Valkyrie's Shadow

Empire in Chains: Act 4, Chapter 32

Empire in Chains: Act 4, Chapter 32

Chapter 32

?How are you doing??

?As fine as a Frost Dragon could be after being hit by a Fireball, I suppose…?

Despite Ilyshn’ish’s grumbling, Ludmila couldn’t find any sign of injury on her companion. There were no chips, cracks or scorch marks over her body. It occurred to her that the Frost Dragon always maintained a perfect appearance regardless of whether she was a Dragon, Human or anything else. Her scales of bluish-white shimmered like polished moonstones while her teeth and claws were impeccably clean and unmarred. Even her wings always seemed to be arranged just right in whatever configuration they were in.

The Bards in the Adventurer Guild and those who entertained the citizens in both the Sorcerous Kingdom and the Baharuth Empire did always endeavour to maintain an immaculate and eye-catching appearance, but Ludmila had no idea how a ten-metre-long Dragon could groom herself so meticulously.

After Ilyshn’ish came over to pick Ludmila back up, they backtracked along the Frost Dragon’s flight path until they came across a line of broken trees. Ilyshn’ish circled the area twice before alighting in the freshly-created clearing. At the end of the snapped trunks and crushed undergrowth was Lady Aura.

“Hey, hey!” The Dark Elf Ranger smiled brightly.

“Good Evening, Lady Aura,” Ludmila couldn’t help but smile in response to her energetic greeting. “‘Cya around’, was it?”

“Tehehe…”

Ilyshn’ish looked over Ludmila’s shoulder.

“Where did the Dragon Lord go?” The Frost Dragon asked.

“Over there,” Lady Aura jerked a thumb over her shoulder.

Ludmila leaned to the side and Ilyshn’ish stretched her neck high as they looked behind Lady Aura. Arranged neatly behind her were a variety of Dragon-derived goods.

“Th-that’s not a Dragon,” Ilyshn’ish said.

“It’s a skinned Dragon,” Lady Aura replied.

“Hiiiieeee!!!!”

Ilyshn’ish ducked behind Ludmila. She scrunched herself up to reduce her profile, folding her wings tightly against her back.

“That’s a bit beyond ‘skinned’,” Ludmila noted.

“Hah? What are you talking about? When you skin something, you get materials – it’s common sense!”

“It’s barely been five minutes…”

“I got it all done four minutes ago,” Lady Aura puffed out her chest proudly.

Ludmila eyed the bones, meat, organs, claws and teeth arranged over the space. Viridian scales piled as high as Lady Aura lay along a neatly-folded hide.

It took Ludmila about four minutes to properly field dress a deer, which she thought was respectably quick. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could so thoroughly dismantle a twenty-eight-metre-long Ancient Green Dragon in less than one minute.

“Say,” Lady Aura walked around Ludmila as she looked up at Ilyshn’ish, “isn’t she wearing…”

Ilyshn’ish scuttled sideways, keeping Ludmila between them. Her fearful eyes stayed fixed on the bloody knife in Lady Aura’s hand.

“Dame Verilyn,” Ludmila said, “you’re being rude.”

“Rude?!” Ilyshn’ish squeaked, “If I drop my guard, I’ll be turned into materials in a heartbeat! That leather armour she’s wearing is dragonscale, you know…she has a red outfit and now she can make a green one. Who knows when she’ll decide she wants a white one!”

“Being on your guard doesn’t matter,” Lady Aura told her. “I’d skin ya all the same.”

“Hiiiieeee!!!!”

Ilyshn’ish took on her Human appearance and clung fearfully to Ludmila from behind. Ludmila frowned as her now-scaleless companion pressed against her back: why did she have to have such an outrageous body? Lady Shalltear was entirely right about insisting on the Snow Elf appearance.

“She’s not going to skin you,” Ludmila said. “Isn’t that right, Lady Aura?”

“Of course not!” Lady Aura pulled out a handkerchief and started wiping her blade clean. “You’re one of Shalltear’s. You don’t see me running around skinning Vampire Brides, do you?”

The Dark Elf Ranger raised the blood-soaked cloth and narrowed an eye at it, sticking out her lower lip. Ludmila reached into her Infinite Haversack, producing a Trooper’s Towel.

“Would you like one of these, my lady?”

“Wuzzat?”

“A magic item that I purchased recently. It can be used to cast a Clean spell three times per day.”

Lady Aura took the Trooper’s Towel in hand. She frowned in concentration for a moment before its magic washed over her, leaving everything in her possession spotless.

