Chương 130: Blood and Rust

Ch. 130 - Blood and Rust Things were already in motion, even before the blade returned to anything resembling consciousness, but as the minutes passed, horns blew and siege engines groaned to life. Everyone moved toward the rusted walls of the Iron City one plodding footfall at a time. The last fight in hell had been a chaotic swirling melee of half a hundred kinds of demons. While this army was filled with the same sorts of strange abominations, there was a uniformity, too.

Each one might be uniquely deformed, but those that were similar were grouped together into large blocks of marching soldiers, and everyone in those blocks was equipped with similar armor and nearly identical weapons. This wasn't a mob; it was a force that had been drilled and trained. At least, that was the case for the most part.

While heavily armored pig men and more lightly armored scarecrow creatures darted to and fro on a variety of shouted orders that the blade didn't always understand, there were other singular creatures here and there. There were three-headed dogs the size of a cottage, and tentacle-limbed ogres that were nearly as tall as the five-story siege towers lumbering their way toward the city. There were mages, too, as well as the victims that were being fed to them regularly to sustain their dark powers.

Those spindly creatures resembled humans more than most, but they were still hopelessly twisted things with too many eyes or fingers; they were the tortured reflections of life, and nothing more. Some cast terrible flaming volleys at the city like infernal artillery, and others cast gusts and shields that swept the projectiles that were raining down on the army from time to time at bay.

While the opposing side fielded no soldiers of their own, they rained down sharpened bone quarrels and larger catapult stones, which were larger than a child, throughout the vast army that it was unwillingly a part of. While the fight was interesting to watch, the blade would have much preferred to participate. Unfortunately, that option was denied, and all it could do was watch as fifty thousand demons marched against the fifteen-foot walls while each side pummeled each other with projectiles or spells.

It took a moment to try to peer deeper into the demon that held it, but the weapon accomplished little. Name: Angarazon Occupation: Prince of the Ninth Circle Toughness: X Strength: X Agility: X Speed: X Intelligence: X Willpower: X Morality: Absolute Bloodlust: Yes Status: Triumphant Martial Skill:????? Armor Proficiency:????? Dodging:????? Athletics:???? Circle: 9th Most of the fields were still blank, but the very fact that it could see more than it had the last time it tried showed that something had changed.

The demons from before were on the 4th circle, weren't they? It considered. How did I get to the ninth circle? How far are those away from each other? Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. It had no idea. It tried to peer into the demon prince's mind, and it tried to analyze the threads of his magic. The blade even attempted to read the grudges that linked his soul to others, but those powers did little good in the face of a demon's twisted existence.

All it could do was watch as siege towers rumbled, catapults loosed, and soldiers screamed and died. It stole the souls of the nearest victims. Demons were much harder than humans to kill, but while they could be filled with enough quarrels to make a porcupine jealous, they could still be turned into a black smear by an eight-hundred-pound stone that hit the bloody ground hard enough to leave a crater. That wasn't surprising.

What was, though, was that mages, and even some of the largest ogres, could catch those things and toss them back. When those returned projectiles hit the tops of the walls, they sent the scattered bodies of maimed defenders raining down, but most of the time, they didn't. They either arced over the wall somewhere into the city to crash down on some building, or they were returned with too little force, impacting the wall itself.

Besides a small dent and a sound like a giant gong being struck, these did little damage. The fiery spells launched by the demonic mages did little more. They might clear a section of the walls for a time, but the defenders would regroup, and the fighting would continue. Some of the siege towers were tipped over or burned down before they reached the wall, but the rest managed to establish footholds for a time before they were repelled. All of that seemed fruitless to the blade.

The defenders were too tenuous, and all that it did was allow the giant battering ram at the heart of the army to inch forward. When it reached the gate, the real fighting finally began. As brutal as it had been until that moment, those frantic few minutes produced as many ugly deaths as the previous hour combined.

The defenders poured down waves of toxic yellow acid and burning oil, and the attackers hammered the walls with lightning and fireballs, but none of that stopped the terrible toll of the battering ram against the gate. It was a giant weapon of war, and the frame it swung from was as big as a barn. It had rolled into place slowly on eight huge wooden wheels, but now that it had stopped, it had become a fixture.

No matter how many of the giant demons were herded to swing it back and forth on arm-thick chains, more were always needed. Still, it didn't stop, and blow after heavy blow, it took its toll on the massive rusty gate. What started as a racket quickly became a dent, and then a crater. Each blow seemed to do little good, but they were as methodical as the hammer of some celestial blacksmith, and after three dozen strikes, the damage was starting to look severe.

The city poured death on the attackers, but in the end, they could only make the army that partially encircled their city pay a heavy price; they could not stop them. Then, the gate gave one final tortured metallic scream and finally broke. The left side bent violently as it caved in, but stayed upright. The left side of the gate, though, fell inwards, crushing any defenders who were too slow to move out of the way. The opening gave the blade its first chance to view the side of the city, but it was not impressed.

The place seemed practically deserted; in fact, it appeared to be more of a giant, complicated forge than a city, and those few people it could see were running from the breach. This was when its demonic wielder chose to move forward after spending the last couple of hours as a general; he was finally choosing to take the field. He didn't fly, though. Presumably, that would make him too great a target. Instead, he walked through the units and warmachines as his forces pressed their advantage.

It was a strange battlefield in that there were no corpses. Even the dead demons that were well out of its range disappeared after a few minutes, becoming nothing more than smoke and dust. The blade didn't understand that; it had assumed that the demons that it had slain up till now had vanished because of its powers, but that did not seem to be the case.

Stranger, though, was the fact that even though there was only a single defender standing between a thousand demonic legionaries, no one seemed willing to press their advantage. Are they waiting for their leader to claim victory? The blade wondered. Momentum was an awful price to pay for vanity, and it wondered why they seemed so unwilling to press their advantage. Then, it saw that sole defender move. From here, it looked like nothing more than a tall man in a suit of armor.

He stood at attention with a halbard, but no sooner did the front three ranks of the men at the gate burst forward to charge him than he mowed them down in a single, nearly instantaneous motion. The blade did not see the entire arc of its strike. It was too fast. One moment the knight stood in one position, and then the next in a very slightly different position. The main difference between the two wasn't the way he held his weapon, though.

It was the way that all of those who had been arrayed against him were split in two. What in the world is that? The blade wondered, suddenly eager to face off against the thing. As a warrior, it looked more normal than anyone else on the battlefield, but the weapon could see that it was anything but.

"That," its wielder rumbled, "Is the Warbringer, and it, not these walls, is the reason that I have never been able to conquer this city. All of that changes today. You will sunder it so completely that Lord Grauvenn will never be able to repair it, and he shall finally kneel before me." While the Ebon Blade was no fan of being wielded by a demon, it desperately wanted to fight that thing.

Win or lose, it would be a battle for the ages, and even though it did not seem to be able to affect its wielder's motions in the slightest, it looked forward to the fight ahead.