Chapter 49

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth.

Dungeon Factory, Command Center.

"This is going to be tricky." Said Alexandra as the first ranks of golems emerged from the dungeon entrance.

"What, killing the manticore, or convincing everyone else that the golems aren't here to kill them?"

Alexandra smiled.

"Your sarcasm is noted vampy. But more seriously, I meant killing the manticore. I think we can convince the adventurers of our benevolence quite easily. I hope."

"How do you hope to accomplish that?"

"I've set every golem to say 'Please stand aside, we are here to assist' on a loop."

"That...Might work. But we're still going to lose a lot of them to friendly fire. All of the soldiers left remember, only the adventurers are still in the camp, and they've spent the last few weeks fighting against our golems. In the heat of combat they'll attack them by reflex."

Alexandra nodded. The soldiers had indeed rushed out of the camp, it was in fact what had triggered the alert from the sentry golem in the first place, leaving only a token force and mostly adventurers to try an hold off the manticore. And the ships of course, but the one engaged with the beast was too busy trying to fend it off, and the others couldn't take off with the pair battling over them.

"Point taken. I'll try to keep them in a single, cohesive bunch, to minimize damage to the fringes." Alexandra sighed. "And now to the real problem, how to attack it in the first place."

Emilia blinked.

"What, can't you just have the Royal Marksmen shoot at it?"

Alexandra shook her head.

"Not if I want to avoid hitting the ship." She pointed at the screen, where a few rangers and mages opened fire, only to be quickly restrained by their peers as most of their spells either missed altogether or hit the ship's shield. A shield that was shining less and less brightly with each hit, and would probably go out soon, if Alexandra was guessing correctly. "That manticore is big, but it's fast as hell, there's no way the golems can hit it without doing at least as much damage to the ship. And, well...That wouldn't go down well with our surface friends, now would it?"

Emilia nodded. She didn't really care all that much about what happened to the surface dwellers, but a direct attack against them outside of the dungeon...would look very bad. Plus Alexandra's official justification for the expedition, which they'll give the surface dwellers if they asked, was to help them out and build up relations, which is hard to make believable when you're murdering the people you're supposed to be helping.

"I suppose not. So how do you plan to do this?"

"We could wait for the ship to go down, but I don't think that would be a good idea. Another way, however, is to get the thing's attention."

"And how do you plan on doing that?"

Alexandra smiled.

"In the simplest, most cartoonish way possible of course!"

*****

Allya and Éclair charged forward, the baroness moving towards the left as her bodyguard went for the right, separating as an unspoken tactic to split the beasts' attention should Éclair lose it's attention.

For a split second, nothing happened, the sand demon too focused on protecting itself from the pitiful volley of arrows fired by the few remaining archers in the beleaguered defenders, then Allya heard a brief incantation, and the sand demon screamed in frustration. It's body, which looked nothing more than a giant pile of sand and stones, the larger examples of the latter bound by the former in mishapen limbs, turned impossibly quickly despite it's bulk.

Allya quickly pulled out her anti-magic elixir, and began coating her daggers in them with the smoothness of long practice, noting with a corner of her mind a hint of movement to her side, before being interrupted by the whizzing of an arrow and the screech of a dying, or at least seriously wounded, sand spirit. It was good to know that Pyn was watching her back at the very least.

The sand demon finished rounding on the puny human that had dared attack it...And immediately realized something was wrong. That one wasn't running or pulling back. That one was standing it's ground. Sensing a form of challenge it's animal like instincts made it stand to it's full height, and roar out a challenge.

And to it's manifest surprise, Éclair answered in kind, belowing a war cry that would have made an orc berserker proud, and surged forward. The demon started swinging it's arms, faster than anyone who hadn't fought his kind would have thought possible, before stopping and screaming as two pinpricks of searing pain appeared in it's back. The slight delay was barely noticeable, it's arm briefly slowing down, but it was enough. Éclair jumped and whirled, dodging every limb by mere centimeters, before striking directly into the body of the beast, uttering a single word as she activated the one use enchantment contained within the blade.

The demon staggered and roared out in pain as a massive lightning bolt discharged from the blade, directly into it's body, causing it to briefly loose out cohesion as some of it's components literally melted from the energy released by the spell. It rallied however, striking out at the creature in front of it as it blindly reached out behind itself, swinging it's arms randomly to try to keep Allya at bay behind him.

He failed. Allya wasn't born yesterday, and she had been trained to take down truly monstrous creatures as a Knight-Valiant. By the time the beasts' arms moved to attack where she had struck it, she was already gone, moving in random directions, constantly dashing everywhere trying to get one more hit in as a tangle of rocks and sands flailed wildly around her.

Meanwhile Pyn fired arrow after arrow, attempting to keep the sand spirits off of her friends' backs. Fortunately the sand demon was proving very accomodating in this, it's wild swings taking out it's nominal allies and leaving the monsters understandably wary of stepping in. Then, with a thrill of horror, Pyn saw them start turning towards Dominique and her, safely outside of the rampaging demon's reach. Fortunately, for many of them the survivors of the attack, still clustered in front of the wagons, were a much more attractive target, especially since the demon had stopped its relentless advance on them, probably the only thing that had kept the sand spirits at bay from just swarming them. Still, many of them, especially the ones at the back of the pack, obviously decided that the two girls alone would be much easier pickings than a formation of heavily armed and evidently experienced soldiers and adventurers.

"Whatever you're doing, better do it quick!" Yelled out the elf as she started firing as fast as she could, her bow constantly glowing due to the sheer strain the rate of fire was putting on the enchantments. But they held. One after another, the sand spirits fell, the arrows punching clearly through them, and the shield penetration enchantments apparently working wonders on whatever arcane means were keeping the monsters together. But it wasn't enough, inexorably they started pushing forward, heedless of their own losses.

