Godsforsaken

The next morning I woke up to the scent of cinnamon and sweet plums. I almost thought the smell was coming from Yume but then I remembered that cuddling with her had happened in a dream and we still weren't allowed to show how close we were in the waking world. I felt amazingly well rested and reflected that snuggling up with Syr and my little fox was a great way to spend the night.

When I got out of our tent I saw where the smell was coming from as Alisha stirred a pot of oatmeal seasoned with cinnamon and in a separate pot she had some plums stewing for a topping. Just one more night and we'd reach the Dark Lord's castle, so she could afford to splurge a little on the meals.

“Good morning”, I said a moment before I hugged her from behind.

“Good morning”, she replied, then hugged my arms to her. “Go sit down, breakfast will be ready soon.”

I let go of her and caressed her cheek as I walked over to one of the big logs we'd built our camp around.

Yume was already sitting on a log, her tails wagging happily. There had been a certain tension in the way she'd held herself the last few days but after last night it was gone and she seemed relaxed.

She tried to give me a neutral nod as I approached but the love in her eyes was plainly visible. I pointedly sniffed the air and she blushed a little while pressing her thighs together.

“So”, I said, trying to make conversation without risking cluing the Chosen One in, in case he woke up and overheard us. “Seriously? Beans?”

**

Most of the day passed without incident. We were finally completely off the roads, the paths only beaten down by all the raiding parties the Dark Lord had sent over the last few weeks. We were attacked by a few boars along the way and something made me think they were running from something, possibly hunting parties sent by the Dark Lord. Him and his troops had to eat something and wild animals weren't just a convenient food source for adventurers, after all.

It was only when afternoon was about to become evening that things went bad.

I've said before that forests could feel either benign or malevolent and it was then that we walked across some invisible barrier and suddenly everyone in our party could feel that the woods were getting evil. We'd reached the Dark Lord's domain.

As they increased their army and conquered more lands their domain grew, increasing the area over which they could extend their powers. That was normal. The Dark Lord Selene had been sent to deal with had been so weak or so incompetent that his domain had barely left his castle and hadn't been able to exert any influence, but this one was different. It wasn't just spread out an entire day's travel from the castle, it also felt even more malevolent than any domain I'd ever felt. I was certain it had something to do with the Outsiders working for him. Or maybe I had it backwards and it was this vile domain that had attracted Outsiders in the first place. Either way, even those in our party without the Sense Evil skill could feel how nasty it was. Alisha and Selene, though? They started retching the moment we hit the transition and it took them half a mile's walk to finally get used to it.

To be honest, Selene's reaction actually excited me a little. I didn't like seeing her uncomfortable but she should have lost her Sense Evil skill the moment she stopped being a Chosen One. In fact, I was pretty sure she had lost it at some point, but it was clearly back. I wondered whether her using the miracles Freya had given her had triggered a class change that turned Selene into a true paladin. Honestly that was the only way I could explain her losing and then regaining the Sense Evil skill. Once this quest was over I'd have to test out how many other paladin abilities she'd unlocked. Blessings were easy enough to test out, but I feared it might be tough to convince her to test out whether she could use Intercession, the ability that let paladins pray to their deity for healing and protection.

Anyway, the further we walked the worse the woods became. It started out with just a vague feeling of discomfort but a couple miles later we saw the first truly disconcerting thing: A decapitated deer's head, the flesh half rotted off, speaking prophecies to a circle of small woodland critters sitting around it with rapt attention. When the head began promising them 'empty night', Yume scorched the entire display.

Then as we kept walking the trees themselves began changing until they looked wet and sticky. I kept wondering why that looked so familiar until I realized they looked as if they were just one more injection of vileness away from turning into Dark Young. Their branches seemed to shift subtly when nobody was watching them and when I suggested we find a clearing to set up camp as far away from the treeline as it was possible to get nobody objected.

