"I am to be your God of Spellcraft." Eban mused, staring blankly at the creatures of darkness pouring from the fallen Eye. "Faenya has one already - a Goddess. Mystra is her name."
"Your brother told me you'd be difficult." I sighed.
"My brother." He huffed, dramatically rolling his eyes. "Why won't you say his name?"
"Because that's the trigger." I grinned knowingly.
"The trigger?" Eban huffed, sweeping his hand over what little he could see through the darkness. "One would think several triggers have been pulled already!"
"Only pop shots." I snorted.
The largest of those pop shots was the fall of Adin'agh, days ago. Now, countless slaves were spilled over the upper and lower parts of Zimysta. They rioted for days before tuckering out and scattering about the Falls for a place to hide from the ensuing chaos. Some managed to escape down the tunnels they'd worked, forsaking themselves to a cruel existence in the Darkworld's wilds. Those who remained were encouraged by the beasts of twilight emerging to hunt the spiders that haunted them, appearing as a mob from the shadows to take up their arms once again, purposelessly so, until their savior arrived.
For most of them, at least.
Their riot ceased as the ground shook beneath them, bringing a light panic to the crowd once off-white shoots pushed apart the stone, rising to split and unfurl into domes around them. Domes that cracked and splintered, releasing Leary's first goblin paragons in waves that appeared like spores from a distance. The rioter's makeshift arms lowered in surprise while the fresh arrivals, standing taller and straighter than their goblin-kin, turned their zealous gazes upward to search the darkness for what I could clearly see.
Leary descended to the fallen guild house atop his bone-armored, skeletal dire-cheetah, Sausage, uplifting a cloud of dust as he reduced its remnants to rubble. Saying nothing, he trotted down, scanning the crowd for prospective minions as it parted for him. His first paragons trailed after him but avoided stepping where he'd been, for my Horseman of War was that great in their eyes. The rest of their goblin-kin followed, forming branching wings to either side of him as if they were unworthy of stepping near the same ground graced with his feet.
Humans, elves, orcs, and other liberated slaves stood to the sidelines as Leary reached the front of the mob and turned to address them with just three words, buttered in ways that made the Falls themselves hear. "I am Leary."
The words released an unseen wave of Leary's divine mana. All they felt was an unyielding urge to kneel, and they abided, lowering their gazes to the floor while their haunched backs straightened and their limbs shifted to better proportions. They couldn't even feel their genes shifting in real-time, yet they knew of their new stations as the first goblin paragons of Leary's empire.
One goblin of a few decades knelt lower as Leary dismounted, stepping forth to stand among his kind. "G- God Emperor." He began, refusing to even look at Leary's feet. "What do you ask of us?"
"War," was his only reply, resting his palm on the goblin's shoulder to allow his other powers to take root.
The perks of Leary's Barbaric Fighter Class were peculiar. On one hand, he was a Scourge Barbarian; His service to the heinous entity that was me augmented his barbarism with warlock abilities. Namely, he could make pacts and cast a few eldritch spells. On the other hand, he was a Battle Fiend - a Fighter whose service to the evil deity that was the Owl granted him superpowered agility, dexterity, strength, and constitution on top of being trained in martial techniques, tactics, and maneuvers unable to be performed by virtually anyone else due to his augmented skeleton. Combined as they were, those perks activated with Leary's rage, tainting it with auras to amplify the physical prowess of those who made pacts with him or otherwise served him; creating the legendary class, Super Villain. And so, by joining Leary's Empire - by making the pact, they became his first Minions, each with a suite of superpowered abilities based on rank, occupation, and position.
"Thrive in this war, and you will become the first royals of my empire, the commanders of my army, or both. Fail; serve in death." With those words, nearly every color of the rainbow shone from Leary's spine as he poured mana through it. First were the three cervical vertebrae, which billowed and bloomed beneath his scalp before rupturing his skin. The first formed a goblin's cowl, the ones with the long tails and a rim that sat just before his bat-like ears poking through the bone. The second one morphed around his face, sealing him in a skeletal mask of fangs and wicked eyes while the third cascaded down the rest of his body, pushing scales out of his skin to wreath him in armor; adamantine armor, infused with my father's Bone Mana.
Something similar happened to the goblins as they moved. The domes and spires that delivered those from the tower started splitting and cracking more, releasing swathes of dust to fall onto the sweaty brows of the churning mob and congeal into helmets, armor, weapons, and equipment. Naturally, the scouts went first. Utilizing the barbed claws of their gauntlets and boots, they skittered and skated toward Zimysta's 8th eye, searching for the drainage pipes or ventilation shafts on the outer rim, only to huddle around the razor-sharp webs blocking them as they tinkered with their newfound abilities.
