Chapter 76

As he let Ix’s limp arm fall from his hand, Marcus felt only a dull numbness take over him.

He ignored Deekius’ words meant to console his fading spirit, and instead stumbled away from the Kobold’s fallen form in silence, lumbering back up the crater to see the seven or so still-living Sharpshots complaining about a lack of ammunition.

His glazed eyes hovered over the environment, seeing clouds of smoke drifting across the battlefield to reveal an ocean of blood. Where the walls of Grindlefecht once stood tall, Skeever was making his final push, his ratguard wavering in the wake of the Kobold’s suicide-bomb runs. Though they were pushing the ailing defenders back, every rat tried to keep his distance, prodding at their bellies from afar with his spear. Such care rendered the Schiltron formation’s key strength practically nullified – they weren’t making enough progress.

He watched them, seeing the rats at the vanguard move back from every desperate strike a Kobold made against him, and then being pushed right back into the thick of battle by the exhortations of Skeever – the black, one-armed ratman who walked into the thick of the horde with no hesitation at all. To their credit, the Kobolds Marcus had picked up on his way here were still fighting back – ironically it was they who looked as though they did so without fear, following Skeever’s lead.

He looked at their demon eyes – little crimson slits that held scheming brains – and thought of how willing they were to kill their own kind. Power – that was it, wasn’t it? That was all their existence truly was.

Then, Marcus felt something in his hand. He looked down and saw the silver stalk of the loaded arquebus that had never left him.

The barrel of the weapon was coated in Ix’s blood – the last blood the Kobold would ever shed. And in that moment, it was as though Marcus could see the eyes of his faithful servant reflected in the still shining barrel, the words of the Kobold echoing down its stalk: “I should have killed them…I should have killed them…”

“Deekius,” Marcus said, not even recognizing his own voice.

“Sire?”

“Fire a flare. Let the cannons fire on them.”

The Gloomraava hesitated.

“But Sire,” he said. “We may be hitting some of our own Kobold auxiliary-“

“Deekius,” Marcus spat, and the dark fury in his barely reserved tone stopped the rat-priest before he even formed another thought never mind voiced one. “I want to hear nothing more except the roar of our guns. Understood?”

The rat-priest bowed his head, licked his lips, and acquiesced to his Shai-Alud’s command.

“As you are saying, Sire.”

Marcus didn’t look as the flare went up. He found Skeever’s bloodied eyes in the midst of the crowd and a moment of psychic understanding seemed to pass between them, for just as the first bellows of the twelve-pounders thundered again in the deeps, the ratman ordered his men back as far as they could make it.

The Kobolds, however, did not have time to unshackle themselves from their once-brethren.

Marcus’s unblinking eyes beheld the devastation that came next: the cannons made short work of Grindlefecht’s final defenders – crashing through the vestiges of their battle-lines and detonating the final suicide troops in a series of red flashes that singed Marcus’s retinas. The Kobold auxiliaries looked behind and around them at the carnage, seeing the ratmen flee in time to mostly avoid the explosive teeth of the iron cannon-shot. They probably died with nothing but hate in their hearts, cries of betrayal flying from their charred lips that turned to ash on the blasted field of battle. But Marcus did not spare more than a cursory look at them.

Instead, he held his arquebus firm and started walking towards the fray, his rats cheering as they watched him limp towards the carnage without fear, or hesitation. To them, they were looking at an unfazed commander storming towards his destiny. It was something Skeever noticed, and it was something he exploited immediately.

“Be following the Shai-Alud!” he wailed, a sound barely audible in Marcus’s ringing ears. “Be slaying the dying where they lay! Be leaving none alive!”

Thus commenced the act of slaughter that would live in infamy – the final punctuation in the tale of Marcus Graham’s underground campaigns as the Shai-Alud: the ratmen began storming through the dark grounds of Grindlefecht and slaying any Kobold that still drew breath. No chance for surrender was no given. Marcus meandered by the screaming Yips as they tried crawling towards him, leaving them to be speared by a ratguard looking for vengeance. For that was the only thing that was now on anyone’s mind. The cannons worked until their ammunition finally ran dry, and though Deekius tried to tug on the rim of Marcus’s trench coat to tell him that he was proceeding towards a still dangerous area of the battle, the Shai-Alud did not turn once to acknowledge his priest.

It was said by those rats that survived the bloody Siege of Grindlefecht that the Shai-Alud entered a state of battle-trance in the end-stages of the ordeal – walking wounded, trailing blood down his shoulder that dripped onto the arquebus he carried with him. On a few occasions, the ratguard gasped as they watched him bring up said arquebus and unload into the face of a Kobold straggler who had run at him, eager to defeat the enemy of Boss Skegga. The Shai-Alud did not stop to watch his enemies fall before him. Instead, he lumbered on, through the smoke and haze and the ruin caused by his plundered cannons, and even those rats who were engaged in torturing or gutting the fallen Kobolds on the field knelt in supplication as the human General passed them by.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The truth, of course, was far from heroic. Far from exceptional. Marcus’s mind had simply ceased to care about the carnage he saw unfolding in front of him. For him, reality had become naught but a kaleidoscope of blood and viscera – a moving mosaic of charred bones and severed limbs passing by his vision like macabre travelers in the dust of this world. He kept walking, his favored commander and Gloomraava shielding him from any who would attempt to overpower him, and it was his feet that crossed the threshold of Grindlefecht’s interior keep before any of his troops.

