Seventeen

Neither Marcus nor Alissa slept at all the first night. Alissa hadn’t the first clue how to assemble the extra-large tent she had used for most of the journey, and Marcus wasn’t able to do it himself. The Pol Trulant soldiers accompanying them didn’t look the most agreeable of people to deal with, so he didn’t even bother asking them. They were much too busy to help him either way.

They had discovered the wine and fine food being brought along with them and decided to help themselves. Sir Caldwell didn’t object to his men drinking and eating the food. In fact, he joined in on the fun. Many of them became drunk as they sat around the fire, gambling away gold coins on games of dice and belting out lewd songs that even made Marcus blush.

With everything going on, both he and Lady Alissa thought it best if she simply stayed in the carriage. Marcus had told her to get some sleep and that he would stand guard the entire night, but that didn’t happen. She couldn’t sleep, not with the frat party happening outside, not to mention the uncertainty of her future racing through her mind. So, they ended up talking the entire night, discussing anything that would take their minds off of their awful situation.

He was just happy to see that their relationship had been repaired.

The second night was much like the first. Sir Caldwell, along with his merry band of men, enjoyed the wine, gambled away gold they had found ‘lying around,’ and told tales of former conquests, monsters, and women alike. It was as if Lady Alissa and Marcus had become nothing more than an afterthought, hangers-on to their own party on wheels.

By the third night, Alissa couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. She was asleep before they had even stopped for the night, and Marcus actually had to wake her in order to eat dinner. He had been making her meals and keeping her filled up with her favorite tea. She was kind enough to tell him that his cooking was actually good, but Marcus knew better than that. He could assemble sandwiches and microwave hot pockets just fine, but that was far way away from being Gorden Ramsey.

During this time, Marcus hadn’t slept at all. Not between driving the carriage and keeping watch at night. His spicy mana water from his water skin was helping him tolerate the lack of sleep, every sip filling him with energy, but even juicing up on questionable liquids wouldn’t hold him over forever. And, with no one to talk to during the night, made it that much harder to keep his eyes open.

The wide-open plains offered him very little to look at in the dead of night. The stars peeked out from behind sporadic clouds that marched steadily across the inky black sky. The cooling embers of the fire crackled and popped , the flames flickering as they ate through the last of the wood. Most of the soldiers lay around the fire bed, spread out in varying undignified poses as the strong wine muddled their heads.

Tonight had been an especially rambunctious night. Marcus didn’t know for certain but figured that they had broken into the stronger stuff reserved as a personal gift to Alissa’s future husband. He wished he knew who had sent these men. It certainly wasn’t the third prince; Marcus would have thought that he would have at least cared somewhat about Alissa. Whoever it was must have some level of authority, at least enough to rival a prince, and that didn’t bode well for him or Alissa.

“Uggghhhhh……”

Marcus perked up at the strange sound. At first , he thought it was the wind. With nothing to impede it, the wind could reach tremendous speeds.

“Arrrhgghhh……”

He whipped his head around, looking for the faint moans he was hearing. None of the drunken soldiers were moving, although their chests indicated that they still breathed; that alone wouldn’t cause a sound like that. Marcus walked around the carriage with careful steps. He didn’t want to wake up Alissa if nothing came of the strange sounds.

He still didn’t find anything. Although the stars were out, the moon was absent from the sky. He had been able to see quite well in the dark as of late, but even his improved vision couldn’t penetrate the veil of darkness around him.

He was about to give up, chalking the odd noises to his lack of sleep, but as he circled the carriage one last time, a sudden movement caught his eye. “Urmmm……” The moan was much louder as he caught the silhouette of a person shambling towards the passed-out soldiers.

“Grrrhhhhh……” Another silhouette joined the first. “Uggghhhh……” Then a third… a fourth… a fifth. It only took Marcus a moment to see that they were surrounded.

“Get up!” Marcus roared, his voice booming like thunder over the plain. “We’re under attack!”

His rousing warning didn’t have the effect that he desired. The men barely moved even as the figures stumbled into their poorly made camp. Marcus was about to rush to their aid, kick them awake if he had to, before he heard the discordant footsteps coming from behind him.

