For week after week, Leo slaughtered his way through the countryside. Without anyone with him, he could go further and faster than ever before, and he gloried in it. Several tis, he found a lone family sheltering in a cave or a farmhouse sowhere well off the beaten path. Each ti, he told them where wayward was and how to get there, using the landmarks of his quest to guide them around anywhere he considered dangerous.
He didn’t accompany them, though, and he had no idea if they made it to safety or not. He felt guilty about that. The right answer would have been to cease his quest and make sure every one of those lives was saved, but every day not spent purging the darkness felt like it would be a waste to him. He had a sword that could not be resisted glowing in his hand and a light that was only burning brighter in his heart.
Food, or the lack of it, no longer held him back. He could make his own bread when he had need of it, but it was the light that fed him now, and the only real nourishnt he needed was after he’d been wounded, which happened on more than one occasion. Each battle where he was wounded badly enough to need to repair his armor afterward was a wake-up call for him. So small part of his mind told him that if he wasn’t careful, he would fall, and no one would ever find his body.
He wasn’t one to back down from a challenge, though. Every near-death experience only taught him what not to do in the future, and he learned from each of them, be they a horde of zombies or a floating brain with tentacles that had tried to make him kill himself without much luck.
Leo slowly circled around Rahkin, planning to co at it from the north after he’d purged the various dungeons that surrounded it. They vented evil like volcanic geysers and were impossible to miss. Soon, he was able to gauge the threat of whatever lay within based solely on the color and thickness of the miasma. That made him overconfident and almost cost him his life when he found one of them full of strange, rusted n.
He had fought all manner of abominations, including many that were made of obvious animal parts, but these were the first he’d seed that weren’t human in any way. At first, he thought they were children trapped in iron armor, which was a horrific thought. But as he’d discovered that the strange ta n knew how to fight better than almost any war zombie he’d ever faced, he quickly reached another conclusion.
“Dwarves,” he grunted as he parried the blow from a deadly axe.
Such creatures were a myth, but there was nothing else that made sense with the beards and the weapons. He’d always thought that dwarves were made of flesh and blood, but maybe the stories got it wrong. Perhaps they were creatures of stone and tal, and when the Lich reanimated them, they rose up just the sa.
He didn’t have a lot of ti to consider the question while he was fighting them, though. They weren’t so fast, but they were skilled and strong. Worse, unlike most of the abominations he’d put down, they actually exhibited teamwork, which made their combined attacks that much worse.
Even after he’d dispatched the creatures and studied their remains, he still couldn’t decide if the things that had almost cut him off at the knees were really mythological creatures that had been returned from the dead or if they were mockeries of the myths. “Why would a monster do such a thing, though?” he asked himself. Surely, such tricks required a sense of humor, or at least irony, and the dead had no room for anything but hunger in their souls.
Those thoughts stuck with him for a while after that. Until now, he’d assud that the creatures he faced, from the ragged birds to the centaurs made from the rotting remains of plow horses and farrs, were no more than the scraps that the darkness had on hand at the ti, but sotis, he found creatures that made that seem less likely. Twice, he found rotting Templars whose rotting forms had been covered with very shiny armor in a mockery of the light, and in the second case, the man exploded with a thick yellowish gas when Leo put him down.
That had made him sick for days while the light healed his burned lungs from the inside out. “At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a dragon,” he said to himself once he finished coughing up blood.
Eventually, though, he decided he was just dragging his feet. For so long, he’d told himself he needed to go into Rahkin, and now that it was there, on the horizon, he kept finding reasons not to go. There was evil out here that needed purging. His friends would look for him there. He thought of any reason except the real one: There might be sothing in that shadow-shrouded city he couldn’t beat.
Oh, it was one thing to secretly believe you could do anything and kill any abomination that existed, but sothing had killed Brother Faerbar, and no matter how hard Leo practiced and how many of the walking dead he slew, he doubted he would hold a candle to that man.
Still, on the day Leo purged the last of the barrows he could find, he reluctantly decided that tomorrow would be the day he would find out what was really in there. The result was… underwhelming.
At first light he entered the town to find it halfway leveled. There was nothing left within the walls that resembled life. He could find neither crows nor rats. He couldn’t even find creeping ivy that wasn’t withered and brown. Sothing awful had happened here. He was sure of it. He didn’t know what, but it had drained every last ounce of light and life that might have ever existed in that place.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Still, that was all the more reason to stay and wait to see what ca out at night. That night, after he finished exploring the city for any sign of survivors, he chose the largely intact castle as the place where he would have his fight. He took the last few hours to prepare the ground and barred what doors he could to ensure he wouldn’t be surrounded, and he’d have several fallback locations if he’d truly bitten off more than he could chew. What found him at sunset was underwhelming, at least at first.
When the red sunlight finally faded and was replaced by the cold, distant stars, the first creatures to scuttle out of cellars and crannies in the rubble where the mangled pieces of zombies who had been killed at least once before waited out the day away from the sun’s harsh light. None of them had all four limbs, and few of them had more than one or two, making them easy to dispatch as they crawled forward in a quest to devour his light.
