Wizard Tournament: Chapter 138 (Patreon)

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Two Hours Before the Conflux

          “Where in the hell did those things come from?” Draevin wondered aloud. There was no helping it. He’d have to do something about it if they were going to have any hope of holding out until the Conflux. Draevin adjusted his mist jets to fly straight towards the wall of enemies. As he moved through the sky, he saw the dragons taking off from the arena floor. There weren’t many of them, but they were dragons, so he hoped they could help out a bit.

          The front ranks of zombies were just reaching the Kreet and Setsyan embassies when Draevin flew forward. Soon, they would reach the abandoned Caldenian embassy as well. The defenses of both of the other embassies looked to be markedly weakened. The Kreetish had stone walls raised around their perimeter, but after the rebellion those walls had been smashed in several places. Zombies poured through the gaps and lizard-kin wizards hurled down fire from the parapets of their castles. On the other side of the Protectorate the massive tree that grew at the center of the Setsyan embassy began to shoot roots out of the ground and impale zombies by the dozens. They were certainly less helpless than he’d first assumed, but that still left the Caldenian embassy undefended.

          Draevin was about to start throwing out some spells when he realized how wasteful that would be. Here they were and the front lines of the zombie horde were just approaching the Caldenian embassy and he was a Caldenian-trained wizard! He flew down to one of the remaining defensive towers on the perimeter of his nation’s embassy. There should have been a force barrier to keep him out with enemies at the gates, but he was hardly surprised to find there wasn’t one in place. All the weakened defenses from the rebellion now seemed like they’d just created the perfect opportunity for a zombie invasion, and without being able to teleport in reinforcements there was no hope of outlasting the enemy forces. From Draevin’s position he still couldn’t see an end to the horde rushing out at the edge of the tree line.

          Draevin heard a strong gust of wind over his shoulder. He looked up and saw the silver flash of scales from Tarrish, the dragon emperor, flying above him. “Hold them off,” Tarrish ordered in a deep vibrating roar. “My people can handle this threat with more time.”

          “What do you think I’m going to do?” Draevin called back in annoyance. The dragon emperor veered off to the left without responding. Another of the dragons—a red-scaled one that was maybe half the size of Tarrish—dived down over the center of the zombie horde between embassies and unleashed a massive wave of dragonfire. The zombies unfortunate enough to be directly under the blast were reduced to ash. If that was “handling it” Draevin wasn’t impressed. The dragon had certainly killed a lot of them, but that many were pouring out of the jungle every two seconds.

          Draevin descended to the Northward-facing wizard tower on the perimeter of the Caldenian embassy. It looked like it had been untouched by whatever rebellion Alex and his allies had kicked off. Of the twelve towers around the embassy it looked like only three hadn’t been either crushed by rocks or strangled in vines. With as much haste as possible, Draevin skidded to a stop on the ground. Soft snow actually formed under his feet to soften his landing. The wizard tower had only a few slits to throw spells out of, but the only way inside was through the door at the ground level. He placed his hand on one of the runes on the off chance it would recognize him and open up. The door slid open. That seemed wrong considering how long it had been since Draevin had formally fought for Caldenia, but he wasn’t about to complain. He rushed inside.

          The sounds of screaming zombies cut off as the door closed behind him. The first thing that Draevin noticed was the smell. It was like he’d just stepped into a latrine. He did his best not to gag as he cast a quick cantrip to clean the air. “Vis et kronea torn,” he intoned. With that taken care of, Draevin hopped the steps two at a time to reach the top of the tower. He found the source of the smell at the top: the previous occupant of the tower. Dead. And for a few hours at least. It was another wizard in the blue robes of Caldenia. Draevin didn’t look too closely in case he recognized the poor guy. As delicately as he could, he grabbed the bracelet from around the other man’s arm that was connected to a silver chain at the center of the tower. He would have to hope it fared him better than the previous wizard.

          As he put the bracelet on, Draevin felt power surge into him. His senses connected to those of the tower. The tower’s enchantments allowed him to see clearly for a league in every direction—even through the walls. He also connected to a network of information. Normally he’d be able to communicate instantaneously with the other wizards in the network but it seemed he was the only one. He still received some basic intelligence from the central castle, so it seemed that not everything had been destroyed. For one thing, he could feel an infallible sense of direction. He realized that what he’d been thinking of as “North” of the Protectorate—the direction the zombies were coming from—was actually more of a Northwest. He could also sense the precise distance and speed of travel of the approaching zombies. They had already  recovered from the dragonfire and were nearly at the tower’s walls. The closest of them were only 137 span away and closing at a rate of forty three span per second.  Draevin shuddered to think of what they would do to him if they were able to break down the door at the bottom of the tower. He had no doubt they could do it if they were given enough time.

