Death: Genesis

The sword whistled past Zeke’s ear, missing him by scant inches. He responded with a herculean uppercut that took the massive Knight in the stomach. His armor buckled as he was lifted a few feet off the ground, and his breath left his body in a rush. However, the Knight, who was under the influence of a powerful transformation skill that had transformed him into a fifteen-foot-tall behemoth of a white knight, was not out of the fight.

Not by a long shot.

He lashed out with his white-and-gold shield, slamming it into Zeke’s face with a metallic clang that echoed through the battlefield. Zeke reeled, stumbling backward from the powerful attack, and was just off-balance enough that he couldn’t avoid the Knight’s follow-up attack, which sent his sword slicing into Zeke’s shoulder.

He grunted in pain as a chunk of his metallic flesh went flying away, hitting another Knight in the face and sending him staggering. Meanwhile, Zeke let the force of the attack drive him to the ground. He tuned his descent into a spring forward, and he hit the Knight in the mid-section with a flying tackle that sent them both clattering to the ground. At that moment, Zeke slammed his hand on the ground, using [Hell Geyser].

Beneath him, the ground erupted into a forty-foot wide explosion of fire, corruption, and rock. He and the Knight were heavy enough that they were only thrown a few feet into the air, but they were both bathed in destructive force. Zeke could easily endure much worse, largely due to his attunements, but the Knight had no such nature on which to rely. He screamed as huge chunks of his enlarged body melted away, but he managed to keep his wits enough to slam his still-intact sword into Zeke’s chest.

It only penetrated a foot before it succumbed to the intense heat and broke in half, but that was enough to send molten mana flooding into Zeke’s chest cavity. He ignored the pain as he reached out to grab the Knight, but suddenly, his foe wasn’t there. Instead, a streak of pure moonlight retreated too quickly for Zeke to follow.

Seeing that, Zeke leaped to his feet and used [Shifting Sands], and sank into the earth. It accepted him willingly, shielding him from a descending beam of blistering moonlight that slammed into the ground with just as much force as his [Hell Geyser]. Zeke ignored it, rocketing forward under his altered perception of time. When the Knight reconstituted himself from the retreating moonlight, Zeke did the same, bursting forth from the ground with another uppercut. This time, though, he used Voromir, the weapon’s head connecting with the Knight’s helmeted head with enough force to send the man flipping backwards.

He arced through the air, but just before he was going to land, Zeke used [Center of Gravity], yanking the Knight in his direction. For his part, the man adjusted as quickly as could be expected, but before he could bring his shield around, Zeke flared [Burden of Sovereignty]. The Knight slowed by just enough that Zeke had no issues hitting him with a momentous, baseball-style swing that elicited the sound of cracking bones.

The Knight went limp, ragdolling through the air. He would have collided with the line of other nearby combatants, but Zeke once again used [Center of Gravity]. This time, the Knight had no defense at all for Zeke’s next attack, which connected with his head and drove him into the ground.

Zeke let out a roar, raising his metallic foot and bringing it down on the Knight’s exposed back. A sound like a car crash swept through the Knights’ ranks as Zeke broke his opponent, infusing the attack with his Runebreaker technique and forcibly cancelling the man’s transformation skill. His shining white armor shattered like glass, then dissipated into motes of mana and revealing the much more normal-sized Knight’s true form.

He tried to rise.

He also attempted to activate some sort of skill.

But Zeke wasn’t going to allow that. He brought his hammer back and dropped it in a sledgehammer strike that obliterated the Knight’s head before he could complete his skill’s activation. Kill energy flooded through Zeke, pushing him past the threshold and to a new level. As the energy flowed through him, he let out a roar of victory before casting his gaze across the rest of the battlefield.

There were thousands of Knights engaged with the kobolds, and though each Knight of Adontis was more than a match for any individual centurion or legionnaire, the battle itself was not going in their favor. Because the kobolds didn’t fight individually – not by a long shot. Instead, they surrounded each Knight, using their tall tower shields to hem the Knights in before bringing their spears to bear.

