V3Ch100-Battle of the Charnel Fortress Part 5

On the second level, with the high value Queens and the prisoner they had come to rescue out of sight, the high elves renewed their attack.

“For the Beastking! For the High Elf King!” yelled Commander Shalott.

The high elves charged down the hall, heedless of safety concerns now. The officers had been drawn back into the open, pursuing Queen Dero. The elves would not let the opportunity to crush them slip past.

Bolts of magic and arrows hurtled back and forth between the two groups, killing a handful of people on each side with every passing second.

But the high elven party had men to spare, and the Nietian officers were fewer and already worn down. The hallway became a killing zone, where the high elves traded caution and restraint for speed and destruction.

In a few minutes, the air was full of smoke and crackled with energy. But the fighting was already all but over.

“No, please,” begged a man wearing a Commander’s insignia. “My family will pay a heavy ransom for me. They’ll make you rich—”

Shalott’s blade pierced deep into the other man’s neck.

“Shameful,” he growled. “You think I’d sell my honor for a bag of gold? We came here on a mission. We’re not bloody mercenaries. Nor are we like you humans, sick with foul lust and battle fever, who kill just because you enjoy it. We are - we are—” He paused.

Commander Shalott had no more to say. The glassy, dead eyes of the man in front of him showed how futile any further dialogue would be.

He rose, cracked his neck, and then motioned to the other high elves to join him near the stairs.

They were still blocked for now, but he knew the next stage of the plan well enough.

He frowned as he looked around at his men. There were just seventy or so left of the hundred he’d come up here with.

They killed more of us than we did of them, he thought regretfully. Despite all those years of training. I was inadequate to my mission. It is my loss.

Shalott looked down at the corpse of one of his warriors, then averted his gaze as its fingers began to twitch.

***

Tybalt opened his eyes and briefly smiled as Dero landed in the crypt beside him, Samara and the unconscious Dominic Sevenhills both in her custody.

“Well done,” the necromancer said.

As Mariella moved forward and embraced her younger brother, the necromancer closed his eyes again. He could sense both that Edgard was on his way back to the crypt with Vidalia and that the small number of Nietian officers remaining upstairs were being quickly massacred.

It was unsurprising.

The high elves up there outnumbered them five to one. Tybalt hadn’t wanted to take any chances with the officers. He waited a few minutes for that to finish before communicating his next command to the Fortress.

“Charnel, take my energy, and channel my skill through your body,” Tybalt ordered silently. “Then I want you to open the front gates.”

“Of course, master.” There was that ever calm, too calm voice right in his ear again. But never mind it. The Fortress was doing what he needed it to do, now.

Tybalt concentrated all his power on two skills that he wanted to use in sequence.

Mass Generate Undead and his newest skill, the one he’d never used before: Undead Reconstruction.

He felt it as the Charnel Fortress’s mind and powers melded with his own, and the necromancer and the spirit reached out to every semi-intact corpse throughout the entire body of the structure. His energy flooded into them and flowed out of him… and flowed… and flowed…

Shit, that’s a lot of bodies…

He hadn’t even begun the second task yet.

But at last, after a couple of minutes of this, he felt them all springing to life around the building. Hundreds of dead bodies. Almost a thousand. Maybe… around eight hundred? It seemed that he had destroyed around a quarter of the enemy force. He had been suppressing all the notifications, but he also knew he had gained some levels.

In barracks one through three, his creatures had killed nearly everyone, and the corpses were almost all intact enough to use. In the chapel, a hundred holy men and women lay still, bodies full of holes. In the courtyard, the undead besides the gashadokuro had murdered a hundred or so people. Tybalt’s giant skeleton unfortunately turned its victims to dust when it struck them with its scythe.

Most of them, anyway.

Tybalt could perceive, in the courtyard, the warrior who had struck Charon down. Hailgrim had received a shallow cut to the chest with the Reaper’s Scythe - the gashadokuro’s instant kill move.

He’d collapsed.

But somehow he wasn’t dead. He hadn’t disintegrated yet, nor had he arisen with Tybalt’s Mass Generate Undead. Maybe it was because there was someone beside him, kneeling, healing him - one of the few priests who hadn’t been in the chapel while Tybalt massacred them.

