Reitz ignored the pain clawing at his side.
It was there—bright, hot, wrong—every time he twisted his torso, every time his lungs expanded against bruised ribs and stabbed flesh. The cauterization had stopped the leak, but it hadn't undone the damage. Every movement sent a shockwave through his nervous system, like someone was jabbing a branding iron into his kidney.
The pain, he could handle. It wasn't the pain it was the stab. The stab looked fatal. It was fatal for commoners, however for a high ranking mage like him, it should just be a major inconvenience. He drove mana to the direction of the wound, to strengthen it and heal it as he went along. But there was something... different.
Even with this amount of damage he should have been able to control his mana perfectly, but somehow he was leaking. It wasn't a lot, it was just odd.
Pain was one thing, it could wait. Pain meant he was still alive. The leak however, was another thing.
Focus, he told himself.
In the heartbeat after Allister became glass and ash, the battlefield reacted.
Four figures blurred inward, their grey cloaks snapping in the heat, boots skidding on fractured stone. They didn't hesitate. They didn't posture. This was Imperial Military Doctrine – textbook procedure for closing in on a higher-level combatant.
They fanned out around him in a diamond, hands already dropping toward the ground.
Reitz's vision tinted orange through the slits of his burning helm. The heat of his own Flame Armor distorted the air, but he could see them clearly enough.
Their auras flared bright in his senses—dense, compact knots of power. Not flickers like hedge mages. Not the soft glow of Knights.
These were Noble-rank. Around baron level, third circle. Maybe higher.
Reitz raised one of his eyebrows. He grinned inside the helm.
"Come on, then, show me who paid for you," Reitz growled.
Two of them slammed their palms into the dirt.
The ground softened.
Stone turned to sludge, a circular patch under Reitz's feet and theirs liquefying like hot wax. The earth sagged, then dropped, turning into a bowl-shaped depression five yards across.
The other two mages had their arms sheathed in stone—thick gauntlets up to the shoulder, jagged and heavy. As the pit formed, they bent their knees.
Catapult, Reitz realized a heartbeat before it triggered. It was another standard tactic.
The bowl of softened earth didn't just harden—it rebounded, snapping upward with vicious force.
The two gauntlet-wielders were launched like human projectiles, the spell turning them into boulders with brains. One rose high, a streak of stone-clad muscle aiming at Reitz's head. The other hugged the lower arc, fists drawn back to shatter his knees and anchor him in the kill zone.
A pincer designed specifically for someone who liked to stand his ground and trade blows.
They thought he would block.
He didn't.
Reitz jumped.
The world slowed.
It wasn't a wild leap. It was calculated—he knew exactly how much mana to spend to hit that gap. At least, he should have. It burned through his reserves harder than it had any right to.
For a moment, he was suspended between them, mid-air, the two stone-armed mages rushing past like meteors on either side.
The mages' eyes widened as they realized he'd taken the narrow gap they'd left only as bait.
Reitz didn't bother raising his hands. He didn't need to. He just needed to see.
He willed mana to condense at two points—chest and knee. In an instant the Flame Armor thickened and burst outward, its surface flickering as he forced mana into those points.
Reitz furrowed his brows. There it was... the leak.
Two lances of compressed fire burst from him.
Thwip.
Two lances one fluid movement—a brutal ballet. The upper mage took the one through the chest.
His stone armor didn't matter. The lance pierced rock, mail, and ribs in one smooth line, exiting between the shoulder blades. For a fraction of a second, Reitz saw the man's silhouette glowing from the inside, like a kiln full of pottery caught mid-firing.
Then the body lost cohesion and turned to ash, the gauntleted arms still punching at phantom air as they crumbled.
The lower mage instinctively tried to guard, mana flaring desperately around his arms.
It didn't even matter.
The other met his shoulder, drove him downward like a hammer, and pinned him into the ground. He hit with a sickening crunch. The fire cut out an instant later, but the momentum—and the half-molten earth beneath him—finished the job. His skull crumpled under his own weight. Then his body was ash.
Reitz hit the ground in a three-point landing, Flame Armor throwing sparks where it scraped stone.
He stood, exhaling slowly, steam hissing from the vents of his helm.
He huffed; his wound wasn't healing.
Two down.
His eyes—those burning slits in the demon-mask—fixed on the remaining pair.
They were still standing at the pit's edge, hands on the ground, realization dawning that the second half of their perfect execution had become a double funeral.
For a heartbeat, Reitz simply looked at them.
Then he laughed.
The sound rolled out of the helm like a broken furnace.
"Forty mages?" he shouted, his voice amplified by the heat-distorted air. "Just forty of you?"
He spread his arms slightly, the Flame Armor flaring brighter around him.
