Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 451

Chapter 451

Chapter 451

Chapter 451

ARIA

Then the new wave hit.

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It came from the west – not the group Priya had engaged earlier, a fresh section that had been held in reserve. Larger than the previous flanking attempt, moving with the momentum of a force that had been staged specifically for the moment when the main attack faltered and the defenders were committed to their positions.

“Sixty,” Jason said, through the walkie-talkie, from his elevated position where he could see what I couldn’t. “Sixty additional, western approach. They had a second wave staged.”

“Of course they did,” Santos said.

“Arrows,” I said.

“We don’t have enough archers to—”Jason started.

“I know,” I said. “Hold the northern group where they are. Don’t let the second wave join the main force. I need them separated.”

“How,” Jason said.

I brought the shield up.

Not around me – extended outward, the way I’d experimented with in training and had never tried at this scale. A barrier rather than a bubble, oriented between the second wave’s approach vector and the main engagement. The white light of it expanded across the western approach but was absolutely real to anything that in a wall that wasn’t physical – wasn’t solid matter — tried to pass through it while I was maintaining it.

The second wave hit the barrier and stopped.

Sixty wolves slamming into a wall of moon-shield energy at full running pace produced a sound that was going to be in my memory for a considerable time.

“Oh,” Jason said, through the walkie-talkie.

“Now arrows,” I said, through the effort of maintaining the barrier.

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Chapter 451

“Now arrows,” Jason confirmed, and the next wave came down.

The barrier was costing me.

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Not failing – holding, but demanding. The expanded shield plus the link plus the ongoing management of the anchor’s other functions was a load I hadn’t carried at this scale before, and I could feel it in the way you felt the edge of something – not falling off, but knowing the edge was there.

“How long can you hold that,” Santos said.

“Long enough,” I said.

“That’s not a number,” he said.

“Long enough,” I said again.

Through the link: Andrew’s eastern flank pushing. The main force, separated from its reserve wave by the barrier, was losing the mathematics of the engagement. They’d planned for the barrier not to exist. They’d planned for the reserves to reinforce at the critical moment. The plan was not producing the intended outcomes.

Then someone tried to take down one of my wolves.

I say tried because the attempt did not succeed.

A fighter from the main force’s edge, using the confusion of the barrier engagement to work around Andrew’s flank position and target a specific wolf who’d extended their coverage Sam, who’d moved forward to press the advantage when the reserve wave hit the barrier. Coming from the side, fast, the angle specifically chosen to avoid Sam’s immediate sightline.

I felt it through the link before I saw it. Sam’s position, the incoming threat, the angle and timing of it.

The blast went out before I’d finished thinking about it.

Not at the fighter – at the ground between the fighter and Sam. The blast impact threw the fighter sideways and broke the angle of their approach, the specific positioning calculated in the fraction of a second that the link gave me.

The fighter went down.

Sam looked at the position where the threat had been and then looked, through the link, at

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Chapter 451

…

“Thank you,” Sam said.

“Don’t extend that far without covering your flank,” I said.

“Noted,” Sam said.

“Also you’re welcome,” I said.

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Through the link: a quality I was starting to recognize as the pack-wolf equivalent of warmth. The specific feeling of thirty animals who’d made a collective decision about the person they were following and were continuing to confirm it with each new data point.

The witches came back for me.

I should have expected it. I had expected it, abstractly, but the specific timing was faster than I’d anticipated two of them moving through the disruption of the barrier’s engagement to reach the position where I was maintaining it from.

The witches weren’t retreating yet. They were recalibrating – I could see it in their positioning, the specific conversation happening between them that was fast and urgent and was producing a new approach. They were going to come at me differently now that the direct blast approach had been reversed once.

I didn’t wait for them to develop the approach.

The lunar scream.

—

I pushed it through at full strength not the half-strength training version, not the controlled test I’d deployed at the beginning of the battle. The full version, the one that had stopped Ivory for six seconds in the training session on the lower slope, carrying every piece of the anchor’s capacity into the frequency that disrupted concentration rather than bodies.

It hit all three witches.

The one on the left went down immediately and didn’t get back up. Unconscious, not dead the scream wasn’t lethal, even at full strength.

The one in the middle staggered. Put both hands over her cars in the instinctive human response to overwhelming sound, which wasn’t going to help her because the scream wasn’t primarily sound, but the instinct was there.

–

The third one the one who’d been hunting Ivory, the one from the lower slope, the one whose teleportation signature I knew from three separate scenes – didn’t go down.

She’d been bracing for it.

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