Chương 34: B6C32 - Death March

Travelling night and day, Tyron's horde marched, untiring and unrelenting. As they moved further from the desert, the land became gradually greener and the signs of human settlement more common. Not that Tyron encountered many people. Each of the villages and farmsteads they encountered had been abandoned, signs of the occupants having fled at the last minute plain to see.

At their rapid pace, a journey of almost two hundred kilometres could be completed in only a matter of days, and it was clear the authorities of the Southern Province were struggling to keep up. Parts of the garrison on the edge of the desert had been left far in their wake, struggling to redeploy somewhere useful.

For the march, Tyon kept the horde in a relatively tight formation, massed ranks of skeletons gathered in square units of a thousand each, wights, demi-liches and revenants distributed amongst them evenly. In the centre, Tyron stood on his platform, with his guard around him and the most important of his minions. Despite being pulled into a relatively dense arrangement, an army of a hundred thousand skeletons still covered a large area, slowing them down when parts of the horde ran into rough terrain.

Three great miasma foundries continued to belch out constant, dense streams of darkness, forming the menacing cloud overhead that rolled forward ahead of the horde. For now, he chose not to raise the Grave Moons, judging it would be wiser to conserve the magick while on the march. He didn't anticipate they would be attacked on the move. So far, it seemed his enemies were determined to fall back until he forced them to commit.

As such, he decided to take the risk to conserve his magick rather than be battle ready across the entire journey. After all, when the full horde was on the move, they chewed through a truly absurd amount of arcane energy. Tyron could feel it being consumed, like a deep lake just vanishing every minute or so. Of that vast torrent of power, very little came from himself, but instead was drawn from the array that had been recreated over a hundred thousand times throughout the horde.

In addition, the magick each skeleton created was like a tiny spark that multiplied until it became a roaring flame.

"How long do we have to walk?" Filetta remarked from beside him. She didn't even look up at the platform to speak, distracting him for the sole purpose of breaking up the monotony of marching.

"Another day, possibly two. We'll have to slow down to make sure our magick reserves are full before we arrive at the city." If they pushed, the horde could certainly travel faster than they were right now, but at the cost of pushing the amount of magick stored across the entire army dangerously low.

"Why do you ask?" he inquired, curious.

"You aren't getting tired, are you?" Now she looked at him, a look of puzzlement on her ghostly features.

"No. I'm dead, how would I get tired?"

"A weariness of the spirit, maybe?" She snorted a laugh, so similar to what she would have done in life that he performed a double take, a slight smile pulling up the corner of his mouth.

"That's called boredom, Tyron. Yes, I'm bored. We've been walking for days without a break. Being dead hasn't made me more tolerant of having my brain go numb."

"I've been wondering about that lately," he mused.

"What it means to be entertained when you're dead, I mean. For the living, a lot of entertainment comes from satiating needs. Food, drink, uh, other appetites." That laugh again, half chuckle, half snort.

"Even rest and relaxation to relieve weariness," he ploughed on, determined to ignore her interruptions.

"The dead don't have those needs–""I don't know, I could do with a lay."

"–so how to relieve boredom?"

"Mental stimulation. The kind you understand the most," she said, rolling her ethereal eyes.

"Read a damned book, learn a new skill, make skeletons hit each other."

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Never mind that. Why? Are you wondering about being bored after you become a lich?" Filetta stated it with a laugh in her voice, but Tyron didn't respond with humour, instead, his face grew more grave and his eyes became quiet.

"Oh shit. You actually were," she said lamely. Tyron sighed.

"I don't think I will be able to kill a god, let alone four, and remain alive," he said simply.

"In many ways, it's lucky I've been able to survive as a mortal as long as I have." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. He tapped his chest for emphasis, right on the enchanted array placed directly into his flesh, responsible for keeping his heart beating. Even now he hadn't found a way to counter the Divine Mandate that had been placed on him, preventing his heart from working.

Perhaps only the Old Gods could, and he wasn't prepared to owe them another favour for something he could manage himself.

"So yes, I have been thinking about… life after death, I suppose."

"It's not that bad," she said.

"On the bright side, you're half dead already, it won't be all that much of a change for you."

"I am not," he huffed.

"When did you last sleep?"

"No comment."

"Exactly." She thought for a minute, then swore.

"When did you last eat?" Tyron looked aside.

"... No comment."

"You fucker," she growled. Filetta grew silent for a moment, then glared at him.

"I've got a group out looking for food. We've been passing farms pretty regularly, it shouldn't take long."

