Kingdom Come: Ch 25

“We need to hit those guns. As soon as the cannons appear, I want you to split. Get behind the artillery and get ready to flame.” I hopped up into a crouch, holding onto the saddle with one hand. “If I die, don’t worry. I’ll respawn at the Fort and catch up. If I fall, don’t try and pick me up unless you’re absolutely sure you can. Okay?”

“Okay!” Karalti dodged to the right and down as a ballista bolt shot just over her wing. “Get ready!”

We broke through the smoke to see the ruins of the swamp crawling with undead. The last zombies were staggering up out of the mud, followed by a tidal wave of rats and skeletons. Primitive iron mortars - smoothbore cannons not seen since the late 1700s back home - were set up in a line of shallow trenches, where an armored commander brandished a glowing staff supervised the artillery teams - who appeared to be animated shades.

“You focus on the guns! I’m going for that commander!” I banged my helmet a couple of times, swallowed the knot of fear in the pit of my belly, and jumped.

We were going fast - very fast. The undead literally had no idea what hit them. They aggro’d on us, pushing the barrels of the mortars up, but we were too fast. At the end of my jump, when I felt my limbs start to flap, I shouted and drew the dark power from inside myself, letting it spill out into my weapon: Master of Blades. The fan of black energy lances flared around me like a pair of wings, shooting past like bolts of lightning to strike the artillery line. They fell among the bombardiers, turning them to dust. I used Rain of Glass to change my trajectory, the shattering energy acting like a cushion to halt my momentum and throw me back into the air. I focused all of those shards of dark energy on the [Wraithlord Commander]. 

The undead champion thrust his staff up above his head and made an arcane gesture with the other hand. The bolts of darkness thumped into a greenish energy barrier like arrows into a shield, embedding before they - and the shield - overloaded and shattered. He took no damage, but was defenseless as I soared down and hit Shadow Lance for the first time.

The Mark of Matir surged, and a liquid rush of power flooded through my hand and into the Spear of Nine Spheres. There was a strange ghostly sensation - like the energy was searching for something in the weapon, but couldn’t find it - but the Spear ignited with rippling black flames anyway.

“DIE PROPERLY THIS TIME, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!” I plunged the weapon deep into the Wraithlord’s body.

The blade and haft of the spear burst out of the undead’s back in a cloud of dark embers, and the Wraithlord’s skeletal mouth gaped as if in shock. There was a frozen moment where I looked into the glowing points of light in his sockets, and saw something I’d never seen in a monster before.

Absolute pants-shitting terror.

[You deal 4725 Darkness damage to Wraithlord! It’s super-effective!]

[You gain 350 EXP]

I sprung up as the [Wraithlord] burst into ash and his staff fell, launching straight into the first oncoming wave of skeletons.

[Objective partially complete: Artillery Brigade 1/3]

“Karalti!” I called to her in my mind - slashing, vaulting, dodging swords and axes as the army crashed forth. The skeletons at the very front were nimble warriors, carrying nothing but their weapons. Behind them lumbered rows of [Burdened Skeletons] wearing what looked all too much like suicide bomber vests. “Karalti, whatever you do, don’t light up those guys in the vests until you’ve got space!”

Even as I spoke, the sky darkened and my dragon gracefully rolled out of the smoke toward us. I smashed a creaking skeleton out of the way with the butt of my spear as she swooped in, kicking skulls and raised axes out of the way on her path toward me. I Jumped, caught her arm, and held on for dear life as she gained altitude. “Yeah, baby! Waaooh! Get ‘em, girl!”

“Toasty bony time!” Karalti’s narrow jaws gaped as she winged back over the teeming skeletons. She blasted the entire front line with her breath weapon. They struggled on, burning, but finally stumbled forward onto their knees. Some of their brethren tripped over their fallen fellows as the bombers lumbered up. They began to struggle through the pile, wading toward their burning fellows. And when they caught fire...

“Bones away!” The explosions rang out beneath us, the shockwave forcing air up under Karalti’s wings. Whooping, I swung wildly from her wrist. “Hell yeah! Bone Appetit, bitches!”

“Oh my god,” Karalti muttered. “Suri’s right. No puns allowed.”

“My grandparents were Millennials, Tidbit. I was born into puns and keyboard-era memes. Molded by them.” Karalti was already headed toward the next artillery battery along the enemy line. “And tibia honest with you-”

“AHHHHH! I HATE YOU! STOP!”

