Chapter 23
Could there be a sweeter confirmation that choosing violence was the correct path? That refusing to succumb to mortal weakness, to allow fear and fatigue to win, was the quickest way to failure, ignominy, and defeat?
Harald felt the Fallen Angel pour her blessings into him, Dark Vigor surged within his frame like never before, and some measure of his old familiarity with power and speed and depth of reserves returned to him.
His muscles filled out over his frame, swelling over his shoulders and chest, thickening his thighs and cording his calves.
His waist grew trim once more, and the world no longer felt so slapdash and overwhelming, his sight and reflexes able to parse and process the actions that were taking place all around him.
But best yet.
The deep burn, the stitch in his side, the fatigue, the rasp in his throat, the thick spit that threatened to choke him, the profuse sweating—it all eased back, leaving him, if not hale and refreshed, than ready for the second round.
The scratches and scrapes he’d received from the Crypt Keepers, few as they were, faded away as well.
Dark Fortitude. Not that he’d been hurt much at all—between his aura and his abyssal blade, he’d devastated his foes without being touched more than three or four times in return—but the ambient gloom fed his spirit, awoke the abyss’ tenacious endurance within him, and overlaid his increased stamina with renewed resolve.
Harald laughed.
Even as the corpses before him reached waist height, even as more Crypt Keepers swarmed like ants over the berms of the dead that surrounded him on all sides, he laughed. Took a moment to simply rest his black blade on one shoulder, his other hand on his hip, and threw back his head.
Here, now, he felt alive.
This was what he was born to do.
There was no end to the tide. As far as he could see, they rippled and surged closer, those outside his aura furious, intent, those who stumbled into it losing all momentum, focus, and ferocity.
Harald flourished the Dawnblade. It left a black smear in the air, as if the abyss bled behind it, and with a courteous nod to his foes, he got back to work.
Now he approached the butchery methodically. Moved his way around the well as best he could, dispatching foes, shoving the piles of corpses back outward, or leaping up onto the well itself so he could fight the western flank where bodies had toppled all the way across the dais.
Each blow he delivered sent a pulse of stolen vitality his way. Each pulse pushed back the exhaustion a little more.
Copper Crescents glittered and floated in the air around him. He purposefully absorbed them as he walked through, though his lack of injuries made doing so largely unnecessary. The vast bulk of the scales, however, hovered high overhead, atop the ridges of the dead.
Ah, to have his strength, speed, and endurance back!
The Dawnblade cut through anything and everything that came close as if it were mist, and the aura was indefatigable, endless, the abyss made manifest, turning the air into a limpid dullness like the bottom of an abbey pond, the air thick and cold and jellied.
Harald’s world narrowed. All thoughts left him. Fears. Doubts. He simply worked. Like a lumberjack intent on meeting his quota by lunchtime, he hewed and hewed and hewed.
It wasn’t a battle. The Keepers couldn’t react quickly enough to his swings, their reflexes and speed dulled by the Aching Depths. A few times Harald considered dropping the aura to level the playing field, but that was true madness.
The bodies mounted.
Time passed.
It reached the point where he could no longer shove the corpses away, tumble them back down the slope and level the peak of the berms. There were just too many Crypt Keepers piled up beyond.
Shoving with all his strength, kicking from the hip, only caused the closest bodies to give, and when he ceased, to return to their positions.
The north collapsed inward, meeting at the well like the west. To the south and east, the mounds of the dead were now taller than his head. He was sweeping legs out, cutting through shins and calves, chunks of Keepers falling around him.
Some fatigue was creeping in. His shoulders were burning again. Constitution 12 wasn’t inhuman by any means. Were it not for Shadow Fortitude, he’d have been depleted by now.
The sound of metallic stars ringing out against the void filled his mind.
The Demon Seed Has Stirred
Your Constitution has risen from 9 to 10
Harald grinned, the expression fiercely satisfied. That put him at an effective Constitution of 14.
But his situation was becoming untenable. Either he dropped into the well, or soon the walls of the dead would collapse on him and he’d literally be buried in desiccated flesh and thick, dusty robes.
Harald hopped back and up onto the well’s edge.
