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maximum-construct - Tangerins — Description

Huddling behind my large, elliptical shield, I watched the enemy on the other side of the field. Groups and groups of soldiers, just like me and my mates. Probably they too were nervous, probably they too clutched their swords with sweaty hands, wondering if they would live to see another daybreak.
Many of us wouldn't, as we were the pawns, the expendables. The ones to push forward first to take the brunt of the enemy force and try to run our blades through as many of their expendables first – before we went the same way, down the road to the Afterworld, which no one really didn't know anything about.
That I had remained as long as I had, this was my 26th battle, was something of a combination between luck, acquired skills and the gifts of strength, agility and fast reflexes. But I knew that while my acquired skills for every battle I lasted trough, my luck could run out anytime. There was no chance to see how much of it was left in that vial. And those vials were unevenly filled. Some died in their very first battle, were cut down in their very first rush. Others, like ole Kembrim, behind me to the right, had lasted for several years. Kembrim may have lost his right eye and his left ear and had scars all over his once handsome face, but he was alive. And whoever was waiting back home for him, did probably dare to begin count down the days until when Kembrim finally got his leave.

I watched as the horn-boy began moving along the muddy plain, war-horn around his chest and his head down against the rain, which has petered out to a slow drizzle. He would blow his signal soon, and then it was time for us to begin our advance. He was just waiting for a magic signal in his ear, sent from the spies far far ahead of us, those who laid in cover, watching the enemies move.

The enemy army was on the other side of the Tweaked Hills, we didn't see much of them but the smoke from their cooking fires, but we knew they were there. And there were whispers of their numbers going around. Ten thousands, Twenty thousands, Fifty thousands. And many numbers between that. But I didn't care about numbers. I knew it only took one enemy to kill you. One enemy with their vial of luck still filled while my own had just spilled its last drop.
The rain stopped altogether and a bleak sun was seen between the clouds, like a flying silver penny. Imagine if I could take that one down and pay for my leave. Go home to the village and continue to breed stock sheep. Utterly lacklustre, lousily paid and almost wonderfully safe. But that was just a stupid dream, and one I had to discard the next moment, because the horn-boy turned in the mud, then he lifted his large instrument to his lips and gave the signal to advance.

Then the huge animal called Army started to sluggishly advance. The pawns first, marching ahead with our shields lifted, our blades drawn and our faces trying to show the courage none of us felt. Well, perhaps one or two newbies who still dreamed of glory. But if they lived through the day, they'd forgot all that delusions as soon as they were back by the camp-fires again.
After us came the archers, riding on their horses. Many of those were centaurs, meaning that they upheld a special telepathic connection with their steads, thus making them formidable fighters. Then again, a centaur who lost his or her horse were very vulnerable, some of them more or less lost their mind without their 'other half'. And I've seen them, titubate around the battlefield, lost to the world in their confusion and grief, and soon to be cut down – liberated of their misery – by one enemy or the other.

After them came the knights, clad in armour – fighters as well as horses, and armed with lances and long swords. Some of these fighters were centaurs as well, but not as many as with the archers. Still, they were a force to count with. When they came storming, they might well maul everything in their way. Leaving nothing but mince and discarded weaponry. And their armour made them hard for the archers to hit.
Still they weren't the worse. The worse came last. Drawn in chariots, those frail old men and women didn't look much for the world. But they were – oh they were. Because they were the warlocks, versant in magic that killed. Not black magic, mind you, that hazardous thing that might well harm the wielder as much as the target, in some cases worse as they more or less inevitable drew the wielder mad. No, the warlocks magic was of the red kind. The warfare kind, forceful and brutal, not leaving anything to chance. A magic not for those who wished to huddle in the alleys but were performed in front of everybody. A magic for battlefields.

As such, those fighters were the most valuable ones of all out there. And thus they came last, drawn in their chariots and protected by everybody else. Because they and their power could change the outcome of a battle.
And that was the problem. According to the whispers that travelled up and down our lines, the enemy's warlocks were more than trice as many as the ones we had. And they were younger, more well trained and more hungry than the oldies that came with us. So if we were going to lose this time, it would not be because of the pawns, the archers or the knights. But it would be our warlocks against their and then ours would go down in flames. And leave the field open for the enemies to chase down the rest of our army. Burn them to cinders. And take some, or the more worthy kinds, like knights and skilled centaurs, as prisoners of war. Fodder for barter.

