57. The Battle for Goldbrand

The wolf moved on instinct, focused only on the enemy ahead of him.

They had to die. All of them.

Swinging his head wildly, his blade clove through countless numbers of fodder. They pestered him with cuts and bites and blows, but this only served to further stoke his wrath.

The wolf did not let them gain an inch on his master. He made piles of dead Beasts around himself that the attackers had to climb over.

Die… the wolf thought, his mouth no longer suited to produce words.

He swung the sword.

Die!

Again.

Die!

Again.

Die!

He didn’t know how long he had been fighting. His body was covered in wounds, but his rage spurred him on, allowing him to move and react as if he were whole and well-rested.

The wolf slid the sword around in his mouth, angling it at the next vermin to be slaughtered.

Something gave him pause. He came to a halt.

A thing lay pinned under his paw, the sword pointed at its face. It was not a Beast. It was… human. Vaguely familiar.

The wolf’s body ached to move. This was an annoyance. He pressed his paw down to end the little human.

Kiren! a voice echoed within him. Stop!

The wolf stiffened. The name was familiar. A nagging reminder.

Please, the voice continued. Let him go. It’s over. We’re your friends.

The wolf looked down at the thing beneath his paw with new eyes. Long, blond hair, square jaw, muscular build.

Kiren… he thought to himself, tasting the word inside his head. That’s… me.

Kiren stepped away from the man as his body began to shift. Intense pain coursed through his body as his frame shrank down, bones grinding against each other as they shifted into place. The blade fell free of his mouth, clattering on the ground. He shedded his fur, groaning heavily as his face flattened out and vision seemed to go just slightly muddled.

He was left on all fours, panting as he lay in the bloody dirt. Cold. Naked. Human.

“What the fuck just happened…?” he breathed.

Looking up, he saw a still courtyard littered with countless mounds of corpses, piled high in a half-moon shape around him. Apprentices wandered about, putting the finishing blows to the spawnlings that still moved.

The first rays of sunlight had begun to chase away the night in the east.

“We can work out the hows and the whys later,” someone said, a pair of boots coming into his field of vision. “For now, know that you did one helluva number on those things.”

Kiren looked up.

Counter.

He lay a hand on Kiren’s shoulder and offered a rare, uncharacteristic smile. “Good job, kid.”

Before him lay the massive blade he had just used to slaughter countless Beasts, half-buried into the ground. The blade was nicked and chipped, drenched with blood, and the grip was marred with deep bite marks.

Looking a little further ahead, Kiren saw the ruined remains of Excelerate. Large chunks of his limbs were gone, fingers twisted this way and that, splinters of bone coming through one leg. He stared sightlessly into the sky.

Kiren stumbled to his feet, fell back down, crawled with all his remaining strength over to his master.

Excelerate’s one eye swiveled to regard him, and the smallest hint of a smirk trace his lip.

He shouldn’t have been alive. He should have been long dead from his injuries, either from shock or blood loss.

And yet, there he was.

Waiting.

He tried to say something, but his voice failed him.

“Don’t strain yourself, old man,” Kiren said. “You can tell me later, after we get you right.”

Excelerate shook his head. He grasped at Kiren with one shattered hand, pulled him close by the back of the neck.

“Your… turn… now…” he worked out.

Those were his last words. He looked up into the sky, and he seemed at peace. It took another minute before he finally bled out, long before any healers reached him.

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Kiren’s consciousness left him as tears streaked his filthy cheeks, and he fell forward onto Excelerate’s still chest.

Jorge Router was no more.

*****

Lace took out the two spawnlings closest to her with a quick swipe of her staff, the wind-blade beheading them both. Her gaze was fixed on the vaguely human-shaped, writhing mass of flesh at the other end of the temple.

Evangel, kneeling almost as if in reverence, before a multitude of dead Heroes who had been strung up from the ceiling.

“It’s you,” Evangel said, slowly standing up. “I suppose it is fitting. Very well. I am ready.”

The double doors at the back of the temple burst open, and Rusty came charging into the temple with his great mallet at hand, Cora following close behind. They dipped to each side, and Legario was standing down the center, a wedge already drawn.

Evangel turned around, growling.

Lace took her opportunity when he looked away from her. She gathered up an aero-shot and sent the powerful blast of air at his back. It did no damage to his corpulent form, but it knocked him forward just a step, leaving him off-balance.

Open to a second attack.

Legario fired his wedge, the heavy arrow lodging itself in Evangel’s flesh.

Lace was forced to roll to the right as a spawnling grasped for her with fat, bloated fingers. She got up on one knee, but didn’t have time to retaliate against the Beast as a shower of water shattered several windows on the eastern side of the temple and washed over the nearby spawnlings, quickly reducing them to sizzling masses of melted flesh.

Lace stood up.

“Faith, you ready?” she asked.

The Sprite appeared on her shoulder. “Sure am. Just say the word.”

