The silence shattered.
The sea of bone surged forward like an avalanche of death, utterly silent but for the clatter of bone on frozen earth and the ethereal, soul-chilling wails of the damned that floated above them. The Krag line braced for the impact.
It was like being hit by heavy horsemen.
The first rank of skeletons crashed into the hammer-wielding guards with mindless, inexorable force. There was no strategy, no finesse, only an overwhelming, relentless push. Axes of chipped mental and rusted iron hacked at green flesh and leathered hide. Spears, clutched in bony fists, thrust through gaps, green fists breaking bone skulls. The air filled with the noise of battle: the crunch of shattered bone under Krag hammers, the clang of metal on metal, the grunts of warriors, and the soulless silence of their attackers.
"Let's go and join our warriors," Arieus said before charging in with Goruk and Varga right by his side.
Varga was the first to reach the front lines, her legs covered in a green aura that made her impossibly fast. She moved to the flanks of her fellow Krags and slashed a skeleton wielding a sword with her axe, crumbling its skull.
Varga was now in the thick of it. Her axe became a silver blur. She fought with focused intensity as she tried to support the flanks, doing her best to keep the enemy from breaching the entrance.
A horizontal slash severed a skeleton's arm at the elbow, the axe it held clattering to the ground. A reverse stroke took its skull from its shoulders. She didn't wait to watch it collapse, already moving to the next, her eyes constantly darting around the battlefield, absorbing everything.
"Hold the line!" Goruk bellowed, his two-headed axe whirling in a devastating circle, clearing a space of three skeletons at once. Bones flew like gruesome shrapnel. But for every one he destroyed, two more shambled into its place, climbing over the fallen remains of their brethren.
Jorik fought with a frantic energy beside Harken. His twin blades parrying a rusted sword here, stabbing through a humanoid skull there. "They don't stop!" he yelled, as he fended off three more attackers. He ducked under a swinging axe, taking one skeleton out with a low sweep, only to have to roll backward as a spear thrust from the second nearly found his throat.
"They are not meant to!" Harken grunted in response, using his heavy war hammer to crush a skeleton into powder. But even his veteran strength was being tested.
The line was bending, buckling under the sheer weight of numbers. The Krags were being forced back, step by step, their boots grinding through a carpet of bone fragments and snow.
A Krag, his name she couldn't quite remember, roared as a skeleton's rusted blade found a gap in his defenses, piercing his thigh. He fell, and the skeletons swarmed over him before his comrades could react, their bone fingers clawing and stabbing him to death.
Varga's focus returned to her own battle as a skeleton, with a human frame wielding a notched cleaver, lunged. She met it, her axe swinging in a short, brutal arc. The blow connected with the ribcage, shattering bones into white splinters.
Yet, a second simply stepped over the first, and a third moved around the side. They were mindless, almost numberless, and utterly without fear.
There's still more out there, trying to get in. We can't fight forever, Varga thought, her gaze snapping to the robed figure who still stood watching. He was surely the silent puppeteer of this carnage.
With a roar of frustration, she smacked the second skeleton down with the flat of her axe and kicked the other away, sending it stumbling into its allies.
I have to take that necromancer's head.
"Give way!"
Varga turned her head at Arieus's voice.
In the midst of battle, varga couldn't help but admire Arieus form. He was simply just controlled violence.
His movements were timely and lethal, every swing of his cleaver destroying a foe and opening a way for Krags to maintain their ground. But his eyes were not on the skeletons; they were on the spectral horrors that flowed through and over the ranks of the undead.
"Get back, I will handle them!" He said as he rushed through his own forces.
But it was too late. A Damned Soul, a flickering, translucent image of a tormented human, swept through the Krag line. It passed through a young warrior's chest. The Krag didn't scream; he simply froze, his eyes wide with an internal horror only he could see, before collapsing into the snow, his spirit extinguished.
Another shot through the line. It passed straight through the chest of another warrior. This Krag didn't scream either; he simply froze, his face a mask of utter horror, his eyes wide and vacant. A moment later, he dropped his hammer and fell to his knees, laughing uncontrollably, blood dripping from his eyes completely broken, before a skeleton's axe ended his misery.
