Chapter 99: Pure Futility

Chapter 99: Pure Futility

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 didnt 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 theyd left behind. This brash general had thought that the dividing line was the difference between danger and safety, but theyd 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 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.

That was only minutes away, though. Every few seconds, another soldier descended those stairs in a tightly packed and intensely vulnerable formation. Theyd checked the nearby buildings and thought that theyd secured the area, but they were wrong. Theyd 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 whod already descended into the depths of its labyrinth, but that didnt mean that they didnt 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, theyd 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 Krulmvenors 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 atop the zombies and ran through the legs of their enemies, attacking anything with a pulse with 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.