The Bathrobe Knight: Volume 2 (50 page)

The damage wasn’t severe. The front line was comprised of strong Ursine warriors with good armor, and they were able to take several hits without falling over, but the barrage was disheartening to the morale of the animal army nonetheless. They had just gone from a sure victory to being repelled by a wall of shields, and now they were being prickled and stabbed by hundreds of falling arrows. Even the Panda King, watching his troops die left and right, could feel their spirits being sapped. “If they think arrows are going to win this fight for them, then let’s show them what real archery looks like! Sound the horn for the archers. Advance to firing position!” the Panda King ordered to the horns. A different, higher pitched set of horns blew this time, three blasts in a very deliberate pattern. It was obviously their way of signalling the archers over the noise of the battle.
A rather handy method,
Qasin noted, thinking about how he might adopt it for his Kingdom back home.

As the archers began making their way towards the wall, two flaming arrows went up into the air from behind the enemy wall. At this point, Qasin could see that whatever hope the Panda King had of a swift victory had been dashed instantly. Even if he were to eventually triumph, the victory would only be seized through a miserable battle of attrition, but even that thought seemed fanciful as the fire arrows, which signaled the enemy’s next phase of attack, summoned a horde of flying Blue-Drakes from each side of the mountain. They flew over the wall, over the enemies, and then rained hell and brimstone down on the archers. As the archers did their best to try and prick and pelt the beasts, explosions of fire shot up from the ground as the very earth itself seemed to catch fire.

After finishing their first flight path, they circled around, and then all the Blue-Drakes at once ignited the ground in a giant arch of burning flames across the field. “I see the Hydra is still intact,” Qasin, the only one amused at the situation, laughed. While the semicircle was being set ablaze, a second crew of Blue-Drakes, each holding on to a single head of a Hydra and two holding its tail, flew down the center from the mountain and dropped the Hydra plumb in the middle of the burning half-ring of fire. Then, the circling Blue-Drakes that had passed by started swinging low enough to drop off warriors before continuing to rain explosive fire into the middle of the enemy forces from above.

The Panda King’s archers were decimated. The front line was dying by the wave with no sign of having made any impact on the Humans. The fire was making the panda’s army smell like barbeque on the battlefield; and now, to top it all off, and as if to add insult to injury, a giant Hydra with dozens of skilled fighters were claiming a spot in the very middle of the terrain. “No . . . No, we can’t fail. We can’t fail here. Everything is counting on this.” Eve started to panic, her eyes flashing red. “This is . . . This is your fault!” She yelled at Qasin, “You just had to stop and save those people. If you hadn’t bothered with them, we would have made it in time!”

I just had to stop and save them? That was the wrong thing?
Qasin thought, but he said nothing. He just stared at her as she clutched her hair so tightly she almost tore it out.

“We’re not going to fail,” the Panda King said, looking over the field. “We just need to pull back the forces, regroup and get the heavy siege equipment out here. If he wants to huddle up under a wall of shields, we’ll crush that wall like we crush every other wall. As far as the Blue-Drakes are concerned, we have the numbers, and we have the nets. We can take refuge under the cover of the trees until we have enough net throwers to rip them out of the sky.”

“I can’t . . . I won’t let it end this way,” Eve mumbled to herself, completely ignoring the Panda King’s new plan. Her feet started to lift into the air, and her body slowly started to hover half a meter above the ground. Her red eyes began glowing like rubies under light, and she began to reach her hands out towards the wall of Humans holding shields. “I don’t care anymore if I have to interfere. I don’t care if this causes problems for us, Stephanie. I won’t let you win like this!” she shouted as the air around her started to crackle with charges of electricity.

This . . . This is worse than with the pirates.
Qasin watched, first in wonder and then in horror.
This will murder every man, woman and child over there if it has even close to the same effect it did on those brigands. If the King sounds the retreat, there is no telling how much damage proper siege equipment will do.
Looking around at his situation, Qasin started putting everything together.
One Panda King, three guards, and then I can make it over the railing,
he mentally added up his danger.
If I get over there, then, given the way those weaklings fight, I should be able to . . .
He wanted to finish plotting, to plan out his entire escape route, but just seeing Eve let him know that her spell was almost done. “I’m sorry,” he whispered at her. In a way, he really was. She was the first person who had taken the time to get to know him as anyone or anything other than the King. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, pulling out his blade and stabbing it through Eve’s back, directly into her heart, before she could even see him move.

He heard her gargle blood as her now limp body fell to the floor in front of him. He heard the Panda King roaring at him, but it didn’t matter. It was too late for them. Without Eve, the Panda King would fall for sure. Without Eve, his people, the Humans of this land, would be free from the tyranny of the repulsive monarch.

