Inflame (The Completionist Chronicles Book 6) Dakota Krout (sci fi books to read TXT) 📖

The walls of the fortress came closer and closer. Havoc touched his throat and shouted, the words powerfully magnified. “Elven invader scum! You have one minute and five seconds to abandon this post. After that, not a single one of you will survive! The Lord of Slaughter marches against you!”

“Your mother wears a green hat, ya chowderhead!” was the only verbal response. A cloud of arrows took flight, followed closely by various glowing effects. The Legion barked a thundering ‘Huoh’. In an instant, Joe and all of his allies had gained a combat buff.

Anti-Elven Phalanx formation (Small). You are part of a group of at least three hundred people with a unified goal. -5% damage from projectiles. -5% damage from spells. 3% chance to pierce illusions.

“I like that,” Joe muttered excitedly, his skin tingling from the protections that came into effect. “Is this a raid buff?”

“Nah.” Havoc nudged him with his elbow, in the best mood that Joe had ever seen him. “This is a raid buff. Time’s up, Elves! I am the Lord of Slaughter! Legion of Steel, on the order of Candidate Joe, take that fort!”

The Lord of Slaughter stands with you! -30% sensation of pain. 25% bonus damage dealt with melee weapons. 10% reduced damage taken from all sources.

“What… is that?” Joe gazed at the buff in awe as all sensation seemed to vanish, the tingling a distant memory. “Is that a spell? An item? How do you do that?”

“It’s a title, and I’m a noble.” Havoc casually pulled a small sphere out of his pocket. “By the way, looks like there is a bigshot here, or those Elves woulda messed themselves, not called out an insult. You’re gonna have your work cut out for you. Get up to the wall; I'll keep them busy.”

The Dwarf held up his hand containing the sphere, and a dense field of power left a shockwave in the air as it traveled upward. As it reached roughly a hundred feet above their heads, a ball of flaming light dropped out of the sky and twisted around… whatever it was that Havoc had just set up. Instead of landing in the center of their formations, the streak of light impacted hundreds of feet away on the open ground.

A mushroom cloud of dust, dirt, and fire crossed the distance between the epicenter and over to where they were standing in less than a second. The Dwarves didn’t flinch, instead taking the cover provided to charge forward at the wall ahead. Havoc sneered up at the structure an instant before it was hidden by the debris, locking eyes with an Elf in particularly regal clothing.

“Pah. You always like to open with a meteor, Francine. At this point, it’s practically boring. We’ll fix that soon.” Havoc’s face was filled with dark joy as he stared at the shining Elf maiden standing in the air above the minor fort. “Can’t believe they’d risk you out here, so something big must be about to go down. Still… can’t wait to have you back on our side.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Havoc’s battle with his Elven rival wasn't something that Joe could participate in, but frankly he didn’t even know that it was happening at this moment. His entire focus was on the walls ahead of him, specifically the need to destroy them utterly. Joe had been on this Zone for almost a couple months now, and he felt like he had accomplished nothing of note.

Now he was running along with a river of shining metal and steam, while fire and dust tried to choke him. The Dwarves were chanting their war cries, the automatons were rumbling alongside them, shaking the ground with every step. Spells and arrows were impacting the ground around them with the force of artillery shells; the blasts made sense for the spells, but Joe could only assume that each individual arrow was heavily enchanted. “This is a lightly guarded fortress?”

A ballista bolt tore directly through an automaton, the well-placed projectile managing to damage and expose the internal Core to the open air. The light around the construction dimmed as the Core itself seemed to suck in everything around it. Joe pounded the ground with his feet, trying to get away from the blast zone. However, it seemed that the Dwarves were used to this occurrence. Instead of fleeing, two of the other automatons grabbed at their falling comrade. One stabilized the machine, while the other pulled out the Core mechanism and threw it like a fastball over the wall in front of them. The explosion it generated shook the air, but more importantly, it slowed down the attacks raining down on them for a few precious seconds.

“Shields up!” a squad leader called out. Smoothly, gracefully, every Dwarf that was carrying a shield lifted it at the same time. An artillery spell landed directly above them, detonating in the air to inflict the most amount of damage as an attempt to scatter the unit. The well-timed order caused the mana of the attack to be reflected, the powerful wind spell turned into a simple breeze by the dense and interconnected enchantments on the shields.

Joe marveled at the efficient movements the Dwarves were showcasing. Back on Midgard, if he had been able to get his guild to move like this, they would have been untouchable, even during the mass incursion by the other Noble Guilds. Another order rang out. “Let's knock on the door, Legion-style!”

Contrary to what the order actually stated, no one went near the gates of the small fort. Joe wasn't entirely certain if it was because they knew it would be more heavily trapped, or if everyone was truly focused on the fact that he was going to take down the wall. Or, perhaps, this was their standard tactic? The only reason Joe thought that might be the case was the fact that the automaton running alongside them shifted into a low configuration as they reached the metal-clad stone of the walls. Their