The poor bastards had no idea what hit them. I landed on the first guard like a pogo stick rider, driving the Spear and the full weight of my body down into his torso. The blade plunged between his neck and his breastplate, dealing catastrophic damage. I vaulted off him and took out the second guard with a lance to the throat. He sunk to his knees, gurgling as he clawed at his neck.
[You deal a mortal blow! 64 EXP!]
On the other side of the wall, I saw Karalti descend in an arc of rippling silk. The torches of the guards there fell and winked out.
“Two ex-guards, served over ice!” Karalti chirped.
“Good work. Now for the ones at the stairwells.” I knelt by the pair of corpses, equipped the spellglove I kept in my inventory, and tuned into my one and only magical ability: Shadow of the Sun, the vampiric spell that allowed me to raise shadows from the dead.
“Sond, Karalt’, Bi’nah!” Mana pulsed through the glove, and wispy tendrils of dark energy as fine as spider silk flowed from my fingertips. A frigid chill caused a fine curtain of mist to rise as the darkness plunged into the corpses of the deceased guards. Their shadows trembled, then came together into a pair of vaguely humanoid forms, pikes in hand.
Shadow Soldier
Unit Rank 0 (Level 12, Common)
Type: Incorporeal Undead
HP: 400/400
Speed: 110 (Extremely Fast)
Melee Attack: 90
Melee Defense: 8
Abilities: Lift Drain, Incorporeal, Sneak Attack (x3 damage)
EXP: 1200 (+400 to next level)
“Kill the men who guard the entry to the Lower Ward stairs,” I ordered. “And make it fast.”
The shades saluted, then warped into the shadows of the rampart and flowed along them, heading for the gates.
“Ready?” I thought back to Karalti.
“Ready!” My dragon leaped silently to the edge of the rampart on the other side of the courtyard.
I climbed up to mirror her position, crouching, and messaged Suri and Rin. “We’ve made contact. Ready Wave One.”
“Roger, be there in five,” Suri replied crisply.
I tensed, ready to jump, when a blood-curdling scream rang out from the stairwell. I whipped my head around to see the pair of shadows attacking only one of the guards, not both of them at the same time.
“FUCK!” I sprung out from the wall, hit the ground in a roll, and kept running. “Karalti, help the shades kill that other guy! Lock the gates!”
The four guards in front of the Keep mobilized immediately. Two of them ran out into the open, calling to their comrades. One stood frozen, clutching his spear and scanning the darkness. One ran to a big iron bell and started to ram it with the butt of his polearm.
“Fuck fuck fuck.” I Jumped into the air, sailing over the spikes, and landed on the pair like a thunderbolt. Umbra Burst sprayed thorny spines of darkness in all directions, impaling the men and freezing them, but it was too late. Lights were blazing to life inside the Keep. I could hear feet thundering down the stairwells.
“The dead are here! The undead demons!” I heard a Vlachian voice shout from behind me.
Whirling, I spotted Karalti battling the pair who’d run from the Keep, and behind them, the first wave of paratroopers descending from the sky. The Yanik were heading right toward us from the Campbell with Zlaslo in the lead. The first wave of Meewfolk were right behind them.
“Okay, first Shadowlord lesson: Lesser undead are really fucking stupid.” I grit my teeth and cast my hand over the two men I’d just killed. “Sond, karalt’, binah!”
The new shadows rose, waiting patiently for orders. I was about to issue them when a thump from behind the doors of the Keep startled me. No one emerged. Instead, there were more thumps, the sound of heavy objects being dragged across the floor. They were barricading themselves inside.
“Fucking bullshit mother-fucking—” I swore to myself, and split for the stairwells with the shadows in tow. It was too late to stop the defenders inside the keep from bracing the door. The fight outside was about to get rolling.
I sprinted, then dashed forward in a comet of black fire, smashing into the back of the guard dueling Karalti. He died without a sound, freeing her up to run to the far stairwell. I ran to the closer of the two, slamming the gate closed and locking the bolt across. As I did, a larger claxon rang out—from the guard tower in the Lower Ward.
