Book 6: Chapter 6: Hordes
Victor was once again enlarged by Iron Berserk, and he rode Guapo up and down the front rank of soldiers, looming over them, gigantic on his massive Mustang, his great banner blazing with light that pushed back the obscuring mists. In the cohort’s compact, modified phalanx formation, that golden aura touched almost every one of the soldiers. The drums had grown louder, rumbling over the ground, but the troops didn’t care; they were buoyed by Victor’s presence, by the closeness of their shield brothers and sisters, and by the months of drilling they’d done, preparing for a battle like this.
Victor had been hollering at them to get ready, to show these “undead pendejos” what they could do. Now he wrapped it up by shouting, “You’re the Glorious Ninth, and you have the spirits of fallen comrades watching—it’s time to kick some ass!” The soldiers cheered, bashing their spears, axes, swords, and cudgels against their shields. Victor whirled Guapo, looking down the slight slope toward the sound of the drums, wondering what Kethelket and his people were finding.
He looked to the left, at the forward corner of the formation, and saw Edeya and Valla, both mounted on Thistle. Valla wouldn’t admit it, but Victor could see she was very worried about Uvu. He’d asked her, outside of Edeya’s hearing, to keep an eye on the young Ghelli, to stay with her during the battle and help her break free for a retreat if need be. She’d wanted to argue but knew how Victor fought, knew he’d be all over the place, shoring up the shield wall and pursuing the more powerful of the enemy combatants. She caught him looking their way and offered him a kind of salute, holding Midnight high and nodding her head. Victor nodded back.
He turned back to the approaching drums, and then he saw, materializing out of the mist, a pair of Naghelli, their wings a black and glowing orange blur, as they streaked toward him, covering the hundred yards or so in seconds. They landed before him, a slight woman with pale hair in tight braids and a tall, thin man, his head completely shaven smooth. They both wore close-fitting black leather armor with the signature glimmering, onyx-black chainmail vests of their kind. The man spoke, his voice breathless, while the woman leaned over, her hands on her knees as she regained her wind. “Kethelket sent us to report.”
“Out with it then.”
“More than five hundred of those you call shamblers, a half dozen bone giants, and a great many lesser undead, more than we could count.”
“Shit.” Victor’s curse was nearly silent; he didn’t want to break the troops’ morale. “How close?”
“They run, and when we set out, they were less than two miles away. They’ll break through into your light in minutes. They don’t move like a disciplined army. Also, Kethelket wants you to know he’s taken the rest of the Naghelli to inspect the structure you glimpsed.”
“We could probably use their help . . .”
The woman straightened up and spoke in a surprisingly bright contralto voice, “We’re to rejoin him with orders—the approaching horde did not seem to notice us in the sky. Kethelket thinks these are . . . ‘simple troops,’ I believe is how he put it.”
“Okay. Tell him to see what the structure is, then fall on the enemy from behind. We’ll hold this ground.”
“As you say,” the man said, and Victor briefly wondered if he should have gotten their names. The moment passed, though, as they both crisply saluted him and then launched into the air, streaking southward toward the thicker mists.
The drums had steadily increased in volume while they spoke, and when Victor let his eyes drift down from the flying scouts, he saw the first figures break from the mists and start tearing up the slopes; they reminded him of the ghouls he fought in the dungeon near Greatbone Mine—pale creatures, hairless and naked, with long, clawed fingers running on all fours. They lifted their weird, noseless faces to the sky and coughed out their inhuman cries through mouths lined with jagged, gore-stained teeth. Their eyes were yellow in the light of his banner, and they seemed to shy from it and the sunlight that pierced the weakened mist.
Still, they charged forth in the hundreds, much smaller than the shamblers but quick and vicious-looking. When they were a mere fifty yards distant, the archers at the center of the modified phalanx unleashed hundreds of arrows at Sarl’s shouted command. They streaked through the air, trailing black smoke from their blazing shafts, and when they struck home, many of the ghouls fell, tumbling over the rough ground. Victor roared his approval and summoned an enormous, rage-fueled bear, placing it halfway between the army and the charging creatures. The bear roared to life, springing from a red mist of Energy and bounding into the face of the monsters.