Qasin then turned to the Panda King, but he had seen his betrayal and already closed the distance between him and Qasin, slamming Qasin in the chest with a fist that left Qasin skidding across the floor. As Qasin got up and readied himself for the second attack, the panda chuckled at him. “Is this the might of a Human swordsman? You can’t even figure out where your feet are,” he taunted, but Qasin didn’t react. He had stayed alive in fights because he knew precisely when to ignore an opponent’s challenge, and this was one of those times. As the Panda King dropped to all fours and charged again, Qasin was slightly more prepared. With one sword he intercepted the panda’s clawed hand, which was about to tear into his flesh. With his other blade, he cut the tendons of the aggressing arm even as the great force of the blow sent Qasin flying back against the railing.

The impact of the railing crushed in on his lungs, audibly snapping a few ribs, but Qasin wasn’t alone in his pain as he coughed up blood. The Panda King had taken a serious hit too. He had halted his charge after hitting Qasin, recoiling as he felt the deep cuts from the Human’s blade. As soon as the furious Ursine tried to resume his charge position on all fours, he found himself limping and unable to put any pressure on his injured limb. The Panda King, irritated at losing his ability to charge, stood up. “So you think you’ve gained an advantage, you pitiful primate?” he snarled. “You think I can’t kill you with one hand tied behind my back? I can crush any man!” he roared.

“Just like you’ve managed to crush the Humans over there behind me?” Qasin taunted in return. While the enemy had size and strength on his side and clearly wasn’t lacking in speed, Qasin still had his wits. The Panda was so mad he wasn’t even thinking straight, and he needed to use that to his advantage. “Perhaps you could come over here, and I can teach you how to juggle and dance like the bears do back home.”

“Nonsense! There are no juggling bears!”

“Oh, but there are. We make them beg, whimper and plead for fish. They do tricks at our command.” Qasin continued to bait the panda, watching as the animal’s eyes grew bloodshot with hatred as if every vein in them were slowly bursting from his rage. “But don’t worry, I’m not insulting you. The bears back home are different. They can’t speak or behave. They’re a lesser species, less . . . Human.”

Overcome with rage at this last unthinkable insult, the Panda King sprang forward at Qasin, swiping at him with his good hand. Qasin saw the attack telegraphed a mile away and ducked under it, using both his blades to sever the tendons of the monarch’s good limb as he had done with the other. As Qasin crouched and lifted his swords into the powerful arm sweeping over him, he grimaced from the intense pain in his sides where his ribs had been broken against the railing. The Panda King, doing his best to press his attack despite the fresh wound, followed up by kicking at Qasin in an odd kung fu fashion, but Qasin dodged the attack, just barely managing to stumble out of range in time.

Not wanting to lose momentum and let his enemy regain his composure, Qasin decided to take the offensive this time. As the Panda King desperately swung his two gimped hands down upon Qasin from his right side, Qasin took the blow with his left shoulder as he pulled the blade in his right hand across the Panda King’ jugular.

As the panda fought to keep his balance and stop the blood from spewing out of his neck, Qasin fought just to stand up as his shattered ribs and mauled shoulder ached in unrelenting pain. The blows had taken their toll. After taking a moment to regain his breath, he looked around and laughed. The Heralds were below, horns ready, but there was no one to tell them what to blow. The fallen King’s guards were on the field with the rest of the soldiers, and he, the only Human on this side of the fight, was left alone upon the King’s platform to stand witness to the battle below.

“I’m sorry, Eve,” he said again, louder this time, as he turned to see where her body had fallen. Only, it wasn’t there.

“Qasin, I’m sorry too,” he heard her say from the railing behind him, where she was now standing, clutching the wound he had given her. “You have no idea what you’ve done,” she said, beginning to float again. If Qasin had had the energy, he would have tried to stab her, stop her mid-spell, but he could barely stand. “You, for the sake of a few thousand people who are no longer even Human, may have damned millions!” she angrily shouted as her body started to draw blood from the Panda King and heal her wounds.

“You . . .” Qasin found even speaking a bit difficult. “You keep saying that, but how can I trust you? I know the way you twist words.”

“Because,” she sighed, the spell now ripping the life from the five Heralds below, their screams muted by the blood that poured out of their mouths. “I trusted you. I tried to help you become something more, something greater, but you just couldn’t get past it, could you? You just couldn’t get past that ridiculous destructive nature of yours. It always has to be violence with you!”

