Dueling Dungeons (Rogue Dungeon 5) - Chapter Sixteen

Constabulary

Though his troops had been forced back into a siege surrounding the Dev’s palace, Lowen had hopes of breaking them quickly. After all, their defending force was incredibly small for such a large edifice; they’d be spread too thin attempting to defend the entirety of Frontflip Studios at once. Accurate numbers were hard to come by—especially with such unreliable spies and informants—but even a rough estimate suggested that there were no more than forty or fifty of these magickally deft miscreants. Half a company at most, and obviously untrained. No way to secure such a fortress against siege.

Despite that, his hopes were dashed when Lowen’s scouts returned minutes later to report—“They have a spring inside the walls, sir, harnessed and controlled. It flows right out of the walls and into basins.”

“Find the source,” Lowen snapped. “We’ll poison it.”

The scout shook his head. “I searched, sir. Only water I could find out here were those shallow watering pools,” he said, gesturing at the decorative ponds dotting the palace green, “and they already stink like death. The spring inside’s as clear as the sky over Traisbin after a snowfall. It isn’t coming from these.”

Lowen scowled. “What of their food stores?”

The scout shifted feet nervously. “There’s a strange sort of horseless wagon round the north side, long as a trader caravan all on its own and enchanted to stay cold as the second hell, with boxes of food stacked in it. Looks as if there was quite a bit more, but they must’ve got most of it inside before we attacked.”

Lowen cursed and clutched the hilt of his sheathed sword until the leather creaked. It would have taken longer to starve these people out than to bend them to his will through thirst, but knowing they’d just taken on new supplies meant that even that was beyond his reach. He’d promised Marek another fortnight was all he needed. He couldn’t come back with nothing to offer but more excuses.

The scout cleared his throat, obviously not done.

“What, damn it, what?” Lowen snapped. “Out with it!”

“Only, sir, that a few of my men reported seeing folks inside using magickal glass-front cabinets through a few of the palace’s windows. From what they say, it looks as if the cabinets drop parcels of food in exchange for coins and bits of paper, which each of the insiders seems to have in abundance.”

A frustrated growl ripping from his throat, Lowen spun on one booted heel and strode through his lines. This redheaded bastard son of an Other World seemed determined to thwart him at every turn through their unknown magicks and enchantments. Well, two could play that game. He would show this bastard world superior intellect and power in action.

He found his spies—the burly man and slight woman—talking with Darith. Perfectly convenient, as he needed to speak to all three of them.

“No magicks in this world, eh?” Lowen said, face twisting in a hateful snarl. Before they could respond, he raised his hands and fired double doses of Heavenly Wrath, one at each of the spies.

[x2 Dual Casting Modifier]

The spies writhed in agony and tried to defend themselves by placing Holy Shield between them and Lowen, but Lowen kept up the attack, nodding at Darith behind them.

Cackling, his bloodthirsty second in command pulled his Broadsword of Agonizing Light, flaring with brilliance even in the noonday sun. With a mighty swing, Darith lopped the burly man’s head from his shoulders. Darith spun with the blow, coming to a stop just behind the woman and propelling the blade through her back and out her chest with a wet crunch—bones snapping and meat parting. Her lips, already melted into near unrecognizable ash, popped open in a surprised shout as she crumbled to the grass. Darith stepped on her side and wrenched his sword free, then hacked her head off as well.

Troops in the immediate area of the execution had taken a step back, either repulsed by the grisly punishment or frightened that they might be next.

“Be warned,” Lowen said, raising his voice for their benefit. “This world suffers no respawns, and the Tyrant King is not the only one who rewards failure with death. Just because you currently serve under me two worlds away from him is no excuse to be lax in your duties.”

He turned back to Darith and found the man toying with the heads, one with his sword stuck up through its gaping neck like a gruesome puppet.

“Can you still hear me, Claron? Nod if this hurts.” Darith guffawed, wiggling the sword so the head bobbed.

“Get hold of yourself, fool,” Lowen barked. “I must return to Hearthworld for reinforcements. Clearly, a traditional siege won’t work here with the provisions they’ve got laid up inside. We need additional troops to storm the palace. Take command in my absence.”

Darith smirked. “Aye, you got it, sir.”

Lowen reached into his breastplate for the portal stone. Before he could break it and activate the rune, however, an eerie howling echoed through the city, bouncing off the walls of the surrounding buildings and filling Frontflip’s green with noise.

Lowen scowled. With his luck, this would be a pack of huge predatory beasts his newly deceased spies claimed not to have found trace of in this Other World.