"Sorry," he muttered, feeling slightly ashamed, then feeling annoyed at himself for it. Why should he feel ashamed? He was managing an invasion by himself, there were other things on his mind!

"You should be. If I stop force feeding you for a single day, you don't eat. You aren't dead yet."

"Fine," he said.

"I'll eat something. Now let me concentrate."

"Sure. I'm not leaving here until I've seen it with my own eyes."

"Suit yourself," he muttered, shifting his feet on the platform as he prepared to cast his mind down the conduits again.

"I'd tell you two to fuck, but I'm not sure how the mechanics would work," Dove observed from nearby.

"Shut up, Dove," they both snapped and he held up both his skeletal palms.

"Sorry, didn't mean to intrude on couple time."

"Then why are you here?" Filetta demanded.

"Because I'm fucking bored! We've been marching for days!" Filetta did indeed wait around until her scavenging party managed to find and deliver something from an abandoned household. As it turned out, they managed to rummage up some sausages, a wedge of cheese and a bottle of wine.

Although she complained about the lack of fresh vegetables, she still nodded with satisfaction after the meat had been cooked by a cooperative demi-lich on the move and he ate it, washing it down with a few bites of cheese and a few mouthfuls from the bottle. The wine was borderline sour, but nowhere near strong enough to have any effect on Tyron, with his absurd, inhuman constitution, so he didn't mind taking a few more pulls from the bottle to wet his throat. A good Mage always took care of their voice.

It was advice his mother had drilled into him from a young age, and she had been meticulous to ensure her voice was always in good condition. Tyron, on the other hand… he grimaced. He'd developed a nasty habit of running himself ragged, not only through a lack of food and sleep, but not properly looking after his throat. Perhaps he'd grown too reliant on his hardy body to power through his lack of basic preparation. He resolved to take steps in future to ensure he was ready to cast magick at any time.

After all, a battle could break out at any moment on his march. Yet, as the kilometres rolled by and the horde advanced, the battle he anticipated didn't eventuate. Instead, abandoned villages and towns were littered along the path, every resident having fled before he arrived. As before, only a few aged and ill residents remained behind, either abandoned or having refused to move with the rest of their families. And as before, Tyron left them alone, moving through as he drew closer and closer to the city.

Less than a dozen kilometres from their destination, Tyron came across the first sign of resistance. It wasn't uncommon for the Noble houses to have their own, personal estates outside of the cities, while they retained a residence within for official business. Indeed, most of the houses in the Western Province had operated this way, and it appeared as though southern Nobles weren't any different. The compound was decently sized, with a ten-foot wall around the perimeter and a stately mansion within.

When they first saw it, Tyron had assumed it was as abandoned as everything else. When a spell had been fired from the walls, an arcing ball of fire that roared through the air towards the forward skeletons, he'd blinked in surprise. It appeared that nobody had been expecting resistance, even the demi-liches were slow on the uptake, only managing to get their shields up at the last moment.

More baffled than anything, Tyron swiftly commanded his horde to surround the estate, before deciding only a fraction of the full army was needed. Twenty thousand skeletons were more than enough to completely lock off the walls from the outside world several ranks deep. Archers and Mages exchanged fire from the walls, but it quickly became clear that there were less than a thousand troops manning the place.

The only explanation was that some fool Lord had refused to surrender his house without a fight, or had left their garrison in place in defiance of the Duke's order to gather the house Soldiers in one central force. Although he could ill afford the delay, Tyron couldn't bear to just walk past such generously donated materials. However, he strongly doubted he would find anyone of Noble blood within the compound. They would have fled long ago, leaving others to fight and die in their place.

Perhaps he was going soft, but he decided to give these defenders a chance. Using magick to augment his voice, he offered them a simple choice.

"Surrender, or perish." He waited for a reply atop his platform, arms folded impatiently. When he received an answer, it came in the form of an arrow fired directly towards his face. An impressive shot, with a great deal of power behind it despite the distance. Whoever had loosed it had a significant amount of skill. Skill that would soon belong to the undying horde.

The mantle blocked the arrow, the souls within forced to defend Tyron as best they could, and he ordered his skeletons forward with a thought as the Grave Moons began to rise. With such an overwhelming advantage in numbers, there wasn't much need for strategy, or even for Tyron to intervene much. But he did. What followed was a one-sided massacre. All in all, butchering and storing the bodies took longer than the fighting did.

As idiotic as it was, the sacrifice of these men and women had bought precious hours for the city of Kallas. The fight would be all the harder when he arrived there.