He spun on his heel to face whatever had snuck up behind them. Even with how Sir Caldwell and his men had treated them, Marcus still felt guilty, leaving them to fend for themselves. But his heart was with Alissa, and he would never leave her undefended.

His hammer whistled through the air, the blunt end smashing into the head of something . It was close enough for him to make out a human shape, but it was disfigured and twisted in an unnatural way. And, without a head, looked even less human than it did before. Cold viscera splattered against his armor as his hammer finished its arc, its momentum spinning him around to face another assailant reaching out with gnarled fingers.

Unable to reverse the direction of his weapon quickly enough, Marcus let go with one of his hands and struck out with a closed fist. It was an awkward punch; his body twisted at an odd angle, but he put enough force behind it to drive the thing back and feel the crunch of bones even through his steel gauntlets.

“Ahhhh!” A gargled scream pierced the night sky, alerting Marcus to the fact that the monsters attacking them had found the soldiers. The man’s dying shrieks must have finally been enough to wake the others as a chorus of shouts and the shling of blades being pulled from their leather prisons joined the moans surrounding the camp.

Leaving the rest of the camp for the soldiers, Marcus rushed to Alissa’s carriage. It wasn’t very far away; he very rarely drifted away from it, and he was relieved to find that the doors and windows were still securely shut. He banged on the door like he was trying to break in. Alissa was still asleep, and she needed not to be.

A shambling figure came from his left, its twisted arms reaching out like he was a long-lost loved one. Marcus didn’t wait for the hug and struck out with his hammer with a horizontal swing. Its body was slightly tougher than the last one’s head and didn’t immediately explode into gory bits, but it still folded in half before tumbling across the flat ground like it had been shot out of a cannon.

“Marcus… Marcus, what is happening?” Alissa’s exhausted voice chimed from the carriage.

“Stay inside!” He shouted back at her. Make sure all of the doors are locked, and do not come out for anything.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

He didn’t wait for a reply as two more humanoid monstrosities shambled his way. The head of his hammer met with one of them, crushing its body into the ground with a sickening squelch. The other one was lucky enough to avoid the weighty steel weapon but was still hit by Marcus’ foot as he kicked it in the chest. He could feel its ribs give way under his boot, and the creature stumbled back on unsteady feet.

Marcus had expected that the blow would have been enough to, if not outright, kill the monster, at least injure it enough so that it wasn’t able to get back up. But it never hit the ground. Once it had regained some semblance of balance, it growled at him before lurching forward once more.

That is when an explosion of white light bathed the battlefield around him. Marcus really wished it hadn’t. Instantly, what little night vision he had was overwhelmed by the burst of illumination, completely blinding him. The monsters he was facing didn’t seem to be phased by the development as he felt something latch onto his armor.

It tried to drag him down to the ground, using its body weight to do the job. Fortunately, Marcus was twice as big as any of the creatures attacking him and many times stronger as well. He abandoned his hammer, not throwing it away but letting go of it so that he could blindly grapple with his foe. He could feel rubbery flesh give way underneath the leathers of his gauntlets, his grip tightening around what felt like an arm.

Twisting his body, he wrenched the creature off his torso and was happy to feel that his armor remained in one piece. He would have been in quite a pickle if his body suddenly became exposed. Midway through his swing, he let go and sent the monster flying through the air in a random direction. He wasn’t worried about hitting anything, as long as whatever it was wasn’t gnawing on him was all that mattered.

The pain assaulting his eyes slowly faded, and with it, his vision gradually came back into focus. A ball of light the size of a basketball hung silently in the air above the carnage, the white light giving color to the tapestry of gore and death around him.

No less than five of the soldiers lay in a pool of their own blood, their throats nothing more than tattered flesh that glistened in the light. They were still in the position that Marcus remembered them passing out in and just so happened to be the closest to where the monsters had wandered in from. Their comrades had at least managed to fight back before they , too, were killed, although from what he could see, they were doing a very poor job of it.

More than half of them were injured in one way or another. A few had arms hanging limply to their sides, bite marks, deep gashes, or both, causing large rivers of blood to spatter the ground beneath them as they fought for their lives. The other half looked to be uninjured in any observable way but were at a stalemate with the remaining monsters, some of them being slowly pushed back.

It was obvious that whoever had sent them did not send their best.

