Magus Reborn-212. Border town shenanigans

When Kai heard that an entire town had fallen to weavers, he didn’t even react as little as a flinch. Beside him, Bishop Maurice’s face lost its color like snow melting under sunlight, while Killian stared ahead with a blank expression. But Kai knew that look. He knew that look so well. The knight’s mind was already churning with strategies, counting strengths and weaknesses, waiting only for Kai’s word to act. He’d always been the one to plan strategies in his mind when a problem arose. Even now, he was doing it.

Kai, on the other hand, had seen this coming.

The plague sickened people and transformed them. It twisted entire communities into sinewy, bone-thin husks that moved like puppets like mindless suckers that only wanted to spread dead mana. It was dangerous to say the least. And now they had finally found a nest of them.

Good, Kai thought.

The sooner they started fighting them, the faster his soldiers could adjust. If they couldn’t handle a few hundred, then they had no place marching deeper into the plague lands, where these things would be crawling out from every ruin and alleyway.

The whole thing became reminiscent of the end of the first golden era. A lich king rose from forgotten lands, flooding the world with walking corpses. Kingdoms swallowed by bone and rot. A war that scorched half the known world and was the last major event for that era. At least that's what he had read.

But that was then.

Now, they were here.

Kai blinked the historical passage away in his mind and turned his gaze to Gareth. “How many lived in that town?”

“About five thousand,” Gareth answered and Kai saw the shadow behind his eyes. “Most of them were military or support staff. Logistics. Craftsmen. Families.”

Kai nodded. “And how many weavers did you count?”

“A few hundred. I didn’t go in too deep—there were too many. I thought I might lead them straight to us if I did.”

“You did well,” Kai said. “We’ll move to take the town.”

That’s when Bishop Maurice stepped forward. Kai’s eyes shifted to him. The bishop looked… spooked. His eyes widened slightly. “Shouldn’t we avoid it?”

Kai thought that if the man had a choice, he wouldn't have run in the opposite direction. Many of the soldiers would think the same, but they couldn't avoid battles forever.

“We could.” Kai said, ignoring his fear completely. “But we won’t.”

Bishop Maurice opened his mouth to protest but Kai cut him short.

“Do you really believe the treant won’t send waves of fiends and weavers after us? It will. And it will throw everything at us to protect itself. Better to gain experience now, while the numbers are manageable.”

“But Count, they’ll only thin our numbers,” the bishop argued weakly.

“They won’t,” Kai replied. “Weavers aren’t as strong as you think. Maybe a few would be former Mages—that’s my concern. I’ll handle those myself. The rest? They won’t get past your paladins’ shields. We have armor, weapons, golems. And if any of our people get injured or touched by the corruption, I’ll deal with it personally. The infection doesn’t spread quickly—not from a weaver’s scratch.”

The bishop didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t object again either. Good enough for now.

Kai turned to Killian and gave a short nod.

The knight stepped away immediately, barking orders. Soon, everything shifted, even the atmosphere. Soldiers straightened, formations began to shift. Lines were drawn. Shields lifted.

Kai watched their faces, focusing on men from Veralt. Some clenched their jaws. Some checked their blades. But none backed away. These weren’t green recruits. They’d faced worse—beast waves, fief war. They had blood on their hands and fire in their eyes. And they would be ready again.

Once the lines settled and silence returned, Kai stepped forward and raised his voice.

“We march,” he said, “to the border town—to put the fallen to rest.”

A cheer rose from the soldiers, a mix of steel-clad boots stomping and voices calling out in tense excitement. Kai didn’t smile, but he allowed it—for a moment. Even though he knew some had fear underneath all the bravery, they refused to show it.

Then he began moving forward, Gareth by his side, leading them across the warped land toward the border town swallowed by plague.

With their current pace, it took less than an hour before the jagged silhouette of the town loomed ahead—walls cracked open like split bone, rooftops sagging under rot and time. As they approached, Kai’s eyes scanned the broken perimeter, already arranging pieces in his head like a battlefield puzzle.

He turned to Gareth. “Can you get the archers to the top of the walls? I don’t see any weavers up there.”

“I can,” Gareth said with a nod before signaling his men.

As Gareth moved to reposition the archers, Kai exhaled and activated a spell—[Hawk Eyes].

In an instant, the world shifted. His vision sharpened, distance collapsing like it was drawn on parchment. The ruins stretched beneath his gaze, clear and cruel.

Weavers crawled between alleys and broken houses—sinewy, blackened bodies of different shapes and sizes twisted in unnatural angles, hunched and twitching as they devoured old corpses or gnawed on each other. But there weren’t as many as he feared. Maybe two thousand, three at most, even counting the ones hiding indoors.

