Godsforsaken

 

Chapter 17: Storming The Castle

Once again, Alisha had used the final shift to get a pot of oatmeal cooking so we had a filling breakfast to last us through the day. After I woke up I came up behind her, pulled her close, and kissed her cheek. She giggled and handed me a bowl of the sweet stuff. She'd seasoned it with cinnamon and my stomach growled at the scent. I had never been much of a fan of the slop but Alisha managed to convert me as she actually cooked it long enough so that it wasn't gritty and disgusting but not so long that it got slimy and mushy.

After breakfast it was only a two hour trek until the castle loomed over us. It was built from gleaming black stone, the back of it protected by a rocky overhang that made going in from behind impossible and going in from above impossible without climbing gear. The front sported a small tower to the left and another to the right as well as a large portcullis in the middle. There was a small courtyard behind it, so small that it would have been filled to the brim by even a moderate group of orcs, and beyond that was the keep, which spiraled up to a single large tower and I was curious whether the throne room was at ground level or all the way at the top of the tower.

I would have liked to simply collapse the entire tower and kill the Dark Lord that way, but on the one hand the tower was way too large and sturdy for that tactic and on the other hand we needed the Gjallarhorn miracle to break the portcullis so we wouldn't have access to it once inside.

“We could break the portcullis today and then come back tomorrow once the miracle has recharged”, Selene suggested.

“Not an option”, I told her, a touch of regret in my voice. “As much as I'd love to do that, by tomorrow the castle will be fixed. As I said, Dark Lords' castles are magical in nature and so long as the Lord lives they regenerate. We need to do the entire break-in on the same day.”

“Shame”, she said. “Any other ideas before we go in?”

“Sure”, I said. “I suggest we stay in the courtyard as little as possible. It's a wide open space where we can be surrounded and where enemies from the tower can throw or shoot things at us. Inside the keep, meanwhile, they are restricted by the width of the hallways, which makes it harder for them to overwhelm us with numbers. And depending on how narrow the hallways are, Alisha will be able to clear them for us with air lances.”

“That reminds me”, Alisha said, “should I enhance you for this?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. Let's keep some tricks in reserve. I also don't want you”, I nodded at Selene, “to use either of your other miracles yet. We need the Gjallarhorn to get in but the other two we should save for the Dark Lord and whatever personal guard he keeps around.”

“I've never fought a Dark Lord before. Are they really that tough?”, Selene asked.

“Depends”, I said. “As I said, they have different classes, same as adventurers. There's the special type that Alisha's Chosen One was sent to slay. He wasn't actually that tough or strong but only a Chosen One could pierce his skin and kill him. Then there's physically powerful ones, terrifying mages, trap masters and beast masters. I hate those because they usually pull out some giant monster you need to fight your way through before you can get to them and when you finally do they have some other annoying pets like a pack of wolves or something that fights alongside them. Also, you need to remember that just like how you were given access to divine miracles, so was the Dark Lord.”

“Great”, she said. “And there's no way of knowing what kind we're dealing with?”

I shrugged and said: “You can make guesses if you know what god granted their powers but you usually have to see them face to face to find that out.”

“So nothing we can plan for?”, she asked.

“Sadly no”, I said.

“Well that just means we need to get a move on”, she said and marched to the portcullis. She was finally growing into the Chosen One role.

She stood firmly, her legs as far apart as her shoulders and her sword stabbed in the ground, then she yelled: “I am the Chosen One of the Goddess Freya! Open this gate for me or forever be branded as cowards!”

“What is she doing?”, Alisha hissed at me, barely above a whisper.

“I'm assuming she's trying to get us in without needing to use her Gjallarhorn”, I said. “That way we could use it on the keep itself.”

“Ooo, that would be useful.”

Sadly it was not to be as the only reaction Selene's challenge garnered was that the orc manning the portcullis spat down on her, hitting her armor right on the chest.

Selene shrugged and said “Your funeral” before unleashing her Gjallarhorn miracle. It blasted into the portcullis in much the same way as it had the watchtower yesterday, except all the bricks that were blasted backward smashed into the keep and the orcs and goblins streaming out of it to see what the racket was about. When the sound finally subsided the net result was a giant hole in the castle wall where the portcullis had been, a big hole in the wooden door of the keep, a dozen dead orcs and at least two dozen dead goblins, though their bodies were squashed so badly it was hard to say for certain. Once we entered the keep we saw a huge spiral staircase in front of us with two paths leading off to the sides.

“Straight ahead?”, Selene asked.

“No”, I said. “I will not have anything ambushing us from behind. We'll check the left, then the right, and then we go up the stairs.”