The doors of the Great Hall behind us burst open, letting out a flood of sleepy, startled warriors. They were caught completely flat-footed as five, ten, twenty Yanik descended from the sky on top of them. Cast-off parachutes draped over the shouting, confused rebels, covering them like funeral shrouds as the Yanik turned on them with blade and bow and hacked them to pieces. The alarm rang continuously from below—the sound of the castle bell joined by the hellish air-raid siren battle cries of a hundred pissed off giant cats.
“Form up! Form-HHRRGH!” I heard someone in Zoltan’s ranks shout, then gurgle as Yanik steel found his belly.
The great hall was a makeshift barracks for at least a hundred men. Rebels spilled out of the building in knots and ran straight into the silk-draped corpses of their friends, tripping over them in the dark as Zlazlo shouted at his men to line up and pull their bows. Arrows clattered off wood and steel and sunk into flesh as the Rangers drew and fired, drew and fired, raining wood and steel on the terrified, half-dressed brigands. Men screamed as they fell, or snarled curses as they turned and fled, stumbling back toward the building where the enemy was hastily lining up with bows and rifles. I shadow danced through the hail of missiles and jumped straight up. Shards of brilliant black energy gathered around me like a forest of spears, then shot down at the enemy archers. The line of twelve at the front danced jerkily as the shards impaled them, rematerialized in the air, and rained down on the increasingly panicked, desperate ranks behind them.
“I am your Voivode, Count Dragozin! The House of Hussar is assuming control of this castle!” I shouted. “Surrender and live, or fight and die!”
“It’s the Dragonlord! Surrender! For the Nine’s sake, brothers!” Cries started to ring through the hall. The fifty or so remaining soldiers, most of them still half-dressed, dropped their weapons and went to their knees.
The Yanik advanced behind me, arrows nocked to their bowstrings. Zlazlo held up a warding hand to them as he jogged forward. He’d been slashed across the face, blood pouring down his cheek and throat into the collar of his armor.
“Got a potion for that?” I asked him, jerking my chin toward him. “That’s a nasty cut.”
“Keh?” Zlaslo, slightly dazed from his combat high, hadn’t even felt the injury. He touched his face, then grunted. “Oh, this. Is fine. I will treat it later. What are your orders?”
“We secure these idiots and move on to the Keep.” I squeezed his shoulder and turned back to our new captives. “Who’s in charge here?!”
“Me! I am!” A burly, grizzled older man spoke up from the ground about twenty feet from me. He had one hand raised, the other holding up his half-laced breeches.
“Name and rank!” I barked.
He winced at the sound of my voice. “Captain! Captain Horna!”
“Captain Horna, barricade this door and remain inside. Treat your wounded as you can. We’re here for Zoltan. If anyone in here steps outside this hall, we’ll kill you and burn this place to the ground with dragonfire. Am I understood?”
“Yes! Yes, Voivode.” He scrambled up, casting a look back at his shocked and bloody men. “All of you hear that? If I see any hands on weapons, I’m throwing you out of here to meet the Maker!”
We waited as the surrendered soldiers poured back into their barracks and dropped the crossbar with an audible ‘thump’. A handful of Rangers whooped victoriously, letting out the roars, shrieks, and barking cries of their totemic dinosaurs as they jammed a bundle of spears into the handles of the doors to bar them from the outside.
I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. �
��Zlaslo, get your men to the wall and provide ranged support for Taethawn.”
“Sir!” Zlaslo whirled around and swept his arms up and forward. “Kel hammangiz!”
The Yanik ran back, covering me in formation as I sprinted back outside. The fighting in the upper ward was already over, the ground littered with the bodies of the dead and dying. “Karalti! Where are you?”
“I’m fine! I’m on the wall!” She replied. “I’ve got a rifle and I’m shooting people trying to come up the stairs!”
“Come back down. I need you.” I opened my group PM with Suri and Rin. “Suri, what’s your status?”
She replied after a couple seconds. “Holding steady. It’s a real brawl down here.”
“Stay safe.” I cut the message, and turned my attention to the keep.
Every interior light was ablaze, the windows full of scurrying shadows. Zoltan faced three options in this situation: try and escape, surrender, or turtle up and attempt to fight us to the death. He’d apparently chosen option three. If my troops tried to take the Keep now, it would be room-to-room fighting. Room-to-room and house-to-house were literally the fucking worst, but fortunately for us, there were about sixty dead rebels strewn all over the courtyard. And I was a motherfucking Shadowlord.
