War God for Hire- Mercenary: A Reincarnation, Cultivation, Litrpg Adventure

by David Burke

  The Archmage staggered back, and Kyle said, “Stand down. Your strength will be needed for the defense of this city.” Then, he turned on the priestess. She still hadn’t been affected, even by the extra essence he’d pushed at her.

  She grinned. “You are him. Most of us didn’t know whether to believe the high priestess or not, but it is true. Krig has returned to Verden.”

  “No,” Kyle snorted, “and you should be glad that he has not. If I were Krig, you would already be dead as would all of your sisters for what your church did to his battle maidens.”

  Kyle’s words seemed to shake her, and she trembled. “We were only following the instructions of our Lady of Lust.”

  “How Begaer ever reached this status is beyond me. It is hardly fitting that a thousand other champions fell so that she might ascend, but here we are nonetheless.” Kyle shook his head. “You present me with a bit of a dilemma, priestess. I can’t let you run and tell your goddess about me, but despite my role in this world, I take no delight in causing unnecessary deaths.”

  “Then what do you propose?”

  Kyle wasn’t sure if he liked her defiant attitude or wanted to squash her. “I think you are the one begging for your life. But for now, just go stand in the corner quietly. If you don’t cause any trouble, I will count it in your favor.”

  Kyle just walked past her and over to the Governor. He used Sky Essence to broadcast his voice. “Nargossa is now under my control. I will be setting up a council to run day-to-day matters, as the governor and his family will be allowed to flee north to Thena—as will any nobles or merchants who don’t want to live under my rule.” He paused. “But anyone that isn’t gone by sunrise tomorrow, will become my subjects. My word is now law in Nargossa.”

  One noble stood up from where he had soiled himself. “We can’t possible gather all of our possessions in that amount of time!”

  “Precisely,” Kyle replied with a stone-cold face.

  The noble sputtered. “You mean to rob us then?”

  “No. I mean to use the wealth created by the people of Nargossa to provide protection for those same people.” He looked the room of cowering nobles over. “War is coming. An army of the undead will be at our gates soon. They are already attacking Calrissi.”

  He arched an eyebrow at them, tilting his head to the side. “You must have realized by now that no caravans or messengers are coming out of the south—only monsters and more refugees.”

  A few more merchants or nobles raised their voices to argue, but Kyle quickly tired of it. He sent out a Rage Burst, but moderated it, so that it was only enough to knock all the people on their asses.

  “This is not a negotiation,” he growled. “I rule Nargossa now. You may either call me Lord Kyle or Lord of War. I don’t care which, so long as you obey. Spread the word that anyone still here come sunrise, will be obligated to fight for the safety of their city. I will protect the weak—but the weak must then serve.”

  As his words sank in, nobles, merchants and even a few guards began running out. The Governor was still huddled on his mini throne. Kyle looked back over his shoulder and said, “Archmage, your city still has need of you. I promise to teach you things you never imagined you might learn, if you will pledge yourself to obey me.”

  The man looked at Kyle warily, but the indecision on his face only lasted a moment. “If you mean what you say and you will protect the people of this city, then I will serve you. I’ve served this fool for long enough,” he said with a derisive snort as he pointed to the Governor.

  “Very well. Get some guards together to escort the Governor and his family to the north gate. He can’t stay, as this would only cause dissent.”

  The Archmage nodded.

  “Then,” Kyle continued, “I want you to gather as many of the city guard or Governor’s personal guard—along with any mages you believe can be trusted to put the city’s interests first—and meet me tomorrow morning at the guildhall. Lady Meeka can arrange the details for you.”

  The Archmage nodded and Kyle turned towards the priestess of Begaer. He walked over to where she was standing behind a column. “At least you can be quiet.”

  She reached out her hand and placed it against his chest.

  Meeka yelled a warning, but Kyle already sensed the spell the priestess was preparing. He felt a wave of Lust Essence rush over him, and he supposed he was supposed to feel an irresistible, overwhelming desire for this woman, but all he felt was disgust. Her spell had no power over him.

  “Thank you for making this decision easy,” Kyle said as his soul bound weapon appeared in his hand in the form of the hand axe he’d used against the vampires. One quick horizontal slash removed her head from her body, a quickly raised barrier of sky essence keeping the fountain of blood that sprayed out from touching him. He watched her headless body collapse and then turned and strode out of the room without looking back.

  Back out in the hallway, Kyle looked at Meeka. “I’m done here. Meeka, work with the Archmage to ensure the Governor is removed. And I mean alive, unless he resists repeatedly.”

  He then turned to the sorcerer. “Gilthan, search the dead priestess. I believe she has an essence reservoir. Take it to Nyda and see if she can cleanse it from Begaer’s taint. If so, it might be useful.”