Those at the forefront took after an experimental young goblin who shrank his skull to elongate his body and limbs to comical sizes. In their zeal, they barreled through their entry points and came out the other side as severed and calcified undead hands, heads, legs, and torsos. Those behind them rightly gazed upon the blue blood streaks strewn about the pipes with caution. Yet, upon tracing the hair-thin webs that would spell their doom, they advanced. They piggybacked off the first group by shrinking their skulls and went on to collapse their ribs into more streamlined, almost serpentine forms. Again, many fell, yet some emerged through the other side and spread out like smart roaches, moving in disorganized waves whilst ensuring to remain out of the faerie light. Even then, however, their orders were largely treated as an afterthought. Goblin slaves were passed by several of Leary's minions, searching to fill their pockets with treasures and trinkets. Others attempted to hunt down the drow who'd dominated them for so long, only to meet a swift but unmerciful end by either the drow or their spiders. Yet a few of them glowed.
One was the goblin who spoke up before, a lad named Geogz. He commanded with the cruel effectiveness born from a life in servitude turned around, using the threat of a clenched fist to spread his ranged troops around the eye to cover those scouring the face, setting mana-packed skulls in weak points while his infantry pushed up to relieve those inside of their scouting duties. As one would expect, such leadership was hardly efficient. The goblins were ambushed the moment they breached and scattered like roaches in the light, leaving those outside the wall clueless to the drow advancing on them. That mattered not, however, for the charges soon blew and the rest of Geogz's forces advanced on House Jusztiir, rushing down any available route under the cover of bone-tipped arrows.
With as many as there were, it was shocking to see them gone so fast. That was true for both me and the drow of the 8th Leg; House Everhiryn, who seemed conflicted between chasing the invaders, rallying the slaves against those entering the fray, or finding a means to escape the end of their house. While some chose the latter, the rest were caught between a rock and a hard place as the goblin tide swept in. Thrown by the ogres who'd joined the fray, a small contingent of hobgoblins engaged them first, using the shock of their bone armor and the deluge of their bodies to their advantage. One landed on top of a drow, impaling him with the spikes of his armor while the rest ganged up on the other two, slashing and lashing with a wild frenzy. More soon followed. Heavily wreathed in bone armor, they swept through the tide of humanoid slaves sent after them while demanding the countless goblin slaves in the distance fight for their God-Emperor, Leary.
I pushed my senses deeper into the House as Leary's will flowed into them, birthing a zeal that caused the slaves to question their masters for the first time in their lives. Soon after, the augured arms of badger-shaped bone hulks breached the ground and walls. The hobgoblins piloting them reeled back and screamed in the ecstasy of their newfound power, opening them to the blows of loyal orc slaves meant for the goblins who turned coat.
The slaves funneled into the newly formed escape tunnels as quickly as the hobgoblins outpoured; both their hulking brutes and more, mounted atop bone-armored lizards and dusk rats. They smashed and bashed their way through in their scramble for glory and conquest, swinging their weapons with wild abandon as they moved to close off the tunnels and corridors from the drow in the distance; not to mention my sight. And so I looked over to the lesser House Everhiryn to see it under siege by the bearbugs. An attempted one, at least.
Only a few teams could get the catapults, ballista, and battering rams functioning, the rest either battered against the walls with their steel weapons or stared dumbfounded at the other teams, searching for an attempt to move forward. Equal parts frustrated with their incompetence and lusting for battle, Leary clenched his fists, leaned back, and unleashed a blood-curdling roar as his spine bloomed. His hood of metallic bones collapsed as more bones lurched around his skull, forming a combat helmet with a devilish goblin mask straddled by serrated mandibles that clicked and clacked with the same wicked intensity as the four skeletal fingers clenched over and under his shoulders, unraveling into skeletal wings. Membranes of solid darkness formed between them, followed by a wreath of metallic scales pushing through his skin as his next two vertebrae flared; then he took flight.
As he soared, the red-green energy of his villainous rage bled off of him like rain, falling onto and flowing into his subjects. Their bone armor and weapons glowed with the lime green of Leary's arcana while the pits of their eyes shone with his wrath; and an all-out war ensued. The bearbugs striking the wall broke through, opening the splash zone to the airborne contraptions thrown by the ogres in their fit of rage.
