Most, if not all of these corpses were victims of the Blood God, sacrificed to him over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. It was high time these long-dead corpses had their revenge. These innocent victims were being given the opportunity to mete out justice, a kind of justice only I could allow them to be a part of.
“All right, assholes,” I whispered as I stared down at the camp. “It’s time for you cum-stains to meet the God of Death.”
I called up the Bone Bow and felt the weapon buzz slightly in my hands as it loaded itself with a shard of jagged bone, and then I took aim at an archer on the far side of the camp. I was going to shoot the ones far away from me first, because they were harder targets to hit; they looked almost like insects from up here. After I’d taken out a few of the ones at the other side, I’d start shooting sentries closer by.
I breathed in, lined up the distant archer’s torso in the sights of the weapon, and then, exhaling slowly and keeping my muscles perfectly steady, I squeezed the trigger. As soon as I did, two spurts of blood sprayed out of his torso—one erupted from the front of his chest, and the other sprayed out of his back; the bone shard had smashed straight through him. His leather armor hadn’t stood a chance, not against my Bone Bow’s magical speed.
Before his dead body had even hit the ground, I shot a bone shard through another archer, and then swung my sights onto another as that one fell. Now that the archers were falling, shouts of surprise started to resound across the camp. I didn’t stop to observe what the soldiers were doing, though; I simply kept on picking off targets, dropping them second after second, firing my Bone Bow again and again, my focus razor sharp as I swung the sights from target to target.
Now that I’d killed about a dozen archers on the far side of the camp, soldiers there were running around shouting out orders and grabbing their weapons, in preparation for the wrong threat: they thought that the attack was coming from that side of the camp, and that there were multiple opponents. I chuckled at the confusion I was causing down there—and it was about to get far worse for those sons of bitches.
I lowered the bow for a second and focused on the archers I’d just killed, and then I raised them from the dead, feeling a jolt pass through me with every zombie I raised. It was a routine job by now. I hurled my spirit into their collective consciousness, and commanded them to shoot every single person in the camp.
Now the shouts from the camp turned to screams of terror as the dead archers started to rise from the ground, their dead eyes shining with a yellow-green glow in the firelight. Chaos reigned as the archers started shooting volleys of arrows into their comrades.
I chuckled again, and left my zombie archers to their business, now turning my attention to the middle-distance perimeters. I repeated the same pattern, shooting a series of archers with the Bone Bow before I raised them from the dead. Finally, after I had ordered these new zombies to pour arrows into their own camp, I went for the archers just below me. They saw the chaos that was unfolding everywhere, but beyond that were clearly incapable of understanding the first part of what was going on. These motherfuckers were about to find out firsthand.
I picked a target close to me and blasted a bone shard at his head, which exploded like an overripe melon. It’s fair to say that the other archers looked utterly gobsmacked when they saw their buddy’s head popping like a pimple. They didn’t have the time to draw their bowstrings—nor would they have known where to aim them—before I blew fist-sized holes in their chests with a couple of well-placed shots, and turned them on their other buddies as zombies.
Finally, as anarchy was unfolding in every corner of the camp, I saw him: my uncle came running out of the main entrance of the Temple of Blood, dressed in gleaming red plate armor, without a helmet.
I could have killed him right there and then; all it would have taken was one shot, and his head would have popped like a rotten egg thrown against a wall. I raised my Bone Bow and lined up his furious, crimson face in my sights. One squeeze of the trigger and he’d be history.
But I couldn’t do it. I guess I was just too selfish; I wanted to see the look on his face from close by when he died. Not only that; I wanted him to look into my eyes as I killed him and sucked his soul out into Gave Oath. I wanted him to know, in the final, agonizing moments of his life, that I was the one who had brought about his doom.
“Vance, you little shit, I know you’re out there!” he roared, gripping his triple-headed flail in his hands. “Hiding in the dark like a coward, are you?”
His eyes were solid red, like those of a Blood Demon, and they oozed blood that ran down his cheeks. I remembered just how potent the red lightning he could shoot from his flail had been even before his recent surge in power, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to give him the advantage of distance by revealing myself now; I needed to get in close and engage him in hand-to-hand combat. I remained silent, hidden behind the
