by Edward Lang
I pointed back down the forest road from which we’d come. “Anybody who can move, GO THAT WAY!”
Suddenly the skeletons hanging above us in the trees whipped out knives, cut the ropes they were dangling from, and dropped to the ground.
Ambush.
At least three dozen blocked our retreat.
“KILL THEM!” I roared as I Venom Blasted the nearest one in the head.
Alia obliterated one with Fang, and Spirella webbed one with a shot of spider silk. Dyra caused vines to grow up and seize the legs of three others –
But there were too many. And they were advancing towards us, nooses dangling from their necks.
Dyra and I were on horseback, and could have possibly raced around them – but Alia and Spirella were on the ground. There was no way they could fit on our horses, not the way they were shaped.
One downside to the more, shall we say, ‘exotic’ monster girls’ bodies.
I suppose we could have draped them across our horses the way that the Baron had carried Alia out of the swamp, but the Baron had been trotting along at a leisurely pace. We needed to gallop. Alia’s long tail would have slowed us down incredibly and given the hanged men plenty of time to attack us.
The road to the valley was blocked by my own lich army…
And the road back through the mountains was blocked by the skeletons who had cut themselves down from the trees.
Both our paths of escape were closed off.
We would have to go around.
“Head that way!” I yelled at Alia, Spirella, and Dyra as I pointed into the woods.
Dyra’s horse thundered off, and Alia and Spirella scampered after her.
But I couldn’t leave Zala.
She was still on top of her horse, but her eyes were glowing bright blue now, and she looked terrified.
“Scott, I can’t control my body!” she shrieked.
“Come here, I’ll carry you,” I said, reaching out –
But as I drew closer, her right hand went for one of her Ravager blades.
“Zala, NO!” I yelled.
“RUN!” she screamed as she whipped out the blade and slashed at my throat.
I didn’t have a choice: I hit her with Venom Blast.
Not on the head, but the chest.
I knew it wouldn’t kill her, because nothing but a head shot could – but it definitely knocked her backwards off her mount.
She thudded onto the ground as her horse freaked out and took off.
Suddenly another voice spoke up far behind me.
“Had enough, little boy?”
I whipped around to see a woman walking towards me along the road from the castle. She was completely alone.
I stared in astonishment. “Who are you?”
“I am Necra, Magistra of the Imperium, Necromanceress Prime of the Dark Immortal. And you are intruding on my lands.”
If you’d asked me what a female necromancer looked like, I would have said some ugly old crone in black rags – but that couldn’t have been further from what I saw.
This woman was young. Late 20s at most.
She was also gorgeous, with light skin and long, black hair.
She was tall, thin, toned, with great C-cups –
And she was almost entirely naked, except for bizarre armor just barely covering her breasts and crotch, and which formed boots and long gloves.
The armor looked like jagged shards of metal woven together, with more jagged shards welded on top of that. It reminded me almost exactly of that chick in the comic Witchblade – except a lot skimpier.
I got ahold of myself and stopped staring at her rack. “Let my friends go!”
She laughed. “I think not. In fact, I think your friends are going to be the ones to kill you.”
Okay – fuck this.
I thrust out my arm and shot Venom Blast at her –
But she stretched out her metal-encased palm and stopped the green bolts in a shower of sparks, exactly like when Darth Vader stopped Han’s blaster shots with his outstretched hand on Bespin.
Oh shit…
“Ah – your dalliances with your female beasts have given you powers,” she sneered. “No matter. Your abilities are as pathetic as your whores’.”
I kept firing, but she kept blocking. No matter what part of her body I aimed at, she intercepted the green shots like it was child’s play.
“I grow weary of this,” she snarled, then lifted one hand into the air.
The metal glove on her hand glowed blue –
And suddenly there was a scraping and clanking noise behind me.
I turned around to see my liches all crawling on top of each other, bones and armor clashing together. Their arms linked up, their bodies intermingled, and suddenly I realized a shape was taking form.
A very large, very tall shape.
It was a humanoid outline, but made of 300 dead bodies interwoven together – almost my entire army. The arms were composed of several liches tightly bound together to form the biceps, and more forming the forearms and hands. The giant’s fingers were individual liches’ arms. And the ‘head’ was a row of lich skulls next to each other.
“Oh shit,” I moaned as the colossal figure towered over me.
“Sorry, Scott!” Urt cried out from where he was part of the creature’s pecs.
“Yeah – sorry, man!” Vurt yelled from where he was part of the thigh. “We can’t help it!”
“Sorry!”
“Really sorry!”
The dead creature reached out a massive arm for me –
But I was already urging my horse into the trees after Alia, Spirella, and Dyra.
“STOP HIM!” Necra shouted.
The monstrous necromorph lumbered after me, but the trees were too thick for it to get through. It pulled one pine aside, snapping it in two halfway up the trunk – which freaked me the hell out, considering how much strength that took – but it was still too slow.
However, the formerly hanged skeletons were mobile and fast. They darted at me, throwing themselves through the air, knives at the ready.
