Bandit ducked beneath a pair of razored tusks and lashed out with his blade, severing artery and nerve then leaping back when the pig tried to trample him. His opponent took a final, staggering step and collapsed, the life fading from her eyes at last. The giant pigs were just so damn tough. They took twice as many hits as most animals their size before going down, and were impervious to pain to boot.
Bandit stopped to catch his breath, as black motes of exhaustion danced before his eyes, casting his gaze across the corpse-strewn hillside. The scent of blood hung heavy in the air, so thick that he could taste it, the metallic bite merging with the electric adrenaline flowing through his veins.
Everywhere he looked, lemurs and hogs were killing one another, as the tribe fought its way up the hillside to where the pig-charmer was directing his forces. The evil fucker seemed almost bored as his minions gave up their lives to protect his own. The tribe was lucky that the tigers had almost no experience in conducting a military campaign, defeating most of their enemies through sheer numbers alone.
Thus, while the battle was grueling and Bandit’s friends were dying all around him, the fight was going better than he’d dared to hope. The shield-and-pike phalanxes were devastating the heavy creatures, the long weapons turning the hogs’ mass and momentum against them. Scores of pigs with pike wounds through their torsos littered the rocky soil, the bodies so thick they had created choke points that slowed the hogs’ advance. The shield wall had minimized the casualties they’d taken in return, although there had been several breaches that the tribe had paid in blood to seal.
While the melees held the line, the archers and mages defended the rear, their ceaseless barrage keeping reinforcements from falling on the lemurs from behind. At least for now. A few of the hogs patrolling the jungle had answered the pig-charmer’s call, rushing back to the hill to defend their master. So far, it hadn’t been enough to overwhelm the tribe’s ranged specialists.
On that note, Bandit traced the path of a flight of arrows as they rained down upon a trio of hogs who were running along the riverside, followed by a cluster of rocks the size of his body.
Arrow and stone struck true, slaughtering the pigs, leaving them broken and bleeding in the grass until they breathed their last. As promising as these developments were, it was a grim, touch-and-go situation. While the hogs died by the dozen, there were far too many left, and Bandit’s forces still had to climb the final third of the hillside.
He didn’t have time to watch the battle play out on the periphery of their formation. He had to focus on his mission, killing the charmer and ending the fight. He would have to trust his captains to handle the rest. Right now, Bandit had his own job to do.
The pig-charmer was guarded by a trio of tiger scouts, standing behind a contingent of the meanest hogs that Bandit had ever seen. But he was determined to break through, before too many of his people perished. The fight would end the moment that the shadow tiger died, then the tribe would disengage and retreat into the jungle.
Ready to make his final push, Bandit called up a unit of heavy club-wielders from the reserve, along with a trio of pikemen. The lemurs fell in with the advanced unit and began climbing the hill.
He let out a bark to let his assault team know that it was time to engage, stopped to cut the throat of a hog who had broken through the line, then began charging straight up the hillside. At least the charmer wouldn’t retreat into his den when the fight reached the hillcrest. A show of weakness would turn his own kind against him, lowering his place in the shadow tiger’s hierarchy.
Pigs raced to stop them, taking pressure off the lemurs’ flanks as the animals pulled back to protect their master, leaving them vulnerable to attacks from behind. The reaction was predictable, since the dreadbeasts valued no life other than their own. Hoping for this exact outcome, Bandit already had a counter underway.
At his signal, the archers and earth casters turned their might toward the hilltop, thinning out the incoming pigs and blunting the force of their charge. Two groups of assault fighters wielding weapons comparable to his own raced among the wounded animals, slitting throats and hamstringing limbs, preventing them from reaching Bandit’s unit.
He set his eyes on the hilltop, ready to take out the elite hogs and their master beyond. Bandit broke into a sprint, spearheading his unit while the rest of the tribe darted forward, keeping the pigs from falling back. He began burning stamina, pushing his body into a greater burst of speed, streaking across the hillcrest with his unit beside him, knowing that the pivotal moment of the battle had arrived.
In another twenty seconds, Bandit would be at the charmer’s throat, leaving the tiger’s guard to the rest of his team. Ten seconds. Five.
