If there was one disadvantage of great planning before the battle, it was boredom…
I used the great number of magical detection wards I had spread underground to get a real-time view of the battle. As I predicted, the zombies were attacking from the wings, rushing in with a recklessness that was exaggerated even for disposable corpses of undead beings.
Some of the elven archers panicked at the unexpected strategy, but the numbers were simply too far apart for it to make any difference, especially with nature mana filling the forests to the brim, both allowing them to cast much stronger spells, and giving them a natural barrier to weaken any undead spell before they were even cast.
However, soon, the reaction of the elves disappointed me. They reacted to the attack rather more obviously than I expected, splitting into two to meet with the attack, and left the center almost completely empty.
I wasn’t afraid of the consequences, as I had already arranged for Seldanna to stay in the middle, ready to defend against the trap, but it was annoying to see elves not only missing the trap, but also reacting to it exaggeratedly.
They were excellent archers and decent mages in their sphere … but their tactical acumen was nonexistent.
A topic for the future, I decided as I continued to watch the assault. Five minutes into the intense assault, I finally noticed a stirring in the middle…
And the monster came strolling in. I didn’t recognize the monster. It looked like a dragon, but with many weird changes on its body. Whether the beast had been a natural chimera when it was alive, or had been adjusted by the necromancers to create a very effective battering ram was a mystery.
But, since the battle was enough to distract the elves, I used the tree-elevator to go to the surface as well. I wanted to watch the battle with my own eyes, though more as a leisure activity than an actual need. With my Divine Spark-infused forest as my focus, my magical senses were much more useful than my eyes to catch anything extraordinary.
I just wanted to watch Seldanna throwing down against the great monstrosity.
Though, I had to admit, the monster rather looked intimidating to the naked eye. A hulking beast, a hundred feet tall and five hundred feet long, it was already scary enough without its skeletal dragon head open, displaying its teeth, each bigger than a sword.
Even at a distance, its roar was dangerous, radiating a huge flood of focused necrotic energy, an ugly facsimile of a dragon’s breath, the thickness of the necrotic energy intense enough to cut through the passive shield of the nature mana.
That was far from the full extent of the defenses I had created, but I was deliberately keeping them hidden — ready to appear only in case of mortal danger — as I let my beautiful priestess a chance to shine.
And, shine she did. “You dare!” she shouted as she raised her hands to the sky, and the mana that surrounded her answered, touching a little seed — one that turned into a huge tree to block the necrotic flood, absorbing it to its structure, rotting as the necrotic mana clashed with nature mana.
But, the elves surrounding Seldanna survived, looking at her with shock as she casually rewrote what was possible to do with nature magic. Understandable, as the strongest elf that visited the forest barely had five points of Divine Spark locked in Chosen form, limiting both their output and their control significantly.
What Seldanna did in a second, a coven barely replicate in a minute.
However, that only made the monster pause for a moment before it continued charging. Seldanne rushed forward as well, doing her best to meet with the monster without it could reach the first guardian tree at the perimeter.
She didn’t know that it didn’t matter to actually defend them and I could pull back its energy and spread along the other trees — though, considering the cultural importance of the guardian trees, I doubted that it would have mattered in the first place. She would have still done her best to defend them.
If there was one thing she was, she was earnest in her desire to defend the land.
The monster charged forward, uncaring of the small figure that it could easily squash standing in front of the first guardian tree — which was enough to confirm its lack of intelligence, and also confirmed that there was no necromancer that was directly controlling it.
Interesting choice, I decided as I stretched a little mana stream inside the beast. Ordinarily, using mana for diagnostics would have been very difficult from such a great distance, but another advantage of the forest was that I could manipulate mana in the forest almost as well as if I were standing next to the beast.
Surprisingly, the moment it slipped into the beast, I lost control of the mana, like it was lost to a raging tornado.
Interesting, I thought, and rather than pushing, I waited for an opportunity.
It arrived soon after. Seldanna cast a spell, and a horde of roots exploded from the ground, wrapping around the limbs of the beast. A single root was weak enough not to slow the beast down, but hundreds of magically-enhanced roots were enough to stop it momentarily.
And gave me an excuse to slip a much more invasive probe.
[-183 Mana]
“No wonder it disappeared instantly,” I murmured as I felt the mana disappear into the beast. Inside the beast, there was a chaotic dance of mana going on, and not just necrotic mana. I could sense different types of mana, each swirling in a different body part. The necrotic mana and nature mana were the most prominent ones, but occasionally, I could sense other types of energy as well.
