Noivern took me over the battlefield, his muscular back flexing as his wide wings beat the air in a steady rhythm. Flying just below the brooding storm, well out of range of any bowshot from the forces arrayed below, I observed the field.

My homies swooped and shrieked around us, a spiraling fortress of black feathers and sharp talons. Their cries echoed above the wind. As we shadowed the rear of Malphas’s army, I relaxed my grip on the reins, holding myself in place with my knees.

Firing a bow from atop a wyvern wasn’t easy, but the war machines below provided an ample target. Rolling through my inventory boxes, the first flame arrow materialized in my hand, already notched as I pulled back my bowstring. Light glimmered along its tip, and I took a deep breath before releasing. It loosed with a twang.

More arrows followed, their red fletching streaking through the air. My aim wasn’t perfect, and the first shot went wide, but the second and third hit their marks. The arrows burst, setting the first trebuchet alight, and the flames spread greedily. The soldiers stationed around the war machines had already been loading their baskets. Now they scattered in a panic, some trying to smother the fires, others running for water and support, but the blaze grew faster than they could manage. I sent down a few more arrows, completing the immolation as Noivern circled to get us over the next machine.

Phantoms rose silently from the ranks of monsters among the enemy encampment, their wings undulating. They usually only screamed when they were diving. There were scores of them, but the rising host didn’t worry me. My homies were calling to each other in excitement. The harpies were ready for a feast.

Slightly more concerning was a pair of wyverns laboriously beating their way up to meet us. They were big enough to barrel through my cordon of birds, and they could bite a harpy in half if it got too close to their wide, toothy maws.

No reason to give them a chance to come close. Cycling through the inventory bar hanging in my vision over my hand, I switched from flaming arrows to Shadowbane. It took me longer to sight the wyverns with my bow than it had the trebuchets. Noivern was circling, and these were moving targets, but they were below me, and a strike to the broad expanse of their wings could be as good as one to their heads. It didn’t matter if they survived as long as I took them out of the sky.

Noivern surged beneath me, issuing a shrill challenge to its rivals. My first shot took one of them in the shoulder, and its flight weakened. The wyvern emitted a cry of pain but kept coming. I missed on the second attempt as Noivern banked. The harpies were already dropping to engage the phantoms, further complicating my aim. A third attempt cut through the flesh of my target’s other wing, tearing all the way through, and it lost altitude.

The second wyvern hit a harpy, slamming into it in mid-air and seizing the poor bird in its oversized maw. We were flying perpendicular to each other, and I had to twist in my harness, gripping Noivern with my legs, targeting the space just ahead of it. The missile whistled through the air, striking near its tail.

It released the harpy, winging sharply to face me and Noivern, still a hundred feet below. The black bird fell from its mouth, one of its wings hanging uselessly, and plummeted to the battlefield below.

I gritted my teeth at the loss. There were a lot of harpies, and I didn’t know more than a handful of them personally, but I hated to see them die for me. Noivern adjusted our course so that we were bound for a head-on collision with the second wyvern, his jaws gaping and his claws extended.

The angle gave me a straight shot into its open mouth. As the arrow disappeared down its gullet, the Shadowbane took full effect. The beast convulsed, then went still, falling like a stone.

I steadied my breathing, glancing up at the grays and browns of the stormy sky roiling violently above as a flash of soundless lighting illuminated us all. The massive silhouette of Mount Doom dominated the horizon, smoke billowing from its caldera. The gates of the fortress were shut.

I’d sent a messenger to Gaap, telling him to advance at full speed to the mountain. Major Garron and the garrison forces were waiting behind the walls for his arrival.

With only the slightest cue from me, Noivern banked once more, taking us back around to the next trebuchet. They were still loading it, and as I watched, its massive counterbalance was released, causing the great arm of the machine to swing up, flinging its ammunition toward the fortress.

The massive stone arced through the sky, impossibly far, smashing into the rampart well to the left of the gate. A section of the crenelation crumbled, easy to repair with my abilities, but it still pissed me off.

My hand moved with practiced ease, drawing back the string as another flame arrow appeared in place. I was using the Tainted Bow instead of Kevin’s crossbow for better range. It had a heavy draw, but I could have held it taut for minutes on end, my fingers protected by the finely articulated metal segments of an orichalcum gauntlet.

I took my time lining up the shot, ignoring the chaos in the air around me as the harpies mobbed the incoming phantoms, tearing them apart. My vision narrowed, and this time, I had it on the first shot. A few moments later, the second trebuchet went up in flames, its operators scurrying for cover.

The phantoms couldn’t break through the savage defensive cordon of the harpies. More of a distraction than a threat, only one approached close enough for Noivern to take a bite out of it. But more trebuchets were threatening the fortress.

The wind picked up suddenly, nearly flipping us upside down, and I was forced to put the bombardment on hold, gripping the harness to avoid being unseated. A dark shape shot up from the enemy army faster than any wyvern or harpy, a black cloak billowing behind it.

