"If the Empress' mages manage to establish a safe Gate past Dograth, the castles that secure the bottleneck will become nothing more than a bunch of useless rocks!" The Lich took flight, moving against the invaders.
Veeza alone had the prowess of a battalion and thanks to her phylactery, she was nigh immortal.
Several units moved outside the city walls to surround the remaining human devices, to force the enemy to reveal their hand while the main undead force remained inside Dograth on standby.
It took Veeza a handful of seconds to get close to the open Gate enough to be able to attack it with her spells. The ground quaked as several tons of earth engulfed with purple flames started floating.
It was Veeza's tier five spell, Shooting Stars, a mix of fire, earth, and gravity magic. The detached ground split into giant flaming rocks that flew at near sonic speed against the human array.
Gravity magic allowed the usually slow earth to overcome its boundaries, making it as light as a feather while Veeza threw them up in the sky and then heavier than lead once they had been locked on their target.
The gravitational slingshot effect gave each one of the projectiles the momentum of a falling mountain.
A lonely figure flew up in the sky, unleashing a tier four gravity magic spell, Wheel of Fate.
The night air was suddenly distorted into a black whirlpool that sucked in the Shooting Stars, making them explode against each other while they were still in mid-air, still too far away from their intended target to deal any damage to the Empire's Gates.
Wheel of Fate used gravity magic to trap its target in a loop and darkness magic to engulf them and smother whatever effect the enemy spell had, turning even Shooting Star's roaring explosions into the muffled sound of a distant firework.
"Nice try!" Milea said while activating her tier five spell Manastorm. She traced with her right forefinger an arc of emerald green light in the air in front of herself.
The crescent released a barrage of emerald bullets made of pure mana, each one with the power of a cannonball.
Veeza activated the barriers built in her magical defenses, but the sheer number of bullets and their might was enough to shoot her down to the ground.
Spirit magic spells had no weakness aside from the huge amount of mana they required, making the Lich's elemental barriers unable to keep up with the emerald onslaught. The projectiles pierced through the Lich's conjured defenses one after the other as if they were nothing more than silk sheets.
Meanwhile, the remaining devices surrounding Dograth activated. Once again the troops coming out the dimensional Gates ignored the fortresses and moved to secure the human vanguard's back while leaving behind just enough soldiers to keep the incoming undead at bay.
"This cannot be! A proper Gate requires more than just a few stones and a bunch of mana crystals. It must be aligned with Mogar's mana lines for grounding and requires adequate protection. Otherwise, all you have is a devastating dimensional bomb."
The Lich unleashed all the spells stored inside her artifacts to buy herself the time she needed to chant her next move.
"So what? It just means that in case we can't defend the conquered lands, I can make sure that the humans you keep as cattle will not have enough food to survive and in turn your army will starve as well." Milea sneered.
"It pains me to sacrifice my people and my land, but in war, collateral damage is unavoidable."
Veeza had never hated Awakened beings so much. They could weave their spells silently, had access to spirit magic, and seemed to have access to an infinite source of mana.
The Lich had no idea what Milea was conjuring, whereas the Empress could predict the elements Veeza would employ based on her chant.
At the Lich's signal, the undead army came out of Dograth and of all the undead fortresses in the Empire, so to turn Milea's plan against her. Every soldier or mage she was employing for her gamble was missing from their original position, weakening the human battlefront somewhere else.
The Empire's army stationed in front of Dograth finally moved forward to intercept the enemy, revealing its numbers to be unchanged. Contrary to Veeza's predictions, it was the undead who flooded the valley in front of the twin cities, moving fast and smoothly like a river, whereas the humans advanced at a slow pace.
The Empire's troops moved forward while keeping their ranks close and their shields even closer. The front rows were comprised of Mage Knights, who fused their conjured defenses together, sharing the burden of the incoming volley of darkness-based spells and forming a living dam that easily stopped the enemy's march.
"Something is wrong." Sukhet the Banshee's voice resounded inside Veeza's communication earpiece. "Only the devices on the north and east side of the cities have formed Gates. The others are still inactive even now that the battle has begun."
The Lich could only reply with a grunt to not interrupt her chant. At the same time, she accessed to all her surveillance artifact at the same time, to better grasp her forces' predicament.
'What the fuck?'
It took her just a quick glance to notice that it was only the undead army to have conjured their reserve troops. The number of people coming out of the dimensional Gates barely reached one thousand, making them irrelevant.
Milea's plan made less sense by the second as the living dead outnumbered the Empire's forces with each soldier that stepped out the fortresses. Yet there was no chaos nor fear among the human ranks.
Despite the fact that the outcome of the battle was already written in stone, the Lich felt the need to get rid of the Empress as quickly as possible. Milea was about to face an army and Veeza at the same time, yet she was so calm that she inspired terror in the Lich's long-dead heart.
Veeza unleashed her tier three gravity spell, Collapse, increasing Mogar's gravitational pull one hundred-fold. Trees collapsed, incapable of bearing their own weight, and rocks cracked as a crater formed in an area several hundreds of meters around Veeza.
The magic fueling the Gate and the gravity field surrounding it allowed the dimensional tunnel to resist the onslaught, but the people caught by the spell weren't so lucky. Some of Milea's finest operatives were turned into meat paste as their skeletons broke down, piercing through their flesh and organs.
The Empress herself didn't come out unscathed. Milea found herself suddenly bleeding from her eyes and ears since no magical protection could save her from the burden that her own body had become.
Only her perfect body refinement allowed her to survive long enough to conjure a gravity field of her own to counter the enemy's. The Lich's bones weren't as sturdy, so they cracked and broke non-stop, but her regenerative abilities were so great that her body still managed to keep performing difficult spells without missing a syllable or hand sign.
Veeza's jaw almost fell more than once, but her voice had nothing to do with her lungs or throat. It came from her blood core, just like the tier four Chaos spell, Howling Void.
