A Seventh Circle shaman entered the battle at the fifteenth hour, and the streets burned.

The shaman was not Vor’gath. Vor’gath remained unconscious in the palace’s eastern wing, the toxin’s degradation of the eldest shaman’s power continuing at the rate that the toxin’s engineered persistence sustained. The shaman who entered the battle was the second Seventh Circle practitioner, the younger of the two shamans whose combined power had produced the atmospheric manipulation that had pressed the Threian army into the earth at Harken Field and whose Departure dome had covered the barbarian army’s withdrawal when the withdrawals occurred.

His name was Shul’Korr. He was forty years old. His Seventh Circle attainment was recent, the elevation from the Sixth Circle having occurred three years before the campaign’s descent from the highlands. His power was the power that recent attainment produced: volatile, immense, the control less refined than Vor’gath’s sixty years of practice provided but the raw output exceeding Vor’gath’s because the younger shaman’s body sustained the Seventh Circle’s energy throughput at the rate that youth’s physical vitality allowed.

Shul’Korr walked into the market district’s central avenue from the palace district’s northern approach at the fifteenth hour with his staff raised and his chanting at the frequency that the Seventh Circle’s combat application produced. The chanting was not the atmospheric manipulation that the Harken Field engagements had used. The chanting was the specific frequency that the shamanic tradition called the Earth’s Wrath, the technique that converted the ground itself into the weapon that the technique’s name described.

The cobblestones in the market district’s central avenue erupted.

Not cracked. Erupted. The stones launched upward from the avenue’s surface at the velocity that the Seventh Circle’s earth manipulation produced when the manipulation’s power was applied to the specific geological layer that the cobblestones rested on, the layer whose compressed stability the Seventh Circle’s frequency disrupted with the concussive force that the frequency’s power delivered to the stone’s molecular structure.

Cobblestones the size of a man’s torso flew upward twenty feet, thirty feet, the stones’ trajectories the trajectories that the eruption’s force and the stones’ mass combined to determine. The stones rose and the stones fell and the falling stones struck everything beneath them with the impact that stone’s mass and gravity’s acceleration combined to produce.

Three Yurakk warriors in the avenue’s center were struck by the falling cobblestones. The warriors’ rectangular shields, raised against the boomstick fire that the avenue’s engagement produced, caught the falling stones at the angle that the shields’ overhead coverage provided. The stones struck the shields and the shields held but the stones’ impact’s force drove the warriors to their knees and the kneeling exposed the warriors to the boomstick fire that the barbarian warriors at the avenue’s far end delivered.

"SEVENTH CIRCLE!" A Yurakk officer’s report carried through the formation with the urgency that the Seventh Circle’s identification demanded. "SEVENTH CIRCLE SHAMAN IN THE AVENUE! EARTH MANIPULATION!"

The Golden Wolf answered.

The Amazzfer raised the totem at the Horde’s deployment’s center, the Golden Wolf’s golden shimmer expanding through the streets in the wave that the warriors’ collective belief produced. The shimmer’s protective nullification of magic below the Fourth Circle was active across the deployment’s area. The Seventh Circle’s earth manipulation exceeded the Fourth Circle’s threshold by three Circles.

The Golden Wolf’s shimmer met the Seventh Circle’s earth eruption and the shimmer attenuated the eruption’s force at the specific ratio that the Circle difference produced: the shimmer reduced the Seventh Circle’s output by approximately twenty percent, the reduction converting the cobblestones’ eruption from the lethal velocity that the full Seventh Circle produced to the injurious velocity that the attenuated Seventh Circle produced. Warriors struck by the attenuated eruption’s cobblestones were injured rather than killed. The reduction was the reduction that the Golden Wolf’s faith-based protection provided against power that exceeded the protection’s nullification threshold.

Shul’Korr pushed harder. The Seventh Circle’s full output directed at the streets that the Horde’s deployment occupied, the earth manipulation spreading from the central avenue to the flanking streets, the cobblestones erupting across a three-hundred-pace front, the eruption’s sustained power producing the specific effect that sustained Seventh Circle output produced in urban terrain: the systematic destruction of the streets’ surfaces and the conversion of the surfaces’ materials into the projectiles that the surfaces’ disruption launched.

