There is a maxim in every war that says the winner is not necessarily the best — but the best prepared.
The truth is that every step taken in a war marks the winner and the loser from the beginning. The ultimate failure is not something shocking or unprecedented. It is the mismatch of small errors that become unbearable too quickly to be put into perspective.
As a human, the fragilities were already errors in themselves. We didn't have more than two arms, didn't have more than two legs — in every criterion the Oasis considered relevant, we weren't the strongest even within our own planet. The only difference, subtle and built over millennia under the eyes of those who dominated us, was intelligence.
That was what made us capable of being, rather than merely surviving.
Deep down, I was genuinely glad to see a noble use that gift without letting herself be blinded by the hierarchies and constraints that existed precisely to cloud that kind of judgment. And even gladder that she was the person who, at that moment, would help dictate my own survival.
"We talked and accepted your tactic. How are we going to act?"
Carla was before me with the clarity of someone who had made the right choice and knew it — but still needed to hear what the right choice meant in practice.
"Our positioning will always be five hundred meters from the enemy."
"But at that distance they'll be out of the archers' range."
"Yes. But they'll also be at minimum range for maximum bombard power. Our objective is to exhaust all the artillery before any other step."
"And the next steps?"
"When the artillery runs out, the Griffins continue. The mounted archers cover the retreats. And the shield line holds whatever comes until we reach close combat."
A pause.
"Which is where we lose."
I said it without softening it.
"So our only advantage is the time we manage to buy before that — and the damage we cause while buying it."
She didn't respond immediately. She looked at me for a second with the expression of someone weighing what they had heard against what they had expected to hear.
Then she nodded.
Before returning to the group, she turned and threw a thin bag in my direction. I caught it in the air. Inside, two high quality mana potions glowed with the kind of intensity that only appears in items that cost more than most people on that field had spent on their own army.
"Thank you."
"I don't need thanks."
A pause.
"Get me out of here alive and we're even."
She left without adding anything. I stood looking at the potions for a moment — not for their value, but for what they represented. She had planned to need them. And had decided I needed them more.
The sound of dispersal was subtle — almost delicate for something that meant the end of any margin of retreat. Like a bubble bursting, the barrier separating the two sides simply ceased to exist at the end of the countdown.
And what was on the other side became visible for the first time.
I had already calculated there would be surprises.
I hadn't calculated three.
"My God — they brought Vorthari."
"We're done."
"All of you shut up and follow the plan."
Carla shouted before fear took hold of the field. There was more than enough reason to be afraid — and she knew that as much as anyone there. The difference was that she had chosen not to let that be what the others saw.
The Vorthari were the Infernals' personal elite. If I were to compare them to something from the world I had known before the Oasis, I would use the word mech — because that was what they were in essence, though the complexity was far greater than any machine. They were living creatures, built as complete organisms, that allowed the biological integration of Infernals psychologically prepared to enter them.
Psychologically — because biological integration was permanent. Nobody who entered a Vorthari ever came out. Never. It was a fusion without reversal: the Infernal and the creature became one thing, and what had been two separate beings began to exist as a single organism that could no longer distinguish where one ended and the other began.
It was cruel. It was unprecedented. And it had kept the Infernals alive for nearly a hundred years — because the Vorthari were the only creatures capable of leaving the protective walls in search of what the walls didn't provide.
Humanoid. Nearly ten meters tall. Resistance that made arrows or bolts irrelevant on direct impact. An enormous sword that wasn't just a weapon — it was an extension of the creature's body, calibrated for the weight and speed of something that shouldn't exist at the size it existed. And a speed that was inconsistent with any of those dimensions.
There were three.
I looked at the three of them.
Two were on the front line, advancing with the army. Positioned to break any resistance before the rest of the troops arrived — the kind of move an experienced commander uses when they want to ensure that what comes behind encounters no obstacles.
The third hadn't moved.
It was exactly where it had appeared when the barrier fell. It hadn't advanced a meter. Hadn't adjusted its position. It simply stood there, at the center of the enemy line, observing the field with the stillness of something that didn't need to move to be the most dangerous threat on the field.
