Chapter 9 – Death Knight

Chapter 9 – Death Knight

Liria stood still in the gray silence.

The Ashen Wastes stretched around her in every direction, pale and sulphurous under the pre-dawn sky. The green light threaded through the cracked ground brightened vein by vein, forming a glowing web of necromantic energy that stretched as far as the eye could see.

She tried calling her siblings and found her attempts blocked. It would take her minutes to bypass the communication jamming.

Liria hated that, despite everything, a part of her felt vindicated.

Her hunch had been correct. She had gotten her all-important confirmation of a malign intellect behind the fragments of the dead god.

Across from her, Seris finally woke. He came to all at once, the way frightened children do, his breath catching in a sharp gasp. His wide, terrified eyes swept across the blasted landscape, taking in the pale ground veined with faintly luminous green, the dead sky above, the utter absence of birdsong or wind.

“Big sis?” His voice cracked on the words. “What happened? Where are we?”

Liria closed the distance between them in three quick strides, arms already reaching for him.

The blast hit her like a wall.

Pure force, omnidirectional, radiating outward from Seris’s chest. She dug her heels in this time and did not fall, sliding back a few feet across the pale earth, robes snapping in the shockwave.

Kaerthis’s medallion blazed an angry green against Seris’s collarbone, its fine metalwork warping before her eyes. Necromantic fire tore through the sigils at blinding speed, rewriting them, bending their purpose inside out. One by one the glyphs ignited and changed. Before Seris could more than gasp and scrabble at it with his fingers, the corrupted circuit closed.

The enchantment was complete. Its new purpose was the opposite of what Liria had built.

Like a tide answering the moon, dark power gathered from all across the Ashen Wastes, wrapping Seris in a cocoon of pitch black shadow.

A death knight emerged from the inky darkness, an echo of lords past. The final glory of long lost heroes—immortalized in memory, honored by the world—has been twisted by the will of a dead god into something profane.

Green necromantic fire cast eerie shadows across the undead knight’s obsidian black armor. The sword in its right hand was a wound in reality. The great shield strapped to its left arm reflected no light. Seris was tied spread-eagled over it, struggling futilely against his bonds.

Liria clamped down on her instinctive need to rush over and save him.

Her emotions cooled, logic taking over as she assessed the threat.

Level 300. The very upper limits of what Liria could handle without the backing of the natural world around her.

She had been operating under the premise that even if the dead god’s remnants possessed reason and intellect, it still had to act through Seris, a malnourished child who had never known love. There were clear limits to its power, which she could extrapolate by using Seris as the basis.

She had been right. This much was still within expectations

But…

This was definitely a worst-case scenario, and the tactics involved felt disturbingly familiar. Liria suppressed her rising unease.

Defend herself. Retrieve Seris. Analyze and bypass the jamming frequency. Her immediate priorities were in that order. Suspicion could wait.

She faced the death knight across the gray and barren expanse. Her magic swirled around her like an aurora of white and gold. The undead knight tensed, gripping its sword. The green veins threading the pale earth pulsed brighter, as if the ground itself was holding its breath.

Their standoff ended with the boom of the sound barrier breaking.

The death knight decisively turned and fled, the ground shuddering under each footfall, ash billowing in great plumes behind it. Green radiance settled over Seris on the shield, a protective cushion against the sudden brutal acceleration.

Seris’s scream of shock was swallowed almost immediately by the distance.

For one eternal moment, Liria simply stared.

No, what is this? Why is a level 300 running away from a level 112? Even caution should have limits!

She bit back a curse, adjusting her plans. Catching up would take everything she had. It was no longer possible for her to finish analyzing the communication jamming and call her siblings for a quick and easy resolution.

The Steps of Providence hurtled her forward. Her own improvised creation, based on her brother Aethon’s divine sword art.

Mana swirled through her body in rhythm with the world’s breath. She imbued each step with her memories of the future. Of thirty years of war. Of walking through a thousand battlefields undefeated.

Each step was communion, impressing her will and conviction upon the world: I am inevitable. I am invincible.

Once, in that erased future, with her victories engraved upon history and her will supported by the faith of millions, each step would have covered miles, each reposition could warp causality to create an opening in the enemies’ defenses where none existed.

This was why Liria had dared to charge into the Ashen Wastes. After passing level 100, her body could finally handle this Conceptual Art without breaking down.

Though it was only a pale shadow of what it once was, it’ll have to do for now.

The undead knight continued its single-minded flight ahead of her, never hesitating, never looking back.

Liria was barely keeping up for now, but the distance between them was slowly but surely increasing. She had to make the death knight stop and fight.

She reached into Vaelir’s bottomless magic pouch and summoned the magic sword he had given her. The sigils along its gleaming silver blade could store and hold up to ten spells, releasing them on her command.

She had imbued them with the most effective anti-undead spell she was capable of casting before setting off.

Ten overlapping Solar Beams could vaporize even a death knight. If Seris hadn’t been taken hostage, the fight would have been over before it even began.

She aimed low and swung.

A beam of concentrated light and heat scoured the earth where the death knight’s legs had been, turning the pale ground into a brief river of molten white. It dodged with a speed that should not have been possible at that size, twisting aside in the last instant. But not quite far enough. The beam caught its right leg below the knee.

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The limb disintegrated. The death knight pitched sideways, hit the ground with a sound like a collapsing wall, and was still for one heartbeat.

The Steps of Providence shortened the distance between them to nothing. Liria reached for Seris, fingers brushing the edge of his sleeve.

The undead knight’s sword swing was almost too fast to see with the naked eye. Impossibly slow in her soul sight. Her sluggish body screamed as it struggled to react in time. Never had the disconnect between her body and soul felt so apparent.

The Steps of Providence activated under her. Causality bent. The world folded, just slightly, around her conviction, and she was elsewhere, a little to the left, her hair and robes fluttering from the wind generated by the death knight’s slash.

Liria reached out to negate its existence. The obsidian armor felt as cold as ice under her hand.

The last will and testament of the fallen lords of Brighthold rose against her. Their final courage and sacrifice. The last blaze of their existence as they stood firm in defense of their land. Now twisted to serve the whims of a dead god.

Liria hated necromancy.

Her mind pushed against that barrier of dying conviction. Please. Don’t be deceived. This isn’t what you should be protecting.

For a moment, the barrier almost wavered, then the death knight leapt backward, breaking the contact. Its right leg was already regenerating.

Liria quickly assessed her situation.