Orphan [LitRPG Adventure] - Book One Complete!

Book Two - Chapter Twenty-Six


By the time Alarion reached it, Carling Hill was less of a hill and more of a crater. A full day of sustained bombardment had devastated the once lush and recently poisoned landscape, turning it into a ragged mess of impact craters, half-filled with ugly brown water after an afternoon of light showers.

Dozens of bodies, or at least parts of them, littered the landscape. These were the remains of the resurrected dead, too strict in their orders to leave the line of fire, as well as a smattering of fiendish bits from those caught in the initial bombardment. The artillery section had done more than they expected, but less than they'd hoped.

During the grueling march from Shae-Yomag to Carling Hill, they had held out hope that the boil had over-committed its forces, that it had gambled everything on the attack and left only a relatively small number behind. Enough to ambush and kill Higgins' group, but perhaps not sufficient to stand up to a frontal assault. If nothing else, they hoped the field would be clear of revenants, depriving the remaining fiends of leadership.

It had been nice to hope while the moment lasted.

The force that greeted them on their arrival was nothing short of a small army. They stood shoulder to shoulder, a wall of inflamed flesh and glistening bone. Alarion had experience with a wide variety of fiends. He had fought the agile Hunters on the Trinity Isle and clashed with several of the massive Brutes. He'd killed the wiry Stalkers and the four-legged Spitters. But these monsters wielded bone spears resembling elongated spinal columns. Swollen large to act as shields against spell and sword, their arms were twisted and bulbous. These he'd only heard of.

Soldiers.

They were not the strongest type of fiends, but they were among the most feared. A boil only birthed Soldiers when it had revenants to lead them. When close to one another, their power was amplified; they hit harder and took less damage. When enough of them formed a group, their shields gained anti-magic properties, reducing or eliminating the ability to kill them from a distance.

"Orphan, Tharen, with me. Second, you have the right wing. Let's get this done," Kali ordered.

None of them hesitated; the time for that had long passed.

They'd arrived three hours earlier at the edge of the ongoing bombardment, the twelve surviving members of the 13th Autonomous Section joined by nearly three hundred members of the subjugation force. Most were Awakened, but even the mundane soldiers fit only for labor and evacuation had volunteered or been conscripted for the task. There were no reserves, nothing held back for a second attempt. They'd succeed at the task or they'd die trying, and the Vitrians would have to put them down when they finally arrived in force.

"Strike and move. Target the revenants, but do not get bogged down fighting," Kali continued as they rushed across the field toward their enemy. Even with the full weight of the subjugation force at their back, the enemy outnumbered them two to one. However, numbers were not everything. In a fight between the Awakened, the true balance of power was harder to gauge. Most of the fiends were rank I and low level, but unlike the Auxilia, they were creatures bred for combat. There was no breaking fiendish morale, no shattering their will to fight and killing them on the rout, the way most soldiers died in battle.

But there was an alternative that was nearly as good. Kill the leadership, and the fiends would revert to animal instincts.

Alarion flickered to Echo as the blade soared a few feet overhead of the bulk of the enemy force. The fiends below him seemed perplexed, but the revenant at the back panicked as the silver streak of Alarion's [Spell-Storing Dagger] raced across the field and took it in the chest. The spell contained within detonated with a flare of light and pressure, killing one revenant and wounding another.

There were six of them. Now only five. Five left to break the enemy's cohesion.

Alarion launched Echo toward a new target but failed to follow it as something struck him from the side.

You have suffered minor Moon Affinity damage. HP -271.

You have been stunned for three seconds.

They had spellcasters. Wonderful.

He spun in the air, disoriented, and hit the ground hard a few seconds later. No. Not the ground. Even the most infested ground didn't move beneath him; it didn't snap at his ankles or stab a deep wound into his thigh with a bony protrusion.

He'd landed atop the pressed-together ranks of the fiendish army. An army that very much wanted to drag him down into their midst and bludgeon him to death, but struggled to do so as their magically compelled orders forced them to remain in formation.

You are no longer stunned.

Alarion flickered to Echo the moment his head cleared and found himself lying on his back twenty yards from the rear of the fiendish line and less than ten feet away from a very confused revenant.

With an act of will, he caused his [Hilt Wrap of the Lost and Recovered] to coil in on itself, dragging his mace back to his hand as he rolled to one knee. He'd dropped it after the impact, but one of the unexpected benefits of the hilt wraps was that they caused the mace to always be brought along during a teleportation. It was one of those odd skill interactions that could have gone either way.

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Alarion was grateful that the System had shown mercy on him, and he displayed that gratitude by throwing the mace at the nearby revenant.

The revenant stepped to the side, neatly dodging the attack. At least, it thought it did. This undead opponent obviously had some experience with combat, but few could prepare for Alarion's unorthodox fighting style. After all, it wasn't every day that a kneeling opponent treated a several-hundred-pound mace as though it were the head of a whip.

Using one more pulse of will, Alarion urged the hilt wrap to coil back toward him. Given its momentum, that was impossible, but making the attempt caused the unravelling hilt wrap to go taut. From there, he jerked the fabric to one side with his free hand. The sudden tension travelled up the line, and when it reached the mace, it redirected much of the weapon's remaining momentum, jerking it to the side just as it would have flown harmlessly past the revenant, striking the monstrosity with enough force to shatter bones.

"Mm!" Alarion congratulated himself as he stood and stalked toward the now crippled fiend. He'd been trying to get that to work for half a year in training, with mixed results.

