The Bathrobe Knight: Volume 2

by Charles Dean

  Before the battle, he had tried to give a rousing speech to try and tell the men that here is where they would make their stand, that the force of the enemies was nothing more than the heavy weight of the anvil on which they would strike and break their chains. But the speech had turned out rather poorly. No one could hear him that well from where he sat atop the wall, so it just ended up being an odd shouting match with him trying to make himself heard over the oncoming army and his red-eyed warriors interpreting that as an invitation to shout too and then add some shield slamming as everyone just cheered randomly.

  “Cheer up,” Daniel had said from beside him during the speech. “It’s not like we worked more than a few hours on that thing.”

  Now that the battle was underway, Daniel, who had flown to the other wall with a bow as well, was in the same boat as Darwin. They were to only fire regular arrows into the enemy force. Then, whenever Darwin shot a flaming arrow into the air to signal orders to the archers behind the wall he was standing on, Daniel was to also relay the signal to the archers inside the wall on his side. It was a rather crude system, but given how ineffective even shouting had been earlier, he was glad that Daniel had talked him into using visual cues for the battle.

  “Lord Darwin,” Justin Yoo came up to deliver a message. “The front five lines are starting to weaken. We haven’t taken many casualties, but it’s been an hour now, and they’re getting tired. If we don’t go through with the plan soon, General Alex is afraid that they’ll start making mistakes. He estimates that one error might cost ten lives, and he’s afraid he’ll see two or three mistakes if we don’t relieve them and switch the lines up.”

  “He’s right. It’s not that they’re tired. It’s just mentally draining to be trying so hard for so long,” Darwin said with a nod. “Alright. We spent a lot of time preparing it. Ready to see if it works?”

  “Yes, Lord Darwin!” Justin almost jumped out of his socks with enthusiasm. “Let me take over for you here. Everyone on their side was still hopeful, but it was easy to tell that the whole defense could be shattered in an instant soon. They were only succeeding because everything was still going as planned. The second the battle deviated from their neatly laid out plan, Darwin knew what would happen. If the shieldwall showed a single crack, then it wouldn’t be ten or twelve that would die. It would be everyone. The reason the shieldwall was getting tired after such a short time, in terms of a normal battle at least, was because of how massive and oppressive the enemy forces were. If they got through the wall, they’d leak into the two courtyards and butcher the archers. Then it would be a race to the finish line. A deadly race to determine if Stephanie would finish in time to save them all like she had before.

  “Great! Let’s do it!” Darwin shot a flaming arrow, signaling to Alex and Daniel what was about to come. Daniel, who passed his bow off to a guard on his side and flew over to where Darwin was at, started grabbing a bunch of flasks that they had tucked away and gave them to Darwin. One at a time, Darwin took the flasks and threw them to the ground below, his range varying from five to ten feet in front of the shieldwall to where the walls first started pulling inwards. The enemies paid the flasks little heed, shrugging them off as they shattered and coated them with the foul smelling liquid that they held inside.

  “You really come up with weird ideas, don’t you?” Daniel asked as he kept handing the flasks to Darwin. “I mean, this is the new tech in old fantasy world thing, so aren’t we supposed to draw giant rings of fire and split the enemy forces? Play some cliché tricks like that?”

  “I think Kitchens already did that with a big semicircle to keep his back safe. He insisted on taking the Hydra to the middle of the battlefield too.”

  “Yeah, I remember. Almost wanted to go with them and see the parachuting black bear wearing a top hat and a monocle,” Daniel laughed. “I heard Minx thought it was so cute on Fuzzy Wuzzy that she even tried to stitch a top hat for every single head on the Hydra. Might have done it too if not for the fact the animal cracker brigade showed up early.”

  “I feel like if she’s going to indulge herself in the crafting lifestyle, she should consider making some slippers for everyone.” Darwin looked at his feet, hoping that he hadn’t accidently spilled any of the oil on them. “Even I could use a new pair.”

