Azhure: This should be fast to rewrite, just action scenes.
“There will be a hundred and three ‘bandits’ ambushing the carriage,” Darc reported, flicking through his phone. “Ten of them are mages of unknown strength.”
“Whoa! That’s a lot of them!”
“Is that not too much?” Alicia asked.
“It’s not,” Jonathan shook his head. “Her highness’ guards consist of thirty-five knights and five mages split into two support and three attackers. Each knight can take on three men at once and each attack mage is worth five.”
“Overconfident much!?”
“His majesty had me oversee their training. I know they’re capable,” the war hero deadpanned. “In fact, Doug would need more than just a hundred and three to truly overwhelm them even with ten mages.”
“I see…” Alicia nodded. Being trained by a known war hero and a Court Wizard would certainly vouch for their competence.
“So! You know the princess then!?”
“Of course I do.”
“Ooh! Does she like you!?”
“Voice!” Alicia scolded.
“Well! It’s pretty obvious the receptionist lady is smitten all over you and-“
BONK
“The super-duper cute pixie Voice is blasting off againnnnnnn!”
TING
“That said, if their objective is to kidnap the princess, Doug’s men could occupy the knights while snatching her in the chaos,” Jonathan then admitted.
“Alright,” William spoke up. “We’ll go like this.”
“Y-You are…!” the princess gasped.
In the Rocky Pass on the fourth day after a certain group of Court Wizards began their operation in earnest, one Court Wizard stood with one foot on a downed bandit and a sword stuck on said bandit. In front of him was a carriage carrying the princess of this land who was the target of these assailants.
SHAAK
SLASH
“Your highness, open the door. Now.” Jonathan nonchalantly yanked his sword off the dead man’s chest as he told the princess and cut another bandit that tried to attack him from behind.
By then, four more bandits were defeated by the knights.
98 bandits left.
“O-Okay!” the princess yelped as she opened the carriage door, “eek!” and screamed as the severely wounded driver was thrown into the carriage.
“Heal him,” Jonathan said, knowing she does, in fact, know some healing magic.
“You go to the carriage and kill anyone coming close to it. Since you know the princess and her knights, let them see your face so they know it’s us,” William explained.
Jonathan then shut the door and gave an Order.
STAB
“Guagh!”
“Aah!”
On the other side of the carriage, a green thorn-like structure erupted from behind another bandit prying the door open, piercing his nape. He died instantly, shocking the maid holding down that door.
97 bandits left.
The beastfolk knight, Alfred, after cutting down three bandits in his way hurried to the carriage and recognized Jonathan. While this was happening, two more bandits were defeated by some of the knights.
92 bandits left.
“Sir Jonathan!” the knight cried. “You’re here!”
“There are four more of us attacking the bandit’s rear,” Jonathan said, cleaning his blade from the blood with his elbow. “Three of them are in the usual outfit and one is in black. You know the drill.”
“Ah,” Alfred quickly understood what the Nature Court Wizard meant. “Got it!”
“Once you tell the knights to not attack us, send a [Telepathy] and we’ll start striking the enemy in the back,” William continued.
You’re clear. (Jonathan)
“You heard him,” William, clad in the brown robe, spoke as he stood up from the boulder the four of them hid behind. “Let’s go.”
“Alright, just follow our lead, Alicia,” Owen said to her as he got up. He was also wearing a robe.
“Right,” Alicia nodded. She too wore the brown robe.
Darcassan the Dark Guardian, however, stayed where he was at. Having taken off his robe in favor of just his black motor jacket before coming here, he had other avenues of attack than just standing up and charging in.
“You do not like wearing it, Owen?” Alicia pondered him as she slipped her arms into the brown robe’s sleeve.
“It’s stuffy and bulky, I hate it,” her childhood friend complained, glaring at the robe he struggled to put on with narrowed eyes. “I don’t get why William can wear it with his hoodie underneath.”
“Right, you do not like this kind of clothes,” Alicia muttered. For as long as she remembered him, he always preferred lighter clothing, just enough to cover him modestly. It’s for that reason he didn’t wear the blazer of their already liberal school uniform. “Is that why you use the cloak more often?”
