Shango POV: Day 51
Current Wealth: 1 silver 47 copper
I was first in through the door, getting inside with the cannoneers while my friends were still busy fighting on the stairs. Part of me wanted to help them, and I shut that part up with a strangling grip. There wasn’t room for another of us, the best I could hope to do was replace one of them, and if they were already struggling to keep the waves of undead at bay, with me substituted for one of their actually competent fighters, they’d have quickly failed.
So, reluctantly, I waited in the mayor’s office. Watching, blood boiling and heart pumping as they slowly fought their way back, keeping the idiot villagers beside me from trapping them outside.
Solitaire, ever the self-preservation enthusiast, was first in. The Vittonian woman followed after. Beam and Argar seemed almost reluctant to disengage, both of them killing easily two or three more rotters than was needed before finally stepping back. The moment they did, our enemy surged on, snarling and cramming their bodies into the door, desperate to make their way into our new shelter. A spear caught one through the eye, a cudgel opened another one’s skull to spray brain matter in all directions, and Solitaire jabbed his thumb so far into one of their ears, that going by the sudden spasms it started suffering, I could only deduce he’d actually managed to skewer its brain. The violence was quickly displayed and viciously delivered, it bought the rest of us a few precious seconds to force the door shut, then bar it.
The thudding came instantly, rhythmic, heavy. It ran through the now-crowded office and churned deep into every set of ears present. The panic started growing instantly.
“We’re gonna die!” One villager moaned, tears wetting his cheeks. He hadn’t been one of the fighters, the stupid bastard had been tucked away here the entire time, but that only meant he’d been a coward from the start. And cowardice spread like cancer.
“They’re going to break through that door just like they did all the others!” Another cried out.
“We’re fucked! We’re all going to die!”
“A window!” Someone called out, “Can we-”
“There’s rotters swarming around the building, waiting for us, we can’t even jump!”
The panic was moving across the room like wildfire, so quick even I was having trouble keeping up with it. I tried calling out for attention, ordering faces turn to me, but the noise was so great no one present could so much as hear me.
I was losing control.
Beam, though, kept calm, and resolved the situation in true Beam fashion. Marching across the room and drawing up to one of the babbling dissenters, then wordlessly uppercutting him so hard I swore his tiny body was actually hoisted a centimetre or two off the ground. The man fell hard, and didn’t get up.
Silence rang out, all eyes turned to my friend, and his eyes turned to me.
“My brother has something to say.” Beam called out, speaking calmly, despite it all, but still looking about ready to knock every single living thing on the continent into unconsciousness if they gave him any more problems.
That was about as good an opportunity as I found likely to happen, and I jumped on it promptly.
“We’ll be fine.” I roared. “This position is far harder to break into than the last, just look at the door, is it suffering any damage?”
It wasn’t, as I’d expected. But the reasons for why weren’t exactly my area of expertise. I turned to Solitaire.
“Solitaire, brother, care to explain to the good people why we’re safe?”
He jumped on the opportunity, and I did my best to avoid glancing at his visibly bulging crotch as he lorded his knowledge over the rest of us.
“It’s called the square-cube law.” He explained, smugly. “Long ago, our people discovered an incredibly complex concept called basic, infant level mathematics. The long and short of it is that as something gets larger, it gets weaker, relative to its body weight. This is why cats can fall ten feet and be fine, but horses can break their legs dropping down a five foot pit. It’s also why that door is going to hold.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Solitaire got a lot of looks from that, and only some were relieved. I saw a lot of confusion, and plenty of scepticism. The former was not ideal, the latter was dangerous.
Fortunately, he seemed to notice it too.
“How many rotters can get at this door?” He tried. “Three, maybe four or five at once? Compared to dozens battering the one outside. It’s just as thick, and smaller things are stronger proportionally. It took the enemy two thousand, one hundred and sixteen seconds to break down the main door outside, this one will last several times longer just from how many more were able to attack the last one.”
That, finally, started to spark widespread recognition, and those few villagers who still didn’t understand had the concepts explained to them by their quicker-witted neighbours. The mood actually seemed to be improving before long.
