by Dante King
An idea then popped into my head. I couldn’t conjure up an invisible shield like my uncle, but I sure as hell could improvise a shield of my own, one that might protect me from the blood lightning long enough for me to get to the temple. As I ran, I began to call zombies over to me, resurrecting every one of my uncle’s soldiers who fell. They surrounded me, packing their bodies in close, all running in sync as I arranged them around me. Then more zombies clambered onto the backs of those who had surrounded me, and even more, locking their arms together and forming an undead, moving dome around me. Once a first layer had been formed, zombies kept coming, thickening the wall of bodies. I heard arrows thudding into the running dome of zombies and my uncle’s soldiers were shouting out with rage, confusion and fright, staring at the grotesque spectacle of this crawling, writhing hill of moving, knitted bodies.
I felt like a Frost Giant; the zombies left a gap in front for me to see through, but aside from that the dome was a solid object, which must have weighed even more than a Jotunn, even with the scant flesh the undead carried on their frames. If any soldiers tried to get to us, we simply steamrolled on, bowling them over and trampling them beneath our feet. Spear thrusts, axe cuts, sword slashes—nothing could get through the wall of bodies.
Now my makeshift protection had successfully resisted some hits, I felt like I had taken the upper hand. A streak of blood lighting slammed into the pile of zombies, and I was showered with viscera, blood, and torn-up body parts as those directly above me exploded—but I laughed and called up more zombies to patch the hole. I hadn’t even been caused a minor discomfort by the blood storm’s latest attack.
“That’s right, Blood God,” I yelled from within the safety of my dome, “I’m laughing at you, you little prick! Your blood storm can’t do shit against the power of Death!”
Another strike of blood lightning smashed into my dome, blowing up more zombies, but again I was unhurt, and again I called in more zombies to patch up the wall. The entrance to the temple was now only fifty yards ahead. More of my uncle’s soldiers were racing in to try to stop us from getting there, but with the momentum we’d built up, I blasted through all of them, trampling them with my running zombie dome.
One last lightning strike hit the dome, blowing a few zombies to pieces, but this time I didn’t patch up the hole; I was almost there. I commanded the zombie dome to open up more space at the front, before I ducked out of the dome and raced through the doors. As soon as I was in, I disbanded the dome and formed it into a solid wall of bodies now, preventing any of my uncle’s soldiers getting into the temple. They understood right away; they were getting the hang of playing the role of building material.
I paused to catch my breath before entering the inner sanctum of the temple. The temple appeared to be arranged in a series of concentric circles, with only one entrance to each next circle. The first door I came to wasn’t guarded, so I slipped inside, my kusarigama in one hand and my Bone Bow in the other.
I ran around the curved passage, seeking out the next door, when two of my uncle’s robed oblates sprang out from behind a pillar, their hands charged with red lightning. Neither had a chance to even raise their hands; less than a second after they’d jumped out, both were toppling to the ground with huge holes ripped through their torsos, courtesy of my Bone Bow.
I skidded to a halt before going through the next door as another idea popped into my head. These oblates were able to channel powerful Blood magic when they were alive—so why wouldn’t they be able to channel equally powerful Death magic when they were undead?
“Fuck you, Rodrick,” I growled. “You trained these servile fuckers to use their Blood magic to take me down—but now I’m gonna use your own little buttlickers against you. You and your living oblates are about to suck on some Death magic!”
Chapter Thirty-Three
I raised the dead oblates as zombies, projected my mind into them, and immediately felt the potential for channeling power within each of them. Keeping each oblate’s undead mind linked to mine, I blasted myself down through the soil below the temple, seeking out the Death magic of this place; as expected, there was plenty of it. But there was more; there was a lingering rage, a furious desire for vengeance against those who had murdered them, which made the adjacent Death magic tremendously powerful. It was festering in the bones of the dead, and I linked it to the cold, black potency of the Death magic, then hauled that magic up and projected it into the undead bodies of my zombie oblates. They raised their hands, but the energy crackling around them was no longer red—it was black.
