The eagle circled around every so often, swooping in to dislodge the stone pillar. The flesh weaver had infected and altered so many orcs around it, creating a circle of safety for itself. Of course, that didn’t concern any of the chosen. No zombie could stand for long against the chosen. It was very clear that the death knight understood that.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t have arrayed a small cadre of unhappy looking Orcs around himself.
It didn’t really matter much to Anthony.
A couple of weeks ago, Anthony had asked the dwarves to make him a powerful weapon that he could use in close range. He was tired of the spear.
Using his bending abilities as a martial art, he could wield the sword effectively in training and, because a lot of his skills transferred over from one weapon system to the other; he lost nothing in his attack.
As he approached, a hulking brute of an orc abomination took the time out of his day to welcome him. It threw down, trying to smash him into bits.
Anthony sidestepped it, cutting across two muscular arms. For a second, the abomination looked at its arms, then returned to trying to crush him. Anthony smiled.
“All this attention for little old me?”
The zombie raged, bellowing in his face as he severed its legs. Without hands to stop itself or legs to keep it up, the zombie quickly. Toppled.
Anthony saw his next target and clove through that as well. Around him, he filled in the gaps in the door. Though most of the dwarves used axes, enough used bows and swords to back him up. A line formed behind him as the airships above descended to create a safe landing space behind them. Two more airships were on a unload path.
He would need the help. Evermore abominations continue to charge at the dwarves. The line held, but Anthony wished they the motherfuckers were defending instead of attacking.
Pulling once again on his spell casting ability, Anthony reached deep to slice a portal through a 3 m tall abomination.
Blood and guts oozed all over the place and he was certain that if he hadn’t already thrown up, he would have done it again.
He steeled his resolve.
The Giant eagle made another pass. Anthony stepped back, firing a holy Magic Bolt at an encroaching abomination. They were slow and large, but his people were agile and fast. He saw more than a few dwarves using Earth powers to move zombies together.
Without them, they probably wouldn’t have those cards. Anthony does a line in his And Sophie’s ship.
He didn’t have an empty sight of where the death knight had to be. Based on the vector of their attack, he created a portal to he presumed it was. The abomination that was trying to assault him cut itself around the aperture of the gate before it winked out.
But for a moment there, he saw the intelligent eyes of a death knight. The sight shocked him.
“Good,” he said. “I will fear no man or orc because I’m the baddest mother fucker in this land.”
He didn’t need the world line to see where the other side of his portal was. There was just a mountain of flesh between them and the death knight.
Anthony got to work.
----------------------------------------
For a moment, Sophie, since the death knight from two directions and had to adjust her aim. Then she realized that there was a gate spell. Sophie realized that somebody was figuring out what the eagle knew. And what the eagle knew had to be the location of the death knight because both she and the eagle were on the attack.
“Circle around there!” She yelled, casting a purple mage light over the death knight.
“Aye, ma’am!”
Immediately, the airship banked sharply, focusing all its side cannons on the light. Even as her Mana returned to her, she was to cast things. She dug deep, remembering how it had been before and how much she had taken to get here. Here. Every single day that she had been out in the wilderness, not knowing if she was going to survive. Had rocked her to her core. And now, now that they were so close to the end, she could feel her resolve. Resolve. It might be iron, but it was heavy.
But it was only heavy for the old Sophie.
Sophie struggled for the briefest moment before firing a bolt of lightning down beneath her purple mage light. If it was connected, she didn’t know. But it sure as heck made a brilliant display, and all the doors now knew what to attack.
The barrage continued.
---
Sonya ship. And the crew were on Dragon detail and crowd control
Sophie had her ship in a tight circle around what had to be the death knight. That meant that Sonya and her crew were going to go counterclockwise in the opposite direction that Sophie was going in order to cover more ground and keep the dwarves safe. In practical terms, she was worried that the two airships would run into each other, but they changed their altitude so that Sonya’s ship was higher.
With three air ships continually firing down on the area of the death night had holed up in, it was apparent that he had encased himself in a mountain of flesh.
Sonya sighed.
It was just like what she assumed was a man to create a zombie army in a mountain of flesh to in case himself in instead of going to therapy.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
But now? Aboard ship she had dubbed ‘court ordered therapy’ She would give it exactly what needed.
And what it needed at that moment was for them to destroy layer after layer of viscera. Orcish muscle and fat from what had to be hundreds of bodies piled atop each other grotesquely just had to be burnt.
For the first time in her meteoric career as a world-saving hero, Sonia wished for the evil powers to use black flame on her enemies. Was she going to have those powers? No. But she really wanted them and it would have been really great if she had gotten a card at exactly that time with those specifications.
----------------------------------------
In the end, Anthony had to burn it down. Dozens of dwarves encircled the death at night. Flames sprouted from every single dwarf of the fire, bending the card, pushing the mountain of flesh inside as it condensed itself deeper and deeper. Scorched flesh, the smell of which would never leave Anthony’s brain for the rest of his life, burnt up into the air.
The barrage from above kept them safe, even as Anthony tapped himself near dry of mana. It was just like a death knight to make a ridiculous situation even worse. And this was the being that had asked for a duel with Bob. This death knight should have thought. Bob’s Eldritch companion. That was the only being that would be capable of doing this in any amount of time.
Over the next 10 minutes, the mountain of flesh slowly weathered away under their barrage until nearly every single orc around them finally reverted to a mindless zombie.
Anthony fell to his knees, taking a second to praise Yil, his patron diet.
