Book 2: Chapter 42: Earthbreakers

  War, it turned out, wasn’t just about strength. It was about patterns, and utilizing advantages. Advantages that you can craft yourself if you know how to do it.

  Which meant that eventually, even the worst hellscape started to look… familiar. The enemy attacks came in waves. Predictable, and rhythmic, like watching a dumb dog keep ramming into the same sliding door, except the dog had lightning spells, swords, and sometimes the door exploded. They’d survived four skirmishes in three days, barely. Something had to change.

  The planning started at the trenches in a lull between attacks, in a shallow dugout behind the ruins of an old watchtower. Rain drizzled over canvas tarps held up with spears and snapped-off tree limbs. The ground squelched with rainwater and blood beneath their boots, and their breath fogged in the air.

  Alex crouched beside a crude, half-melted map of the region etched into the mud with a sglyph tylus. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked and that’s what mattered.

  “We’ve got to stop fighting them where they want us,” he muttered, brushing off a clump of bloodied moss. “Let’s flip the terrain on them.”

  “Guerrilla style?” Kate asked, one brow rising.

  Alex nodded. “Elevation, bottlenecks, bait lines. We make the field work for us.”

  “Finally, some asymmetry,” Eric rumbled, rolling one shoulder and cracking the joint like a tree splitting in winter.

  Devon knelt beside them, working on a prototype glyph array on a disc of flat stone.

  “Say hello to the Mobile Anchor v3,” he said, eyes sparkling. “Temporarily stabilizes a 10-meter zone of ambient aether, locking energy movement in place. No spellcasting for anyone bellow middle stage Adept Tier. Don’t bump it too hard or it’ll explode.”

  “Don’t bump it?” Kate asked.

  “Please don’t bump it.”

  “You can set those in the field and remote activate them?” Eric asked.

  Devon clicked his tongue in thought, “Yeah, I will have to design a new trigger, but I start on that now. Should be ready in a few hours.”

  “Good, focus on that, shout if you need any help,” Alex said.

  Meanwhile, Cole and Allie were organizing the medics into something resembling a trauma ballet. She rotated between medical stations every hundred meters along the trenches, each marked with glowing red powder and tri-layered glyphs for faster healing effects. They were setting up standard protocols for all the medical teams. Streamlining their jargon and communication and giving very basic germ theory lessons. Something this world seemed to have lacked up to this point.

  “If they can walk, they patch. If they can’t, we drag them. If they’re screaming…” Cole sighed, tightening a bandage. “Well. Screaming is still good.”

  “Means they’ve got time,” Allie muttered.

  Other medic mages stood around them as the two performed a mock display of some wounded coming in from a battle. Many nodded as they listened, some taking notes. One of them eve held an aether-slate, recording the event for others to see later.

  As the day went on, they started developing strategies and attack plans. Things inspired by their knowledge of wars back home, public-education-level history knowledge coming into its own. Alex scribbled a few new plans onto the back of a parchment paper. All of them ideas from Earth, updated for magical warfare:

  Buried IEDs formed with enchanted aether-crystals etched with Alex’s [Flare] spell, and anything else Devon could come up with, became almost commonplace. Illusory regiments placed in key locations, either to draw attacks, or scare squads into moving in less advantageous positions, showed themselves in every new battle from then on.

  They spent large amounts of energy to create artificial ridgelines and cliff faces. Crafting new elevation used to launch attacks at tighter curves, steeper, harder to dodge. Decoy aether mines rigged to bounce and release smoke sigils mid-roll, colored smoke showing up to mark locations and signal enemy movements automatically.

  Garret and Zach brought something else to the table, silent kill tags.They scouted ahead each night, placing red-threaded pins into the ground or onto corpses. One thread? Patrol. Two threads? Officer. Three?

  “Big bastard,” Garret whispered.

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  The large beasts used by either side could only utilize certain lanes of attack because of their size. Three, marked those lanes. They learned to trust it. When three threads showed up, Alex routed the squad wide around the kill zone and set a trap in its place. Every time, something big walked into it. And every time, something didn’t walk out.

  The war was still brutal. Still blood-soaked and loud and hideous. But now it was shifting to happen on their terms. The Worldstriders knew war from a different mindset, a different place and a different time. They were dirty, efficient, ruthless.

  As most things did in war, rumors mattered. It started with a skirmish on the southern ridge.

  The battlefield was a mud-slick nightmare, sloshing underfoot with blood, aether runoff, and whatever unholy ichor arcane beasts bled when you cut them deep enough.

  A Terraxum captain had been trying to push his troops through a pocket of resistance, three squads of Aerali elite troopers and a rune-carved Lightning-Tuskling siege beast that had somehow merged with a fog elemental. Alex didn’t ask how. He just assumed it was unpleasant.

