V3Ch103-The Last Stand

In the space where the Charnel Fortress, formerly Fort Hadrian, had stood, a battle raged.

Less than a thousand Nietian troops had escaped the grim fortification alive when it made its move to travel through space-time.

They faced off against seven hundred high elves, over a thousand beastfolk, and over two thousand undead.

The bulk of the Army had been destroyed, the officers corps accompanying the brigade had been entirely obliterated, and the remaining humans were tired. Dead tired.

The enemy surrounded them, hacking and stabbing with sword and spear - mainly swords from the elves, almost entirely spears for the beastfolk and undead.

From all sides, the remainder of Caracalla’s undefeated force bled into the sands.

Even with a small average level advantage, they could not fight against these numbers, not on this relatively flat terrain, not with a large quantity of enemies that never tired, never bled out, never died of any wound short of decapitation or severe trauma to the head.

For every soldier that fell fighting beastfolk, they typically took a beastman or two with them. For those that fell fighting high elves, the humans were lucky if two of them together could kill one elf.

But the same calculations did not hold at all for the undead component of the opposing force. Most undead that fell rose again. Periodically, the soldiers they killed rose too, compelled by the glowing, deep green energy of the necromancer, who puppeteered the battle from a distant position. The math simply grew worse and worse as the fighting wore on.

After a few minutes of fighting on open ground, many of the men began to realize that they might not be victorious in this battle.

After half an hour - and witnessing the necromancer raise over a hundred of their fallen to join the fight against them - men began to succumb to despair.

Some looked for gaps in the encirclement to flee for their lives, but it was tight and difficult to penetrate. Those who did get through were subsequently cut down by arrow fire from the catgirl who stood by the necromancer’s side, or glowing magical daggers thrown by a fast-moving lavender-skinned elf.

But the vast majority of the Nietian troops were steady enough, experienced and hardened enough, that they chose to keep fighting.

Tybalt had to give them that. They were determined. They would not readily concede defeat.

There was no attempt made at surrender, and he didn’t think it was just because the leadership structure had been destroyed.

I’ll just slowly grind them down, the necromancer thought grimly.

As a master of the undead, battles of attrition ought theoretically to be his bread and butter. So he mentally prepared himself for a long but triumphant wait. He wouldn’t do anything fancy. Raising the dead as they fell was demanding enough for the stores of mana he had recovered by consuming the Charnel Fortress’s spirits.

Then a duo of people at the front of the Nietian Army’s force flipped the calculation upside down.

A wave of swamp appeared where there had been sand and scattered the front ranks of Tybalt’s beastfolk. A fierce warrior wielding a battle-worn sword rushed into the gap, and in an instant, cut down a dozen undead that had stood shoulder to shoulder with those beastfolk.

In an instant, fresh life seemed to flow into the men fighting around them. Not enough to change the outcome, but enough for a noticeable, if temporary shift in the dynamic of the battle.

Black Hailgrim and Swamp Mage Mischa.

From the body language of those remaining, it seemed that Hailgrim had become the Army’s de facto leader, with the actual officers all dead at Tybalt’s hands. The necromancer frowned.

He had been using mostly zombies, skeletons, ghouls - lesser undead relative to the strongest in his arsenal - so as to avoid spending any of his best creatures to finish off the rump of Caracalla’s forces. He had already lost the vampire Esmerelda, his wight knight, a few skeleton knights, some of his ghouls, many spirits, and all of his wendigos to the Charnel Fortress’s treachery.

Now he reluctantly commanded all his mummies, his banshee, his wight knights, his remaining skeleton knights, and the reconstructed gashadokuro.

“Go forth, and turn the tide the other way again,” Tybalt silently ordered.

A minute passed, as the necromancer watched his elite undead surge forward.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” Liora suggested from his side.

Tybalt turned and saw the vampire, beside her, Aoife - already in her dragon form - and Dero, smirking knowingly.

Off to the side stood Vidalia, Victoria, Mariella, and in front of those three, Samara, clearly trying to position herself as their protector - perhaps in part because she was unwilling to kill any more humans than she was ordered to.

“Yes,” the necromancer said. “Please join the undead in finishing off the Nietian Army. We’re trying not to kill those two—” He gestured at Hailgrim and Mischa—“but destroy the rest.”

“Easy,” said Dero.

The group charged forward.

