V3Ch21-The Chaplain
On the first day, while Mariella and Kistana planned their attack and gathered their force, Tybalt prepared to assault Fort Hadrian with just a handful of undead.
Tybalt joined Stanislaw and Edgard practicing their chanting together, harmonizing for their first ever joint spellcasting exercise. He wasn’t sure he would actually be free to join them when they executed their plan within Fort Hadrian, but he knew there was a powerful skill he could gain if he practiced enough.
His mind was elsewhere. I was planning on taking the huntsmasters into Fort Hadrian with me, but since I won’t have them, I’ll bring…
He came up with a mental draft list, carefully leaving Baldwin, the huntsmaster Beastkings, and the other chthonic mages out of it. It was a little annoying to consider how much of his power came from just the mummies, most of whom he’d be missing this time.
But that just gave him a reason to be more strategic and thoughtful.
“May I join, master?” Hieron’s voice rippled through the air, causing Tybalt’s head to whip around. Even if he knew the fext was his creation, the sound of his cold, stiff voice was still slightly unsettling.
The necromancer’s eyes fell on Hieron, and he nodded to himself. It was strange, but Hieron’s evolution had given him the form of an adult man. Young, but grown. The new form was called a fext apprentice, a monster class that allowed him to learn by observing until he developed a full class of his own. Tybalt was planning on raising him to be a second necromancer.
That made his answer obvious.
“Go ahead,” Tybalt replied. “This is how you learn.”
Hieron stepped up, bowed his head to both the necromancer and the mummies - he seemed disconcertingly more mature mentally, to go with the sudden physical development - and waited for them to resume. When Tybalt nodded for Stanislaw and Edgard to continue chanting, Hieron waited a beat and then slowly, haltingly joined in along with the necromancer.
It wasn’t quite perfect, but Tybalt didn’t worry about it. They had all day to think about this and practice, and since they weren’t pouring any mana or divine energy into this right now, the chanting wouldn’t have any magical effects.
After he finished practicing the joint spellcasting, he would ask other powerful undead he was considering using to demonstrate their skills for him too.
The real action would begin that night.
***
In the darkness, Tybalt teleported to just outside Fort Hadrian.
Far enough away to remain unseen via signal fire.
Close enough to see who stood on the walls, lit up as the sentries were by those same flames.
Hopefully no mages to see what he was about to do next, but he was confident enough about that. Mariella had been an anomaly, a noble with a class sent into the Salt Waste because her father was willing to expose her to some level of danger and risk to honor her wish to learn and bring further repute to their house.
Most nobles and generals would not send their offspring into such an unpromising backwater.
Tybalt glowed brighter than he’d have liked - or such was his perception in the near complete darkness - as he pushed mana into his Undead Storage seal. But he didn’t detect anyone on watch at the fortress shift in response at all.
Then they stood beside him. Edgard, Stanislaw, and Saoirse the banshee.
Tybalt had more undead concealed in storage, but these were the ones he absolutely needed for the first stages of his plan.
“Go, Saoirse,” the necromancer whispered. “Let them hear your song.” He turned his head to look at the two mummies and added, “Edgard, take us under.”
“Yes, master.”
As the former Beastking pulled himself, Stanislaw, and Tybalt underground, the necromancer heard Saoirse begin to sing her haunting melody. There was more than one form to it, with varying levels of intensity. This time, it wasn’t the type of song to shatter eardrums. Rather, it was a more subtle variation - still something that would degrade the souls of all who heard it, but not a noise to wake the dead.
Tybalt gritted his teeth and then relaxed as they got further away from the noise.
The banshee’s Shattering Shriek was not strictly necessary to the plan, and some would say it was an unnecessary risk… but those people were not mages. The forms and methods used to accomplish tasks were powerful in the magical world. Symbolic actions held meanings that went beyond communication.
If Saoirse’s power left an imprint on the souls of these men before they died, it could make Tybalt’s subsequent magic all the more effective.
Even from underground, he heard the men on watch cursing aloud. He could imagine them looking at each other for reassurance, not certain of what to do. They weren’t raising the alarm yet.
It was just someone out there singing, after all. Someone singing a song that was somehow painful to listen to, despite the fact that her voice wasn’t bad at all.
They weren’t trained to know what this magical attack might be.
Edgard, Tybalt, and Stanislaw moved under the fortress walls and kept going. They shifted when Tybalt felt a holy aura hostile to his own from a certain patch of soil. Then they reached the barracks.
Here, once they were close, they sensed another holy power. This one didn’t come from a physical place but from a person.
“Take us up,” Tybalt ordered.
Edgard silently obeyed.
This was their first target.
The soldiers slept in a handful of large rooms in bunk beds. The officers would be in rooms of their own, alone.
Except the chaplain. By longstanding tradition, the holy man of the Fort slept among the men who needed his spiritual counsel.
As they emerged from underground, the necromancer knew who he was looking at immediately. The chaplain stood out, and not just because he had the sole single bed in the room - the only acknowledgement of his special status.
“The two of you, stay back,” Tybalt warned silently. “Be prepared to kill anyone who wakes up.”
“Yes, master,” the mummies replied.
