The Creeping Death wasted no time in sending out an opening shot. He cast a few balls of water at the enemy army, they flew comparatively slowly, up and out, each about six feet in diameter. That wasn't small by any means, but it wasn't enough to drown an enemy armor. He expected more from an [Archmage's] opening salvo, and he was a bit surprised that an [Archmage of the Creeping Death] would use water magic.

Brin wasn't naive enough to assume that the balls of water was all there was to it. He had to be missing something. The Arcaenean army apparently agreed, because they scattered to avoid the balls of water where they landed as if they were made of burning plasma.

The water splashed down, and at first Brin couldn't help but think it really had been ordinary water. But then, something came out of it, like a faint shadow covering the land. The undead near any down water balls paid it no heed, but the one that had landed among a human army produced a violent reaction. The Arcaenean soldiers panicked, fighting each other with shoves and fists to get away from the spreading... something.

Brin frowned and flew his Invisible Eye closer until he saw it.

"I can't believe it. And he's on our side?"

"What's wrong?" asked Cid.

Everything was wrong. Writhing little legs, buzzing wings, scurrying, flying, biting monstrosities. The pools of splashed water were producing an endless supply of insects.

"The [Archmage of the Creeping Death] is a bug mage!" Brin said.

"That's correct," said Cid, as if he didn't really understand why Brin would be so outraged.

He had to admit that after all the disgusting things he'd seen today, bugs weren't really at the top of the list. But it was just one more thing heaped on top of the stinking pile. For as gross as it was to have bugs as allies, the enemy had it worse. It was quickly apparent that several were deadly venomous and the Arcaenean soldiers nearest to the splashdowns were overcome with deadly bites.

It wasn't long before the first mosquito landed on the plate of his armguard, probing for a weakness that it wasn't going to find.

"Oh come on, I thought he was on our side!" Despite saying that, Brin was actually ready to give the Creeping Death the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was just a random mosquito, but when he checked his Invisible Eyes he saw that there were many more, entire swarms descending on the allied troops. Why? Maybe sucking the blood of thousands of men would give him experience or fill his Mana? That sounded like the exact kind of spell a bug mage would have.

[Wyrdic Inspect] didn't tell him much about the mosquito, it was too small to carry much weight in the Wyrd, and his sunlight didn't affect them enough for his magic to interact with whatever spells may have been put on them.

Soon, a new abomination rose from the Arcaenean army, whether monster or spell Brin couldn't tell at first. It moved unnaturally in the air. First it was a pale green snake that reached into the sky. Then it ballooned on the end, puffing up into a ball that sucked the tendril inside of itself. As a floating ball it sort of anchored itself in the air and produced a new long green tendril that climbed higher until ballooning out again, repeating the process. A few small purple flakes fell off here and there, but otherwise it seemed to keep most of its mass.

It climbed through the air and gained speed. The reaching, probing tendrils grew more confident until the strange thing was practically shooting into the air like an arrow--an arrow aimed straight at the middle of Brin's suns.

He used [Wyrdic Inspect] and got a name. [Zephyrous Mint Vine].

It was some kind of plant? Looking closer with his Invisible Eyes he saw that those little purple flakes he'd seen were actually the petals of flowers. He could only watch with dread as it approached his sun.

He aimed and shot it with a laser just as it puffed out to form a target, but the plant weathered the spell with ease. Others from the army were targeting it with Skills and attacks and only a single arrow managed to puncture it, bursting straight through. But it wasn't enough to stop the thing's climb.

A roar echoed throughout the battlefield, and Brin soon saw the source. The winged lion from the [Beast Master] camp pounced into the air. It climbed with a furious speed, dodging the storm of projectiles now coming from the Arcaenean side.

The winged lion crashed into the Zephyrous Mint and tore the plant apart with teeth and claws. A strange, clear light appeared on the lion's fur and at first Brin assumed it was some evil Arcaenean poison. Then he recognized it. No, this was worse. The plant had been carrying an Eveladis into the air, and when the winged lion struck it, had let it loose.

