It was not as long a journey to reunite with Shaiagrazni as Ado had made to actually reach Ironbane, for he met her halfway between the cities. That had been the plan, of course. She would go ahead whilst he prepared the forces and marched, and Ado felt a fearful shiver run down her spine as she laid eyes on them.
New, all of them, and numbering in the dozens. She shouldn’t have been surprised, she’d seen the man create monsters big enough to swallow a bull whole and each of the bladed abominations now lined up behind him could have had their weights combined without equalling a single one of his largest creations. Still, it struck her.
“...Sir.” Ado croaked, suddenly feeling the unseen blade of his displeasure hanging over her. “I…We have returned, and I am sorry to say that our mission was a failure.”
Shaiagrazni eyed her, head tilting fractionally as if he were studying some bloody specimen laid out across a laboratory table. Then he sighed.
“It is no matter, I did not truly expect you to succeed in any case. There is a reason I spent so much of my precious time preparing our…Contingency.”
Her eyes flitted back to the creatures, and her blood ran cold all over again. They really were revolting. Like some bizarre cross between a cat and a snake, all long and lithe, limbs jutting in bizarre angles and coiled with thin musculature that bound their bones as tight as ship rigging. The look of the blades protruding from their arms made Ado feel rather queasy, she knew full well how viciously sharp the edged weaponry of House Shaiagrazni’s monsters was.
“We will be attacking shortly.” Shaiagrazni announced, looking to the few humans alongside him. Among them was his apprentice, Sphera. Ado had tried to make friendly with her before, knowing how rare it was to find another woman- let alone another woman of foreign-black skin- so high in any order as them. It had not worked, and she looked decidedly less friendly now than she had before.
“You did admirably enough, in any case.” Shaiagrazni continued, drawing Ado’s attention back in much the same way any extinction-level event’s speech would. “Consider this a mark in your favour, the very act of marching so fearlessly into such dangerous territory has proven you possess a degree of mental resilience not common to this world.”
Ado felt a smile blossom on her face, surprisingly enough. She wasn’t certain why, wasn’t certain, still, that she didn’t hate Shaiagrazni, and yet somehow his praise touched some part of her that had gone long ignored. Her eyes flitted back to his apprentice.
Sure enough, her glare had only intensified in its hatred.
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Collin wasn’t surprised to be called on by Shaiagrazni for a personal chat, the man tended towards compartmentalisation when it came to his subordinates. Probably it was a legacy of the great, ever-underdescribed betrayal which had first left him stranded in their world.
He answered his calls, standing before him and feeling his back straighten on reflex. Collin didn’t know so many ways of interacting with a superior, he supposed, and the military ones seemed most appropriate here.
“You were inside the city.” Shaiagrazni noted. “You studied the interior?”
“‘Course.” Collin replied, almost offended at the fact that his ally had even asked. “Got a good look, nice and proper. Even peeped around the insides of the palace a bit while the princess was drawing everybody’s eye.”
Shaiagrazni nodded, not seeming particularly surprised or impressed, but certainly pleased. That was about as close as he ever got to either.
“What did you make of them?” He asked, eagerly. Collin took a moment to gather his thoughts.
“The defences are more primitive than the natural barriers around it, the place definitely lets its location do a lot of the heavy lifting. That said, it’s not exactly run by cavemen. There are city walls, battlements, siege engines placed in defensive positions too. And the king struck me as a sharp bastard, probably there’s a couple of extra surprises he had stashed away and out of sight before letting us through. Expect a fight, a tough one.”
The Necromancer was impassive as ever, as impassive as he might have been upon hearing that his enemy’s gates were guarded by drunkards. It was strangely reassuring to work with a man so adverse to the basic treachery of expression and tone.
“Any other observations?” He asked. Collin thought about it, then sighed.
“I may have implied we’d be coming for his family, the Rangers I mean. So…You know, they might make a good intimidating aspect. I reckon his forces’ll focus on anywhere they have reason to believe we are, might come in handy for redirecting their strength before you hit somewhere.”
That certainly pleased him, and Shaiagrazni nodded.
“Excellent. Then get ready, I want you commanding the human element to our forces. Rangers, Knights, the humanoid undead.”
Collin blinked, surprise well and truly unhidden across his features, then nodded.
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“Understood, we’ll be playing distraction then?”
“You will.” The Necromancer confirmed. “As I understand it, you have quite a successful record of luring opponents into fixating too much on particular areas.”
He felt a smile growing.
“I do.” Collin turned, heading off to locate his new men, finding himself eager as he went. It was always a good stroke, finding the chance to kill more of the Dark Lord’s bastards.
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The battle began without any great excess of ceremony, though Silenos heard war drums pounding behind the enemy’s walls. Whether for communication or morale, he could not be certain. It didn’t matter much either way; soon enough they would be silenced.
It was rather tempting to simply stand back and watch his creations work; Silenos had spent so many decades growing accustomed to indulging just such a luxury. It was because of that past, and not in spite of it, that he forced himself to take part. He was not such a fool as to learn hard lessons twice.
