Absolute pants-shitting terror.
[You deal 4725 Darkness damage to Wraithlord! It’s super-effective!]
[You gain 350 EXP]
“TARN TAKRARHN MOTHERFUCKER!” I sprung up as the [Wraithlord] burst into ash and his staff fell, launching straight into an oncoming wave of skeleton infantry.
[Objective partially complete: Artillery Brigade 1/3]
“Karalti!” I called to her in my mind - slashing, vaulting, dodging sickle-shaped desert swords and pickaxes as the unit surged in around me. The skeletons at the very front were nimble warriors, carrying nothing but their weapons. Behind them lumbered rows of [Burdened Skeletons] wearing what looked all too much like suicide bomber vests. “Karalti, whatever you do, don’t light up those guys in the vests until you’ve got space!”
Even as I spoke, the sky darkened as my dragon rolled gracefully towards us out of the smoke. I smashed a creaking skeleton out of the way with the butt of my spear as she swooped in, kicking skulls and raised axes out of the way on her path toward me. I Jumped, caught her arm, and held on for dear life as she gained altitude. “Yeah, baby! Waaooh! Get ‘em, girl!”
“Toasty bony time!” Karalti’s narrow jaws gaped as she wheeled back over the teeming skeletons, blasting the entire front line with her breath weapon. They struggled on, burning, but finally stumbled forward onto their knees. Some of their brethren tripped over their fallen fellows as the bombers lumbered up. They began to struggle through the pile, wading toward their burning fellows. And when they caught fire...
“Bones away!” The explosions rang out beneath us, the shockwave forcing air up under Karalti’s wings. Whooping, I swung wildly from her wrist. “Hell yeah! Bone Appetit, bitches!”
“Oh my god,” Karalti muttered. “Suri’s right. No puns allowed.”
“My grandparents were Millennials, Tidbit. I was born into puns. Memed by them.” Karalti was already headed toward the next artillery battery along the enemy line. “And tibia honest with you-”
“AHHHHH! I HATE YOU! STOP!”
This barrage was expecting us. I scrambled up, ready to leap at the rows of mortars suddenly facing east. Before they could fire, Karalti burst forward in a surge of speed, and her form divided in two as we came out of the dark cloud of power that disguised her Wings of Deception ability. We split to the right as the mortars fired on the left. The dragon shuddered with referred pain as twenty shells obliterated the illusory Karalti, but she wasn’t damaged - and we were in position. The Wraithlord commanding this unit must have seen something on my face as Karalti spat fire down along the trench, because he pulled his bull mount around and turned to flee.
“Oh no you don’t! You get back here right now, young man!” I dropped, dashed in the air, then Jumped and landed right on the ass-end of the bull. The Spear danced with black fire as I plunged it through the Wraithlord’s back, toppling him - and me - from the saddle.
[Objective partially complete: Artillery Brigade 2/3]
I hit the ground awkwardly - it was muddy enough that I didn’t concuss myself, but there were bony feet surging toward me from all directions. The Spear spilled from my hand. In the brief panic that followed, I called to it- and it responded, shooting up into my hand from the pile of ash that remained of the Wraithlord. Whoa. Okay. Gotta remember I can do that.
Dense battlefields was where the Dark Dragoon class shined. Clashing infantry battled behind me as lances of shimmering dark energy struck down in an expanding double ring, blowing rats and skeletons into the air. When I landed from the combo, I struck the end of my spear into the ground, discharging a field of indigo-blue energy from my body. Twisting whip-like bolts of shadow sprung from the ground, destroying every rodent in a ten-foot radius around me, freezing the mud into a natural bulwark. But more skeletons were coming, and Karalti wasn’t there. Kalxat were flying in from the swamp: she was held up fighting them in the sky, about a hundred yards away. And I was out of AP.
“If you can pick me up right about now, that would be great!” A knot of sword-wielding skeleton rushed me, scimitars raised to strike. I kicked a dead rat at them and followed up with the spear, ordinary attacks only. I caught a sword blade on the haft and shoved it back, kicking the warrior right in the pelvis. It was one thing to know they couldn’t feel pain, quite another to have an enemy who could get kicked in the remains of their junk and not even slow down. They fought without artistry - heavy strikes, overhead swings, shield bashes. Rats swarmed around our feet, squealing and nipping, trailing clouds of contagion. My Tuun resistance to disease held me in good stead, but my HP chipped away every time something bit me or got through my guard. And after the boss fight...
