[Ilnori]
Not remaining idle while the battle between the mythic ranks was in full swing, Alicia and the elven soldiers with her continuously advanced toward the human camp and the still massive portion of the army that was stationed there. To their sides, dozens, if not hundreds, more units of elves marched through the forest, nervousness evident even in the members of the emerald guard among them.
Unlike how it had been up until then, this time they wouldn't have the luxury of fighting inside the forest. And though it could cover their approach until they were within half a kilometer, afterward they would have to contend with a larger force that had all the space they needed to gather into formations.
But no matter how risky it was, they knew it had to be done. Specially trained groups of high ranked mana users, mostly mages but also a few aura users, were well known to be one of, if not the greatest strength of the human armies of the central continent.
Their skill in multiplying the power they could project when working in concert was unrivaled, allowing them to threaten even mythic ranks far more efficiently than any of their peers among the other races. Their large numbers only facilitated this advantage further by making it near impossible for another species to try and match them with the same tactic, with none of them having enough mages among their people to not be outnumbered at least two to one in the shootout that would inevitably ensue among these units.
As such the elven force had to find other ways to minimize the impact they could have. After all, while they had no mythic ranks with them at that time, the power these units bring to bear could just as well be used to tear through entire formations of enemies, that much did the two centuries since their wide-scale adoption by the military prove.
Consequently, every elf present knew that these units couldn't be allowed to still be able to gather into formation once the main portion of the troops from their side arrived. As such, they had to disrupt them enough that once the lower ranked elves finished acting as rear guard and captured or killed most of the humans currently fleeing from the fighting mythic ranks, they wouldn't have to wait for a signal and could join the fight immediately upon their arrival.
With this knowledge in their minds, the elven forces only briefly stopped at the edge of the tree line. Waiting a tense minute for everyone to arrive, they kept nervously glancing at the sky until an orange light shot up from amid their lines.
The moment its light emerged above the trees and cast an orange glow onto the fields ahead, hundreds of elves came charging out under the cover of a barrage of spells that erupted from their lines.
Streaking through the air, these projectiles arced downward onto the human army that was still in their camp. Glowing brightly and blinding most soldiers, they slammed into the confused troops a second later.
Exploding into anything from blinding light to destructive flames that devoured anything within tens of meters of them, they caused chaos to erupt in the camp. Running around wildly, humans crashed into one another, with doctors, healers, and their patients blocking the men trying to get into formation, different units colliding with each other on the way to their positions, all while the few who kept their calm shouted orders in futility.
After only a few seconds, the elves then came crashing into the feeble front line that had managed to form amid this chaos. Evading the spearmen in it and concentrating their force on the swordsmen scattered in between, they slammed into the first line in a lightning-fast maneuver.
Immediately upon contact, the first few sections of defenders crumbled as aura-enhanced swords tore through the simple wooden shields of manaless soldiers. And with each second that passed from then, only more parts of the formation either fell under the overwhelming assault or fled in the face of it, opening more and more paths until only a few small groups of mostly third ranks held the original line.
Rushing through the openings that formed in the wake of this, the elven soldiers ignored the rest of the formation and went charging into the camp behind it.
At the forefront of this, aura users rose into the air as their avatars formed around them. Tramping tents, wagons, and people under their feet, they swept through the crowd of manaless and low ranking mana user soldiers that stood in their path toward the fourth ranks among the army.
For a few seconds, the speed with which this assault rolled over the camp paralyzed any response from the defenders.
But this didn't last long. Though initially caught off guard as a whole, some parts of the human army hadn't fallen into disarray and had taken up formations amid the chaos once they realized they wouldn't make it to the first defensive line in time.
Scattered wildly among the crowd, these units were bastions that parted the momentum of the elven tide.
At the edges of these unit's formations stood aura users that blunted the charge, blocking the strikes of incoming aura avatars with such constructs of their own and engaging them in a clash of titans. In the middle of their protective circle were the mages, their spells flying in all directions as they fired onto the elves that streamed past their unit on the sides.
Like this, the elven advance soon started to slow down. With each meter they advanced further into the camp, ever larger parts of the attacking force found their way forward obstructed by a formation of enemies they couldn't evade. As such, the seemingly unstoppable wave became bogged down in a series of skirmishes that were scattered throughout easily half the human camp.
Leading a small group while transformed into her past appearance with elven features, she was at the forefront of the attack. Engaging the two aura users and one mage that it took to block her advance, she flung gravity spells with terrifying ease.
Flinging the aura avatar charging at her back with a flick of her wrist, she fell back a meter to dodge the other aura user's attack. Reaching downward with one arm, she pulled parts of the soil beneath her into the gravitational vortex she had created above her palm. Working akin to a lesser form of a black hole, it caught the matter in its orbit and dragged it along as she shot it at her opponent a moment later.
Impacting under the thundering sound of rocks striking metal, the swirl of earth and stone rained against the aura users's shield and arm, causing hairline cracks in the latter. This was shortly followed by the spell's body passing by the already weakened bone, with its gravitational pull snapping forcing the arm toward itself and causing the bone to snap with a sickening crunch.
