Just as the three clan leaders had predicted, the Conquest Legion's retaliation came hard and fast the second news of the fallen fortress reached their main camp.
The humiliation of being raided by a bunch of "moles" who'd hidden underground for a year was too much for the Legion's proud, battle-hardened followers to stomach. They'd spent a full day gathering every digging tool, every earth mage, every burrowing beast they could find, descending on the western plains in a horde of over twenty thousand, hell-bent on digging the moles out of their holes and crushing them once and for all.
What they didn't know was that the second the raid on the fortress had ended, Korg, Lirael, and Gromm had already ordered a full retreat. With the lizard clan's unmatched digging speed, they'd carved a new, miles-long tunnel back to their main underground fortress before the sun had even risen. They'd left nothing behind in the old tunnels but a few nasty surprises for anyone foolish enough to follow.
Out on the western plains, the Legion's digging operation was in full swing. A portly pigman chieftain sat on a raised wooden platform, screaming at the hordes of orcs and goblins below, his face red with rage. "Quit slacking off, you lazy bastards! The patron gods have spoken! Find one of these mole rats, and you get ten gold coins! Catch ten, and you're promoted to clan priest! A hundred, and you become a divine herald of the gods themselves!"
Other clan leaders up and down the line echoed his words, dangling ever-greater rewards in front of their followers. The digging picked up speed, the ground tearing open in long, deep trenches, the dirt flying as the horde burrowed deeper and deeper. Within an hour, the trenches were over three meters deep, stretching for miles across the plains.
Suddenly, a burly orc at the front of the line let out a grunt, his shovel hitting something hard with a sharp *crack*. He froze for a second, then threw his shovel aside and whooped, waving his arms at the platform. "Chieftain! I found something! It's their tunnels!"
The pigman's face lit up with glee. He practically fell off the platform in his rush to get down, barreling through the crowd to the trench. "Well done! Let's see what those cowards were hiding!"
But when he leaned over the edge, there was no tunnel. Just a row of large, sealed clay jars, half-buried in the dirt. Up and down the line, other diggers were shouting, too—they'd all hit jars, hundreds of them, buried in neat rows beneath the surface.
A rock elf knelt down, prying the lid off one of the jars with a knife, his brow furrowed in confusion. Red powder spilled out of the opening, hissing as it hit the air, a thin wisp of acrid smoke curling up from the jar. "What in the blazes is this stuff? It's oozing some kind of slime residue…"
The pigman sniffed the air, his nose twitching. He frowned, turning to the others. "Wait a second. Do you guys smell that?"
The other followers paused, sniffing the air. One of them shrugged. "Smells like gunpowder. Nothin' weird about that."
The pigman froze.
Gunpowder.
Before he could scream a warning, the diggers' shovels had already triggered the tripwires buried beneath the jars. The volatile fire slime residue mixed with the compressed powder, and the entire plain erupted.
A deafening explosion ripped across the plains, the ground heaving upward like a living thing. The entire trench line blew apart, dirt and rock and shrapnel flying hundreds of meters into the air. The shockwave flattened the grass for miles around, the roar echoing off the distant mountains.
When the smoke finally cleared, there was nothing left. The entire digging operation was gone. The trenches were collapsed into a massive, smoking crater, the twenty thousand diggers wiped out in an instant. Not a single body was left intact.
Three miles away, a wolfen general leading a patrol of a thousand elite warriors felt the ground shake beneath his feet. He froze, his head snapping toward the sound of the explosion, his fur standing on end.
"Move! Now!" He roared, drawing his sword, and sprinted toward the crater at full speed, his warriors hot on his heels.
But when they arrived, there was nothing to see but carnage. The wolfen general stared at the smoking crater, his face twisted with rage and disbelief. He'd fought on the void front for decades, led a hundred battles, won every single one. He'd never imagined he'd be outplayed by a bunch of moles hiding in the dirt.