Knights fought back, often using their various skills. However, the kobolds had developed well, and most of them had chosen defensive skills that made their shields – especially when utilized together – into a powerful bulwark against enemy abilities. As a result, each fight devolved into a melee, and one which was usually won by the more numerous and cooperative kobolds.

Meanwhile, the beastkin attempted a mimicry of the kobold’s teamwork, but they didn’t have the collectivist history of their reptilian allies, and so, they were less powerful as a group. Yet, they’d gotten better with every battle, which was all Zeke could have hoped for.

The centaurs were just as deadly as the kobolds, though in a different manner. They engaged in hit-and-run tactics, slicing through the outer edges of the Knights’ forces and trampling the weaker, more poorly armored infantry and ranged specialists. At the same time, the powerful members of the herd, like Rasa Tamaki, targeted the strongest Knights in individual combat. They didn’t always win, but they did garner enough attention to let their allies fight more appropriate opponents.

Finally, the rangers had once again proved their value. The archers consistently peppered the battlefield with arrows, most of which bore an enhancement that poisoned their enemies. At the same time, hordes of the melee-oriented rangers would erupt out of stealth and overwhelm strategic targets before melting back into the shadows.

But other than Zeke himself, Pudge was the real terror of the battlefield. He was constantly moving, bathing enemies in [Hellfire] or eviscerating huge swaths of Knights with his claws. Like the rangers, he was more than capable of using stealth, and from time to time, he did. Yet, he knew he was far more useful in a straight-up fight, largely because of a combination of the borrowed version of [Cambion’s Awakening] and the new armor the kobolds had given him. It was made all of black leather that was harder than steal, and it represented the peak of the kobold crafters’ achievements. Though those leatherworkers clearly had a long way to go, their product had proven adequate protection. As a result, they were already buy creating enough to outfit the entire army.

When Zeke had asked where they’d gotten all the hide, he’d discovered that they had repurposed the skin of the cyclops he’d killed in the dungeon. That revelation had come as quite a surprise to Zeke, who didn’t even realize that he’d looted anything but meat from the monster. Still, he could readily attest to the thing’s durability, so he wholeheartedly supported the endeavor.

Zeke took all that in over the space of a few seconds, then turned his attention to his next opponent. Like the previous one, this Knight was over level seventy, but he ended up being much easier to dispatch, largely because Zeke didn’t hesitate to use [Unleash Momentum], which remained his most devastating attack. It ripped through the stunned Knight as well as his cadre of followers that Zeke suspected intended to gang up on him the moment he was knocked off balance.

He had no intention of enduring that kind of situation, so he’d chosen to preempt it. Fortunately, he didn’t have to worry about collateral damage because he hadn’t stored the maximum amount of momentum. It was just enough to send that group of Knights flying backwards, their bones broken and their bodies pummeled into submission. As they landed, Zeke embraced [Hell Geyser], ending their lives.

The leader hadn’t been tossed backward, but he hadn’t fared very well, either. As a result, he was too stunned to react to Zeke’s next attack, which took him in the chest with every point of strength Zeke could muster. As the Knight was knocked backward, Zeke once again used [Center of Gravity] to keep his opponent in range. After that, the localized fight devolved into a series of unfettered attacks that soon ended the Knight’s life.

That’s when Zeke turned his attention to the larger battle, assisting where he could, but mostly plunging into the largest concentration of Knights, where he wrought havoc in their midst. Without any higher-leveled Knights to challenge him, the results were predictably brutal, which meant that the battle was already over.

The Knights just weren’t aware of it yet.

To their credit, they fought hard, and for the longest time, they refused to surrender. However, once their numbers had been cut down to a mere fraction of what they were at the beginning of the battle, they began to surrender.

Not all of them did, though. There were enough holdouts that the fight lasted well into the night. But eventually, Zeke and his army came out on top, ending a battle that had begun days before when he and his people had been baited into an ambush. It wasn’t all that different from the tactic Zeke’s people had utilized before entering the labyrinth, and it was a sign that he and his people were not immune to being outmaneuvered.

