I opened my eyes screaming, which was very unlike me. The pain in the my head was like nothing I had ever experienced. It was like my head was on fire three times over, radiating a crippling heat that scorched the absolute hell out of my entire body.
Out the corner of my teary eyes I got the impression the massive green orc might have even faltered at my sudden appearance and screaming, rather than just swinging mercilessly like he usually did, but in the end he did ultimately did swing. I didn't even have it in me to dodge.
Splat.
Splat.
I weakly rolled. Splat.
I rolled with slightly more gusto. Splat.
It took five full loops until the damage to my... soul, maybe? Until the damage to my soul had healed enough for me to successfully dodge out of the way of the axe. It wasn't rare for soul damage to last through even time loops, and it seemed this was one such case, if I had to guess. Whatever had happened, it crippled me to the point of near-immobility for five loops. Hopefully I didn't have a hard cap of those.
I stood up on wavering legs, still reeling a bit from the pounding pain in my head. The orc was, as usual, taking a second to pull his axe out of the mud. I shook my head and focused. I had shit to do.
"Yamiyo tekionagure," I said, pouring as much mana into my ball of darkness as I could before launching it. It flew forward and hit the orc in the side, causing it to roar with pain.
Skill up! Curse Magic Level 2
Nice. It was hurt, but not dead. It pulled the axe out of the ground and swung it in my direction.
"Hantai ike," I chanted, and the axe launched back, bending the orc's arm back over it's shoulder. I heard a crack, possibly its shoulder getting dislocated or broken, then another roar. I cast a barrage of darkness balls at it while it reeled to adjust to its new life as a cripple.
Skill up! Mysticism Level 3
Skill up! Curse Magic Level 3
The levels were coming fast and swift. As expected, combat would probably work a lot better than any grinding, though I doubted I would get infinite EXP from fighting a crippled orc. I turned to go grab the sword I usually got, and in retrospect, rarely actually used.
On my way there I noticed a few humans giving me quick, baffled glances before returning their focus to their fights. I felt like I should know what earned that response this time, but it wasn't coming to me. Maybe due to the still-pounding headache from the possibly-soul damage. I scooped up the sword, stretched for a bit, held out an arm, and said "Haintai ike". The goblin's arrow that had been rushing for my head abruptly reversed.
Goblin Archer Defeated!
Skill up! Mysticism Level 4
Level Up! All Attributes increased.
Not usable against arrows... unless you knew they were coming. The timing was pretty lucky, I had to admit, but that goblin and I were likeblood brothers by this point. He killed me, I killed him, he gave me a concussion, I gave him... death? Okay, our relationship was pretty one-note, but I felt like I really knew him on a deep level. Same for the orc from before. It would be nice to hang out and maybe play some video games together once this whole thing blew over.
I left the helmet and trudged on. It marked me immediately as a sus impostor, and with Rose—the blonde knight, presumably—so high-strung from this battle, she would kill me the second I misspoke. Better to go in with a different plan. (As for the sword, I figured that since mages didn't need to do complex hand gestures, it would be standard for them to at least know how to use a sword).
Once I reached the camp, I walked over to Rose.
"—at least five hundred of them. The Excursed could send more at any moment, if she's behind this," I heard her saying, voice as hard as steel, just like always. I saluted her.
"Ma'am! I'm a novice Mystic, here thanks to Timothy. Scouts have reported orc mages in the back of the enemy ranks, I'm to stand ready for any artillery spells," I said, speaking quickly to not give her any room to ask questions about my rank. Hopefully Farmer Second-Class was a thing for mages and not just infantry.
"Damn!" she pounded a fist on the table. "Orc mages, here, now? The Excursed is behind this after all. At least we have a Mystic now," she said, glancing my way. Her icy blue eyes were visible behind her visor. "Name and rank?" she asked.
"Ma'am! Malcador, Farmer Second-Class."
She tilted her head, but ultimately nodded. Whew. Last time, she asked for her name and my commanding officer's name due to my jumbled equipment, among other things, but this time I knew her name, and had Timothy to back me up. In name only, that is. Hopefully he would cover for me afterwards.
