God Conqueror 3

by Logan Jacobs

  Ilandere came up and clutched my arm and buried her face in my shoulder and shuddered against me as the man inside the tent started to scream. I guess whatever sharp instruments the medics were utilizing had finally managed to cut through his spider-induced mental haze.

  “It’s so horrible,” the little centaur princess whispered. “I wish there were some way he didn’t have to lose the leg. It reminds me of what happened to Yuri’s arm from the Pyralian flamethrower in the desert, only even worse.”

  “Yeah, Yuri was a good guy,” I said. “I hope he’s doing okay now. I know his friends in the caravan will take care of him, but I know he’s not the kind of guy that would want to have to be taken care of. I bet he’ll figure out how to do everything with just one arm.”

  “I don’t understand why there are gods like Pyralis, and Hakmut, and Thorvinius,” Ilandere said. “I don’t understand why they would want to hurt innocent people for no reason and cause so much suffering in the world.”

  “It’s about power and resources,” I said. “Sadism might be a factor for some of them, but it’s usually not purely irrational. And good people cause suffering too. Think about your herd. Think how miserable your life was with them, even though they meant well, just because they lived by a different ideology than yours.”

  “That’s true,” Ilandere sighed. She pulled out the golden apple that we had been awarded in Galeurn and clutched it to her chest. I had noticed that she had a habit of doing that and rolling it around in her palms when she got nervous or distressed and needed comfort, which was often, especially as we approached the Cliffs of Nadirizi over the past week.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I think Thorvinius is a lot worse than most other kinds of power-seekers and that we need to destroy him. Your herd was essentially good from what it sounds like, and Thorvinius is essentially evil. I mean he not only takes peoples’ lives and destroys their homes, he destroys their minds and mutates and enslaves their bodies. It doesn’t get much worse than that. But most mortal and divine conflicts are more… multi-faceted than that, with depravity and heroism on both sides. And destroying Thorvinius isn’t going to eliminate all the evil from the world or even just from Ambria. It’s just going to… improve the balance a lot, for the time being, until the next threat rises.”

  “And then you’ll conquer the next threat?” Ilandere asked.

  “Well, I’m certainly going to try--” I began.

  Then, there was a flash of movement so sudden that by the time it even registered, the arrow had already thudded into the centaur princess’ chest.

  She let out a gasp.

  “Ilandere!” I yelled.

  She swooned and I caught her in my arms. Since she weighed as much as either a very small horse or a very large pony, what I mean by caught is that I slowed her fall and ended up partially beneath her. My legs quickly started to go numb.

  But that didn’t matter at all. What mattered was that when Ilandere passed out, her arms went limp, and she dropped the artificial apple that she had been clutching, and I saw that the arrow head had embedded itself an inch into the solid gold. Ilandere’s ivory chest was completely untouched, so I guessed the little centaur must have just fainted from fear.

  I left her in the concealment of the bedsheet tent that she had fallen beside, drew my sword, and rushed in the direction that the arrow had come from as I called out a warning to the rest of the camp. I could hear shouts of shock and fear coming from elsewhere in the camp and knew that the arrow that had nearly killed Ilandere hadn’t been the only one just aimed our way.

  There was a party of Thorvinians less than a hundred feet away charging at us through the trees.

  I spotted the crumpled arrow-pierced bodies of the four priests and vestals that had been posted on watch, so that was why we hadn’t received any earlier warning. But I didn’t know how the Thorvinians had gotten out here or found us in the first place. Either they must have been already out patrolling when we launched our attack on the fortress, or they had used some kind of emergency side exit and managed to circumvent the battle in front of the fortress in order to comb the woods for our camp. Either way, they were here now, and there looked to be about thirty of them, which put us at roughly even odds.

  That is, if you were counting each relentlessly bloodthirsty, inhumanly fast and strong divinely powered hybrid beast slave warrior as equal to one terrified soft bodied noncombatant priest or vestal. Or duke’s daughter or gnome.