A normal army would have faltered. But this wasn’t a normal army. He turned to look over his formation.

Paladins stood at the front, shields gleaming despite the grime, ready to take the first wave. Behind them, Clerics murmured quiet prayers and their hands glew with their blessings. The Enforcers had taken position to the sides, leading shock units meant to carve through weaver lines with brute force and deadly precision. Mages had already begun binding spells to assist, while six hulking golems flanked the formation like metal giants. Sentinel stood tallest among them, the runes on its body pulsing faintly.

Kai took it all in—and nodded. This would work. He would take the rest. His own skills had been sharpened by killing abominations like these. Plague-born or not, they still bled.

Once Gareth signaled that the archers were in position atop the walls, Kai raised his hand, then dropped it sharply. A sharp whistle tore through the air.

Seconds later, the first volley of arrows screamed downward. They hit hard.

Weavers jerked and collapsed mid-bite, twitching over dead fiends with arrows lodged through their skulls. Others scrambled, hissing and snarling, as their blood-slicked jaws turned toward the noise—the fresh scent of the living had finally reached them.

Their charge began. Snarls, screeches, limbs pounding against broken cobblestone.

“Charge! Kill them all!” Kai’s voice boomed across the field as an amplifier spell took place.

The front lines surged forward. Shields locked. Golems thundered behind them, crashing through the ruined walls with ease. Spells flashed as Mages lit up the battlefield in bursts of color and destruction. Kai didn’t follow. He rose.

With a single word and a twist of mana, [Flight] activated, lifting him high above the chaos. Wind tugged at his coat, but he didn’t falter—his eyes locked onto the rooftops, where more weavers skittered like insects, waiting to pounce.

Too late.

[Fiend fire] kindled in his palm, a flicker of pale flame that grew with every breath. Then, he launched it.

The first fireball exploded across a rooftop, incinerating three weavers mid-snarl. Their screams didn’t echo for long—another fireball followed, then another. Rooftop by rooftop, they lit up under the white flames, collapsing as scorched bodies tumbled down like broken dolls.

Some leapt at him in desperation, with their claws stretched and mouths open—only to fall short, screaming as gravity betrayed them. Most hit the ground like wet sacks. The few that survived found a soldier’s blade waiting for them, cold and merciless.

Kai hovered above it all, raining death. And below, his army marched into fire without fear.

While soaring above the battlefield, Kai became a blur of white fire and motion—each flick of his hand sending another rooftop into flames, another pack of weavers screeching as they burned. Bodies dropped like flies, smoke rising from scorched wood and twitching limbs, but his eyes stayed fixed below.

He was watching closely while casting.

His forces cut through the enemy left and right. Killian was at the front, his blade already stained black with weaver blood. He was quick—the quickest Kai had seen. The Enforcers under him were also fast—weapons crackling with flames, lighting and different elements, killing tens of weavers at once. Frost formed in weaver wounds. A wave of wind pressured blade sent three skittering creatures flying into a wall.

Spells and arrows filled in the gaps, but they weren’t needed often. The trained soldiers—his soldiers—were holding their ground. Slaughtering in clean, practiced movements.

A year ago, half of them hadn’t even held swords properly. Now they moved like war-born veterans. But not all of them.

Kai’s eyes shifted to the right flank—Viscount Redmont’s men. They were slower. Hesitant. Their stances betrayed uncertainty, and their strikes lacked conviction. Some Paladins managed well enough, their glowing golden shields bashing back weavers before a companion split them in two, but the rest… Too cautious. Too scared.

They simply lacked the aggression that Kai needed his men to have.

But he exhaled, eyes narrowing. He waved his hand toward Sentinel and one of the iron golems.

Assist the Viscount’s troops, the unspoken command pulsed through the spell etched inside the constructs.

The two giants broke off from the Enforcer line, stomping across rubble and gore to join the faltering men. A weaver leapt for one of Redmont’s archers, only to be grabbed mid-air by the golem and slammed into the dirt with enough force to crack the stone beneath.

They’d learn. With time. And protection.

Kai couldn’t blame them. They were used to fighting other humans. Not monsters born of plague and twisted mana. He left them to it. Instead, his attention turned to the source of the real threat.

More weavers were spilling out of a crumbling building in the center of town—its pillars cracked, walls blackened with rot and dried blood. A command post once, or perhaps a church. Hard to tell now. But clearly a nest.

