To call their situation dire would have been an understatement. The Blood had just waited for this sort of deep strike, it seemed, and now pushed on all fronts at once. John had no idea how or from where they had gathered this kind of force, but it was most likely that they mobilized the entirety of their remaining forces.

West Prussia, Transylvania, eastern Slovakia, the Baltic states and the northern parts of Russia, they all had been taken over or reconquered by the Blood of the Proletariat. And worst of all, they sat right there in the middle, separated from everyone else. Maybe their situation was getting better by the minute, maybe it was getting even worse. John couldn’t know; they’d been without a connection for hours now, so he only had this old map to go by.

They couldn’t leave the barrier. Even with the apparent power boost the mask of his former superior gave him, Magoi was unable to break through. What he could do was buy them all a few hours of sleep, however. Which was exactly what they had done, taking shifts to ward off eventual invaders. Just because they were safe from a giant assault didn’t mean that the two Fateweavers outside couldn’t just do what Magoi did in Styria and smuggle at least a few people in.

Thankfully, Aclysia, Momo and Metra didn’t need sleep, so there was always at least someone who was watching out.

It was the fourth day of the war, and now, at seven in the morning, they were facing a serious problem: Magoi was getting tired. He had been pretty exhausted from the start, having to try and contain Gehnigm during John’s underground squabble, but after 9 more hours of this, the Fateweaver reached his limit.

“How do we deal with this?” John wondered. There had to be some way they could have taken the defensive measures to a higher level; after all, the estimate for breaking into the barrier they had tried to invade had been about a month. Granted, that had been a much smaller barrier.

“You let me deal with it,” Magoi grumbled and reached into his coat to pull out a bottle of pills. “Give me some water.”

John was curious what the plan here was and created a bowl out of some wood. Now where did he get that wood from? The apple tree. Why was there an apple tree? He had grown one. Inside the ruined city, underneath a powered down giant robot and in the shadow of a shattered hexagonal tower, John had used Nadine to grow some things that would supply them with something to eat.

‘Note to self, always carry food for at least one day with you in your inventory,’ John thought. He used to do that, but after Aclysia having cook for him every day for a prolonged period he had forgotten that simple lesson. Growing this little grove had cost way too much mana, but they needed some sort of breakfast. Fighting on an empty stomach would have made them weaker than necessary.

The bowl with water was given to Magoi who threw in one of the pills from the bottle and quickly rinsed it down. “What is that?” John asked as the Fateweaver made a groaning sound.

“Caffeine mixed with dragon’s blood and pressurized undeath essence,” Magoi said; “It will put me into a state of trance where I can keep using my powers at high capacity while ‘sleeping’, although it will take quite the toll on me.”

‘Yeah, can’t imagine taking undeath into your body to be especially healthy,’ John thought as the Fateweaver slinked together, mumbling a bit of advice.

“I won’t be able to react to any great changes in their strategy… while in this state,” he yawned, “but it’s going to be better than leaving you defenceless.” The masked man leaned against the apple tree and was unaddressable from that point onwards.

“We will have to defend ourselves for as long as we can hold out and hope for the best,” Lydia, with clear disdain for that kind of strategy, laid the situation out as they held their strategic meeting. After a, admittedly plant based, meal, chewing on what meagre Baelementium reserves John had built up and an undisturbed night’s rest (she was the only one who hadn’t been part of the guarding shifts upon everyone’s insistence aside from her own), the princess looked a lot better. Less bags under the eyes, although the rest hadn’t been near good enough to remove them completely.

“That is true; we should make our stand here,” John said. He had booby trapped the area with Shardbound and was in the process of transforming it with Gnome’s help to resemble something like fortifications. Mana was a scarce comodity right now.

“We could retreat underground,” Maximillian gave a different opinion.

“Or literally anywhere else,” Momo agreed with that. “We are like sitting ducks here.”

“Yeah, but there is a bit of a reason why we shouldn’t move,” John said and pointed upwards at the iron giant. “If they get their hands on that and reactivate it, we are fucked. Also, the underground network is vast but once they have us located, and they will have ample time to do so, they can bury us under the earth.”

“Points taken,” Momo backed down from the argument.

“Let’s just kill them all,” Metra spoke out. John looked at the newest addition to his team. He had found out the most important bits about her powers by now. For a start, the reason why she didn’t want anyone involved in her fights was that her rage-buff only worked if she was fighting on her own. Made her a pretty competent duellist, or even good in one versus many situations, but also made her majorly suck at teamplay. Thankfully, John’s group was well-rounded even without her.

Her reality ripping powers were a bit more difficult to ascertain. In essence, she could rip open portals just about everywhere where she could see. However, these only allowed her to travel through, and they announced themselves with some sort of flicker in the air. The tears through which she could drill her weapon took almost no effort to create, but actual, body-sized portals or anything else of the sort were took quite a bit of mana. Basically, just as John had thought, there were always limitations.

He pulled out his phone and checked, still no connection. “Seems like killing them all is actually our best bet,” John said and looked at the largely levelled city around him. There were probably some civilians under that rubble, but he had no way to discern them from how many other enemies were still in the barrier as well. Pragmatically, he had no way to save them and himself.

He turned to look at his own group. Counting the elementals, they were 11 high levelled fighters, one healer, one Fateweaver, one technomancer, and the seven remaining knights of Teuton (14 of them had fallen over the course of this mission) made a middle class fighting core.

Their situation was dire indeed on a pure tactical standpoint; however, they weren’t a force the Blood could just run over. If they rationed their powers correctly, this should be completely possible. Defending the food source became just that bit more important. Growing new apples wasn’t nearly as mana intensive as growing a tree.

“Okay then, let’s prepare for their arrival.

