“Not if I can help it.” I whipped up my hand and shot a crossbow bolt at his face.
The little wrist crossbow was a deceptively powerful weapon, and it zipped its bolt across the cavern far faster than my uncle could react, even though he embodied the power of the Blood God. My aim was true, and the bolt smashed into his left cheek, burying itself almost completely into his face, and sent him staggering back. The Tree God’s magic began to spread across his face, which started turning brown and woody in texture. My uncle dropped his huge flail and gasped and grunted, pawing at the end of the deeply embedded crossbow bolt.
“Suck on that, asshole!” I yelled.
Turning him into a tree hadn’t been how I’d planned to kill him, but I wasn’t about to let him unleash whatever Blood Magic he was capable of wielding. It was a little unsatisfying, but ultimately the wisest option.
Coughing and gasping, he dropped to his knees, with all of us watching grimly as his face turned brown.
But then, he managed to get a grip on the end of the crossbow bolt and pulled it out of his face. Snapping it in half, he tossed the broken bits aside and started to laugh, slowly and loudly, a booming, mocking sound. When he turned around to face us, blood was flowing freely from the hole in his cheek the bolt had made, but all signs of the Tree magic were gone, and his skin was normal again.
“Foolish boy,” he growled. “You think that trinket can harm us? You think that little toy of a forgotten god can contend with the kind of power we wield? Now, you die, all of you.”
He picked up his three-headed flail and started whirling it around his head, and I sensed potent magic being summoned. I had a feeling that something really bad was about to go down.
“Get behind the shield wall!” I roared as I simultaneously commanded Jandor and his zombie Crusaders to lock their shields together to create a solid barrier between my companions and my uncle.
Everyone scrambled to get behind it, while I summoned the power of death from the deepest pits of the earth, plunging my mind and consciousness deep into the soil and harnessing the death energy of millions of corpses and skeletons buried beneath ground for thousands of years. I drew it up from the depths, sucking the ancient, all-numbing cold into my body, and channeled it into the magic shields of my zombie Crusaders, constructing a black wall of unimaginable cold, imbuing the steel of their shields with the blackest power of death.
And just as I did this, my uncle roared out a throaty bellow— his voice and the Blood God’s voice combined— and blasted a surging, spreading vein of red lightning out from his triple-headed flail. The boom of it rocked the walls of the crypt, sending down a shower of plaster dust and bits of masonry. Had I not strengthened my Crusaders’ shields with death energy, the power of the blood lightning would have killed us all instantly.
Instead, however, the red Blood Magic met a force it had not expected to encounter: the black magic of Death. The red lightning smashed into my Crusaders’ shields and sent them staggering back from the brute force of the impact, but my Death magic was strong enough to deflect the blast, and veins of red lightning bounced off the shields, rocketing outward in all directions, smashing holes through the walls they hit and bringing parts of the crypt ceiling crashing down. One vein hit one of the oblates, and he was vaporized in the blink of an eye. Nothing remained of him but a sprayed bloodstain on the side of the huge cauldron and a grisly pair of smoking feet.
“So, you are stronger than I thought, boy,” my uncle and the Blood God both said, the latter’s thunderous voice booming from my uncle’s throat. His eyes had now turned blood red, and trickles of blood were oozing out from them and dribbling down his cheeks. “Not nearly strong enough though!”
Veins of lightning crackled and surged around the spinning chains and heads of his flail as he whirled it around his head again. I braced for another impact, summoning more death energy from the depths of the earth and spreading it through my Crusaders’ shields as they hurriedly got back into formation.
“We have to counter attack!” I yelled. “Rollar, blast that asshole with your hammer!”
“As you command, my lord!”
Rollar leaned out from behind the shield wall, his hammer glowing, and sent out a crack of thunder that rocked the walls of the crypt almost as violently as my uncle’s blast of red lightning had. The force of it hurled my uncle up through the air, slamming him into the back wall of the crypt, but he retained his grip on the flail, and it continued to shine with rippling currents of red electricity.
“Hit him again!” I yelled, and Rollar blasted out another ear-splitting boom of thunder, which hurled my uncle up against the ceiling, after which he came crashing down in a heap on the floor, groaning.
Still Rodrick managed to grip his lightning-crackling flail, so I popped my head out above the top of the shield wall and fired off a few crossbow bolts in quick succession, each of which slammed into my uncle’s plate armor, the magic-imbued bolts piercing the red steel as if it were mere paper. I knew he could shrug off one shot of Tree magic, but half a dozen would at least slow him down. I sent bolt after bolt into him, his body jerking as
