Chương 191: A Path of Destruction

From where they were, neither the Ebon Blade nor its wielder could see the mountain where the gods made their home, but the blade knew where it was. It had ripped the knowledge from Hydonar's Avatar. It would be weeks of walking through rough terrain, but those mountains only slowed its wielder. Nothing, not even ice fields or sheer granite cliffs would stop Geral at this point.

A god probably could have, and those the sword kept a close eye out for, but their defenders did not come to try to strike Geral down again. They're afraid, the weapon realized. Afraid or marshaling their defenders. While it hoped the former was true, it was certain that the latter would be as well. They were gathering strength somewhere. Geral had enough mishaps in the form of monsters and avalanches on those slopes that he was sure someone was intervening to buy time, but for what exactly remained a mystery.

+342 Life Force. +2 Monster Souls. +4 Lesser Monster Souls. None of those things slowed them, though. Cliffs were scaled, avalanches were navigated, rivers were crossed, and monsters were slain. Even the fearsome griffon that the blade had wanted its wielder to face for so long was thrown at him in an anticlimactic battle that saw Geral transform it into a pike as it charged from the cloudy sky. The fight was over almost as quickly as it had begun. +65 Life Force. +1 Great Monster Soul.

That disappointed the Ebon Blade, but its wielder walked on implacably. The area they walked through was wild, and roads, even crude ones were as rare as people at first. After a week of walking, and a single night of rest where Geral finally collapsed from exhaustion, though, they started to find inhabitants of this land. Most were small farmstead with little palisades to protect them from the night. Geral never once looked at them with curiosity or interest.

He didn't look at them at all unless they barred the way. Instead he simply hummed a half remembered lullaby that he'd sung to his young son dozens of times. The locals studied him, though. Geral attracted attention everywhere he went. Most were smart enough to stand well clear, but a few found friends instead. Whether they sought to bar his way or simply ask him questions didn't matter. If someone strayed too close, he struck them down. +258 Life Force. +4 Human Souls.

You wouldn't have fought them before, the blade whispered to him sometimes. Other times it would ask, Why do you kill them when they've done nothing to you? It didn't do this because it minded striking down strangers, but because it wondered if the old Geral was still in there somewhere. Those words were largely shrugged of with simple statements.

"If their lives didn't matter then no lives do," or "We're all dead anyway" were his most common responses. The only people he spared were women and children. Those moments were the ones that Geral studied the most. He'd kill a woman warrior or a maiden with a bow in her hand if she took a shot at him, but cowering children and the mothers with defiant eyes that cradled them? Those gave him pause, and a pang of remorse. +1, 258 Life Force. +43 Human Souls.

That tiny spark of the man he'd been was the reason the blade let its wielder do something that it knew was entirely against his nature. It hoped that with enough reoccurances, the man might rekindle some part of who he'd been, but each time that spark failed to catch, and he walked on, lost in his own rage, leaving only the helpless to witness what he'd done.

The blade might have struck them down with its zombies as a mercy killing, but that's not what its wielder would have wanted, so it refrained, but that wasn't enough to sate Geral's bloodlust. Sometimes, if one of those undead minions got to close to him, the man even tried to strike down the blade's slowly increasing collection of zombies and death knights. It prevented most of those at least. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. -45 Human Souls. -10 Monster Souls.

They are not your enemy, it instructed its wielder even as it halted the man's attacks. We may need them in the fight to come. The sword didn't know what it might need a couple dozen limping corpses for, but it no longer cost it anything but the souls to animate them at this point, and each time Geral crossed through a village or encountered a caravan, it harvested more of those. At this point it wasn't even trying to build an army. It was just exploring its powers. Given its new power set, souls were at a premium.

So it did not waste them to ask questions about their surroundings. Sometimes that resulted in surprises, such as when they found a walled city that seemed to be home to thousands of souls, not hundreds. That one Geral walked by just skirting the edges of the place until the archers got brave and launched a volley at the retreating man. Most of those arrows riddled the growing mob of zombies, but one of them struck Geral, impaling him in the back, just below his shoulder blade.

That was the first time in days he stopped walking toward his goal. He turned around then, and attacked the city. What followed was the bloodiest day the blade had experienced since it had led orcs into battle. In fact, so much happened that it was hard for the weapon to focus on any single incident after the first few minutes. It was focused when Geral turned and leaped onto the battlements with his own enhanced strength. That maneuver took all of them by surprise except for the blade.

It was surprised he didn't use bolt, but Geral's actions made more sense when he used his time in the air to rip the arrow out before cleaving through his foes in a vicious series of strikes that left nothing but corpses. +306 Life Force. +5 Human Souls. The men were crowded together on a narrow catwalk, so they had no chance to retreat. Only two even managed to draw a sword to parry before he cut them down.

As the wielder moved, its shambling horde charged the main gate, but without any way to get in on their own, it was forced to redirect Geral toward the enemies that guarded it when he leapt down inside the city walls. He didn't struggle against the weapon's commands. As long as he was killing he seemed to think that these were decisions he was making, which saddened the blade; this was not how it wanted things to go. It wanted to be wielded, not wield, but there was nothing it could do about it just now.

When it bit through the heavy wooden bar holding the gates shut, though, and they opened spilling its reinforcements into the streets, it no longer really wanted to, because the violence began to consume everyone, like a wildfire. There were screams of pain and calls to arms. Somewhere beyond all that a bell was tolling in alarm.

It became harder to focus on all of those things, though, when the zombies started to draw blood, though, and the power of that Life Force began to trickle to it through a dozen different channels. As those multiplied, and the red haze began to saturate the area, it became harder still. +1, 731 Life Force. 27 Human Souls. It wasn't even a lot of Life Force, not at first. It was enough, though.

One trashing melee at a time, its focus spread out, flashing from combat to combat to taste the moment as blade and teeth ripped through enemies. It wasn't quite a warrior in that moment, or even a general. It was more like a demi god of war. It didn't rule over all combats, but this one belonged solely to it, and it watched as it unfolded with great interest. As the bodies began to stack up, it lost a few zombies, but as the souls flooded in, it added some of the most intact corpses to its roster too.

Geral didn't need its help to slaughter these people, but he really didn't have a choice in the matter; this was not a duel, and it would not stand idly by as blood and death churned to new heights. +4, 652 Life Force. 1 Greater Soul. 1 Elven Soul. 2 Dwarven Souls. 58 Human Souls. Something this good couldn't last forever, though.

Within an hour it was over, and was only toward the end that it realized that this was the city belonged to Franizal, which was where the Lusitiveriein Avatar that had tried to chain them had come from. The high temple it had seen in the mind of her honor guard was too grand to be in such a small city, but it was an interesting enough coincidence that it devoured the soul of a merchant to understand where that might be as the fighting wore down.

The answers flowed immediately, populating the map in the weapons mind. It was too far from their destination to be considered on their way, but still the Ebon Blade toyed with the idea of taking the detour just to burn it down. It didn't yet have an army in its own right, but if it conquered a few more cities like this than it might soon. By the time they finally left only the defenseless remained, permanently traumatized by the orgy of violence.

The blade wasn't sure that counted as a kindness, but it was what its wielder wanted. So it contented itself with tripling the size of its shambling horde instead. Many of the newer additions had been made with pure human souls. That combined with the freshness of their corpses made them the most effective of its soldiers. If we were to stop for a time I might repair many of these with some twine and wood, the blade considered, noting the simple structural failures in many of its zombies caused by violent deaths.

It doubted it would get the chance, and really it didn't care, but it had nearly a hundred of the shambling wretches now. So, it made for something to study as Geral started back on his path toward Mount Olyvel.