A sphere of concentrated magic hurtled straight at Iron's face, scorching the air and cracking the frozen ground beneath him from the sudden temperature shift.
"I didn't want to do this..." Iron whispered in his mind. "Lumon, do it."
"Acknowledged," Lumon responded instantly in his mind.
In that exact second, Iron straightened up sharply. All the trembling in his limbs vanished instantly.
The enemy projectile was barely half a meter from his face. In a fraction of a second, Lumon recalculated the spatial metrics. A localized topological rift tore open the air.
The incoming spell, along with arrows and energy charges fired from afar, plunged into the displaced point in space. An instant later, they materialized directly above the heads of the very mages and archers who had launched them.
Iron lifted off the ground, rising into the air. The system locked onto another squad advancing from the flank. Lumon instantly directed the engineer's body forward.
A spatial shear barely a few atoms thick formed right in front of Iron's body. As he flew through the enemy knights' formation at colossal speed, the slipstream barely rustled the dirt before the projected plane passed through armor, bone, and flesh without a shred of resistance. The entire squad was cleaved perfectly in half simultaneously, their bodies collapsing to the ground before the soldiers could even process what had happened.
Observing everything from the back of his own mind, Iron ordered:
"Take direct control of the turrets in Dornheim."
[Remote override complete. All automated turrets and mine networks in the village transferred to direct control.]
"Perfect," Iron replied curtly. "Continue the sweep."
Iron monitored the vital signs of his allies and the villagers through the shared sensor grid. A signal on the edge of the sector flashed red—it was Golbert.
"Protect Golbert at all costs," Iron commanded.
"Acknowledged," Lumon replied coldly.
The engineer's body tore over the forest canopy at breakneck speed, weaving around the trajectories of belated enemy projectiles. He was barely a couple of hundred meters from the target's position. The man was pressing himself against a boulder as a group of knights tightened the noose around him.
"Hold on. Lumon, hover for a sec. Something isn't right here."
His body instantly froze midair. Grey-white eyes tracked every movement of the soldiers below.
"It looks like they aren't trying to kill him..." Iron noted with a frown, analyzing the feed from his optical sensors. "Or is it just me?"
"Enemy behavioral analysis in this sector complete," Lumon reported instantly. "Aggression toward unarmed civilians has decreased by 84%. Enemy units are attempting to detain targets while avoiding lethal damage. Priority is currently assigned to neutralizing active combatants."
"Alright, let's just observe this group for now. Keep Golbert on the local radar. At the same time, take that sector to the right—their main forces are pushing there."
"Attack vector altered," Lumon replied.
Iron's body, now piloted by Lumon, instantly shifted two hundred meters to the right, materializing directly above a dense infantry column.
Lumon triggered a localized atmospheric pressure collapse. The space above the column instantly imploded. Heavy armored wagons and knights' shields crumpled into shapeless hunks of scrap under their own immense weight, while the mages marching behind them were violently thrown back and neutralized by the spatial shockwave.
The HUD continued to flash before Iron's eyes. The enemy troop count plummeted rapidly with every passing second.
[Remaining enemy forces: 237,838.]
Meanwhile, inside a heavily armored command wagon, cracked candlesticks sat on a center table amid a chaotic scatter of maps and torn reports. Olgerd was pacing frantically from corner to corner, beside himself with fury.
Muffled explosions and a continuous, deafening rumble echoed from outside.
"Have you all completely lost your damn minds?!" Olgerd roared, hurling a wooden goblet against the wall with all his might. The wagon shuddered. "There were five hundred thousand of you! Half are already dead! What kind of knights are you?! What the hell do I need you for if you can't even do your jobs properly?!"
One of his subordinates, standing near the door with a stack of fresh reports, shrank back and carefully tried to interject:
"Lord Olgerd, we didn't anticipate..."
"Shut up!" Olgerd barked, breathing heavily as he slammed his hands onto the edge of the table. "Shut your mouth and do your job!"
He snatched his comm artifact. A chaotic mess of overlapping shouts instantly blared from the speaker. Flank commanders, magic corps officers, and staff generals were screaming at each other, trying to shift the blame for the failures while desperately demanding reinforcements.
Suddenly, King Valdes's icy voice sliced straight through the uproar.
"Shut up, all of you!" he commanded, and a dead silence instantly fell over the channel. "Just kill them all and be done with it! I don't care if they're civilians or not! We wipe them out, and then we'll kill him along with them!"
Olgerd froze for a split second. His eyes widened, then his expression changed.
"Yes..." Olgerd said quietly but distinctly into the artifact. "You're right."
Edriac's hoarse voice suddenly broke through the speaker—he had been quietly sitting on the open line the entire time:
"No... No, I beg you, please don't... They'll..."
"If you don't have the stomach for it, then stay out of it, coward!" Valdes cut him off harshly and instantly severed the connection.
Olgerd smirked and switched off his own artifact. He immediately turned to his subordinate with a cold order: issue the order for the total extermination of everything breathing.
Several dozen kilometers away, Edriac sat alone in his own command wagon.