  The push had failed, miserably. Then Alex’s squad arrived. They didn’t storm the front as a team of gallant avengers. They didn’t yell anything heroic, they just showed up like a team of disgruntled construction contractors, to get a job done.

  Devon tossed a tethered glyph anchor into the air and it started humming. Kate vanished in a blur of fire and static. Zach pointed his spear. One by one, shadows slithered and targets fell. Allie cast a spread-field burst of light that blinded a whole enemy squad. Cole tossed healing potions on the wounded without even stopping his run.

  Garret, utilizing his heightened jumping effect from his ring, rocketed from behind and slammed into the side of the beast like a meteor with a grudge, and Henry caught the rebound with his halberd.

  Alex himself darted straight up the cliff wall, leapt off a boulder, and delivered a compressed [Flare] timed with his punch, directly into the fog-merged Tuskling’s mouth. The explosion was impressive. The mess? Considerably less so.

  By the time the actual Terraxum commander caught up, the enemy flank was in shambles, the siege beast was a crater, and Alex was halfway through shoving a severed enemy lieutenant’s dimensional ring into his inventory with all the grace of someone stuffing Tupperware after a church potluck.

  And that was when the rumors started to circle. As the next following days continued in that same vein, they were getting noticed, and whispers were being told about them.

  That the strange foreigners, the ones with no House banners, no sect tattoos, no generational name to adorn their armor, had brought down a hybrid Adept siege-beast with nothing but a tunnel collapse, a firebomb, and a boy who spoke too fast to be human.

  It wasn’t true.

  They’d used three firebombs. And Devon absolutely was human, most likely. By the next engagement, the Worldstriders noticed the shift.

  They hadn’t meant to lead. But when Alex dropped a bundled collection of [Flare] crystals onto a hilltop, a full platoon shifted formation to cover it.

  When Kate called a target, three archers loosed before she finished the word.

  When Zach gave a hand signal, one he thought only their squad used, a row of spear-wielders mirrored it perfectly, a full element of sixty soldiers shifting in response.

  “Are we… in charge of people?” Garret asked, breathless, glancing behind them after a skirmish.

  The trail behind them was littered with fallen arcane beasts and shattered weapons, but also soldiers, dozens. And they weren’t dead. They were waiting, looking at them.

  “I don’t think it’s official,” Allie muttered.

  “It never is,” Eric said grimly, cleaning blood off his vambrace. “Until it is.”

  By week’s end, the pattern was impossible to ignore. Wherever the Worldstriders fought, others followed. Wherever they pointed, enemies fell. When monstrous siege-beasts emerged, breathing aether-choked flame and lumbering through the fog like titans of old, it was the Striders who answered the call, every time.

  Holly lead a beast down a kill lane and straight into an ambush that another regiment helped set, without them needing to ask. Alex punched one into a ravine with a chained explosion of IED glyphs charges. A squad of archers and mages laid down fire on the beast shortly after.

  Ten soldiers held a beast with enchanted chains as Henry cleaved it in two with a full-body augmentor spell surging through his halberd’s blade, the ground splitting as his swing finished.

  Kate danced through aetherfire with a speed that made lightning look lazy, while Devon dropped anchor nodes mid-sprint to pin down elite officers before they could counterattack.

  And Zach…he had started making kills before the rest of the army even knew a fight had begun, leading scout troops into encampments at night to work that most people thought unhonorable.

  And when the elite Aerali assassins launched a strike into the rear tents, aiming for officers and supply points, it was Alex’s squad that intercepted them in full. Kate killed two before they landed from their Cloud-falcons. Zach struck one in the back of the skull from thirty meters, right when they had landed on their feet.

  Allie had shielded an officer with a glimmering light barrier and took a dagger to the arm in the process. Devon tossed in a lightning field glyph that turned the last assassin into a very crunchy stain.

  They saved the command tent. They weren’t thanked. But that night, a new sigil appeared on their tent, daubed in blood and aether resin. A circle, with twelve smaller marks within it, surrounding a crumbling mountain.

  No one claimed to have made it and no one asked them to take it down.

  The next morning, a scout with three confirmed beast-kills asked if they “had room for one more.”

  All in all, they were fast, efficient, and a little terrifying. Which meant, of course, that the rest of the army gave them a name. “The Earthbreakers.” Unofficially, of course. Some officers hated it. Some admired it.

  Captain Drenn just rolled with it. “Better a name than another pile of bodies.” He had said in one early morning meeting with Alex and a few other lieutenants.

  At night, around campfires, soldiers whispered stories of how the Earthbreakers moved like a single body, struck like a storm, and always hit the worst of the enemy head-on. Of how Alex’s team bled with them, fought beside them, and never took a step back unless it was part of a trap.

  Alex heard the stories.

  He didn’t believe half of them.