The mages... Are really... Fucking useless... Spoilers below the cut. And believe me, this is short for how much I could go on about E06's weirdness alone...
I cannot, for the life of me, fathon how a room full of mages was equally matched to a room full of archers with one-and-a-half supporting mages, because, what, the archers were using antimagic arrows? Who gives a fuck? Shields and Fire magic are not your most powerful tools as a mage - your MIND is.
As soon as those troops assembled in the room, why didn't anyone do an AOE? Of any kind? Shatter the floor so they have nothing to stand on and easily fight around. Drop a poison cloud and have your mages magic-mask up. Raise the temperature of all the metal in their armour. Bind them with vines, or stone, or fucking anything.
Sympathetically target the kneecaps of the arrayed enemy forces in front of you, and transpose them 3m to the left, thereby removing all fighting capability from both the melee and archers for more than long enough to simply obliterate the rest. The archers might be able to recover and fire an arrow at some point in the next 15 seconds, depending on pain tolerance, but that's more than enough time to pull back and safely fill the room with death.
Target the strings of their bows, and turn them into live snakes, or even just dust.
Hell, just fucking force-push as one cohesive group, and knock them all over, then attack.
Did Sodden teach them nothing? Did they basically forget anything the learned? Tissaea gave them unified instructions after her shield was ignored, but they were the most individualistic and least-followable instructions. "DEFLECT. TARGET THE ARCHERS." How about any one of you AOE from behind some cover? Fucking pathetic.
Really, there are no excuses for telekinetic-combat-capable mages in that large a group to have lost to that pathetically small ground-based fighting force that had only roughly two mages on-side.
If Aretuza could have been taken by that few, against the entirety of the Brotherhood sans a couple of turncoat stragglers, they were never anything to be feared to begin with, in the slightest.
Even fucking Stregobor's barely-on-screen super "HES USING FIRE MAGIC" attack was... Pathetic. The equivalent of a large firebomb that any alchemist could and has put together in-universe. At the very least I thought he would self-consume in a directed torrent of pure focused fire that risked pushing them back, melting stone and metal and flesh alike. But no, he just went 'boom', and basically did nothing, since the regrouped immediately after that, and fought again.
Absolute fucking shitshow. Pathetic mages, not an ounce of imagination in their heads.
