Rosa

The Pagutum army was on the move and the thundering of their well-trained marching could be heard even two kilometres away. Joret had the high ground currently, with all the war-dens of the artifisuki sitting atop a low rolling ridgeline. Their many spider-like mechanical legs were motionless while they disgorged hundreds of thousands of troops.

On the Joret side, the core troops of the republic thundered into position with as much orderly precision as their counterparts on the Imperial side. The professional republican troops were far outnumbered by those same counterparts, however. In place of those missing numbers, huge quantities of auxiliaries gathered in loose formations.

The seven foot tall Maageru lionfolk were easy to spot with their white and gold manes catching the sunset. Ice tribesmen from further south were present too, riding their massive direwolves around in a horde that never stayed in one place for long.

Then there were the artifisuki wartechs. Each one was augmented with mechanical gadgets that they designed, built, and maintained all on their own. They were loosely grouped into combat roles that the Joret commanders could make sense of, but even then it was a scattershot approach to categorisation. They’d do their jobs though.

The adventurers were treated by the military as another type of auxiliary force, but one that was purposefully deployed to counter the enemy players. Neither side wanted to break the unspoken agreement and risk unleashing respawning players on the much more finite number of professionally trained troops they had.

Loud booming reports echoed across the snowy plains, signalling the start of the artillery duel. The Taeru’s cannons belched mundane shot and amplified magical attacks both, which whistled over our heads to drop down onto the Imperial crawlers. The smaller war-villages turned their guns on the enemy ranks, indiscriminately ripping chunks out of their formations and the dirt beneath them. Mage platforms returned fire with devastating accuracy, and all down both lines magic users erected powerful arcane barriers.

Amelia and I were near the front of the lines today, since as far as we could see, the airships hadn’t been deployed at all. I only hoped they were being held back out of fear, rather than some sort of refit that would negate our ability to drop them from the sky.

“Their formation looks weird today,” Sang commented. “No ranged in front, and there’s less mage platforms out.”

“True,” one of the angels agreed. Aurora, I think her name was. “Something feels wrong. They don’t normally attack at this time either.”

“Whatever it is they have up their sleeves, I’m going to go and punch it,” Tami declared, and with a whistling of feathers she leapt up into the sky.

“God damn it,” Aurora muttered, jumping up to follow her girlfriend. Pretty soon, the streamer twin whose name I’d forgotten was following them, leaving the healer and the alchemist on the ground with us.

The healer girl groaned, rolled her eyes and turned to look at Sang. “Hey dude, mind if we tag along with you lot?”

“Absolutely,” our guild leader replied. “Although… what do you actually do?”

The question was directed at the small elfin girl with the platinum blonde hair and the bondalier of potions wrapped twice around her body.

She twitched when our attention turned to her and gave a sort of half-shrug. “I dunno. I make things go boom?”

“Oh, she’s a gunpowder alchemist,” Amado exclaimed, suddenly pushing through the group towards her. “Hey, do you want to give me some of those bombs? I’ll use my stealth to deliver them to the enemy.”

A small, excited and positively feral grin split her face, and she started to pull several potions from her bandolier. “Yes! Definitely! My name is Millie, by the way! Anyway, this one is an aerosolized acid that gravitates towards warm objects! It’s really fun in big groups because it makes their skin dissolve!”

She and Amado continued to plan their little war-crime party, but I stopped paying attention because a familiar emotional smell piqued my interest. Bia was speaking to the healer girl, Kimberly, and one or both of them was feeling very sapphic. Cute. I hoped it was both, although the healer didn’t seem like the type to be into girls. Wait… no, that was definitely a blush.

Abruptly, a cold wrongness rolled out from somewhere beyond the Pagutum lines, and a hush spread over the Joret army. Everyone felt it—like someone had just stepped on our graves far in the future.

“What the fuck was that?” someone whispered into the unnatural silence.

“Felt like… death magic,” Bia replied, terror in her voice. “I hate undead stuff. Oh god, I really hope it isn’t zombies.”

