“GET DOWN!!!” Leon shouted as more fireballs came roaring out from the trees.

He and those closest to him hit the dirt. Even Anzu dropped down to the ground. The giants, on the other hand, stood their ground. Led by Lapis, the giants created huge earthen walls between themselves and the fireballs, reinforcing them in certain places with stone.

The fireballs hit this wall and detonated with extreme force. Fire spilled over the top of the wall, but none of it hit the giants. The explosions, however, tore the wall to pieces, and a moment later, another volley of fireballs followed the previous. Most of these ended up like the first volley, smashing and exploding relatively harmlessly against the wall, but two fireballs made it through and splashed across the bodies of a pair of giants, throwing them to the ground hard enough to shake the ground.

Leon was dismayed to see the giants remain laying there, unmoving. He focused his magic senses on those giants and could vaguely feel the lightning magic that animated their bodies dissipate into the air.

Fury ignited within him. He was tied to these giants in a way that he wasn’t to most of the humans in his unit, and while he was angered and saddened when he lost any of them, seeing the giants fall was a personal loss that simply outweighed that of the others. He turned his gaze back ahead of him, and his magic senses slipped past the wall, rippling out into the woods.

There, he could see the hordes of Octavian troops waiting among the trees. In front of their ranks were a dozen groups of powerful mages, twenty per group, and each mage possessed of fifth-tier strength. The formation they stood in somewhat resembled that of a fire rune, with each holding a silver baton covered in runes that funneled their magic power to the mage in front of the formation. Each of these mages were sixth-tier, and fire danced at their fingertips as they prepared another volley of fireballs.

Leaping up from where he lay almost face-down, lightning coursing through his body, Leon alighted on the top of the wall, a golden spear of lightning appearing in his hand. The formations powering the fire mages were far away and many trees stood between him and them, but there were a few angles he had available. Sensing the mages about to fire again and the holes in the wall not quite patched up yet, Leon chose one of these angles and hurled the lightning bolt with all the strength he could muster.

The bolt passed through the trees with great speed, faster than any bolt he’d ever hurled before. In less time than it took Leon to blink, the bolt exploded on the chest of his target, one of the sixth-tier fire mages in front of the formation.

The fire mage was thrown back like a ragdoll by an explosion of golden sparks and hundreds of tiny arcs of lightning. The lightning explosion was powerful enough to impact the formation behind him, throwing to the ground those closer to the front while forcing those further back to their knees. The fire mage himself was killed almost instantly, his flesh melted away and the rest charred black.

Leon wasn’t quite expecting his attack to have such an effect, but after a moment of thought, he figured it made some sense. It likely required everything that mage had to control the magic power of the twenty mages behind him into his attacks even with the aid of those silver batons, leaving him with nothing left over to defend himself.

For the briefest of moments, Leon felt a welling of pride in his chest, which was immediately dashed as another volley of fireballs rocketed forth toward the giants’ wall. He raised his defenses in anticipation of the barrage.

Again, fire exploded upon the wall, and again, a few fireballs managed to make it through, striking several of the giants and killing the lightning wisps within their stony forms. The rest of the giants began rumbling, but not in any way that Leon could interpret. It wasn’t language, more like a roar of fury, something which Leon had rarely seen in the normally ever-calm beings.

For his part, thanks to his considerable command over the element of fire, none of the fire came close to him.

Once the flames died down, Lapis and the rest of the giants extended their arms toward the wall, and with what seemed like a synchronized snap of their massive rocky fingers, caused the wall to detonate outward, firing debris in the direction of the Octavian forces. Contrary to Leon’s muted expectations, the debris flew fast and far, hitting their enemy like meteors. In an instant, hundreds of the weakest members of their enemy’s force were killed or incapacitated.

The mages powering the flame artillery, however, were largely unharmed and continued to prepare another attack. Leon noticed that the attacks were slowing down, however, and Lapis seemed to realize the same thing.

“AGAIN!” the blue-streaked giant roared, and the giants once more began using their mastery of earth magic to rip immense boulders from the ground and heave them at their enemies. Leon pitched in, too, with a couple of well-aimed lightning bolts.

