I needed to act very quickly while the fighting at the door was a stalemate. But I also had to be very careful too–one wrong step and I would be frozen-out before I could finish the necessary changes.

  The key to everything were the two front doors. When they were closed, they sat flush with my demesne and I was free to act. Even a tiny bit open and someone sticking so much as a fingernail through the gap would cause me to freeze. Fortunately, the dwarves had gotten the dead body out and had managed to push the door back so it was fully closed again. Unfortunately, the goblins outside were still pushing the doors trying to open them. The result was one or the other door would swing a bit ajar before being closed again, over and over.

  So I waited on a hair trigger, and when I felt free I immediately acted.

  I ground down the hinges so they were too solid to move, effectively welding the doors closed. Neither the dwarves nor the goblins realized it right away, which worked in my favor. They just kept pushing.

  I wove a simple trap into the doors even as it cost me a bunch of my remaining mana. With what little I had after that, I extended my demesne all over just underneath the ground’s surface, both in the lobby and a large area outside the doors.

  One of the dwarves said something about the door; they must have realized it wasn’t opening as easily.

  Sorry, but not sorry, dudes–there will be no rest for you.

  I reverted the hinges back to normal.

  The dwarves holding the doors must have relaxed, because in that moment the goblins outside pushed hard. The door opened even more than before and I was frozen as the Goblins pushed in.

  The dwarves shouted more. The goblins shouted too.

  I couldn’t see the fighting, but the dwarves disrupted the goblins and they gained the upper hand again. The door swung almost all the way closed where it stopped again for just a moment. But they pushed again and the door shut.

  Then the doors shattered.

  Chunks of stone, large and small, crashed down on both sides of the door and on those nearby. But I completely ignored the screams and shouts that filtered into the Closed Caption Box.

  No, in that moment, I focused everything I had on expanding my demesne from the doorway’s arch. But I didn’t expand it blindly wholesale. Rather, I shot out thin tendrils as fast as I could like a starburst of a frag shell exploding in the air. The tendrils expanded outward and down, and where they hit anything that identified as outerwear–leather, cloth, armor–I stopped that tendril from advancing. I nearly buckled under the information overload as I juggled all of the tendrils in such a short time frame, but I managed to keep it together and continue.

  At the same time as I did that, I also extended even more spikes of demesne to come out of the lobby’s floor and the ground outside, hoping that the fighters on both sides would be momentarily shocked from moving. It seemed to work, as, while many spikes of demesne I had to stop because they hit something, many others were able to expand a lot. Eventually, perhaps only a couple seconds, someone–a goblin several dozen feet away from the door–moved and locked me out.

  The idea was simple: I needed as many of these guys to die in my demesne so I could collect that sweet, sweet Essence. I had at first thought about simply expanding my demesne everywhere, particularly from the ground upwards. After all, the most likely place a person would die would be on the floor. But between all the people standing and that one Dwarf likely lying on the floor unconscious, I would get locked-out and be kept locked-out. Thus, the spikes.

  The Goblin moved and I immediately went to work again. Someone else, though, stepped into another demesne spike. Freeze, expand, freeze, expand. A half-dozen more times it went like this before too many people were getting in for me to get another chance.

  At least with my expanded demesne, my demesne senses now gave me a better, if not imperfect, sense of what was happening.

  The doors’ destruction had caught several of the goblins and dwarves that had been pushing and fighting there. One on each side had been killed outright while others had suffered injuries of varying degrees. The dwarves pulled back from the ruins of the doors closer to the center of the room where the others were.

  The goblins–I estimated there were about twenty of them–milled about outside for a bit. They gathered their courage and moved through the now-open doorway in order to press the dwarves. However, I noticed that the goblins were splitting up. The lower level goblins moved through the doorway to fight the dwarves. Three goblins–all exactly level five–came through the doorway and stopped. They stayed there for a few seconds, then I noticed the Dwarf’s body moving. They pulled the body out of the rubble in order to take it back outside.

  The Closed Caption Box was having a hard time separating all the screaming and shouting by the two sides into easy-to-read dialogue. But as the three goblins pulled the body, the dwarves seemed to become extremely angry.

  All of the dwarves rushed towards the door, attacking the nearby goblins. The sudden charge shocked the goblins and the dwarves cut through several goblins. Two of the level 5 goblins turned and ran back towards the door to help stem the tide.

  A burning flask of alcohol–a Molotov?--flew through the entrance way’s demesne. Whoever had thrown it had thrown it too high; it wouldn’t hit the goblins swarming the entryway. Then, my senses picked up a large explosion in several of my demesne spikes outside the entrance, one of which currently had part of the dead dwarf’s body being dragged across it. The body was completely blasted, pieces of it flying off.

