Akamori felt an explosion of power from behind him, followed by another. Sirsir and Yasiin had both used high power abilities that had long cool downs. A void beam that stretched the length of the room swept side to side, evaporating vast swaths of necrotic flesh. Sirsir’s cannon banged like a machine, firing explosive rounds into the surging wall of decaying tissue.
“What good is being a god if I can’t stop even this?” he growled to himself. He was a void reaper. More than that, he was a god now. Ascended beyond mortality. Time froze around him. The hyper compression of time a side effect of his channeled divinity. He’d burned off most of his excess worship on his stunt topside. He was nowhere near full enough to try that again.
But he could go beyond a normal mortal’s limits and call upon the unnatural. Frank appeared a smokey black cloud that condensed into his umbral wraith form, slashing down into a Flesh Abomination, leaving deep tracks carved into its grotesque hide. Akamori back peddled, avoiding a follow up attack from the creature, and slapped his palm down on its cold clammy sin, branding it with his Death’s Shadow curse.
*System Info:* Death’s Shadow: You may make a special attack that marks your target with the Death’s Shadow debuff. Targets suffering the Death’s Shadow mark feel the creeping cold dread of death. This ability boosts all the damage the target receives.
He checked his Aether Gauge in his peripheral vision. Unsurprisingly, he’d filled it up some time ago. Black viscous fluid poured down his sword hand along Thanaton’s blade into the shape of a long haft, and a large scythe blade grew from the end. The entire form hardened with a snap into black void glass.
Thanaton cut a wide sweeping slash across the Abomination’s torso, disemboweling the massive creature. Rancid guts spilled out of the slash like a bowl of rotten spaghetti tipped over and covered in congealed blood and ink. The ungainly creature failed to maintain its balance as it tripped on its own innards and toppled over, making it an easy target for Akamori to lob off its head.
Again he caught the dwarven chuckling like a whisper on a summer breeze. Akamori twirled Thanaton and rotated him with practiced ease. He became a bipedal lawnmower, and the undead were on his unkempt summer lawn. Limbs, heads, and chunks of gore flew free of their host bodies as they bounced and splatted against the deck plates with wet squelches.
Meanwhile, to his left and right, Sirsir’s explosive rounds and Yasiin’s void beams were laying down mass swaths of the undead that pushed back the dead. And then it got eerily silent. He hopped back a step and quickly scanned around. Both Sirsir’s assault and Yasiin’s attack had stopped. They’d depleted their abilities, and their AP was tapped out.
As one, all the dead chuckled with the same singular voice in a raspy horse imitation that posed as a weak mockery of the dwarven necromancer. Akamori was thinking of the voice’s owner as Chuckles now, since he’d never had the courtesy to give his name.
“Seems like yer friends’ve run outta gas, lad. I promise I’ll be gentle with their bodies.” Chuckles’ voice trailed off into the dead silence as the sneering expressions of the dead slackened back in the hungry ravenous and vacant gazes of the undead as they resumed their press forward.
Sala was doing double duty now, using the undead as improvised flails to hammer their own ranks with. Burned flesh and decay choked the corridor as it mixed with acrid sulfur from the discharged gunpowder from the human’s weapons. The marines barked for Akamori’s mages to fall back and form up a line.
“Sala, get the others and fall back.”
Two black void axes bisected a pair of dead faces. One was a dead man wearing a half eaten suit with dark brown stains near his neck. The other a woman with a professionally styled look before she’d stumbled around dead for a few days. The color already drained out of her face. They toppled backwards as the axes squelched free of their faces into Helios’ open hands as he strolled next to Akamori.
“Dicey situation down here.”
“Yeah.”
Helios peered around, studying the dimensions of the corridor. “We need some big guns.”
“We had them. They ran dry.”
Helios picked his teeth with a talon for a moment. “I was thinking more about teeth and claws rather than spells and bolts.”
Akamori repeated Helios’ quick scan of the corridor. “Would you fit?”
Helios nodded confidently. “Yeah. I think. Probably? I’m not an elder wyrm, so should do?”
“Do it.”
The space around Akamori rippled with void magic as he tipped backward into the darkness. A withered hand seized Akamori by the wrist as teeth clamped down on his black Reaper armor. Ivory fragments pitter pattered to the deck as the zombie worked its jaws back and forth feverishly, trying to tear chunks of tissue from and getting nothing for its efforts. It may as well as have been gnawing on a piece of titanium. Akamori stabbed his fingers into the side of its skull quickly, and the body went limp, falling to the ground.
Ahead, an alone Helios’ body rippled as he transmuted himself from human back to dragon. Moments later, a large dragon stood like a scaled barrier against the undead. That brought him time to shore up their defenses. Akamori spun, his void reaper armor evaporating off of him like smoke as he strode to Sgt. Corthon.
“Pull your men back to the last position. Deploy the automated systems. And pray.”
“To who?”
“Me, I guess.”
“You?”
“Yeah. I’m a god now.” Akamori called back over his shoulder as he linked up with his squad. They lay Sirsir and Yasiin back behind a barrier with aether potion bottles in hand. The air rumbled as Helios roared, spraying void flame into the hall like a dark scaled flame thrower. Bodies stumbled free of the firewall, dead flesh crackling like kindling in a fireplace.
