Nua savored it. The rush. The thrill. The kill. She felt her heart pounding in her chest, the feel of power… addictive, intoxicating, the sweet smell of the forests that birthed her race, even in the darkness, their branches seemed like open arms waiting to embrace her. It was like every tree was a comrade striving to protect her.
Creeping, stalking, her low breath loud as a hurricane to her ears, yet still and silent as the moss that grows on an unmoving stone. She drew a poisoned throwing knife from her belt, and watched for a straggler. ‘Undisciplined, weak. Lazy thugs. Pathetic. Threats only to the Nua of a lifetime ago, and those like her. Now?’ Her lips formed a thin smile behind her black covering, and she cast it from her hand as if it were a lover being thrown onto bed.
Its adamantite tip went through the unprotected back of the bandit like a hot knife through butter, and with just as much noise. It pierced his skin, his flesh, and his lung, stealing his air as it stole his life. He staggered, slumped, resting on his spear for a moment as he tried to process what was happening, and instinctively turned to look at what had wounded him.
He saw only a shadow as he collapsed, and fell onto his back. He tried to speak with lips that had no breath to spend, and closed his eyes forever after.
She lifted him up enough to retrieve her blade, and went after the next one.
So it went, until she was satisfied that she’d thinned their numbers. ‘That will do for a start.’ She mused with joy, her heart sang as she glanced behind her, a string of bodies stretching back a mile, if anyone cared to go back and see them every now and then, like breadcrumbs to be followed to the kill zone.
Satisfied that she’d done enough, Nua slipped beneath the shadow of the trees and vanished into the darkness like she was part of it. ‘Is there a greater bliss than the power to bring death to one’s enemies? Is this what it means to be evil to do good? Or is what I am doing good, because they are evil?’ She teased herself with the question for the thousandth time, and for the thousandth time, she failed to find an answer.
‘I’m fairly sure the Prince at least caught a glimpse of me, sharp eyes on that one, he’ll be useful. Or at least he’d better be, I’m not saving him to make problems for myself later.’ Nua contemplated this as she followed the line of march in the darkness, the bandits were trudging for the most part, tired. Their shoulders slumped and if they’d ever had any real order to them, it had long since been lost.
Those with spears held them lazily for comfort rather than ready for use. Those with armor seemed to care little about maintaining it, rust spots were plentiful. Only two seemed to be exceptions to that. ‘I’d say they’re down to about one hundred and thirty now, and they’re not ready for a fight. Good, not surprising, they’re not expecting us. There are no villages here they haven’t burned, and as far as they know, Tlizin is still eager to pick up his cargo. She mentally reviewed her preparations as she followed them until they reached the entrance to the village.
‘Did you enjoy that, Yersin?’ Nua asked with a pleasant expression as she spoke to her ‘hand held’ companion.
‘Very much, I’ve been held by assassins before, but only one killer I’ve ever been near, enjoyed killing more than you, and for her, it was sexual bliss.’ Yersin responded with a bit of bemusement as he recalled the woman.
‘Well, I’m going to enjoy myself, but… probably not that way, did you draw sufficient mana to raise a few more undead for me?’ Nua asked hopefully.
‘Yes, those will let me raise up more, but they will only be skeletons.’ Yersin replied with a note of caution in his telepathic voice.
‘Not to worry, I can ‘handle’ this. But I’ve got to ‘hand’ it to you, Yersin, you sure know how to make a girl feel appreciated. And you’re mighty ‘handy’ to have around.’ She let the grin come through her voice to him, and felt him groan mentally.
“By our god of death… no more puns!’ Yersin exclaimed.
‘Oh pooh, nobody likes my jokes anymore.’ Nua pouted mentally before giving a teasing laugh, and cutting off contact as she watched them reach the entrance.
“We camp in the center of the village for now, when we get in, clear out the corpses, or if any undead are near, take them down, but we don’t rest long. Every hour we wait is an hour longer before we get rich!” Bracer shouted, and reached over behind Beren’s back where the Prince was draped like the cargo he was, and patted the bound up Prince Sado on the back of his head teasingly.
“You’ve been a good boy, Prince Sado, a very good boy.” Bracer said mockingly as if praising a dog, his grin wide and cruel on his face.