We ended up setting the watch shifts in such a way that the shifts overlapped, just to make sure nobody went missing between shifts, and we built a campfire much larger than normal. Procuring the necessary firewood was a pain in the ass since we couldn't just chop down one of those trees. They bled like crazy.

I had to admit the creepy forest was almost as good a defense as the walls around the Dark Lord's castle were going to be. If nobody wanted to venture close enough they wouldn't be able to attack, but we were too determined for that to work.

In the morning Alisha made the most fragrant porridge I'd ever seen her make and it was clear she was trying to overpower the rotting meat smell that had started wafting in from the forest in the middle of the night.

By noon we finally reached the... um... walls. They weren't walls. I mean sure, they were the outer defenses of the Dark Lord's castle, but calling them walls would be inaccurate. Walls weren't made of rotting flesh. Walls didn't have eyes staring out of them. Walls didn't have grasping emaciated arms. The portcullis was even worse, looking like the maw of some giant beast, and none of us felt like traveling through what amounted to a mouth. Sure it led into a courtyard and not into a stomach but nobody felt like letting a portcullis-sized maw chomp down on them.

In all fairness, this wasn't the most bizarre Dark Lord's castle I'd ever seen. They weren't all dark stone like the one of Selene's Dark Lord had been and they could get pretty crazy, from black glass to solid smoke to never-melting ice. No, this wasn't particularly unusual as these castles went, but it was definitely the most disgusting I'd ever seen.

The Chosen One suggested using his battering ram miracle on a particularly rotten section of 'wall', but I told him to wait and asked Yume to burn us a way through instead.

She summoned a fire snake filled with Qi and let it slam against the wall, right into a large eye that had been staring at us. The effect was both better and worse than I expected. Better because it didn't just burn a hole large enough for us to step through, the fire also spread over much of the defenses, including to that giant maw. Worse because apparently the stuff didn't just look like rotting flesh, it actually was rotting flesh and setting it on fire produced an absolutely appalling smell.

None of the Dark Lord's troops dared to approach us through the fire and so we were able to attack them at range, at least for a little while. Ever since she'd learned that I'd won Yume over Alisha had started tinkering with spells that would synergize with what the little fox could use and this was the first time she had occasion to try them. She sent a barrage of air projectiles at the forces gathered in the courtyard, but they weren't her usual air lances. Instead each of the projectiles flew through the wall of fire, scooped up a portion of the flames and then carried them further towards the creatures that had thought they'd be safe from the flames. I doubted that trick would have worked under normal circumstances but the flames were amplified by Yume's Qi and were almost alive and therefore seemed to respond to intent, which made it work.

When the fire died down we got our first good look at what we were fighting.

There was the usual horde of orcs and goblins, but there was something off about the orcs and it took me a while to realize what it was. Aside from the boar heads orcs looked mostly human under normal circumstances, except for the thick coarse bristles they had instead of body hair. But these orcs had backwards bent legs that ended in cloven hooves. There was also something off about the goblins as well but aside from their skin being slightly too pale I just couldn't put my finger on what it was.

Off to the side of the courtyard was a stable and whatever was inside it slammed itself against the door again and again, making it rattle. An orc chieftain gestured for a couple goblins to open the stable door and apparently the goblins were arguing on who was going to draw the short straw until the chieftain threw them a murderous glance and the goblins decided they'd rather deal with whatever was behind that door.

The moment they removed the bolt the stable doors slammed open, tossing the two closest goblins through the air like rag dolls and one of them landed broken at our feet and I finally realized why they looked off to me. Real goblins were snot green and had the big round yellow eyes of a frog. These goblins looked deathly pale, the green faded to an almost off-white and their eyes were orange with rectangular pupils like those of a goat.

But I had barely any time to look at the goblin because out of the stables... things... emerged.