          Draevin stuck his hand out the narrow window and sent forth a wave of icy devastation. He didn’t bother trying to cover the zombies in a glacier. He knew that wouldn’t kill them. Instead he blasted out with a Subzero Freeze to rival any he’d ever cast in his life. The tower attuned to his spell and mirrored it through the bracelet. Draevin’s not-inconsiderable power was multiplied many times. The screaming zombies before him turned to solid statues as a shockwave of gentle-looking fog rolled over them. Draevin pushed more power into his spell and the wave extended all the way to the edge of the jungle. That didn’t do anything to stop the next wave of the creatures as they barreled forward, but now they had to pick through the frozen remains of their fellows to make any ground. They charged blindly forward, crushing the frozen statues in their way. Draevin was sure that given enough time the zombies he’d frozen would merely dethaw and continue their rampage, but if they were crushed underfoot before that happened he wouldn’t have to worry about them again.

          Through the enhanced senses of the wizard tower, Draevin was able to see that the other embassies weren't doing nearly as well. Zombies were climbing the walls of the Kreetish embassy, only just barely being held back with slung fire spells. At the Setsyan embassy they were climbing the branches of the dryad’s central tree while ripping at the bark and breaking off smaller branches. Rather than risk hurting his allies by throwing spells their way, Draevin decided to use his position further from the action to prevent new waves of zombies from reaching the other embassies. They would have to handle the ones that had already gotten through their defenses on their own.

          The frozen statues of the zombies Draevin had struck with his Subzero Freeze seemed to be working to slow down the next wave, but there didn’t look to be any end to them. Surely this was a nation-level invasion force. In any of the countless wars Draevin had fought in he thought this many zombies would have been difficult to deal with by either side. The extra psychological factor of not knowing how many more were going to come through those trees only added to the stress. Where were the Setsyans? Surely if these zombies had run all the way from Brornia they would have had to pass through hundreds of leagues of Setsyan land. The Setsyans were supposed to have massive defenses set up along their border with Bronia. Had they been overwhelmed? If they had failed to hold back this tide, what chance did he have?

          It was no matter. There was still at least two hours before the Conflux. In fact, while connected to the Caldenian network through the tower, Draevin was able to tell precisely how much time remained until the Conflux merely by looking up at the position of the sun and moon. At present they would reach alignment in 143 minutes. Surely they could hold out that long. Draevin threw three compressed balls of ice out at the newest wave. With them being so far from his position another Subzero Freeze would have been an inefficient use of mana. The balls flew off in three separate directions: one straight ahead, and one to the boundary of the other two embassies. One by one Draevin triggered his attack when they reached the appropriate distance. His ice balls exploded into thousands of tiny shards and rained devastation down on the zombies. The zombies struck by his attack weren’t necessarily killed, but they became immobilized by spikes of ice. Ice covered nearly every span of ground between the Caldenian embassy and the tree line on the edge of the Protectorate. The spikes embedded in the ground made for hazardous terrain. It slowed the horde down as the ones in the back tried to climb over the ones in front, then ended up impaling themselves on spikes and getting stopped once more, but that was all it did. More just kept coming and climbed over their impaled fellows. Draevin just had to slow them down. Playing for time was all he could do. The undead couldn’t actually be killed, the only way to stop them was to completely destroy their bodies. Not something he could really do with ice magic.

          Kaboom!

          Just as he was readying his next attack, Draevin saw a cluster of zombies explode in a blast of dirt. He looked up and saw that the human’s airship was dropping projectiles down. “Well,” Draevin said to himself, “I guess I know where to hide out if we get overwhelmed.”

          Several more blasts slammed into the ground from the impact point of the airship’s projectiles. It looked like the Setsyan and Kreetish embassies were just starting to get a handle on the first wave of zombies that had breached their defenses. There was still no end to them. If anything their numbers were increasing! At first they’d only approached the protectorate from a single point on the Northwest side, but now the horde was pouring out of the jungle from a much wider swath that encompassed fully a third of the Protectorate’s jungle border. The horde had to be a league wide. A league wide! How large would a horde of zombies have to be if they had to cram them together a league across. Draevin re-adjusted his previous approximation. There weren’t tens of thousands of the creatures. There were hundreds of thousands of them. Maybe even a million. Brorn must’ve been building up this army for decades, if not longer. Why now? Why attack now?