"Mage, stand on guard. Reverse what you can, and put up a Magic Barrier for what you can't." Uh oh.
"Yes ma'am!" I said with another salute, pretending to have Magic Barrier. Damn. I could already see the future laid out, but I had to make do with what I could. No point admitting I couldn't cast Magic Barrier, which was, it seemed, as basic-bitch of a spell as you could get, considering it was novice-level next to the reverse spell. I had the sneaking suspicion that admitting I couldn't cast it would out me as a doppelgager in her eyes and swiftly earn me a sword through the heart. Oh Rose, what can I do to melt your icy heart? Just enough that you don't kill me on sight?
I stood on guard, waiting for the meteors. In the meantime I eavesdropped on Rose's conversation with the other captains. Or rather, the captains, because as it turns out, Rose was actually a paladin sent from the church to observe the base. She wasn't highest authority (the captain-general, highest ranking of the three or so other captains there, was), but she had a lot of influence. Unfortunately, Paladin Rose's influence was not enough to convince the captain-general to call a full retreat to the fort where the mages were. It was just some orcs, he said. Better get real battle experience than hide and do training exercises, he said. He honestly might have had a point if this were a standard raid, and that explained some of the hesitation on the shoulders, but now Rose had an ace up her sleeve. Orc mages.
The thing about orc mages was that they were fairly uncommon. One in ten thousand, at best. Magic took intelligence and regular training (for most people anyway, eheheh), which orcs didn't have the brains or diligence for. There were, however, the ocassional mutants born with blue skin, more powerful brains, and a modicum of responsibility. They would take books stolen from human settlements, teach themselves magic, and then use their superior brains and abilities to take control of orc camps. It wasn't rare to find an individual orc mage, and if you were say raiding a normal orc camp, you would probably find one (or maybe two) in the biggest tent.
Here, however, we were facing a platoon of them. An entire row, from my measure (which they were basing this off), that could be like 20+. That was unusual. Orc mages didn't usually gang up with each other en masse, or give up their little settlements. Platoons of orc mages in armies wasn't unheard of, especially when the Demon King (key term!) was calling the Demon Realm to arms, but the current Demon King had been silent for ten years, and most of all the attack was sudden. That implied the Excursed was to blame.
The Excursed. From what I could gather from Rose's ranting (the captain-general was very slow on the uptake, and very subborn, it seemed), the Excursed was a term used for both individuals and an entire phenomenon. It was hard to grasp the specifics, but it seemed like Excursed were individuals who obtained unnaturally immense power out of nowhere by "tapping directly into the Soul of the World," and there was one Excursed out there of an unknown name who had specialized in summoning before she ended up Excursed a couple months ago. The result? An ungodly powerful summoner who could summon armies out of nowhere. Like, say, the orcs we were facing now.
The geopolitical implications of an ungodly powerful, unnamed summoner stirring up shit were, of course, staggering. Thankfully or perhaps not, the discussion was interrupted by Meteors rushing down. My time to shine.
"Paladin Rose, they're here!" I shouted, using her title instead of "ma'am" now that I knew it. Rose looked up and nodded. I extended a hand into the air for dramatic effect. "Hantai ike!" I roared, and the first meteor did reverse direction, soaring back in an arc.
Skill up! Mysticism Level 5
Bonus: +5 Base INT + WIS!
I had a lot of questions. A bonus at level 5? Base INT + WIS, not total INT + WIS? But I didn't have the opportunity to think on that. I quickly realized there were a lot of meteors - twenty, at least. One from each Elemental orc? I reversed the momentum of one, but nineteen more were coming. I heard Rose cursing aloud, which implied to me she hadn't expected so many, and didn't think a novice could reverse them all. She was, perhaps, entirely correct.
