Chapter 235: Heroes

[High sequence: astra swarm.]

 

[Wind Vortice]

 

Viv’s spell mixed with Arthur’s own to form a spray of exploding orbs. Winds dragged Nero towards the attack but he managed to dodge away, avoiding most of those he couldn’t detonate. Viv didn’t go after him, instead casting again.

 

He was playing for time now. The initial assault ended with dragon fire to the face so he returned to a more comfortable defensive fighting. Now that Viv had unlocked her last aspect, the battle was not exactly easy but she wasn’t cornered either. Amusingly, Nero wasn’t built for offense. She could only assume the Immortal couldn’t also be the ultimate killer. His battle plan was clearly to outlast her until she started making mistakes. Her battle plan was to outlast him while her army cut his to fucking ribbons, using [A Light That Never Dims] to grow in strength as time went on. Clearly, one of them was deluded but she wasn’t sure which one.

 

After him!

 

For some reason, Arthur was furious. Viv let her daughter take the lead while her attention was drawn below, past the allied air wings now dominating the skies over the battlefield. She herself couldn’t be angry because her mind demanded she be detached. Anger tended to narrow the mind. She couldn’t afford it now.

 

On the ground, the battle continued.

 

***

 

Aragan was hunting spiders. Two of the large tarantulas had already perished by her arrows, and the vanguards were pushing the other ones away. Her eyes kept going to the heavens, waiting for dragons. They were tricky to shoot because missing often meant getting roasted.

 

“I hate it here,” she whispered.

 

There were people on the spiders. They mourned when she killed the beasts. The others thought the strange ‘merl’ were not people but she knew better. She was flagging. She couldn’t afford to flag, but she was. This wasn’t the dream. It hadn’t been ‘The dream’ for a long time. Now she was just protecting her fellow Shadowlanders.

 

But what she really wanted to do was to go home. It was too cold here and the smells were all wrong.

 

“Climb! Climb!” The Sheem urged each other on.

 

The merls were in full retreat back into their forest now. They aimed well, almost as well as she did, but they were small. They couldn’t hold against armored human warriors. The Sheem cut their trees and killed their spiders through sheer numbers, even at a high cost. When casualties became too horrifying, new regiments were rotated in. She hated it. Hated how it made human life something to be traded. With a sigh, she brushed her dark hair away from her face. Her braid was getting undone.

 

The Sheem crawled up the slope. Burnt trees fell and were carried away, a waste of effort but the Maranorians could afford it. All she could see were red uniforms heading deeper in. The last few times, the merls had rallied, pushing back the attackers but now they had to be tired and bleeding.

 

Horns blared. From the left, humans sallied out against the Sheem. Those were templars of Neriad and those shadowy servants of Efestar. A shiver crawled up her spine when the golden radiance spread across the battlefield. There were not a lot of those templars, just enough to remind her they were going against the will of another light god. She didn’t like what it implied. It was a dark day when light gods defended both sides of a war.

 

Crashes and screams returned. The Sheem warriors faltered. Swords tinged with mana rose and fell. Spears lashed out. The men in red died. Aragan took a deep breath, then held it in, charging her skill to slay another hero. Her arms ached from the effort of shooting her special arrows, but it was necessary.

 

“They’re rallying,” someone said next to her.

 

She was going to have to do it. She hated doing it. They didn’t feel like enemies. They were just defending their homes. The yells and clashes of weapons grew closer now and she spotted Baranese knights in the distance. The officers next to her screamed. Things were not going well.

 

Dammit.

 

Who should she kill? There were several captains leading their men. The templars were not united behind a single champion. Could she even make a difference? Aragan was a huntress, not a damn assassin. She didn’t know where to aim. No one was giving her orders. The vanguards were a shadow of their former selves, split along the line. What should she do?

 

THUD.

 

The ground shook. Something parted the trees in the distance. Something huge.

 

THUD.

 

How could it have been hidden? From this angle, she could only see the canopies shaking and moving down over the merl forest.

 

THUD.

 

Men were running. Some fell down the slope like empty bottles tumbling down a table. They almost resembled toys. For a reason she couldn’t explain, it looked like there were fiery motes sticking to many of them, like buzzing embers. From afar, the sight was almost beautiful. It made what followed that much more nightmarish. First came towers emerging from the trees like scout platforms over the desert, then a back, pitted and rugged like an old mountain. Then eyes.

 

Fairly large eyes.

 

“Maranor, save us.”

 

Alright so now Aragan could take everything back about not being a huntress and also about not knowing where to shoot. This was it. Her target. The monstrous arachnid spat a transparent blob of… something at a squad of archers, and they died. Her steps crushed people. She needed to die. So Aragan aimed, breath still held in.