The Keep was of solid material, gilded and still standing strong even amidst the wreckage of its walled exterior. The intricate markings left by the Dwarves were lost on Marcus entirely. He only looked forward into the darkness of the keep interior, ignoring the calls Skeever made for his men, now distracted and reveling in their applications of torture, to form up and secure the perimeter in case of reinforcements. For some reason, however, Marcus simply couldn’t feel fear in this moment. He crept forwards, into the long expanse of the dark, with nothing but his firm grip on the gun that shook in his hands telling him that he was still alive.

Eventually, the pitch dark of the keep receded, and Marcus arrived with his two ever-companions at the temple of Skegga himself.

The doorway was framed by grisly displays of hanged Kobolds and Dwarves, each one’s stomach opened to drape their innards down from the roof, their blood long since dried up on the ground the invaders now walked on. Marcus ascended the crimson-gold steps to the temple without much fanfare, hearing the ratguard forces finally scurry their way up behind him.

“Stay back,” he ordered quietly, stopping only momentarily to address those new arrivals. It was an order that Skeever and Deekius immediately relayed with gumption, hearing only their Shai-Alud’s next quiet words: “Enough of you have died today…”

The Shai-Alud stepped over the threshold of the golden palace doors, smelling the raw stench of dry meat and stale blood from the grisly tableau decorating the temple’s walls. Dwarven meat and Kobold bones, stretched beyond recognition, bound and sewn up together like the grisly biological experiments performed the angel of death Mengele himself, greeted Marcus as he trudged through broken bodies and discarded weapons, seeing the stone operating tables where the Kobolds must have been stitched up to carry their deadly payloads.

And there, at the very end of the hallway of horrors, sat the mad God behind it all.

You…

Marcus considered the limp, tiny limbs of the beast who sat upon his floating throne, his eyes blinking as he recognized the Shai-Alud who had finally come to stand before him.

An assortment of five Kobold honor guards stood, rusted scimitars ready, before the bloated toad, their legs shaking as the enemy commander of legend stumbled towards them, his two elite lieutenants keeping in step beside.

He saw the dwindling desire to fight within their eyes. He saw that, if he had offered them the chance, then and there, they would have thrown down their arms and begged for mercy.

“Skeever,” he said instead. “Send them to the paradise they long for.”

His Talon Commander’s blade was a blur of blood and steel, his swift and sure strikes making short work of the guards while Deekius looked on, chanting a prayer to He-Who-Festers as though it would drown out the blood-curdling screams of Grindlefecht’s last defenders.

And when the final Kobold hit the ground, all that remained was a one-armed ratman slathered in their blood.

He unsheathed his blade from the broken torso of a Kobold and shook it free of the little imp’s blood – the same blade Gatskeek had held proud as the commander of Knifegut.

Another one who died…because of me…because of me…

No…no, his mind barked, vehemently refuting what was so plainly obvious. No…not me…not…

Marcus’s eyes lighted on the great bulbous toad again.

“Sire,” Skeever barked, snarling up at the inert toad shriveling in his throne. “The honor should be yours.”

You.

Skegga was both more and less than he’d imagined. He did not know, really, what his imagination had cooked up when he thought of his enemy. Seeing him from above on Razor Ridge had not truly allowed him to look into the eyes of the beast that had caused all the pain and torment of untold thousands in this underground realm. He had expected a grand welcome. He had expected one final trick that the bloated thing would give him to deal with – a final, bitter curse or recremation that he would throw at the Shai-Alud who was his enemy. He at least expected to see hatred in the fat beast’s eyes.

Instead, he was surprised to look through the veil of his own grief and fury and see only a set of glazed grey eyes staring back at him. He had heard tale that this amphibian was the architect of all the horrors he had seen, and yet, all he saw as he looked upon him now was nothing but a giant frog, slathered in pus, practically stewing in his own juices.

Somehow, that only served to heighten his rage.

“You.”

He said it aloud as he approached the creature’s throne, Skeever and Deekius urging caution from his back. He didn’t care. He had eyes for nothing but the freakish oaf he saw sitting in that chair – little more than a barely breathing corpse.

“You – you did all this.”

He threw the accusation at Skegga with slurred speech, like he was talking in a dream, moving through a sea of treacle. He knew he should say something glorious – something history would remember in this point. For wasn’t that what all the great commanders of legend said when they finally came to the end of their toils?

Looking into the chortling snout of Skegga, Marcus now felt nothing but weary resignation to the anger that had been rising in his gullet since he’d first set foot in this damned world.

Maybe even Alexander the Great had felt the same way…

Marcus thought he saw the toad start to mumble – his slimy lips tried to mouth something.

But the Shai-Alud was done listening. He brought the rifle up, aiming directly at the toad’s chest, and grit his teeth in animal fury.

“This,” he said. “Is for Gatskeek. For Festicus. For Ix…for the countless souls of this place you’ve wasted…and the countless more you’ve corrupted.”

Something at the back of his mind shook him – something that told him the toad’s silence might have more meaning…

Even Skeever and Deekius were starting to get antsy at his back…

“Sire,” Deekius warned. “Wait…”

But Marcus’s body had its own will, now. After letting so many kill in his name, he decided it was time for someone to die by his own hand.

“Your reign of terror ends…now.”

A pull. A click. A moment – that’s all it took.

In the flash of his weapon’s muzzle Marcus finally saw what the expression was on the great toad’s face: terror.

When the bullet traveled through his gut, Skegga’s body vanished in a budding flower of flame, and the walls of his temple finally came crashing down.

***

Support the story on Patreon to read + 10 advanced chapters for $9.50. Patrons are charged when they join, never by the month, so it's as perfect a time as any to join up and get some sweet extra chaps.

Discord