“Yeah, it’s the better of the two,” Owen nodded. “But I only get to use it if it’s hunting skeleton goblins.”
“True,” Alicia cupped her cheek. “Bringing a colorful cloak to battle would not be helpful.”
The cloak, which was supposed to be for ceremonial use, usually has a color matching the Court Wizard’s Element’s main color on the banner. Any enemy who knew about Court Wizards can tell their Element by their cloak; even if they don’t they can still make an educated guess. Also, going in as a group dressed like they were in a tokusatsu show was just asking enemies to keep track of them in battle.
“Too bad I ain’t a Guardian, then I can veto myself from wearing it.” Owen crossed his arms, then grinned at Alicia. “That’s what Master Darc did; I think he likes fighting without it and doing spy stuff with it.”
Forty bandits were on standby at the rear, readying themselves to switch with their exhausted comrades to keep up the pressure. However, none of them deigned to watch their back as the dark elf assassin sank into the ground and slipped between them. He could have taken them out by surprise but he had another target to hunt.
Meanwhile, ten mages on the bandits’ side were bombarding the knights with fireballs and the like, pressing them from attacking anyone else. “Again!” one of them shouted, raising both hands like the rest of them.
“””Oh Fire. Like a raging inferno. Strike my enemy with your ball of flame.”””
CRACKLE CRACKLE CRACKLE
Ten red spheres of fire formed in front of them. They were not as large as what the opposing side could create, but they made up for it in sheer numbers.
WHOOSH
“””Fire-“””
SLASHSLASHSLASHSLASHSLASHSLASHSLASHSLASHSLASHSLASH
However, before the bandit mages could finish their incantation and launch the balls of death, a gust of wind interrupted them.
“I’ll take out the mages,” William stated.
Ten heads came rolling down the rocky terrain. Red blood trailed behind them as they tumbled.
That doesn’t sound good. “…How will you do it?” Alicia hesitantly asked.
“I kill them,” William said nonchalantly, crossing his arms. Before anyone could ask why, he immediately followed with, “I don’t care if I have blood in my hands. If it gets the job done, then I’ll do it.”
For a teenage boy from ‘Earth,’ that definitely wasn’t a normal mindset, not in a psychopathic way but more in a cynical way. It must have been something to do with what happened to him before he was recruited, but it was not Alicia’s place to pry. Though she does wonder if father didn’t extend the no-killing rule to him or if he ignored that.
“…Is that necessary?” Regardless, she still needed to ask this.
“Qantasia mages only need verbal chants to cast spells, the better ones can do it silently,” William explained. “Keeping them alive is too problematic, offing them is more efficient.”
The knights killed two more bandits by this time.
80 bandits left.
“””Oh Fire. Like a raging inferno. Strike my enemy with your ball of flame.”””
Freed from having to duel with the other mages, the three mage knights prepared to hurl their fireballs.
CRACKLE CRACKLE CRACKLE
Three balls of flame burst in front of them. It was larger than their own bodies, ten times larger than the [Fireball] Alicia ordered for the first time. And with a single word, the mage knights unleashed their spells.
“””Fireball!”””
WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH
BOOM BOOM BOOM
“Guagh!”
“Eargh!”
“Aargh!”
The three gigantic balls of flame were hurled in an arc passing through the defensive line of their fellow knights and blasted the clump of bandits pushing through. Twenty bandits were caught in the blast head-on, burning into a crisp. Nine more bandits were severely injured after being caught on the outskirts of the explosion.
60 bandits left.
“Dammit!” one bandit cursed, shielding his eyes from the bright fire still burning their comrades. “What happened!? What are the mages doing!?” he demanded. Their mages were supposed to keep the knight mages occupied so that they could focus on seizing the princess.
“C-Commander!” another bandit shouted, visibly panting after running to his location. “All of our mages are dead! We are being attacked in the rear!”
“W-What!?” the bandit, the commander of their group, exclaimed. “How!? He told us no reinforcement will intervene!”
