I can't do this. I didn't w- There was a Hound shaped like an ant the size of my torso, and they wanted me to reanimate it. Bring it to life. They're insisting that I'm the Archmage of Necromancy, that I could raise an army capable of holding back the Dungeon, but this is insane. Madness.
The Dungeon can't be beaten, and I can't stand my creations. I can't stand how they stare at me, how their bodies are bereft of souls, how the Empress expects me to create thousands of these. Millions.
I'm leaving. I'm taking Millie and I'm taking my dog, then I'm going to Parna. I'll finally propose, I'll study anything but necromancy, and I'll hope that one day the dreams will stop. I won't ask for forgiveness, but neither will I offer any apologies. This isn't my war.
Note added by REDACTED:
REDACTED was a Godsdammned coward. He abandoned three Legions during a Dungeon break, got tens of thousands of good soldiers killed, and fled. He fled to a place I can't follow, or I would have turned his body to stone. I would have found a way to unmake that slithering, soulless traitor.
I mean it. Should he ever set foot on Ablios again, I'll break the bonds between the very atoms he is made out of. I would see him turn into nothing. Poof, gone.
I can't believe REDACTED was ever my friend. I can't believe he looked at the Dungeon, at our situation, and flinched. Fled. I'll unmake him, mark my word. I'll find a way.
Excerpt from The Beasts of the Dungeon.
REPLACE WITH LINE BREAK p^o^q REPLACE WITH LINE BREAK
"This is only a light wave?" Marcus asked, more barking than speaking. He grasped another group of Champions, the unsettlingly human-looking monsters vanishing from view. They'd be reappearing soon enough, falling with enough velocity to kill. Barely. "Really?!"
Elly shrugged, calmly looking over the battle whilst doing nothing. 'Conserving her strength' she'd said, but frankly there was no target to warrant her bow, and other than that she held little area of effect capabilities.
"Technically speaking, yes. Breach on the right."
Marcus twisted, slicing down with a spatial arc. The tide of Hounds fell, either dead or wounded, and a cluster of mages rained fire on the temporarily stumbling group. He grunted, bracing himself against the wall another as another impact rocked the tower.
That was another good thing about hickory, he'd found. Stone shattered, wood absorbed. With how aggressively the flying Hounds were trying to get inside, it turned out to be quite the lifesaver.
"Fuck off," Marcus hissed, perspective shifting. His tower was positively crawling with Hounds, and a flex of will manifested two dozen ice spikes. The monsters died, only two escaping with their lives. He shook his head, returning to hear Elly order another flood of oil. "We're going to run out of that soon."
Elly hummed. "Eventually, but I brought almost a hundred boxes full of the stuff. The Hounds need to be burned, or their corpses will build a ramp up to the walls."
Marcus looked, seeing she was right. Damn. Who'd have thought Elly would be accustomed to horde-like enemies swarming her people?
Wow, he was already getting tired. That… that was bad. The tower shook again, an actual hole being ripped into the roof this time. Another Hound, but this one seemed to have found a weakness. A damaged spot to tear at, their druids running ragged keeping the Eastfort whole and fortified.
It fell inside, and Marcus' guards moved a hair slower than Marcus himself. The mace on his belt was in hand before the monster had even fallen, halfway towards its skull before it got its bearings. A claw came up, his shield deflected it sideways as the spatially infused spell altered its trajectory, and the mace made contact with the beast.
Its skull exploded, the already heavy blow magnified fourfold. His scale armor almost jingled as he shifted his weight, straightening after a moment. Damn he loved that mace. Loved his new and improved defenses, too. He'd had them for a while now, slowly crafted over the last eight or so months, but this battle was testing them.
Any attack was twisted and altered, anything approaching without enough speed deflected completely. Something heavy was sent off-course, limiting the energy it could impact, and even if it did connect, his inertial damping spell now pushed his defenses into one small layer.
It was more suit than shell, meaning it didn't ward against unnecessary attacks. Efficiency, that was the name of the game. Marcus grunted, waving towards the hole in the roof. "Close that up."