Dominique didn't even answer as she continue incanting, her eyes almost glazed over as she focused all her attention on her spell, glowing runes starting to weave into a complex pattern in front of her, almost like a ritual circle.

Meanwhile, the dance of death between the sand demon and its two attackers continued, with Éclair's first strike firmly focusing the beasts' attention on her, forcing her fully on the defensive, dodging and parrying like crazy, forcing her to even invoke her tesla field and damn the consequences, too busy to be able to restrain it from striking anyone unlucky to happen near her. Which undoubtedly saved her life, as the bolts of electricity hit several arms that would have otherwise crushed her, briefly making them lose cohesion and just crash to the ground as so much pebbles and sand, before being picked back up and coalescing back, but always a bit lesser than before.

Allya for herself was continuing to weave in and out of combat, inflicting as many stab wounds as she could...until she misstepped. The briefest of hesitation as her foot slipped doomed her, and she flew backward, screaming out as the massive limb swatted her aside like a fly.

"ALLYA!" Screamed Pyn as she saw her girlfriend fly through the makeshift arena and crash into a nearby tent. She stopped firing, and the sand spirits, sensing an opening, surged forward. She fired an arrow at the nearest monster, and began to reach for her shortsword, when a deafening roar filled the air, and she closed her eyes reflexively as a blinding flash filled her vision. When she opened them again, the sand spirits had retreated, shaken, their front ranks reduced to half-melted piles of sand. The elf nodded in thanks at Éclair, who didn't acknowledge it, too busy fending off the demon, and failing as she started taking minor hits. Obviously the bodyguard used some form of high powered lightning spell, one with a sizeable area of effect to boot, although it seemed that the strain, or perhaps cost in mana, had caused her to drop her tesla field.

Pyn started firing once more, driving back the sand spirits, who obviously no longer saw them as easy pickings anymore, and trying to keep the area where Allya had crashed in relatively clear.

"I need an opening!" Yelled out Dominique. A yell that was very much necessary as something began roaring near them, and Pyn felt a strong wind tuck at her clothes. The elf suddenly realized that whatever was happening the mage must have been the source of it, as sand was starting to fly towards them from all direction.

"What?" Yelled back the elf as she almost sighed in relief when a sand spirit that had tried to poke it's figurative head into the tent Allya had crashed into flew backwards, a dagger firmly planted in it's rapidly dissolving body.

"An opening! I need my spell to penetrate, you need to make the demon lose cohesion, briefly!"

Pyn nodded, and shifted her aim, firing as many arrows as she dared into the towering beast. Allya and Éclair obviously got the message as well, as a pair of daggers flew through the air, and hit the beast in the back, making it scream in agony as the two weapons began digging trenches along it's back, the parts they were in loosing cohesion due to the anti magic coating, causing them to go through it like butter. Then, as it was distracted, a definitely battered Éclair raised her hand, and another lightning bolt leapt out of her palm, striking the sand demon.

That was all the signal Dominique needed, and the complex weave of runes in front of her, which seemed to have been the epicenter of the wind, vanished in a flash of energy, revealing....a sphere.

A perfect sphere, where light coming through seemed distorted somehow. Then Dominique simply made a pushing motion, and the sphere canonballed forward, straight into the sand spirit. It penetrated the beast's weakened body easily.

"EVERYONE! GET DOWN!" Yelled out the mage, simply tackling Pyn to the ground as the elf hesitated.

And then the sphere finally lost cohesion. And inside of it, the air that Dominique had been compressing, which was the cause for the wind, as the atmosphere around them was trying to fill the void left by all the air she had been trapping inside of her spell, was released.

Compressed air spells were fairly rare, wind magic being more often used with the environment for deadly combination, like creating a flesh flensing sand storm, or tornados. But in the hands of a skilled mage, with an understanding of just how deadly the power of pressure could be, they could be devastating. And Dominique was very much one such mage.

The air, now at several hundred times the pressure that most people considered breathable, released in a single, massive thunderclap, creating a shockwave only comparable to that of a WW2 era bomb. The sand demon didn't exploded into chunks, it disintegrated.

Pyn gulped as she came back up, noting the devastation around her. The sand demon had been effectively turned into a giant shrapnel bomb, it's chunks thrown away at such speed that anything that hadn't taken cover had been shredded. Unfortunately, that included some of the survivors near the wagons, too slow to throw themselves down, or simply too distracted to hear the cry. Fortunately however, the sand spirits had very much not understood what was going on, and the last few remaining ones were scattering as fast as they could move, clearly realizing that they had very much bitten off something they couldn't chew.

The elf blinked as someone tapped on her shoulder, and found herself face to face with Allya. She opened her mouth to speak...only to realize that her girlfriend's mouth was moving already, and yet she wasn't hearing any sound. Pyn winced and touched her ear, and brought back her hand covered in blood. Her mind idly noted that shock must have prevented her from feeling the pain, or even noticing that something was wrong. Then she felt something being pushed into her hands, and smiled up at Allya as her girlfriend handed her over a healing potion. She downed it in a single gulp, wincing as she felt a popping, and her ears suddenly began working again.

"You know, sometimes being an elf sucks." She simply said to Allya, who laughed.

"That's your first thought?" The baroness shook her head, smiling. "Come on, let's grab the others and greet our new friends."

Pyn nodded, then froze as her ears twitched, and she heard a massive scream in the distance, then an answering roar, and Allya sighed, clearly having heard it despite her inferior hearing.

"Oh dear Gods what now?"