by Dakota Krout
The real threats were the higher undead and demonic controllers of the armies. The undead had no real will of their own; they were mainly hungry husks that were pushed in a general direction or controlled carefully to ensure they didn’t turn on their masters. Thanks to the height of the dungeon coupled with our telescopic abilities, we could see the far fringes of the army as well as the closer ranks. We were on the only front that did not have a really active war being waged. This conflict spanned nearly thirty miles, and the entire perimeter was filled with flying Essence, Mana, debris, and especially blood. Blood was everywhere. Some of it was rotting, but there was undoubtedly fresh red blood splashed liberally across the landscape. At this rate, there would be a moat of the sanguine fluid around the necromantic horde.
Here I was, powerless to do a single thing to help or absorb any of that power. I was too weak to help people survive this conflict, and I could only hope that the generous rewards and anti-demon weapons I had given out were going to be put to good use. I felt like… a group buffer, someone who could make the party stronger but was basically useless during actual combat. Oh, celestial, was I a cleric? Please no…. but all the signs pointed to yes. Anti-infernal weaponry, giving extra abilities and power to people, sitting back and not being useful… oh no! I shook off my melancholy, resolving to change this fact right now.
“What can I do for you, Cal?” Bob had dropped the ‘Great Spirit’ honorific, and I couldn’t tell if I was happy about that or not. I had disliked it at the time, but… now I missed it a little. It reminded me of their arrival in my dungeon. I shuddered in revulsion at the memory. I decided that maybe it was better this way; natural Goblins were nasty.
He thought for a moment, leaning back and forth on his staff. “That’s hard to say, Cal. We’ve used Mana in the past to power the Runes, but I haven’t been able to find a good method of rejecting the corruption that would be pulled into you. In all other cases, when the Cores we are using input their Mana, they swiftly turn into corruption Cores. Their link to the Runes is nearly impossible to break, and even if they are removed from the Runes, there is a permanent sympathetic link and power flows through them and into them until they are destroyed either manually or by the energetic density. I am just… I’m not sure if this is a good idea. Ever. No matter what changes we make to the Runes.”
How very interesting.
“Exactly, Cal! I am relieved to hear that you see just how terrible of an idea this is.” Bob Prime smiled and turned to go watch the screens again.
“Have you talked to Dani about your plans for all of this?”
Chapter Forty
“Everyone! Prepare yourselves!” a High Mageous was shouting at the cultivators that were already present on Mountaindale as well as the troops pouring through the portal to augment their combat power. The portal had been locked as ‘one-way’ until the end of the conflict. At this point, there was no escape; survival was the only option for leaving this place. “If you do not yet have access to flight or a flight-like ability, you will be deposited on the ground. Depending on the Mage setting you down, the ride might be rough. As soon as you land, get into a formation. You will only have a few moments to set up a defensive perimeter before getting swarmed by the creatures waiting below! If you die, please at least try to take a few with you.”
“This guy should be a motivational speaker, hey, Dale?” Hans poked Dale in the side, trying to tickle a reaction out of the pale-faced youth.
“So what should we do after all of this?” Tom spoke with a wide smile. “I am thinking of visiting an exotic location, perhaps finding a secluded island and being revered as a god by the local women.”
“Sounds like fun.” Adam smiled and looked over at Rose, who was not paying attention to the conversation. “Any plans, Rose?”
“Hum? Oh, aim for the head, I guess,” she responded somewhat distractedly.
“I… I meant after the fight?” Adam stammered as she turned her attention to him.
“Oh.” She was silent for a bit. “Get some dinner I guess? One way or the other, I don’t see this war lasting too long. There is a Mana haze here that screams ‘the most powerful people in the world are present’ to me. So… I’d say dinner time is an accurate guess-timate.”
“A what, now?” Tom interjected. “I am unfamiliar with this word.”
“Guess-timate.” Rose cocked her head to the side. “A guess, an estimate. A guess-timate.”
“Why do people have to keep changing the language with weird mash-ups?” Tom grumbled. “I have a hard enough time with it as it is normally; there are just too many consonants. Sounds like a bunch of snakes hissing at each other.”
The Mage that had been speaking earlier began shouting again. “First groups! Lifting off in three… two… go!” Dale’s party sucked in a deep breath as they were suddenly accelerated forward. To Dale, it felt like he was a ninety kilogram projectile being launched from a trebuchet to a point over three hundred meters away. In reality, their landing point was nearly a half kilometer away if the descent were included. The only reason the sudden velocity didn’t damage anyone was that they were accelerated as a single piece, a unit, not grabbed and tossed. It was hard to describe the difference, but there was a notable one.
Dale watched as the ground approached at a rapid pace. The unspeakable abominations that were the undead - including actual Abominations - began turning toward the living flesh that was falling from the sky like a treat thrown to a hungry dog. Dale’s section was not the first to touch down; that dubious honor went to a contingent of earth Mages who prepared their landing point and threw up some rudimentary defenses to slow the advancing nightmare fuel. From his current vantage, it looked like a group landed like a meteor and formed a crater when, in reality, they fell with prepared spells and walls sprang up around them. Either way, it was amazing to watch what he hoped to be able to soon accomplish under his own power. They landed not-exactly-gently within the sudden protections and hurried to the chest-level barricades to help hold back the flood of rotting flesh.