Malphas had the head of a raven and an affinity for air. He didn’t need wings to fly, and as Noivern righted himself, the demon approached too swiftly for me to line up a shot. He came level with us a few seconds later, hanging in the air as if suspended by wires, his hands contorting in a series of arcane gestures.

At least as long as he was holding still, I had a chance to hit him. Switching back to Shadowbane arrows, I aimed for his chest. The shot was good, with Noivern headed for the demon, my target was directly in front of me. But the arrow veered aside, caught in a sudden gust.

The demon had protected himself with a spell. I tried again, but the second missile was as ineffective as the first, so I replaced the bow in my inventory and drew the blue-edged sword from my hip. With Noivern rushing at top speed, we would be on him in seconds.

A gang of harpies swarmed Malphas, but he sent them spiraling away with a broad gesture backed by a vicious wind. The swirl around him expanded, and the nearest harpies were thrown into disarray, fighting to stay aloft. The milling phantoms didn’t fare any better, tossed like rags, whatever magic they used to swim through the air was no match for the forces generated around the demon.

I shouted against the wind, urging Noivern on, and my wyvern folded his wings back, taking us forward on sheer momentum, cutting through the last of the distance between us and the demon in an instant. Malphas gestured, and a column of air hit us head-on, as solid as a battering ram.

Noivern twisted, flipping nearly vertically, and I almost slashed through his wing. My legs tightened, barely holding on as Noivern turned onto his side and tried to right us.

His wings stretched out again, fighting to hold against the chaotic currents in the air, and we passed below Malphas, who was already at work on another spell.

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“One more time,” I shouted at Noivern, “Let’s get him.”

Noivern trilled, agitated by the difficult air currents, but always eager for the prospect of a kill. Fighting Malphas this way put us at a severe disadvantage, but it wouldn’t be any better on the ground. Bojack had warned me that the demon could fly, and if I wasn’t on the back of a wyvern, he would be free to hound me from above, sending spell after spell to bog me down. The remaining trebuchet teams were hard at work, lobbing boulders at the high walls of Mount Doom. They wouldn’t dismantle it any time soon, but they couldn’t be allowed free reign to assault the fortress.

I considered retreating. Baal would have to arrive at some point, and then we could move in on Malphas’s army from two sides. But I hated the idea of wasting my forces that way when it was possible for me to end this right here.

We circled up and around the raven demon, Noivern navigating the wild gusts that protected him, unable to bring us within melee range. His massive wings battled against the oppressive winds. My mount was a flying machine, and he was going to get some choice treats when this was over. Maybe some cow hearts or something.

The wyverns weren’t picky about what they ate, but there had to be a meat hierarchy of some kind.

He managed to bring us above the demon, angling down for a sheer dive. The wyvern let out a shrill cry as we bulleted through the buffeting winds, and I held my sword out ahead of me like a lance. We came close, and the Raven dropped, turning upside down as if he was suspended by his feet alone, and we streaked by him.

In the next second, a solid column of air struck Noivern in the belly, and before I knew it, I was falling, knocked clean out of the harness. Though this was way too high for Feather Fall to save me, the enchantment gave me a few seconds to think before gravity kicked in. An image flashed through my mind, summoning a bucket of water, depositing it on the earth below, and landing safely. That was how it worked in Minecraft.

This was definitely not Minecraft, but it was Minecraft-adjacent.

Thrusting my arm out, I used the Storage Ring to build a column of leaf blocks at the limit of its range below me. They collapsed the instant I fell into them, but I continued to empty the stack of leaves in my inventory as I went down.

It wasn’t a parachute, not even close, but the floating blocks did slow me down as I plowed through them.

The ground slapped me like a divine palm, and I bounced, once, twice, rolling helplessly to the side. My armor was magic, and so was I, but there had to be limits to the enchantments. Protection and Unbreaking were well and good for fist-fighting a troll, not that I would want to, but falling hundreds of feet onto solid ground in a suit of heavy armor was not an ideal method of testing the damage absorption parameters of my equipment.

image [https://i.imgur.com/KGltQql.png[/img]

The rolling hadn’t been on purpose, it was completely out of my control. To say I was sore would miss the mark. I felt like someone who had just dropped off of a wyvern to certain death and then not died.

My ears were ringing too badly to hear much, but soldiers surrounded me. They looked confused. One of them poked me with a spear. Their voices gradually penetrated the fog of my concussion.

“Is…is he dead?” The man asked.

“Has to be,” another replied, “did you see that?”

The spear nudged me again, its tip clinking against my cuirass. I took a deep breath, and the man holding the spear dropped it, jumping back.

“He moved! I saw him move!”

“There’s no way.”

My sword was gone, who knew where, but there was a backup in my inventory. Kevin’s buster. A wide-open field, surrounded by enemies, was the ideal place to put that ungainly superweapon to good use. I lifted my hand to look at the inventory bar. It hurt, and the soldiers freaked out. One of them cracked his sword against my helm.

It was annoying.

