The trio from Celia stood together on the longest pier at the docks, watching the light on the water as the sun rose in the west behind them. They had made every preparation they could. The mercenaries had been hard-pressed to find worth in their cause, even with coin aplenty paid for their services. But between them, the constabulary, Turk and Reno, Garrity and the trio, they should have been as able as possible to repel The Chained One and whatever forces he brought against them.
Daggeuro sipped water from his rounded canteen. "Today we find out what we're up against," he said somberly.
"Or get turned into stains in the road," Byron added. He had tried using his 'Tsen Chuk' card the previous evening, to no avail. The card had simply crumbled.
"Knock it off," Kathy warned, her tone tight. "I'm not going to die on my period. If I'm going out, it's going to be without Mother Nature's lovely gift of cramps." The men snickered, as she'd hoped they would. Levity saves, she thought.
"In all seriousness, we have to be at the ready," said Daggeuro, undoing the tie-downs on Boon and Bane. "The sage Ocstar told me the day, but not the hour of The Chained One's arrival. We'll have to hope the mayor's decree of staying inside or evacuation holds good."
"I saw a bunch of people leaving town last night out the window of our room," said Kathy. "People spook easy here." She took water from her own canteen, wiped her mouth and chin. "The Wildmen ready in the woods," she asked Byron.
"Along with your statues," he replied. "How long will they stay up and running?"
"I'll have to renew the magic around noon," she said. "Until then, they're following the orders of the Wildmen. Got your cards stacked?" Byron pulled out a thin deck of twenty yellow cards. "Good."
The trio headed back up the pier into the town proper, entering a pastry shop still open for business, despite the mayor's decree. The owner, a thick dwarf with flaming red hair and beard, offered them half price on everything if they promised to eat and drink outside. Each got a doughnut and cup of sludge-like coffee, seating themselves on a bench fronting the bakery.
The sweets were eaten and their drinks only half finished when a battle roar went up from the woods north of town. Daggeuro sprang to his feet, Boon and Bane drawn. Kathy had her bow in hand, arrow in the other, and Byron snapped out his first cards, a standard hellfire shotgun and a feather-light iron armor suit for protection. Daggeuro looked to his companions, orange light spilling from his eyes and mouth as he said, "For Amermidst."
They split up, ready for battle.
The Chained One and his five attendant ghostwood trees arrived in the middle of the woods, appearing instantly where there had been but wilderness. Dozens of specters and faerie warriors, now all wearing the leather kilts and emblazoned cuirasses with the Chain crest that was the standard of his army, released their hands and legs from the trees, forming ranks for the march on Craeton's Bay. The tereko lieutenant, now named Kitek, stood before the wedges as they took shape, his scorpion's stinger wavering back and forth lazily behind him as he faced the troops.
The enchanted collar round his neck only prevented him from attacking Quintus, Darius and the master himself. All others were fair game. Kitek had tested this by ripping a copper renderman apart, suffering no adverse effects. This battle would give him an outlet for his native aggression, and he would bask in his victims' terror.
The three wedges had just finished settling into formation when Kitek heard a twig snap nearby. Wheeling on the sound, he was the first to see a bear-faerie Wildman, wearing a blood red robe over loose leather armor, preparing a swirling yellow fireball to lob at the battalion. The faerie let out a booming war cry and hurled his spell at the nearest wedge to him.
A lone chain from the master whipped out, colliding with the spell, creating an explosion that rocked the woods. The master's forces maintained impressive discipline, barely flinching as the trees nearby swayed or fell over from the detonation. Kitek pointed one long claw at the bear faerie. "Kill him," he shouted.
The right wedge, composed of equal parts specter and soldier, rushed the Wildman, who turned to flee, falling down as spears flew from soldiers and pierced his legs. The giant scorpions and spiders landed on him moments later, swiftly reducing the Wildman to so much blood and torn flesh.
Kitek spotted movement just south of their position, and a split second later, a pair of arrows flew into the stunned faces of two of his elven soldiers, dropping them dead to the ground. The Chained One said nothing, simply hovering on his chains ten yards from his anchor tree, withered arms folded over his chest within his robes.
"Forward," Kitek hollered, and the battalion began streaming south. The archer Wildmen, a gotrin and elf, fell beneath flashing blades and gnashing teeth a minute later, but not before hitting a chimera with enough arrows to slay the beast. They had barely begun, and already both sides had lost three people.
The tereko foresaw an awful day ahead.
The first wedge to hit the town of Craeton's Bay had already been cut down to thirty troops by the time it arrived, but when they were out of the woods and had room to move, the tide quickly turned. Wildmen who had been able to ambush from cover were slaughtered out in the open, and the six Bold Blade mercenaries that set out after the wedge were sent running with one less man in under a minute, their fallen comrade crushed by a fist made of stone rising up out of the ground and hammering down atop his head.