Scores of Octavian troops fell, and three of their artillery formations were taken out of action. The remaining eight, however, opened up with another volley, and the giants weren’t able to raise their wall in time to block the strike. Two fireballs missed their targets, careening out into the woods behind them and smashing into the shallow hill that the camp had been built under, but the remaining six hit their marks, killing six more giants.

The giants roared again, shaking the earth with their fury. Without waiting for a command from Leon, the giants charged, leaving only Lapis behind with Leon, Valeria, Alix, Anzu, Marcus, and Alcander.

“Fucking hell!” Alix shouted, finally getting a moment to breathe after that exchange of magic.

Marcus and Valeria were a bit more composed, both rising as Marcus asked the question on both of their minds.

“Should we charge, too?”

Leon turned his gold eyes to the two young nobles, and neither balked. They were ready for a fight, they wanted to fight.

Then, he glanced behind them. The rest of the unit had paused in their evacuation. The camp had been emptied, but the column wasn’t moving.

Projecting his magic senses once more, Leon scanned the region to see what the problem was. And his heart sank.

“Not yet,” he whispered. “We have another problem. The marching column has been engaged by a flanking force.”

The others turned to face the same direction, Leon’s look of dismay mirrored on each of their faces.

“… how many…?” Marcus solemnly asked.

“Can’t tell. More than we have, at any rate,” Leon answered.

“Enemies behind, enemies ahead…” Valeria whispered. “We have to attack one of these. Which one?”

Leon grimaced, time seeming to slow down as he contemplated their terrible situation. If it were any other unit, he’d drop everything and aid the giants. They were, after all, the group that he could most claim to be ‘his’, and he felt that his responsibility to them was above that of his responsibility to the Barons. However, the giants were more than capable on their own, while he could see the front of the Barons’ column being pushed back by the front lines of the Octavian flanking force.

But as Leon considered this, he saw the giants crashing into the front ranks of the Octavian lines. One more fire volley had been launched in the time he’d hesitated, killing seven more giants. The artillery formations had been disrupted, however, leaving the rest of the giants either tangled with powerful mages or rampaging through their enemy. Said enemy was not helpless before them, however, for Leon saw another giant fall as fourth and fifth-tier mages attacked it with hammers and axes.

The giants had no support, and while they were strong on their own, there were just too many Octavian troops for them to handle without help.

On the other side, the Barons were being pushed back. One of the Barons had already fallen, and the flanking unit was starting to exert pressure further down the marching column. They weren’t going to last much longer, and neither were the giants.

Leon had to make a decision.

He grimaced, glanced guiltily at Lapis, and said, “We have to help the Barons! We’ll get them to swing around and get into a defensive position back at the camp!”

The others nodded.

“All right, then we should get moving quickly!” Marcus said emphatically.

Leon agreed, but he spared the giants one more look. Two more had fallen in that time; their foes were far more prepared and organized than those Leon had fought before, and casualties were mounting.

“Let’s go!” he reluctantly shouted, and he started running for the front of the marching column, the others hot on his heels. A little surprisingly, Lapis followed as well, and the giant spoke not a single word of complaint. Leon wasn’t entirely sure why, but he wished he could say it was a surprise. That the giant was choosing to follow him over assisting its people only added onto the guilt that was starting to tear Leon apart inside.

Pushing those thoughts out of his mind for the moment, Leon focused only on putting one foot in front of the other. He and the others made good time, quickly reaching the marching column and shouting for everyone to fall back to the camp. This started a somewhat haphazard retreat, but Leon preferred a sloppy retreat to a last stand in these woods.

A few minutes later, they reached the point where the flanking force had engaged the front of the column, and Leon could already see that his side had come out of it in much worse condition than their previous engagements. The flanking force was stronger magically, they had more armor, they had better weapons. In truth, most of their engagements had been similar, but Leon’s side had used surprise and the support of the stone giants to even the playing field. They had neither now, with the sole exception of Lapis.

“Into the fire!” Leon shouted, not slowing down for a second as they charged at the flanking force. Their charge didn’t go unnoticed; many turned to face them, spears and swords at the ready, but Leon flicked his off-hand and launched a fireball at the Octavian ranks. Lapis did one better, coming to a full stop so it could use its magic power to reach into the ground beneath them and summon dozens of stone spikes.

