Shale quickly dismissed the anxiety and fear that were threatening to enter her mind. She imagined that she was a stained-glass window and the fear, the stress, and the doubt were just three more pieces of glass to be welded into the rest. They were no more or less significant than any other part. When the light shined through, it would cast a rainbow as equally strong or dim as the rest. They were not the entire window. The visualization helped her dismiss her thoughts. She turned out into the darkness at her target. The purple light and the chanting continued. Are we ready? She asked the forces. She could feel them confirm like little lights of confidence in the dark. Charge, she ordered before launching herself into the darkness.
She decided not to rise into the air. Flight during this battle would just increase the chances she would be injured. Soon, the sky would be filled with fireballs, and they would illuminate her position for everyone on the ground to see. It was better for her to enter the fray from the field under cover of chaos. She also elected not to activate her Camouflage Hide. Her reasoning was simple: her scales were stronger than the rest of the Lurkers, which meant she was more suited for front line combat than her cohort. If she could draw a strike away from one of them, she would willingly take the hit.
Additionally, if she needed to use her Aspect of Cleansing Flame, she didn’t want the effect to become dampened. The results were slight, but the slight difference could mean the difference in battle. Although, if the press of fighting became too dense, she wouldn’t be able to use it out of fear for hurting her troops. The fire wouldn’t burn them, but the superheated air would.
Following her own orders, she took off toward the center of the clearing like a cheetah on the hunt. Her acceleration was so abrupt that she gouged great rents in the earth with her nails. As she sprinted across the yards that separated her from the obsidian obelisk, screaming missiles appeared in the sky. They rocketed to the ground in plumes of blue-white fire. The ground shook at their impact, and Shale could hear screaming as men and women were thrown from their position into the air like discarded toys.
Shale grinned. This is what I had been waiting for. As she neared the center of the clearing, she realized that there were far more individuals in the clearing than she initially noticed. The night and the distance had made it difficult for her to make an accurate estimate. Even in her mana vision, the Vallyr tended to blend together. Now that she was approaching them, she realized that her numbers and the Vallyr’s were almost the same. Not counting the Mystics and the Enticers that had remained behind, there were more Vallyr than Scourge. It didn’t matter, though. The Scourge had the element of surprise. The Vallyr were still enthralled by whatever ritual they were participating in. Shale scythed through their formation like death itself. Gray silhouettes, highlighted with purple from the Vallyr magic, appeared from the shadows as if summoned there.
The Vallyr hadn’t been expecting them, and when they turned to face their attackers, it was far too late for many of them. The purple light around obelisk winked out, and the clearing was shattered in darkness. The change in illumination didn’t mean much to the combatants. Both the Vallyr and the Scourge could see in the dark, so it didn’t change the pace of combat. Shale assumed that some, like her, could see mana as well. In her mana vision, the Vallyr looked like purple and black silhouettes while the Scourge shone with powers resembling their classes. The benefit of the distinction was that the Mystics should be able to easily differentiate between the combatants, even from a distance. Shale’s entire body felt like a tightly wound cord as she tracked her first target without thought. She idly noticed that it was a woman as she struck out with her claws. The Vallyr had just been turning around as Shale made contact. The Vallyr’s face became a death mask of surprise as her claws ripped through the woman’s throat. After the first kill, she began to dance through the battlefield. Wherever she went, blood bloomed in the air like crimson fireworks signaling death.
Congratulations! You have killed a level 50 Vallyr Cultist. You have earned 194,750 experience!
The killing blow she launched with her right hand turned into a somersault that spun her tail through the air to punch through the Vallyr behind her first victim. Her tail came free with a sucking sensation as she returned to her feet. The system message indicated a second victim.
Congratulations! You have killed a level 51 Vallyr Cultist. You have earned 259,950 experience!