He was glowing literally now. That was a first, even for him. He barely took note of it while he was hacking the monsters to pieces, but when he did, he doubted it would last once he left this cursed place. After all, anything halfway to decent would burn with light in a place so dark, and no matter how many souls he set free, the miasma clung to everything like a stubborn fog.
Those dead were rely the warm-up act, though. Other, larger, broken things ca after that. There was the upper half of an armored ogre that had long since lost its legs, there was a giant spider made from the parts of n that only had five limbs and three eyes left to attack him with, and there were a few war zombies that were still in mostly decent shape, though there was nothing special about them otherwise.
None of them stood a chance. Oh, the ogre could certainly have killed Leo if it had gotten a grip on him with those giant hands. They ripped out a door fra without an issue, and he doubted his bones would fare any better. Still, it couldn’t turn fast enough to stop him from climbing its exposed spine like a ladder and embedding his glowing sword deep into its thick skull.
The spider hadn’t even been that hard. Maybe when it had been fresh, it had been a quick, dangerous enemy. Now, it was simply an arthritic zombie on stilts, which again made him wonder about whatever it was that had created it. Sothing or soone had labored for months and years to create this panoply of horrors, and he had trouble imagining that.
Once those monsters were dispatched, Leo was starting to grow confident. At least until he felt the ground start to rumble and shake. It didn't take him long to realize that sothing was attacking the castle because it was too large to get at him inside. So, he went up top of the battlent to take a look. The result wasn’t quite a dragon, but it might as well have been.
Soone had taken the broken pieces of sunken ships, the severed parts of sea monsters, and a seemingly endless variety of human hands and feet and created a three-story hermit crab. The thing was vile, and even after all of Leo’s experience up until now, the sll made him gag.
When his light showed up on the parapet, the thing noticed him imdiately, but it was much too large to climb, so it continued to attack the wall, as it alternated between roaring in frustration and
Still, he mounted the battlent and prepared to jump.
Leo had no doubt he could jump onto its back. He just had no idea how he was supposed to kill the thing. The other creatures had been easy enough. Even the ogre had an obvious weak point, but this thing? It was armored in three inches of wood, and under that, it was nothing but a writing mass of evil.
He studied the problem while the beast thrashed and flailed, and then when he identified what he thought was a cluster of eyes, he decided to make that his target. “I’d rather fight the dragon,” he said with more than a little disgust before he finally lept down to the monstrosity fifteen feet below.
In that mont, Leo had considered a lot of things. He’d considered where he would land and how he should strike. He’d considered his escape plan and the thing’s reach. The one thing he hadn’t considered, though, was how slimy it was. He’d never fought a sea monster before, and when he landed on its rough back, his legs instantly went out from under him, sending him sliding down the thing’s back toward its many limbs.
Leo buried the silver blade into the thing’s side, using it to slow his descent, but as it moved, his hand slipped, and he was sent tumbling to the thick wood of the drawbridge. He was up imdiately but imdiately wasn’t fast enough for this thing. It wasn’t a dried-out, desiccated husk like so many of the creatures he’d fought up until now. Its movents were fast and slick. And before he could do more than rise, rotting tentacles had wrapped around the young man and were slowly squeezing the life out of him.
Leo’s life flashed before his eyes for a mont as he looked at the glittering hilt of his magical sword embedded in the monster a dozen feet away. If I had that, I could cut myself free, he thought into despair. That mont of weakness was dispelled when the thing began to crush him even tighter as it dragged him toward its maw. The thing wasn’t a proper mouth. It was just a cavern lined with rusting swords; it was nothing but a mockery of life, and it was that mont of indignity that made his light shine brighter.
Leo Garvin the Fifth would not go out like this. He would not let the darkness take him as it had his forebearers. Leo struggled as hard as he could against the vice-like grip, determined to use its slimy nature to his advantage. It did nothing, though.
Well, nothing, physically. His light had been visible as an aura nearly all evening in this vile place, but the more he struggled and fought, the brighter it grew. Eventually, only a few feet from rotting, certain death, the thing’s tentacles burst into fla, and it shied away as Leo’s light began to take a real toll on the creature.
He thought about pressing his luck but decided against it. First, he needed his blade. Even his silver sword glowed when he pulled it out of the creature, and that made him smile grimly. As it tried to move away from him, flailing widely, he thought about pressing the fight but decided it was too risky. He could feel his broken ribs still trying to nd, and he knew that light or not, he wasn’t at 100% yet.
Instead, he pulled back, and before the thing could leave the drawbridge, he attacked the chains holding the thing in place. Each severed cleanly with a single stroke from his radiant blade, sending the bridge and the giant crab zombie tumbling into the dried-up moat. It fell there, hopelessly pinned, which was good enough for Leo.
“Let the sun take you,” he spat as he went back inside. He would find a place to heal and rest, and then, in the morning, he would continue his purge. If there were still things like this around, then there was more work to do.
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