At the walls, Silenos saw enemies gathering. Most were insects, a few of notable strength. One or two were higher undead, liches. Clearly they had been placed in Ironbane to safeguard it against the local savages- the linchpin of any defence they would take part in.
Silenos focused on them, first.
His new cannon was perhaps the most complicated mechanical construct he had yet created, but also a contender for the greatest height of genius. Silenos began its activation by compressing the great, organic pistons he’d had lining its back. They closed in, squeezing the air tight, tighter, tighter still until its volume shrivelled and viscosity skyrocketed, and he held within him a space of gas forced to a water-like density. Then the shadestuff came.
Ordinarily, shadestuff would fall down and fill whatever container he tried to conjure it into- eating apart biomaterial just as easily as it did stone or steel. Not now, however. Now Silenos left it in the midst of air dense enough that it was simply held aloft, and like always it left the gas untouched. Shadestuff did not leave a popping vacuum in its wake, even if it boiled away water. That had been the observation that made this creation possible. Finally, he encased the mixture in a shell of hard, thin bone and started the firing mechanism.
His cannon had been tweaked, too, and its projectiles made able to fly faster. Silenos had yet to perfect the secrets of hypersonic flight, and yet that was an irrelevance now. This new kind of projectile could not withstand such intense strain as was generated by that order of velocity anyway, and it hurtled for the enemy at a middling mach two.
It broke against a lich, sending the undead back a step. Silenos watched through his enhanced vision as the inky shadestuff burst out from its container, pressurised air blasting out the moment it cracked open and letting the liquefied death cling deathly tight to its enemy. Within one second the lich was panicking, scrambling, trying and failing to wipe itself clean. Within two it was coming apart, body surrendering to the unrelenting destruction of Necromancy’s greatest weapon.
By the third second, the lich was a bubbling pile of sludge just starting to run down the battlement. Silenos allowed himself a smile.
Had Walriq the windmage re-appeared, he would have no luck blocking Silenos’ shadestuff now. A single shot would leave him just as molten as it had the lich. He’d have to seek out a better quality of enemy to more properly test his new device, but that was a consideration for later.
Something hissed in the air, an arcing flight which drew Silenos’ attention just in time for his attention to catch the trebuchet stone in flight. It was a remarkable shot, accurate beyond measure, to have been aligned so perfectly on a single, man-sized target like him. He had the blink of an eye to move, and knew he was not so fast. Instead Silenos conjured more shadestuff. The boulder crashed into a wall of it, was enveloped instantly and eroded to nothing before it even hit Silenos where he stood a metre farther back.
The event galvanised his wits nicely. There was a battle going on, after all, he could admire his own genius once it had been won. Silenos turned his focus back to the fighting.
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Collin wasn’t commanding as many men as might have been inferred by the phrase “all of Shaiagrazni’s humanoids”. The simple fact was that the caster wasn’t much fond of using anything even remotely shaped like a man, and had seemed actively irritated for him to request that his own physical enhancement not turn him into some sort of monster.
He was also, as always, rather generous with what constituted humanoid. The giant snake-like sword creatures certainly didn’t fit Collin’s definition.
If nothing else, they looked tough enough to go a long way in helping with his endeavour. Collin tried not to think about how there may well have been nothing else to feel thankful for, and got to work.
His role in the attack was simple- fuck the enemy off. Now, a simple man might have taken these instructions and considered them easy, simple, even mindless. Collin, though, was a Kaltan. He knew full well the vast world of difference that stretched between an annoyed man and a truly, sincerely, incandescently fucked off one. It was his job to ensure the enemy became the latter. The pissier they got, the more predictable and the more fixated they’d be on him.
What helped this was that Collin had a large pack of, essentially, infiltration units. Human Rangers, and these new “Raboviax” of Shaiagrazni’s. Both specialised for scaling walls, jumping unexpecting enemies and cutting open throats.
The exact sorts of things a careful, fearful commander would watch out for when Collin Baird was on the enemy’s side. Even to the expense of the enemy’s other forces.
It was all theoretical, which meant that it was very likely to get a lot of poor people killed, but it was about as good a guarantee as Collin was likely to get.
Other than the guarantee of being shot at, of course. That came with the territory.
He started for the walls, aiming to come within three hundred yards. It was a smaller range than his own maximum, smaller even than the range of his Rangers, but perfect for letting the enemy know where they were- and if the proximity let them get kills in that much faster then so much the better.
It didn’t take long for them to take notice, it rarely did when people started watching their Knights’ and Lords’ heads explode. Collin felt the satisfaction that always accompanied his work, bowstring singing and arrows whistling as the iron bolts shot through one skull after another.
Ironbane’s army was better than most Collin had seen. Nothing compared to Kaltan, of course, that was a natural consequence of Kaltan actually caring when its individual soldiers died, but clearly more used to actually contested battle than was normal for the local region. They reacted quickly, reports moving like wildfire through their ranks, orders moving back down even faster still. He wouldn’t have had it any other way, the sooner Alfonso’s bastards took notice the sooner everything could properly kick off.