“Let me see you use your sword,” Gastard said.

“What?” I was piling the iron ingots back in their sack, thinking about how much stone I was going to have to harvest before I could use them, and his question caught me off guard.

“Your sword. If we fight together, I need to know how you wield it.”

There was still some time before dark, so I grabbed my stone blade and hefted it. The hilt was long enough that I could grip it with both hands, which was convenient, as it was too heavy to use comfortably in one.

Gastard paused in the act of drawing his own sword, his sharp blue eyes narrowing as they took in mine. He stepped forward. “Let me see that.”

I switched up my grip so I could hand it to him hilt first, and he frowned as he lifted it. His armor looked old, with some links in his chain shirt showing signs of rust and repair, but his chest plate was so polished that it caught the evening sun.

“What is this?” He asked. “It isn’t steel.”

“Stone,” I said.

He grunted. “Your blessing.” Turning to one side, he made a few practice swings, and the muscles in his forearms bulged like ropes beneath his skin.

“This is far too heavy,” he said, running his thumb along its edge, “but sharp enough.”

He flipped it over to hand it back to me. “Try to land a blow to my cuirass. Let me see what you can do.”

Gastard stepped back and drew his own weapon, giving me a nod. Even if we were just sparring, going up against him made me nervous, so I started out with a halfhearted poke at his chest, and he batted it aside with ease.

“No.” He said. “Do better.”

I went at him with a full on side swing, and he parried, but his eyes widened a fraction as he absorbed the blow. My sword’s extra weight added to its momentum, and his blade rang, while mine remained silent. I felt the impact in my hands, and he clearly felt it as well. Was I stronger than him?

“Keep trying,” he said.

What followed was an awkward series of attacks that were expertly rebuffed. I lost my hesitancy and started really putting my all into the swings. Gastard stepped away from one, then slapped the back of my hand with the flat of his blade. It stung, but I kept my grip.

“Enough,” he said. “You are strong, but unskilled. You need training, lots of it.”

I couldn’t argue with his assessment. Apart from my lack of skill, my forearms were already burning, and I’d been trying to hit him for less than a minute.

“Will you help me?”

“I will. For tonight, stay close, and you may not die.”

“I have a spear,” I said. “I was thinking about using that.”

“Good. A spear is a fine weapon for a beginner.”

There were probably many people who would have said that a spear was a fine weapon at any skill level, but he had a point. The best thing I could do was try to keep my enemies at a distance, and if I were fighting with a partner, it would be easier to keep the mobs from getting too close.

I showed him how the gates worked and moved all my stuff inside to prepare for what was coming.

“This place reeks of death,” Gastard said as soon as he had stepped down into the basement.

“Yeah,” I said, “that checks out.”

I’d cleared out all the shambler corpses, but the smell was in the dirt, and I was constantly having to clear mushrooms from the cells. It was an altogether earthy aroma, with a powerful undertone of swamp. I got the fire pit going and crafted a new torch to stick in the entrance hall. I could replace it when it went out.

The sun was going down, and Gastard grimaced when I produced my mask.

“What is that?” He asked.

“My helmet,” I said.

Gastard didn’t have a helmet, though his dirty blonde hair had a bit of a helmet look to it. His armor was limited to his cuirass and the chain shirt under it, which hung down below his waist, and leather leggings that were reinforced with metal studs. No shield for either of us. If the formula to craft a shield was the same as in the game, then I would have to be able to use iron before I could make any.

“Disgusting,” he said, as I put it on.

“Hey, it works.”

He didn’t look like he thought the tradeoff was worth it, but protecting my head was more important than not looking like a serial killer.

“Listen,” I said, “if Bill shows up, I want to capture him.”

“Bill?”

“The special koroshai. The one that has my face. If we kill him, he might just come back tomorrow.”

Gastard grunted his assent, and not long after, we heard the first mobs begin to spawn outside. My hope that the phantoms wouldn’t come back if I got a full night’s sleep proved to be false. We had moved into the hall as darkness rolled in, and one of them swooped by the front gate, its unearthly scream echoing in the tight space.

I pressed the button with my spear, and the gate swung open. There wasn’t room for us to stand side by side, so I took up a position a step behind Gastard. When the phantom flew in, he cut it down in a stroke, and I collected the body to toss down in the basement.

“No room,” he said. “I can’t fight like this. We should go outside.”

“They’ll surround us,” I said.

“We keep the hall at our backs, and retreat if there are too many.”

“The phantoms come from above. They could drop on your head.”

“Still,” he tapped the ceiling with the tip of his sword. “I dislike this.”

“It’s safer here.”

Gastard frowned. “This is not how heroes do battle.”

