54. Hull - The Thick of It

Chapter 54

The Thick of It

I surged through the chaos in a haze that was somehow both focused and almost free of thought. I was sweating freely inside my armor, the Talisman of Spite blazed on my chest, fully charged, I clutched the Vampiric Blade in my left hand, and the Hateful Hammer was held in a reverse grip in my right, giving me the option of choosing its fated Overkill or the more freeform damage from the clawed brass knuckles on the same hand. My punches were getting harder every day now; I could feel it. My hand of cards floated at the edge of my vision, and a swarm of my summoned demons darted all around me. I was death’s heavy hand on light feet, and with Nether raging in my veins, that felt pretty damn good.

The trick was to use my eyepatch to zero in on Summoners instead of getting bogged down by Souls. The circling source was a solid indicator, sure, but with the mass of bodies on all sides, it was easiest to look for a body that didn’t bring up the image of a card telling me what it did. Then all I had to do was get to that body and break it. Feeling my weapons tear flesh and seeing blood spatter instead of sparkling dust was something I’d probably have bad dreams about later, but that was a problem for an older me, one that wasn’t up to his neck in screaming assholes trying to kill everything in sight.

A heavy sword clanged off my Iron Maiden Plate – a normal, non-fated blade by the feel of it, and I whipped my claws around to face the Orc who’d just rung my bell. By the time I turned around, though, someone else had torn into the poor bastard, sinking their teeth into his neck as he screamed and gurgled.

“You’re welcome,” called another copy of the Mythic soul from a few feet away. “That’s nineteen, now.”

“Next time get him before he hits me,” I shot back. “We’re no good to each other if I’m dead.”

The one that had made the kill popped back up, his jaws dripping. “Please. He didn’t even make it through your Plate.” He sounded disgusted.

I didn’t bother answering, as a yowl off to my left had caught my attention. A misshapen, stitched-together Undead was rearing back its massive hands to pound its opponent into the bloody cobblestones, and the form cowering in front of it was one of my guys.

I didn’t stop to think, and my legs didn’t move, but suddenly I was there in front of the winged demon, the stinking Undead’s ham-sized fists driving down into the top of my head. I was really starting to get the hang of my Intervene ability.

Fate’s Grace slowed the blow, but as I looked to see what I could do to respond to the blow, the Talisman of Fate buzzed and bounced on my chest.

With a satisfied bark of laughter, I let the blow land, my armor taking nearly all the damage. A Ravening Hatchling vanished momentarily out of my hand to absorb the rest. At the same time, I focused Nether and let a Spell rip.

Instead of hitting the Soul that had just clobbered me, I targeted an low-level Orc Summoner some thirty feet away, the purple fire hitting him out of nowhere and stripping his Mind Home clean. The blowback from the Spell coursed through my body and shot back out through the Talisman, blasting half the attacking undead Soul’s face off. The Relic was only supposed to reflect damage on my turn, not when someone else was hitting me, but turns turned out to be a pretty loose concept in open battle like this, what with some source types being faster than others. As a result, sometimes the Talisman refreshed at unexpected moments, allowing me to get in two hits for the price of one when I’d never have been able to in a proper duel.

“I was fine,” the Night Terror growled, leaping past me to tear the thing’s kneecaps off. That was enough to send the ugly undead bastard sparkling into card dust.

“You’d have been dead, and then I’d have to wait for you to cycle back through to my hand,” I said. “Stop bitching and go kill something, will you?”

He huffed, looking mortally offended, but I knew he was enjoying himself. That short asshole was made for this sort of thing. I could see both of my Marauders out in the fray, chuckling and howling as they killed. One of them went down to some kind of demon I’d never seen before, and I felt the Soul slide into my discard, waiting for my Vampiric Blade to bring it back. I could do this all day, I thought. Just keep feeding me opponents and I’ll never run out of cards.

That only worked while I worked on the rank and file of the army flooding through the gaping hole in the wall, though, and I knew it. In the view of the open field beyond the city wall, framed by the ragged hole in the stone, I saw Gerad battling an Orc that had to be one of their leaders – the creature’s axe looked too big to even lift, and it sent up shockwaves so strong that people fell over within ten feet of wherever it landed. My insufferable half-brother looked to be holding his own, throwing off Protection Spells and hammering away with his Legendary sword in return. Some time before I’d seen Esmi rush out with an army of kobolds at her heels, and I’d had a glimpse of her coming to grips with a hugely muscular vampire in fine clothing. I need to be focusing on the heavy hitters instead of picking away the chaff.

Chaff the rest of them might be, but by the Twins, there certainly were a lot of them. Even with my Yveda card making an ever-larger plug of defenders in the streets, hordes of demons, Orcs, and undead still streamed past us in all directions, doing their best to slip past me and into the city to wreak havoc. City Watchmen and Guards were pouring in from side streets to slow the tide, but there just weren’t enough of them. Fortune’s stones, I’ve never seen so many people all in the same place at the same time. It seemed as if we’d emptied the entire world and plunked all of its inhabitants right outside that damned wall. The sun was starting to reach toward the west; it was early afternoon. We’d been fighting for hours, but it felt as if it had been days. The army will get here by nightfall. We have to hold.

I bashed in the skull of a luckless wight, watching its Souls vanish. There was no time for collecting cards. Undead were good kills; they tended to have fuller decks than either Orcs or demons, so taking down one of their Summoners removed more enemy bodies from the field. Still, what I was doing was like trying to stop a flood by holding a sieve against the flow. I needed to find a captain of some sort if I wanted to make a dent. Even with how often his copies died, Yveda was still building up a small army. If I could rush an important enemy and overwhelm them, maybe I could make a difference. The problem was that they were flooding me with their infantry. I needed to get past the walls and out onto the field like Esmi and Gerad had done. Anything else was just wasting time.

