, gasping for air that had suddenly been superheated.
Squinting through the roaring dust, he searched for the human lines. They were gone. Replaced by a jagged, burning chasm.
A misfire? His mind desperately tried to organize the chaos. Their trap failed. They blew themselves to pieces.
But then the screaming started on his side of the field.
Carric snapped his head around. Fault lines from the subterranean blast were sprinting across the valley floor. The ground beneath his high-mages groaned, shuddered, and gave way.
"No!" Carric rasped, his hand shooting out as if he could physically hold the crust together.
The cliff face sheared off completely. Dozens of his most powerful spellcasters tumbled into the black smoke, their robes flailing as the abyss swallowed them alive. The battlefield was no longer a valley. It was a smoking, fractured wound dividing two decimated armies.
Carric forced himself to stand, his legs trembling under the weight of his ash-stained uniform. He looked across the chasm, through the falling debris, until his eyes found the human command post.
General Stone was still sitting on his horse. Unmoving. Unbothered.
A horrifying realization settled into Carric's bones, turning his blood to ice. It hadn't been a misfire. Stone hadn't lost control of his trap. When the mages started their bombardment, the human general had chosen to detonate the payload right where it was. Twenty yards short.
He blew up his own men, Carric realized, staring at the unblinking monster across the canyon. Just to drag us down with them.When the dust finally settled over the newly formed chasm, the true scale of the slaughter became clear. Barely an hour had passed since the first charge, but the valley was already a graveyard.
General Stone's brutal calculations had cost the human army dearly. Over nineteen thousand, six hundred heavy infantrymen had been butchered or swallowed by the earth, along with Captain Fenn and his fifty sappers buried in the deep.
But Lord Commander Carric had paid an even steeper price. Thirty-two thousand elite Elven Shadowraths lay dead or vaporized in the ash, alongside a hundred irreplaceable high-mages.
Fifty thousand souls, gone in sixty minutes of tactical madness. And the battle wasn't even over.