Allies of Inconvenience

The sun rose on a quiet, uneasy camp. Uneasy in all the ways that it had been for the weeks before the Springfield forces had arrived, and uneasy in all sorts of fun new ways that were unique to the situation before them.

The weariness had not abated among the alliance mages. Every man and woman assembled among the GPA troops wore the fatigue in the lines of their features — carved into the hollows beneath their eyes, etched into the way they moved, as if their bodies had learned to expect the next retreat and were already bracing for it. One night of decent rest could not so easily undo weeks of war followed by repeated days of frantic retreat. Terrified, continuous days of backpedaling while hurtling defensive lines at their enemies one after another, praying to find one that did not shatter at first contact.

In a mixed blessing, there were no intrusions, no analytical forays thrown at them on the second day. That gave the weariness a further reprieve, but it also gave many bitter and irritable soldiers little to do besides cast a wary eye at the most threatening things around them. For two armies that had never so much as spoken before, let alone spent their morning breakfast in campsites separated by a distance that scarcely stretched the length of a football field, the nearest target was obvious.

So a gap was carefully kept and maintained between the two forces, and no one seemed to find it worth the effort to bridge it who ranked anywhere below an officer. 'High Mage' Setivus only crossed the distance once, and even then, only to inquire about the Barrier and how soon John could apply proper warding to it. The answer that he couldn't seemed to dissatisfy him. The invitation to have his Fateweavers re-establish their own Barriers, if John's suited him so poorly, furthered the agitation. He did not return.

But that was the most excitement the two camps shared. As for John, the highlight of his day was the four-hour period Kim spent trying to teach him how to sense a presence beyond the boundaries of his Barrier. Another four hours spent staring at landmarks and trying to pretend he could feel something other than disappointment, while Kim practiced sword forms beside him with an almost meditative concentration. That last part was conveyed to him by Sophia during her turn on watch duty, when the doubt finally reached its tipping point and he asked her to confirm that Kim was at least standing where she said she was.

She was. And still the only thing John had any awareness of was the voice in the back of his head — the one that had grown bored of laughing at him several hours prior and moved on to the sort of lazy, half-hearted mockery that would've been worthy of ridicule in itself, if he were accomplishing anything more productive than the voice was.

The hours passed. The sun set. A watch was set, held, and dismissed when it rose again.

On the third day, the probing incursions returned, but not the same as before. These were not endless and trivial, the sort of default compositions of bone and flesh in familiar formations that spoke of routine and tempo. They were specific, unique, and varied in ways that made them feel purposeful rather than obligatory — and they battered their way into the Barrier, breaking through its protections through sheer persistence and repetition. They arrived quickly enough to avoid being pulled in piecemeal, which **** the assembled troops to engage them whole.

First, a cluster of flying skeletons fashioned into the shape of pterodactyls, each one the size of a small car, that rained down bone fragments with the concentration and velocity to shred unprepared mages where they stood. They were cut down by a blend of Sophia and Vallya's efforts in the skies and Order magic cast from below — golden rays of light that scorched bone to ash before it hit the ground.

A few hours later, there came a formation of rolling spheres, bones packed and fused into dense orbs and further weighted with metal poured into every hollow. The rolling constructs decayed and rotted all that they touched. Several of the GPA were crushed in the opening moments, before it was clear what exactly had been loosed upon them. Lord Brighton shattered the forerunner with a single blow before it could claim another, and Adantia's cables locked down the rest that were not ground apart in her wake.

After dark, when the camps were beginning to settle in, a third wave came. These appeared to be ordinary skeletons, and the soldiers on the front moved to meet them expecting another manageable skirmish.

The first blow that was struck, their bodies scattered. Each bone became an individual weapon, sharpened at the joints and coated with a toxin that burned like acid in the wound and left the flesh necrotic within hours. What had been a formation of skeletons became a living storm of shrapnel, and no soldier escaped the front lines without something buried in them.

They avoided losing anyone, but only barely, and only because the Order healers worked through the night to drag men and women back from the edge. The progress of their work was tracked by the slowly receding volume of agonized cries that carried through the dark.

Kwang and Adantia made efforts to track the source of the creations throughout the day, but each time, the most they could find was a lingering mana presence in the air — the residue of a Barrier erected and hastily torn apart.

On the fourth day, the Forgotten Legion arrived.

Their arrival was heralded in advance by a discernible shift in the GPA camp — a restlessness, a spike in volume, the way a body of soldiers moved when word had passed through the ranks but hadn't reached the outsiders yet. Gerry contacted them an hour later, but the implications were already clear. Something was changing, and either the chain of communication ran as unevenly as the GPA's uniforms or the Springfield forces were simply the last to be notified, catching only whatever intelligence Gerry saw fit to pass on once everyone else had been alerted.

That was not something that surprised them. But it did frustrate them. Much like the arrival of the Legion itself.

The arrival of the main Springfield forces had been time-sensitive and tempered by immediate bonding — the sort that came from soldiers beginning to come to terms with their own impending deaths, only to find their ranks bolstered by strangers powerful enough to turn the tide inside of an hour, and friendly enough to set up camp next door without anyone worrying about having their throats slit in the night. Well. Without worrying about it seriously.

There was no battle when the Legion arrived. There was no bonding brought through the sharing of an Abyssal trench.

There was, John was **** to admit, a not entirely misplaced concern about throat-slitting.

