Defiant Necromancer (Book 2 stubbed)

As Mariella, William, and Stanislaw chased the Hero, the fire mage considered the situation.

Running like a coward? I thought the Hero was supposed to be brave. Maybe his goal was to split us up, but he took the risk that we’d all attack his ally together. He had no way of being sure we’d break into two groups. If we killed the dragon, he wouldn’t be able to escape the Salt Waste. Unless he has Teleport or some other rare magic. Or maybe he has some sort of trap prepared?

She squinted at the ground between her and the Hero, but all she saw was sand dunes and hot sun. No trace of mana besides what she, the Hero, and the two mummies emanated.

“Can either of you sense a trap?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

“No, my lady,” replied William. “He does have a holy sword, though. Perhaps he simply means to draw us in as close as possible, suddenly turn, and run the nearest one of us through. A simple strategy, but he already destroyed one of our brethren that way.”

“Keep your distance and support me, then,” Mariella said.

“That was the strategy the other Beastkings tried against him before,” Stanislaw said. “It was effective at whittling him down a bit, but then he got away. If I can get in close, I might be able to corrupt his sword. Easiest if he’s not touching it at the time.”

“Or it would destroy you,” William replied.

Stanislaw simply gritted his teeth and said nothing back to that.

“Both of you keep your distance,” Mariella repeated. “I’ll engage him.”

“My lady, your pregnancy,” began William.

“Provide support as best you can without coming in range of the blade,” Mariella said, cutting him off. “I will not take unnecessary risks. We aim to fight and keep him from fleeing until Tybalt and Edgard can join us. Then we’ll overwhelm him together. But I have to take the lead. We cannot afford to lose more of you to that blessed sword.”

The prophecy from that lamia said that we could not kill the Hero without incurring losses, but it never addressed capturing or maiming. Since Kistana asked Tybalt to spare the dragon, he’ll likely aim to capture them both.

“Yes, my lady,” William replied.

Stanislaw gave a grudging nod of approval.

Mariella gathered her mana, then raised a wall of fire in front of the Hero, semicircular, hot as she could conjure, and cutting off his path of retreat for twenty feet on both sides.

It wasn’t too taxing, but she knew she would have to manage her resources in this fight.

She drew her sword as the Hero turned around, his expression determined - and then his eyes fell on her. A sleazy smile spread across his face.

What is that look? It made her uncomfortable.

“Fair maiden,” he said, inclining his head in a slight bow - though not one that took his eyes off of the opponents in front of him. “I had not seen you up close before, but now I see you are both beautiful and quite alive. For a short time, I imagined that you might be a vampire, but their weakness to sunlight is notorious.”

“I’m human,” Mariella replied, pointing her sword at the man warily. Despite his flattering demeanor, she could sense he was ready to strike at any moment. His sword was loose in its sheath, one hand lightly touched the grip, and she could feel a vast quantity of mana for someone who she knew wasn’t a mage type class.

“Exactly,” the Hero began. “This conflict is a mistake—”

“I am placing you under arrest for violently invading the town of Whadesgart,” Mariella interrupted. “You can choose to come quietly and explain this ‘mistake’ to the local authorities, or you can try to escape justice. Given how dangerous you’ve already shown yourself to be, however, I recommend going quietly with us. We will kill you if we have to rather than risk our own lives trying to keep you alive.”

She left it deliberately murky under whose authority she operated. Let the Hero believe that she was just local law enforcement for a moment. The longer they spent talking while close enough for Tybalt to catch up, the safer the situation would be. One wrong move, and William or Stanislaw might be destroyed.

“Surely you know who I am,” he said. “But I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Chad. I’m the Hero. The once in a generation Hero? I came to Whadesgart chasing a necromancer, and you are fighting alongside two mummies. References to their ‘lives’ are a bad joke. Perhaps you’ve been deceived in some way, or threatened, but you must lay down your sword and surrender.”

“I refuse. Yes, there is a necromancer operating from Whadesgart. Yes, I am pursuing you alongside the mummies. But the necromancer has not harmed anyone in the town. He only scared away another dragon that came and attacked it a month ago. Whatever we might have heard about the necromancer class seems to be a lot of silly superstition and prejudice.” She tried to accurately represent what she had heard from some of the townsfolk as she walked Whadesgart. Since Tybalt had not destroyed the town or spread his plague any further - had genuinely saved Whadesgart from being destroyed, as far as the locals could tell - he actually enjoyed a fair amount of approval from them.

The Hero’s eyes hardened. “The gods despise such creatures and their masters. If the local authorities have fallen so far as to throw in their lot with a necromancer deliberately, perhaps the authorities must be removed. You have been twisted into working against your own kind by even tolerating the existence of things such as these. Corrupted by the necromancer’s lies. Perhaps he brought on this dragon attack only to pretend to rescue your town, so he could secure a safe base of operations. Lay down your arms, maiden, or prepare to defend yourself.”

“Corrupted, huh?” Mariella allowed herself to laugh, breaking character. “At one time, I would have agreed with you. I was deceived and corrupted.”

“Then—”

“But at some point, the lies fell away, and the ‘corruption’ became just picking a side.” She shook her head. “For a man. The same man who’d deceived me. But he’s also given me cause to see his point of view. So have the other people around us. Both the beastfolk and a single surviving dark elf. Both of their peoples have both been slaughtered for worshipping the wrong god. Which I think is safely… worse than anything that you can complain about. Clearly, the ways of Vika and Astara are corrupted. I don’t pretend to understand the power struggles of the gods, and maybe it’s not my place to criticize their methods, but I suspect some rebalancing is in order.

