by Nick Harrow
“But, sir!”
The final crimson sliver of sun vanished behind the horizon.
The world grew fuzzy and indistinct, and for a heartbeat nothing moved. Shattered pieces of the wall hung suspended in midair. Arrows from my guards’ bows stopped inches from their targets. The smoke that rose from the barbecued center of the collector’s forces froze like paintings of black clouds.
A wave of distortion rippled out from the heart of the oasis, and the stone beneath my feet shifted and rushed forward. The wall expanded outward like a tide of stone advancing toward a distant shore. The shattered gate reformed in the blink of an eye, thicker, taller, more powerful than ever before. The splintered wood was replaced with bars of solid iron welded together and studded with foot-long spikes of hardened steel.
The defensive upgrade I’d purchased three days before were finally completed.
Not a moment too goddamned soon.
A wave of relief scoured my heart like a whirlwind. A storm of emotions crashed over my thoughts, and the pain of my lost guardians was tempered by the surge of hope that my plan could still work.
And then the rest of the upgrades kicked in.
<<<>>>
The Tablet of Conquest
First Settlement
The Kahtsinka Oasis (2nd-Level Settlement)
Current Status: Weak
Improvements
Martial: 4
Defenses: 3
Agrarian: 2
Education: 1
Religion: 1
Mercantile: 2
Build Points Invested: 13
Build Points Available: 0
Current Build Point Cost: 2,000 gold pieces
Maximum Build Points: 2
Build Points to Next Settlement Level: 2
Modifier adjustments: Str +3, Dex +2, Con +1, Cha +1, Int -1
<<<>>>
Lexios howled in outrage as his army was pushed back by the explosive growth of my settlement. The ram pitched onto its side as the gorilla-like creatures who’d propelled it forward lost their minds and charged into the darkness.
My memories of what had just occurred became fluid, and reality bent around the upgrades I’d purchased to write them into the pages of the history books.
The gate had never been breached. It had always been where it stood now, and my memories to the contrary had already begun to fade. The wall was forty feet tall, and the image in my mind of a much shorter, much weaker barrier was replaced by memories of weeks of construction.
The two units of my soldiers hidden on the western edge of the ridgeline had been encamped there for three days, per my orders. That stretch of woods couldn’t have been empty until a few seconds ago, could it?
This timey-wimey bullshit was hard to wrap my head around, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that all this messing around with the fabric of reality would come back to bite me in the ass, somehow, someday.
The upgrades settled into the new grooves they’d carved into the fabric of reality, and my brain struggled to reconcile it all as past and present collided in an unpleasant burst of dissonance.
The same confusion beset Lexios and his men, and they handled it far worse than I did. They had no experience with this sort of thing, and for a handful of heartbeats, their minds melted into useless goo.
“Sound the horn,” I commanded the soldier next to me. “It’s finally fucking time.”
The soldier wasted no time in raising the curled brass instrument to his lips. His breath burst from the horn in a braying cry, three long blasts that echoed over the battlefield.
“Boss?” Zillah asked. “Should I attack?”
“No.” Something had happened to me. My mind spread across the oasis and settled into each of the soldiers who served me. My thoughts were embedded with theirs, and their flesh was welded to my will. The same dungeon lord magic that had changed the city had made me more than just this army’s commander. In so many ways, I was the army. “Search the battlefield for Nephket. Bring her back to the city.”
I still couldn’t feel my familiar, but I wanted Zillah away from the fight. There was nothing she could do here, and her presence risked her life. She’d be far safer searching the farmlands for the corpse of my fallen priestess than she would be in the valley.
I directed a part of my mind to the treasure vault. The moment the sun had set, the dragons I’d slain in the light of day had respawned, back at full health and filled with a hunger for battle.
My thoughts slid into the largest dragon’s thoughts. The body was ill suited to my mind, and I was thankful I wouldn’t need it for long.
“Tyrilese,” I choked through the dragon’s unfamiliar vocal cords. “It is time for you to repay your debt.”
