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Book 5: Chapter 47 - Against the Odds (RAW)
🕑 Added 2025-04-21 09:40:29 +0000 UTCMined in scant handfuls from the deep tunnels beneath the Dwarven Hold of Bronzegate, the midnight‑black ore yields pure Adamantium only after punishing labor and ruinous expense. Though less rare than Mithril, its brutal weight keeps it impractical: wealthy adventurers settle for a razor‑thin plating, and modern forges temper and alloy it with steel, yet even then, only the strongest can bear it. Near‑indestructible, the Empire of old forged the metal into the infamous ‘Sinner’s Shackles’ for the vilest criminals deemed unworthy of the mercy of death. Thus Adamantium, or ‘Sinner’s Shackles’ remains the dusk‑forged counterpoint to Mithril’s revered ‘Saint’s Silver.’”
- The Fanciful Travels by Beron de Laney 376 AC.
The man before me looked every inch the heroic ideal—if one could overlook his too‑perfect, almost inhuman features. Even the sun conspired with him, its glare shimmering off his brilliant armor, while I stood cloaked in the ruin’s shadow. Clearly, the wily cur had positioned himself so the light shone directly into my eyes, but such a petty advantage would do him little good.
“After you, big Al,” I quipped.
He answered with an easy, infuriating smile and hurled his pike at me. It streaked toward my gorget like a meteor, yet I had read his intent long before he moved. The thrust was merely a probe, testing my speed. I let myself react a heartbeat too late, exaggerating the clumsiness my heavy armor supposedly imposed. The blade glanced off my pauldron, the heavy impact shaving a sliver off my Health bar, and the ancient hero’s smile widened.
“It seems I have already won,” he declared pompously. “You cannot outmatch me in such cumbersome panoply. Your loss is a victory for our craftsmen. I implore you once more—yield; honor is served.”
I raised my visor and adopted the look of a man resigned to death yet determined to fight. It was all theater—bait for his insufferable arrogance.
“For honor, I still must fight,” I replied, closing the visor again.
Gripping my hammer in both hands, I parried two more testing blows, each faster than the last, making my defense appear desperate.
“This will be but a matter of time,” he murmured, shaking his head.
A pike excels in formation, but in a duel it is a poor choice. If I got past the blade, he would be left wielding an unwieldy pole.
Alexandros struck once more; I let the point scrape across my black armor with a shower of sparks—and surged inside his reach. Raising my hammer, I aimed a crushing blow at his helm. Yet Bellringer felt strangely lethargic, its usual voracious hunger curiously absent. Predictably, Alexandros blocked with his round shield; the impact rang out like a bell. In the very same beat—impossibly close—he thrust again. The pike, now as short as a spear, scored a line across my breastplate and nearly caught the mail beneath my arm.
I retreated, stunned: his weapon was lengthening back to full size before my eyes.
Feigning bravado, I taunted, “That must be quite the conversation piece at parties.”
“It is a relic,” he said, “forged in an age when one Empire ruled the world in peace and greatness.”
“Wonderful,” I laughed, eyeing the xiphos at his waist. “I wonder what it would fetch at auction.”
He sighed. “I make allowances for your youth, but my patience has limits. You have not seen the full breadth of my powers.”
“Whatever you say, old man,” I responded shrugging. Charging again, I trusted my armor to blunt his attacks. Alexandros wore heavy armor too, yet his face and feet were exposed—obvious targets.
At close quarters, the pike shrank once more. I locked our weapons, intent on overpowering him, but to my surprise his Strength matched my own. Pulling back, I reassessed. This could prove troublesome; I might need to employ my magic.
But, not before he did. This was player versus player, and in such contests, it was always good to have a few aces in your sleeve.
“You possess the strength of Heracles, though not Apollo’s speed,” Alexandros said, grinning like a madman. “Still, I would rather not take your life.”
“It isn’t yours to take,” I retorted, failing to muster a sharper comeback.
