Chapter 49: Volume 3 Chapter 15 – Massive Strike (Part 3/4)

Torsten Asgeirsen closed his eyes as he immersed his thoughts in the icy winds.

He rode atop his drake at the head of the column, flying through the clear night skies above the thick clouds and the raging blizzard below. Without the enchanted shirt he wore beneath his heavy drakeskin armor, the cold air buffeting his exposed face would have left ice crystals in his thin beard. Yet to an experienced Outrider, the feeling of cutting through wintry winds was the epitome of blissful serenity.

No man could become an Outrider without loving this paradise. To appreciate the flawless beauty of the open heavens, unveiled by bashful clouds and untouched by the desires of men -- such was the duty of every being who wished to master the skies.

The Wickers' air cavalry simply did not understand it. Despite all their three-dimensional combat training, they had no real feel for aerial maneuvers. To them, the skies were just multiple layers of flat plains at different altitudes.

Torsten almost felt sorry for those poor heathens... almost.

After all, those Wickers and the Imps who once backed them were the aggressors. They were the ones who settled upon the Hyperboreans' promised land and began over a thousand years of enmity. All the wars that resulted were entirely their fault.

They deserved to die.

...Or so he told himself.

Torsten did not like this mission, if he were to be honest. There was no glory in massacring a city through aerial bombardment. Yet the Weichsel army gathering in Nordkreuz left him no choice.

As the firstborn son of Admiral Asgeirr Vintersvend and the commander of Polarlys' air group, it was his duty to lead the assault. Against this duty to his people, his nation, his family, his comrades, and his friends, his personal feelings and sense of ethics weighed next to nothing.

He focused on his Pathfinder guidance spell once more and realized that their distance to Nordkreuz beacon had fallen under a kilopace at last.

Their mission was simple: to lay waste to the city before the Weichsel air cavalry could return. Only by destroying the city's fortifications and crippling the Weichsel army gathered there will Skagen's main force have a chance of successfully storming the settlement.

The Skagen army didn't need to occupy the whole city. However they needed at least enough of a breach for his father to tap the ley-line junction which lay inside the walls.

It's time.

Torsten pulled four pebbles from his pocket and threw them into the air. The runes on them triggered as they left his hand, bursting into flares of red, blue, yellow, and black. They formed an emergency call for aid in Hyperborean maritime communications. Yet on the precipice of battle, the combination carried another special meaning:

'The fate of our people lies in your hands.'

"<Commence attack!>" Torsten sent to squadron leaders over the command telepathy channel as he pulled his drake into a leftward dive. "<Group Polarlys with me to northern gate and fortifications. Group Lyngbakr to eastern gate and camps. Group Hafgufa to southern gate and camps. and Group Livjatan the central city and docks. Brothers! Let's send these Wickers to the freezing mists of Hel!>"

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He didn't really need to repeat their orders. His men were the best and already knew their jobs. Nevertheless he felt the moment needed a bit more 'oomph' to precede his last line. Unfortunately, his scholarly father hadn't passed down much in the ways of oratory skills.

"<Yes Sir!>"

The strike groups began splitting up even before their commanders responded. Volcanic drakes in cloudy-gray illusory camouflage banked away from the aerial armada by the dozens. The separate units flew in loose formations as they plunged straight into the clouds.

Skagen Outriders didn't practice the neat arrays their Weichsel counterparts fought in. But then, they didn't need to. They much preferred scrambling the battle into one giant mess and letting individual superiority carry the day.

Torsten activated two more runestones just as he dived out of the freezing clouds. His eyes began to radiate an icy blue as Snow Sight allowed his vision to see through the blizzard as though the snow was transluscent. His partner's retracted wings also shimmered faintly, embraced by a Stormblessed spell that shifted the winds to its favor.

After verifying his target in the distance, Torsten tugged the reins and swerved right before urging his drake into a yet steeper plunge.

Thirty-one more volcanic drakes followed in his wake. Each of them dived towards the ground at a slightly different angle. Each rider aimed for a separate tower or length of walls as gravity accelerated them through over a thousand paces of air, basking in the thrill of free fall just before the kill.

Seven hundred... six hundred... five hundred!

"DROP! DROP! DROP!" Torsten shouted over both the howling winds and the telepathy channel.

Releasing his reins for a moment, Torsten first touched two runes in the front of his saddle. They disengaged the 'safety' sticking spells that kept the payload containers closed. He then reached behind and grabbed two small metal loops held up by the back of his saddle. Yanking both forward with all his strength, he pulled out the heavy duty cords attached to each loop. These cords fed through several pulleys, around the drake's sides, and connected to the lids of two long, metal boxes bound to the mount's underside.

Tugged back by the cords, the container lids slid open, revealing hundreds of rune-inscribed stones.

As Torsten took back his reins and urged his drake out of its dive, gravity and the difference in velocity accelerated those rocks out of their compartment. They scattered into the air as they emerged, forming two rough 'blankets' of massed bomblets that fell toward the gatehouse below.

The runestones came in numerous varieties, from single-spell pebbles that exploded in lightning or shrapnel, to multi-spell combinations that could penetrate structures and set interiors ablaze. There were even runes attached to shrunken down barrels of noxious alchemical liquids.

But the most dangerous kind came from the Admiral himself. Packed all the way in the back to avoid being struck by counterspells, these runestones surrounded themselves with a Dispel Barrier once they entered free fall to protect against Mana Seekers and other antimagic spells. After they landed, the Animated rocks would roll until they struck earth or stone ground. From there, high-powered Tectonic spells would reach deep underground and send violent tremors throughout the city.

With over a hundred runestones per container, two containers per drake, and four groups totaling one-hundred-twenty-eight drakes, Torsten's strike force would dump more than twenty-six thousand magical munitions over the city of Nordkreuz.

Amidst the blizzard brought forth by Admiral Winter, the skies literally rained death.

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