Medusa: Fate's Game

Chapter 13

~~Darian~~

Discovering that the red-eyed guards on the bridge were actually undead was an unwelcome surprise. He should have guessed it; not the first time he'd fought Andromeda's summoned skeletons.

Skeletons shouldn't have been able to scream, though. They didn't have any flesh or throat or muscle. They shouldn't have been able to do anything but lay on the ground, like dead should. But his eyes and sword told him differently as his blade hacked through bone, bone, and more bone. Their arms fell, their heads, sometimes their legs, but every fight was a dance with death in a way he wasn't used to. Cut the arm off a living, breathing thing, and they went down. Stab them in the gut, and they died a slow, miserable death, and they'd be of little use for the rest of the battle. Get them in the neck and they died instantly.

The skeletons didn't care if you cut off their head. If you managed to get through the waist of the breastplate and into the stomach, again they did not care. If you cut off their arm, they reached for a weapon with their other arm and kept coming. One mistake and he'd get a spear in the face, and making a mistake would be easy with the skeletons ignoring all the rules.

Worse was their screams. Their mouths opened, their eyes flashed red, and a raspy sound filled his ears, like a wailing wind mixed with scraping rock against rock. And they screamed from their bodies. The heads were lifeless once removed, and their glowing red eyes faded quickly, but the headless corpses still screamed the odd sound, and stabbed at them with brutal tenacity. Like Otrera had noticed earlier, the guards were dumb, but that didn't mean they couldn't keep stabbing and stabbing until they were in bits.

He'd rather have fought the manticore, but Chimera's surprise attack had dealt with them.

Pegasus rode up the hillside, wing ruined, Perseus on his back. Darian winced and looked back at Medusa. She looked destroyed. It had to be done, and Pegasus would understand, but he didn't have time to explain that to her. He only had time to keep hacking away and keep moving forward. Don't stop, don't let the enemy adapt to the insanity of their strategy; it was its only true value, the absurdity of walking up to the sorceress's front door.

He slammed his shield out and buried the huge disc of black in the chest of one of the guards. The skeletons were armored, with shields and spears of their own, and killing them was becoming less of a battle, and more of an exercise in endurance. But they were just skeletons, light, and as he started to crash his shield into them with all his strength behind the swing, the results became explosive. Bones shattered, limbs fell away, and the undead started to crumble under the force.

But just as he was getting into a new rhythm, he looked up at the sound of someone's voice.

"You will all suffer for this. And Otrera. You betray me? After all I've done for you?"

He found a moment to get his breath. What few skeletons remained were either in front of him, and being stomped into powder by Chimera, or behind him. The mob was doing good work, swarming over the remains of the guards, and attacking the few the three of them had missed.

Darian struggled to get his lungs working again. Sweat started to bead on his forehead, and his muscles in his arms started to ache. Only a little, only enough to tell him he was going to get tired soon. Bad time for the sorceress to appear.

Otrera raised her voice. "You deceived me! Tricked me! These people do not deserve to die!"

Darian frowned and glanced back at the mob. A swarm was too accurate a word. Locusts. He couldn't entirely agree with Otrera.

Lightning struck, close enough to blind him for a moment, and loud enough to shake the very ground he stood upon. He gasped hard, and caught himself holding his breath as the thunder worked outward. He knew the feel of lightning, the sound of thunder. Knew them too well.