The wedge splintered apart once it was in the town proper, forming into groups of three or four and solitary specters taking off on their own. One of these, a sickly looking coyote with a serpent's head, ran afoul of a statue crafted in the form of a squid-headed god worshipped by sailors all over Ether Plane. It punched the specter repeatedly, until its blows made only a thick, wet slapping sound.
Byron stood with a group of five constables, exchanging wind and fire magic with blasts from his hellfire shotgun. The elves and lizardmen his group faced down were skilled, but much of their magic and that of the constables canceled each other out. The result was closing the gap, wherein The Chained One's minions held experience. Three constables lay dead by the time he shot dead the last chain soldier, the lizardman's head blown into a red-and-black spray on the ground.
Kathy led a stampeding velociraptor-like specter down narrow streets and alleys, finally guiding it down one of the pathways with altered gravity. While she was able to turn naturally and draw her arrows, firing at the beast, its momentum threw it off balance as it entered the alley, smashing its head into the 'ground' of the tilted area. Her arrows flew true, pelting it until the fifth one pierced its heart.
She came out the other end of the alley and brought her cloak up out of instinct, blocking the swipe of a sword with the magically hardened cloth. The impact threw her back, and she whipped the bow around her shoulder by its string, pulling out her axe as the lizardman attacking her swung again in a wide horizontal slash. She turned into the blow with her cape, bracing herself by bending her knees and leaning back, taking the impact on her shoulderblade. The lizardman recoiled, allowing her to counterattack with a savage uppercut with her axe. The swing took the chain soldier just past the chin, carving his blunted snout in half, leaving a bloody, gaping hole from which he screamed with half a tongue. Kathy followed through with a downward chop, splitting his head open like cord wood.
Daggeuro, meanwhile, performed a lethal dance of deadly motion by the docks, cutting a gory swath through man and specter alike. Hazard Incorporated's mercenaries had done their best to defend the homes of Craeton's Bay, but civilians were still being butchered in their homes, chain soldiers launching ambushes from within against the mercenaries.
He was in the midst of fighting a trio of elven soldiers when a wave of black energy ripped through the town. Everyone felt the power, and soon the recently slain faerie were rising up again, those whose heads were intact. Necromancy didn't work on specters, a point which the kennin High Knight was thankful for; they were already against bad odds.
Weaving through undead and living foes, Daggeuro fought his way toward the cutch of ghostwoods, whose upper halves he could see above the rooftops. Unbeknownst to him, Kathy and Byron were also working their way toward The Chained One.
Despite superior numbers, The Chained One's battalion was slowly drawing back, the mercenaries seeming to have caught a second wind. Turk and Reno flitted about town, wrecking specters with ease and dodging biggers and their futile efforts to snare them. As Daggeuro, Kathy and Byron fought clear to the intersection in which the trees stood, they witnessed the sprites bombard The Chained One with storming sheets of flames, each blocked by a translucent green barrier. Yet the creature and his anchor tree were pushed back with each strike, his free chains brought up to aid in his defense.
Byron drew out a card and snapped it, producing a handheld buzzsaw. He turned to Kathy, who tapped it, bringing it to life with her magic. Whining high, the saw was raised over the human's head, and he bellowed as he streaked toward the apparition.
"IIIIIII'm Leatherface," he shrieked, bringing the saw down on one of the chains pressed into a half-crescent between the sprites and The Chained One. Turk and Reno redirected their spells higher, as not to strike Byron, and as the creature roared in rage, his power saw cut through the chain, which fell lifeless to the ground. "Hey," Byron said. "It worked."
A second later, Cassius Melchar lashed out at him with a wind spell so potent it tossed him through the air like a pebble, howling mad laughter as he disappeared towards the western edge of town.
Kathy, frightened for her lover and angered by The Chained One's attack, used her power to animate the fallen length of chain, directing it at the others forming his physical shield. It hovered upward off the ground, and with a flicker of will, she made it wrap itself around them and tug them aside. Turk and Reno's next fire wave burned through The Chained One's magical shield, blasting him back against his anchor tree, which began to topple.
Daggeuro hooted victoriously, pumping Boon in the air after taking down another specter that had engaged him in combat. Kitek, seeing an opening, swept in with his stinger tail and stabbed at his back. Daggeuro's armor saved his life; rather than being impaled, he was merely thrown forward, pain exploding through his spine from the force of the impact.
"Kitek," The Chained One screamed in his withered voice. "To me! Retreat! Retreat!" The tereko sprinted past Kathy, shouting out the order of retreat to his people. When he touched one of the ghostwoods, along with several chain soldiers and specters, The Chained One used his power to vanish back to Parik.
