Chapter 50 – The Best Around

The fireball roared overhead, covering the distance between Grebthar and the wall in an eyeblink.  It was like some sort of horrific spell dual between gods and men, and the fireball slammed into the combined barrier of the entire Falconian Royal House in an explosion that vaporized the snow off the nearby mountain tops.  

The only reason that there wasn’t an avalanche was that the boulders had been blasted away.  One landed as far away as West Windfall, smashing into a brand new granary.  Still, the barrier held.  

***

“Is that the best you can do?”

“NO!” bellowed Grebthar in response.

***

SueLeeta didn’t exactly hate Julia, she just didn’t care for the overly pugnacious princess.  Julia had a stick in her ass that was in there so deep you could see it when she talked and she could give Fenris lessons on saying the worst thing at the worst possible moment.  

Case in point, don’t taunt the god.  

SueLeeta could gather that while the first fireball was almost comically huge it wasn’t exactly the end of the world event that she had been anticipating.  Frankly when the fireball hit, SueLeeta figured she was cooked but instead it mostly deflected up and away from the barriers.  

Now everyone was yelling at Julia and SueLeeta noticed that the fire vortex from Jersey was getting bigger.  Much bigger.  Thankfully her new stepdaughter decided to remind Julia of why they were here before that became a problem.  

***

“This is a much bigger fireball,” said TriBlade uncomfortably as Grebthar kept swinging his hands over his head.  The ‘fire node’ was much larger now and the fire ball hovering over it was so large that the radiant heat was burning his soldiers.  

Thankfully, the troops were so dedicated to the cause none of them moved.  Even the ones that caught on fire.  TriBlade considered that for a moment, but decided it was best not to ask questions, the mayor hated being questioned while he was casting spells.  

Grebthar was cackling, and that was never a good sign.

“They think they can stop me but they can’t,” muttered Grebthar.  

TriBlade decided to step back.

***

I am a banner to my people.  

“Weave them together,” said Julia.  “Just like when you are doing your own barrier, but do it with your neighbors!”

“But they only do that in the stories,” said the Duchess.

“Yes, the ancient battle lore to fight the Dark Overlord,” yelled an irate Julia.  “WEAVE WOMAN!”

Julia’s own barrier made up the dead center of the entire wall and she set threads of the barrier out so that her cousins could join their barriers with hers.  Even those who didn’t practice solid barriers were in use, as the Queen of the Inner Sea stood next to Julia and began jamming immovable rods behind the denser parts of the massive super barrier.

“No gaps,” she commanded, checking her weave against the others.  A tiny gap separated two barriers and she fused it shut.  Then another.  It wasn’t that her cousins were sloppy, it was that no one ever seriously tried a formation like this on the battlefield.

It was like moving one of those units of interlocked shields.  They worked well, when they were used properly, but actually moving in formation like that was challenging and required special drill.  Drill her family did not have.  

One moment she was checking a weave, ensuring there wasn’t a gap, and the next she got to watch the slow motion blast of fire race towards her.  She was standing in the center of the formation, in the hardest possible part of the barrier where it bowed out specifically to deflect shots like this.  

In theory.

In practice, that was the biggest fireball she’d ever seen.  It wasn’t natural.  It wasn’t possible.  It just was.  

The fireball crossed the distance in less than a second, and jerked to the right at the last moment.  Julia reacted, but pulling the other barriers with her was a slower process and aligning everything was impossible in the time she had.  When the fireball struck it was like the sun exploded.  Julia took the perk that deflected light from her barrier, at the time it was to protect herself from a certain pervy Mayor in case he attempted to peek.  Now her barrier was one of the few that didn’t flash so brightly that the people behind it were instantly blinded.

Some even caught on fire.

Not that the flash burn was the only thing causing her kin to perish.  The barriers were not woven together well enough, and some of them allowed streaks of flame to shoot past.  The heat was so intense Julia could feel it from here.  If one of those struck you, you didn’t just die.  You popped like a sausage that was overheated.  