  “Hmm, I always liked moccasins better than slippers,” Daniel thought aloud. “Anyways, watch your flap. You need to get down there. That’s plenty. The area is good and covered.”

  Darwin nodded then jumped the entire distance to the ground behind the phalanx. He might have been eager to get back to the real world so people would stop trying to kill him, but being in the game world had huge advantages--especially when it came to his ability to run and jump. He had gone from a sit-around gamer to a professional parkour-level runner with just a few level-ups increasing his Speed attribute.

  “Ready, Lord Darwin?” Alex asked as he approached from out of nowhere as usual.

  “Wouldn’t be here if I weren’t,” Darwin said while equipping his flamberge.

  “I know you say it’s for the best, but I still highly recommend against this course of action. The skill, the position, everything about it is too risky. We aren’t in danger of losing the field anytime soon, Lord Darwin, we just need to swap out our front lines--a feat I have done in many battles before.”

  “With formations like this one?” Darwin questioned. Pulling men back from a loose formation with space on the sides of each person was different than pulling them out of a phalanx.

  “No, Lord Darwin.” Alex gave a lopsided frown.

  “Do you have any better ideas for how to do it then? They’re shoulder to shoulder with ten guys pushing on their back,” Darwin said as he looked at the situation. Even he was a bit nervous and sometimes worried about dying, but with enough souls to revive him and an army at his back, it was worth the risk.

  “No, I have no alternative suggestions, Lord Darwin.” Alex’s frown worsened. “Be careful, Lord Darwin. We need you back here.”

  “As you command,” Darwin joked, though he was the only one who found it funny. And then he quickly jumped up and started the plan.

  He pulled out his flamberge zweihander and lept on the shields of the men protecting themselves from arrows and ran across the top of the phalanx. It was a bit of a chore making sure he didn’t get hit by a loose dory or shift all of his weight onto one innocent, unsuspecting soldier, but eventually he made it to the end. When he finally got there, he used the rest of his momentum to jump in the air and slammed the flaming blade into the ground as he landed. It instantly erupted, triggering the oil that he had just been throwing all across the field and setting off an explosion that shook even the walls as it massacred the almost five hundred Animal Kingdom soldiers that were in the split. The sword had hit a special trail of oil that had been laid down before the battle had begun. As this makeshift fuse of sorts had ignited, it had burned his legs a bit; but, for the most part, Darwin was unhurt by the blast, a sentiment that could not be shared by the hundreds caught in the roaring fireball a little over ten feet in front of him. Surrounding Darwin, there were still a number of enemies untouched for the most part by the blast that occurred almost a dozen feet behind them them. However, the Hell that had erupted at their backs had the disoriented the animals, and the phalanx quickly moved forward and mercilessly slaughtered the remaining enemies, pushing them away from Darwin until he was able to pull his blade out of the ground.

  Then it happened. As the flames died down, all of the enemies that had been toasted by the explosion started to pick themselves up, howling in a beastly fashion as they did so. Each one then shook himself off as if he never had oil burning across his body to begin with, grabbed his weapon, and stood still, waiting. Upon receiving the order from Darwin telepathically to turn and butcher their erstwhile allies, they obligingly did just that. Their former allies, who had never seen Darwin’s unique ability in action, thought that their comrades had just managed to someho
w live through the explosion. Those who seemed to have survived weren’t paying any attention to the fires scattered around them, but it didn’t seem weird to the Panda King’s men for adrenaline to block out their wounded comrades’ pain during a fight. That’s why the unconverted animal soldiers weren’t expecting those who had just picked themselves up off the burning field to turn around and start slicing and stabbing at them. The conversion took an entire line of the animal men by surprise, leaving them gutted before they even had a chance to defend themselves.