Moments later, Dale was fighting against zombies. He lashed out with his fist, and the skull of the first creature broke with a squishy *thud*. Dale was taken aback by the ease his first foe was dispatched, but another slightly alarming component was the infernal Essence that was absorbed by his gauntlet and absorbed into his Core. He was momentarily distracted, concerned that a necromancer would somehow gain a hold on him through his usage of his gauntlets, but he was forced to recover quickly. The dead were not waiting for him to resolve his internal crisis. Besides, after a moment, he could feel the corruption Core in his chest separate out the taint and suck it into itself. He should have nothing to fear from fighting as usual.
Right, left, right, left. Dale’s punches were nearly as regular as a drum beat playing a marching cadence as he beat down the undead rushing at him. There were already bodies and skeletons piling up around the basic fortifications. Their opponents were starting to use the rotting corpses as a platform to jump at them or to gain the high ground and swing at them from above. Fire and celestial cultivators were working overtime in an attempt to destroy or consecrate the bodies so that the approaching Abominations couldn’t pull them into themselves and become stronger.
Dale could only continue to punch, kick, and dodge. Sometimes he wished he had a longer range weapon, but his body was more durable at this point than many of the items
he could buy, and his gauntlets were Inscribed and effective. Dale took a deep breath as he eyed the mounds of flesh that were shambling to their location. They didn’t bother to avoid the other undead as they traveled, simply crushing them with each step and slurping up their broken forms to add to their own mass. The first of them reached the line of consecrated bodies, absorbing them and continuing forward. Having expected a different outcome, Dale debated reaching for a Core to throw an enhanced attack at the creature. It was too close and was standing eight feet taller than him at this point. It hesitated for the first time, quivering as the consecrated bodies deposited their payload of celestial Essence directly into the greater undead.
Blisters began forming on it, turning into weeping sores in seconds as the Abomination worked to expel the consecrated flesh and bone. It did, finally, needing to sacrifice a more substantial chunk of its body in order to package and regurgitate the damaging ‘food’ it had swallowed. A large sack of meat and bones fell out of the humanoid, looking for all the world like it was defecating on the battlefield. The smell of the creature didn’t help either, as the rotting meat already smelled worse than - *boom*. A pillar of holy light seemed to fall from the heavens, and the squatting Abomination disintegrated, the ashes flowing upward and vanishing.
“Looks like the Mages finally woke up.” Hans panted as he lashed out with his daggers yet again. Dale didn’t know what he was attacking at first, then saw a few zombies drop a half dozen feet from them. He must be using his wind affinity to increase the range of his attacks. Probably because… Dale looked at Hans. Yup. Perfectly clean still.
“Your reluctance to get filthy in combat is song worthy, Hans!” Dale called over, breaking the tension and putting smiles back on the faces of his friends.
“Don’t you dare! Oh, and I’m sorry that I don’t want rotten meat and blood on me. I’m no Mage; I can still get sick from this nasty stuff.” Hans slashed the air, cutting deep into a pair of sprinting ghouls. “Ew, I hate the running ones. They splash when you cut them down.”
Everyone else in earshot was surreptitiously trying to clean particles off their hands or faces as Hans’ words registered. Most people here hadn’t lived through the last necromantic war, but the tales of disease and pestilence from that time were nearly as legendary as the war itself. Everyone winced as screams tore through the air behind them; an Abomination had broken through the defenses and was able to smash a hole through the defenders, swelling in size as fresh meat and blood empowered and emboldened it. A Mage sent it flying away from the area to impact a swarm of skeletons that were using the breach as a gateway.
“Someone close that hole! Where is the Mage that was supposed to be watching this area? Stop sitting on your thumbs and get fighting! Now is not the time to be conserving Mana!” Dale looked at the unknown person shouting orders, trying to figure out the chain of command here.
“We need to move,” Adam calmly stated to the group. “Not just us five, all of us. I am seeing a ripple in the area, the kind that washes through time when a cataclysmic event occurs. I’d say we have less than two minutes to get away from this area.”
Hans’ eyes widened, then narrowed. “Guild members! I am invoking martial clause twenty-five bravo! We need to shift our position a hundred-”
“Two hundred, at the minimum,” Adam interrupted quietly.
“Two hundred and fifty meters south, now!” Hans easily incorporated the new information and disseminated it.