The light was hard to see with nothing but open air in the background, but Brin could faintly track its progress as it spread in a ball. Out, up, until it hit the illusory sun.

Brin stopped the thread controlling his suns before it could return; he didn't need that mind-altered thread reuniting with his consciousness.

The battlefield was again cast into darkness. Arcaena attacked.

With a roar, the human soldiers charged, preceded by a wave of undead. Strange shapes lurked around and above them, terrible monsters of every kind, and the advance was too wild and diverse to create any kind of coherent defense. The allied commoner soldiers stood with shields up and spears ready, but Brin didn't think their discipline would last long. Even he was having trouble adjusting his vision, at least with his natural eyes, and most of these men wouldn't have his darkvision.

The commanders obviously thought so as well, because a great number of command Skills were fired off, and the [Bards] music changed to sing of standing firm against all odds.

The enemy crashed into their lines, and for the most part the allies stayed firm, but there in the center where the enemy concentrated, the first line of men were pressed back just by sheer weight of bodies. The ones behind them couldn't see what was happening, they could only feel that the men in front of them were moving the wrong direction and assumed that a retreat was in progress. This caused an actual retreat, and the whole center started to give way.

Commanders shouted orders, and soon Brin's Lance was riding again. They formed up into a charge, clearly to repel the mass of undead, monsters, and soldiers that were slaughtering their men from behind.

Even after forming up they waited. Too long, Brin thought, but his [Battle Sense] disagreed. If they charged now it would be a mess, they'd be riding into a chaotic mix of attackers and retreating allies. It would do little to restore order. Saving the men's lives wasn't as important to the battle as maintaining order.

The commoner soldiers ran, and the enemies slowed, not wanting to be caught out too deeply into the enemy lines. That widened up the space the knights needed. They charged.

They didn't actually use the [Knight's Charge] Skill; Brin didn't know who actually had the Skill to make an entire line of knights-at-arms do that at once, and it was unnecessary besides. Just moving on the backs of these specially bred horses made them faster than nearly everything else on the battlefield.

The undead rushed towards them to cover the retreat of the Arcaenean human soldiers. The knights didn't let it slow them. They crashed straight through the undead, swinging swords and axes as they passed, but not relenting in their charge. Brin used his shield more than anything. He floated it around at top speed, protecting their horses from any wild swings of the undead.

They burst through and descended on the Arcaenean commoner troops. The men scattered, breaking ranks, every man for himself. Some even threw themselves on the ground, hoping that the horses would instinctively jump over them. It only worked about half the time, and the trained warhorses didn't find the prone forms of men any harder to run across than the uneven fields.

It was a slaughter, and the knights cut through them with impunity. Brin himself stabbed a fleeing Arcaenean straight through the back with his spear. It was a bittersweet victory. One, because this was the first real loss that Arcaena's side had taken. Their undead were expendable, but just looking at humans they were outnumbered ten to one. On the other hand, Brin had just stabbed a man in the back.

Soon bolts and arrows began to fill the sky, and Brin saw the first of the knights go down, overcome with a storm of projectiles. Then a horse fell, and another. Also, the disease was starting to change. He could see blood on the armor of the knights, seeping through the cracks of their armor. He was certain none of the retreating soldiers had wounded them; the sickness was getting worse again. The hundred-man commander signalled a retreat and the force of knights turned to fall back. The return was almost anti-climactic as the enemy seemed perfectly happy to let them go. They returned, and the hundred-man commander ordered them to dismount to rest the horses.

"Keep an eye on them," Cid told Brin. "Other Orders aren't above 'accidentally' bringing the horses back to their own camp and it'll be like pulling teeth trying to get them back again."

Brin assigned a directed thread to the case, and then the Lance was pulled to the front again. This time, they were sent to stand at the front of an infantry formation that was struggling with the disease and might've been close to breaking.

