Here we go.

Cover Art: GWBrex

Chapter 73

The church's army took their sweet time lining up against them. There were a lot of people for them to move, and it took them several hours to arrive, get in formation and then organise themselves further. They'd even set down tents and rough wooden stake walls around what Jaune assumed was their supply wagons. Their food, drink, and medical supplies. They had to suspect their plan might be to destroy those and then flee onto their ships, leaving the enemy army to starve. They certainly didn't expect them to hold the line and try and fight when they were outnumbered four to one.

But, by now, they had also noticed their positions, the wetlands, and the forest. A lot of the delay must have been their commanders meeting to discuss how best they'd deal with the issue. Menagerie's navy was anchored just off the shallows, with lighter vessels on the shore ready to be pushed out if retreat became necessary.

It wouldn't be bloodless, however. There wasn't going to be such a thing as an organised retreat in marshy terrain with an army at your back. If they broke, then their forces would be savaged. After that, they'd almost certainly have to give up and return to Menagerie in defeat.

They needed to hold here. There was no other option.

"Now you see what led so many of your predecessors to this moment," said Ozma. "Not all of them were the maniacal and maddened men history may have had you believe. Many, like you, were simply not given a choice."

And yet they all died in the end…

"They did, but few had as many aura users as you do. Those that leaned most into war kept their numbers low, fearing rebellion or buying into Salem's dogma that they were somehow cursed. I will not tell you victory is assured for it is not, but four-to-one are some of the better odds my hosts have been through."

Four to one was good odds. That was dark.

"Salem has ruled the kingdoms for millennia. There simply weren't any other landmasses for your predecessors to draw recruits from. Even when they won the loyalty of Mistral, it was not of every fighting man and woman. And Salem is no fool. Grimm ravaged Mistral when they turned on her, eating into your predecessor's pool of recruits even more. Of course, by that time he had refused to listen to me and considered me a part of his madness. Any help I may have offered was rebuffed."

"Feel free to offer some now," mumbled Jaune. His reservists were talking among themselves to keep morale up, so they didn't pay him much attention. "I'll gladly let you take control if you think it'll help us."

"No. Like this, I can support your casting by offering control. Like this, we are two souls fighting alongside one another. If I took over, it would just be me." There was a deep chuckle in his mind. "You are the first to ever accept my aid, Jaune. To think it would be you, after all this time. You are not so dissimilar to how he was."

"He-?"

"Witness history for long enough and you will find elements of it repeating. I knew a Jaune Arc once, and he was so much like you. A liar and a cheat, at least at first, but a brave huntsman later, who shouldered more responsibility than anyone could have asked of him. He lost someone close to him and swore he would never lose another."

"Did he succeed?"

"No. He lost more, but he never let that break him, and he never stopped trying. Right up until the end, where others cracked, he continued fighting. I see a lot of him in you. Enough that I wonder if you don't both have the same soul." There was a moment of silence. "Forgive me. I'm distracting you with meaningless prattle."

Jaune didn't much mind it when the alternative was watching an enemy army, but he understood the necessity. The church's army had done as Sienna expected and split into two evenly sized forces. One for the main line and one for the flank he was holding. The only surprise was a small force of cavalry sweeping out to their left, to ford the river. He didn't think they'd lead to much since the water was too deep at the mouth, but the ship moored there could handle them. Maybe they were Chosen and were planning to try and force the ship out into deeper water with magic.

Among the rest of the force, the cavalry had opted to dismount and pen their horses and join the lines as infantry. They couldn't charge into the marshy wetlands, and they couldn't really navigate among the trees and ditches either. Better to go on foot than be unhorsed and risk breaking your neck. Seeing as their own forces only had enough horses for scouts and travel, that was fine. They couldn't hold the church off on flat, open ground where cavalry would constantly be harassing them.

Ahead of the enemy army, a much smaller force moved out on foot, spread out in a loose formation. There were too few of them to be skirmishers, and they had expected this anyway. Chosen. It was Salem's great weapon, and one that had served her well in the past. The dedicated force of magic users that could rain hell down on the enemy and force them to abandon their position. In a battle like this, the army with the ranged advantage could force the other onto the offensive, and the church would have loved for them to be forced to give up the defensive positions.

Jaune raised his voice. "Ready!?" he shouted. "Wait for them, and then show them what makes us so dangerous!"

There was laughter among the troops. It was nervous, strained, but they needed it, and hearing the person beside you laughing was comforting. Faunus set their weapons down, stabbing them into wood or dirt, and reached for their aura.