He was hoping for a quest reward, but he would take whatever was offered. But before he could even think about our award, he assessed the surrounding dwarves. Dozens of dwarfs had stood side to buy side with him during this dark hour. Even a few handfuls of lizard folk had joined them in this fight. And as he watched, a giant eagle landed in front of him. He expected one of his druids. Though he never seen Finley's wild shape. He knew the druid could if he wanted to. Instead, the eagle turned into an orc.
The orc collapsed in front of him, and he healed it.
“Oh Yil, are you okay?” He said.
“Are you a chosen?” The orc asked.
“I am,” he said. “And you’re safe now.”
The orc, a grown man and nothing but a line cloth, sagged into his arms. Though he was physically healthy, it looked like his recovery was going to take some time.
Seeing and opening, Anthony looked for the newest goat. He flagged down one of the goat dwarves and the man came running over.
“I’m going to need you to call for help. It looks like there was another area code here and I don’t think we can take every one without help. Can you signal the airships that were going to make a retreat in?..”
He pointed northeast, the direction they had come from. It would be the best option for them to make a hasty retreat.
Then, several hundred Orcs appeared next to the dwarves. Instantly, hands were up returning the weapons, and Anthony was on his feet again. He thought that all the intelligent Orcs had gone away and then he realized that every single one of those Orcs was alive.
He began to tear up.
“Get them over here,” he said to one of the dwarf sergeants.
“But they’re undead?”
“Those are not undead Orcs. Those are friends,” he said. “We need to welcome our friends and set a perimeter. There’s no way that we’re going to take off with all these people. Earth benders to me!”
----------------------------------------
Sonya watched as the living Orcs joined the dwarves. The clearing around the death knight now was so populated that it looked like a small festival. And that was when what she knew was Dwarven. Earth benders had shaped walls around them. She knew Anthony was going to insist that she help, so she began designing around what they were doing and cementing it into place with rocks.
It took them five minutes to build one wall and fortify it. Within fifteen, they had three with a door that they were defending against the rest of the zombies.
Then, fires were lit, and they constructed a last wall.
Dwarves had already gotten on top of the wall and created a safe zone for the Orcs.
That was when Sonya dropped.
“What is going on with all these Orcs?”
“Sophie must have done it.”
Sonya leveled a gaze at him, trying to turn him into stone. It didn’t work, but she didn’t expect it to. It would have been nice, though. Anthony did like it when the thought counted, but so did Sonya.
“So this is a bunch of Orcs. How about we take them someplace else? This is not the safest or most defensible space.”
“Think that they’re just going to follow along with us and dip into another area. I mean, I guess we could try. Hey orc guys, you guys all want to go on a little gate trip real quick to a safe spot? We’ve got delicious meat!”
Anthony might not have been getting through to them, but several dwarves asked the surrounding Orcs the same question. Then it was a matter of getting people to just get inside of the portals, while saving enough Defenders so they didn’t get overrun. Sonya created a gate between where they were and the workshop at the promontory, so they would spit out hundreds of miles away.
“You know that I fucking love you, right?” He said,
“All I know is that you don’t say that shit enough, boo.”
Anthony and Sonya stayed till the end and left with the last squad of dwarves.
“You know what? I just thought of something. This is going to be very difficult for Finley to feed this many Orcs all at once.”
“What we have now is someone else’s problem. How about the two of us celebrate our victory?”
----------------------------------------
There was no time for family to celebrate anyone’s victory. He had nearly doubled the amount of mouths that he needed to feed in one day. Well, it wasn’t him that had made that change. A certain coat. Lord had decided that today was the day that it was going to shower. Its people with gifts. And those gifts comprised about 1,000 Orcs. Every single orc that passed through the gate with the returning Champions of the Dwarven people needed the place to stay and three or four meals a day.
It turned out that being a zombie for a while made one starving. When one wasn’t subsisting solely on magical means, things changed. This meant that Zan was shuffling Finley back and forth to Sunderland to get as much meat as possible, as fast as possible. In fact, for the first time since he’d known him, the velociraptor meat vendor had shut up.
It was a momentous occasion. Instead of trying to make endless jokes about shoving his meat into people’s mouths, he was struggling to fill the requests that were coming in.
There was too much meat in the grinder.
There were other things that needed to happen when that many enlightened joined a group. Most of the Orcs didn’t have clothing and, without a way to transfer them back to the Capitol real quick just to pop over and get their wardrobes back, he was going to have to increase manufacturing of textiles.
If there was one thing that Finley hated, it was being in the air. If there were two things, it was orc accountants. But if he extended that metaphor, the third thing that he hated was dealing with textiles.
Friendly hated having to deal with people who created cloth and fabric. They treated their dish towels as artistic masterpieces, believing they should never be sullied. Of course, he would never say such things in front of them. Not wanting to be subject to that kind of scrutiny, Finley let them know in other ways.
He sent out a message, searching for any dwarves with the skills to make clothing for the Orcs, as well as asking Borgan and Song to organize their brothers and sisters.
The two Orcs from the green Fang tribe took to the organization with a fervor that Finley had only seen in their art. Finley loved good art from skilled performers like the bards of the Green fang.
It took nearly all day to get the food to them and without the help of the Yellow Tail tribe, many of the Orcs would still be grumbling. Finally thanked his helpers. Tumble and Fen before he let them collapse next to the workshop. On this side of the gate, there was too much to do. They would return to Sunderland later to get more food. The Yellow Tail tribe was going to increase their hunts in response to this additional need to feed so many mouths.
They would make money, so much money that it made Finley sick to think about it.