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Board & Conquest 30: Lord of Flies
🕑 Added 2025-03-06 08:56:16 +0000 UTC--------
The blow caved her breast plate in, shattered ribs, and nearly killed her on the spot.
Victoire had heard old soldiers who narrowly avoided death telling her that they had relieved parts of their life a moment at the instant of truth. She couldn’t boast the same in her case. All Victoire could say was that when she finally landed on the debris of the wall Grudu punched her through, she became acutely aware that the weremammoth was charging straight at her for the kill. She barely had time to look up to see him about to kick her like a child playing ball.
Victoire’s skin turned to bark a second before the foot struck.
She felt her god’s power flowing through her and softening Grudu’s blow, turning it from almost certainly lethal to merely agonizingly painful. It still sent her flying through another wall though.
The ribs the weremammoth had broken with the first impact healed within her chest before she even hit the cold and surprisingly soft ground. Victoire had somehow landed on snow amidst frozen houses in an empty street, and it only took her a glance at the cloudy sky above her head to realize what happened.
Grudu had thrown her so hard she ended up on a street outside the western keep.
“Ugh…” Victoire forced herself back to her feet, struggling against the pain in her chest. “That hurt…”
“Can you stand, Victoire?” her god asked her telepathically.
“I think so.” Victoire glanced at her chest. Grudu’s first blow had caved her breastplate in, and the second would have likely pulverized her internal organs without Lord Wepwawet’s magic hardening her skin into thick wood. “You saved my life.”
“Not for long,” her god replied grimly. “Run!”
Victoire heard Grudu’s thundering roar a few seconds before he burst out of the western keep with murder on his mind. The weremammoth shattered the stone walls in his way and charged across the street, the ground shaking with each step.
Victoire quickly dodged the charge by leaping to the side of the icy road. Grudu tried to turn to intercept her, but a combination of the cold, slippery ice floor and his momentum caused him to stumble and crash face-first against a frozen house. The front wall collapsed under his weight, but it didn’t diminish his rage in the slightest.
“Big Guy, calm down!” Mistouffe shouted from atop the weremammoth. She vainly tried to steer him by pulling at his ears, to no avail. “Bad Grudu!”
“What’s happening to him?” Victoire asked while catching her breath. Her enraged ally was already rising back to his feet for round two.
“The enemy has taken control of his mind!” Wepwawet telepathically informed Victoire. “I can’t break him out of it!”
Victoire clenched her jaw. That was bad, very bad. “Any way to restrain him then?”
“I might, but not yet. You’ll need to buy time until I can freeze him like I did with the dragon.”
“Wait,” Victoire muttered to herself, an idea crossing her mind. She had still managed to hang onto her spear and shield in spite of Grudu’s repeated hits. “I can freeze him too.”
She channeled frost magic through her spear and readied herself for Grudu’s next attack. The weremammoth lunged at her and attempted to smash her with his fist. Victoire hastily dodged, the punch turning the spot where she stood a second ago into a crater, and she retaliated by grazing his leg.
Victoire knew she couldn’t wound the weremammoth even if she wanted to from their previous encounter, and the way her spear failed to pierce through his thick hide only confirmed it.
However, she had managed to freeze a few targets with her spear’s magic in the past—including Goreville—and Grudu had spent centuries frozen in ice. She didn’t need to harm her rabid ally, only to restrain him. The issue was that the freezing effect was random as far as she could tell.
“It’s roughly one hit out of ten for now, if that helps,” Lord Wepwawet tried to reassure her.
It didn’t, but Victoire was too busy avoiding being gored by Grudu’s tusks to answer. She struck back at his trunk, her blade narrowly missing his eye. Two.
She needed eight more hits, and he only needed to hit her once. Wonderful.
“Mistouffe, blind him!” Victoire ordered her ally as Grudu attempted to squash her under his foot. Mistouffe hastily covered the weremammoth’s left eye—being too small to blind him entirely—and Victoire leaped in that direction. The half-blinded weremammoth only stomped snow and Victoire’s spear grazed his knee. Three!