“Ooh…I don’t have anything like this. Is it really okay to have it?”

“They’re quite convenient, so I bought several sets of them,” Ludmila pulled out more of the magic items. “Please take these for your household. Make sure Lord Mare carries a few as well: we get quite dirty doing things together in Warden’s Vale and I’m sure he ends up that way wherever he goes.”

One by one, the towels disappeared into Lady Aura’s inventory. The young Dark Elf pursed her lips with a thoughtful look, then turned around to pick something up.

“Here,” she held out a two-metre-long dragon horn. “Maybe you can turn this into something. You need to upgrade that bow especially: it’s not powerful enough to land accurate attacks at a distance.”

“I…thank you, my lady,” Ludmila received the incalculably valuable material in her hands. “I’ll see what can be done about that. Out of curiosity: have you been waiting here all this time?”

“Not here here, but I’ve been around. Demiurge said that something like this would be the most likely outcome, but I was wondering when you’d catch on. That dummy said you might become all stubborn again and get eaten.”

“Wait,” Ilyshn’ish poked her head over Ludmila’s shoulder, “so you knew this would happen even before we started fighting?”

“Not until recently,” Ludmila replied. “But I had a hunch. Lord Cocytus cheated a bit, I think – the saddle that came with the Soul Eater was a big hint.”

“Un!” Lady Aura grinned, “Hunches are the best – it works because it does! Just follow your feelings; you can think about what you did later.”

“That makes sense,” Ilyshn’ish agreed. “Thinking makes you dumb.”

It did, to a degree. One could overthink themselves to their doom, just as the Viridian Dragon Lord had. Imperial society was mired by convoluted and harmful machinations, as well.

Analysing things after the fact was all well and good, but, as Lady Shalltear and Lady Aura noted, trusting her intuition more often than not resulted in favourable outcomes. Ludmila had invested the vast majority of her time learning about the Empire and experiencing what it was like. This enabled her to act with surprising effectiveness as she felt her way through her duties.

With this being the case, what she required was the expertise to ensure that her intuition led her in the right direction.

“Aaanyway,” Lady Aura said. “You still have a job to do. Those Humans are probably panicking like crazy right now.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Also…”

“Yes, my lady?”

“Her wearing that saddle as a Human makes you two look like perverts.”

A Gnoll arrow thunked into the fallen log by Rangobart’s head. The spray of splinters it sent into the air was stopped by his Protection From Arrows spell, but he still ducked instinctively.

“How long are we stuck in this hole for?” He muttered.

“For as long as we’re ordered to,” Commander Enz said. “It’s still pitch-black out, anyway.”

As a measure against being spotted through the canopy, the soldiers of the Second Legion were prohibited from lighting fires and instructed to minimise any magical lighting. They were to entrench themselves, camouflage their positions and conserve their fighting strength until conditions more amenable for Human operations were available. Rangobart agreed that it was a prudent course of action, but it didn’t make being attacked in the dark feel any better.

Despite heading for cover in an orderly fashion when the Viridian Dragon Lord’s appearance had been reported, chaos broke loose when the entire army group was hit by dragonfear. Thousands of men were turned into a screaming, fleeing mass in a single flyover by the Viridian Terror. How could anyone fight such a ridiculous adversary?

After things had settled down, Rangobart found himself in a trench excavated under a fallen tree by a Transmuter from the Engineer Corps. Five dozen men from a jumble of units joined them over the next few minutes – most notably Commander Enz.

Aside from the Engineer, Rangobart was the only other Wizard present. There was also a Cleric from the First Division’s First Company, who spent most of his time staring across the trench at the Death Priest who had hopped in with them sometime during the initial commotion. Not long after that, they found that the Demihuman tribes had taken advantage of the situation to move into the area. Now, they were laying siege to their positions.

Fortunately, most of the scattered groups had a Commander or Captain with them, so communicating back and forth between their hiding places provided a measure of collective assurance and awareness. Unfortunately, it had started to rain, turning their positions into waterlogged holes.

“How are we for mana?” Commander Enz asked.

The Death Priest gave the Commander a thumbs-up. The Cleric sighed and nodded.

“Let’s see if we can find whoever sent that arrow over.”

Four Wraiths appeared before them, followed by an Archangel Flame. Several of the men shook their heads wordlessly at the sight. War made for some ridiculous tales.

