As the sound of surf splashing announced someone reaching the beach, Drake walked to the edge of the tarp. Just like with defending in shrikes and turtles, they’d be overwhelmed inside this tent if they waited to be charged. They had to take the offensive and catch the enemy flat-footed. Otherwise, they’d be slaughtered inside this makeshift bunker.
“Go, go go!” Drake roared to his people... and led by example.
As he rounded the corner of the tarp, he spotted his first kromian—a female kromian, judging from her slender facial features and warrior’s chest wrap—leading the charge out of the bay. She wore next to no armor, just that chest wrap, a loin cloth, and some beads and other bands that were likely ceremonial. It must not be possible to swim fast in armor.
One squeeze of Magnum’s trigger put a crossbow bolt through her chest.
Her eyes widened as the impact sent her flying backward. His weapon made a loud click as its cylinder spun. More kromians burst from the surf and charged onto the beach. Before Drake could fire again, one took a ball of rocky fire directly to the face.
The exploding meteor kaboom left multiple bloodied fishman burning and rolling in the surf, while screaming. Carl’s doing. Another screaming ball of rock splashed into the oncoming fishmen and scattered more. Others in the back line brought blowguns to their lips.
Drake took two darts to the chest, which stung, but he knew from his experience with their poisoned arrows he’d be able to survive these. He calmly tracked targets and fired again. He speared one of the blowgun-using kromians through the neck. It gurgled and dropped.
An arrow buried itself in the face of the other blowgun-wielding kromian, dropping him. Robin was picking her targets wisely, yet despite the best efforts of the zarovians still fighting the bay, so many kromians were already on the beach. Ten, fifteen? Twenty?
A stream of purple butterflies zipped past him, and then Lydia was behind the enemy line. As the kromians belatedly realized they’d been flanked and turned to defend themselves, glowing yellow knives flashed like the strikes of a snake. Lydia dropped two, three, four, all from behind, slicing tendons and necks. Each strike was vicious, precise, and deadly.
As another kromian tried to stab her with one of those long spears, Lydia burst apart into butterflies—the spear went through the air she no longer occupied—and appeared behind the spearman. He got knifed in the kidneys for his trouble. Spinning and dodging like a dervish, Lydia dropped five, six, seven.
She was also in his line of fire, and obviously getting tired. “Get clear!” Drake roared.
As Lydia’s next flutterstep took her behind Drake, he fired his third bolt at the nearest fish man. Another kromian fell, and then the survivors reached the tent, a mass of screaming fish people wielding swords and spears and big serrated knives. It was chaos, but Drake refused to let them reach the wounded. They were not taking any more of his people today!
Drake smashed a kromian in the nose with Magnum’s stock. As he did so, another stabbed a spear directly through his chest. Instead of going down like any reasonable person, Drake stepped into the spear and punched the shocked fish man as hard as he could in the face.
The kromian dropped like a punching bag coming off its chain. Drake stepped forward and stomped on the fish man’s chest before he could rise, crushing the kromian’s ribcage like a cardboard box. As he swung Magnum around like a club, another kromian went flying. The fish people warriors were fast, but apparently rather flimsy.
Emily slammed shoulder first into the next kromian to come after him. That sent it tumbling, but she swept Chopper through its body before it could land. The horrific scream it made as it collapsed chilled Drake, but he focused on staying alive and killing more fish men.
Before he could fire again, Emily charged into the enemy lines with her spectral battle axe spinning about like a lawnmower blade. He saw now that she had somehow made it bigger. It was at least as long as a person, if not longer, which gave her plenty of breathing room.
Weapons could not stop it. Armor could not stop it. Bone could not stop it. Her spectral axe was a ghost as it chopped through enemy souls, and every time her axe coursed through a kromian, they howled like a demon being exorcised... and immediately dropped dead.
Given how long the pitched battle felt—an eternity of a kromian mob trying and failing to reach him and the others—Drake was surprised to be barely winded when the last kromian fell. Must be his physical regeneration rarity. It was also why he wasn’t dead despite being speared, darted, and stabbed in the melee.
He ripped a spear from his chest, a blow gun dart from his arm, and ignored the bone knife sticking out of his leg as he marched forward to finish the job. He had one last crossbow bolt to use before he had to reload.