  Darwin smiled as he watched it all in action. The plan, a rather simple concept that Valerie had come up with, was paying off way better than he had anticipated. After explaining how the ability worked to Valerie, who had persistently asked him over and over again before the fight, she noted that there was an issue of ambiguity--one that might be exploited. If the game said that every time he was personally responsible for killing an NPC, he had the ability to resurrect that particular NPC entity, then there was only one thing that was slightly unclear: what counts as being responsible for killing someone? When they tested killing enemies with oil, he found that he was able to resurrect all of them so long as he both set the oil and triggered the explosion. The best part about it was that the fire that was burning them would be extinguished by the conversion process, so he just had to make sure to get the oil mostly on the enemy rather than on the ground, something tossing flasks on tightly bunched foes easily allowed.

  “That’s terrifying,” one of the soldiers from the phalanx said as they lowered their shields for a minute. “Are they the same as us now?”

  “I . . .” Darwin was about to say that he didn’t think so, that the zombies had no brains or personality, as was his experience with Turtle-Wolves, but then he remembered Fuzzy Wuzzy. “I actually don’t know. Either way, we’ve bought ourselves some time.”

  “Right, right,” the shield man said. “We better get moving, or Alex will kill us before the enemies are back to even try.”

  As the phalanx swapped its front and back lines out, Darwin couldn’t help but watch the newly summoned beast men fighting at the front, holding off the enemy in the push. It pulled to him. The clean, neat and tidy way of phalanx fighting had made him want to enter the battle a little, but the messy massacre that was occurring now drew him in an entirely different way. That’s where you belong, a voice rang through his head like it had whispered in his ear. That’s where you should be right now. You haven’t even given your flamberge a proper test run. Don’t you owe it to yourself to try it out? Go on. They’re still switching positions. They’ll need extra time, right? It kept calling out to him.

  “Lord Darwin, we’ve almost finished the swap. Do you want to head back now?” one of the soldiers asked, the troops were making somewhat of an effort to leave a hole for him so he could go back to his position. So he could go back to waiting . . . “Lord Darwin!” the soldier called out again as Darwin gave up on the idea and started charging into the lines with his new miniature army.

  Every kill is a new soldier, Darwin told himself. Every kill is one less man that has a chance to kill my people, he justified, pulling out his flamberge and pushing his way through the line of soldiers into the enemy ranks. He knew they were not entirely sound justifications, that his men at the gap could easily handle the enemy and likely wouldn’t take many losses if any at all, but the lack of solid excuses didn’t bother him. He had waited so patiently. He needed to fight. This wasn’t just a siege. It was the ultimate battle in the ultimate game. The crème de la crème of fights, and he couldn’t just stand idly by and watch it happen around him. He needed to feel the thrill of the kill.

  “I’m with you, Boss,” Daniel called from above, flying over him, “Let’s make the break count!”

  Darwin smiled a bit. Daniel was the only one who had volunteered to wait in the back with him and fire signal arrows. Seeing Daniel join in too, knowing that he understood, was a comforting feeling. “First one to a hundred kills wins!” Darwin laughed, leaping through the final enemies into a downward thrust that split his first opponent in two.

  “That’s cheating! You had a head start on me!” Daniel joined in with a chuckle, driving his twin daggers into a poor dog-man’s skull.

  Darwin cleaved through three enemies with the flaming zweihander, each of them pulling and piecing back together until they were freshly-made, red-eyed undead, a process that wasn’t finished until he had already split, maimed and fatally wounded several more. Now he had the advantage. He wasn’t just killing the enemy; he was turning their numbers against them. With the weapons, gear, and items that he wore with bonus levels and stats for members in his faction, the dead he raised were significantly stronger than they had been before. That, added to the fact that he was increasing the number of red-eyed warriors by the second, made him question if the phalanx would even be needed anymore.

  “Daniel,” he asked as he sidestepped an incoming axe, ducked under another sword, and brought his own blade up diagonally with the most force he could muster to split the two attackers in half. The enemy didn’t let him catch his breath enough to finish his thought though. As soon as those two were dead, he found himself having to push off an enemy that was thrown into him and then stab it before it could turn around and attack him. “Daniel,” he tried again, the three fresh summons providing him enough space to pause long enough to get his thought out. “How are the troops in the center holding?”