They arrived mid-afternoon, after a silent morning with no signs of enemy action. Sophia was the one who alerted them to their approach; she'd been patrolling the skies when the convoy of SUVs appeared on the southern road, led by Julianna at the forefront on a custom motorcycle that she rode with the stiff-backed posture of someone who considered the machine beneath her dignity but refused to let it show. By that point, John's initial awkwardness with bringing others into the Barrier had been more or less smoothed over through the repetitive practice of pulling each shift's guards across the threshold. Once the Legion assembled and stepped to the perimeter of the Barrier, John pulled them through.

The initial meeting was more civil than John expected — which was to say that Julianna made a point of not acknowledging him. She met his gaze precisely once, looked as if she'd found something on her shoe that didn't warrant the effort of scraping off, then addressed Adantia regarding the state of things without any further mind for him whatsoever. John was perfectly fine with this. His expectations had been somewhere between an exchange of insults and a bar brawl, so things were looking up.

Not to say that the meeting wasn't approaching that in its own time. Gathered around Moira and Lord Brighton's campfire while the Legion soldiers set to work establishing their own section within the Barrier, Julianna had been briefed on the current status of the front and their plans for the near future. She found both extremely disappointing, and did not hesitate to make as much clear.

"That is the entirety of your plan?" The remark was delivered without malice. The gaze she rotated between those assembled carried it for her. "You allow these guilds to rest the defenses of this line on your shoulders while they lick their wounds and cower?"

"We lack the numbers to make any meaningful forays into their territory without excessive risk," Moira explained, with the calm energy of a teacher deciding whether today was the day she throttled a student. "We will need the aid of the alliance mages to reclaim territory without exposing ourselves to ambushes and flanking, let alone the issue of maintaining defensive Barriers behind us."

"This Barrier seems well-managed enough to defend you, even if it does lack proper warding," Julianna noted, glancing into the distance, though whether she could actually perceive the magical structure remained unclear. "If you are lacking in Fateweavers, the Legion has a handful that can manage as a rear guard when yours require rest."

"The territory the Northern Ashes have conquered is quite vast at this point, let alone the amount of land they resided in prior to this conflict." Lord Brighton shook his head, his composure more opaque than Moira's. "We will need the full aid of the Great Plains Alliance to advance, else we'll be little more than a single presence in a vast territory, easily surrounded and without the ability to clear and hold the ground we pass through. Any attempt to push too deeply into their territory would only leave us **** to being isolated and trapped inside a Barrier. No matter how well-fortified John's Barrier is, it does us little good if the enemy can simply stand outside of it and wait us out. We need a unified front."

"You are the one who has created this Barrier?" Julianna turned her attention to John for the first time since the meeting had begun. John sat up straight, a note of pride surfacing as he remembered the way Adantia and Gerry had spoken about the effort required to maintain a Barrier of this size.

"I am. I've been holding it up for four days now," John said. He kept his voice even, but it sat a single notch below a boast. "We're attempting to stabilize the front, so that we can—"

"So that these mewling initiates can gorge themselves and idle while you stand as their doorstop." There was no sign of being even the slightest bit impressed. Julianna sharpened her gaze until it cut the same way her words did. "If you were making efforts to stabilize the entire front rather than grounding yourself in a single location for them to harass at their leisure, you might have done something of use by now."

John felt a familiar burn igniting in his chest. His heart beat, and something else beat along with it. Beside him, Kim's even breathing hitched for a moment, then slowed — deliberately, a very concentrated effort to restrain something before it broke free.

"We have already prevented another collapse of this line," Kim said, the words coming through her teeth in a way that could not be mistaken for anything other than what it was. "We have slain two of their number, and allowed the Fateweavers holding this line to reinforce it properly. Without us, this war might already have been lost."

"That speaks ill of our 'allies' far more than it speaks well of you," Julianna responded, without missing a beat.

"If you have a problem with the strategy we've settled on," John said, "you're welcome to make your case and suggest a better one."

There was a pause — not long, but sharp. John's tone hadn't risen. It hadn't needed to. The words were delivered level and unhurried, the kind of calm that came from deciding, very deliberately, not to say the other thing.

Julianna studied him for a moment. Whatever she found did not seem to concern her.

"Very well." She leaned back, folding her arms across her chest. "Your forces arrived four days ago. In that time, you've erected a single Barrier with no warding, fought off a handful of probing attacks that any competent garrison could have managed, and allowed the GPA to place the full weight of this section's defense on the shoulders of a man who, by your own admission, cannot ward his own creation. You have stabilized nothing. You have merely given them a wall to hide behind while they decide how long they can afford to let you hold it."

No one spoke. Julianna's gaze swept the fire, lingered on John for a beat longer than necessary, then moved on.

"I do not question your willingness to fight," she said, and the concession landed like a stone dropped into still water — heavy, precise, gone before the ripples could settle. "I question whether you are being spent wisely, or simply spent. There is a difference, and in my experience, the people being spent are always the last to notice."

The meeting continued. It did not improve.

But it didn't come to blows, either, and when Julianna rose to leave—citing the need to see to her soldiers, which may have been true and may have been a decision that the conversation had outlived its usefulness—she did so without further hostility.

She paused at the edge of the firelight and looked back. Not at John, but at the Barrier shimmering faintly in the dark above them.

"It is a good Barrier," she said, as if the admission cost her something. "It deserves better than to be someone else's crutch."

She left. The fire crackled. John stared into it and said nothing, because the worst part—the part that sat in his chest like a coal alongside the Shard's slow, steady heat—was that she wasn't entirely wrong.