Howling in pain, the aura user barely managed to think clearly enough to manifest a part of an aura armor before the spell then struck his torso. Clashing against his defenses for a moment, it pushed and disorientated him just enough before it lost its cohesiveness and broke apart that the man failed to notice Alicia's approach.
Dashing forward, she slammed her open palm against his torso. With it, she unleashed the mana that she had prepared, forming a pulse of repulsion force that sent the aura user flying into her third enemy.
But instead of colliding with the mage, the aura user Alicia had sent flying impacted the former's shield spell. Slamming into it and coming to an abrupt and painful halt, his body was furthermore flooded with the crackling electricity of the shield, electrocuting him and making sure that he would never reach his ally alive.
As his smoldering corpse collapsed onto the ground, Alicia noticed the mage already finishing the cast of a complex spell. Before she could react, he looked up and raised an arm while manifesting an easily two-meter-wide spell circle above his palm.
Accelerating forward, she tried to interrupt him, only for the aura avatar she had catapulted away seconds before to reappear in her way. Swing its sword downward, the aura user it was formed around cut off her path and forced her to jump to the side.
Growing nervous in the face of this situation, Alicia quickly made the decision to transform. Returning to her draconic appearance in the middle of dashing forward, her towering body abruptly appeared only a handful of meters in front of the aura user.
Not bothering too long with him, she batted his aura avatar to the side before rushing past it. Giving it another strike with one of her wings in passing, she nonetheless focused most of her attention on the mage.
Pouncing, Alicia's claw tore through the air as she struck his shield. Sliding off to the side, her attack left a deep gash in the soil, though this didn't slow her down in the slightest. Lashing out with her tail, she slapped against the shield of crackling lightning.
Achieving little success, her strike didn't even dent her opponent's defenses despite the thunderous boom its impact produced. Instead, a surge of electricity came flooding into her body through this contact, causing Alicia to flinch back and reveal enough of an opening for the mage to finish his spell without any chance for her to block it.
Shooting into the sky in a straight line, the blue sphere of electricity that the spell conjured up ascended a few hundred meters before erupting in a brightly glowing discharge of lightning.
Without delay, a new spell circle appeared above the spell's projectile. Arcs of electricity then curved upward and connected the two, causing a soft glow in the part of the circle surrounding them and revealing the otherwise invisible spell. Slowly more and more such connections formed, revealing ever more of the easily thirty-meter-wide spell circle.
As its looming form was revealed above the battlefield, the surrounding fight quickly died down. Both elven and human combatants paused, their weapons slowly sinking while they raised their heads to stare at the massive spell overhead with a mix of fear and confusion in their eyes.
Not a full second later, the spell then discharged before the crowd's eyes. Erupting with blinding light, the mana of over a dozen mages that were powering the spell from some distance away was expelled in a single combined beam of seven different elements.
Raising her head in the face of this, Alicia opened her maw and tried to counter the attack by unleashing her breath attack. Having already charged it during the delay before the spell activated, she could instantly fire a shimmering, nearly invisible beam with a dark purple, almost black hue at the incoming attack.
Meeting the descending beam head-on, her breath attack started clashing against the incoming spell. For a brief moment, this slowed the incoming attack down, with the crackle of energy that was visible around where the two beams met almost coming to a full stop.
Though while Alicia was already pushing her breath attack to its limit by that point, the energy she sensed from the spell overhead only increased. This rising power quickly started pushing Alicia's attack back again, shaking Sonita and Vika out of their shock.
Ignoring their previous opponents, they respectively gathered flames and blood in their hands and dashed toward Alicia. Already knowing that they were too late to still help her push back against the attack, they nonetheless unleashed their attacks in the hopes of at least redirecting the incoming spell slightly.
At the same time, they prepared a barrier spell, gathering as much mana for it as they could while hoping that they reached Alicia in time.
But to their shock, the moment their attacks left their hands, the two beams of elementally attuned mana drastically veered off their paths. Curving to the two women's left, they completely missed their intended target and vanished somewhere past the edge of their field of vision.
Shocked by what they just witnessed, Sonita's thoughts froze in disbelief, leaving her unable to react to this new development, while Vika could only think of deploying her barrier ahead of time and praying for the best.
However, to both women's surprise, the expected explosion didn't follow even after a few seconds had passed. The confusion only increased for Vika when she felt the blood barrier she had deployed being ripped from her control and dissolved, leaving her unprotected yet still unharmed.
Slowly lowering her arms after having shielded her head with them, her eyes immediately widened as she watched at least a thousand individual streams of energy coalesce in the same direction her attack had veered toward. Spells, aura energy, and raw mana alike were pulled toward the same point in the sky.
Among this was the massive attack from overhead and Alicia's breath, with the two beams being just one minuscule part of the explosion that engulfed the shared destination of all these attacks. For a few seconds, no other sound echoed out across the entire battlefield and no other movement was visible but the constant flashes of light this produced.