An annoyed Grudu then roared and tried to shake Mistouffe off his body. The agile werecat quickly climbed along his back and narrowly avoided being slapped aside, which allowed Victoire to strike him again in the leg. Four!
Getting so close proved to be a mistake though. Grudu kicked Victoire again, her bark-skin cracking at the edge and her back hitting a frozen house. She felt the snow hitting her face through the wood, and then barely managed to roll to the side to avoid being trampled to death by the next charge. She quickly rose up and landed a quick hit on Grudu’s thigh.
Five! Halfway there! Victoire smiled ear to ear, her blood rushing to her head. I can win this!
Grudu grunted, turned at the nearest home, grabbed its facade… and then tore it apart.
Victoire’s heart skipped a beat as she watched the weremammoth rip out a wall of stone bare-handed and then raise it above his head like a plank. He turned to face her with bloodshot eyes.
“GRUDU!” he roared to the sky while preparing to squash Victoire like a fly.
As if on cue, Lord Wepwawet’s magic ceased working at that very moment. Victoire steadied her spear as the bark covering her turned back into skin. Five more…
Then a bolt of ethereal magic struck Grudu in the back without warning.
The weremammoth barely had time to look behind his back before ice surged from the point of impact and began to spread across his back. Grudu immediately attempted to shake it off, his muscles cracking the frozen cocoon that threatened to engulf him.
That’s my chance! Victoire immediately exploited the giant wereling’s distraction to lunge forward and strike him in the leg. Six!
She beat the odds.
Her spear surged with sorcerous power that swiftly engulfed Grudu alive in a frozen prison, wall-club and all. Mistouffe leaped off his shoulders to avoid being trapped in the effect alongside him, and the weremammoth’s roars soon turned silent, his body trapped in an expression of pure savage rage.
Victoire faced the statue of ice that Grudu had turned into, breathed in relief, and then glanced at the western keep. Wintresse stood atop a pile of debris the weremammoth had left in his wake, her staff still simmering with power.
“It was a beautiful icing, wouldn’t you agree?” Wintresse asked Victoire. “I assume freezing that creature was your intention behind all that splendid spearplay, yes?”
“It was,” Victoire confirmed. While part of her was slightly unhappy that she required an ally to help her out rather than winning by herself, she did feel satisfaction upon landing the final blow. I guess we can’t expect our god to do all the work. “Thank you.”
“Oh, good. And here I feared I should have killed the mad pachyderm where he stood.”
Victoire had no idea what a pachyderm was, but she knew better than to answer that. Filou escorted Kale and the surviving wereling soldiers outside, with her squire offering her former fellow knight one of their healing potions to help him recover.
“I’m sorry, Vicky, I couldn’t calm him down,” Mistouffe apologized. “Will he be alright?”
“He has already spent centuries this way, so it should feel like little more than a nap for him,” Victoire reassured her. She hoped that the mind-control effect would have worn off by then.
“There’s no time to waste on chit chat!” Lord Wepwawet telepathically warned them. “Leave Grudu where he stands and rush to the main castle! Goreville’s team is about to reach it!”
“We’ll be on our way,” Victoire replied before focusing on Kale. “Are you well, Kale?”
“I’m… I’m not fine, but there’s no time,” he said. “You need to burn the corpses, quickly!”
“The corpses?” Her friend’s demand confused Victoire. “The flies?”
“Yours!” Kale gripped her shoulders, his fingers shaking with desperation. “Or else the flies… the flies will keep on coming!”
—----
Crisis averted, at least on one battlefront.
Casting Oath of Spring to save Victoire and a few of her allies from death had cost Wepwawet some mana, but his Champions had managed to neutralize Grudu far quicker than he expected. He feared he might have to use Geyser Tribute or a similar Miracle on the weremammoth to stop him.
I’m relying too much on werelings, Wepwawet realized. Almost all of his Champions sharing the same type made them extraordinarily vulnerable to specialized tactics. I’ll need to diversify my army.