“Hold!” Victor roared as he saw some soldiers step forward, perhaps feeling they should run to fight beside the bear. “Let my bear soften their charge!”
“Fire!” Sarl screamed, and another volley of arrows streaked into the charging ghouls with the precision only an Energy user could provide. More of them fell, and then, in a flurry of coughing shrieks, dirt, and claws, they fell upon the front row of soldiers, smashing into their shields. Meanwhile, Victor’s bear rampaged among them, throwing them left and right, snapping their limbs and heads off with vicious bites. Ghouls clung to its back, raking its thick hide with their claws, utterly fearless despite how the bear mauled their comrades.
Victor charged up and down the front line, smashing over the ghouls with Guapo, hacking down with his axe. Lifedrinker obliterated the monsters when she hit home, her scorching, razor-sharp blade more than a match for their leathery skin and hard bones. Meanwhile, his banner blazed, giving comfort and aid to his soldiers and, seemingly, causing pain and near blindness to the undead. He watched as the last of the ghouls crested the hill and the Phalanx opened, the sides moving out in unison to a trumpeted command, boxing in and flanking the creatures.
Victor and his bear rampaged among the enemy while the soldiers beat them back, hacking and stabbing over the shields of the front line. Arrows and spells fell upon the horde, and Victor laughed at the slaughter, a part of him thankful to the forces of Prince Hector for their lack of discipline—it wasn’t until the ghouls were nearly slaughtered that the larger part of the attacking force began to mount the hill. Sarl ordered the bugler to call for the phalanx to reform, and the wings collapsed, pressing in tight, forming that impenetrable box again. As the last of the ghouls were mopped up, mindlessly flinging themselves on the front line, Victor watched the next wave approach.
His earlier euphoria was challenged as he saw the numbers pouring out of the mist. These creatures were slower than the ghouls, but they were bigger and far more numerous—hundreds of shamblers and at least twice that number of smaller but better-equipped monsters. Despite the hundred yards between them, Victor’s eyes were good, piercing the haze of the half-formed mist trying to seep into the light of his banner. He studied the smaller enemy combatants and saw they looked very much like zombies from movies he’d seen back on Earth but geared out with all sorts of armor, shields, and weapons.
They shuffled along with the shamblers, sometimes getting trampled or knocked aside by the larger undead. Their eyes were vacant, and their mouths, if they had a lower jaw, hung open. They looked almost pathetic in that regard, but Victor knew better. He could see the waves of dark Energy pulsing through their forms, and he knew they weren’t just mindless, slow zombies that could be mowed down; they looked formidable.
Marching among the shamblers and zombies were at least half a dozen of the bone-plated juggernauts like he’d faced earlier. “Five too many,” he grumbled, wondering how much damage they’d do while he struggled to kill them one by one. Victor whirled to find Sarl, saw him exhorting his soldiers to tighten up their shield wall, and urged Guapo over to him. “Sarl!” he called.
“Aye, Legate!”
“You need your casters to slow the giants. The ones with the bone plates. They’re hard as hell to kill, and I can’t get them all at once.”
“Say no more, sir!” Sarl dove into the ranks of his soldiers, pushing his way toward the center of the phalanx, where his dedicated ranged units were arrayed. Victor, trusting the captain to get the job done, turned back to the advancing enemies and watched as missiles erupted from the formation behind him. Arrows and spells showered down among the zombies and shamblers, catching them alight, freezing them, or exploding in showers of sparks or even magma. Their slow, steady march didn’t stop; they didn’t scream or flee. The monsters simply continued to trudge forward, ignoring their fallen, broken brethren as more and more ranged attacks fell among them.