That was when everything changed in the blink of an eye.
One second, the lemurs were mopping up the remnants of the tigers’ forces, ready to take on the charmer’s elite guard, and the next the world grew dim. It was as if someone had flung mud and splattered it across the sun, plunging the jungle from sunny noon into dusky twilight within a scant handful of heartbeats.
All along the murky hillside, shadows writhed their way across the earth like an endless river of serpents. Some bands of blackness were thinner than the others, letting wan strips of sunlight bleed through. It cast an ever-shifting net across the hilltop, like a living latticework of scars.
In the heart of that dark moment, Bandit cast his senses beyond his body. When he felt a surge of wrongness in reply, he understood what was happening. It was clear in that moment that this was no ordinary darkness, but foul magic he’d only seen from a distance until now.
He cast his gaze across the hilltop, only to have his worst fears confirmed. Because walking out of the pig-charmer's lair, wreathed in a mantle of coruscating shadow, was the tiger king himself. The leader of the dreadbeasts corrupting the heart of the jungle and the tribe’s mortal enemy.
The king was a grizzled old male, half again bigger than the rest. A wicked scar ran all the way down one side of his face, leaving his ear in tatters. Every inch of his body was covered in dense, rippling muscle. Every move was lithe and agile, like oil flowing over water. Most disconcerting of all, instead of the normal black bands that all tigers wear, the dreadbeast king was striped in living shadow. A striking testament to his dark art.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Bandit knew in that moment that he’d been lured into a trap. That the tigers had sacrificed the hogs without a second thought to draw the tribe up the hillside. That before they could hope to escape, the teeth of that trap would come swinging shut. Hoping against hope, Bandit sounded the retreat, but it was already too late.
In between the drawing of one breath and the next, the shadows blanketing the hillside came alive.
The patch of midnight closest to him began to shimmer and warp, the magic fading away as something walked out of it. As bile rose hot within his throat, a creature born of nightmare stepped into the waking world. It looked like no animal or beast that Bandit had ever seen, not in the jungle and not on the island.
Instead of hands, feet, hoofs, or paws, the shadowspawn ran on dozens of blades, each as long as Bandit’s fang. It was impossibly slim when facing him directly. Though it had a head, it had no eyes, ears, or other sensory organs, just a wicked mouth filled with row after row of needle-sharp teeth. It gave off no scent and no presence. Had no blood in its veins or a heart to pump it through. The thing was wrong in a way that he’d never felt before, a shaping of the dreadbeast’s tainted magic.
The instant that it came to life, the shadowspawn struck in a flash, leaping atop the nearest lemur and tearing her to pieces. She was dead before she had time to scream, body reduced to ragged tatters of flesh and fur upon the hillside.
All around him, his people were screaming and dying, as the shadowspawn multiplied with every beat of his heart. Bandit desperately tried to come up with a plan, but nothing he could think of would work. All time for thought came to an end when the shadow-thing turned and came straight at him. Bandit wanted nothing more than to run for everything he was worth, but he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. Not with his friends counting on him.
The shadowspawn streaked for his throat, moving like no creature born of this Earth. It glanced off a dozen blows along the way, as if weapons of steel meant nothing to it. That realization was the only thing that saved his life. Fortunately, steel wasn’t the only weapon that Bandit had. Just before the blade-studded horror reached him, he finished casting his spell, hurling a fireball straight into the shadow’s teeth.
Bandit prayed that this would work. If it didn’t, he wouldn’t live long enough to regret his mistake. But he had sensed on a deep, fundamental level that when magic meets magic of the same potency, shadow is weak against light.
It appeared that his intuition was correct. The thing’s head exploded and then vanished like smoke, the rest of its body dissipating a heartbeat later. Either the light or the force of the blast had unmade it. Bandit couldn’t tell, and he honestly didn’t care.
It seemed that the tiger king’s shadow army was vulnerable to magic, at least against certain elements. But that welcome bit of good news was all there was to be found. While flame had been enough to save Bandit, it wasn’t enough to save the tribe. Most of the lemurs’ mages were earth casters. Only a few could wield other elements. The rocks they threw weren’t nearly as effective, although they did slow the shadowspawn down, buying the lemurs precious seconds to react.
