Chapter 15
The battlefield was alive.
Sam’s Starfire Bastion bathed them all in celestial energy, even as her Beacon of Hope lifted their spirits and Guardian’s Mantle lessened the demonic influence being hurled at them.
Where Sam’s powers were protective, Nessa’s were seamlessly aggressive. Harald felt her Will of the Blade subtly guiding him, helping him find the optimum position to receive the charge even as her Harmonic Resonance inspired him and sharpened his senses.
But it was his Abyssal Imperium and Well of Starless Dominion that were changing the very nature of the battlefield.
With each passing moment, the rate of demonic vitality flooding into him was increasing.
As more slashes and wounds were opened up in their foes, more demonic essence flooded into him, which empowered his Imperium further, so that more motes clouded the air, which only served to cut the demons further.
The Handmaidens sported numerous cuts across their faces, hands, and where the motes had seared through their leather and scored their metal armor. The larger the wound, the greater the drain, and Harald felt the rate of empowerment rising ever more quickly.
If they could just hold.
If they could just last long enough, he’d crush them through Imperium and the Well alone.
But time was what they didn’t have.
The demons charged. Whips flailing, blades drawn back, mouths opened in harrowing screams, they fell upon the trio.
Disoriented by each of Harald’s pulses, weakened by the Bastion, enervated by the Imperium, and cowed by Harald’s Crown of the Abyssal Tyrant, still they came, their prowess blunted but not stopped.
Nessa hurled the Compressed World, and the ball of bronze unfurled right in the path of the main body of attackers to warp space and cause the very ground to curve up, the air to distort, light the sheer.
Goldchops flew forth, three of them, the sight of his old faithful hatchets filling Harald with something akin to nostalgic cheer.
The demons surged around the Compressed World, though one or two floundered as they were trapped into its depths, only to run right into a coruscating beam of white power that flooded forth from Sam’s extended palm.
A great corridor of holy energy flooded forward in a direct line, causing the demons to wilt back in sudden disarray.
“Charge!” cried Nessa, blade flashing as she led the way.
Pulled by her powers, Harald didn’t hesitate. He flung himself ahead of her, painfully aware of how delicate she was in the face of Level 10 demons, and entered the fray.
Oh, exultation. Oh, dark lordly might.
A fresh pulse radiated out from him, and this one caused all the demons—all of them—to momentarily falter.
Well was empowering the darkbeat pulse at a categorically new level.
Harald laughed as more and more demonic essence flooded into him and hewed off an arm. Ducked a slash, spun, and cut the tip of the Scourge through half a demon’s ankle, causing chunks of black rock to scatter out of the wound onto the grass.
The sound of metallic stars ringing out against the void filled his mind.
The Demon Seed Has Stirred
Your Dexterity has risen from 21 to 22
Hooks swarmed him, but his shadow-flesh resisted.
Sam cried out in pain. Wheeling about, he saw a demon had stabbed her clear through the shoulder.
“Shadowpaw!” He could sense the mastiff bounding around the outskirt of the combat, and the hound responded by surging forward, faster than Harald could cross the distance, and leaping up on the demon, who turned at the last to tear her blade free and stab it into the hound’s gut even as she went down.
Another pulse, and the whole battlefield constricted and expanded as the demons again staggered.
Lancing wrongness in his back. Harald swung about, but the demon ducked under his blade—and straight into his rising knee.
Her nose crunched, and as she reeled up, he headbutted her right in the ruined mash of her face, doubling the damage, only to bring the Scourge all the way around and slam it into her side, cleaving straight through near to the spine.
Nessa faltered, blade lowering as one of the demons finished hissing something at her.
Harald summoned the new Shadow Handmaiden from his Cosmos as he focused his authority upon the Bladeweaver. “Nessa, fight it off!”
The Crown caught her up in its fell authority, and her eyes widened just as the demon came in to stab her. She parried, deflected, gave ground, then surged forward to drive the demon back.
The battlefield flared white, a blinding cataclysm of light that caused the demons to snarl and flinch—Sam’s Celestial Flare.
But the Level 2 Active barely registered against such potent foes.
Another Handmaiden slid in behind Sam, but Harald focused Imperium so that she was enveloped in swirling blades.
No time to watch. He parried, backed away, swayed aside, parried again, then took a blow square on the shoulder.