He was just noticing that his ranks seemed… thinner, even for the darkness, and wondering how long it would take for the stragglers to catch up, when a shout reached his ears.
The dawn was starting to break, and as it did so, he saw a young man there, shouting at them.
“Nagru! Tenbu! Remember me, motherfuckers! Do you?! Do you remember your old friend Yorig! I remember you! I remember how you stabbed me in the gut and left me to die! Get out here you treacherous trash!” Yorig shouted, and uncomfortable looks were traded between two old friends.
Bracer looked back at them. “If he hadn’t just said he remembers you trying to kill him… I’d cut you down right now. Get up front, time to finish him off.”
The sun continued its inexorable rise, bathing the world in light, Yorig continued shouting for his friends to come forward, which they continued to do as Bracer spurred his horse at a steady walk. Nua smiled behind her veiled face, her teeth bared but invisible, the smile of a wolf who has secured its prey.
They were now twenty feet from Yorig, who slowly backed away.
He had a sword out and held loosely in hand. “Nagru, Tenbu! So who was it?! Who did you have to hurt from among our friends, our neighbors, to get in good with this scumbag!” Yorig snarled and pointed his sword at the fully armored Bracer who sat, sneering atop his horse.
The two had enough left of themselves to hang their heads as they came closer, and gave no answer.
“We didn’t want to…” Tenbu said, looking down at Yorig from a head and a half higher, his hand twitching around his sword. His large body left deep impressions in the soft ground over which he moved.
“We just… didn’t want to die! It’s your fault Yorig!” Nagru leveled his sword at his old friend and screamed it in a rage. “Always thinking you’re going to be the big hero, always looking down on the course of action that just, well we just didn’t want to die! What’s so wrong with that?!” Nagru’s eyes implored Yorig to understand, but Yorig shook his head.
Yorig sneered at his former friends in utter disgust. “Nothing, but you sold us all out to do it, at least if you’d died then, you’d have died as one of us, one of the village. Now… now you’re just going to die as scum amidst more scum. You’ll just die with them and that’ll be it.”
Tenbu and Nagru looked blankly at him, at one another, then back at Bracer and their bandit allies, many of whom had started to laugh and cluster together to crack jokes and brandish weapons. “Us? No, just you, because we’re all together, and you’re all alone, don’t know how you survived, but you’re just going to die again.” Tenbu said unhappily and took a step forward alongside Negru.
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“Oh?” Yorig said as he held his sword up erect. “Who said I was here alone?” He asked, and took off running for the exit. It had them confused for just a moment, looking around frantically at nothing.
“He tricked you idiots! Go!” Bracer said and slapped the pair with the flat of his blade on the backs of their heads.
They took off running, he rounded the corner of a burnt out building, hit the road, crossed the small pass, and both Negru and Tenbu did as well. They had only a moment to scream before the giant boulder was lifted up, and came crashing down on their heads, cutting off their cries in one brutal motion. The sound reached them and left the bandits briefly stunned.
Then Bracer saw the arrows. “Ambush! Archers!” He shouted, and twenty-five arrows shot from both sides and into the clustered mob. The platinum tips pierced armor with relative ease, but the aim was shoddy, with the Breakers just firing into the densely packed mob from their elevated positions. They loosed and loosed, some arrows were glancing blows and scattered away into the grass and dirt, while others found a home in flesh and drew cries of pain when it struck a limb or body.
Nua watched it unfold with quiet satisfaction as men fell screaming and clutching at their wounds, tearing arrows out and probably doing more harm than good, or doing nothing because they fell dead where they stood.
‘What the hell?! Where did these bastards come from?! Who are they?!’ Bracer mentally exclaimed and started batting arrows out of the air. ‘What moved that rock?! This is bad, very bad!’ He mentally cried out, but kept a brave face on it and shouted, “Kill them! They’re just inside the treeline!”
His bandits, given direction, charged without consideration toward whichever direction was closest… and then the first fell into a pit with a cry of shock and pain as his body was pierced by stakes. It froze them for a moment, time enough for another volley, over seventy-five arrows had been fired, fifty into massed clumps, bodies were strewn about, but they were far from finished.
The bandits resumed their charge, and a few more fell into pits.
Nua stepped into view from behind them. ‘Yersin, now it’s time for you to play your part.’ She said to her partner as she held out her hand.
