Then the dark creatures sprinted past me. I wasn’t their target.
“Gowes,” I said. “They’re attacking the temple!”
Not weighed down by my spear, I ran. My fists pumped against the air as my legs burned with the effort. I wasn’t a natural runner, so it was only adrenaline and necessity forcing my muscles to act. When this was over, I’d need to get in better shape.
Concerned citizens looked warily out their windows, but none came to their doors. None wanted to get personally involved in the war that had come to their doorstep. The temple was just ahead, and while I wasn’t closing in on the three cretins charging ahead, I wasn’t losing ground either.
The temple doors were locked, so the cretins started hacking away with their swords. It was the time I needed to catch up to them.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey, you!”
One of the cretins turned back and stepped toward me while the other two kept beating down the doors. It whipped its sword toward me and I jumped back to avoid getting hit. It slashed again, forcing me further from the temple I was trying to save. I couldn’t let the cretins steal the life energy from another god, it would only make Duul stronger and the other gods weaker, including Nola.
With another slash of its sword, the cretin got closer and I lunged. My head crashed into its chest, knocking it to the ground. I punched its face, which felt like punching a metal mailbox. My knuckles split open, bleeding onto the creature’s jaw. It sent a slimy black tongue across its lips, taking my blood into its mouth and smiling before bashing my skull with its forehead.
I reeled back, dizzy from the impact. Ahead, the temple doors splintered open, allowing the other two monster men to get inside.
The cretin that was attacking me pressed its sword against my neck. The sharp blade dug into my skin, but my hands pressed against the cretin’s arms, pushing against the force that bore down on my throat.
I couldn’t hold out for long. Soon, this thing would decapitate me. I kicked my legs out but couldn’t get between this monster and myself.
Then, a new blade appeared. A shining metal knife sliced into the cretin’s throat, spilling black blood sludge all over me. The creature flopped to the side. Standing over me, and offering a hand to help me up, was gangster extraordinaire Blade.
“Thank you,” I panted. “There are two more, in the temple.”
“Not my problem,” he said. “The gods and I don’t care for each other. I’ve done enough here for you to owe me, teach. Keep yourself alive long enough for me to cash that in.”
He strutted away, as if he weren’t a walking target himself. Meanwhile, the black ooze from the cretin’s dead body coalesced into a thin tendril of inky magic that soared through air, through my pant pocket, and into one of the energems I had brought with me. My skin seared from the heat of that energy transfer for a moment, then it was over.
The dizziness subsided. I got to my feet as I heard a scream from the temple. Eranza.
I ran into the temple as quickly as I could. There, with black blades aimed forward, were two cretins just inches from Gowes. The cyan god floated out of reach, just above the altar.
“You boys won’t hurt me,” he said. “My friend Arden will see to that. Over here, Arden!”
Eranza cowered behind the altar, next to the temple’s fireplace. A light blue flame flickered behind her.
“Throw me a poker!” I yelled, running toward the altar. Eranza threw the fireplace implement toward me like a javelin, which I caught in both hands. I kept running, holding the weapon across my body. When I reached the cretins, I used the force from Piercing Blow to whack them both across the heads as I thrust my new weapon forward horizontally.
The cretins tumbled ahead. I stabbed one with the sharp end of the poker, then pulled the weapon from its flesh. Its chest was torn like metal foil leaking black oil. The second cretin opened its mouth, revealing jagged, sharp teeth. It lunged at me with its scimitar and its mouth. I wasn’t sure what to block first.
I went for the mouth. The handle end of my poker was already facing the creature, so I rammed it into its gaping maw. The metal scraped against the back of its skull as I tore the monster’s head open. It fell, dead.
The other cretin was getting back to its feet. Gowes continued to waft overhead, smiling as we battled to the death below him.
“Today’s not the day I die, fellas, I’ve got a long life ahead!” he said.
“But do I?” I asked, kicking the cretin in the stomach. I didn’t know if it had a stomach inside that black shining body, but I did hope I had kicked something vital.
“If you want one,” he said, “you can have one. You just need a little ingenuity and faith!”
I found it hard to be so optimistic with a cretin slashing his dark sword at me. I ducked backward to avoid an attack, then did it again. I didn’t realize how close I had gotten to the temple’s pews until I tripped over one and landed in a heap between the wooden benches.
The cretin leapt onto the pew’s back and pointed at me with his sword. He was about to drop his body toward me and let gravity sink that blade as far into me as it would. I had nowhere to roll to, no way to stand and run before that blade fell.
Instead, I pointed my poker at the pew and activated Piercing Blow. The polearm shot forward, splintering the wooden bench and sending long shards of oak in every direction. The cretin flew across the room, slamming into another pew and destroying it. I climbed over the wreckage and stared down at it, trapped under a long, heavy stretch of the decimated bench.
“It’s over,” I said. With a final thrust, I speared the monster and killed it.
The blood of two cretins wove through the air toward me. I reached in my pocket for the energems and set them on the floor just in time to avoid adding to the third degree burns on my thigh from the first cretin.
When the stones cooled, I collected them, nodded at Gowes and Eranza, and limped out of the temple.
+20
When I stepped into the street, I saw him. The general that led this charge. He was much taller than the other cretins and his eyes burned with red energy. He was on the far side of the city gates, so he hadn’t set foot in Valleyvale yet, but time was short.
I ran. My vision blurred like I might pass out from over exertion, but I couldn’t care about that. I could only run, toward the guards, the Mayor, the witches that struggled to keep the cretins at bay. If we didn’t turn this menace away, Duul would add Valleyvale’s men to his cabal of warmongering subjects, and trap the women in a state of constant uncertainty.
“Six!” Lily yelled as I approached. She had slashed her axe through a frozen cretin’s neck, sending its head rolling away in a frosted block of frozen death. “Seven!” she slashed again.
Ambry straddled a cretin on the ground, pressing the length of her staff against its throat. It went limp as she finished strangling it to death.
I took out the energems again. The cretins’ bodies turned to a river of black energy that filled the gems with power and heat.
“We have company,” I said.
The only cretin standing was the largest of the bunch. He stood outside the front gates, accepting arrows from Valleyvale’s last living archer as though they were flakes of snow on a mild winter day. The sizzling ball of yellow energy that grew atop the other tower prepared to jolt him with electric magic, but the oversized monster didn’t seem to care.
A feeble punch in my back spun me around. It was the Mayor. His eyes were black as night, his skin a deathly shade of gray. He had succumbed to Duul’s curse.
I realized then that he had been right to keep the citizens from pitching in against the cretins. Extra bodies would have only added to Duul’s forces once the curse took hold.