At first glance they looked like horses, but then some odd details started popping up. They had patches of missing flesh and from the steam coming off them their flesh was rotting. Calling them zombie horses was tempting but would have been inaccurate given the pulsing cankers on their chests that clearly kept them alive even as their flesh sloughed off. The setup reminded me of the wendigo, except wendigo looked to be the picture of health by comparison. Maybe there was something about a mortal intellect that kept these growths from killing their hosts? Anyway, the other odd detail was that these horses had maws full of pointed fangs and most of the goblins that had opened the stable doors were torn apart and eaten by these horses before we caught their attention.

“Alisha”, I called and instead of replying she began her incantation.

I'd asked her why she hadn't used the Cleanse miracle on the Jabberwock and she'd explained to me that the lengthy incantation had made it impossible. Any time she'd started chanting for it something else had happened that had forced her to divert her attention away from finishing the miracle. But now we were in the perfect position and the horse things were still too busy devouring the goblins to charge us yet.

When the horse things... I couldn't just keep calling them horse things, could I? Nameless monsters were much scarier than monsters with proper names. Rotting canker horses? No, too on the nose. Hmm. They were horse-like but whatever transformation had been forced on them had made them something else, something that only resembled horses. Equoids? Yeah, Equoids. That sounded nicely alien.

Anyway, when the Equoids had finally finished chowing down on the goblins they looked slightly less rotten as if the fresh meat fixed some of the degenerative effects of the pulsing cankers grafted onto them and with their meal finished they set their sights on the next edible thing in their path: Us. It suddenly became clear why the goblins had been so reluctant to open the stable doors and why all the other orcs and goblins had made sure not to stand between the Equoids and us.

The herd of Equoids bared their pointy teeth at us and charged but before they could reach us Alisha finished her incantation:

“Cleanse!”

Clearly Brigid knew exactly where we were and what we were doing because the miracle hit with an intensity that dwarfed the previous casting. The sphere expanded faster and over a wider area, blazing through the entire courtyard. The 'walls' were burned down so badly that not even ash was left. The wet glistening film burned off the trees behind us, leaving them looking healthy and whole again. The earth regained its normal coloration and the gloom that had hung over the area was dispersed and revealed a sunny, cloudless sky. The orcs and goblins writhed on the ground in pain but did not go up in flames, which considering their clear and evident corruption was a little concerning and the Equoids were hit as if by an S-Tier Anti-Army offensive spell, the kind that destroys all and then salts the earth for good measure. All traces of corruption were burned out of the Equoids and as the corruption had been all that had been keeping them upright and breathing they collapsed into piles of charred rotting flesh, maybe a tenth of their previous mass.

“Hold out your weapons”, Alisha said once the miracle had run its course and Selene and I dutifully held our swords out.

I'd gone for the greatsword because I just felt better wielding a sword than any other type of weapon even if it was too large for my taste.

First Alisha blessed the weapons with a muttered prayer and then she splashed holy water over them. When the Chosen One saw what she was doing he held out his own weapon as well. He was an ass but he wasn't too arrogant to refuse a useful buff. When Alisha was done with the weapons she turned to Yume and said:

“Hands.”

“Huh?”, the fox girl asked.

“Hold out your hands”, Alisha explained. “Worst case you'll be able to punch them to death.”

Yume shrugged and held out her hands before Alisha splashed them with holy water. Honestly, between the holy water and some of the Qi techniques Yume had shown me I was pretty sure she'd be able to punch even a Jabberwock to death if she could reach it.

By the time Alisha finished blessing us the orcs and goblins had righted themselves and at this point Yume knew our game plan well enough to cast a large Stupor effect focused on the goblins. Given her track record with creatures of the Black Goat I knew I could only count on it to hold for a moment and so I made that moment count.

I forced Qi into the greatsword and swung in a wide horizontal arc, projecting the slash forward to cut through half a dozen goblins in a single move, then pulled out my crossbow and fired a bolt at another goblin, killing that little shit as well. Seven down, lots to go.

