Chương 21: Bloody Oath

Leaping from the back of a winged horse to fall upon a slavering horde of monsters from Hell itself was insane. Doing it without any real plan was more so. Asgar hurtled through the air. His God-forged armour wrapped him in its protective embrace scant heartbeats before impact. When he hit the horde, it was as a blur of dark metal turning the world into a tumble of half-felt impacts. Coming to rest against corpses—human or otherwise, no time to tell—Asgar launched to his feet and searched for a weapon.

Only a soldier for a few weeks, he nevertheless knew that to be unarmed on a battlefield was liked being a fresh peach at the market; ripe for the picking. Thankfully, there were plenty of poor sods around that wouldn't be needing their weapons ever again. A creature hit him from behind and he went down beneath its bulk, but he spun in time to land on his back, legs bunching to launch it far over his head.

Claws and upsettingly large mandibles were all that he saw of the creature before it was thrown out of view, but he took the lesson for what it was: don't stop moving. Rising from his fall with one hand wrapped around the hilt of a sword and the other grasping a broken tusk, he threw himself from the little mound of corpses back into the horde with a roar. He swung left and right, great bludgeoning sweeps with both weapons as he surged towards the palisade a score of yards away.

He lacked the pounding, pulsing strength of blood rage—to activate it now would be to lose himself completely in mindless slaughter—but he was still a level 19 Squire. His base strength was already supernatural. Carapace cracked and the smaller creatures were flung into the air in the wake of his attacks, their retaliatory bites glancing harmlessly from darkened plate. It was like forging a path through dense forest underbrush. He slogged mercilessly onwards.

A glance behind showed the red-striped group heading his way, gaining ground by the moment. He redoubled his efforts, but each step was slower, more of the smaller creatures leaping atop him and fouling his stride. No time. He activated Hallowed Strike and the thundercrack of his next blow shook the world, bodies flung aside like kindling. He dashed through, leaping onto the bottom of the palisade and then up, over, onto the scaffolded platform behind.

Three spears clanged off his chest plate, snaring his neck in a triangle of wooden staves, the shocked faces of unprepared guards taking in his gore-slicked form. Asgar forced himself not to rip the weapons from their fists and spoke as calmly as he could.

"I'm on your side." What a statement. Well done, Asgar, you really reassured them there. It worked though. He might look a little like a hell-knight right now, but as far as they all knew, those demons didn't speak, and certainly didn't explain themselves to lowly camp followers.

"You need reinforcements," he said.

"More are coming, and they'll crack this wall like an egg unless we stop them." Their weapons may have lowered, but their expressions remained blank, confused. Too slow. Too shocked.

"Who's in command here?" Asgar barked, channelling his best impression of Sergeant Tarkin. He turned back to look over the palisade, watching the crimson-daubed shock troops rush their way. Maybe half a minute, if they were lucky? He noticed for the first time the oversized claws on their forearms. Not for slashing, as he'd first thought, but crushing and cutting, like crabs. They were going to sheer right through the fucking wall, log by log. A scared-looking man with a cook's apron stepped forwards.

"We got no commander, sir. Just told to hold as best we can. I can call—""Never mind, too slow. Anyone with a ranged weapon, take out the reds when they get close, and send runners to the nearest soldiers. We need spears or we'll lose the wall."

"What about the Lance? Won't he save us?" Asgar tilted his visor toward the man.

"Do you feel safe?"

"Wh… what about you?"

"I'm going to slow them down. Get some backup." With that, he vaulted back over the wall. Marking the second time he'd leapt from on high to crash into a field of monsters, Asgar was becoming a bit of an expert. He led with a Hallowed Strike, the hellscythe—as he was coming to think of the long, curved, slightly serrated bone claw he carried—slamming into one of the hellspawn with a cacophonous boom, clearing space all around him as he landed.

It felt like only a handful of strides before he was crashing into the first of the wall-breakers, and his burrowed sword met the first's oversized claw with an impact that reverberated up his arm. His hellscythe stabbed the creature through the neck, bone slipping between carapace. Avarron approves of your slaughter. You have gained a level. Level 20 achieved. New class skill achieved. Sweet levels. Sweet power. But it would have to wait. For now, he was fighting for his life.

Having ploughed through the first line and into the second, Asgar struck about with steel and bone. Another hellspawn went down, then a third. One hit him in the back and he spun with the momentum, pirouetting to stab his sword straight through one of its large, kaleidoscopic eyes. A glimpse of the wall showed him a half-dozen nervous archers lined up, most with arrows knocked, but none were loosing. Idiots! He couldn't blame them truthfully, though. Asgar had no fucking idea what he was doing.

