Now there was just one more shield wall for Elyse to handle. Talon swooped down low again so that Elyse could get a clear shot at her target soldier—and that was when a clap of thunder rang out.
It didn’t come from my explosions though; it came from Rollar’s huge hammer as he charged forward, riding his dire bear. There was no energy, only sound… but fuck me, what a sound it was.
Fang reared up, almost throwing me off, and I heard a number of horses behind me stumble and scream in terror. I didn’t think undead monsters would respond to sound, so it must have been an enchantment of some kind. The deafening clamor was louder than anything I’d ever heard, and, indeed, louder than anything I could ever imagine. I thought my eardrums might actually have exploded because after the boom, I could hardly hear anything except a shrill, high-pitched whistling.
What was clear, though, was that most of the force had been directed at Elyse and Talon. They veered out of the sky, the harpy completely stunned and spinning out of control, before crashing into the treetops to the right of the camp.
Pure, blinding rage blitzed like an oil fire through me. I cared about Talon only a little—I could always find another harpy—but if Elyse was hurt, or worse, I would flay Rollar alive, and every single one of his scumbag troops.
“Death has descended on you!” I yelled as Fang and I steamed onward toward the shield wall. “And by the end of this fight, I’ll have every one of your fucking souls!”
Elyse had been taken out of the fight, but that didn’t matter now. There were enough corpses to fuel my spell. What was more, I could now raise the dead and turn them against their living comrades.
In the blink of an eye, I raised almost every one of the soldiers who had died in the blasts as skeletons, then proceeded to make those few corpses I hadn’t raised explode.
Fang and I smashed into the shield wall with the force of a mighty boulder dropped off a high cliff. Bodies went flying in all directions as Fang smashed through the wall, scooping up a screaming soldier into his jaws as he ran. I leaned off his back, left and right, lopping off heads with the blade end of my kusarigama.
My mounted troops poured through the hole Fang and I had opened up, and the battle was on. Drok sprinted forward, his eyes wild, screaming and salivating as he double-wielded his battle-axes and cut down terrified soldiers left, right, and center in a hurricane of violence. Rami whirled and somersaulted, fighting off multiple opponents with her sais, while Isu blasted soldiers with her acidic mist and cackled as they died, screaming as their flesh sloughed off their bones.
I charged straight at the archers, who had now turned their attention to me. The instant they loosed a volley, I made Fang rear up onto his hind legs. The arrows thudded into his body but couldn’t penetrate his armored scales. They did nothing but piss him off.
As he crashed down onto all four legs again, I whipped out a rapid-fire volley of my own, zipping all of my throwing stars in quick succession at the archers in the center of the formation. The throwing stars thudded home, and the combined effect of their necrotic magic killed the archers in seconds, while their comrades were pulling back their bowstrings to loose another volley at me.
Before they could fire, I detonated a dead archer’s corpse. The explosion blew them all to shreds, sending archers, their body parts, and shattered bows and arrows flying out in all directions.
To my left and right, Rami, Isu, and my skeletal cavalrymen were all engaging Rollar’s men, who were struggling to handle both them and the skeletons of their comrades I had raised. They still had the advantage of numbers over my troops, albeit barely.
Ahead, the blood-curdling roar of a dire bear grabbed my attention.
“Vance Chauzec, the Soultaker,” Rollar growled as he and the dire bear stared me down from 25 yards away. “So, we finally meet in person. I would have thanked you for killing my rogue troops, but since you’ve decided to attack me instead of coming to negotiate like a civilized man, I have no choice but to respond in kind.”
I was quite surprised when I heard Rollar talk. While his accent still had a trace of his barbarian roots, he spoke as fluently as any of my countrymen.
“I don’t know why you’d want to thank me for killing your men,” I said, “but what I do know is that you’ll soon be joining them in the grave.”
Rollar’s bear roared, and Fang let out a roar of his own as we charged each other. The earth rumbled under our massive steeds’ feet as the gap grew ever shorter. Drawing on the strength of my skeletal warriors, I began swinging the chain end of my kusarigama around my head. I would smack this asshole with the full force of 20 skeletal warriors’ power and pop him like a fucking egg thrown against a wall.
As he raced toward me atop his bear, his huge hammer crackled with what looked like miniature veins of lightning. I didn’t have time to think about this or analyze it; in a second, we were upon each other.
I lashed the chain with all my might at Rollar’s chest, and he swung his hammer at me. Our weapons clashed, and the explosion from the impact hurled us both off our mounts. I crashed to the ground, rolling and tumbling, but I turned the fall into a controlled move and sprang up onto my feet, my kusarigama at the ready as