I drove the butt end of the spear against the ground, drew a deep breath, and focused on the brooding spark of magic in my chest. “Sond, Karalt’, Bi’nah!”
One by one, the shadows of Zoltan’s dead men peeled themselves up from their corpses, until a field of no fewer than thirty simmering pillars of shadow stood in the courtyard, weapons in their hands.
“Into the Keep, all of you!” I took the Spear and gestured toward the building. “Minimize casualties, maximize chaos! Spare non-combatants! Kill any hostile mages!”
The shadow soldiers turned and poured toward the barricaded door. Thumps were still coming from behind it as Zoltan’s men piled furniture into the entryway... sounds interrupted by hoarse shouts of terror as the shades simply phased through the barricade and fell on the men inside. I leaned on the Spear, eyes screwed shut in concentration, and gripped it to steady myself as my awareness traveled with the shadows into the keep. I sensed them pursuing the fleeing soldiers, cutting down just enough of them to make a point—and more importantly, to clear the hall so that we could bust in the door.
“Hector!” Karalti ran up to me, panting and streaked with gore. She was still clutching her borrowed rifle. “Things are crazy in the Lower Ward! The Orphans are doing well, but I don’t know how long that’ll last. The guards are starting to organize, and there’s a lot of them.”
“We’re about to fix that.” I stared ahead at the Keep as screams tore through the air. “We need to bolster our troops in the lower ward, and then we need to bust in that door.”
“Just as well that I’m the best at breaking things!” Karalti took several bounding steps back from me, unequipped her gear, and spread her arms wide. She swirled up into a coil of blue-black plunging the courtyard into shade as she extended her wings, inflated her throat, and bellowed a long, deep, guttural roar of challenge toward the Keep.
“Head up onto the wall. We need to keep a low profile: no flying around the outside of the towers. They’ve got their cannons pointed out toward the city, not in toward the keep.” I vaulted up to Karalti’s back, landing in a crouch on the saddle. “Let’s try your Queensong to back up our troops, and then you and I are breaking up Zoltan’s slumber party.”
Karalti replied by climbing up onto the ramparts, keeping her wings spread to reduce her weight and not crush the bricks into powder. The battle below raged like a storm: in the nexus of the whirling steel and screams was Suri, a flow of pure violence as she cut down men with her axes. Kitti and her men were guarding her back, the young Berserker dueling a cluster of pikemen trying to break through Letho and Gruna’s crossbow barrage. Not far from them, I saw Taethawn fighting with all four limbs—the scimitars in his hands and the bonded metal claw sheaths on his feet—as sword blows glanced off a gleaming blue barrier of magical energy that surrounded his armor. A rebel rushed him, only to have his throat torn out as the commander spun into a graceful capoeira-like kick. He flung the body into the next man over before landing and rushed him, plunging both swords into his chest from either side. Karalti was right: we were mowing down the first wave of soldiers, the ones who’d stumbled out unprepared and half-witted, but their deaths were allowing the second wave to ready themselves—and they were circling around the outside, getting ready to pin our troops with shields and spears.
Karalti leaned out over the edge of the wall and roared again. The effect was immediate: half a dozen less experienced rebels fell beneath swords and claws as the sight of the dragon distracted them. But she was just warming up. I felt her draw a deep breath, arming some deep inner power.
[Karalti uses Queensong!]
The dragon’s jaws gaped as a dark nimbus formed around us both, crackling with bright seams of color... and then she emitted a primordial, bone-shuddering bass rumble. It sounded like a stampede of horses, getting louder and louder until suddenly the muscles of her neck squeezed and a clear, high, tone of pure soprano pierced the bass and drowned out almost every other sound in the castle. It spread from her like a shockwave, and as it washed over the stunned, brawling mob, Zoltan’s troops crumbled. A full hundred of his men stumbled to their knees, vomiting helplessly onto the flagstones, while others tried to flee in terror and impaled themselves on the waiting sabers of the Orphans Company.
