Chương 99: Crashing the Party

Ch. 99 - Crashing the Party Even as Evelyn's limbs spasmed and heart started beating fitfully once more, before the woman could even grapple with the horror of what had happened to her, the blade was forcing her to her feet. It had to. While the surrounding crowd was mostly men and women in fancy outfits right now, it could see the guards pressing forward to see what had happened. -188 Life Force. Even more urgent, though, was its need to feed.

Its wielder was using a titanic amount of power to put herself back together, and it dared not run out of energy. Was that thing chasing it? The Ebon Blade didn't know. It had been walking slowly toward the window as Evelyn had flown out of it, but it seemed to be in no hurry. The only urgency was death, and the fact that half of the people in the crowd were related to its wielder didn't slow it down in the slightest.

Instead, as it staggered toward the nearest gawking woman in a pink dress, it raised the half-healed arm of its wielder and brought it down like the executioners axe, murdering her, the man that had been holding her hand, and the man that had been standing next to her on the other side in a single stroke. -207 Life Force. +74 Life Force. +3 Human Souls. The screams started then, louder than before, but even as the guests tried to run away, the blade followed them with its broken body like a clumsy scythe.

It reaped new souls with every attack. Even so, its Life Force held steady at just over a thousand. -198Life Force. +61 Life Force. +2 Human Souls.

"What was that thing?!" Evelyn gasped as her mind returned to a half healed body. One of her lungs was still deflated, and most of her digestive organs were ruptured, but moment by moment she was becoming whole, and as the blade pressed her toward the nearest group of guards, her strength slowly joined with its own once more. I don't know, the blade answered. But we are done trying to do this the surgical way. One of them will tell us, even if I have to devour all of their souls. She didn't respond.

Instead, she focused only on healing and killing, and as her limbs knitted her strikes became more precise and she moved deeper into the ballroom she'd just spent half the night in, the blade started to tune out. -174 Life Force. +228 Life Force. +7 Human Souls. Rather than focusing on the rising amounts of blood, or even the sound of alarm that was spreading through the castle it began to interrogate the souls of the guards that it slew.

The guests were merely consumed, but the men that worked here and defended this place, they had information that it wanted. No, they had information that it needed. It ripped through them one at a time, with the same questions repeated over and over again. What is that black knight? How do you defeat the gold knights? What else defends the throne? -158 Life Force. +311 Life Force. +14 Human Souls. Few knew much, and no one knew the whole picture, but one screaming mind at a time, the larger picture began to emerge.

As it did so, and the blade added to its screaming choir of souls, one name that was more feared than the Doll's began to appear over and over. The Juggernaut. The crown might have studied and dissected the doll to learn how her magic worked, but it had managed to enslave the Juggernaut, bending it to the will of the throne. This was a secret known only to the handful of guard captains whose souls it shredded, but each of them lived in fear of the thing that towered over them.

The golden knights sometimes left the throne room, and even Altbearstein altogether to enforce the King's will or deliver an important message, but for the last six decades since its capture, the juggernaut had stayed right there, defending King Paralon from anyone that would seek to prematurely end his near eternal life. -142 Life Force. +661 Life Force. +22 Human Souls.

When the man held court, apparently his only acknowledgement to decorum was to have the thing stand behind the throne like the veiled threat that he was so that the lords of the land wouldn't have to look at it. Even as an ever present shadow, though, no one knew what it was precisely, which helped the blade little. They said it couldn't die, and that it couldn't be defeated, but that was obviously untrue, because it had been subdued at least once to end up here in the first place.

While the blade worried about all of this, its wielder became consumed with bloodlust. By the time it was giving her its full attention once more, she was covered in blood and smiling manically. Her outfit had been shredded by her near-death experience, but even so she looked every inch the Bloody Baroness. -131 Life Force. +299 Life Force. +19 Human Souls.

Somewhere in the savage, swirling scrum, the interface appeared to let it know that it had reached the fourth level of The Path of Vengeance, but the blade didn't care, and dismissed it as it focused on killing. By this point, most of the guests were dead or fled, but she did not chase the survivors. Instead, she pressed toward the stairs that would lead to the second floor, and their destiny, one way or the other. Stolen story; please report. Vengeance binds everyone, even more surely than loyalty.

You have cut those bonds and reoriented them into your own web. Now you need only find the fulcrum for which the new state of things will rest upon. To do that, you must find someone for which you and your wielder share a grudge, and you must strike them down. It is through that shared vengeance that everything can be made whole.

