The soldiers kicked and gasped, dropping their weapons and trying to grab the skeleton’s fingers, but their faces quickly turned purple as their tongues bulged grotesquely from their mouths.
A big, drooling soldier stumbled at me, swiping his battle ax at my head. I ducked and spun so that my back was turned to him and caught his arm in the crook of my left elbow. I grabbed his belt with my right hand and twisted my hips to throw him over my shoulder, and as I slammed his body into the ground, I tossed Grave Oath into the air, jumped up, caught it again, and brought it whistling down, driving the blade into his chest as I landed on my hands and knees. He screamed and convulsed as the cruel steel sucked his soul out of his body and crumpled him into a dry husk.
As I backflipped into a standing position again, preparing to take on the next soldier, I saw the second skeleton grab one of the smaller men, picking him up as if he were nothing but a sack of potatoes. It raised him high above its head and hurled him at the huge cleaver blade that was hanging from the ceiling from a previously triggered trap. The flying soldier’s scream was cut abruptly short as the blade split his body in half at the waist.
These skeletons were pretty damn handy to have by your side in a fight. I was starting to like these new powers.
As two more soldiers were staggering over, I sidestepped the first one’s saber lunge, slammed my dagger into his stomach, then used the embedded weapon as support to send a double-legged kick flying into the second, who stumbled right into the arms of a waiting skeleton. The dead fighter grabbed the soldier’s head and gave it a sharp, vicious twist. As the first soldier’s soul was being sucked into my blade, the second man’s neck snapped with a sickening crack, and his body slumped to the ground, limp as a dead fish.
The tables had turned. The remaining six soldiers now faced me and my two skeletons, the raw fear in their bleary eyes unconcealed. One of them, foaming at the mouth and swaying from side to side from the debilitating effects of the poison, threw his blade down on the ground and raised his shaking hands above his head.
“Mercy, Soultaker,” he said. “Please, don’t use that… dagger on me.”
“The women and children you assholes slaughtered in the village a few hours from here begged for mercy too, didn’t they?” I said. “But their pleas fell on deaf ears, didn’t they? No, not just deaf ears—ugly, stupid, stinking ears. I’ve met goats with more brain than you scum have combined, and more compassionate vipers lurking under moonlit rocks. But justice, my friends, finds a way. Remember that as my blade takes your soul; justice is finding a way.”
Again, I felt Isu’s unseen presence, like the echo of a whisper, and the strange energy crackled in my fingertips. Yet again the words of an arcane language passed through my lips, and I didn’t know the sounds I was whispering, but I knew what they meant: “Attack, kill, tear them to pieces.”
The skeletons charged at the remaining soldiers with their bony fingers outstretched, and the fight entered its final stage. This time, there would be no pause, no reprieve, no more talking. A darkness gripped my soul and drove me on with merciless determination. I flung Grave Oath at the scumbag who had dared to beg for mercy. It whizzed through the air, spinning in deadly circles until it embedded itself in the bastard’s throat.
As he staggered back, clutching futilely at the blade, I sprinted forward, leapt, and ran up his falling body, using him as living ramp. I plucked the blade from his throat and in one go, launched myself off his chest, vaulting over the heads of the other soldiers and somersaulting through the air.
Having landed behind them, I slashed the blade across a jugular vein of the closest one. Just as his startled companion tried to turn around and defend himself, I gripped his wrist, breaking it with a savage twist. When he dropped his longsword with a yelp, I finally drove Grave Oath in an uppercut-style stab up through his jaw and into his brain. There, it sucked the soul out of him, his body withering into that of an old man before he even hit the ground.
I looked around and found that the skeletons had taken care of the rest. The fight was over.
I surveyed the scene while I caught my breath. The skeletons stood to either side of me, still as statues, waiting for me to give them another command. Corpses littered the floor. Their blood was gathering in pools that glinted in the red light from the burning torches.
As I stood there, I began to sense Isu’s presence again. The pools of blood on the dusty floor started to run toward the center of the room, as if pulled by gravity into some invisible drain. There was no drain or crack in the floor, though.
But when enough blood had gathered there, I realized what was happening. It rose up and slowly took on the form of a woman, a naked woman with long, shapely legs, flared hips curving smoothly into a narrow waist and a silky belly. Her big round tits sat gloriously atop their hourglass pedestal, gleaming a dark, slick crimson in the dancing light of the burning torches.
Finally, a now well-known face was formed.
Isu was stunningly beautiful in a dark, sinister way; she was the kind of woman with the word TROUBLE tattooed in huge, invisible letters across every