Helios raked his massive talons across the torsos of multiple undead, opening them up like rotten meat bags. Fetid organs spilled out. Zombies began slipping and falling on the horrid smelling slop of dead organs and coagulated blood on the tile of the floor. Akamori sighed from the back, watching Helios do an acceptable job of crowd control and stemming the tide. Watching undead drones comically slip and fall was just leaving itself open to a good joke or laugh. But the mood just wasn’t there.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“Ugh. Am I turning serious?”
You could stand to get a little more serious. Bahumet counseled.
FOCUS! Thanaton hissed again.
The void crystal on Thanaton crumbled, revealing the exceptionally long nodachi blade beneath. It thrummed in irritation in his hand. He sank several points of magic into the blade, channeling a sheathe of air magic along it. The blade sang again and nostalgia threatened to creep in. Akamori advanced ahead of the defensive line, his blade singing as it used to it.
We haven’t used this spell in a long time. Thanaton said.
“Yeah. Sometimes it’s nice to go back to the classics.”
“Sir! What are you doing?” Sgt. Corthon shouted between shots of her oversized pistol. A modified grenade launcher reduced to the size of a pistol and firing 20 mm rounds.
“Something stupid to buy you guys time.” He called back over his shoulder as two of her shots pulped two approaching zombies in small explosive pops.
She snapped off several more rounds as the automated weapons activated. The tide slowed, but it still pressed forward. Undead crawled all over Helios, but his scales made him immune to their clumsy attacks, so he focused on clawing apart as many as possible. The marines faced a new threat when some of the dead grinned and lifted weapons of their own and returned fire. The aim was horrible since they were, well, dead. But in such tight quarters, even bad aim was good enough.
Akamori’s blade flicked wildly back and forth, sending a storm of wind slashes into the horde. The gap between death and living inevitably closed, forcing him and Sala into melee ranges while the humans went into panic mode. A thin haze of discharged weapons smoke clung in the air at head height, giving the entire battle a surreal haze. Thankfully, it also helped mask the scent of rotting flesh.
The dead pressed forward, unconcerned with his or anyone else’s attacks. To their credit, the necromancers had plenty of corpses to work with. Automatic weapons fire drowned out all sounds as mounted turrets, marines, and his own men fought. It was like using pebbles to stop a tsunami. The mob got so thick he couldn’t even swing Thanton, having to resort to going to hand to hand.
Eventually the speed with which the defenders dropped undead slowed to a trickle until the dead did what they always did under necromancer control. Claim the living. The first marine’s scream turned into a bubbly gurgle. There was panicked shouting, and then another. Cursing under his breath, he left his own people. Their armor would protect them from these mundane zombies.
A void portal opened above the marines, and Akamori spilled out like an azure and crimson cyclone of hands and feet. While they trained him to use weapons, he also was a weapon. He’d depleted his temporary divinity, and was close to exhaustion himself. That was when he heard the dull thudding of heavy foots steps on the deck.
A flesh abomination with a partially amputated arm courtesy of Helios slowly lumbered forward. The skin on its face had been peeled away, revealing the skull beneath. It had no eyes. Just two ghostly white and green orbs of magic. It looked past Akamori to the marines scrambling away. Several small arms fire slammed into its thick torso.
In a last-ditch bid, the marines fell back behind the final stand off line and deployed a series of industrial sized saws. The blades whined as they sheered through meat and bone. It bought the marines time to form up. The automatic weapons emplacements rattled away, whittling at the mob of dead and leaving bodies in their wake, but gaps filled faster than they were created.
A half chewed hand reached out of the crowd for a marine only to be sheered off at the wrist by the defensive saws. The abomination paused the saws as though it recognized even it couldn’t take the damage they would deal and then turned back to its peers. Before Akamori could stop it, the lumbering brute hurled an undead over the saws like a sack of rotten flour.
Marines called out, coordinating their fire and riddled the corpse with rounds. Another landed with a wet slapping sound, followed by another and another. Akamori paused, surveying the defensive line and found a number brutes who were now tossing their peers over the defenses. His own men were flying now having recovered enough to rejoin the fight, but they could only use basic spells since their armor and weapons required some magic.
“No…” Akamori stammered. “Stop..” More bodies over the line. Hands seized him all over and pulled him down to his knees. “please…” He said so softly it was barely a whisper. “Anyone… please.”
Everything went still. All motion. All sounds. Everything stopped. He looked up and found a woman in a black dress before him.
“Who?”
“You know who I am.”
“Death?”
She nodded with a coy smile. “But the real question isn’t who I am. But why.”
“My…prayer?”
She nodded. Somehow she had the room to walk in a slow half circle in front of him. As if the undead had cleared a space for her.
“Do gods answer other gods’ prayers?”
“In a manner. We broker deals. It’s how divine beings used to operate before the divine wars. It’s time for a return to tradition. You’re new at this, so you lack the power to execute what you truly need. A miracle. You had some temporary worship, but your following is too weak to pull off the kinds of feats you need. You need something more… bold. More… seasoned than you can manage. But I’ll need something in return.”
“Okay.”
Death looked confused. “Well. That’s a surprise. Given your penchant dislike for fate, I’d have expected more resistance than this.”
“My people are in a bind. We need this win.”
“More than you know, I’m afraid. But I’m willing to offer my help for a price. The flip side of the deal, if you will.”
“Name it.”