I blasted one, but they came at me from all sides.
I felt knives slam into my leather armor, but they didn’t pierce it – they just raked down my back and arms.
However, a couple of the liches stabbed my horse in their frenzy.
It screamed in terror and bolted through the trees.
“WHOA! WHOA!” I yelled, to no avail.
It raced through the pines –
And suddenly there were no more trees, just an endless vista of mountains at the edge of a sheer drop.
There was no time – my horse was going too fast to stop –
So I leaned over and flung out a hand, grabbed the nearest tree with Wall Crawler, and let my grip on it heave me out of the saddle.
Just in time, too.
My horse screamed as it went over the edge of the cliff – an awful, awful sound as it tumbled down into the abyss.
I dropped to the ground and immediately thought of Dyra. Her horse hadn’t been raging out of control, but still –
“DYRA!” I screamed. “ALIA – SPIRELLA!”
“We’re here, Scott!” Dyra’s voice cried out about a hundred feet to my left, followed by an equine screech of pain.
I ran as fast as I could over the craggy terrain.
I found Dyra, Alia, and Spirella crouched by the edge of a nasty cliff. Dyra’s horse was on the ground, trying to get up but unable. Its foreleg was quite obviously broken.
“It fell as we reached the edge of the cliff,” Dyra cried out in distress. “I keep trying to heal it, but it won’t let me get close enough!”
Far behind us in the trees, there was the sound of armor rattling against bones.
The hanged men were coming.
Shit –
“We’re going to have to fight our way out,” I said as I turned back to the forest.
“What?!” Spirella cried out.
“T
here’s only about a dozen of them – we can take them,” I said confidently.
Then I saw the glowing blue eyes in the gloom.
Hundreds of them.
My stomach sank.
Where the hell did she get all those dead guys?!
Parch stepped up to state what should have been obvious.
Oh no…
it appears Necra divided the giant
back into its constituent parts…
Of course she did.
From deep within the trees I heard Zala’s voice cry out in anguish, “RUN, SCOTT! WE CAN’T CONTROL OURSELVES!”
This was bad.
This was really, really bad.
I looked behind me and down over the edge.
The drop was a good thousand feet over exposed rock, down to a tree-filled valley below… except it was more of an 80-degree slide than a 90-degree drop.
It would have been deadly for most people –
But we weren’t most people.
“New plan,” I said. “We’re going over the side.”
“What?!” Dyra cried out in horror.
“Spirella, use your webs to rappel down! Take Dyra – but before you do, bind me and Alia together!”
Spirella looked panicked. “Are you sure we – ”
“DO IT!” I yelled as those blue eyes loomed ever closer in the shadows.
I could hear the click-click-click of their bony feet clacking on the ground as they drew closer.
Spirella aimed her backside at me and fired.
A gobbet of white fluid smacked into my chest and dribbled down.
I’d never been on the receiving end of her webbing before, and I couldn’t help but wonder if a female porn star felt the same way during a money shot.
I grabbed Alia’s hand and smacked it into the gooey glob.
“What are you DOING?!” she cried out as she tried pulling her hand away, to no avail.
“Safety harness!” I said, then grabbed her around the waist as I headed for the edge of the cliff.
I dropped down onto my butt with Alia smashed right up against me, her tail flailing along on the ground behind us – and just about lost my lunch as I watched a bunch of rocks clatter down the cliff-face in a mini avalanche.
Make that ‘clatter hundreds of feet down the cliff-face in a mini avalanche.’
Spirella shot a web line onto a hunk of exposed boulder and grabbed Dyra.
“Hang on!” she cried out as she threw them both over the side of the cliff.
“Noooo!” Dyra screamed in terror, and held on with all her might.
Spirella basically rappelled down the mountain, using her webbing as her support line. Her spiky black spider legs scrabbled across the rock cliff, slowing her descent, as she and Dyra plummeted down at a semi-controlled pace.
I was going to try to do more or less the same as Spirella… except I didn’t have a spiderweb to work with.
Suddenly two dozen skeletons broke out of the trees and headed right for me, eyes blazing blue fog, knives and swords raised high.
Zala led the pack, her Ravagers ready to strike.
“SCOTT, GO!” she shrieked, tears running out of her glowing blue eyes and down her cheeks.
I figure I had two choices:
Stay, and definitely get chopped up into itty bitty pieces.
Or go, and maybe not get squished into a bloody pulp a thousand feet below.
I decided to bet on the ‘maybe.’
“I’ll come back for you!” I yelled at Zala as I scooted forward and started falling down the cliff.
“SCOTT!” Alia screamed in my ear as we went over.
My right hand was around her waist, but my left hand dragged out behind us.
I used Wall Crawler to hang on to the cliff face for a split second. Then I released my powers, slid ten feet, grabbed on with Wall Crawler again, and nearly got my shoulder yanked out of its socket.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Latch on, stop our fall, release.
At least, that was how it was supposed to work in theory.