  Chapter 26 - New Birth

  Kyle headed back to the guildhall but got distracted when he sensed an odd fluctuation of essence in the city. It spread from the old side of town, like a ripple does in a pool when a rock is thrown in. He shouted for Gilthan, who was flying back with him to go on ahead while he checked it out. Then he turned and headed to where he’d sensed the disruption.

  It likely had been part of the original city, hundreds of years ago. It might have even been a good part of the city, but now it was in disrepair. Unlike the newer low rent sections, this was all old stone. His senses told him there was practically a catacomb beneath the city. So, he stretched out more and more, trying to get more of a feel for what was wrong.

  The problem was, he could only get back little bits of information. It was irritating, now that he was finally getting used to relying upon his other senses, that he couldn’t seem to detect things clearly. Suddenly, a surge of anxiety ran through him as he felt a burst of emotion through his link with one of his bonded.

  He homed in on that, and it seemed to increase the accuracy of what he could detect. Marie was down there, somewhere under the city. There were numerous undead creatures fighting her, though he could also sense something worse that sent an icy chill down his spine.

  It couldn’t be. He must be wrong. He had to get to Marie, now.

  Kyle burst through the first layer of the stone pavers in the street. They were old and porous, the limestone having eroded over time, but he didn’t stop with the first layer. He summoned the rock into armor around his fists with Earth Essence and blasted down through layer after layer of stone. He didn’t care about the white dust that covered him from head to toe. He needed to reach Marie.

  When he finally hit the bottom of the catacombs, he found her. Marie might be her name, but it didn’t seem to fit the being who spun, ducked, dodged, and attacked in a smooth, almost fluid glide before him. She was Lash, in all her glory, at least at the moment. He took a second to fully take the scene in. They were in what must have been an ancient building that had been built over as the city expanded. The room must have been thirty by thirty, with a ceiling that arched up more like a cavern.

  Then, he realized where they were. It must have been an old temple to Krig, god of war. The placement seemed odd, but Kyle didn’t question it. He could feel the War Essence that had flowed through this place long ago. There was a thick residue of it all around him. The air practically hummed with it.

  Lash made the most of it, as she moved with both grace and power. He knew she had grown much stronger since he’d upgraded her, but it was still magnificent to watch. She faced off against at least a dozen ghouls. Ea
ch was a horrid corruption of Life and Death essence. They’d once been human—he judged from their appearance that they had likely been teenagers—but not a trace of humanity remained, as they glared at Lush with a desperate hunger in the black eyes. Their half-naked bodies were hunched over, long claws tipped their fingers, and drooling fangs extended from their mouth.

  Each ghoul struck at her with a tongue longer than a fat man’s belt. Lash had already been already wounded in half a dozen places, but she’d given far better than she got. There were more than a dozen ghouls blasted to pieces too small to do more than quiver.

  Each time she struck with her whip, it cracked like thunder. A combination of War and Justice essence ripped through not only the ghoul she struck, but also the one behind it.

  Still, the others used the extension of her whip to leap at her. Had he not been there, she would have been overwhelmed at that moment, but he was. Kyle felt so bad for her. He had taken her on because of her faithfulness and the requests of the other girls in his harem. He thought he had felt some tingling of love for her before, but that had been remnants of Krig’s tangled feelings.

  Now seeing her fight so hard, he understood more about her. She must have come down here trying to find the people who had been kidnapped, but instead she found that far worse had happened to them. They had been changed into ghouls, and she was close to paying with her life for discovering the secret.

  Kyle’s descent brought him down in the midst of the ghouls trying, who immediately tried to scramble all over him. A clawed hand slashed out at him, but his reflexes were faster. While his left hand grabbed the arm, his right summoned his soul bound weapon. He called it forth in its naginata form and then made a wide sweep with the blade, cutting a pair of ghouls in half as he ripped the arm of the first ghoul from its shoulder.

  He shouted, “Drop!”

  Hoping that Lash understood what he meant, he cut loose with a ring of Rage Burst that scattered the remaining ghouls, giving them some breathing room. Thankfully, Lash had understood what he intended to do and had dropped without question. As soon as the force of the attack passed over her head, she bounced back up from the ground.

  From there, the fight went back and forth. Lash and Kyle stood back-to-back and cut down the enemy before any of them got too close. There was a certain joy in this kind of fighting and he exulted in it. Kyle could feel sorrow running through the bond from Lash, but to him these people were already dead. They were now an enemy that he could destroy without any moral concerns.

  He hacked away at the foe, keeping the fight at a purely melee level. As each slash of his naginata was enhanced by War Essence, the enemy before him were quickly cut into pieces—and then those pieces were cut into smaller pieces. Eventually, he knew, he’d have to trap all the bits and pieces, so the corruption couldn’t spread any further.

  Perhaps he would destroy them with essence, but for now, it felt good to cut loose physically. That was, until he felt Lash slump against his back. She must have been injured worse than he’d thought.

  A partition of his mind delved into her and realized that the ghoul wounds caused a type of infection. It was like they were spreading Death Essence through her otherwise healthy tissue like a cancer. This must be how they created new ghouls; Kyle realized.