The Chosen stopped maybe a thousand feet away from them and, with impressive synchronicity, sent over a hundred flaming balls of fire into the sky, arching up like rocks thrown by trebuchet. It was questionable how accurate they would be for a first attempt, but it was more to cause fear than loss of life. Seeing those fireballs rain down around you would be enough to make anyone crack, and if you did stay in position then they'd find the right angle and range to hit you eventually.

"NOW!" roared Jaune.

He flung his own fire up, and with it raced easily over a thousand more. From their line, from the main line, from all up and down it, a wall of fire flew up, in such a volume that it was blinding, and that the church's own artillery was blown away. Some exploded in the air as they collided, but many hundreds more arched toward the enemy. Like the church, their own accuracy on a first attempt was nowhere close to good, but, unlike the church, they had over a thousand attempts in one go. Some were bound to land well, and the Chosen were sent scrambling.

Magical shields were erected, bubbles deflected, and other attacks were thrown up to intercept, but it was still a messy affair. The church had been so sure in its usual tactics, never once expecting that Menagerie could have mastered magic to this degree. In so short a time. It was because of people like Pyrrha, Coco, and Weiss – but also because they spent all their time training it, while much of a Chosen's early tuition was in dogma, scripture, and ceremony.

"Another volley! Send them running!"

Jaune led with his own fireball, but others took up the shout. Seeing it, the faunus in Sienna's half of the army echoed and sent another wave arching up. This time, the Chosen knew they couldn't trade. The church may have had four times their number, but they had ten times the Chosen's numbers, and that forced them to break ranks. Salem's finest turned and fled back to their lines, and trumpets and horns sounded. To the terrifying display of magic, and of fire bursting on the ground in front of them, the enemy army was forced to advance.

"Hold off for now!" shouted Adam. "Let them get closer! Don't waste your aura!"

The same order obviously hadn't been given on Sienna's side, because their aura users kept firing, but he supposed it might be better for them. They couldn't afford to be so indiscriminate once they were engaged in melee.

The enemy wanted to move in formation, as most armies did. Being tightly packed with your allies made you more confident, and moving in ranks made you feel like you were the more disciplined force. It was a small thing, but morale was made from such small matters. When you were in formation, you could also count on those at the front to keep moving, because they were being pushed forward, and those in the middle couldn't delay their advance either.

The rain of fire meant they couldn't do that. They had to split into a looser formation, and that made everything slower. At its simplest, it meant they had to take up more space and approach slower because they couldn't fit everyone close, but beyond that they also had to contend with nerves and fear at walking through a barrage of flames without the encouragement of friends at their shoulders.

The advance slowed, and it looked like it might even halt, but then the commanders began barking orders and more horns were blown. Whatever was said, it was enough to remind them they didn't have the supplies to just go home, and that they might not be welcome if they tried. The front ranks, comprised mostly of the levy, lost their nerve, but, instead of fleeing, they charged forward.

They were still a good few hundred feet out, not even at the forest, but their terror had driven them mad. In their fear, they wanted to close with the enemy. Get it over with. Escape the magical bombardment that they had been so sure would be the enemy's problem to deal with, and not theirs. They weren't disciplined like the professional soldiers, and most of them only had spears, shields and javelins. They were skirmishers at best, not even meant to hold the line but to flank and harry while the real soldiery did the worst of the fighting. They were just regular village and town folk called on to fight.

But he couldn't go easy on them because of that.

"Save your aura for the worst fighting!" shouted Blake. "Archers!"

There was no call to release. The faunus knew what they were doing. The first volley hissed out the trees and struck the charging enemy, whipping many off their feet and causing the rest to drag up their shields. Immediately, their pace slowed. They couldn't see ahead of them because of the large, oval-shaped shields designed to be locked together into a shieldwall. They could see their feet beneath them enough to avoid the ditches, but they slowed to a crawl stepping into them and between the sharpened stakes.

And those shields didn't cover everything.

Arrows thudded into the wood over and over, and it was inevitable that some would find gaps where a man was holding it too wide, never having had to use one before. Ankles, shoulders, thighs, and even the occasional scalp. Arrows found their mark by virtue of sheer volume over skill. And that was to say nothing of the enemy who simply bottled under the pressure, hunkering down behind their shields and refusing to move.