“Don’t go thinking you’ve won this one yet!” Beelzebub snapped in annoyance. He clearly had hoped for Grudu to kill a few of Wepwawet’s Champions before being neutralized. “We’re nowhere near finished!”
“I doubt any goddess saw you finish at all!” Wepwawet taunted him back. Beelzebub buzzed angrily at him in response, but didn’t take the bait yet.
The west flank is secured, and Goreville’s crew should reach our target anytime now, Wepwawet thought upon surveying the battlefield. But what that Kale said bothers me…
While Insupportable and the Flying Saucer were still dueling in the sky while Viviane’s and Bernard’s group held back the giant flies at the den’s entrance with no small amount of arrows, the situation moved fast at the front gates. The battleground there was littered with the corpses of acid-dissolved werelings or dead flies, though casualties on Wepwawet’s side remained relatively minimal. Beelzebub was forced to cast a powerful Lighting Crash Miracle on a giant threatening to climb over the outer walls and vaporized him with a thunderbolt. Other members of Cynisca’s crew, including the charioteer herself, tossed grappling hooks over the fortifications to tear a breach open.
Everything seemed to be going well, until Wepwawet focused on his dead soldiers’ remains. To his horror, their bodies wriggled in the snow under the influence of divine magic, flesh crawling out of flesh. Conjured spirit-flies crawled out of the dead like a vile harvest of blooming flowers.
That bug bastard…
“Finally realized it?” Beelzebub cackled. “This is my Providence, Lord of Flies! Any creature that perishes within my realm of Influence lets me hatch a giant fly from its corpse! One per Rank of the victim!”
A number further doubled by his Multifly Doctrine no doubt. No wonder why Beelzebub played it earlier and challenged Wepwawet to a fight where his side was guaranteed to take casualties within the range of his enemy’s Influence.
“This city…” Wepwawet growled as he drew his What’s Yours is Mine Prophecy and immediately placed it in play. His divine burned with disgust upon realizing how Beelzebub managed to summon so many giant flies. “You’ve murdered nearly all its people!”
“The destiny of all mortals is to feed my swarm! No more, no less!” Beelzebub replied upon drawing a card. “Mortals complain and whine, but my swarm? My swarm does what it’s told!”
“Your disdain for mortals will be your undoing!” Wepwawet scoffed in scorn. His Champions had managed to restrain Grudu on their own, and he trusted them to shatter this bug’s Altar to pieces!
“And your army’s death will be the rebirth of mine!” Whatever Miracle Beelzebub drew overjoyed him so much he laughed in Wepwawet’s face. “I cast the Rank 2 Ritual Poisoned Gift! Each of us can name a Miracle our opponent owns, and if we guess correctly, it’ll move straight to the top of their deck! I choose Parasite Miracle!”
Wepwawet clenched his jaw as that cursed card moved to the top of his deck. Not only would Parasite Miracle cost him a hefty amount of mana the moment he drew it, but it would more or less waste his current draw and valuable minutes.
At least he had a chance to stick it to Beelzebub. Wepwawet’s best bet was to name a weak beginner deck’s card in the hopes that the titan infiltrator hadn’t replaced it yet. He immediately excluded options like Protect Champion or Boost Champion, as they wouldn’t provide Beelzebub with an advantage. Revelations like Skill: Translation or Skill: Longstrider would be his best pick to force a dead draw, but Wepwawet couldn’t tell which of them his enemy kept in his deck, if any.
Which left only one option.
“I pick Sacred Food,” Wepwawet said.
Beelzebub cursed out loud when a card suddenly moved to the top of his deck, confirming that Wepwawet had guessed right. The god wouldn’t have challenged him to a siege without a way to supply his troops in a pinch, but that Miracle wouldn’t serve him well with how quick the battle was going.
At least I got him to waste his draw, Wepwawet thought as he was forced to add Parasite Miracle to his hand once the counter hit zero. The vile trap immediately deducted a full ten mana points from his pool. That would have stung if I could feel pain.