‘As you like.’ He said eagerly, revealing that ‘he’ was really going to like it as well.
‘Create Skeletons.’ Nua said, and the bodies of the dead villagers rose from where they were scattered about.
“Attack!” Nua screamed with golden eyes aglow in the voice of wrath, and her skeletons went wailing and screaming at the now divided bandits, who suddenly found themselves between pitfalls and arrows on both sides, and then attacked by skeletons in the back, the dead continued to mount.
“Solution! Take the second! Grab the Prince!” Nua shouted and took out a throwing knife, she cast it hard and true, and it passed through an unfortunate neck.
The rain of arrows slowed as the dwindling numbers made it through the pitfalls, and Nua shouted the next phase. “Breakers! Hit them! Hit them with everything you’ve got!”
Her ears danced as she heard the sound of her soldiers jumping down from their security points and landing on the ground below. Though they were but twenty-seven in number as Yorig and Solution entered through the thick woods to join the fray, the bandits’ numbers had dropped off.
Beren picked up the body of one of his own and began swinging it like a club, driving Breakers back or knocking them flying whenever they got too close. His horse was clearly dead, hit by an arrow, and the Prince was unmoving.
But Nua’s focus was Bracer.
“Bracer!” Nua shouted from where she stood and drew out her throwing knife.
“You… you’re the bitch that did this!” He shouted from atop his horse and wheeled it about to face her.
He spurred his horse at her. ‘Easy.’ He thought, ‘Charge at her, cut her down, and finish everything off myself, if Beren and I alone survive, it’s fine. Means there’s no splitting a reward, it’ll just take longer.’
Nua’s knife flew out, but to his shock, not at him. It hit the horse in the right eye, pierced its brain, and came out the other side to strike him in the shoulder as a glancing blow.
The horse collapsed under him, he leaped from it as it fell and charged at her to close the distance. She threw two more knives in rapid succession, but he knocked them away with ease.
His sword flashed out to sever her head, but somehow, the bitch wasn’t there, she’d gone backward and drawn another blade. He saw her throw it, and easily knocked it aside with a resounding clang of metal on metal, only to find she’d closed the distance, and her left hand hit him in the sternum.
‘What… the…’ He wondered as he went bouncing like tumbleweed over the ground, away from where she was. As he rolled, he saw a beautiful golden haired woman with lovely locks approach Beren as if she were taking a stroll through a garden, and then he lost sight of it, as the boy he knew as Yorig came barrelling towards him with his sword up for the kill.
“You killed my village, you sonofabitch!” Yorig shrieked with wild hate, sword high in both hands he leaped the remaining distance to close the gap.
Bracer’s sword thrust out, severing the boy’s hands at the wrists. A look of confusion and disbelief went over his face, the whites of his eyes wide as he tried to understand what happened… and then Bracer’s sword found its way through the boy’s eye. Bracer was on his feet again and pushed the corpse back, driving the sword through the brain, carrying the body along directly towards the elven bitch in black.
“Killed you too, motherfucker!” He shouted into the ear of the boy who was already dead, turning his corpse into a shield.
“In his Majesty’s name! I will bring justice down on your fucking head!” Nua shouted as she rolled out of the way of his knight’s charge.
‘No, she didn’t say… oh… shit, the coin, those things, she’s one of them?!’ He shouted in his brain and let the body fall off his blade from the momentum of his charge.
“Is there nowhere I can go to get away from you people?! I traveled here all the way from the west, had all this fun! And now you’re here to ruin it all again?!” He roared like a toddler having his toys taken away, and began to take a more wary approach.
“I love taking the toys away from shit like you.” Nua snarled as the two began to circle one another. Her knife was out in her right hand, held with the tip out but her hand close to her chest. “I’m bringing you back alive… but that doesn’t mean I have to bring you back… intact.” She laughed and let the tip of her knife point down to his waist.
He turned purple with rage and brought his sword up and pointed out to her. “Your tits are too big for my liking, but after what you’ve done today to get in the way… I’ll make an exception for you. I’ll shame you till you beg to die…”
Nua reached up and tore the veil from her face so that he would see her bared teeth. “Try it… I doubt I’d even notice, that’s why you like little girls isn’t it… because your little tool is too inadequate for a grown woman to even know you’re there.”