I rubbed my hands with pride and glee. I couldn’t wait to see the look on my uncle’s face when his own oblates came at him, blasting out Death lightning. I knew that there would be more oblates waiting to attack near the next door, so I kept my undead oblates in front of me as I ran around the curved passageway, searching for the next door.
Sure enough, more oblates jumped out from behind pillars—only this time there were four of them instead of two. I pumped two full of holes with my Bone Bow before they could launch their blood lightning strikes at me; as for the others, I let my undead oblates deal with them. I watched, fascinated, as black lightning—so dark that it seemed to suck in all of the light around it—blasted out from my zombie oblates’ hands, meeting the red lightning that the living oblates blasted back. The red lightning streaks crashed into the black ones with a boom that shook the walls of the temple and rained down dust on our heads. The living oblates’ faces were twisted grimaces, their jaws clenched with effort—but as hard as they tried, they could not push my zombies’ black lightning back, and the black lighting surged closer and closer to them, burning away the red lightning; the power of Death was winning. I remembered what Friya had said, about Blood magic being particularly susceptible to both Death magic and Cold magic. I might not have been wearing my Cold-enchanted plate armor, but I had plenty of Death magic to use.
Finally, my uncle’s oblates couldn’t hold off the black lighting any longer. Streaks started whipping into them, flinging them through the air and smashing them against the wall behind them; the impact killed them on the spot. I raised the four fresh corpses right away. Now I had six undead oblates, all able to channel the power of Death from the ground beneath this temple.
As I progressed, killing and turning oblates on the way, I noticed each level of the concentric circles seemed lower than the previous one. I also began to detect an incredibly foul smell that grew more pungent with every level we descended. When it had moved beyond overpowering and had become positively unbearable, I started to hear chanting. The sound was quite clear, so I was getting close to the center of this foul place. Which meant, of course, that I was getting closer to the final showdown with my uncle. I could only hope that he hadn’t sacrificed Lucielle yet.
I took out one more set of oblates on this level, but when I reached the door they were guarding I quickly saw that it was not like the other doors. This one was large and had a wide set of stone steps leading down into a huge chamber—and at the bottom of the chamber was the reason that this place was shaped like it was: a huge pool of blood, almost a pond of blood, a lake.
I stood in the door opening and looked around. Hundreds of corpses hung from the ceiling, which was almost a hundred yards above the blood pool below. The corpses hung by their feet, they were naked, and they had had their throats slit. They were in various stages of decomposition; this, and the blood lake, was causing the stench.
But there were living people too—hundreds of them, all tied up and gagged in cages around the perimeter of the vast chamber. This was beyond sick; they had to breathe in the blood of the previous victims as they waited to be sacrificed.
At the far end of the pool—tied to a stake and dressed in a white robe like the ones Bishop Nabu had used to dress his sacrificial victims in—was Lucielle. I recognized her right away from the sculpture I’d seen. My uncle was standing on her right, and another man, his face obscured by the hood of his
robe, was standing on her left. Both of them held curved daggers.
Standing around the pool were creatures the likes of which I had never seen. They were the size of cave trolls—smaller than Frost Giants, but three or four times bigger than even the largest northern barbarian—but were grotesque-looking things. Their skin was red, bubbly, and lumpy all over, and their limbs were disproportionate and distorted—one arm might be huge and muscular, while the other would be withered, one leg jiggly and fat and the other wrinkly and lame. Their faces were like those of men, but were similarly distorted. In short, they were the ugliest fucking things I’d ever seen, and I guessed they were dangerous. Very dangerous.
Oh, and there were Blood Demons too, a handful of them, all holding red daggers.
Everyone stopped and turned to look at me when I stepped into the chamber with my zombie oblates.
“The beggar,” the hooded figure hissed, his voice vaguely familiar. “Destroy him, Rodrick.”