As Leary dive-bombed the House, I turned my attention to the hobgoblin army overwhelming House Jusztiir with sheer numbers, compounded by the waves of liberated goblin-kin reemerging from the tunnels with maddened fervor. My eyes, however, remained focused on my Horsemen of War. He flew above the conflict on feathered wings of adamantine and bone, holding his hands palm up as if he were praying. But only wicked curses and wild screams poured from his mouth, seeming to fuel the blade mana infused into his fingertips.
Adamantine fingernails rapidly rained down the corridor like suppressed auto-cannon fire, felling countless slaves and countless more as the drow wove the ambient arcana into dense domes to deflect the projectiles and counter them with constellations of projected slices. Although their shields cracked under the barrage, Leary's strafing run left more than enough time for them to recover and weave some countermeasures into place before he banked around. Unbeknownst to them, however, Leary had more up his sleeves.
Tucking in his wings, his 2nd thoracic vertebra drank the light before it pulsed, ejecting an umbral tendril that whipped from his back to engross a statue and pull taught as Leary whipped around, to be released on a return trajectory. And yet, he wasn't done. Leary's umbral tendrils undulated forth and whipped against the air, spinning the aberrant arms around each other until they formed a fat spear poised over his head. His 3rd and 4th thoracic vertebra flared next, the former billowing into a dense skin of augmented bone that wreathed his spear with deadly intent while the latter pushed more scales through his skin, wreathing him in an armored hide.
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As I experienced with Wilson before, cursed mana flowed from my spirit as I surveyed Leary's battlefield. Unlike Wilson, however, Leary was a fighter first, trained to be the most attuned to my wickedness. Thus, he needed no orders or assistance, for his faith made him follow such paths seamlessly.
My wickedness synergized with Leary's just before his great bone spear impaled the midst of the fray; and the ambient darkness responded, congealing around the point of impact to catch him in an amorphous stone membrane that dipped down like a bowling ball on a trampoline. Only his spear punched through the net of dark stone, releasing the tension to make the ground comically dip and undulate before shattering in a catastrophic mess, flinging the enemy into the field of smaller bone-adamantine spears rising from every shadow in sight to occlude the light itself.
They impaled, skewered, and slayed many; mostly slaves sent into the meat grinder. The tendrils packed inside the spears took care of the rest when Leary forced them to balloon and pop, flinging Leary's adamantine bone shrapnel in every direction, as if a belt of oversized frag grenades had been scattered across the House. Limbs were blown off and heads were vaporized, reduced to a pink mist amongst failing mana shields and arcane armor. Yet the shrapnel continued on, spreading like a disease that chased the enemy as they ran for cover, calcifying all it touched into sleek black bone; except for the goblins. The goblins who'd been smacked by the umbral globules felt no pain, only a comforting cold that morphed into cowls, greaves, chain mail, and gauntlets; as was the case for the goblins splintered by Leary's spears. The shrapnel dug into their skin and surfaced in their jaws, fingers, and toes to form metallic fangs and claws.
Relishing in their newfound power, Leary's first army turned their collective sights on their only remaining foes: Demon Spiders. The spiders, however, were after their God-Emperor. Sensing a devil's darkness, they had leaped into the air before Leary's attack, only landing once the subsequent destruction had passed. Their waxy chitinous flesh allowed them to ignore the raining shrapnel, with it staggering but bouncing off of them or detaching impaled masses of goo that was quickly replaced.
Two, 3-meter spiders were on his sides before he recovered, lunging to crunch their mandibles around his right leg and left arm, dig their legs into the ground, and pull to expose him to the wrath of a 5-meter spider. Its massive legs stomped and stabbed at Leary's armor while countless smaller spiders swarmed him, biting at his weak points and encasing his limbs in their waxy, flammable webs; unknowingly aiding their demise.
Leary began cackling as the Volterum in his ribs began to glow a dull red gleam through his armor. Simultaneously, his spirit began to glow as the 'adrenal heart' that managed his rage began to pump a wicked chemical concoction through his body. As his laughs became more frenzied, and heat radiated from his form, more of his accursedly blessed arcana flowed from him to his minions scattered about, expanding their minds with orders and ideas while their frames were molded further according to their roles.
Even through a forced evolution, they did not falter; instead, scattering like goblins in fright. Only this time, with purpose.