Standing in the reserve, it was hard not to feel useless. Their job was to conserve their energy so that they could respond to wherever the enemy applied the most pressure, but that meant cooling their heels for the first part of the battle. Even if he could have offered his archery skills to the line, it would have tired him out. A war bow was something that took a lot of upper body strength to draw, and he'd be fatigued by the time the main lines clashed.

Horns blared and drums sounded. They were using musical instruments to relay orders. This one appeared to be for order, or cohesion, because the professional soldiery had reached the line at last and had formed a much more organised shieldwall. The drum began to beat more slowly, a single drumbeat for a single step of the shieldwall, and then another drumbeat for the next.

Jaune thrust his hand upward and felt Ozma control his aura, spreading it out like a lightning rod toward the sky. The clouds above swirled ominously, and though he felt the tendrils of other people's aura trying to interfere, the Chosen, they were not fighting against him. They were fighting Ozma. They were trying to wrest control from a man with thousands of years' experience in this. Jaune heard the muted laughter in his head as the attempts were effortlessly batted away. Then, he heard the whisper, "It's all yours."

He dragged his hand down, slicing his fist from the sky toward the ground. There was a rumble of thunder and then a flash. The lightning struck his aura, and, like a channel, it raced down to touch the ground where Ozma had anchored it. At least, that was how it looked to anyone with his fine control.

To everyone else, it seemed like the skies had struck down with a bolt of lightning directly into the centre of the shield wall. A good number of men died immediately. Six to ten gone in a second. The rest were sent flying by the force of it, and yet more were burnt by the electrical discharge. The drummer went silent, too shocked to beat, and the shield wall crumbled. They were disciplined, true, but they were also intelligent soldiers. They knew when a shield wall was a bad idea, and that had just been proven. They were forced to break up and adopt a loose formation like their skirmishers, and that was not where their skills lay. But they still had the numbers. They still outnumbered the faunus by many thousands.

The ten or so he'd killed was meaningless in the face of that.

With a roar, the main lines clashed, and moments after, with arrows and magic flying, their lines did as well. Faunus stood upon the raised ramparts hacking and stabbing down, and Jaune's reserves tensed behind, waiting for the enemy to commit properly.

/-/

It was impossible to keep track of time, but Jaune knew it had been a while.

The enemy had closed with them at last, and the fighting was fierce. People screamed and died up and down the line, and aura didn't necessarily make their side invulnerable to it all. Faunus were dragged away from the fighting to where they could have their wounds patched up, and fresh fighters took their place. Magic exploded everywhere, and with their people so distracted, the Chosen were finally able to chip in.

They weren't able to fire upon the main line for fear of striking their own people, and for all that they fought for Salem – a monster in control of the Grimm – they thought they were on the side of good. They thought they were the civilised ones. The Chosen aimed their magic over the top, often trying to strike at the reservists, and only aiming at the line when they were using focused and precise attacks that they could be sure wouldn't hit an ally.

He would have liked to join in as well and disrupt them, but the reality of this all was that only about three thousand had engaged with their line. That was about all that realistically could, as their own forces were already shoulder to shoulder, and it wasn't like the church could stack people on top of their shoulders. That meant some seven thousand, less after all the barrages and magic, but still a significant number, were hovering back waiting to commit.

For now, they were filling in losses as Jaune's own reserves were, but he could feel them waiting for the moment to strike. They wanted to see him committed, and there was no doubt some signal horn prepped for whenever the main or flanking army saw him. They didn't know if he was here or on the main battleline, and they didn't want to commit fully until they knew for sure.

It was a standoff as a result, and, as much as he hated it, there was no arguing it wasn't a good thing for their side. The longer this dragged on, the more their aura would help them win out against tiring soldiers. Assuming their line held. One breach, one pocket, and he'd have to commit to clear that out, and then they would commit somewhere else and break the back of the defenders. It was Ozma who did the most to keep him still, being a reasonable voice in his ear.

"It is not cowardice to support your army like this. Do not even use too much aura. You will need it when the time comes. Trust in your allies; they aren't helpless. You are helping, Jaune. You are keeping thousands of trained soldiers at bay simply by existing as a possible threat. You could never kill that many if you joined the battle. You are more valuable to them all like this."

The constant litany helped keep him grounded, cutting off all the little reasons he could come up with to want to rush in and help. Instead, he kept himself busy defending the reservists. They were all capable men and women, but whenever a stray fireball would come close, or a chunk of ice would hurl toward them, he would deflect it into the ground nearby.

Something had to give.