I saw a portal like the one my uncle had used to escape Brakith behind him. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to let him get away again, not this time—so I sent out a silent command to my oblates to destroy it. The hooded man, however, seemed to sense what I was about to do, and he screamed and dived through the portal just before the zombie oblates’ black lightning crashed into it, destroying it.
“There won’t be any escaping the fight this time, Rodrick,” I growled. “This is the time we finish this once and for all. One of us walks away alive, the other…not alive.”
“You may be stupid, Vance,” my uncle snarled, tucking his dagger into his belt and picking up his triple-headed flail, “but you’re one stubborn little shit, aren’t you? I guess those qualities often go together. No matter—we will drink your blood tonight and grow more powerful than ever. Come, fool, and meet your doom!”
With a roar, the Blood Demons all turned to charge at me—but I was ready for them. Knowing how long it took to kill one of those fuckers, I knew that facing multiple demons was a sure way to get myself killed. Of course, I wouldn’t have to do that, because this was the perfect time to use my Bone Prison spell. I looked at each Blood Demon, marking them as targets, and then I reached deep into the earth and called up Bone Prisons. Huge bones, jagged and sharp, burst through the floor around each of the Blood Demons, closing shut around them like the jaws of some massive carnivorous plant. The demons howled with frustration, grabbing the bone bars and shaking them furiously, but the Death magic was strong here, and they could not break free.
The huge Blood Ogres—that was the only way I could describe the red, bulgy abominations—now turned and charged. One of them picked up a man-sized chunk of stone as if it were nothing but a twig, and hurled it at me. I only just managed to dodge it as it whooshed through the air mere inches from me, and smashed a hole through the stone wall behind me. In response, I blasted a couple of bone shards through the beast with my Bone Bow—but they did nothing to it. They passed straight through it, leaving a hole in its body through which I could actually see the wall behind it for a moment, before the hole just closed up again. The creature seemed to be made entirely of congealed blood.
“Okay,” I muttered as the dozen or so Blood Ogres bore down on me. “These fuckers are pretty damn strong, and pretty hard to hurt. Time for a plan.”
My kusarigama’s wind magic could come in handy here, and as the Blood Ogres came at me, I called up some of my tornadoes. I knew my magic was strong enough to pick up one of these fuckers, so I hurled a spinning tornado at the closest one, and used the tornado’s power to lift it up off the ground. I then directed the tornado to hurl the Blood Ogre into a wall, which it did. The Blood Ogre exploded in a shower of blood, bursting into nothing and raining buckets of coagulated blood down on the floor.
“Found your weakness, assholes,” I muttered.
Another human-sized rock came flying through the air at speed, though, and I had to dive to the ground to avoid being flattened like a fucking crepe with extra-red berry sauce. This time the rock was so close to hitting me that it grazed the top of my head. On the other side of the blood pool, my uncle was whirling his flail around his head, calling up some lightning to blast at me. I could deal with that, or I could deal with the stone-chucking Blood Ogres, but not with both at once. Still, the former was clearly the greater threat, so I focused on that for a moment.
My uncle was nigh-on invulnerable with the invisible shield of magic around him—but since it was a Blood magic shield, I figured I knew how to take it down. I commanded all of my undead oblates to attack him simultaneously; with all of their Death magic focused on him, the shield would surely disintegrate. If it didn’t do that, at least the attack would distract him from me.
“You have your Blood Ogres, Rodrick,” I yelled. “But I have zombie oblates, you diarrhea-drinking fuckstick! Suck on some Death lightning, piece of troll shit!”
With that, all of my undead oblates blasted Rodrick simultaneously, and he was hurled back against the wall with the force of their combined lightning streaks. He started firing blasts of red lightning at them from his flail, and each streak of red lightning that hit an oblate blew the undead creature to smithereens—but each blast of their Death lightning knocked him off his feet and—judging from the look of worry and fear that was slowly taking hold on his face—weakened his shield too.