Dead silence filled the space. Edriac didn't move a muscle. He sat on a bench, his fingers clenched into tight fists, staring blankly at a single point on the floor. The king's words echoed relentlessly in his head.
A young aide standing near the entrance shifted nervously. Looking deeply concerned, he took a cautious step closer and asked quietly:
"Lord Edriac... Is everything alright, sir?"
Edriac slowly swallowed the dry lump in his throat, but never lifted his eyes from the floorboards.
"Yes..." he replied in a broken whisper. "I suppose..."
At that exact moment, a rapid series of critical warnings flared to life in Iron's mind.
[Warning: Enemy behavior has shifted to total annihilation protocols. Extreme spike in aggression detected across all sectors.] Lumon reported.
Iron instantly switched his visual feed to the squad surrounding Golbert in the woods. The soldiers' demeanor had changed in a matter of seconds. The knights were no longer keeping their distance or trying to simply detain the man. One of them immediately leveled a crossbow squarely at the cowering Golbert's chest, while a mage beside him ignited a lethal spell in his palm.
"To Golbert, now!" Iron commanded.
Just as the crossbow bolt snapped toward Golbert and the mage unleashed his fireball, the space directly in front of the man ruptured. Iron's body, driven by Lumon, burst from a micro-vortex of distorted air.
The incoming bolt and fireball slammed into a flat gravitational shield, instantly ricocheting off and cratering into the dirt. Without giving the enemy soldiers a second to process, Lumon grabbed Golbert by the scruff of the neck. He immediately locked the man's posture with a spatial grip, ensuring the extreme G-forces wouldn't snap his spine.
"What the—" was all the utterly bewildered Golbert managed to gasp.
[Recalculating coordinates. Destination: Dornheim City Center.]
The space around them compressed into a single, needle-thin point. A fraction of a second later, both vanished from the battlefield. The only sign they had ever been there was a deep crater in the scorched grass and the enemy knights bowled over by the resulting shockwave.
A heartbeat later, they materialized on the soot-stained earth right in the center of Dornheim. Golbert collapsed to his knees, violently dizzy from the instantaneous teleportation.
Deafening turret fire thundered all around them. Nearly every house had either burned to its foundations or collapsed from enemy artillery strikes. A heavy rumble hung over the village: the turrets under Lumon’s control were laying down relentless crossfire along the tree line, shredding through wave after wave of advancing infantry. Only two structures remained fully intact: the Tower and the bunker.
The defenders manning the pillbox loopholes instantly spotted the engineer's silhouette. Gaston rushed out from behind a half-crumbled wall:
"Iron! You made it back!"
Golbert slumped heavily against the dirt, while Iron's body—piloted by Lumon—merely gave a curt nod.
"Everything is under control," Lumon stated in a flat, emotionless voice. "Good job holding the line."
A fresh platoon of enemy mages spilled out from the treeline on the outskirts. Spotting Iron, they frantically began channeling a massive, large-scale spell. Plasma arcs and erratic electrical discharges swirled furiously around them.
Lumon rapidly engaged an algorithm to rewrite the environment's local physical constants. Within a three-hundred-meter radius of Iron, the system generated an energy vacuum—a spatial field that completely locked down all subtle-matter fluctuations. Any connection to the ambient mana field was instantly severed.
The mages' glowing spells fizzled out into nothingness. They froze in sheer horror. A split second later, on Lumon’s command, the turrets bracketed them with a pinpoint volley, clearing that sector.
Watching it all unfold, Iron mentally reached out to Lumon:
"Patch me through to Elyria."
A second later, Elyria's erratic, wheezing breaths crackled over the comms, heavily mixed with the clash of steel and the violent snapping of timber.
"Elyria!" Iron called out. "Can you summon any more monsters?"
"No..." she gasped through heavy breaths, cutting down another enemy mid-sentence. "All the monsters are dead... And I just don't have the mana for a new summon..."
"Damn it..." Iron cursed under his breath. "Alright. If you're feeling really bad, fall back to the village. We're all here."
"Got it," Elyria replied curtly, and the line went dead.
The enemy mages positioned outside Iron's suppression radius rained a ceaseless barrage of spells onto the outskirts, while infantry torched the remaining trees and ruined buildings. The enemy commanders were blindly driving their soldiers straight through the walls of fire.
Dornheim was entirely choked in thick smoke. There was no wind, leaving the acrid fumes to settle.
Around the pillbox, people could barely stay on their feet. Marek, Gaston, and the remaining fighters coughed violently, clamping wet rags over their mouths and noses. The caustic smoke burned their eyes. Tears streamed down their soot-caked faces, practically blinding them.
"Damn it... we're suffocating out here..." Marek wheezed, desperately trying to peer through the haze.
He stood a little taller, wiping his eyes with his sleeve, and peeked over the crumbling wall. For a brief second, a gust of blistering heat parted the smokescreen.
Through the gap, Marek saw one of their own golems. Blackened with soot and riddled with stress fractures, it was fighting alone in the middle of the fire
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