**

The room to the left turned out to be the living area of the troops, with a large amount of empty cots and a large kitchen and from the quality of the food I was fairly certain the kitchen was just for the troops and there was a second kitchen providing for the Dark Lord and his strongest warriors, probably somewhere higher up the tower. The girls had been horrified by what was being roasted over the fire but it wasn't the first time I'd seen the minions of a Dark Lord roasting up some... ah... long pig. Orcs weren't usually inclined to such a diet but working for a Dark Lord brought out the worst in them. Goblins, by stark contrast, had no ethical concerns with such a diet and sure enough, the chef turning the spit was in fact a goblin. The chef's hat on its head would have been funny if it hadn't been for the food he'd been cooking. We made short work of the goblins manning the kitchen and we even managed to find one human who was still alive and hadn't been strung up like a side of beef yet, probably so his meat wouldn't spoil, so we cut him loose and after thanking us he immediately legged it out of the keep.

The room to the right meanwhile led down a staircase to a dungeon, where we cleared out the three orc guards with zero difficulty and thankfully didn't find anyone being held in those cells.

Once we were done with both of the side paths we ascended the huge staircase, with Alisha holding a shield of air magic above and in front of us in case the defenders got ideas about hurling things down at us, but nothing happened.

Instead, when we reached the second floor we found a treasure trove of gold, gems, and golden tableware as well as pieces of gear strewn throughout that I assumed were magical items of some stripe or other. Less thrilling was the trio of orcs standing in front of us. Unlike the ones we'd been facing so far these three were clearly some sort of elite unit. Their armor was significantly thicker, they wore helmets, and instead of normal weapons they wore gauntlets with claws on them, three rusty blades sticking out of each, roughly ten inches in length. Sadly, despite the rust on them they looked more than sturdy enough to not fall apart immediately.

I scrambled to pull out a shield and a spear from my bag of holding and told the women to get behind me as the orcs leaned forward, spread their arms wide and let out their war cries, which sounded like loud, pig-like squeals. Then they came charging at us.

The center one slammed into my shield with his left shoulder, rocking me back a step, and tried to reach around the shield with his right claw to stab me but I preempted him by stabbing him with my spear. The armor was thick but didn't cover anywhere near enough and I thrust into his stomach at an upward angle and from the wheezing squeal I got in return I was pretty sure I'd stabbed the lung if not the heart. Then, a second later, the one on the right reached us but Selene stepped forward and past the orc and slashed up in a single motion, severing the arm that he'd tried to stab her with. The one on the left meanwhile ran face first into a wall of wind. His steps faltered, slowing down to a crawl as though he was walking through a storm, and then Alisha suddenly cut the gale off and thrust forward with her rapier, sending a lance of air magic into his exposed stomach that pierced all the way through, and a shower of blood came out the other side.

One punctured lung, one gut wound, and one amputation but none of them had had enough yet so I shoved forward with the shield to send the orc off-balance. Under normal circumstances I wouldn't have been able to shove an orc away but I'd clearly done enough damage to weaken him. Once he was reeling I dropped both the shield and the spear and pulled out a longsword and went for a horizontal spinning slash that ripped the blade through the orc's neck. It didn't quite decapitate the beast but between the pierced lung and the cut throat he dropped. Then I assessed the situation in a heartbeat. Selene's orc was still contemplating the loss of limb and had only just started to turn around while Alisha's orc was clutching his gut wound but staggered towards her. Judging by strength and size I should have turned to help Alisha but if I had I'd only have gotten in the way of her magic while I didn't have to worry about that if I went to help Selene. Additionally, Selene's orc had its back turned to me and I noticed that whoever had designed their armor to be tough and to look menacing had clearly only focused on the front as the back was mostly leather with very little metal.

So while Selene was looking for the best angle to avoid the other claw and take the other arm off I rammed my sword into the orc's heart from behind with a mighty two-handed thrust. I twisted the sword once to make sure the orc wouldn't survive it before pulling it out and turning back to Alisha whose orc had raised both arms to slam down onto her at once. Even if the beast was dying, that attack would have killed Alisha... if she'd given him the chance to finish. But instead she kept pelting it with air lance after air lance, the first bouncing off the chest armor, the second taking it in the shoulder and the third digging into its guts even more. When Alisha paused to pick a new target I decided to take pity on the orc and cut its throat from behind.

Two floors down, gods knew how many left, no injuries yet. So far, so good.

We made our way up to the third floor, deciding to only dig through the treasure hoard once we'd beaten the Dark Lord. On the third floor we were greeted by another kitchen, this one for the Dark Lord's personal use as evidenced by the lack of strung-up corpses. This kitchen, too, was manned by a crew of goblins and they'd created crude barricades by flipping all the tables on their sides and hiding behind them.

