V2Ch88-Beastfolk Yell
The street fell into chaos in an instant.
One by one, and then as a group, the women of Madam Aslaug’s across the street started screaming. The words “Murder! The infirmary!” could be clearly heard. An understandable, if inconvenient, reaction to what Baldwin was doing.
Fortunately, the small number of pedestrians out walking ran for cover immediately at the screaming, without interfering or generally looking to see what was happening.
Watchman Chuck stepped forward as soon as the revenant started crushing the whore’s throat. The other two watchmen still standing outside came alive and advanced toward the revenant too, their hands on their truncheons, eyes wide with shock.
But the undead were just more mentally prepared for this situation than they were.
Brunn and Hieron lunged at the two watchmen instantly, knives drawn from their sides, blades flashing silver and orange in the dying sunlight. The watchmen reacted and tried to raise their weapons defensively, but Sidon surprised them from behind, grabbing their legs. Both men stumbled forward, losing their balance. Then the fexts were upon the two, going for their throats with quick stabs and instantly staining the sandy street with long streaks of blood.
Baldwin hardly noticed the whore clawing at his sleeves and face as he crushed her throat. His eyes were on Watchman Chuck, approaching with truncheon raised. The revenant made sure to keep the whore’s body between himself and Chuck for the seconds it took him to draw his weapon and use it. His free hand quickly found his dagger, and he plunged it into her chest - once, twice - and she stopped fighting.
A shame, he thought as he watched her body drop limply to the ground. I remember her. Trixie? She was a nice girl.
With no time to dwell on her death, he pulled the dagger free from the whore’s chest and stepped forward to meet Chuck in the middle of the man swinging his club down at Baldwin. The revenant suppressed the natural instinct to evade, ignored the blunt force coming toward him, and stabbed forward with all his strength, using both hands.
The dagger penetrated through Chuck’s chest with such force that it passed through the other side. The blade punched the air out of the watchman.
A fraction of a second later, the man crumpled to the ground.
Baldwin was dimly aware that there was blood streaming from the top of his head, but it wasn’t much. The man had hit him, but a club was just a poor weapon to fight the undead with. Unless his head was totally pulped, Tybalt would only fix him up later.
Which reminded Baldwin.
“Master, our cover is blown,” Baldwin sent. “We will try to clear a way through the gate for you, but the town will be up in arms at this point.”
“Thanks for the warning, going in now,” Tybalt replied.
This was far from perfect execution, but the necromancer didn’t sound worried, at least. Baldwin would focus on his own role.
He turned and saw that Hieron and Brunn were done, looking to him for orders. Sidon was pushing himself to his feet.
“We need to kill the other watchmen in the infirmary,” Baldwin said. “Then we go for the gate.”
“Understood,” said Hieron.
“What about the women watching?” Brunn asked, gesturing to the brothel, where ladies of the night stood anxiously observing from a second floor balcony.
“We don’t concern ourselves with them,” Baldwin replied. “They won’t fight to defend this town. That’s what matters right now. The master will deal with them later.”
Baldwin, Sidon, Hieron, and Brunn quickly moved into the infirmary. As they entered, the revenant had a moment of reflection where he wondered why the watchmen inside hadn’t come back out in response to the sounds of their comrades being killed.
Then they passed through the doorway, and he didn’t wonder any longer.
Deron crouched on top of one watchman, strangling him. The dying man’s face had already turned purple, so it had clearly been going on for a little while. He wasn’t moving, and Deron only used one hand for the strangulation. The other was in the center of the watchman’s chest.
Right, Deron’s got that paralyzing touch. I guess the paralysis has spread to his whole upper body. Nice!
Beside the dying watchman lay his comrade with a dagger sticking crookedly from his chest, eyes staring unblinking up at the ceiling.
In another corner of the room, a doctor lay face down in a pool of his own blood.
Three more bodies lay in similar condition.
“You’re a good killer, Deron,” Baldwin observed.
The ghoul glanced up at him and smiled, a gruesome expression of mute satisfaction. His teeth gleamed redly, and Baldwin saw a scrap of human skin stuck between two of them.
The picture should have been disconcerting, but Baldwin’s emotions were so different now than they had been in his human days.
All he thought was, You really used every weapon at your disposal, huh?
“Well, now that this place is done, we’ll head straight for the gate,” the revenant said after a moment.
The others followed him back out, including Deron after a few seconds longer.
Baldwin looked up and down the street, saw that it was more or less deserted - the ladies of Madam Aslaug’s had withdrawn from the balcony and shuttered the first floor windows - and smiled. No one had come yet. They still had some sort of element of surprise, some opportunity to attack the unsuspecting watchmen by the gate itself.
Then he heard a shout go up. The noise began to grow louder, and Baldwin’s eyes widened as he realized it wasn’t a single shout.
