The breath left her lips in a plume of white vapor that curled upward against the cold winter air, hot from the exertion, the bloodlust, the warmth still pooling beneath the Beloved mark on her belly. The faintest trace of crimson misted off the katana in the same updraft, painting the vapor pink.
The Venomborne Terror stood in the ruins of what she had done with her dark hair falling across a face devoid of emotion, looking up at him through the rising heat of her own breath.
Her hand pressed against her belly, fingers spreading across the Beloved mark, and the mark blazed violet beneath her palm, bright enough to burn through her clothing.
The pulse that erupted from it shot upward toward the man in the sky like a flare.
Across the circle of the dead, serpent marks seared themselves into every corpse's forehead in the same instant, violet brands that hissed against cold skin and burned bright enough to cast shadows on the soldiers standing over them.
Then the dead began to move.
A dwarven soldier outside the circle noticed first, and he released a frantic, guttural scream filled with the raw terror of a man watching a corpse sit up with violet light where its eyes had been.
"T-t-t-the d-d-d-d-dead!"
The corpses rose in perfect sync, and the first thing every living soldier noticed was how deeply wrong their movement was.
Gorthrax's horde had been shambling across the battlefield, and everyone on this field knew what reanimated corpses looked like: slow, mechanical, predictable, bodies driven forward by will that was not their own.
The dwarven captain she had bisected pushed to his feet with a fluidity that made the soldiers watching stumble backward.
His legs found balance in a single motion and his body settled into a low serpentine crouch the captain had never once used in life, weight forward, his hand curled like a claw.
Every puppet that followed rose the same way. The same posture, the same predatory economy, the same coiled readiness that belonged to one person and one person only.
Purple light burned behind their eyes with the cold patience of serpents studying prey, and the mindless shells that should have been lurching forward like every other animated corpse on this battlefield instead moved with the sharp, purposeful aggression of the deadliest woman on the continent, because that was exactly what was piloting them.
The serpent tattoos that had crawled from Black Fang's skin into her blade had done far more than coat the steel.
Every kill [Damnation's Fang] made deposited a fragment of that infusion into the wound it carved, a sliver of venom carrying with it a trace of the bat instinct and killing drive that the Venomborne Terror had refined into her very marrow.
The corpses were empty, bereft of anything that had once made them who they were, but the serpent threading through their dead muscles did not need a mind to make them dangerous.
It needed a predator's will.
And the worst predator of all had given them hers.
Quinlan's Beloveds had each claimed a different facet of the Bloodfather's power, most drawing on his elements and some on Nyxara's demonic traits.
But Black Fang had reached for the darkest pillar of them all.
The Venomborne Terror had bee the Primordial Villain's fang, and what the fang cut, the villain claimed.
Above the battlefield, Quinlan's [Soul Reaper] erupted without him having willed anything.
Pale blue flames roared to life along the saber's edge with a hunger that pressed down on the field like a second gravity.
The souls of Black Fang's slain answered.
They ripped free of the corpses in pale blue streamers, tearing upward from the wounds she had carved, one after another after another, a river of screaming light that poured from the circle of the dead and rushed toward the burning saber in the sky.
Black Fang's violet eyes remained on Quinlan throughout the ordeal, and the look that passed between them as the souls streamed upward needed no words at all.
The continent's most feared killer had activated the Primordial Villain's [Eternal Damnation] of her own accord and every soul she'd harvested was given to him on a silver platter.
Quinlan's saber drank them all. The lesser souls dissolved first, their pale blue fire feeding into the blade.
The [Necromantic Codex] appeared - still without Quinlan having cast anything himself - and the fusion began.
Dozens of weaker flames pressed into the few that had carried real power, officers and elites and manders forged from the fuel of the rank and file.
Then, the saber released them.
Pale blue flames cascaded down from the sky like falling stars.
Where they struck the ground beside Black Fang's purple-eyed puppets, bodies began to form. Blue skin stretched over new bone. Faces took shape. Armor condensed from flame into steel, and soldiers who had been dead seconds ago opened their eyes for a second time, except these eyes burned pale blue.
The dwarven captain materialized first, intact and upright, standing beside his own bisected corpse that crouched in a serpentine stance with purple fire churning behind its dead eyes.
The soul looked down at the two halves of the body it had been ripped from. The body looked back with an expression that had never belonged to the captain in life.
One kill.
Two soldiers.
Officers and elites followed, each reforming in pale blue skin beside the purple-eyed puppet that wore their face, and every living soldier watching the circle understood what Black Fang's kills truly cost.
She split you in half and put both halves to work.
The body served her. The soul served him.
Despite Quinlan having his lips covered by Synchra's armor, Black Fang could tell.
She could tell far too well.
The grin that crossed his face.
His eyes danced with something warm and insufferably smug, and the Beloved mark on her abdomen pulsed with a question so clear she could feel it in her teeth.
Having your belly marked isn't so bad after all, is it?
Black Fang's eyes narrowed at him so dangerously the nearest puppet flinched, then she looked away.
Her gaze found Chizuru.
The old woman took a step backward. It was involuntary, the first uncontrolled movement the elder had made in decades, and the color that had already drained from her face finished the job until she was ashen from jaw to hairline.
"You unholy abomination… May the Goddess show you the light…"
The katana twirled once in Black Fang's grip, a slow serpentine revolution that caught the pale blue light falling from above and the violet glow burning from below and scattered both across the ashen faces of the Fujimori elders, and when the blade settled its tip was leveled at the old woman's heart.
"Kill."
One word from Black Fang, barely louder than a breath, and both armies moved.
Purple-eyed puppets surged forward from the circle of the dead in the same instant the blue-skinned elites broke into a disciplined charge beside them, two forces born from a single massacre launching toward the Fujimori line in perfect, terrible synchrony, and the battlefield that had gone silent in horror found its voice again in screams.
Reviews
All reviews (0)