Published at 24th of February 2024 11:54 am

Chapter 99 Pure Futility

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It watched the army approach with a calm feeling that bordered on amusement. The army itself was impressive enough for being a mass of flickering candles surrounding a single bonfire, but the Lich had nothing to fear here. It had watched the mass of men grow at every step of the way as they marched from the battered husk of the holy city to the southwest through the red eyes of its ravens and other, more shadowy minions, but Tenebroum was no longer concerned. Their window had already passed, though, and they didn’t even know it.

A small group of swift riders that had gotten here three or four days ago could have done far more damage to it than the lumbering force that was arrayed against it today. Now, it had left Tagel by the sea and all the other cities across the river in Dutton as burnt-out husks to stand as a warning to any humans who might try to venture this close again and reunited the fingers of its vast army into a single fist once more.

Even now, the fools that were marching on Blackwater had no more of an idea of what awaited them there than they had of the fate that was already befalling the men they’d left behind. This brash general had thought that the dividing line was the difference between danger and safety, but they’d made a horrible miscalculation. Tenebroum was awake now. It was more awake than it had ever been in its entire unlife, perhaps, and safety was quickly becoming a scarce commodity everywhere.

It had devoured the Lord of Light, but that feast had only clarified things, making the shadows of its soul that much darker by contrast. What it had gained from the God that had ruled the skies until so recently, though, was a newfound appreciation for a sense of order.

The Lich had managed to stumble on some of those precepts in the last decade, but all of those had bent toward the end of trapping and slaying a god. Beyond that, it had simply worked as nature willed and unleashed its creations based on whim.

For a long time, chaos had served its goals. It had been as natural as the swamp that had been a part of it for so long. Now, though, it understood the limitations. Chaos could not form clean battle lines, it could not execute orders simple enough for its drudges to obey, and it could not execute pincer attacks.

But the Lich could do all those things now. It was a new clarity that it had stolen from the God that now made up almost half of its oversoul. In some ways, that was worth more than the sheer amount of power it had gained from its latest conquest.

It watched the battlefield now, not as a hungry observer but as a cautious general. For days, it had been sending small waves of useless drudges to slow the march, and now, after the Templars had wasted precious days curing the sick and feeding the hungry, it had them boxed in on all sides. Once its ambushing force massacred their rear guard, it would outnumber them two to one and grind them to dust.

The early victories it allowed them were meant only to test their mettle and increase their overconfidence enough that they felt strong enough to venture into the depths. When they finally succeeded in killing its juggernaut, the Lich’s interest became all the more intense as it watched the wave of shrapnel shred the nearest men in a hail of green fire and cursed metal. The leader survived, but that was unsurprising. The man fairly glowed with divine light, though the Lich had watched with great interest as it had flickered when the man had viewed the corpse of his God.

As with so many things in the world, it seemed to Tenebroum that the human heart was the weak link, and it wondered how many of the man’s soldiers it would have to slaughter before that light went out for good. It was a question that the darkness was hoping to find out soon, though for now, all it could do was watch as they healed the dying and counted the dead.

That little skirmish had cost almost 50 lives, and most of those had come from the juggernaut’s explosion, but the Lich was unconcerned by the loss. Those bones were dipped in molten iron - it could easily reassemble the thing once the fighting was done. It would build others like it now that the concept worked. It had only built the bomb to blast open the doors of a particularly resilient keep, but it had worked wonderfully to flense the living as well.

When they reached the Temple of the Dawn, it did not bar their way. It let them gaze upon the mockery that had been made of their holy site without any obstacle to bar them. The sight of the golden saints reduced to nothing but necromantic abominations pinned to the walls was enough by itself to make the light go out in more than a few of the Crusaders all by itself. And they quickly smashed many of the decorations before they started down the winding stairs into the darkness.

The Lich could have stopped them here. It was sure of that. There were two armies on the surface right now, and both were larger than the Templar force. The former stood silently five hundred yards to the west near the river, in neat rows and was made up of eight thousand war zombies, and the latter group was made up of almost four thousand and was drawing slowly into a tighter ring around the outnumbered defenders that were being methodically slaughtered.