"Are you insulting me?"
There was no bluff in his tone. No forced bravado. Just genuine indignation.
He was the Ashbringer—Augmenti of the Rex, the man who turned battlefields into graveyards of dust. Forty Baron-level mages wasn't a death squad. It was an annoyance.
"You better let your employer kill me instead," he roared, pointing a flaming gauntlet at them. "You small-fry don't have the ability. Do you think I am some country Lord?"
The two earth mages traded a glance. He could feel their aura flicker—the sharp spike of instinctive fear, quickly suppressed by training.
They started to retreat.
"You are not going anywhere," Reitz hissed.
He moved.
His guard had already fallen back into formation behind him as it tightened, shields interlocking, leaving a clear lane down the center. They didn't need to be told. They knew what happened next.
Reitz ignored the throbbing in his side. He kicked off the half-melted ground and sprinted.
Most mages needed stillness to work. The mind could only handle so much at once—maintaining a construct, modulating mana flow, shaping the aura—all while reciting the complicated, archaic chants honed by generations.
Reitz ran anyway.
Stone shards and broken spears crunched under his boots. His Flame Armor threw off sheets of sparks. He wove through fallen men and carved-out trenches, never slowing.
And he began to chant.
\[ Oh most wondrous, Fire of heaven the sun ]
The words carved a pattern down the center of his mind. He didn't picture the sun abstractly; he pictured a burning sphere caged in his ribs, imprisoned behind his sternum.
\[ Thy light shines upon both valorous and evil ]
His awareness split.
Part of him tracked footing, distance, the way the two mages glanced back, gauging his range. Part of him traced invisible lines in the air, plotting where they would be in three heartbeats.
\[ By day thee art the scorn of toil, the scourge of darkness ]
Shift Casting.
Very few could do it. Moving while chanting, fighting while running a second track of thought that held the geometry of the spell intact. Most mages stumbled, their mental construct collapsing the moment their attention diverted.
Reitz didn't.
His Flame Armor flickered.
The helm and pauldrons dissolved, molten light sliding back into his core. He stripped his defenses voluntarily, ripping the mana away from protection to fuel the forming orb in his chest.
Now, the earth mages thought.
They felt the drop in pressure, the momentary weakness in his aura. Training screamed at them to exploit it.
They stopped retreating and braced, palms hitting the ground, ready to raise walls, spikes, or seize his ankles.
They were too slow.
\[ May thy frown beest upon those who doth me harm ]
The heat pooled at a point just behind them, an invisible knot ten inches above the ground.
\[ And the fire ablaze pour forth toward mine enemies ]
Reitz's eyes never left their backs.
He wasn't aiming at their bodies.
He was aiming at the instinct every trained imperial fighter had—the tiny hop backward when death rushed their way.
He had seen it a thousand times. He had drilled it into his own soldiers. Step back on threat. Yield the inches. Reset your stance.
They stepped.
\[ Fire Implosion! ]
The air screamed.
The temperature behind their skulls spiked past reason. For a single instant, a sphere the size of a barrel turned into a miniature sun. Pressure collapsed inward, then detonated outward.
BOOM.
The two earth mages didn't even have time to scream.
From the outside, it looked like someone had swung a hammer through fog.
One head turned into red mist, fragments vaporizing faster than human eyes could track. The torso lost coherence, flesh and bone pulverized into a spray of ash and wet dust.
The other mage fared no better. The explosion hit his upper spine and ribcage full-on, ripping him forward. His head vanished. A smoking arc of something that might have once been skull flew high into the air, trailing embers, before disappearing over the ridge.
Where they had stood was a scorched crater.
Reitz stumbled to a halt, boots skidding. The Flame Armor flickered back over his shoulders and helm a heartbeat later, but thinner, less bright.
His lungs burned. He spat a glob of blood onto the cracked stone. This shouldn't have been too much—a fourth-circle spell. But the burn felt like he'd just thrown a fifth-circle one. The mana cost wasn't adding up A leak.
Now it was noticeable, but he composed himself. He didn't have time to let his attention drift.
"Predictable," he growled. Whether he meant the spell's effect or their footwork even he didn't know.
The battlefield went quiet.
Not silent—men still shouted, horses still screamed where they were pinned under broken carts, the mountain still groaned under the Earth mages' distant working—but something changed.
The center of the chaos… stilled.
Every eye that could see turned toward him.
The Ashbringer stood alone in a ring of glassed earth and bone dust, four masks' worth of killers erased from existence in the span of a few breaths.
"…Ashbringer."
The word slipped out of someone's mouth like an exhale.
It came from near the rear—one of the injured men-at-arms, pressing a torn sleeve against his own bleeding flank, eyes wide and glassy.
