Lyra was in her element. From her standpoint, she had magical parity… no, absolute magical superiority. Under her watchful eye, not a single magic attack had gotten through her barriers. She was the best, after all. There would be no breaching of her shields with the enemy projecting their spells at extended distances.
The young mage was using her staple defensive spell, Aegis. It was her quickest, most simple form of defense, a basic, translucent hexagonal shield that could be linked together. It was an easy spell for her to recast, and took little energy to maintain. In theory, she could create a dome-like barrier with a larger set of shields, but this particular spell had a fundamental flaw in that a shield would completely shatter when its defenses were overwhelmed. Lyra, who most often used the shields linked, found that if a single shield took enough damage, the entire array would destroyed. As such, a dome or a configuration that used a large number of the shields was an inefficient use of potential. Because of this, Lyra limited herself to six instances of the spell. This was the configuration that she was using now, and up until this point, it was ample defense against the Astopolian garrison.
The Mauritania girl caught a muddy dark object at the corner of her vision. In a flash, the six-shield array was at her left, taking the brunt of a powerful magic attack. The shield, which was positioned three meters away was forced back so far that Lyra could reach out and touch it. She knew instantly what had happened. They had made a terrible mistake, a horrid miscalculation. The self-proclaimed scholar, the meticulous researcher, had failed to realize just how unstable Yazu the stowaway was. She unwittingly and singlehandedly created a second front by condoning her presence. Her acquaintance Chad and his team probably would not be able to handle the new enemy. She had been working on attempting to identify the enemy mages and mustering a counterbattery, but now she had to split her focuses.
“Chad, Nephenee, Yazu is an enemy.” informed Lyra, in case the two were still unaware of the new threat in the flurry of combat.
Running her hand across the smooth leather cover of her tome, she projected energy around her. It seemed the enemy had switched to attempting to destabilize the ground, but this was an action even easier to counter than their battery of lightning. Slowly, the energy materialized into the form of an invisible half-dome, surrounding Yazu, the knights, and Chad’s party, protecting the bodies inside it and stabilizing the ground. It was unfortunate that the enemy was shielded as well, but the situation had to be stabilized before she could render any further support. By projecting a large, areal defensive shield, she could focus her efforts inwards for a short while. But the defensive setup was time consuming, and it was time that Lyra did not have.
Yazu ravaged the battlefield indiscriminately, skewering knight and sailor alike. On the other side of the battlefield, Chad was fighting a losing battle against the cursed elf. A black tentacle lashed out towards the ship captain. Narrowly escaping by shoving a distracted knight into the path of the cursed limb, he blinked in horror as his enemy’s guts flew sky high. But he had no more tricks up his sleeve when a second tentacle lashed out. He futilely attempted to block the blow with his thin sword, but the disparity in force was overwhelmingly obvious. He had laughed away comments that his sword was like toothpick, but at this very moment, it snapped like one against Yazu, his arm forced back behind his body in an unnatural position. He screamed in pain, dropping the twisted remains of his weapon. He jumped back nursing his arm, unsure if it was broken or not. Yazu seemed to solely focused on Chad. She was out with a vendetta. The cursed elf attacked again. A dozen tainted hands shot out from her body towards the boat captain. He cursed. He would not be able to escape this one, he was done for. But the last second, something appeared in front of him, and a second later, Yazu’s attack connected in what seemed to be an explosion. Chad was thrown back, slamming violently into a tree.
Lyra bit her lip. She had thrown the entirety of Aegis in front of Chad, destroying the array in the process. The shield was not enough –the attack still connected and threw him aside, but it seemed to be enough for him to survive. But Yazu didn’t seem to be satisfied until Chad was eviscerated. With the party leader out of commission and the formation in disarray, Lyra became the de facto commander. She would have to counterattack.
She had no battlefield experience, but she had read a few of Chad’s books on tactics. Evaluating the battlefield with the books in mind, she realized the knights were attempting in encircle her party. With their reduced numbers, this was even more obvious as Yazu maintained her unrelenting attacks. She did not understand why the knights continued to fight, but she could extrapolate what they were trying to do. If a fighting force was confined to a single tight formation, it could be easily destroyed by a single large areal attack. Such an attack was likely forthcoming. The mage casted another Aegis spell.
“Party, break formation and scatter.”
She did not waste time explaining herself. If they did not understand or disregarded her instructions, it was not her problem if they were too dense to save themselves.
Immediately after issuing her order, she doubled down her efforts against Yazu, in an attempt to draw attention to herself. She fired off several weak elemental attacks in quick succession, before launching several materialized lances in the elf’s direction for good measure. Since the range was so close, there was no point in creating a firing solution.
She had wrought this situation by allowing her aboard. She would finish it by her own hand.