“This would so be a job for my ice storm”, Selene said wistfully, “but I know we need to save that so I guess this is your time to shine, Alisha.”

The elf nodded and created a hail of air lances that tore through the tables and into the goblins. One of them tried to get cute and sneaked up on Alisha with a kitchen knife but I pulled out my mace and turned the little shit into an ugly green smear on the ground before it ever reached her.

I wanted to make a snarky comment about this all being way too easy but I didn't want to jinx anything so I held my tongue.

The fourth floor was different. Instead of the spiral staircase continuing there was a proper double staircase leading up a single floor at the far end of the room. In our way stood a rather large group of goblins, upwards of three dozen, wielding knives and one slightly bigger goblin wearing robes and holding a staff.

“I hate goblin shamans”, I said to nobody in particular, then turned to my elven beauty. “Alisha, can I ask you to stand back and protect us from whatever spells that green shit”, I pointed at the shaman, “is going to cast at us while Selene and I wade in there and smash the other green shits?”

“With pleasure”, she said and the butterfly wings on her back beat once.

Selene drew her sword and I pulled out a long sword of my own.

“Competition to see who can kill more?”, she asked.

I smiled. “You're on.”

We charged forward, our swords drawn, and the goblin shaman began to chant something in the garbled syllables that pass for goblin language. A second later two pumpkin-sized purple orbs came streaking at us. They looked like liquid fire and smelled like boiling sewage but before they could get close to us they were swatted out of the air by Alisha's air magic. Instead of swatting them straight back, though, she angled them downward so they hit the advancing goblins and wherever they hit flesh they began melting through it, resulting in six goblins letting out high-pitched screams of agony before the acid completely ate through them and killed them.

By that time Selene and I were on the goblins and I couldn't focus on anything except my immediate surroundings. I started with a thrusting attack to use my forward momentum but had to angle it downward to actually hit the little shits and the attack took one goblin in the forehead and sunk right in. The goblin was stuck on my sword so I turned sideways into a spinning attack. At the height of my spin the goblin flew off my sword and then I angled my sword down to scare off the ones who'd advanced on me and actually managed to cut one that hadn't backed off enough across the face, killing it as well. In a perfect world the one I'd launched would have hit the goblin shaman and at least distracted him but instead I heard the chanting again, then another whoosh as his projectiles were slapped out of the air by Alisha and then more screams of pain. That shaman was pretty dumb for being the wise man of his people given that his own attacks had now caused more damage to the goblins than Selene and I combined. After the spinning attack I went for an overhead slam that crumpled another goblin, dead with a split skull.

Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my left leg and turned to see a goblin shoving a knife into it. I wanted to kick out but I'd seen Selene try and fail with that trick a few days ago so instead I took my left hand off my sword and simultaneously punched the goblin with my left and swung my sword through another with my right. Now, normal humans couldn't just do two completely different things with either hand, at least not in a high stress situation, the old 'patting your head while rubbing your tummy' thing, but in this case I didn't do two different things. Both my hands were clenched, one empty and one holding a sword, and I used both of them for the same motion while turning my upper body to the right. The goblin I'd punched went flying so hard he took his knife with him. Thankfully it'd been a very thin knife and the wound wasn't big enough to cripple me, so I kept going. My empty hand went back to my sword and I turned back to the left, pulling my sword down with a diagonal swing to my lower left, cutting through two more goblins.

I'd fought enough goblins to know what was coming next so I kicked out like a mule and sure enough I felt my foot connecting with a goblin's face, crumpling its nose and sending him flying backward. Then I drew my sword through a horizontal slash that caught two more, pulled my crossbow out of my bag of holding, turned around and shot the one who'd tried to stab me in the back right between the eyes.

Nine down and they finally let up enough for me to take stock. Selene was surrounded by a huddle of dead goblins, her sword in one hand and her buckler in the other. It wasn't a big shield but she used it perfectly, deflecting whatever came her way and then slashing and stabbing in careful, measured attacks that didn't leave her exposed. She'd started the contest but she was clearly playing defensively. I chanced a quick look at Alisha and there were a few dead goblins close to her. Apparently some of them had thought about sneaking around the fighting to attack our supporter but all of them had fist-sized holes in their bodies and none of them had even gotten within fifteen feet of her.

The goblins that were focused on me had paused for a moment but had found their courage again and were coming at me once more so I pulled a halberd from my bag of holding. I didn't like to use it much because it was so unwieldy but right now unwieldy would just mean devastating. As I swung it through a low horizontal arc I caught six goblins with it. Two were hit by the weapon's head and the force of the blow actually bisected them while the other four were hit by the handle and went flying, their bodies broken. This time I actually did manage to toss one right at the goblin shaman and he fell over under the force of the thrown goblin, though both of them were still alive. But, just as I'd hoped, Alisha used the moment's distraction to send a dozen air lances in the shaman's direction, skewering him and the three goblins closest to him.