Victor, meanwhile, eyed the six juggernauts, watching them make their inevitable progress toward the phalanx. Arrows and spells hit them to no avail; they didn’t flinch, and they certainly didn’t fall. He glanced over his shoulder at the soldiers; they looked good, eager, even. He didn’t see any dead or wounded. Either they’d had an exceptionally easy time with the ghouls, or they’d pulled their casualties back into their ranks. Victor let his eye drift further into the phalanx, looking for Sarl, wondering what he and his casters could do about the rapidly approaching juggernauts.
He’d finally picked out Sarl’s red-plumed helmet when, in unison, several mages cried out, a weird note in their voice as the temperature of the air dropped by several degrees. Frost sprang into existence on the helmets of the soldiers near the center of the formation, and then, with a great whoosh, a ball of icy, swirling water erupted from a trio of casters, surging through the air, arcing high, crystallizing the thin mist as it passed, creating a sort of faux snowfall. Victor watched its progress as it hurtled down the slight slope, passing by the front rows of shamblers and zombies and then crashing into one of the bone-plated juggernauts. The creature staggered and nearly fell back, and when the splash of icy water and mist faded away, Victor could see it was frozen in place, unmoving.
“Hell, yes!” He pumped his fist in the air, waving Lifedrinker. “Okay, chica, we need to figure out how to kill these things quicker.” Victor tightened his knuckles on Lifedrinker’s haft, then pushed his Sovereign Will bonus into his muscles, enhancing his strength and vitality. As the sinews of his neck and shoulders bulged and battle fury began to tint his vision red, he cast Channel Spirit, filling his right arm and Lifedrinker with his furious, rage-attuned Energy.
Victor urged Guapo into a charge, and he saw another ball of icy water streak over the zombies and shamblers, bursting into the chest of yet another juggernaut. Victor veered to the left; the now-frozen giant had been his intended target. He didn’t have to look far to see a new goal. Not thirty yards distant, the front line of shamblers and zombies surged toward him, and just a few ranks back marched another juggernaut. It wasn’t quick, but its larger stature afforded it more speed, and it was, literally, trampling its smaller comrades in its hurry toward the front line of Victor’s soldiers. Victor leaned forward, and Guapo leaped into motion, streaking toward the enemy.
The shamblers were big, maybe big enough to stop Guapo in his tracks, so Victor aimed for gaps in their ranks, trusting the giant Mustang to trample the smaller zombies despite their armor and shields. His trust was well founded; the horse crashed into the first rank, utterly flattening one zombie and then bowling aside two more as Victor’s outstretched boot kicked a shambler aside. Five seconds later, they’d crashed through two more ranks, and the juggernaut was before him.
Victor couldn’t have accurately guessed his speed when Guapo charged past, and he swung Lifedrinker into the juggernaut’s leather-wrapped forehead, but it had to be pretty damn fast. He put everything he had into that hacking cleave, trusting that his instinct was right, that Lifedrinker could handle it, and that she wouldn’t bounce off or break. He believed her haft was stronger than the juggernaut’s skull. At least, he hoped so. He hoped this particular creature wasn’t any tougher than the one he’d already killed.
His gamble paid off; Lifedrinker’s smoldering edge sliced through the air, hardly slowing when it touched the thick leather wrapping the juggernaut’s brow, splitting the bone beneath with a thunderous crack that echoed through the wild melee. In a steaming spray of black blood, Lifedrinker chopped through the top third of the monster’s skull, slicing off a leather-wrapped, bone bowl full of rancid, frothing brains. As Guapo thundered past and Victor recovered Lifedrinker’s momentum in a looping swing, the juggernaut collapsed, face first onto the rough, blood-spattered turf, utterly still.
Victor held Lifedrinker high, her blade smoldering and streaming black smoke into the air, and he screamed his battle lust. Despite the imminent assault on the phalanx by shamblers and zombies, many of his troops echoed his warcry, having watched him drop the giant bone-plated monstrosity. Victor whirled Guapo, hacking downward with this axe, giving the Mustang some room to move. As he spun, he took in the battlefield and saw that three of the juggernauts were now frozen in place, only two more still making progress toward his army. He zeroed in on the closest one, and Guapo leaped into action.