Yet the only kromian still standing was a single figure stumbling toward the surf with another limp kromian dangling across her shoulder. He must be her comrade or friend, her sibling, maybe. She was probably hoping to save his life.
Drake raised Magnum, took careful aim, and shot the fleeing kromian in the back with his last bolt. She dropped with a cry and a thump. Her motionless friend dropped with her. Their blood mixed as they died together in the shallow surf.
Drake couldn’t pity two more dead fish people when so many of his own dead were still lying on this beach, good people like Alice and Hugo who’d been slaughtered without warning or mercy. The clear blue water of the Alicean Bay, once so gorgeous, now swirled with blood.
Bodies floated in the bay as well, many kromians but also several motionless lizardmen. His zarovians had taken heavy losses blunting the kromian charge so the rest of his manor could survive. They never should have died like that.
A towering, blood-soaked figure stomped through the bay toward the beach: Cresh. The huge lizardman had so many kromian arrows sticking out of him he might as well be a pincushion, but it seemed zarovian biology or Cresh’s sheer ballsiness kept the paralytic poison from dropping him. Still, the giant lizardman was stumbling through the sea.
Cresh would need treatment once he reached the beach. Other zarovians were swimming or wading back as well, though there were less than there had been this afternoon. Ten? Fifteen? Drake was furious when he failed to find any more to count.
“We need a healer!” Drake shouted. “Check everyone! No one dies until I say so!”
“Gather the wounded!” Marissa shouted. “We need to get back inside the walls!”
She meant Korhaurbauten. The capital. The one place they might be safe if another horde of kromians came rushing up on this beach... and she was right. Though given the capital guards he’d been promised were nowhere to be seen, he didn’t have high hopes for that.
If they hadn’t come to protect him on the beach, they were likely all dead.
Drake didn’t know why the kromians were here, or what they were after, or why they were killing people, but he knew his mother was right and he was wasting precious time. Now was not the time to mourn. They had to get the wounded back to the capital and get some sturdy walls between him and the enemy. He’d have to leave the dead on the beach.
There was no way the small group of exhausted people under his command could carry both the wounded and the dead, but they’d come back for the fallen. All of them. Every last one would be given a burial. His heroic zarovians would all have their Viking funerals.
“Cut the tarps into strips!” Lydia shouted. “We’ll use the tarps as litters!”
That was a great idea. Lydia had those. As Drake stumbled back to help his people organize to retreat, he paused as he spotted the kromian bodies littered on the other side of the forward-facing tarp. He hadn’t seen Nicole or Gaby in the fighting. Now, he knew why.
The kromians he, Emily, Lydia, Robin, and others had killed had been only half of their number. The group had split around the tarp to attack from each side, and had Drake not had his people take the offensive, they likely would have cut everyone apart in a pincer.
Shrikes and turtles had served its purpose after all. Those tactics had saved their lives. Or some of them, anyway.
Samuel supported Valentia, who was on her feet but only just. She was so pale it was frightening, and the pile of freshly frozen kromians on the other side of the tarp suggested she had continued to use her rarity despite being almost drained of blood.
Valentia would power through this. That was who she was. Drake wouldn’t worry about her making it when so many others needed his focus right now.
It soon became clear his best course of action would be to let his people do their work. Meanwhile, he walked numbly across the beach and picked up bolt after bolt, reloading Magnum. He might have to use the weapon again soon. He needed four bolts ready to go.
Once he’d finished reloading, Lydia found him. “We’re ready to move, lord.”
As he glanced at her, he felt an overwhelming desire to hug her. Her face was bloody and her swimsuit was torn, but she was alive. He barely stopped himself. As glad as he was to have her at his side, he needed to focus on leading his manor.
He couldn’t lose Lydia. He hadn’t lost Lydia. They were a team with a manor to lead and people to protect. “Move out!” Drake shouted. “Back to the capital!”
He made his shout strong and forceful. He had to sound strong for his people, even though all he wanted to do at that moment was punch the beach with his fist and scream. He’d tried to give his people a day free of murder politics, and now some of them were dead.
Even so, Drake refused to blame himself for his people dying in a random act of war. He had simply given his people one day to enjoy themselves, something all of them deserved, and the kromians had ruined it. The fish people were to blame for this, not him.