“As you wish.” The angel nodded her head, and her sisters bowed to the dragon. “Show us the way.”
“Follow me.” I impressed my commands into the dragon’s mind, and it roared its approval as it shifted its bulk and crawled toward the exit. I trusted the dragons would do what I’d ordered and turned my full attention back to the army under my command.
Suddenly, I understood what those modifiers in the city upgrades had affected.
Me.
The oasis and all its defenses were an extension of my will. Every soldier, every stone in the wall, every ballista mounted in the towers was mine to command. The settlement’s forces were my flesh and blood, my body to use as I wanted.
“Lexios,” I shouted from hundreds of throats. “Your time is at an end.”
The remnants of the two units that Zillah had commanded and the two fresh units that had just traveled through time to appear poured into the valley from opposite sides. They charged in perfect unison, every step planted by the same mind, every breath taken as if from a single set of lungs. The thunder of their charge rattled Lexios and his men, and they watched in horror as their doom approached.
I had a little over three hundred men, barely half of what Lexios still commanded. But his cavalry was useless, and the siege engines were too close to fire upon my troops. The collector’s vanguard, scarcely two full units, froze in awe as my forces descended upon them.
The collision of armored bodies shattered the twilight into a thousand screaming shards. The spears at the forefront of my troops punched through breastplates and found gaps between greaves. The force of their perfectly synchronized charge drove Lexios’s men back toward the center of the narrow valley. The golden-armored men tripped over one another, their weapons tangled together.
The tax collector wheeled on his horse, his eyes ablaze with unearthly rage. The enormous weapon in his hands hummed an eerie tune as he lashed out in every direction with shocking speed. He took a few of my men’s lives, but it was too little, too late.
The spearmen fell back from the front lines and were replaced by heavily armored soldiers wielding greatswords. Those heavy blades crashed down onto the enemy troops with merciless precision. Swords the length of a man rose and fell in a machine-like rhythm and filled the air with a spray of severed limbs and spurting blood. In less than thirty seconds, half of the tax collector’s vanguard had been laid to waste. Those that remained scrambled to retreat, but the ground behind them still burned with the heat of Hakhmet’s Blood.
“Release the amorphium!” Lexios cried. He cleaved the head from one of my soldiers and his blade wailed like a wounded child. “Release them all!”
The gray wagons behind the siege engines creaked and groaned as the heavy panels on their sides and top began to retract.
“Motherfucker.” There was no way for my troops to reach those wagons before they unleashed their rainbow waves of hellish cargo. One of those wagons had wiped out the raiders and slaughtered half of my guardians. The five gray boxes of death that remained would devastate my forces.
Despite everything I’d done, Lexios had still outsmarted me.
Fury swept over me and the troops under my command shredded the last of the invading army’s soldiers within their reach
. They tried to capture Lexios, but the tax collector’s mount burst through the ring that surrounded him and plunged into the flames of Hakhmet’s Blood behind him. The collector’s hair caught fire, along with his horse’s mane, as they fled through the fire, and I howled with frustrated rage that he had escaped my wrath.
The gray wagons were halfway to finishing their deployment. Another handful of seconds, and the shadow demons would sweep through my forces like wildfire. My mind turned over the pieces of the puzzle in front of me, desperate to find some solution. Where were the fucking dragons and angels?
For that matter, where were the blood gnomes?
A sudden explosion of high-pitched screams answered that question. The pale cannibals had taken their fucking time, but they’d finally arrived to claim their share of the meat. Thin white bodies surged through the crews of the war machines and hacked their legs from under them.
Thank the gods for murderous cannibals.
“Surrender,” my army shouted at Lexios. “Submit to my judgment.”
The tax collector turned to face the gate. His face was a ruin of molten flesh and exposed, blistered muscle. His horse’s neck was little more than a rope of burned meat that supported a head scoured down to the skull. And yet, despite his horrific injuries, Lexios looked as strong or stronger than he had ever been.