They'd burrowed an entire network of tunnels beneath the plains, filled it with explosives, and lured his men into a death trap. And the worst part? They hadn't even stuck around to gloat. There wasn't a single trace of them left. Not a scale, not a hair, not a footprint.
Worse, the twenty thousand men he'd lost were the Legion's best burrowers, the only ones with the skill to navigate the underground tunnels. Without them, they had no way to chase the moles into their warren.
The wolfen general's jaw clenched so hard his teeth cracked. Before he could even snarl an order, a young wolfen warrior came sprinting up to him, his face pale with terror. "General! Bad news! We sent a 5,000-man team into the tunnel network we found in the western forest! None of them have come back! We can't raise them on the comms either!"
Before he could process that, another warrior skidded to a halt beside him. "General! The southern outpost fortress has fallen! The walls were blown open from the inside! All the supplies are gone!"
A third runner arrived, gasping for breath. "General! The grain caravan from the southern farms was ambushed! All the guards are dead! The entire harvest is gone!"
Bad news piled on bad news, each report worse than the last. The wolfen general felt his chest tighten, a hot, burning rage building in his gut. He'd never fought a more infuriating battle in his life.
His whole career, he'd won wars by charging headfirst into the fray, cutting down every enemy in his path. Victory was simple: kill everything you could see. But these moles? They were ghosts. They were everywhere and nowhere at once. They'd strike from the shadows, blow up a fortress, hijack a caravan, vanish back into the tunnels before he could even get his men into formation. They'd stab him in the back before he even knew they were there.
He let out a long, frustrated sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Enough. Pull all patrols back. Send the order to the third battalion to retreat to the main camp immediately. We're consolidating our forces. No more scattered patrols."
The warriors around him nodded, turning to relay the order. But the general suddenly froze. He felt a sharp, cold pain in his chest, spreading through his body like wildfire.
He looked down.
A massive shard of ice had pierced clean through his chest, the tip glinting with frost magic, sticking out of his back.
His eyes widened in disbelief. He looked up, and saw the young wolfen warrior who'd first reported the missing tunnel team standing in front of him. The warrior's form shimmered, the illusion melting away to reveal a slender elven woman with silver hair, her eyes cold as ice, a wand in her hand.
Before anyone could react, the general collapsed to the ground, dead before he hit the dirt.
Chaos erupted. The wolfen warriors drew their swords, screaming, but it was too late. A hail of fireballs rained down from the surrounding hills, slamming into the disorganized battalion. The elven woman vanished into the crowd, her form shifting again, while more hidden attackers emerged from the grass, firing arrows and spells into the fray.
The thousand-strong elite battalion was wiped out in minutes, torn apart by a raiding party of just 200. They never even had a chance to mount a proper defense.
The last surviving pigman captain fought back for all of two seconds before a fireball to the chest sent him sprawling to the ground, dead before he hit the dirt. His last thought was a confused, frantic question: how had an ice-attuned elven mage snuck into the battalion with illusion magic, then killed him with a fireball?
The lead elf stepped forward, pressing her boot into the pigman's corpse, her voice sharp and crisp. "Finish them off. Burn the bodies. This much noise will bring reinforcements fast."
The other raiders nodded, pale blue flame flickering in their palms, incinerating the bodies and any trace of their presence. A second later, they chanted a soft incantation, their forms fading into the shadows, vanishing as completely as if they'd never been there at all.
The poor wolfen general had never stood a chance. He'd read all the intelligence reports, after all. The moles were made up of three races: rock lizards, void apes, and ice-attuned star elves. No one had ever expected an ice elf to master illusion magic, let alone fire magic.
It was true that ice magic was the elves' innate gift, their strongest attribute by far. Learning fire magic, an element diametrically opposed to their own, was a waste of time and energy for most—its power would always be weaker, the cost to cast it far higher. But there was a method to the madness.
They'd used the ice magic to kill the general, the strongest target, with a single, lethal blow from their most powerful attribute. But every other warrior in the battalion had been killed with fire magic.