That did it, [Knight charge][Killing blow][Limit break] he uttered.
[Assassin’s Luck][Undead strength][Deflection] Nua uttered, and they ran at one another with battlecries that split the sky. Hatred painted both their faces, his sword came out in a deadly thrust, backed by his martial charge, her blade caught his and pushed it aside.
‘No surprise there, it’s fine though, I expected her to deflect that, but my charge will crush… her.’ He thought, until the left hand of the black clad woman came up and caught his throat and picked him up bodily off the ground, halting his charge.
‘Feast! Make it hurt! But don’t kill him!’ Nua shouted to Yersin. Without even answering, the death loving gem obliged.
Bracer screamed as he felt the life being sucked out of his body, he dropped his sword and began to spasm, he felt his face become callow and his body lose its vigor, and then he felt her spinning on her heel and he was flying face first through the air, and smashing face first into the armored corpse of one of his fallen soldiers.
His nose shattered and he snorted blood over the corpse and himself. He tried to stand, getting his arms under him, he began to push himself up.
However… he felt a hand on his ankle, he was being dragged back bodily.
“Boys who abuse their toys, lose them!” He heard the voice behind him say, but before he could fully comprehend the meaning behind her words, that hideous knife she held, pierced him in his favorite place, straight through and down to the earth below, and then wrenched left, twisted, and wrenched right.
He howled in pain and began to kick and scream, holding the wounded place.
The rest of her breakers were finishing off the dead, not far away, Beren lay beaten to death while some of the Breakers looked at Solution as if she’d grown twenty heads.
A few meager cries came here and there from those unfortunates who survived long enough to exist in agony before merciful death could be brought to them. But they were exceedingly rare. Her soldiers thrust swords through eyes and held them there until the spasms stopped.
Bracer was soon the only one screaming. “Solution, cauterize the wound.” Nua ordered brusquely and raised her knife to the sky as if to stab it. “We. Have. Won!” She shouted, and echoing a sentiment that had been denied them since their city perished, they raised their weapons with shouts of their own.
“Sever their ears, look for anything of value, we might as well take what we can, anything you carry, you can sell for yourself and keep the money.” Nua said magnanimously, and they looked at her in dismayed awe.
Vargas approached, “Mistress… you… you would let slaves… SLAVES… keep things, sell things… have actual money for us to use. You’re not going to take it from us after?”
Nua shook her head, “You fought hard today, you all did a marvelous job! I’m proud of you, my Breakers! You’ve earned your plunder, take what you can from the dead bandits, the ears are mine, Bracer is mine, all other plunder, is for you to divide up amongst yourselves.”
Smiles began to form on numerous bloody faces. “But before that! See to our wounded, the battle is over, nobody needs to die now! And Sergeant Vargas, take accountability of your men. I want a full report in ten minutes. Make sure you check the Prince!”
Solution held her hand over Bracer’s crotch, and the howling grew till his vocal chords tore and he couldn’t scream, and finally, luckily for himself, passed out. “He’ll live now.” Solution said with a shrug, “Probably won’t want to, but he will.”
“Good, thank you, Teacher.” Nua said sincerely. “Looks like we lost Yorig, but… my guess is he was suicidal anyway, and he didn’t die for nothing, he got to play his part. A shame though, I hoped to put him to longer use, he wasn’t without potential.”
“Meh, he got what he wanted.” Solution said without care, “His treacherous friends are dead, his village is avenged. Anything more than that is just greed.”
“Alright, fine, but I wonder how many others we lost.” Nua pondered as she looked around, “Not many, if any. Most of those bandits didn’t have armor, and other than Bracer, the best they had was steel, which is as good as nothing against our equipment. Plus they were worn out from the walk, while we were nice and fresh. It couldn’t have gone better if the Dark Savior herself had been present.” Nua savored the moment of victory like fine wine.
“You carried out what was expected of you, my Student, but there is still more to do.” Solution reminded her pointedly.
“Yes… there is, but this is a fine start.” Nua replied proudly and put her hands on her hips, nodding in satisfaction as to her surprise, not only was the unconscious Prince being dragged over to her, but so were two unconscious little girls in large bags.
“OK, I didn’t see this one coming.” Nua admitted when they were laid at her feet.