The Doomed Bastards: Reckoning (story complete)
HugeOgre
First Post
Drowbane said:So LB... update?
Yea, I almost wish I just found these little treasures after he finished them and put them into one big pdf. Waiting sucks. lol
But LB is besides being a great writer, probably the most frequent poster. Daily updates are nigh unheard of on the Internet. Look for his about 5 PM Pacific Time most days.
Lazybones
Adventurer
Some days, even earlier.HugeOgre said:
Heh, that would be too easy, wouldn't it? Besides, having Varo take down the monster wouldn't make for much of a Friday cliffhanger.jensun said:
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
Welcome to Drowbane to cmnash, and thanks for posting. Glad folks are continuing to enjoy the story. I am still well ahead in writing so we'll have regular updates for quite some time.
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Chapter 135
HACK AND SLASH
Dar felt a moment’s flashback as he saw the huge whatever-the-hell-it-was swallowed Talen. He surged up the hill toward it, Valor pulsing eagerly in his fist.
He heard a yell above, and saw Shay clambering on the monster’s body. He wasn’t sure exactly what she was trying to do, but it didn’t look like it was going to help Talen any. As he lowered his gaze again, he heard Allera’s voice, crying out somewhere from the shadows on hillside beyond the creature. “Dar! The left ankle!”
The fighter looked that way, and saw that the creature’s joint had been damaged, a black gash visible where someone had managed to hew away part of its substance. He nodded to himself and ran toward it. The gatherer, distracted by swallowing Talen, and the returning riders coming at it from the far side of the hill, did not attack him.
Time seemed to slow as he covered the last ten yards between him and his target, but finally he was where he needed to be. The monster started to move, lifting its foot for a step, but before it could get away Dar was in range, bringing his sword around in a powerful swing that had his full strength behind it.
The sword tore deep into the gatherer’s body, ripping through dirt and bone and the fibrous tendrils that held it together. The injured foot moved out of his reach as he finished his stroke, but as it came down fifteen feet away, the crippled joint collapsed. The huge monster lost its footing, and fell hard onto its back, crushing a rider who could not get out of its way in time. It slid thirty feet down the hill, and lay there for a moment, like a man who’d slipped and fallen on a set of stairs.
Then it started to get up again.
Dar saw Shay lying in the rocks, trying unsuccessfully to rise. The scout had been flung from the creature’s body as it fell; blood trickled down the side of her face where she’d smashed into the rocks. She looked at him, her eyes trying to focus as he rushed over to her.
“Are you all right?”
“Talen... he’s inside that thing! You’ve got to help... him...” She thrust herself to her feet, only to fall back to the ground, still dazed.
“It never ends,” he said, turning and charging back down the the hill.
Varo pulled himself to his feet; he’d been struck inadvertently when the creature had fallen. His heal spell, cast from the scroll he’d taken from the high priest of Orcus, had faltered harmlessly against the corpse gatherer’s spell resistance. The thing was a force of nature, almost unstoppable. Varo had also sensed something else when he had touched it; the negative energy that fueled it was continuing to grow. Varo did not have to ponder long to guess its source. The monster was drawing life from the bodies it was absorbing into its mass.
If they didn’t defeat it soon, it would quickly become unstoppable.
Dar’s men were doing their best. The remaining riders, joined by a few men on foot who had survived the death of their mounts, continued to harry the creature as it rose. Realizing that their regular attacks were having little effect on it, they had resorted to all-out power attacks, using both hands on their weapons to hew at its dense substance. A big piece of its leg had just come apart as it had fallen, but as it got up, the damaged leg began to expand and shift, forming a new foot to support its mass; the other leg shortened slightly to even out its stance. The regeneration cost it, and it immediately sought out fuel to restore its animating power. As the riders came past it again, it lashed out with a hand, snaring a horse and mount together, smashing them into its body, which opened to receive them. The horse had its neck snapped by the rough treatment, while the rider screamed as gray hands seized him from inside the creature’s body, drawing him in.
Dar ran toward a boulder that jutted out from the ground near the monster, and as he finished his charge, he ran out onto it, leaping into the air. Armored as he was, he didn’t get very high, but his path brought him close to the monster’s knee, and as he came down he drove Valor down like a spike through the joint. He felt his breath knocked out of him as he hit the creature’s leg; a protruding gravestone had hit him hard enough to dent his breastplate. Hanging from the hilt of the sword with both hands, he looked up to see the monster reaching down for him.
