Ascendant

In Nym’s experience, ghouls weren’t actually that dangerous to a prepared mage. They won primarily through numbers and ambush tactics, and they weren’t even that good at ambushes since they really only had one trick. Any mage with a decent repertoire of second circle spells wouldn’t have a problem defeating a single ghoul. A simple flight spell was enough to completely negate almost all danger from them, as they had no way to pursue and never used any sort of weapons, ranged or otherwise.

Ghouls were normally very easy to distract. As soon as they got ahold of someone, it was dinner time, regardless of whether that person was still alive. Their all-consuming hunger was so great that even attacking them wasn’t always enough of a distraction from gorging themselves on meat. A macabre hunting party could set out a bait pile of dead bodies and pick ghouls off at their leisure as the undead locked in on the meat and ignored the live humans around them.

The ghouls assaulting the ninth outpost were not acting the way every other ghoul he’d encountered had. For the first time, Nym understood exactly why wights were such a big deal. He was sure they were extremely difficult opponents on their own, but the fact that they forced a semblance of military discipline on the ghouls they controlled was the real problem.

 Nym saw a soldier go down, his throat ripped out, and the ghoul that did it just stepped over the body to attack the next one on the wall. Ghouls retreated when they lost limbs instead of continuing to fight. The soldiers were then distracted by other ghouls, and the still-living limbs would wiggle, crawl, or flop their way back towards their owners to be picked up and reattached.

Even the body parts that the soldiers managed to kick off the back walls into the fire pits set up below them were not going down easily. There were three people in the courtyard with long sticks pushing the squirming limbs back into the fire, and all three of them were busy running laps from wall to wall to keep the limbs contained.

A ghoul managed to pull itself together despite the fire and caused a minor panic when it clawed its way out of the pit to rise up and attack the non-combat staff in charge of keeping them contained. Before the ghoul could cause any damage, Captain Lygan leaped off the balcony he’d been giving orders from and split it in two with a vicious slash from an oversized axe. The pit handlers rushed forward to hack it back apart and scatter its pieces into different fires.

Nym landed next to him, surprising the man. “God’s balls! Don’t do that!” he swore.

“Sorry,” Nym said. “Where did you send my companions? I need to get back to them.”

The captain gave him a confused look. “They left minutes after you did. No freelancer is going to stick around and volunteer for this kind of a fight without an official job paying them for it.”

“What? But what about the job we had to sweep for ghouls? They’re all right here. Aren’t we supposed to kill them?”

“You’re a green one, huh?” the captain said grimly. “Come on, give me a lift back up there will you?”

Nym flew them up to the balcony, where he resumed bellowing orders to various soldiers, commanding the reserves to reinforce different sections of the walls as the ghouls surged. “Are those dirt things yours?” he asked, pointing at the east wall.

“Yeah. It looked like they needed something to take some pressure off.”

“Good eye. Probably saved at least two of my soldiers,” Captain Lygan said. He sighed and added, “But you should get out of here. You’re not getting paid for this and you’re not part of the army. We’ll hold until the artillery mages show up.”

“About that,” Nym said. “The guys who took the message were arguing about if they were going to send anyone at all. They said there wasn’t a squad close enough to arrive that was combat-ready.”

Captain Lygan let out a blistering string of curses, stopping only to shout down at the courtyard to tell the mages working on a ritual spell down there to hurry up. One of them looked up, gave him the finger, and continued pouring arcana into the spell the three of them were building.

Nym’s eyebrows shot up, but the captain just sighed and shook his head. “My brother,” he said wryly. “He knows he’ll pay for it later, if there is a later. But he can’t help himself.”

“How can I help?” Nym asked.

“You really want to?”

At Nym’s nod, the captain said, “Help move the reserves faster. Get them airborne so they can react to a push instantly. That’ll save more lives than anything else.”

“I can do that,” Nym said. “The golems will crumble if I don’t keep them powered.”

The captain nodded. “Go warn them first so they’re not caught off-guard.”

Nym lifted into the air and flew over to the east wall. There he used one of the new spells he’d picked up from the book Analia’d secured for him and wove a construct to paralyze undead. It would only hold for a few seconds, long enough for the soldiers to hopefully chop them apart. Nym unleashed it on the closest ghoul, then another, and third in rapid succession. “It won’t last long,” he called out. “Take them out now!”

The golems collapsed once he cut their arcana supply, but the soldiers had the opening they needed to dismember the ghouls and throw the body parts over the back of the wall into the fire pits, or at least near enough that the handlers could kick them in the rest of the way. He supposed accuracy took a back seat to speed when new ghouls were already breaching the walls.

Nym hit those with paralysis spells too before he flew back to the captain. “Ready, sir.”