Rather, there were hundreds of voices shouting, all at once, from far away, and drawing closer quickly.
His mind could put together the picture.
The beastfolk were charging, and apparently, they had all decided to yell at once.
If I was still a soldier, I’d shit a brick. It’s madness to think those people were ever afraid of us… Though I suppose, if this many had ever come out to face us, the Kingdom would have sent out more than just a couple of squads worth of people.
As the shouting grew louder, Baldwin motioned for the others to follow - they would no longer be able to hear him if he spoke - and after a few seconds, he broke into a run.
They ran for a minute and came back within view of the town gate, just as the watchmen lowered a thick metal bar into place to hold it shut. The gate’s hinges, and the bar were the only metal elements here. The gate itself was a thick, sturdy-looking wood, while the wall was stone at the base and earthen above. The whole thing was extremely basic from Baldwin’s point of view.
There was a walkway to allow watchmen to see over the wall and permit archers to shoot down at attackers, but there was no gatehouse, no towers.
Still, the wall would hold out for a while against the brute force of Tybalt’s ragtag army and allow for some casualties to be inflicted, unless the undead infiltrators could do something about it.
The watchmen were all focused on the exterior, standing along the parapet and staring anxiously outward. Even the two who had just slotted the bar into place immediately clambered up onto the walkway so they could see the mass of people charging at them. Their postures conveyed alarm.
Perfect. They’re not thinking about the screaming they probably heard from inside the town now. They might even imagine it was about this.
Baldwin gestured with his fingers, pointing out the four watchmen closest to the gate; those were the ones most likely to interfere.
The others nodded with understanding and drew their blades, while the revenant approached the gate itself. The bar was thick metal that had taken two strong men to put it in place, but with his levels as a revenant combined with his pre-mortem strength, he should be strong enough to shift it.
A man fell from the walkway twenty feet to one side, with what looked like an arrow in his eye.
Baldwin gritted his teeth. If the beastmen were within range to sling stones and shoot arrows, that meant they were also within range to be shot at. He needed to move quickly.
As the others threw themselves, blades in hand, at their selected targets, the revenant put his shoulder to the iron and pushed up, hard.
The weight of the metal resisted him. It must have been around four hundred pounds.
He let out a little grunt. Then the bar began to rise.
Yes!
An impact struck the gate and pressed the bar hard into the recesses that held it, sticking it fast.
Baldwin waited for the pressure to come off, then pushed up harder, putting all of his strength into it. The bar popped out, and a fraction of a second later, the gate flew open, knocking Baldwin a few feet back as several beastfolk tumbled in. The bar struck the ground in between them.
“Surrender!” shouted a voice from above, yelling over the still-ongoing beastfolk roar. Baldwin looked up and saw a harpy wearing bone armor. One of Tybalt’s priesthood, he recognized. “Surrender, and you may serve! Resist, and die!”
The revenant could see now that the watchmen standing on the walkway had been shooting arrows down at the approaching enemies, and a half dozen of the watchmen lay dead at the foot of the wall. Now, though, with more beastfolk pouring through the open gateway, the remaining twenty or so men saw that the struggle was over.
They began throwing down their weapons and raising their hands over their heads.
The little wave of beastfolk entering the town slowed to a trickle as Tybalt’s own entourage - the same men who had accompanied him into the last village - muscled their way to the forefront, the necromancer himself standing at their center, resplendent in his handcrafted bone armor.
“Congratulations on making the wise choice to surrender, guardsmen!” he boomed over the sound of beastfolk cheers. “You have been liberated from the Kingdom by the Grand Beastfolk Army!”
The revenant got a little more joy than he perhaps should have out of the looks on the watchmen’s faces.
An army of beastfolk? they must have been thinking.
Given the stereotypes about beastfolk in the Kingdom - that they were more beast than person - the watchmen might have been contemplating whether choosing death would have been better after all.
The rest of the undead infiltration group had come back down from the wall, and they gathered around Baldwin as he watched Tybalt enter. Then the six of them knelt, all together, to the necromancer.
“How was it, doing this for the first time?” he asked quietly.
“Easier than it will be next time, but not without complications,” Baldwin replied.
“I leveled up!” Hieron exclaimed. “The system said I’m getting an evolution!”
Jaws dropped around the fext, but Tybalt looked unsurprised.
“Good, go and commandeer one of the buildings to have some privacy while you complete your evolution,” he said. “Congratulations, Hieron. I’m sure you earned it.” He gestured down toward the fext’s hands, and Baldwin observed that they were soaked in blood. The knife Hieron had wielded, which the fext had abruptly tucked into his belt for convenience at some point, was also leaving bloody smudges on his clothing wherever it touched.
The necromancer turned his head and raised his voice again as he began giving instructions.
“Fan out in groups of twelve, each one taking a watchman with you, and let the town know it’s under new management…”