The Runners and Tellers, as they were called, retreated the fastest. Using their smaller, agile bodies and natural claws, they snaked through the masses toward Leary's Dragonimp and the support forces gathered outside; the former to scatter about the staged resources while the latter to direct the Boomers, Soldiers, Gurus, and Pilots trailing them. Other Minion castes like the Kings, Nobles, Orators, and Engines remained behind, commanding, leading, and relaying orders to evacuate while bone plates as hard as steel were woven over the House's inner walls.
Their numbers were such that the corridors were sealed off and the House was isolated from its lesser counterpart in less than ten minutes. More importantly, the non-goblin slaves thrown into the slaughter had nowhere to go and nothing to do other than submit themselves to the spiders and swarm forth to bleed this heretical goblin dry. Thus, they were eager to deliver the House's final blow.
Their eagerness was rewarded with cackling screams and dwarven-sized kegs, barrels, and canisters of bone they heaved onto their backs, saddles, and packs before turning tail, scrambling up the tunnels from which they came to puncture their cargo and leak its contents amidst the house. Then, matches, torches, or even their makeshift weapons were scraped against the ground, and for the first time in history, House Jusztiir of Zimysta Falls saw the light.
The fires of Leary's bone-based fuel blinded and seared the House white. Spiders and drow alike reeled in pain, flinging arcana in every form at the torturous energy while their slaves pressed forward, ever fearful of their overlords. The thick aberrant smoke filling the cavern was almost alive, given the way it churned and roiled; almost as if it was drawn and pulled by Leary's minions, yet made to go wild by Leary losing himself to his rage.
I tuned out his ear-piercing threats as his arcana flowed into his arm, still clamped in the demon-spider's fangs, and watched the augmented bone of Leary's fingertips pierce through his skin, doubling his finger length with cruelly serrated blades that sank into the spider's chelicerae with little resistance. The severed venom duct within hissed like a steam whistle as the monstrosity released Leary and stomped on him, but he paid it no mind. More arcana rippled down his spine and the spider's segmented leg seemed to impale him as a spider's leg of metallic bone ejected from his back to stab into the ground.
The stone crunched and cracked beneath Leary's support as three more legs erupted from his spine, arcing around his shoulders and ribs to lunge toward the spider with haste. The first leg deflected off the spider's, yet it was merely the second leg's shadow, arcing overheard to pierce the spider through its hate-filled eye, leaving it open to the third leg rising from below to reopen its scarred chelicerae. The first leg followed suit, rushing on its original path to stab the spider's remaining chelicerae. All three legs splintered like crushed beams once embedded, giving the frenzied goblin an anchor on which to pull himself free of the 5-meter spider munching on his foot. Claws reared behind him, Leary launched at a blur, and yet a faster blur came from the foot-munching spider, twerking its spinner toward Leary and firing away.
He howled as the waxy webs halted his momentum and reversed it as the spider turned, swinging him through slaves and stalagmite balconies before flinging him across the room as if he was shot out of a catapult. Tumbling and howling, Leary lost himself in his frenzy and became drunk on his faith as he fell deeper into his wrathful pit. He slammed into the wall like a cannonball and then started laughing, uncaring of the boulders falling onto him or the arcane bolts arcing toward him. His voice became rattled and giddy as the waxy webs covering him ignited, making the bone encasing him glow a shade darker than his vibrant yellow ribs as the flames caught the combustable smoke of his bone-based fuel.
Walking with Leary in spirit, I watched the fires spawn in slow motion. Even then, the sparks raced among the lingering gray particulates in the smoke and expanded into a great ball of fire, pancaking the air into a deadly wave that pulverized bones, vaporized flesh, and flung whatever remained toward the inner shell of calcified stone Leary's minions cast over the House. As it rebounded, however, a star shone amidst the chaos.
Glowing from the blue of his Volterum ribs, the Super Villain awoke with a bloodcurdling scream that made the previous explosion seem like a whisper. His arcana rippled down his frame as the empowered sound waves banged at the walls, activating all three of his lumbar vertebrae.
The lowest lashed out from his spine first, spreading silk threads as strong as adamantine among the stone, slaves, and spiders as he pounced. The second swept over his body, growing cruel spikes over his form before he put his bladed fingers, mandibles, and clawed feet into a frenzied dance. He was thrown around as the demon spiders and more powerful drow fought back, but the rubber mana infusions to his 1st lumbar vertebra saw his body compress and coil like a spring before bouncing back at twice the speed to sever or outright bullrush through their defenses. Weaker drow, smaller spiders, and the helpless slaves caught by the metallic silk trailing him, slicing into the enemy and dicing what remained of the environment until all that was attached to the webs were mangled flesh and stone chunks.