She watched three Julia’s die.  Two of them were her cousins, young determined girls who just wanted to do right by the family.  One had been her aunt.  The duchess was in charge of the entire right side of the barrier, and was trying to protect her children from the hit by using the staff to it's fullest potential.  Someone didn’t weave the barriers tightly enough and the streak of flame tore through her as her daughter and Lance were somehow protected.  

In total, twenty seven members of her family perished in the explosion.  Those that survived were either in Mana crashed states or were so badly wounded that they couldn’t fight until they recovered.  

Chunks of the wall had been blown free and fallen into the courtyard below.  All of their forces were in disarray.  Fenris was leading a clean up effort and trying to redress the soldiers, but if the Dark Overlord attacked now they were finished.  Even now death stalked towards Windfall.  

And the only person standing in the face of Armageddon was Julia.  

***

“And that’s that,” said Grebthar, holding up his hands to cancel the fire node.  Generating one this big was draining, even for him.  Time to get the army marching so they could pound this out before dinner.  He glanced around for TriBlade, who was well away from him, and then he heard something annoying.  

“Is that the best you got?”

The princess was still alive.  Charles knew adjusting the aim away from that barrier wasn’t optimal.  He’d exploded the entire top of the wall, but somehow she’d lived.  He hated Falconian princesses most of all.  They did not know when to quit.  He was going to have to ensure there were no more of those.  

It was his own fault.  The Rod and the Staff were never going to be able to hurt him, however they could protect against his attacks just fine.  They weren’t even his best work, really.  Just good enough to make his companions somewhat useful.  He would have needed to get demonic orbs for that and he’d never had any luck in stealing them.  

Badgelor could have done it.

Charles balked at that.  He didn’t need help.  Not Badgelor’s, not anyones.  He was supposed to defeat the Dark Overlord, except you couldn’t defeat the Dark Overlord.  That Dark Overlord was invincible.  

We both know that’s not true.  

“Alright, no more AOE,” said Grebthar and began weaving a different spell through the node.  His infinite mana became a trickle, then a stream, then a mighty river.  He seldom used this spell, because of environmental concerns but this was just the right time for it.  

“Cuyahoga Cannon!”

A burning river of mana blasted towards the last Princess of Falcon.  

***

“It's a single target spell,” said Queen, throwing Julia the Staff of Power.  

“What about you,” asked Julia.  

“I’m tapped out,” smiled her burnt cousin.  “You got this, I believe in you.”

Julia set up her barrier, remembering the words of her Father.  Heat rises, give it a place to go.  You have to be strong to make it work.  Everyone is counting on you.  You are a banner to your people, you have to be worthy of that.

“Cuyahoga Cannon!”

That was in the stories, Grebthar used it once against a great monster that was threatening the world.  It was forbidden magic, a massive river of fire, capable of injuring the wielder if done improperly.  He thought she was so dangerous?    

She expanded her barrier.  That was easy with her weapon, and with the staff she made the barrier even harder.  She realized it wasn’t all the weapons either.  It was her confidence.  The Dark Overlord saw her as a threat.  

Status prompts shot up in her vision, but she ignored them.  It was just numbers, lots of numbers and the answer was that if she wasn’t strong enough she wouldn’t live long enough to figure out what they meant.  So, she didn’t.

Julia focused every bit of her power through her implements and deflected the fire upwards into the sky.  It would have been visible from Windfall.  By Jersey, it would have been visible from the Vinelands.  

She remembered the battle with Jim in the trial of Lions.  He’d been fecking with her, but she realized something.  There was a lesson there.  

“You have no power here!” she yelled; her voice amplified by the enchantment so that it covered the entire battlefield.  “No Force is with you!”  

The stream of fire got even more intense, and the ground started to warm under her feet.  She shot down a barrier to use as shoes even as she started trying to mend cracks her defensive barrier.  The staff was beginning to burn her hand from the amount of mana coursing through it so she discarded it, grabbing her great golden rod by the twin orbs and massaging all of her power through it.  

“Just a bit hotter,” she muttered, trying to think.  She could provoke him, but how.  Then it came to her.  The greatest insult of all time.  

