NOVEL NEXT Chapter 65: Lure
A behemoth of twisted flesh and bone lumbered towards the imperial outpost. Each step shook the earth beneath its colossal legs. It wasn’t the first of its kind to approach the fortifications. But unlike the last time such a monster had threatened the outpost, the imperial defenders were run ragged from exhaustion and skill overuse.
On the battlements, soldiers scrambled to get into position to repel the towering abomination. Overhead, the light cloud cover built, the pitter patter of rain plinked off laminar armour bringing an intermittent percussion to the melody of battle.
The monster lowered its disfigured body and let out a garbled roar. Soldiers released projectiles and unleashed skills. They impacted the colossal undead but did little to injure it, with each earth shaking step it drew closer and closer.
Then something that gleamed a brilliant white impacted the monster directly in its misshapen forehead. The creature staggered, the blow wouldn’t be lethal but the sheer force of the projectile temporarily stunned it.
Then, where the arrow protruded from its noggin two figures flashed into existence. The first drove an already drawn sword through the undead monstrosity's bulbous neck, severing the head in a single swift strike.
The second had what looked like tendrils of gold billowing from their cloaked back. From the battlements only those with perception skills enhancing ocular vision could make out the scene clearly.
Not tendrils. Arms. Each balled into a fist and clutching tightly around gleaming objects. The swordswoman kicked off the toppling behemoth as the cloaked individual plunged two ivory arms into the stump where the monster's neck had been.
Black ichor flowed up what looked like armoured bone white arms only to burn away into an inner golden glow. A second arrow fell, this one landing atop the wooden battlements. Soldiers scrambled away but the arrow hadn’t been an attack.
With another flash of light Hera appeared, stumbled, then caught herself against a sharpened wooden parapet.
===
Leif rode the undead as it collapsed. His weight, increased thanks to [Gold Iron Physique] pushed its body down and allowed him to maintain his balance. Hera vanished in a flash of light, no doubt repositioning to her second arrow.
Speaking of arrows…
As death energies flooded into his body, only to be subsumed and converted into golden lifeforce, Leif felt every inch of his body flex with power. [Blight’s Bounty] was working overtime and the attribute increase from the skill was already maxed out at forty percent.
Leif hopped off the now unmoving behemoth and slammed the first of his already conjured amber limbs into the disturbed soil. Or more specifically, the glowing arrow it was holding. Working quickly he repeated the action, planting each arrow like a tent stake before doing the same with the next.
All around him Leif could feel the hostile intent from the nearby swarms of undeath slowly shift from the human outpost and onto the much closer, and much more concentrated source of vitality.
Leif triggered [Amber Steps]. Not to return to the hill, but instead to quickly reposition himself back to the bloated corpse of the abomination. He jumped off the body, striking down ravenous undead and they clawed at him in seeming desperation.
He twisted, letting the amber arms spin in a wide arc, crushing reanimated corpses and twisted ghouls. Then, with the last three arrows planted he retreated into the centre of the circle he had created.
The first arrow he had planted began to fade, the skill’s structure losing its cohesion. That’s when Hera triggered another skill. In a flash of light an ethereal soldier clad in ghostly white armour burst into existence where the arrow had once been.
It wielded a massive two handed blade, the weapon already in mid swing as the entity was summoned. Its translucent armour a set of gleaming, interlocking plates that seemed to be without flaws.
Leif stepped back from a monkey shaped undead before punching a hole right through its chest. All around him undead howled and gnashed their teeth. Then, in sequential order each of the arrows flashed.
Within seconds Leif was surrounded not just by undead, but an armoured entourage of summoned ethereal guardians. Limbs were removed and bodies bisected as glowing white steel began to hack and slash. What would have been a slow but inevitable death surrounded by rotting monsters turned into a blender of carnage.
The undead were seemingly unaware, or perhaps unwilling to fight Hera’s summoned warriors. She had called them ‘Sentinels of Light’, but Leif wasn’t sure of the exact details behind her ability.
Well, other than that they needed to be summoned from arrows she used as anchors, and that they couldn’t move far from said anchors. There were some academic theories about why certain skills had restrictions, but they mostly went over his head.
Leif could study when he wasn’t in the undead infested frontiers of humanity's territory.
A hideously twisted beast, like several quadrupedal animals stitched together lunged past the line of defence and met an amber fist straight to the face. It crumpled, the front half of its body being squished into its deformed rear.