Every living soul in the camp meanwhile stared at this spectacle, with humans and elves alike feeling their mana drain toward it as soon as it left their mana pool. Alicia too had to pull back her mana into her heart, but unlike how it was for every other being present, the tiny part of her mana pool that held her draconic mana seemed to be unaffected by whatever was affecting everything else.
Channeling her nearly full yet nonetheless extremely meager draconic mana reserves into one of her front legs, she prepared to use it as if it were regular mana. Though this was an extremely wasteful usage of the theoretically most powerful resource available to her, apart from using it as the spark that elevated her dragon's breath above any beast's innate abilities and gave it much of the power it held, she knew no usage for draconic mana. And without any regular mana to fuel her breath attack, this wasn't a possibility.
Right as she started, a voice to her side suddenly interrupted her planning, "Don't waste your energy, even your fully powered breath didn't even scratch his transformed body."
Swirling around, Alicia was surprised to see Neandra calmly standing next to her. Even more so, it confused her to see the beast empress in her true form, even if shrunk down significantly and consequently only towering over her by a few dozen meters, as she knew that the other woman was similar to herself in that they both preferred humanoid forms, even if for different reasons.
"You know what is happening right now?" Alicia asked.
"Consider it a job application to serve under your brother. Back during the meeting I had extended an invitation for it to two old friends, this is just their way of telling me that they accept." Neandra said.
"It leaves an impression."
Humming in response to her statement, Neandra turned back toward where the explosions of the redirected spells had flashed only seconds earlier.
Following her gaze, Alicia found the light show to have been replaced by the forms of two massive beasts.
The one further right from her perspective was a creature she could only describe as a carnivorous tortoise. Easily hundreds of shark-like teeth lined the beaked maw that was reminiscent of its aquatic relatives, with a leathery, crocodile-like hide covering its head and what she could see of its neck.
On its back was a shell that clearly indicated the beast as having once been or at least descending from a land-dwelling species of its kind, with five sharp dorsal ridges comprising out of multiple pointed peaks. In contrast to this, the edges of its shell were surprisingly streamlined, making it hard for Alicia to guess whether the beast thrived more on land or in the sea.
This question wasn't even answered by its legs, with them being short limbs covered in the same hide as the being's head and ending in a foot with four claw-tipped fingers with webbing in between. Its tail only further reinforced the idea of an at least partially aquatic nature, with its appearance being reminiscent of a dragon's tail, only with a row of thin spikes connected by a leathery membrane on top of it, a part of the limb that could likely be unfurled to act in a manner similar to a fish's tail fin when it water.
The other beast was meanwhile far more consistent in its appearance, with the mix of octopus and squid features that dominated its form making a mainly aquatic nature quite clear.
To nonetheless stand on dry land, the beast was using tens of the uncountable tentacles that covered its long, vaguely squid-like torso to prop itself up. These covered practically every inch of it, with only an area on its back instead being covered by three large plates of an exoskeleton. Though even there, longer but thinner tentacles that only had suction cups on their flatter and wider ends poked out from under the last plate.
Toward the hind end of this torso, the tentacles covering it stopped protruding from the skin at a right angle, instead getting increasingly angled backward. Furthermore, their suction cup-covered side was always facing toward the tail-like, flexible stinger extending from the back of its body.
The being's head meanwhile was the least squid-like, instead resembling the body of an octopus more closely. But instead of eight tentacles extending from it, a maw filled with razor-sharp teeth formed the lower part of the head. Apart from this, the only other difference to an octopus's body was that the head was more ridged, with the rounded part that started behind the eyes being closer to a skull than the more malleable body part that it was in an octopus.
Towering before her, these two massive creatures mustered her for a moment before their gaze drifted to Neandra within a second of one another. Seemingly exchanging years worth of conversations through seconds of eye contact alone, they raised their heads a moment later while shrinking their body's size to one that was similar to Neandra's.
Amid this, Darganth's draconic form appeared in the skies above the camp, the glow that came from between his scales illuminating him in front of the backdrop of the night sky. Already descending slowly, he landed in front of the two newly arrived beasts with his neck raised high and front legs fully stretched, thus angling his back slightly and puffing out his chest.
As he stood there regally, Alicia noticed that the present forms of the two beasts were slightly smaller than Darganth, with the small difference making it rather apparent that this was on purpose.
Watching from the sidelines as her brother held the two being gazes for a few seconds, Alicia watched with some surprise as they lowered their heads and bowed before him.
In response, the edges of Darganth's lips curled up into the closest thing to a smile he could achieve in his dragon form, followed by him unleashing an earth-shattering roar skyward to announce their victory.
Within moments, cheers followed from the elven soldiers, partially in response to Darganth and partially because they finally noticed the massive tree Venrie had created in the distance. To Alicia's right, Neandra joined in with a roar of her own, with she being swept up by the atmosphere a moment later and roaring skyward herself.