“O Humanos, O Humanos! The plague came and took our young ‘uns! Where are my ancestors?” the humans sang as they merrily marched through the deadlands. Their cheerful attitude was contrasted by dull, silent gray army led by Exarchi at the front.
“What do you think of ol’ Kentfeared song, lad?” Oyuf asked.
“It’s quite an interesting… song,” Exarchi commented, holding back his urge to say ‘noise’ instead of song.
“That’s good to hear! It spread along the lands of the Marcher Lords centuries ago, and I can proudly say that it’s one of the traditional folk songs sung throughout Vyssium!”
“I see.” Exarchi nodded apathetically.
“And you, lad? Got any songs from your people?”
Exarchi shook his hand dismissively and replied, “My people don’t do songs.”
“What? That’s utter nonsense. How do people live without the joys of song and dance?”
“They just do. Now, tell your men to quiet down. We’re about to enter hostile territory,” Exarchi warned to which Oyuf followed through.
An hour of marching later, Exarchi ordered the army to stop. The drone commander pointed at the horizon and told his human counterpart, “Towards that direction, there is an army of approximately a thousand undead.”
“A one-to-two disadvantage! I like that! Humanos will greet me gladly!” Oyuf said as he pulled out his axe.
“You’re no use to me dead. Follow my command and you will be victorious.”
“That’s-”
“In addition, you and your men will be lavished with ancient loot accumulated by the undead lords, of course.”
“I’ve got no arguments with that!” Oyuf cheered loudly with his men.
After a stern warning to keep quiet, the army moved into position to ambush the unwary undead.
At the other side of the field, the undead had gathered into organized formations. Though their equipment were decrepit and rusted, they still looked much better equipped compared to the other undead which roamed the barren wastelands. Abovehead, crows circled the zombies in the sky.
The unliving soldiers formed a circle around a band of horsemen. Even with their masks and helmets, they still couldn’t hide their pale skin and green glowing eyes. One even had a missing arm.
“I still don’t understand how Lord Tanne lost his fort to the heretics,” one of the horsemen complained. “This loss is a great hit to the Nobility! It’s bad enough that the Clergy treats us like second-class citizens in our own empires, but this…”
“We’ve lost land many times before, we’ve always taken them back,” a nobleman added.
“But we’ve never lost a fort before, my fellow lord!”
“But Lord Tanne said that this is a new adversary we’re facing. Even Brother Farold is unsure of what to make of this,” a third one chimed in.
“Bah! It doesn’t matter. We’ll have to fix the mess of that incompetent fool! Anyway, where is the Clergy?!”
A nobleman coughed and reported, “My lord, the priests will arrive in approximately four days’ time.”
“Those gospel-obsessed fools seemed to enjoy taking their time doing anything and everything! In the first place, the frontline is handled by those pesky devout fools! If they didn’t fall, Lord Tanne wouldn’t have lost his fort in the first place!”
“Aye!”
“The Clergy’s at fault, not us!”
“May the Light judge them wisely!”
The noblemen continued to grumble in dissatisfaction until one of them horsemen noticed something was wrong. He bobbed his head around as if he was checking the weather. The undead lord got off his horse then planted his hand against the ground.
“Lord Fors, is there something wrong?”
“I sense-... I sense mortals!” the nobleman growled as he got back on his horse.
“The fools wish to serve the Church, so we will oblige gladly!” someone roared. The undead noblemen started returning to their respective armies but before they could do anything, the crows flying above began screeching.
“W-What?! The enemy approaches!” one of the undead leaders announced.
“How did they get past our detection?!”
“We’ve no time to ponder on these things! Gather your levy!”
The undead formed up to face their adversaries - rows of unknown men clad in chainmail armed with axes and large round shields. There were no formalities involved. Both sides marched towards each other without hesitation.
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Within seconds, the enemy’s shieldwall rammed straight into the undead’s pike wall. Normally nigh unstoppable, the undead’s rigid pike wall was proving nothing to be a minor nuisance to their foes. Bodies were skewered but the enemy acted more like the undead than the undead themselves!
When the armored men managed to get close enough to the undead lines, the effects were devastating. Line after line of zombies were cut apart, though the undead still held their ground thanks to the fact that they didn’t suffer from fear or loss of morale. To add to that, their advanced segmented plate armor helped in negating some of the damage done.
The undead crows were proving themselves to be as useful as a pebble thrown at a forest fire. They couldn’t get too close as the enemy archers seemed to hit them with eagle-eye precision.
The undead nobles had a hard time trying to fight off this unrelenting foe as they usually didn’t have a problem routing their foes within seconds. One of them grit their teeth and shouted angrily towards the field of gray, “Show yourself, you warlock! How dare you summon this army of demons!”
Meanwhile, atop a hill, the so-called ‘warlock’ was leisurely watching the battle unfold. Exarchi observed how the undead moved in great detail and analyzed them in real-time. “Interesting. It’s possible that the commanding units also known as ‘liches’ have greater control over these undead. But what makes these liches different from the ones we’ve encountered before?”
He couldn’t help but think back to the time he besieged the undead castle. Instead of fighting to the last as expected, the undead opted to retreat in one piece. “Is it possible that, like us, they have different variations of liches? We should study them, perhaps even kidnap one of them.”