He saw the mana gathering in Edgard’s chest for Breath of Decay and in Stanislaw’s hand for Life Drain, and Tybalt nodded to himself.
Good.
The necromancer took a step toward the man with the holy feeling about him - an aura that mildly repelled him on an instinctive level, since it was diametrically opposed to his own.
This was a man, Tybalt could tell from mere proximity, who was simultaneously faithful to his gods and at peace with himself. He had probably never been forced to look the hypocrisy of Vika and Astara in the face, had probably given spiritual counsel to murderers and rapists without partaking in their crimes.
He lay there snoring with a beatific smile on his face.
The chaplain had to be a good man without the whiff of hypocrisy to have such a pure feeling. The High Priestess, in the Great Temple, would have a more powerful aura, but given that she did not live in compliance with the strictures of her own faith - at least according to rumor - hers would not give off the same feeling of purity.
Tybalt drew a bone knife from his side, gripped it in both hands, and then raised it overhead, readying the killing blow.
The snoring stumbled. The chaplain sniffled, one nostril twitched - perhaps he could smell the scent of the chthonic close by - and as Tybalt’s hand plunged down, the holy man’s eyes suddenly opened.
A look of fear crossed the chaplain’s face, and he tried to throw himself to the side.
Too slow. Or rather, Tybalt was too quick.
The blade buried itself deep into his chest. But not the heart. With the sudden movement, the necromancer had missed the heart.
The chaplain raised an unsteady hand and pointed it at Tybalt.
No way. He doesn’t… have a class, does he?
A ray of white energy burst forth from the man’s hand as if in answer to the necromancer’s unspoken question.
Tybalt suppressed a grunt as his eyes reflexively closed at the blinding light. He felt his skin break, blister, and burn under the onslaught of divine power. At the same time, those in the room around them began to stir from the bright light that even non-magical people could see.
“Go, use your attacks now!” he ordered.
He felt it rather than seeing as Breath of Decay filled the air and began disintegrating those around him. He sensed it as Stanislaw’s Life Drain began tugging at the chaplain’s life force.
The necromancer saw, through his eyelids, that the light aimed at him was beginning to wane - the chaplain was starting to turn his hand away, perhaps thinking he needed to blast someone or something else that lurked in the shadows. Perhaps sensing that the men around him who had been roused from their slumber by his Purifying Light were starting to breathe in Edgard’s Breath of Decay and disintegrate.
Tybalt forced his eyes open, despite the pain of the blinding light, and he threw himself on the chaplain, pinning one arm under his body and grabbing the other with his right hand. With his left, Tybalt yanked the knife out and then stabbed it into the man’s chest again and again.
As best he could, the necromancer ignored the divine power burning him through his clothing, even as it produced blisters and raw skin in places he’d have preferred never to think about being burned.
Tybalt had to keep doing his job. He had suddenly gone from being a supervisor to the most essential piece in his own plan. The possibility of a man with a priestly class was why he had needed to be here himself rather than sending his undead.
Any of his creatures might be killed by this Purifying Light power, as his book had called it. While it could hurt Tybalt, it would have turned Edgard or Stanislaw to ash if it had hit them straight on for more than a moment.
None of his existing undead would make effective assassins against holy men or women.
The chaplain gasped and gurgled on blood, and then Tybalt felt the fight begin to go out of him. It was a little quicker than it should have been, but the necromancer knew it was probably owing to Stanislaw’s Life Drain.
“Master- ”
“Healing, now,” Tybalt rasped. They had already awakened some people, so there was no point in being silent.
He couldn’t see Stanislaw - the necromancer might actually have been blinded by that light - but he could feel the presence of his undead, his magical additional senses alerting him to exactly where they were.
Stanislaw positioned his lips beside Tybalt’s and breathed out pure life force, stolen from the chaplain and perhaps other men around them. The necromancer felt broken skin knit back together, burns soothe, and blisters recede into his flesh as if they’d never existed. His vision returned.
Thank Lord Mudo…
He looked around as his eyes came back to normal. They weren’t adjusted to the darkness properly anymore - he genuinely seemed to have regenerated some lost part of his eyes - but he could still tell generally that some people still moved.
There was some activity in the room, some people who had not been close to the epicenter of the attack and weren’t dead from Breath of Decay. Events had happened very quickly - the whole fight had been under a minute long - and everyone had been asleep at the beginning. They were all still groggy and confused. The first man among them to understand what had happened at any level began shouting.
“We’re under attack!”
Then the room broke into shouts and frenzied motion.
“Get your weapons!”
“Someone light a candle!”
The chaos was fine for Tybalt.
“Grab a couple of living soldiers in the confusion,” the necromancer ordered Stanislaw. He looked at Edgard. “Then take us underground again.”
The mummy could continue using Underworld Motion for hours, he’d said once. Tonight shouldn’t be any special challenge for him.
“Y-you… never…”
The necromancer looked down and saw the chaplain, still barely clinging to life, struggling to form words. He lacked the power to move in his own defense anymore, but he was trying to go out with some last, dignified, defiant statement.
Tybalt’s lips curled. A man after my own heart, really.