For the next twenty minutes, Nym ferried the eight reserve soldiers in two groups between different walls at Captain Lygan’s orders to reinforce any faltering spots in the line. He watched the other mages when he could, studying their attacks to see if he could duplicate them. The water mage wasn’t doing anything special beyond basic hydrokinesis with a freezing and expanding twist added to it, but with a large enough volume of water, it was proving extremely effective.

It was the sword mage that really got his attention. He’d tried his hand at controlling a weapon telekinetically, and while he was sure he could lift nine swords at once, and he struggled to pull them back out of the wooden practice panels. Somehow she was not only controlling that many weapons, but also hacking clean through most ghouls that came close. He wanted to study the spell closer, but there was little time for diversions.

He did determine that it wasn’t just telekinesis, but something second circle that served to increase its power while being molded with a twist of divination that he suspected gave her some kind of proprioception that helped keep track of where the blades where. Nym resolved to revisit that spell later and maybe make a trip back to that weapons store once he’d mastered it.

However it worked, the woman mage was holding a stretch of wall twenty feet wide by herself. If she could have gotten the parts she hacked off the ghouls over the walls into the burn pits, her effectiveness would have been tripled. The wights seemed to agree with Nym’s assessment, because two of them teamed up to work against her. One launched constant bursts of arcana she had to defend against, and the other coordinated the ghouls using some sort of hive mind spell that kept them covering for each other and recovering any lost limbs for easy reattachment.

For all of that, the north wall was probably the most stable, followed by the west wall. The ghouls had largely abandoned any attempt to breach it as the water mage there’s spells hit far less targets, but the ones he did had a much harder time getting back into the battle. His range wasn’t great though, and when the ghouls shifted away to mass at a different point on the wall, he couldn’t chase after them without another group attacking the spot he’d abandoned.

For Nym though, most of his work involved moving the reserves back and forth between the east and the south wall. The ghouls took the most losses there, but only because they pressed the hardest against the soldiers who did their best to toss any ghouls they hacked up into the burn pits. The third and final wight also alternated between the two walls, and whatever side he focused on, the ghouls grew stronger and more ferocious.

“Damn it, we’re not going to last at this point,” Captain Lygan said. “If they don’t get that artillery spell going in the next ten minutes, we’re going to be overwhelmed.”

“Why is it taking so long?” Nym asked, wiping sweat from his face.

“There’s only three of them. A full squad is twenty. They said it’d take an hour to finish.”

“We need more time,” Nym said. “If we could take out one of the wights, that would take a lot of pressure off.”

“That’s what the artillery spell is for.” The captain pointed to a spot on the south wall where six ghouls had clawed their way up the stone and were pushing back the defenders. “Reserves there!”

Nym flew four soldiers up to help push the ghouls back and turned his attention back to the captain. “West wall is starting to have problems too. I think the mage there is almost tapped out.”

“Aren’t we all,” the captain said. “There’s no way out of this. It might be time for you to escape.”

“What if I took a wall like the other mages? You could move soldiers around then?”

“That would be incredibly foolhardy,” Captain Lygan. “You’re strong for your age, but those ghouls won’t go easy on you just because you’re young.”

“I’ve fought them before,” Nym said.

The captain hesitated, then said, “It could work. I don’t like it, but it could work. Are you sure you can do it?”

“No,” Nym said bluntly. “I’m more than half spent, but do we have another choice?”

The captain waivered. Nym could see his mind scrambling to find another solution, but in the end, he shook his head. “Take the south wall, right in the middle. We’ll shift soldiers to the west and east to help solidify those lines. You need to hold for at least another twenty minutes.”

“Got it.” Nym floated up into the air, but before he could leave, the captain grabbed his arm.

“The ghouls cannot get into the courtyard, no matter what. If they breach the walls and make it to the artillery mages, we’re all dead.”

“I understand.”

“Good luck, son. And… thank you for coming back.”

Nym flew to the center wall and landed. He launched paralysis spells at the ghouls already on the wall so that the men could cut them apart, then yelled for them to spread out and give him some room. He’d spent some time considering his options when he was shifting the reserves around, and come to the conclusion that lightning bolt was too costly to use on a single ghoul when there were still hundreds of them left.

Setting them on fire didn’t actually stop them until they’d burned down to charred skeletons. It was a disposal tactic, not a combat one. He didn’t need to actually kill them, just hold them back until the artillery mages could take out the wights. Once that happened, the rest of the fight would just be clean up, he hoped. For that, he opted to play to his strengths.

Simple elemental air magic to shove ghouls back as they crested the walls would take the least amount of arcana. His only concern was that if he didn’t do enough damage, their numbers would begin to build up and overwhelm him. If they got too thick though, he’d fry the whole group with lightning.

The first ghouls leaped up onto the wall, and Nym got to work.