Daniel
The fortress came into view all at once.
From above, Crescent Hyr looked less like a city and more like a wound carved into the mountain. The bowl-shaped valley held it tight, stone walls curving inward as if the earth itself had tried to close around it and failed. Smoke rose from half a dozen points along the inner ring. Spelllight flared and guttered in uneven pulses, lighting the valley in violent color.
Orcs ringed it.
Daniel leaned forward as the flying carriage slowed just enough for him to see clearly. Red bodies clustered thickest near the main approach, their formations crude but dense. Farther out, smaller groups moved in erratic patterns, testing lines, probing weaknesses.
“They’re everywhere,” someone said behind him.
Daniel didn’t answer. He was already reaching into his coat and pulling out a piece of hardware that looked somewhere between high-tech night-vision goggles and something you’d see on the set of a starship movie.
“Are you sure you want to use that again?” Ethan said, his voice sounding weary. “You—strike that—we were blind for like three days the last time.”
“You know I fixed the light calibration issue,” Daniel said. “Don’t be a dick.”
Ethan snickered.
The goggles slid over Daniel’s eyes with a soft click as the runes along the frame activated and he fed them his own mana. The world changed instantly.
Mana resolved into color.
Not a single shade, not even a spectrum, but layers—overlapping bands refracting through one another like light forced through flawed crystal. Daniel watched it bloom across his vision as the magnification rune in his goggles finished calibrating.
Crescent Hyr was fighting for its life.
Defensive wards clung to the fortress walls in strained arcs, their glow uneven and jagged where they had been hastily reinforced. Old arrays flared under new loads, sigils stitched together by different hands, different eras, different assumptions. Emergency barriers snapped into existence only to collapse seconds later, leaving bright afterimages hanging in the air like scars that refused to fade.
It was elegant in its struggle and stubborn in execution.
“There,” Daniel murmured.
He adjusted the focus, narrowing in on the lower curve of the bowl-shaped wall. Even without the overlay, the weakness would have been obvious to anyone who knew how mana liked to move. With the goggles, it was unmistakable.
A distortion in the flow.
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A place where stone had cracked, where spellwork no longer aligned with structure, where energy bled sideways instead of cycling back into the array. Someone had tried to patch it. Someone else had tried to reinforce the patch. The result was a knot of stress the size of a carriage door.
He flipped the switch again, dropping back to raw magnification.
Sure enough, orcs were pouring toward the gap.
At first it looked like blind charging, surging in a mindless wave. Daniel briefly thought of an online game. But on second look, that wasn’t the case. They moved like a current finding a fissure, exploiting it, widening it by sheer pressure. Below, defenders scrambled to compensate, throwing up temporary constructs, burning mana at an unsustainable rate just to keep the breach from tearing fully open.
Daniel felt his jaw tighten.
Then he saw the counterattack.
A group of men advanced from the breach in perfect unison.
They were not regular cultivators. That much was obvious at a glance. Their mana signatures were wrong—or no, not wrong, just different—flattened, muted, layered beneath something else. This wasn’t a display of raw power but something far more refined and locked in.
Daniel watched in fascination as the men locked shields, leveled massively thick spears, and moved as one.
Daniel blinked, then let out a slow breath as recognition settled in.
Spartans. Did this world have Spartans?
“Wardens of Serran,” Ethan said quickly in the recesses of Daniel’s mind. “You’re not seeing mana but Resonance.”
“What’s the difference?”
Ethan’s tone sounded like a shrug. “Honestly, I don’t know. Never had a chance to study it. It’s mana, but it’s not mana.”
Daniel glowered. “So like divine power?”
“No, actually,” Ethan said. “Chaos energy and divine power are two totally different things. Resonance is like mana, but more—”
“Well, that makes total sense.”
Ethan didn’t respond.
Daniel continued to watch the Wardens of Serran. The image wouldn’t leave him. They advanced like a living wall, shields overlapping, steps measured, formation tight enough that even chaos-tainted mana struggled to find purchase between them. Their magic wasn’t flashy. It didn’t bloom or roar. It reinforced, redirected, and stabilized. It was much closer to the thing he was trying to teach the cultivators.
Resonance was like mana, but processed—filtered through doctrine and drill instead of instinct.
They hit the orc line like a hammer driving iron into stone.
The impact rippled outward. Orcs reeled. The formation held.
Behind them, Bowcasters fired synchronized volleys that struck the orc lines—if you could call them that—with mana-infused arrows that delivered devastating results. Daniel tracked the shots instinctively, which was strange under his goggles’ mana sight. He followed the magic trails mid-flight. The arrows didn’t just fly; they resonated, their trajectories subtly adjusting in response to one another, correcting drift, compensating for wind and interference.
These weapons were some of the few long-range tools that weren’t completely mana-dependent. Mana was strange that way—the way it separated from the whole and lost potency. It was another thing he had considered when thinking about bringing firearms into the world. That unique property had made it useless to try.
Well, mostly, useless to try.
Daniel reached down to the canvas carry case he had brought specifically for this trip as his mind raced, mapping patterns, noting rotations, identifying where the defenders were compensating for losses and where they were bleeding resources. This wasn’t a professional Imperial legion, but it wasn’t a mob either.
This was a city that had learned how to survive.
He tracked the Serrans’ movements as they advanced and withdrew in controlled cycles, never overextending, never chasing. Every step forward was paid for. Every retreat was covered. They weren’t trying to win.
They were trying to hold.
Daniel exhaled slowly.
“They’re doing everything right,” he said, more to himself than anyone else. But that wasn’t going to be enough.
His thoughts turned to his wife, who was probably in the thick of the fighting.
He began mapping variables in his head.
Attack the orcs. Rescue his family. Save the day.
No problem, right?