Cinna knew she couldn’t take on an entire army of draugr single-handed. Particularly not while protecting Lilia. So while she couldn’t be sure whether Lilia could immobilize them or for how long, Cinna decided her only choice was to assume Lilia would pull it off and focus on the second lich.
Mages were tricky. At distances more than a few strides they would start with quick spells meant to slow their opponent down, then start in on ones that took more time to cast but could do more damage. Trying to distract a mage with talk was pointless; they knew full well that they fought with their tongues, so they would remain focused on chanting their next spell at all times.
“Earth mage. Not a particularly skilled one, though,” Cinna noted to herself as she smashed through a spike of stone. Not with her hammer, but with her body. The first few she’d avoided or destroyed with her hammer, but it hadn’t taken her long to figure out that this mage didn’t have the skill to harden the stone he manipulated.
Going straight through saved time, bringing her ever closer to the lich. But she remained wary. Having a singular lich assault her from a distance only seemed like an effective strategy to the rankest of amateurs, and she wasn’t convinced the necromancer controlling this lich was that naïve. There had to be some kind of plan in place to prevent her from closing the distance as quickly as she had with Count Keller.
A flurry of smaller stones stopped Cinna momentarily, forcing her to raise her arm to protect her face. Each impact felt like being punched, even through her armor. The instant the storm receded Cinna lowered her hand. She had barely a second’s notice to duck before a much larger rock arced through the space her head had just occupied, smashing into the ground right behind her.
“Lilia! Your familiars!” Cinna called out. She worried the earth lich might target Lilia either to end the deadlock or distract Cinna herself. She didn’t want to say too much and tip the enemy necromancer off, though. Hopefully the reminder would be enough to prompt Lilia to summon them to her side. They would need some time to arrive, but it would be a comfort to know she had something to protect her.
In the meantime she would need to keep up the pressure. Even liches couldn’t cast spells instantly. She needed both liches to believe that if she were to be granted even a moment’s reprieve this fight would be over.
The lich began to back away, apparently realizing it wouldn’t be able to kill Cinna before she reached it at the rate things were going. Just as Cinna began to pick up speed, though, it cast its next spell. Bumps formed in the stone floor between them extending from the inside of the tower right out into the courtyard where the lich stood, clearly intended to foul her footing.
With as much momentum as she’d already built up, Cinna couldn’t adjust her stride as much as she would have liked in the split second she had to react. Her foot came down on one of the bumps. What she’d assumed to be a mound of dirt beneath the stone turned out to be a hollow cavity. Her foot broke straight through the surface and sank into the trap.
Cinna felt her ankle twist and gritted her teeth as she turned the fall into a roll. Pulling her foot out likely damaged her ankle further, but she couldn’t let that slow her down now. She saw shock on the lich’s face—its own, or the necromancer’s?— as she returned to her feet without losing speed and continued to run towards it, carefully picking her way through the field of traps it had prepared.
In response, the lich hastily started throwing stones again. Cinna leaned to the side to avoid the first and caught the next with her hammer, smashing it apart even as she felt the recoil from the impact run down her arm. Emerging into the courtyard, Cinna noticed draugr standing to the sides of the hole the lich had blown in the wall. Every second or so they seemed to twitch as they fought against their conflicting orders.
Bodies littered the courtyard as well, introducing another obstacle for Cinna to navigate. She had to take a longer stride than normal to avoid tripping over a corpse. It unbalanced her enough that she took a stone to the shoulder in the process. A few moments later a wall of solid rock sprouted up from the ground in front of her, too close to avoid.
Placing her bad shoulder first, Cinna rammed straight into the wall. It didn’t budge. She hadn’t expected it to, but she also hadn’t had enough time to shift her course. Pain shot through her arm as Cinna hopped to the side to get around the wall, which she now saw was really more of a pillar, and resumed her charge.
Only a few meters separated her from the lich now. Its back lay flat against the outer wall of the courtyard. She reared back, planning to throw her hammer at it much as she’d done with her sword against Bjorn, but an ominous cracking sound gave her pause.
Cinna dug her heels in, then threw herself in the opposite direction as the wall itself collapsed towards her. An avalanche bereft of a mountain sailed towards Cinna, defying gravity to strike the ground further away from its starting point than should have been possible. Massive blocks crashed down around her even at the very edge of the collapse.
