V3Ch102-The Great Escape

Slowly, Mariella, Aoife, Dero, Kistana, and the huntsmaster mummies chipped away at the Charnel Fortress’s defenses with their combination of magic, draconic fire, and oversized arrows that could turn into corrosive mana at the will of the attacker.

No single blow blasted through the wall, and it felt very incremental: a hole the size of a void dagger here, a melted section there, an arrow that landed between the two and then burned away, eroding some of the stone to try and link the damaged sections together. But Tybalt could sense how the Fortress spirit concentrated its mana in the area where they were concentrating their fire. In under a minute, their offensive had forced it to defend itself.

The whole structure still glowed, the light coming from it fluctuating with the Fortress’s efforts to harness the power of the two key corpses inside it: General Caracalla and Major Geta, whose shared class, its specific name unknown to Tybalt, allowed them to move through the flow of time.

But the necromancer thought he could sense the larger light - the one that encompassed the entire building - had dimmed from a minute ago. Hopefully that meant that the magic the Charnel Fortress was trying to work was proceeding more slowly now thanks to the distraction from Tybalt’s wives.

There was still fighting going on, both inside and, increasingly, outside of the Fortress.

Tybalt began to turn his attention away from the attack on the body of the structure and toward controlling his undead more carefully. Now that he faced losing hundreds or even thousands of them if the Charnel Fortress succeeded in its magic, he had to be careful with those he had.

And it wasn’t as if he could help with the attack on the walls anyway. His head still ached from mana exhaustion, because his supply of energy remained virtually empty after his exertions earlier.

As the necromancer was tentatively probing at the minds of his undead, trying to decide which ones to guide more directly, a half dozen shadowy shapes flitted out of the walls right beside where his women had been blasting.

They slipped free from the structure, moving out from places where there weren’t even holes, which told Tybalt without even looking exactly what they were.

The air filled with the sounds of hectoring screams.

“Butcher of men! Traitor to the Kingdom!”

“Begone, foul necromancer!”

“Blood! Give us your blood!”

The shrieks threw off the women all around him, who winced, covered their ears, and missed their targeted strikes respectively.

Though the huntsmasters continued loosing their arrows, Tybalt was forced to pull his attention back to what was going on right next to him.

Fuck me. Those stupid spirits the Fortress controls… He paused in his annoyance. Wait a second. The spirits are connected to the Fortress. The Fortress spirit, for all that it wants independence, is still connected to me. Maybe…

As a dozen more spirits emerged from the walls and began shrieking, the Fortress glowing more brightly now without the need to focus as much on defending its walls, Tybalt reached out with his power.

Sure enough, he felt the thread of energy that kept the spirits tethered to this world, coherent in their ethereal forms.

Grasping hold of the threads for all of the ones that had emerged and those he could see coming out - a total of thirty spirits - Tybalt pulled hard.

He smiled as he felt it, energy draining out of the spirits and flowing into him. The task was made easier by the fact that the spirits were composed more purely of energy than most of his undead, and by their proximity to the necromancer.

The Charnel Fortress had made a mistake here.

The spirits stopped their haunting jeers and shrieks and began making quieter sounds that faded more quickly. Sounds of alarm, of defeat - of peace? It was hard to tell for certain, and the necromancer wasn’t very concerned about it. These were the spirits of his enemies, anyway, and now they were fuel.

As he consumed the energy of the dozens of spirits, he felt his mana refill. Not all the way to the top, unfortunately. Not even close. But enough that he could be useful in the fight with the Kingdom’s soldiers. The battle that the Charnel Fortress had only interrupted, not ended.

Good. Something beneficial is at least coming of this waste.

As he drained the spirits, Tybalt’s women resumed their assault on the Fortress walls. The defenses had dropped considerably in the under a minute when the spirit had falsely assumed that it was safe from attack, and with a combined burst of flames from Aoife and Mariella, a large hole finally exploded inward from where they had repeatedly attacked and weakened the stone.

The necromancer still maintained his connection with the spirit of the Fortress, and he could feel its inner state: shock at this turn of events and pain at having its body so significantly damaged. It was nothing the Charnel Fortress could not repair in time, but every stone was meaningful to it, and having a wall blown open against its wishes was unpleasant and slightly humiliating.

Tybalt responded to its wordless horror simply.

“Thanks for the appetizer.” He licked his lips meaningfully. “You’re next.”

The necromancer began to tug at the Charnel Fortress’s own thread - a powerful one, rich with energy, that instantly began to refill his mana and stamina bars to a far greater degree than the lesser spirits had. He might not have been willing to fully destroy the Fortress just yet, but now he at least had another evacuation route for his creatures, and of course, if the Charnel Fortress completed its plan, it was going to whisk them all off to another time or place anyway.

He might as well pull out all the stops to prevent it from getting away with that.

The struggle with its thread of energy was different, though. Difficult. The spirit was far more willful. It resisted him, fighting for every scrap of energy. Tybalt recognized the feeling. It confirmed something he thought he’d noticed before. The Charnel Fortress had been skimming off the top when Tybalt transferred mana through it to use skills throughout the structure. It had been siphoning energy for itself, storing up his power. Better preparing itself, probably, for this betrayal.

“Master, do not do this,” the Fortress said pleadingly.

“Then stop trying to run. You can still serve.”