“Poison! Fuck! All kinds of poison!” I struggled toward Karalti as my HP ring throbbed red, covered in ichor and mud. “And no fucking potions! Fuck!”
“Hang on! Almost there!” Karalti split-turned in the air, tearing toward me with three undead vultures in hot pursuit.
“I just killed like fifty skeletons! Maybe eighty!” I called out happily, stumbling as my stamina ran out and forced me to rest on one knee. “Whew. This… this Path is awesome!”
“Get up!” Karalti bellowed as she leveled out toward me. “Something big’s coming!”
“That’s what she said!” I spun around to stab a zombie coming up on me from behind, and was still stabbing it when Karalti’s foot caught me by the back of my armor. She lifted me off into the air, showing me the battlefield - and the titanic saurian shadow pushing through the smoke toward us. It had a head that looked like a soggy potato, small eyes staring stupidly over a sagging jaw lined with peg-like teeth. A Brontosaurus. The massive dinosaur was covered in at least four tons of sacks, barrels and rigging strapped around its bloated eighty-foot long body. Skeleton archers shot arrows at the wall from its back. A flock of what looked like winged snakes circled around its head.
“That is... a zombie brontosaurus suicide bomber,” I said. “Words I never expected to say in the same sentence together. Let’s get that third artillery bank and then go murder this thing before it reaches the Line.”
“Yay! Murder!” Karalti dove toward the last remaining line of mortars, coming around from the back through the smoke. As we broke through, I saw the Wraithlord looking up at us, staff raised.
“Dodge!” A bolt of green fire shot out from the Wraithlord. Karalti dropped to the side, but not fast enough. It hit her square on.
[Karalti takes 670 damage!]
[You take 49 damage!]
“AAAAAAH!!!” It was the most damage Karalti had ever taken in a single hit - almost half her total health. She keened with pain, limbs spasming as the force of the impact flung me off and sent me cartwheeling through the air toward the mortars. The Wraithlord’s shadow soldiers dragged them around into position and began to load.
“Fuck fuck fuck!” I corrected my uncontrolled dive at the last second, landing into a roll - just as well, because I was now at 29 HP and didn’t have any heals. But now, I had AP. I sprung up, roaring as crackling black light ripped around my body and down the length of the spear. “EAT A DIIIICK!”
The Master of Blades split out toward the Wraithlord. It vaporized three of his shadows and blew him onto his back. Before he could get up, I was on him, the flaming Spear of Nine Spheres raised to strike.
“We will take back what you stole!” The Wraithlord hissed. Its voice was like dry wind howling down a stone tunnel. “For Ashur! For Napath!”
There was a pretty good chance he was buying for time, so rather than give it to him, I plunged the Spear down into his face. It exploded into dust, and the remaining shadows vaporized.
[Quest Updated: Objective complete! 3/3 Artillery batteries destroyed!]
[You gain 500 EXP!]
[New objective: Protect the Wall!]
The game didn’t have to elaborate. There was really only one thing to protect the wall from now.
The Brontosaurus reached the useless abatises and charged in against them, s
hoving them out of the way with its chest. Now that I had a better look at the dino-zombie, it was definitely packed with explosives.
“Okay, Tidbit! Let’s go break up this donkey show!” I called up to her. “You got fire?”
“Yes! But only enough for one more attack!” The dragon soared down to land, heaving for breath. The opalescent color between her scales was glowing. She was burning hot to touch. “Almost... phew... almost out. Stamina potions?”
“Last one.” I pulled it from my inventory and helped her chug it. “Glad I picked up all those herbs in the swamp. Gonna be brewing all night.”
“You should make some beer.” Karalti bent down to let me onto her back, then launched heavily into the air.
“Beer?”
“Yeah! For Vash! We were talking about food before, and he really likes beer. He said he drank a whole keg during an orgy once. I don’t know what an orgy is, but he said everyone was dancing and cheering him on. It sounds like fun!”