Dregs like me and my comrades might not get away. So if what they were whispering today as we started moving ahead, towards the Tweaked Hills, I might never get a chance to return to my sheep. My vial of luck would run dry today. Last drops steaming away in the furnace of magic fire.

But we had no choice but to press on, the force of the ones coming after us was simply too strong. So together with Kembrim and Armand and Volia and Wekt and Misiana and all the rest, I kept marching on, holding my shield high and my hope a little higher.

The first enemy arrows hit when we were two thirds away from the Tweaked Hills. A drizzle first, that soon turned into a torrent. We hunched behind our shields, hoping that they would cover us and that no arrows would find holes to sneak through. But I saw Misiana fall to the left of me and Armand to the right. I heard Okman bellow out in pain as an arrow scratched his left arm, but he didn't stop, he kept on advancing.
The fight started in earnest perhaps a quarter of an hour later. And it was quite a different fight from what we had expected. As a matter of fact, the enemy might just be a couple of thousands, and they soon ran out of arrows – or maybe even archers. And our group pressed forwards, suddenly feeling the pressure of all the people behind us as a stronger force than the one opposite of us. The enemies had begun retreating! The flank we were attacking turned concave, bulging inwards, falling and twisting as some of the ones we met suddenly felt the vacuum behind them and tried to use that to retreat, defect even.

I had lowered my shield by now and kept on working with my blade. Kept on hacking and slashing and stabbing. Grinding forward, feeling blood that was not mine splash in my face, hot and salty and smelly. And it surged through me, the thrive to move forward, to kill, kill, kill. To do as many enemies in as possible. Not much finesse, just brutal slaughter. No, a butcher would be more careful, do not want to destroy the meat you can sell. I had no such demands. Hack and slash and stab. Repeat.
I had stopped thinking by then. Stopped figuring out how many I had killed and how far away we really were from the Tweaked Hills. Thus I became quite surprised as I suddenly found the enemies attacking me from upwards, trying to get a higher level to get an upper hand. Shield up again, I didn't let that stop me, I was moved by a much more powerful force now, filled with an adrenaline high that might well turn into battle-craze if I didn't keep myself in check. Hack and slash and stab. Repeat.

But this obstacle of a slope took care of that problem. Perhaps it did, because we were moving slower now. Okman was screaming next to me now, urging us on. And I, Volia, Wekt and Triko were following Okman upwards. Okman, who seemed to have forgotten his injury altogether. Some enemies had taken to throwing stones at us, and I felt several of them hit my raised shield. I also heard Wekt scream as he took a hit in his shoulder. Still we pressed on. And on.
Hack and slash and stab. Repeat. Hack and slash and stab. Repeat.
Repeat. Repeat.
The stones eventually stopped coming, perhaps the enemy had run out of them. Or rather...
"Stop!" someone was facing me, he was wearing red and purple just as I. One of our guys. And for the first time I looked around. There were perhaps twenty of us pawns gathered on the moderate top of one of the Tweaked Hills. We stood there together with half a dozen centaurs, two or three knights and some foot archers. All of those had their brows strung, arrows knocked, but they were waiting. Why?

I soon understood why, the nearest enemy that was not dead or wounded were too far away for any arrows.
"They're retreating," a woman with an eye-patch said next to me. I'd never seen her before, but it was obvious she was not new to this. Relocated from some other part of the front perhaps.
"Does that mean that we have won?" little Tinre asked on my other side.
"Not yet," Eyepatch said. "There hasn't been any horn calls for official surrender yet. I guess they are just following some rogue plan. Trying to re-group."
"Where?" I asked as I stared down at the fields and the snaking river a bit away. It had began raining again, something I became aware of first now, as streaks of water tried to wash blood from our faces.
"Behind that other hill," Eyepatch pointed with a hand that lacked several fingers. I followed her sole middle finger and saw how the enemies were turning themselves into a whirlpool and how our guys were following them. Riders urging on their horses, knights locked in duelling battles, foot soldiers trying to pull wounded comrades into safety... But I was missing something in this picture...
"Damn," Eyepatch said. "May it not be a trap. Re-enforcements behind one of those hills. I wish I'd had a spyglass."
"How many could be in hiding," a man with long unkempt braids sneaking out from a cap asked. He was holding a rag to his face, a rag that was partly red.
"Perhaps a few hundreds just," another woman, one of the archers answered. "A thousand the most."
"We've yet..." the wounded man began.