“I-I don’t know, commande- Gorkh!”
Blood poured out of the lackey’s mouth as a black blade emerged out of his neck in a gruesome manner. Holding the knife behind him was a man wearing black with tanned skin, white hair, and a pair of elongated ears; a dark elf. Wordlessly, the dark elf swung the knife stuck in the dead man’s throat aside, making it unstuck while splattering the dead bandit’s blood on the rocks, and began approaching the bandit leader.
59 bandits left.
“K-Kill that elf!” the bandit leader screamed to the nearby bandits, waving his longsword at the dark elf.
Five bandits surrounded the elf and brandished their swords. After a moment of hesitation, they all simultaneously lunged at the dark elf, hoping to skewer him through sheer numbers. The dark elf scoffed at this and simply clenched his free hand as the bandits closed in.
STABSTABSTABSTABSTAB
CLA-CLAN-NG-CLAN-CLANG-G
Five long, black stakes erupted from their shadows, each impaling them from the bottom jaw up. At such instant death, they did not even have a chance to scream in agony as their bodies hung lifelessly and their swords fell from their hands.
STABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTAB
Then, in an act of desecration, more stakes burst from the ground, rendering their bodies nearly unrecognizable in a practical show of exploding blood and guts. Such an act of horror struck fear in those who witnessed such a thing, rendering them frozen on their feet. This allowed the dark elf to march closer to the commanding bandit visibly pissing his pants.
54 bandits left.
“N-No…! Stay away!” the bandit leader cried, his sword arm trembling and his free arm trying to shoo the dark elf away as he backed away in fear.
But the grim reaper crept closer and somehow materialized another black dagger with a slightly different shape in his other hand. He then lifted that blade above his heart.
“Captain!” one bandit cried as he bravely charged behind the elf with his sword high above his head.
SLASH
It was a futile effort as the dark elf turned around and brought down the dagger, slicing the bandit’s throat. The bandit staggered back, holding his bleeding neck before falling to the ground.
53 bandits left.
Unable to say anything else in fear, the bandit leader lifted up his longsword, trembling along the way, and tried to swing it down at his oncoming death once he was in striking range.
CLANK
Death, however, swatted the longsword with his dagger as if it were a fly. Combined with his fright loosening his grip and the force of the strike, the bandit found his longsword flying from his hand.
THUNK
Before he could even register what happened, a strike from the pommel of the dagger knocked the bandit leader on the forehead. Then, his collar was pulled before he could see the sun in the clear afternoon sky. With his life dangling at the dark elf’s mercy, the bandit leader looked at him; the dark elf did not say anything, and that further added to the horror.
“We’ll need to make this over quick, so Darc will take out the enemy leader,” William added. “We might need to interrogate him, so capture him alive.”
Then, everything he saw shifted upwards. The dark elf, however, seemed to still be in place. The bandit leader needed only to look down to realize how wrong he was; it was not that the world was going up, but they who went down.
“Aa… Aaah!” he screamed, realizing he was sinking deep into the rocky ground. He, his consciousness, along with the dark elf disappeared into the murky black shadow beneath, never to be seen.
1 bandit leader captured.
52 bandits left.
“They… They disappeared!”
“W-What foul magic is this!?”
“Don’t panic, men! Keep the forma-”
WHOOSH
SLASH
Another head rolled unceremoniously to the ground. The bandit who tried to assume command and take control of the situation found his head decapitated out of nowhere. To the others, it was as if the deities looked down on them in contempt.
51 bandits left.
“Damn it! I didn’t sign up for this!” one bandit cursed. This one had a different gear than the others. He turned to the other bandits who have similar equipment as he did. “Men!” he barked. “We are retreating!”
“Mercenaries?” Alicia tilted her head.
“Yes, Doug had hired them to bolster his numbers,” Darc reported, the phone in his hand having just replayed that part of the recording. “Around forty of them. Couldn’t find any information on them given the time.”
“Doesn’t matter,” William shook his head. “Once they realize they’re getting their asses kicked, they’ll run away.”