Characteristically, Solitaire had to ruin it.
“Get ready to watch the windows!” He called out. “The rotters can climb over one another, and we didn’t have time to board the shutters up, they’ll be trying to get at us through there.”
In an instant, the panic returned. But this time it was manageable. Weaker than before, sure, but cornered, too. We’d convinced the people that there was no way the enemy could breach the door, now we’d drawn their attention to the one actual weakness in our defences.
And it wasn’t a weakness we’d failed to cover.
Solitaire had posed the idea, and I’d agreed. We needed to kill rotters if we were to survive long-term, that was why we’d made our barricades out in the main hall, and it was why we’d left the windows accessible. The enemy would be through them soon, and blood would spill.
As if I’d conjured them just by thinking about their attack, rotters soon reared ugly faces, smashing heads and fists through the fragile wood of the shutters, reaching out to drag their bodies inside. They didn’t get far.
Hammer, spear, pitchfork and cudgel. Rocks and bits of timber, carving knives and scythes. We went at them with everything we had on hand, actually organising the carnage to ensure only a few of us were around the windows at once. The rotters could only come through slowly, because of the awkward climb, and there were only two windows in all. That meant four people were more than enough to hold them at bay.
I watched it all with satisfaction, the tension dropping in my gut, along with everyone else’s, as minutes of unending success passed us farther on. I grinned.
“I’ll admit it.” I eventually said, turning to Solitaire and speaking quietly, “It was a good idea.”
The idea of course had been his, leaving a weak point in our defence and forcing the terrified villagers to do what was best for them long-term was a stroke of brilliance even for him. And the positioning couldn’t have been better.
A rotter caught a particularly nasty blow to the eye and lost its grip, plummeting out of sight.
How far would they be falling? I aimed the question at Solitaire, who replied promptly by thinking back to his view from the outside and doing a few mental calculations.
It was nothing complex, he assured me, apparently a similar technique to one he’d used in figuring out how tall his own house was as a kid, even before reading about the works of Euclid. Remarkable what a man can do when his brain is a compass.
“Twenty six feet, or just under eight metres in non-caveman units. Redacle has a gravitational field more or less equal to earth’s, so that’d be yielding a velocity of twelve point five metres per second. Basically picture getting hit by a truck going thirty miles per hour.”
It wasn’t as deadly as I would’ve hoped, being honest, but it was nothing to scoff at. If nothing else, broken bones would be occurring regularly, and death would be happening a decent number of times. They were hitting the ground faster than any human could sprint, after all, and I’d heard of death occuring in much slower impacts. Slowly but surely, we’d be whittling the enemy down.
But Solitaire had to ruin whatever surety I’d gotten from that, too. It was just what he did. He leaned in, speaking with a hushed tone.
“For what it’s worth, I think there’s something smarter than a rotter out there coordinating them. Probably responsible for reanimating them, and…Possibly quite powerful.” I could see him twitching slightly, but not in all the ways that usually indicated he was feeling paranoid.
Well, no points for guessing why. If he was right, and I was fairly sure he was, there was something still out there more dangerous than anything we’d spent the lat hour killing. Undead, almost definitely, and smart enough to coordinate the rotters. It hadn’t shown itself yet, and that made me more nervous, not less.
I was just halfway through considering what it might think to do next when the wooden frame around one of the windows ruptured apart, and the fighters keeping it from being flooded were sent flying back amid the sound of cracking timber and splintering bones.
Where they’d just been standing was now a tall man. His hair was dark, his eyes were darker, his glare was darkest of all. He wore the silks and linens of an aristocrat, and carried at his side a fancy-looking rapier glittering with jewels and decorative flourishes.
Just at a glance I could feel how dangerous he was, feel it as a deep, instinctual terror. The same kind a rabbit felt when stepping over a hawk’s shadow. Every nerve in my body screamed at me to turn and run, even if it meant throwing myself into the rotters trying to break in through the only exits, and my mouth dried as I recognised the creature I was now facing.
Maybe everyone else did, too. They were definitely appropriately silent. Because we were all standing before a fucking vampire.
And the vampire moved fast.