She didn’t pause to think; the Way didn’t require conscious thought. Each movement was merely a continuation of the last. She launched into a roundhouse kick, and her talons scraped across the face of another Vallyr woman. She shrieked as she followed through the kick with her tail blade. The woman’s head came free of the torso with a fountain of blood. That makes three. Shale thought.
Congratulations! You have killed a level 49 Vallyr Cultist. You have earned 162,350 experience!
By the time she made it to the fourth opponent, the Vallyr had rallied. Through the Scourgemind, Shale could feel that the Lurkers were meeting with resistance as well. Shale’s first real resistance came in the form of a short, stocky man as pale as the moonlight that covered the clearing. He had the same four-nostril nose like the rest of his kind, and Shale could see him breathing deeply from the pain and fear that had to be clogging the air in the clearing. Shale considered the fact that the death of their allies may make the Vallyr stronger—or at least less hungry. Either way, her opponent hadn’t wasted time speaking to Shale before drawing a long, thin dagger and brandishing it toward her. Shale studied the man’s posture. He held the knife out, his other arm held close to his body. He was balanced on the balls of his feet and looked as if he knew what he was doing.
Good, Shale thought. This might be a challenge.
Shale’s form of the Way relied on deception and fast movements. The flips, cartwheels, and back handsprings were simply ways of distracting the opponent. She had little to worry about, given how difficult it was to pierce her scales. She was far more mobile than the average opponent, and she had a tail that could perforate most substances with little effort. She decided to show the Vallyr the work she had been putting into her martial art. She propelled herself forward with one foot, and gravity lost its hold over her body. She floated through the air like a butterfly and kicked out with one leg. The kick rocketed toward the man like a crashing wave, but the Vallyr didn’t flinch. He merely raised his dagger to block her incoming strike. The lack of movement was a testament to his skill. When Shale was first learning to fight, one of her mentors told her that if she were ever fighting an opponent who didn’t back up after one punch, and instead dodged the strike while maintaining a fighting stance, that she should flee. The opponent knew what they were doing, and she hadn’t progressed to the point that she could reliably defeat them. That phase hadn’t lasted long; she quickly became capable of defeating most, if not all, of the children her age in Woodhaven. However, to this day, she remembered the advice and used it as a test when fighting. This Vallyr knew what he was doing.
The talons clanged against the blade, causing a shower of sparks to light up their small battlefield and illuminating the faces of the two fighters. They were mirror opposites of each other. The man was hideous, his pale, sunken features advertising a person close to death. Shale, on the other hand, had finely crafted features that shone with a silver reflection from her scales. She looked like moonlight itself while the Vallyr was merely a knock off version of her coloring. The lighting was immaterial. Shale was already working through the next movements of her assault. When the Vallyr blocked, Shale was already pivoting her hips to strike out with her other leg. The man’s blade was already engaged, so he merely ducked at the second strike, and Shale rolled with the kick, completely disengaging from her opponent. The horizontal spin of her motion took her a couple of yards from the Vallyr, and she landed smoothly, splaying out her hands for balance. The Vallyr didn’t give her time to recover before sprinting at her and slashing downward with his knife. The light of the mo
on glinted off of its polished surface, and Shale spun to the side and grasped the man’s wrist on its downward arc with her right hand. She used their momentum to spin them both in a quarter turn, before blasting the man’s face with acid and kicking him away from her.
A blood-curdling scream came from the man as the acid began to melt the side of his face. He flailed outward with his knife, in a blind, panicked attack that went in the entirely wrong direction. Shale left the man to his own devices and moved to engage another opponent. In his pain and confusion, the man used his knife to stab the back of another Vallyr.
Shale knew the acid had killed him already, the man’s body just hadn’t realized it yet. Looking around, she recognized that the clearing was a seething mess of fighting bodies. A system message informed her of her kill as she was watching.
Congratulations! You have killed a level 55 Vallyr Cultist. You have earned 551,150 experience!