The Conquest Legion knew for a fact that the three mole races were all innately opposed to fire magic. If an entire elite battalion was wiped out by fire magic, who would they blame? Not the moles. They'd look inward. They'd suspect traitors in their own ranks, fire mages from the other allied gods, spies from the Tide Pact.
The already fractured Legion would tear itself apart from the inside out.
By the end of the day, Laia's followers had suffered barely a dozen minor injuries. The Conquest Legion, meanwhile, had lost nearly thirty thousand warriors, three fortresses, their entire southern grain harvest, and half of their top commanding officers. Four of the allied gods in the Legion had their follower populations wiped out entirely, eliminating them from the tournament for good.
In the Conquest Legion's main fortress, the war room was dead silent. The faction leaders sat around the table, their faces pale with rage and fear, staring at the casualty reports spread out in front of them.
At the head of the table, Lex Thorne sat frozen, his jaw tight, his knuckles white where he gripped the armrests of his throne. He'd watched the reports come in all day, one disaster after another. His Legion was bleeding out, and he couldn't even find the enemy to strike back.
What unnerved him most wasn't the body count, or the lost supplies. It was the magic. The ice shard that had killed his best general, the fireballs that had wiped out his battalion, the illusion magic that had let the assassin slip right into his ranks. The earth-shattering explosives that had wiped out his dig team.
None of it lined up. The intelligence they'd gathered said the moles were three primitive races, hiding underground, relying on brute strength and burrowing. But this? This was coordinated, tactical, masterful warfare. This was illusion magic, cross-element spellwork, trap engineering, guerrilla tactics that even the empire's top generals would struggle to counter.
The other faction leaders were already bickering, their voices rising in anger and suspicion.
"It was fire magic! The only fire mages in the Legion are yours, Gareth! You're the one who betrayed us!"
"Bullshit! My men were in the northern camp when the attack happened! It was the Tide Pact! They've got fire mages and illusionists! They're working with the moles!"
"Or maybe it's the moles themselves! You saw the ice magic! It's definitely them! How do we know you haven't been feeding them information this whole time!"
The room descended into shouting, the fragile alliance fracturing by the second. Lex said nothing, staring down at the map of the continent, his brow furrowed. He couldn't wrap his head around it. Who was this girl, Laia Hayes? How had she trained her followers to fight like this? To outthink his best generals, to outmaneuver his entire army, without even lifting a finger herself?
He'd thought she was a lazy, uninterested amateur, a girl who cared more about pastries than the tournament. He'd been so, so wrong.
In her private viewing box, Laia stared at the scrying screen, her head in her hands, groaning so loud the walls shook.
She'd watched the whole thing unfold. The trap in the plains. the ambush of the wolfen battalion. the hijacked grain caravans. The Conquest Legion tearing itself apart in the war room.
"Are you kidding me!" She moaned, slumping back in her chair. "I told you guys to lay low! To hide! And you started a full-scale war! You wiped out thirty thousand people! Now the entire Legion is out for blood! I'm never gonna live this down! The War God's gonna put a hit on me! I just wanted to open a sandwich shop!"
She buried her face in a pillow, screaming into it. She'd really thought teaching them basic guerrilla warfare tactics over a sandwich was just harmless chit-chat. She'd really thought explaining how to mix slime explosives was just a fun little science experiment.
Now look at them. They were running a full-scale insurgency.
In the monitoring spire, Headmaster Valerius stared at the screen, a slow, impressed smile spreading across his face.
He'd designed this tournament to test the young gods' ability to lead, to adapt, to fight a war when their backs were against the wall. And every single one of the top contestants had failed the test. They'd relied on their raw power, their numbers, their divine gifts.
Except for Laia Hayes.
She'd taught her followers to fight smart. To use the terrain. To turn their enemy's strength against them. To win a war without ever meeting the enemy face to face.
He leaned back in his chair, chuckling softly. The other examiners around him stared at the screen, their mouths agape, unable to believe what they'd just seen.
Valerius shook his head, still smiling.
This girl was full of surprises. He couldn't wait to see what she did next.