Ninther could still hear the panicked and anguished screams… even though they had long ceased, and it was the same for his fellow knights.
Grounding their teeth together and tightening their steel like grips on their swords, the enraged and vengeful men looked to their leader for orders on what to do next.
The wall, despite being similar in height and thickness to that of a castle's, was made of simple rock, and they had revealed its inability to withstand the full might of their combined blows.
They could blast another hole in it and rush through before it closed up. Ninther was obviously of the same mind as he raised his sword and opened his mouth to give the order.
His attempt was interrupted when a series of overlapping, leathery flapping drew their gazes forcefully to the topmost section of the wall.
Multiple eyes immediately went red when they saw the humanoid bats transform into humans before landing and lining up like soldiers, the filthy creatures baring their fangs and screeching at them.
Despite the infuriating and worrying sight, it was the three in the middle that really put the spectating knights on edge.
Two thin figures, one in armor as red as blood and the other wrapped head to toe in a dark cloak flanked a tall and massive man.
His apparel was a mixture of red and black design, seemingly the middle ground between his two followers.
He held a black spear taller than himself, while the woman with the bewitching appearance had her lips pulled in a bloodthirsty smile, her red eyes conveying a promise of carnage.
Over her shoulder and beside her head, a dull silver sword hovered seemingly on its own, the unusually long and thin blade perfectly still like a dutiful soldier.
With no visible or audible prompt whatsoever, the woman raised her left hand up to the sky as a pool of blood coalesced above it out of thin air, the crimson liquid condensing into a spiked sphere.
The spikes elongated and split from the main body, forming fifteen crystalline projectiles with a wicked shine.
"Shields!" Ninther's voice boomed, right as Mary gently swung her dainty palm forward.
The blood spikes transitioned into red blurs as they shot downwards, the translucent energy shields the knights were trusting on to protect them coming to life above each of them.
Little did they know that they weren't the targets.
Under the astonished and "oh no" gazes of the utterly bamboozled knights, the spikes went through the long heads of each of their mounts.
The tough scales, dense muscles, and steel bones of the specially bred magic colts did nothing whatsoever to slow or stop the advance of the projectiles.
As if they were puppets who had had their strings cut, they crumpled unceremoniously and brought their riders down with them, causing a series of confusing and awkward tumbles.
Greem, Mary, and Anderson obviously took this opportunity to strike. And the knights with their wealth of experience knew they would due to how crazy opportune this moment was.
Hence, their falls, despite being rough and messy, didn't disrupt their awareness and preparedness too much. Them being First Grades also meant being caught flat footed even in such a manner wouldn't mean instant death for any of them.
As one of them proved when Mary vanished from the top of the wall and reappeared in front of him, the tip of her sword clashing with his hastily repositioned shield and propelling him back and away from his comrades.
Caught mid-fall and without any leverage, the knight had no choice but to be launched and pushed backward by the vampire's unrelenting momentum, the latter pushing her sword with both hands and beating her wings like her life depended on it.
Loud, odd scrapes resounded as a blur of red and silver dragged across the air and hit the ground from time to time, leaving short furrows with every collision.
This transitioned into splintering wood, loud bangs, and resounding booms when they encountered their first house, went through it, and then another and another.
At the same time Mary moved, Greem did too. While she sent her opponent away and used the buildings as battering rams to wear him down, he chose to use the ground.
Diving down from the wall, he held Allerdyce with both hands, cranked the booster to stage one speed and tore through the air like a missile, reaching Ninther in less than an instant.
An explosion went off from their collision, the knight leader's attempt to get on his feet interrupted when a spear appeared out of nowhere and slammed into his "moved at the last second" shield.
He widened his eyes and gasped as the transmitted force slammed him on the ground forcefully, the wind yanked from his lungs as he carved a wide crater beneath him, the earth devolving into chunks in a circular pattern.
From behind his dangerously flickering shield, the fearful Ninther's normal breathing resumed somewhat pitifully as he processed the agonising rattle in his bones—especially in his arm, the speartip pressing the shield forcefully against his body, and the one responsible for all this.
The one he'd recognised as the leader of the heretics stood above him, the muscles of his thigh sized arms straining against his black shirt as he gripped and pushed down the pole keeping him pinned.
Just when Ninther felt his arm couldn't get any more broken, the heretic leaned back and darted backward as though he'd been yanked by an invisible rope.
A series of familiar orange crescents then sailed over the knight's defeated form, reminding him of his brothers and filling him with immense relief.
Not a moment after, they joined him in the crater, their metal boots clinking unsteadily against the loose rock chunks as they rushed to him, helped him up, and surrounded him.
A dozen meters away, Greem hovered a few inches above ground, holding Allerdyce with one hand, its tip pointed downward.
There were 15 knights. Mary was fighting one of them in the distance. He'd injured their leader and four had chased him away with their attacks, while the others were rushing to reinforce their brothers.
He couldn't let that happen. They needed to be kept apart. They needed to be destabilized.
Holding his spear horizontally with both arms in front of himself, he cranked the booster again to stage one speed momentarily and blasted from his position.
Their reactions on point, the rushing knights deployed and raised their shields while others hurled flame streaks towards him, showering him in potent cutting and burning attacks.
