Chapter 158: Light in the Dark

Rosa grit her teeth as she watched her second wave get torn to pieces by the hive. Her zombies and ghouls were barely slowing those creatures down. She could practically feel the malice on her skin as she watched the display. 

Yes her second wave was meant to be used as chaff to wear down the enemy but it seems to her these creatures were not feeling the attrition at all. Their movements were both eerily graceful yet brutally feral at the same time. Their four insectoid legs twitch and writhe with unsettling fluidity as they clambered over the corpses of her soldiers in a white tide.

Their serrated blades rent the necrotic flesh of her ghouls to pieces. She turned to another monitor and saw one ghoul being dragged into the sea of white. She watched as the monsters started ripping it limb from limb, the ghouls black blood spraying out onto their white hides. Yet their white hides were so smooth the black blood just slid off their carapace.

Rosa hasn’t seen something like this in a long time. The creatures of the hive were some macabre mix of insect and nightmare. She knew why she was here. Rosa was no fool, she knew she couldn’t fight the likes of the Great Beast. She has lived since the Firstborn walked the world, granted she was still a High Elf back then but she remembered the fear they inspired.

Her mind went back to when the Firstborn known as The Wraith suddenly shimmered into existence in the middle of the Ancient Woods. There were screams of terror as mothers grabbed their children and fled. The elders all came but they did not draw their weapons, they just fell to their knees and brought their foreheads to the dirt. 

It was the first time Rosa saw what true power could give, she always saw her elders as wise and powerful but right then she saw nothing but worms in the dirt. That was all they were before the might of the Firstborn. 

One particularly grief stricken woman ran up to The Wraith and started hysterically screaming at it. Rosa remembers the fear being thick in the air from her outburst. The Wraith just looked at her in amusement before glancing at the elders as if seeing if they were going to do anything.

The woman was a widow, her husband died in one of the Firstborn’s wars of entertainment. A hive attacked the Ancient Woods for no other reason than the Firstborn being bored and though the attack was repelled the elves still took heavy casualties. 

Rosa remembers her screaming on and on about how she was going to raise her two children without him. How her children were going to grow up without a father and other useless things. Then she screamed over and over again at The Wraith at how her children were going to grow up without a father.

Eventually, The Wraith grew bored at her outburst. 

So The Wraith turned her children into orphans…

Quick as lightning it slammed its hand on top of her as if it was squishing some common insect. As far as Rosa could tell the widow did indeed squish like any other common insect.

In Rosa’s eyes that was an eye opening moment. It was proof of how the world worked, power meant everything. That moment was what started Rosa on this path, it wasn’t the pivotal moment. That came a few thousand years later but it was the first moment she acknowledged the truth.

The strong take what they will and the weak suffer what they must.

“Pull them back.” Rosa said with a sigh.

“Finally clued in have you?” Ordias said bluntly from the side.

“Shut. Up.” Rosa seethed as she watched her second wave retreat in poor order, the white wave of monsters continuing to tear into them as the wave retreated.

“You should know by now this whole thing is just bad theater. Form up the army, we are going to do a decisive battle. No more waves, we are wasting the Great Beast’s time.” Ordias said and Rosa sighed as she nodded.

Rosa had hoped to at least wear down the Imperial Army, it would make the coming battle easier. However, it seems the Great Beast wanted to protect his toys. 

“Very well. Send out the order.” Rosa said with a grimace.

It didn’t take long for the army to form up in full battle formation. In just under an hour the army was formed up. They were going to throw almost everything they had in this one battle. The vampires had a lot of tricks up their sleeves and they were very capable in a pitched battle. They just preferred to take the fights in stages to maximize their advantages.

The formation was made to be spread out, the entire army formation was twice as wide as the army of the Imperials. This made encirclement easy but the problem was the Hive. Rosa had no idea how many of those white creatures there were. Rosa was aware she could very well be outnumbered. Rosa has seen full on assaults by ancient hives, at times there were so many of them it looked like the ground was coming to life.

The front was as per usual a wave of trash soldiers designed to draw fire. The center was where she kept her more valuable soldiers. The entire airspace above her was filled with her flyers. The flanks were occupied by fast moving hard hitters for flanking maneuvers. 

Ordias’s blood knights were mostly located in the center and on the flanks. The ones of the flanks were mounted and would be able to deliver devastating charges if they could pull it off.

Rosa let out a small sigh as she watched her army stand still while awaiting order. It was pretty anticlimactic all things considered. In the end the deciding battle will just be a brawl in the desert heat…

◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.♚.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦

I watched from above as the army of the dead advanced. The flyers overhead moved in first, these were more of those giant bats and my best guess was that they wanted to weaken the front line and dodge my mass of ground based soldiers in the process.

But here’s the thing, this strategy was quite predictable all things considered. I control a burrowing hive, as in a hive that burrows underground. So just don’t touch the ground and no problem… right?

