Rollar had to chuckle softly and shake his head. “Nobody I’ve ever met is quite as talented as you, Lord Vance, when it comes to turning a disaster into an opportunity. It’s still going to be one hell of a battle to kill so many of ‘em, though.”
“I didn’t say it would be easy, Rollar, but great achievements rarely are. The beasts are far away for now, and I’ll come up with a solid battle plan before we get close enough for them to attack, which, considering their nature, they surely will.”
“I trust you, Lord Vance, and if you think we can take those vile things on and win, I believe we can. I’m going to armor up; just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
Rollar headed below deck to his cabin to put his battle armor on, while I remained on deck, watching the flock of harpies and trying to figure out how best to take them on. I vividly remembered the day I’d fought and killed Talon. I had been a far weaker deity then, granted, but even now, as powerful as I was, I wasn’t about to underestimate the creatures.
Aside from their ability to fly and their physical strength, the harpies’ main weapon was their ear-piercing screams, which was so intense that it could cause the bravest, fiercest warriors to break down in fear and piss their pants, and paralyze the most powerful Fated, making them unable to utter the simplest of spells. In order to effectively battle these creatures, I needed a way to nullify their ability to attack us with those debilitating screams. One of them screaming had been enough to almost paralyze my entire party, so with hundreds of them all shrieking at once, it would surely be a ferocious enough aural assault to make all of our heads explode—quite literally.
“All right,” I muttered to myself, “given that having this deck littered with our headless corpses, splattered with our skull fragments and exploded brains is not an ideal result of the coming encounter, how do I neutralize the whole sound thing the harpies have got going?”
The first answer that came to my head was as obvious as it was frustrating: the easiest thing to do would be to fight them at a distance with my undead troops, who were completely immune to harpy shrieks, and wouldn’t flinch even if you sawed out their eardrums with a rusty scalpel. Of course, there was no way for me to do this given the fact that my undead army was hundreds of miles away, being dragged across the floor of the ocean. The only undead creatures I had with me were Fang and Talon, and a few Jotunn in the bottom hold with the dragon skeleton, and while I knew that Fang would happily munch harpies like a cat catching low-flying birds, and the Jotunn would be able to swat a few from the sky like pesky flies, there were simply too many harpies for them to handle, and they wouldn’t be able to stop them from flying across the water to attack us on the ship. And here, if we were surrounded by even a third of that huge flock and attacked en-masse, we would all be in deep trouble, very quickly.
I was sure that with our various powers and weapons, my party would be able to defeat the flock of harpies, as long as we were able to nullify the advantage of their terrible shrieks. The question was, of course, how I could do that.
I felt a sudden grin curving my mouth upward; the answer had just come to me.
“What are you so happy about?” Rami-Xayon asked, looking out over the sea at the flock of harpies with a look of consternation on her beautiful face. “It looks to me like we have a very dangerous enemy ahead. I don’t see how we’re going to be able to get within a mile of Castle Island without being attacked by those awful creatures.”
“I do, and you’re exactly the goddess I wanted to speak about how to do just that,” I said.
“Ah yes, of course!” she said, her face lighting up. “They’re flying creatures, and If I call up a hurricane, I can keep them away from us with a shield of powerful winds.”
“I don’t just want to keep them at bay, though, Rami-Xayon,” I said. “I need to kill them. I want to add that flock of harpies to my undead army.”
“That will be a much more difficult challenge than simply keeping them at bay, but I’m guessing you’ve already figured out a plan?”
“I have.” I explained to Rami-Xayon what I needed her to do, and as I did her look of consternation turned to one of hope.
“All right,” she said, grinning. “Let’s go harpy hunting.”
As we got closer to Castle Island, I gathered everyone on deck to explain the plan. “Listen up everyone. We’re switching around the order of the challenges of the Black Passage. Instead of taking on the harpies last, after we’ve overcome the other two challenges, we’re going to handle those overgrown mosquito bitches first. Now, some of you have fought harpies before, and many of you haven’t, but what I’m about to say applies to those who have fought them as much as those who haven’t. Come on over and have a close look at Talon, everyone.”
I commanded Talon to land on the deck, and got everyone to have a good, close up look at the undead harpy. Even Drok and Rollar looked like children next to Talon, and this drove home the point about how physically large and strong a harpy was.
“Now, I