This barrage was expecting us. I scrambled up, ready to leap at the rows of mortars suddenly facing east. Before they could fire, Karalti burst forward in a surge of speed, and her form divided in two as we came out of the dark cloud of power that disguised her Wings of Deception ability. We split to the right as the mortars fired on the left. The dragon shuddered with referred pain as twenty shells obliterated the illusory Karalti, but she wasn’t damaged - and we were in position. The Wraithlord commanding this unit must have seen something on my face as Karalti spat fire down along the trench, because he pulled his skeletal horse around and turned to flee.

“Oh no you don’t, Casper! You get back here right now, young man!” I dropped, dashed in the air, then Jumped and landed right on the ass-end of the bull. The Spear danced with black fire as I plunged it through the Wraithlord’s back, toppling him - and me - from the saddle. I hit the ground awkwardly - it was muddy enough that I didn’t concuss myself, but there were feet surging toward me from all directions.

“You guys fucking stink!” Before I realized what I was doing, I called the Spear - and it responded, shooting up into my hand from the pile of ash that remained of the Wraithlord. Whoa. Okay. Gotta remember I can do that. 

I hit all my AoE moves. Lances of shimmering dark energy struck down around me in an expanding double ring, blowing rats and skeletons into the air. When I landed from the combo, I struck the end of my spear into the ground, discharging a field of energy from my body. Twisting whip-like bolts of shadow sprung from the ground, destroying every rodent in a ten-foot radius around me and freezing the mud into a natural bulwark. But more skeletons were coming, and Karalti wasn’t there. Kalxat were flying in from the swamp: she was held up fighting them in the sky, about a hundred yards away. And I was out of AP.

“If you can pick me up right about now, that would be great!” A knot of sword-wielding skeletons headed for me, scimitars raised to strike. I kicked a dead rat at them and followed up with the spear, ordinary attacks only. I caught a sword blade on the haft and shoved it back, kicking the warrior right in the pelvis. It was one thing to know they couldn’t feel pain, quite another to have an enemy who could get kicked in the in the remains of their junk and not even slow down. They fought without artistry - heavy strikes, overhead swings, shield bashes. Rats swarmed around our feet, squealing and nipping, trailing clouds of contagion. My Tuun resistance to disease held me in good stead, but my HP was eaten away every time something bit me or got through my guard. And after the boss fight...

“Poison! Fuck! All kinds of poison!” I struggled toward Karalti as my HP ring throbbed red, covered in ichor and mud. “And no fucking potions! Fuck!”

“Hang on!” Karalti split-turned in the air, tearing toward me with three vultures in hot pursuit. 

“I just killed like fifty skeletons! Maybe eighty!” I called out happily, stumbling as my stamina ran out and forced me to rest on one knee. “Whew. This… this Path is awesome!”

“Get up!” Karalti bellowed as she leveled out toward me. “Something big’s coming!”

“That’s what she said!” I spun around to stab a zombie coming up on me from behind, and was still stabbing it when Karalti’s foot caught me by the back of my armor. She lifted me off into the air, showing me the battlefield - and the titanic saurian shadow pushing through the smoke toward us. It had a head that looked like a soggy potato, small eyes staring stupidly over a sagging jaw lined with peg-like teeth. A Brontosaurus. The massive dinosaur was covered in at least four tons of sacks, barrels and rigging strapped around its bloated eighty-foot long body.

“That is... a zombie brontosaurus suicide bomber,” I said. “Words I never expected to say in the same sentence together. Let’s get that third artillery bank and then go murder this thing before it reaches the Line.”

“Yay! Murder!” Karalti dove toward the last remaining line of mortars, coming around from the back through the smoke. As we broke through, I saw the Wraithlord looking up at us, staff raised.

“Dodge!” A bolt of green fire shot out from the Wraithlord. Karalti dropped to the side, but not fast enough. It hit her square on.

[Karalti takes 670 damage!]

[You take 49 damage!]

“AAAAAAH!!!” It was the most damage Karalti had ever taken in a single hit - almost half her total health. She shrilled with pain, limbs spasming - including her foot. I was flung off without control or direction, cartwheeling through the air toward the mortars, which the Wraithlord’s shadow soldiers were dragging around in the mud to try and shoot my injured dragon out of the sky.

“Fuck fuck fuck!” I corrected at the last second, landing into a roll - just as well, because I was now at 29 HP and didn’t have any heals. But now, I had AP. I sprung up, roaring as crackling black light ripped around my body and down the length of the spear. “EAT A DIIIICK!”