"Ashbringer."
Another voice picked it up, this time from the archers' line.
"Ashbringer!"
The sergeant behind the shattered wagon snorted softly.
"Here we go," he muttered.
The whisper spread.
Men who had been huddled behind their shields straightened just a little. Archers who had been flinching at every stone spike now leaned around them, eyes burning.
"ASHBRINGER! ASHBRINGER!"
The canyon caught the chant and threw it back, the walls turning the name into a war drum.
The boy with the cheap spear felt his heart slam against his ribs in time with the roar. His terror didn't vanish, but it found something to cling to—something hot and wild and bigger than his fear.
The sergeant rolled his shoulders, loosening the stiffness in his arms. He did this to release the the tension his muscle built up as he buckled beneath the shield.
The boy swallowed. "He—he killed four of them like—"
"Bugs" the sergeant snorted, finishing the sentence.
He watched as Reitz turned away from the crater, shoulders rising and falling with each ragged breath, Flame Sabre still burning bright at his side.
"Don't get cocky, though," the sergeant added. "You know why we are here? Our job is to get close enough that they have to worry about us. The bastards know even we're a problem if we get into stabbing distance."
"But—"
"Shut up and keep your shield up," the older man grunted. "just don't die while the Lord turns his annoyance into ash. "
On the ridges and behind the earthen barricades, the enemy mages felt the shift in morale like a change in pressure.
The Blackfyre troops were no longer collapsing. They were rallying.
Archers took firing positions on higher ground, using the broken terrain for cover. Men-at-arms re-formed around the Great Flame Formation, shields overlapping in a disciplined half-circle behind their Lord.
The earth mages had suppressed an army.
Now they were facing an army with a god of war at the front.
The ones flanking the main force knew they couldn't maintain their positions.
"Pull back!" someone shouted in a clipped, professional tone completely out of place for "bandits". "Regroup with the main squad! Do not engage the target alone!"
Three mages on the eastern ridge broke cover, sliding down a slope of loose scree, using stone bulwarks to block arrows as they ran toward the main barrier where the strongest of their number waited.
Reitz watched them go.
The laugh that rasped out of his helm was low and ugly.
"Too slow," he snarled.
He moved before any of his men could think to stop him.
He didn't sprint at full speed this time. He couldn't. The Fire Implosion had eaten a chunk of his reserves. It shouldn't have. He caught his breath as the stab in his side screamed protest with every heavy stride. His Flame Armor adjusted, thinning around his legs, thickening around his core.
Mana allocation was a habit burned into his bones.
He raised his right hand.
The fire around his forearm dimmed, then shrank entirely, sucked inward toward his palm.
A tiny ember appeared in the center of his gauntlet.
Reitz fed it.
In an instant the ember grew into a line, then into a spear of pure, coherent fire—twenty yards long, tapering to a wicked point. It crackled in the air, the heat bending light around it, making the edges of the world ripple.
He didn't stop running.
He drew his arm back. He didn't even need to cast. He just needed to visualize.
Thwack.
The spear crossed the distance in the time it took a man to blink.
It punched through the back of the rear-most fleeing mage, entering between the shoulder blades and exiting out the sternum. The impact lifted the man clean off his feet and carried him forward, nailing him to a tree trunk.
He never got the chance to scream. Flame crawled greedily along his limbs, consuming cloth, hair, skin. In seconds, he was a charcoal silhouette bolted to blackened wood.
The second mage risked a glance back, saw what pinned his comrade, and broke.
He bolted.
His aura flared panic-bright, feet churning up dust, casting clumsy stone bulwarks behind him.
Zip.
An arrow hummed through the air and buried itself in his calf.
The mage shrieked, stumbling, his forward momentum turning into an ugly tumble.
On the ridgeline, one of the Blackfyre archers lowered his bow, hands still trembling.
"Got you, you bastard," he whispered.
The stumble was all Reitz needed.
He reached the fallen mage in three strides.
The Flame Sabre hissed into existence along the outside of his right hand again, sprouting from the base of his thumb like a third, lethal finger. The blade hummed, a tight line of blue-white fire that buzzed against the very air.
Reitz swung once.
The cut was mercifully quick.
The mage hit the ground in two pieces, the joining line sealed by heat.
Reitz didn't spare him a second glance. He was already moving.
**
Near the earthen barricade, four more Noble-rank earth mages felt their numbers thinning.
"He's cutting through the outer teams," one of them snarled, sensing the loss of auras. "We can't let him reach this position or—"
He didn't finish the sentence.
Reitz was already on them.
They ran.
These ones didn't bother with subtlety now. They raised walls, pits, and spikes in desperation, the ground buckling as they hurled terrain in his path.