The situation on the ground continued to worsen. Not only did the sight of giant flies bursting out of their dead comrades frighten and unnerve his werelings in spite of Rickart’s best attempts to rally them, but the number of conjured insects quickly let the swarm replenish its losses. Every victim they claimed let them replace their own losses.
Wepwawet would lose his entire army to attrition if this continued.
He quickly checked on Victoire to see her and the others had set the corpses in the western keep ablaze to prevent a similar scenario, but this had unfortunately delayed their progress. The large amount of mana surging towards the central keep and whipping up stormy clouds in the sky also worried Wepwawet. He had the gut feeling a terrible disaster would befall his troops should they not prevail soon.
It was all up to Goreville’s team for now.
—---
The torc around Goreville’s neck burned hotter on his fur with every step.
He could taste blood on the tip of his tongue and divine wrath surging from Lord Wepwawet’s gift. Whatever danger the torc sensed was a despised foe of his god and worthy of extermination.
“Almost there…” Rapoleon struck a stone wall with a spear and caused a breach to crumble open. A faint light brighter than their torches illuminated the secret passage. “Here we are.”
Goreville had to give it to Rapoleon’s crew—when it came to digging tunnels, the wererats were second to none. Their sappers, helped by Alpine’s explosive concoctions, had quickly opened a tunnel joining up with the secret passages Victoire informed them about. The absence of attacks meant they hadn’t been detected yet.
Using this entrance forced Goreville to take a very small team with him, including Renarde, Lourson, Alpine, Rapoleon, and a small cadre of wererat sappers. Almost every single one of the latter carried spheres filled with incendiary liquid of Alpine’s own creation. Shattering one of them should cause a small explosive blast, and using them all would destroy a whole building.
Goreville hoped it would be enough for their mission.
“Finally, some fresh air,” Renarde complained at the back of the group. She blew some dust away with her fan. “I thought I would choke–”
“Quiet,” Lourson interrupted her. “I smell danger ahead.”
“So do I,” Goreville confirmed. He walked out of the breach first, his sword steady, his nose sniffing the air. A smell of salt and spoiled food immediately assaulted his nostrils while a deep thrumming noise echoed in his ears.
Victoire had given him a detailed description of the so-called “Sacred Source” which the Glarmes worshipped. Besides the fact that venerating a place rather than a being baffled Goreville, Victoire’s tales spoke of a magnificent place worthy of tales; a holy sanctuary of pure glittering water surrounded by fields so fertile her fellow humans had to build an entire castle around the spot to protect it.
The twisted area Goreville’s team stepped into couldn’t be farther from that description.
It was a lake, alright, and one big enough to flood most of Narc at that, but its boiling black waters were fouler than any marsh he had ever visited. Plants rotted on its befouled shores under the shadow of frozen castle walls trapped in ice. While the remains of an irrigation system informed Goreville that this place was indeed used for agriculture at one point, that day seemed very far into the past. This place couldn’t sustain life now.
And what a strange idea to build another watchtower in the middle of a lake too, Goreville thought as he looked up to a structure rising from the waters… and up, and up. What the…
A colossal black metal structure stood out of the lake, its pumps swallowing boiling water and ejecting mud through metal pipes. Its strange shape vaguely reminded Goreville of a spiraling watchtower, albeit one curved in ways that no stone could support. A shining, spiky sphere of crystal the size of a house stood at its summit and exhaled billows of colored smoke through dozens of pylons covering its surface, causing the fumes to rise up to the sky until they clouded it.
Goreville was no mage, yet he sensed the same kind of magic coursing through Lord Wepwawet’s Altar suffusing this strange device. What overwhelming power coursed through the air!
“What is this devilry?” Lourson wondered, his paw gripping his shield and warhammer. “This… This is not of this world.”
“I’ve never seen a magical device so complex before,” Renarde muttered under her breath. She sounded torn between awe and fear. “I suspect we’re facing the source of the strange blizzards plaguing the region.”
Alpine spotted something at the top of the structure and pointed a finger that way. “Look! Over there!”
Goreville noticed that one of the pylons protruding from the sphere wasn’t like the others. This one took the shape of an Altar representing a monstrous amalgam between a wereling and a fly overseeing the area. Its metal wings were drenched in blood, and the smell of death hung around its tinted eyes.
