211 211 Mary Likes Simple Solutions
Simple plans were best since plans never survived the first few rounds being fired anyhow, so Wolfe went for the simplest one he had heard in a while. He would put a barrier around their position and then fill it with a [Lightning Array]. For added measure, he would give them a [Gravity Array] which had proven to be incredibly effective so far.
Wolfe mentally prepared the spells so that he would be able to activate them all at the same time and prevent some of the damage to his shield. Their position was no bigger than the camp, so he knew he would have at least a few minutes before they broke free from the confinement of the barrier, and he intended to make them count.
But first, he had to find whatever assets they had hidden before he could arrive. They seemed to think that they still had four hours until their target got to them, but they were well underway with their preparations before Wolfe noticed them. Of course, he could go around and leave them be, but that meant some unfortunate scouting group would likely stumble across them without warning and take heavy casualties.
With [Detect Hidden] at the maximum, Wolfe searched the camp for anything that might give away the secret to their confidence. He had eliminated quite a few of these groups since arriving in the Wastes, and one more should make no difference, even if they had a bit of time to prepare for his arrival.
It didn’t take him long to find the source of their confidence. Sitting in a shallow bunker, likely leftover from a previous camp at this location, were a group of witches bound and gagged, sitting in the middle of a huge spell circle, along with three other witches in mundane army uniforms.
Either they had been keeping this special tactics unit in reserve the whole time, or they had gained a few traitors who were willing to use their kinfolk as a source for some sort of curse.
That had to be the purpose of the spell circle. It wasn’t an elemental inscription, and living witches weren’t a reagent for anything but the nastiest of curses. If they managed to get the curse off, there was no telling what sort of damage they would do, so Wolfe listened for a few more minutes as the Commander gave the orders to finish setting up the camp.
Once they were done, the three witches in army uniforms came out of the bunker, swaggering about as if they owned the place, and began to cast a spell to cover the army’s emplacements with vines, grass and snow. Wolfe took that as his signal and added one more spell to the group he had prepared.
A [Lightning Array] specifically targeting those three witches.
Wolfe drew lightly from every witch that was bound to him and poured in the mana to get the spells activated quickly. The thunder of the strikes began to roll like the booming of artillery as the first bolts of lightning hit the camp, and chaos came to the fortified position.
The three witches were struck down in an instant, and Wolfe could see that whatever magic had been holding the witches in the bunker weakened as well.
The restrained witches began to wriggle in their bonds, wiping out as much of the spell circle as they could, not knowing that the witches above ground weren’t in any shape to be using it, and then stopped as the wards of the bunker lit up, absorbing the residual lightning strikes that were still happening to the equipment placed over their heads.
Being even a few meters underground was an effective barrier against the lightning, so Wolfe didn’t pay them much heed. He just did his best to keep the barrier up while the tanks and artillery began to fire, intending to blast their way out before the lightning could kill their crews.
The infantry treated it like any other artillery barrage, deadly and coming from above, so they hid in their foxholes. But it was magic, not natural lightning, and the strikes hit their hiding spaces with uncanny accuracy.
With all the mana that he had put into the [Lightning Array], Wolfe didn’t have much left to keep up the barrier encasing the camp. If they could hold out for even a few more minutes, they would be free. But then, something truly unexpected happened.
The ground beneath them opened wide, collapsing into a seemingly bottomless pit, and the entire camp tumbled down into the depths. The witches in the bunker realized that something was wrong at the very last second and created a set of vines, reaching to the edge of the barrier, and held on for dear life as everything crumbled around them.
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A second after the ground had collapsed, Wolfe heard a noise that he would almost call a splash as the tanks hit something liquid, and then a wave of orange light spread through the hole.
The bottom of the pit was molten rock, Wolfe realized, and the tanks had broken the cooled upper crust when they fell in, letting the light from the magma escape. That was one seriously deep hole, and it couldn’t have been made by any monster that Wolfe had heard of.
“Mister Wolfe, good work. I wasn’t quite sure where you would be until you started booming out thunder for all the world to hear. Aren’t you worried about anything hearing you?” Mary’s voice sounded through their mental link.
“Why would I be? They like me here. Even the Monsters only attack me if they think I’m a threat to them or their young.” Wolfe replied and let his sense of relief spread through the link.
He had been worried that this was some huge new monster, but it was Mary using a combination of Earth and Witch Magic at the Second Rank to eliminate the enemy.