And if they did, that spoke volumes to the quality of soldiers Pol Trulant produced.

Marcus scooped his warhammer from off the ground. Now that he could see, the weapon would prove much more useful than his fists. He turned to face another shambling monster that thought it could sneak up on him from his left. Although the light did help him fight, once the blindness wore off, Marcus couldn’t help but think he would rather be fighting blind.

The monsters were an amalgamation of seeping boils, huge, disfiguring tumors, and waxy, mottled skin stretched over twisted limbs and sunken eye sockets occupied by cloudy, white eyes. They moved in jerky motions as their muscles were constantly spasming, and reached for them with empty hands curled into grasping claws. Rotted teeth gnashed as they lurched forward, creating a cacophony of sickening clicks and clacks .

Marcus’ face twisted in disgust. It was like looking at a walking, mutated corpse; the smell was exactly how one would expect… except much worse. So thick was the scent that it coated his tongue, the heavy air clinging to the inside of his throat and causing him to retch.

Destroying the monster’s upper body with his hammer and spattering chunks of it everywhere only served to make the odor even more repugnant.

Another flash of light drew his attention to where the others were fighting for their lives. A fist-sized fireball sizzled through the air, leaving behind it a thick trail of billowing smoke before impacting a monster squarely in the chest. Its flesh popped and hissed as the magic ate into its body before erupting into a gout of flame that completely devoured it from the waist up.

Looking for the source of the spell, Marcus’ eyes followed the trail of smoke back to Sir Caldwell, who was standing atop a carriage directing his men in their efforts to repel the monsters. It would appear that the man was a mage of some skill—at least it looked that way to Marcus. His only experience with the magical side of this world was with the old, grumpy healer who had saved Jorel and Duke Dresden when he had healed Franklin after their sparring session.

He had to say, this magic was much more impressive than the healing spells he had seen before.

Another flash of light and an arc of smoke sailed through the air, marking another monster for death. With his help, it was only a matter of time before the remaining soldiers slayed the rest of the beasts, leaving Marcus to focus solely on defending Alissa’s carriage.

The monsters had no sense of self-preservation, which, coupled with their obvious lack of intelligence, had them lining up to be killed by Marcus. He cut them down one by one, his hammer making short work of their otherwise resilient bodies. In fact, the most difficult aspect of the battle was avoiding the spray of the sticky, black ichor that came with each of his deadly blows.

Soon enough, not a single one of the horridly disfigured monsters remained.

Marcus’ chest heaved like overworked bellows, the stink hanging in the air, making it physically difficult to breathe. The entire skirmish, from start to finish, lasted no longer than ten minutes at the most, but he had never felt as exhausted as he did now. His legs were like Jell-O, weak and wobbly. His hands were cramping so badly from gripping his hammer that he thought he had torn the muscles in his hands, his arms burned like they had been set ablaze, and his heart hammered in his chest so loudly that it was all he could do to hear the carriage door swing open behind him.

“Marcus!” Alissa called out as she jumped down from her carriage door. She pointedly ignored the grotesque carnage around her and ran over to him. “Are you alright? You are not injured, are you?”

Her eyes combed over his gore-spattered armor, the detailed etchings no longer visible underneath tar-like blood and corrupted chunks of meat, brain, and bone. Although her concern filled him with a warmth he could scarcely explain, the fact that she had decided to leave the safety of her carriage still managed to ruffle his feathers. “What are you doing out here!? You need to get back inside.”

“I was worried about you,” she said defiantly, reaching out for him but being stopped by Marcus’ raised hand. “I could hear the screaming, and… and the other sounds. I didn’t know what was happening. Then everything went quiet. I had to see if you were alright.”

“I’m fine, see…” Marcus said, holding out his arms to make his point. “Now, please, go back inside until I say it’s ok to come out.”

Alissa opened her mouth to argue, but as her eyes drifted over the bodies of the soldiers and monsters spread about the campsite, her words slowly died in her throat. Marcus could see the color drain from her face as the reality of what had happened sunk in. Her pristine, pale skin took on a sickly hue as her late dinner attempted to join the other lurid debris on the ground.

“Al-alright,” she said, swallowing hard as she turned back to the carriage before promptly turning around. “Be careful, Marcus.”