***

Hailgrim gritted his teeth as the figures wrapped in bandages appeared all around him and Mischa, sprouting from the soil like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

He shrouded his sword in mana and swung it at the closest of the opponents to him.

The earth burst apart as a pillar of condensed soil rose and blocked his attack - or tried to. Hailgrim simply put more force into his arm, and he saw the look of surprise on the mummy’s face as the blade carved through its barrier and chopped the figure right behind it in half.

A split-second later, he reacted as the scythe from earlier - that invisible creature’s weapon - swung down toward him. It followed up on the opening he had left when he attacked the mummy, so all Hailgrim could do was tuck his head and roll to escape.

A pair of crimson spears jabbed toward him, but Hailgrim pushed mana into his hands to reinforce his skin, caught both spears on his palms, and then jerked the closer of the two attackers down toward him.

The warrior caught the mummy with a full force punch, rising to his feet in the same motion that he used to slam his knuckles into the undead’s chest.

His fist sent the creature flying, but he could tell that he hadn’t done any significant damage.

I could really use Chad right about now. If we had his holy sword, this would be much easier…

All around Hailgrim, men disintegrated as the scythes of the invisible undead swung through the trained warriors unchecked.

Somewhere behind his back, he felt a burst of heat. He snapped his head back and saw a half dozen men burning, screaming as a dragon breathed flames on them. In front of those half dozen lay another unidentifiable, horrendously burnt twenty.

Is that the same dragon…?

It couldn’t be the dragon he had seen Chad fight before. That wouldn’t make any sense. This one did look young, though.

As he stared, Hailgrim’s senses barely warned him in time to avoid a stab from a pointed weapon. He shifted to the side, just enough - or so he’d thought until he felt a pain in his arm. A long cut had opened up.

The crimson pike whipped backward at just the right moment for Hailgrim to notice the shaft was now serrated. He could swear the weapon hadn’t been shaped that way before. And it had grown longer, from a spear into a pike. The other mummy with a spear now had a similarly proportioned weapon.

So that was a power of the crimson weapon wielders. Altering the size and form of the weapons they used.

And it seemed they wanted to keep their distance from him, which meant they were intelligent too.

Screams filled the air behind Hailgrim - some human, some from the spirit he recognized had wailed in his ear to distract him during the last fight with the gashadokuro. The warrior did not allow himself to turn or be thrown off by any of this.

He could tell he was in for the fight of his life. Two strong, experienced opponents, plus the unpredictable gashadokuro nearby, and he needed to defeat all three of them without letting them hurt Mischa, who was behind him, using her powers to hamper enemy visibility and create openings for the soldiers to strike at the horde that surrounded the remnant of Caracalla’s army.

Hailgrim sensed, rather than seeing, two of the enemy undead hurl energy blasts into the huddled mass of soldiers behind him.

At almost the same time, two of the crimson pike wielders thrust their weapons forward - and behind him, Hailgrim sensed movement from beneath the soil itself.

No!

He forced himself to turn back, ignoring the attacks coming his way, and he tried to shield Mischa as a mummy attacked her from underground. Its hand grasped her throat, she choked, the pike tips stabbed into Hailgrim’s side and thigh, and he finally took a swing at the undead with his sword.

But it was too late.

As the air sang with the movement of his blade, Hailgrim saw a glowing something flow from the swamp mage into the mummy. Mischa’s expression turned to one of horror, and her magic lost its focus for a moment. Her body seemed to shrink slightly, as if she was withering.

Then Hailgrim’s blade slashed through ancient flesh, severing meat and bone from the torso it belonged to. The mummy’s leg dropped off onto the sand as another undead pulled it back under the earth.

Two more pike thrusts speared Hailgrim at almost the same moment, but he spun, the force of his movement ripping the weapons from their wielders’ hands. He advanced on the mummies, forcing them to give ground, ready to throw his life away to end their immortal existences.

The closest mummy stepped backward too quickly and stumbled over a fallen soldier, and Hailgrim found himself standing over his foe at last.

Just as he was about to swing his weapon at the nearest enemy’s neck, Hailgrim felt a force tug at his wounds, and his injuries began to bleed a bit more freely.

Yet another opponent focusing on him specifically.

He growled, swung down - he wanted to take care of one opponent before engaging another - and found his blade blocked by another, a longsword clutched in the quivering hands of a slight, pale elf.

“Get away, knife ears!” he barked. “I won’t warn you twice. Why you’re even fighting with the undead, I’ll never understand.”

