48.

  The cursed warriors swarmed over the wall and into Yessi’s first trap. With her current power and skills she didn’t have the pure power to simply eradicate the cursed inside of her spell circles. Santi and Yessi had put their heads together to figure out the best way to lay a large scale trap to kill as many as possible as efficiently as possible.

  Best way to do it, they had agreed, was to use the cursed warriors' own energy against them. Similar to what they had done with the heating circle, but much more directed. Santi landed on the second wall as Yessi ran toward it, bent in half to avoid any stray blows that came flowing over the top of the much smaller wall.

  “Ready?” Santi asked as he stayed down and under the wall. The rest of the team came scrambling over the wall and across the inner field. Santi looked over to finally see Rayleigh and her team coming from the inner circle where the pillar was. Mom was trailing far behind them, Torin with her.

  “Under this,” Yessi pointed to a small divot in the wall and Santi hopped off of the wall and to the ground and looked at the divot. A single large crystal sat there, liberated from some store that has specialized in home remedies. Already a soft blue glow was emanating from it the moment that Yessi laid a finger down on the chalk line. Stray mana being captured in the large circle that took up nearly a third of the defensive position.

  Every spell and stray skill that was activated had a small iota of mana that drifted free. Every blast of power had stray mana that drifted about, slowly dispersing back to the planet or atmosphere or wherever it was that mana went. Except in the circle Yessi had built and was focusing the power into the fist sized crystal at their feet.

  “Rayleigh, get up on that wall with your team. Chad, keep the pressure on them, we just need to hold the line for a bit longer,” Santi ordered. The wall was only eight feet or so, easily leapable for any Acolyte. Rayleigh’s team jumped to their fighting posts and began to rain down skills and spells on the oncoming horde, the blasts of noise and flashes of light noticeable even on the other side of the wall.

  “Mom, what’s the numbers?”

  “There are a hundred-sixty-eight Acolytes around us. I didn’t have time to count which ones were Duncan’s and which were Mercy’s.”

  “That’s a lot of bodies, Santi,” Bianca said.

  “We hold the line, Bianca. Time to get up on the wall,” Santi backed up his comments with actions, jumping up and landing to look into the scrum boiling about just feet away.

  Rayleigh’s team hit them with the full power of their attacks, and along with the rest, had halted the advance dead in its tracks. Bodies were piling up as lower leveled Acolytes were obliterated under the pressure of the attack. It didn’t take more than a few moments befor the weight of the cursed pushed themselves through the temporary barrier of death and started to scramble up the walls.

  Santi speared down with his morph blade, piercing the skull of an emaciated man with wild brown eyes. The man froze, dirty clawed hands clutching the edge of the wall for a moment before he slid backwards and fell back into the crowd below.

  A bolt of violet energy seared across the area and struck one of Rayleigh’s fighters, the man didn’t even have time to scream as his body liquefied, sloshing away and down in a burst of blood. There was a frozen moment of horror as everyone stared at the soft, drooping, remnants of who he had been. The strength of the spells fueled by the curse overwhelming natural defenses.

  [Wind Blade] cut free limbs as it scythed through the crowd. Over and over Santi cast his spells until he could feel the strain on his body as mana cycled through his body. The kills were slow to come, the cursed were taking monstrous amounts of damage, limbs sheared free, chests caved in, burned to the bones, stabbed, crushed, and generally maimed. Still, they came on like mindless zombies, just taking the brunt of the attacks.

  Santi stepped to the side, slashing apart a thrown spear that had a ruddy light around it. Pieces of steel and wood slashed at his face, but the deadly skill dissipated as his morph weapon growled in hunger as it ate a piece of the energy that had fueled the attack.

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  Chloe’s axe chopped down and a head came free, but a spear flashed up to pierce her side, only to rebound as she flared her affinity and turned her side to steel. She countered to chop apart the top of the spear and then slammed the axe home into her attacker’s chest. The woman grunted, backing up and spitting blood up as she pulled herself off of Chloe’s axe. Then she smiled, teeth red-black and gleaming, and came back toward Chloe despite the grievous wound.