Leon’s fireball raced through the air, detonating on the armor of the strongest Octavian knight he could see, killing the man instantly, along with a handful of those around him. Lapis’ spikes, meanwhile, skewered a dozen more while allowing Leon’s group to run up the back of the spikes like a ramp, mostly bypassing the spear wall.

And like that, they crashed into the flanking force’s flank. Leon did most of the heavy lifting, his lightning and fire creating openings for the others to exploit, while Lapis covered their rear once it caught up. After a few minutes of desperate combat, they hewed their way through their enemy’s lines to reach the Barons not far away, leaving almost a hundred dead in their wake.

The Barons had been marching at the front of the column, and as such, were the first to have been engaged by the flanking force. Unfortunately, Leon could only see four of them, the last was nowhere to be found. Making things worse, the Barons were being pushed back by three sixth-tier mages and at least fifteen fifth-tier mages.

With those clues, Leon was fairly sure where the fifth Baron was—probably one of the hundreds of corpses strewn about the place.

Leon and the others cut their way to the Baron’s vicinity, and Leon burst onto the scene with a blast of lightning that killed one of the sixth-tier mages outright; the knight had been too preoccupied with playing with Baron Gellius to notice Leon’s arrival.

The other two noticed Leon, though, and pulled back in surprise as Lapis and Anzu made their presence known. In an instant, the odds had almost evened out.

But Leon couldn’t take advantage of that, as much as his instincts screamed at him to do so. Behind those mages were hundreds more knights and men-at-arms, and even Leon couldn’t take them all on his own, or even with the forces he had with him.

“Fall back,” he whispered to the Barons.

For once, he detected not a hint of hesitation or antipathy in their attitudes. They could see the writing on the wall as well as he could, and they fell back as soon as he gave the word.

Once they started running, the Octavian knights surged forward, intent on killing Leon and his people. However, with a great rumbling that had Leon’s teeth chattering in his skull, Lapis raised its stony fist and slammed it into the ground. A wave of earth magic spread out, and thick stone walls appeared thirty feet high all around them. Leon could sense that the outside of the walls sprouted spikes, too, killing a handful of Octavian knights. That, however, wasn’t the point; buying enough time to fall back was.

“Thanks!” Leon shouted to Lapis, giving the giant a look of true gratitude—he wasn’t just thanking the giant for the wall.

“We must go,” the giant whispered back to Leon, who nodded and started following the Barons back to the camp. The others fell in beside him, and they ran as fast as they could, occasionally fighting off squads of their enemies as they went. The entire time, Leon was intensely aware of the two sixth-tier mages on their backs, and he had to stop and toss a few fireballs to buy his weaker comrades a few more seconds. The Octavian knights responded in kind, and soon, the entire pathway that Leon’s unit had chosen looked like an apocalyptic landscape; the ground was broken and burned by earth and fire magic, cut by light, water, and wind, deformed by ice, and scorched by one of Leon’s occasional lightning bolts.

But they made good time, and the Barons had already gotten started on getting their people organized by the time Leon and the rest returned to the camp’s entrance. Rather than going back down underground, however, they had formed up on the hill above it, which Leon wholeheartedly agreed with. If they had fallen back down into the camp, they’d have been at the mercy of the Octavian earth mages, and that wasn’t a position he was in any hurry to be in.

The good news ended there, though. Leon could see in the distance that more giants had fallen, adding up to almost half of the total number. His heart sank in shame and sorrow, and not even the piles of dead enemy troops could raise it. Making matters even worse, as his magic senses swept over his human contingent, he could see that they’d lost roughly a third of their number in the woods. They had barely over a thousand fighting men and women left.

There was no getting past this. On the other side of the hill was a tributary of the Naga River that they’d have to ford to get away, and the crossing would leave them sitting ducks for their pursuers. They’d have to stand and fight.

Leon and his group sprinted right back to the front of their line, right next to the Barons, and then turned to face their foes barely even a hundred feet away. They’d slowed to reform their lines, but Leon knew they were either about to charge again or blast them with magic. Neither option appealed to him, but now that his people were back in something that resembled a cohesive formation, he had another option.

“Looks like this is it,” Leon said to everyone who could hear him. “All or nothing, we’re not getting away from this fight. We either counter them, or we die here. AND I DON’T FEEL LIKE DYING HERE! CHARGE!!!”

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