The Path of Vengeance: Level 4 -> kill a hundred people that have committed significant wrongs to reach level 5 Powers: Brutality: Rather than use a grudge for its intended purpose, you may expend one to double the strength of a given blow by spending 5 Life Force. Eye for an Eye: For the cost of 10 Life Force you can force an enemy to take 25% of the damage they inflict on you.

This only works on enemies you are in melee conflict with; cowardly mages and archers are too far away to face their well deserved comeuppance. That was where the golden knights re-entered the fight. There were more of them, this time. Four had become six, and though the blade could not explain that, it needed them out of action fast. Fortunately, this time it had a plan.

The battle that followed was even fiercer than the one that they'd endured before, but this time all of Evelyn's grace had been abandoned in favor of pure, brute force. She lashed out time and again shattering her opponents, and sometimes, when they fell to pieces the blade would do the unthinkable, and pick up a weapon from some dead guard and use it to pin a helmet or a breastplate to one of the thick plaster walls. -144 Life Force. +66 Life Force. +3 Human Souls.

The armor continued to squirm as it tried to break free, but once these things came apart they were much weaker until they came back together, and the blade exploited that. It still Disrupted them several times when they attacked with too much coordination, but it didn't fear them or their tricks anymore. After this bloodbath, it was overflowing with power.

Between the dying, the dead, and their souls, the blade had consumed, it had over 8, 000 Life Force, and that number was growing, not shrinking as it fought the dwindling number of golden knights. When the blade was almost finished, two more came down the stairs, but it and its wielder had become quite adept at taking them apart and left them there, pinned to the wood with their own blades, as well as any daggers or other blades that happened to be left lying around from the violence. -144 Life Force.

+54 Life Force. +1 Human Souls. Once that was done, it proceeded to the throne room a second time. There were more guards during its second assault. They manned barricades with crossbows in well drilled units behind trestle tables, and riddled its wielder with quarrels even as she ran along the walls in an effort to circumvent their defenses. On their first trip they'd managed to skulk through the halls, avoiding only the occasional servant, but the distant alarm bells that rang incessantly through the place.

They weren't summoning defenders that would stop the onslaught, though. They were just feeding it, and adding to its strength. -111 Life Force. +438 Life Force. +11 Human Souls. While it considered that, it noted that its Life Force had increased to over 10, 000 and was at risk of overflowing. While it wanted as much power as it could get for the fight ahead, it also knew that it was not strong or fast enough to fight this monster, so the Ebon Blade looked through its abilities while its wielder continued to fight.

For a moment, it almost selected Amplify Wielder, or Accelerate Wielder, but it decided against both options, because of their cost. Instead, it decided to go another way, and turned to its cheap, secondary abilities. They'd been neglected for a long time, but in this case, against this opponent, they might be ideal, if it handled things correctly. Giant's Strength 3 only cost it 800 Life Force, and 4 was an additional 1500.

Likewise, Speed of the Shadows 3 was only 1000 Life Force, bringing the total to 3300, and leaving it just a touch under 7, 000 Life Force to spare. The boosts, on their own, were small, but the way it which it could leverage them were obvious. Giant's Strength, 4: +4 strength. This bonus is doubled when facing an enemy that is more than a foot larger than you. Speed of the Shadows 3: +3 agility, +20% speed in dim or darker conditions.

This is like trying to snuff out the flames by adding more firewood, the blade quipped, making its wielder laughed as she slew another guard before running down those who had fled. No matter how much damage their spears and quarrels had done, they didn't slow her down. Somewhere between the moment she'd died and the moment she'd come back to slaughter dozens of her brothers and sister's Evelyn transformed into a demon that only resembled the woman she'd once been The blade found it hard to judge that too harshly.

Not only was it perfect for its needs, but it was certain that the men and women that made up the pieces of its soul would have reached the same conclusion if it could. They were all demons now, but the blade regretted it even less than Eveyln did as they continued to fight their way through the defenses, pressing ever closer to the king fro a second time. On the third floor, they encountered a lightning mage and two warriors wielding hexblades.

One of them was even a Penitent Blade, which would have been enough to frighten the blade at one point. This time, they were little more than a distraction, and though the weapon was careful not to touch before it slew the man, he still died. -86 Life Force. +99 Life Force. +3 Human Souls.

Once all three of them had slumped to the ground and gasped their last, the blade flashed its Aethersight to make sure that there were no surprises on the far side of the door, then Evelyn cleaved through the door and returned to the throne room whole and unharmed. Despite her ragged clothing, her new and vivid scars, and her blood spattered appearance, she was whole once more, and spoiling for a fight.