I registered that and stored it.
"Don't worry — the Vorthari will be the bombards' focus. Maintain distance, retreat as they advance, archers in constant volleys. Shield soldiers on the front line."
The enemy's advance was cohesive. There was leadership there — someone coordinating thousands of creatures with the precision of someone who had done that before, many times, and had learned from every mistake the previous times had produced. Finding that leadership in the middle of thousands would be difficult.
My eyes went directly to the Vorthari standing still behind the enemy lines.
"Wait for the mines to be triggered. Watch out for the hypersonic attacks."
After a few seconds the enemy line crossed the five-hundred-meter mark.
The first mine was triggered.
The effect wasn't the damage — the damage was minimal, and I knew that. The effect was the pause. The cohesive Infernal line that had advanced with the certainty of those who had never encountered real resistance simply stopped, because the ground had exploded beneath their own feet without any sign that it had been there. For creatures that had categorized such devices as something the Oasis blocked, seeing that was almost incomprehensible.
That pause was the signal I needed.
"Arachne — prepare for impact."
I had loaded Arachne's Turkish Bombard through the ring before the field was opened — gunpowder bag first, stone positioned, ignition prepared. Arachne had stayed motionless while I did that, her silk already adjusting the saddle's tension to absorb the recoil.
BOOOOM.
The sound wasn't just sound.
It was pressure. A wave that passed through every chest on the field before the ears registered what had happened. The humans closest to Arachne stepped back by instinct — not by order, but because the human body has responses that precede thought when something of that size fires something of that magnitude.
The impact made the earth rise.
A cloud of soil and smoke covered the enemy line for an instant that seemed longer than it was. When it cleared, the first Vorthari had a hole in its chest the size of a man. Everything around it was destroyed — creatures fallen, the terrain torn open, a radius of destruction that had transformed that section of the enemy field into silence.
The humans screamed.
Not from fear — from something I hadn't heard on the field until that moment. Real hope. The difference between believing something was possible and seeing that it was.
The second Vorthari had stopped.
The third hadn't moved.
I looked at it for a second longer than I should have.
"Arachne — are you alright?"
"Ye… Yes. I can manage one more."
Carrying a Bombard weighing tons and absorbing the recoil of the shot had a cost. I could see it in her joints — the way the weight was distributed differently from before, how the silk had adjusted to compensate for what her body was feeling.
"I'm going to heal you."
Healing a seven-meter creature would consume everything I had. The two potions Carla had given me were the margin that allowed me to do that more than once without collapsing.
I healed.
And while healing, the second Vorthari advanced.
Five hundred meters in less than a second.
That was it. That was exactly what I had predicted would happen when the enemy understood that distance was our advantage. There was no complex reasoning involved — it was the most obvious response of any creature that had just seen one of its own destroyed and identified where the destruction had come from.
"BARRIER — NOW."
Luna's dome closed around the Vorthari the moment the enormous sword came down on the front line.
The impact shook the field.
The barrier held. For how long — I didn't know.
"Do it fast — Luna won't hold for more than a few seconds." — Carla shouted in my direction.
"YOKAIS — FIRE NOW."
The five shots from the mini-bombards were inferior to the Turkish Bombard. Much inferior. But the quantity did what quality alone wouldn't — four of the five hit. And what remained of the second Vorthari after four impacts concentrated on the same point was no longer a threat.
It was debris.
The humans screamed again.
I didn't scream. I was looking at the third Vorthari.
Which was still exactly where it had been since the beginning.
Motionless. Observing. With the patience of something that had calculated it didn't need to act yet — that had seen two of its own fall and had processed that information in a way that wasn't despair, wasn't rage, was adjustment.
It was intelligence.
I had taken down two Vorthari. I was left with compromised bombards, Arachne needing recovery, and the mini-bombards without enough ammunition for a third long-distance engagement in time.
And the third Vorthari knew that.
Or had calculated something very close to it.
The enemy army had reached the two-hundred-meter line in rapid advance. The remaining mines were being triggered by the advance itself — not with caution, not with hesitation, but with the indifference of those who had realized that didn't kill. Only delayed.
