Chapter 30 - Overload.
The forest grew denser with every step, and the tree crowns closed overhead and drew the sky into a thick green canopy through which the daylight came in occasional motionless columns.
Bernard walked with a hand on the haft of his axe and his eyes moving over everything around him.
He dropped his eyes to the roots underfoot as he thought back to what had happened half an hour or so earlier.
The knights of the Green Order, Bram Wellard's Forest Watch and Bernard had stood before the Great Forest, with Queen Edith out in front and turned to face them all.
"Our task is to find Sir William, and also the lad he took, a boy named Aren. We will split into two groups and search the forest from two sides. Bernard and the Forest Watch will go through the western part of the forest, the rest will follow me," the Queen said.
Bernard stopped and looked around at Wellard, who had gone down on one knee.
He was running a finger over the ground and studying the surface and the edges of every print closely.
Bernard came over and stood behind him, looking down.
"Found something?"
Wellard did not answer straight away and went on tracing the outlines of the prints with his finger, feeling the edges.
"Human tracks. And more than one man. It looks like a group of people came through here... but the tracks are old."
"Tracks from the Sacred Hunt?" Bernard asked.
Wellard raised his eyes from the ground without getting up from his knee.
"Possibly. But we're already past the inner boundary, and they're not allowed this far in."
A roar suddenly came out of the depths of the forest.
Wellard sprang to his feet, while the men of the Forest Watch exchanged looks and did not move from where they stood, and Bernard was already turning his horse toward the roar and did not wait for the rest.
They rode hard east, bent low over their saddles, while the ground hummed under the horses' hooves.
As they drew closer, other sounds joined the noise ahead. Peals of thunder tore the air over the clash of steel.
They rode out to the treeline, and Bernard reined his horse in and went still, with the rest halted behind him.
Ursus was enormous even beside the ancient trunks that loomed over the fight.
The Green Order's knights attacked it from every side, landing short strikes on the joints of its front legs and springing away at once from its swift counter-attacks.
The beast-god struck in wide sweeps, every one of which took down whoever had not got far enough away in time. Two knights lay among the roots at the edge of the clearing, and one of them was still trying to get up.
The Queen held her position directly in front of the beast's muzzle, while her sword ran with arcs of electricity. With every swing, discharges of lightning tore loose from the blade and struck straight into Ursus.
She never stopped moving, getting clear of every attack with a step or a turn, and she never stopped striking through all of it.
Ursus reached for her with a hoarse growl and time after time bared its teeth and missed by a fraction of a second.
In those moments Sir Alistair appeared, going for the beast's tendons with his greatsword or climbing up its flank at a speed astonishing for a man in heavy armor.
The beast jerked again and again to shake him off its back, though Alistair was always down and away before its paw reached him.
Off to the side of the battle, at the edge of the clearing, Aren stood with his fingers white on the hilt of his sword and his teeth clenched, while his eyes took in the whole sweep of the fight and moved from one point to another.
Aren! Bernard thought, and at once drove his heels into the horse's flanks and went off at a gallop.
Ursus caught a warrior who had hesitated, its jaws shut on the man's pauldron, and the knight managed one cry before the beast-god shook its head and flung him in a high arc over the open ground.
The armored body struck Bernard's horse in the flank with a crash, so that the animal lost its footing, but the smith got clear an instant before it went down, rolled across the ground in the rising dust and came up on one knee beside Aren.
Aren turned to Bernard with his eyes wide.
"Bernard?! How did you get—"
Bernard ran his eyes over him from head to foot.
"ARE YOU HURT?!"
"N-No, I'm all right, but..."
Ursus raised its head slowly, opened its jaws to their full width and let out a deep roar aimed straight at them, so that a wave of wind rolled out through the forest, flattened the grass, tore the leaves away and made the knights duck and clamp their hands over their ears.
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When the sound died away, a moment of complete silence hung over the clearing, but soon the thud of feet, a rustling and the crack of branches came from all around, and grew louder with every second.
Cortexes poured out from behind the trees, and after them massive white-stone boars with broad plated backs appeared in the shadow of the trunks.
Several dozen Ethereal Kestrels broke from the crowns and threw fast-moving shadows across the clearing.
Alistair landed after another strike at Ursus's flank, took in the oncoming creatures and lowered his sword.
"It called them."
The Order's knights re-formed without a word of command and turned from Ursus to the Cortexes while holding the ring around the beast-god.
One of them took a creature's head off with a level sweep of his heavy sword, while the next was already springing in from the other side.
Two knights covered each other back to back, one holding a shield while the other struck again and again at the vulnerable joints of the creatures.
The men of the Forest Watch scattered along the edge of the clearing, taking the positions they were used to in forest fighting, and put their bows to work.
One arrow went clean through the throat of a white-stone boar and brought it down, though the next jumped the body and forced the archer to take cover behind a trunk.
Ethereal Kestrels dived out of the sky at exposed shoulders and backs, and one of them missed a knight, slammed into the ground and threw up a cloud of dust; another tore through the line of the Watch, took a man by the pauldron and hauled him upward.
The man of the Watch pulled a knife and drove it into the bird's clawed foot before it had gained any height.
Alistair covered the Queen with his greatsword and moved around her to follow the attacks, and he met every paw Ursus raised toward Edith, who sent discharge after discharge into the beast-god and gave it no chance to fix on one target.
Aren and Bernard meanwhile found themselves in a fight of their own: a Cortex sprang out on the right and came at Bernard, who met it with a wide horizontal stroke of the axe.