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The Arcanean side only made a few probing attacks with undead, and Brin's Lance easily took the brunt of each attack and cut the undead down with ease. Up close, he saw that they were the grimy, rotting kind of undead. They were covered with insects; foul maggots and worms devoured their bodies even as they flung themselves at the humans, driven by a [Witch's] commands and insatiable hunger.

"These really aren't as dangerous as you made it sound in all your stories about Hammon's Bog!" Govannon shouted towards Brin.

Pointing out that the insects devouring the undead were making them quite a bit weaker wouldn't help with morale, so Brin said, "In my defense, you're all a lot stronger than I was back then!"

That had the effect he wanted, and the Lance shrugged off any weariness to prove that mere undead soldiers were no trouble against real [Knights].

Healers moved in among the faltering army behind them, addressing their new symptoms and reasserting their fighting strength. This was a battle of attrition on both sides, he realized. The diseases sapped their strength on this side, while insects did the same to the enemy. The effect of the bugs on the undead was obvious, and the Arcaenean human soldiers must've been struggling with them too from the way he occasionally saw a burst of flame or a cloud of poisonous gas billow up behind their lines.

Of the two, the disease should've been worse, but the sickness really hadn't been as horrible as he'd expected once the suns went out. He expected mass deaths when the disease switched back to its more deadly mode, but if anything it was getting better. There was something fighting it, something invisible to his senses. It was only when the mosquitos thickened in the struggling unit Brin had been assigned to that he figured it out. It was the Creeping Death. He'd somehow found or made a cure, and he was using the mosquitos to spread it to the troops. Judging just by what he knew of medicine in this world, it was a mind boggling achievement. The Creeping Death was a genius. No, he was an [Archmage].

He could see the enemy fighting it. Here and there, pockets of the disease were being transformed into something else, something with different symptoms that the Creeping Death couldn't counter. A row of axemen started vomiting blood, a group of archers found maggots wriggling around in their skin. The worst effect on morale seemed to be the ones where the disease made only superficial changes. Men whose hair started falling out, or whose skin started to look green and rotten often let their fear overwhelm them quicker than those who were actually dying.

In the case of the knights who'd been infected during the charge, their skin had started to crack and break like dry paper, but they'd been met with the best healers as soon as they returned, and Brin's Lance had avoided it regardless.

Brin started to believe that the outbreaks of new diseases were tracking the enemy [Witch's] progress across the battlefield. If she could alter the disease everywhere at once, then of course she would, which meant that she probably had to be in a certain range.

That's when Brin saw it. All across the battlefield, potions of Eveladis had been deployed as commanders on either side decided they didn't trust what they were seeing. Often it was to counter [Illusionists] doing what Brin had seen in his Class Selection vision and trying to sow discord, and sometimes they seemed a bit random. Every time one landed, it was another place where Brin couldn't send an Invisible Eye, so he only had a few left, floating high above the battlefield.

One such bloom of Eveladis light revealed a tall, seven foot [Dread Knight], level 40. His armor was a strange mix of fearsome and noble-looking. The metal itself was bright and silvery, but it had been shaped into the form of a snarling demon. As the illusion-breaking light spread, it revealed another one, just as fearsome. Then it revealed a woman. She was lightly armored, and [Wyrdic Inspect] gave him her status.

Name: Angelic

Class: Great Witch

Level: 40

Description: Angelic has an unhidden Title. [Mistress of Malady]

"That's her! That's our [Witch]!" Brin said, using the helmet's magic to send his voice to his Lance.

Cid stared out, and Brin could see him considering. This might be the best chance they got against her. There were two meager lines of undead soldiers and two body guards between them and her.

"We have to try!" Cid decided. "Let's crack open that egg! Brin, I'll trust you to land the final blow."

Brin immediately started running, trusting that the other men would be faster than him, though Cowl ran right behind him. Anwir stayed in the back, though he'd already switched his sword for his bow.

"No, fall back!" the commoners' commander shouted, but Brin ignored him.

