NOVEL NEXT Chapter Seventy-Six – Armies Abound
Nightmares just don’t end...
The Curse gave up.
Doc had turned the tide. Matching up with a shot of Invigoration from Tremble to overcome any fatigue, the Curse literally could not kill me. I just hacked myself back to full Health, and my Soak went up and down as my Battle Vigor had the chance to work… which it did when Invigoration went off, something I discovered and promptly started making use of. I needed only seconds outside of combat to restart Battle Vigor now, which I could get simply by withdrawing at top speed.
Being in Battle Focus all the time basically made me even more of a killer. I gave them nothing.
The Fey had come in again with more of their kind, bolstered with tree-kin, thornfolk, shamblers, and whatnot, all led by a hamadryad queen who thought being able to make walls of thorns and animate plants while plinking with a long bow made her something special.
Yeah, she died, too.
Pure numbers finally overcame my fighters, but they made a great showing of themselves. With bardsong amplified by Tremble’s Courageous Slot, they reaped a gory harvest, stacking up hills and heaps of countless Fey and plants, hacking down trees as I ripped through the invaders time after time, until finally the swarming vines and roots dragged the last of my wounded giants down, unlimited hordes of Fey washed over them, and they died.
But me, I just wouldn’t die.
If they swarmed me, the swarm basically exploded. Bigger stuff meant fewer attackers, and Doc was always on the job, pumping vitality into me to deal with massive bruises, fractured bones, internal injuries, cuts, scrapes, and whatnot.
Tremble was Singing in Fey, totally defiant as we carved through them non-stop, cutting and thrusting dread into them at wholesale prices. Animated trees and their tree-kin controllers went down in fire. Earthen Fey dissolved in acid, burning Fey and Elementals froze, insects and air-type servants burned, while water and bestial Fey got the lightning.
Sometimes we just hacked and slashed away, and blood flew… with none of it sticking to me, even as everything around me was covered in gore. Just to demoralize them even more, I stayed untouched.
I tore my way through the spears of the Amazonian dryad honor guard of the hamadryad, not a single arrow of hers touched me, and I carved her up without batting an eye, sending her en vivus to join her erlking.
The Fey all screamed and raged to the attack. Whirlwinds and Cleaves galore greeted them, building me a burning pile of the dead that raged vivic beneath me, burning away even as it rose, feeding me more Karma.
I didn’t get tired, and they couldn’t bring me down. I was too hard to hit, too hard to hurt, and I hit way too hard, fast, and accurately in return. Throwing a horde at me resulted in a rapidly dead horde. Magic and spells failed in my Null. Stand took care of missile fire.
It couldn’t outlast me now.
Grey fog billowed out of nowhere, and swallowed the world in concealing mist.
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It took me a few breaths to realize I was back at my starting point, the clearing in the fog. I turned around slowly, wondering if something oversized was going to come lunging out of the mists at me, but nothing happened.
“It’s Renewal again.”
Tremble’s pointed voice drew attention to a wave of energy sweeping over us.
Regardless of how the Curse shifted night and day, Renewal was an absolute. The rest was just a change in illumination, an illusion, that with my Mask didn’t matter to me at all.
A day had passed, and the Curse hadn’t killed me. It was all starting over…
“Well, this is quite the landmark,” I mused, slowly relaxing, as I tipped over a couple levers. Crystal Dragon Mastery/5, Roll With It III, plus Defiant, maxed out my DR at 26/- for now. Indestructible cockroach powers, activate!
I had a lot of /5’s to go through, and a bunch of Power Feats, too. I calmly flipped over Myrmidon/4, too, because mass combat and all.
“Think it will learn its lesson?” Tremble asked, laughing softly.
I had to chuckle, too. This was like reaching the end of the most damnably hard video game ever, where failure was met with pain and loss, and finding that after all that fighting, all you got to do was to start over.
But wow, I had actually beaten the damn thing’s tactics. I hadn’t actually beaten IT, struck no blows against it, but I had definitely reached some kind of waypoint on the journey.
“No. It’s not intelligent, it’s a twisted aspect of Fate. It can only work with the toolbox it has. There has to be an outside force popping in for it to do something new.” I frowned. “Of course, it now knows it can go outside the Dream and bring things in, like the Fey. The erlking can literally Summon a small army, so the Curse made a big one and threw it at me. I imagine it’s going to try more armies, and see if it can’t wear me down now…”
“More of this ridiculous mass slaughter stuff?” sniffed my Sword. “With Doc and me here, that’s not going to work!”
“The Curse is dumb.”
“It is!” he agreed promptly.
“So, yeah, more mass slaughter. It may change stuff up, who knows. But we can’t be totally passive, you know. It has invited in others, and if the Curse can’t kill us, other things certainly can, and replace us…” I took a deep breath. “But now we know something else. Even the Curse is subject to Renewal, one law having to obey another.”
“What to do?” Tremble asked.
“I need two hours of meditation, whose effects thereof I usually get by being dead.” He laughed softly again. “Then, we start anew, and keep slogging. There’s a long way to go yet. Advanced Class 4’s, level Five Masteries, making Ten, Secondary Class 6’s and Advanced Class 5’s…”
“Well, maybe we can start counting Renewals, instead of deaths,” Tremble observed.
“That will be a change…” I agreed.
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After some navel-gazing relaxation...
“Orcs, huh…”
I watched the yellow-skinned figures swarming over the walls, and waved my troop forwards. There were more of them today, because Myrmidon/4 was in place, upping my Warlord command numbers. Whether the Curse liked it or not, I was also accruing military merits, invisible little reputation counters in its false world, and getting more of the soldiers to follow me as I fought.
“Advance!” I ordered the line of spearmen behind me. The orcs weren’t pulling down buildings like the Fey, and if they wanted to Summon stuff to fight me, that was fine, I was not afraid of their Shamanic magic.
They were also disorganized brawlers, and a good spear line was going to chew them up. There was a reason soldiers carried shields… I began to allocate the archers who had fallen in with me, and I had me more cavalry to work with, although they weren’t as useful in a city without charge lanes around…
But orcs came in hordes, and these were all ogre-sized Olympian-types, so there were going to be a lot of them, and they were tough. I looked forward to the fighting, and Tremble looked forward to a new Bane. I highly doubted their numbers would end before Renewal…