Out of the forty mercenaries participating in this banditry, thirty-four of them were still alive. It was how their company survived and thrived back in the civil war: never fighting on their own, leaving the thick of the battle to their client’s army, and collecting the gold all the same.
The most important thing to this band of mercenaries, however, was knowing when to cut their losses and run. Even though a job like this was harder to come by now that the war was over, it wasn’t worth their lives over it – it was high time to move to greener pastures, anyway. So, like the cowards they are, they turned their tails and tried to escape. Keyword: tried.
As the mercenaries proceeded their organized retreat away from the place of a cavalry’s nightmare as they had done so many times before, they were met with a short brown hooded figure standing in their way.
“Someone’s in the way, boss!” one mercenary yelled.
“Then we cut’em right through!” the mercenary leader yelled, charging with his sword ahead.
The hooded figure, however, lifted his arms. To the mercenaries, it was an obvious tell-tale sign.
“It’s a mage!”
“Kill him before he finishes his spell!”
But that mercenary who said it didn’t even land his feet on the ground.
“Well, like hell they’re getting away,” William continued. “Owen, freeze them. Those guys should be loose-lipped enough to spill it to the king.”
A cold sensation covered them all. They also seemed to have lost all movement functions.
The mercenary leader rolled his eyes down to see why and yelled, “W-What in the Abyss is this!”
And what in the Abyss was ice; layers upon layers of thin ice trapped their bodies from head-to-toe with more layers growing outwards, encasing them even further. People in the kingdom such as CoastLine, where it was summer year-round, would have never seen ice in their lifetimes, so there were a lot of emotions seeing all of this ice coming out from a single mage no less.
THUNK
Something hit the back of his head.
“…?!”
Then his vision became red.
“Haagh! Augh!” In his panic, he tried to gasp for air, but it felt like smoke coming out of a bonfire.
“Alicia, heard you somehow made your family Order non-lethal,” William then turned to her. “Knock them out with it.”
He was suffocating.
He can’t breathe.
He doesn’t understand why the fire wrapping his head did not burn, but he knew every breath he took burned his lungs with the smoke, that much he understood. He tried to hold his breath, staving off the white gas assaulting his nose as much as he could, but it was futile.
Soon, the world around him turned black and he lost consciousness.
34 mercenaries subdued.
17 bandits left.
Just as the Nature Court Wizard and the knight captain, Alfred, cut down three more bandits coming for the carriage, they saw the sorry state of the enemy being rather decimated. Jonathan knew it meant the battle was over.
14 bandits left.
“…What happened to them?” Alfred muttered dumbstruck. Literally minutes ago, about a hundred belligerents were coming at them and now they were reduced to a fraction of that number.
“Alfred,” Jonathan simply said, snapping his old friend out of his confusion.
“O-Oh right!” the half-animal knight blinked before turning to his subordinates in battle and shouting. “Men! The enemy has fallen enough! Capture them!”
“””Yes, sir!”””
The rest of the bandits didn’t put too much resistance anymore as the knights rounded them up. Four of the bandits succumbed to their blast injuries as the knights found out while five more would likely survive after the mage knights healed them.
10 bandits arrested.
0 bandits left.
Battle over. Emotions returned.
“Hm, I wonder, why do we not warn the king about this?” Alicia asked. “In fact, why have we not told him about the coup in the first place?”
“…”
“…”
“…Just make sure no one in the princess’ group dies when we break the news,” William finished.
“Urk…!” Alicia gagged, her hand covering her mouth as she lifted her mask a bit to do so. This was long after she had recalled her loyal maneg from doing more than knocking out the mercenary bandits.
“Are you alright, Alicia?” Owen asked in concern, running over to her. He had just coordinated with the knights to break the ice maneg from the mercenaries to tie them up when he saw her about to throw up. “Rose said you puked after we fight the bandits in Beohar.”