Would arrows even bring down these creatures? The big ones were as large as horses, and even he couldn't penetrate their shells directly. He went down again, having to use another Hallowed Strike to gain space and climb to his feet. His pulse was erratic, heart hammering wildly as he tried to fight the monsters while simultaneously keep a leash on his own anger. Blood rage wanted to activate, his entire class built around losing control and giving himself over to primal violence.

And yet, that wouldn't serve him here. It wouldn't keep the fort whole and unbreached, wouldn't keep his guts out of reach of these slobbering creatures. Wouldn't protect the closest things he had to friends, nor advance his position to let him claim justice from the Golden Lance. His new class skill might help, but there wasn't time to inspect it, to see how it manifested within his soul and understand its function and purpose.

If it was a berserking skill like blood rage, he'd be sentencing himself to failure and death by activating it now. But as a claw gripped him around the shin and the metal of his armour buckled and screeched, he knew both would find him soon enough if he did nothing, so he gave himself over to his class, and trusted in Avarron's bloody-minded wisdom. Hadn't steered him wrong so far. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Class Skill activated: Bloody Oath The world seemed to freeze in place. Nothing moved, but neither did Asgar. He tried to look around, to catalogue the battlefield and make some sort of tactical assessment, but he couldn't. His body wasn't his to control. His mind still worked, but it seemed slow, dragged in circular currents. What was he here for? Why was he…? Why was he here? Asgar hesitated. To save his friends, right? There was something coming, something happening. He wanted to… he needed to save his friends.

Who were they? Who did he need to save, and from what? It was all so distant in this frozen time. The world seemed so far away, and his memories strangely slow to surface. His friends, his companions. Strix and Tarkin, the sisters, Lord Finley—but no, that pompous fool could fuck himself. But the others were important. Strix was important. There was something else there beneath it all. Something huge and of great import, some burning need that pulsed for his attention, but it felt wrong to focus on now. Strix.

He wanted to save her. From what he didn't know, but the intent was enough. Focusing on that seemed to bring the world closer again. He fought through the haze, memory giving way to intent, intent crystallising into thought and then that thought suddenly, shockingly, giving way to action. The world resolved into focus once more, the violence and speed of it all terrifying. All at once, mud was spraying, his armour was shrieking as it was crushed by his enemies, and there was death all around him.

But to Asgar, his purpose was so suddenly, achingly clear. He had to save Strix. He could feel her, just as he'd felt the witch days ago; a throbbing awareness in his magikal senses. Not rife with corruption and aberration, but still important, still impossible to ignore. The creatures all around him only mattered in so far as they were in the way, and he turned to them. The sword in his right hand buried itself in the hellspawn currently worrying at his leg, and it crumpled with a tea-kettle hiss.

He barely felt the resistance. He pointed the claw in his left hand out straight in front, almost lazily, and one of the crab-like creatures scuttled right into it, face-first. Mandibles crunched and ichor sprayed, and then it fell away, many legs scrabbling at its own shell and curling up beneath itself as it died. While in the grip of the blood rage, everything felt so intense. He could barely think through the experiences, barely hold to a coherent goal in the face of overwhelming sensation.

This now was the opposite. His goal was so undeniably clear, the path before him shining and obvious. He barely felt anything. Here came a big brute of a demon, clacking fell claws as it charged, but to Asgar it was just a moving obstacle in the way of his goal. He stepped aside, easy as that, and then darted forward to skewer another through the chest, sword nipping between the plates of hardened carapace. So quick, so precise. Nothing graceful or courageous about it, just mechanical efficiency.

Asgar strode through the ranks of red demons that had surrounded him, running here, striking there, harrying and parrying and generally thinning their ranks. He stayed mostly out of danger, but sometimes he traded a minor injury for a kill, trusting in his armour to protect him. This was no longer a desperate last stand to slow an advancing enemy. Now, he simply moved through them towards his goal. She pulsed somewhere beyond the palisade, and he followed.

By the time he reached that barrier, the crimson tide had become a trickle. Less than a dozen of the creatures remained, twice that number having fallen to his weapons, perhaps a few to arrows. His soul was straining from repeated uses of Hallowed Strike and maintaining Avarron's armour, but the extra level he'd received helped. It didn't matter, really, but it had helped him towards his goal, his bloody oath, and therefore it was worthy of consideration at least.

