I sat on the battlements on the eve of the battle, my legs hanging off the parapet as I watched the enemy army slowly march in, settling a good distance away from the walls. I had to admit, their numbers were impressive, and even with the majority being conscripts, the task ahead of us seemed daunting.

They had come prepared, however. I could see the catapults and battering rams trudging along in the distance, horses straining to pull them up to the plateau on which Ardenburg stood.

They must have been planning the attack for quite some time, I believed. Suddenly, the duke’s willingness to take the risk by approaching me made a good deal of more sense. Siege weaponry did not grow on trees, and there was no way they could have had all those built within the three days between the duke’s death and the beginning of their march. It was clear, now, that the duke’s control over his vassals had been slipping — this rebellion was months in the making.

Even Kirin had not been aware of any rising tensions, which made me wary of more divine plots. A god could have helped hide the rebels’ preparations from the loyalists. But at the same time, it was just as likely the duke was hiding it himself, to protect himself from potential betrayal.

I sighed, shaking my head. There was nothing else to do about it now, other than fight it out.

I took one last look at the army — gods, did the sight give me chills — then turned around, receiving a salute from a nearby archer, which I returned with a nod. Climbing down the stairs into the city, I gave a mental call to all the undead in range. It was time to get to business.

The attackers began their assault shortly after noon — they’d picked the time well, unfortunately for us. With the sun behind them, the forces on our walls were already squinting, and there was no cloud in sight, so the glare of the sun would only get worse until it finally set.

I had hoped that their makeup being mostly conscripts would mean they were incapable of standard siege tactics, but I had been woefully mistaken. Apparently it does not take much skill to climb a ladder or arm a trebuchet, and the front gate was constantly straining against the incoming battering rams. I ended up conscripting a handful of Force and Matter mages that lived in the city — they were adventurers, so at least they were no strangers to fighting — using them to reinforce the gate. Without them, I was afraid we’d lose the gate within the day.

In the end, it seemed the place where I could have the greatest impact from was the top of the walls. While my skills did not lend themselves to big, flashy magic, it turned out that using Mind magic on my own troops could significantly improve their combat capability.

It worked kind of like an artificial, widespread blanket of courage and motivation, and the defenders were all ever so slightly more accurate and better coordinated. Maintaining this spell took a fair bit of mana, but very little concentration, which allowed me to target the enemies with quick, short bursts of its logical opposite. Whenever an approaching enemy was close enough, I could blast them with waves upon waves of terror, causing them at worst to flee, and at best to freeze — which made them easy targets for the archers on the walls.

My biggest challenge was that I could only be in one place at a time, while Ardenburg was big. The archers were concentrated near the city’s entrance, where the bulk of the enemy forces were attacking and siege engines battered at the gate. More than a few times had small attacking parties gotten up the walls, causing destruction and chaos in those parts of the battlements.

Sarah and Shiro — he had, somewhat unsurprisingly, wished to join our little insurrection against the gods, and I saw no reason to reject him — spent most of their time trying to mitigate this deficit. Both had little ability for attacking at range, so they patrolled the battlements at great speed — a perk of being undead was that you can just run as fast as you are able without ever getting tired — seeking bubbles of fighting where they could make a difference. Either of them could run the entire length of the wall twice in an hour, and since they remained together, I wasn’t worried they’d get in a fight they couldn’t win.

Even so, infiltrators still managed to get through. A few hours into the siege, a series of fires began in the Merchant Ward. Before we had any chance of stopping the blaze, it had spread to some of the bigger grain stores, and the damage was extensive. I had to divert the mages from the gates to the fires, and it took both me and their concentrated efforts to stop the blaze from spreading, and it took the better part of an hour to put it out entirely.

Alchemical accelerants would have had to be used for a fire of that magnitude, and they were not cheap at all. To make matters worse, the infiltrator was still on the loose, and it was foolish to assume this was all they had in store for us.

The invaders had taken full advantage of my absence on the walls. With the loss of my Mind magic, the attackers scaled the walls unimpeded, and the defenders suffered greatly from the diminished morale. Three dozen enemy soldiers had successfully made it inside the city and were battling the Guard near the gates.

I was later informed that thanks to the Revenant duo’s quick intervention, they were able to slay the invading party before they could mount serious casualties. Still, the whole engagement sunk the Guard’s morale, as more than a score of their own had been slain in that short amount of time — mostly the lightly armored archers on the walls.