Selecting the item took more concentration than it should have, but a beat later, the oversized blade appeared in my hand, and I swung it casually, still on my back, just trying to make some space.

I didn’t hit anyone, and the immediate response was a mixed bag of “attack” and “run for your lives,” which suggested that at least a few of these guys had some sense. I rose, clay and grit clinging to my armor, and stretched a bit to make sure nothing was broken. Miraculously, nothing was.

I noticed that the soldiers surrounding me weren’t wearing stormtrooper armor. They had on more traditional hauberks and metal caps. They’d come from Nargul, so maybe only the train guards had the privilege of wearing what the Dark Lord had crafted himself.

Even Kevin’s obsession with uniform production standards had to end somewhere, I supposed.

“For the record,” I announced, “I am your new Dark Lord. If you surrender to me now, this is going to go great. If you fight me, I will mess you up.”

“For the Throne!” Someone screamed, and others took up the cry. Malphas or Agares must have told them that their ruler was trapped, and I was an imposter. That was inconvenient. One man got ahead of the others, charging in with a spear and a wild shout, so I cut him in half.

I hadn’t been trying to cut him in half, but the buster sword made it hard not to. It seemed to have been designed for turning people into people pieces, as well as swinging to hit multiple opponents at once. It certainly treated the man’s armor like more of a suggestion to pause rather than an actual impediment.

As the two halves of the man plopped to the ground, the sight was enough to give the others a reason to reconsider their life choices, and it wasn’t a good moment for me either. Bile rose in my throat, and I couldn’t help but focus on the entrails, the expression on his face as what seemed to be every ounce of blood in his body drained out into the dry soil of Dargoth. I’d killed people before, lots of people, but almost always at a distance, or with traps. This was gruesome.

The soldiers hesitated, but the monsters did not. A hoard of shamblers had been headed in my direction since I landed, and there were trolls out in front, rolling in like tanks. The humans made way for them, warding with their spears as reinforcements gathered behind them. I’d landed at the back of Malphas’s force, closer to the siege weapons and the supply wagons than the assault force, but they were coming.

I glanced up. Mount Doom was straight ahead of me, something like half a mile. Even their monstrous trebuchets, enhanced by demonic runes, couldn’t throw farther than that. It wouldn’t take me more than a few minutes to jog back to the safety of the fortress, or at least the outermost gate. But there was an entire army in my way.

A troll came barreling in, hooting mad, and I stepped to one side, chopping its neck with the buster blade like an executioner. Its head came off, and the big body skidded to a stop just beyond me. Then a column of semisolid air smashed into me from above, driving me to my knees.

“Kill him!” Came the screech of the raven demon, hovering high above. My homies, bless their hearts, were still trying to jump him, but the chaotic forces he had summoned around himself kept them at bay. We were at a bit of a stalemate here. As long as I was on the ground, there was no way he could kill me with wind magic, at least not with the spells he’d displayed so far. But he could sure make a nuisance of himself while his army did the grunt work of bringing me down.

They came, a relentless tide of shamblers, their forms twisting and snarling in the storm’s gloom. I was spinning, slicing, and probably looked ridiculous. This kind of main-strength swordplay wouldn’t have been very effective against highly skilled opponents, but these were just mobs, and I mowed them down, trying to press closer to Mount Doom step by labored step. They were swarming me, and the fighting was a blur. I was swinging as fast as my enhanced physiology would allow, and soon I was walking over bodies, zombies and humans alike.

My world narrowed to the pulse of the fight, the howling trolls, the moaning shamblers, and the cries of the human soldiers brave or stupid enough to get in my way. Weapons bounced off of my armor, and the occasional gust threw me off balance, but Malphas’s spells weren’t very precise, and they caused more trouble for the enemies around me, who weren’t encased in a suit of invulnerable orichalcum, than they did for me.

Agares had managed to dent my breastplate with his hammer, but no mortal weapon had so much as left a scratch.

Each heartbeat became a marker of time, and the sound of my panting breath within the full helm, ticking away moments that stretched into eternity. I found a grim clarity, a flow. Once or twice, I caught sight of Malphas, but there was nothing I could do about him from here, so I didn’t bother trying to follow his movements.

My arms were getting heavy, and when I paused to summon a torch for my belt to discourage the monsters, a sudden rush from the soldiers took me off my feet. They dog-piled me, not even bothering to try to cut me anymore, instead climbing onto my chest and arms to hold me down.

With a mental flex, the buster popped back into my inventory. I didn’t want to lose it in the struggle. They got me on my back, their hands scrabbling for the clasps of my helm, but some of them let go quickly, screaming in pain as cuts appeared on their limbs.

My chestplate included the Thorns enchantment. It would have been more effective if the other pieces of my armor included it as well, but regardless, grappling me was not fun for anyone.

Distant horns. The gates of Mount Doom had opened, and though I couldn’t see it through the mountain of soldiers on top of me, I knew that Major Garren was leading the garrison out onto the field. Gaap hadn’t arrived yet, but they must have seen me fall and decided to take action.

The real battle was just beginning.