The three druids stationed on the tower nodded, eyes wide, and power flooded into the wood. Encouraging growth, another thing you couldn't do with stone, and the gap closed before their eyes. The druids were sweating, by the end, but luckily the Hounds needed to work quite hard to manage a breach.
It was almost as if the Empire knew what they were doing when they built this place, or something.
The door creaked open, and Marcus twisted. Acted before thinking, too attuned to violence, and every instinct insisted that hesitation meant death. Elly pushed his arm down, Otmon raising an eyebrow at the scene he'd walked into.
Marcus grunted. Stupid. "This is no place for non-combatants, Otmon."
"I'd argue that anyone physically close to you two is in the fourth safest place on the continent, right now," the man replied, not seeming overly bothered. "But I won't. I am merely here to inform you that the Empire has launched their counter attack against the Dungeon, so we can expect this wave to end soon."
Already? Marcus hummed. "That's good."
"It's not good, is it?" Elly asked, face carved from stone. The Vizier shook his head. "Out with it, then."
"Of course, your Grace. The Empire has been preparing an undead army to be of use in critical moments, in essence fighting fire with fire. Waves of monsters against waves of necromantic constructs. This army is bolstered by fifteen thousand summons of various kinds, including two hundred higher-order creatures. It is an emergency response to buy time at crucial moments."
Marcus exhaled slowly. "And we've barely started. Great. Lovely. Any more good news?"
"That is all," the man responded, bowing his head. "I shall take my leave, Arch-"
Elly flicked her hand, one of their guards closing the door before the man could exit the cramped room. "And how did you come to know this information, Otmon? Either you already knew, in which case we're going to have a problem, or the Viziers have a method of communication that doesn't rely on messengers, because nothing and no one is making it through the chaos outside."
"We are entrusted with many artifacts during the course of our duties," the Vizier replied, spreading his hands. "If we were able to provide you with this service on a greater scale, rest assured we would have already done so."
Marcus rolled his eyes, turning back to his small window to the outside. "They're using creatures to communicate by having them summon a trusted 'messenger' at set times. Go back to the civilian quarters, Otmon. I don't want to have to apologize to the Empress because a Hound ripped out your throat."
Or because Elly did.
The man bowed low, not even having the grace to look smug, but there was a brief moment of irritation. Of annoyance at one of their secrets being so easily shared. Elly turned after the door had shut, grunting. "I don't like him. More importantly, I don't trust him. He can keep the Empire informed of our movements, comes and goes as he pleases, and Vess even said he's probing the intelligence agents keeping an eye on him. I say we throw him off the tower and blame it on the Dungeon."
"He's old," Marcus pointed out, flinching when a javelin impacted very close to his arrowslit. "Fuck. He's old, and I'm not. Vistus is probably not the only Archmage that dislikes Viziers, so I'm fairly sure the man expected to die here. One last assignment before he retires forever. Maybe the Empress prefers me to kill him, gaining more leverage in the future. Either way, he could be worse."
Elly shifted her weight, taking the bow from her back and firing an arrow in one smooth motion. An Orcish Champion carrying a crude ladder was no longer doing much of anything. "I don't like the Empire, and the sooner we can regain complete independence the better."
Marcus didn't reply, already knowing her reasons. Angry at having lost another war, if only technically so. Angry at the Empire for not helping her people during their extinction event, but now expecting her to help with theirs anyway. Angry at quite a few things, really, but she was mostly angry because they'd dared to make good arguments.
Without unity they would die, so Elly would help anyway. Without the Empire humanity was dead, so it wasn't like she could tell them to go fuck themselves. It was always easier to hate the comically evil, but the Empire refused to conform.
They'd done monstrous things, but without them Marcus would never have been born. They'd invaded his home, but now they treated him like Royalty. Hells, he even liked Vistus, the man who killed so very many of his people.
"Left wall," Elly called, snapping him out of his thoughts. He looked, having to bend his perception, and saw dozens of Champions having breached through the hoarding. That technically meant a temporary enclosure of the wall walkway, and theirs was not temporary, but either way the enemy had broken in and were streaming inside. "Can you clear it?"