The kromians had attacked unarmed civilians and slaughtered them without warning, and far more than those he’d defeated on this beach were going to pay. Someone had ordered these soldiers to attack. Someone led them. That someone, Drake decided, was going to die.
Because Drake was going to find him and put a crossbow bolt in his neck.
But first, he had a job to do: lead. Drake led the trudge of weary, bloody, and terrified people back up the rocky path leading away from the beach. The high cliff walls that rose on either side of them were less of a comfort now. There were no capital guards atop them.
Where was Sachi? That question was answered a moment later with his huntress leapt down from the clifftop. She carried a bow and a quiver, but there were no arrows in her quiver. Hadn’t she had a bunch of arrows this morning when they set out?
At her fierce expression, he understood. He knew where all her arrows were. They were buried in the necks of approximately twenty stone-dead kromians.
“Hey Sachi.” He doubted any of the blood coating her fur was hers. “Seen any sign of our escort?”
She bared her teeth. “Not after a giant octopus dragged one off.”
Yikes. Drake wished he could take pride in the fact that his people, unarmored and lightly armed, had managed to take down the enemy a dozen to one. But even losing one person was too much, and Drake had lost more than one today. That vexed him.
As his exhausted and tattered party wound through the narrow pathway, each step felt far too long. At any moment more kromians could boil up the pass behind him and engage Cresh and his surviving zarovians, who had fallen into a rear guard. Sachi had vanished as soon as she snatched Robin’s quiver and its ten or so arrows.
Robin had not complained about losing her arrows. She could use airstep to reach the cliffs, but Sachi could scramble up on them. Despite her success in combat today, Robin still looked shell-shocked. Drake suspected today had been her first real pitched battle.
Come to think of it, it had been his first pitched battle as well. Why wasn’t he freaking out after seeing death and so much close combat? Probably because he couldn’t afford to do so. He was going to get his people to safety, and then...
He was going to get revenge.
Author's Note: Next week, Drake encounters a crowd, is noticeably impolite, and plots his vengeance.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Read Ahead on the Patreon
Chat on the Discord
As the sound of surf splashing announced someone reaching the beach, Drake walked to the edge of the tarp. Just like with defending in shrikes and turtles, they’d be overwhelmed inside this tent if they waited to be charged. They had to take the offensive and catch the enemy flat-footed. Otherwise, they’d be slaughtered inside this makeshift bunker.
“Go, go go!” Drake roared to his people... and led by example.
As he rounded the corner of the tarp, he spotted his first kromian—a female kromian, judging from her slender facial features and warrior’s chest wrap—leading the charge out of the bay. She wore next to no armor, just that chest wrap, a loin cloth, and some beads and other bands that were likely ceremonial. It must not be possible to swim fast in armor.
One squeeze of Magnum’s trigger put a crossbow bolt through her chest.
Her eyes widened as the impact sent her flying backward. His weapon made a loud click as its cylinder spun. More kromians burst from the surf and charged onto the beach. Before Drake could fire again, one took a ball of rocky fire directly to the face.
The exploding meteor kaboom left multiple bloodied fishman burning and rolling in the surf, while screaming. Carl’s doing. Another screaming ball of rock splashed into the oncoming fishmen and scattered more. Others in the back line brought blowguns to their lips.
Drake took two darts to the chest, which stung, but he knew from his experience with their poisoned arrows he’d be able to survive these. He calmly tracked targets and fired again. He speared one of the blowgun-using kromians through the neck. It gurgled and dropped.
An arrow buried itself in the face of the other blowgun-wielding kromian, dropping him. Robin was picking her targets wisely, yet despite the best efforts of the zarovians still fighting the bay, so many kromians were already on the beach. Ten, fifteen? Twenty?
A stream of purple butterflies zipped past him, and then Lydia was behind the enemy line. As the kromians belatedly realized they’d been flanked and turned to defend themselves, glowing yellow knives flashed like the strikes of a snake. Lydia dropped two, three, four, all from behind, slicing tendons and necks. Each strike was vicious, precise, and deadly.
As another kromian tried to stab her with one of those long spears, Lydia burst apart into butterflies—the spear went through the air she no longer occupied—and appeared behind the spearman. He got knifed in the kidneys for his trouble. Spinning and dodging like a dervish, Lydia dropped five, six, seven.
