The pressure of the tornado in my kusarigama was so powerful, it seemed ready to explode into splinters in my hands. Exactly the right time to release it. A man-sized tornado tore out of the weapon. While I was tempted to direct it at the red-haired leader, I sent it hurtling off to the side, aiming at a massive, obese barbarian warrior with long black dreadlocks and a beard down to his boulder-like gut instead. As he raced toward my troops seated on his direwolf, I sent the tornado smashing into him from the side.
The whirling wind plucked him off his wolf like the hand of a god—which it was, in a sense. Then I used the tornado with the 300-pound barbarian like a flail: directing the barbarian’s momentum and weight, I smashed through the ranks of his scruffy companions, bowling them off their mounts as they charged.
Inside the kusarigama, another tornado was building with rapidly increasing pressure. This one I directed at a tall, blond barbarian wearing a bear’s head for a helmet. Again, I used the mass of howling wind to pluck him off his mount, but this time, I made the tornado come at him from below, sweeping him just inches above the ground and whipping him across in a vicious arc. The flying rider-and-wolf smashed more charging wolves’ legs out from underneath them, causing the beasts to throw their riders face-first into the dirt.
Damn, this weapon was fun.
We were mere moments from impact now, so I switched up my kusarigama’s magic, drawing instead on its Death Magic so that I could channel the raw strength of my skeletons into the chain section.
The red-haired brute was barreling straight at me, intent on giving me a lil’ taste of that disproportionate battle-axe of his. Unfortunately for him, he was going to taste my kusarigama chain long before the blade of his axe got anywhere near me. I could have lopped his head off quite easily, but I’d promised Drok he could take this carrot-top’s life, so I reluctantly held back.
As he reared up on his direwolf, I whipped my kusarigama chain at his direwolf, channeling the strength of a few skeletons through the weapon. The chain hit the beast with the force of a dragon’s tail, sending it and the shocked rider up in the air. The beast crashed through the treetops 50 yards away, but I caught the barbarian by sprinting past him and whipping the kusarigama chain around him while he was airborne. Once my makeshift lasso caught, I snapped him backward, slamming him into the ground behind me as Fang and I hurtled onward.
The red-haired chump screamed as he was dragged along behind us, bouncing and lurching over every rock on the road. It was perhaps understandable, as Drok was running right behind us, hacking with his battle-axe at the man who’d screwed his wife, roaring out insults in his coarse barbarian tongue while he lopped the fool’s limbs off one by one.
That was one barbarian I wouldn’t be resurrecting; there wasn’t much left to resurrect by the time Drok was done with him. Just as I whipped the chain of the kusarigama back in front of me, with nothing but the red-haired asshole’s headless, limbless torso left hanging on, our forces met with ground-shaking impact.
As large as the direwolves and their mounts were, Fang was much bigger, and the momentum of his furious charge sent him smashing through their center like a raging bull plowing through a field full of lambs. Jerking his massive, blood-red head left and right, he sent wolves and riders flying, while Rollar’s gigantic direbear did the same beside me, cannoning through the barbarians like a boulder launched by a trebuchet.
As I sped through them, I leaned out of my saddle, slicing through barbarian warriors with the razor edge of the kusarigama blade. I clove torsos in half and removed heads and limbs as if they were made of nothing but wet paper. One of the barbarians aimed his direwolf in a flying leap at me, hoping to smash into me and knock me off of Fang. I ducked under the flying missile of wolf and man but aimed a quick upward slash at the wolf as it passed over me. It was sufficient to take its head off. Instinct made me dart out a hand and catch the decapitated wolf’s head as it fell in a blood-spraying whirl. In a spur of brutal inspiration, I jolted a charge of reanimating Death magic into the wolf’s head and hurled it at a passing barbarian. The suddenly alive-and-snapping wolf’s head clamped its jaws around the barbarian’s throat. He screamed as he fell off his mount, rolling in a chaotic cartwheel in the dirt as he tried to fight off the huge beast’s undead disembodied head.
To the left, Elyse was whipping her rope of light around, plucking enemies off their wolves and slamming them into the ground while Jandor and his zombies presented the charging enemy cavalry with an impenetrable wall of tower shields, against which their charge broke and shattered.
To the right, Isu was making short work of any barbarians who dared to attack her, blasting flesh-melting acid into their faces and the faces of their direwolves, sending them screaming in agony. Sarge, meanwhile, swung his golden greatsword around him in scything arcs and hacked off limbs and heads of direwolves and barbarians alike, with his skeleton infantrymen mopping up any momentarily lucky bastard who survived the combined onslaught of him and Isu.
Of course, the barbarians and their direwolves were inflicting some damage on my forces; whenever one of them managed to turn aside or dodge the thrust of one of my skeletal cavalrymen’s lances, or a skeletal infantryman’s sword or ax, they would invariably smash that skeleton to smithereens with the impact of their heavy weapons or the powerful jaws of their direwolves. In terms of overall damage, however, the northerners were
