The Fire and The Storm - The Nexus of Kellaran #2 novel Chapter 173

PART 25

A week after releasing the Education spell they participated in the first joint void exercise involving the militaries of every nation on Kellaran.

It began in the void opposite the sun from the real demons where Mark and his family had tested their power. There they faced simulations of the demons’ small rock world and every demon in it, all run by gods of Kellaran and The Triax. There was no way to know if the simulated demons’ strength matched that of the real ones, but they faced more than eleven billion demons in the exercise. Only a hundredth of them were greater demons, and there were only a handful of DemonLords.

Only those with a combat score of five thousand or less were allowed to fight unrestrained. Those with more power than that were allowed to command, but were forbidden from using their own power in combat, and only allowed to fight with spelled swords and shields that they were issued by the organizers that gave an expert fighter a combat score of about fifty. No concentration of power or simulacrums were allowed. Every soldier fought with his or her own power and their own bodies, along with whatever spelled items and equipment they could procure. They were still allowed to co-ordinate their forces with a Command Link, and they would certainly have been quickly slaughtered without it.

After fourteen hours of battle they had only defeated half the demons, and had destroyed less than a tenth of the tunnels and caverns.

Then their enemy surprised them by Translocating to Kellaran, where they all started attacking two Clan-Holdings in a desert in the center of Kletiuk with a combined area equal to that of Venak, and two sizable cities.

The demons had their way of it in the beginning of the battle in the void, and Kellarani losses were heavy. The Kellarani were just adapting to the challenge and turning the tide when the battle moved to Kletiuk. There the demons initially dominated the battle again, half of which was aerial and half was among the houses, buildings, tunnels, and underground caverns of the dwarves’ semi-subterranean cities.

The battle’s move to Kellaran did allow the Kellarani to bring much of their non-void-qualified fighters into the fray, and those reinforcements were sorely needed.

After another four hours the demons were losing badly again, so they retreated back to their rock in the void, where the battle continued in their tunnels and caverns for a final three hours.

When it was done, most of Kellaran’s forces, over half the total population of the world, had been ‘killed’. But all the simulated demons were dead. All the surviving void-qualified forces were so bone-tired that they were almost asleep on their feet, so reviews and evaluations of the exercise were postponed for ten hours.