Olephia rolled out of bed with a heavy sigh. Another Code-One-Purple came through, another alert with either Zerus or Sceo going on rampage. With the spies removed, they would only appear for a few minutes at a time, Zerus would destroy a few bunkers, Sceo would tear up a trench with her winds. A man would be thrown into the air, another would be fried by lightning. And then Olephia would arrive, and Zerus and Sceo would be long gone by then. She knew the script by now, it was boring and unexciting, and she would annihilate another band of Guardians, and that would be that!

What a bore!

Elassa stood high up, on an invisible platform of hardened air as she looked at Iniri’s great oaks. Each one was wide as a small fort, and as tall as a city block, with great canopies. Platforms and bridges interconnected them as if Iniri had gotten crazed spiders drunk and told them to build a huge web. The platforms turned and twisted to provide cover from her mages. The bridges became sky-tunnels, then crenulations, then lead into bunkers that sat on top of trees.

Behind every wooden barrier was a man, and in that man’s hands was a rifle. Each one wearing brown or green in some attempt at stealth. Honestly, it matched Kassandora perfectly. Naturally, the men wouldn’t be able to hide or blend in like chameleons, but a swift eye may need a second look to spot all of them. And a second look was more than enough time to pull the trigger. Those modern guns were exactly what Theosius had predicted a thousand years ago, fully automatic rifles that could bring down even a Divine in a few seconds. Concentrated fire would overwhelm the shields of magicians under lead, that wasn’t even a question. Elassa had personally seen it happen.

Worse though, were the thick cannons that hid behind tall walls. Those were Kassandora’s dreaded artillery. The Goddess of War’s loudest instrument, when they started to play, it was as if she was bringing a little bit of Hell onto Arda. Maybe Kassandora had not realised it yet, but that artillery was far more destructive than simply being able to hurl explosives through the air. Already, Elassa had seen more than two hundred of her mages be brought to insanity by constant shelling. Fortia’s Guardians had it worse though. Tales of men being unable to sleep or sit still, of men who jumped when the door opened, or who went crazy and had to be subdued when someone dropped a fork, were more than commonplace. Every single of Fortia’s frontline battalions had a few like that.

A sonic boom sounded from above and Elassa spun in the air, her eyes going up. She had missed it again. Once, it was just her and Anassa who the Queens of movement. And Anassa did not move but rather blink from location to location, Elassa was the fastest the White Pantheon had to offer. By the time she spotted those black spots in the sky, they were already out of range and she would not leave her army to fight without Divine support.

Well, there were a few minor Divines, those who had the power to fly or float through the air, but they weren’t real Divines. A God of Breezes and a Goddess of Windmills were stronger than a man, but when facing real Divine war, Elassa would bet on two dozen men led by Kassandora than two dozen minor Divines.

Elassa turned in the air, her whitewood staff floating into her grip by itself, her dark blue battledress spinning around her in the wind as she caught sight of the bombs that had just been dropped. A hundred of them, she already knew she couldn’t handle that many, maybe Allasaria would be able to, but Allasaria was not here. The army of mages on the ground raised a shield without orders needing to be given. Winds hardened, dirt was pulled from the ground and water coalesced into the usual barrier against napalm as Elassa charged her power into her staff.

A brilliant blue beam of mana, the purest essence of magic, fire from the large white diamond that served as a catalyst. It destroyed one bomb, then formed an orb in the air, Elassa charged it for a second and the ignited the centre. The mana exploded into spikes, each one incinerating a bomb or two. Out of the hundred, she had managed to destroy sixty. The rest landed on the shield and Elassa let her mages deal with it as she waved her sky. Kirinyaa’s monsoon season would not come for another two months at least, but the Central Mountain Range acted as a funnel that ensured the jungles in the middle almost never had a clear sky.

A tornado appeared behind her mages, Elassa set up a barrier to protect her men from the vicious winds as it started to pick up speeds. It pulled up dirt at first, becoming an ugly shade of red-brown, then rocks. Leaves were pulled off branches, branches pulled off trees, trees pulled off roots and roots were whisked out of the ground. It all got sucked up into the whirling winds. Elassa pointed her glowing staff at it, and then motioned upwards.

The tornado spiralled higher past Elassa and into the sky. The clouds around it started to swirl and Elassa started to chant a spell. The bottom of the tornado started to curl upwards, the whirling winds fell onto their side like a snake and then followed Elassa’s staff as she waved it through the air. White clouds turned dark and were sucked in, or on the other side were blown away until the sky was a brilliant bright blue again.

Kassandora’s planes had already seen this tactic before, and they were far too high in the air for Elassa to reach. They circled high above and began to fly away, tiny black blips in that light blue ocean above. A moment later, sonic booms shook the trees as they broke the sound barrier. Elassa didn’t know why they tried to escape to urgently, she wasn’t going to waste her energy and time tracking lost birds. She had thought about it when she saw one the first time, but then she remembered it was Kassandora commanding them. No doubt they’d have orders to split up, no doubt the pilots would be suicidal in their fanaticism and would rather dive into the ground than lead Elassa back to whatever secret airport they were being housed in.

