Sera awoke the next morning to Tiriana shaking her shoulder. She jolted up out of bed and looked around in confusion, too groggy to process what was going on.

  “The nachzehrer have been spotted. Do you want to evac on the airship or stick around? I’m planning to head to the wall and get a better view,” Tiriana told Sera while handing her a change of clothes. Sera obediently pulled a shirt on over her undershirt as she processed what the elf had said.

  “…I guess I’ll follow you to the wall?” she decided after thinking it over. “It’s not like they aren’t planning to pick up their adventurers if the fight goes south, and the wall is far from the fighting.”

  Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, but Sera didn’t fully trust anyone that was going to be on that ship. Dr. Kahnton seemed more loyal to the mysterious Hippodamedes than his people and Sera hadn’t spoken to any of the researchers. Better to stick with Tiriana, whom she was fairly confident would protect her.

  “Great. We’ll get going as soon as you put on some pants.”

  When Sera emerged from the building she was staying in, trailing Tiriana, the settlement was abuzz with activity. Civilian members of the expedition were streaming in the direction of the airship to the east in varying degrees of panic, though the crowd seemed orderly on the whole. The nachzehrer were, of course, approaching from the south, the direction that the head of the turtle they stood upon was pointing in, so the pair of adventurers were forced to fight their way through the evacuees to get anywhere.

  The fortress being as large as it was, Sera and Tiriana stopped by the barn to grab Verinilla and Soswa on the way. What time was lost saddling the flokkas was easily made up during the run to the other end of the fort, a distance that neither woman could have managed at a dead run. They hopped off the flokkas when they arrived and hurried up onto the walls to find Cadenza and ten or so mages staring off towards the southeast.

  “I don’t see anything,” Sera said to Tiriana as they joined the group. As far as she could tell there was nothing in the distance except scarlet grass.

  “Here, look through this,” Cadenza said, passing Sera a pair of lenses with a fold-out handle. “The more mana you run through it, the further it will zoom in.”

  Following Cadenza’s instructions, Sera scanned the distant plains for movement. Omichlódis might have been flat, but there was still a limit to how far one could see based on perspective and the thickness of the atmosphere, so without the binoculars everything eventually faded into a blue-white haze where objects were too small to see.

  After zooming in, Sera found what everyone was looking at, though it took a bit of trial and error. It appeared the nachzehrer had arrived in huge, boxy personnel carriers and dismounted when they could just barely see the fortress in the distance. Now they had left those behind and were advancing in a loose, spread out formation with agile leapers scouting ahead and to their flanks, bulkier vanguards wielding blunt weapons making up the next echelon, and gunners filling out the core of the formation. Some of the latter, Sera noticed, were wielding their weapons with both hands rather than using guns built into their gauntlets.

  There had to have been at least three hundred infantry out there, and to make matters worse, they were escorting a handful of armored vehicles. They might have been artillery or they might have been tanks- Sera wasn’t informed enough to tell the difference.

  “Have your adventurers not gotten into position yet?” Sera asked, realizing she hadn’t spotted them.

  “Until the nachzehrer get close they’ll be making themselves invisible. Hopefully when the illusion drops, the nachzehrer will to realize it was only the first layer,” Cadenza answered.

  “I see…so, you aren’t going to call for a retreat? It looks like we’re outnumbered pretty badly,” Sera pointed out. Cadenza still looked confident, however.

  “Three to one odds are manageable. Most of their vanguards should go down early, and we’ll thin out the leapers during the approach. Speaking of which- go ahead and start picking them off,” Cadenza said, signaling to the mages around her at the end.

  Although the nachzehrer were still too far away for Sera too see without aid, the mages with Cadenza were capable of magnifying their vision themselves, allowing them to aim at targets much too far away to target with the naked eye. It was quickly clear why these specific mages were chosen. The first spell cast was essentially a laser beam that cut across the distance in an instant, burning a hole through a leaper. Lightning fell from an empty sky next to strike another, and soon a smoothly rounded rock, spinning to create stability, blasted off into the distance, caving in the skull of an unfortunate leaper just as it landed, helmet and all.

  “This is most likely why they chose that formation. They were expecting us to start casting from extreme range and knew to keep some distance between each other to prevent blast damage from killing several of them at a time,” Cadenza explained to Sera as the mages continued to pick off leapers. Despite the spectacle of it, though, there were only ten mages here and each spell took time to prepare. On top of that, not every shot was a kill, or even a hit for that matter.

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  “Why are they just taking it instead of returning fire?” Sera wondered as the advance continued.

  “Elevation. We can hit them from here, but no matter how much they incline their guns, they’re not close enough to return fire. That’s one of the disadvantages of firearms- we’d be able to hit them just fine if the positions were reversed,” Cadenza replied. She drew her swords just as she had against the golems, but this time her off hand held an irregularly shaped white crystal. “And once they do enter range, it’ll be my cue to launch my own attack.”

  The nachzehrer marched implacably, unphased by the losses they were incurring already. Sera began to notice a pattern in the mages’ targets over time; they were exclusively targeting the leapers scouting directly ahead of the formation. They weren’t trying to kill as many as possible- just to prevent any of them from stumbling upon the cloaked adventurers ahead.