She was also in his line of fire, and obviously getting tired. “Get clear!” Drake roared.
As Lydia’s next flutterstep took her behind Drake, he fired his third bolt at the nearest fish man. Another kromian fell, and then the survivors reached the tent, a mass of screaming fish people wielding swords and spears and big serrated knives. It was chaos, but Drake refused to let them reach the wounded. They were not taking any more of his people today!
Drake smashed a kromian in the nose with Magnum’s stock. As he did so, another stabbed a spear directly through his chest. Instead of going down like any reasonable person, Drake stepped into the spear and punched the shocked fish man as hard as he could in the face.
The kromian dropped like a punching bag coming off its chain. Drake stepped forward and stomped on the fish man’s chest before he could rise, crushing the kromian’s ribcage like a cardboard box. As he swung Magnum around like a club, another kromian went flying. The fish people warriors were fast, but apparently rather flimsy.
Emily slammed shoulder first into the next kromian to come after him. That sent it tumbling, but she swept Chopper through its body before it could land. The horrific scream it made as it collapsed chilled Drake, but he focused on staying alive and killing more fish men.
Before he could fire again, Emily charged into the enemy lines with her spectral battle axe spinning about like a lawnmower blade. He saw now that she had somehow made it bigger. It was at least as long as a person, if not longer, which gave her plenty of breathing room.
Weapons could not stop it. Armor could not stop it. Bone could not stop it. Her spectral axe was a ghost as it chopped through enemy souls, and every time her axe coursed through a kromian, they howled like a demon being exorcised... and immediately dropped dead.
Given how long the pitched battle felt—an eternity of a kromian mob trying and failing to reach him and the others—Drake was surprised to be barely winded when the last kromian fell. Must be his physical regeneration rarity. It was also why he wasn’t dead despite being speared, darted, and stabbed in the melee.
He ripped a spear from his chest, a blow gun dart from his arm, and ignored the bone knife sticking out of his leg as he marched forward to finish the job. He had one last crossbow bolt to use before he had to reload.
Yet the only kromian still standing was a single figure stumbling toward the surf with another limp kromian dangling across her shoulder. He must be her comrade or friend, her sibling, maybe. She was probably hoping to save his life.
Drake raised Magnum, took careful aim, and shot the fleeing kromian in the back with his last bolt. She dropped with a cry and a thump. Her motionless friend dropped with her. Their blood mixed as they died together in the shallow surf.
Drake couldn’t pity two more dead fish people when so many of his own dead were still lying on this beach, good people like Alice and Hugo who’d been slaughtered without warning or mercy. The clear blue water of the Alicean Bay, once so gorgeous, now swirled with blood.
Bodies floated in the bay as well, many kromians but also several motionless lizardmen. His zarovians had taken heavy losses blunting the kromian charge so the rest of his manor could survive. They never should have died like that.
A towering, blood-soaked figure stomped through the bay toward the beach: Cresh. The huge lizardman had so many kromian arrows sticking out of him he might as well be a pincushion, but it seemed zarovian biology or Cresh’s sheer ballsiness kept the paralytic poison from dropping him. Still, the giant lizardman was stumbling through the sea.
Cresh would need treatment once he reached the beach. Other zarovians were swimming or wading back as well, though there were less than there had been this afternoon. Ten? Fifteen? Drake was furious when he failed to find any more to count.
“We need a healer!” Drake shouted. “Check everyone! No one dies until I say so!”
“Gather the wounded!” Marissa shouted. “We need to get back inside the walls!”
She meant Korhaurbauten. The capital. The one place they might be safe if another horde of kromians came rushing up on this beach... and she was right. Though given the capital guards he’d been promised were nowhere to be seen, he didn’t have high hopes for that.
If they hadn’t come to protect him on the beach, they were likely all dead.
Drake didn’t know why the kromians were here, or what they were after, or why they were killing people, but he knew his mother was right and he was wasting precious time. Now was not the time to mourn. They had to get the wounded back to the capital and get some sturdy walls between him and the enemy. He’d have to leave the dead on the beach.