People died there.
“That must be the vile Altar Lord Wepwawet tasked us to destroy,” Goreville informed his allies once they all stepped out of the breach. “Do you see any guards?”
“No,” Lourson replied. “And that’s not a good sign.”
“This place is far too empty,” Rapoleon confirmed, his eyes squinting at the lake. “There should be defenders protecting this place in case anybody made it through.”
Goreville focused on his eyesight. The smell of rot overshadowed everything else and he had a hard time hearing anything subtle with all the thrumming of this cursed machinery, but he did notice odd ripples across the lake’s surface. He followed their movements along the shore until they abruptly stopped without warning.
They had been spotted.
“Something’s in the water!” Goreville warned. “Alpine, you and the sappers will blow up this tower! The rest of us will cover you–”
“Quiet, wereslave.”
The cruel voice wormed its way into Goreville’s brain like hot iron and set his skull on fire.
Or so it felt that way to him, as the mother of all headaches struck him. He howled in pain, the agony so great he nearly dropped his sword to the floor. His allies screamed and screeched and snarled all once behind him, some holding their heads in pain, others like Lourson collapsing to the ground and spasming. Renarde alone simply winced and clenched her teeth.
“You’ve come here to die, vermin,” the voice said as two antennae the length of Goreville’s arms peeked out of the water. Its words wormed their way into Goreville’s mind like claws wading through flesh. “You are so close, I won’t even need the brainjackers to put you in your place.”
A deafening buzz erupted in the back of Goreville’s head. The pain sharpened so much he had to bite his tongue to silence himself. The torc heated up on his chest as if trying to ward away the evil infesting his mind.
A stronger, warmer voice suddenly cut through the buzzing.
“Renarde, sing a song of willpower!” Lord Wepwawet ordered, and Renarde delivered.
She whistled notes beautiful like the spring rain that silenced the buzzing and cleared Goreville’s mind. His allies grew quieter, the evil seeking to claim their souls repelled.
The monster rose from the waters in frustration.
It was huge; huge enough to rival Grudu himself in size. However, where the weremammoth was thick and strong, the enemy ahead of them was lean and lanky like a scarecrow. A white insectoid exoskeleton thicker than plate armor covered every inch of its body, except for the back from which sprouted eight long crimson tentacles. The monster had two arms and two legs like any wereling, but its face was that of a bug with four black mandibles and two reptilian yellow eyes glaring at the group with malicious contempt.
Goreville had never seen such a vile creature, but from the way the torc gleamed, his god loathed it back. The monster’s eyes squinted with anger upon spotting the artifact, after which two sharp stinger-blades surged from his arms.
“You dare bare your fangs at your creators again, Grand-Loup?!” the creature hissed both in Goreville’s ears and mind. “I should have known you vermin would survive the Winter Age!”
“I am no god,” Goreville replied, his sword ready to strike. Being mistaken for Grand-Loup was quite the honor, which he hoped to live up to. “But my master ordered me to tear down this place, and I shall!”
“All you will do is die!” The monster waved its hand, and half a dozen human knights teleported all around Goreville’s crew. Each of them had a bug worming its way into their ears rather than helmets. “Look upon the face of Zelesto, rightful ruler of these lands! Your lord and master!”
“There is only one ruler of this land, bug, and his name is Wepwawet!” Goreville grinned ear to ear. “And if you can’t remember it, I’ll carve it into your skull!”
His hand reached out for the torc and unleashed its power.
------
Comments
Void Herald
Dimensional Fortress only covers his realm of Influence (so he can prevent teleportations to his own altar, but not in Promesse, which is under Beel's influence)
Jasus
Wait they teleported the knights could Wep not have stoped that?
MaliMi
If rabbits were lunarians, would not that be Filou's race?
anon
lean, lanky, white, two arms/legs - I think the rabbit=lunarian theory is still a go. Admittedly a bit insecty - but thats probably a result of being undeadified by beelzebub.