When she relaxed her mind, she could feel the exact positions of the Scourge around her. There was a bubble of peace around her in the chaos, and she used the opportunity to find places where her allies were struggling. As soon as she thought of them, a fireball would fall from the sky and impact that location. Clearly, Lynia had gotten over her reluctance to use the Scourgemind. She was performing admirably for her first time. Shale resolved to encourage her when the battle was over. She wasn’t used to the effort, but Lynia would probably appreciate it. Slate was adept at using praise to motivate his followers, and Shale wanted to make sure that she did a passable job in his absence.
Things are going well, Shale thought. She had committed the secret sin of the battlefield. A warrior couldn’t think about their success until the enemy were dead and the lost buried. To do so any sooner, invited disaster. Still, it was hard not to feel confident about the results of the encounter. The Scourge were eviscerating the Vallyr. She could feel that a few of them had died, but most of the Vallyrians in the clearing were wearing shapeless black frocks and equipped with daggers. They weren’t ready for a protracted battle with something as naturally deadly as the Scourge. Her forces had their natural scales, the protections of the Scourgeshield, and greater reach with their and greater range due to their imposing size advantage over the Cultists. It helped that fireballs continuously fell from the sky at regular intervals.
Shale sensed that Lynia was spacing them out so that the barrage was consistent. That was important for breaking enemy morale. If the Vallyr thought that the fireballs were endless—which, realistically, they couldn’t be. Each fireball had a subsequent mana cost, and the Mystics only had so much stored. There wasn’t enough ambient mana in the air to keep the pace up forever. Lynia’s spacing of the timing also allowed the Vallyr to believe it might be possible to run and escape the wrath of the mages. If that happened, they would be easy pickings for the Scourge. They would run them down and slay them indiscriminately. There was no room for mercy in Slate’s Scourge. It wasn’t in his personality, and that was precisely why Lucidus picked him for the honor of leading her army.
Things are going almost too well, Shale thought suspiciously. She didn’t trust how easily the victory was coming and so she studied the ebb and flow of the battlefield to see where the enemy’s blade would strike next. In the time that she had been fighting the Vallyr, they had never succumbed easily. They would sacrifice entire cities before they admitted defeat from the Scourge. She couldn’t imagine that they would allow themselves to be ambushed so easily and not have a backup plan. They were too close to Scourge territory to be that comfortable. If that was the case, then they were bigger fools than Shale had realized. Soon, she found what she was looking for.
A pocket of Vallyr defenders had taken up a defensive position around the obelisk, and a single cultist was chanting in front of it. Violet light washed over the pillar from the man’s hands, and Shale knew whatever happened next wouldn’t be pleasant for her warriors. She sprinted forward on all fours in an attempt to interrupt the casting process. She had just made it to the line of defenders when she heard a strange clicking sound in the darkness. The man had fallen silent, and he seemed to be merely waiting. He didn’t even turn as Shale drove through the formation line of Vallyr like an ax through deadwood. The two Vallyr nearest her were driven into their fellow Cultists by the force of her assault. She used two powerful kicks to cave in their chests and open a path to the Vallyr in the center.
She dismissed the subsequent system messages that vied for her attention. Her only goal was to destroy this new threat before it could be released on her forces. As she reached the man, he turned, and his visage caused her to pause.
“You’re too late,” he hissed.
His eyes were burning with malevolent light as he brought his knife into the air and looked upon it like a favored child. Shale stared at him, confused, but knowing she couldn’t let him do anything else. She struck out like a scorpion with her tail. She didn’t want to engage the enemy any closer than necessary. Striking in this manner allowed her to create the maximum amount of space between them. Something about him was giving her a strange impression. She thought about her ruminations on a warrior’s gut instinct and decided to trust it now. Before she could finish her strike, the man plunged his knife into his heart. A serene smile crossed his face as he allowed the blade to jut from his body like ornamentation. His hands fell from his side, and explosions began to wreak havoc behind her.