There was no way the small group of exhausted people under his command could carry both the wounded and the dead, but they’d come back for the fallen. All of them. Every last one would be given a burial. His heroic zarovians would all have their Viking funerals.
“Cut the tarps into strips!” Lydia shouted. “We’ll use the tarps as litters!”
That was a great idea. Lydia had those. As Drake stumbled back to help his people organize to retreat, he paused as he spotted the kromian bodies littered on the other side of the forward-facing tarp. He hadn’t seen Nicole or Gaby in the fighting. Now, he knew why.
The kromians he, Emily, Lydia, Robin, and others had killed had been only half of their number. The group had split around the tarp to attack from each side, and had Drake not had his people take the offensive, they likely would have cut everyone apart in a pincer.
Shrikes and turtles had served its purpose after all. Those tactics had saved their lives. Or some of them, anyway.
Samuel supported Valentia, who was on her feet but only just. She was so pale it was frightening, and the pile of freshly frozen kromians on the other side of the tarp suggested she had continued to use her rarity despite being almost drained of blood.
Valentia would power through this. That was who she was. Drake wouldn’t worry about her making it when so many others needed his focus right now.
It soon became clear his best course of action would be to let his people do their work. Meanwhile, he walked numbly across the beach and picked up bolt after bolt, reloading Magnum. He might have to use the weapon again soon. He needed four bolts ready to go.
Once he’d finished reloading, Lydia found him. “We’re ready to move, lord.”
As he glanced at her, he felt an overwhelming desire to hug her. Her face was bloody and her swimsuit was torn, but she was alive. He barely stopped himself. As glad as he was to have her at his side, he needed to focus on leading his manor.
He couldn’t lose Lydia. He hadn’t lost Lydia. They were a team with a manor to lead and people to protect. “Move out!” Drake shouted. “Back to the capital!”
He made his shout strong and forceful. He had to sound strong for his people, even though all he wanted to do at that moment was punch the beach with his fist and scream. He’d tried to give his people a day free of murder politics, and now some of them were dead.
Even so, Drake refused to blame himself for his people dying in a random act of war. He had simply given his people one day to enjoy themselves, something all of them deserved, and the kromians had ruined it. The fish people were to blame for this, not him.
The kromians had attacked unarmed civilians and slaughtered them without warning, and far more than those he’d defeated on this beach were going to pay. Someone had ordered these soldiers to attack. Someone led them. That someone, Drake decided, was going to die.
Because Drake was going to find him and put a crossbow bolt in his neck.
But first, he had a job to do: lead. Drake led the trudge of weary, bloody, and terrified people back up the rocky path leading away from the beach. The high cliff walls that rose on either side of them were less of a comfort now. There were no capital guards atop them.
Where was Sachi? That question was answered a moment later with his huntress leapt down from the clifftop. She carried a bow and a quiver, but there were no arrows in her quiver. Hadn’t she had a bunch of arrows this morning when they set out?
At her fierce expression, he understood. He knew where all her arrows were. They were buried in the necks of approximately twenty stone-dead kromians.
“Hey Sachi.” He doubted any of the blood coating her fur was hers. “Seen any sign of our escort?”
She bared her teeth. “Not after a giant octopus dragged one off.”
Yikes. Drake wished he could take pride in the fact that his people, unarmored and lightly armed, had managed to take down the enemy a dozen to one. But even losing one person was too much, and Drake had lost more than one today. That vexed him.
As his exhausted and tattered party wound through the narrow pathway, each step felt far too long. At any moment more kromians could boil up the pass behind him and engage Cresh and his surviving zarovians, who had fallen into a rear guard. Sachi had vanished as soon as she snatched Robin’s quiver and its ten or so arrows.
Robin had not complained about losing her arrows. She could use airstep to reach the cliffs, but Sachi could scramble up on them. Despite her success in combat today, Robin still looked shell-shocked. Drake suspected today had been her first real pitched battle.
Come to think of it, it had been his first pitched battle as well. Why wasn’t he freaking out after seeing death and so much close combat? Probably because he couldn’t afford to do so. He was going to get his people to safety, and then...
He was going to get revenge.
Author's Note: Next week, Drake encounters a crowd, is noticeably impolite, and plots his vengeance.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Read Ahead on the Patreon
Chat on the Discord
