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Okay, here goes.  I'm going to go back to the Chapter 3 scene with Mayor Nolathreal and Tern, because it is vivid and memorable.  Hold that in your mind.

It is a principle taught to instructors that you Tell Them What You Are Going To Tell Them, then you Tell Them, then you Tell Them What You've Told Them.  The magician's version is that you Tell Them That You Are Going To Amaze Them, then you Amaze Them, then you Tell Them That You've Amazed Them.

This doesn't work for storytelling, except in very limited cases and ways, and it is more and more frowned upon.  The reflective preludes and prologues that novelists wrote before the 1930s are long out of fashion.  (In fairness, the best writers could still do it, and don't need to.  The others probably never should have done it.  Hindsight is a bear.)

The analysis that follows has come to me over the last few months, so it's far from settled dogma.

When we write a story, we're not simply telling a story.  We're writing a story that engages the reader by telling the story that we really mean to tell.  Hence "Show, don't tell," which means to stay in that outer-story frame.  (It can be applied too far.  Some things are better told by the narrator, except possibly in Russian novels.)  There's another level: the story that the reader takes away from the story, which is where the theme and thesis business comes in.

Here's the harsh criticism.  In this framework, I would say that you aren't telling a story that tells a story.  You're telling us a story about a story that's telling a story.  You're showing and telling, and providing a commentary on the process.

By way of example, let me take a section from that confrontation between Nolathreal and Tern, with Talmas the thing at stake:

Let's take this much.

Tern showed only a face of calm towards the Mayor.  If you wrote "Tern's expression was steady," or "Tern faced the mayor with a calm superiority," you would be showing us what Tern is doing.  But you're telling us that Tern is putting the expression on, as well as what the expression is.

The modern reader expects to be trusted to draw that conclusion, or miss it, in order that the events flow at a speed that feels lifelike.

When you tell us that Talmas is "now visibly" shaken, you open the possibility that you might talk about another time--in other words, you remind us of the distance between the narrator-recounting and the events-recounted.  And unless we're in Talmas's PoV or maintaining a true omniscient PoV, we won't see anything that our PoV doesn't show us.  Telling us that Talmas is "visibly" shaken opens the possibily that you would tell us something not visible, again reminding us that the narrator chooses to tell us this but might have chosen to tell us something else.  You're showing the narrator telling, rather than using the narrator to show.

Okay, this is a different issue.  You have two verbs here, one in the predicate ('beckoned') and one in a participle clause ('walking').  Both are gravid with modifiers.  You're painting the scene in exquisite detail, and sometimes that's called for.  (C. S. Lewis's Perelandra, the chapters detailing Ransom's arrival up to the meeting with the Queen.)  But when you do that, you slow the action; you pay a price.  What are you buying with that payment?  (Lewis immersed the reader in Ransom's experience and showed us the nascent world, in ways that would pay back later thematically.  We discovered the world through Ransom's eyes, fingers, skin, and ears.)

What if we had instead

The Mayor stepped to the edge of the road and waved Tern over to join him.'  -- ?

You have twenty-four words.  I have sixteen.  I trust the reader to interpret 'stepped' as 'walked a short distance', and 'the edge' as 'one side of'.  The latter change doesn't quite match the meanings perfectly, but I suspect you mean 'near the edge' rather than 'on one side of the centerline'.  Likewise 'waved' for 'beckoned with a raised hand'.

Vigorous writing is concise, and when conciseness is achieved by well-chosen verbs it can be more exact and more evocative, even if only by keeping the reader in the moment.

And that too hides the seam between the narrator-recalling and the event-recalled, because the reader does less work with a single verb than with a verb heavily modified.

I also chose two coordinate, conjunction-joined predicates on the subject, rather than making one of the actions a participle phrase.  It's hard to express why I chose that; the nearest I can say is that they actions seem balanced in their weight, both in words and in importance.  It cost me a word, but I saved nine by choosing more exact verbs.

Tern approached the Mayor, hoping that Nolathreal would admit defeat or try offering a deal, out of the boy's hearing.  Tern had no intention of accepting.  Talmas was his.

Compare "Filled with anticipation ... hoping" with "expecting".  In the first, the narrator spells out affect and cause.  In the second, the narrator gives us a verb, 'hoping (that)' which covers the link from cause to affect.  (Yes, Affect, not Effect; the Affect here is an effect.)

