A press of bodies formed on either side of the foothold the creatures had gotten on the wall. Guards and militiamen surged forward, propelled by adrenaline and desperation as they launched themselves into the fray. The fear that had suffused them in the earlier stages of the battle was still there, but now it was tempered by action. They were bystanders no more.

Daniel passed the governor, who the watchman Captain Vymes had stopped. He was shouting at her now, telling her it was too dangerous to get involved herself.

Daniel brandished his sword. Or Telann’s sword—to be precise—but it certainly felt like his at that moment. Even more so than during the duel, it was an extension of his body. The memories were there at his fingertips, lending him the instincts of a man who’d practiced with this blade since childhood. And yet, it was something more than that. He wasn’t just some vicar for the late duke. He felt more… in control.

The instincts were his, yes, but he wasn’t the man who had developed those instincts. They were tools at his command, but Daniel was still the one that would have to use them.

As Daniel reached the back of the crushing mass of bodies, several more many-limbed humanoid figures were lifted onto the wall. Meeting immediate resistance from the defending soldiers, one launched itself over their heads, stepping on the back of one unlucky man and landing behind them, right next to Daniel.

Daniel struck at the very moment it landed, while most of its limbs were still busy absorbing the impact with the ground. His sword bit deep into one of its shoulders, causing the arm to spasm as tendons were cut.

The creature’s face turned toward him. It had been a human face, once. A woman just passed her middle years, bearing her first few wrinkles but without the frailty that would come later. Would have come later, if not for the fate that had befallen her.

Now, her face was slack, expressionless. Her eyes were glazed over and her graying hair was a wild unkempt tangle. There was nothing human in her expression anymore. Even rage or savage glee would have been a comforting sight in comparison to this total neutrality.

The creature that had once been a woman lurched toward him. Daniel danced back, his sword licking outward to punish the reckless advance. It caught her along the face, easily slicing the flesh along her cheek and jaw.

The creature did not react. It kept scrambling toward him, forcing Daniel back against the rampart.

There was nowhere left to run. Cornered, Daniel responded like an animal in a trap. He lashed out.

In the sports he’d played growing up, Daniel had heard it said that “the best defense is a good offense.” As often as not, amateurs said it to excuse their lackluster defense, but there was a degree of truth to the maxim. It went deeper than the pithy acknowledgment that you didn’t need to stop your opponent from scoring points as long as you could score faster than they could. There was a psychological component. Something about facing fast, ruthless aggression tended to throw people off, to induce mistakes that they otherwise wouldn’t make as they frantically tried to protect themselves.

And so, when Daniel lunged to meet the twisted flesh creature and sank nearly a foot of steel into its abdomen, he expected a reaction. He expected it to flail back or at least wince. If it didn’t die right there, he at least expected it to give him some space out of newfound respect for his ability to wound it.

The abomination did none of these things.

Daniel’s strike would have killed any mortal human, but the creature hardly reacted at all. Apparently, with its altered biology it didn’t keep the essentials in quite the same places.

Daniel felt the creature’s limbs close around him in a crushing embrace. It forced him backward against the stone rampart, and pain shot through his abdomen. In shock, some part of Daniel remembered an anatomy class and decided that one of his ribs had probably cracked.

White-hot pain blossomed in his right hand as it was ground into the stone by one of the creature’s unnaturally clawed feet.

This is it, he thought. This is how I die. I’m sorry Telann, I should have done more with this chance I took from you. He waited for the creature to tear out his heart, or crush his skull, or do whatever it intended to do to finish him off.

Instead, something struck the creature from behind. It turned to face the new threat. A guardsman was hacking away at it with an axe, chopping through the flesh like the wood of a rotten tree.

Daniel slid down the wall to the ground, gasping and clutching his injured hand. His fingers didn’t quite respond the way they should, and it was covered in blood. His own blood.

As he tried to summon the strength to rise to his feet again, he watched the battle between the axe-wielding guardsman and the creature. The man was doing a lot more damage than Daniel had, and a few of the extraneous limbs now hung limp, the musculature that controlled them savaged beyond function.

Unfortunately, the fight wasn’t fair for long. A nine-foot-tall behemoth had somehow made its way up the wall and was forcing back the guardsmen, freeing another humanoid creature to come to aid the first in its struggle against the axe-wielding soldier. The combined force of two was too much for the man, and he was quickly overwhelmed.

Daniel gritted his teeth, summoning the strength to gather his legs under him. The sounds of battle filled the wall. This was not done yet.

He saw the creatures tear into the body of the man that had saved him, shoving his flesh into their wounds to replenish what they had lost.

This was Daniel’s first time seeing it so close, and he watched in horror as the blood oozing from the abominations’ wounds came to life, writhing out to knit together with the spilled blood of the soldier.

Nausea swept through Daniel.

It was a sickening sight, an image he would not soon forget. And yet, that nausea did not feel entirely natural. It was distinct in its way from anything he’d felt before, but reminiscent of how he felt around Arnica, around Eijah.