“RRRRRHHHHOOOOOOOO!” Tail and wings vibrating, Karalti built into her throat singing like an earthquake, the upper note now as clear and pure as glass. I was rooted to the spot on her back, barely able to breathe as waves of what could only be raw magic passed over me. Just when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, Karalti relaxed her throat, and the overnote faded back into a deep rolling growl, like the rattling of a huge raven.
“Holy tits.” I gasped, clutching to the saddle like a life raft. As the last wave of resonance passed over me, it left me with fresh energy, a sense of vigor so powerful I felt manic. “WOO!”
“Yeah! Take that!” Karalti spat a gout of fire into a unit of spearmen, scattering them, then turned around and used her wings to climb back down into the Upper Ward. “Need me to break open that door?”
“No one looks like they’re surrendering.” I thumped the top of my helmet with a fist. “Let’s get some!”
Karalti tossed her head, then stood up and broke into a lumbering charge toward the keep. She bought her shoulders down and compressed her neck into a straight line, and then rammed the bony plate at the base of her horns right into the entryway. Wood splintered and groaned, but the doors held.
“OOF! Ow!” Karalti backed up, shaking her head and snorting.
“This asshole isn’t worth breaking your neck over. Just torch the damn thing.” I knelt up again, watching the windows and arrow slits. The sound of fighting was still coming from inside: when I checked the Mass Combat menu, I saw that I’d lost thirty of the fifty-four shadow units I’d animated. Someone was using magic.
“No, we can’t risk setting the keep on fire! Use your freezy-jumpy move on it!” Karalti backed up for another charge. “Uhhhh... what’s it called... Shattering Darkness! And make the Spear Dark-element! It’ll do some bonus cold damage and weaken the door!”
I jumped off her and sped to the ground, dashing forward just before I hit dirt. The Spear of Nine Spheres burned with a brilliant deep indigo, coils of dark energy building up around my arm and the haft of the weapon as I roared and plunged the blade deep into the shattered oak.
[You deal 628 Darkness damage to door! -15% Damage Reduction!]
The wood buckled and squealed as it froze solid. Frost and cracks bloomed over it, spreading as I backpedaled and made room for Karalti. She pawed the ground with a back foot, and then charged the door a second time. She smashed into it with the full force of her ten-ton terrestrial weight, and the
frozen wood exploded around her head and caved into the hall beyond.
“Ugh.” My dragon groaned as she pulled her head free of the wreckage. “I need to pay more attention to Vash’s khiig-channeling lessons.”
“You alright?” I looked back at her.
“I’m fine! I hit my head harder than that all the time. You know, doing... uhh... dragon stuff.” She cocked her head at me, her eyes a little unfocused. “I’ll go and try and stop the fighting, force the soldiers to surrender.”
“Go. Just watch out for artillery.” A nasty acid burning sensation churned at the back of my throat at the thought of what mortar shells could do to a dragon. “Artillery and Ix’tamo will kill you stone dead.”
“I will. I’ll be fine. Go get Zoltan!” Karalti rumbled, then pivoted and stalked back toward the wall, broadcasting her telepathy across the battlefield. “Guess what, fuckers?! It’s dragon time!”
Chapter 27
With Karalti keeping the infantry busy, I ran for the door of the Keep, glancing over my HP and Adrenaline. The door was smashed into the dense barricade of furniture the defenders had piled up behind the door. Some of it had been shoved back by Karalti, but not all of it—not enough that I could Shadow Dance past the blockade.
[Solar Burst II deals 351 reduced Light damage to Lesser Shades!]
[Raven Helm protects from Blindness!]
I winced as the spell went off like a clap of lightning, briefly turning the hall white. Ears ringing, I resolutely shoved my way past a wardrobe and six tumbled chairs, then crouched down to survey the entry hall from concealment. Ten dead men lay sprawled on the ground, killed by the shadows crowding in front of the grand staircase. A pair of terrified mages were trapped on the first landing. One of them was holding some kind of barrier that kept the shadows from attacking them. The other was winding up to cast another offensive spell.
“You two! Stand down!” I called to them, looking out just far enough to get a proper line of sight on them. “I am Count Dragozin Hector, the Voivode of Myszno! Surrender now, and keep your lives!”
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