Thank the angels for Constitution 39. The edge thunked against him instead of whisper-parting flesh into a red mouth. Harald slammed the pommel of the Scourge into the demon’s face just as a black blade emerged from her chest.
The Shadow Handmaiden grinned at him from over her sister’s shoulder.
Harald didn’t hesitate. A cross-cut, and the Handmaiden’s head went flying.
A second later, she appeared on the battlefield as a second Shadow Handmaiden.
Both being fed by the ravenous, all-devouring Well in his chest.
“Now!” cried Nessa. “Trust me!”
An instinct, an outside will, reached for Harald.
Sought to swing him up into a greater cadence, a coordinated pattern of perfect lethality.
Harald felt Nessa behind the power, a vastly more potent version of Will of the Blade—but just as he and the Handmaidens began to swirl to the side, moving to flank a trio of Handmaidens that were pressing Sam, the guiding will, that sense of impossible knowledge and tactical mastery, faded and broke.
“Damn it!” cried Nessa.
The vision that had been unfurling in Harald’s mind fell apart, and the battlefield returned to its incoherent chaos.
Sam was stumbling back, one arm hanging by her side, desperately parrying an attack.
The demon was playing with her.
Fury seized Harald. He lunged, only to cry out in frustration as a whip coiled around his neck. He spun about, Scourge rising to slash the whip in twain, when a second Handmaiden stepped in and stabbed her blade down into his chest.
Elixethera.
She pressed in close, black lips parted in a wild, diabolical grin, each tooth outlined in black blood, eyes burning bright, and wrenched the blade aside, carving open a channel half a foot wide in his chest.
His blood spurted forth in a great dull red spray that was shot through with streaks of black.
“And so it ends,” snarled Elixethera, curling one hand behind her head. “As it was destined to do.”
Golden light washed over Harald, radiating out from the Solace of Aurelum, and the demon’s wound healed over.
Every cut, every scrape, the deep wrenching wrongness in his spine—all healed over in an instant, and even as Elixethera’s sword was shoved out of his chest by the golden light, he headbutted her face with all his strength, slamming his brow down on the bridge of her nose.
She reeled back, shocked, and he kicked her foot out from under her—but she pirouetted, parried his follow-up slash, rocked back as he punched her clear in the face, fist sailing over the edge of the Scourge, and as she screamed in rage, hand rising to the ruined architecture of her skull, Harald drank deep from the Well, invested himself in all the demonic energy it had to spare, and thrust the Scourge straight into her chest in turn.
Metal screeched, distorted, fragmented before the blade’s dimension- cutting abilities, and the sword plunged in deep.
“No.” Harald grunted and lifted her clear off the ground. Elixethera gasped and scrabbled at the green stone sword, but gravity pulled her down, inch by black-bloody inch, toward him. “I’m not done yet by a long mile.”
Her entire body was mineralizing, crystalizing. And with a cry, he swept the sword to the side, the blade parting her flesh from within, and she fell to the ground, black blood bubbling to her lips, lavender eyes wide and staring.
The sound of metallic stars ringing out against the void filled his mind.
The Demon Seed Has Stirred
Your Strength has risen from 21 to 22
Harald felt a flare of brutal satisfaction, then waited for the precise moment and snatched her soul.
A second later Elixethera appeared by his side, all in shadow, huge horns glistening, blade propped over one shoulder.
“Your order, Master?” she purred.
“Kill your sisters.”
Elixethera laughed, the sound hollow. “With pleasure!”
Nessa was fighting over Sam, who’d collapsed to the ground. Shadowpaw had been defeated and banished, and he’d lost one of his three Shadow Handmaidens.
Six foes left. Two Shadow Handmaidens pressing their flank, Harald in the center, and Nessa barely keeping her assailants at bay.
Damn, but Nessa could fight. Even wounded and out-leveled, she was peerless, dancing and dodging, deflecting and parrying, as if she knew each blow was coming a beat before it was swung, completely unlike anything Harald could imagine.
Time to end this.
Another pulse surged forth from his core, and this time the six remaining demons tottered, falling back. Black essence flowed from them into Harald, and the Well was roaring, consuming, a vortex of unstoppable avarice.
One of the Handmaidens sank to her knee. She was fighting to regain her breath. Essence flooded out of her faster than she could replenish.
That’s when Harald realized. The Well had just tipped past their rate to sustain combat.
The battlefield was his.
His to command. His to control.
And the Handmaidens were his to consume.