Withstanding such impacts forever was a losing proposition, and being downed entirely was death. Silenos did not intend to permit either. He Fleshcrafted as he ran, producing venting ports on the sides and back of his body similar to the ones he’d used to stabilise himself during his early cannon experiments. The process took only a few moments, and once finished he put them to use instantly.
His first detonation of blasting oil sent him fully two metres ahead, the second sent him sidelong, with a third maintaining his momentum. A volley of projectiles missed him entirely, and Silenos made further use of his new trick.
Stride by stride, explosive leap by explosive leap, the castle drew nearer. Silenos was soon hurling himself inside and hurrying through the halls.
Evidently, the place’s defences had been largely expended on trying to kill his companions earlier, because there was little resistance, attempted or otherwise, as the undead pursued him through its halls. He followed the path indicated by memory, drawing himself at last to the hall in which he had first encountered The Hand and the Godblade. Luck was on his side, because the mangled corpses of the guards who’d tried to halt his pursuit remained.
Silenos put them to good use.
Reanimation could be done in many ways, but a caster of his calibre needed only touch and focus. At least for bodies as weak as these. Silenos estimated he had perhaps twenty metres separating him and his enemies still, which did not leave time for dallying. He extended chords of nerve tissue from his hands, impaling each of the scattered corpses as he did, Fleshcrafting their bodies back into functionality even as the necromantic energies flooded into them.
Likewise, he split his focus. Searching the Abyss for suitable forces with which to imbue them.
It was very, very rare for an undead to be inhabited by their own previous soul, and House Shaiagrazni had learned that some souls were stronger than others. Silenos searched now for those of killers, of saviours, of heroes and pit-fighters. He scraped the Abyss for congealed warfare, and emptied it out into the empty vessels of the dozen or so carcasses lying at his feet.
By the time Silenos’ undead were rising, twitchy and spasmodic, to a stand, the enemy was already upon him. His cannon screamed, blasting a hole the size of a fist through one of the undead and leaving perforated entrails to spill out over its legs. It kept coming however, and Silenos recognised more would be upon him before he could ready another shot. He fired the blasting oil from his backports, surprising the enemy with a tackle that left bones breaking against the keratin of his shoulder-plates, then aimed again and decapitated the foe before it could recover.
One dead enemy was a start, but he saw his battle was going poorly even with that advantage.
An undead knight was sent stumbling as a fist caught its head, impacting with such force that the knuckles broke and the steel buckled. It replied by cramming its polearm through the enemy’s chest, then twisted it free. Another one was being wrestled by two of Silenos’ undead at once, skull slowly popped from the socket of its spine by brute strength while it failed to free itself, elsewhere he saw one of his reanimates deprived of a head in one hammer swing.
Equipment and armour made the difference here. Silenos’ side had the numbers, and they certainly had more raw physical prowess, but such things were easily overcome by their being either unarmed or wielding weapons too fragile and shoddy to withstand their users’ power.
Silenos was quick to turn his own power into helping. He fired his cannon again, this time aiming for legs and heads, closing in to shoot from the shortest distance possible and maximise his odds of a hit. Where the projectiles found undead flesh, they ruined it. One, two, three enemies disabled in twice as many shots. Even still, the flow of the battle moved against him.
The rotating skull finished its movement with a sharp crack, another enemy Knight was paralyzed by a stolen polearm crunching down into the back of its head. Meanwhile, Silenos’ dozen servitors were hacked apart. By the end of it all he stood alone once more, surrounded by five reanimates and a smirking Necromancer.
“I over-prepared.” The woman grinned. “I came here expecting you’d unleash that form you used in the siege, the one that could bite off a Beladonnan Puppeteer’s head and weather the strikes of Dullahan. I planned to delay you, at best, and here you are at my mercy.” As she spoke, more undead funnelled in from behind her, a third trap that would never be sprung simply because Silenos had been too weak to make it necessary. He saw the magic in these ones, recognising them instantly. Two liches and three Necrotic Gladiators, any one of which might have been a test for his dozen reanimates alone. It almost distracted him from following the implication of her words.
So she had been at the siege, and Silenos had doubtless destroyed the undead she’d spent more time on during it. That explained why she’d come to fight him with only the ones crafted from local corpses, caution about losing the remainder of her prepared forces.
“It seems a Necromancer is still a Necromancer, you should have taken more measures to protect yourself.” Her hands raised, shadestuff coiling around them. Silenos felt himself taken by a new emotion.
Impotent, bitter fury.
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Ensharia had come to find that the Heroes were not as unstoppable as she’d once believed, and that discovery was, perhaps, responsible for the shock that took her at how easily Kraika the Toxicologist overpowered her.
He was toying with her, she saw. And that alone already conveyed much. Cats did not play with food larger than mice, humans did not amuse themselves in a battle with their life on the line. That her enemy could afford to take her so lightly, despite his clear experience, demonstrated an insurmountable separation of power between them.
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But she was a Paladin, fighting against such gaps was what her people did.
Ensharia’s mace flew like a falcon, and missed like a blind man’s swing. Kraika was under it, then he was beside her as she tried to reposition, lashing out with some curiously shaped dagger with an oddly thick blade and a hollow tip to its edge. The blade missed her, and she saw liquid flick out of it, realised in an instant that the weapon was a delivery system for some poison or drug, then felt the air leave her as a heel crunched into her broken breastplate.
Her back hit the wall, she dove aside as Kraika jabbed at her again, then rolled to her feet. Ensharia was swinging, dodging, even screaming after a moment, limbs animated by something bestial and terrified.