  And if you were counting the unconscious centaur princess.

  Hell, if you counted the moaning casualties that had started to accumulate inside our medical tents, then our odds were better than even.

  The leader of the Thorvinian unit appeared to be a centaur type carrying a bow, and in my personal experience, you didn’t want to be facing down a centaur archer. So I ran straight at him like a berserker while he also charged toward me, and I zigzagged to make myself a harder target. He got off a few shots that whizzed past me into the camp behind. I could only hope that the priests and vestals had all taken cover by then. Then at the last minute, I sidestepped to avoid being trampled or kicked by the Thorvinian’s hooves, since I already had a pretty good idea of their anvil like weight, and swung myself up behind him with my arms around his waist to stabilize myself. For a moment there, the Thorvinian centaur and I must have looked like a pretty affectionate pair.

  Then, I cracked his neck from behind with a quick twist. His torso went limp and flopped over grotesquely. His horse hooves took one or two more uncertain steps, then paralysis set in, and his entire body thudded to the ground.

  I grabbed the bow out of his dead hand, which already had an arrow strung, turned, nocked it back, and unleashed it at the gargantuan shaggy Thorvinian that was stomping up on me from behind. I wasn’t sure what kind of creature exactly he or she was based on, but he or she sure was ugly, and his or her forehead proved luckily quite pervious to the steel head of the centaur’s arrow.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do. It had taken Lizzy in her giant wolf form and two of my selves with all our combined might to handle about forty Thorvinians at that outpost in Kanminar, and now here were about thirty-- now twenty-eight-- for one of me to handle by myself. All the priests and vestals here in camp, after all, had specifically opted out of combat duties, and I felt responsible for protecting them from that. Not to mention protecting Ilandere, Florenia, and Willobee. And three of my other selves were deep inside the fortress of Nadirizi, and the fourth one wielding Polliver was needed to sustain the attack at the front gates, especially as more reinforcements started pouring out to replace the Thorvinians that my forces had slain. To call back any one of my other selves could jeopardize our entire mission of destroying the transfiguration shrine.

  Then, young Lily, the vestal who wore her hair in two twin braids, ran past me screaming to dash a bucket full of boiling water into the warty green face of an unprepared Thorvinian.

  The Thorvinian’s skin tone and texture made it difficult to tell, but I was pretty sure that it immediately started blistering and peeling as she screeched in pain and fury and clawed for Lily. The vestal scrambled backward, and a priest stepped in to run the partly boiled Thorvinian through with a spear.

  A matronly looking middle-aged vestal stampeded past me waving an axe as she bellowed, “How dare you attack a medical facility! This is a flagrant violation of every convention of human decency!” and proceeded to bury the axe head in the belly of a troll-like creature that was twice her height.

  The rest of the priests and vestals seemed to be inspired, and rightfully so, by these two examples. The majority of them rushed forward at that point wielding either conventional weapons or things like pots, pans, scalpels, and bone saws. When I saw a bone saw dripping in gore being carried past me, I hoped for the recent patient’s sake that the operation had been completed before this unfortunate interruption.

  Under the circumstances, I didn’t take the same aggressively offensiv
e approach that I was naturally inclined to by seeking out the most powerful Thorvinians to pit myself against them. Instead, I tried to position myself somewhat centrally in the fray, keep a roving eye over the proceedings, and fling myself in to intervene wherever possible to save whichever of my people were in the most vulnerable position at the time.

  I couldn’t be everywhere at once, at least not without abandoning the fighters in front of the fortress and the critical mission of reaching the shrine inside the fortress which was a chance I might never get again, so it wasn’t possible for me to save every single one. The helplessness of that wrenched my gut and made me wish for another ten selves, another hundred, yet at the same time I knew that no matter how many selves I ever acquired, I would always be outnumbered by the vulnerable portion of the populace in need of saving in one way or another.

