A small part of my consciousness counted the number of mages on that field, even as I tore through their ranks, and they were exactly two hundred and six.
Nineteen Adepts, the rest Acolytes, holding a broken Academy line against a low stone wall, and they had the advantage. After all, they were the invaders, and they were ready for war, and most mages on the continent were not Battlemages, just normal craftsmen and scholars looking for the truth... for them to have held on this long against the Conclave was a miracle.
I got through a hundred of them before anyone on either side understood what was happening. They were Acolytes and Adepts, and they had no defense against me. Their spells passed through my afterimages, their shields shattered at my touch, their bodies fell before they could scream.
The Academy forces, the blue and grey mages who had been on the verge of breaking, watched in stunned silence as the Conclave formation collapsed from within.
∞
My threads were supposed to glow with a silver sheen, but I used Lightning Edict to cloak that color, and so when I moved through the ranks of the enemy, they only saw a hand’s motion and a wet sound and a man going down, and by the time the man beside him looked, I was four ranks away.
I was killing those that were far weaker than me, but it did not mean I did not respect their intelligence or abilities, and I was definitely not going to make their lives... or death, easier by showing them what was killing them.
The almost invisible way they were dying might have terrified them, but I did not much care for their mental health at this point.
Of course they tried to form up; I had noticed that formations are the Conclave’s answer to everything; they are disciplined and fight as units. It was this sort of formation that was conquering my continent.
However, a formation was the wrong way to fight someone like me; what they should have done instead was to spread out and run as far as possible away from me... it was possible that I would have let a few escape because I was focused on the entire continent and not the few stragglers who slipped out of the net.
You see, a formation is a shape, and a shape has seams, and one thing about threads is their capacity to be able to go through spaces like this. My threads could weave through spaces that they could not see or defend against.
Cut the two men holding the left flank together and the flank is not a flank anymore; now it is just nineteen frightened people standing near each other, who soon lost their heads in the next two seconds.
I did that four times in eleven seconds, and bodies began to pile up around me.
∞
When I began killing, I had a mental count of the bodies that were dropping to the floor; it was a habit I had developed when I was killing mages at Caelith Mourne, and it had followed me to this place... one, two, seven, fifteen, forty... and then somewhere past sixty I noticed the numbers had stopped meaning anything.
I was slipping back into a more familiar habit, which I had learned while killing demons in their thousands, and at this moment, it was becoming harder for me to see the distinction between man and demon.
I did not stop, but I noticed, and even though I could have dismissed this thought, I let it sit with me. In a minute, every Conclave mage was dead; none of them had tried to run, but most of them begged.
∞
The slaughter was quick, and the defending mages behind the low wall still stood there with their spells half-cast, not fully comprehending what had just happened.
When it was quiet, one of them came over the wall. It was an Adept, older, which meant he should be over a century in age. Most Adepts only show visible signs of aging in their eighties, and with specialised spells, those signs could be delayed up to the moment of death.
His face was filled with tiredness, as if he had been awake for a week, and he stopped twenty feet from me, a sensible distance, in the circumstances, before he made a deep bow, as he glanced at the field behind me.
"Lord Arcanist, thank you for saving us."
I glanced at my Acolyte’s grey robes, and knew that it would only deceive those who had not seen me wield my powers, especially since I was not holding a Staff.
I did not reply for a moment, and I could see him becoming nervous, and so I nodded at him. "Go, find a place to be safe. I will be cleansing the surface; send warnings to those that you can that I am coming."
He gasped, and I could see many thoughts going through his head, but I had no time to satisfy them before I took to the skies again, and with Stormsteps, I vanished.
Perhaps the news of my coming would spread ahead of me, and I was counting on it.
∞
I found the next one three miles south. It was larger, a proper engagement with thousands on each side. The Academy forces were holding, but barely. The Conclave had the advantage in fielding more battle-hardened mages, and I could smell demonic corruption from a mile away. There were no demons here, but their spells were being used, and I know what that corruption does to the soul of a person.
I descended, and I did not hold back. Behind me, my threads spread out, almost like wings, and I sent them down in a wave that pierced and sliced through rows of mages as if they were standing still... most of them did not know how they died.
Some of the Adepts had fancy spells, some of them were demonic, two of them could even teleport, but their range of three hundred meters was too small... my threads crossed the distance and found them before they even arrived at their destination.
This time, the slaughter was even faster; in one moment there were hundreds of spells flying through the air, and then in about two minutes, the field was silent.
I hovered in the air for a moment to see if I missed anyone, and leaving only instructions to the mages here to spread word of my coming... I vanished under a flash of lightning.