MAZE - The Endless Quest

The moment the barrier dropped, the Alliance was ready to attack. They pretended to fire a weaker Elemental Meteor, as if they were running out of steam but instead attacked with a barrage of various spells, all aimed at the battlements of the city. Still, the humans were able to answer to the assault quickly enough to reduce the damage by a considerable amount.

But the Alliance troops didn’t care about that. They rushed forward, shouting rallying cries and using their skills to attack the human army. The final battle for the Crater of the Sky had truly begun.

Roan was running with the initial charge, while Vash started a show to buff all his allies. Skyler was with the mages, steadily going forward and intercepting the spells sent by the humans, and Flint was with a group focused on breaking the actual walls. People could jump, fly, or teleport inside with their skills and spells, but if they were able to open an actual path to the city, things would be much easier. Behind everyone, together with the supply line and the healers were Neria, Hera, Daskka, Livy, and Vulcan.

The triton was there to help the wounded. She was a healer at heart, not someone who specialized in barriers. While Hera was too injured to participate in the large-scale assault. It wasn’t as if she was having problems to move around, but she was still recovering from the fight against the soldiers of strength. The Empress was also waiting for Kaela’s signal to trigger the pool of Styx. It felt like it was already time, but for some reason, the Scoutmaster had yet to give the order.

“Can you see them?” Hera asked. She was worried about Roan and Flint, the two should be the closest to the wall at this time.

“Yes, but I don’t think you would be able to see anything from here. There is too much dust and smoke from the explosions,” Neria replied.

“Robin?” Hera looked up, the bowblade was high in the sky, firing at the humans from a distance and doing his best to help the Alliance, but the reality was that they were too far away for his attacks to be of any danger. The best he could do was to intercept the projectiles coming their way.

‘I can’t see anything, sorry,’ the construct replied.

“Shit. Nothing,” Hera grumbled.

“That’s the hardest part of being a healer. When you have to wait around for people to get hurt,” Neria turned to the Ophidianite, “We learn some tricks. Such as focusing on other things. In this case, can I ask you to make sure no one is coming to attack us while I test something with Vulcan?”

“What do you want to test?” Vulcan asked.

“Remember when we talked about healing with strength mana? Well, because of the Soldiers of Strength I had a chance of seeing their mana up close. I’ve been trying to replicate that and I think I got it,” the triton replied.

“You’ve managed to replicate strength mana in just a few hours?” Hera asked.

“Yeah… what’s the problem?”

“No problem. I jutes heard that I’m amazing for figuring some stuff out with mana every now and then. But it takes me weeks, and you did it in a single day. I guess that’s the difference between being talented and being a genius,” the Empress smiled.

“I’m not a genius!” Neria protested.

“If you did that, you are. Sorry to tell you,” Vulcan nodded.

“I agree,” Livy spoke up.

“They are right, you know,” Kaela appeared almost out of nowhere and joined the conversation.

“Is everything ok?” Hera turned to the Scoutmaster, her face full of worry.

“Yeah, I just dropped by to tell you to use that spell. It’s time. I wasn’t sure if you would need some support so I brought a few people to defend you,” she gestured to the side where a group of 10 scouts was there. In this battle, they wouldn’t be as effective while the walls had yet to be breached. Once that happened though, this team could move around the battlefield taking out important targets, “ Also, you did say you would need a lot of mana, so here,” she gave a bag with almost 100 mana stones inside. All filled to the brim. They all had a range from 30 to 80 million mana each.

“That will help. I need to focus for a moment,” Hera sat on the ground and opened her [Treasure Map].

In there, she could see all the snakes she sent to the various parts of the room. Using an overlay, she placed the spell circle on top of the map and adjusted it to the positions of the constructs. As she got everything ready, Livy, Vulcan, the court and Kaela’s team approached, covering her from all sides.

Hera took a deep breath and closed her eyes, keeping the image of the map in her mind. First, each snake lit up like a pyre as all the remaining mana that Hera had in the [Empress Core] and in the numerous mana stones on her lap started to flood the constructs. One by one they ignited and the mana slowly started to follow the path of the spell circle. Said path was partially created by the snakes themselves, but it would mostly have to be done at the same time.

Thankfully, Hera didn’t have to do it alone. After the rampage on the Cinderspire Citadel, Hera realized that controlling the mana in a large scale spell like that was extremely difficult, and it took too long to be used during a battle. While talking with her court, they came up with ways for them to help her. The Empress still had to control all the mana, but instead of having to remember the path and follow it perfectly, her court would guide the mana while Hera herself only had to follow. It still took a lot of offer and brain power. In essence, she was still multitasking like crazy. Having to control nine different strands of mana was a humongous task, and there was still much to improve. In a perfect world she would flood the path of the spell circle, letting the mana split on each intersection, covering all the parts of the runes as soon as possible. But that would require a fine control of hundreds of strands of mana if not thousands.

