The monster meat turned out to be mildly spicy but very edible and paired well enough with the rice and beans, saving them from using up their limited travel rations.
The next day they searched the camp again, recovering what they could for reagents, Talismans, and amulets left behind by the defenders and the dead.
Most of the bodies had been eaten, not even bones left behind, but their tools weren’t edible, and not all were destroyed.
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The question was, what did all of these recovered talismans do? The Witches were still first-year students, after all, and had never seen a lot of these spells before. So, they kept the ones they could identify and buried the rest in a box just outside the bunker.
The day after that brought a brutal storm, with the wind whipping hard against the wards on the shelter and the temperature climbing rapidly, turning the snow to a freezing, blinding slush in the middle of the day, then back to ice with a thick layer of snow in the night.
They were going to have to break through that icy shell the next time they wanted to leave, as it had encased the wards making the entry look like a natural hill.
However, that gave them an entire day to work on a new spell. [Elemental Wall] was the second-year student’s first Elemental assignment. They needed to make one in at least two varieties, along with the Witch Magic and Charms they were supposed to be learning, to pass the first midterm.
Fire and Earth were the priority Elements, with Ella and Mary going for Earth, While Cassie and Reiko went for Fire. It was a balanced combination, and the more they worked on it, the larger the wall they could hold.
The next evening brought the sounds of enemies, a shuffling march of footsteps by the thousands that slowly got louder over the course of the next ten minutes while they waited inside the bunker to see if the group was actually approaching them.
Wolfe made a view hole in the snow layer over the wards and searched the perimeter for movement until he found the cause. A swarm of undead, mostly humans with some monstrous forms mixed in, was headed their way from the north.
If that tightly packed swarm reached their camp, it would destroy everything useful and might even endanger their bunker. They would have to do something to either redirect it or kill off enough of the swarm to protect their spot.
“What’s the plan?” Ella asked when he came back inside, turning to Wolfe for a decision.
“I hate to say it, but we did better at destroying the monsters while I was meditating, so we are all going outside today. I will sit behind the line and meditate to keep up the mana flow, use your walls to try to divert the swarm around the camp and kill as many as possible.
Beth, you’re with me, watching our backs and bringing the Witches anything they need. Don’t let anything get close enough to disturb their spellcasting.” Wolfe informed the others.
“Got it. Should we move to the far side of the camp? There might be some surviving defences or something out there. This was a military camp, right?” Their group’s lone mundane human suggested.
“Good thinking. Everyone stay low, and we will cross the camp toward the undead pack. Even if there is a trench or something, it will help divert them.”
With [Detect Hidden] Active, it became clear that this camp had not gone down without a fight as soon as they got near the edge of the rubble.
There was a double line of trenches, with the remains of a spike wall inside of them, but whatever battles had taken place had torn the majority of the spikes up, leaving paths through the line, and a large portion of the outer trench was filled with monster bones and dirt.
Beyond that, thousands of craters marked the land, and Wolfe could see countless bones littering the ground under the snow.
Only a few of them even had scraps of flesh left, but Wolfe couldn’t tell if that was due to magic, scavengers, or the amount of time since the battle.
The draft had just begun, but he could see that the battle against the monsters and undead had been ongoing long before the Coven decided to take most of the students as soldiers for the front lines.
“Mary and Ella, Create a low Earth wall as long as you can behind the second trench. While that goes up, Cassie and Reiko can work on their Water Magic and try to fill the outer trench. If we can turn it to mud, it buys us time, and the crowd might move away when they get piled up against the stuck ones.”
The Witches got to work, and Wolfe began to meditate, recovering the mana they were using. If he had finished his second mana focus, this wouldn’t be an issue, but he was still so far away from completing it that he couldn’t even hope to have it done before things inevitably went bad out here at the edge of the Frozen Wastes.
With the earth wall at the back of a trench, even one meter high was enough to make it effective, and the two Witches effectively blocked fifty meters of the camp before reaching the end of their range.
They could only hope that it was enough and that the ground wasn’t so frozen that the outer trench rejected the influx of water.
“Cassie and Reiko, crawl toward the edge of the rock wall, staying out of sight, and set your [Flame Wall] wherever you think it will do the most to either kill or redirect the undead. Once they start getting close to the trenches, retreat back here.”
Wolfe closed his eyes again and prepared to deal with the impending draw of the flame walls. Once they began casting, Wolfe focused his efforts on the need to channel as much mana as he could to the duo. The more mana they could dump into the spell, the larger and hotter the barrier would be.
As the group quickly learned, zombies were incredibly flammable, but they didn’t really care about that fact. The horde did nothing to avoid the walls of fire, even as the flames began to spread through their ranks.
At first, it seemed like the flames would be largely ineffective, but slowly the ones that had taken the most damage began to fall, either from having their brains melted or having lost their mobility due to catastrophic damage.
The problem was not all of the horde members were highly flammable zombies. The Ghouls didn’t burn, and they were smart enough not to walk through the flame walls, and there were other, unidentified types of the undead with them as well, including some sort of knight that seemed to be leading the group.
If that thing was intelligent, they could be in trouble here. Fortunately, Wolfe could tell that it didn’t understand what was happening at the front and behaved as if the spells were a one-time event.
As far as Wolfe could tell when he snuck a peek, eliminating the zombies had removed the vast majority of the horde, but the smoke cloud was becoming intense, so he decided to change the plan a little.
“Beth, bring Reiko and Cassie back and tell them to stop casting while the zombies burn. We will wait here in hiding and hope that the smoke doesn’t bring anything else to our location.”