There were wide eyes all around as people were forced to move. A Mage stepped forward and parted the bodies, making a corridor of death that the formation charged through. The Mage then caught up and sprinted alongside Hans with furious eyes as they moved, speaking quietly, “If you flippantly made us leave a fortified position in the middle of a war, I will ensure that you pay for every life we lose. I don’t know how you have the authority to declare a state of emergency in the middle of a battlefield-”
“That’s fine, but in that case, you’d better make sure my team gets the accolades for saving every single person in the company that survives when we are done here,” Hans returned darkly, his serious tone making the Mage raise a brow and go silent. They both had good reason for their concerns, as the undead collapsed upon them from all sides now. Shambling zombies, sprinting ghouls, clacking skeletons, and moaning Abominations did their very best to grow the numbers of the dead. In too many cases, they succeeded. Anyone below the C-ranks had a difficult time against anything but the zombies or skeletons, and fighting the Abominations was reserved almost exclusively for Mages.
When they reached their new position, the fighters all needed to work together to push the dead far enough for the earth affinity cultivators to raise solid barricades again. The seconds ticked by, and tempers started to rise against Hans as nothing happened to their old position. The entire fighting force of the Guild that had deployed in the area were well-spaced out so that a single blow couldn’t eradicate them, but now, they were cut off from any chance of reinforcements. Before their anger could boil over, a Tomb Lord fell out of the sky and impacted their old position so hard that the flesh within its armor turned to paste.
Barry stood solidly in the air above it, exhaling a green mist that washed over everything in the area. A word from the midst of the cloud in front of him shattered the very air, and thunder was heard as all the mass in that section was converted into a hand-sized sphere of energy. The thunder was generated from air rushing to refill the empty space as the green cloud returned to Barry’s body. The sphere of power started moving toward him as well, but as he caught it, the S-ranker snorted and tossed the silver orb deep into the ranks of the dead. There was a detonation nearly a half mile away as the energies contained in the globe were released, and the shockwave knocked over roughly half of the undead. Then Barry vanished, returning to do battle in the air at speeds that lower ranks simply couldn’t even see.
The Mage next to Hans glanced over, taking a deep breath. Hans spoke first, “I got it, and we are all set here. Same team, right? Also, we’ll take the bonus in gold, please. So you know, this is the man that was doing the scrying for us.” He jerked his head at Adam and continued to fight.
Adam nodded at the Mage. “Don’t worry too much; I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Please do. I am granting you the same authority he used to get us here; if you see something, make sure we all hear it.” With that, the Mage hopped into the air and went to take his position. The war was nowhere close to being over, and there was no time to waste.
Chapter Forty-one
An hour later, Dale was brimming with energy. He cheerfully smashed yet another skull in the endless tide, absorbing the small amount of Essence that was keeping the corpse moving. The people around him, fighting just as hard as he was, were forced to switch out as they ran low on stamina and Essence. Dale was certain that he should be sore or weary, but his powerful aura, as well as his new ranking, kept him from falling out of the line like the others. Hans eventually came over and gripped his arm, pulling him into the center.
“I know you feel fine, but you need to take a break or the mental stress might break you. Battle trances can be really hard to break out of, and if the rumors are true, you have a bad history with overdoing it in trances.” Hans forced him to sit and drink some water, and the ice-cold thrill as the liquid hit his stomach made him remember that he was starving. Then he nearly fell asleep in seconds as the adrenaline wore off. Having enhanced his entire body meant that the chemicals keeping him going also had a more powerful effect. Dale’s hands shook, and then he actually fell asleep in the middle of a battle.
He was shaken awake fifteen minutes later to the unpleasant sight of Tom urinating a few feet from his head. He was upright in a second as the others laughed. Rose shrugged at him while chuckling. “Well, we couldn’t use the outer edge as the latrine. A zombie would have bit that off of him.”
The others winced at the visual, and she rolled her eyes. “Seriously? We are
in the middle of a war where… you know what, forget it. Dale, we could use you on the line with us again; we need to cycle back in.”
“That’s fine. I’m feeling refreshed even if my masculinity is feeling a little threatened right now.” Dale’s eyes flicked to Tom as he sighed in loud relief.
“Ahh, that’s the good stuff. I try to stay hydrated, and this is the price. Fear not, Dale. Most men would be having insecurities right now.” Tom grinned as Rose’s cheeks went pink and Hans rolled his eyes.
“Just wait until the C-ranks, Tom,” Hans told him. “You can get up to an inch extra each rank. Just ask Dale.”
Dale nodded with a straight face. “If anything, Tom, I was feeling a little bad for you.”
Tom’s hands twitched, as though he were hoping to take their necks and squeeze. “The two of you are not funny. If these were true facts, there would not be a man alive who didn’t do his utmost to enter the C-ranks.”
“Well, you got me there.” Dale smiled as they tapped a few people, signaling that they should switch. The punching began anew, and Dale was soon absorbing infernal Essence once again. His Core did separate it, but he was starting to feel a little ill after collecting the mess of filthy energy. Remembering what Artorian had taught him, Dale shifted the output of his auric Essence and carefully shifted to an aura of starlight. There was still a regenerative property to this version, though it was far less pronounced than what he had been using. The real difference became apparent as he landed a punch and the skeleton’s skull not only broke as usual but melted for a few seconds after landing on the ground.