The rest of the day settled into a similar pattern. We’d hold a good defense in the front, until an enemy squad successfully scaled the walls or an infiltrator made it past the fortifications, when we’d be forced to deal with the diversion to mitigate the damage. It was a stressful, tiresome ordeal and by the end of the day we’d lost three score of our forces, which stung.

As the sun set, the assaults abated — they’d still be testing the walls, but generally the fall of night meant a temporary cessation of hostilities. Humans did not fight well in the dark, for the most of it, and they needed regular rest, so the nightly reprieve was mostly an unofficial understanding between enemies, even if one that was broken more rarely than actual treaties.

It was this assumption on which my strategy hinged, so I gathered my pair of minions and we made our way to the nearest sewer entrance, where my half a thousand wights had already gathered.

“God, how do you handle this stench?” Shiro complained as we squeezed our way through the cramped sewer system beneath the city. I’d heard many folktales in which some hero or another walked through wide, spacious sewers as they made their way to a castle to kill some evil king or something like that. Contrary to popular expectation, actual sewers were anything but spacious. There was barely enough space for a ten-year-old child to stand straight, and Sarah’s armor scratching against the walls was already a familiar background noise.

There was a reason why, despite the sewers being a possible way into the city, no sane attacker would ever think to use it.

“Dumbass,” Sarah snorted with amusement. “You know how you can turn the pain off, right? Just do that with smell.”

“Oh,” Shiro replied with a small voice. “That’s much better.”

“Did you really just suffer through it till now?”

“Hey, I’m new at this stuff,” he retorted indignantly.

“Children, quiet down please,” I interrupted, earning me a mumbled “I’m not a child” from Shiro. We were approaching the sewer exit, after which the refuse would flow into the adjacent river. From what I’d seen from the top of the wall, the immediate area should have been clear of the enemy army, but my plan depended on us getting close to them undetected, so caution was important.

Exiting the sewer, I crouched near the river bank and quickly wove Force into a dome around us that would block the waves of sound from going out.

“Right, you can be noisy now, as long as you stay within twenty-five meters of here,” I said, letting the two off the hook for a while. They chatted softly between themselves as we waited for all the wights to make it out of the sewer, which would take a while.

I began gathering Mind mana, in preparation for one of my biggest workings yet. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to pull it off, given the scope of the spell, but even if I failed, I trusted I could buy enough time for the three of us to escape if I sacrificed the wights.

I started the spellwork by spreading sixteen threads away from me, all equally spaced from one another. Once their ends were about half a kilometer across — part of them went back into the city, but Mind mana did not care much for walls — I began weaving shorter threads between them, connecting them all into a great spiderweb. The spiderweb imagery was important, as it helped solidify the spellwork into a “trap” without having to focus my intent in that direction. Instead, using all my willpower, I imbued the working with a simple intent, using a single concept: sleep.

As it was, the spell was strong enough to make an adult human very sleepy, and would likely prevent most people from waking up from loud noises coming from a distance. I wasn’t entirely done, though.

Using my conduit’s little remaining mana capacity, I drew as much Soul as I was able. Then, I wove the threads much like I did with the Mind mana earlier, carefully connecting them to the greater web. Herein laid the difficulty of this working — using Soul mana to supplement the original spell could increase its effects exponentially, but making any mistake while weaving the two together would destroy the entire spell framework, and most likely cause the mana to violently explode.

As gently as I could, I made all the final connections at once — and no explosion happened.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I stilled my trembling hands. Casting that had been terrifying but… exciting, at the same time. With the spell in place, my concentration wasn’t needed anymore — I just needed to keep the supply of mana steady and it would do its job for as long as I kept it fed. Somewhat unfortunately, I was still rather helpless right now — with all my mana tied to maintaining my minions and the empowered Sleep, I had to rely on the two Heroes and the wights to fight any upcoming battles.

I was shaken from my thoughts by a trio of birds crashing suddenly into the ground in front of me. I… should probably have put an upper bound on the spell’s height. Oh well.

All in all, it took about ten minutes for my minions to gather, and I took a final glance at the assembled forces. The wights had assembled into twenty neat rows of twenty-five-odd and waited patiently for instruction. Sarah and Shiro were… playing cards? Where had they even gotten that deck from? I shook my head helplessly — that was a mystery for another time.

I coughed lightly to get the pair’s attention, while also instructing the wights to begin marching. “It’s time,” I addressed the two Heroes. “Let’s end this siege before it can properly begin.”