  Sera felt the air begin to shake and vibrate as Cadenza prepared her attack. There were five armored vehicles in the nachzehrer force and five swords arrayed before the mage. This spell was far more potent than any she had used before, even against the golem knight. Static electricity began to build in the air, causing Sera’s hair to stand on end, and when she looked around she saw she wasn’t alone. The crystal in Cadenza’s hand shrank as crystallized mana was converted back into raw mana and poured into the spell.

  “Cease fire! Everyone, get ready to fire your widest-ranged spells at their vanguards the instant I let go,” Cadenza instructed the adventurer mages around her once the nachzehrer drew close enough. That seemed risky to Sera, but it did look like the nachzehrer had pulled their leapers back after losing a number of them.

  There was an enormous bang and a simultaneous burst of air as Cadenza released her swords. In a fraction of a second they’d already covered the entire distance to the enemy armored vehicles. Above the nachzehrer, the air itself seemed to break into pieces and scatter as a barrier was shattered- but it was barely even perceptible because the event was followed so closely by five concurrent impacts that obliterated armor and incinerated flesh.

  A small crater was left where each vehicle had been, but as impressive as the attack had looked to Sera, the damage was otherwise minimal. Still, it was followed shortly by even more spells that touched down amid the vulnerable nachzehrer formation, its barriers eliminated by Cadenza’s first strike. Arcing electricity, an artificial meteor strike, a telekinetic palm, and more reached out and blew holes in the nachzehrer ranks. As each spell landed, a mage slumped over in exhaustion, completely spent. Even Cadenza was now leaning on the crenellations, panting heavily.

  Even so, the nachzehrer had chosen their formation well, minimizing the losses from those devastating strikes as a result of being too spread out for any one attack to kill more than a few of them. Over half still remained, and when the adventurers on the ground uncloaked, those remnants rapidly reacted by closing the distance and bringing the fight to a range where artillery risked friendly fire.

  Just as planned, the vanguards assaulted Cadenza’s disguised mages while the leapers darted around and attacked the rearguard, utilizing tactics the nachzehrer considered tried and true for facing alchemists. Sera watched with bated breath as the groups closed in. The moment contact was made, reality seemed to shift, and then the mages were now in front and the warriors in the rear, locking down the leapers.

  Spells less suited to long-ranged attacks shot off now from the front ranks. Plumes of fire, pressurized water, and pillars of stone were easily identifiable even from Sera’s vantage point, with other varieties of magic surely mixed in. Nachzehrer vanguards fell one after another, but despite that, Cadenza cursed.

  “Shit. They have anti-mages mixed in among the vanguards- we won’t be able to wipe them out with magic,” she commented as the opening attack finished to reveal a good three-fifths of the vanguards still standing. Some were damaged, but still capable. Rather than pressing the attack, however, their ranks split in the middle. As a reaction to the revelation of mages in the adventurers’ frontline, they stepped aside, giving the gunners behind them a clear line of fire.

  “They do say that no plan survives contact with the enemy,” Sera mused.

  “Having officers present makes a huge difference. They’re adjusting to us,” Tiriana observed as the gunners opened fire. It was impossible to tell how badly that opening volley depleted the mages’ barriers, but it several came away clutching wounds before some among them pulled dirt from the ground ahead, forming ramparts of earth than bullets couldn’t pierce.

  “Good, Dalian reacted quickly. Or maybe it was Mira?” Cadenza praised. She glanced at Sera and Tiriana, speaking between deep breaths. “Ah, Mira was the other mage in my party. She’s the most senior mage here after myself.”

  “Doesn’t look like the nachzehrer are done yet, though,” Sera replied as the beings in question, rather than firing uselessly at dirt, began to circle around. Some remained in place to prevent the mages from noticing.

  “Dalian, the gunners are trying to flank to your left. The ones still firing on that wall are a distraction,” Cadenza said into her communicator. By now the warriors had dispatched many of the leapers, bereft of favorable launch points as they were. That allowed them to disengage and reposition. The mages circled up in the center and hunkered down, apparently focusing on defense, while the warriors abruptly charged the nachzehrer gunners.

  On Earth, firearms were the king of the battlefield. In the right hands, and against the right opponents, guns were potent on Omichlódis as well. Neither of those criteria were met here as armored adventurers assaulted the nachzehrer lines, rushing down forces designed to defeat mages. Leapers and vanguards broke off from attacking the adventurer mages in response, but they would have needed to react ahead of time to have been fast enough.

  In an effort to save their gunners, the nachzehrers’ greatest weapon against mages, they committed a cardinal sin: never turn your back on the enemy. Seeing what was happening, the mages launched attacks into the rear of the nachzehrer moving to relieve their gunner unit, then turned their focus entirely to the survivors on their other flank. Moments later the warriors crashed into the gunners and began to smash them to pieces. The fight was as good as over, though it would still take quite some time given how sturdy nachzehrer anti-mages were.

  “Alright, as soon as the mopping up is done, we’ll recall our field unit and-” Cadenza began just to be cut off as someone came through on her communicator.

  “More nachzehrer sighted to the southwest!”