“Let’s push forward!” I yelled to my Souls. “Out past the breach!”

“Are you mad?” one of the Yvedas called back. “That’s where the real shit is happening!”

“I know!” I said. “Let’s go!”

I got a broad shield of two dozen of the replicating demon in front of me and pushed as if I were in a crowd trying to escape a burning building. The Yvedas up front slashed and fought, dying in droves as we pushed against the advancing horde, gradually gaining ground one slick cobblestone at a time. I wished I could use the double Wildfire board clear I’d done when fighting alongside Gerad out in the forest, but that’d kill all my troops, too, which hardly seemed worth it. I used my Plate’s self-damage alongside what my one remaining Marauder dealt me to send bolts of sizzling light against key points of resistance whenever I could. More Yvedas budded into being to take the place of the ones dying up front, and some sweaty eternity later I found myself standing in the gap of the broken wall, surveying the massive battle beyond. 

Edaine had outdone herself; her Spirits of Korikana were everywhere, making up entire phalanxes of troops surging against the enemy. She must have been summoning those things nonstop since she’d learned the army was approaching. If I had the time to amass my troops with this Mythic, I could do the same thing. It was a sobering thought.

Even more sobering, though, was to scan the horizon and see the sheer impossible enormity of what we faced. Our forces waged war in a thin line right around the city wall, and beyond that… the enemy stretched out across the hills as far as the eye could see. It reminded me of kicking over an anthill. No matter where I looked, everything moved.

A shriek of rage off to my right drew my eye, and I saw the muscular vampire take Esmi’s cat mount and tear it in two with his bare hands, sending the poor thing scattering into motes of light. Esmi sent one of her upgraded Fireballs right at his head, and card shards fluffed away, catching fire as they dissipated.

Huge enemy Souls were scattered across the field, towering over us humans like trees as they surged forward to destroy us. Closer at hand, a tall, slender stick of a creature loomed in midair a few heads higher than the swarm of undead surrounding it, and I caught sight of source circling its head. It looked like an old woman who’d been dead for a century, her nose rotted away and her dried-out muscle showing through the papery skin she was slowly losing. She was throwing out Spells like a noble scattering coins to the poor on feastday. She was focused on the hole in the wall as if nothing else mastered as she flew over everyone else. “That’s one,” I said. “Her.”

The Yveda closest to me turned and looked where I pointed. All three dozen of his copies nearby stiffened, going still.

“Fuck no,” all the copies said in unison. They crowded back against me, pushing me against the rough, broken stones of the city wall.

“Get off me,” I snapped. “I said we’re going after her. You have to!”

The one right against me turned around, placing its hands on my chest and holding me still. “Listen, whatever your name is, you’re not half bad, but I’m telling you, if you go up against Felstrife, you die right now. I wouldn’t face her with ten thousand of myself in between. Next to her you’re nothing, do you understand? You’re shit. You and everybody else you ever met. I kept a good gods-damned distance from her when I was alive, and I don’t want her to have my card. So we’re just going to stand here nice and quiet for a minute, you hear me? She’s not even looking at us. Once she’s gone we can slaughter somebody else.”

“Let go!” I raged. “You can’t do this. I’m your Summoner!”

“It’s hard to resist your orders,” Yveda agreed. “It feels like spiders under my skin.” The tall undead woman was passing by us, and his copies closest to her were kneeling, keeping well out of her way, letting themselves die as other enemies attacked. “But by the Chance and the Choice, I would hold you here for a year if it meant not facing that one.”

“Come back!” I screamed at the woman. “Fight me!” It wasn’t that I wanted to die, but that was the kind of enemy I needed to be facing if we were going to survive until the army arrived. “I’m right here, you bitch!” I used another Unstable Rift.

The purple fire engulfed her, and I used the Talisman’s channeling of the self-damage to blow the Yveda holding me to nothing. Three more grabbed me even as it died. The undead woman never slowed her step or even glanced in my direction. Two more seconds and she was out of sight.

“I’ll break your card,” I hissed at the Yvedas. “I’ll end you.”

“You won’t,” one said, patting me on the shoulder as the others let me loose. “I’ve done us both a favor. Come on, let’s go kill something we actually can kill. You’ll feel better.”

I had the most withering insults known to man lined up on my tongue, but none of them ever saw the light of day. At that moment, an enormous explosion rocked the field only two hundred feet away, sending bodies sailing into the air like feathers. Some slammed against the wall; others careened off into the greater body of the opposing army, crushing those who thought themselves still far from danger. An undead skeleton-thing standing some thirty feet tall tottered and fell to pieces as a winged demon sent skyward by the blast clipped through its leg bone, removing its support. Grit and sand scoured my face, and I turned away from the wave of sound, screaming without even hearing myself.

Yvedas picked themselves up all around me, and I blinked to clear my eyes. A crater a hundred feet across was blasted clean, and in the center of it were two people. One was the Orc with the massive axe, which he held aloft in one hand. The other hand was gripped tight around the head of the second figure, who was kneeling in the dirt. It was Gerad. The Prince’s face was ashen and his eyes were rolling back in his head. One arm hung at an odd angle at his side, and blood trickled from his nose.

“Human king,” the Orc roared. “I have your whelp! Face me now or he dies!”