by nobody103
Wait. That was it, wasn't it? Life force was something every living being had and depended on to stay alive. And it was basically just an exotic form of mana. And the outer portion of the soul – the part that can get warped and mutilated – was the one in charge of regulating a person's mana flow. If a person's soul was damaged, that would cause their very life-giving energies to spin out of control…
"I understand now," Zorian nodded. "Though, if I could trouble you for a few more questions…"
Two hours later, Zorian wrapped up his conversation with Batak and left the temple. Strangely, the green-haired priest actually expressed a wish for Zorian to drop by some time for another chat. Strange. Zorian would have expected the man to be rather leery of him after discussing such a topic. He gave Batak a non-committal response, unsure whether he should take the man's offer, and left for home.
✦ ✧ ✦
The next day, Zorian went to Knyazov Dveri to talk to Alanic. Since he had saved Lukav from Sudomir's schemes and helped Alanic drive off his own attackers, he figured that the man would be well disposed towards him and inclined to listen to what he had to say. Just to be sure, however, Zorian had made a little detour before talking to the warrior priest – he went to the house of Vazen, the merchant that did Sudomir's dirty work, and stole all the incriminating evidence from his safe.
In the end, though, Alanic didn't even look at all those papers Zorian had brought him. The moment Zorian started talking to him about a mansion full of undead and the soul trap surrounding it, he demanded that Zorian teleport him to the place immediately. Not tomorrow or in an hour or when he was done looking through all the gathered evidence – immediately.
So Zorian did just that, internally grumbling about all the effort he had wasted into preparing his case. Wasn't Alanic in the least bit afraid that Zorian would teleport him into some sort of pre-arranged trap? No, apparently he wasn't.
Once Zorian teleported them to the edge of Iasku Mansion's ward, Alanic just stood still and stared in the direction of Iasku Mansion in total silence. This continued for quite a long time.
"Uh, are you okay?" Zorian finally said, unable to restrain himself any longer. "Shouldn't you be casting spells to confirm my story?"
"There is no need," Alanic said calmly. "I can feel the spiritual sinkhole tugging at my soul easily enough."
Zorian looked at Alanic in alarm.
"We're in no danger," Alanic assured him. "The effect is weak and the souls of living beings are tethered to their bodies too strongly to succumb to it. It's only because my awareness of my own soul is so high that I can easily spot it. You have some measure of soul awareness too, I see, but too little to notice such things."
So a sufficiently good soul mage could tell that the soul trap existed just by entering its area of effect? No wonder Sudomir considered everyone with a hint of aptitude in the field a threat to his plans. Even if most of the people he killed and kidnapped weren't on the level of skill that Alanic displayed, it only took one to blow his conspiracy wide open.
Suddenly, Zorian noticed a group of dark dots flying towards him and swore internally. Damn iron beaks.
"I hate to interrupt you, but some of the mansion's guards are already coming towards us," Zorian told Alanic. "If we don't leave, we'll soon be flooded with winter wolves, undead boars and the like. I speak from experience."
"Oh, so you've done some sneaking around the place already?" Alanic asked curiously.
"Had you read all the information I brought you, you would have known that," Zorian grumbled.
"Worry not, we'll get back to the information later, when we start organizing an assault on this place with the army."
Zorian gave Alanic a surprised look, startled.
"What?" Alanic laughed. "Did you think we were going to infiltrate this place? No, we're bringing soldiers, artillery and several mage combat groups and sieging the place into submission. And you're going to help me investigate the rubble."
"What, I don't get any say in this?" Zorian asked, unable to keep a bit on challenge from creeping into his voice. Damnit, this was exactly what he was afraid of…
"Don't complain," Alanic told him. "I know what you're going to say: you don't want to be involved. You want to go home and pretend this has nothing to do with you, right?"
"Well, yeah," Zorian admitted. "I gave you all information I know, what more do you want from me?"