The necromancer frowned and shook his head.

Focus.

He still had more left to do. One man was ultimately of little consequence compared with an army.

He reached out with Undead Reconstruction. The Charnel Fortress’s body became his body. Its every stone became one of his limbs, as he worked his power, channeling it into every single zombie, every skeleton, every ghoul and ghast, every creature that had been raised and then slain in battle.

Now his power reconstructed them.

It was clumsy work compared with what he could do with his hands, like slapping clay together instead of shaping it delicately with fingertips.

But it would suffice.

The bodies of all the creatures that had fallen alongside the gashadokuro, protecting Charon as best they could, now joined with the giant skeleton and became a part of its being. As they joined with the gashadokuro’s remaining body, they too became invisible, all parts benefiting from the skill as the various undead became one.

Elsewhere, in the darkness of all three barracks, the undead became similar juggernauts of combined flesh and bone, multiplying their strength and power, combining the skills they’d had before death.

As he finished returning all of his undead to full functioning - and beyond - the necromancer slumped backward, suddenly too weak even to hold himself up properly, his head pounding. A pair of arms encircled him from behind, keeping him from falling over completely. The flat chest pressed against his back told him exactly who it was.

“Dero,” he muttered. “Thanks.”

“You should get some rest soon,” she said. Her voice sounded distant. “You look terrible.”

He knew what she meant. He could feel the cold sweat that had broken out all over his body. He was panting hard, and he imagined he was even paler than usual. That last sequence, reconstructing the bodies, had taken more out of him than he’d expected, and…

And what?

Did it feel, a bit, like the Fortress had taken a chunk of his energy for itself, instead of merely serving as his conduit?

During his time here, performing rituals, it had been content to serve as a place of power for him and to absorb the ambient mana that his power cast off, the runoff from his successful procedures. But it felt like the drain from this had been a little too much, a little more than just the normal inefficiency of using magic.

It’s impossible to tell for sure. You’ve never even used Undead Reconstruction before. It’s clearly a demanding skill. And you can’t afford to argue with the Fortress about it right now.

“I can’t rest yet,” Tybalt said quietly. “I have just a few more orders to give.”

“Everyone, open all the areas that are closed off. Attack. Slay everything that moves in the courtyard. That includes your creatures, Charnel.”

“Of course, master.”

***

Black Hailgrim blinked awake.

He’d just been having the most pleasant dream. He was surrounded by all his friends, he was young and handsome and unscarred again… and as he woke, he remembered.

All his old friends were dead.

A man crouched over him, a healing glow coming from his hands.

“You’re awake,” the healer exclaimed. “Thank the gods!”

“What’s going on?” Hailgrim asked, shaking his head and resisting the urge to push the man’s hand away. He could feel the divine energy from the glowing hands fighting with the foreign energy in his chest. Only a fool would refuse that healing.

A man wearing a sergeant’s pin pressed in beside the two on the ground and began eagerly explaining.

“We’ve still got the walls, we have the Fort, and you and the others - well, mostly you - slew the necromancer’s strongest undead. There are more coming out of the barracks, now, yes, but those are just whatever he made in a hurry, from the men he’s just killed. He’s desperate, running scared. As long as we have the walls, we have the numbers advantage inside here—”

But as he was speaking that sentence, men began falling off the walls.

No, that wasn’t quite right. Stone rose out of the walls and began punching the men off the tops.

Hailgrim turned his head to the side as the front gate made a strange noise.

No…

The bars that held it shut seemed, impossibly, to lift out of place on their own and drop gently to the ground. Then the gates slammed open, hard, crushing two men into the walls nearby.

Hailgrim hadn’t deactivated his Spectral Sight while he was unconscious, and it was the type of skill that just kept running if you didn’t consciously stop using it.

The result was that he could still see the spirits, even the ones that weren’t making themselves easily visible. What his eyes told him was that there weren’t any supernatural creatures pushing open the gates. Rather…

The Fortress isn’t just haunted by spirits the necromancer brought here. The Fortress itself is a dark entity. It’s possessed by one great spirit that dominates everything in the place.