Dar planted his feet, and tried to get leverage to rip Valor out, and hopefully take a good chunk of the monster’s knee with it. But he was too slow, and it snagged him, doing to him what it had already done to Talen, and to several of the other defenders. He lost his grip on the sword as the creature crushed him in its huge paw, and Valor was left jammed into its knee, useless.
The monster’s body quivered; Dar could feel it shake through the thick fingers holding him captive. The fighter looked down and saw Varo standing beside its foot, pouring healing energy into its ankle, marshalling his considerable will and power in an effort to get through its spell resistance. His men were continuing to hack at the creature’s other foot and leg, slashing and thrusting with spears, axes, maces, and swords. The creature paid no heed to any of them, instead lifting Dar up to his chest.
“I’m not going to be eaten by the likes of you,” the fighter growled. But his struggles to break free were useless; the monster was insanely strong.
A bright, flickering light from above caught his attention. Looking up, he saw that the light was a point of white radiance shining from the bottom of the creature’s jaw. It was very faint, and as the monster shifted, the light vanished, leaving only the dark mass of its head.
Dar heard a yell from below, Shay’s voice, but from his prison he could not look down to see what was happening. And then everything went dark, as the creature thrust its fist, along with Dar, deep into its own body.
Richard Rawen
First Post
Lazybones said:
Ummm, and now it's only almost unstoppable? Crazy!
Lazybones said:
K, Talen is chopping his way out from inside, but Dar has no magical uber weapon w/out Valor... I doubt that magical staff is going to be much use buried alive in a walking tomb.
Brogarn said:
LOL Brogarn, the image was all to easy to conjure =-)
You guys have come up with some great predictions! Now how are they gonna get out alive?
Lazybones
Adventurer
Chapter 136
SACRIFICE
The men of the Border Legion were tough men from a region known for dire threats, but none of them had confronted anything even remotely like the corpse gatherer. While they had followed Dar’s blind charge into battle against this seemingly unstoppable foe, the creature had withstood their attacks without much apparent effect. Now, as it simply absorbed their new leader, their courage began to falter, and they started to fall back.
Varo thought he felt a slight weakening as one of his cure spells penetrated its resistances, but he too felt that their time was running out. With both Talen and Dar consumed by the creature, their ability to harm it was rapidly diminishing. And he was nearly out of spells, at least those with any chance at all of affecting it.
For a moment he felt despair, as he saw the darkest prophecies written in the Codex Thanara come true in his mind.
Then Shaylara’s yell drew his attention up, and he saw the young woman rush forward, a sword in her hand. She leapt onto the same boulder that Dar had used as a springboard a moment ago, but whereas the fighter had leapt onto its knee, the scout sprang high into the air, driving the sword down with both hands into its chest, just above where it had absorbed Dar.
The attack hit where the creature’s heart would have been, had it been a mortal creature. But to Varo’s surprise, the attack had an obvious effect; the monster reared back, and Shay’s weight dragged the sword deeper, opening a gash in its chest that trailed crumbling clods of packed gray earth instead of blood.
Realization came in a flash. She’s using Sextus’s sword! he thought. The weapon, aligned earlier by Serah, could hurt the monster, and penetrate its considerable resistance to mundane damage. But Varo doubted that even that would be enough.
His suspicion was born out a moment later, as the gatherer smashed its hand into its chest. Shay was crushed against its body, and when it pulled its hand away, the scout had been all but absorbed into its mass, with gray hands grabbing her, drawing her further in.
Knowing it was useless, Varo touched the monster again, burning his last healing spell. The cure light wounds spell dissolved against its spell resistance. He knew better than to try his wands; the potency within them would have no chance whatsoever of harming it.
The gatherer, however, was beginning to shake. Its protruding “head” shifted toward Varo, who clutched another scroll, ready to invoke a word of recall that would yank him out of there. But before the monster could lunge for him, the bright point of light that Varo had seen earlier reappeared along the curve where the monster’s jaw met its face. This time, instead of vanishing, it grew brighter, until Varo could see the white flames that appeared along the length of the blessed steel, and knew its source.
At the same time, a gout of earth exploded out of the creature’s chest, and Varo realized that Dar was not giving up without a fight either. And then, the thing just started to come apart.
Varo fled, running back as clods the size of wagons smashed into the ground, spraying showers of gray earth and dust around the area. He was blocked as a huge mound—one of the creature’s arms—crashed into the ground in front of him, blocking his escape. Clods glanced off of his body, and he flinched as a gravestone slammed into the ground next to him, having narrowly missing his head by less than a foot.