A ridge of stone lunged up, trying to clothesline him.
Reitz dropped into a slide, knees bent, the greaves of his Flame Armor throwing sparks as they scraped along the newly raised rock, skimming under the obstruction with inches to spare.
A pit opened where he should have landed.
He kicked off the sliding momentum, twisting his body in the air to clear the gap.
Spikes reacted late, bursting out of the ground where his feet had been.
The mages cursed, hands a blur on the dirt.
They were good.
Just not good enough.
Somewhere to his left, someone launched a boulder at his back—an opportunistic caster with a heavier specialty. This should have been a longer spell to chant.
Reitz didn't turn. He knew it was coming.
He felt it in his field—that subtle bowing of air and disturbance in the pressure behind him. The Flame Armor hummed, the heat like a second skin extending his awareness.
He jumped backward.
The timing was perfect.
His boots met the boulder's rough surface as it screamed past, the stone already glowing faintly from the ambient heat of the battlefield.
He bent his knees as if he were on solid ground.
Then he kicked.
For a heartbeat, Reitz rode the projectile—a demon of fire standing on a moving mountain.
He launched himself off it, using its momentum as a springboard. The boulder continued on and smashed into an abandoned cart, obliterating it in a shower of splinters.
Reitz became a streak.
He landed behind two of the fleeing mages, the impact sending a shockwave through the cracked earth.
They had just enough time to begin turning.
Slash. Slash.
One stroke. Two lives.
The Flame Sabre whispered through the air, carving a diagonal line across the first mage's torso from hip to shoulder, then reversing into a horizontal stroke that took the second at the waist.
Both men fell in smoking halves... then ash.
The remaining two spun around, pure reflex turning their fear into attack.
They fired stone bullets at point-blank range, each rock the size of a man's fist, packed with lethal kinetic energy.
Thud. Thud.
The projectiles slammed into Reitz's chest.
His Flame Armor flared on instinct, a dense layer of burning mana hardening in front of the cuirass. The stones hit, disintegrated, and turned into a fine spray of dust that hissed across the glowing plates.
He took two staggering steps back, the impact radiating pain from his wounded side, but he didn't fall.
"You little sh\ts," Reitz growled, his voice a rumble from inside the helm.
He loomed over them, shoulders squared, sabre humming.
"Flies," Reitz spat.
He raised his hand again, preparing to condense another spear, to erase them as cleanly as Allister.
Whoosh.
The sky answered before he could.
A hail of stones zoomed toward him—dozens of them, each as large as a man's head. They shot at oblique angles, slamming into the ground around him, forcing him to move.
Reitz bobbed and weaved as he cursed and twisted, dodging left, then right, hopping to avoid the worst of it.
"Fuck," Reitz wheezed
One stone clipped his shoulder, jarring the Flame Armor. Another exploded at his feet, sending a shockwave up his legs.
The two mages used the distraction to dive away, rolling behind a newly raised wall of jagged rock.
Reitz shouldered through a curtain of dust, vision narrowing.
A shadow fell over him.
The ground beneath his boots split open.
It wasn't a natural crack. The earth peeled apart in a controlled line, forming a sudden chasm that dropped into blackness. Thin spikes of stone lined the opening like teeth, ready to impale anything that fell.
A coordinated trap.
They had timed it with the falling stones, predicting where he would dodge.
The ground vanished under his right foot.
Reitz reacted on instinct.
He slammed his left hand into the edge of the fissure, Flame Armor gouging a molten handhold out of the rock. His body swung down, momentum threatening to drag him into the spike-lined maw.
He snarled and heaved, muscles screaming, the wound in his side flaring so white-hot he almost blacked out.
He vaulted.
His body arced over the crack, landing in a low crouch on the far side. The fissure snapped shut behind him, stone grinding against stone.
He didn't get back up immediately.
He stayed there for a breath, one knee and one hand on the ground, panting. Each inhale scraped his lungs raw. His vision pulsed at the edges.
"Persistent bastards," he muttered.
He forced himself to stand.
He turned toward the mountain.
Beyond the earthen barricades, half-hidden by the haze of dust and heat, movement stirred at the cave mouths.
More figures emerged—first in twos and threes, then in larger clusters. Cloaks, armor, the telltale weight of Noble auras pressing against his senses.
They spilled out of the shadowed tunnels like ants poured from a kicked nest, lining the ridges and ledges, taking up attack positions with an efficiency that screamed training, not brigandry.
Reitz straightened, squinting through the shimmering air.
Dozens of signatures. Mana burning bright. Lines of power as far as his senses could reach.
His lips peeled back in a humorless grin inside the helm.
"So," he rasped. "The rest of you finally crawled out."
The bandit reinforcements had arrived.