He didn't reply, forcing his sight inside. Something he did with raw manipulation, meaning he was free to weave his fifth tier spatial spell together, and a moment later the twenty four Champions and nine Hounds were falling from the sky. The soldiers inside only hesitated for a moment before they were plugging the gap, calling for druids to seal it properly.
"Done. Wait, uuhm. Elly, what's that?"
She looked, finishing the clipped instructions she'd been giving a messenger. Her face tightened, a weary sigh escaping it. "That is what they call a siege tower."
"I kind of knew what it was," he admitted. "I suppose what I was really asking was; aren't they supposed to be too disorganized and stupid to build one?"
"I guess not. Can you take care of it?"
Marcus shrugged. "It doesn't feel magical. Hold up."
He focused, weaving one of his spatial arcs and angled it sideways. Hah, practice paying off. And they said he had no sense of humor. Either way, a forty five degree angle should be good enough, and a moment later he slashed the spell forwards. The towering siege… tower, he wasn't sure how else to describe the thing, didn't seem to really care at first.
It was a looming structure of rough wood and twitching corpses being dragged up the hill by leashed Hounds, which were frothing at the mouth. He wasn't really sure how any of that worked. Still, his arc seemed to do nothing.
Then slowly, ever so slowly, the top half slid away from the bottom. The angle gave it momentum, his arcs cut so cleanly a straight line would have done nothing as its weight pushed it together again, and as it fell he realized he might as well have cut it vertically.
Well, this worked. The thing collapsed, and he shrugged. "Alright. Let me know if they bring more of those."
"Alright, he says," Elly muttered, shaking her head. "I would have to take a party of Life Enhanced soldiers to take it down inside enemy lines, that, or exhaust two dozen mages by concentrating their power. But no, one little arc of bullshit and it just falls over."
Fair. Marcus shrugged, not sure how to reply to that in a way which wouldn't get him mocked. Another impact hit the tower, meaning another Hound had landed on the roof, and he was really starting to get annoyed with that.
He turned to the druids. "Can you put spikes on the roof, or something? Anything to make breaking inside painful and annoying."
The trio looked at one another, offering a hesitant shrug. He rolled his eyes, motioning for them to get on with it, and power flowed into the wood as they weaved basic matrices.
Druid powers were very much not his thing, but oh boy were they proving their usefulness in a siege. The spikes grew, and while the pounding didn't stop, it did grow less excessive. The druids staggered, the oldest among them speaking up.
"We won't be able to repair anything else for at least an hour," the woman said, pushing the hair out of her face. She was covered in sweat, flinching when a Hound roared. "And the spikes aren't sharp, but we did it."
Marcus hummed. "Go pass down the order. It'll stop them from throwing their entire weight behind their blows, if nothing else."
"I got it," Elly said, turning. "A Calamity seems unlikely at this point, but if one shows up, teleport to me. From what I've read I'm fairly confident we can take care of it together."
He nodded, and she was gone. Moving in a way that felt natural to her with that much life energy running through her veins, all impossible grace and rapid movement. Terrifying, in other words, and coming closer and closer to what she called a 'realization'.
She hadn't explained it further, but then he didn't expect her to keep up with his side of bullshit either. And Hells, from what he was seeing outside, they were going to need the additional power.
This had only been going on for two hours, but already the bodies were stacked high. Monstrous bodies, specifically, the fortifications doing a good job at limiting their own casualties. But even with corpses stacked high, the enemy was coming in waves.
Hounds by the tens of thousands, three dozen species and more, charged at the walls. Flying beasts tore at the roof, claws tried to climb living wood, Champions schemed a dozen ways to get inside. Burrowers undermined the very ground they stood on, though the latter was mostly Kleph's and Gretched's problem.
Still, even without that dimension to focus on, it was a tide. A horde of monsters, some smart but none truly unified, and all utterly fixated on their flesh. Fixated on feeding, because the land around the Dungeon was less than plentiful these days.
The good news; even Champions were pretty stupid. Not in the individual sense, he'd rate them the same as any other human, but as a species. There was no structure or organization beyond the tribal level, from what little he'd seen infighting was common, and what tools they carried were basic and worn.
