Eternal Beasts

Chapter 29: Throne City Surprises

As if to underscore his words, there was a shout from the three denai struggling against the torith, the shout enough to pull the nomads' collective attention to them. Where they saw the half elf warriors about to be swarmed under.

"Timothy!" Bithra cried from the middle of the shifting mass. "Lightning shield scatter! Now!"

Nodding, the wizard reached a hand towards the sky. Then he was snapping it downward as if throwing something against the ground, barking a word of command as he did. And a single bolt of lightning dropped from the sky in time with the gesture to slam into Bithra's shield.

Instead of imbuing it with power, as the nomads expected, it divided at impact into a dozen separate but equally powerful tendrils of lashing blue-white light. With her shield perfectly angled, Bithra sent those tendrils stabbing into the mass of torith in front of her.

In an eye link a dozen torith were down, sporting burn holes in their chests and faces. Teeth grit against the torrent of energy dropping out of the sky onto her shield, Bithra twisted a quarter turn to her left, cutting down even more of the powerful Harbinger shock troopers. She managed a second twist before the lightning faltered and disappeared, leaving a large, glowing spot in the middle of her shield.

That left Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Bithra to survey the results of their devastating counterattack for a second or two. And they saw in the space of a second or two, the attack had cut down over three quarters of the torith that had stood against them at its beginning.

The counter had been deathly effective. But the war leaders weren't ready to fall back into a defensive position. They churned into the remaining torith blades whirling, the shock troopers stunned into immobility by the lightning attack's power. Within seconds the remaining torith were down, slashed and pierced to death by the veteran warriors.

The denai now secure, at least for the moment, Seth, Phineas and Mordecai turned back to the open gate, weapons ready. They then stepped backwards until they were once again grouped loosely around Timothy in a defensive posture.

"Do we advance?" Phineas asked, glancing at Seth. "While we've got the chance?"

"And what chance is that?" a hard voice asked in accented westerling.

Turning towards it, they watched as several platoons of heavily armed and armored cholim gladetori stepped out of the crumbling buildings surrounding the courtyard. And, with black-tinged green light swirling around a number of them, black-touched red light around others, they saw the gladetori were accompanied by both necromancers and sorcerers.

"Burn me," Timothy, their only pure magic user, growled. Then he was hissing a word of command before snapping his hands apart.

With a rush of motion and sound, his hands flared with actinic light before launching from the space between his hands a seething cable of living lightning right at the cholim. The dark elves had just enough time to draw in a breath then the cable was hammering into a breastplate-wearing gladetori.

And it didn't stop there; after striking the soldier and ripping apart his breastplate to sear the life from his body, the cable jumped to the nearest necromancer to hammer her aside, then to her male comrade, before ending by punching through a sorcerer.

"Kill that wizard!" the original cholim speaker, now revealed as one of the necromancers, snarled in westerling so Timothy would know they were now all focusing on him. Then the speaker was going down with a grunt, one of Seth's arrows in his throat.

"Necros first," he tautly directed. "Then sorcerers!" Then the veteran pathfinder was loosing another arrow.

Two more necromancers went down in mid cast, one with an arrow in the chest, the other in the eye. Then devastating columns of green light coalesced out of thin air to be sent racing towards them.