Usually by now I would have given an encouraging cheer, but instead I was watching the approaching enemy in silence. My Fellows gave me concerned looks, but I was waiting for a certain something to happen.
The enemy force had realized their arrows and slings weren’t harming us, so they had picked up the pace. As they moved, they quickly changed into a spearhead formation, evidently ready to splinter our front line. Their shields were up and their spears were pointed forward; the backliners had drawn their close-range weapons and were following close behind. The sight of their fifty-plus soldiers growing ever closer was enough to send shivers down anyone’s spine. Although holding their weapons reduced their mobility, when they hit, they would hit hard. Horseback soldiers and sufficient training had made formations like theirs redundant in most battles nowadays, but there was always a time and place for them to show the might that had carried the method through ancient days. So long as they reached us.
“Three... Two... One... And kaboom.”
I did a little countdown based on some quick mental math, and all of a sudden a flare of vivid scarlet shattered through the twilight.
Our enemy had been marching at quite the clip; the plume of heat consumed them without warning. The shock wave was enough to ripple through our hair; the heat on our cheeks spoke enough of the mines’ destructive potential.
Very good. My mystic napalm is as explosive as I thought.
Every enemy caught within its radius had been immolated in a thousand-plus degrees of heat, and now their bodies were dancing. As they burned, their muscles contracted in reaction to the shock. Their weapons melted into puddles at their feet. Not even a dvergr with burning blood could survive this—the undead army could do nothing.
This show illustrated the one great weakness of having an army of zombies.
People were cowardly creatures. If you saw your front line gruesomely fall to pieces, you would stop marching. Our enemy did not. They kept on moving, stepping over their fallen fellows, to first be turned into pin cushions and then activate the mines that lay ahead. I’d placed the mines at strategic locations, having considered their route forward, and each formation was drowned in burning napalm. Even those who didn’t directly step onto the mines got caught in the splash zone. The flames jumped from one zombie to the next. Our bodies were mostly water, and so although the zombies bodies didn’t burn so quickly, their clothes provided ample fuel for the flames, slowly incinerating them and rendering their bodies useless.
Our victory was pretty much guaranteed.
Everything had been for show: our formations, our arrow-ward potion to indicate we didn’t want a ranged battle. It had all been chosen to lead the enemy into the trap we had laid for them.
“Very good. Our traps have worked splendidly,” I muttered.
“B-Boss...?”
I turned around to the owner of the voice. I expected to see my Fellows all pumped up and eager to protect the canton, but instead they were all staring at me with the blood drained from their faces.
“D-Did you really make us walk over that?”
They were all terrified—expressed in different ways depending on their race—and so I gave them a hearty grin.
“You have our Merciful Sapling to thank,” I said. “Right, let’s clean our plate.”
It felt good when a plan came together. There was nothing more refreshing than a defensive battle when the enemy fell right into your trap and could do nothing but perish. The enemy had been sent in primed to hack us to bits, but now they were melting away. I wished I could see the face of the mastermind behind all this.
“None of you have forgotten your tags, I hope. Now, let’s go.”
By the end of the mop-up, not even a single zombie was in one piece or fit to attack us.
[Tips] The proteins that make up the human body coagulate under high heats and bones become brittle. If you force yourself to move after this, you could easily find your body falling apart.
If you were a part of the Fellowship of the Blade, it wasn’t rare to see sights that would make you doubt your own eyes. Their leader, Goldilocks, could easily knock over men multiple times his size; the arachne hunter, the Silent, could pop in and out of sight. However, these were pretty much quotidian by now. The techniques required for someone small to topple a goliath were no longer a thing of legend and tall tales; many Fellows were beginning to achieve similar feats. Even the arachne’s ability to fade in and out had become somewhat normal—some scouts had warily asked for her secrets—and they came to understand that this wasn’t some mystical convenience, but sheer skill. Even the charmingly sweet couple of Siegfried the Lucky and Hapless and Kaya the Merciful Sapling had produced results in battle that were almost unbelievable.
But today? This had topped everything they had ever seen.
Explosions of flame, ripples of blistering heat, burned figures that melted like ice in the summertime, fully armed warriors that collapsed like toy soldiers. They could barely believe their senses.
The terror of fire was primeval, universal, known to all but the most secluded and spoiled of wild things. Many had run afoul of it as children after doing something stupid. Some had seen disastrous fires; others had even seen Great Work polemurgy at work on the battlefield. But had they seen bodies immolated and liquefied with such speed and horror? Some came to realize that if such methods were ever to disseminate into the realm of commonplace tactics, the very meaning of war as they knew it would never be the same.