In front of the Pagutum battle line, pools of diseased blood began to bubble up out of the ground, and Bia's fears became reality. Twisted figures began to rise out of the awful muck like a crop of nightmare flowers, twitching and writhing the whole way. Each one was unique in their own twisted way, but they all had one thing in common. At some point in the past, they were corpses.

They weren't zombies, though. They were so much worse than that. Many still had a hand or two, but their fingers were unnaturally long, and the bones had thrust themselves out of the tips to hook into claws. Many didn't even have that. Instead, forearms were doubled in length so the bones could be turned into blades.

In contrast to the rotting flesh and bone of their bodies, all the horrors sported red and gold helmets. None had any sort of accommodations for vision, but in the place of eye slits or visors was a decorative metal magi's eye overlaid on top of a crucifix.

All around me, I could smell fear. My allies looked upon the numberless mass of undead and despaired. Except me. I'd lived a similar nightmare for months. It was my home. Death and an overwhelming number of foes was nothing to me.

"Time to start shooting, I guess," I laughed in a conversational tone.

Ame twitched and turned her attention to me. Slowly, a smile spread over her face, and she asked, "Rapid fire?"

"Yes, ma'am," I agreed, and placed a hand onto Jazz, imbuing it with incredible power.

"Sick," she said, and turned Jazz on the enemy. "Time to make this baby purr like yo momma's XL vibrator."

To my surprise, that was a remarkably apt description of the sound that Jazz made. The growl of my girlfriend's weapon tore up the silence and set it on fire. Each round left a gently smoking trail in its wake as it travelled out over the battlefield to impact its target. Explosions followed half a heartbeat later, throwing chunks of flesh and bone high into the sky. Filthy with glee, Ame began to cackle like a witch who was immune to fire.

All down the Joret lines, hesitation and fear were replaced with determination and resolve. The spell was broken, and the battle began in earnest.

Starting with a gathering storm above us. Clouds blossomed out of nothing, undulating as they spread out over the nearby sky. Each one was the colour of twilight, but lit from within by the snap and boom of thunder.

Tami made her entrance as an instantaneous tracer of lightning that smashed into the gathering undead hard enough to send a shockwave out. Behind her and on a half second delay, the actual bolt of lightning followed. A mighty explosion of force and electricity created a gaping hole in the undead ranks, and at the centre of that crater stood the girl who'd caused it.

The undead didn't take any of this laying down, though. They charged our front lines with a single minded ferocity that only a monster could manage. There was no intelligence behind the hollow eye sockets that seemed black blood, nor was there any attempt at self preservation. They just charged us, while their living breathing masters followed behind at an almost sedate pace.

Ame quickly turned her barrage of explosive projectiles on the front of the undead battle lines as they began to scale the incline towards us. Even over the sound of Jazz throwing spells at a rate that would make a minigun jealous, we could hear the howls of the monstrous horde. The screams of rage were anything but human. They tore from their dessicated throats like barbed wire, and in a few cases that appeared to be almost literal. Dark, tainted blood oozed from their mouths and flew like spittle into the air.

Spells, arrows, and other projectiles leapt out over the intervening space from all down the Joret lines, shaving off entire rows of the undead. Their living brethren didn’t slow their charge for even a moment, even if a body got in their way. More than a few times, this turned into a mass of undead limbs when a collision occurred.

Beyond the undead, amongst the enemy players opposite us, an explosion rocked their ranks, and they were forced to slow their charge to deal with a sudden knot of confusion and dead teammates. I was pretty sure I saw Amado blink-stepping his way back to us with a wild grin on his face. The manic rogue had found someone who meshed with his uniquely chaotic style of play, that was for sure.

When the undead finally hit us, it was as a wave of carnage and bloodshed. Weapons flashed, catching the sunset on polished steel before their surfaces were coated in blackened gore. It was chaos, and I loved every moment of it. I just wished I could take my witch form. Scything down hundreds of undead monsters with my chains would’ve been so much fun. I did have a question, though. Where did the Pagutum mages get the kind of power necessary to summon an army of the undead like that?