"Talmas was his" gives us Tern's planned outcome without explicitly repeating the predator-prey relationship.  It can reinforce the relationship, and it expresses Tern's certainty, justifying (in his inner logic) his attitude toward the offer he expects from Nolathreal.

And because these connections are implicit in the statements, and especially in the verbs chosen, the reader does not have to paint-by-numbers in the outlines provided by the narrator.  The narrator disappears, and the reader has the story the narrator presents, rather than the (story of the) narrator presenting a story.

I've labored and belabored here, and I'm sure that reading this has been rough, since it goes to the way the story flows from you.  But I think it explains most of why your narrative is sluggish in spite of good action, fair-to-strong character writing, and a vivid and imaginative world filled with terrific power moments.

I hope it helps you.

The virtue of doing short stories is that you're forced to work economically, so you develop that skill.  You're forced to begin, develop, and end a story all in arm's reach, and you deal with problems in the small so you learn to identify them and deal with them on the small scale before going onto the large scale.

Don't worry about the number of chapters or word count.  Your genre is more flexible than most.  Worry instead about the story on its own terms: on how it pulls the reader, on how the reader can grasp the characters and scenes and connections, how the large plot unfolds from the series of power moments.

Incidentally, have you considered taking time off to join the MF/M group and enter the Power Moment contest?  You have lots of inventive power moments; your difficulty will be the 1000 word short-short limit.  But in the ten days left you might be able to get a very nice entry in.  (Of the seven entries as of a few moments ago, I'd say four of them are in the running.)

Edit:  I'm thinking of Mayor Nolathreal's little duel with Tern on the road.  The contest wants a new submission, but except for that the Nolathreal/Tern conflict would have been a perfect episode to submit.  I don't know how much tightening it would need to fit the 1000 words, but it would still have been recognizable.  If you can equal or better that scene in 1000 words, you have a very good chance to win.  (Says someone who thinks his own entry is still one of the best.)

And it can be a scene you plan to use in a future chapter.  That's encouraged, actually.

A further thought on the tapestry here.  One way to handle too much story is to take some out.  Another way is to fit it in properly, so that it carries the reader rather than burdening the reader.

Smoothing the flow within paragraphs and from paragraph to paragraph will help considerably.

Organing the paragraphs to carry the flow will help.  Arranging them so there are natural scene breaks will help as well.  Sometimes a scene break occurs not because the place changes or the ensemble changes, but because the action or the jeopardy changes with the same ensemble and place.

Finally, there is the question of tension and release, movement and rest.  I used David Bellavia's House to House as my example.  It's a battle history, and that's not to everyone's taste.  Staff Sgt. Bellavia brought the history and his co-author, I suspect, brought the pacing and structure, which are symphonic in their alternation of rising tension and release.  If you don't mind the read and you can give it the time, this might be a useful exemplar.

House to House is a very skillful example, and it will take time to learn that skill.  (I don't have it yet.)  But your story could make good use of it, even if you don't achieve instant mastery.

I just made a small edit in Battle with Cott and the Beaast.  It's in the final approach to the climax.  It took one of my two remaining words, but I think it adds a little more Zing.

'Skirmish' maybe?  Though I suspect they are cognates.

On the heater shield: the Wikipedia article asserts that the term is a neologism and properly refers to a small shield, not a full-body shield.  I can see that Tazar would not want to carry a scutum himself, but those holding the line probably need larger shields to hold the line.

If, on the other had, we view Tazar as two-legged cavalry, a concentration-shock element, the smaller shield makes sense.

I attended the U of Iowa summer program a couple of times.  Even in a week, you learn an awful lot.   Of course learning what you need to do it and learning to make it work yourself are different things.  But it's still a big jump.

'each pressed hard, holding fast against the enemy'?

Okay, I missed this.  Techincally, a melee is what you have after the line of battle (or other proper order) has broken down.

Sorry about that.

I have the pigeon-flasher working as intended, but I've disturbed some things in my testbed detector.  I need to set them back to be sure everything is working as planned.  Then I need to set up another breadboard prototype to check the major (and minor)  layout revisions I have planned.  Before I start placing parts, I want to do a new master wiring/parts layout diagram.

And I need to work on Physical Design, and to order more parts.

Okay, let me give this a try.