The Umbra Blast split out toward the Wraithlord. It vaporized three of his shadows and blew him onto his back. Before he could get up, I was on him, the flaming Spear of Nine Spheres raised to strike.

“Those who come after me will take back what you stole!” The Wraithlord hissed. Its voice was like dry wind howling down a stone tunnel. “We will save our homeland!”

There was a pretty good chance he was buying for time, so rather than give it to him, I plunged the Spear down into his face. It exploded into dust, and the remaining shadows vaporized.

[Quest Updated: Objective complete! 3/3 Artillery batteries destroyed!]

[You gain 500 EXP!]

[New objective: Protect the Wall!]

The game didn’t have to elaborate. There was really only one thing to protect the wall from now. 

When the Brontosaurus reached the abatises - abatii? - it picked up a rotting leg and slammed it down on top of the fallen trees, climbing over them as they cracked and groaned under its weight. Now that I had a better look at the dino-zombie, it was definitely packed with explosives.

“Okay, Tidbit! Let’s go break up this donkey show!” I called up to her. “You got fire?”

“Yes! But only enough for one more attack!” The dragon soared down to land, heaving for breath. The opalescent color between her scales was seething like a liquid. She was burning hot to touch. “Almost... phew... almost out. Stamina potions?”

“Last one.” I pulled it from my inventory and helped her chug it. “Glad I picked up all those herbs in the swamp. Gonna be brewing all night.”

“You should make some beer.” Karalti bent down to let me onto her back, then launched heavily into the air. 

“Beer?”

“Yeah! For Vash! We were talking about food before, and he really likes beer. He said he drank a whole keg during an orgy once. I don’t know what an orgy is, but he said everyone was dancing and cheering him on. It sounds like fun!”

I shook my head in disbelief. “This guy is supposed to be a monk.”

“He is! So it was a monk orgy or something, I dunno!”

The bronto was gaining on the No Man’s Land with frightening speed. It wasn’t fast, but it seemed completely unstoppable, ploughing through trees, mud, razor wire, barricades and bodies, shedding chunks of flesh on its relentless course toward the wall, guarded by four headless, rotten winged creatures with giant eyes mounted in their rib cages.

“Let’s do an A-roll past those things and scatter them, then flame the port side,” I said. “We only have one chance at this.”

“I know! Hold onto your butthole!” Karalti’s focus intensified, just before she furled her wings in close to her flanks and dove. 

My AP began to quickly refill. I stared over her shoulder as the bloated corpse got closer and closer... and when we close, she turned to the side, her wingtip nearly skimming the ground, and sprayed a precise line of Ghost Fire along the brontosaurus’s flank. It hit the explosives and caught, white fire blazing. 

I looked back, bracing for the earth-shattering kaboom - but as we soared back up into the air with the eye-things flapping along behind us, I looked behind to see the Bronto still moving just as it had been - except that it was now on fire.

“Fuck. What the... oh, shit!” I slapped my own thigh, then held onto the saddle. “Karalti! Turn back! That thing is carrying Greek Fire!”

“What’s that?”

“I will bet real money those explosives are protected by a layer of quicklime. Insulates the payload from fire, but gets really really hot on contact with water.” I looked over the terrain, trying to figure out the strategy at work. There were puddles of water on the ground. There were the heaps of dead, soggy zombies and vest-wearing skeletons piled against the walls. Skeletons carrying payloads of explosives and-or Greek Fire. “We need water. A lot of water. We need it fast.”

“How, though?” 

Just as she said that, a trebuchet behind the wall flung a huge ball of flaming pitch at the approaching bronto. The projectile nailed it in the chest, pitching it to the side. It stumbled and fell to its knees in the mud, the vest barely touching the sodden ground. Where it did contact, white steam began to rise.

“Uhh... uhhh...” for a terrified second, I found myself paralyzed. I’m not smart enough for this shit, I thought, staring at the distant trebuchet as the counterweight cocked back. My eyes widened. “Trebuchet! See that bucket that they’re using to balance the counterweight? Do you think you can carry it?”

“Gonna have to!” Karalti rolled up and pumped her wings, tongue lolling.

“You have Haste, don’t you? Any mana?”

“Just enough!”