For a moment he considered dropping away—the entire dungeon awaited, but no—a fever-bright idea seized him, wicked and mad, and before his common sense could constrain him, Harald crouched and then hurled himself up and at the western berm, landing near the top, boots sinking amidst limbs and heads and spreads of cloak, to begin frantically climbing to the top.
Laughing, gasping, he waded up to the ridge and there set about him, Dawnblade gripped in both fists, swaying and reeling, hacking at the Keepers that came clambering up on all fours, their faces raised in pure unadulterated hatred, to meet their deaths.
The aura blessed the battlefield with its endless draining kiss, and around Harald forty or fifty Keepers slowed, skin growing ashen, pinprick-burning eyes dulling. They came from the other sides, too, now rushing around the well and climbing up the western mount, assailing him on all sides.
The footing was terrible. The bodies shifted under him.
His leg sank to the knee as it slid through a mess of arms and legs.
Harald laughed, cursed, tore himself out, then lost his balance altogether as the bodies shifted and he fell, toppling into a roll down the outside of the huge mound, Keepers slow to take advantage around him, banging through legs, knocking his foes away, to come up panting and sweep his sword around in a great cleaving arc, clearing the area around him.
He was at the bottom of the berm, some good fifteen yards from the well, which was now hidden beyond the abattoir of the dead.
“I’m here!” screamed Harald, and broke into a charge. “I’m here! What are you waiting for?!”
He backhanded the blade across a withered face, lopping off the upper half of the skull.
Plowed his shoulder into another, its claws scrabbling at his side.
Ducked under a slash, cut open a chest which instantly withered as the abyss bloomed in the dried flesh, then burst forward, blade before him, scattering foes.
Pommel to the twin nostril slits, collapsing the face, then a kick to sweep out a leg and a descending slash to ruin their day.
On he fought, never stopping, protected from instant death only by the Aching Depths, cutting and hewing through the forest of hissing, ghastly foes.
Lunge through the chest, turn and twist to rip the blade out and across three foes at once, then another scattering run, sword flashing out left and right in smears of darkness.
The sound of metallic stars ringing out against the void filled his mind.
The Demon Seed Has Stirred
Your Dexterity has risen from 9 to 10
What he wouldn’t have given for the Goldchops now!
The press was total now. A complete ring of closing Crypt Keepers on all sides, shoulder to shoulder, rank upon rank, eyes burning, claws reaching, countless heads and hoods receding in every direction.
Harald had become the fulcrum of a universe of monstrous foes, the hub to their endless existence, the sole island of space in a packed and infinite crowd.
Where was the—damn, how had he come to be so far from the well?
Heaving for breath, his lungs burning now despite his gifts, Harald wiped sweat from his brow, swinging the blade continuously around him, and focused on the well, visible only as a hill of corpses in the near distance.
Time to get back.
He’d gone too far.
Time to get out of here.
Harald lurched into the wall of Keepers, angling so that he absorbed Copper Crescents. Thank the abyss for his aura. Thank every demon bastard, angel blessing, thank the Fallen Angel and her hundred bleeding levels.
Only the Aching Depths gave him a remote chance.
Bodies collapsed before him as he smote a path through the packed foes. Monsters simply collapsed before Abyssal Attunement’s leaching death. Gasping, grunting, not even trying for finesse now, Harald tore his way back to the hill of the slain.
It was hard work. He had to earn every pace. Blows were starting to rain into him now, half-hearted, true, but the press was so tight he couldn’t get away from them fast enough.
No pain.
Just a growing sense of wrongness as gashes and cuts began to be slashed down his back and along his sides.
So close.
The well.
Right there.
Harald dropped to one knee, foot slipping on blood or ichor or something, and the Keepers swarmed over him.
For a second they were all around, cutting and gashing and biting. No light. Just shifting leathery skin, glaring eyes, their dusty aroma in his nose.
Harald roared and rose up, flinging them off him, spun in a mad circle, cutting down those closest. The hill was only some fifteen yards away.
How was he going to reach it? He’d gone too far.
There was nobody to call. No help. He was here, alone in the depths with who knew how many thousands of Crypt Keepers.
Wait.
He wasn’t alone.
Harald summoned Shadowpaw.
The giant hound had no room to manifest. He literally appeared in the air above the Keeper’s ranks, fell upon them with a surprised snarl, and began to tear and gnash and howl.
It was like dropping a rock onto a plane of grass.