Resistance was not futile.
There had been roughly twenty living soldiers remaining, along with the undead risen by Cassius Melchar's necromancy, when the creature had fled. Half an hour after he'd gone, The Chained One's last servant left behind in Craeton's Bay dropped dead under the claws of a hundred tiny green cartoon werewolves Byron had unleashed with one of his cards. It had been simple enough; he'd simply written '100' before 'tiny', and pluralized 'werewolf' into 'werewolves' on one of his prepared demonstration cards.
When he'd been thrown off by Cassius's wind spell, he'd come crashing down through the cottage of a shoemaker, whose kitchen table had fallen apart under him and a section of his roof. The cobbler, an aging lizardman with brown scales, remained sitting there with his coffee as Byron moaned and tried to get up, his body sending important telegrams about damages on the front lines to his brain. The cobbler met Byron's eyes, sipped his coffee, and said, "Well, I've seen stranger things, but this ranks pretty high."
Byron had recovered enough to rejoin Kathy and Daggeuro ten minutes later, limping badly. His left ankle had been twisted when he hit the cobbler's roof, but he'd had enough gumption to use one last card for the tiny green werewolves. Kathy said they were hideous yet somehow adorable, which cheered him up.
Now she helped him to a bench in front of a bookstore, where he laid out with his bag stuffed under his foot to elevate it. Kathy was covered in grime, blood, and ashes from head to foot. The battle had been savage, but they had done all right. Chief Gafferty stood nearby, speaking with Daggeuro about the casualties and wounded. Kathy listened idly to them while kneeling by the bench, stroking Byron's hair, thankful that they were both alive.
"Just terrible," the terrier clan kennin officer was saying, left hand still gripping his short sword. "I've six men left, Sir Daggeuro, six! To police an entire port town! What am I going to do with them?"
"You're going to demand they receive commendations from that sniveling mayor of yours," Daggeuro replied, wiping down Boon with a rainbow-colored rag. The blood and gore disappeared from the blade, yet didn't soak the rag. Kathy decided to ask about that, though she knew he'd explained it to her before.
"Feh, lot of good that'll do," Gafferty snorted. He sheathed his own weapon finally after shaking the majority of blood from it. "I'll need to recruit new constables. That'll take a while. Think those mercenaries'd fill in meanwhile?"
"I don't think those men are going to want anything more to do with this town," Daggeuro said. "Their losses were heavy."
"Good point." Kathy tuned them out, turning her attention to Byron. His face had gone slack, his eyes twitching rapidly back and forth, his lips moving slightly. She realized with a start that he was muttering something, and pressed her ear close to his lips to listen.
"-and I know those pumps don't match, so here, ruby slippers, much better, click them together three times and say there's no place like Tartarus, and behold the pale rider, pickle in hand and shield warmed up in the microwave, nice and chewy, only on sale through March 21st so order now," he rambled. She silently wept for him, his mind tethered to his body by the loosest of threads. Was this one of his fugues? Did excess trauma or stress cause his mind to wander into these moments of otherworldly nonsense?
She hugged him, and his muttering stopped. A moment later his arms wrapped around her in return. "Sorry about that," he said, his voice muffled on her shoulder.
"It's okay," she said, now freely sobbing. "You're back. That's all that matters." Soon after, she and Daggeuro helped him back to the room he shared with her, and he fell quickly asleep on the cozy bed. She stepped out into the hallway with the kennin, who looked at her with concern clear in his face.
"What happened back there," he asked quietly.
"The stress caught up to him, I think," she offered. "He fought a lot of nasty things out there. And hey, why didn't you go after that thing when the sprites downed it?"
"I was fending off water magic wielders among The Chained One's soldiers. They were trying to go after Byron when he cut into the chains." Kathy nodded. Her attention had been upon Byron then, statues holding defense around her.
"Sorry," she said. "I should've known you would have finished it if you could have. This was bad, Dag. I mean, so was the battle in Celia against Luga and his people, but this felt somehow worse. How could that be?"
"It's a rare phenomenon," Daggeuro said gently, hand on her arm, rubbing soothingly. "It happens when the people you're fighting seem more afraid of their own commanders than of you. They fight with a kind of desperation that poisons the very air we breath. Surely you noticed how none tried to escape after The Chained One fled?"
"Yeah."
"That's a result of that terror. These servants march against their own will." He started down the hall toward his own room.
"Dag? How do we fight something like that," Kathy called after him.
"The same way we fight anything else," he replied, still moving. "With pride, honor, and skill. Remember Kathy," he said, unlocking his rented room's door and looking at her. "You have all three. Mad as he may or may not be, so does Byron." He disappeared then into his room, and a long, quiet day stretched out before her.