Purer mana that reminded me of Janelor at the head of the dragon, arcana mana that radiated from a weird-shaped grafted wing, some purer healing energy coming from a shell … and some other energies that I could barely recognize.
Each of them was contained by a crystal that was buried in the middle, one that was containing a crystal filled with Necrotic Spark, and one that clearly contained more than a hundred points of Divine Spark.
No wonder no necromancers were actually defending it. It was not a vanguard, but an explosive trap, and the creature was just there to isolate the different types of mana as they brought it deeper into the center.
An interesting gambit. In its nature, it was very easy to defeat the beast, just immobilize it and push it away, and watch it destabilize as the different types of mana started to react violently. With no necromancers controlling it — no doubt afraid of the backlash, a phenomenon I flirted with during my own attempts of mixing energies — it was almost trivial for an accomplished mage.
Yet, that required a reasonable tactical response, which the elves were lacking significantly. As the beast appeared in the center, most of the elves rushed toward it in panic, arrows flying desperately as they wanted to take down the beast before it could reach the first tree.
Arrows themselves weren’t a threat against any undead, but the nature mana these arrows delivered was a different thing. It started to infuse the beast, triggering its chaos. The beast pushed to move forward as its mana started to destabilize, but the hold of the roots was too strong for it to move.
A fact that the few necromancers that were a part of the army didn’t miss, and aimed their spells at the roots that were holding the beast in place, the necrotic energy enough to destroy them.
I could have intervened to keep the roots, but instead, I decided to let them snap, curious how Seldanna would react.
My aims were twofold. I wanted to test her tactical understanding of the situation — as we had many discussions about magic and its strategic applications for the last week — and I wanted to give her an opportunity to display her true power in front of the other tribes.
I didn’t miss that more than one was grumbling about her authority, and a little reminder about true power wouldn’t be amiss.
For the first attack, Seldanna attacked the beast directly with several spells, trying to take it down as quickly as possible, but a flare of mana made her realize something was wrong.
“Get away, and continue protecting the edges, something is wrong,” Seldanna ordered them, shouting as loudly as she could manage, but even with her incredible displays of magic, not all elves listened to her orders.
The majority listened, but a significant minority did not — and some I recognized as the latest arrivals, and the guardian trees they brought along were right at the edge, risking destruction.
As far as disobedience went, it was not a terrible reason, but that didn’t change the fact that it made Saldenna’s next move extremely difficult. She started casting two spells at the same, another horde of roots to pin the beast in place, and a wide shield that would not only protect her, but also the elves that surrounded the monster, some stupid enough to try and flank the beast.
Their presence made Seldanna’s job much more difficult. Creating a half-circle shield was relatively easy, because it only needed to deflect the explosion, leaving it to spread to the other side. It was not trivial by any means, but it was still doable for her after the power-up, even with the roots taking some of her attention.
Unfortunately, the same didn’t apply to a full shield, especially when she made the mistake of covering the top and making a half-circle, impossible to contain. And, ironically, even if it did, there would have been only one direction for Necrotic Spark to escape; underground, and it would have damaged the forest just as much.
Luckily, I was there to help her. Just as the explosion was triggered, I took control of her shield, opening a gap at the top to channel the explosion away safely, while reinforcing the ground to avoid disaster from there.
{-2949 Mana}
Right in time, as the explosion happened hard enough to imitate an earthquake. I watched as Seldanna collapsed due to exhaustion, pushing herself to the limit to reinforce the shield, which showed she was too distracted to actually notice I had taken over the shield.
The elves rushed toward her, some in panic, but even from a distance, I could sense several of them had some bad motives — one even had his knife out already — showing that generations of tribal hatred weren’t just gone, but simmering underneath.
“How fun,” I muttered sarcastically even as I cast a spell, and roots appeared around Seldanna and pulled her into the ground. Since I had such a convenient excuse to intervene, I just did so.
Luckily, I was able to steal most of the Divine Spark the necromancers hid in the beast, making it not only a beautiful teaching moment, but also profitable.
{+192 Divine Spark}
{Strength: 8 Charisma: 10
Precision: 8 Perception: 9
Agility: 8 Manipulation: 10
Speed: 8 Intelligence: 10
Endurance: 8 Wisdom: 9}
{Purified Divine Spark: 712}
{Pseudo-HP: 2869 Mana: 7352}
{ADDITIONAL SPARKS
Light - Chosen 7.4
Nature - Chosen 10}
{MINIONS
Guardian God Forest - 2050}
Elven Priestess - 70}
[Level: 36 Experience: 631374 / 666000]