  “Well . . .” Daniel started, but paused as attacked a few more enemies. Daniel looked less like he was fighting and more like he was playing the part of a yo-yo to some invisible hand in the sky as he landed on his foes then immediately took back to the skies. He didn’t even bother trying to carve up the animal warriors with his daggers once they had fallen like he had with the Blue-Drakes. This time, he knew his strong suit, and he stuck to it. It wasn’t as fast--getting in the air took time--but it was a lot safer and easier to repeat. Taking a quick break from stabbing people, Daniel continued, “I can’t see too well, but between the circling Blue-Drakes and the giant half circle of fire in the middle of the field, I don’t think we will have to fight much longer. This is going to go down in--” he paused as he thumped into another Panthera before lifting off again, “--history as the most one-sided fight to date. It’s like the enemy didn’t prepare at all.”

  It didn’t make sense to Darwin. If it was so one-sided, if they were pulling it off so well, how come there hadn’t been a horn for retreat sounded? Why weren’t their commanders pulling back and preparing for a new wave, one where they could levy siege equipment and crush his encampment? He tried to puzzle it out as his flamberge crashed into the shield of a foe, giving the soldier a moment to dig into Darwin’s left arm with the makeshift axe he was holding. Darwin shrugged off the pain, kicked the Ursine holding the shield to generate enough force to pull his blade out, and thrust it into the center of the bear’s chest, cutting right into the bear-man’s lung.

  Before he could even pull his flamberge free, another enemy had taken advantage of his occupied weapon and come cutting down at him with a halberd that dug right into Darwin’s left leg, nearly splitting it open.

  “Darwin!” Daniel, who heard Darwin’s scream as the halberd ripped flesh from bone, shouted, “Let’s get out of here!”

  “No!” Darwin ignored the suggestion. No, he thought as he grabbed the halberd, yanking the tiger-man who held it closer, where he had a headbutt waiting for him. He finally got his flamberge free and used it to decapitate his stunned adversary. This is where I belong. He smiled. The pain was growing. Each grunt turned into a howl as the wound in his arm stung. His leg tormented him with each step or attempt to put weight on it. This is what I want, his thoughts continued to echo. This is what you want.

  “Darwin, this is madness! You’re going to die. Get out of there!” Daniel pleaded again, flying down to stab an enemy next to Darwin. “The phalanx works. Your plan works. Let’s get back to where we were atop the wall and
let it work.”

  The Phalanx did work, but I didn’t. I was useless, Darwin grumbled to himself as he spun forward, landing a cleaving attack that split two more Ursines right down the middle but left his blade wedged into the ground. It was another moment that the enemy seized instantly, impaling his stomach with the pointed end of a halberd from a distance.

  “Darwin . . .” Daniel, who had taken to the skies again, watched Darwin dying with an almost empty expression. “Darwin, you really need to get out of here. I can try to carry you,” he tried one last time.

  Yes, I need to get out of here, Darwin thought, looking at the wound, watching his health bleed out into the field. He had killed his fair share. Twenty, thirty, forty--it didn’t matter. He had done his fair share and killed the numbers he needed to. It was time to leave. Not yet, you still need more, a voice whispered at him. It tugged in his heart every time the notion of leaving entered his mind. The halberd pressed deeper into his gut, barely missing his spine as Darwin lifted his zweihander up for one more massive cleaving attack. If the foolish mutt-boy had let go of the weapon, he’d have lived. If he hadn’t been so sure that Darwin’s death would stop him from retaliating, that a man wouldn’t press on regardless of the pole sticking out of him, he’d have managed to survive--but he didn’t. The scorching edge of Darwin’s flamberge ripped the enemy open beautifully, cauterizing just as quickly as it cut through his killer.