As she failed to take her hands away after a moment, Hailgrim swiftly let go of his sword with one of his two hands, snatched a dagger from his belt, and quickly embedded his dagger in her chest.

To his surprise, the elf did not fall over dead.

“That’s the second time tonight,” she muttered instead.

She opened her mouth, and then Hailgrim’s eyes widened. He felt that tug at his wounds again. The blood gushed out in a heavy rush, then, but it did not flow into the sand. It swirled through the air, directly from his cuts into the elven girl’s mouth.

Into the vampire’s mouth, he realized.

She swallowed, and her body pushed the blade out of her chest as it repaired her wound before his eyes.

“Now you know why I fight for the undead,” the girl said with a smile.

Hailgrim reached out and grasped her neck just as a pike stabbed him in the side again. He ignored it. He needed to get the vampire out of the fight. He already felt weak.

Healing Hands.

The vampire’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second as his touch withered her from her neck in a slowly widening radius.

Then her flesh gave from beneath his fingers, her whole body suddenly turned to mist.

He smiled through the pain and the wooziness from blood loss. That was as close as he could get to killing a vampire in the night without tools or skills that he lacked. He had forced her to turn to mist.

Hailgrim turned back to the two mummies, both on their feet now, both wielding long pikes again. His senses told him that Mischa was still alive some feet behind him, albeit moving slowly. The soldiers’ numbers continued to drop alarmingly, especially now that he and Mischa were occupied.

He would have to prioritize the one thing, the one friend, he could still protect rather than worrying too much about the Nietian Army. He would destroy these two and then find the undead that had attacked Mischa and end it. Hopefully she and the surviving soldiers could handle things from there if something happened to him.

“Let’s finish this,” Hailgrim said.

***

“Hailgrim is becoming a bit of a problem,” Tybalt said thoughtfully.

As he watched, the number of surviving soldiers was being rapidly whittled down. The gashadokuro cut them down like wheat, Aoife roasted them, Dero put lots of holes in them, and the undead were killing them with a combined battery of magical and brute force attacks, but the two mummies still engaging Hailgrim were having a lot of trouble with putting him down, especially now that he was able to focus exclusively on them.

The necromancer turned to Samara, who stood at his side.

“Master, please, I want him to live through this,” the paladin said, looking stricken. “When I offered to help you, you said—”

“I know what I said,” he replied. “Did you think I would be anything less than as good as my word? I’m trying my best to keep your friends alive. As I promised. Your friend Hailgrim keeps throwing himself into situations where he leaves my forces little choice, though. If I wanted him dead, there are at least a few things I would have tried already that I haven’t.”

I think Breath of Decay and Flame of Destruction would be pretty devastating, even for him. And Stanislaw could have performed a ritual to sacrifice the number of humans who are still remaining, but he hasn’t. Because… well, for a few reasons, but one of them is that I didn’t want to break my word.

“All right.” She swallowed and lowered her gaze. “Um, I apologize for doubting your word, master. What would you have me do?”

“Just… tell me how I might win without killing him. Is there some weakness I could take advantage of, some old injury I could press on? Anything that would take him out of the fight.”

She bit her lip. “I don’t think…”

Tybalt sensed that she was holding something back. He reached out and cupped her cheek.

“Samara, if he dies in combat now, or if he kills one of my wives and gets killed by me in retaliation, do you want to live with the regret of that? I wouldn’t punish you for a bad outcome. But if you know something, you must tell me.”

“It’s not a weakness. It’s just—” She gestured over at the fighting still ongoing—“you can see it yourself, can’t you?”

“No, I’m blind, spell it out.”

She slumped. “Very well, master.”

***

Black Hailgrim panted, his stance visibly weakening, his shoulders aching, his grip painfully locked.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been at this now.

He swung with precise timing and deflected another pike thrust from one of the mummies. With similarly perfect coordination, he used mana control to harden his skin and endure a thrust he sensed coming from the opposite side.

The tip bounced off of his flesh without leaving so much as an impression, and he allowed himself a quick exhale.

“Getting predictable,” he taunted breathlessly. He had adapted and was able to effectively counter all their pike thrusts without accruing additional injuries. For now, at least. While his strength held.

“You are slowing down,” replied one of the mummies in a tone that sounded utterly emotionless.

“Growing weaker,” the other agreed.

“At any moment, you will fall.”