The Archangel Flame flew out of the trench first, wreathed in radiant light. Rather than searching for something to attack, it was sent weaving around over the undergrowth. Arrows flew up to greet it, most of them incapable of penetrating the Angel’s damage reduction. One of them stuck. The Commander nodded.

“Go.”

Hugging the jungle floor, the four Wraiths soundlessly disappeared into the night. Startled yips sounded in the air. A few minutes later, the sounds of nearby fighting diminished. The Cleric and the Death Priest sat down again.

“How many did we get?” Someone asked.

The Death Priest held up three fingers. Heads nodded around the trench.

At first, they had tried using the Death-series servitors to clear away the Demihumans suppressing their positions. The idea fell flat on its face for reasons similar to why the Death Knights and Death Warriors couldn’t just be sent to rampage all around The Blister without support. They were too slow in the jungle terrain and they couldn’t detect the Gnolls hiding everywhere.

To make things worse, the range of Darkvision was limited and only scouts with natural Darkvision enjoyed any advantage. That meant the Gnolls, despite their relative weakness, outclassed the Death-series servitors in their current environment. After all of the Zombies that they had accumulated were destroyed and two Death Knights came back looking like giant hedgehogs made out of Gnoll arrows, the General called off any further attempts to forcefully clear away their Demihuman opponents.

Thirty minutes after that, someone reported limited success using summons. Some retaliation was better than sitting around impotently with arrows landing all around them, so a strange battle had since ensued between the Demihuman forces and the Imperial Army’s expendable conjured attackers.

Rangobart made a note to himself about learning a few Conjuration-school spells just in case he ever found himself in a similar situation. Assuming he survived. As a new War Wizard, his training so far focused on the essentials: defensive enchantments, crowd control and damaging spells of different energy types to be used as the situation demanded. That being said, he only had the barest of the basics so far and it would take him years to learn all of the spells required of a company War Wizard.

He turned his head up to stare wearily at the canopy. Was the sky getting lighter? Checking his watch for probably the eighth time since holing up, he found it to be three-and-a-half hours past midnight. Just over three hours after the Dragon Lord had emerged from her lair.

When the Dragon unexpectedly left without laying waste to the Second Legion, the air wing had flown off in pursuit. As Wing Commander Burke had noted at the first meeting in Enz, however, she was far faster than they were. The last report had her disappearing to the southwest. There was no sign of Lady Zahradnik or her Frost Dragon and mana spent keeping track of a fight that they couldn’t influence was mana that couldn’t be used in their own battle.

The man to his right yawned. To his left, Commander Enz stirred.

“Get ready to move,” he told them.

“We have orders, sir?” Rangobart asked.

“Yeah,” the Commander nodded. “Increase the lighting. Get some fires going – I’m sick of standing in a puddle.”

All across the trench, the men moved. Most looked glad to be doing something other than sitting miserably in the rain. As the space lit up, Commander Enz seemed to engage in some silent conversation. His hands made the accompanying gestures, boots squishing in the mud as he paced back and forth.

The men huddled around the fires as the minutes passed. At long last, the Commander broke his silence.

“It’s done.”

“It’s done…you mean the Dragon’s gone?”

“Yeah, she went down somewhere around Oestestadt.”

Faces brightened and excited chatter rose. The Commander held up his hand for silence.

“First things first. There are two Captains, about a hundred soldiers, and a Death Knight holed up around two hundred metres to the west. We’ve been slowly picking off the strongest Demis around us with summons, so coming out of our holes to form up shouldn’t be too bad.”

“How many shields we got?” One of the Sergeants asked.

“About two squads’ worth between us. We’ll be pretty thin at the start, but the Death Knight and our Death Priest here will be pushing ahead. They probably won’t catch much with how these Gnolls are, but they should buy plenty of time for us to get organised and pick up more men.”

They gathered up their loose things and made ready below the lip of the trench. Sounds of distant fighting filtered through the trees.

“One more set of summons,” the Commander said. “Have them fan out ahead of us. The Death Priest and the Death Knight on the other side will come out after that, then the heavy infantry will move to cover the way out. Keep your heads down until we’ve reorganised ourselves.”

Rangobart refreshed his defensive enchantments as the fresh summons went over the top. Rustling and the sound of Gnolls being disturbed in the undergrowth came from nearby. The Death Priest hopped out of the trench, extending its wicked flail.

“?Mass Inflict Wounds?.”

Piercing shrieks issued from the unseen Demihumans. The heavy infantry came out with shields raised, covering the top of the ramp leading out of the trench. An arrow bounced off one of the mens’ pauldrons.

