It didn’t take long for the fires to be brought back under control. Octavius’ forces had been taken completely by surprise, but with a few water mages in their ranks, the rain that continued to hammer the camp, and a few good experienced knights taking control of the situation, the fires were extinguished within half an hour.
The white fire that had consumed the supply tent took the most work, as it burned so hot that the rain evaporated before it had a chance to help. It took nearly all of the water mages in the army working together to finally put it out, and even then, they had to wait for the magic in the fire to dissipate a bit, cooling it from white to bright yellow.
Throughout this time, Gaius nervously tried to find the Count of Tarsus, the commander of the fifteen-thousand-strong army—and also the largest contributor of knights to it, even including Octavius himself. Gaius was worried and extremely paranoid about the lack of further attack following the chaos of the initial attack. They had no sentries, no walls, no defensive wards protecting the camp, it would’ve been the perfect time to strike. That there hadn’t been a follow-up attack disturbed him greatly.
Only after the fires had been extinguished was Gaius able to find the Count. Tarsus had returned to his fortified tent with more than a few burns covering his body. He wasn’t the oldest man around, but for a fifth-tier mage, he was well into middle-age. His hair had almost turned completely silver, and his pale face was steadily growing more wrinkled with what seemed like every passing day. Being caught up in all this excitement hadn’t done him any favors, either, as his pained expression clearly indicated.
“My Lord!” Gaius exclaimed as he saw the state of the Count. Tarsus was being tended to by several attendants and healers, but he still turned and politely nodded to Gaius upon the latter’s arrival.
“Lord Tullius,” Tarsus said in greeting. “What’s the state of the camp?”
Gaius was about to answer, but the words caught in his throat for a moment. He hadn’t been able to find the Count since the start of the chaos, so he’d assumed that Tarsus had been out coordinating the response. If Tarsus didn’t already know the state the camp was in, however, then Gaius couldn’t help but begin to doubt his assumption.
“Uh…” Gaius mumbled, his noble upbringing being the only reason he didn’t mumble even further. A moment later, he straightened up and reported, “The fires have been put out, the camp is safe. There doesn’t seem to have been any follow-up attacks.”
“Good to hear…” Tarsus murmured as he leaned back in his chair, one of the healers next to him pressing an expensive—and to Gaius’ eyes, far too powerful for the wound in question—healing spell against one of Tarsus’ burns, which healed in an instant. Tarsus’ expression relaxed as the pain vanished. “Call the commanders, we need to get things set up. We need a proper accounting of our losses, and we need to coordinate a proper response. Such a brazen attack cannot go unanswered. No matter who did this, they must pay!”
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Leon smiled to himself as he snuck around the perimeter of the camp, his body completely invisible. As a sixth-tier mage, he could keep his invisibility up for hours, and since the camp had no walls or defensive wards, he could essentially come and go as he pleased so long as he didn’t bump into anything magical that might disrupt his invisibility, such as another mage.
Far above him, Anzu flew with both Alix and Valeria strapped into his saddle, both armed with powerful bows and most of Leon’s remaining explosion spells. They were far above the limits of where most mages would project their magic senses—flight was an incredibly rare power in the Bull Kingdom, so while it wasn’t impossible for anyone to spot something so far up, Leon wasn’t too worried. Besides, he’d ordered them to stay well out of the effective range of Legion bows.
Somewhere beneath the camp shifted Lapis, moving surprisingly quickly for such a large being. It didn’t have any need to breathe, and with the natural control over earth magic that came with being a stone giant, it was a simple thing for it to move its rocky form a few dozen feet below the ground. Of course, if it were human and needed air, then it would’ve needed a tunnel that would’ve been impossible to hide, but since it didn’t need air, it didn’t even need to make itself a tunnel. It simply burrowed through the earth as easily and smoothly as a snake swimming through a river, its magic closing the soil and stone behind it with ease.
Leon didn’t know where his comrades were, and he wasn’t going to risk releasing his magic senses to find out. They had their jobs and he trusted them to do those jobs. He could only focus on his own task. To that end, he moved through the camp slowly and methodically, taking his time scouting the place out and looking for his goal.
He found it about an hour after separating from Grim and the rest of his knights. An hour of moving through the camp as carefully as he could, coming harrowingly close to being discovered several times when a roaming knight, squire, or whoever else almost bumped into him unexpectedly. Grim was absolutely correct when he told Leon that this was reckless and stupid, but Leon was willing to risk it anyway. If he were to be discovered and killed, then they’d only lose him and not someone who was actually important.
Leon thought the risk worth the reward, and once he found the commander’s tent, that belief multiplied within him. He was gratified a bit to hear some of the servants talking outside about how the Count of Tarsus had been injured and was resting in his tent as he waited for the command staff to meet—Leon had already heard that the Count was the commander of this force, confirming that he was in the right place.
The only problem he now faced was how to get inside the tent. Apart from the expected guards, it had been enchanted to keep the interior warm and dry, and though this wasn’t a meaningful defensive enchantment, it was enough to disrupt his invisibility if he were to touch the tent’s fabric—nearly all of the tents in the camp had been similarly enchanted, in fact. More than that, it had been raised off the ground on an earthen platform which had then been fortified with a stone wall he’d have to surmount, through which he could sense flowing a decent amount of magic that could reveal him if he wasn’t careful. He’d hoped to encounter the Count out in the camp where he might be vulnerable to attack from a distance, but now if Leon wanted to kill him and confirm the death, then he’d have to get inside somehow without being seen.