Rusty rushed ahead to hammer in the wedge burrowed in Evangel’s chest. The amalgam saw him coming and raised one of his arms, sending out a multitude of tentacles that pinned the black-haired man to the ground and knocked the mallet from his grasp.

“Nasaizh, I wish to bargain!” Lace cried, setting into a run towards the fighting.

Evangel seized up momentarily, growing stiff. Just a moment.

“I refuse!” he bellowed, and resumed normal function.

But a moment was all that was needed.

Cora slipped in beside the Beast, wrapping her silvery thread around the thick, squirming arm. With a hard tug, the thread sank clean through the limb, and the arm fell limp to the ground, allowing Rusty to work himself free and retrieve his weapon.

Evangel slapped Cora aside with another arm. She landed some distance away on her side.

Another wave of water flooded the temple and eliminated the rest of the spawnlings, causing Evangel some distraction as he hissed at the water that pooled around his feet and made his skin sizzle.

With a roar, Evangel unleashed a circle of dark energy that spread out horizontally. It passed over Cora’s head, but Rusty was caught in the blast, the skin and muscle of his legs rapidly rotting away.

Unmaker’s black, Lace thought.

“Khruj, I wish to bargain!” she shouted as she ran.

“I refuse!” Evangel bellowed.

Lace inserted a sand vial as she reached him to give her wind-blade extra power. With a quick combination of swipes, she cut through his flesh, slicing off tendons and muscles. He turned to face her, and another wedge thudded into his back, followed by a third.

One of the shots seemed to have struck a heart as part of Evangel’s body went slack, and the creature sank down on one knee.

“Now!” Lace shouted.

Faith sprang forward, growing to the size of a human. She placed her hands on Evangel, the touch causing him to recoil with something more than pain. Fear.

“Gorod, I wish to bargain!” she called, and he stiffened for a third time.

Magge’s Sprite, Ray, zipped in through one of the open windows. She, too, grew to roughly the size of a normal person, approaching the Beast from behind and placing her hands on his back.

Together, the two Sprites began to purify his flesh, pieces of otherworldly beings falling away from the unholy amalgam.

“I refuse!” Evangel howled.

Straining his quickly disintegrating form, he reached up and grabbed Lace by the throat. He squeezed hard, cutting off her airflow. She was lifted off the ground, feet dangling uselessly as she batted against his arm.

Another few moments and he’d crush her windpipe.

“Maxim…” she croaked. “If there’s… any of you left… remember your humanity.”

Evangel paused. For the first time, his gaze truly focused on him. However grotesque he had become, his eyes were still human.

He let her go and she fell to the floor, landing on her side. She coughed and rubbed at her throat as she sucked in new air.

“Do it, then,” Evangel said. He sounded weary. “There’s no going back for me. I got what I wanted.”

Evangel remained motionless as his flesh sloughed off. Layer by wretched layer it fell away until Lace could actually make out the human he had once been, just a grey old man. Elder Maxim.

Heavy bruising appeared on his neck, and he began to struggle for breath.

Lace stood up and pointed the end of her staff at his head. At this point, the greatest kindness she could offer him was a quick death.

She ran a strong current through the staff, and the sand rushing out the end quickly blasted a hole right through his forehead, sending fragments of bone and brain out the back.

Maxim regarded her dully for just a moment before all cognition left him. He slumped to the side.

Lace breathed a sigh of relief. She kicked at the quickly decomposing Beast flesh that lay around Maxim, but there was no sign of movement.

“Clear?” Legario asked, heading into the temple.

“Clear,” Lace said with a somber nod.

Faith winked and dispersed into the air, while Ray returned to her companion.

Lace turned her attention to Rusty, who was being tended to by Cora. She had amputated both his legs at the thigh with her silver thread, the blessed metal cutting clean through tendon and bone and cauterizing the stumps left behind. Rusty had passed out from the pain but appeared to be alive.

“We’ll see to it that he gets the best possible care,” Legario said, reaching Lace’s side. “I’ll make sure he pulls through.”

With the battle over, she helped Legario take down the corpses hanging from the ceiling. All eleven of them, dead, including Steelfeather, the last active A-Rank Hero Goldbrand had left.

We only won by a hair, Lace realized. Even so, the losses…

She wanted to cry, but she held it in. This was not the time for tears. That would come later.

Magge found a pair of children hidden among the corpses in the middle of the temple who claimed to be Maxim’s daughters. They were clearly both shocked and terrified, and the big man did his best to soothe them.

“Seems like he really did get what he wanted,” Lace said. “That’s what he was looking for all along. To resurrect his daughters.”

“I heard,” Legario said.

“What will happen to them?” She nodded towards the children.

“For now, I can’t say. They will be questioned, then held somewhere safe, I suppose. You can never be too safe about these things.”

Lace nodded. Her heart ached for those girls, but Legario was right. If she had learned anything from this, it was that you could never leave things half-finished with Beasts.