His eyes burned like twin suns, and I knew that I faced the King of Kyth.
The horrific monstrosity opened its mouth to unleash a spell of such power I could feel the energy gather around him even from this distance. In seconds, Selician would play whatever trump card he’d been holding, and the balance of power between us would shift again. I didn’t know how, but I knew I was about to regret everything that had led up to this moment.
An amber light gathered over the corpses that littered the field. Dead flesh twitched and writhed, severed hunks of meat attached themselves to whatever convenient body was nearest, and a gargantuan monstrosity took shape under the dark, smoke-streaked sky. A giant built from the bodies of the fallen struggled to stand and grew larger with every passing moment.
The dragons arrived, finally, and their lightning breath carved the back half of Lexios’s army into sizzling chunks. Horses burst like tomatoes in a microwave as blast after blast of vivid blue arcs struck them and hurled their riders through the air with shattered limbs and crushed skulls. The dragons landed in the center of the charred earth clearing they’d created. Lithe figures leapt from their backs and charged toward the amorphium wagons.
The wahket wove through the troops that guarded those hell-spawned weapons like a river of death. Their spears plunged into the throats of their enemies, and their shields crushed skulls and turned aside blades. The wagon’s tenders weren’t front-line soldiers, and they fled screaming from the enraged cat women.
“Rathokhetra!” the wahket roared like a pride of lions on the hunt, and hurled flasks of burning oil through the gaps in the sides of the wagons.
Orange and yellow flames rose toward the sky, and the scorched bodies of the amorphium released clouds of turbulent purple smoke into the night sky. The tax collector’s twisted weapons burned, and the wahket raced back to their dragon mounts and took to the sky once more.
My attention jumped back to the gargantuan undead creature Selician had created. I ordered the greatswords to attack, and their enormous blades hacked at the titanic monster’s legs. They carved away slabs of dead meat and spilled buckets of black blood with seemingly no effect on the creature.
For all the destruction I’d rained down on the tax collector’s army, it was still headed for my gates. Every corpse shambled back to its feet and dragged itself forward, relentlessly pulled to rejoin the patchwork zombie giant that lumbered toward the gates of the oasis.
The fleshy monstrosity was fifty feet tall if it was an inch, and its eyes were mirrored balls the height of a grown man.
“Your struggle was valiant, dungeon lord,” Selician’s voice bellowed over the moans of the undead and dying, “but I am done toying with you.”
The undead monstrosity crushed twenty of my men underfoot as it advanced toward the tower, its eyes fixed on me.
Oh. Fuck.
Chapter 25 – Kez Strikes Again
“KILL THIS FUCKING THING!” I roared.
The dragons did their best to obey my command. Their lightning breath ripped across the gargantuan creature’s body and tore ugly wounds through its dead flesh, but the giant never slowed or wavered. The dead didn’t give a shit about pain, and the lightning couldn’t do structural damage fast enough to take the fucker apart. With a curse, I ordered the dragons to the top of the wall to unload the wahket. Things were about to get ugly, and I wanted the wahket in a more defensible position than on the backs of flying lizards when the shit went down.
A train of carrion crawled along in the mammoth’s wake. The dead bits and pieces scrambled up its body to fill the holes in the giant’s body and swell its girth. No matter how much we hurt Selician’s corpse giant, there were too many bodies for us to carve it down to size before it reached the walls. The king had thrown everything into this one last play, and it might just be the Hail Mary pass that won him the big game.
The thing was within a dozen yards of my tower. The guard next to me had been struck dumb by the horror of what we faced. He couldn’t imagine how we’d win this, and the truth was, I didn’t know, either.
“Get out of here, kid,” I barked. “Tell everyone else to run, too. This is no fight for you guys.”
I wasn’t sure it was a fight for me, either, but I wasn’t about to let this big sack of dead meat fuck up my city while I still had the strength to lift my khopesh.
“Brace yourself,” I warned the largest dragon as I slid into its mind. The contours of its bestial body were still unfamiliar to me, but the strength I could lend to the big guy should more than make up for that.