"I truly doubt you've really told me everything you know. And the army will be doubtful as well," Alanic sighed. "They will want to find you, and they would eventually succeed at doing so. If, on the other hand, you are clearly working for me, they will be leery of going after you. Strange as it may sound to you, but you are far safer beside me than you are on your own."
As if to punctuate his claim, Alanic pointed his hand at the approaching iron beak flock and snapped his fingers. A dazzling beam of electricity erupted from his palm and struck the leading bird. In the blink of an eye, the beam arced from one bird to another, jumping from target to target.
In but a moment, a twenty-strong flock had been reduced to a rain of charred corpses and blown-off feathers that descended on the forest canopy.
Okay, he had to admit, that was very impressive. Especially since he knew that Alanic was a fire specialist. It would seem his specialization wasn't as narrow as Zorian had thought.
Still…
"How would the army even know I exist unless you tell them about it?" Zorian argued.
"I'll have to tell them about it," Alanic said, shaking his head. "I'm not much of a liar, and they can be rather shrewd and persistent. It wouldn't take them long to figure out that I'm working with someone else, and they will naturally want to know who that person is."
Ugh. How annoying. Should he just dismiss this restart as a failure and start over?
…No, not yet. Maybe he could get this to work.
"I need to stay anonymous," Zorian eventually said.
"We will work something out," Alanic said dismissively.
And that was that. From that moment onward, Alanic considered him his subordinate.
✦ ✧ ✦
Zorian had to admit, it was kind of amazing how quickly Eldemar could mobilize its forces once it identified a serious threat. It took only four days for them to organize the assault on Iasku Mansion and mobilize the necessary troops. The Triumvirate Church was involved too, sending two groups of twelve warrior priests each to support the several hundred soldiers and nearly fifty mages that Eldemar itself threw at the problem. Four huge war golems and thirteen magic-enhanced cannons served as heavy support.
Zorian himself was not involved much in the preparations. He mostly just silently followed Alanic around, clad in a face-concealing robe that the warrior priest had given him. The few times he had to speak, he did so exclusively through a magic orb that could translate his thoughts to speech. He had made it himself, surprising Alanic somewhat. Apparently Zorian's standards were a little skewed again, and what he thought was a mildly-useful trinket was actually something that was worth quite a bit of money in stores and took some practice to learn how to use.
From what Alanic had told him, the rest of the force thought he was some kind of elite investigator in the employ of the Triumvirate Church and were more than a little intimidated by him. Alanic seemed endlessly amused by that. In any case, very few questions had been asked about his presence, but the restart was still young and Zorian didn't dare hope that could last. At least for now, though, his identity was secure.
He really felt out of depth in all of this, though. This wasn't what he'd had in mind at all when he had decided to make the Church aware of Sudomir's schemes. Hell, Sudomir himself was probably long gone now – there was no way he hadn't noticed all the preparations going on around him.
He told Alanic as much one day, but the warrior priest didn't share his opinion.
"Sudomir has invested a lot of time and money into that place," he said. "There's no way he's going to abandon
it without a fight. Four days is not enough for him to evacuate his possessions from that place, and he probably had less than that. I doubt he noticed the preparations straight away."
"If you had moved more carefully in the start, you could have probably arrested him before he realized what was happening," Zorian said.
"Not at all. You can't just suddenly arrest a popular and influential mayor like Sudomir like that," Alanic said. "You need solid evidence, or else people will cry foul. What you gathered is a good start, but nowhere near enough. Attacking a mansion full of undead is a lot easier to justify, and I'm sure we will find plenty of evidence to convict him inside."
Zorian shook his head, not really convinced, but he didn't argue the point further. He would just have to wait for the assault to see how things went. Alanic and the army might be right, after all.