But the structure continued its stubborn glowing, and Tybalt kept slowly but surely draining it of its power even as it and the necromancer conversed.

Undead flowed out of the wall hole at a gratifying speed, and Tybalt sensed that most, if not all, of the living beastfolk and high elves had evacuated. The longer he and the Fortress wrestled with their energy, the better it would go for his escaping creatures.

“I have only been seeking to assert independence,” the Charnel Fortress said. “You… would not destroy your greatest creation.”

“Only my greatest creation so far. I’m young. Creating you was trivial. I will make another, stronger and more loyal. Or you could accept your place within my force. You still have time to make a choice.”

The necromancer continued to pull energy from the Fortress as it went silent. His mana was more than halfway full now, and it continued to climb. The Charnel Fortress had deep reserves. Probably more mana than he himself possessed, and he would feast on all of it.

Nice, I took one of its skills. Its power must have dipped below a certain threshold.

The necromancer had never drained an undead as powerful as the Charnel Fortress before. Normally, the energy hit, and the skill came shortly after the creature died. Killing this spirit was a more involved process, so it taught him some things about his own powers that he hadn’t known before.

“What’s Tybalt doing?”

He heard the voice of Liora, and he realized he’d been ignoring the sounds of his women talking close by, focused as he was on both talking to and slowly draining the undeath energy from the Charnel Fortress.

“He’s killing this treacherous piece of musty masonry,” Dero said. He could hear the cocky smirk in her voice, and it brought a smile to his own face. She was right. It was only a matter of time now, unless the Charnel Fortress quickly figured out how to use the powers it was attempting to harness from the dead father and son. Soon he would have everything that had been the Fortress’s.

Then the wall in front of him turned translucent.

Oh, shit.

That wasn’t the Fortress unraveling. It would crumble if he drained its energy completely, the only question was how large the pieces would be.

No, the Charnel Fortress had finally grasped how to make itself disappear, to some other place or some other time. Or it had been pushed by desperation to force the power to work, without grasping how to properly apply it at all.

Either way, the spirit that had once been Fort Hadrian was disappearing.

“Any undead remaining inside, get out of there!” Tybalt ordered telepathically. “Immediately. Forget all other priorities for the next thirty seconds, and just escape!”

His wives were outside. For any of the living, if they remained trapped inside the Charnel Fortress while it went on its strange tour of time and space, tough luck.

The necromancer pulled harder on the thread of power that held the spirit and its stone body together, but it was harder than it had been to get even a fraction of the energy he had been draining. It felt as though he was reaching across a vast distance, trying to drink the ocean through a straw. He got almost nothing.

The thread grew ever more distant with each passing second, even as more undead scrambled to escape through the gate and the wall hole.

Finally, the Charnel Fortress became fully transparent. No walls, no structure, no energy he could perceive, just a shape in space.

And then Tybalt was just staring at flattened sand in front of him. That was the only sign a building had once stood on that spot. He couldn’t feel the thread he’d been trying to pull at all. The spirit and its stone fortress body had simply vanished, to a place and time unknown.

You won, he thought bitterly. You fucking won.

Tybalt sensed the connections to hundreds, perhaps a thousand, of his undead sever in an instant. Though it wasn’t the majority - not nearly as great a loss as he’d feared - it was considerable. None of the Beastkings had been caught in the time-space power as he had initially feared. Almost all of his truly important undead had been salvaged.

The only named ones he knew he had definitely lost were his wight knight, Harald, and his vampire knight, Esmerelda. She was a heavier loss, given the little bit of effort he’d made at convincing her that she should be willing to follow him, rather than simply obeying without compulsion. He had even helped her develop her vampire powers a little.

He sighed, shook his head, and returned his attention, with difficulty, to the continued fighting. There were hundreds, almost a thousand, humans struggling with his undead now. These soldiers, the minority who had escaped the Charnel Fortress despite no one warning them to leave, were fatigued and heavily outnumbered. The fighting was unstructured compared with what it had been, with their squads reduced to a fraction of their former selves and their officers all dead or incapacitated. Their military discipline was less of a factor as they bumped into each other, stumbled, and seemed to draw nearer to collapse.

Now the fight felt like a foregone conclusion, but there had to be a true conclusion.

The battle had to be finished.

***

Somewhere in time and space, Esmerelda blinked.

She had just been fighting for her unlife, surrounded by enemies that refused to let her break out.

She found that her entire body felt different. It was heavier, as if she had somehow put on weight.

More important than that, she felt free. There had always been a tie connecting her to her master, a bond to the necromancer that she had imagined only her own death would sever.

Now… there was nothing.

A human charged at her, and almost absentmindedly, she locked eyes with him.

Vampiric Gaze. As he froze up, she thrust her glaive in precisely through a gap in his armor, just below the armpit. A second later, the other humans closest to her charged, but they seemed a little bit slower than they had been.

Esmerelda dispatched them all efficiently.

She got the notification for the last kill and nodded to herself with a grim smile.

Well, whatever just happened, at least the system still works.

Esmerelda dismounted from her noble steed and quickly hopped to the top of the wall.

She saw strange stars and two moons.

The vampire knight let a low whistle escape her lips before she turned to face down at her horse, looking up at her expectantly.

“Sugar, I don’t think we’re in Abadd anymore.”

But then again, I suppose I might just enjoy that. A little freedom. Finally.