Fortunately, though, they’d managed to survive the initial onslaught, and through Zeke’s contributions, they had broken the would-be anvil, mitigating the viability of the Knights’ hammer. Still, thousands of kobolds, beastkin, and centaurs had perished in the fight, and that was with everything after the initial ambush going their way. If the Knights had been any more competent, it might have ended in a rout.

Such thoughts flitted through Zeke’s head as he scanned the battlefield, the head of his hammer resting against the ground. Ever since being reborn, he’d become well acclimated to death. However, war was a very different beast, and he didn’t think he’d ever get used to such large scale slaughter.

It was the smell that really did him in – a curious mix of blood, the early stages of rot, and feces – eliciting a visceral reaction that was impossible to endure without dwelling on what it meant.

But there was one well-established benefit of so much killing. Not only did it give his army the experience they needed to function as a well-oiled machine, but it also gave them the kill energy they needed to progress in levels. And if the army’s average level rose by even a few, the power they could bring to bear would grow significantly. And Zeke expected that they would need it before the war was done.

They’d barely made it a few miles out of the labyrinth before having to fight the latest bloody battle, and Zeke was certain that they’d only seen the tip of the iceberg. There were many more fights to come.

From a personal perspective, though, Zeke had finally reached level fifty-five, which came with another skill choice. Before he got into that, though, he inspected his status for the first time in what felt like forever:

Name

Ezekiel Blackwood

Class

Arcane Colossus

Level

55

Race

Cambion (F)

Attunement

Earth (E), Demon (E)

Alignment

Unchosen

Titles

n/a

Path

Arcane Destruction (D)

Strength (S+)

70

Agility (C)

27

Dexterity (B)

27

Endurance (S+)

68

Vitality (C)

25

Intelligence (A)

36

Wisdom (S)

38

Resistances

Fire

Ice

Water

Earth

Wind

Nature

Arcane

Poison

Disease

S+

D

E

S+

E

D

B

C

D

In addition to the normal automatic point allocation from his {Arcane Colossus} class, he’d used his two free points per level to raise his vitality, agility, and dexterity. It probably wasn’t the most effective strategy, but he hated leaving those stats at such low levels. Soon, though, he intended to start investing even more points into strength and endurance.

Regardless, he was making significant progress in terms of levels, but he knew that wouldn’t last much longer. Eveline had often spoken of how steep the climb to the peak became once a person progressed into the seventies. And the twenty-five levels after that often took decades, at the least.

Zeke intended to make the climb much more quickly, though he wasn’t certain how he intended to accomplish that. In any case, if he ended up having to take the slow and steady approach, then that was what he would do. He was in no hurry, after all.

Over the next few hours, the kobolds poured out of the gate Zeke summoned and commenced with the clean-up. They looted everything, stripping corpses of anything that might be remotely valuable. Even if the armor, clothes, and weapons wouldn’t fit the kobolds, beastkin, or centaurs, they still made for valuable materials that the budding kobold crafters were more than eager to utilize.

Meanwhile, the centaurs and rangers chased down any of the Knights that had tried to escape. Those would not survive long. Finally, a contingent of centurions and beastkin guarded the Knights who’d chosen to surrender. The prisoners knelt on the ground, stripped of the armor and weapons and surrounded by hostile kobolds as well as vengeful beastkin. It was clear what the latter wanted to do, but the kobolds were mostly indifferent.

Zeke was taken back to his brief conversation with Adara.

The Jail had continued to expand, so space wouldn’t be an issue. However, the question of what to do with the Knights lingered. The easiest thing to do would be to simply dispose of them. There were plenty of low-level kobolds who could use a few easy levels. Yet, Zeke struggled with that. He’d killed hundreds of Knights by that point, but there was something vastly different about executing unarmed prisoners and killing an enemy in battle.

Eventually, he would have to decide what to do with them.

But for now, Zeke was more worried about an impending decision. After all, with level fifty-five had come a new trio of skill options from which to choose. So, after making certain that the area was secure, Zeke retreated into the tower, headed to the Lord’s Manor, and took the time to shower before settling onto his bed to look at his choices.