Then I heard her yell “Selene, Felix, back off!” and both of us scrambled back before she unleashed another barrage of air lances that took out most of the other goblins. Three were still stumbling around and after a brief look at Selene we ran at them, trying to kill them before the other could. I killed one, then ran to the other and when I rammed my sword through the second, I felt Selene's sword enter it from the other side a fraction of a second later.

“That one was mine, I stabbed it first”, I told her.

“I stabbed it through the heart, that means I killed it”, she replied.

Alisha started giggling at our antics and told us: “It doesn't matter, neither of you won.” Selene and I turned around and looked at her. She added: “I killed nineteen and the shaman. You”, she pointed at me, “killed somewhere around a dozen, you”, she pointed at Selene, “killed nine or ten. That means I beat both of you.”

“You didn't even take part!”, Selene countered.

“So?”, Alisha asked.

I just chuckled and pulled out a healing potion for the stab in my leg and a few cuts I'd suffered. Once I had downed about two thirds I handed the rest to Selene when I spotted a few cuts on her. By the time I handed the vial over my wounds were already gone.

“You know I could have healed that, right?”, Alisha asked, slightly annoyed.

“Sure”, I said, “but your miracles are too valuable to waste on small things like this. Save them for the main event.”

That seemed to mollify her and we continued to the throne room.

“Game plan?”, Selene asked.

“I'll pull out a shield, you two stand behind me. If there's only a few guards, Alisha takes them out with air magic. If there's a big group between us and the Dark Lord you use your ice storm. I do not want to deal with a group while there's a Dark Lord chucking spells or miracles downrange. Once the way is clear we try to assess what the guy is capable of and go from there. Unless either of you have a better idea?”, I added, looking at them.

They shook their heads, so we headed up.

At the end of the final stairway there was a large set of double doors.

I asked: “Alisha, would you like to start us out with a bang?”

She nodded and stepped forward, the butterfly wings erupting from her back. Instead of thrusting with her rapier she threw her arms forward, her wings beating forward, and an almost solid column of air slammed into the doors, throwing them open with a shockingly loud bang as the metal decorations slammed against the stone walls.

At the far end of the wall sat the Dark Lord on a throne that looked... weird. At first glance I thought it was made out of bone. It certainly had the beige color, but instead of obvious bone shapes it looked scaly, though not smooth enough to be made from lizard hide. Behind the throne was a stone statue, easily twenty feet tall, depicting a naked man with long billowing hair holding a stone sword in a ceremonial stance.

The Dark Lord himself was less armored than most of them were. He wore leggings and gauntlets made out of a material that took me a while to identify as burnt copper but instead of wearing a matching chest piece he wore a much lighter suit of scale mail. Unlike the last Dark Lord, whose skin had been purple and leathery and whose face I was glad I'd never gotten to see, this one looked mostly human. His skin was a bit pink in color as if he was suffering a bad case of sunburn and his hair was snow white with a crown in it that sort of matched the one Selene wore.

Sitting on his throne it was hard to gauge his height but I was pretty sure he was taller than the average human male, tall and spindly but with a runner's build. He had one leg crossed over his knee and a saber was balanced on the arm rests of the throne, parallel to the ground. He also looked entirely unconcerned about us barging in, which might have had something to do with the two orcs flanking the throne and more to do with the three dozen goblins between us and him.

I pulled out my shield and the girls got behind me just as he started to monologue. As he spoke, a sweet scent started to fill the air. “So, finally the gods have sent their lapdog to slay me. It took them long enough. And even worse, they sent a girl. A girl cowering behind the shield of her better. But no matter. My master gave me all the power I need to destroy the likes of you and an army so I don't even need those powers.” He said the last part while waving at his goblins, who advanced on us.

“We already killed most of your army, bub”, I called out as Selene cast her ice storm miracle at the goblins.

The sweet smell was now pronounced and I had to blink a couple of times to be able to see the goblins falling over in the ice storm. When it lifted most of them were frozen to death but a few were left and cautiously advanced, but kept a healthy distance away from us as if worried about something. I wanted to tell Alisha to blast them but speaking seemed too much work and a second later holding up the shield did as well. I blinked hard a couple of times as the shield clattered to the floor and on the third blink I wondered why the Dark Lord was suddenly sideways. It took me a moment to realize that the Dark Lord was still standing and I was the one lying on the ground. The last things I noticed before I lost consciousness were the Dark Lord's cackling and the goblins dragging Selene towards the throne.