Our debate was cut short as a second phantom barreled in through the entrance. As if to make his point, Gastard’s swing scraped against the log wall, which threw off his timing. The phantom’s tail whipped against his breastplate, and it floated back when I tried to jab it with my spear. Gastard stepped forward, thrusting his sword up into the monster’s belly, and it fell to the ground. Without bothering to continue the argument, he moved to stand in the open just outside the hall.

If that’s how he was going to play it, I felt like I had no choice but to follow his example. I retrieved the torch and replanted it on one side of the entrance. We stood side by side to face the incoming mobs.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

There was only one more phantom in the sky, and it was circling high above, waiting for an opportunity to strike as a pair of zombies shambled our way. Gastard rushed forward to meet them, and had sliced off both their heads before I made up my mind on whether or not to go after him.

“They are only dangerous in numbers,” he said, walking back to take up his post once more. “We cannot allow them to gather.”

While I didn’t agree about the level of danger involved, he was right that the shamblers were easier to deal with alone than in groups.

“Just don’t get too far away from the shelter,” I said, and he nodded in response. A shriek warned us both of the incoming phantom, but it pulled up out of its dive well before it came within range of my spear. It was testing us.

A few more shamblers appeared over the next few minutes, but between the two of us, they were quickly dispatched. Then it got quiet. The phantom continued to circle, and I lost sight of it as a cloud drifted over the moons. The minutes ticked by, and I could tell Gastard was getting restless.

“Why do you want to fight monsters?” I said. “I mean, I appreciate the help, but it seems important to you.”

“The templars,” Gastard said, his voice pitched low. “They were knights in the old times. I dreamt of being one of them when I was a boy and learned the speech of the enemy to better understand them. But there is no Order in these days.”

“Is that why you came here? To be closer to Dargoth?”

“Yes,” his face hardened. “I was going to find my death in my dream.”

That sounded ominous. “You wanted to die?”

“I did.”

“Like you were going to go into Dargoth yourself, but you stayed with the lillits instead?”

He grunted, and I let him be. Boffin had said Gastard had gotten himself into some kind of dispute with the Lord of Henterfell, so maybe he was an exile, or otherwise decided that the only way for him to retain his honor was to ride off into the sunset. Regardless, I was glad he hadn’t gone through with his suicide mission. He was a useful man to have around, and he seemed like a good one, despite his gruff manner.

There was a moan from around the other side of the shelter, and we waited for the shambler to come for us, but it didn’t.

“There,” Gastard said, pointing at a shape a hundred feet away from us. It was crouching in the tall grass, and I wouldn’t have noticed if not for his warning. It looked like a shambler, but its stillness told me it was something more. Bill.

“He’s watching us,” I said.

“Waiting,” Gastard said. “Gathering. That is why they do not attack.”

Another figure rose out of the shadows a few dozen paces away, shifting from side to side, but not approaching. This was an entirely new level of problem.

“You think he can tell the others what to do?”

Gastard shrugged. “Demons can. The aychar.”

“What’s an aychar?”

“The Dark Lord’s generals.”

“But he’s not a demon, is he? I thought he was just a smart shambler.”

“I do not know how demons are born, or how many other evils lurk in the ranks of Dargoth.”

Gastard moved forward, and I backed him up. Bill laughed as we approached, then moved away, matching our pace. He had no intention of facing us yet, and the farther we got from the shelter, the easier it would be to get mobbed.

“He wants us to go after him,” I said, and we retreated to the hall. The phantom was still keeping its distance, as were the other monsters. If Bill was communicating his intentions to them, he did so silently. The first torch guttered out, its charcoal spent. How long had it been, an hour?

Gastard watched the entrance while I crafted a replacement, and we continued the vigil.

“If Bill thinks he can’t win,” I said, “he may not come at all.”

“He will come,” Gastard said, “or the others will, as long as the way is open.”

“How do you know?”

“They have only the night.”

The minutes dragged on, and the moons came out again, revealing more shamblers assembling at a distance from the shelter. I snacked on a carrot, more to pass the time than because I was hungry, chewing the fibers into mush. Gastard refused my offer to share.

A bow would have been nice. Gastard, apparently, had not brought his. I could make rope with grass, but not string. Would I have to kill spiders to get thread? Hopefully, some flax or something would do.

Though there was no signal we could see, the shamblers began moving all at once, coming together in a loose semicircle as they approached the shelter with Bill walking up behind them. His laughter cut through the chorus of their moans.

They stopped a dozen paces away from the entrance, and the shrieks of phantoms filled the night, but they were high above.

“As long as we have a chokepoint,” I said, “we’ll be fine.”

Gastard took a single step out into the open.

“What are you doing?” I shouted.

“He won’t send them to us,” he said, not looking back. “He knows it would be pointless.”

“You don’t know what he’s thinking!” I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back into the hall. “Just wait it out.”

