Collin heard explosions thrashing the building around him as he ran. He’d read about them, of course. Typically things born from that weird, black powder made in the East, but more commonly the work of a particularly strong magus. He wasn’t surprised to find such ability in the lean man, but to feel it unleashed on the fortress was another thing entirely.
The floor shook, the walls creaked, and the sound of crumbling mortar and crashing stone was impossible to ignore. It felt more like being in a castle under attack than simply hearing a distant battle, and apparently King Galukar was not immune to his concerns.
“Damned fool is going to bring the place down around us.” He grumbled. “Pick up the pace, I’d rather not have to dig us both out of stone.”
He didn’t make it easy for Collin to pick up the pace. Rangers like him were trained for speed, able to outpace a warrior without even reaching the limits. Most of the time. Collin was no Hero, though, and clearly King Galukar was a man to match the stories shared about him. Within a few more moments sweat was running down Collin’s body in thick rivulets as he strained himself just to near the King’s velocity.
The corner was turned sharply, first by Galukar, then Collin. As Collin himself rounded it he found the King locked in battle with a Fomori of all things, giant. Gaunt beast reared up to more than a yard over even the foreigner’s incredible height, its powerful limbs whipping at him to tear the flesh away with barbed points. Like a man being attacked by an entire den of snakes at once.
Galukar did not seem to struggle with such a thing.
In an instant the Fomori’s tendrils were tight around Galukar’s forearms, squeezing them and straining to drag them apart, exposing the man’s chest to further attack. The King’s lip curled as he eyed the beast.
“Please,” He scoffed.
With one move he broke its grip, tearing his arms from the Fomorian hold and flexing the fingers as he did. The creature was sent forwards, off-balanced by the movement, and quickly turned its stumble into a desperate lunge for the warrior. Collin understood why, the man had yet to draw that beastly sword of his. Attacking now, while he remained unarmed, seemed the best chance for victory.
Galukar moved, too, however. And Collin saw in that single motion that victory had never been within his enemy’s reach to begin with.
The King slammed a shoulder into the Fomori, sending it flat against the ground, then he came down atop it, pinning the creature beneath his body, holding its flailing, thrashing form in place. With one hand he reached up to the blade mounted at his back and drew it, raising the sword high, then turning it and thrusting downwards in one great motion.
Collin had seen kebabs skewered with less ease than that Fomori, seen the juicy stock of cooking meat let to ooze free in more reluctance than the black blood of its veins. The sword stabbed the monster so violently that it broke through the back of its skull and sank several feet into the stone below, pinning it in place to flail and scream.
But not to die. Fomori took a long time to die, even when hurt enough to die properly. Collin watched this one fail to lose its life, and felt a stab of satisfaction.
King Galukar ruined it by dragging his sword free, standing, and swinging down. His second strike split the thing’s head open completely, his third took it from the Fomori’s shoulders, and by his seventh the abomination was in more pieces than could easily be counted.
Collin stared blankly as the King finally straightened back up, glancing to eye him thoughtfully.
“You’re unhurt?” He asked.
“...Yes.” Collin breathed, barely finding the words in light of what he’d just seen. Galukar nodded, seemingly heedless.
“Good, then let’s continue. Do as you did this time for any more enemies we encounter, we need you kept safe.”
Collin almost thought he was being mocked for a moment, then realised that to this man his regionally famous combat power was simply not a factor to be considered. Not entirely sure how he might respond to such a truthful slight, he merely nodded and hurried to follow the jogging King.
Their pace continued, and the combat continued with even more violence. Soon enough Collin found cracks beginning to diffuse along the stone walls, dust raining from the ceiling. King Galukar seemed more annoyed than angry.
“What is he doing!?” The monarch growled. “Does he not know anything but damned blasting magic and heresy?”
Many things had been drilled into Collin over the years, when it came to dealing with the doings of magi, and chief among them was to ensure he was as far away as possible when one of them started hurling magic. Being inside the same building certainly went against those tenets, and so he was rather tempted to just continue walking as they came past the armoury.
Tempted, but he didn’t cave.
“Wait.” Collin barked. “In here, my weapons, if I get them I’ll be able to defend myself.”
The King seemed half-tempted to argue, but ended up just gesturing him on.
“Hurry up.” He growled.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Collin did so.
The armoury was not shaped in the same way that any he’d ever encountered had been, but there was a certain, inexorable logic to the organisation of any storehouse that made it navigable to one familiar with what it held. Collin soon found the bows, then his bow, taking the weapon with the sensation of power and lightning running along his arm. A purely phantom sensation, most would say, but he knew better. Limbed with flexible steel and strung with metal wire tense enough to hurl arrows over a horizon, it was a weapon that had served Collin even beyond its physical faculties. A thing of luck and old magic the likes of which only fighters could understand.
His arrows were located nearby, or ones able to serve as arrows, at the very least. Lengths of worked iron heavy enough that a normal man might have used them as smaller javelins.
Collin resisted the urge to take his time in admiring the finds, simply stuffing as many arrows as he could manage into quivers, binding as many of those as he could manage across his body and taking flight. As he exited the armoury, he found Galukar locked in battle again. This time, it seemed a more testing contest.