In truth, the Lich could have likely wiped the second, smaller group out already if it wanted to. In this case, though, the fear that was radiating from the women and children that were clustered there in the center that stayed its hand. The templars had faced a difficult choice, of course - leave the stragglers they found undefended to be killed by the first mob of zombies that found them or keep them close to protect them. They had tried to be heroic, but there was no heroic defense to be had on a battlefield where they could not even save themselves, and in time, it would slaughter them to the last man.

Well - to a boy. It amused the Lich to spare the son of his favorite tome. So, when the bloodbath was complete, only one squalling cry remained. Its minions could have easily struck it down, of course, but as far as the Lich was concerned, the child was welcome to lay there until exposure took him and serenade the drudges with his piteous wailing. It would bring it back to its lair with the other corpses so they could be transformed and resurrected once the battle was done. It didn’t know what it would do with the child’s corpse, but it was sure it would think of something appropriate.

And though it would be hours before the battle was done, the Lich was already confident of the outcome. Oroza lay just offshore, waiting to catch any soldiers that managed to flee so far when its army had broken them. The Lich just wanted a few hundred more deep beneath the earth so that their army was spread out as much as possible.

That was only minutes away, though. Every few seconds, another soldier descended those stairs in a tightly packed and intensely vulnerable formation. They’d checked the nearby buildings and thought that they’d secured the area, but they were wrong. They’d been trapped by it.

Once the vanguard was completely below ground, the altar mechanism was tripped, and the stairs began to slowly rise back into position, cleanly splitting the army yet again. Now, it could leave its war zombies to massacre the leaderless group on the surface while its menagerie of monsters devoured the elite in the depths.

As the second battle started in earnest, the screams and battle cries were inaudible to those who’d already descended into the depths of its labyrinth, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t happen. Unlike the battle that was just coming to a conclusion just outside its domain, this one was only beginning and would take time.

At first, it was a simple thing with plate mail-wearing warriors against platemail-wearing warriors. The zombies moved slower, but they were almost impossible to bring down while wearing steel gorgets that made beheading impossible. This turned the whole thing into an ugly grinding deathmatch, with the warriors of light using pikes to try to help their front ranks while the zombie warriors took blow after fatal blow without falling while the warm blood of the living slowly turned the icy ground they were battling on into dark, sticky mud.

This was just a feint, though. The Lich was merely checking to see what use of divine magic those that remained might have, and the answer proved to be almost none, which filled it with hunger. That would let it unleash the second part of its plan without fear of reprisal.

Sadly the shadow drake was still lying in pieces on the floor of its largest fleshcrafting shop, but it had other shadowy servants that it could bring to bear to break the ranks of these brave holy men. That distraction came in the form of a flock of blackbirds that descended on the bright-eyed men. Up until now, they’d shown such bravery, but it was one thing to face down a common zombie armed with a sword bolted to its hand. It was quite another to deal with a flock of undead, skeletonized birds soaring out of the dark to peck out those bright, glowing eyes from your skull.

Paroxysms of panic and fear shot through the assembled men as those without their visors down who thought they were safely in the third or fourth rank were suddenly forced to defend themselves against a threat that should have been little more than an annoyance. In truth, its blackbirds were hardly a threat to a prepared enemy, but it had thousands of them to spare at this point and a flesh crafter who did nothing but make half a dozen every day, so it was worth wasting a few hundred for a moment of advantage.

While the Templars were distracted, the zombies surged forward, breaking through the ranks of their enemy in several places. Given time, the Templars would close ranks and fill the gaps, of course, if it let them, but the Lich had no plans of doing that. Now that everyone was hopelessly locked into place, it released the few hundred dead goblins it had been holding in reserve. Many of them had been originally intended to be incorporated with Krulm’venors form to increase his multiplicity further, but the loss of so many of himself in the battle of Siddrimar had driven its favorite fire spirit quite mad, and so for now, the Lich held off until it could incorporate it with some of the dwarven dead to bring the mixture back into balance.

Though not as fast as they were in life, the goblins clamored among the zombies and ran through the legs of their enemies, attacking anything with a pulse using their wicked steel claws. For an already besieged enemy, this was enough to force them to start blowing the horns and sound a fighting retreat, which suited the Lich fine. If they wanted to wait until both of its armies could fight them at once and crush them between the hammer and the anvil, then it would oblige them.

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