The Mustang trampled the zombies with ease, but their claws and weapons began to take a toll, leaving long gouges in the horse’s flanks. Victor knew the spirit animal wasn’t indestructible, knew it would have to depart this realm soon, but he hoped he could get one more good charge out of him. “Come on, Guapito!” He urged the horse with his will to continue the charge, trampling zombies and shouldering between shamblers. The Mustang soldiered on, and Victor, too, began to amass wounds.
The shamblers’ claws and the zombie’s weapons cut through his sturdy leather pants, and when they met his flesh, they left shallow cuts that his Berserk Energy rapidly healed. Nevertheless, the wounds stung, and something vile was on the blades and claws, something that his body had to fight off. He began to notice the effect and felt his rage seeping away as the Energy was forced to fight harder and harder to heal him. “Dirty assholes,” he growled as, with a tremendous yawp, he brought Lifedrinker down on the back of the second juggernaut’s skull. She split the thing’s head like a dry log, showering brains to either side as it collapsed in a heap.
Victor felt Guapo fading, so he released him. As the mount dispersed in a cloud of sparkling golden mist, Victor landed on his feet and began to lay about himself with Lifedrinker, slaughtering shamblers and zombies. The zombies were surprisingly sturdy. Even though Victor was more than twice their size, some of them managed to deflect his blows. Of course, this only furthered to enrage Victor, and he began to lose himself to the mad dance of slaughter. He swung Lifedrinker one-handed, and with his left hand, he grabbed his opponents, threw them, and swung them about, smashing them into each other and creating openings for his axe.
Simultaneously, he became aware of a low roar, like a distant river crashing over boulders, and he felt a pang from his Battle Awareness feat. Victor paused his slaughter and jerked his head toward the formation of his soldiers. Sure enough, the roar was the sound of zombies and shamblers pounding on shields, punctuated by the shouts, screams, and battle cries of the troops. Then his eyes fell on the other unfrozen juggernaut—it was carving a swath through the phalanx, already three ranks deep. Victor roared and leaped, bunching his mighty legs and exploding into the air. He arched his back, hoisted Lifedrinker in a two-handed grip, and, screaming like a wyrm-scale-clad meteor, fell toward the colossal monster’s back.
His aim wasn’t perfect, or the monster moved, or both, but Lifedrinker’s edge cut a groove through the back of the juggernaut’s skull instead of completely splitting it. She slid through the bone, and then her smoldering edge impacted the back of the undead monstrosity’s bone carapace, and, with the sound of a cannon shot, she split it.
Ayeeeeeeeeeee! she shrieked, the warcry of an avenging angel, and she pulled with more force than Victor had ever felt from her, burying herself into the rotten spine of the monster as it fell on its face, shaking the ground and eliciting thunderous cheers from the nearby soldiers.
“Good work, beautiful. Take what’s yours.” Victor released the axe and reached into his storage container, the one he’d taken from Karnice, and pulled out a massive, two-handed maul. It was a hugely heavy weapon, one that Victor had examined before and determined would be a nice weapon in a pinch. Every part of the maul was made of a copper-colored metal, a single piece from which the handle and the two hammerheads were forged. The handle was grooved and rough, easy to grip, and the sides of the anvil-sized hammerhead were etched with black-inlaid runes.
“Let’s see what you can do, big boy,” he laughed, shouldering past his troops toward the front line, where they struggled to hold back the massive shamblers. “Come on, pendejos!” he roared, lifting the hammer high. “Fight like you fucking mean it!” Then he waded between an Ardeni man with a tower shield and a wild-looking Shadeni with a silvery round shield on one arm and a short trident in her other hand. He thrust the maul forward, slamming it into the face of a shambler, knocking it back, and then he was in the fight, whipping that great hammer around like an abuela with a broomstick.
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