He punched me in the face. The mask absorbed the damage, but it was still vigorous enough to knock my head back. Anger surged through me, and I saw myself stabbing him, an intrusive thought, but I clamped down on the impulse.

“What was that for?”

Gastard turned back toward the enemy. “Hero or not, if you touch me again, there will be blood between us.”

“I’m trying to save you!”

“You are not my lord. You do not command me. Attempting to physically force me to obey you is an assault on my person.”

“Are you kidding me?” If that was his attitude toward being told what to do, it was easy to imagine how this man might have run afoul of a noble.

“I am not.” Gastard readied his sword and moved toward the line of zombies, which remained where it was. A phantom dove, and he cut it out of the air, sidestepping so that its trajectory drove it into the dirt instead of into him. As furious as I was, I had to admit, he looked badass doing it.

Bill giggled hysterically, and the shamblers converged on their target. Despite his skill, there was no way Gastard could kill them all before he was dog piled. I uttered a four-letter word and went after him.

As soon as I was out of the hall, phantoms came at me from either side. I got my spear up to meet one of them, and it pulled up at the last second to avoid skewering itself. The other slammed into my back. Its tail jabbed into my tunic, and I felt the point graze my skin. I had to let go of my spear to grab it by one wing and rip it off of me. It was light enough to throw, but it never touched the ground, rising again as if propelled by an antigravity engine.

[https://i.imgur.com/hP026V3.png[/img]

The first one came back, and I jumped to one side to avoid its dive, ripping my sword out so forcefully that it cut through my rope belt. The phantoms circled me, their tails whipping at my face as I swung wildly to fend them off. Gastard was engaging the shamblers, who already had him surrounded, and I glimpsed Bill moving in with his stick.

As the phantoms continued to harry me, I hit one of them by sheer luck, and the stone blade nearly took off its wing. Despite their unnatural mode of flight, the wings mattered. It rolled, but could no longer ascend, and I chased it with an overhand swing that bit into its spine. The second phantom whipped me again, costing me another half of a heart.

Sword or spear? I wasn’t sure which was the better choice, but one of them was already in my hands. Gastard was cutting down zombies left and right, but he was facing a horde. One was about to lunge at him from behind, and I brought my sword around into its neck, nearly severing its head.

If this fight lasted long enough for fatigue to be a problem, we would probably have already lost, so I went in with everything I had. There were more zombies than I’d realized. Fifteen? Twenty? The next few moments were a fragmented mess of grasping limbs and yawning mouths as the mob of mobs surged around me.

Gastard saw I had joined him and greeted me with a grim smile before disappearing behind a wall of gray flesh. I slashed open a zombie’s belly, and it tried to tackle me, but I kicked us apart, falling back into the arms of another monster. Its teeth sank into the leather covering my shoulder, and I swung my sword up and back into where I was pretty sure its head was. It was an awkward maneuver, but the weight of the stone blade was enough to drive its edge into the zombie's skull, where it stuck.

Then Bill was there, laughing as he thrust his makeshift spear into my chest. It hurt, but the leather stopped it from impaling me.

[https://i.imgur.com/RkxkuOY.png[/img]

Bill seemed to think this was hilarious. I reached for my dagger, only to realize that it had fallen from my side when my belt was cut. Rather than try to pry my sword out of the head of the shambler that had just collapsed behind me, I jumped Bill. As adroit as he was for a zombie, he had not been expecting this, and we went to the ground with me on top.

His hands ripped at my mask while toothy tentacles slipped around to gnaw at my torso. They would get through eventually, but the tunic was doing its job. Without another weapon at my disposal, I rose to my knees and started smashing my fists into his face, a distorted version of my own face, over and over.

[https://i.imgur.com/SLiJ4rI.png[/img]

It hurt my hands, but I wasn’t thinking about capturing him. I wasn’t thinking about anything; just hitting. The world boiled down to a tiny point of awareness, his jaw distorting as it broke, a single eye popping out, and his laughter, never-ending.

I wasn’t aware of anything happening around me until the laughter stopped. Then all I could hear was my breathing. There were shambler corpses all around me, but I hadn’t killed them. Gastard was still moving, finishing the leftovers. He didn’t waste movement on dealing them superficial wounds. Every stroke was to the neck or the head, and soon, we were alone.

I glanced up, no phantoms were circling. He’d taken care of the last of them too.

“Not bad.” He said.

Bill was still under me, and his face, my face, was just a pulp. One of his tentacles was still trying to chew through my tunic, but the rest of him was still. I got up, looking for my sword, but there were no more monsters to slay, and my hands weren’t working properly. They were bloody, and I couldn’t open them all the way. I'd lost another heart pummeling him. More than one of my knuckles was broken, and the pain was flowing up my arms like a flame.

“The night’s still young,” Gastard said.

I went inside.