With a roar, I took to the sky.
It took me a bit to get the hang of flying, but by the time I’d completed my second circle around the battlefield, I was ready to make my move.
The dragon’s powerful wings carried us high into the sky above the flesh giant, then folded back against the lizard’s muscular flanks. Its jaws spread wide and a sizzling ball of power built inside its gullet like a thunderhead trapped in a bottle.
We plummeted toward the flesh giant like a missile of flesh and blood. Wind screamed past our head and our nostrils filled with the scents of death and fire. Lightning burst from our jaws and slammed into the flesh giant’s shoulders. The electric blue arcs carved jagged, charred wounds through the dead meat in a pattern that reminded me of the tangled roots of an ancient tree.
“Die, you shithead,” we growled.
At the last possible second, our wings billowed out to our sides and caught the wind. Our suicidal plunge became a calculated charge, and our talons bit deep into the giant’s back. We tore whole corpses free from the mass and hurled them into the distance. Our dagger-like fangs crunched into the back of the hellish creature’s head, and the bitter taste of coagulated blood coated our tongue.
The giant flailed its arms like tentacles, but the clumsy attacks bounced off our armored body. We had all the advantages here. We’d won.
With a triumphant cry, we shredded the giant’s head and revealed the crystalline orbs of its eyes. Power roiled around those twin stars, and we knew what we had to do.
We opened our mouth and slammed our teeth down on the left eye. Our teeth, iron hard and driven by enormously powerful muscles, drove into the crystalline surface. A maze of cracks raced across the eye, and a shower of sparks burst into our mouth.
Raw power flooded into our throat and clawed at our gullet. Pain blazed through the dragon like a forge-hot iron spike. The dragon’s mind rebelled against the agony, but it didn’t flee. It bore down on the eye even as the scales along the sides of its muzzle blackened and peeled away like old scabs.
The King of Kyth bellowed in agony, and the eye sh
attered.
The dragon thrust itself away from the giant, and its enormous wings dragged it up, up, up. It was dazed by the power that had burst within its mouth, but it was too proud to leave the battle. Fifty feet above the giant’s head, the dragon turned back and took a look at its work.
The giant’s head was already reformed, and it was still headed for the wall.
“You did well.” The dragon had done its best, but it just wasn’t enough. “The rest is up to me.”
I returned to my body and was shocked to see that the giant hadn’t stopped its advance even as the dragon had crushed one of its eyes. The king’s remaining eye gleamed above me like an omen of doom, far too close and far too powerful.
If the angels would just show up and lend a hand, that’d be swell. I scanned the sky in the vain hope I’d spy them winging toward me, their blazing swords raised to smite evil.
Fat fucking chance. The sky was choked with smoke that hid the stars and cloaked the moon in grim shadows. Not an angel in sight.
A dozen thoughts raced through my mind as I climbed up onto the edge of the wall that surrounded the top of the tower. I couldn’t feel Nephket or Delsinia, and Zillah’s mind was a tempest of fear and sorrow. Kezakazek rushed somewhere, her mind a whirlwind of knowledge and fragments of hope that I couldn’t spare the energy to understand.
“I love you all,” I whispered.
Now it was time to prove just how much.
My khopesh appeared in my right hand and I squeezed its hilt like an old friend.
“Here goes fucking nothing,” I growled.
The flesh giant raised its deformed fists over its head, ready to shatter the tower under me.
Before that hammer could fall, I incarnated and leapt.
I knew I’d missed my mark before the fingers of my left hand slid past the creature’s body. My fingernails scraped away a thin layer of skin and blood but found no purchase on the undead monstrosity.
I plummeted toward the earth and lashed out from pure instinct. The khopesh buried itself in the face of a fallen soldier, and the hooked blade bit deep into the corpse giant’s side. My shoulder screamed in protest as my falling body suddenly jerked to a stop. A chunk of my health vanished from the red circle. I was still alive, though who knew how much longer that would last.