“Flick that tail of yours, Fang!” I yelled.
Fang gave his tail a sharp lash, and the force hurled me up over the wall. I turned my impromptu flight into a graceful somersault, tumbling through the air, and I landed with a smooth forward roll inside the fort. The instant I came up from the roll, I began whirling in a tornado of precision-directed fury with the Dragon Sword. The enchanted greatsword lopped off limbs and heads, and dozens of soldiers fell in seconds before my vicious hacks and slashes.
Hengchun saw me carving a passage of death through the ranks of his troops and roared with fury.
“Welcome, God of Nothing, to your final resting place! Now you die!”
He shoved the nearest soldier aside and wheeled the trooper’s wolf’s head weapon around. I’d seen the wolf’s head in action, and knew that if the power of that weapon was unleashed on me I’d be turned into dogfood as quickly as Jengshen’s men had been. While Henchun prepared to aim the weapon at me, I fought off the hordes of soldiers attacking me from all sides. I jumped back to give myself some room and pulled Death energy from my distant army to empower my assassin’s armor and tower shield until they were at bursting point.
Hengchun pointed his spear at the wolf’s head and fired. Thunder crashed and pink flame blasted from the mouth of the war machine, and a force just as potent as the strongest of the Warlock’s lightning bolts smashed into my shield. I was flung backward with such force that my flying body pulverized dozens of men behind me. I was hurled through the air in a gory spray of blood and flying limbs. I slammed into the far wall of the fort, and all the air was driven from my lungs. I bounced off it and rolled in the dirt, gasping for breath.
The immense Death magic in my shield and armor had saved me, but this energy had been completely depleted by just one shot from Hengchun’s weapon. Indeed, nothing was left of the shield at all.
Hengchun was already at the next wolf’s head, screaming at the soldiers who were manning the weapon to aim it at me. I couldn’t afford to let them take another shot at me, because I certainly wouldn’t survive one more.
Groaning, I struggled to my feet and drew Grave Oath. I flung the dagger across the courtyard, and it passed a hundred of Hengchun’s and Jengshen’s troops as they engaged my party in battle. My dagger cut through the air, avoiding the many fighting soldiers, and slammed into the eyeball of one of the troops manning the final wolf’s head. I dispatched the other with a shot of my wrist crossbow, and he gasped as roots sprung from the wound and strangled him from the inside out.
Hengchun was now forced to turn the heavy weapon around by himself.. With my strength returning rapidly, I charged toward Hengchun. Cursing and swearing, he struggled to turn the heavy steel wolf’s head around, but as I bore down on him, cutting down any troop who dared stand in my way, he saw that he wouldn’t make it.
When I came within twenty yards of him, he ceased trying to move the weapon. He growled and shifted into a combat stance, and his red spear lit up. With a deep whoosh, flame encapsulated the weapon, burning brightest at its tip. Skidding to a halt, I snatched up a shield from a dead soldier and empowered it with a quick boost of Death energy from the dead soldiers nearby. With a snarl, Hengchun unleashed the Fire Spear’s magic, and a torrent of roaring flame blasted toward me.
I crouched behind the Death-enhanced shield as flame crashed in a tsunami against it. It was only due to the Death magic that the shield didn’t melt in a second or two, but there wasn’t enough Death magic to hold it together much longer. Once it melted away, I’d be toast, literally.
What I needed was a distraction. With a snap of my fingers, I raised a dozen dead soldiers near Hengchun as zombies, and had them all swarm him at once. He had no choice but to cut off his stream of fire and fight off the attacking zombies.
I dropped the red-hot shield, and it turned into a lump of molten goo the moment I pulled the Death magic out of it. Despite being well into middle age and heavy around the belly, Hengchun moved with astonishing speed and fought with a grandmaster’s flair. He was spinning and dodging, cutting down zombies left, right and center, stabbing his Fire spear through their eyeballs or tripping them up with its shaft, or whipping the blade edge of the spearhead around in fearsome cuts that took zombies’ heads off their shoulders. Within less than a minute, he’d killed every zombie around him.
“Nice work Hengchun,” I said, spinning the Dragon Sword in my hands as I advanced on him. “But you’re going to have to do better than that against me.”
“Foreign devil,” he snarled. “You will die as rapidly as your undead minions did!”
We charged at each other and exchanged a flurry of blows. As quick as his lunges and cuts were, my ducks, dodges, and counterattacks were faster. Soon, I was beating him back, blow by savage blow. His Fire spear was a potent weapon; the Dragon Sword could not cut through its shaft. As powerful a weapon as the Fire spear was, its weakness was the man who wielded it. In one final, desperate attack, he hurled all his strength and momentum into a flying lunge at my throat. I ducked and flung myself forward in a knee slide, passing under Hengchun as he leaped over me. I hacked at him as he passed, and the Dragon Blade cleaved his body in half from his balls to his cranium.
The two halves of