Then he clipped her wrist. It wasn’t a deep gash, barely a cut, but she felt the toxic fluids enter her in an instant, then her fingers were seizing up. The mace fell from Ensharia’s hand, her arm dropped to her side, her knees began to tremble and drool started leaking from her half-open mouth. She tried to retreat, couldn’t. Tried to hit the Toxicologist, and failed to even lift an arm. She tried to remain standing but found herself drawn inexorably closer to the ground underfoot, body surrendering in spite of the silent protests of will and intellect.
Kraika’s brown eyes were like empty pits as they met hers, his face a needle-sharp mask of bemused cruelty and malice. Ensharia could barely even breath, so deeply was the poison seeping.
“I should’ve used a weaker blend.” The man sighed. “I’d expected to fight two people on Falls’ level, a Paladin that strong would still be moving.”
His words were a sharper and deeper wound than any Ensharia had yet felt today, and they brought tears of frustration to her eyes. She couldn’t even lower her gaze, paralyzed as she was. Only watch as the knife slowly moved for her throat.
“Might as well finish things now then and link back up with my Master.” The man- the undead- breathed, then pressed the knife’s edge against her neck.
“Stop.”
The voice came out without any strain of a shout to it, but the sheer volume was enough to instantly snap both Ensharia and Kraika’s focus to the source. And it was certainly a source to behold.
At first, she did not recognise King Galukar. He had grown to be an inch or two taller than even Silenos’ newly increased height, standing bare-chested and clad below the waist only in sleeping wear. His exposed skin was not wrinkled and withered, however, but rather smooth and glinting, pulled taut by the subdermal press of muscles that now bulged quite unlike any she’d ever seen. His hair spilled down to his shoulders like a black mane, his eyes were narrowed for battle, and his face was every bit as strong and handsome as the noble Knights from a story she might have heard in her childhood.
In the King’s right hand, he held the Godblade. Ensharia took a moment to recognise it, for the weapon almost looked normal-sized. Galukar’s fist was the size of a boulder, closed tight about his sword’s handle, and the four-foot length of iron erupting from its guard was hardly unusual compared to the proportions of his form. He moved forwards, twisting his wrist, bringing the weapon around as if it weighed nothing at all. Ensharia had an instant to marvel at the strength involved before his first swing came.
Easier to see a crossbow bolt in flight than to catch the movement of his weapon in the air, and easier to halt the crumbling of a cliff face than withstand it. Kraika did the only thing he could have, leaping back from the swing.
It was a near-miss, even still, and Ensharia saw the Toxicologist desperately drawing a new vial to toss at his enemy. Galukar sidestepped it, bringing the Godblade around in an arc so wide it threatened to intersect with the ceiling. Ensharia almost warned him of it, certain she was about to see the man’s blow interrupted and body caught in the resultant opening. Instead, the cold iron clove right through the stone above it like a normal blade carving through thickets. It was barely even slowed as it came down on Kraika, this time catching the man’s outer calf as he threw himself from it.
Ensharia had seen glancing blows from sword swings before, but the Godblade was no normal sword. Through sheer weight and breadth it tore a jagged gash down Kraika’s leg and left the ugly wound weeping a putrid reddish black blood in a long trail as he scrambled farther back.The display seemed only to draw Galukar in faster.
Acids spilled out of some strange ventilator on Kraika’s person, forming a deadly mist that the Godblade dispersed with a single wind-shearing weep, then Galukar was marching back after him. This, Ensharia realised, was the battle of a warrior and an alchemist in close quarters. No sort of true battle at all.
Obviously Kraika realised it too, because his scrambles for escape only grew more frantic. He seemed to hurl every little thing on his person as he backed away, until the hallway was alight with chemical reaction and his feet were fast and blurry under him.
Galukar pursued, like a hunting hound after a rabbit. His musculature moved in great rippling waves with every step, hair whipping behind him as his pace accelerated, and the two had disappeared around a corner almost before she knew what was happening.
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Silenos readied himself for the finishing blow, a mass of shadestuff that, imperfectly conjured though it was, would likely have eaten through an iron door. He was tense, coiled, ready to leap aside even while knowing that he’d be bowled over and held by the woman’s servitors to ensure her attacks hit. Curious. Would he have given up, had his emotions still been absent? He couldn’t know.
And he didn’t find out what his last moments with them would be like, either, because before the attack could come he heard the sound of thunderous footsteps on the stone behind him. The genuine surprise upon the Necromancer’s face was near-impossible to fake, and so he turned to follow her gaze at the risk of an attack from behind.
An undead was sprinting towards them, though new. By the flawlessness of its body and the ease of its movements, Silenos could tell it had been reanimated almost at the exact moment of its death. The thing chasing it, however, was closing in nonetheless.
Galukar was recognizable only by the Godblade clutched in one ludicrously sized hand, and Silenos’ own preternatural reactions scarcely gave him a moment’s warning before the chase was upon him.
Everything happened with remarkable speed after that. The newly arrived undead rushed past him, while the Necromancer abandoned her attack on him and chose instead to tear her way through a wall before slipping through it. Her servitors followed suit as one, but despite the exit being barely large enough for a normal man, Galukar wasn’t impeded by it at all.
“Wait.” Silenos called out, jaggedly. The giant paused for only an instant. “I’ll accompany you.”
Before Galukar could reply, footsteps rang out along the hall for a second time. Silenos looked over to see Ensharia hurrying over.
“Falls.” She gasped, seeming to wrestle herself for every word. “He’s…Injured, Silenos, you need to help him.”
They needed to take care of this enemy now, before she could beat them to the fourth Hero. Each one she found first would be another powerful enemy alongside her, and one less ally on their own side. Silenos found his decision quickly.
“Lead me to him.” He ordered, and the Paladin sprinted off to do just that.