Then, it was over. The cleric of Dagos turned, and saw a new hill had formed where most of the creature’s body had collapsed. Gray dust hung thick in the air, drifting into his lungs, making him choke.
The cleric started back toward the mound. Something stirred in the dirt, and he headed for it, thinking it would be Dar, or one of the others absorbed by the creature.
But the thing that rose up out of the dirt was not one of his companions. Covered in dirt, Varo nevertheless instantly identified the gray, mottled flesh, the stiff movements, and above all, the unnatural aura of undeath that hung about the creature. Even before it turned its vacant gaze upon him.
And all around him, more zombies were stirring, rising up out of the remains of the corpse gatherer.
Dozens of them.
The battle, as it turned out, had not been won; if anything, it had just begun.
SACRIFICE
The men of the Border Legion were tough men from a region known for dire threats, but none of them had confronted anything even remotely like the corpse gatherer. While they had followed Dar’s blind charge into battle against this seemingly unstoppable foe, the creature had withstood their attacks without much apparent effect. Now, as it simply absorbed their new leader, their courage began to falter, and they started to fall back.
Varo thought he felt a slight weakening as one of his cure spells penetrated its resistances, but he too felt that their time was running out. With both Talen and Dar consumed by the creature, their ability to harm it was rapidly diminishing. And he was nearly out of spells, at least those with any chance at all of affecting it.
For a moment he felt despair, as he saw the darkest prophecies written in the Codex Thanara come true in his mind.
Then Shaylara’s yell drew his attention up, and he saw the young woman rush forward, a sword in her hand. She leapt onto the same boulder that Dar had used as a springboard a moment ago, but whereas the fighter had leapt onto its knee, the scout sprang high into the air, driving the sword down with both hands into its chest, just above where it had absorbed Dar.
The attack hit where the creature’s heart would have been, had it been a mortal creature. But to Varo’s surprise, the attack had an obvious effect; the monster reared back, and Shay’s weight dragged the sword deeper, opening a gash in its chest that trailed crumbling clods of packed gray earth instead of blood.
Realization came in a flash. She’s using Sextus’s sword! he thought. The weapon, aligned earlier by Serah, could hurt the monster, and penetrate its considerable resistance to mundane damage. But Varo doubted that even that would be enough.
His suspicion was born out a moment later, as the gatherer smashed its hand into its chest. Shay was crushed against its body, and when it pulled its hand away, the scout had been all but absorbed into its mass, with gray hands grabbing her, drawing her further in.
Knowing it was useless, Varo touched the monster again, burning his last healing spell. The cure light wounds spell dissolved against its spell resistance. He knew better than to try his wands; the potency within them would have no chance whatsoever of harming it.
The gatherer, however, was beginning to shake. Its protruding “head” shifted toward Varo, who clutched another scroll, ready to invoke a word of recall that would yank him out of there. But before the monster could lunge for him, the bright point of light that Varo had seen earlier reappeared along the curve where the monster’s jaw met its face. This time, instead of vanishing, it grew brighter, until Varo could see the white flames that appeared along the length of the blessed steel, and knew its source.
At the same time, a gout of earth exploded out of the creature’s chest, and Varo realized that Dar was not giving up without a fight either. And then, the thing just started to come apart.
Varo fled, running back as clods the size of wagons smashed into the ground, spraying showers of gray earth and dust around the area. He was blocked as a huge mound—one of the creature’s arms—crashed into the ground in front of him, blocking his escape. Clods glanced off of his body, and he flinched as a gravestone slammed into the ground next to him, having narrowly missing his head by less than a foot.
Then, it was over. The cleric of Dagos turned, and saw a new hill had formed where most of the creature’s body had collapsed. Gray dust hung thick in the air, drifting into his lungs, making him choke.
The cleric started back toward the mound. Something stirred in the dirt, and he headed for it, thinking it would be Dar, or one of the others absorbed by the creature.
But the thing that rose up out of the dirt was not one of his companions. Covered in dirt, Varo nevertheless instantly identified the gray, mottled flesh, the stiff movements, and above all, the unnatural aura of undeath that hung about the creature. Even before it turned its vacant gaze upon him.
And all around him, more zombies were stirring, rising up out of the remains of the corpse gatherer.
Dozens of them.
The battle, as it turned out, had not been won; if anything, it had just begun.