He could always, of course, simply jump up there, walk in, kill the Count, wait the five minutes for his ring to recover, and then leave, but that bore great risk. Though he didn’t want to release his magic senses to confirm, it seemed to him that the Count only had a couple of weak attendants in the tent with him, but between the Count’s fifth-tier power and the number of attendants, Leon wasn’t confident in killing all of them without revealing himself to the entire camp—assuming he could even get in there undetected in the first place.
A better solution would be to leave a Thunderblast spell somewhere on the tent and simply hope that it would kill the Count, but that would defeat the purpose of coming this far. Leon wanted to confirm the Count’s death and save the spell if he could. He’d use it if he had to, but he wasn’t quite convinced that he had to just yet.
This left one more solution to his problem in his mind, and that was to cause some kind of distraction nearby and simply hope that it would draw enough people away that he could get away with dropping his invisibility, killing the Count, and then making his escape. However, he felt like it was a good chance that any distraction he could make sufficient enough to get most of the large number of attendants and guards surrounding the Count’s tent to leave would likely also send a number of higher-tiered mages into the tent, if only to make their report.
Leon grimaced, then quickly made his way around the tent, inspecting it from every angle that he could. The guard detail was heavy, enough to even overpower Leon’s own severe recklessness.
With a deep, quiet sigh, Leon turned around and started making his way back to the edge of the camp. As much as it would pain him to do so, he decided to take the most cautious option and tie a Thunderblast spell to an arrow and fire it at Tarsus’ tent. At the range he would have to do so, there was little chance he would miss, but he wouldn’t be able to personally confirm the Count’s death.
Before he left, though, Leon played with the idea of waiting until the Count met with some of his higher-ranked subordinates. If he was going to obliterate the entire tent with a Thunderblast spell, then he wouldn’t mind taking out a few more knights along with the Count, assuming Tarsus even died in the blast. However, with Valeria, Anzu, and Alix flying above him and Lapis ‘swimming’ through the earth like a snake through water, all waiting on him to begin their own work, he decided that he needed to focus solely on the Count and not stick around to see when a meeting might take place.
And so, Leon silently made his way out of the camp over the course of the next fifteen minutes or so—he had to stop and wait for a few men-at-arms that had unexpectedly boxed him into the gap between two tents to leave at one point. Fortunately, with how narrow the camp was, he didn’t have to go far before he was out into the valley forest. He found a tall tree and scampered up it as easily as he would a ladder, and once at the top, he had a fantastic vantage point from which to fire his bow.
He unlimbered the weapon and without any sign of hesitation, nocked an arrow with a Thunderblast spell tied to the shaft and loosed it right at Tarsus’ tent.
---
“… it’s just coordinating our response, as far as I’m aware,” Gaius said as he and a couple other knights in the army made their way through the camp toward Tarsus’ tent.
“Good,” one of the knights, a young fifth-tier nobleman named Marius Balbinus who had brought a force of three hundred knights of his noble House with him. He was rather short, had dark brown eyes, a round face, and a thin build. “If I were to return home, my mother would be enraged if I didn’t take revenge for whoever killed our people…”
Gaius nodded, understanding the feeling. Marius’ mother was a relatively powerful Baroness in the Western Territories, and the thirty knights that had been lost in the attack from House Balbinus represented a terrible blow to their war potential. The Baroness only had about five hundred knights in her retinue, if Gaius recalled correctly.
“We’ll get them, but we have to keep our other goals in mind,” the other knight accompanying them said, her tone deadly serious. “We’ve lost at least half of our food and drinkable water in that attack, let alone our spells and other equipment. If we lose much more, we’ll have to resort to taking supplies from the locals, and that will slow us down considerably.”
This knightess Gaius wasn’t too familiar with, but he knew that she came from a family of hereditary knights in the capital rather than from landed nobility and that her name was Victoria Vitellius. She was very tall, to the point of towering over the much shorter Marius. She had long auburn hair tied into a professional bun, a stern expression, dark blue eyes, and the kind of body that Gaius could easily believe had been trained practically from birth to fight. She was of the fourth-tier, but between her and Marius, Gaius thought her the more dangerous of the two.
As they approached the tent, they could hear the muffled conversations of several of their colleagues who had arrived before them. The tent wasn’t as warded against sound as it should’ve been, Gaius noted, as they could hear the conversation that was being had within quite easily.
The three never made it into the tent. As they drew to within twenty feet, it suddenly erupted in an explosion of golden lightning. The bolts ripped through the tent fabric, setting some of it on fire and utterly ravaging those within. Gaius was hurled back into the other two knights with him, and all three went flying backward.
Gaius was taken completely by surprise, though he at least had donned his armor not long after the fires had been put out. Still, the shockwave from the explosion completely knocked his lights out, and he didn’t see the lightning tearing those within the tent to pieces. The most powerful knights inside the tent weren’t outright killed, but they were severely burned, and their flesh was cut to ribbons. Those who were of the fifth-tier and below were not so lucky, with many of the attendants and servants being outright incinerated by the lightning. Gaius also missed the follow-up explosions—five of them ripped through the camp, targeting the densest parts of the camp and starting new fires.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Huge stone spikes burst from the ground, impaling the survivors still in the tent and killing most of those that remained. Luckily for Gaius and the other two, they were far enough away that they hadn’t been targeted.
It was over in the space of a heartbeat, and the leaders of Octavius’ force of knights had nearly all been incapacitated or killed.
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