  It wasn’t some bacteria or virus like his Earth mind had assumed, but rather the taint of Death Essence. That was fine, he was prepared to handle this. Kyle spun around and pulled Lash close to his chest as a cocoon of rock flowed up and over them. Once she was protected, he let loose with his most powerful Rage Burst. It shattered the bodies of the remaining ghouls, as well as many of the stone walls around them.

  If he wasn’t careful, he realized, they were going to be buried within these catacombs. But Kyle didn’t want to leave any bits of ghoul flesh around to cause problems later. He didn’t know how they had gotten into the city in the first place, but he would be sure to at least end these.

  For some reason, he still felt more at ease dealing with Death Essence than Justice Essence, so he reached out and pulled on every little sliver of Death Essence he sensed all around them. Tendrils of power shot off of him but as the stone ceiling above them crumbled. He forced himself to work faster.

  A stabbing pain went through Kyle’s head as he split his mind to handle more and more tasks at the same time. No matter how it might have looked like to an outsider, each tendril of Death Essence required the specific focus and attention of one of his partitions. A mortal mind never would have been able to keep up with all the flows, but Kyle was so much more than that.

  He split his attention into two, then four, and then eight tendrils. He doubled that to sixteen, and then thirty-two. Each time he doubled the flows, it got harder and harder. Around one hundred and twenty-eight flows, it felt like his brain was being torn apart, but Kyle kept pushing. As he tried to split his mind again to control twice as many tendrils, he felt his mind tear.

  It was like there had been a veil over his eyes and suddenly, he could see things so much more clearly. He stopped fighting the flow and accepted the Death Essence into the very core of his being. He started moving it almost as intuitively as he did War Essence. No longer was he tugging on each thread individually, but instead was controlling every bit of Death Essence instinctively. He pulled them all to himself and cleanse the taint of undeath from the ghouls’ diced corpses. As he did so, the corrupted flesh crumbled to dust.

  Kyle breathed deeply. It was a reflexive action, though, since his construct of a body didn’t actually need to breathe. It was obvious that his mind had expanded in new ways, but he didn’t take time to check his status sheet—not while the ceiling was collapsing around them.

  Instead, a column of pure war essence shot up from him. He blasted a hole straight through all the stone and then sprang through it, using Sky Essence to reinforce his powerful leap. When he exited from the sinkhole that had formed where the catacombs had been, it was as fast a bullet.

  He wove a barrier around Lash so that the rapid acceleration and deceleration wouldn’t hurt her When he landed, he surveyed the damage. This entire part of the city had collapsed. It was a good thing that it had been mostly ruins, with only a few homeless people seeking shelter in the dilapidated buildings.

  A quick scan revealed that even those few had fled during the battle.

  Kyle laid Marie down on a cushion of Sky and Sea Essence that he formed in the air. It didn’t even occur to him that he was instinctively altering the world around him. If it had, he might have grinned, but that was the furthest thing from his mind at the moment. He was worried about Marie.

  She looked up at him. “You came.”

  Her words were simple, but Kyle knew they meant everything to Marie. She’d waited and resisted for nearly three long years, all the while enduring torture—until doubt crippled her iron faith that Krig would return to her. She had been his faithful servant and unconsummated wife, but Krig never returned. She’d suffered in vain.

  When the mantle of war god had passed to Kyle, Lash had at first hated him, doubted him, and accused him of being an imposter. It had been a slow road for her to learn to trust him, though when she finally gave herself to him, it was in ways that she’d never given herself to Krig. She’d once again made herself vulnerable.

  Her vulnerability became openness, and he had justified her faith in him in a way that Krig had not. He had come. Doing so restored a piece of her that even their bonding couldn’t heal. She now knew that Kyle would never abandon her. She had value and, despite the horrible pain, she smiled up at him through her tears.

  Kyle could see the love and the pain in her eyes, as his other senses showed him the damage being wrought inside her body by Death Essence run amuck. It was like the Death Essence was no longer trying to fulfill its purpose but had been twisted into something ugly. Even death, as a release from this life to something more, could be a beautiful thing.

  In fact, life without
death lost some of its value. But this was doing something unnatural. It was trying to bond with the Life Essence inside of her, to consume who she was from the inside out, twisting her into a monster. If it weren’t for her enhancements as his bonded, she would likely have already succumbed to it.

  Kyle realized then that she must have been fighting for longer than he had known. She had probably been fighting for her life while he was putting on a show at the Governor’s mansion. He cursed himself for a fool.

  She reached her hand up to his face and stroked his check. Her hand trembled as she struggled to resist the corruption growing inside her. “Thank you. You came. You didn’t let me die alone.”

  Kyle bit back a sob. But no, he didn’t intend to let her die at all. The corruption might have sunk deep in her bones, but he was a god, dammit. He was the war god, but he also possessed a death splinter. He could undo this.