“This unit is awaiting orders to kidnap entities identified as lich,” a bodyguard responded.
“We can do that once we destroy their lesser undead units. Speaking of which, they have quite a surprisingly good armor. We should study them as well and bring the information back home as soon as possible,” Exarchi mused.
“Command Unit Exarchi, the humans are in place,” a thane reported.
“Send them to the side. Humans are useless in frontal assaults,” Exarchi ordered. The drone commander hoped to encircle the undead and smash them all before the next batch of troublesome flesh-bags arrive, but just like before, his enemy started to retreat. “What? Again?! Such inconsistencies in behavior patterns!”
“Any changes in command?” his thane asked.
“Luckily for me, I planned for this. Initiate Plan Beta-2! Break formation and destroy as many of them as possible!” Exarchi commanded. “It seems that the enemy has an acceptable level of intelligence. This will make fights much more… interesting.”
The undead pulled back one by one. Some forces were left to hold back the drone army, but most of them managed to escape. Both drones and undead lacked the need for stamina so eventually the faster and less-encumbered undead managed to outpace Exarchi’s forces. Unable to chase the undead further into their territory, Exarchi had no choice but to call off the chase. His goal wasn’t the total destruction of the undead forces, anyway.
The humans scrambled to loot the battlefield when the chase ended while the drones organized any dead bodies they could carry.
“Bwahahaha! The undead ran as fast as those Rhankish pansies back home! I’ve never seen the undead run away before!” Oyuf boasted as he held a handful of old amulets. “But one thing’s for sure, these Church trinkets would fetch a better price than some Rhankish arm rings!”
“Never before?” Exarchi asked.
“Aye. Or that’s what I think. If the undead ever ran, it would cause great commotion especially among the priesthood.”
Exarchi thought back to the time the undead abandoned their fort. He had planned to get information from the humans, but it seemed that they were useless in information gathering. “The area is secure, but my forces will stay here briefly.”
Oyuf raised his helmet and asked with a confused gaze, “If your lads are staying, I’ll take my men back to the fort.”
“Acceptable.” Exarchi replied and got to work.
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Lord Tanne led his army across the Undead Front flanked by his bodyguards. The two women hummed a song which somehow sparked a sense of familiarity and nostalgia among the unliving retinue of the undead lord, though they were stopped for a moment when Tanne raised his half-skeletal hand.
His ghastly eyes were fixated on the horizon, studying the shattered group of shambling corpses moving towards him. In the middle of the hordes, there were visible banners fluttering against the wind.
“That appears-... to be our… fellows’ armies,” Tanne declared in between violent bouts of coughing. The two veiled women beside him seemed uneasy at the sight of the broken army.
“Lord Tanne! The infidels have defeated us!” an undead nobleman reported with a loud, angry voice as soon as two armies met. “Ambushed! Not only that, we’ve lost most of our numbers in the ensuing rout!”
“Oh? I must thank you for clarifying it. I had thought-... that your armies tripped upon each other!” Tanne laughed. “But, I refrain from further jests. Tell me everything-... that has transpired.”
The highest ranking nobleman reported first, followed by the rest. Some of the stories conflicted as the noblemen tried to save face for themselves. Still, Tanne listened attentively to the bickering nobles.
“I see. Not very-... surprising.”
“You expected this, Lord Tanne?!”
“T’is not that I expected your loss. I only expected those new foes to be more-... formidable than the mortal fools we’ve been fighting for decades…But to actually defeat us this badly…” Tanne grumbled then went quiet. He closed his eyes, concentrating all of his focus into his mind. As a lich, he had the ability to peer through the eyes of his minions, though it was easier to do this with smaller creatures such as crows. His mind went blank as he started his magic, and soon, images of crows flashed, followed by sceneries of the cold, unliving lands. The crows descended from the sky and landed onto a battlefield filled with corpses.
Ominous-looking men stood over the battlefield, as if they were all imitating gravestones for the fallen. The crows studied the men until one of the ‘statues’ turned its head towards the crows. It was only for a moment, but Tanne could faintly see red glowing eyes before he opened his eyes once more. He had initially thought that he was sweating, but it was all his imagination—after all, he was a lich.
After a brief respite, he once again turned back into his mind. This time, he peered through one of the crows he had dispatched to tail another army - the Clergy’s army. Rather than going forward, they seemed to be going backwards instead.
“The Clergy turned tails after your defeat, it seems,” Tanne concluded before coughing.
“They abandoned us?!” the nobles shouted in outrage.
“It is possible that they-... were simply using you to test the waters. Then again, it’s also possible that they-... lost their nerves after your defeat.” Tanne placed a hand against his chin and sighed. “Either way, it is of no loss-... to them as they could just blame-... us for this defeat.”
“What? Those honorless bastards!”
“The Clergy is pushing too far!”
“In the first place, those robed scum seem highly aware of the existence of these… strange foes,” Tanne pointed out. “My fellows, we should-... return and investigate the actions of the Clergy.”
“What about the heretics, my lord?”
“They can wait. As they had for centuries.”