          The embassies were going to get overwhelmed. Even with the support of the airship, Draevin could see that now. He was positioned at the center between the two fortresses, but the horde was now so massive it was hitting them from the far sides he couldn’t reach with his spells. The crippled embassies had barely managed to handle the first wave. The dryad’s giant tree hurled zombies away by the dozen with its roots while shaking them out of its branches. They just kept coming. Draevin could see more zombies climbing the stone walls of the Kreetish embassy. They no longer even needed to aim for the broken sections. With the wards depleted, the walls were just mundane boundaries.

          The undead kept coming in a tidal wave. They climbed over the ones who couldn’t move or were too slow. Draevin sent out another cluster of shrapnel bombs, but his attacks were absorbed without making much of an impact anymore. The leading edge of the horde once again got close enough to Draevin’s tower he had to send out another wave of Subzero Freeze. More frozen undead joined the ranks frozen in place around the Caldenian embassy. They were replaced with another wave in half the time of his last freeze. There was no end to them. No end. Connected to his tower, Draevin wasn’t at risk of running out of mana, but at a certain point his body wouldn’t be able to handle the stress of all the mana he was pumping through it. He could already feel the tingling in his extremities that indicated he was reaching his limit. If this were a normal situation he would have taken that as a signal to swap out with another wizard. He couldn’t do that. He was all alone.

          Draevin’s enhanced senses spotted a beam of blue light off to the West. The beam ran across the perimeter of the Protectorate and it was headed straight for Draevin’s location. The beam ran from the ground, up nearly a league into the air where the silver flash of Tarrish’s wings beat steadily. The dragon emperor was shooting a blast of ice out of his maw that reached all the way to the ground from where he flew. It was an impressive display of power for him to attack from so high up. Airships flew that high because so few offensive spells could usually reach that high with any strength… No, it was far more impressive than that. Behind the dragon there was a wall of ice a full league high. He wasn’t attacking the undead; he was erecting a wall around the entire Protectorate to keep them out. The amount of power necessary for a feat like that was beyond anything Draevin had ever seen. Even a mana well couldn’t provide enough power for something like that. Tarrish had to be tapping directly into the source of magic itself. Nothing else could explain it. There were legends of what that kind of power could do, but this was the first time Draevin had seen it himself. It was truly a wonder to behold.

          Draevin scanned the perimeter of the new wall with his senses and saw the other end. It seemed Tarrish had nearly encircled the entire Protectorate already. Draevin felt hope at last. All the time he’d been fighting, the dragon had been erecting his wall to stop the enemy advance. He just had to hold out for a bit longer. Draevin sent another pulse of Subzero Freeze to stop the advancing undead. There was now a sea of frozen statues all around Draevin’s tower. And yet, more undead charged in from the forest and climbed over those that couldn’t move.

          Tarrish was getting closer. Draevin sent another wave of freezing cold. Then another. The zombies had to climb two or three stories high to make it over their frozen brethren now. They kept coming regardless.

          Draevin’s limbs started to go numb. His fingers could barely move. If he weren’t a Master capable of working magic without hand signs he’d already have been forced to stop. That wasn’t an option. Things would be so much simpler if he could just reuse the ice from his previous attacks instead of sending out new waves of cryomancy, but Draevin knew that wouldn’t work against undead. If he pulled his ice out of them, they would immediately renew their attack.

          An idea struck Draevin. He didn’t need to pull his ice out of the undead he’d restrained. He reached out. He felt the shards of frozen ice in the statues that surrounded his tower. He could feel the shape of it. Bodies frozen in place, some still struggling to move. He grabbed the ice and commanded it. “Fight!” Draevin roared. “Fight back!”

          Draevin’s frozen undead sprang to life. They began to charge in the opposite direction. It was the turn of the tide. Undead fighting undead. Both equally unkillable. Tarrish’s wall snapped shut behind the approaching horde.

          Draevin smiled. “Now you’re trapped in here with me,” Draevin said to himself. “Let’s see how you like it.” His army of frozen undead surged forward.

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