The Sixth Realm chieftains entered the battle at the third hour, and the battle changed.

Five barbarian chieftains, each one operating at the Sixth Realm of Power, had been held in reserve behind the barbarian ridgeline since the engagement’s start. Their reserve was not the reserve of commanders directing from the rear. It was the reserve of weapons being held for the decisive moment, the moment when the engagement’s balance was close enough that five Sixth Realm warriors entering the field simultaneously would tip the balance in the direction the tipping was designed to produce.

The first chieftain hit the Threian left flank like a thundermaker ball made flesh.

Warchief Garrok stood seven feet tall in his dwarven armor, the plates custom-forged to fit the frame that the Sixth Realm’s physical enhancement had built over decades of continuous combat. His weapon was a war axe whose head was the size of a man’s torso, the shaft reinforced with iron bands that the Sixth Realm’s striking force required because ordinary wood shattered at the impact forces that the Sixth Realm produced.

He drove into the Threian line at the point where the left flank’s formation was thinnest, the point that three hours of melee had eroded, and his war axe’s first swing killed three soldiers. Not wounded. Killed. The swing’s arc covered eight feet of the Threian line, the axe head passing through the first soldier’s neck and into the second soldier’s shoulder and through the third soldier’s raised shield and into the arm behind it. The three soldiers fell in the specific sequence that a single swing produced when the swing’s power exceeded the three targets’ combined resistance.

"Sixth Realm on the left!" The officer’s report carried the urgency that Sixth Realm contacts produced. "Barbarian chieftain! War axe! He’s through the second rank!"

Lord Fairfax rode toward the left flank. The Fifth Realm lord’s warhorse bore the runic enhancement that the Realm’s power provided to combat mounts, the horse’s speed and agility beyond what natural breeding produced. Fairfax’s sword blazed with Fifth Realm energy, the light running along the blade’s edge in the specific pattern that offensive channeling produced.

He met Garrok at the breach the chieftain had carved.

Fairfax’s sword struck Garrok’s war axe and the contact produced the shockwave that Realm-enhanced weapons produced when they met: a concussive pulse that scattered the soldiers within five paces and cracked the ground beneath the impact point. Fairfax’s horse staggered. Garrok’s feet dug furrows in the earth.

"Pinkskin lord," Garrok said, in the highland dialect that the Threian campaign had taught Fairfax to understand if not speak.

"Barbarian chieftain," Fairfax said.

Garrok swung. The war axe came across in the horizontal arc that the Sixth Realm’s power turned from a fighting technique into a force of nature, the axe head displacing the air in its path with the specific violence that compressed air produced when the displacement was fast enough to be felt as wind. Fairfax ducked. The axe passed over his head and struck the horse’s neck armor. The horse screamed. The runic enhancement absorbed the blow’s lethal component but the horse buckled and Fairfax dismounted in the controlled fall that cavalry training provided for the moment when the mount went down.

He hit the ground rolling, came up with his sword in guard position, and drove the blade at Garrok’s exposed knee. The Sixth Realm lord’s Fifth Realm strike was fast, precise, and landed with the power that the Fifth Realm provided. The sword’s point struck the dwarven knee plate and the plate cracked, the blade’s Realm-enhanced edge exceeding the armor’s structural limits at the joint where the metal was thinnest.

Garrok’s knee buckled. He roared, the Sixth Realm’s pain suppression engaging, and brought the war axe down in the overhead strike that used the Sixth Realm’s full power in the vertical arc that gravity and muscle combined to produce.

Fairfax rolled. The axe struck the ground where he had been standing and the ground cratered, the impact producing a hole two feet deep and three feet wide, the specific crater that the Sixth Realm’s striking power produced when the strike hit something that could not resist it.

"Your Majesty!" Fairfax shouted. "The chieftains are in the field! I need the Sixth Realm!"

* * * * *

King Aldric heard the call.

The king had been sustaining the Sixth Realm’s atmospheric contest against the Seventh Circle shamans for three hours, the golden aura’s energy a constant drain on the Realm’s reserves that the contest’s sustained nature demanded. Three hours of contesting the sky with two Seventh Circle shamans had reduced the king’s available power to approximately sixty percent of the Realm’s full capacity.

He could not sustain the atmospheric contest and engage the chieftains. The Sixth Realm’s power was a reservoir, not a river, and the reservoir had been draining for three hours. Splitting the remaining power between the atmospheric contest and the chieftain engagement would reduce both to the level where neither was effective.

The king made the decision that the battle’s geometry demanded.

He dropped the atmospheric contest.

The Seventh Circle’s downdraft slammed into the Threian center with the full force that three hours of contested pressure had been holding at bay. Soldiers in the center were driven to their knees. Boomsticks were torn from grips. Shields were pressed flat against bodies that the pressure compressed into the ground.

The center buckled.

The king turned his Sixth Realm’s full remaining power toward the barbarian chieftains.

Golden light blazed from the king’s position. The Sixth Realm’s full combat manifestation, the power that the Realm provided to its wielder when the wielder committed everything to the offensive application rather than the defensive, erupted from the king’s body in the specific visual that the highest Realm’s combat activation produced: a golden figure within a golden figure, the king’s physical form surrounded by the Realm’s energy form, the energy form three times the physical form’s size and radiating the power that the Realm’s full commitment provided.

He struck Garrok from the flank. The Sixth Realm’s power met the Sixth Realm’s power and the collision produced the shockwave that equal-Realm contacts produced: both combatants staggered, neither overwhelmed, the specific equilibrium that same-Realm engagements produced when neither fighter held the advantage that Circle or Realm superiority provided.

Garrok turned to face the king. Two Sixth Realm warriors, face to face, weapons raised, the battlefield’s lesser combatants giving way around them because the space that two Sixth Realm warriors occupied when they fought was the space that no lesser fighter could survive being inside.

"Mountain king," the king said.

"Valley king," Garrok said.

They fought. The war axe against the sword. The Sixth Realm’s power channeled through each blow, each parry, each dodge. The ground beneath them cracked with each impact. The air around them shimmered with the energy discharge that Realm-level combat produced. Soldiers on both sides pulled back from the radius of the engagement because the radius was the radius of destruction and the destruction did not distinguish between the combatants’ allies.

Fairfax engaged the second chieftain. The king’s Royal Guard, six warriors at the Fifth and Sixth Realm, engaged the remaining three chieftains. The individual combats raged across the left flank in the specific pattern that high-Realm engagements produced: pockets of devastating violence surrounded by clear zones where lesser fighters could not survive, the pockets’ destruction radiating outward in the shockwaves and energy discharges that the combatants’ Realm-level strikes produced.

The battle’s outcome hung in the balance of the individual combats and the atmospheric contest that the king’s withdrawal from had unleashed the Seventh Circle’s full power on the Threian center.

The center was being crushed by atmosphere. The left flank was being contested by chieftains. The right flank was holding against the barbarian infantry’s numerical disadvantage but the holding was the holding of a flank that knew the center was buckling and the left was in crisis.

The battle was not decided. The battle was the battle that the power levels on both sides had always predicted: a battle where numbers and weapons and magic and Realm-level combat produced a contest whose outcome was not predetermined by any single advantage because every advantage was countered by a different advantage on the other side.