I shook my head in disbelief. “This guy is supposed to be a monk.”
“He is! So it was a monk orgy or something, I dunno!”
The bronto was gaining on the No Man’s Land with frightening speed. Nerveless, fearless, it was completely unstoppable. It ploughed through trees, mud, razor wire, barricades and bodies, shedding chunks of flesh on its relentless course toward the wall.
“Let’s do an A-roll past those things and scatter them, then flame the port side,” I said. “We only have one chance at this.”
“I know! Hold onto your butthole!” Karalti’s focus intensified, just before she furled her wings in close to her flanks and dove.
I stared over her shoulder as the bloated corpse got closer and closer... and when we closed in, she pivoted and sprayed a precise line of Ghost Fire along the brontosaurus’s flank. It hit the explosives and caught, white fire blazing.
Pinned by centrifuge, I fought gravity to snap my head around and look back to see the earth-shattering kaboom - but as we soared back up into the air, the Bronto was still moving just as it had been - except that it was now on fire. An acrid, caustic smell filled the air.
“Fuck. What the... oh, shit!” I slapped my own thigh, then held onto the saddle. “Karalti! Turn back! That thing is carrying Greek Fire!”
“What’s that?”
“Those explosives are protected by a layer of quicklime that insulates the payload from fire, but gets really really hot on contact with water.” I looked over the terrain, trying to figure out the Demon’s strategy. There were puddles of water on the ground. There were heaps of dead, soggy zombies and explosive vest-wearing skeletons piled against the walls. “We need water. A lot of water. We need it fast.”
“How, though?”
Just as she said that, a trebuchet behind the wall flung a huge ball of flaming pitch at the approaching bronto. The projectile nailed it in the chest, sending it reeling to the side. It stumbled and fell to its knees in the mud, the vest barely touching the sodden ground. Where it did contact, white steam began to rise.
“Uhh... uhhh...” for a terrified second, I found myself paralyzed. I’m not smart enough for this shit, I thought, staring at the distant trebuchets as another counterweight cocked back. My eyes widened. “Wait! Trebuchet! See that bucket that they’re using to balance the counterweight? Do you think you can carry it?”
“Gonna have to!” Karalti rolled up and pumped her wings, tongue lolling.
“You have Haste, don’t you? Any mana?”
“Just enough!”
The dragon’s hot scales flared with seams of light as she silently cast the Spera-Cil-Kain spell, boosting her speed another twenty percent. The Weaponeers manning the siege engine scattered as she winged over the wall and landed on the trebuchet’s beam. Seesawing back and forth, beating her wings to maintain balance, she hastily pulled the rocks out of the counterweight and threw them to the ground.
“What are you doing?!” The Catapult Supervisor ran for us, pulling at his hair. “Stop!”
“Excuse me sir! We’re just going to borrow this for a second! Trust me!” I shouted back down, catching the saddle grips just as Karalti lurched back into the air with the bucket clasped in her hands.
Fortunately, there was a lot of water around the Prezyemi Line. The bronto was about halfway across No Man’s Land, dragging barbed wire and corpses on its course toward the men. It had lost its guts from a cannon blast, but it just dragged those along, too. Karalti flew down to the surface of a shell crater, scooping up half a huge bucket of water.
“I can’t do it!” She panted as she struggled back into the air. “Too heavy!”
“You can! Pour a bit out, and let’s go!” I checked her weight limit. We were a hundred pounds over. White-knuckled, I went into my inventory to throw out anything heavy. We were carrying a couple of sets of armor and spare weapons. Without a thought, I threw them all to the ground along with a bag of five hundred gold. They all landed in the mud below. Items didn’t despawn in Archemi - and they were as safe out in the battlefield as they were in my Inventory.
The reduction in weight was enough that Karalti could fly. Her stamina was at 5% by the time we reached the brontosaurus, who was barely a body length away from the pile of zombies at the Wall. In synch with her, I felt the burning of her efforts as she lined herself up.
“I’m going to go down and slash open those bags.” Grim and focused, I fixed on our rapidly approaching target. “Pour behind me. At the end, land and I’ll jump on: we can restore a bit of stamina, grab the thing’s tail to stop it walking, and hold on.”