Sadly, the fiends were on him before he could land the killing blow. Revenants never gave verbal commands; instead, the fiends seemed to be intrinsically aware of their desires, with rank and proximity playing varying roles in who they listened to at any time. With Alarion bearing down on their domitor, several of the closest fiends peeled away from the formation and came rushing to save their master.

They were individually weak, but even with a difference in rank, their numbers counted. Every one of his swings crippled or claimed a life, but they cost Alarion in HP as much as stamina as the remaining fiends struck with spears and claws. He was faster than them by a considerable margin, but his limbs could only be in so many places at once, and he could only avoid attacks from so many angles. They weren't going to kill him, not unless he acted recklessly, but they were driving him away from his target one body at a time.

Until Kali arrived.

The Sergeant tore through the corner of the fiend formation like a rampaging bull, scattering even the largest fiends with the sheer ferocity of his attack.

It was not the first time Alarion had seen him fight, but it was the first time he had watched the Godborn go all out. He was a whirlwind of destruction, each heavy swing pulverizing flesh and bone. His knees shattered fiendish cores within caved-in chest cavities, his elbows decapitating Soldiers who met their true end when he stomped on their chests on his way toward his next victim. There was skill in his fighting style, the practiced fluidity of a warrior who had fought as many battles as Alarion had lived years, but curiously, there were no skills that he could detect.

With Kali providing an opening, Alarion redoubled his efforts. He impaled one and bisected another. He brought his mace down in a [Void Crush] that opened his way to a fleeing target, then dismantled the revenant when he finally laid hands on it.

Four to go. Maybe less, if their comrades had been successful.

"I told you to keep moving!" Kali shouted as they retreated from a fresh wave of fiendish attacks.

That had been the strategy they'd developed in the few minutes they had to plan. It was risky, devoting all seven of their frontline rank II fighters to a series of assassination attempts, as evidenced by Alarion's near-death experience, but it had its perks. Hunters would have run them down, chasing them with infinite stamina until they stumbled or were exhausted. The soldiers would not. They could not break formation for long, not without weakening themselves and the whole.

"Are you alright?" Kali asked.

Alarion gave him an odd look, then followed the Sergeant's eyes to the bleeding wound on his side. He'd known he was injured, but a system notification was far less gruesome than seeing the open wound. "I can go again."

"You are sure?"

Rather than answer, Alarion drew a potion from his wrist sheath and downed it in a single gulp. He shuddered in disgust as the shiny liquid went down, then felt a stinging in his scalp as the potion worked its magic on the attack that had stunned him. "They are moving."

"Damn," Kali grunted, starting back toward the enemy formation at a sprint.

With their strong resistance to ranged attacks, the enemy force had been more than willing to stand and wait for the Auxilia to launch their assault. They knew the living were on a timer, and that the ragged terrain gave the defender the advantage. The attacks on the revenants had altered the math, provoking a response. Now the fiends were advancing, and the living were retreating to buy time. And the fiends were faster.

If the two columns met, it would be a slaughter. The bulk of the Auxilia were fighters, not soldiers, more experienced with small-unit tactics against individual foes than in a clash of armies.

They had to hurry.

Alarion leapfrogged Kali's headlong rush with a flicker from Echo, his elevated position giving him the information he needed. "Two left, one partway into the flank, one buried in the middle. "

"Can you-" Kali mimed throwing a dagger, followed by an explosion.

Alarion shook his head and threw Echo toward the fray. "Used it. But I can get him."

"You're sure?" He asked an instant before the youth leapt into the air and curled in tight upon himself, as though jumping into a lake.

Alarion reappeared in the sky above, narrowly dodging another spell from his left by virtue of his tight profile. It was believed that a boil shared the senses of all its revenants and could pass the information along to others. They'd figured out how Echo worked weeks ago, and creatures from this boil weren't likely to fall for the fake dagger trick again.

But he had others. Even if he hated to use them.

Alarion threw and flickered once again. This time, the revenant waited for him to appear before launching a bolt of midnight purple energy in his direction. It was not Alarion's first time seeing the moon affinity in action, but he had always felt that the effects of the magic were hauntingly beautiful, a fact entirely at odds with the monsters who adopted it.

"Kotone!"

"Yes, Miss! Yes, M-" the magical blast struck his familiar cleanly in the back, singing one wing and sending her spiraling as Alarion fell toward his target unmolested.

"Void Crush!" Alarion intoned a few seconds before he hit the ground. A wave of vibration and pain rocketed through his legs as he landed hard, but it was nothing compared to the double impact that [Void Crush] and his descending mace imposed upon the revenant who'd thought himself safe. Only scattered limbs remained as Alarion withdrew his mace, though the surrounding fiends had fared far better. Only one had died to the spell, and the others were rushing in from all sides.

He flickered, reappearing in the sky next to Kotone, the familiar holding Echo in one of its stubby forelimbs, right where he'd left it.

"Sorry," he told it with genuine sympathy. Using the creature as a shield was a cruel tactic, one he genuinely disliked, but desperate times called for desperate measures. It'd be right as rain by the next summoning. "You can go."

"Yes, Miss! Yes, Miss!" Kotone said, its tone subtly indignant, as it disappeared with a pop.

Alarion lined up a throw that brought him above the last target, but there was no need. Below him, he could see Kali tearing through the disorganized fiends, standing atop the body of the last revenant. No longer on the back foot, the Auxilia was rushing toward the battle to take advantage of the enemy's disarray.

The plan had worked.

So far.

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