He held his spear ready, his shield in the other hand. The undead seemed to grin in anticipation, though of course that was all in his head. The two [Grim Knights] seemed unconcerned, and the [Witch] was already turning to flee.

Cid and Hedrek used [Knight's Charge] at the same time. They rushed past Brin and crashed into the first row of undead soldiers, decimating them, and immediately Hedrek's wild swings started carving a deeper hole in the ranks. Cid... also fought, though his current step on [Path of the Blade] left him less impressive than his friend.

Rhun's [Knight’s Charge] crashed through the second rank alone, and moments after Aeron and Meredydd used [Knight's Charge] as well. They each slammed into a [Dread Knight], though to Brin's dismay neither one was able to kill or even injure either of the enemy [Knights]. They were more than enough to distract them, though.

Brych and Govannon both used their [Knight's Charge], both of them aiming at the [Witch]. The [Dread Knights] each managed to disentangle themselves and defend the [Witch] again, though this time they took deep gouges in their heavy armor.

The path was clear. Brin's shield struck out and defended as if it had a life of its own, because in this case it did, a split mind with a quarter of his consciousness. It cleared a path through the remaining undead.

The [Witch] was already fleeing, so Brin went invisible, skirted around the edge of where the Eveladis had already spread, and caught her from the side.

He rammed his spear into her, felt a bit of resistance, and... then she burst apart into a thousand flapping wings and was gone.

There was no death notification; that was the [Witch] escape Skill. The System still had something for him, though.

Level up! 42 - 43

+5 Strength +1 Dexterity, +2 Vitality, +2 Magic, +3 Mental Control, +1 Will, +2 free attributes.

There was no time to think about that. The brief contact with the spear and her body had let the trace amounts of Eveladis light that had stuck to her spread onto Brin, and now he was visible again and cut off from all his illusions.

He didn't know where he was. Which way was the allied army? His brief moment of confusion didn't last long. His men were fighting; he needed to go that way.

It was chaos. The undead were everywhere, and there was no thought of strategy or how to disentangle themselves. All Brin's effort went into surviving from one moment to the next. It was sheer luck that the [Dread Knights] had fled with their mistress. The undead coming from every direction were overwhelming all by themselves, and only the nigh-unbreakable armor saved Brin’s weary Lance from falling to their blacksteel weapons.

Then all at once, the undead retreated on their own. He looked for the cause, and saw that a group of thirty knights were galloping in their direction and the Arcaeneans had decided to pull back.

They were safe. Mostly. The enemy army still tried projectiles, and it strained Brin's magic and dexterity to the limit to keep all the poison darts and terrible spells from hitting his Lance, even with Rhun's perfect defense on his side.

The arriving knights didn't offer them rides on their horses, so the Lance had to run back. The run wasn't as easy as the charge in had been, and this was on top of an already exhausting day. Brych faltered first and Brin picked him up and kept running. Cowl ended up carrying both Meredydd and Govannon on his shoulders, but they made it back.

They weren't deployed again. After thirty minutes of waiting, unsure what to do, they received orders to head back to camp.

It was hard to believe they really could. The fighting wasn't over; the battle could still go either way. But... it was mostly over, wasn't it? Arcaena had been hoping to use the nightfall variant of the disease to overwhelm the defenders and break their advance here. That wasn't going to happen now. On the other hand, the losses on the allied side were much, much greater. No one could really call this a victory.

At least they’d wounded the [Great Witch]. The little spot of blood on the tip of his spear gave him a lot of satisfaction. How sad was it that this wasn’t even one of the important Arcaenean leaders that Aberfa had warned him about, and he still thought wounding her was a great victory. But it was; since he’d stabbed her no new mutations of the disease had sprung up. Already, the allies had gotten a handle on the sickness, and eventually they’d drive the Arcaenean army back and gain a few more feet of ground.

Another day in the Great War of Arcaena was over, and Brin was ready to get some sleep.