✦ ✧ ✦
Considering the amount of forces the army planned to bring to bear on Iasku Mansion, there was no way to really launch a surprise attack on the place. Even with the use of teleportation, it would take quite a while to bring everyone over to their destination and assume proper positions. As such, the initial phase of the plan called for three groups of mages to arrive first and erect a large-scale teleport ward over the entire region – hopefully preventing Sudomir from simply teleporting out when he realized the sheer scale of the assault heading his way.
Well, that part of the plan went off without a hitch. Unfortunately, erecting the anti-teleportation had been like kicking over the hornet's nest – almost as soon as the wards solidified, endless streams of undead started pouring out of the mansion, as well as from the storage facility next to it. Skeletons, undead boars, flesh golems, massive abominations of stitched human flesh (Zorian didn't even know Sudomir had those; then again they were just up-scaled versions of a normal flesh golem) – the amount of reanimated soldiers Sudomir had at his disposal was mind-boggling. Zorian could only presume that he hadn't faced such hordes in his own incursions on Iasku Mansion because by that point most of these joined the invaders in their attack on Cyoria.
Caught off-guard by the ferocious counter-attack, the army struggled to organize its forces. Fortunately, these were all disciplined and experienced soldiers, and they came here fully expecting to fight against undead hordes. It would take a lot more than this to demoralize them.
Cannons fired again and again into the approaching horde, thinning the ranks considerably. The four solid-steel war golems, although far inferior in numbers to the giant flesh-stitched monstrosities mixed into the undead ranks, proved to be far superior to them in strength and durability. The giant flesh golems failed to make a breakthrough, being thrown back again and again until they fell apart. Nonetheless, the chaos of that initial exchange meant that a lot of mages and ordinary soldiers fell to the horde. Ten mages and more than 50 normal soldiers became casualties in the first ten minutes of the battle.
After that, however, the army had had enough time to get a grip on the situation. As had the mages. After some initial difficulty, they finished some kind of multi-mage spell and a pair of giant fire vortexes suddenly sprung into existence in front of the approaching horde.
Almost like living beings, the two vortexes wove through the undead ranks, sucking up reanimated bodies into their center, where they were burnt to a crisp. The strange thing was that instead of growing weaker with time, the vortexes only seemed to be getting stronger with every undead body they consumed.
The few reanimated corpses and flesh golems that survived the artillery, war golems and the fire vortexes were met with a hail of grenades and high-caliber bullets wielded by normal soldiers and none of them survived to make contact with the assault force.
And then the top of Iasku Mansion exploded upwards. For a moment Zorian thought that Sudomir had perhaps once again panicked in face of a determined attack and did something to screw himself over, just like he had during their last encounter, but then something inside the resulting dust cloud roared.
Something huge. The roar reverberated through the area, creating a shockwave of force that blew away all dust and debris shielding the top of Iasku Mansion from sight. As such, Zorian was treated to a sight for a massive metal platform that was almost entirely taken up by an equally massive skeletal dragon. Its gleaming white bones glowed with countless lines of yellow light that signified a staggering amount of spell formula etched onto the long-dead bones, and instead of being hollow, its ribcage seemed to be crammed full of some kind of metal machinery and likewise looked rather sophisticated in nature.
What.
What!?
Why did Sudomir have that thing!? Why hadn't he ever given any indication he had something like that in the past!?
The skeletal dragon didn't care about Zorian's internal incredulity and muttered curses. Its entire surface lit up with a pale yellow light, creating some sort of ghostly mimicry of a membrane over its wing bones, and then it lazily took fight.
It set off straight towards where Zorian and Alanic were standing.
The battle for Iasku Mansion had begun.
Chapter 52
Things Fall Apart
Zorian was caught thoroughly off-guard by the appearance of the skeletal dragon. After all, he had already explored Iasku Mansion during the previous restarts, and thus thought he knew what kind of forces Sudomir had at his disposal. He could hardly believe he'd managed to miss something so big and dramatic. On top of that, the way in which the skeletal dragon revealed itself was very loud and dramatic, and it clearly knew where to find Zorian, since it immediately set off towards him…
Well, probably not towards him specifically – in all likelihood, it just went after the assault force leadership, trying to perform a decapitation strike. Not a bad idea, since most of said leadership was concentrated in one command area. Granted, such an attack needed a proper strike force – one that could somehow bypass the frontlines to reach the command area in the back, and one that was strong enough to overcome the defenses protecting it – but the skeletal dragon coming after them probably qualified. It could fly pretty fast, after all, and it was clearly infused with very potent magic.