“Your mother was a hamster!” The river of fire glowed brighter and a massive pulse started at the node.  She was almost there.  “And your father stinks of elderberries!”  

The pulse flashed up the line and Julia smiled.  Even gods could be tricked.  The instant before the pulse hit her, Julia struck the back of the barrier with her weapon and all the stored power exploded out of it.

While her father told her heat ran up, power was conducted.  The power she had been gathering in her barrier was all the power the Dark Overlord had been feeding into it for those long seconds.  It all flashed straight down the line and right into his fire node, and even a fire node couldn’t handle that much power so it exploded.  

Julia staggered slightly, her Mana crashed.  She had taken the best the Dark Overlord had to offer and shoved it right back down his throat.  The first few dozen ranks of his army were just gone, and the crater was magnificent.  The only thing inside of it that still moved was a being of pure shadow.  

It held up a finger, and a glowing maelstrom of shadows flowed around it forming into a spear aimed directly at her.  Julia held up her hands, desperate to generate anything but the magic wouldn’t come to her.  She stopped him, but only for a moment and now she was as good as dead.

“Only human,” hissed the Dark Overlord as the spell began moving forward.  

Then the spear slammed into the wall under her as the fiend staggered backward.  

***

“Just shoot him in the crystal, how hard could it be,” muttered SueLeeta as she aimed the Scorpow II and tried to spot the crystal again.  The problem was the stupid thing moved around and was nearly invisible.  Seriously, it was like trying to find ice underwater.  

Plus the stupid science bolts with their crystal busting tips were hard to aim and unreliable.  The upshot was that the Dark Overlord was stupid.  Since her arrows didn’t do anything, he just stood there and let her shoot him.  

That was until she actually hit the crystal.  Now he definitely noticed her, and SueLeeta realized that the barrier was no longer protecting her.  She dove to cover the instant before the wall was bathed with lightning from Toomen’s hammer.  

***

Grebthar stared at the cracked crystal.

The crystal healed, slowly.  Depleting those hit points was technically the only way he could really die.  His own pool of hit points were secondary to that fact, and in fact he was so durable and those hit points recovered so quickly he almost never thought about them.

Certainly, the elder demon’s blood potion could cause a permanent injury by changing the shape of his divine body, but even that really didn’t do lasting hit point damage.  The issue there was that his divine form held a precious few reminders of his mortal body, and the I’ve Got Magic Fingers perk was just so useful, Charles kept it when he ascended.  

To his near constant regret.

However, damage to the crystal was nigh impossible.  The entire stream of fire merged together and striking him all at once hadn’t even bothered it in the slightest, so imagine his surprise when a simple crossbow bolt managed it.  

The head was different, made of some new material he didn’t recognize initially.  He actually had to dig into his lore skills for a moment before he recognized the material.  “Apocalypse Pony horn.”  Charles had just never seen anyone break one of those down for arrowheads before as the difficulty of gathering the material was extreme.  

Each bolt had a small fragment, but there were nearly a dozen of them.  That would have required at least three horns, possibly more and Jim was using them for arrowheads.  

“Grebthar, perhaps we need to gather more resources, see if anyone else can come to our aid,” said TriBlade.  

Charles considered that carefully for a long moment.  

You are a failure.

Charles seethed, of course it would happen again.  He was so close he could taste it, and yet once again he was being thwarted by those who should have been his allies.  Maybe he should listen to TriBlade, he was nothing but loyal, but as Charles looked he wondered when Triblade would betray him as well.

Grebthar opened his mouth to say the unimaginable.  He would retreat and gather more forces.  He would come at Jim in a year’s time and utterly shatter the fool.  Charles would be calm and collected.

Then the Princess stood up, holding her magical golden tallywacker and laughed.  Grebthar’s eyebrow twitched.  She had beaten him with Jim’s giant weapon.  Jim had beaten him, that he might have been able to stomach.  But having the princess beat him with that weapon?  

“No, we advance,” said the Dark Overlord clutching Mojinir.  “We do this the hard way.”