He has a point. Much like back in Beohar, the body rack was quite the mess. From the relatively tame slashed torsos and severed heads to nightmare-fueled human pin cushions, the sight was not for the faint of heart. Alicia often wondered the reasoning that the Court’s combat doctrine was to literally do worse than putting an enemy on a stake to scare the others to submission.
“Y-Yes, I am alright, Owen,” Alicia assured him. “I will not get used to this, am I?” After all, she will have to stand by this for years to come.
“…No, and you shouldn’t get used to it,” Owen muttered softly. “Your dad wouldn’t want that for you.”
Commands
Commands are keywords in an Order, much like reserved words of a programming language, a Maneg Soul understands when interpreting the Order. The Command ‘travel’ quite literally tells a maneg construct to move to a location parameter specified after the Command. There can be duplicate Commands doing the same thing like ‘coat’ and ‘cover’ having identical functions.
It is thought that Commands are learned through repeated usage of a single word denoting a single function in an Order until the Maneg Soul performing gets it. Then, because the Maneg Soul is still connected to its Mother Soul as attested by the Guardians, it sends the knowledge of the Command to its Mother Soul that then passes it down to future Maneg Souls it produces.
There are, however, Commands so esoteric only the originating Maneg Soul can understand, giving the respective Court Wizard sole access to the as esoteric Order. And while all Elements of the Mother Souls generally share an understanding of most Commands, there are Commands tied to the Element like ‘oxidize’ only working for Fire.
Commands are a central part of Orders as they make it easier for Court Wizards to convey the Orders they want. Two of the most used Commands are ‘form’ and ‘create’ and are in almost every Order regardless of element. They are commonly used as the first word of a step, but there may be exceptions and there can be more than one Command per step. It is possible for just the Commands to be used in a step and omit parameters altogether, the Maneg Soul will use a default value the Court Wizard has to find it out by trying it.
Azhure: ‘wizardsoftheotherworldlycourt.com/lore/orders/commands-list/‘ contains a list of all the Commands I’ve written since the latest chapter (I think) on my WordPress version. Check it out if you want to know more about it.
Personal Skill
As explained before in Chapter 13.3, Personal Skills are any and every technique a Court Wizard has that doesn’t come from their Maneg Soul. These include the likes of magic spells of their world, supernatural sword skills, or even the ability to shoot laser beams out of their eyes.
An example of this is the black stakes Darc shoots out. That is his own magic, not a maneg Order. Dark maneg is not capable of creating stakes that could impale people. To make a dark maneg construct that’s even touchable would require too much of it to be even worth it.
Azhure: An explanation about how each Element works will come out.
Personal Skills can be used in conjunction with Orders either to support it or vice versa. Darc’s magic to sink into shadow aptly requires a shadowy area to hop into, so an Order is used to create that shadow that can even move around, making the original magic even more effective. As mentioned before, the marriage between Orders and Personal Skills is called Half-Orders.
Orders
[Ice Layer] forms a thin layer of ice around a body. By forming multiple layers one by one, it will result in a thick layer of ice that can immobilize the target and increase the Time Interval for Break-Off as long as possible. Order: attach to body by x, form x thick layer on body of x exclude head area, form x thick layer on body of x exclude head area, form x thick layer on body of x exclude head area, …
Owen Ruze’s Maneg Soul is currently the only one capable of carrying out this Order. He usually gives this Order as a Progressive one. With careful wording, like all Orders, it is possible to give the Order to multiple targets at the same time.
[Thorn] forms sharp thorns akin to thorns of roses for Nature Court Wizards of the plant side and ivory for Nature Court Wizards of the animal side and can emerge to impale things like a stake. Order: form cone x base diameter x height on x position, protrude in x angle horizontal x angle vertical from top to base.
Azhure: On the subject of [Burning Fist], I took the time to re-read chapter 12 and decided to rewrite it next. Also, I’ve added a few more lines to chapter 13.4 to reflect the future rewrite.
Azhure: So, what do you all think of this sub-chapter? Is it good? Are there any problems with it? Any reviews or feedback is appreciated as long as they’re not plain insults meant to blow off your stress.
Voice: Don’t do that to people! Not even on the internet!
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