Wrong, dead wrong. I may be a burrowing hive but my main opponents were bloody angels. I wasn’t going to relinquish control of the air without a fight, so I had Malegaros prepare some new toys. From what I could tell from his memories he did have a lot of experience fighting angels and he had plenty of battle-tested blueprints to base his creations on.

I released a swarm of flyers the moment I heard the dead had entered the desert. I ordered them to burrow themselves in the sand so as to hide themselves. The designs I chose were called Swarm Locusts. They were pretty crappy individually but they were also notoriously hard to deal with.

If anyone asks as to why these creatures are hard to deal with… well the question could be answered with another question. How do you think someone would fare if they tried to fight a swarm of angry flesh-eating hornets with a sword? Not very well obviously.

These Swarm Locusts were about as big as a human hand and consisted of a gnashing mouth filled with teeth, tiny wings on the side and they attacked by burrowing into their target. I really liked them because they were kind of funny. I’m a burrowing hive and no one said that burrowing hives are only good at burrowing through the earth. 

So as soon as I gave the command the sands surrounding the area came to life as a giant swarm of the little buggers erupted from the ground.

They flew up into the sky in a buzzing swarm and they descended upon the swarm of bats. I watched as the bats shrieked, trying their best to fend off the little creatures. But many of the Swarm Locusts managed to latch onto the bodies of the bats. The locusts tore into the flesh of the bats, they got sufficiently deep inside and then… they exploded.

I watched as the bats started popping like firecrackers, their limp bodies falling out of the sky like sacks of potatoes. I loved these locusts, they were so cost-effective and they basically necessitated area-of-effect spells to deal with and that was a great way to waste their precious resources. When the bodies fell my soldiers quickly recovered the bodies, yes it was dead flesh, but dead flesh was still usable. It was just a lower yield and you just had to process it a little more. Plus I wanted Malegaros to have a look at these bodies, apparently, he doesn’t have much experience with necromancy so I wanted him to learn. I could tell he felt that necromancy was a rather crude type of magic and honestly it was true to an extent. Necromancy was vastly inferior to Flesh Crafting but still there might be something worth learning.

It didn’t take long before the bats retreated, just a few minutes into the clash the retreat was immediately called. However, I wasn’t going to let them get away scot free and Nafas knew that. She ordered the pursuit and by the time the bats managed to get clear of the combat zone the vampires had lost almost half of their bats. 

The next thing I saw them do was to fan out to flanks, so it looks like they would be trying to flank my army.

Several groups of the bats broke off completely and started to try to circle around. At the same time the ground army started to pick up the pace. It looks like they were trying to hit us in multiple directions at once. It won’t work of course but it would buy the bats more room to maneuver. Given the circumstances it was probably their best move given that they had no idea where my hive was buried. 

At the very least the bats would pull my troops away from the main force. I would have no choice but to pursue and destroy the bats because they might get to the artillery if I left them alone for too long. Well that was if the forces I had at my disposal were slow…

One quick order later, I saw phoenixes descend onto the swarms of bats. Each phoenix dove right into the mass and detonated a wave of searing ether from their bodies. Entire swarms of bats were blown out of the sky, their bodies turned to burning masses of flesh plummeting out of the sky. 

I heard the Imperial soldiers cheer at the sight, from their perspective they saw the blazing bodies of the phoenixes decimating the flyers of the vampires. The very bats that caused so many casualties to the Zarimans have just been swatted out of the sky like flies.

The swarms were rather large so it took multiple phoenixes to down the entire swarm. However, there was one particular swarm that was pulling ahead of the pack. It looked like this one was making a beeline right for the artillery. This one however, ended up being pounced on by none other than Azatherine herself. Her white form dived down from above, the ether blazing from her body made her descent accompanied by a screaming wail as her body tore through the air.

Her white form plunged into the mass of bats, there was a flash of light then the cracking sound of an explosion tearing the air. I could even feel some of the wind from where I’m at. The bats didn’t fall in flames this time, they were just reduced to ash from her searing flames. The ones closest to her were actually vaporized from the heat. With my modifications to Azatherine she was now far more powerful as compared to when she first met me.

Azatherine the army could use a morale boost, put on a bit of a show

I said into the hive mind and Azatherine returned a slightly annoyed affirmation. I knew she didn’t like humanoids, couldn’t stand them in fact. I could read her thoughts, she felt that anything that needed a morale boost was just weak-minded.

But regardless she let out a great cry and her voice carried across the sands in a challenge to the enemy. Then she opened her maw and fired a white hot beam. The crackling white beam raked over the army of the dead, incinerating thousands of the lesser zombies with a single wide sweep.

The vampires didn’t take lightly to my provocation and the army of the dead picked up the pace. Well I can’t let that massive blob hit my shiny imperial army so I got to blunt the charge at least.

I ordered Nafas to engage and immediately a hundred thousand of my soldiers appeared out of the sand.

Alright let see how Nafas does…

Nafas…

Sic em…