Hailgrim resisted the urge to glance behind him at where Mischa stood, sweaty and weak, panting harder than he was, barely standing. He was still worried about her condition. He didn’t understand what had happened to her, and her breathing was too erratic for his liking.

Even at the level of her magical potency, the swamp mage’s presence felt like a shadow of itself. Which would be a disaster for the overall force, if Hailgrim was still worried about them. Besides Hailgrim himself, she was the only one left still combat capable who was strong enough to put up a meaningful resistance against these mummies.

Her apparently enfeebled condition meant that he continued to be on his own.

That’s all right. I’ve always fought well by myself.

The years of training that had allowed him to master and pass on various skills to Chad and the others had also prepared him for a moment like this. Even though he felt that the mummies were right. He was weakening. Not enough that he couldn’t take them with him, but weakening.

“Black Hailgrim.”

“Hm?”

A different voice was coming from one of the mummies now, and the warrior didn’t recognize it.

“I have heard many stories of your exploits, and it’s impressive to see that your power was not exaggerated.”

“Oh. It’s you.” This must be the voice of the necromancer, speaking through one of his minions. “Show yourself. Fight your own twice-damned battles for once.”

“Does that sort of taunting ever work on anyone in your experience?”

Hailgrim just inhaled and exhaled, drawing in more energy from his surroundings with Nature Breathing. If the necromancer wanted to talk, then Hailgrim would restore some stamina with the time that this taunting took.

“There’s only about a hundred or so of your allies left, Hailgrim,” the necromancer said.

“That must feel like such a triumph for you, demon worshiper,” Hailgrim growled.

“I’m not… that. You’ve been lied to about me.”

“Perhaps. Be that as it may, you won’t win here.”

The aging warrior didn’t believe what he was saying, but it was what one said in circumstances like these. Heroic last stands.

“Are you so determined to die?” the necromancer asked.

“I am determined to do damage to your army that you will never recover from,” Hailgrim replied. “I am determined that when the forces of humanity fight you, at some point, they will win, and you will lose. Even if I die on the way to that end goal.”

“It’s a shame. You should know, what happens to your friends will depend on your decisions here.”

Hailgrim’s eyes widened a trace before he got control of his own expressions again.

“I… Of course you would take this in that direction.” He slumped, paused, and thought carefully about his next words. Finally, he spoke again. “I will never fight for you. I will never turn my sword against mankind.” Sadness flickered across his face. Fatigue. He was tired. He wanted this to be over. He wanted to climb into a bottle or perhaps drown in the ocean.

This expedition had not gone nearly the way he had imagined. He had seen Mischa hurt in some way he did not fully understand, he believed Samara was likely lost with the fortress, and he now increasingly suspected that the dragon fighting for the necromancer was the same one he’d seen Chad struggle with.

With all of that information, Hailgrim worried that the whole Party of Heroes, all those he had trained and tried to bond with over the last couple of years, had been brought low without him noticing.

Perhaps the necromancer had gone into the Discontented Lands after she split the party. Perhaps that had been his design all along, to separate Chad from half of his supporters. Maybe, in alliance with the dragon, the necromancer had already destroyed the Hero and his other companions.

Even if that’s what happened, Hailgrim thought. Still, I can fix one thing. I can force him to undo whatever has afflicted Mischa.

“I don’t want you to fight for me,” the necromancer said. “I want you to put down that sword and stop fighting against me.”

Hailgrim sighed.

“Fix Mischa,” he whispered quietly. “Save her from… whatever your creature did to her.”

“Of course,” the voice of the necromancer promised smoothly.

“Spare the remaining soldiers,” Hailgrim added, because he thought he had the leverage to demand that.

“Make them surrender, and I will treat you and them honorably as prisoners of war,” the necromancer replied.

Hailgrim lowered his blade, darted his eyes from side to side - expecting some treachery - and with a hesitant expression, turned his head back. Mana gathered in his throat as he prepared to issue a command.

Already, behind him, the undead, the elves, and the beastfolk were backing away from what remained of the human force. An appallingly small body. Definitely less than a hundred left not wounded. Perhaps two hundred others who were alive but wounded.

Gods…

“We surrender!” Hailgrim shouted, his voice empowered by mana and carrying the full force of his intent through the air.

Behind him, obeying his command as if he was their officer, the men began throwing down their weapons and falling to their knees.

I hope… I hope I haven’t made a terrible mistake.