A torrent of destruction poured down on the spot the squad had just appeared in, but they were already moving into the serried ranks of undead with murderous intent. The necromancer had vanished somewhere in the crowd.
Fiona peeled off to the right, firing her pistols so fast they sounded like machine guns, and each shot detonated like a cannon. Shards of bone flew into the air from the explosions, but for each cratering hole she blew into the masses of undead, more rushed in to fill it.
To the left, Mikael was carving his way through the horde with lightning quick flashes of his katana. The glowing blue-steel blade cleaved skulls from spines and jagged weapons from hands, but, as with Fiona, for each skeleton he cut down two leaped to take its place, and both were suddenly in danger of being overwhelmed.
In front of Brock, Verdant’s giant construct plunged its arms into the stone, and a forest of impaling brown stakes burst out of the ground. Bodies flew into the air, where they were violently wrenched apart by smaller green vines. Above them, Cap was levitating with her staff held perpendicular in front of her chest, and jagged streaks of lightning blasted down amongst the thickets of thorns. When they sank back into the ground, an area clear of nothing more than drifting bone dust and scorch marks surrounded the group.
A tsunami of fireballs came hurtling in from clusters of undead mages scattered in the distance. Cap spun her staff and a collection of silvery shields appeared in a scintillating dome around the group, deflecting the first salvo, but more were on the way.
“Fiona,” she yelled. “Thin out those ranged ones!”
“Gimme a lift, Verdant,” Fiona called out, holstering her pistols and pulling her sniper rifle off her back. Vines twisted around her legs and midsection, cradling her back, and lifted her into the air. She sighted through the rifle’s scope, then squeezed the trigger.
A thunderous report sent concentric shock rings radiating out from the end of the long barrel, and an eye-searing line snapped into place between Fiona and one of the mage groups. There was a swelling roar, and then a sphere of pure light exploded into existence, vaporizing the skeletal forms. The vine chair Fiona was sitting in swayed back almost entirely to the ground from the recoil, then returned to place. A bead of sweat trickled down the side of her face, and she leaned forward for another shot. Another volley of fireballs arced in from the surviving mages.
“Mikael,” Cap shouted beneath the roar of Fiona’s sniper rifle firing once again, her hands spinning the staff through another deflecting motion, “heavies to the east!”
A trio of lumbering creatures, hideous amalgamations of corrupted flesh and blackened bone nearly three stories tall, were lurching towards them in an ungainly trot. Slobbering mouths covered their irregular limbs, along with wildly rolling eyes, and the wails coming from them sounded like a chorus of dying babies.
Mikael shifted his katana to a two-handed grip, hilt next to his ear, point extending out towards the vile things.
“Ugh. Shoggoths.”
He seemed to flicker slightly, then vanished.
Black and red eruptions appeared amongst the grotesqueries, gigantic razors slashing across limbs and bodies in crosses and crescents. One of the Shoggoths staggered and fell, but the other two began stamping around, and a cloud of evil-looking ashen smoke started issuing from their wailing mouths. Fiona’s sniper rifle hammered the air again, and another blinding explosion turned the cave interior monochromatic.
When the light cleared, the other two creatures were down, and Mikael had reappeared beneath Cap. A streak of blood covered the right side of his face, and his black tactical gear had several rents and tears in it.
“Hate Shoggoths,” he muttered.
More fireballs splashed against Cap’s silvery shields, a horde of skeletons scrambling towards them beneath the billowing flames. Despite not having lungs, inhuman shrieks echoed from their leering skulls, and they brandished cruel axes and swords, their ragged black cloaks streaming out behind them.
Cap snapped her staff out in a scything sweep. Thousands of rainbow darts sprayed into the onrushing figures and exploded in a rippling burst of color that sent them flying through the air, disintegrating as they fell. Those that survived kept advancing, but were quickly engulfed by the sudden appearance of white and pink flowers twice their size, their thorny teeth crunching and splintering through bone and armor.
Another round of fireballs came crashing in, this time accompanied by surges of crackling lightning and freezing ice. The silver shields held, but contracted closer to the group. Up in the air, Cap staggered, then lost some altitude, while Fiona slammed out another sniper blast.
“Anyone see the Overlord?” Cap yelled, scanning the battlefield. Strands of hair whipped around her face from the constant explosions, flying free from her beret.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Nothing over here,” Mikael growled, katana periodically licking out another sickle of force into the advancing undead.
“Negative, Cap,” Fiona called, swinging back up from the recoil, “and I’m not having any luck thinning out those mages.”
Below her, Verdant’s plant golem shook its head side to side. Cap placed her staff to the side, still floating in midair, and gathered her loose hair back under her cap.
“Time to step it up a notch, then. Let’s force that fucker out.”
“Shit yeah!” Fiona cheered, waving her rifle in the air enthusiastically. Verdant lowered her to the ground, golem vines shrinking and condensing into the small figurine that Brock had seen earlier, and an emerald glow appeared in the formerly empty eye sockets, fire burning in its depths. Fiona holstered her sniper rifle and clapped her hands. A sequence of golden numbers circled her body, and then her equipment was gone, replaced with a set of golden knuckles on each hand, and a lustrous sheen around her combat boots.