Of course, he thought. They use magic to graft the flesh. How else would they do it?

The image of those foul creatures ripping apart his savior ignited a rage in him. Daniel clenched his injured hand into a loose approximation of a fist, and blood flowed from the wound like water. Daniel took one wobbly step forward, then another.

The creatures ignored him at first as they feasted on the fallen soldier in their grotesque way.

Daniel braced himself, then shoved his mangled hand deep into the side of one of the creatures, right where it had been wounded by the dead man’s axe.

Would it work? Daniel had no idea. But if it didn’t, he was just as likely to die anyway, right? Better to try something, even if that something was insane.

The creature’s flesh squirmed around him. He felt pressure then, and the sensation of a thousand needles pricking his wound. The sickening pain of magic overwhelmed him, radiating from his hand and suffusing every fiber of his being. His blood pulled away from his body as the abomination’s own blood tried to join with it.

A foreign presence touched the edge of his mind. For just a moment, he felt thoughts that were so close to being comprehensible and yet weren’t. It was cold, calculating, and massive. The presence pulled away as fast as it had appeared.

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The twisted creature screamed. It was the first vocalization he’d heard from one of them. The cry was warped and strange, coming from vibrating flesh as much as from what was left of its throat.

It convulsed and began to come apart at the seams. First, the flesh it had recently added from the dead soldier fell off, then more pieces began to fall away, lifeless. Mere seconds after Daniel had introduced his blood to its system, the creature was barely recognizable, just a disjointed pile of flesh, separate from the abomination once more.

They used magic to keep themselves together. What happened, then, when they tried to absorb something that magic rejected altogether?

Daniel hadn’t known whether or not it would work. That stupid knot of courage somewhere deep inside him had urged him forward though, urged him to take the kind of risk taken by someone likely to die anyway. Why not stick your hand in the hellish flesh monster?

The creature’s companion turned toward him then, paying him mind for the first time. This one had rent its skin to graft in pieces from the corpse. Before it could react, Daniel jumped forward and pressed his hand to one of the tears, just as he had before.

Thankfully its reaction was similar, and soon Daniel stood in the middle of a pile of putrid flesh. That foreign mind was there again, and there was mutual recognition.

When he was sure the creature was dead, he spared a moment to look at the face of the guardsman who had saved him, one of the few parts of the body that was left intact. He committed it to memory. This man had died in his place. He deserved not to be forgotten, at least.

Farther along the wall, Deirdre seemed to be rallying her troops, beating back a few of the things and chopping them to pieces. The more immediate threat was that behemoth. It had crushed the soldiers opposing it, and it seemed to have identified Daniel as its next target.

Daniel hefted his sword in his good hand, cradling the injured one. It was still bleeding. Good.

The behemoth approached. Its barrel-shaped torso was large and patchy, with animal hair in some places and various shades of human skin. Its two legs seemed to be from a cow or moose, but its thighs were bulging with extra muscle, and a second pair of shins and calves diverged at its knees to support its weight. Three bulging arms were set in the front of its chest.

As it approached, Daniel realized to his dismay that he couldn’t see any obvious wounds. He would need to make one himself. If he tried to let the creature absorb him of its own accord, it would likely kill him first. Not Daniel’s preferred outcome.

The beast swung one meaty fist down like a hammer, cracking the stones where Daniel had been standing moments before. He shifted to the left, stepping inward to close the distance between him and the monster.

He ducked a lateral swing from another arm, but not quite in time. It grazed the top of his head and Daniel sprawled to the ground, his vision swimming.

The gigantic creature loomed above him, ready to crush Daniel into a fine paste.

Deirdre got there first.

She wore no armor and held only a shortsword and feeble buckler that looked like it would struggle to stop a round from a paintball gun.

It didn’t matter.

She was a whirlwind of gray hair and bright steel. The behemoth’s face was incapable of expressing emotion, but there was no mistaking the frustration in the way it reeled about, trying to land a solid blow on its much smaller opponent.

It made sense now, that Telann had admired Deirdre the way he had. She fought with artistry that no one on this battlefield but Captain Diallos could have challenged, and perhaps not even him. What must she have been like in her prime, back when she had fought as a soldier, an elite for that old emperor in his wars of conquest?

Daniel wondered if she had partaken in some magic herself since then, as the alacrity and power of her movements belied her age.

A swipe from her shortsword severed one of the creature’s four calves, spraying blood across the stone floor. That shocked Daniel to his senses. She was faring well, but she could hardly chop this huge monster to pieces the way she had done to the little ones.

He scrambled to his feet and darted forward, head and shoulders low like a football player bracing for contact. His shoulders struck the creature at its injured knee and he shoved his hand into the mess of blood. He felt that consciousness again, those stinging needles, the overwhelming discomfort of sorcery.

Seconds later, the thing collapsed, thankfully missing Daniel with its fall. All structural integrity fled its massive body, and by the time it finished, he could hardly tell that the pieces had once belonged to a single creature.

