To my left, my skeletons charged silently at the enemy right horn, led by Sarge with his golden greatsword. Immediately ahead of us, the left horn, commanded by their captain, surged forward. Their tower shields were locked together, with their longswords poking out over the top, forming an impenetrable wall of spiky steel.
I shifted into a combat stance. “Elyse, your rope trick. Go for their ankles and trip a few of them up so that we can break this formation. Rami—”
Rami, however, had already sprung into action. With a sai in each hand, she was bounding from pew to pew, building up speed with incredible agility, veering in a rapid arc toward the end of the enemy horn. I figured she was going to try to get behind them and attack from the rear, forcing them to break formation. How she was going to get over that wall of jagged steel, though, I had no idea.
As she reached top speed at the end of her arc, she launched into a triple somersault, flying high over the heads of the outermost Crusaders, who couldn’t reach her with their longsword lunges. After spinning in the air, she landed behind the outermost warrior and stabbed a sai through a tiny gap in his leg armor and skewered his knee. She backflipped away just as he responded with a lightning-fast backhanded slash that missed her by a hair’s breadth.
I had no time to keep watching Rami though, because the captain and his men were almost upon me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sarge dueling with a Crusader, and behind him, Fang had one of them in his jaws. The giant lizard bit down hard, and there was a sickening crunch as the man’s ribs all splintered at once. But even then, the Crusader continued to fight, trying to stab at Fang’s eyes. With a flick of his huge head, Fang tossed the dying warrior through a stained glass window, and it shattered in a shower of colored glass fragments.
To my left, Elyse whipped out one of her golden light ropes and wrapped it around a Crusader’s ankle. She yanked on it, ripping the man’s leg out from under him and slamming him to the ground.
“Show me what you’ve got, holy boy,” I snarled as the captain and another Crusader attacked me simultaneously.
“Judgment is nigh, unbeliever!”
The captain feinted with a stab of his longsword, but his actual attack came a half-second later, a sweeping slash of his razor-edged tower shield. The goal of this attack was to remove my head from my shoulders, and perhaps if the captain had been facing a lesser fighter, he would have achieved it. But I had picked up on the subtle cues and micro-movements.
Ducking under the slashing shield was hard enough, but another Crusader made it all the more difficult by aiming a slash at my legs. I jumped in the nick of time, narrowly avoiding becoming 10 inches shorter.
I wasted no time in counter-attacking. In mid-air, I drew a throwing star and hurled it at the captain, once again aiming for the eye slit of his great helm. This time, as fast as his reflexes were, there was no way he could avoid it. A split-second after the star left my hand, it was buried in his left eyeball. By the time my feet hit the ground, I already had another throwing star in my hand.
The captain staggered back, growling wordlessly as the necrotic magic started its destructive work on his ruined eyeball. He uttered a last scream as his soul entered my dagger before I focused all of my attention on the other Crusader.
He lifted his shield and lunged for me, and I stepped aside. As he withdrew his sword and raised his shield again, I detected a small gap in his armor between his gauntlets and the bottom of his wrist bracers.
I darted in low with an angled lunge of my dagger, aiming at getting around his shield and skewering his hand. He saw it coming and yanked his shield arm out of the way while springing back and aiming a downward slash of his longsword at my head. I dived to the side and avoided a cut that would have split me in two.
I turned the dive into a roll, blocking a vicious slash from the Crusader’s tower shield and used the momentum to spring to my feet. The shield’s bladed edge hovered a mere inch from my face, held at bay only by Grave Oath in my right hand. The Crusader and I held this position for a few moments, each pushing against the other with all our might.
I overcame him, shoved him back, and didn’t waste a single moment in pressing home my attack. As he stumbled back, I darted forward and feinted for a high stab at his eye slit over his shield. As he was raising his shield to counter-attack, I dropped rapidly down in mid-attack and slid under his shield. Before he could react, I hooked my ankles through his, and with a swift twist of my legs, I pulled him down. He hit the ground with a crash.
I had no time to pounce on him because the captain was already back in the fight. He was Fated, so my necrotic star had only slowed him down and done little more than blind him in one eye. We exchanged a flurry of blows, with him attacking both with his shield and his longsword, and me frantically parrying and counter-attacking with Grave Oath.
The second Crusader was getting back to his feet, and the captain’s shield was glowing subtly brighter, which meant that he was about
