Bloodstained Blade-Chapter 20 - The Edge of Nowhere

Over the next few weeks, the battles came every three or four days. They followed a predictable pattern. First would be the bloodletting of war. Increasingly, as the numbers grew this would take on an almost ceremonial form, with one chief and his warband against the opponents. After that, the culling of those that would not serve would happen when they were struck down. This was followed by an orgy of conquered does and fermented milk.

It was those latter stages that showed off the true monsterousness of the beastmen. The battles were the least of the ugliness that these frenzied goatmen were capable of.

Still, with each fight, the tribe grew. First, the Fleet Hooves were dozens, but by the time a second moon had passed, they were hundreds. By then, other tribes were joining them voluntarily rather than fighting, and Gar-lok was not an old goat with a magic sword; he was chief of chiefs.

He had several war bands under his command. That was real power. It was also when they descended the rugged hills to the Kaladian plains and began to devour humans wherever they found them,

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By this point, the Ebon Blade was already looking for a new wielder, though not from the humans. The goatman it had chosen was growing lazy, and with so many warriors under its command, the mangy beast was eager to get out of combat whenever possible. Only the blade’s urging kept him running at the vanguard with the rest of his younger kin in most fights.

You have to fight! It lectured its wielder silently. I receive no Life Force, and you receive no strength when you sit all of it out and let others do the killing.

The fact that it fought only reluctantly as its forces grew grated on the Ebon Blade in a way that could not be solved with blood. Still, even with Gar-lok’s support, the beastman hoard swept through the unsuspecting valleys like a cloud of locusts. Every farm they found was stripped bare, and enemies were roasted on the pyres of their homes.

+84 Life Force

+3 Human Souls

None of those early fights could be called battles. They were slaughters but even slaughters gave it Life Force and souls.

It was one night around the fire of what had once been a barn, while its wielder was feasting on human flesh that it decided to use one of the human souls to do something besides give it energy. The Ebon Blade was back over 1500, life force. In a few more days, when it topped 2000, it would gain the next level of Increase Reserves.

For now, though, what it needed was not energy but information, and for that it finally turned to the other way to use a soul for the first time. It devoured an old farmer it had killed by the name of Ruthers, with a simple demand. The weapon wanted to know where it was and where the nearby towns were, the man gave it every last scrap of information it knew on the subject before he faded into oblivion.

He told the weapon not just where the nearby farm holds were, which were only of middling importance. His ghost also told him how far it was to other nearby villages like Olden-va as well as larger towns and cities like Trodden, Tollin’s Cross, and Kalraka. Those were further away, of course; anything of any size was. The man had only the vaguest idea of where Severon was, near the heart of the Three Kingdoms, far to the southwest.

It was not a place he’d ever been, and it wasn’t just a few leagues away. It was hundreds of miles from where they stood at least.

It turned out that the plains were a desolate place, but even here at the edge of nowhere, there were lives to be taken and carnage to be caused, and over the next week, the blade used its hoard of beastman to carve a blazing swath across the plains. They tore right through Olden-va and its villagers as if it wasn’t there.

+191 Life Force

+6 Human Souls

The Ebon Blade didn’t see the shepherd boy that had led him to the temple die or the girl that its first wielder had fawned over so much. However, it didn’t really seek her out, either, and it doubted either of them survived.

After that, they rampaged through an abandoned Tollin’s Cross but found no one there to kill. They had obviously been warned and fled before the monsterous horde. The place they’d left behind was still in ruins. They’d only just started to rebuild in the wake of the dragon attacks half a year ago. In one night, half a year of progress was put to the torch, and the braying goatmen turned toward the distant city of Kalraka, which was at least a week away for this filthy, undisciplined lot.

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The beastmen didn’t seem too concerned by distances, though. Their leader never even tried to explain how far they would go to the rest of his war chiefs. He just pointed in a direction, and they obeyed. Gar-lok, for all of his laziness, was practically a god to them by this point. He was the only one who had participated in every major battle and survived to tell the tale without so much as a scratch.

The beasts were killing humans at every turn, but the goat men were hardly immortal, and every fight that wasn’t a complete rout maimed a few of them bad enough that they were killed and eaten by their companions.

The blade didn’t care. Every last one of these creatures was entirely expendable. It was sure they’d find that out as soon as they met their first cavalry patrol.

Those words proved to be prophetic. The first men they fought that were ready for them fought on light horses, with lance and bow. If they’d stuck to bow, they might have won. The beasts had no counter for that. If they stayed where they were, then they were punctured, and if they ran toward the enemy, the enemy fled from them.

It was frustrating for them, and even as the Ebon Blade tried to explain the proper strategies to deal with such a foe to Gar-lok, there was no way that he could, in turn, relay those words to scores of drooling imbeciles.

Still, eventually, they got lucky. Eventually, the horsemen decided that the beasts were spread out enough for a charge. That was their downfall because even as most of the beastmen fled before the iron-shod steeds, Gar-lok ran toward them. Specifically, he ran right for their leader. He didn’t want to, but he wasn’t given a choice. The blade was not about to see its small army whittled away to nothing because beastmen hadn’t figured out weapons that were more complicated than throwing spears.

Gar-lok’s suicide attack took the horses out from under two men in a single furious swing, even though he was pierced by both lances and born to the ground with them. He didn’t let go of the blade, though, so even as his opponents died, he lived to fight another day.

The death of the squad’s captain made the surviving members of the patrol try to battle their way to his corpse. That was their second mistake.

It was that sentimentality that the blade had been counting on. If they’d fled, then eight men would have lived, but because they tried to keep a body from being devoured and desecrated, twenty minutes later, only two were fleeing.

What a pity, the blade said to itself as it watched them retreat into the distance. The city will be ready for us now.

There was nothing it could do to stop men on horses, though. Not until it was once again in the hands of a man on a horse. All it could do was change their route to make the defenders less able to anticipate and prepare for their attack.

To that end, the beastman horde avoided roads after that. Both large trade roads and smaller footpaths were off-limits. Instead, they moved toward a sluggish river heading in the same direction that they were, and when they found the first good ford, the entire group crossed it and continued on in the weeds and cattails of its banks like a heard of sheep more than an organized army.

The city was on the coast. It knew that much but little more. It had no idea what their defenses or fortifications were. In these wild lands, it could guess that they would be somewhere between pathetic and enough to be a problem. They almost certainly wouldn't be formidable, and it leaned toward the former rather than the latter because of the insignificant location.

Two days from the city, some of the beastmen scouts spotted a human army on the other side of the river heading in exactly the wrong direction, which pleased it greatly. Hundreds of men in mail would have been enough to put a stop to this little adventure, but they were going toward where they thought the beastmen horde would be and not where they were, which made all the difference in the world.

When the weapon finally sighted the city from a distance, it was plain to see that their low mud brick walls didn’t have anything close to the number of defenders they should have had. There were watchmen, of course. They were enough to sound the alarm, but even as they did, the blade knew that there wouldn’t be enough defenders to matter. The goatmen were awful in so many ways, but one thing they excelled at was uneven terrain, and they practically ran up and over the walls of the doomed city like the animals they were.

Their battle cries were deafening. As far as they were concerned, this was about to become the greatest victory in their short, muddy history. The Ebon Blade was inclined to agree with that assessment, pathetic as it was.

Tonight, everyone would feast, and then tomorrow, whatever humans happened to survive would starve. It could live with that. This was, after all, just one more steppingstone toward its far-off revenge. These lives only mattered in that they would fuel its rise to power so that it could find out the truth of its existence, then it would wreak havoc on whatever order or nation had locked it away for so long. Then it would make its wrath known to the world.