The bad news; there were a lot of them. Mindlessly focused, biologically well-put together and not quite so savage as to attack their own kind wholesale. Infighting, yes, even amongst Hounds, but no cannibalistic feeding frenzies.
Marcus stepped back as another javelin impacted very close to his arrowslit, shifting his perspective. It was giving him a headache, doing it this much, but this was getting annoying. The culprit was easier to find than expected, even among the chaos, because it was a rather peculiar Champion.
Big, for one thing, and now that Marcus was paying proper attention, magically resistant. Too filled with internal magic to be easily affected, an attempt at teleporting the massive Elf into the sky confirming that.
Marcus hummed, grasping space and folding it together. The Champion startled, but the man's eyes only widened for a split moment. Already the creature was dropping the javelin and pulling a knife, thrusting forwards in one smooth motion.
Not at him, of course. There was a wall in the way, and Marcus didn't much fancy fighting something resistant to his attack. No, instead the massive Elf stabbed a fairly basic demonic summon, the Brute not quick enough to dodge, and Marcus used the opportunity to teleport a small boulder above their heads.
The Elf twisted aside, even with the distraction his reaction time was superb, but not quite quick enough. The demon and Elf were crushed together, but where the demon only vanished, the Champion promptly broke their neck.
Magical resistance doesn't really help against indirect uses of magic, now did it?
He felt a surge of magic and briefly panicked, assuming it was related to the Champion, but no. Just his support mages summoning another wave of creatures. Mostly fire elementals to burn up the Hounds, but plenty of demons too. Brutes and Felids to serve as distractions and archers.
And half an hour later, having downed his second energy potion, the tide subsided. No Calamity, no breach into the fort that wasn't repelled seconds later. Just blood and death, and he didn't doubt hundreds of his men had died.
Thousands of the enemy corpses littered around the fort in comparison, thousands and thousands and thousands. The Hounds had retreated once reinforcements stopped arriving, Champions slinking back into the wasteland when the tide turned against them.
It really was a shame the monsters weren't mindlessly aggressive. It would make luring them into traps far easier, and prevent the survivors from scattering every which way. Elly joined him in the tower some minutes after the last wounded Hounds had been killed, leaning against the door after closing it.
"This went well," she began. "The Eastfort is holding together, casualties are relatively minimal, and the wounded are already being tended to. This is a victory."
"But?"
Elly sighed. "But we've both read the reports. The projected number of Hounds and Champions expected for the first wave. The Empire already used one of their trump cards, and frankly, if you weren't here I would have had to exert myself. Been unable to deal with the few critical problems quickly enough. This went well, but it should have gone better."
"It should have taken a week to ramp up to this," he finished, rolling his shoulders. "I know. But we have time to build proper traps now, both magical and mundane, and to shape the mountain further. Create steeper slopes closer to the walls so dead bodies roll downwards instead of piling up."
She closed her eyes, taking a breath. "And we will. But I want to prepare exit strategies for when—if—we have to abandon this place. Defenses are good, but the more we fortify, the more trapped we become."
"A tunnel," he proposed. "Highly defended and leading some miles away. Big enough to let us evacuate rapidly, though I don't see us fairing much better outside these walls should it come to that."
Elly nodded, and he frowned. She sighed. "I'm fine. This is just bringing back old memories. I'll be alright."
"I know," he replied, making her snort. Marcus shrugged. "But hey, this is supposed to be a partnership, right? Equality and all that? I trust that you'll be fine on your own, but you don't have to be."
She smiled, seeming to appreciate it, but didn't reply. Well, not like he could fix trauma with a few words. Elly turned to the arrowslit, looking outside to where mages were already starting to clear away dead Hounds, and he once again bemoaned his lack of necromancers.
He stepped up next to her, bumping her shoulder, and braced as she bumped him back. He still almost stumbled, shooting her a glare, and she sniggered with far more force than the situation warranted.
Marcus joined a moment later, adrenaline released through nearly hysterical laughter, and the sound echoed through the tower as thousands of corpses burned.