The reality was, there was a lot of loose stones and dirt – which stuck to my glove because of my powers – but I couldn’t always get a good hold on the cliff face.
In fact, Wall Crawler slowed us down significantly rather than fully stopping us. Which means we slid at a fairly constant rate, but a lot faster than I would have liked.
That turned out to be a good thing when the liches started divebombing us.
The first skeleton tumbled past us, ass over teakettle, and exploded in a pile of bones far below us.
“Oh SHIT!” I said as I looked up and saw several more liches belly-sliding down the cliff towards us.
“Wha– OH!” Alia shrieked as another skeleton launched off an outcropping and flew over us into the void.
“Can you hit them?!” I cried out.
To her credit, Alia didn’t complain. She just aimed Fang with her free hand (the other being stuck to my chest with Spirella’s webbing) and fired away as best she could.
So we were sliding down a damn steep mountain, with me using magical powers to slow our descent as much as possible, as homicidal skeletons slid after us going five times as fast.
Good times.
Alia hit two that were headed right for us. They exploded into disconnected bones with a sound like a wooden marimba toppling over: clatter clatter CLANK CLANK!
The other liches aimed wide and went zipping past us, where they blasted into bits at the bottom of the gorge.
I hoped and prayed that I wouldn’t see Zala coming after us. I didn’t want to see Urt or Vurt or any of our other allies, either – but I would have been heartbroken to have Zala fall to her doom.
As it so happened, I guess the Enchantress could only force her hanged men to come after us, because we didn’t recognize a single one of our own liches. Maybe our guys had just enough willpower to resist throwing themselves suicidally over the edge.
The barrage of skeletons ceased – possibly because Necra realized she wasn’t going to get us that way, or possibly because she’d run out of dead guys she could force to do kamikaze runs.
Either way, we continued our descent to the bottom of the mountain in relative calm.
Well, ‘relative calm’ if you didn’t count getting battered and bruised by every outcropping we slid over, that is.
It was brutal. I shielded Alia’s upper body with my own, but I knew her tail was going to be in bad shape once we got to the bottom.
It took a while, but the slope gradually flattened out, and I was able to use Wall Crawler to actually stop us. From there we continued at a slower and more controlled pace.
Spirella was still rappelling over to our side with almost no problem whatsoever. She’d taken the opportunity to shoot a new web line halfway down – but she was still doing a great job traveling down the cliff face and slowing her and Dyra’s descent with her stiletto-like feet.
Finally we got to the bottom and slid to a halt without any help from my powers.
I looked up. The top of the mountain looked impossibly far away from down here. I could even see the Grim Keep in the distance, but it looked like a hazy painting, it was so far away.
The army of liches had paused on the edge of the precipice, but I guess Necra had decided not to send them on what was obviously a suicide mission.
I could see a lone figure at the forefront of the group – one with black leggings, a black top, and white hair.
Zala.
“I’ll come back for you,” I promised in a whisper.
“Scott, we have to go, and I’m still stuck to you!” Alia cried out.
“Spirella, can you – ?”
But my little arachne was already on it. She let go of Dyra and quickly scuttled over to us, then began to lick Alia’s hand.
It would have been kind of hot if we weren’t under imminent threat of death.
Everywhere Spirella’s tongue touched, the webbing dissolved.
Alia finally pulled her hand free.
“Yuck,” she said, wiping her hand off against her scaly hip.
“Let’s go!” I said, and herded the girls down the remaining slope and into the forest, out of sight of the lich army.
6
As night fell, we huddled together in the forest for warmth. We couldn’t even light a campfire for fear that Necra might see it and send the liches after us. We didn’t have our horses, and thus we didn’t have our supplies – so no food and water. Dyra used her powers to find berries and edible roots for us, but that was all we had for sustenance.
But that wasn’t the first priority; healing Alia was.
My little lamia was so brave; that slide down the mountain had really done a number on her lower snake half. I’d been able to shield her human upper half, and she at least had scales to protect against the worst injuries. But even though her tail had still been left battered and bleeding in dozens of different spots, she never once complained.
Thank god for my leather armor – that slide down the mountain would have rubbed my skin off like a belt sander. As it was, the leather was horribly scuffed and scarred, like somebody had taken a barbed-wire weed whacker to it.
“How exactly did we stumble into a necromancer’s domain?” Dyra asked with an accusatory note in her voice.
“Yeah, Parch – how DID that happen?” I asked sardonically.
I’m so very sorry, Scott.
Had I known,
I absolutely would have warned you.
I would guess that Necra
just recently moved into the area –
not to mention that
she must be a very new addition
to the Dark Immortal’s forces.
I have absolutely no information about her,
other than what we witnessed earlier.
“It’s alright,” I grumbled. “You can’t be expected to know everything.”
“Why can’t he?” Spirella asked, though entirely without rancor.
“Yes – he IS a messenger from the gods, isn’t he?” Dyra asked with a lot less charity.
I could almost hear the defensiveness in Parch’s ‘voice.’