70. Sweeping the Field

Sweeping the Field

A vast demon army was moving slowly through the ruins, its formations repeatedly disrupted by craters while its light infantry were forced again and again to detour around rows of slagged cars.

Their numbers were so immense that the streets could not contain them. Stragglers spilled onto sidewalks and into alleys.

Despite their slow pace, despite the terrain, despite resistance at every step, the advance of the undead army was unstoppable.

At the front marched hundreds of sword-guards and executioners in grim black iron plate, armed with serrated swords or two-handed halberds. They cleared every obstacle in the street that could be hacked apart with Mavis enchanted iron.

Behind them came thousands of large, skinless monsters, raw red from head to foot. The necromancers called this class of undead ghouls.

The name came from their craving for human flesh, and from their habit of digging up freshly buried graves when there was no… fresher source of food available.

With every step, those flayed demons leaked a red fluid that only vaguely resembled blood. Wherever it dripped, asphalt hissed and corroded away, metal pitted and rusted in seconds, and plastic or paper caught fire immediately.

The truly terrifying thing about Mavis infantry was not their diet, their revolting appearance, or their casual brutality. It was the fact that a single touch from them could melt living flesh.

Several hundred skeletal archers marched along the flanks of the main force. These petrified skeletons were joined together by molten metal joints, carried steel longbows, and fired arrows made of magical thermite.

Although they were merely archers, they had durability and strength beyond any ordinary human, and every step they took dripped molten metal. Anything flammable it touched ignited at once.

Those ranged units were reinforced by unbound lesser demons.

The lesser demons were tall, almost like mobile artillery pieces, because they could summon self-guided fireballs.

Those fireballs pursued targets like the magical offspring of missiles and drones, then exploded with enough force to destroy buildings.

If that were not bad enough, the lesser demons were nearly impervious to most infantry weapons, and their cursed breath stole the life from any living thing it touched.

Above the army, thousands of small imps wheeled through the sky.

They were chicken-sized humanoids with doglike faces and batlike wings.

They could summon small bursts of fire with the force of shotgun pellets and use weaker illusions to make themselves invisible. Their stony bodies gave them some durability, as well as a small but extremely disruptive magical pyrotechnic effect.

Larger shadows moved among their swarms: iron birds the size of tanks and shaped like chickens.

Like the legendary Stymphalian birds, they could rain down explosive steel feathers. Like miniature dragons, they could breathe fire and destruction.

These iron-beaks were the Mavis equivalent of fighter-bombers. They were slower than jet aircraft, but much tougher, and when striking the enemies of the necromancers, they were not limited by ammunition.

Unlike the forces the enemy had summoned before, this was a true army, built on combined arms, if one could call any of this “arms” without insulting several military academies and possibly reality itself. It was supported by Mavis magic that had finally taken root on Earth.

With the full support of that background flow of magical energy, this was no longer a raiding horde meant for quick plunder or sacrifice, bought just long enough to hold opponents in place until their master’s weather magic could do its work.

By the rules of physics, their weapons were three times as effective as normal, while their armor was three times stronger, three times lighter, flexible, and capable of spiritual repair.

This was what a group of heretical numerologists might call a “+2 magic item,” and it was only part of the army’s deadly…