“No, you can’t talk me out of it. Even if I weren’t carrying Tybalt’s - that’s the necromancer’s name - child. You’re not the sort of person who could talk me out of my position. The legendary Hero spent the last few days stalking a pregnant woman, waiting to attack her until she had as few of her bodyguards as possible. How very heroic. There is no argument that could make that right. For that matter, your first encounter with us was you trying to seduce a woman who told you she was engaged to be married. And Vicky wanted me to tell you, you are the absolute worst sort of scum.”

“You’re… really one of them,” Chad said, sword instantly out and at the ready. His face was red, his eyes hard.

Is that really all you took from what I just said?

“Don’t you have any doubts about your own path?” Mariella asked, mana surging all around her.

“Whatever path I choose is righteous,” he replied simply. She couldn’t tell if he truly believed it. “That’s what being the Hero means. The gods picked me to carry their cause. My methods are my own matter, not something for the necromancer’s whores to—”

Mariella cut him off with a surge of flames to the face. She wasn’t so annoyed by him calling her a whore. By the morals of Niet, she was a slut for letting Tybalt not only sleep with her but impregnate her before marriage. She had a small but visible bump at this point.

But it made her angry that Chad referred to all of Tybalt’s fiancees that way when he’d tried to seduce them himself, even knowing they were promised to someone else. He was the worst sort of hypocrite.

She had the satisfying sight of seeing the skin burn off the side of his face. At the same time, William hurled a crimson spear.

The Hero pivoted and knocked the spear throw aside with his sword, then charged at Mariella. Already, she could see the flesh on his face beginning to grow back, knitting together before her eyes.

That’s the only ‘heroic’ thing about him, she thought as she darted backward, trying to stay out of close combat range while keeping him in view. His power.

As he got close, she unleashed two giant tongues of flame from both palms, not so much aiming to badly injure him as to push him away and get some distance. They struck his sides and hurled him back into the fire wall still burning behind him.

He let out a satisfying scream of pain as the smell of burning flesh filled the air. Mariella concentrated on controlling and shaping the flames all around Chad, surrounding him from all sides with a thick curtain of fire, while William swiftly conjured and threw javelin after javelin at where the Hero burned.

Both of them knew that he was far from dead.

Mariella got her first sight of him again when a single scorched fist punched a hole through the wall of flame.

She patched it up instantly, but then a kick from a horribly burned foot cut a vertical line through the fire. She sealed up the opening as quickly as it appeared.

She recognized that Chad wasn’t just punching. He was using a skill of some sort to compress wind mana and launch it from the ends of his limbs. He could overpower her flames and part them again and again with this. It might become a battle of attrition, which she would lose. She had been trying to stall until Tybalt could assist, but would that be a truly viable strategy?

She allowed herself to glance back at Tybalt’s fight with the dragon, which she had been dimly aware was ongoing behind her. She saw the necromancer seemed to be running from a stream of fire. He and Edgard were coordinating well, at least - she would expect nothing less when the mummy was assisting his master - but it was hard to say how long the fight might endure. The dragon was clearly hurting, but Mariella had no way of knowing if it could outlast her fight with the Hero.

I need more, she decided. I’ll have to pull out all the stops.

Her entire focus still on containing the increasing number of openings in her fiery containment space around the Hero, she began unbuttoning her gambeson.

As she was gathering more power, maintaining her existing flames, and efficiently removing her outermost garment, William continued his attacks. Apparently giving up on the javelins, he conjured a great crimson axe larger than himself and swung it through the middle of the fiery pillar that enveloped the Hero.

Mariella couldn’t see exactly what happened through the flames, of course, but she saw that something stopped the axe.

A moment later, the handle snapped in two, leaving William holding only the long shaft. The axehead vanished into the flames, then reappeared as a rapidly spinning disc, hurtling through the air in Mariella’s direction. It spun swiftly enough to decapitate if it made contact, she darted to the side - and then it dematerialized. She saw the aura it was composed of shoot back to William.

Finally, the Hero’s entire body charged through the flames, parting them with a gust of hot wind that Mariella felt from the twenty feet away she stood.

Chad was a hideous sight to behold.

“You’d better fucking apologize, bitch.” He spoke through teeth without lips to obstruct them, his voice strange and hollow. His entire body was laid bare to the eye, a work of horror. Flesh without skin, in some places down to the bone. Meat that still bubbled and sizzled with the flames that had been applied indiscriminately to contain this monster. Javelins protruded from one shoulder, the lower part of his torso, the left leg, the side of his neck.

Mariella had scorched away anything that could have identified him as the Hero, or even as a man. The only possession he had left was that holy sword, clutched in his right hand in a death grip.

Yet none of the destruction the fire had wrought seemed to mean much of anything.

Chad was clearly in great pain, as his livid expression showed. But his lost flesh began to grow back before Mariella’s eyes. A toe that had been scorched to bone regenerated flesh and blood. His bare ribs rapidly cloaked themselves in muscle and flesh again. Cartilage regrew on the end of his nose, which had been reduced to a nub. His gaze locked onto hers, eyes half-mad with pain, his fingers clenching and unclenching as new skin grew, every bit of body language promising terrible vengeance if he got his hands on her.

“I’ve contended with a dragon before, you stupid bitch.” The Hero practically spat the words as he began to reach around his body, dig javelins from his flesh, and throw them aside like he was picking brambles from his clothing. “You think your paltry flames could do anything to stop me? You’re just burning your own mana. You worthless whore!”