“We need to make it to Plassus!” shouted Merideva, pointing south, and Taron gave a thumbs up and began retreating toward them. His mirror-fiends pushed out wide, stemming the tide, and he flung a hand out to turn the desert before them as smooth as greased steel. The fiends there slipped and fell, toppling and lashing out at each other, but as Scorio hesitated he saw that Taron was keeping the edge of his frictionless domain just before them, ever retreating as the Great Souls pressed south.
They ran within the circle of burning staves and mirror-fiends. The Shadow Petal darted through the ranks of the fiends, ignored until it was too late, and the Nightmare Lady’s dark fog banks drifted through the crowds, tails lashing, ever eviscerating.
Scorio and Merideva took the front edge, and together they tore apart the fiends that fought to find their footing. Scorio would leap forward, wings emerging so that he glided over the fallen, slashing down with his talons and blasting others with his command aura so that they reeled, stunned, just in time for Merideva to smash their heads apart. Fyrona’s blasts cleared the air of falling Okozs, causing huge limbs and bloody chunks of torso to rain amongst the survivors, and yard by bloody yard they made progress.
Wesanin came into view. He’d lost all control, his vortex massive, partially composed of butchered fiends, a revolving mass of sand and gore that swept across the dunes, the Great Soul’s mindless howl trailing behind it. Scorio gaped, awed both by its power as it churned up hundreds of fiends, but sickened by the piercing knowledge that Wesanin was lost, would rage in such manner till he ran out of mana, somewhere out over the fiend army, and there collapse to his death.
On and on they fought, making just enough progress to roll into fresh banks of mana, but one by one the Great Souls guttered.
Merideva was the last to lose her power. She fought with increasing fury and panic, her cry rising up into a continuous scream, her staves swirling and flying back and forth with frenetic violence, right up until she crashed to her knees and each and every one of them disappeared.
Only Taron’s mirror-fiends remained, endlessly replenished as more were generated by fresh attackers, but they couldn’t withstand the pressure of the endless ranks. Taron whipped his frictionless surface around and around their position, and over and over again fiends toppled and fell only to find their footing as the glassy surface slid on. It slowed the assault, but couldn’t stop it.
Scorio, drinking now from his reservoir, wielded his Shroud as a battering ram, swinging it around and around the knot of Great Souls in similar fashion, even as he hurled brute commands for the fiends to RUN AWAY and threw himself again and again against incoming foes. His talons sliced through flesh, severed hands and heads, but their numbers were too great; again and again he turned into flame and flew through their ranks, immolating all in his path, only to reform and breath a gout of black flame down the other side of his friends, incinerating dozens of fiends.
The Shadow Petal appeared in their midst in her human form, merely Himiko now, her Heart guttered, blades gone from her hands. A second later Naomi burst out of an evaporating bank of fog, the last of her tails vanishing as she crashed down onto her knees beside Fyrona.
Taron and Scorio were the only ones left with power. Scorio drank greedily of what little Bronze remained, but their progress had stalled out. Together, he and the Pyre Lord fought to keep the endless legions of fiends back, but Scorio knew they couldn’t hold. He threw himself around like a maddened cat, endlessly surging back and forth, taking greater and greater risks as he leaned on his Gold-tempered body and scaled plating to keep him from the worst wounds.
“Look!” shouted Fyrona, pointing south, and Scorio could but spare a glance to see a wall of Okozs moving toward them, scores of them suspended in the air, forming a perfect curvature so that it was like a sphere of fiends rolling up on them, and for a second he faltered, unsure what he was looking at, right till the wall of fiends to the south parted and Plassus came racing up, hundreds of fiends trapped by his power about him, straining still to reach him but held fast like insects in amber.
Behind him came another hundred or so Great Souls, most guttered but a handful of Pyre Lords and Blood Barons yet hurling death at the army of fiends around them. Scorio tore the Okozs trapped in the Charnel Duke’s sphere at ground level apart, and then the sphere’s protective circumference swept over them, driving fiends before it, and the immediacy of the danger was past.
Scorio reeled, blinked dazedly, and relinquished his burning Heart so that he staggered back into his human form. Blazing forth his Dread Blaze power so frequently had left him hollowed out and seared from within, and he felt as if his throat and chest were little more than badly charred husks.
Taron released his own Heart and stepped up to clasp arms with Plassus, whose face was carved deep with lines of wrath. The Charnel Duke took in the pitiful remnants of their company but kept striding on, and wordless everyone fell in behind him as they continued to the next dunerunner.
Naomi appeared by Scorio’s side, sliding in under his arm and helping him walk.
No words. He shared a look with her, gazing deep into her eyes to make sure she was still whole, still with him, and then bowed his head as he wheezed for breath, his chest endlessly rising and falling, fiendish ichor dripping off him sticking his shredded robes to his body, plastering his hair to his scalp.
Though they only walked, somehow they covered the intervening ground in short time and gathered another six or seven surviving Great Souls from the next gutted beetle.
On they pressed, surrounded at all times by fiends who raged but failed to penetrate the Charnel Duke’s protective sphere, and ten minutes later reached the next part of their convoy, but here they only found the dead, Great Soul corpses torn and shredded and partially eaten. Scores strewn across the dunes, and that’s where Plassus stopped, having reached the last beetle, and gazed across their gathered forces, reduced from four hundred to something close to one hundred strong.
It was surreal, impossible to relax with a hundred fiends pressed into a frozen hemisphere around them. Everywhere Scorio glanced he saw Okozs and tentacled flying demons trapped about them, none closer than twenty yards, all alive and hissing and roaring and reaching for them without gaining an inch.
Trapped in a bubble of threats, Plassus turned to the company clustered about him and raised his voice to carry over the clamor.
“Charoth and Aezryna report that LastRock stands empty. None remain to defend it. Vermina’s forces have found empty warrens and abandoned hives. The entire might of the Blood Ox’s army has been gathered here and told to march north. But the Blood Ox himself is missing. His prized Gold-ranked fiends are also absent. The Imperators are still twelve hours or more from reaching us. Something has gone terribly wrong. Somehow the True Fiend bastard caught wind of our plans.”
The Charnel Duke fought to master his rage, jaw clenching, his eyes burning with flickers of incandescent mana. “It falls to us to find him and stop him. To pin him down till the Imperators arrive. Gather yourselves, Great Souls! What we have fought this past hour is but the appetizer! We go in hunt of the Blood Ox, we go in hunt of his elite. We hundred, we mad fools, we blood-thirsty warmongers! Find your strength, affirm your desire for death, for nothing remains us now but to cut through this endless army in search of our true foe!”
Chapter 40
The Charnel Duke led them at a run toward the distant tumbled mass of the wall. Scorio limped and fought to regain his composure, but it felt as if he’d torn something vital within himself through such savage exertion. Naomi was always there, however, indomitable, fierce, ferocious.
The fiends parted before them, but it became ever more evident that the exertion was taking a toll on Plassus. He held in suspension over a hundred fiends and forged a path through thousands more, and despite his might, his masterful mana manipulation, his stride soon slowed to a weary walk. Their ability to travel at an accelerated rate diminished as the load upon the Charnel Duke grew overwhelming; the man hung his head, sweat dripping from his nose and chin, and each labored step looked as if he shifted a boulder the size of the world before him.