'jabbed for' suggests that the point itself had intent.  'jabbed towards' or 'jabbed at' woud avoid this.

Good image, though 'jumble' is a mild word.  'tangle' might be better, but I suggest a session with Mister Thesaurus.

You could drop 'looking' and 'like', speeding the flow a bit.

'opposed each other, holding fast'?

So they are using linear tactics, never having had Roman Legions whose movements within their line would break the opposing line?  (We still don't know just how they did it.)

This is in the past tense, but 'thrust' is present tense.

You don't need 'both'.

Instead of specifying 'good guys', why not just name that side and let the reader make the usual assumption: that until further notice, the protagonist(s) are the good guys?

The first comma suggests a parenthetical-effect match with the second comma.  Since that's not the structure, I suggest dropping the first comma.  The second is the more necessary, and provides a more balanced break of the sentence.  Everything after the comma modifies not the immediately preceeding predicate but the more remote subect of the sentence, 'the shields'.

Instead of 'in front of', 'before'.  Its length matches 'above', creating symmetrical brevity around the conjunction.

'bad guys'=>'Their opponents, {name},'

'other fighter' == 'fallen fighter'?  Otherwise I might thing that the other fighter is the enemy who struck the blow.

'keeping him protected'=>'protecting'.

What shield?

The fallen priest's magical bracer?  Charmed bracer?  The magic of the fallen priest's bracer?

In the priest's eyes?  Why is Tazar looking away from the threat?  Doesn't he know better?  I suggest leaving Tazar's PoV for a couple of paragraphs to cover this, and letting him concentrate on the battle.

This asserts a negative with an oblique expression.  'The City called this a game.  It was battle, staking Tos G'Swa's future on wooden weapons wielded.'  Okay, that last bit is frumpery.

'struck the head of the enemy soldier taunting Tazar.  The man's head flew back and his body followed, to the ground.' ?

'The oversized lance flew across the fighting lines and struck ... .  His head flew back ...' ?

'was willing'=>'was ready'?

'keeping the shield wall from being shoved off their feet' => 'holding the shield wall together on its feet'?

The tip had a blunt tip, or the spear's tip was blunt and wide, with hooks?  In which case it's not really a spear.  Not exactly a halberd either, but hooked weapons were used to pull down mounted fighters.  A paging tour of Wikipedia, starting perhaps with 'halberd', should turn up some suitable words.

That is what made {x} the bad guys.

'A muffled, mocking laugh made Tazar ...'

They were getting nowhere?

Exchange 'He' and 'Tazar'.

Can you remove the question, and adjust the second sentence to match?

Try without 'of them'.  Instead of 'Tazar waited ...', try 'When all five ... Tazar ...'

Have you defined 'heater shield'?  You use it more than once, so I assume it's not a typo.

'The' bad guy?  Which one?  There are a lot of them.  You mean the taunter, the loudmouth?

Why hyphenate 'bad-guy'?

You don't need the first phrase.

'other tall men followed suit'=>'four tall fighters pushed/pressed forward/ with Tazar'?

'knocking down ... armored soldiers'=>toppling ((seven or eight)) armored enemies out of their line', and you can drop the simile.

'Tazar didn't care'=>'it didn't matter'.

Try 'be' instead of 'make'.  It's a little shorter, but also a little less vivid.

'The enemy shield wall was falling'?

Overall, the description, flow, and logic are good and feel true to linear tactics as I understand them.

Does the character have to choose the moment (Katerin's display) or can the moment choose the character (an unexpected assailant in battle)?

For me, a use of power gains strength by its immediate connection to action, plot, and character.  It loses strength if it is scene-setting or milieu

Good luck on the test.  Remember the little stuff and stay 5 mph below all the speed limits.

Yes, the power budget is about battery life.  I'm using C cells.  Depending on how fast you draw the current and where your low voltage cutoff is, good alkaline C's can give you between two and ten amp-hours.  My low-voltage cutoff is about 3.6 volts for four or 0.9 volts per cell.  With very low current, I'm on the longest curve, so I'm hoping for 7.7 amp-hours.  When it's off-hook or flashing it will draw more current, so I need a little margin.  If I figure 7.5 amp-hours and 52560 hours.  Divide 7.4 amp-hours by 52560 hours and you get 0.000136 amps, or 136 microamps.  Might as well call it 135.

The most important operations in High School Algebra are adding zero and multiplying by one.