 

Just a little bit more time ought to do. The spider didn’t have protection on her eyes, after all. Panic was making aiming difficult. Not her own. The Sheem. They were pushed back. Again.

 

On top of the spider, shamans sang. That was fine. Aragan ignored the din of war around her, the screams of pain, the horns, all of that. She focused.

 

She aimed.

 

She released the breath. The arrow departed with a loud twang. In front, the song of the shamans reached a climax, and a ghostly, giant merl appeared midair. Hushed reverence quieted their bird cries. The ghostly merl wore a fantastic headdress in garish colors. He drew an arrow too, his entire body pulling from a large bow, the body held between the fingers of his feet. Not toes, actual fingers.

 

Aragan knew the speed of her arrows. She knew her own should have landed long ago, but it hadn’t. A loud bang showed where the two arrows impossibly collided.

 

“I don’t believe it,” she whispered.

 

Ancestral magic. Like her clan did. Used against her.

 

Now the spider was looking at her specifically. Eight ancient eyes.

 

“Shit.”

 

She turned to run, but not fast enough. A portal opened a few paces away. She’d seen Crest do it often enough to recognize what it was, although this one felt cruder, not as fast. It was still a portal. None of those who could open them besides Crest were on her side. Aragan ran faster.

 

Steel titans crashed out of the aperture. The officer group disappeared in clinical cuts and sprays of arterial blood. She’d seen many people die but not like this, not the way those officers were sliced. A chilling sentence swam at the front of her mind, unbidden. It was something the Hopecrusher had said.

 

“We don’t have anything that can stop the golems, so just slow them down until they run out of energy.”

 

That’s what he’d said.

 

“FUCK.”

 

She ran, using her [One with the Land] skill to disappear but it didn’t help. She still felt it on her back. She turned. Yellow glares were aimed right at her and through the skill. The golems were humming among each other in a discordant harmony that grated her ears until one of them spoke in Harrakan, a language she had only recently learned.

 

//PRIORITY TARGET LOCATED.

 

That was her. The priority target. She ran faster. A whoosh of displaced heat was all the warning she got to hit the ground. A tongue of fire rushed over her, cracking the dusty land and killing anyone in its path. They didn’t even scream. They sizzled. Her back flared with pain. She was going to die here. Roll to the side. Get up. Hurry.

 

Heavy stomps. They had to struggle to stop, she hoped. A dodge to the side based on experience facing large monsters. Something whistled by her ear and a puff of her hair floated away. Grooves were carved in the ground.

 

Shadowland riders charged by, their leader hailing her.

 

“Move!” the tall spearwoman leading them screamed.

 

They were going to sacrifice their lives for her own. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Had to help somehow. The inhuman babble was so close, and the screams of her people, closer still. She ran, her back an ocean of agony. She still flipped to the side, aimed. The golems were too resilient.

 

There, beyond the aperture: a man with a scar on his cheek. She aimed. She loosed. A portal appeared between them, just a blink.

 

Her own arrow tore through her biceps.

 

“Aragan of the One Breath, was it?” the archmage asked in conversational Viziman from barely a pace away.

 

She ran again. One of the vanguard shield-bearers was heading her way at the head of a squad of spearmen.

 

“Since we’re doing silly names, my name is Sidjin the Red Mist.”

 

Monstrous mana poured from the smaller portal, covering everything in sight. A shield covered Aragan just in time to save her miserable life. The spearmen weren’t so lucky. She’d heard similar sounds butchering her catches but then it had only been one knife, not several hundreds of them. They ran. They kept running. Aragan’s everything hurt, and she had lost a lot of blood but when she looked back, the Harrakans had pulled back. The merls were back in control of the heights, however, and their reserves of arrows felt inexhaustible.

 

She hoped the other surviving vanguards were doing better than her.

 

***

There were more ways to help than just killing. Lotta pumped her tired legs as fast as they could safely go. Those priests could really accomplish small miracles as long as the patient on her stretcher was still breathing. She supposed it was the point. This one looked dead already but it wasn’t for her to decide. The trench led up, towards the field hospitals. A pair of young girls carrying buckets of bolts hurried past.

“You holding on, grandma?” The little shit at the other end of the stretcher asked.

The worst thing was, Lotta couldn’t reply. She was out of breath. That made the boy look back with a tinge of worry, then amusement at what Lotta presumed was her large puffy sweaty red face. Asshole.

“We’re almost there! The entrance of the bunker’s right around the corner.”

The hospital was underground just like most everything else to prevent the Maranorians from spelling it to ashes. The wounded man on the stretcher moaned, and the mask of congealed blood on his bald face twitched. He was still alive.