The revelation changed things. The fundamental character of the battle was different, taken in that light.

This entire time, they had been fighting inside the necromancer’s creation.

As the enemy troops rushed toward the opened gates, and men charged up to try and stop them, Hailgrim all but ignored it all, even as his eyes carefully looked over the enemy invaders. His mind was focused more on the implications of what he’d just seen.

We’re puppets dancing in the palm of his hand. From inside the Fortress, the battle is unwinnable. The real threat isn’t those men rushing in. Not the beastfolk, the elves beside them, not even the horde of undead with them. Yes, they outnumber us, but we might still outfight them. But we can’t do it here. Not in this place.

“Sir Hailgrim?” A hand shook the warrior’s shoulder as if jerking him awake again. It was the Sergeant. “The Major’s injured. The General and his son and half the officers are gone as far as we know. Including all the more senior people. The upper level was walled off. We can only guess they’re fighting their own battle. A few men are working on breaking through.”

“And?” Hailgrim’s voice came out more harshly than he’d intended, but he felt a sense of urgency. Even as the elves, beastmen, and undead forced their way in, there was still time. He just had to figure out what to do next and make sure to do it.

I don’t have much time, though.

“I know you just woke up. But your wound looks healed to my eyes… and your experience is legendary, sir. We don’t have any of the senior officers left uninjured here. Just Lieutenants and below. Fucking untried men and women, sir, if you’ll pardon the assessment. It’s going to be a long night of battle. Could you take the lead here?”

No, Hailgrim thought. My responsibility is to Mischa and Samara… Ah, fuck. The three of us won’t get out of here on our own. Nothing to do but fight.

“Yes,” he said. “Send a half dozen men to let Samara - that’s my paladin friend - out of her cell. We’ll need her. Have a few men get the Major and the other injured there out of the courtyard. The mess hall seems safe enough for now. As for the upstairs—” His eyes widened as an awareness of the situation washed over them, and he continued with renewed urgency, “As for the upstairs, tell the men to stop trying to break down the barriers. In fact, put up some of our own—”

The words coincided with an explosive sound from one of the stairways.

Shit…

***

The necromancer’s women laid him down gently, eyes closed, his head in Dero’s lap, Vidalia nearby stroking his hair.

He could see everything through the Charnel Fortress’s senses.

He saw how the chthonic mages had used Pillars of Earth to knock all the defenders from the walls. He saw those sentries get butchered by the thousands Tybalt had assembled outside the Fortress.

Then the real main event began.

The Charnel Fortress opened the front gate.

He saw how the doors to the barracks and the chapel were unsealed, how the Pillars of Earth blocking all of those things came down and how the zombified officers under his control blew apart the barrier between upstairs and downstairs.

High elves and zombified Nietian officers flowed downstairs into the courtyard, undead streamed out of barracks one, two, and three, and finally the chapel, too. The haugbuis from around Tybalt moved into the courtyard too, and Leonardo the Charnel Lord appeared to lead them, the Charnel Fortress finally unleashing the bulk of its own physical undead.

And the thousands from outside began pressing in through the gate.

The mages who had cornered his mummies in barracks one were forced to flee from that room. The soldiers who’d had Esmerelda and Sugar surrounded outside the chapel turned tail and ran.

But there was nowhere to go.

Everywhere the troops raced, they ran into other troops trying to gain distance and regroup.

The Nietian Army was surrounded in the courtyard, outnumbered, and exhausted.

The surviving two thousand or so of their force was already worn down from being ambushed when they had been hoping for sleep.

Now they were assailed by completely fresh and well rested beastfolk and high elves from outside, along with tireless undead.

Game over, Tybalt thought, smiling to himself. I win.

“Farewell, master.” The smile froze on his face as the Charnel Fortress’s voice spoke directly into his mind.

The necromancer’s head dropped down out of Dero’s lap, onto nothingness? No, he felt something soft touch the back of his head almost immediately.

Tybalt opened his eyes and found himself fifty feet outside of the Charnel Fortress, lying in the sand.