To my relief the goblins didn't recover from the Stupor instantly but I didn't count on it to last much longer.

“What the fuck was that?”, the Chosen One demanded as he charged forward and unleashed a lance of flame that caught another three dazed goblins.

It was only then that I realized that this was the first time I'd used a really flashy Qi technique where he could see. I replied as I charged in:

“Special technique I learned from a traveling master a while ago. You pick up quite a lot working as a mercenary.” Technically none of that had been a lie, I just hadn't mentioned the fact that the traveling master was the cute fox girl in our midst.

“Looks convenient”, he said as he burned his way through some more goblins. “I'll have to go searching for a technique like that when we're done here.”

“You do that”, I said and pointed my sword at one of the goblins in front of us.

Instead of attacking the ones in front I first turned around to deal with the inevitable backstabbing little shit. Sure enough, there was one preparing to stab me with what looked to be a kitchen knife, except I was too late to deal with him because while I was still turning around a hammer blow of air from Alisha took the goblin in the back and tossed him through the air, where he fell stomach first onto a spike mounted to the keep roof. The little shit's keening wails were music to my fucking ears.

Selene hadn't been idle during all that and had already waded into the fray, swinging her big sword through dazed goblins with smooth efficiency. But sure enough, after only six seconds the Stupor ended and the goblins shook themselves out of it. I had gotten a pretty good estimate of Yume's abilities during our travels and that spell should have lasted ten seconds. So, they were only slightly resistant to illusions but also only slightly weak to cleansing abilities. Interesting. I really hoped this Dark Lord was the only one creating experimental hybrids like these and we'd destroy the research along with him.

Either way, Yume had planned for when the Stupor wore off. As we were busy plowing our way through the goblins the orcs had begun approaching us and so when the Stupor on the goblins dissipated Yume simply cast another one, this time on the orcs.

“What the fuck are you doing?!”, the orc chieftain bellowed as his kin started staring vacantly into space.

Apparently he was significantly more resistant than his grunts. I decided to deal with him first thing, trusting the rest of my party to take care of the grunts.

I stepped up and pointed my sword at him, then said: “Come on. Your troops seem a little distracted so we might as well dance.”

He snorted and pulled out a machete quite similar to the one the last chieftain had wielded but thankfully without one of those giant spiky tower shields. “Sure”, he said. “Letting them handle everything gets boring.”

We began circling each other and I knew that this guy was an experienced duelist. Maybe that's how he'd become a chieftain or maybe that was how he managed to hold his title. Either way, it gave me time to get a good look at him and, sure enough, the signs of corruption on him were much stronger than on the others, to the point where he seemed a little singed by the miracle Alisha had cast. Like the other corrupted orcs he had the backwards-bent legs and cloven hooves but on top of that he had goat eyes. But the most distinctive feature were his bristles. Or rather, what should have been bristles. Orc chieftains had bony spines on their backs that were only barely hidden by their bristles but this guy had neither bristles nor spines. Instead he had a mass of undulating black tentacles on his back and trailing along his arms, looking a little like a cloak of black feathers if you looked at him from really far away.

“What the fuck did that Dark Lord do to you?”, I asked and he apparently thought I was distracted because he went on the offensive. He came charging at me with an overhead slam from his machete and I blocked it by holding the sword above my head. The blow made my knees buckle but I was able to hold him back.

“He offered us a path to power”, the chieftain explained, bearing down on me. “Those of us who didn't take it were the first ones to be sent to war.”

“Your goblins didn't seem all that much stronger”, I remarked.

We'd circled around so much that I had a good look at the rest of the battle and the goblins were pretty much all dead already.

“No force in this world can make goblins formidable”, the chieftain scoffed.

He was still bearing down on me with the weapon and I kicked out at his chest and then disengaged when he was off balance.

“Yeah, that's fair”, I said. “So, who was the other chieftain? Your rival? Your friend?”

He shrugged. “He was competition. I guess you killed him for me?”