“Huh, thought he was already a goner.”

He moved in his ill-fitting armor, unbalancing the stretcher.

“Hey hey!”

“Oh, so that was where your healers were,” he suddenly said in accented Enorian.

The voice was cold and cruel. Memories of her ex-husband flashed through Lotta’s mind, bringing the phantom pain of a cracked cheekbones and the taste of her blood on her tongue. She froze like a beastling meeting a pack of children. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong.

The wounded man moved. The boy fell without a word, and now Lotta was looking into detached eyes without a shred of pity. Her legs shook. Cold crept up her spine. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t scream. Her mind was blank except for terror. Terror. Terror. Terror Terror.

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A knife.

A hand.

Lotta gasped, falling on her ass in the dusty bottom of the trench. A mask, white and vicious. Gray braids falling from a hood in a silver cascade.

“Hello hello,” the woman whispered.

The bald man must have lashed out because the two of them moved far too fast for Lotta to follow. She was a baker and a grandmother, not some fancy assassin. She could tell who’d won from the grunt of pain and the collapsing bald man. The halal woman twisted a knife in his shoulder.

Lotta felt very cold and her chest ached. Her eyes searched for a wound and found none. She was not hurt, just old and scared.

“We searched for you,” the hadal whispered.

Lotta made herself very small. It was easy. She had a lot of practice. Another hadal appeared behind the bald man.

“Hello hello, Jar’ko the Undying.”

There were four of them now, surrounding who Lotta assumed was a Maranorian. She checked the boy.

He was dead. Dammit. She’d even forgotten his name.

“Hellow.”

That was the hadal king right there, appearing out of nowhere like a bad memory. She had seen him once when she had attended a ceremony at the palace. One of her granddaughters had joined the mages. She had been very proud.

“You pathetic abominations. Just get this over with. The day is young,” the bald man spat.

But the king didn’t reply. He removed a ceremonial dagger from… somewhere. Humming to himself, he let the blade hover above the bald man’s chest. It bit too fast for her to see. A shallow cut was made. Definitely not enough to kill even her, so why…

“Is this the way you want to do it? Degenerates. Fine. If you think pain…”

A second cut, again every shallow. The bald man’s sneer of arrogance turned into a chuckle. But then his face paled until even the ash of his skin grew more sickly.

“Wait. Wait, what are you… no. No! That is impossible! You are no servant of Enttiku!”

“Hmmm.”

“Stop. Stop!”

“Paths. At the highest levels, they are… aspirations. You are not undying. Your master is not Immortal. He wields a god slayer and yet never stopped to consider the implications. Since we are talking about paths…”

“Let me go! Please!”

“I am the Endbringer. I progress by killing that which thought it had escaped mortality. Like you.”

“Please…”

“Your master is next. Goodbye.”

The next incision led to a sort of shake, like her ex husband when he drank too much. It was weird, and gross, and a bit vulgar also. When the bald man stopped shaking, she knew he’d never move again.

The king grabbed the corpse and left, as did the other masked ones. Only the gray-haired one was left.

“I am Thirteen. You need help? Yes?”

“I…”

Did Lotta need help? She did, but she didn’t want to hold them back…

“The boy. We shouldn’t leave him.”

Maybe, just maybe, it should have been her instead. She was old. He had… he had his life in front of him.

“Hey. Stop. Come. I carry him. We go to the bunker.”

Lotta nodded.

She absolutely hated being part of history, sometimes. She very much preferred to be left alone.

“I need a drink.”

“Me too,” Thirteen said. “Me too.”

***

The dragon was here to avenge Judgment. He knew a human had killed him. The problem was that there were a lot of humans here. More than he even knew existed. And they were fighting each other. He was still smart enough to realize there were two sides.

In the distance, he saw that insufferable spiky bitch She-Who-Rides-The-Storm’s-Darkest-Clouds attack the ones that were closer to the forest. A white youngling did so, too, so the dragon decided he would do so as well. They were also here to avenge Judgment. He dove, then he hesitated.

There were just… so many of the squirming bipeds. Where should he even begin? He didn’t have enough fire for all of those either… After a moment of hesitation, he went for a group in better garments than the others. In his experience, they were usually important.

Hey!

She-Who-Rides-The-Storm’s-Darkest-Clouds‘ mind assaulted his, as spiky and infuriating as ever.

You brainless winged worm!

He ignored her.

Come with us! We need to explain how to fight!

What was there to explain? He was dragon. He knew how to fight already. The humans had committed the unforgivable, thus they would be punished. And severely! Below him, the colorful humans were screaming and pointing at him.