The Extra is a Genius!?-Chapter 607 - 608: Against the Horde [II]
The opening minutes had been ugly, but the line was already learning how to breathe.
Soldiers who could no longer continue were dragged back the moment their legs began to fail, and fresh troops stepped into those places before the opening could even become visible. It was rough and far from graceful, but it worked. Shields changed hands. Spears were replaced. Mages with pale faces and trembling fingers fell back toward the rear while others moved past them with mana already gathered in their palms. The battlefield was still chaos, still loud enough to make thought feel far away, but the rhythm of rotation had begun to take shape at last.
One part of the line made that change clearer than the rest.
The warriors and mages of the Northern Isles were holding far better than most had expected, and the reason was obvious once the eye stayed on them for more than a moment. Anyone raised around those waters would have to be strong. The seas surrounding the Isles were violent, cold, and merciless, and people who survived there did not become soft. Their fighters moved with the balance of men used to unstable footing, and their mages cast with the kind of control born from years spent shaping power in storms that could swallow ships whole.
Water magic ruled that stretch of the battlefield. Compressed streams shot forward in violent bursts, narrow and dense enough to resemble blue lances of glass, punching through the torsos of charging beasts and tearing into the bodies behind them before exploding into spray. Broad sheets of water spread low across the ground, thin at the edge and sharp enough to cut through tendons and legs like a rolling blade. Monsters lost their footing all at once, collapsing into the soaked earth before the soldiers behind the spell line finished them. In other sections, water rose in spinning columns around larger targets, circling tighter and tighter until bone cracked and heavy bodies were thrown sideways like driftwood caught in a whirlpool.
But many of the Northern Isles mages did not use water only to kill. Some simply flooded the earth ahead of the advancing horde and turned entire sections of open ground into deep sucking mud. Beasts charged on instinct, plunged into it, slowed, stumbled, and crowded into each other in ugly clusters. Fire fell over them. Stone spikes burst up beneath them. Lightning struck through grouped bodies and left smoking corpses half-buried in the sludge. The strategy was brutally simple, and it kept working for the same reason bait worked on starving predators.
Monsters did not stop to think.
That strategy kept working until the shadow wolves reached that part of the field.
They did not behave like the rest of the horde. There was no blind rush in them, no wasted movement, no animal panic driving them straight into the mud and death. They watched. They adjusted. They flowed around danger with the cold patience of predators that understood exactly what the battlefield was trying to do to them. In that alone, they were already worse than the ogres, worse than the skeletal beasts, worse than anything that only knew how to charge and kill until something stronger stopped it.
And the resemblance made them worse still. Their bodies were not identical to Noir’s, but close enough to leave a bad taste in the mouth. The same dark fur. The same way they seemed to sit half inside the light and half outside it. Looking at them felt less like seeing a species of monster and more like seeing a twisted echo of something Noel’s side knew too well.
The mud fields that trapped other beasts barely slowed them. One moment a section of ground would be empty except for churned sludge and broken stakes. Then a shadow would ripple beneath a shattered barricade, stretch unnaturally across the earth, and a wolf would burst out from it several meters ahead of where it should have been. Others moved through the darkness cast by overturned supply carts, by collapsing bodies, by the jagged angles of ruined defenses. Some crossed entire sections of the battlefield by chaining those patches together, slipping from one shadow to the next like black water flowing through cracks in stone.
And when they struck, they struck to kill. A soldier who had fallen back behind the first line turned just in time to see movement at his feet. A shadow wolf surged up from his own shadow and tore into his throat so hard the blood sprayed across the shield of the man beside him. Elsewhere, a mage from the Northern Isles finished casting and lifted his hand for the next spell, only for dark jaws to appear behind his shoulder and bury themselves into the side of his neck. He went down before the water he had summoned even fully collapsed.
Worse than that, some moved in small groups. While the front kept the defenders’ eyes forward, those wolves slipped through weak flanks and broken angles so quickly that ordinary soldiers barely had time to shout warnings before the rear line was suddenly fighting for itself.
That was when the field truly changed. Near the rear, members of the Holy Capital moved without pause among the wounded, hands glowing with blessings, voices low and controlled as they pulled men and women back from the edge just enough to force them upright again. Some could barely stand, yet the moment they were restored enough to grip a weapon, they turned and ran back toward the fighting.
From the high ground above the main lines, the battlefield looked less like a single war and more like several smaller ones forced to overlap. Troops shifted constantly across Thorne Territory, rotating in and out of pressure points while spells burst in different colors across the land. Water crashed and spread through one flank, fire fell over another, earth rose in jagged walls and spikes where the line threatened to bend too far, and in between all of it the horde kept pressing forward in waves that never seemed to end.
Noel stood with his eyes on the field, following the movement of men, monsters, and mana with quiet focus. From up there, it was easier to see the shape of things. The opening had been awful, uglier than he would have liked, but the defenders were holding much better now than they had in those first minutes. The soldiers had adapted quickly. So had the allied factions. The line was still under pressure everywhere, but at least now it had structure.
Beside him, Noir watched the battlefield with narrowed purple eyes. "The shadow wolves are still being a problem," she said. "They can pass through the flanks too easily. They’ll be annoying the whole time."
"No doubt," Noel replied. "I agree, to be honest. They don’t look easy to stop." His gaze stayed on the field for another second before shifting slightly toward the wolves moving through shadow below. "Still, if I compare them to you, they don’t seem especially developed. They feel more like cubs."
Noir straightened at once, chest lifting with open pride. "So you’ve finally realized how incredible I am, dad?" 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂
A small smile touched Noel’s face. He reached over and gently stroked her hair. "Of course. You’ve always been."
Selene stood at his other side, one hand resting near her wand as she looked down toward another section of the battlefield. "It looks like my mother is fighting well too," she said. "I’m glad she came to help. It was the least I expected from her, so I’m glad she’s here." Her eyes shifted farther across the line. "The warriors from the Iskandar Peaks are very strong. I think they might even be stronger than the ones from House Thorne."
"That’s good," Noel said. "Though I can’t really say much about the Thorne forces. As you know, I don’t know them well enough."
Selene glanced at him. "When do you plan to enter the battle?"
"When things get worse, or when Roberto tries something." Noel’s voice remained calm. "For now, waiting is the smart choice. I could use Shadow Step or Spatial Shift and reach him immediately, but if we start too early, the destruction will be too large. Roberto could use that chaos to cause even more casualties."
Selene nodded. "I agree. I’ll stay with you. I’ll cover you, keep monsters off you, and open the way when it’s time."
Her gaze lowered again toward the battlefield, toward Elyra, Elena, and Charlotte somewhere within it all. "I just hope they don’t overexert themselves. They gave birth not that long ago. Even if they look recovered, they should still be vulnerable."
Noel’s expression dimmed slightly. "I know. I was worried about that too. But we already talked about it, and none of you were willing to stay behind. They know not to expose themselves too much." He looked over the battlefield again, quiet for a moment. "So for now, we trust them."