Witnessing his efforts, Leary's minions seemed conflicted between following their orders and following the urge to fight for their God-Emperor. The slaves and lesser drow, on the other hand, were showing a tenacity I didn't expect of them; born from the fear of punishment and the promise of death for the former and the refusal to be defeated by a lesser creature for the latter, I assumed. At any rate, such things were beyond their purview, for I alone would judge these souls in life and death; and Leary's familiar ensured they would witness such a defeat.
Dinky, the Dragonimp, skittered up the walls like Cononthoth would, melding with the darkness until he poked his little head out to pierce the air with a grating, warbling roar that belied his size entirely. The spiders reeled, the drow arced their bodies in pain while the slaves clenched and clawed at their ears until they bled. The Minions cheered amidst their pain. I grinned as my wicked mana highlighted the most tactical path. Leary, as always, cackled.
Frenzied off the high of his fully charged Volterum ribs, Leary's spider legs trudged forward with haste, impaling two human slaves before he shot forward like a gunshot, reducing those in his path to a pink mist as he skittered, slid, and spun beneath the large demon spider. The two smaller spiders appeared below and on top of the foul thing a moment later and screeched at the goblin paragon, pushing his glowing chest out as if to taunt them.
They launched simultaneously, albeit in different ways. The one beneath hissed something foul, prompting a nearby drow to launch a fire bolt while the larger spider twerked its ass toward Leary to spew its webs. The one up top then leaped like the jumping spider still in my hair; rocketing at an off angle towards Leary with its dripping fangs extended forward, crossed like drow scimitars.
The webs hit the airborne spider's underside, giving it the lift it needed to close the distance while the fire bolt slammed into its side, igniting its chitinous flesh and putting it on course for Leary. The second spider surged beneath the belly of its larger brethren the moment it ignited, hissing its demands to the drow and their slaves to swarm behind the flaming spider. Then the Darkworld turned white.
The beam ejected from Leary's sternum, seared retinas and stone alike, before the ensuing shockwave could fully form. As I watched it propagate at a crawl, the radiant spear barreled forward, punching through all three spiders before expanding into a colossal pipe that pushed their remains apart and pressed on to vaporize everything standing between Leary and the far wall. The shockwave blasted the blinded faces and armored frames carried forward by their momentum into a wall of viscera that dispersed into a pink mist and onto char and ash as the recoil pushed Leary back. Yet he maintained. Digging in his heels, he leaned back and let out a frenzied roar, raking the beam across House Jusztiir's ceiling until his feet left the ground and the recoil slammed him through the floor. Yet each meter Leary was pushed down was matched a kilometer by his beam, barreling through the Dark Sky in an attempt to breach the Underground.
Of course, not even that much power could bore through a quarter million kilometers of bedrock. But it did dislodge several mountains' worth of stone to fall like rain through the remaining clouds of bone gas spread by Leary's minions, forming the pitter-patter of rocky rain that signaled the end of both this battle and this ancient house.
While loosed stone smashed into the few survivors, the bone gas awaited the wickedness of Leary's voice, calling to the dead to "Kneel," wherein it surged.
It swept among the splintered bones and calcified stone, stripping them bare before attacking the dead en masse. The eldritch smoke seeped into their eyes and mouths, seeming to poison and corrupt their flesh into black, bubbling heaps. As if attracted to it, the floating bits of bone in the air began flowing, aggregating around the bubbling corpses to harden into segmented plates resembling crude goblin forms, no matter if the skeletons they wreathed once belonged to human, dwarf, or elf.
They set to work at once, picking apart the stone to remake the fallen house in Leary's image while his minions returned from their point of retreat to scour the remains for loot. The relative calm pushed the slaves left behind from the furthest reaches of the house, giving them front-row seats of the rocks being pushed apart by a thin bone spire before it split at the base, allowing the man-sized goblin to step out and survey the destruction he'd created.
In the end, while Leary's abilities gave his minions power and knowledge, they were still uneducated, undisciplined, and untrained. Thus, against the drow house with the most surface raids and the most slaves, their losses were around 60%. Conversely, while half of their slaves died, and the rest were soon liberated, only the lesser members of House Everhiryn fell. The sons of House Jusztiir had joined with the rest of Nydorden Halls' monks and their clerical daughters were hiding in G'eldantaar with their mother and the rest of Lilith's clergy. Being only one battle long, it was a brief war, Leary's first; a pyrrhic victory, were he not a necromancer.
Unlike his next war.