Unfortunately, their leisurely morning of training was not meant to last.
Before lunch was finished, the Monster Tide was back at the barrier and attacking with such ferocity that it was taking all ten senior Witches from their unit to keep the main barrier active.
Even though the entire front rank burned with Unholy Fire, it wasn’t deterring the bloodlust of the Monsters. They just charged through to attack the barrier, charging over the dead to try to reach the witches.
The rest of the unit was at the front line, taking over for units who had been on duty all morning and that had already done their best to thin out the incoming wave before it reached the flank’s defences.
Wolfe noticed that today, the defence force’s tactics had changed. The unit had built catapults and used their limited magic to set fire and Earth explosion magic on the boulders.
They crashed down among the tide, wounding many and leaving large holes in the attacking line, but there weren’t enough of them to stop the advance, only to thin it out, and the archers were doing their best to keep the wall from taking enough damage that the witches from the other two units in their zone would be needed to assist.
The other unit’s Witches had done most of the work keeping the barrier full during their unit’s morning training, and though the wall didn’t suffer much damage, they were sure to need the rest.
There wasn’t much downtime for a skilled Witch during the Monster Tide, as far as Wolfe could tell, but he hadn’t been here long enough to know if this was going to be a regular pattern or if they were just having a heavy week for attacks.
After the first surge, the monster tide began to thin, and the Witches changed tactics, spreading out and spending the next fifteen minutes using the skills they had been working on since arriving here to build defences around their camp in preparation for the next time the monsters breached the first line of defence.
Earth Magic created a new trench, and Witch Magic filled it with sharp wooden spikes along the close wall. Then they began on a fresh trench outside the main barrier wall to slow the advance of the Monster Tide enough that the archers could kill most of them off without damage to the barrier.
The more mana they could save, the better. In a battle of attrition, they wanted to have every advantage that they could get, even if it meant spending so much effort digging a trench along their entire section of the flank.
With that finished and inscriptions added that would fill it with magical fire on command, they got to work on creating new defensive weapons, going by the plans in the military manual that Priya and her officers all carried.
The launchers would be the catapults that the units had made, but the real weapons were magic-created projectiles full of highly flammable oil. Once lit, it would burn for hours and stick to everything, so it was great for warding off large groups of monsters.
They had a small pile of them by the time the monster tide started getting thick again, swarming into the trench and being trampled over as the others attempted to get to the Witches.
It was obvious to Wolfe that something was driving these creatures into a frenzy, and it didn’t appear to be hunger. He had seen starving animals in the city, and these were neither thin nor sickly.
The archers dropped the group on the close side of the trench, increasing the height of the obstacle, and then continued their work all along the line.
Just like when they were defending the camp, firing Arrows through the barrier picked up a bit of fire from [Unholy Smite], a minor hindrance to the living monsters, but it did a great job of burning the corpses in the trench without spending extra mana to activate the spells that they had added to it.
More monsters kept coming through the flame-filled trench, rebuilding the wall of corpses as they died to the archers and the previous group burned to ash in a continual cycle of fuel for the defensive line.
That made the barrier much easier to maintain since only a few monsters made it through to attack the defensive spell, and they could be quickly dispatched once they were in the open.
Today the battle simply dragged on, hour after hour, until they were switched out by half of each of the other two units, keeping the number of defenders steady throughout the afternoon and eventually into the evening without any hint of respite.
“Is this normal for a Monster Tide? I had assumed that they would stop coming at some point.” Wolfe asked.
“This is a heavy day for the main line. Normally a position on the flanks only sees a few attacks a week, just to test their defences for weakness. The monsters should be drawn to the highest concentration of defenders, then the villages and the cities.
Even the mundane nations report the same phenomenon. The tide always focuses on the living and will mostly ignore Drone defence lines and mannequins.” Priya responded.
That begged the obvious question. Why were they here instead of the main line, then? Was there something driving them away from the way to access open plains with their abundance of defenders? Or were the main lines getting it even worse?
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For this reason, they rested in shifts. Priya and the others had gone to sleep just after their unit came off duty, while Wolfe’s group had stayed up in case of emergency, and now they switched.
As rapidly as the tide had grown, the number of incoming attackers dwindled as dawn approached until only a handful of monsters remained along the line, leaving the soldiers who had just come on duty to stare at an empty wasteland full of shattered rocks and burning corpses.
The two other nearby defensive groups said that all along their section of the flank, the situation was the same. They had held off the attacks during the night, and now the monsters were gone.
After a full night of having Wolfe work on their mana veins and aura capacity, his Witches were ready for a battle that no longer existed. It was a strange feeling, but the quiet felt somehow peaceful instead of ominous.
So, instead of combat, they began cycling through the soldiers for a session with Wolfe to build their Aura and expand their mana veins a little more.
This time it was two minutes each, instead of one, to speed up their adaptation to life as a fully magical unit. The gains wouldn’t be immediately overwhelming, they would still need to work hard, but by the end of the week, when they were supposed to have another session, it should be clear that they were significantly stronger than before.
“Isn’t there a way that we could speed this process up? I mean, the group that you are Bonded with grows so much every day just by existing. Isn’t there a less formal bond that would encompass the full unit?” Priya asked.
“There might be, but it’s not anything that I know of. I need to gain strength before I can bond a second Pentacle, and I don’t know any other forms of bonding except the Familiar bond.” Wolfe shrugged.
“What about a Coven bond?” Mary asked, and everyone turned to look at her in shock.
“What? You can leave at will, and you only share a fraction of your power with the leader, who can send it back out to the Coven. It might work.” She explained.
“A Coven Leader can also take full control of the nearby Coven members’ magic to cast grand spells, impose restrictions on them and even enforce oaths on Coven members.
It’s a position of great trust that most wouldn’t even consider giving to a military officer. To ask them to make a Demon their Coven Leader and trust that he won’t enslave them? That’s a lot of blind trust.”
Reiko nodded grimly, then gave Wolfe a one-armed hug. “No offence Wolfe, but it would be a big request of anyone, especially soldiers, and there are so many ways that it could go wrong since the leader of a Coven is appointed, and it could be passed off to anyone or used to do nearly anything.”