“Gnolls on the flank!” Commander Enz called from below, “The front’s tied up; cover our rear!”

The spearmen hefted their shields and repositioned themselves. Rangobart scrambled out as the trench emptied of soldiers, his body bent low over the ground. Ahead, he could see where the men were forming up. From behind the small shield wall, Rangers were already exchanging arrows with Gnolls in the rear that Rangobart couldn’t see.

?We’re all here! Advance northwest three hundred metres – we have another group holed up there. Light up these trees!?

A nearby Ranger pulled a flight arrow from his quiver, holding it out towards him. Rangobart reached into one of his belt pouches for a pinch of ruby dust.

“?Continual Light?.”

Rangobart squinted as the arrow flared brightly. The Ranger loosed it up into a nearby trunk. More enchanted arrows from different Rangers planted themselves high into the trees along the way, effectively eliminating the Gnolls’ night advantage. Soldiers streamed out from their hiding places to join the advancing formation as they came close.

Their ranks grew as they picked up the disparate groups in the area. With their growing ranks came a sense of stability as the Gnolls’ harassment grew increasingly ineffective. Another large group with a Death Knight and two Death Warriors eventually joined them. The Commander stopped as they reordered their formations.

“Still kicking, Roberbad?” A voice came from over his shoulder. “Clean, too.”

He turned to find Captain Germund grinning at him, face and armour smeared with mud. Several of the Fifth Company’s Sergeants were with the Captain, barking out orders as they sorted out their makeshift squads.

“We had an Engineer with us, sir,” Rangobart replied.

“Must have been nice. We had to hide between the roots of a tree. Demis tried to drive us from our position four or five times.”

An arrow stopped a few centimetres in front of Rangobart’s face. He blinked as it fell to the mud.

“Damn things are getting too smart,” Harlow spat as he raised his shield in the direction of the hidden sniper. “They’re aiming for the Wizards now. It’s hard to tell the Clerics apart from the heavy infantry, but your dresses stick out like nothing else. Ran into a Gnoll using Martial Arts and that fancy magic didn’t do jack shit for the mage with us.”

Rangobart eyed the huge arrow on the ground as he edged closer to the infantry ranks. Another arrow flew in from the darkness, glancing off of Captain Germund’s vambrace.

“Things are better now,” the Captain said, “but this is still chaos. There must be a Gnoll behind every third tree. What are our orders, Commander?”

“We’re going to advance on the hill with the others,” Commander Enz said. “The General wants our encampment back. We need to recuperate and figure out what our next move is now that the Dragon Lord is gone.”

Within five minutes, they advanced north towards the distant lights of their abandoned camp. Curiously, they didn’t encounter any resistance at all. When they approached the perimeter of the camp, it became clear why that was.

“What in the bloody hell…” Harlow breathed.

Rangobart squeezed his eyes open and shut several times. Dead Gnolls were strewn everywhere, creating a grisly scene over the hillside. Rivulets of blood trickled down the trail leading through the rows of tents.

“Was it the Death Warriors?” Rangobart frowned.

“Our Death Warriors are still with us,” the Commander said, “and it looks like we’re the first ones here.”

Along the base of the hill, he could see other groups of Imperial Knights similarly coming to a confused stop. The scenery changed little as they scaled the trail. Demihuman corpses littered the lanes and spaces between the tents. Considering the lack of carnage characteristic of Death Warriors and the fact that no Zombies indicating the work of Death Knights were present, Rangobart was at a loss as to what had happened. Most had simply been sliced or stabbed with unsettling precision.

Near the headquarters on the highest ridge of the hill, they found the first sign of life. Frowning into her tent with hands on her hips was Baroness Zahradnik. The frown vanished and the silver trim of her pure white armour gleamed as she turned to face them.

“Good evening, Commander Enz.”

“Good evening, Lady Zahradnik…do you know what happened here?”

“When I returned,” she replied, “I found Gnolls all over the camp.”

“So these dead Gnolls…you did this?”

“As you’ve already demonstrated the ability to take this hill with the Death-series servitors, I thought it better to make sure that they didn’t run off with your supplies. You have my apologies if I overstepped myself.”

Rangobart turned in place, eyeing the dead Demihumans lying everywhere. If the entire hill was like this, then the Baroness had slain hundreds, if not thousands of them.

“I still can’t figure out where some of my things went,” Lady Zahradnik muttered. “Please inform General Kabein that I’ve returned in case he needs me for anything – I’ll be working on some reports in my tent.”