“Roger.” Karalti’s tongue lolled as she lined up, and I jumped. The wind rushed by as I fell, then landed with a soft ‘thump’ on one of the satchels, driving my spear into the thick oiled leather. It split open, puffing out a cloud of stinging white dust. Quicklime was cheap to produce, caustic as hell, and reacts explosively with water, reaching temperatures of 200 degrees within ten seconds. This much quicklime was guaranteed to reach the effective maximum temperature in less than half a minute - around 500 degrees. I knew the stuff well: we’d used it to cook powered armor pilots in their armor in the swamps of Indonesia.
Holding my breath against the toxic dust, I zig-zagged from side to side on the dinosaur’s back, dragged the Spear through each payload, and jumped to the next one, trusting in Karalti behind me. As water slopped onto the exposed powder, it began to hiss and crackle, absorbing every drop of liquid as it hardened and cracked with a sound like huge grinding teeth. I was fucked if the payload under the quicklime was explosive instead of flammable.
The brontosaurus emitted a gurgling moan as the packs on its back swelled, rupturing with steam and the expanding stone inside. I was about halfway along when the first pack ignited with an audible ‘phwoomph’. Heat and a garish, dancing yellowish light flooded over me, along with an awful rotten egg odor.
“Sulfur! Fuck fuck fuck!” I stabbed a pack on the way past, but then just focused on running past the skeleton archers and the flying snakes. Above and behind me, Karalti threw the bucket into a pack of zombies charging toward the front line and then landed on top of them. Swiping and stomping, smashing them to pulp with her tail, she struggled to keep pace with me as I wove across the see-sawing Bronto’s back and leaped toward her. I was out of AP and out of enhanced jumps. Even with a run up, I hit her ribs, bounced off, and landed in the mud.
“Watch out!” Karalti lumbered forward, seized me in her jaws, and ran.
The Brontosaurus’s vest ignited, belching steam, then greenish fire that consumed the huge dinosaur and turned it into a hundred-foot long barbecue grill. It collapsed to its knees, then toppled forward with its head barely resting against the base of the corpses piled up at the wall. When the belly of it hit the mud, there were muffled explosions, then a roaring conflagration as the wet ground ignited all the Greek fire beneath it. Flaming oil gushed out onto the oil-soaked corpses, lighting them. The flames streaked toward us across the water.
“Throw sand! Throw sand!” Somewhere on the battlements, a man shouted over and over until his voice broke.
I jostled up and down in my dragon’s mouth. She ran until her stamina ran out, breaking down into a heap of wings and long sagging tail. She dropped me on a pile of smashed skeletons to heave for breath.
“Holy fucking titballs.” I reached up to embrace her around the neck, watching as the fallen bronto’s bones ignited. The entire battlefield blazed white as they cooked, the heat so intense we could feel it at the other end of the battlefield. “Imagine if that had gotten to the Wall. You did it, Tidbit.”
“You helped too.” She pulled her wings back into position, shuddering with the effort to lift them.
I leaned back to look up at her. “Hey, now. Don’t downplay this. You worked your ass off. Take the credit.”
“Okay.” She crooned, tucking her face down shyly. “But you saw the bucket. I don’t notice lots of things while I’m flying.”
“That’s why we’re a team. Speaking of noticing things - those flying eye things have me worried.” I searched the sky. “Did you kill any?”
“A few.” Karalti’s mental voice was strained. “I dunno if we got all of them.”
“I have a feeling those flying snakes we saw are recon units. Nothing we can do about it now, though.” I rubbed her hot neck, monitoring her status. Only once the Fatigue penalty icon blinked out did I climb onto her back.
When she was back at 5%, Karalti awkwardly took off into the air, tilting to one side as her left wing caught the wind a little slower than the stronger right wing. She strained on the way to the wall, where we were greeted by a crowd of cheering, whooping soldiers.
“Good gods, man!” Istvan was at the front ready to receive us, and when I jumped down, he reached out a hand to clap my forearm. “What a performance! Between you and Suri, you nearly wiped out the entire attack force!”
Kingdom Come Page 25