Rather than a gang of ravenous maka-ronin or rabid brindle panthers loping onto the green ready to attack, flashing black and white carriages tore across the grass, leaving deep ruts in their wake. Lowen identified them immediately—they were painted with symbols and badges much like the ones the ones the city constabulary in Traisbin put on their Inquisitor Wagons.

Men in black armor, carrying strange clear tower shields marked with the letters S W A T debarked, quickly and efficiently surrounding the Heralds’ line. Unlike the makeshift resistance inside the Dev’s palace, it was clear these men had come prepared for war—even if their armor and armaments were unconventional. Still, Lowen had no time to waste on town guards. He had a war to make and a traitor to kill.

“Attack!” Lowen shouted, idly firing Angelic Lances into their ranks.

A hail of Divine spells followed at his command. A few SWAT constables were blasted from their feet. Others had their thighs or shins pierced with shining lances. But these injured men were dragged to the back of their line, and more swarmed in to take their place, lobbing metal vessels over their shields and into Lowen’s troops.

Lowen cast Shield of Faith for himself. The cannister tumbling through the air at him ricocheted, trailing choking smoke, but immediately his eyes burned and his sinuses ran like a flooded river.

Gagging, he leapt into the air and beat his wings. In moments, he’d risen above the deadly fumes.

“Get above the smoke!” he shouted at his troops, though many of the Heralds were quickly figuring this out for themselves. “Take them from the air!”

Heralds spun and wheeled high above, spitting and clearing their streaming sinuses. Once they were able to see again, they fired upon the constabulary in earnest. Their taking flight seemed to shock and perplex the black-armored men for a moment. Mouths dropped open and eyes stared up from beneath black helmets as the men craned their necks to better see their enemies wheel through the sky like birds of prey.

With his preternatural hearing, Lowen caught more than a few reverential mutters of the word ‘angel.’

A chestnut-winged Herald Lowen knew as Willa saw her opportunity to have some fun and darted low, scooping up a SWAT constable by the handle on the back of his armored vest. The man shouted, dropping his shield, and clawed at her golden arms. Willa laughed, and for a moment, Lowen thought certain his troops would defeat this Other World constabulary much the same way they’d defeated Roark’s mobs in the beginning—simply picking them up and dropping them to their deaths.

Then the man reached to his side and drew a strange black shape that he pointed over his head at Willa’s chest. A series of sharp pops rang out, and golden Herald’s blood splattered across the man’s black helmet and shoulders. Willa’s face twisted in shock, and she let the man drop—though it was only a matter of feet. Rather than circling around, however, she clutched her chest and soared directly into the wall of Frontflip Studios. By the time she tumbled to the grass, she was dead, golden blood frothing from her mouth.

“What in the bleeding hells?” Lowen whispered.

Below, Darith finished off the dropped man, heedless of the noxious smoke, then leapt back into the air, eyes and nose streaming. More of those black weapons, however, were appearing in the hands of the constabulary. Some were the same size and shape as the one that had killed Willa, but others were long and slung around these SWAT constables’ shoulders with black straps. Every man carried one. Some even carried multiple versions of them—smaller, backup weapons strapped about their legs or waist.

“Shield yourselves!” Lowen bellowed, casting his own as he soared over to meet Darith. “Hold them off!” he bellowed at his second in command. “I’ll return directly with reinforcements!”

“Will do, sir!” Darith cackled and held up that strange black shape he’d taken from the constable’s corpse.

With a squeeze of his hand, Lowen snapped the stone snapped in his fist, activating the rune. A violet portal ripped into existence midair. He shot through it, flapping wildly into the Vault’s Throne Room.

“—don’t care what it takes, we can’t just let them march up the spire and in the front entrance!” a man’s voice echoed off the high ceilings.

“And I suppose you’ve got an idea what to do if we can’t fly out—” a woman’s voice returned. Then she gasped, “Oh!”

Lowen threw his wings wide to slow his momentum, then landed, jogging a few steps before coming to a stop. Viago and Nitola, the two he’d left in command, had obviously been in the middle of a heated argument.

“Close your traps, fools,” Lowen growled. “Gather as many troops as can be spared. Leave only a skeleton crew to watch over the Vault. We’re under attack from the Other World’s town guards, and we can’t take the Devs’ palace until they’re dealt with.”

“Ah, sir,” Nitola said, stepping forward hesitantly. “About that. We can’t spare that many.”