Class: Squire of Slaughter Level: 21 Alignment: Celestial Blessings: Stonehoof Class Skills: Blood Rage, Hallowed Strike, Armour of Avarron, Bloody Oath Swift as a spider, he scuttled up the palisade to stand atop it. A few of the men and women backed away, but most looked at him with something between awe and fear.

"Thank you, milord," babbled the apron-clad man he'd spoken to earlier.

"I sent a runner to Lord Hendry, so I expect reinforcements soon." Asgar wasn't so sure—his impression of the gold-cloak was not a positive one—but he knew nothing of strategy or the state of the wider battle. The Golden Lance was busy burning the rest of the horde beyond the palisade, flying to and fro in zig-zagging patterns to decimate the strand, and the crush up against the fort was beginning to ease.

He was about to leave, to chase down that pulsing glow in his senses, when he saw one of the crimson crabs burying itself in the mud and corpses, its great front claw affixed to the log in front of it. Then it began to saw. His goal was not just to find Strix, but to save her. Wouldn't work if the palisade fell, so without a second's hesitation, he dropped back over the wall to land on the creature's back. Despite his weight and the height of his fall, his sword skittered off its back.

He dropped to the muck, tried to stab under it, but there was nothing save thick, rounded carapace visible above the ground. He growled, tossed the weapon aside, and gripped the edge of the creature closest to him. With a groan of effort that emerged from his helmet as just a breathy hiss, he squatted down, pulled the creature half-out of the sucking bog that the battlefield had become, then reversed his grip to push upwards above his head.

Legs wriggled against his armour, clawed tips leaving scratches trailing over the battered metal while inch by inch he lifted it higher. The claw still clutched the palisade, so he was lifting not just the bulk of the massive creature, but also the strength of its claw-joint. Hellborn it might have been, claw the size of a wheelbarrow attached to a body larger than a horse it might have had, but to bet its strength against Asgar's was foolish. He was almost a Knight, and he had a goal.

He flipped the creature, its arm crunching as it rolled, and while the brutal claw kept its sawing motion, there was no longer any strength to help it bite given that the arm was now pulled entirely from the socket. Asgar panted. The job was done though, the wall safe. Then he looked to either side and saw three more of the creatures wriggling their way into the muck, and sighed. He didn't have time for this. How was he to repeat this for the whole dozen?

Perhaps the better move was to let these three continue while he killed the others, then come back to them. Bloody oath brought with it a clarity of purpose that made the decision easy. Two heartbeats was all it took, but just as he was striding to a nearby corpse and pulling a spiked maul from dead fingers, a wave of force bloomed high into the sky. He had a bare second to recognise it as whatever power the mages had been summoning.

He'd seen it on the approach with the Lance; a wave that surged high, then fell over the palisade, crushing and throwing everything from its path as it surged forth. Asgar dove to the ground, wriggled into the side of the largest corpse-mound within reach, and scrunched himself into a ball. The wave of force hit. The wall-breakers were plucked from the ground and thrown back dozens of yards, like crabs being picked apart by seagulls.

Bodies and corpses, dead and alive alike were sent flying, and Asgar was no different. A deluge of metal and flesh and carapace tumbled around with him at its centre—the weirdest whirlwind you'd ever see—and then he was shoving aside bodies and pulling himself to his feet. He'd lost his bearing entirely, but thanks to Bloody Oath, he never lost his target. Somehow he'd kept his grip on the maul, and he swung it at anything in his way as he ran. Three more kills, Avarron no doubt approving.

Then he hit the palisade, though his strength was retreating now. The insistent pull from Bloody Oath was becoming distant, his assurance of Strix's position retreating second by second. He heaved himself up, knowing she was close. On the other side of the wall, he thought. He climbed with all of his strength, but the armour soon dissolved into nothing but ash on the wind. It was difficult to grip without the hard-edged metal to dig into the soft wood, but he wormed his fingers into cracks and heaved anyway.

God, he was tired. Each pull was harder, his body no longer ponderous and powerful, but just fucking heavy. Like a sack of turnips in the afternoon. Fuck, he wanted to put it down. One more heave. His hand slapped atop the palisade, but his strength was exhausted. He couldn't pull, could barely hold, and so he just hung there forlornly.

"Up you come, soldier." Strong hands grasped him, accompanied by a strong voice.

"No time to be sleeping on duty, aye?" The note of humour in it made him smile faintly, something familiar about it, and then; "Asgar!? The fuck are you doin' here?" He blinked tired eyes open, and came face to face with a surprised blacksmith.