Elassa took a heavy breath as she looked at the thirty-six thousand men she had come with. There had been a full forty thousand when Elassa had first pushed into the mountains. Then a man. Another man was shot. Someone failed to block an artillery round and a dozen lives were lost. Someone was ambushed, someone grew sick and needed to be sent back. The mountains had only cost them five hundred souls. The jungle should have been easier, and then the constant bombings started. Most of the losses weren’t even fatalities, men simply grew tired, then grew restless, then paranoid, and then they snapped.

Kassandora would no doubt have a solution to this crisis. Fortia already had a pipeline set up were men were recovered with advanced Divine magics. Maisara’s Paladins were blessed with her boldness and perseverance, they fared the best under artillery fire of all the White Pantheon troops. But Elassa had mages and herself. She wasn’t a leader, she never had been. She was a teacher, a warrior and a scholar, never had she wanted to lead a war. And now, all she could think to do was simply send them back to Arcadia to be healed.

The worst part was the pace of it. During the second day, two men snapped. Then four. Then ten. Yesterday had been the worst, eight hundred men had simply given up and sat on the ground. And that was that. No matter how Elassa tried to heal them, she couldn’t find any wounds in their bodies or their souls. It was as if the mind itself had cracked.

And Elassa turned back to Kassandora’s fortress. That concoction of trees and guns and artillery. That wasn’t the challenge in itself. It was that red opaque bubble around. Magic and Sorcery were similar arts, sorcery had come around as a delusion form of magic in the first place. So they could do similar things. Just as Elassa could form a shield of mana, so could Anassa.

And Elassa had come across this disgusting shield sorcery before. There was going to be a glass catalyst crystal somewhere in the base that needed to be destroyed or overpowered. Anything that touched that opaque red sphere would simply be sucked into the barrier. Sending pure mana into that bubble was the equivalent of giving your soul to one of Anassa’s traps.

There was no way to get in, there was no way to get out. In the past, one of the tactics had been to simply wait them out for the air within to be used up and for men inside to suffocate. Elassa’s eyes went to the green leaves of Iniri’s trees. Fat chance of them running out of oxygen with that much vegetation within. Starving them out was just as farcical, Iniri had changed her title to Of Food and Bounty precisely because the woman was woman was an endless walking granary. And with Kassandora in there, Elassa doubted that morale and will would run out anytime soon. The crystal could be destroyed, but to destroy it, one would have to cross the shield in the first place.

So it could not be waited out. It could not be destroyed from within. It would have to be overpowered.

Elassa waved her staff and the platform of solid air that carried her lowered to the ground. High-ranking battlemages were already arranged, the captains she had picked out to give out orders. She didn’t bother learning names at this point, snipers had picked off the first round of captains, and artillery-madness had sent the second round back home. Unlike the other Divines, she simply did not have a good eye for men.

“We are preparing for a full siege.” Elassa said. “Surround the bubble, no one is to come within fifty steps of the shield itself, no one is to touch it with magic, no one is to even think about touching it. Understood?” Elassa said. She got a series of confused nods. This, she could pick up on,  men needed explanations, and it was far better to show than to explain with words.

Elassa turned and waved her staff. A blade of air made a clean cut through one of the large jungle trees. Elassa’s staff started to shine bright, and she lifted the wood up, then threw it into the bubble. Where the tree made contact with the shield, it simply disappeared. Before the Great War, Anassa had once explained the principle of the barrier to Elassa. It’s an eraser, everything is a drawing. How can a drawing break through an eraser? At first, Elassa thought Anassa spoke in metaphors and flowery language as most Divines did. She thought she understood it through that lens, but then she realised Anassa always spoke literally. The barrier was in fact an eraser. And everything was a drawing. And the fact it confused Elassa only terrified her.

“Understand now?” Elassa said.

“Yes Goddess!” The mages replied.

“Have floromancers remove the trees around this area. The rest are to…” Elassa saw the faces of the floromancer captains. “Is there an issue?”

“The flora here does not listen to us but we…” They looked at each other, each one in a green cloak and shrugging, faces obviously confused. “I really don’t know what to say. It’s as if they’re not flora.”

“It’s Iniri.” Elassa said with a sigh. “Have pyromancers burn the forest around us down then. Geomancers are to bury the deep and pull up rocks. Make this ground stone.” That would a day of delay. That meant a day of constant bombings, the clouds were already returning. “Then start forming a ritual circle. I will guide it.” Elassa said. “Don’t worry about the details for now, I’ll draw everything.”

Anassa made a giant eraser, but there was one issue with erasers.

No matter how delusional you were, you had to admit that there was no such thing as an infinite eraser.

All of them ran out eventually.

The shield simply needed to be dirtied with so much mana that it would crack.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep