The gate cracked an inch wide — then burst as the charmed poured through. Each of them had lost all the light in their eyes. Saliva flew as they screamed and raked the air with crooked fingers.
Kalender winced. His heart pounded faster, and they were upon Lilia, their vanguard. He just had to do it.
“Wake up!” he screamed at them with a shaking voice, and they collapsed like cards. It was a shock; he’d hoped to see them snap out of it, but maybe they’d wake up eventually. They would, right?
More of them poured in, and he screamed once more; they dropped like discarded puppets once more. He dreaded to know what was actually happening to them, but they were charging at them in an unending torrent.
“Onwards!” Jyn shouted. “Steadily! Out the gate! Keep close to Kalender!”
Kalender watched Lilia step over the bodies. It was eerie, but when Jyn and even Page started to move, even he had to go along.
His feet felt numb, yet he walked. Instead of shouting, he sung. His heart still raced, and his voice was terrible, but it was far more comfortable than shouting all the time, and it helped steady his nerves a little.
The zombies’ moans were still louder. They came at them in waves. Lilia cut down out any zombies who got too close, all the while her cuffs steamed; Kalender tried not to dwell on the fact that she was killing them, and that his voice was scarring her skin.
She seemed just so unfazed. In spite of it, she moved according to her own deeper nature, something that Kalender had caught a glimpse of before.
Jyn’s words were a North Star for everyone, but Lilia’s actions gave him a better model on how to act in this situation: not without fear, but with purpose.
As they left the gate, he cursed the ###### God. He tip-toed over bodies sprawled over each other and jumped back from zombies who’d reached out to claw his face off. His curse’s aura crashed against most zombies who’d come too close, lighting up in orange and purple just like sparklers.
The sheer number of them made him curse the ###### God even more. The deeper the bitterness of his role seeped in, the more they fueled his power.
The next thing they knew, they didn’t need to fend off any of the charmed. They were falling well before reaching them, like dominoes with them as the epicenter.
***
Sherry was desperate. Viktor, Helma, Code, and Searchie were fine, but her Maids and the Clerics had been whittled down to a little under half their original number. They could hear buildings collapsing on one part of the town, gunfire and explosions all around the walls, and since a while ago, the war cries of Kilia and the moans of the lesser charmed. They would only stay dead for so long.
Desperation became despair as she sensed the epicenter of some kind of terrifying magic barrelling towards them from the direction of the castle.
When she looked that way, she saw an approaching wave of zombies dropping dead. It spooked the shit out of her, but she just ended up laughing. Oh, to be caught up in a battle of gods and demons.
It was the end — or she thought so. She saw an odd group running to them from the castle. That odd assortment of weapons… She realized who they were.
She looked to Code and Searchie. They’d also seen the group, but having no prior knowledge, they assumed the worst. Code readied her dagger for a good stabbin’, putting herself between Searchie and their perceived enemy.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Sherry realized they only had one anti-charm cuff each. That wouldn’t be enough.
She resigned herself to her fate. She took off her anti-charm bracelet and clipped it around Searchie’s arm before coming up behind Code and putting her in an arm lock.
“What are you doing!” both Code and Searchie screamed.
“Relax, idiot,” Sherry said, “our fight’s over.”
As Kalender approached, Code’s armor and Searchie’s bracelets grew hotter and hotter.
Kalender saw them all and their predicament. He slowed to a jog, about to stop and check on them, but Jyn called out, “Don’t stop! We can’t waste time!”
All the survivors heard were apologies as the group ran by, and then shouting that got smaller and smaller as they disappeared down the road.
“See? No damage,” Sherry said…but she could only cope with the joke for so long. She’d volunteered her entire future to one man. Even if he was an ally — and continued to be one — it was still possible for him to fail his mission. What would happen to her, then? An eternity of suffering, obviously. Ah, this life.
She laughed to herself, and she laughed for a while. Code, Searchie, and everyone else had been looking at her with concern, contempt, and anything else they were allowed to feel. She didn’t really care. She was in the same deep shit, anyway.
It was just morbid curiosity, but what did she ended up getting charmed with? She opened her status.
[+1 Ambiguity]
What was that supposed to be? Were they supposed to be lovers or… Oh. Oh my.
***
Arpeggio’s fight with Manager was going about as well as her last engagement’s cancellation.
Her sword had been shaved down until its crossguard. She threw a brick at Manager, one he received like a baseball catcher before raising a leg, cocking his body and his arm back, and pitching the thing at Cyrraia half a mile away.
Cyrraia jumped out of the fourth story of the building she’d been sniping from before the window and the whole room behind it exploded.
Arpeggio cleaved the air with magic, sending out a vibrating crescent aimed right at Manager, but he hadn’t been distracted enough and he put up his hand, receiving the blow head-on with Iron Hand.
He raised his other hand into the air, intercepting a pebble flicked at him by Minimine. It exploded with the force of a crashing building, the resulting shockwave umbrella destroying everything around him except himself.
He looked up at Minimine, watching her fight the red-skinned demon and his noble sword with nothing but a kitchen knife, attacking and parrying a hundred times a second, turning the air into a heated mirage of blurs. He found it admirable that the red-skinned demon had survived this long; the green-skinned demon had already been killed a while ago, an arrow driven through his heart, exploding and wiping out his existence.
He looked back at Arpeggio with a smile. “It’s about time,” he said.
Arpeggio’s heart dropped. He had been toying with her, she knew as much, yet every attempt at baiting him into a trap had failed. Now that his patience’s fuze had reached the end, she’d have to struggle with everything she had.
She loosened her grip, making her mana sword thinner, longer—brighter than it had ever been, burning through so much MP, flattening a kilometer of the Monster Wall paled in comparison.
Her sword lit up the entire battlefield of flattened ruinscape; pillars and bricks casted long, sharp shadows, as if the sun itself had begun to rise.
It wouldn’t be enough. Her sword changed shape, splitting into five blades like a rake.
There was going to be no such thing as a protracted fight with this man. She’ll turn him into sausage slices or get charmed trying.
She pushed off. He pushed off. He stretched out his hand. She waved her sword. He missed. She didn’t.
The two skidded to a stop on opposite ends once more. Manager could only be bloody well annoyed that he’d lost a hand, down to the wrist and all he had was a cauterized stump now. With all the power he possessed, pain was just a footnote to him — but this footnote irked him.
Something was wrong. He hadn’t moved as fast as he thought he would. Evading Arpeggio’s attack had taken more than calculations predicted.
[Companions: 8672 …]
[Companions: 8634 …]
[Companions: 8599 …]
His eyes widened. Undying Love should have meant that his thralls wouldn’t be put down forever, yet there he was watching his numbers go down. Had his enemies found a way to sever the curse’s link? Had they finally resorted to permanently destroying the soul? No, anyone on System’s side wouldn’t do that…
Was someone stealing from him?
The thought enraged him. Those were his. Nothing and no one ought to touch them but him.
There could have only been one person capable of doing this.