A Wandering Soul - Rider 1.11

Five minutes before the battle started I had been nervous. Scouts had come running back letting us know the Urgals were getting close and I had never been in a battle with more than a dozen participants. The scale of the fight alone had been enough to unnerve me.

Ten minutes after the start of the battle nerves had turned into exhilaration. It was still nerve wracking, but watching an army of non-human monsters splinter against our defences tickled something in the back of my mind. I would probably be having nightmares about the pitch defences though. Burning to death was not clean in any sense of the word, not at the comparatively low temperatures the Varden was working with. Between that, the archers focusing on the mouth of each path, and my Bounded Fields messing with the Urgal's perception, the attackers were crawling over a mound of their fallen before they even had a chance to strike back at us. It was even worse for them at the tunnel entrance where I was because not only was I cheating with near unlimited ammo, I was also shooting about five times as fast as the next archer and all my shots had the potential to kill.

There were a handful of magic users in the attacking army and they had certainly set up protections around key personnel so a random arrow didn't hit them out of nowhere, but those protections usually failed to deflect my attacks or I simply focused on the ones that survived the first time until they did.

An hour after the fighting began I was numb to the killing. The frontline defences had long since fallen to the Urgal assault and the main armies clashed against each other. Something that clearly favored the larger, stronger Urgals.

I had occasionally spotted Saphira (and presumably Eragon) flying from battlefield to battlefield, ambushing soft targets and doing their best to disrupt the enemy. I didn't know how successful they were but whenever they were near it was an excellent morale burst to the soldiers.

But morale wasn't enough to hold back the Urgals.

A small band of them broke through the Varden warriors and started charging directly towards me. Unsurprising because I was definitely one of the main factors keeping this part of the defenses from being overrun.

The few warriors between the band and me didn't stand a chance. The better equipped, more experienced warriors had long since been sent to reinforce the holes in our line. We couldn't afford for them to be standing around guarding me. The Urgals barely slowed them down.

The first one caught an arrow in the forehead before the others got close enough to take their own swings. Once they were, though, I allowed my bow to dissipate into mana and without thinking summoned a copy of Benihime.

The sword part of the sword worked just fine, Benihime's razor edge sliced through two of the Urgals like butter, but when I pulsed mana into the blade to activate one of it's abilities that's when things went wrong. I had to pour three times the mana than normal just to get the energy beam to fire, and even then it was maybe a quarter of the size it normally would be.

It was frustrating. Another ability arbitrarily not working as expected. I was just glad I used Benihime and not Zangetsu. If I had, the drain would have been so much worse. The silver lining was I was at least back up to tracing Zanpakuto. Hopefully I would be able to freely use Noble Phantasms again pretty soon.

Even undersized, the energy blast did kill the remaining Urgals so I was free to swap back to my bow and resume mechanically shooting.

There was...just so much death around me.

In a way I would've almost preferred more urgals breaking through so I could justify close quarters combat more. I could distract myself from the amount of bodies getting trampled on the ground by focusing on the next opponent. Instead I got to see the whole field, my enhanced vision doing me no favors since the low light and dust hid nothing from me, and in an ironic twist of fate act as some kind of death god where anyone that fell under my sights wasn't long for this world.

I lost track of time at some point. I fell into an almost trancelike state of mechanically firing arrow after arrow, only breaking out of it on the increasingly more common instances where urgals broke through the lines as the more experienced warriors were forced to spread out even more.

It got so bad that I almost reflexively stabbed a messenger that came up and grabbed my elbow.

"You need to fall back, Lady Alexandria! We're about to be overrun!"

I threw the quickly traced dagger into the chest of an unlucky urgal and tried to pretend it was a natural movement, not me realising I was going to stab a human at the last second, before taking a look around. Yes, we were getting pressured but it didn't seem that bad.

"We're holding just fine!" I shouted back to the messenger.

"Yer also about the only one who is! The rest of the line is collapsing, if you don't fall back you're going to end up surrounded!"

Damn, I hadn't considered that.

We pulled back far enough that some of the more rested warriors were able to take over and I went hunting for more information on how the battle was going. Something that wasn't as easy as just pulling aside a random messenger and getting updates. Eventually I was able to track down the commander for this battlefield and get some answers, but they weren't all that great.

Jörmundur, the man in charge, let me know it wasn't just here where the Varden were struggling. All three battlefields were on a slow retreat for one simple reason, the Varden was tired and the Urgals remained fresh due to their seemingly unending supply of reinforcements. The Varden would eventually lose just because their warriors would be too tired to keep fighting.