"They cannot be harmed by steel!" Arieus roared, his voice cutting through the fighting. He swung his own cleaver, and unlike the others, it connected with the specter. The weapon didn't pass through; it sheared the apparition in two with a sound like tearing cloth and a final, fading shriek.
"Varga! Goruk! To me!"
She immediately smashed her fist into a skeleton blocking her way and rushed to his side, carving a path through the undead.
"What is it?"
"Our men's weapons are useless against the souls. Yours and mine… might be the only things that affect them."
As he said that, Goruk arrived at Arieus's side.
"Goruk, get that mixture we were working on! Tell Danna to get the remaining forces ready for a counter. They are to dip their weapons in it and get some torches lit."
"As you command, War Chief," Goruk replied with a chest salute, before turning to carry out his commands.
"Varga, handle the ones on the right flank! They will slaughter us if left unchecked!"
Varga hesitated. There was a reason she had been fighting on the right flank. The left flank was away from the infirmary ward. To follow his order meant leaving it exposed.
She looked past the fray, to the old house. Tarlak had seen her being pulled from the left flank and, seeing the danger, was already rallying a handful of warriors, pulling them back to form a secondary defensive semi-circle around the building's door.
"Arieus, the wounded…" she started.
"The living will join them if those specters are not stopped!" he interrupted, his gaze fierce. "Go! That is an order....Truth-seeker!"
The title was a low blow, his way of reminding of her duty.
What a nasty move.
With a final, frustrated look at the old house, Varga turned and plunged toward the right flank, hoping Tarlak would be able to hold.
"You three, with me!" she yelled at the nearest Krags, pulling a small squad from the main line. "Protect my flanks! I'll deal with the souls!"
She raised her free hand, her emerald eyes igniting once more. "Kuros!" The world slowed. She saw the spectral forms not as ghosts, but for what they truly were, patterns of malevolent energy.
Taking a deep breath, varga suddenly lunged forward moving like a vengeful spirit herself. The Krags at her side doing their best to keep up, but they were soon left to spread out around her, doing their best to keep as much skeletons as they can away from her.
A skeleton lunged, while she sidestepped and drove her axe up through its jaw, silencing it forever. She didn't engage the ranks of bone, but weaved through them, her true target the flickering, wailing horrors that sought to demoralize and destroy her kin.
She saw one descend toward Jorik, who was frantically trying to swat at it with his blade, the steel passing through its form harmlessly.
Kuros - Partial Enchantment - Crushing Blade
"Jorik, down!" she screamed.
He dropped without question. Varga leaped, her axe singing a deadly song through the air. She cleaved the Damned Soul from shoulder to hip with her axe that was now covered in a fierce emerald light. It erupted into a mist of light and a final, piercing scream that sounded more relief than paint. She landed, rolled to her feet, and immediately engaged another.
Another damned soul reached for a warrior, its incorporeal fingers inches from her face. Varga's axe, still shimmering with a faint, inner light, intercepted it. The weapon connected with a sound like tearing silk and a burst of cold light. The soul screamed, a sound of profound release, and vanished into nothingness.
She continued, banishing one wailing soul after another. Each one she destroyed eased the palpable dread weighing on the warriors, allowing them to focus on the physical threat. But with every step she took away from the old house, a cold dread grew in her own gut.
From the corner of her eye, she saw the main Krag line falter.
"Fall back! Cover your sides!" Goruk's voice boomed, though she could see he was pinned, surrounded by a knot of undead. While the unthinkable happened. A section of the line broke.
"Shit!"
Her worst worries was realized. The relentless skeletal pressure had found a weakness. While the main force still held the entrance, a flanking group of skeletons had broken through over the bodies of their own fallen and the Krag dead, circumventing the main line. They were now swarming toward the less-defended side of the camp, which included the old human home serving as the infirmary.
"The ward! They're breaking through to the ward!" a Krag shouted, his cry cut short as a rusted spear found his throat.
Tarlak and his handful of warriors were now the only thing standing between the tide and the injured. They fought savagely, Tarlak's sword shattering skulls, hip bone and severing spinal columns. For a moment, it seemed they might hold.
Then a wave of twenty skeletons all had large frames. One didn't need imagination to guess what they were when they were alive, for they had frames similar to Krags. They hit Tarlak's tiny line. A warrior fell to a rusty spearhead buried in his thigh. Another was dragged down, disappearing under a scrum of clawing bony fingers. The line shattered.
