Wood chips flew from the front doors as they burst open. Black bladed swords slashed from black shining bodies as cretins poured onto the path ahead.
The hills rose on either side, since this patch was cut from the hill itself, so the terrain funneled them toward us. The next set of towers, at five stories tall, were curved at the base. Fighters rolled brown rock boulders from the tops of those towers, which rolled toward the cretins. They dodged as best they could, but a few were flattened by the hulking rocks.
Then we released the brockerballs. Cindra had the brilliant idea of using the gi-ants she charmed to hold brockerballs in place until we needed them. The hulking insects followed her lead and released the rock monsters. Their four stone arms punched and whipped through the air, knocking cretins senseless.
Still, more monsters poured through the front gate. We had slain five or six, and injured far more, but there were twenty cretins and counting, plus a dozen war dogs. The brockerballs helped, but the fight wouldn’t end with them. Eventually the cretins chopped the rock creatures to pieces and pressed on.
As the path narrowed toward the temple’s entrance, the towers got closer together. At the four story level, Ambry had charged two energems with her fire magic. When evil attackers got within range, the fire walls erupted, trapping many of them inside burning rings of dancing flame.
Training constantly had its benefits, one of which being an improvement we made to her fire magic. At her newest level, her fire walls would begin to close in toward their own center gradually. Archers fired at the trapped invaders while the fire magic squeezed them into a tighter circle.
One brave cretin ran through the flames. While the fire looked intimidating, it wasn’t deadly. The other cretins chose to follow after, sustaining burns and losing health but otherwise escaping their fiery pens. Only two died from the combined damage of burns and arrows.
We were whittling them down, but not fast enough.
The three-story level was Cindra’s department. She was an archer in her own right, so she continued to rain arrows onto the creatures. She also released an army of gi-ants that she had convinced to hide in that pair of towers.
She directed the insects to tear into the monsters, and they did an admirable job. The energems in my palm were searing hot with the influx of energy, and I had to drop them to dirt floor.
Eventually, Cindra’s action points ran out. The gi-ants continued to fight until the cretins had diced them to shreds, then it was on to the second story towers.
Ambry sat atop one while Lily staffed the other. While the cretins had a taste of this magic from the earlier energems, it was stronger and faster coming right from the witches’ own hands. Cretins fought against fire and ice as Vix and I charged.
Looking ahead, we saw more cretins coming through the gates, so we knew we had to act fast if we wanted to avoid a deadly pileup. I chopped off a cretin’s head with Razortooth while Vix Walloped a war dog. The vile creature flew at a cretin and landed on top of it, the warrior’s black sword piercing through its body. We continued to spear and hammer at our foes.
At first, Lily and Ambry froze and trapped enough of them that we were able to pick cretins off one by one. As they melted and escaped the rings of fire, however, they started to overwhelm us. Lily ran out of AP first, but Ambry was soon to follow.
“Back up,” I said to Vix. She did, stepping between the first and second towers with me. I reached out and snapped a cord with my polearm, forcing the wooden gate at the two-story level to drop.
Half of the cretins were on this side of the gate, allowing us to whittle down this number without worrying about the others. Vix took a nasty cut to the arm, while my face was bleeding from my forehead down to my chin. We had paid enough attention to our Constitution to give us the HP to survive these blows, but only so many of them.
We needed to take a breather and regroup. “Fall back,” I said.
With only a few cretins left on our side of the wooden pike grate, we fell back toward the temple’s front door. We fought off these cretins as the gates at the very front of our base’s wall came crashing down.
The general was here. There were no more cretins behind him, only the dozen that still clamored at the wooden pikes blocking the path. They destroyed the fence well before the general got close.
As they charged, Vix plucked another cord with her hammer. It forced the second fence to fall. We were trapped now, unless we fled into the temple itself. We wouldn’t do that though. Under no circumstance were we going to open that door.
The rest of the settlers, those with low combat levels, huddled inside. They were the last line of defense to protect Nola, and I didn’t want it to come to that. As the cretins piled up against the wooden fence that fell before them, Mamba released the snakes.
She controlled almost twenty of them now that we had trained her up further, and they slithered up from the ground in a surprise attack against the cretins. She stood in one tower, conjuring more of the ophidian pests without regard to their control. These snakes wanted to fight, so Mamba didn’t have to waste any AP on forcing them to.
The other tower held an energem, summoning more snakes every two minutes. Cindra continued to shoot arrows at the cretins from her tower as the snakes crawled up their legs and immobilized them.
By the time the gate was finally destroyed, only two cretins remained. Mamba, dancing on the tower’s roof, forced her snakes to leave us so Vix and I could destroy the last two cretins.
We were hurt, and exhausted. Cindra, Mamba, Ambry, and Lily were all spent. We had stopped this wave’s most numerous attackers, but now it was time to destroy their boss. He was more powerful than the others, but we were on the side of the right and the just. I hoped that counted for something.
The general stomped closer, sending a tremor through the surrounding structures and up our legs as he approached.
“You fight well!” he yelled. “But not well enough!” He pumped black magic out from his fists. It rippled in black ribbons that bounded toward me, licking against my arms and my face as I tried in vain to swat them away.
The girls weren’t affected, but I was. My mind became cloudy, angry. I wanted to lash out at everyone, but I had to resist. It was a magical mind game. If I lost, I would lose myself. At least until this monster left, but that wasn’t likely to happen. He would kill me first, and then Nola.
That magic works on your thoughts, Nola said, so think the opposite to counter it!
The opposite. What would that be, calm? Thinking about sandy beaches and deep tissue massages wouldn’t help me stab my spear through this monster’s face. I tried to steady my mind against the onslaught of unwanted rage, and for the moment, I was still in control.
The general slammed his fists into the second story towers, knocking them to the ground. Cindra zip lined to the first story tower in time to avoid the collapse, but I was worried. She and Mamba were in harm’s way here.
Vix ran forward and Walloped this monster in the leg. His knee buckled for a moment, but then he stood straight and kicked her.
The general was three stories tall, and Vix was not. She flew backward and hit the temple door with a thud.
I couldn’t look back there. I was dying to know if she was alright, but the second I took my gaze away from my attacker, I would be next.
“I’m the one you want!” I yelled. “I’m the one Duul came to. Fight me, not them.”
“My master spoke to you?” the general said. “You must not have listened!”