"Okay, that's bad." I worried my bottom lip at the situation. "Is there anything we can do about it? Shift some people from here? I could probably fill in if I start using more draining magic..." Enchanting arrows to explode wasn't much more difficult than enchanted weapons. Even if they were way less powerful than a broken phantasm or similar weapon, carpet bombing the battlefield should buy us a little time at least.

Jörmundur was already shaking his head though. "We've been doing that already. But after a certain point the Urgals won't even bother facing us, they'll just target the bigger groups. We would need to give them a reason to keep focusing on us and I do not think they will continue to do so for one magician, no matter how powerful, if it means they can kill the rest of us."

A reason they had to focus on me, huh? The carpet bombing idea wouldn't work then. I could kill as many of the Urgals as I wanted but that didn't matter to Galbatorix in the end. Hell, I could kill the entire army and he wouldn't mind as long as the Varden was shattered. I needed to do something to make him, or rather the commander he sent, target me.

Thankfully I think I had an idea.

"Can the lines hold without me for ten minutes?" I fixed Jörmundur with a serious stare.

"If we commit everything, possibly?" the officer said with an air of desperation. "We won't have much more after that. Not since Arya and the Rider were called away…"

I blinked at that. Eragon and Arya left?

"Well, with a bit of luck this should give us some breathing room."

"And what do you plan on doing?"

I took a deep breath because once I did this, there was no putting that particular genie back in a bottle. "A siege spell. Specifically a bombardment spell that will wipe out the entire army if I can cast it enough times. That should be enough to make the urgals focus on me."

"Wip-, wipe out the whole army?!" Jörmundur sputtered, eyes wide. "Lady Alexandria-"

"Why are people suddenly calling me a Lady?" I asked, rolling my eyes. "Anyway, I'm going to get started. Be ready, because when I'm done this is going to grab a lot of attention. Should ease the pressure on the other two battles though."

I gave him a falsely cheery wave and ran off before he could say anything. It didn't take long before I found a spot with some decent sightlines and started casting.

Honestly I hated the whole process. I had practiced manual casting bombardment spells a few times just to make sure I could, but it was a pain. I had to manually encode the mana into the spell and a single decent twitch or miscalculation would ruin the whole thing. Something that made trying to cast this in the middle of a battlefield even more stressful…

And that was before I started drawing attention with a giant, glowing yellow spell-circle.

The Varden endured though. Twelve minutes after I started drawing out the spell, it was ready to fire. I gave one final warning to get out of my way to the few warriors around me and triggered the firing section. I took an instant to pray that this actually worked like I was hoping because otherwise it was going to be a colossal waste of time. Luckily, I only had to worry about the output of the spell since the mana cost was fixed while I manually drew the circle.

"Nova Blast!"

The yellow-white beam of destruction carved a path straight through the urgal army and didn't stop until it crashed into the distant wall of Farthen Dûr, effectively cutting the attacking forces into two uneven halves.

The entire battle across all three fields stopped in the wake of my spell.

Well, the good news was my siege spell worked just fine. There was actually a twinge of annoyance at that fact because now I definitely had no idea why some of them misfired. The bad news was the spell worked just fine and now I had the near undivided attention of an army.

I took a deep breath. This had been the plan after all.

Of course now I needed to live through my plan and I had a sneaking suspicion limiting myself to arrows wasn't going to be enough. Well, one more trick wouldn't matter at this point…

"Trace Bullet"

Hundreds of swords projected themselves behind me and launched forward at the rate and power of a particularly large machine gun. Eighty percent of them might have been normal steel but that wasn't an issue as the blades created a kill zone in front of me, tearing through bodies, armor, and magical protections alike.

I was now holding off a good amount of the forces directly in front of me by myself and the rest of the forces were shifting away from the Varden's battered lines to focus on me. Which made drawing another spell-circle a bit of a challenge and much slower, but it was doable.

I ended up firing off two more Nova Blasts, each one taking an increasingly longer time to cast as fatigue started to take its toll, before what I was hoping for finally happened. A terrible wail echoed out from the city behind us and three spectral shapes flew across Farthen Dûr. The Urgals paused as the spells forcing them to cooperate and attack failed. They quickly fell into infighting or started running back into the tunnels they came from.

The battered forces of the Varden and dwarves broke out in cheers and pushed forward, eager to take advantage of the sudden confusion and rout the urgals before anything changed.

I was done though.

I had killed...fuck, who knows how many urgals in the past few hours. Possibly thousands.

My stomach almost rebelled at being directly responsible for so much death even if it was to protect people from being slaughtered to the last woman and child. I'd let the others pursue the remnant forces, I was just going to head to the medical tents. See if I could balance out the number of lives I had taken by trying to save some others.

Somehow I doubted I would be feeling better anytime soon.

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