Iron moved among the charred trunks, maintaining continuous fire on the advancing enemy lines. Every shot found its target, but there were still far too many enemies.
At the same time, the engineer coordinated his people's actions through their wristbands. Darwin and Marek were in other sectors of the forest, but Iron tracked their positions. Through sharp mana spikes and thermal signatures on his tactical screen, he instantly analyzed their situation and mentally issued precise commands: who should fall back, where to redirect fire, and where to expect a breakthrough. All the while, he never stopped shooting for a second, picking off knights trying to flank him.
The pressure was becoming unbearable, and panic broke out in the enemy ranks. Seeing his men die one after another, one of the vanguard commanders snapped into a frantic scream:
"Kill him! Break out the C14!"
"Are we really going to use it?" one of the fighters objected uncertainly, pressing against the dirt from another blast. "Sir, we have too few of these charges—maybe save them?"
The commander turned in a rage and grabbed the soldier by the lapels:
"Are you an idiot?! That's Iron Everfall! Did you forget Lord Edriac's words? If you see him, kill him immediately, spare nothing! Get it out, double time!"
Iron caught the yell clearly. He veered sharply to the side, dodging an incoming spell, and frowned for a second.
"How does he know it's me?" crossed the engineer's mind. "Did I give myself away somehow?"
Iron raised his main pistol and fired a series of rapid shots, aiming at a dense group of enemy mages. However, the energy charges simply bogged down in the deployed magical domes.
Realizing the current attack was ineffective, the engineer switched weapons on the fly. He holstered the first pistol and drew another. In this design, Chaos energy served as gunpowder.
"Looks like I'll have to use you then," Iron muttered, cocking the mechanism.
He steadied his arm and pulled the trigger. The bullet instantly crossed the distance to the target and slammed directly into the center of the magical barrier. A web of cracks immediately spidered across the shield, and a fraction of a second later, the dome shattered.
Having spent all its kinetic energy breaching the magical barrier, the bullet immediately lost all momentum.
The enemy mages froze in total stupor for a moment, staring blankly at the fallen bullet:
"What was that?!"
A standard blob of Chaos from the first pistol—which Iron was already holding again—flew straight into the resulting breach. Left defenseless, the unit blew up on the spot. The engineer didn't linger and quickly repeated the tactical trick at two neighboring positions, wiping out the enemy's defensive links.
After a short while, Iron fell back, seeking cover among the dense trees to catch his breath for at least a few moments. Still, he had to maintain constant awareness of the space around him, reacting to the slightest rustle or swaying branch.
Moving past one of the armored wagons, Iron caught the sharp snap of twigs right behind his back. A knight had already crept up close and was bringing his sword down over him. Iron instantly drew his own blade, knocked the enemy's stroke aside with a swift motion, and thrust his sword into the knight's face with a counter-lunge. The tip went straight through.
The engineer jerked his weapon free with a quick motion. The soldier's body crashed heavily to the ground, but the noise drew the attention of the others. Fresh troops emerged from behind the trees, and one of them yelled:
"He's here!"
The mages reacted to the yell instantly. They turned toward Iron and began rapidly weaving a spell.
"Damn it," the engineer spat through his teeth.
Iron charged straight forward. Closing the distance, he forced them into close-quarters combat. He dispatched them one after another, using the trees as natural cover.
At that moment, a blast of flame burst from behind the knights' backs. Iron reacted to the heat, shifting aside in time, but the shockwave still struck him, launching him several meters back. He tucked in midair, rolled across the dirt, and tumbled back onto his feet without losing focus.
He looked around: even more knights were converging on his position, closing the circle. To escape the line of fire and gain a tactical advantage, Iron launched into the air, leaving the ground behind.
As soon as he gained altitude, a thin beam of light struck from below. Iron barely managed to slip out of the line of fire with a hard bank to the side. While airborne, he opened fire on the enemy positions, triggering a series of explosions among the knights before they could even regroup.
Suddenly, a massive orb of green light was hurled at him. Iron fired three quick shots directly at the incoming object. Knocked free from the energy shell, the bullets arced downward and detonated right in the middle of a dense enemy formation. The green orb itself exploded midair.