A zombie with wickedly sharp claws pushed its way past a sentinel, it lashed out at the same moment a glowing white blade bisected it at the waist. The monster’s claws stabbed into the summon’s pauldrons but otherwise did little damage. Leif, seeing the monster was still trying to reach him, stomped its skull into the soil, it shattered like a dropped vase.
The captured life-force within him began to leak through, burning him up from the inside. His every attack syphoned small amounts of twisted vitality, each drop quickly added up as pain built in his chest. Leif repeatedly reconjured and empowered his amber limbs, trying to outpace the input of vitality with wasteful expenditure.
A dog or large fox snuck between a sentinel’s armoured legs and bit down hard on Leif’s own shin. A second set of jaws overlapped the undead’s own, though much larger. They too bit down and Leif fell to one knee as he buckled under his considerable weight.
He fell, then plucked the reanimated beast up by the bushy tail and tore it free, sending a pair of back legs and attached spine spinning off into the distance. He battered away the still latched on head and pressed a palm to the wound.
Already the innate vitality within him was bubbling forward to restore him to health. A [Healing Palm] accelerated the process with a flash of light. Leif stood, shook off the growing ache within his soul and dropped into a low fighting stance.
This might take a while.
===
A communications officer peeked over the edge of the fortified bluff. In his hand was a small communication crystal linked with the outposts command centre.
As the soldier looked over the edge he spotted a group of academy students bickering while trying to climb the steep almost cliff. They seemed to be having issues with getting their ropes secured.
One of the students looked up, a young man with sandy blond hair and glasses. The man waved.
Damn kids. They should have waited for a recon team to have collected them. The soldier grumbled internally.
“Wait one moment!” The officer called down as he ran off to find anyone not currently occupied with defending the outpost to assist him.
Something that was surprisingly easy as the fighting along the walls seemed to have mostly stopped. He called up to a squad staring slack jawed into the distance. When they didn’t reply he picked up a loose stone and threw it.
“What?” Their leader called down, rubbing the back of his helmeted head.
===
It sat cross legged in a cavern beneath the world. It could sense the puppets it commanded go limp one by one, their strings cut. The humans were surprisingly resilient, if it had expected two elites to be accompanying their little excursion it would have handled things slightly differently…
A beetle crawled out from between its teeth. It snapped its jaws shut, snapping the insect in two with a satisfying crunch. Though it neither hungered nor tired, the being intimately enjoyed the sensation. The feeling of breaking something far below itself in stature and power.
The thrill, the hunt, the game. Undeath could get so dull if one didn’t invest in little ways to keep themselves… occupied.
Lifeforce bloomed above and the large carapaced form it was sitting on twitched. A skeletal hand steadied the former royal, soothing its innate urges. An observer may have called the gesture kind, almost caring.
Instincts it had long suppressed urged it to snuff out any and all life. To satiate and fulfil the purpose its kind were born to do. But you didn’t get far within undead society if you were little better than a feral beast.
It tapped bony fingers along the obsidian exoskeleton of its most beloved prize. Formians were a fascinating commodity. Even a queen as young and relatively weak as the one it had risen were such… unique specimens.
A spider chittered nearby, one among a few of the enthralled it had bothered to recover. The beast was still alive, though with every passing day it drew closer and closer to undeath as ambient energies claimed it. Sending those creatures after the humans had been quite amusing. Though, with how the current situation was going it regretted not having its more potent undead available at the time.
Yes, cutting the game short would have been a considerable let-down. But victory was its own reward. Though, with how its horde had grown both in size and strength the being couldn’t truly complain.
Even now, some of its more prized possessions were hard at work. Butchering their way through the network of caverns that gave the depths of the world such a unique and abyssal flair.
One of its more stable connections, a string of death connecting to a reanimated griffon snapped. It hissed in displeasure, the undead surrounding it within the cavern instinctually doing the same. Their wills resonant and subservient to its own.
It contemplated its next move while gently stroking the formian queen. It was still possible to get a perfect victory. If the humans escaped, the status quo in the east may change, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing… Its kind were a little too happy to enter extended periods of stagnation.
No. It wouldn’t let that happen. If only to avoid the displeasure from the underlord it served. It still had several cards to play. And if all went to plan it could gain far, far more than it would lose. It just needed to dangle the appropriate bait…
It cackled, the chilling sound reverberating through the oddly geometric cavern. As it had done many times before, it reached for the string connecting itself to the ant queen. With a blur of consciousness its mind merged with that of the ant’s, its senses the ant’s own.
Time to have some fun, claim another prize, and finish this little game.