Deirdre used the leg of her mayor’s uniform to wipe the gore off her shortsword. The Konti militia’s counteroffensive had been successful, taking back the space they’d lost along the wall. The tower of flesh was still there, but the soldiers below—both living and undead—had beaten back enough of the enemy that new foes were no longer climbing it.

Farther out stood the smooth-skinned figure that Arnica had identified as the heart of this abomination. Bright-armored Captain Diallos was on his knees several meters away. He was missing an arm, and wide gauges had been carved all along his body. If he hadn’t been dead before, the deed had been done several times over now. And yet, he struggled on, crawling towards the tall abomination.

That eyeless face was not staring at its challenger, however. It was facing the wall, facing Daniel. He remembered the presence he felt when he had destroyed the monstrous creatures. He got the feeling that he was looking at its source. Diallos lurched toward the abomination again. The creature glanced toward him, then back at Daniel. It cocked its head, as if curious.

Then, it turned and ran. It wasn’t a frightened run, but the smooth gait of a creature that had somewhere it wanted to go, like a predator deciding not to pursue a particular prey animal. Its legs were so long, and its movements so swift, that in mere moments it was already disappearing into the distance.

The governor raised an eyebrow at him. “How did you do that?” she asked, gesturing to the pile of collapsed flesh.

Daniel shrugged, fighting off the exhaustion that came from subjecting himself to the abomination’s magic. “I don’t know how to explain,” he said between breaths.

“Can you do it again?” she asked.

Daniel nodded, placing his hands on his knees. “They need to be bleeding,” he said.

Deirdre bared her teeth in a grin. “I’m good at that.”

----------------------------------------

Daniel kneeled shivering in a thick miasma of blood, flesh, and mud. The soldiers of the sixth had taken down most of the creatures by now, but his intervention had been necessary to finish off several of the larger ones. He coughed, and he couldn’t tell if the blood that sprayed was his own, or if some of the creatures’ remains had gotten in his mouth.

Taur crouched at his side. The man had survived, thankfully, and had found Daniel nearly as soon as he’d descended to the battlefield. The big man boasted several wounds, but Daniel had been glad to see that none were life-threatening.

Deirdre stood to his side, keeping a careful eye on their surroundings as a dozen city guardsmen kept a careful eye on her. She didn’t entirely trust that the heart of the abomination had truly fled. Daniel was though. The consciousness he felt when he destroyed these beings felt more distant than it had before.

He rose unsteadily, waving off help from Taur. The battle had been won, and the Sixth Army had managed to isolate and surround many of the remaining creatures, hacking them apart with axes and swords. When enough of their flesh had been destroyed, they died just as anything else did.

Daniel caught a glimpse of Arnica approaching, her face even paler than usual. Well, they died just as most things did.

While most of the soldiers whose souls she’d bound to their bodies stood with their old units, many were trailing in her wake, sensing somehow that she was responsible for their condition.

She stopped in front of Daniel, crossing her arms. She nodded to the mound of flesh beside him. A mound that had once been a hulking tower of flesh.

“This will be difficult to explain,” she said.

“It’s not the only thing,” Daniel replied, waving to her train of walking corpses.

She looked back at them and sighed. “The ritual’s power is running out,” she said. “They’ll be on their way soon. It’s for the best. The dead shouldn’t spend too much time with the living, or vice versa.”

Daniel thought that she did not speak as quietly as she probably should have.

“What?” one of the undead croaked. He was a young man, maybe fifteen or sixteen. His armor was soaked red from a broad gut wound. That was a nasty way to go.

“I’m going to die?” he asked. “I don’t want to die.”

Arnica met his gaze, her expression softening. “You already have,” she told him.

The boy’s face went slack, and while no tears could escape his eyes Daniel could hear choked sobs coming from the dead soldier’s throat.

“But my mother,” he whispered, “I promised her. I told her I’d come home. I told her I’d be a hero…”

Daniel looked away, fighting tears of his own. So much death. So much pain. His reverie was interrupted by the sound of approaching hooves. Lord Arlan Diallos, the army’s commander, with his honor guard. Daniel expected him to come to a stop by their little group, but he rode right past. Daniel was surprised, but glad. He wasn’t in a mood to deal with that fop.

Instead, Arlan rode closer to the city, stopping in front of a tattered soldier in bright armor. Captain Diallos, Arlan’s cousin. What remained of the cavalry already surrounded their captain, and they stepped back to make space for their lord commander.

“He cannot speak,” Taur said, following Daniel’s gaze. “His neck wound prevents him. I already tried, once the tall thing left.”

Daniel watched as Arlan dismounted. It looked like he said something to the captain that Daniel couldn’t hear. Then, the cousins embraced.

“The power dissipates,” Arnica said, her own exhaustion apparent in her voice. She was with the young soldier. The necromancer rested her fingers on the boy’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

Like puppets whose strings had been cut, the undead soldiers collapsed to the ground, returned once more to their natural state.