Aren got clear of a diving kestrel, let it pass over his head, turned and drove the blade straight into a Cortex coming at him from the other side.
Two more came in on the flanks and forced Aren and Bernard back to back.
A white-stone boar gathered speed and charged Aren, who threw up a magical shield that held against the impact and cracked all over under the force of it, but when he dropped the shield and struck at once with the sword, the blade bounced off the white stone with a hard shock and left no mark at all on the beast.
The boar came on with its jutting tusks aimed straight at Aren, though in the next second its head was struck from its neck by a single heavy blow of Bernard's two-handed axe, which was covered completely in magical energy.
"BEHIND YOU!" Bernard shouted.
Aren turned and brought his sword up to meet a giant Ethereal Kestrel, and caught its talons on the blade at the last instant.
Bernard, already running toward him, jumped onto the headless body of the boar, pushed off and brought the two-handed axe down in a wide arc that sheared the bird's wing off.
The kestrel came down with a shriek of pain and dragged the ruined wing after it, as Bernard landed on both feet.
Edith and Alistair drew Ursus off in turn and struck at the openings, pulling it now toward one of them and now toward the other and giving each other time to set up a new attack.
Edith was finding that rhythm harder and harder to hold, though, and getting clear of the beast-god's paws a fraction of a second later than before, since her body was beginning to feel the overload from using magic.
At the next attack she jumped aside, but she was a moment late, and Alistair stepped in and took the blow from Ursus in her place, so that both of them were thrown several dozen meters.
"The Queen!" one of the knights shouted as he turned toward them.
The next moment pieces of armor and metal went flying across the battlefield.
Ursus tore men apart and threw them in every direction, and the other creatures set on the fallen.
The beast-god swung its head toward the place where Edith and Alistair had been thrown.
Aren saw Alistair lying on the ground and coughing up blood, barely able to get up, his own body over the Queen.
Ursus moved toward them with a growl, and Aren threw himself after it.
He tore across the middle of the fight, over bodies, clear of teeth and claws, and through the crash of the battle came Bernard's voice.
"AREN!"
One of the kestrels dived at Aren from above, but an arrow took it through the eye at once. Bernard looked around and saw Ray with his bow drawn.
Once he reached Ursus's hind legs, Aren drew back and struck, though the edge slid along the hide and left not the slightest mark.
The beast-god turned slowly to Aren, who stared at it, at a loss.
Ursus lashed out with a hind leg straight at Aren.
Aren suddenly felt an animal instinct and pushed off the ground at once, and the next moment he was on the trunk of a tree. His arms were covered in a blue magical shell shaped into claws that had sunk into the bark.
Aren looked from the magical claws to the beast-god, and Arswald's words came back to him.
"The magical shell of those creatures can only be broken by other magical energy."
Aren narrowed his eyes and worked it out fast, and when Ursus threw a paw at him he pushed off the trunk, passed within a few centimeters of the blow and drew the claws along the beast-god's limb in a single motion, which opened five cuts that poured blood.
Ursus growled and looked at the wounded paw, then turned to Aren, who had landed.
A bright glow flared up off to the side, and the beast-god and Aren both turned their heads.
Edith stood with fury in her eyes, and lightning ran all around her body.
The beast-god's wounds closed over in moments, and then it drove straight at the Queen.
"NOW!" Edith shouted.
Alistair appeared above Ursus without warning and drove his sword between the beast-god's shoulder blades with a furious shout. The next moment he pulled the blade out and sprang aside, and Edith pushed off the nearest trunk in a flash, shot up and came down on the very place where the wound lay open.
With a loud breath out the Queen drove her fist into the opening and loosed the whole stored charge of lightning into the beast-god's body.
Ursus let out a furious and pained roar that rolled through the whole forest.
Edith sprang straight back to a safe distance and landed on her feet.
Ursus stood motionless with its back to them all and its breathing heavy.
Most of the warriors had survived, and once they had finished off the remaining creatures they went still and watched the huge beast-god.
Ursus turned slowly back to the warriors with its eyes blazing, and its wounds were no longer closing.
"Its wounds..." Aren said, standing beside Edith.
"At last... I couldn't overload his Pandorum because of that magical hide of his, but once I got through to the inside... I managed it..." Edith answered.
"Pandorum?" Aren asked.
Edith waved a hand and went on watching Ursus.
"Not now. WARRIORS! SPREAD OUT! STRIKE ONLY WHEN THE OTHERS HAVE HIM DISTRACTED!"
Bernard looked over the battlefield and turned to Edith.
"So why aren't we attacking now?"
"I've put an enormous electrical charge into him, and it's stored there now and can't get out until he drops his magical defense. The moment he drops it, the whole charge will go into the ground, and until then, if you attack him and break through his shell, the whole of that charge will go through you."
"That's exactly why Ursus isn't attacking first. He's clearly clever and knows it works better for him if somebody else strikes first... and besides, that much electrical energy in the body stiffens him badly," Alistair added.
Bernard stared at the magical claws on Aren's hands in surprise, then looked out to the far edge of the battlefield and saw a familiar young face among warriors he did not know.
E... Elen? Bernard thought, unable to look away from him.
Edith meanwhile narrowed her eyes and watched the sparks on Ursus's paws.
"Here it comes."
Everyone took a fighting stance on the instant and made ready to meet the beast.
"Remember, we watch where his attention goes and we strike while the others draw him off," the Queen said.