Two Fomori were already attacking the King, whipping at his body with their wiry limbs, drawing blood on direct hits and gouging great clefts out of the surrounding diabase upon misses. The King himself fought back well, but his focus was split between the two greatest undead and the numerous lesser beasts striking from other sides. Dullahan, numbering perhaps a half dozen, and a magic caster hurling jets of flame and spears of ice as if they were Collin’s own arrows.
Collin got to work quickly, overcoming his shock and shaking off the weeks of rust from his old killing machinery. He was in a corridor. A wide one, it had to be said, but far from the ideal circumstances for a Ranger to do battle in. His best chance- his only chance- was to provide support for the King. Slipping around to put the giant man between himself and the enemy, Collin nocked his first arrow, then drew.
He was not his father. He was better. Collin’s arrow flew with a skill and strength trained into him from before he could even recall, and it met the eyeslit of a Fomori just as the beast reared up. He felt himself smiling at the sight of iron burying itself in necrotic flesh, fragments of skull, ocular fluid and brain matter frothing forth from the socket. Then the other monster was turning onto him. He froze, started for another arrow, realised in an instant that the second enemy would move too quickly and unpredictably to bring it down before he was dead.
Then King Galukar stepped in.
His sword moved like nothing Collin had ever seen, or even heard about. One moment it was cocked back, held by his side, then the next it had already passed through the Fomori’s arm and hacked the limb off like a meat cleaver going through entrails.
The sheer weight of it actually spun his enemy, and Galukar had already readied another swing by the time it did. This one found the Fomori’s side, biting down to cut an angled mark as low as the monster’s hips, almost opening up the groins and leaving disgusting viscera to spill out. More undead were closing in at the King’s back, by then, and Collin got to work quickly. His next arrow found a Dullahan.
A puncture, a fountain of dark blood, then Galukar rounded on the charging undead with a roar like an entire pride of lions. The Godblade took another dark knight’s head off at the base of its neck, then the King’s foot sent a third crashing back into several more with such force as might have been mustered by a crumbling fortress.
Collin was given a more immediate point of comparison as the fortress continued to crumble around him.
“We need to leave!” He roared, loosing another arrow which found that magic site between pauldron and cuirass. A fireball came for him, and he sidestepped just in time to keep himself from death.
King Galukar was quick to respond, plucking a fallen enemy from the ground with one swift motion and hurling them across the corridor. They crunched into the caster so hard that Collin swore he heard bones break even from ten yards back, both bodies flailing and spinning in separate directions as they bounced from one another. He and the King were sprinting past before the enemy could reveal itself to be either active or destroyed.
It seemed to Collin that the fortress was racing them, desperate to crumble and die before they could be free of its shadow, but if King Galukar shared his observation, he certainly didn’t share his fears. The man moved as if escape from the place was merely his due, and the lengthy run a scarce inconvenience in claiming it. Collin did what he could to match the pace, but it was a challenge even for him.
They were out of it, thank God, before it finished dying. Rubble fell in their wake and stone ruptured in their shadow, each sight and sound another fist closing tight about Collin’s lungs. He felt the fear taking him deep and harsh, perhaps more so than ever before. It felt sharp after his weeks of captivity, a sensation exaggerated by how alien it had become. Like feeling his gut burst from overeating after a month without food.
A more poetic man might have extended that metaphor, upon seeing the place Collin had been wishing to escape crumble just as he left. Collin had never found the time for poetry, though. Kaltan lads had more practical things to concern themselves with, like watching the devastation.
It happened oddly fast, great sections of the dark spire seeming to fold inwards like a punctured wineskin. Gravity and tension did much of the work, that much was clear, but one thing caught Collin’s eye clearer than anything else. Despite the scale of the place, the sprawling lengths and towering peaks, despite the formidable depth of its fortifications and bedrock foundations, he still caught sight of the great pillar of flame arching high into the air.
One moment after he did, the concussion of its force reached him.
Collin yelped, humiliatingly, and took a step back, though he needn’t have bothered. A normal man may have been wounded by the force, and certainly would have by the chips of rock carried upon the winds, but his body was hardened beyond such considerations. King Galukar didn’t even blink, just watched the display with an oddly disapproving look. Collin stared back at it, and realised what the monarch had been studying a moment later.
Wings, leathery and spanning the height of five men each. Both emerged from the back of some creature so terrible as to defy description, and so powerful that even Collin could feel the press of its power from all the hundreds of yards separating them.
“What is that?” He croaked, hating the sound of his own wavering voice, hating his helplessness to strengthen it even more. He’d fought the Dark Lord’s armies thrice, bested them twice, slain over a dozen Dullahan and two Fomori. But he’d never seen anything half the equal of that abomination. It soared higher, rising as if dragged skywards on invisible strings, then its wings stretched outwards and Collin watched a new wave of fire descend upon the structure below. His heart sank.
Ten. With just ten creatures like that, he thought, the Dark Lord would be unstoppable. The entire continent could unite against him and still break against ten creatures like that.
King Galukar only sighed.
“You can stop pissing yourself now.” He growled. “Relax, you’re not in any danger. That’s my companion.”
Collin blinked, trying to make sense of the nonsensical claim just as he saw a dark streak flit out from the inferno.