  But in that unexpected and unwanted fight, the nurses, cooks, laundresses, personal assistants, and moral supporters among the ranks of my order proved that they weren’t nearly as helpless as they looked, or as they might have regarded themselves as being. They fought with the scrappy fury of small cornered animals with nothing left to lose, and together, we cut down the Thorvinians without letting them reach our wounded.

  I even saw Tarlinis himself help out in the form of Thorvinians whose heads suddenly got yanked back by an invisible hand to bare their throats for the blade, Thorvinian archers whose bows suddenly flew out of their hands before they could shoot, and Thorvinians who lunged at Qaar’endothians only to trip suddenly over nothing, fall on their faces, and get promptly and unapologetically stabbed in the back.

  When it was over and the priests and vestals stood over thirty Thorvinian corpses staring around in shock and disbelief, many of them trembling and all of them heavily spattered in blood of various hues, there was no time for them to process what had just happened, much less celebrate their victory.

  Instead they immediately and without needing to be told by anyone set about the grim work of determining who was dead and who was not, who could only be given water and solace and who could still be saved, and rushing to prioritize the care of the latter categories.

  I didn’t have any medical expertise, so I took on the job of carrying people into tents where the nurses waited to stanch bleeding, bind and cauterize or poultice wounds, reset broken bones, extract arrows, extract venom or administer antidotes as best as they could manage, and more.

  In the middle of all this commotion, Ilandere woke back up and tottered on her hooves. She was clearly dazed and distressed by the sights, sounds, and smells that greeted her, but she didn’t waste any time feeling sorry for herself when confronted with the clear evidence of all these people who were so much worse off and needed her help. The princess didn’t really have any medical expertise either, Elodette knew much more about such things, but Ilandere started doling out water and applying cold cloths and assisting the nurses with whatever other small tasks they requested of her. I was glad to see Florenia busily doing the same and know that she was safe. Willobee was the last of my three friends in camp that I was able to account for, but eventually, he sidled out from behind a large tree where he had clearly spent the entire battle with a shamefaced expression.

  “Master, I’m sorry I--” he began.

  “Don’t worry, you’re fine, just go help the girls,” I said, and the gnome waddled off to obey.

  A while later when there was a lull in the work that was time critical for her to fulfill, Ilandere came up to me with brimming dark eyes and whispered, “You saved me, Vander.”

  “What?” I asked. “No, I didn’t. It was the apple that blocked the arrow.”

  “Yes, the apple that you won for me in Galeurn,” she replied.

  I didn’t really think I could take credit for that stroke of sheer luck, but Ilandere clearly preferred to see it that way as me having indirectly been her rescuer, so I didn’t argue with her. I just kissed her and stroked her luminous cascade of silvery blonde hair from her head to the small of her back until her trembling lessened.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Meanwhile, inside the fortress, I made a mad dash for the shrine where the transfiguration of the Eukalonian captives into mutant Thorvinian slaves had taken place.

  I had three chances to get it right, and I had a feeling I was going to need all of them.

  I didn’t perfectly remember the extremely and perhaps intentionally circuitous route that the guards had led us on to get to that big waiting chamber, and two of my selves hadn’t even entered from the same door that I had gone through that first time anyway, but I tried my best to follow it.

  Early on, one of my selves ran into a passage blocked by rubble that had partially collapsed and was clearly no longer in use. So I reassimilated that self and sent out another self from one of my other bodies that was currently deepest into the fortress.

  Those two selves had run along together for a while, when I heard Thorvinian voices approaching me from the opposite direction, and I quickly used a set of handholds cut into the wall to climb up through a hole in the ceiling and emerge on the level above.

  Four Thorvinians who were already occupying that hallway stared at me.

  Then they charged.

  The hallway we were in was about five feet across, and half of its width was taken up by the hole. I both quickly retreated to the other side of the hole to put it between me and my opponents.