Briefly vanishing from the enemy's line of sight, Iron pressed the transmitter button on his neck and tried to reach his squad:
"How are things on your end, Gaston?.. Hey, Gaston, answer!.. Come on!"
After a few seconds of tense waiting, Gaston's voice came through the speaker:
"We're alright, Iron, but they're pressing us hard, so we're being forced to fall back toward the village now."
Iron breathed a sigh of relief:
"Gaston! Phew, don't scare me like that again. Right, head toward the village while laying down suppressive fire. Contact everyone and tell them the same thing."
"Got it," Gaston cut in short, and the line went dead.
The engineer turned his gaze back to the battlefield. He carefully tracked thermal signatures, energy spikes, and clusters of foreign mana across the entire forest.
"We keep killing them and killing them, but it's like they never end," he muttered to himself.
At that moment, Lumon pulled up a new system notification:
[Suppression successfully neutralized. Magic usage available without restrictions.]
Iron smirked, preparing for a swift descent back down.
"Thanks," he mumbled. "But couldn't you have told me that sooner?"
Iron began a rapid descent. Spotting his approach, the enemy squad commander bellowed:
"Fire! Shoot him, quick!"
Knights, archers, and soldiers wielding cannons opened a simultaneous storm of fire. Dozens of arrows, shells, and magical blasts shot into the sky. However, the projectiles and arrows abruptly reversed direction and flew back at blinding speed, instantly sweeping away and obliterating those who had fired them.
The commander froze in disbelief, wildly staring around at his mowed-down ranks:
"What the... hell?!"
Iron dropped slightly lower and instantly froze molecular motion in space. Within a hundred-meter radius around him, the temperature plunged to near absolute zero. In a fraction of a second, all surviving soldiers turned into solid ice statues, frozen in the exact positions they stood in.
The engineer landed smoothly on the iced-over ground and walked toward the commander. The man had only been half-frozen—ice locked his body up to his neck, leaving only his head unfrozen. The commander stared in horror at Iron approaching him.
The engineer stepped right up to him, leaned down, and, looking into the man's terrified eyes, said softly:
"Attacking Dornheim..."
In that exact second, he drove his hand straight through the commander's chest. Without pulling his palm back out the same way, Iron yanked his hand to the right, violently ripping through the frozen tissue, and tore it out the side of the body.
"...was a huge mistake," Iron finished coldly.
Meanwhile, new enemy units were already converging on Iron from all sides. The sky above his head clouded over once more with incoming spells and arrows. At that moment, Iron violently coughed, spitting blood from his mouth.
Ignoring the pain, he wiped his lips with the back of his hand and redirected all the incoming magic back at them. The spells turned around midair and slammed into the dense ranks of the attackers, wiping them out.
The commander of another enemy group, watching this from the flank, yelled at his troops:
"Don't attack him! You idiots!"
"Then what are we supposed to do?!" one of the mages replied fearfully, dropping his hands.
Instead of answering, the commander hastily whipped out a communication artifact:
"Lord Olgerd, Iron has neutralized the suppression! What should we do next?"
Olgerd's calm voice came through the device:
"Let him feel total control over the battle. And once you accomplish that—give me the signal."
"Understood," the commander stowed the artifact and turned to the remaining soldiers. "Attack! Charge!"
The knights dutifully surged forward, closing the distance. Iron utilized spatial resonance—and the bodies of the soldiers charging at him simply evaporated in that very second, before they could even swing their weapons.
Without giving the commander a chance to recover, Iron sharply collapsed space in front of himself. In that fraction of a second, he materialized silently right behind the commander's back and whispered:
"Vanish."
Space around them flickered briefly. The commander, along with all remaining soldiers and gear within a fifty-meter radius, was instantly erased from the face of the earth.
Right after, Iron spat blood onto the ground and dropped to one knee, exhausted. A terrifying, bone-breaking pain pierced his entire body, and his muscles throbbed so intensely he could barely twitch his fingers.
Seeing from a distance that Iron couldn't get up, the mages holding distant positions caught on instantly. They began weaving a new spell in sync, concentrating all their remaining mana for a strike on Iron.
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