Abandoning words, I became a whirlwind—hammer, spike, and butt flying against spear and shield. Shifting Bellringer to one hand, I saw curiosity flare in Alexandros’s eyes. It was answered when a part of my free arm morphed into a round Mimic shield, blocking his spear point and opening a path to his unguarded feet.
Bellringer struck true, but met something harder than flesh. Shock stole a heartbeat, and Alexandros’s shield counter‑blow smashed into me, knocking me back and filling my mouth with the taste of blood.
I blinked, and the truth snapped into focus: Alexandros wore no sandals at all, but armored sabatons like my own. Cursed illusion magics.
“To know an opponent’s intent is to know his future,” he lectured. “Offer him a clear path, and you guide him along a path of your choosing.”
“Is that the extent of your tricks?” I shot back. There was no more room for pretending.
He raised his shield and settled into a light, blade‑pointed stance, his feet forming a neat L. “And that weapon you cling to... it reeks of Hades’ curse,” he added, voice edged with distaste. “How you endure its presence baffles me. Can you not feel what it’s doing to you?”
His eyes narrowing, Alexandros uttered a few words, words filled with power and the unknowable. A dark‑violet radiance crawled along Alexandros’s pike, runes blazing to life until the entire weapon throbbed with sorcerous power. With uncanny speed he flicked the weapon upward, its point weaving a dizzying sigil in the air. Instinct screamed that the thrust was bound for my eyes, and I raised my Mimic shield to intercept—only to feel a bone‑rattling jolt in my hands.
The spearhead veered at the last instant, snapping down like a striking serpent and shearing clean through Bellringer’s shaft just below the langets. The weapon shrieked as enchanted Mithril parted magically imbued wood; the hammer’s crowned head spun away with a shriek, flying out to crash against an old wall of a ruin at the edge of the square. I stared at the ruined haft in my grip, disbelief flaring into rage. Bellringer had been broken. Shocksteel and Ironwood had been no match for the cheater’s Mithril.
Then it happened, a howl that was not my own, a funeral dirge echoing inside my skull. The seal had broken. Something oily and dark clawed at my essence, filling the void of lost memories with insidious knowledge: the balance of life, the debts of death, the tether between this world and the next.
A cascade of options flashed through my mind, written in characters only half‑comprehensible. One path promised dominion over bone, another control of decaying flesh. Yet a single cluster of words shone brightest: command over souls. I reached out of my own free will and chose.
You have attained the sub-class Necromancer.
You have learned spell Whispers of the Grave (lvl.1)
You have gained 1000 experience
In that instant I knew the Necromancer had kept his word; he had given me the birth-seed of his magic from the start. It was almost touching, really.
Words rose unbidden, seductive: “Heed me, you who are bonded to all of grand creation. Edge of the abyss connected to the empty void, grant me power from the passing, fading souls. Whispers of the Grave.”
My Silent Casting could not contain the incantation; the syllables were too alien, too ancient. And then I saw them: a host of ashen, familiar faces, twisted by anger and grief—the grey souls tied to me in death.
A chill swept over the ruins of a long-dead city, a cold the sun itself could do little to dispel. I did not resist; there could be power in defiance, but in this, there was a greater power in surrender. A surrender to a power that demanded to be used.
And Alexandros… Alexandros saw them too. Passionate fury tightened his features.
“You would fling open the gates of Hades? Do you understand the powers you toy with, boy?”
His outrage washed over me like wind.
“You who would use illusions to play with and twist men’s minds?” I answered, voice heavy with new gravity. New purpose. “Your sin is the theft of free will of the living; mine is only the shackling of the will of the dead.”
I pointed at him, and as the wraiths of the wailing dead converged, I unleashed Entropic Aura. Grey waves rippled outward, a death‑pulse as inevitable as the end of things.
Alexandros whirled his weapon; whether haft or blade struck, it mattered little—each arc of his violet weapon shredded the spectres before they could reach him.