  The goblin that had been pulling the body was violently thrown up and back then rag-dolled off the ground before coming to a stop. Fortuitously, the goblin landed with his torso within one of my demesne spikes.

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  The dwarves on the attack were superior to the goblins in every way but were still outnumbered almost four-to-one. The leader, who I had identified by checking his sigil array and carefully reading the CCB, was doing something interesting–

  –he was running an “aura” skill. Thin, undulating, tendrils extended out of the sigil in the leader’s array, connecting to the edge of the sigil arrays of the other dwarves. Neither Interface nor Sigilmancy told me what bonus he was conferring onto his compatriots, but it seemed fairly minor.

  Regardless, the goblins abandoned their attack and fled orderly across the rubble and back outside. But they didn’t run away, merely regrouping.

  The dwarves took a breather then the leader bellowed more orders, “@!#! the rocks and $!@# a wall!”

  The dwarves hurried to pile the rock pieces of the doors into a very short makeshift wall. The rocks went only up about a foot, but the unstable ground would make it difficult for the goblins to clamber over. If I wasn’t still locked out, I would have absorbed those rocks.

  “I ?!@! a mana #1@#,” the healer said as he walked toward one of the dwarves near the entrance (I noticed yet another set of feet, which meant the unconscious Dwarf had woken up). Specifically, the highest level dwarf of the group, who was level seven had a class skill called “Brewer.” I guessed he was the one that threw the explosive and was now being asked to give a mana–liquor? The brewer made magical alcohol.

  Anyways, there were seven dwarves left, two of whom were seriously injured. The goblins still numbered about two-dozen.

  The dwarves should win easily.

  But then, a goblin I hadn’t sensed before stepped through one of my demesne spikes.

  Interface reflected the underlying sigil, so I took a look. Where once had been the sigil node for [Sapiophagia] was something that looked straight out of a horror movie. The black node was now a disgusting tumorous growth with three large bulges that spread outward, each bulge pulsing with ethereal dark light and filled with black lines and swirls that looked like worms. The skill was magical cancer.

  The dwarven commander must have realized this was the goblins’ leader too. He told the dwarf next to him, a fighter with a big square shield, that they would focus on holding off the big guy while the others would handle the lesser goblins.

  They didn’t have to wait long. A horn sounded and the goblin leader bellowed out a “charge” in its harsh language. The other goblins screamed in response and rushed towards the dwarves in a frenzy of rage and bravado.

  The two sides met in the entryway, the rubble and rocks tripping up a couple goblins and making their attack less effective. Nevertheless, the dwarves were quickly pushed a bit back as they tried to hold the line. When they held, goblins died.

  The goblins parted as the goblin leader charged the center. He carried a big poleaxe and he swung it with [Axe Hew Strike] like he was chopping at a tree. The dwarf fighter with the big shield stepped up and braced for the strike, activating his own skill, [Shield Bulwark].

  Skill versus skill.

  The poleaxe slammed into the Dwarf’s shield. The Dwarf took the powerful hit, but the shield suffered no damage. The attack had been completely negated. But the goblin didn’t give up, he rotated the axe and started trying to use the hook to pull the Dwarf’s shield away from him.

  But that may have been only a distraction. The goblin had long natty hair that fell in several braids down below his waist. He activated another cancer skill and one of his hair “tendrils” lashed out and struck the dwarf to the left of the fighter. The fighter held his shield in his left hand and in blocking the poleaxe, he wasn’t able to follow-up and stop the lash. The other dwarf–a crafter–took the lash right in the face. He screamed, grabbing his face, and fell back and onto the ground.

  Another goblin charged into the hole in the line and the fight turned into a proper melee.

  The dwarves were good at fighting as a unit as they communicated clearly with each other and kept better cohesion despite the chaos. But the big goblin weaved in and out of combat, using [Trichokinetic Lash] effectively to attack unexpectedly at odd angles. Plus, the dwarves were already tired and injured while the goblins were fresh and emboldened by their numbers.

  The big goblin reared back for another axe cutter swing, but an arrow from the scout punctured into his shoulder and caused him to real back, howling in pain. Still, the boss goblin reacted quickly to dodge back from a follow-up strike from the sword of another Dwarf. The leader lashed out with his hair to create some distance. It worked–he was able to disengage–but a wiley dwarf managed to parry and cut some hair off.

  The stomping of boots and fighting shifted, rotated. The dwarves moved closer to a side wall, using it to keep themselves from getting surrounded. My demesne didn’t cover many spots over on that side, so I lost track of the dwarves and had to follow through the movements of the various goblins.

  The retreat of the boss goblin shifted the fight back into the dwarves’ favor. They pushed back towards the entryway and even took out another one of the higher-leveled goblins.

  A horn again sounded from outside the walls and the goblins immediately turned tail and ran outside. The dwarves had held off the attack.