More spells fell from the sky through both his hands, his [Fiend Fire] splitting in midair and crashing down on the rooftop-dwellers. The screaming was constant. The stench, even worse. But then—

A sudden pulse of energy hit him like a wall of ash.

It surged from the far side of town, rolling across the rooftops like a tide. Kai snapped his head toward it just in time to see movement—fast and coordinated. Three figures leapt from the rooftops, trailing smoke. By the looks of it, they were definitely not normal weavers.

Their skin was still twisted, sinewy and pale, but their blackened eyes gleamed with something else entirely. And in their clawed hands, dead mana twisted and coiled, forming rudimentary spell shapes. The patterns were broken, unstable—but still dangerous.

One weaver raised its arm and hurled a crackling mass of black flame. Kai veered hard to the side. The spell whizzed past, striking a nearby building. The upper floor detonated in a bloom of shadow and fire. He steadied himself mid-air, breathing in sharply.

Mage-weavers.

Sick remains of once-human Mages, their memories clinging on just enough to form malformed spells from corrupted cores.

The thought barely passed through his mind before the Enforcers below started to notice, their formation tightening under the pressure of the emerging threat. Killian stood at the center, sword raised, his gaze locking onto Kai for a heartbeat.

“Killian!” Kai shouted. “Take one of them!”

Killian nodded, the air around his sword crackling as arcs of lightning raced along the blade’s edge. One of the mage-weavers spotted him—twisted head tilting, its ruined face curling in a snarl before it lunged forward. It chose the ground-bound prey over the flaming terror in the sky.

But it was a wrong choice.

Chunks of earth rose at the creature’s command, forming a jagged wall between them as stone spikes shot out from the street.

Killian didn’t slow.

His lightning struck the wall—and fizzled. But instead of retreating, he surged forward, slamming his boot into the rising stone, cracking it with brute force. Shards flew. The weaver raised both arms, readying another volley of spikes.

Kai turned his gaze away at the moment, knowing Killian could manage.

His eyes snapped back to the other two mage-weavers perched on the rooftops—one spewing fireballs one after another, the other slicing at the air with blades of wind. To them, Kai was a fly dancing in the sky.

But to Kai, they were slow, predictable, and sloppy. The wind blades curved through the air, fast—but not fast enough. He slipped between them, twisting mid-flight. A fireball came next, hurtling toward him in a messy arc.

Kai raised his hand, forming a crude line of blue in the air. An ice beam hissed forward, slamming into the fireball. In an instant, it froze—solid, sharp, and heavy. Then gravity claimed it.

The frozen fireball dropped like a meteor.

The wind aspected weaver looked up too late, raising a gust to break it. It shattered—but the core of the frozen fireball still struck him full-force, smashing him into the roof tiles with a wet, broken crunch. The second weaver turned to flee, flame coiling around his legs like jets. He launched himself toward the next rooftop, trying to escape.

Kai’s eyes narrowed. Two spells formed in his hands, symbols spinning into place. A vortex of flame coiled around his fingertip with the power of wind, small at first—then growing into a roaring spiral. He pointed.

The tornado screamed through the air and found its mark.

The flame-weaver twisted, trying to counter it—his own fire pouring into the tornado in a desperate attempt to disrupt it. Useless.

The vortex absorbed it all and wrapped around him in a burning embrace. The weaver didn’t scream for long. His limbs were torn apart mid-air, flung in different directions like scraps of cloth. Smoke and ash followed.

But Kai didn’t stop the spell.

He pointed downward, directing the flaming tornado into the heart of the town. It rolled across the streets like a beast, sucking in any weavers in its path and reducing them to cinders. Buildings trembled. Fire danced in the windows.

By the time it vanished, a few hundred bodies lay smoldering.

Kai hovered, breathing slow, before scanning the battlefield again.

Below, Killian pulled his blade free from the final mage-weaver’s chest. The creature slumped without a sound, black blood steaming off the knight’s armor. Around him, the Enforcers were already fanning out—cutting down retreating weavers, sweeping the ruins.

The main force was split—half sweeping the houses, clearing out the last nests of corruption, while the rest guarded the streets, eyes sharp, blades raised, waiting for any more signs of movement.

But there was nothing. No more snarls. No more spells. No more screeches.Only thick silence.

Kai slowly descended, landing on top of a fractured stone pillar. The wind brushed his coat. His fingers still glowed faintly with the last of the spell’s heat.

This battle is over.

But as he looked toward the horizon—the plague-touched sky stretching far beyond the crumbled walls—he knew this was only the beginning.

One battle down. Countless more to go.

***

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