The dragon’s hot scales flared with seams of light as she silently cast the Spera-Cil-Kain spell, boosting her speed another twenty percent. The engineers manning the siege engine scattered as she winged over the wall and landed on the trebuchet’s beam. Seesawing back and forth, beating her wings to maintain balance, she hastily pulled the rocks out of the counterweight and threw them to the ground.

“What are you doing?!” The Chief Weaponeer ran for us, pulling at his hair. “Stop!”

“Excuse me sir! We’re just going to borrow this for a second! Trust me!” I shouted back down, catching the saddle grips just as Karalti lurched back into the air with the bucket in hand.

Fortunately, there was a lot of water around the Prezyemi Line. The bronto was about halfway across No Man’s Land, dragging barbed wire and corpses on its course toward the men. It had lost its guts from a cannon blast, but it just dragged those along, too. Karalti flew down to the surface of a shell crater, scooping up half a huge bucket of water.

“I can’t do it!” She panted as she struggled back into the air. “Too heavy!”

“You can! Pour a bit out, and let’s go!” I checked her weight limit. We were a hundred pounds over. White-knuckled, I went into my inventory to throw out anything heavy. We were carrying a couple of sets of armor and spare weapons. Without a thought, I threw them all to the ground along with a bag of five hundred gold. They all landed in the mud below. Items didn’t despawn in Archemi - and they were as safe out in the battlefield as they were in my Inventory.

The reduction in weight was enough that Karalti could fly. Her stamina was at 5% by the time we reached the brontosaurus, who was only a body length away from the Wall. Burning with effort, she lined herself up.

“I’m going to go down and slash open those bags.” Grim and focused, I fixed on our rapidly approaching target. “Pour behind me. At the end,  land and I’ll jump on: we can restore a bit of stamina, grab the thing’s tail to stop it walking, and hold on.”

“Roger.” Karalti’s tongue lolled as she lined up, and I jumped. The wind rushed by as I fell, then landed with a soft ‘thump’ on one of the satchels, driving my spear into the thick oiled leather. It split open, puffing out a cloud of stinging white dust. Quicklime was as caustic as hell, common as dirt, and reacted explosively with water. It reached temperatures of 200 degrees within ten seconds. This much quicklime was guaranteed to reach the effective maximum temperature - around 500 degrees. I knew the stuff well: we’d used it to cook powered armor pilots in their armor in the swamps of Indonesia.

Holding my breath against the burning powder, I didn’t look back as Karalti poured water in the incision. I zig-zagged from side to side on the dinosaur’s back, dragged the Spear through each payload, and jumped to the next one. When the water hit the quicklime, it began to hiss and then crack, absorbing every drop of liquid before emitting it back out as steam. 

“Come on, come on...” I was fucked if the payload under the quicklime was explosive instead of flammable.

The brontosaurus emitted a gurgling moan as the packs on its back swelled, rupturing with steam and the expanding stone inside. I was about halfway along when the first pack ignited with an audible ‘phwoomph’. Heat and a garish, dancing yellowish light flooded over me, along with an awful rotten egg odor.

“Sulfur! Fuck fuck fuck.” I stabbed a pack on the way past, but then just focused on running. Above and behind me, Karalti threw the bucket away and landed heavily on the battlefield, crushing a pack of zombies charging toward the front line. She staggered forward a step, trying to keep pace with me as I wove across the see-sawing Bronto’s back and leaped toward her. I was out of AP and out of enhanced jumps. Even with a run up, I hit her ribs, bounced off, and landed in the mud.

“Watch out!” I was still flailing around when Karalti lumbered forward, seized me in her jaws, and ran.

The Brontosaurus’s vest ignited, belching steam, then greenish fire that consumed the huge dinosaur and turned it into a hundred-foot long barbecue. It went to its knees, then toppled forward with its head barely resting against the base of the corpses piled up at the wall. When the belly of it hit the mud, there were muffled explosions, then a roaring conflagration as the wet ground ignited all of the Greek fire underneath it. Flaming oil gushed out onto the oil-soaked corpses, lighting them.

“Throw sand! Throw sand!” Somewhere on the battlements, a man shouted over and until his voice broke.

I jostled up and down in my dragon’s mouth. She ran until she couldn’t any more, breaking down into a heap of wings and long sagging tail. She dropped me as she stumbled to her hands in the filthy mud, huffing and exhausted.

“Holy fucking titballs.” I reached up to embrace her around the neck, watching as the fallen bronto’s bones ignited. The entire battlefield blazed white as they cooked, the heat so intense we could feel it at the other end of the battlefield. “Imagine if that had gotten to the Wall. You did it, Tidbit.”