“That’s rich.” Qasin used his sword for support as he started limping towards Eve. “You didn’t even try diplomacy with your own brother, but you accuse me of loving violence?” Each step he took was painful yet necessary as he walked towards Eve, who was hovering a foot above the ground with an odd mixture of blood and purple energy swirling about her.

“You should have trusted me!” Eve shouted back, her eyes now glowing purple with the same energy that floated around her.

“I did.” Qasin took another labored breath. “You just didn’t know me,” he managed to get out. Then, before she could respond again, he dashed at her, plunging his blade into her stomach. “This is just who I am,” he said, pulling the blade out of her.

“That’s why I’m sorry too.” She put on a smile that was almost instantly betrayed by the welling tears in her eyes. “I can’t have you standing in my way,” she said. Qasin saw that the fresh sword wound he had given her was already healed. Suddenly, the purple energy that had been encircling her rushed into him all at once from every angle. Eve’s spell pulled and ripped at his insides, the clawing energy finally bursting forth from his chest as if it were some beastly maw which carried his still-beating heart in its teeth. The energies then gnashed the heart into so many tiny pieces that it appeared to be nothing more than orbs of blood hovering in the air, which Eve drank up as Qasin watched in silent horror.

In that brief moment, between the terror of knowing he was dead and the abject horror of watching his heart being torn into a thousand pieces and greedily sucked up by Eve, he had torn emotions as to which was worse. Was it that he was going to die, or was it that his death was worthless? She had somehow shrugged off the wounds he had inflicted, and he was certain she would be able to go into the battle unscathed, destroying every Human there.

But then, as his body fell limp to the floor, so did hers. She was healed, but whatever she had done had taken its toll. That fact meant that the people he had died to protect were safe for now. Knowing that his death meant something for Humanity drew a smile across his lips as he lay on the ground powerless but at peace, unable to even tighten his fingers around the hilt of the sword that still lay in his hand. As he died, with all the burden of Kingdoms and conquests behind him, his last thoughts were on the woman with whom his fate had been so tightly bound.
She really is beautiful,
he thought, still smiling as his vision finally went dark.

Darwin
:

              “Push! Thrust! Back! Push! Thrust! Back!” Alex called out to the troops below, the day-old phalanx that now operated like a well-oiled machine.

             
He had less than a day, and he made them like this?
Darwin admired his new force from atop the wall on their side, holding a bow and ready to shoot the retreat signal for the men in the main battlefield if need be. The precision with which the phalanx moved and the unison in which they acted reminded him of perfectly-organized fire ants. It was astounding to see such progress with weapons they had never wielded and in a formation they had never heard of until less than a day ago.
Alex is a truly terrifying and fierce force. I’m glad to have him as an ally.
Darwin nodded to himself.

              Everything was going as planned. His year of reading about the details of the Battle of Thermopylae after watching a graphic-novel-turned-movie on the subject had paid off in spades. Even the detail of raising the platform they were on by just a step and pushing the enemy force back before letting them ebb forward again to maintain that upwards advantage was a success. It was forcing the foe to either climb up, and have no-one at their backs to support them, or push forward into a wall of shields that pressed into them from above and drove them back. Anyone attacking into the position was either immediately killed by the dory spear or forced to fight to maintain their footing as they tripped and stumbled around before eventually being forced to their knees where they would be trampled by their allies.
Leonidas couldn’t have asked for better conditions. Now I just have to make sure there isn’t a traitor to betray me with a hidden route to our flank,
he chuckled, finding humor in the moment despite the tough battle waging below.

              Before the battle, he had tried to give a rousing speech to try and tell the men that here is where they would make their stand, that the force of the enemies was nothing more than the heavy weight of the anvil on which they would strike and break their chains. But the speech had turned out rather poorly. No one could hear him that well from where he sat atop the wall, so it just ended up being an odd shouting match with him trying to make himself heard over the oncoming army and his red-eyed warriors interpreting that as an invitation to shout too and then add some shield slamming as everyone just cheered randomly.

              “Cheer up,” Daniel had said from beside him during the speech. “It’s not like we worked more than a few hours on that thing.”

              Now that the battle was underway, Daniel, who had flown to the other wall with a bow as well, was in the same boat as Darwin. They were to only fire regular arrows into the enemy force. Then, whenever Darwin shot a flaming arrow into the air to signal orders to the archers behind the wall he was standing on, Daniel was to also relay the signal to the archers inside the wall on his side. It was a rather crude system, but given how ineffective even shouting had been earlier, he was glad that Daniel had talked him into using visual cues for the battle.

