The war raged on; one-fourth of the Narakian army had been decimated, with their corpses lying on the battlefield, cold and devoid of life. Egil was in the middle of the bout with Mal. They were engaged in lethal hand-to-hand combat. Although she was petite compared to Egil, it was advantageous for her on the ground. Her movements were faster than Egil, and she was outmaneuvering Egil most of the time. This was frustrating for him, and it was beginning to show as he started to lose composure, which was unusual for a worshiper like him.
An eerie feeling started to surround the Narakian soldiers as they felt something was off; the battlefield on their side felt scary and terrible; as they could sense something coming towards them, they continued to fight with a slow buildup of unease. Mal dodged a mighty punch from Egil; his hand created a small shockwave in the surrounding air as it missed her face. She looked at him confidently, dashing out of his melee range and flying into the sky.
The corpses on the battlefield rattled and came back to life. The dark hue surrounding the bodies was enough indication that it was her doing. This caught the Narakian soldiers off guard as they were now being attacked from the inside. This helped turn the tide of the war in Mal’s favor. Egil couldn’t use his full spiritual might as it was halved because Juli used it to fight the temple invaders. He had to come up with something other than brute force to counter Mal.
He had to think fast, as his army was being overpowered, and they wouldn’t last long if it kept going like that. She smirked, knowing she now had the upper hand in the battle and, soon, maybe even in the war. Something clicked in Egil’s brain as the axes appeared in his hand with a small flash of bright white light.
Egil glanced at his second command, yelling, “Back Four-One!”
As soon as he yelled those words, four archers stood behind Egil with their backs aligned with his. Egil started to run forward, trying to pierce the enemy army head-on, with the archers firing arrows at Mal, trying to make her lose concentration from manipulating the corpses. He threw his axes toward the area they were targeting; the enemy soldiers standing in front held their positions to halt them, but his axes were leagues apart compared to Mal’s army. The axes sliced through the limbs of the soldiers like knives in butter. The archers kept moving with Egil as he ran behind the axes.
Due to the sheer robust nature of the axes, a path made of blood started forming on the ground on which Egil was running as the soldiers were getting sliced left and right, which was in the way the axes were thrown. Mal could see a tunnel forming into her Army’s formation from above. This was helping the Narakian army gain more ground as many soldiers started to break into the opposing army’s construction through the path that Egil and his axes opened.
Mal’s dark clouds were fending off the arrows, so her concentration was interrupted, but it seemed like her dead soldiers weren’t helping her change the tide of the war that much. She resorted to returning the dead, disfigured soldiers Egil left in his wake. These soldiers started to attack the Narakian army aggressively. Mal looked down at the colossal line left in her army’s formation, paved with the blood of her dead soldiers.
However, every time the Narakian soldiers would strike down the corpses back down, they would assemble themselves back to their working form and start attacking again. This was beginning to gain a foothold against the invading Narakian army as the dead soldiers would keep rising again and again. This was tiring the soldiers in the Narakian military, making them lose numbers and momentum.
Egil halted when his axes were done, carving a straight line through Mal’s army. He glanced back at the repeatedly rising corpses. The axes he had thrown stopped in Midair and charged back toward the rising corpses he glanced at. The axes would keep hitting the rising corpses faster and faster than they could regenerate and get back up; this would help alleviate some pressure off the army portion near them. However, this left Egil without his weapons, reducing his power further.
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He could only engage in hand-to-hand combat now, and reaching Mal seemed impossible without his axes. He couldn’t afford to take them off the battlefield as they kept a considerable portion of the corpses from rising, helping his army get in further onto Mal’s army. Egil had to devise something that involved luring Mal onto the ground.
During this ordeal, Mal's frustration due to Egil’s countermeasures reached a new height. It seemed like a perfect opportunity for Egil to taunt Mal into descending to the ground for another hand-to-hand bout. Mal glared down at a smug Egil looking up at her; this pissed her off more than before. Her dark clouds were a pain in the ass for Egil; they were classified as a semi-sentient secondary weapon granted by the God Of Death to Mal after she had continuously completed her Penance for months. They solidified into piercing spears and shot toward him. Egil saw it and started to charge toward them, using his right leg to leap off the ground in the direction of the incoming projectiles. He planned to grab one of them and use its momentum against it to throw it back and propel himself toward Mal.
However, another wave of eerie feeling seemed to stalk Egil, which caught him off guard and made him lose some momentum as he looked down toward the direction from which it appeared to emanate. It was coming off his axes, with both emitting a white glow before disappearing. At the same time, he felt a gripping pain overcome him, reducing his momentum in the air to zero; the sharp dark-ice spears pierced his left shoulder and lower right abdomen, as some of the armor that was created from his spiritual energy on him vanished into thin air, leaving him vulnerable to attacks that wouldn’t usually be able even to come close to him.
He yelled out in pain; as the projectile left his body, he fell on the ground hard as a noticeable noise from his impact could be heard. The ground underneath him cracked and formed a small crater due to the body impact. He lay in the hole, barely conscious. He was completely exposed now, his armor gone, and his power was depleted as Juli was still fighting off the raiders using some of Egil’s power which stressed his spiritual bond with Vi’tabah.
As time passed, his body lay in the crater, and many Narakian soldiers looked over to see him getting more lifeless. Mal smirked as she looked at Egil's life fading away from his body, but she decided not to do anything to it, instead focusing on eradicating the whole Narakian offensive.
Fear began to breed anxiety and despair, with them witnessing their most potent power lying almost lifeless on the ground. Egil’s second in command rushed to the crater with some soldiers as he wanted to get Egil out of that dire situation. Heavy Knights blocked the front of the cavity as a few soldiers grabbed his body, trying to hurry him off the battlefield as soon as possible.
This was starting to look bad for the Narakian state and army. The reanimated soldiers tore through the Narakian front with ease. Their soldiers screamed in despair as they died cold deaths, getting impaled by spears that would suck their soul out and feed it to Mal, who was getting more powerful with every person killed, whether it was Narakian or Sovian.
“FALL BACK!!” Egil’s lieutenant shouted at his fellow army men as he hurried off with others carrying Egil’s cold body. However, while they were going off the field with the remaining soldiers, most noticed something odd about Mal; even though she hovered in mid-air, it seemed like she was still struggling.
Suddenly, Mal began to fall from the sky, but she regained her control in a split second; the effects of her sharing her powers with the Raiders started to show. The soldiers carrying Egil’s body dropped it on the ground quickly as it almost burned their hands. His body was getting too hot.
He opened his eyes all of a sudden and looked around. They were in a small forest area surrounded by tall trees; his wounds started to recover rapidly, with red armor forming back on his body.
“I’ll defeat her.” Egil mumbled as he lay on the ground, waiting for his wounds to heal and his power to be restored fully. However, Egil was recovering with his companions in a secluded forest hidden from the battlefield. Mal wasn’t doing too well with her condition, Juli had decimated the Raiders, and now the power divided between them had been lost into the world, slowly reclaimed by nature. She decided it was enough as the few Narakian soldiers had retreated, taking a heavily injured Egil with them, so a strategic push wasn’t needed. The path to Narakita lay wide open and unprotected, and she could just march toward the state with her undead army.
Mal had decided to march to Narakita by Midnight so she could be at the height of her power around the time and claim all the living souls as hers and the Guardian stone of the temple of the God Of War: Vi’tabah. This is what she had been after all the time. However, the raiders could not accomplish the objective alone while she could distract their army. Only time would tell which side would win as both parties prepared to launch the second act.
To be continued…