What followed were maybe the longest 15 hours of John’s life. Soon after Magoi put himself into trance, the enemy Fateweavers must have noticed what happened and changed their strategy. They broke in group after group of enemy fighters, usually just consisting of about five people.

Whenever John saw one of these groups enter through Jack, he immediately made it so that Rave, Nariko, Sylph and Siena (their quickest members) moved out and took care of the problem before it could become one. An isolated group of 5 was nothing, both sides knew that.

Which was exactly why the enemy’s main plan was to get them in and then wait for the next group to arrive, rinse and repeat until they had a sizeable force. That was about the first two hours, during which John’s main concern was to make the perimeter as secure as possible.

Then they had amassed about 100 people; John had no idea about the total scope as they had gathered whoever was still in this barrier in the first place as well. The early game was over, and they entered the second phase: the sieging.

And that was when John finally experienced trench warfare. Five enemy soldiers weren’t a concern, but 25? That was one fireball they couldn’t just get away from. A hundred? Spells cut through the air and crashed into their position, just as John strategically fired the prepared Shardbounds he had placed. Jack let Arcane Echo’s fall on enemy positions. Some then lay dormant for hours, but eventually, someone of the enemy melee reinforcements stepped on them in their desperate charge.

The enemy had created a ring of ranged fighters around them and was now swarming them with small fry that they probably force enlisted from somewhere, going by the average subpar quality. It was disgusting, like mowing down an assault with a fortified machine gun position.

While they lost another two of the Knights of Teuton in that fight, overall, they were winning. By an ever so slight margin, the amount of people John and his group killed was bigger than the amount that the enemy could reinforce. Eventually, the reinforcements ceased to come altogether.

Abyssal manpower ran in the thousands, not in the millions. Fitted with the right items, average crafters and workers could become fighters as well, but John could smell the desperation coming from the Blood that they were willing to send hundreds of people into this battlefield.

This wasn’t a move to win the war, but one to make the empire’s losses bigger. It was pure pettiness on the scale of total warfare. That’s what John realized when yet another one of the knights fell, reducing their total numbers down to 4. They had almost succeeded now in wiping out an organization over 800 years old.

In a fight like this, everyone but the truly powerful had a chance to die at any second. Even John had to pull more than a few emergency solutions; by the end of the 13 hours of constant assaults, Aclysia’s and all of the elemental’s, save Undine’s, teleports were on cooldown.

Aclysia was the first to sacrifice hers, as an assassin, not more skilled than the run of the mill man John had encountered in Graz but with an easier time to hide himself thanks to the general haste of everything, attacked John. The attacker succeeded in stabbing John into the side, and with no one else around, the weaponized maid immediately jumped to his side using the Defensive Teleportation skill. Afterwards the assassin was quickly taken care off.

Salamander lost hers when she overextended to hunt down somebody who was fleeing the battle scene to meet up with the next wave, which brought her right in the midst of said wave and surrounded with people who at least had the common sense to throw water spells; she had no other choice but to use the teleport to get out.

Siena’s and Gnome’s were next, but those were a calculated loss as they fused and Darkness then had the job of getting them behind enemy lines and take out or delay enemy reinforcement parties for a while. This relieved everyone else for half an hour, as the Blood had to send people to deal with that disturbance once it had become apparent. Eventually, they had to retreat, and the safest way was to use the teleport they had.

Finally, Sylph used hers in a rather mindless fashion. After cleaning the westside for a good while she wanted to get over to the opposite side of the battlefield as quickly as possible, bridging half the distance immediately with the use of the skill. A quick talk about what she was thinking wasting precious resources like that conveyed the obvious answer that she hadn’t been thinking about it at all. To her credit, however, her getting over in such a short amount of time greatly disturbed an enemy assault attempt.

All of this happened under constant barrages of magic over a long, long stretch of time.

And it was cold. Winter reminded them that is was a hostile time to be a human. The weather inside the barrier just emulated the outside, and soon snow fell. That was where they were right now. The enemy ranks slowly depleted under the constant air harassment from Sylph and Salamander while their group’s defensive line held against the assaults the Blood ran, positioned in a weirdly green grove underneath an iron giant that was slowly getting covered in white.

“Man, this is the most boring kind of action,” Rave said, peeling her pink bodysuit off her arm to reveal a wound caused by a giant icicle that she had blocked. The suit had closed the wound by immediately regrowing the torn fabric, but it was better to have it healed by Undine.

“You are the real hero of this battle,” John said and patted the puddle with arms and a head. All that healing and the four times she had unleashed had exhausted her to a point where it had become hard to stay in a human shape. She perked up a little at the touch as she closed the wound in Rave’s arm.

Without the healing, they would have eventually succumbed to the death by a thousand cuts. This way they were relatively safe. “I do my best,” Undine’s melodic voice sang the song of motivated sleepiness. It was 5 PM.

At 7 PM they had finally defeated all of the enemy forces. Somehow the ensuing silence was even worse. It was unnatural, after hours and hours of explosions, to just hear nothing. The charred trees bore forced fruits as Gnome and Undine pumped mana into them, the latter collapsing the moment that deed was done and resting in her incorporeal state for as long as she could.

They ate what little John’s remaining mana had been able to produce. Both him and Momo were regularly tapped on mana, although John did his best to conserve hers as his came back way quicker. Their method of replenishing mana by just existing had its drawbacks as well, as they couldn’t speed the process along like Lydia did by gnawing on a piece of steel, used for construction that had splintered off from one of the many buildings that were now nothing but rubble filled with corpses, like it was a particularly dry piece of meat.

John let out a long sigh, slowly sinking into the trampled grass that had grown with the tree. This was the kind of fight he never wanted to have again. Long, boring, one-sided and without any gains for either side at the end, just the death of a bunch of people.

And they were still trapped. This whole game could just repeat itself. Would it?

Or would something else happen?