              “Lord Darwin,” Justin Yoo came up to deliver a message. “The front five lines are starting to weaken. We haven’t taken many casualties, but it’s been an hour now, and they’re getting tired. If we don’t go through with the plan soon, General Alex is afraid that they’ll start making mistakes. He estimates that one error might cost ten lives, and he’s afraid he’ll see two or three mistakes if we don’t relieve them and switch the lines up.”

              “He’s right. It’s not that they’re tired. It’s just mentally draining to be trying so hard for so long,” Darwin said with a nod. “Alright. We spent a lot of time preparing it. Ready to see if it works?”

              “Yes, Lord Darwin!” Justin almost jumped out of his socks with enthusiasm. “Let me take over for you here. Everyone on their side was still hopeful, but it was easy to tell that the whole defense could be shattered in an instant soon. They were only succeeding because everything was still going as planned. The second the battle deviated from their neatly laid out plan, Darwin knew what would happen. If the shieldwall showed a single crack, then it wouldn’t be ten or twelve that would die. It would be everyone. The reason the shieldwall was getting tired after such a short time, in terms of a normal battle at least, was because of how massive and oppressive the enemy forces were. If they got through the wall, they’d leak into the two courtyards and butcher the archers. Then it would be a race to the finish line. A deadly race to determine if Stephanie would finish in time to save them all like she had before.

              “Great! Let’s do it!” Darwin shot a flaming arrow, signaling to Alex and Daniel what was about to come. Daniel, who passed his bow off to a guard on his side and flew over to where Darwin was at, started grabbing a bunch of flasks that they had tucked away and gave them to Darwin. One at a time, Darwin took the flasks and threw them to the ground below, his range varying from five to ten feet in front of the shieldwall to where the walls first started pulling inwards. The enemies paid the flasks little heed, shrugging them off as they shattered and coated them with the foul smelling liquid that they held inside.

              “You really come up with weird ideas, don’t you?” Daniel asked as he kept handing the flasks to Darwin. “I mean, this is the new tech in old fantasy world thing, so aren’t we supposed to draw giant rings of fire and split the enemy forces? Play some clich
é
tricks like that?”

              “I think Kitchens already did that with a big semicircle to keep his back safe. He insisted on taking the Hydra to the middle of the battlefield too.”

              “Yeah, I remember. Almost wanted to go with them and see the parachuting black bear wearing a top hat and a monocle,” Daniel laughed. “I heard Minx thought it was so cute on Fuzzy Wuzzy that she even tried to stitch a top hat for every single head on the Hydra. Might have done it too if not for the fact the animal cracker brigade showed up early.”

              “I feel like if she’s going to indulge herself in the crafting lifestyle, she should consider making some slippers for everyone.” Darwin looked at his feet, hoping that he hadn’t accidently spilled any of the oil on them. “Even I could use a new pair.”

              “Hmm, I always liked moccasins better than slippers,” Daniel thought aloud. “Anyways, watch your flap. You need to get down there. That’s plenty. The area is good and covered.”

              Darwin nodded then jumped the entire distance to the ground behind the phalanx. He might have been eager to get back to the real world so people would stop trying to kill him, but being in the game world had huge advantages--especially when it came to his ability to run and jump. He had gone from a sit-around gamer to a professional parkour-level runner with just a few level-ups increasing his Speed attribute.

              “Ready, Lord Darwin?” Alex asked as he approached from out of nowhere as usual.

              “Wouldn’t be here if I weren’t,” Darwin said while equipping his flamberge.

              “I know you say it’s for the best, but I still highly recommend against this course of action. The skill, the position, everything about it is too risky. We aren’t in danger of losing the field anytime soon, Lord Darwin, we just need to swap out our front lines--a feat I have done in many battles before.”

              “With formations like this one?” Darwin questioned. Pulling men back from a loose formation with space on the sides of each person was different than pulling them out of a phalanx.

              “No, Lord Darwin.” Alex gave a lopsided frown.

              “Do you have any better ideas for how to do it then? They’re shoulder to shoulder with ten guys pushing on their back,” Darwin said as he looked at the situation. Even he was a bit nervous and sometimes worried about dying, but with enough souls to revive him and an army at his back, it was worth the risk.

              “No, I have no alternative suggestions, Lord Darwin.” Alex’s frown worsened. “Be careful, Lord Darwin. We need you back here.”

              “As you command,” Darwin joked, though he was the only one who found it funny. And then he quickly jumped up and started the plan.