The speed with which they arrived at that conclusion surprised me.
"Arachne — stay here. I'm going to advance."
"Father — I want to fight."
"You need to stay. Our victory depends on defeating that Vorthari. And for that you need to be standing when I need you."
I paused.
Helena was on top of the large Owlbear, lost somewhere between what she was seeing and what she was still trying to process. Her face mixed fear and anxiety in the specific way that appears in people who had never felt both at the same time — a child learning what fear was too early, in a place that shouldn't have been hers.
"Helena — keep Arachne protected from any enemy that gets through the front line."
She blinked. Came back.
"Understood, sir."
The voice came out steadier than her face suggested. It was the kind of response that happens when someone decides, in the middle of fear, not to let others see it. I had seen Carla do the same thing minutes before.
Perhaps it was something certain people simply carried.
I advanced to the front line just in time for the first impact.
One-sided massacre.
There was no other way to describe it. The Infernals were simply more than the soldiers could absorb — not in number, but in everything that mattered in direct contact. Each hypersonic attack that came through the line dropped creatures and humans with the indifference of something that wasn't making effort, just existing in the space others occupied. There was no rage in those movements. No calculated brutality. It was simply the natural result of placing two types of creature in the same space when one of them was built for it and the other wasn't.
The mines had funneled the advance and bought time. But the time had been spent. And what remained was exactly the confrontation I had said would be our defeat.
"Zaetar — come to me."
The enormous scorpion-man materialized at my side with the solidity of something that had been summoned before and knew what summoning meant. Carla, a few meters away, watched without hiding her surprise.
I passed her.
"Let's hold the line."
She advanced with the unicorns without my needing to ask.
The close-combat field was different from the artillery field.
It was louder. Closer. More personal, in a way that made it impossible to maintain the strategic perspective I had used to survive to that point. Each Infernal that appeared before me was a decision that needed to be made in fractions of a second — retreat, summon, heal, retreat again.
The first Infernal appeared before I finished processing that I had reached the line.
Zaetar advanced before I ordered.
The Infernal died in his claws. But not before driving his sword into Zaetar's chest, who disappeared — summoning ended by the damage, not by my decision.
"Zaetar — come."
I took a potion.
Summoned again.
This time he took down two before falling. I was calculating how much summoning time I had left when an Infernal appeared too fast for me to react — sword already descending, zero distance, no margin.
A bolt passed through the creature's eye.
It fell a few centimeters from me.
Carla sped past in her chariot pulled by her two unicorns, already aiming at the next one. Her tactic was different from mine — the unicorn's shield absorbed the impact while she eliminated the enemy with point-blank bolts, each death clean and precise, without wasted movement. She was massacring. It was the right word. For someone I had assessed as having no field experience, what I was seeing was something that only exists when theory meets the right urgency and the person discovers they knew more than they thought they knew.
On the other side of the field, the high-status Lord who had questioned me alongside Carla had lost his entire army and was operating alone with an enormous axe — and the axe was doing work that shouldn't have been possible for the status he displayed. There was something in that weapon that multiplied what he already was in a way I couldn't calculate from that distance.
The second Lord — the one with mounted archers — was still standing. His cavalry executed the hit-and-run tactic with a precision that indicated real training, not field improvisation. They attacked, retreated, never staying still long enough to be engaged.
The field was alive.
Human screams overlapping Infernal screams. Explosions from the Griffins dropping bombs on the enemy's rear line. The Yokais' bombards doing what they could with the remaining ammunition. Death on both sides — not in equal proportion, never in equal proportion, but enough for the field not to be the one-sided massacre it had seemed inevitable when the portals opened.
And the third Vorthari still hadn't moved.
I searched for it through the chaos.
It was there. Exactly where it had been. The enemy line had advanced around it like water around a stone — and it had stayed watching, with the stillness of something waiting for the right moment with a patience that wasn't natural for a creature of that size.
It wasn't afraid of the bombards.
It was waiting for them to run out.
"Zaetar — come."
The war of attrition was only just beginning.