Unfortunately, the leadership of the strike force included Alanic, from whom Zorian never strayed much due to the role he'd assumed in front of the rest of the assault force. So now he had a huge dragon skeleton coming straight at him.
"Safest place in the entire battlefield, my ass," Zorian mumbled gloomily, just loud enough for Alanic to hear him.
The stern priest said nothing, instead focusing on casting a spell of some sort. An anti-scrying measure, if Zorian interpreted his chants and gestures correctly. Zorian supposed that Alanic was disturbed at the ease with which Sudomir had managed to pinpoint their command area, and was trying to prevent further surveillance.
Glancing around him, Zorian noticed that the other mages in the command area were also hurriedly casting spells. The command area became a hurricane of activity in a flash – well, even more so than it already had been during the opening clashes of the assault. Despite this, Zorian remained still, aware that any contribution of his would likely cause more harm than good. He could barely understand what was going on around him, so how could he make sure he wasn't getting in the way? Unless one of the mages asked for his assistance, he would refrain from doing anything.
The dragon had barely started its flight towards the command area when a thick black cloud rose into the sky from the forest around the mansion. Iron beaks. Their numbers blackened the sky and filled the air with ominous cawing that could easily be heard all the way to where Zorian was standing. Sudomir probably intended them to serve as a distraction for the skeleton dragon.
The swarm of magical corvids quickly separated itself into five smaller flocks and descended upon the assault force, sending a rain of knife-like feathers at the Eldemarian soldiers. In response, one Eldemarian war golem pointed its metal palms at the approaching iron beaks and a series of explosions erupted in the midst of the f
lock, killing hundreds of birds with each detonation. The regular soldiers were not defenseless either, and soon brought out some kind of grenade launcher devices and started firing potion canisters into the air. They detonated into flashes of light and electricity, effortlessly scything through the attacking birds. Despite this, the iron beaks kept coming, their numbers seemingly endless. If anything, the death of so many of their kin only made them fiercer and angrier, if the increased volume of cawing and feather attacks was of any indication.
Zorian frowned and shifted in his place uneasily. He had been uneasy with the trajectory of the whole restart for a while now, feeling he had completely lost control over events a while ago. Seeing the scene in front of him, that unease only grew stronger. The Eldemarian forces might even lose at this rate. Should he end the current restart and start over?
No… no, not yet. He was taking a bit of a risk, since dying here meant getting sucked into that soul-gathering pillar that Sudomir had in his mansion, but he wanted to see how things would develop. At the very least, he wanted to see how the battle would end. Maybe Sudomir had more surprises in store for them, not just the undead dragon currently flying towards him.
And speaking of the skeletal dragon, Zorian had expected it to swoop in and try to tear them apart in melee combat. Most skeletons could not manage much beside that. Evidently, though, the spell formula and machinery used in this skeletal dragon's construction were not there just for show. Still on its way towards them, the dragon skeleton opened its maw and fired a thin yellow spell beam at them from within the depths of its skull. The beam was faint and translucent, but Zorian knew better than to assume this made it weak. It crossed the distance between the dragon and the command area in an instant, losing little of its coherence in the process.
Thankfully, the mages in charge of the defense had good reflexes – in the brief moment between when the skeletal dragon opened its maw and the beam flew out, they managed to erect a barrier to tank the blow. Unlike the barriers that Zorian was familiar with, this one wasn't a thin layer of force – it was a thick, gelatinous wall of ectoplasm that distorted everything seen through it.