              He pulled out his flamberge zweihander and lept on the shields of the men protecting themselves from arrows and ran across the top of the phalanx. It was a bit of a chore making sure he didn’t get hit by a loose dory or shift all of his weight onto one innocent, unsuspecting soldier, but eventually he made it to the end. When he finally got there, he used the rest of his momentum to jump in the air and slammed the flaming blade into the ground as he landed. It instantly erupted, triggering the oil that he had just been throwing all across the field and setting off an explosion that shook even the walls as it massacred the almost five hundred Animal Kingdom soldiers that were in the split. The sword had hit a special trail of oil that had been laid down before the battle had begun. As this makeshift fuse of sorts had ignited, it had burned his legs a bit; but, for the most part, Darwin was unhurt by the blast, a sentiment that could not be shared by the hundreds caught in the roaring fireball a little over ten feet in front of him. Surrounding Darwin, there were still a number of enemies untouched for the most part by the blast that occurred almost a dozen feet behind them them. However, the Hell that had erupted at their backs had the disoriented the animals, and the phalanx quickly moved forward and mercilessly slaughtered the remaining enemies, pushing them away from Darwin until he was able to pull his blade out of the ground.

              Then it happened. As the flames died down, all of the enemies that had been toasted by the explosion started to pick themselves up, howling in a beastly fashion as they did so. Each one then shook himself off as if he never had oil burning across his body to begin with, grabbed his weapon, and stood still, waiting. Upon receiving the order from Darwin telepathically to turn and butcher their erstwhile allies, they obligingly did just that. Their former allies, who had never seen Darwin’s unique ability in action, thought that their comrades had just managed to somehow live through the explosion. Those who seemed to have survived weren’t paying any attention to the fires scattered around them, but it didn’t seem weird to the Panda King’s men for adrenaline to block out their wounded comrades’ pain during a fight. That’s why the unconverted animal soldiers weren’t expecting those who had just picked themselves up off the burning field to turn around and start slicing and stabbing at them. The conversion took an entire line of the animal men by surprise, leaving them gutted before they even had a chance to defend themselves.

Darwin smiled as he watched it all in action. The plan, a rather simple concept that Valerie had come up with, was paying off way better than he had anticipated. After explaining how the ability worked to Valerie, who had persistently asked him over and over again before the fight, she noted that there was an issue of ambiguity--one that might be exploited. If the game said that every time he was personally responsible for killing an NPC, he had the ability to resurrect that particular NPC entity, then there was only one thing that was slightly unclear: what counts as being responsible for killing someone? When they tested killing enemies with oil, he found that he was able to resurrect all of them so long as he both set the oil and triggered the explosion. The best part about it was that the fire that was burning them would be extinguished by the conversion process, so he just had to make sure to get the oil mostly on the enemy rather than on the ground, something tossing flasks on tightly bunched foes easily allowed.

“That’s terrifying,” one of the soldiers from the phalanx said as they lowered their shields for a minute. “Are they the same as us now?”

“I . . .” Darwin was about to say that he didn’t think so, that the zombies had no brains or personality, as was his experience with Turtle-Wolves, but then he remembered Fuzzy Wuzzy. “I actually don’t know. Either way, we’ve bought ourselves some time.”

“Right, right,” the shield man said. “We better get moving, or Alex will kill us before the enemies are back to even try.”

As the phalanx swapped its front and back lines out, Darwin couldn’t help but watch the newly summoned beast men fighting at the front, holding off the enemy in the push. It pulled to him. The clean, neat and tidy way of phalanx fighting had made him want to enter the battle a little, but the messy massacre that was occurring now drew him in an entirely different way.
That’s where you belong,
a voice rang through his head like it had whispered in his ear.
That’s where you should be right now. You haven’t even given your flamberge a proper test run. Don’t you owe it to yourself to try it out? Go on. They’re still switching positions. They’ll need extra time, right?
It kept calling out to him.

“Lord Darwin, we’ve almost finished the swap. Do you want to head back now?” one of the soldiers asked, the troops were making somewhat of an effort to leave a hole for him so he could go back to his position. So he could go back to waiting . . . “Lord Darwin!” the soldier called out again as Darwin gave up on the idea and started charging into the lines with his new miniature army.

Every kill is a new soldier,
Darwin told himself.
Every kill is one less man that has a chance to kill my people,
he justified, pulling out his flamberge and pushing his way through the line of soldiers into the enemy ranks. He knew they were not entirely sound justifications, that his men at the gap could easily handle the enemy and likely wouldn’t take many losses if any at all, but the lack of solid excuses didn’t bother him. He had waited so patiently. He needed to fight. This wasn’t just a siege. It was the ultimate battle in the ultimate game. The crème de la crème of fights, and he couldn’t just stand idly by and watch it happen around him. He needed to feel the thrill of the kill.