I focused and chanted the reverse spell non-stop. I reversed about five more of them (getting two Mysticism levels in the process - these things were giving a lot of EXP, for now at least) before realizing the initial meteor was coming back. And then the others, too. The so-called ritter match had begun, and they had more Mystics than we did. By which I mean they had more than just me.
"Retreat! Back to the fort!" Rose yelled, and it didn't look like the captain-general was about to protest that with imminent doom rushing down. I was buying a slight amount of time, but the meteors were coming. Oh lawd, were they coming.
Reverse. Reverse. Reverse. Reverse. Reverse. I focused on the closest one each time, but they were gaining ground. I realized something—after reversing something, there was a set period of time where it couldn't be reversed again. The momentum was stuck, static, unmovable by outside forces. I concluded leveling up would expand that set period, but I was a mere level 8-ish Mystic, and no doubt they had much higher levels than me. If my momentum was locked in place for half of second, theirs was locked in place for more like two. The game was rigged from the start. Not to mention I was just about out of MP. Whoops.
I was falling back with the troops, casting reverse where I could, where I heard the yell.
"TROOOOOOLL! TROLL IN THE BATTLEFIELD!"
I craned my neck, chanting all the while, and saw the problem. A massive, twenty-foot tall troll, covered in red plate armor and wielding a massive mace that almost gave me a traumatic flashback at the sight of it. I got the impression that these guys were a Big Fucking Deal, and there was one standing directly between the retreating army and the fort. A rock and a hard place, as they say. For a second I wondered why I hadn't seen him before, then discarded it. Surely he had been summoned here by the Excursed summoner, who clearly had a boner for ensuring Rose was dead.
And that was in fact what was happening here. Rose wasn't about to leave her soldiers to die, regardless of whether she was simply an assigned paladin or not. She unsheathed her sword, now glowing blue—that was new—and started going to town on the troll's lower legs. It seemed like her sword was enchanted with frost, and left jagged ice in its place with each stab. The troll didn't seem all too pleased by that, and was swinging his mace like a scythe cutting grass. Rose ducked, jumped, and altogether acrobatically dodged the swings. It was by the time she did a backflip to avoid a ground smash that my jaw was hanging a bit. What the fuck? How much battle experience did she have?
My thoughts were interrupted be a meteor slamming into the ground behind me. Whoops. I had run out of MP and my chants weren't doing anything. Most of the troops had gotten out, and so most of the deaths were probably any orcs that tried chasing us, but— Another meteor hit, shaking the earth and blasting me with heat hard enough I almost fell over. I got a distinct sense of doom, but hey, maybe the army could handle the troll collectively.
I checked up on that hypothesis and did not find encouraging evidence. Most people were running right past it, leaving Rose to die, and the few that stayed got stomped on, which discouraged others from joining the fray. It looked like Rose was mostly on her own, unless I stepped in, and I wasn't actually sure what I could do. I had in my repertoire three spells, one useless in actual combat, and... a middling skill in Throwing Weapons? Maybe I should find a target and throw daggers at it until I leveled it up enough to accurately throw a dagger at its eye or something. Then again, don't trolls regenerate? Hard to tell with Rose freezing the wounds... Oh, that was why she was doing it at all. Of course.
All these thoughts were punctuated with a series of explosive Meteor impacts that each ran the risk of blowing me off my feet. Luckily I had walked far enough away from them to not be knocked unconscious by them, and they were keeping the orc horde away (for now), so I tried to ignore them.
I jogged with the soldiers in the general direction of the fort and Rose. It was clear by this point, especially considering the flash of yellow amid swarming orcs I had seen in my second-ish loop, that Rose would never retreat without making sure as many people as possible were alive. She understood the tactical value of retreating, but refused to put her life above those of the men she was trusted to oversee and protect. Paladin morals, perhaps? A sense of responsibility? Pride? Who knew, but either she was going to kill that troll or it was going to kill her. Outlasting it wasn't much of an option, since the orc army was coming, and I got the feeling she couldn't outrun an army throwing shit at her, on top of a troll. It was either she face the troll down, on let the troll cut through the army like butter, and she chose the former.