Position Two had fallen by roughly three-quarters.
The remaining quarter was covered by the Serenade Barrier, forming a "salient." Two Serenade cores had been placed in the same area. The double shield, powered by drawing energy from the underground psionic nodes, was strong enough to keep the gnolls from breaking through with their claws and weapons.
Even falling meteorites would be blocked.
The moment this "strategic wonder" appeared on the battlefield, it brought the gnolls' latest all-out assault to an end. Clawcleaver Matriarch would need to gather enough psions to have any chance of breaking the crystal, now anchored to the psionic node.
This thing was the culmination of vampire sorcery. The Secretblood Clan had crafted it as a defensive relic specifically for the Blood Eagle Clan. During the disaster in Cadman City, Murphy and Triss had found three of them. The remaining four had been buried beneath the ruins, and as the Stonemasons' Brotherhood began rebuilding the city, two more Serenade cores had gradually been unearthed.
But the last two core crystals were nowhere to be found.
Triss suspected they had been swept into the Astral Plane, while Murphy's theory was even bolder.
The Endless One, Mannis, had said that a hundred thousand people from Cadman City were still alive in the Astral Plane. The main reason they had survived there was probably that they had somehow managed to activate two core crystals within the Astral Plane.
In any case, the Serenade Barrier was miraculous in all sorts of ways. Paired with the Serenade Scepter in Triss's hands, its debut at the Blackflame Pass had turned the tide like a masterstroke from the heavens.
However, the cost of this feat was terrible.
The veteran players had been all but wiped out!
Before they died, they had killed several times