  Santi hit the cursed woman with a [Wind Blade] as Chloe tried to recover as another cursed leapt at her, distracting her momentarily. Santi’s spell hit where Chloe had already cut her, and split the attacker apart horizontally. Chloe blocked a sword strike then punched the man with a steel fist before ducking behind the wall again. A hunter took her place, stabbing out with a long spear wreathed in power.

  Santi ducked a stray strike and cut back with a long sword, taking a few fingers and sending the man backwards, cackling maniacally as he clutched at his severed fingers.

  Cam and Bianca were fighting as a duo, Cam holding the attention of three cursed warriors who were all trying to get at him, climbing up towards them on a rampart of loose earth. Bianca was fury incarnate, her weapon tearing apart flesh as she ripped into the three of them, skills radiating off of her as she fought to her utmost without fear of reprisal.

  They were in a good spot, unlike Rayleigh who was clutching a spear wedged in her gut. The woman was bent in half, still lashing about herself with her maul. Tank was there the next moment, his strong hands grabbing her and pulling her free from the wall. Grimvr took her place, his axe a blur as his heavy armor fended off stray attacks.

  A hunter was grabbed, a rope flying up and wrapping around her, before tugging her free of the wall. Her scream was short lived, dying even as she hit the ground perforated in a dozen areas.

  A minute and forty seconds.

  That’s how long all of it had taken and already the second wall was bowing backward. Santi’s team and followers just didn’t have the weight needed to hold against the push. Too many Acolytes were arrayed against them, even with their disdain for any type of small scale tactics, the amount of damage they were absorbing allowed the second wave to push with little fear.

  “Anyone see Mercy?” Santi asked, up and down the line. Nobody said anything, too caught up in the fight. Santi risked peeking his head over the top and looking around for the woman. If he could find her in the thick of the fight and eliminate her that way, he would save himself plenty of time and effort.

  No one was really standing out in the crowd though, it was a mess of fighting and laughter and crying and the red miasma that permeated the area around everything. A few clumps of people stood out, but Santi couldn’t figure out which one of the three groups held the curse anchor.

  “Yessi, fire it up!” Santi barked as another hunter died, caught between two different cursed warriors, ripped to pieces in the struggle.

  Yessi ducked under the divot and grabbed the crystal, now glowing so brightly that Santi’s eyes watered. She scrambled up quickly to the ledge on the wall and Santi cast a series of [Air Shields] to allow her to stand up and look over the field. She took a deep breath and threw the crystal in a shallow arc toward the closest cluster of more put together cursed warriors.

  Santi watched as the crystal crossed the distance, a stray spell hitting it directly and simply being sucked into the crystal like a blackhole. The crystal glowed a bit brighter before it detonated in a noiseless blast of blue-white light. Heat blasted across the field as the cluster of twelve disappeared instantly, shadows burnt across the pavement.

  Another dozen in a loose group around them burned away, bodies cooking instantly as they tried to scream. Then skills were slamming home, spells reinforcing bodies or slowing the heat wave that had launched from the crystal. Santi watched as the last two clusters backed up a bit, the cloud of bloodlust burned away momentarily by the shock of the magic blast.

  “Retreat!” Santi called. They had purged a large amount of the Acolytes Mercy had brought and stunned them leaving a clear path to pulling what was left of the horde deeper into their trap. The main circle was still growing in power and Yessi had one last trap to set off.

  The moment they pulled off the second level of defenses Mercy struck. She appeared out of the scrum, where she had been hiding in plain sight near the back. Away from the tight clusters of more controlled berserkers.

  A dark woman, tall and statuesque with cruelty etched onto her features as she raised a hand languidly toward them. Blood flowed around, pulled from the air and the pools on the ground, from wounds still weeping and from corpses spent of nearly everything. A whirlpool formed around her outstretched fingers, spinning fast as she smiled brightly.

  The blood shot out in a burst of energy, spearing right through the walls and bursting them apart like they were rotten wood. The explosion plucked Santi from his feet, his breath wheezing free as he was flung away. Several of Rayleigh’s team disintegrated while Grimvr’s armor sizzled and smoked as he flew.

  Santi hit the ground with a grunt, air whooshing free as he ragdolled across the ground. He ended up facing the sky, ears ringing and eyes watering as he stared into the sky, thinking of the woman’s class floating above her head.

  Blood Mage lvl. 68