Surprised, Shale turned, and Vallyr corpses on the ground were exploding, much like the fireballs that had been falling from the sky since the attack began. Each body simply…popped. That wasn’t the right description for the sheer amount of violence in each popping, but Shale couldn’t consider it anything else. Each body was like a bubble in a bog that rose to the surface. Each time it happened, the body was transformed into a fine mist of blood and pieces of bone. The fragments of bone became projectiles as fast and as strong as an arrow from a bow. The effect shredded through the Scourge fighters as the bone shards flew through their scales like they were made of paper. Roars of pain and confusion became common as the Scourge were surprised by the new attack. Many were lucky that a combination of the Scourgeshield and their natural protection kept them from being killed outright. About a quarter of her force wasn’t so fortunate.
The knife-like shards of bone found themselves lodged into the brains of the Scourge, causing them to drop to the ground like empty sacks of flesh. When they died, their corpses became more fuel for the disgusting magic of the Vallyr. They exploded as well, furthering the wave of destruction. The destructive wave of corpse detonations started on the outside of the clearing and made its way toward Shale. She closed her eyes and wrapped her wings around her as the inevitable death came her way. She knew that if she tried to fly, the shards of bone would pass through her as effortlessly as it did the rest of her forces. Her only chance would be to put enough layers between her and the blasts and hope that the Enticers could fix her up after the fact.
She lamented that so many of the Scourge had died already. The Enticers couldn’t raise the dead, only heal the living. She felt tiny pieces of bone rip through her scales and embed themselves in her flesh. Thankfully, her plan worked as intended, and they were stopped by the many layers they had to penetrate to find a vital organ. When the ear-shattering sound of the explosions faded away, Shale painfully drew her wings behind her to study the wreckage. Her ears were ringing, and she could feel blood pouring from her eyes, ears, and nose. The concussive force had done severe damage to her body, but she only had eyes for the dead members of the Scourge on the ground.
She only had a heartbeat of time to observe the battlefield before the last detonation split the night. The entire obelisk behind her exploded, and a concussive force caught her body and threw her halfway across the clearing. She couldn’t help but scream in pain as all the injuries made by the first Vallyr reprisal worsened. She tried to rise to her feet, but she couldn’t even send the signals from her brain to her limbs. Her body simply refu
sed to go through with the motion. Instead, she sank into the soupy mud caused by the mixing of earth and black Vallyrian blood. She felt the dirt enter her mouth and nose, and she tried to spit it out as she took shuddering breaths in an attempt to clear her breathing passages. The effort was simply too much, and her body decided that it had enough torment for the moment. She faded from consciousness.
CHAPTER 13: THE SCION ARRIVES
AFTER FINDING THE Rocs and taking their eggs, the journey had gone much smoother. Slate decided to stay on foot, although he was growing tired of always traveling with his army. He found himself thinking about Shale and wondering how her campaign was going. He could have asked Bastion to check up on her and report back to him, but that would be a waste, and he wanted Shale to feel like he trusted her to see her mission through to completion. If he made a point of looking over her shoulder, she wouldn’t develop the autonomy that she needed.
He missed flying through the air with her as they fought their way around Somnium. It might be an odd thing to feel nostalgic about, but the happiest he may have ever been was the scouting of Wayward. Things were simpler. He wasn’t usually one to whine about the past, but he was starting to feel the dragging chains of authority. People thought that leadership meant they got to do what they wanted. Slate tried to live his life that way. However, the more people that an individual was responsible for, the more they had to do. It wasn’t that the people themselves imposed more conditions. After all, Slate couldn’t give a shit less about what the ordinary people thought about him so long as it didn’t affect the security of his administration. No, the flying was a perfect example. Slate would rather be flying above the formation. Logically, he knew it was a bad idea and that he should stay with the forces on the ground. It wasn’t the army that told him he had to do that. Although, Matek had implied as much. Instead, Slate did it out of his sense of self-preservation and responsibility.
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