novelraw Chapter 95: Breakout
Chapter 95: Breakout
But how?
How would he come down and still be alive after a second?
Coming down into that was a different kind of problem.
The ground directly below the tree was a mass of movement, his undead fighting, the Valdenmoor knights fighting back, the wolves cutting through the crowd and the skeleton knights holding whatever ground they could.
Coming down into the middle of it meant landing in the worst possible position with enemies on every side and no clear line to run.
He watched the fight and tried to find the angle.
The wolves were doing well. Better than well, honestly. They moved through the crowd in ways that living wolves didn’t move. They had no hesitation to them, no self-preservation instinct pulling them back from a hit or pack behavior making them wait for each other either.
One of them had gotten its jaws around a knight’s sword arm and simply held while the man screamed and tried to pull free.
Another was running through the legs of a cluster of men, low and fast, knocking them sideways, the weight of it at speed doing more damage than the bite. One was biting a knight right at the head, killing him brutally.
One of the pack wolves went down though, a knight’s sword found its skull from above and the wolf dissolved in the middle of a motion, and the knight who had done it stumbled forward into the space it had left, not expecting the resistance to simply vanish.
The undead knights were holding the base of the tree but not for long. They were getting destroyed, one by one, pulled apart by the number of men pressing in on them. But each one that went down took time, and each one took knights with it, a skeleton that didn’t feel pain didn’t stop fighting when it should have stopped, didn’t flinch when it was hit and kept its grip on whatever it had its hands on until the core structure failed.
Three Valdenmoor knights had gone down to undead knights that had already been effectively destroyed but were still moving.
The bats were invisible in the chaos. That was the word for it: invisible. In the noise and the movement and the press of bodies, nobody was tracking small things landing on their arms for half a second.
The bats worked through the crowd methodically, biting and lifting and moving to the next.
More knights were coming out of the barracks.
He looked at the open ground and counted and felt something close to alarm.
There were too many. More coming every second, the shouts having carried back inside and every man in that building now pouring out to deal with whatever was happening at the treeline.
It was literally one to three thousand!
The wolves couldn’t hold that many. The undead knights were already failing. In two minutes the ground below the tree would be entirely Valdenmoor soldiers and the tree would simply be surrounded.
He looked at his original undead wolf.
It was on the ground below, fighting three knights simultaneously, moving between them with the speed that had made it remarkable from the first moment he had seen it alive. Strength fifty-five. The highest in his entire inventory. And fast, faster than the pack wolves, faster than anything he had raised.
He sent the command through his distant command ability.
’Come up.’
The wolf turned from the three knights it was fighting and jumped. Not for the trunk but for the first branch, its front paws catching the wood and its body swinging up with fluid ease. The Wild wolf climbed trees when it was alive and hadn’t forgotten how.
It came up through the branches fast, the tree shaking slightly with the weight of it, and then it was on the branch beside him.
Darion didn’t hesitate.
He got on.
The branch dropped under the combined weight and he grabbed the wolf’s neck and held, and the wolf went down the same way it had come up, fast and not carefully, dropping through the branches with Darion on its back and landing on the ground with an impact that sent men stumbling away from the sudden weight of it.
The undead knights around the base of the tree were nearly gone. Two left, both badly damaged, fighting with the persistence.
Darion sent the command through the binding to every remaining undead on the ground:
Cover me!
The remaining undead knights and wolves immediately moved into the gap between the wolf Darion was on and the nearest men, taking hits that were meant for the wolf, buying seconds.
The wolf ran.
He had commanded full speed before he was properly seated and full speed was what he got. The wolf accelerated through the treeline in the way a wolf moved when nothing was holding it back. It moved low and fast and completely committed, weaving between trunks, the branches whipping past, the sound of the knights shouting behind him dropping away fast as the distance opened up.
Men ran after him. He could hear them. The boots on ground, voices, the sound of a sword thrown that clattered off a trunk well to his left.
Then another sound, further back, as men ran into the dark treeline without torches and found that chasing something at full speed through a forest at night without light was a different proposition from chasing it across open ground.
He didn’t stop at the horse. He didn’t stop at the tie-off point. He didn’t even stop to unsummon anything — the bats still in the crowd, the wolves still fighting, whatever remained of the undead knights still standing.
He left them to it and rode the wolf at full speed away from Valdenmoor’s walls.
A thought arrived as the distance grew: would the bodies of his undead be examined? Would Valdenmoor’s people find skeleton knights and dead wolves on the ground outside their barracks and start pulling them apart looking for answers?
Then his status screen flickered and words appeared across his vision.
[All bound undead will decay to green dust upon destruction of the binding. No physical remains will persist.].