In response, Yumo-Rezu picked men off in rapid succession with her Ice bow, the blue arrows shattering whatever soldier they hit into chunks of ice.
Rami-Xayon blasted a series of tornados at the defenders. Each whirling creation plucked a handful of men from the walls and hurled them, screaming, hundreds of feet up into the air.
Layna was firing webs from her hands, ensnaring soldiers in these sticky traps.
Elyse, clad in her golden armor in the morning sunlight, was burning men to ashes with searing blasts of white light from her mace.
Anna-Lucielle wasn’t much of a fighter, but she’d borrowed a nifty repeating crossbow from the Emperor’s armory, and was shooting from the rear, making every shot count.
Friya transformed into her werewolf form and started scrambling up the wall, climbing the horizontal stone as easily as if it had been a ladder. At the sight of a ten-foot-tall werewolf scaling the walls, many of Hengchun’s troops simply threw down their weapons and ran, screaming in terror.
Ji-Ko and his monks whipped fist-sized rocks through the air with powerful slings, taking aim via the sound of the enemy’s bowstrings, and each precise shot smacked an enemy soldier in the head and knocked him unconscious.
As for me, I was having great fun racing parallel to the wall on Fang and picking off soldiers with my wrist-mounted Tree crossbow. The enemy troops screamed and writhed as leaves and branches burst through their skin.
Then, just as I wheeled Fang around to do another run, I saw Hengchun himself on the walls. I knew it was him from the description the Emperor had given me: he was a rotund, bald man with a dense black beard and thick eyebrows. He was wearing an ornate suit of white and purple armor, displaying his loyalty to the dead Warlock. A large red spear was gripped in his hands, waves of magic rolling off it like steam.
“Reinforcements!” he roared. “Everyone to the North Gate, now! Move, move! Ready the weapon; we’ll blast these foreign fools into the center of the earth!”
Ah, the secret weapon that Hengchun had used to defeat the Emperor’s troops. I intended to approach the weapon with caution since it had been used to win a battle where they’d been outnumbered three to one.
I ducked behind my tower shield just as a volley of arrows shattered against it. A few projectiles streaked past me, missing me by mere inches, and I flung my spirit into Talon. I summoned my Corpse Explosion spell and dropped the body from her claws, watching as it hurtled earthward. I needed to detonate the explosion at exactly the right moment to bring down the south wall. Just before the cadaver hit the ground, I blasted a charge of Death energy into it. With a loud boom, it exploded in a fireball and a green-tinged mushroom cloud. The south wall groaned for a few seconds before disintegrating into a tumble of rubble, accompanied by a billowing cloud of thick dust.
“For the Glorious Emperor!” Captain Jengshen roared, spurring his horse into a charge. His men echoed this shout in a unified roar and charged in perfect formation behind him.
Through Talon’s eyes, I watched as they raced up the hill. Inside the fort, I saw Hengchun’s men wheeling out a few large steel tubes, each about the size of a horse. They had been cast in the shape of a snarling wolf’s head with open jaws, and each was mounted on two wagon wheels. The soldiers operating them also wheeled out a small wagon, stacked with large red balls. The men poured gray powder into the mouths of the “wolves”, then rolled a red ball down after it. Hengchun jumped acrobatically off the battlements, landing in a pile of straw, and raced over to the war machines to operate them himself.
“Come fools,” he growled as Captain Jengshen and his cavalrymen started pouring through the broken wall into the fort. “Come and meet your doom!”
He pointed his spear at the first of the steel wolf heads. There was a titanic boom, like a thunderclap, and bright pink fire belched from the wolf’s jaws, while the head was hurled backward from the force of the explosion. Immediately, a series of similarly powerful explosions detonated. They proceeded in a perfectly straight line from the wolf’s mouth at intervals of a few yards, blowing a passage of carnage through Jengshen’s troops. Men were turned into splatters of blood, flying organs and red mist, and horses were similarly vaporized from the force of these explosions. It was both horrifying and darkly fascinating to watch.
Hengchun grinned and pointed his spear at the second steel wolf’s head. Another massive thunderclap crashed through the fort, and another series of powerful explosions tore a brutal, perfectly linear passage through the ranks of Jengshen’s charging troops. Hengchun’s spear was no doubt some sort of Fire weapon, and he was using it to detonate the gray powder inside the wolf’s head weapons. I could see now why he had so easily defeated the Emperor’s much larger force.
“Take the fort!” I roared to my party.
We launched one more volley of arrows, stones, and crossbow bolts at the defenders on the walls, then we veered off, racing around the perimeter of the fort to get to the smashed-out south wall. I needed to get inside and take on Hengchun right away before he could wreak much more havoc with his secret weapons.
While the others charged to give support to Captain Jengshen and his troops, I reined in Fang and sprang out of the saddle, running down his scaly back until I was balanced on his tail. With a single swipe of his powerful tail he could