Regardless, they would only endure for another few minutes at most. Soon, their line would collapse, and the slaughter would begin. Bandit knew that his only chance was to take out the king. To break his spell before the shadowspawn were among them like claws in the dark. Before he committed to what would likely be the last act of his life, he glanced over his shoulder to survey the battlefield, afraid of what he would see.
He was surprised to discover that the hogs had pulled back, even the elite unit on the hilltop. Apparently, they were so afraid of the taint-spawned shadows that it pierced the pig-charmer’s control. Not completely, but enough to let the pigs pull back. Not that Bandit could blame them. The shadows scared him so much that his body was shaking.
But that was the extent of the tribe’s good fortune. As he had feared, hundreds more shadow-things had come to life, encircling the lemur warriors. They tightened around their position like a creeper vine around his throat, drawing closer with every passing second.
Lemurs were dying with every breath that he took, but the worst was yet to come. Within another handful of heartbeats, the bladed shadows would pour over them in a razored tide, and they would all be dead. The future of their species dying alongside them.
But Bandit wasn’t about to let that happen. Not while his lungs still drew breath, and his hands could grip a blade. He would put an end to this now, no matter what it cost him.
He set his gaze upon the dreadbeast king, shrieked out his fury, and charged. Half of his assault unit came with him, while the rest held the shadowspawn back at the cost of their lives.
Shutting out the screams of the dying, at last, Bandit arrived at the hilltop. The pig-charmer came at him, seeking to win favor with his master, but Bandit drove him back with a cluster of fireballs. The tribe’s elite forces followed up, going in for the kill, lemurs fighting tigers until one side breathed their last. But in the heart of that moment, Bandit didn’t even notice. He only had eyes for the king.
Over the last desperate seconds, he had come up with a plan. He only had one shot at this, and it wasn’t going to work if the dreadbeast monarch saw it coming. He cried out, signaling the final pair of earth casters who were still by his side, then scampered on top of a boulder resting beside a bigger rock.
Pulse pounding in his ears, adrenaline surging in his veins, he felt magic coalescing beneath him, as both stones began to rise. Half a heartbeat later, the first boulder shot straight for the king, screaming through the air as it approached the master of shadows. A bare instant before the boulder struck true, the tiger leapt out of the way with liquid grace, letting the rock go rushing over his head.
That was when the dreadbeast saw the second boulder, which had been hidden behind the first. By this point, Bandit was streaking through the sky, riding the rock that was sailing straight for the tiger lord. A lesser creature would have been hit, but the king was so agile that he leapt out of the way at the last possible second, the boulder missing his head by mere inches.
Instead of being the end of the tribe, the move offered them a final hope of living through the day. Because that was exactly what Bandit had been counting on.
He had leapt off the boulder half a second before, anticipating where the tiger would land. He spread his arms wide and hit the king broadside, the impact so intense that it fractured his ribs. Bandit gripped tight and let momentum carry them both down the far side of the hill, where the grade was so steep that it was almost a cliff.
Round and round they tumbled, soil and sky changing position with wild abandon. Even now, the king didn’t panic. He scrambled for purchase, clawing at Bandit all the while. But Bandit shifted positions and held on, keeping the dreadbeast from breaking their fall.
Earth and stone pummeled his battered body. The king’s claws shredded his flesh as they sought to cast him aside. But Bandit merely gritted his teeth and held on for everything he was worth, sinking his teeth into the tiger’s remaining ear for good measure.
After a final rotation, they rolled over a bluff and soared out over the raging river. For a handful of heartbeats, they were airborne, but neither beast could fly. Just before the water rose to engulf them, Bandit released his grip and kicked off, trying to propel himself back toward the shore.
But he was too weak and disoriented to pull it off and they both fell into the water. Struggling against the current, both lemur and tiger were trapped in the powerful pull. Before either of them could hope to escape, they went over the edge of the falls. Bandit found himself plummeting for the final time that day, plunging deep into the bowels of the earth.
There was a shocking chill, then an incredible sensation of impact, after which Bandit knew only darkness.