“Yeah”, I said. “He was formidable, put up as much of a fight as his whole army put together.”

He smiled around his gleaming tusks. “Then killing you will bring me much glory”, he said and came for me again.

This time he tried for a series of diagonal slashes that were insanely hard to evade, but after the fourth I found my window and stabbed forward, catching him in the bicep.

“Felix, look out!”, I heard Alisha yell out and instinctively threw myself out of the way as another orc charged at me, trying to run me through with a spear.

To my surprise the orc chieftain reached out and caught the orc by the throat.

“How dare you?!”, he bellowed at the underling. “Interrupting my duel?” Then he slammed the orc to the ground by his throat and, as the orc lay there dazed, brought his machete down, decapitating the intruder. I let him finish his business and then let him stand up. If he was going to be honorable about this, so would I.

He locked eyes with me but when he spoke up it was clear he was addressing his troops: “Anyone else who interferes suffers the same fate!”

Then he came at me again, this time dragging the machete behind him as he tried for a brutal two-handed uppercut that would either cleave me in two or send me flying, which would end up being just as lethal. I only barely managed to roll out of the way and around him. As I came out of the roll I threw a slash at his unprotected back. I managed to cut off a few of those disgusting tentacles but my blade didn't penetrate much further and a couple of the tentacles wrapped around my sword and held it firmly in place. That same training about keeping hold of your weapon at the wrong time came to mind and I backed off just in time to avoid a horizontal spin.

The thing about duels is that they're exhausting. Just a few moves can leave you breathing like a bellows and it was clearly taking its toll on us. I was a good fighter but so was he. The difference was that with this brutal weapon of his all he needed to end me was one good hit while my attacks either barely made him flinch or just didn't have any noticeable effect. What I needed was a way to change the rules of engagement. I needed a way to deal the same catastrophic damage to him that he could deal to me. Of course, I had just such a way. I hadn't wanted to exhaust myself this early in the attack on the castle but it wouldn't matter how much power I saved up if I died here, so I decided to stop holding back. And to use something new I'd been tinkering with.

Right after avoiding the horizontal spin I unleashed a Qi Burst to dash towards the chieftain, grabbed the sword, and with the momentum behind me I managed to yank it away from the tentacles. Then I built up a Qi Projection for a thrust and, while that one was still charging, pushed more Qi into a Qi Burst.

As the chieftain was still off balance from both the spin and me pulling the sword off his back I had all the time in the world to line up a mighty two-handed thrust with the greatsword and when it hit, it did so with the force enhanced by the Qi Burst and the area of effect magnified by the Qi Projection, boring a hole three times as thick as the sword itself into his back, taking out far more of his innards than was healthy.

“Sorry”, I told him as he twitched. “I couldn't afford to hold back.”

But then I noticed something odd. The chieftain wasn't dropping. Instead he pulled out a vial with a red liquid and downed it before I could stop him and his flesh bubbled up, closing around the wound, trapping the sword once again.

“Neither can I”, he said and turned around to face me.

He didn't exactly look healthy but he was still standing when he should have been dead. I couldn't afford to let this drag on much longer so I jumped back, pulled out the machete I'd looted from his rival, dashed forward with a Qi Burst and took his head off. Then, before something else weird could happen, I pulled out a dagger and stabbed his heart. Only then did he collapse.

With that I turned around and realized that my party members had managed to kill all the orcs and goblins while I was fighting their leader.

“That was amazing”, Alisha told me and Selene nodded. Yume was standing behind the Chosen One, pretending to be meek but really she'd just positioned herself there so that she could smile at me approvingly.

I was about to turn towards the keep when I heard Syr's voice in my head.

Felix, there's something you should know, she said.

What is it?, I asked.

I recognize the vial that orc used, she said. She sounded shaken.

Where from?, I asked.

Remember when I told you about the red breast milk my body produces?, she asked. That was some of it.