So focused was she on avoiding being crushed that Cinna tripped over a body in her haste. A growing shadow alerted her to coming danger in time, and Cinna rolled aside just as a rock the size of her entire torso came down beside her. She still wasn’t out of trouble, as she quickly found another right behind the first. Prone as she was and pinned between two rocks of similar size, Cinna had only once option left.
She swung her hammer, which she’d miraculously held onto through all the chaos. It felt like she’d struck a mountain. The stone practically exploded into smaller, but still large, fragments as Cinna lost her grip on her weapon.
“Ugh…” Cinna groaned. She’d survived, but the shower of rocks had still left her dazed. One had bounced off her forehead, she suspected. It was hard to tell; her entire body had transformed into a mosaic of pain. Her ears rang so badly that it took Cinna several seconds to process that the courtyard had gone silent—except for two sounds.
Footsteps, mixed with the clatter of rocks being knocked loose by a person’s passage.
In her shell-shocked state, Cinna couldn’t figure out for several seconds why the lich didn’t just drop something on her from afar. But she soon realized that, with all the draugr unable to move, the necromancer had no way of confirming her exact location save for the earth lich himself.
She had no idea where her hammer had gone, but Cinna still had her sword. The lich, though, would likely have a spell nearly ready by the time it found her. There would be no time to rise to her feet. Cinna would have to shift only enough to draw her sword and stab it through the lich’s throat before it could complete its spell. In preparation she dragged her elbow back, propping herself up ever so slightly.
As the footsteps came closer, Cinna scanned her surroundings, trying to remember which way she’d been facing. All she could see right now were rocks and the sky. One of her ears seemed to be injured or plugged with dust and dirt, as she couldn’t seem to identify the direction the sounds were coming from.
Then her eyes caught the crown of the lich’s head from the direction of her feet.
“Rrrragh!” Cinna roared as she surged up and into a sitting position, casting off the stones that had been pressing down on her body. The lich stumbled back, even managing to trip over its own words in surprise. That bought Cinna an extra second to grasp for her sword, exceedingly awkward in her current position, and drag it from its sheath.
She actually failed to catch the lich in that instant. Her sword cut threw only empty air as the lich fell onto its own rear. But of the two of them, Cinna recovered first. She pulled back her blade and leaned forward, then stabbed it straight through the lich’s neck.
Unlike Count Keller, that wasn’t enough to drop the lich outright. However, Lilia had given the Cinna the knowledge on what to do next. Cinna pulled herself free from her own makeshift cairn and climbed atop the ruins of the wall, placing herself directly over the lich. Then she sank her sword into its abdomen, running it down the length of the undead monster’s spine until she felt resistance.
With one quick motion, Cinna withdrew her sword and stabbed down a final time, sending it straight through the lich’s soul crystal.
“Bastard. I liked that hammer,” Cinna grumbled, knowing she didn’t have the time to find it in the rubble. She needed to get back to Lilia quickly. She couldn’t see the necromancer through the hole in the tower wall, so she picked her way through the rocks as fast as she dared and limped her way over.
Just as Cinna arrived, a burst of motion from the direction of the door send a spike of adrenaline through her body. Before she could act, however, her mind caught up to her eyes. What she’d reflexively assumed to be the necromancer lich regaining control of its thralls turned out to be something quite the opposite.
“What is—is that a bear!? Release me!” Javert’s army shouted in rage as Mr. Bearbones dragged him across the room by the neck, having bowled over at least a dozen draugr on his way through their ranks. Cyclops hopped from draugr to draugr to land on Javert’s back, drawing forth a litany of impotent curses from his mouth.
“Oh, welcome back!” Lilia greeted Cinna cheerfully, waving in her direction.
“I see I had nothing to worry about,” Cinna sighed. “Is there any point in dragging him around instead of simply finishing him, though? I doubt he’ll be willing to tell us anything more than he already has.”
“Hm…I did want to ask him a few questions, but now that you mention it, he does seem pretty angry,” Lilia agreed after a moment of though. She stared at Javert a moment before frowning. “Um, there’s a little problem, though.”
“Problems seem to be all we have these days. What is it?” Cinna asked, dreading the answer already.
“Well, I was thinking I could break his soul crystal and sever his soul before it regenerated, but…he doesn’t have one.”
Patreon