“You helped too.” She pulled her wings back into position, shuddering with the effort to lift them. 

I leaned back to look up at her. “Hey, now. Don’t downplay this. You worked your ass off. Take the credit.”

“Okay.” She crooned, tucking her face down shyly. “But you saw the bucket. I don’t notice lots of things while I’m flying.”

“That’s why we’re a team. Speaking of noticing things - those flying eye things have me worried.” I searched the sky. “Did you kill any?”

“A few.” Karalti’s mental voice was strained. “I dunno if we got all of them.”

“I have a feeling those things are recon units. Nothing we can do about it now, though.” I rubbed her hot neck, monitoring her status. Only once the Fatigue penalty icon blinked out did I climb onto her back.

When she was back at 5%, Karalti awkwardly took off into the air, tilting to one side as her left wing caught the wind a little slower than the stronger right wing. She strained on the way to the wall, where we were greeted by a crowd of cheering, whooping soldiers. 

“Good gods, man!” Istvan was at the front ready to receive us, and when I jumped down, he reached out a hand to clap my forearm. “What a performance! Between you and Suri, you nearly wiped out the entire attack force!”

“Karalti is the only reason I didn’t get my ass kicked.” I wearily clapped the dragon on her knee as she reared back up to sit on her tail and rest. “How’d Suri go?”

“Well, first she grabbed a heavy crossbow and took out fifty-two zombies.” Vash’s deep, gravelly voice rasped from behind me, making me and Karalti both jump. “Then she loaded in ten crates of cannonballs by herself while you were bouncing around in the mud, THEN single-handedly took out the four Allosaurs looming out of the mists behind the Brontosaurus with a rocket launcher-”

“And if you don’t think I’m keeping this baby, you’re out of your mind.” Bathed in sweat and streaked with gunpowder, Suri pushed through the crowd of soldiers with a simple musket-like rocket launcher braced over one shoulder. It was made for launching shells from the ground, but she carried the four-foot long weapon like it was made of feathers instead of iron and hardwood. “Turns out I like guns. I’m ditching the sword and swapping it for Mr. Rocket launcher here.”

Vash pointed at her. “If you don’t marry her, I will.”

“I thought you weren’t talking to me?” I stepped away from Karalti and embraced Suri one-armed, thumping her on the back and kissing her on the cheek.

The monk scratched his stubbly jaw. “Oh... yes. That’s right. I almost forgot that you’re filthy lying scum.”

“We all saw you out there, Fly-boy and Fly-girl.” Suri let go of me, eyes dancing. “So, how many’d you get?”

I made a show of thinking for a moment. “It was pretty chaotic out there... I don’t exactly know, but I know it was a skele-ton.”

Istvan’s nose wrinkled. Vash laughed, slapping his thighs as Suri turned away in disgust. I cackled and raised my hands to the sky, bathed in the joy of pun-romantic power right up until my Berserker girlfriend decked me across the face with her free fist and knocked my ass to the ground.

“Oof.” I pushed up on one arm, and reset my jaw back into position with a muffled crunch. “Okay. I guess deserved to get boned for that.”

Suri’s eyes narrowed to smoldering golden slits. “You did not.”

“You do NOT want to rib me any further, young lady. I can do this forever.” I grinned back at her.

She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Okay. Fine. I surrender. What do you want from me?”

“Well... we could go back to our bedroom at the Fort and...” I paused as the grin went from ‘playful’ to ‘shit-eating’.

Suri glared at me. “Do. Not.”

“... we can go back and have a mature, consensual adult conversation over a bottle of wine,” I finished.

The woman put her hands on both my shoulders. “Good. Because my consent to anything ends when you start in with the puns. Got it?”

“Got it.”

Istvan cleared his throat softly. “If you two are done... we must urgently debrief now that the crisis has passed.”

“Sure.” Suri stepped around me, looking up at Karalti. The exhausted dragon lowered her muzzle to sniff, huffing hot air over Suri’s skin. Hesitantly, she reached up a hand to stroke her. Karalti tensed, but as the woman dug her thumb into sore muscles, the dragon’s crests went from alert to half-mast. “You fought a hell of a fight today, Special-K. You gonna be able to make it home?”

“Of course, I’ll be able to make it home!” The dragon stiffened, then snorted and brushed Suri’s hand off. “Come on, Hector. We got a debrief to go to. And we’ll be the first ones there!”