And the church knew they had the numbers. Chances were, it'd be something on Menagerie's side that faltered. Jaune spared a glance out the forest toward the main line, but that was an ugly mess of bodies pressing against one another, with many more dead and half-buried in the wet, mushy ground. It was hard to tell if either side was winning, and it would probably stay like that until one side broke.

Adam came staggering out from the line, sweaty and streaked with blood and clasping his left shoulder. He waved a helper off, accepted a waterskin and drank greedily. "Someone take my spot!" he rasped. "I need a moment."

"How is everyone?" asked Jaune.

"Alive, as far as I can tell. Most of your lot are on the rear lines using magic. We have frontliners aplenty, so they're more valuable to us there." Adam accepted a bandage and began wrapping his arm. Jaune moved to help. "They're relentless out there. Fighting like their lives depend on it. Hah. Maybe they do. Hard to say what Salem will do if they go back having failed."

"They still haven't committed their reserves, Adam."

"I know. Expected this. They have the numbers, and they're tyring to force your hand. How is the main line?"

"I can't tell. Bloody."

"Sounds about right." He sat on a stump and stabbed his sword down into the dirt. "I'd have been dead twenty times over if not for aura. It's a rush, I'll give you that much. We're going to have to fall back to the second line soon."

Jaune hissed. "Things are going that bad?"

"No. We're winning. Sort of." Adam sighed. "We're causing a lot more losses than we're taking, but people are getting tired. That's the real problem. My speech about killing four men earlier? It wasn't wrong, but it doesn't say everything. The real killer here is going to be exhaustion, and they can afford to keep letting their people catch a breath. We can't. He took a shuddering one of his own. "We're going to need you guys to help with the retreat. Take our spots as we fall back and hold the line while we become the new reserves."

"But if they see me—"

"Don't let them see you." Adam gestured toward his head. "Use a hood, cut back on the magic. I don't know." He took several breaths in quick succession. "I just know we can't win this if we don't let our troops rest. I've swung this sword two hundred times already. I'm running on fumes. They're just trying to push us back, too. It's constant shield wall pushing. I can't cut through to the people behind. Their plan must be to drain us."

"Isn't there something we can do to turn the tables? If we killed their leader-?"

"This isn't something where killing one person will end it all. This is a trained army. They have a chain of command." Adam bit his lip. "Look, I might have a plan. Of sorts. But I'll need to catch my breath first, and we'll need to fall back."

"What are you thinking?"

"They want to see you engaged. Let's give them that. I'll take your sword, you take mine. Grab some straw to make my hair look yellow, and make sure I'm seen charging into battle like a madman. Driven insane."

"They'll do everything they can to kill you, Adam."

He flashed a tired grin. "Like they aren't doing that already, eh? Do you have a better idea?"

He didn't, but this was dangerous. Adam would become the biggest target on the battlefield, and he'd be risking his life to buy Jaune an opportunity. Once the enemy had him, they'd send in their reserves, allowing Jaune to crash with them and put his and Ozma's magic to devastating use. But it would mean abandoning Adam to hold against what would no doubt be a dedicated kill-team of Chosen handpicked to face him.

"You'll be torn apart."

"We're going to be torn apart anyway if we don't do anything!" snapped Adam. "Give me your damn sword." He took it, and Jaune didn't stop him. "Here. Look after mine for me. Someone get this guy a hood." Adam raised his voice. "Ruby! Ruby, damn you! Yes." He relaxed when she heard him and trotted over. Ruby was exhausted, but she was alive, safe behind the lines throwing magic over them. "Go tell the drummers to signal the retreat. We're falling back to the second defensive line."

"A-Already!?"

"It's okay. Jaune and I." He jerked his thumb between the both of them. "We have a plan. This is all part of that. It'll work out." Under his breath he added. "It had better work out."

It had better, or Adam would be throwing his life away for nothing. Jaune accepted the cloak someone offered him and pulled the hood up. His reservists had already passed the orders down the line, and they were ready to hold the line while the exhausted troops retreated, then fall back slowly themselves. The log fortifications would buy some short time while the attackers scaled over them, and they'd use that to get back to the next line.

As the drums in the forest began to beat, Jaune marched forward with Adam's sword in hand.

Getting solar panels installed on the roof today. Energy costs in the UK are twice what the average is in Europe, which I suppose it just another one of those "Brexit benefits" we get to enjoy. I was even planning on getting some fish and chips later, but my favourite place has closed down because of those same costs. Booo.

Next Chapter: 13th August

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