  The first one to reach me was eight feet tall and had only one eye in the center of his forehead. He just strode right over the hole instead of going around. Only one of me had a weapon which was a sword, since the other had been reassimilated and sent out again since I armed my selves at camp that morning. So that self went after the cyclops, ducked low to dodge his hammer swing aimed at my skull, and hamstringed him by slashing him behind both knees with my blade.

  As the cyclops crashed down roaring, and I drove my bloodied blade into his single eye, my other, unarmed self was grappling with a smaller, goat-legged and goat-horned Thorvinian who wielded twin daggers. First, he stabbed me in the right side of my stomach. I grabbed onto his wrist to stop him from yanking the dagger back out and delivered a left hook to his temple. The blow dazed him, and I felt his grip relax on the hilt of the dagger that was buried in my side, so I pried his hand off and yanked the dagger out myself. When he felt himself lose control of that blade he slashed wildly with the other one and cut my stomach open, which created the kind of wound that took hours to die from. All I needed, however, was another five seconds to slash his throat open, then kick his body through the hole so that it fell down to the level below.

  Then I dropped the goat-man’s dagger, reassimilated my mortally wounded self, sent out a replacement self, picked his dagger back up, and resumed the fight. My sword-wielding self had already dispatched a third Thorvinian in the meantime, so we had just one left to tackle together, a big red beast with a sort of spiny turtle-like armor that covered both his back and chest and a spiked tail.

  He whipped his tail at my dagger-wielding self and sent me flying through the air and crashing into one of the walls with rib-cracking force. My sword-wielding self retaliated with a stab aimed at the heart, but the sword didn’t penetrate the Thorvinian’s natural armor. The Thorvinian seized my sword-wielding self by the throat in his hand, which was like a scaled gauntlet. As I choked, my dagger-wielding self got back up and started running away from us down the hallway.

  The Thorvinian roared in anger, threw me on the ground, and stomped after my fleeing self. I turned around and sprinted to close the gap between us while my other still weakly coughing self crawled after the armored Thorvinian. My running self leapt into the air at the last second and slammed into the Thorvinian’s chest and head with all my momentum while at the same time my crawling self behind him pushed my self up onto my hands and knees into the shape of a table. The Thorvinian tipped slightly, then hit my tabled body behind him, and his stocky knees folded, and he went down hard on his back. A few peb
bles rained down from the ceiling.

  The downed Thorvinian started roaring and thrashing with all his might, but his cumbersome anatomy prevented him from being able to right himself. I both climbed on top of him and drove my blades into both sides of his leathery neck at the same time above the point where his armor ended. He gave a moan of what sounded more like disappointment really than anything else, and his limbs stopped moving.

  “Wish I had time to make a shield out of that body armor, I think it’s tougher and lighter than steel,” I remarked to my self.

  “Bulkier though,” I pointed out.

  I both stood up and dropped my weapons. Then I took turns with my self reassimilating and reappearing so that I had two fresh selves. I picked my weapons back up and kept running down the hall, aware that all the noise my opponents had made, especially the giant turtle type at the end, probably hadn’t gone unnoticed by other occupants of the fortress.

  When we came to a fork between two tunnels, and I wasn’t sure which one led toward the shrine, one of me went left and one of me went right.

  My other self that had been solo the whole time descended a narrow staircase, squeezed through a passageway that was almost but not quite entirely blocked by one of those huge circular rolling stone doors, and climbed up a level through a hole. Then I started choking on acrid smoke that filled the entire hallway and I heard screaming about a hundred feet away. Clearly, this was the location where one of the fire bombs that Lizzy and I dropped through the ventilation shafts had landed.

  I turned around and was going to retrace my steps until an alternate route presented itself, but then I heard the rhythmic tramping of a large group on the march, and a horde of Thorvinians appeared to block my retreat. The hall was narrow enough that I couldn’t tell how many there were, but probably at least two dozen. I didn’t know whether they had been sent to extinguish the fire or to extinguish the instigator of the fire, but either way, as soon as they laid eyes on me trapped in the middle of the hall between them and the clouds of smoke, I instantly became their top priority.