Heart of Dorkness

Scourge Sixty-Three - Blood

My wolf monsters jump in and tackle the zombies into the mansion where it’s easier for them to tear heads and limbs off.

It’s a start, but I’m willing to bet the necromancer out there has a whole lot more undead than I have monsters or patience.

In theory, I realise that if I stall for long enough the Templars are probably going to come around to see what’s going on, but that could be in ten minutes or it could be tomorrow. I’m not going to gamble my friend’s lives on anyone showing up to help us now.

We could also just run.

I glance at my friends, to try and imagine how they’d take that idea.

Felix is bouncing on the balls of her feet, staff held loose by her side with the knife fixed to its end dancing near the floor. Esme’s thin-lipped, but serious, I can almost imagine her going through her entire repertoire of spells to decide on which one to use here.

Bianca looks a little nervous, but still collected. She’s standing by the back of the room, eyes on the zombies, and when one of them happens to stumble out of my monster’s grasp she’s quick to fling a fist-sized ball of fire right into its face to send it reeling back.

Lily, meanwhile, looks bored. It’s as if she’s seen all of this before and nothing about it holds any interest for her. Or maybe I’m just misreading her confidence. It’s hard to tell.

“Get ready,” I say. “If Getorix just wants to send undead at us, then we’ll help him trim down his numbers. But he might come in himself.”

“Depends on if he’s a coward or not,” Felix says.

The doors bang, and I shift into a better fighting stance. Legs spread a little, knees bent to lower my centre of mass, one arm raised in front of me while I summon a small shield of black magic linked to that arm to defend against incoming attacks. My other hand is lower, near to my side and balled into a fist. I split my focus a little and reach for the roiling in my gut.

It’s not hard to feel disgusted while watching day-old moving corpses being shredded by my monsters. Maybe that’s why disgust and fear mages are so strong in a big battle, there’s a lot of both to go around.

The doors bang again, this time there’s a heavy crack in the wood, and we all tense.

Then Felix points out the obvious. “Are the doors even locked?”

“I didn’t lock them,” I say.

“Same here,” Lily says.

Esme and Bianca shake their heads.

“Well, no points for intelligence with the undead, you know?” I say.

The doors smash inwards and crash to the ground. An abomination follows them in. A huge monster, with a stitched-together torso the size of a horse with a dozen arms and legs. It doesn’t have a head, but it does have eyes shoved into leaking holes across its body.

Bianca’s fire washes over it. Felix fans the flames with a mad cackle and soon the room fills with the intense stink of rotten meat cooking. The abomination races across the room only for my dark darts to swoop in and stab into its legs and arms. I’m aiming for the elbows and knees, and my aim’s not too bad.

Esme mutters something, then spins around, an arm rising, then slicing down. The air above her twirls around and I can feel the room’s humidity being sucked away a moment before a long icy spine appears and slams down into the abomination.

It flops, properly unalive.

“Nice!” I say.

“They’re undead, held together with water magic,” she says, sounding particularly proud of herself. “It only makes sense that disrupting that will break the undead down.”

My attention turns back to the doorway before I have time to praise Esme. There’s another abomination. No, two... three more of them, they’re all different, long centipedes of torsos stuck together, big hulking things with arms made of hundreds of limbs fused together. One of them looks like someone stuck a dozen horses into a blender then sewed up the results and gave it life.

“Okay, that’s a lot,” I say.

My monsters are pretty tough, but I don’t know if I can expect them to endure against all of these.

I fling dark darts at the abominations only to see them sink into flesh then flop back out with only minor injuries at best. Yeah, that’s not going to be enough. Bianca growls and her next gout of fire is significantly warmer, but fire can only do so much against skin.

Then Lily and Felix join in. Lily adds to the fire a moment before she jumps ahead and swings a short sword around. The sword cleaves through limbs as if they’re little more than thin branches. A rising flame follows the path of the sword, searing into the cut flesh and burning at exposed muscles and nerves.

Felix’s attack is a lot less precise. She spins her staff around and long slices of wind woosh out across the room, pressing back on the abominations even as they leave thin slices open on their flesh. The big advantage is the way the air feeds Bianca and Lily’s fire.

I’m not helping a lot. It’s annoying. I’m supposed to be a princess. Mom taught me herself. And yet here I am, letting my friends do all of the work.

I fight back my rising gorge and the growing feeling in the pit of my tummy that feels like vomit burning. I take it, that feeling, the nausea, and force it into my core where it empowers my next spell.

I cast, and it feels like I’ve just jammed a dozen ice-picks into my skull. It hurts, but this is a vaguely familiar pain, it’s meant to happen. I run forwards.

“Val!” Esme shouts.

Dropping down, I land on my knees and slide under Bianca’s continued fiery blast. Then I cast the spell’s second part and a dozen long limbs burst out from around me, all of them touching my skin like wet, oil-covered eels that don’t care that I’m wearing clothes.

These tentacles reach out and almost carelessly run over the nearest abomination just as I bounce back to my feet and bring my shielded arm up to parry a strike from the same abomination. The movement brings me between Lily and Felix.

The tentacles get to work. Flesh doesn’t so much melt where they touch as it turns to dust. It’s really fast. The tentacles only disintegrate a paper-thin layer every second, but there’s a dozen of them and when they press into something they sort of flatten out and cover the entire abomination’s body.

It only takes a few seconds before the disintegration starts to really work, and, best of all, it doesn’t prevent other magic from working, so Bianca’s fire and Felix’s windy swipes still tear and burn the enemy apart.

We push the abominations back, then with our combined attacks, rip them apart.

They’re tough, sure, and against non-cultivators I’m sure these things would be awful to fight. They have plenty of limbs, take a lot of damage to go down, and they don’t feel pain. One of these would rip through a full squad of guards without trouble, and weaker cultivators, the sort who need to focus and meditate before using their abilities, would be in deep trouble against a group of these.

But we’re not normal cultivators. Sure, we’re all young, but Bianca seems like she’s basically a natural, Esme is Esme the overachiever, Felix is a genius with her own Joy magic, and I’m mom’s daughter. Even Lily’s really, really strong for her age. I’m guessing that years spent at an academy where people learn to become Templars has helped her refine her magic.

My tentacles wrap around the last abomination. Felix flips around so that she’s off the ground and using her staff as a pole to stand up while she plants her feet on the abomination’s face and pries open its mouth.

I force my tentacles in, and the effects of disintegration inside of a body proves to be pretty great at taking out even a pretty tough undead.

Felix flips around and hops back. “Well, that was easy,” she says.

There’s more undead behind the abominations, but they’re slow moving ghouls.

“Where’s the necromancer?” I ask.

He should have showed up already, right?

“Watch out!” Bianca screams.

I turn, and am immediately hit by a stupid thought. Why is Bianca the one screaming that when she’s the one in the most danger?

The necromancer didn’t follow my plan. Instead, he went around, and he brought more of his monsters with him.

Bianca jumps back, and with a gasp, she swings her arms around and changes the course of the flying wave of water that might have hit her if she wasn’t so fast.

Her landing is rough though, and she stumbles back and trips on the hem of her skirts.

An abomination jumps towards Bianca, and there’s no way any of my spells will reach her.

And then Esme slams Bianca away and I watch, confused and horrified, as Esme’s blood splashes out of a massive gash along her back.

***