“Do not think you alone command loyal spirits to your cause,” he warned. “I see now that you are far too foolish and dangerous to save.”
Then he began an Elvish chant—harsh, hateful words I neither knew nor cared to learn. Rage eclipsed reason. Forgetting the swords at my hips, I lunged, gauntleted hands hooked like talons. He parried, slipped, and danced away, still chanting.
As my claws raked through empty air, his incantation finally reached its apex. I caught only the final two words, my mind able to translate their vague meaning: Heroic Call.
Four figures seemed to step out of the light and air, as though the world itself exhaled warriors. These were no ghostly shades like mine, but living men, muscle, sweat, iron and bronze—each radiating an aura of storied might.
My eyes roved over them, widening as I registered each presence. The first strode forward in scale‑plated bronze chased with silver. A plumed Thracian helm framed eyes hard as obsidian. In his fists rested a pair of kopides—curved blades whose backs were jagged like sharks’ teeth. The metal shimmered with an inner flame that promised limbs severed with every swing.
The second towered above the rest, mailed head to greaves in green‑black iron. Across his back lay a two‑handed labrys—a double‑bladed axe taller than I was. Runic channels scored its broad edges, and tiny motes of ochre light trickled down them like falling sand, whispering of mountains split and war‑beasts felled.
The third wore a corselet of interlocking bronze feathers and carried a round shield of polished iron that mirrored the battlefield in distorted glints. In his right hand he gripped a slim, leaf‑shaped spear whose point glowed cold white, as though forged from a shard of winter. Every slight shift of his stance suggested a duelist’s lethal poise.
The fourth advanced last, clad in lacquered linothorax dyed the deepest crimson of blood. A gilded serpent circled his waist as a belt, its head clasping a sheathed machaira, a long dagger, curved almost to a crescent. Yet his true menace lay in the composite bow already notched; the arrow shimmered violet, the same hungry hue that pulsed along Alexandros’s spear.
Blood beat in my ears. Four champions of legend arrayed themselves around their king like planets around a sun. Alexandros lowered his pike, its violet glow steady and bright.
“Meet my sworn brothers,” he said, voice calm as a judge giving the death sentence. “They conquered the known world at my side—and they would do so again to protect this world from your blasphemous existence.”
For the first time, a flicker of true uncertainty chilled me. The wraiths behind me hissed in unison, their thirst for vengeance undimmed. I dismissed my Mimic‑shield, flexed my clawed gauntlets, and felt Entropic Aura pulse with each heartbeat—grey waves rolling out like a storm tide.
“Let them come,” I growled, drawing on the cold fire of my never‑born magic. “The grave has room for four more.”
Even as the words left my mouth, I swung my great Adamantine bow from my back, nocked, and loosed in a single fluid motion, every ounce of my superior Dexterity behind it. The solid iron bolt flew swifter than the wind, then flared into incandescent fury. The Inferno Bolt splashed across the bowman’s cloth cuirass, burning him to his unnatural bones. Unfortunately, he did not scream.
If Alexandros would cheat, I would level the field.
My summoned spectres howled, charging the four remaining warriors of antiquity. Yet no notification flashed, and there was no experience awarded for the fallen archer. Unease prickled.
I tried to nock another shaft, but the titan with the giant axe barreled through the wraiths, his sheer solidity scattering them like mist. He swung a two‑handed blow mighty enough to split rocks; I blocked with my bow as though it were a staff, sparks skittering from the impact. I countered, cracking him across the helm and sending him sprawling, then dashed back, using Improved Dash to gain space.
The reason for the missing experience soon became clear. Alexandros murmured a few syllables, and the archer re‑formed beside him, whole as ever. Brought back from non-existence to serve once more.
How, in the Heavens, do you kill someone, or something, already centuries dead? The arrogant whoreson truly did have an impressive, if detestable, cheat skill.
