At the gate, the towers suffered devastating damage with no way of knowing what was attacking them. Stone dust hung in the air where ramparts had collapsed. Bodies lay in the rubble, unmoving.
The Ryugana soldiers fired essence ballista into the forest, burning and razing swathes of it in an instant. The treeline blazed now, flas roaring through the canopy, casting writhing orange light across the mountainside.
And yet it was not enough. Javelins kept flying out of the burning forest, trailing darkness behind them like wounds in the air. Whatever was firing them remained untouched by the explosions and the inferno consuming everything around them.
The projectiles flew with terrible speed, striking the bastioned gate of the kingdom. All four towers had been crushed to rubble, their defensive enchantnts flickering and dying in the wreckage. From the battlents of the wall that coiled around the mountain like a stone serpent rged with the peak itself, torrents of arrows exploded into the dark sky and rained down on the forest. So detonated on impact, throwing gouts of fla into the air. Others pierced straight through the canopy, expecting to destroy concentrations of enemy forces beneath.
But the unending flow of black javelins made the Ryugana soldiers' efforts look futile. Nothing they did stopped the advancent. Nothing even slowed it.
The gate was quaking with each impact, groaning under the assault, but there was nothing to worry about. Not yet.
As javelins slamd against the towering gate and rattled it, curls of blue lightning discharged in shockwaves and the damage restored itself almost imdiately. Cracks sealed and dents smoothed. The whips of lightning released from the massive tal fortress made a portion of the mountain tremble with each pulse, stone grinding against stone deep within.
It looked like a stalemate.
It wasn't.
The Ryugana soldiers had no idea how much damage their enemies had taken, how much force their enemies possessed. The fact that they couldn't even see who they were fighting gnawed at them. n shifted their weight on the battlents. Hands tightened on weapons until knuckles went white. Eyes darted toward shadows that held nothing, searching for targets that refused to exist.
Fear is an instrunt. It births irrational patterns. And their enemy would be waiting to exploit every one of them.
Another Captain of the defense force stood on the rampart before a stereoscope, peering through the enchanted lenses to gauge the distance to their enemy.
Nothing, not a single target. Just burning trees and smoke.
He stepped back and tightened his jaw with frustration. Yet even as he pulled away from the stereoscope, another black javelin tore out of the forest, trailing that sa unnatural darkness.
Targeting the point of origin, a barrage of massive arrows flew toward it and bombarded the treeline. Explosions blood through the burning forest. But there was no reaction, no devastation beyond what they had already caused. No screams too.
They had repeated this pattern again and again, firing at the source of each javelin the mont it appeared. Their enemies were either dying in absolute silence or not being hit at all.
Just as the soldiers concluded a round of firing and began loading for the next, a savage torrent of black javelins exploded into the air, tearing out of the forest and curving to descend on the gates. Dozens of them. Perhaps a hundred.
The Captain's face went pale.
It wasn't the numbers that scared him. Barely more than a hundred projectiles. But each one carried devastating power, and the cumulative damage to the gate had stopped being negligible chapters ago.
Now they intended to destroy the walls too.
Like they were running out of patience.
In that mont, sothing strange happened.
As the javelins descended, a trail of light from the northwestern angle of the mountain curled through the sky with blinding speed. It moved like a star given purpose, leaving a searing afterimage across the darkness. They all saw it for a heartbeat before it streaked across the sky and detonated the falling javelins in a single catastrophic flash.
The explosion turned the entire mountain white.
The land shook as if trying to tear itself apart. The shockwave hit the battlents and staggered soldiers backward, those too close to the edge grabbing desperately for handholds.
Trees lted in the heat. Flas that had been burning through the forest simply ceased to exist, consud by sothing hotter. Heat scars seared into the ground in radiating patterns. The earth shifted from brown to black to scorched red in layers. Then the explosion rumbled backward, a wall of force and fire upheaving and razing everything that remained of the forest with implacable hunger.
The soldiers on the battlent were blinded for a long second, hands raised against the light, comprehension failing them entirely.
When the brilliance dimd and their vision slowly returned, their eyes widened at the landscape that lay bare before them.
The forest was gone.
The entire forest that had spread across the western base of the mountain and transitioned into the stony plains leading to the Clustered Cliff had vanished. Only burned ground remained, stretching to the horizon, emitting thick wisps of smoke that rose into the night sky like the breath of sothing dying.
And yet, sohow, a portion of the land was unscathed. The trees that had covered it were gone, torn from the earth and reduced to ash drifting on the wind. But the ground beneath remained untouched, unmarked by the devastation surrounding it.
The Captain leaned forward, he grabbed the stereoscope quickly and positioned it to that direction.
There, a large, almost invisible do spreading across the distant landscape. No one would have known it existed if not for the way it flickered, phasing in and out of visibility. Each blink revealed a cluster of shapes within, coloring that section of terrain differently before vanishing again into transparency.
Then the do collapsed entirely, whatever power sustaining it finally spent.
The clusters were revealed.
The distance was staggering, far over a hundred kiloters. This was roughly three hundred kiloters from the wall. A march of ten to twelve days for ordinary n crossing that terrain. Five days at a hard run for trained soldiers pushing themselves to exhaustion.
They had been attacking from three hundred kiloters away.
It was inconceivable. They had stood at that impossible distance and struck the gate, struck the towers, with accuracy and force that should not have been possible. The stereoscopes could barely see that far. The essence ballista couldn't reach a fraction of that range.
The Captain stared into the distance, shock carved into his face. They all knew the Empire fielded soldiers of terrifying power, warriors who treated the impossible as routine.
But this set a new standard entirely. This rewrote what possibility ant.
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