"No! Hold them!" Tarlak bellowed, but he was overwhelmed, surrounded by three skeletons hacking at his armor. He couldn't disengage. The tide of bone began to flow, unimpeded, toward the door of the old house.
The world snapped back into a horrifying, razor-sharp focus. The ethereal wail of the damned soul she had just bisected faded into nothing, but it was replaced by a sound that carved a deeper chill into Varga's bones.
It came from the old human home. The splintering crash of the door giving way. The beginning of the slaughter. Shouts, choked and brief, cut through the battle's din. The wet, final thud of a weapon meeting unresisting flesh. The splintering of wood as cots were overturned. Then, a silence more terrible than any noise.
Her world narrowed to that dark, broken doorway.
"Femi…" she whispered.
She slashed through another specter without seeing it and began to run, a desperate, headlong charge toward the ward.
Arieus saw her break formation. "Varga, hold the line!" he commanded, but his voice was distant, muffled by the roaring in her ears.
He's dead. He's dead because I left him. The thought was a spike of pure, incandescent anger, and the sudden, sharp pain it brought was worse than the gash weeping blood on her side.
Not again. Not like this.
With a raw cry of rage that tore from her throat, she abandoned her post. She forgot the specters, forgot the battle, forgot her war chief's orders. She had one purpose: get to the cabin. She had to stop it.
Arieus watched her break away, his face a grim mask of frustration. "Goruk! Cover her back!" he thundered, redoubling his own efforts, his axe and cleaver a blur as they systematically destroyed the damned souls threatening to collapse his position.
Varga became a whirlwind of destruction, no longer avoiding the skeletons but plowing through them. Every step was paid for in shattered bone. She kicked a skeleton out of her path, slammed another with her shoulder, using her body as a battering ram. She was almost there, the ward's porch steps within reach.
Then she heard it. Faint at first, from within the house. A high-pitched, fierce growl. A puppy's defiant snarl. Victim, Femi's wolf pup. The sound was cut off abruptly by a pained yelp, then a whimper that was silenced mid-breath.
The sound tore a hole in Varga's soul. She reached the doorway, a scream building in her throat, ready to see the worst, ready to see the small ratman and his loyal pup broken amidst the other casualties.
What happened next froze her in her tracks.
There was a shout from inside, loud and improbably vibrant. A thud and a crash of something heavy hitting the wall.
Then a voice, cracked with pain but burning with indignant fury, rang out clear:
"HOW DARE YOU TOUCH MY DOG,"
Crack! The sound of something breaking
"YOU DOMINATED DUCKFOWEL!"
Doombom!
" YOU UNFORTUNATE MOSQUITO!"
Crack!
"GET OUT OF HERE!"
There was a loud duffel of breaking wood, and a skeleton came flying out through the front door as if launched from a sling. It landed in a heap of broken bones at Varga's feet, its skull utterly shattered.
Standing in the doorway, was a figure. He was leaning heavily on the doorframe, one arm clutched around his bandaged middle, the other holding the unconscious form of Victim. He panted with the exertion.
Varga blinked, unsure if it was the adrenaline or the dim light, but his brown fur seemed to have a faint, almost imperceptible grey sheen. And his left eye, once a warm brown like its pair, now had a solid, stormy grey ring around the pupil, making his gaze look mysterious.
It was Femi. And he was furious.
He glared down at the destroyed skeleton with utter contempt, his whiskers twitching violently. He then looked up, his strange, mismatched eyes scanning the chaotic battlefield before landing on a stunned Varga.
"Why are you looking at me as if I am a goat? My friend concentrate," he said, while bending down to gently placed the unconscious pup just inside the doorway.
"Rest up, you did well," he whispered, as he turned back to face the skeletons that had broken through the main line. His face twisting in anger. He grabbed a large, splintered piece of the broken doorframe, hefting it like a club.
"You bloody skeletons," Femi spat, his voice dripping with venomous annoyance. This creatures seem to have something against him because it not normal to be jamming them twice in one's life time.
His sharp clawed fingers tightened around the piece of broken door, that had volunteered to act as his makeshift weapon and took a step forward.
"Okay, bring your head here. Let this uncle teach you respect."