But it was all for naught. He covered his head with both arms and weathered the attacks, his insensitivity to pain and indestructible shirt ensuring that the inevitable clash happened.
A series of loud clunks went off as he smashed into the knights and caught three of them on the shaft of Allerdyce, separating them from their brothers.
Their shields saved them from the bone-breaking force transmitted by the collision, but their sword arms remained trapped by the unbreakable pole.
The shocked knights could only watch helplessly as the heretic dragged them up and away from their brothers, stopped suddenly, and jerked his huge arms forward.
The powerful thrust combined with his strength sent all three of them even higher, far above ground than they'd ever been and removed them from their element completely.
They didn't even get time to adjust to their new horizons when Greem, who launched them and stayed back, fired up his thruster and closed their distance between them again, sweeping his spear in a wide arc.
With its white hot, 5000 degrees Celsius edges, Allerdyce met zero resistance as it swept through the neck of the first knight, the arms and torso of the second one, and the sword and waist of the third one.
Flaring his wings wide, Greem stabilised himself and turned around, removing the bisected opponents from his mind and zeroing in on their remaining brothers.
Mary had returned seemingly victorious and engaged them, dancing within their midst and swinging Alucard around in wide, ultra fast sweeps.
They couldn't touch her and she couldn't touch them. When she tried to attack one, the others would launch those bothersome flame streaks at her from multiple directions, forcing her to dodge.
Not wanting to lose out on the action, Greem angled his wings properly and blasted towards the chaos, arriving in an instant and sending Allerdyce through two of the knights and clipping a third for good measure.
This third lowered his shield due to the pain in his arm where the spear left a nasty cut and Mary capitalized on the brief moment of weakness.
One second she was across the battlefield weaving through the attack of four knights, the next, she was beside Greem in a flash of red, a silver line going through the knight's neck and his head falling off right after.
Amidst this chaos and bloodshed, she and Greem locked eyes and smiled, the latter making a light motion with his arm to fling the bodies impaled on Allerdyce away.
When the regrouping knights saw how their brothers were being treated by the filthy heretics, their grimaces and glowering worsened even further.
They clenched their teeth and lifted their swords in unison, vowing in their hearts to make these enemies pay the price, no matter how much it took from them.
To their affirmed determinations, Greem only smiled and leaned back slightly, letting his rocket pack increase the distance between himself and the knights, Mary following suit with a slight flap of her leathery wings.
Ninther, who'd been paying attention to Anderson this whole time and was wondering why the heretic hadn't attacked, noticed the cloaked man raise his wooden staff and tip it in their direction.
"Brace yourselves!" He screamed and threw himself flat against the ground, hiding his body behind one of the dead mounts.
His vision went white for a moment, the agony from his ruined arm a bit too much for even him, but he ignored it and forced the haze away, unsheathing his dagger and stabbing it hilt deep into the earth when he felt the wind pick up.
Right in the midst of the still standing, closely grouped knights, a grey whirlwind took form and latched onto them with its rotating influence, sending them airborne in confusing and heavily disorienting messes.
Greem and Mary responded exactly how you thought they would.
Sending a quick order to Anderson through the mind control ring, Greem gestured to his lover with his head and flew forward and matched heights with the magical cyclone.
All of its targets grasped tightly within its spinning influence, the whirlwind rose off the ground, going higher and higher until it reached more than five storeys high and then… fizzled out.
Knights, weapons, satchels, and dead mounts fell like rain.
The adepts maneuvered this rain with ease, Greem rushing and slamming into a knight knee first, sending him careening into a house with a dent in his breastplate and sternum.
Mary meanwhile held Alucard straight and zipped towards her first target, sending its tip through his eye socket and out the back of his head.
They were both done in no time, all those Greem attacked alive but incapacitated. His lover's targets however, weren't so lucky.
Five shriveled corpses in shiny metal armor hung from her sword like clothes on a rack, their right eye holes serving as a rod hole for her bracket rail of a blade.
In a similar manner to Greem, she flicked her wrist and sent the bodies flying off her perfect baby, landing back on the ground beside her lover.
Ninter's somehow empty but at the same hate filled eyes moved towards the desiccated husks that used to be his brothers before moving back to settle on the reasons for all this.
Clutching the sword he'd grabbed from somewhere with all the strength he could muster, he grit his teeth and ignored the protests of his limp left arm and ran towards the duo, letting out a loud battle cry.
Alucard moved under Mary's command to deal with the idiot, but Greem placed his hand on her shoulder and shook his head before stepping forward.
Tossing Allerdyce up and catching it in a throwing stance and grip, his arm moved back before coming forward in a blur, sending the spear shooting towards the charging knight.
Ninther's movements halted suddenly as he jerked forward but remained stationary, a new source of agony blooming in his thigh.
Unwilling to let the filthy heretics hear him scream, he bit his tongue and muffled it, not even bothering to look at the pole going through his leg as he raised his head to meet their gazes with his bloodshot eyes.
The expressionless spectators caught only a brief glance of his defiant and sweat stained expression before his chest and throat ballooned and a mushroom cloud assumed his position.
Boom!
****
Author's note:
If you want to read five chapters ahead and support me, you can do so here: patreon.com/MasterReigen