Next to them, Mikael’s lips peeled back in a wolf-tooth grin. He brought his katana up in front of his face, then twisted his hands on the hilt. When he pulled the left one off, it was holding a photo-negative copy of the blue-black blade in his right, and a series of geometric tattoos in pearlescent light glowed down the left side of his face and neck.
In the air, Cap grabbed her staff and started whirling it in a circle, faster and faster in spinning blurs until it was barely visible as a shimmer in the air in front of her.
Then she took her hands off the staff.
It continued hovering in front of her at first, then started rotating and picking up speed until it seemed like she was hidden behind a shimmering field in the air. Runic diagrams in concentric circles appeared above and below her, casting out brilliant cerulean light.
“Find him,” she ordered.
Mikael disappeared from sight, and a quarter of the cavern become a howling barrage of black-red white-purple energies. Stone shrieked overhead, and chunks of ceiling over the chaos started raining down. A small figure, trailing white and black afterimages, could be seen flickering in and out of the fray, dual swords in constant motion like mirror images of each other.
Fiona dashed in the other direction, fists clenched to her face like a prize-fighter. After covering half the distance to the undead troops threatening from that area, she slid to a halt. She bounced back and forth, then knocked herself on the chin twice, once with each hand. Satisfied, she threw a jab with her left hand.
A hypersonic railgun round lashed out, punching through an entire column of undead, and she rolled her shoulders.
“Guess that’ll do for a warmup.”
The goblin launched into a flurry of combinations. A right cross ended in a depleted uranium tank shell that obliterated over a hundred figures, followed by a left uppercut of shotgun blasts that launched the surviving front line into the air, who were quickly cut down by a spinning roundhouse kick of mini-gun lasers spraying out like a firehose. She continued attacking her way forward, hooks and backhands and high kicks unleashing a steady stream of kinetic devastation that carved great holes in the oncoming horde.
The fire in Verdant’s doll’s eyes flared even brighter, and a third quarter of the necromancer’s troops rose slowly into the air with confused expressions. It looked like they were being dragged upwards by their ubiquitous ragged black cloaks.
Suddenly, they started smashing against the ceiling and the floor of the chamber, back and forth, at an extremely high rate of speed. After a couple seconds, all that moved was dust and scattered bone fragments still vibrating to a halt.
The necromancer was not among them.
Cap’s visible eye narrowed, staff still blurring around her.
“Guess you’re mine, then.”
She snapped a finger, silver charms jangling, and the air shimmered over the remaining undead, condensing into a swirling ball that bent the light around it. She snapped again, and the sphere exploded into an enormous cyclone filled with shadowy figures of red smoke, gray teeth and eyes made of jagged lightning.
When it dissipated, there was nothing left but scoured stone.
“Where is he,” she yelled.
“Where I’ve always been. Right here.”
The necromancer stepped out of Brock’s shadow, still covered in layers of rainbow light, and his unctuous expression turned Brock’s stomach to lead. He tried desperately to break free of his stasis, but as before, he was unsuccessful. The decrepit old man started cackling, his right hand draped over Brock’s shoulder.
“Of course it was that simple,” he laughed, “you NPCs always only see what you’re allowed to see.”
Fiona was the first to react, unleashing a hurricane of palm strikes and front kicks that created a storm of hypervelocity projectiles whip-cracking the air, all targeted at the necromancer’s head. Each round froze an inch before his face, still glowing superheated red, until there was a slowly spinning ball of collected munitions. They vanished with a soft pop. The necromancer shook his head in mock sadness.
Mikael came slashing in with his swords, intense concentration creasing his face, but they bounced off the necromancer as if he was made of rubber. Brock felt like he was in the middle of a threshing machine. Somehow, neither of the blades touched him.
“Tsk, tsk,” the necromancer waggled his finger sternly, “that’s not going to work either. I am-”
A writhing tangle of barbed branches slammed down from above, carnivorous flowers gnashing along their lengths, but they desiccated into ash and dust upon touching the necromancer’s form.
“-perfectly ready. Aha. Ahaha. AhahahaHAHA!”
Cap crossed her wrists and melted the stone beneath the necromancer’s feet into a whirlpool of spitting magma and clutching fiery hands, but he froze it solid with a careless wave of his hand, giggling the entire time.
“NPCs never understand,” he whispered. “Once you figure out their patterns, it’s too easy.”
The necromancer withdrew a small crystal carved to look like an hourglass from his robes, then crushed it between his fingers. Instantly, Cap and the others stopped in place, weapons outstretched, caught in the same stasis that was afflicting Brock.
Everything fell silent. Jagged rents and craters pockmarked the chamber’s entire interior, smooth stone reduced to piles of rubble and gaping chasms. Mountains of bone were littered everywhere, heaped in great mounds and drifts, but other than the necromancer, nothing moved.
“As I told you.” The ominous form bent down next to Brock’s ear, an unholy light gleaming from his eyes. “I am perfectly ready for anything, Brock.”