The Horde’s Roarers answered from the flanking positions. The rolling volleys directed at the shaman’s position at the avenue’s northern approach, the balls crossing the six-hundred-pace distance at the trajectory that the flanking positions’ angles provided. The balls struck the ground around the shaman and the shaman’s shamanic field deflected the balls’ trajectories, the field’s defensive function converting the balls’ paths from the straight lines that the Roarers’ barrels dictated into the curved lines that the shamanic deflection produced.

"The Roarers cannot reach him," Sakh’arran reported. "The shamanic field deflects the Roarer fire. The field’s defensive function at the Seventh Circle exceeds the Roarers’ ballistic penetration capability."

"The battlemages could not reach the shamans either," Khao’khen said. "The Threian battlemages spent three weeks failing to penetrate the shamanic field with structured magic. The Roarers fail to penetrate the field with physical projectiles. The field deflects both."

"Then how do we reach him?"

"We do not reach him with projectiles. We reach him with proximity. The shamanic field deflects projectiles. The shamanic field does not deflect warriors. The field’s defensive function is the function that protects the shaman from ranged attacks. The field does not protect the shaman from the warrior who walks through the field and drives a sword into the shaman’s body at the range where the sword’s blade is inside the field’s perimeter."

"Walking through the field requires walking through the earth eruption that the field’s offensive function produces."

"Yes. Walking through the earth eruption requires the specific warrior whose capabilities include the capability that walking through a Seventh Circle’s earth eruption demands."

Khao’khen looked at the Rakshas’ position in the avenue. The 1st Warband’s formation, held in the defensive posture that the thundermakers’ avenue denial had imposed, was the formation that contained the specific warriors whose capabilities the plan required.

"Arka’garr."

The 1st Warband’s master stepped forward. The master’s face was the face that the 1st Warband’s every engagement had been fought behind: flat, composed, the specific expression that communicated nothing about the expression’s wearer’s emotional state and everything about the expression’s wearer’s readiness.

"Take the Rakshas forward," Khao’khen said. "Through the avenue. Through the earth eruption. Through the shamanic field. Close to contact range. Kill the shaman."

"The eruption will kill warriors in the advance."

"The eruption will kill warriors. The Golden Wolf’s attenuation reduces the eruption from lethal to injurious. Injurious is the condition that the Rakshas advance through because the advance through injurious conditions is the advance that the Rakshas have been making since the campaign’s first engagement."

"Drak’ul vosh," Arka’garr said. Death before surrender. The words were the words that the 1st Warband spoke before the engagements that the words described, the engagements whose conditions included the specific possibility that the words’ content addressed.

"Drak’ul vosh," Khao’khen confirmed.

The Rakshas advanced.

The earth eruption’s effect on the capital’s architecture was the effect that sustained Seventh Circle geological manipulation produced in an urban environment whose buildings’ foundations depended on the geological stability that the manipulation was disrupting. The buildings flanking the avenue’s central section shifted as the cobblestones’ eruption propagated through the sublayer that the foundations rested on. Window frames cracked. Masonry joints opened. A chimney on the avenue’s eastern building tilted and shed bricks that fell into the avenue alongside the erupting cobblestones, the bricks’ descent adding the architectural debris to the geological debris that the Rakshas’ Tohr’terra was deflecting.

The lesser barbarian shamans, nine remaining practitioners whose capabilities had been degraded by the Harken Field engagement’s mutual annihilation, attempted to supplement Shul’Korr’s earth eruption with the ground liquefaction techniques that the lesser shamans’ Fourth Circle capabilities provided. The liquefaction spells struck the Golden Wolf’s shimmer and the shimmer nullified them. The Fourth Circle was below the totem’s nullification threshold. The lesser shamans’ contributions to the engagement were the contributions that the Golden Wolf converted from attacks into nothing, the spells’ energy absorbed by the collective belief that seven thousand warriors sustained in their chieftain and that the Amazzfer’s bleeding arms channeled into the totem’s protective field.

"The lesser shamans are nullified," Sakh’arran reported. "The Golden Wolf absorbs everything below the Fourth Circle. Only the Seventh Circle penetrates. The shaman is the only magical threat."

"Then the shaman is the only magical target," Khao’khen said. "Everything else is infantry. Infantry is what the Rakshas were built to grind."

The distinction was the distinction that the Golden Wolf’s specific capability produced in the engagement’s magical dimension: the reduction of the barbarian army’s magical capability from the combined output of ten practitioners to the single output of one practitioner whose power exceeded the others’ combined output but whose singularity made the single practitioner the single target that the single practitioner’s elimination would convert from the magical threat into the magical absence.