Lowen readied a cast of Divine Missiles, but on remembering the constabulary and their powerful weaponry, he held it up as a threat only. He couldn’t waste a limited supply of warm bodies when he needed to overwhelm an enemy with superior numbers.

“Why, pray tell, can’t we?” he gritted out through a clenched jaw.

Nitola glanced maddeningly at Viago.

“We’re under attack, sir,” Viago said, his wings rustling nervously behind him. “They appeared shortly after you left—that von Graf trash and his allied dungeons.”

Nitola nodded. “They failed to take the Vault with an outright attack, and now they’ve set up a siege around us. We’re trapped in here.”

It took all of his restraint not to immediately blast both idiots from their feet. How could he be surrounded by such a host of incompetent fools?

“And I suppose your wings stopped working?” Lowen balled his hands into fists so he wouldn’t be tempted to take their heads off anyway. “Bloody fly over them, damn you! You’ve got wings, haven’t you!”

“Von Graf found a way around that, sir.” Viago strode to the doorway out into the antechamber and gestured at the wide opening looking out onto the night. “It looks open, but they’ve trapped every flight entrance with something akin to spiderweb. It’s poisoned with a corrosive toxin, and the second we’re tangled in it, their guerilla fighters drop down from the top of the Vault and tear us apart. Already we’ve had nearly a dozen sent for respawn.”

Lowen felt as if his teeth would break from grinding against one another, but after a moment, an icy calm came over him.

“I suppose you’ve never seen servants clean a formerly closed-off wing of your manor,” he said, stalking to the weapon rack in the antechamber. “Even those mindless peasants know there’s a simple way to deal with spider webs.”

He grabbed a long, golden lance from the rack and thrust it out through the seemingly innocuous opening. Then he swished it around vigorously, winding the lance up with a tangle of webbing. Right away, the poison began to eat away at the lance, spidery black veins racing across its surface. But the way was cleared for flight.

A shadowy face appeared for a moment as if to attack, but Lowen speared it with an Angelic Lance. The creature screamed and tumbled off the Vault, screaming as it flailed all the way to the canyon floor below.

That relieved a measure of the tension that had settled into Lowen’s neck and shoulders. He let out a breath, steadying his nerves, then stepped to the edge of the port and looked down.

They were surrounded by mobs of every dungeon type imaginable, swarming the ground like a hill of warrior ants. Fires sparked and glinted at the edges where enormous siege towers were under construction.

“That uppity half-breed whelp,” Lowen muttered under his breath.

Had von Graf known he would be gone and chosen his absence to launch his attack? Was there a traitor in Lowen’s midst? Or did the cur simply have the outright gall to think he could attack Lowen in his own dungeon and emerge victorious? That von Graf trash was so arrogant that Lowen could believe the latter. And yet there was Talise to think of. She played the Tyrant’s King pet so easily, but tainted Lyuko blood always ran together eventually, didn’t it?

With a frustrated growl, Lowen spun away from the sight of the besieging armies. He would deal with von Graf. The cur wouldn’t be so arrogant when his bloody World Stone was no longer bound to him.

To do that, however, he would have to play a trick straight from Roark’s hand.

Lowen tossed a pair of portal stones to Viago. “Take two-thirds of the Heralds still out of respawn and join Darith at Frontflip Studios in the Other World. You, Nitola, get the rest to tear down these bloody webs.”

“Of course, sir. But what will you—”

“I’m going out.” He returned to the newly cleared opening. “There are hundreds of Infernal mobs out there as wild as a bloody wolf pack. They might not ally themselves willingly with me, but I doubt they’ll welcome a gang of humans in armor firing some sort of strange magickal weapon at them, either.” Lowen smiled. “The enemy of my enemy sows bloody chaos on the battlefield.”

With that, he launched himself into the night, readying another portal stone in his fist. Shouts rang out and spells and projectiles streaked toward him. He swooped and dodged the shots effortlessly, searching the ranks below for his first candidate.

His eyes locked on an enormous Grim Corpse Defiler.

Perfect.

Angling his wings, Lowen swooped down, grabbed the Defiler by the throat, and crushed the portal stone. A breath later, they flew through the sky over Frontflip. The startled Defiler shrieked and tried to rip through Lowen’s armor with its savage telescoping maw, but Lowen dropped it.

Right into the ranks of the constabulary.

“He’s opening the gates of Hell!” someone called out from below.

Screams and more pops rang out below, but Lowen didn’t wait around to see the results of his new attack. He cracked another portal stone and darted back to Hearthworld, scooping up more of von Graf’s precious allies and ferrying them away to wreak havoc on the Other World.