While working on the spell, Hera could sense the room, the craters, the forests, the monsters that were on the path of her mana. Everything moved at an extreme speed, passing like a race car from point to point. The advantage of moving something that had no mass was that increasing its velocity was simple, natural, and effective. The Empress watched as her mana, her power, cover the room. Every single snake keeping to their location unimpeded by anyone, or anything.

She opened her eyes, looking at the map. For a moment, she could see herself in there. Her own mana, where the source of all this magic was coming from. It was almost as if she was a guide looking down on the room and making a decision about what to change. After almost 5 minutes, the last connection was made, and the spell circle became complete. She raised one hand and activated the spell. Aiming the debuff at the human army, while everyone else in the area of effect would receive a buff if possible.

“Pool of Styx,” the Empress said when she opened her eyes. Not that she had to do that, it was possible to trigger the spell silently, but doing like this made sure that no problems would occur. Small specks of purple and a dark green started to float around everywhere. They were very sparse and people could only truly notice them when looking into the distance, but there were there.

To make sure things were working, Hera opened her status screen. She only got a single point into intelligence as a buff, but that was already better than she expected. Shouts coming from the city confirmed the humans were caught off guard by the debuff and were now on the back foot.

Kaela thanked the Empress and walked off, going back to her position with her team. Not long after, an explosion opened a large hole in the side of the walls that surrounded the human city. The Alliance troops flooded in, clashing with the human army. They were making sure not to hurt the civilians, but still doing their best to destroy any defenses they could. Part of the plan was to make this city exposed. As both a punishment and a way to ensure that humans wouldn’t have any bright ideas once the room was closed.

The battle continued, and despite the large numbers of the enemy, the Alliance had several advantages. The Pool of Styx was helping a lot, and the soldiers of the humans were struggling with their strength being taken from them. Neria took the chance to test her strength healing with Vulcan. Unfortunately, it was hard to tell if the spell was a success or not. On one hand, it didn’t increase Forge’s Daemonic Influence, and he did say it felt nice when she was using the spell. But on the other, there were no visible effects. The influence didn’t change, there were no buffs, no benefits, nothing. Still, it was too early to give up that idea. Sure, this time it didn’t work, but there still could be something there.

Hera suddenly heard some shouting, and Thalion himself rushed to the battlefield accompanied by several of the other commanders of the army. She wasn’t sure what was going on, but it didn’t take long for a rumor to reach her ears. Apparently, a team of Soldiers of Strength had appeared and were pushing back against the tide of Alliance members. Once that became clear, the strongest people in the army rushed to deal with the elite squadron.

Despite the strength of the humans, they couldn’t compare to the true elite members of the Alliance. And after a couple of minutes, the threat was neutralized. The Empress felt the need to cheer, but her gut was telling her it was too early. Another Soldier of Strength appeared, this time on her own. She was stronger than the others, being at level 58, and the Alliance commanders struggled to defeat her. Even then, it was only possible to win after Aella and Vazor got close to sacrificing themselves to give Thalion an opening to strike and finish the fight.

The two wounded members had to be rushed to the healing tent, where Neria and a few other healers did their best to save the duo. Despite the losses, with the last of the Soldiers of Strength dead, the humans lost their momentum and slowly but surely were defeated. The battle, the actual battle, not just the moment when they were sending teams to invade the power plant, was over.

Hera ended up not doing much during this fight, with was fine by her. She used a massive spell and sent her court to do a mission, having a break felt fair.

“Hey, Hera,” Vash approached her, looking a bit worse for wear. Even more scary, the harpy was walking and not flying.

“What happened?” the Ophidianite rushed to his side.

“A guy with the short sword, he managed to stab me a few times. I tried to help the generals during the fight. It didn’t work as I hoped,“ Vash gave a weak smile.

“Don’t worry. You did great. Come with me, I know where Neria is. While we walk, Daskka is going to heal you, is that ok?”

Vash just nodded as the small white snake turned into mist and started healing him. Not long after, they arrived at the healer’s tent to a grim sight. There were about two dozen people taking up the beds with varying degrees of wounds. But that wasn’t the reason for that. Aella, the harpy in charge of the aerial division, had succumbed to her wounds. She became one more victim of this war.

Hera passed Vash to Neria while clutching her fist. Another person she knew had lost their life in this war. Hera could only hope that this was the last time this would happen, but a part of her doubted that.