I left the zombie oblates to their work, and turned my attention to the advancing Blood Ogres. Another rock from one of the grotesque monsters came hurtling through the air at me, and it was only thanks to my perfected speed and acrobatics that I was able to dodge it. I flung a howling tornado at the Blood Ogre responsible though, and picked the fucker up with the tornado, before I splattered him into a bloody mess against a huge stone pillar.
I flung another tornado out of my kusarigama and picked up another of the Blood Ogres, but this time I figured I’d try something different, since they were closing in on me. I hurled the Blood Ogre I’d picked up into another. This idea totally backfired; when they collided, the hurled body was simply absorbed into the other, making a new Blood Ogre that was twice the size.
“Shouldn’t have done that,” I said.
I tried to pick the now-gigantic ogre up with another tornado, but it was simply too heavy; I’d have to find another way of dealing with this new monstrosity. I flung another against a wall, making a splash of red juice like a rotten tomato, and just managed to sidestep another huge boulder that was hurled at me. The double-sized Blood Ogre was almost on me now. I used a tornado to fling the last regular-sized one against a wall, leaving me only the massive one to deal with.
I glanced across at my uncle, and saw that he had killed a number of my undead oblates, but he was looking haggard and exhausted. His formerly gleaming red armor was dented all over, while pieces of it had been destroyed and blasted off his body. He was taking some serious damage from the Death lightning, and I suspected that his invisible shield had been destroyed. I couldn’t focus on him just yet, though—I had one last Blood Ogre to deal with.
The huge monster ripped a stone pillar out of the wall and swung it at me like a club. I ducked under the clumsy but powerful blow, and darted forward, slashing through the Blood Demon’s leading leg with the razor-sharp blade of the kusarigama. The thick leg parted as the blade severed it completely, but in a second it simply joined back again, and there was no sign that it had ever been cut. The Blood Ogre swung the pillar at me again, this time crashing the makeshift club toward the ground.
I dodged the blow, ran up the pillar before he could lift it for another swing, cut his head off with the kusarigama, and finally backflipped away from the creature. The head flew up into the air, but then dropped back onto the creature’s neck and simply joined back to the body, as if nothing had happened.
“You just won’t fucking die, will you?” I roared.
The only reply I got was a vicious swing of the pillar that almost turned me into mincemeat; I took that as a no. I barely dodged the attack,
and the wind from the passing massive object almost bowled me over. That was when a plan popped into my head. The section of the stone ceiling from which the Blood Ogre had snatched the pillar now looked like it might collapse.
“Come on, fucker,” I growled, moving around and drawing the Blood Ogre forward. “Come on, hit me, I dare you!”
He took another swing at me, and I ducked under the attack, moved subtly back again.
“What’s wrong? Come on, kill me, you asshole, do it!”
The creature staggered forward on its huge, grotesque limbs and tried to smash me again with the pillar. Again I dodged the blow, but only just. One of these strikes would be enough, it would be all over. I jumped back and goaded the Blood Demon into coming forward for another attack—and when it did, it was finally in the position I wanted it to be in. Only one of my undead oblates was still alive by now; he’d survived long enough to serve one final purpose. He’d have to shift his attention from one target to another one, though. Instead of launching his strike of black lightning at my uncle—who was on his knees now, most of his armor lying in broken pieces around him—I directed the oblate’s black lightning at the ceiling above the gigantic Blood Ogre. It struck the ceiling immediately, and the whole thing came crashing down in an avalanche of stones and dust, all over the Blood Ogre. The creature was flattened beneath a few dozen tons of broken rock. Like all its pals, it had been splattered—perhaps not the most honorable of deaths, but if they left me no choice but to splotch them to death, splotch them to death was what I would do.
I stepped back and glared across the pool of blood at my uncle.
“Now it’s just you and me, fucker,” I snarled. “Let’s finish this!”
Chapter Thirty-Four
“I knew I should have just killed you when you were a boy,” Rodrick growled.