"There!" Someone cut in from away to the right of me. "The enemy warlocks! Oh sun and moon, there's a lot of them!"
And he was right, there were perhaps thirty chariots coming around that bend now, the horses at full tilt, the charioteer urging them on at the same time as they were trying to create a safe and even ride for their passengers, enabling them to work their red magic upon our guys and gals.
"There's even more than I feared," Okman said. "I'd heard the number 18, thought that to be an exaggeration."
"Where are our Warlocks," Triko said.
"Yeah," Tinre nodded her head. "Shouldn't they be here by now?"
One of the archers lifted her bow, but a comrade laid his sinewy arm on hers, saying something which I guessed was 'wait'.

That was when the enemy warlocks lashed out with their red magic. Waves of foul energy danced around the fields, burning away fighters as they went. Our people were chanceless, they were drowning in that fire as if it'd been an ocean. The archer snarled something at her comrade, then she let loose an arrow and I watched that sole stick fly trough the air – and then disappear as one of the warlocks turned towards it.

"Idiot!" the male man was saying louder. "Now, we're..."

What happened next, I cannot even begin to describe. Just like the sinewy archer I thought that we were indeed toasted. That the warlock would bathe our hill in those red waves and kill us all. Just because of one arrow.
But there came no wave. Instead the sky above us exploded in yellow and lime, and black lashes alike inverted lightnings crossed through the weird colouring. Around me, I felt like the air had become electrified, I felt the hair at the nape of my neck lift, and then something pop inside of my nostrils, the nose bleed mixing with enemy blood on my cheek. Warm and damp.

Around me, people were holding on to their ears, screaming. Some even falling to their knees, including the sinewy archer. The centaurs turned and fled, or make that, the horses fled, throwing off their riders.
"I cannot hear my horse anymore," one of them lamented, drying her own nose-bleed away with a dirty sleeve. "My horse, my horse!"
What was happening?

This went beyond anything I'd ever experienced earlier.
"Welcome to the new war," a man with dark eyes said behind me.
"Say what?"
"Turn around! Look!"

I complied, noticing that the green and lime and the black lightnings were gone now, and the weather had returned to its normal, drizzling programming.
And down below in the valley, the enemy warlocks were surrounded by a large contingent of our knights, cutting them off from everything else, including a possible chance to retreat. Some of the chariots had toppled and their riders had fallen out, others were still standing but the charioteers were holding in the horses in fear of being cut down by the surrounding knights.

"Why are they not fighting back?" Okman asked?
"What, are you disappointed, lad?" Eyepatch asked.
"No, just perplexed."

As we watched, the knights fell in on the warlocks, ending them quickly. And as they turned and rode back, to the cheers of our people, enemy horses in tow as plunder, very little save for chariot pieces remained of what had once been a proud and powerful force of foreign warlocks.

What had really happened?
***
The Neitherbolt had happened. Or that was the explanation we've got. A new kind of magic, a new kind of weapon.

Instead of letting themselves become annihilated by the enemy warlocks, our little group of ten remaining magicians had got together and created a kind of strange magic weapon that sucked energy out of an approaching thunderstorm, turning it backwards, or perhaps was it inside out, and launched it at the enemy warlocks.
When the Neitherbolt were deployed, it had cut off all the access to magic in the surrounding, leaving people without any way to reach to vibe or to tap the well. That was why the enemy warlocks had been rendered powerless, because without their magic, there were just a bunch of overweight and weak middle aged men and women. No match for a well trained group of knights.
And that was also why the centaurs had lost contact with their horses, as telepathy was just another kind of magic.
The nosebleed and such had just been side effect, caused by a change in pressure around us as the Neitherbolt was deployed.
"This will change the way war is fought in the future," Okman said as we were marching back to camp.
"True," Eyepatch said. Her name was Nidla. "We're going to see a lot more usage of other things than magic during the decades to come."
"Like what?" I asked.
"Sun only knows," Triko said with a shrug.
"I guess we cannot even begin to guess," one of the horseless centaurs added in a sad voice. "But I guess I and my comrades are soon to become history."
I looked around at our small group. There were Volia, there were Wekt. There were Imlo, Tinre and Asga. There were the archers and the man with the braids. And there were Zomu walking with a limp and Esho helping one other man carrying a wounded. But ole Kembrim I saw nowhere. Perhaps his vial of luck had ran out.