Chapter 209 - Not Much of a Planner (Patreon)

Zeke stood atop Jariq’s wall, looking out over the desert, and frowned. Marring the landscape was a cancerous mass of writhing undead, marching toward the city with unceasing resolve. Even at a distance of a few miles, Zeke could see that the army was comprised of a much wider variety of undead than he’d encountered before. There were mundane zombies, with their shambling gait and mostly rotted bodies, robed reapers carrying wicked scythes made from silver and black metal and coated in a green energy, and hulking and disgusting flesh golems – all of which, he’d encountered before, so they were expected. However, there were plenty of new additions as well.

The most pervasive were the elite zombies that, judging by their fluid movements and obvious speed, seemed to have more in common with the revenant twins than with their less powerful cousins. Even to Zeke, they looked like a threat, if more because of their numbers than due to their individual power.

Then there were the misshapen abominations that looked like flesh golems gone horribly wrong. With giant, gaping maws and slender, lop-sided bodies, Zeke couldn’t help but shudder in disgust when he looked upon them. Moreso because he knew precisely what they were. According to Talia, who’d spent days scouting the undead army, these new category of undead were called wights, and they had a terrifying method of attack. When these creatures saw prey, the majority of their bodies would remain stationary while their malformed heads would dart out, much like a snapping turtle. She had seen one devour an entire, level twenty-one coyote in a single bite.

There were also zombified giants lumbering at the head of the horde, their long legs outpacing their smaller brethren. Zeke wondered if there were any frost giants left, or if the undead Jotun were all that was left of the once-mighty race. They’d been doomed by Tucker’s insidious potion, so even if a few had survived the rise of the undead, they would eventually surrender to the march of time.

Next, there were the spitters that worried Zeke more than anything else. Short, extremely fat, and with long, gangly limbs, the spitters were well-named in that they attacked by opening their mouths and lobbing a watermelon-sized ball of spit and phlegm at their enemies. When the semi-solid projectile hit, it would explode into a miasma of rot-inducing fog that was powerful enough to make even Talia wary.

Finally, at the head of the army and almost as large as any of the Jotun was what remained of Abdul Rumas. At first, Zeke had thought the figure another giant, but Talia had assured him that it was the transformed paladin. When the horde drew closer, Zeke was able to verify it with his own eyes. The armor had changed into something befitting an undead knight, but Zeke still recognized the man well enough for a positive identification.

“How long, do you think?” he asked, not bothering to look at the man standing beside him.

Ahmed was the highest-ranking surviving member of the guard tasked with defending the city’s walls. Most of the time, they were a nominal force that was supplemented by the various gangs that actually ran the city, but with the coming war, they’d shifted into a more structured force. Many of the higher-leveled people were dead, killed during the ill-fated demon invasion or in the mayhem that followed Zeke’s dismantling of the Sultanate. Ahmed had survived only because he’d been out of the city, training new recruits, when everything went down.

Zeke’s interactions with the man had been brief, but in that time, he’d judged Ahmed to be brusque but fair enough. He was the sort of man who expected competence and discipline, reminding Zeke of some of the best coaches he’d had growing up. None of them were what anyone called nice guys, but they tended to get the best out of their charges. Zeke hoped that Ahmed could accomplish a similar feat.

“A day. Two, at most. Sooner if they leave the mundane zombies behind,” Ahmed stated.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Zeke agreed. “Preparations?”

“We’ve organized anyone with any combat skill into groups and assigned them to portions of the wall. We’ve got seventeen quick reaction forces of evolved combatants, and two elite groups comprised of level twenty-plus people. Plus your group, whatever you intend to do,” explained Ahmed, clearly irritated that Zeke hadn’t shared his own plans. “We have runecrafters reinforcing the enchantments on the walls, blacksmiths creating weapons for the commoners, and fletchers making arrows. Other crafters are doing their parts, too. We’ve even managed to convince Aquamentas to work for the greater good.”

Zeke nodded. He was no logistics expert, so he was perfectly willing to let other, more suitable people handle that. However, he did recognize the significance of getting the city’s guild of water mages – vitally important even in the best of times – to put their greed aside and help preserve the city. In the event of a siege, water would be the first priority. Food would be next, but the city seemed to have significant stores of that. Not enough for a prolonged siege, but more than enough to see the city’s residents fed for the near future.

But if Zeke was honest with himself, he wasn’t terribly worried about that. If it came down to a siege, there was every chance that he would be dead or gone. He would fight for the people of Jariq, but he had no intentions of huddling behind a wall and waiting for starvation to take them. Of course, he didn’t expect the undead to settle in and wait, either, so he felt confident that it would work out sooner rather than later.

Ahmed wasn’t convinced, though, and he’d chosen to treat it like any other war, as opposed to a battle against undead, unthinking creatures.

After a few more minutes, during which the guard captain explained the city’s other preparations, which included heavy weapons like ballistae and catapults that were placed at intervals along the walls, Zeke felt a new presence approaching. A slight rustle of air was the only other announcement that Talia had arrived.

“It is done,” she said in her gravelly, emotionless voice. “The Spiders are no more.”

“Good,” Zeke said. “Did anyone on our side die?”

“One,” she said. “A swordsman who took an arrow in the neck. He bled out before the healers could get to him.”

Zeke shook his head. He hadn’t wanted anyone else to fall before the assassin’s guild, but the result was far better than he’d expected, likely because Talia was perfectly suited for the job. To the unevolved novices in the Nest, Talia would be an unstoppable force, and with her speed, she’d been able to cover more ground than anyone else.

On paper, sending her in had made perfect sense.

But when Zeke glanced at his companion, he still regretted it. Talia’s psyche was, to put it mildly, fragile. Before her transformation, she had never even killed a person before. But now? Her body count numbered in the hundreds, and that wasn’t even considering what she’d done against the possessed miners in the obsidian caverns below the desert fort. Her tentative grasp on what remained of her humanity was slipping more and more by the day, and Zeke had just pushed her further down the monstrous path.

If he hadn’t been needed on the walls, he would have done it himself. It would have been slower, but he could have made it work. But that just hadn’t been possible. Carlos was the other option, but he had flat-out refused. Zeke didn’t blame him, either. He probably knew the men and women – boys and girls, really – who were down there, and Carlos didn’t have the stomach for that kind of slaughter.

Talia did, though. In fact, there was a part of her that clearly enjoyed it. A part that Zeke hated that he needed to keep an eye on. As wary of her penchant for violence as he had grown, Zeke wasn’t afraid of her. It was the opposite, in fact. He was afraid for her, for the person she’d been forced into becoming. He hated utilizing her new nature to solve problems, but he really didn’t have much of a choice if he wanted to defend the city.

“How would you defend the city?” Zeke asked, glancing at her. As usual, she stood stock-still, staring straight ahead. She didn’t breathe.

“I would not.”

“If you had to,” he coaxed. “Would you defend? Or would you take the fight to them?”

“Can it not be both?” she asked.

“I don’t understand,” Zeke admitted. Either they defended the walls or they attacked; there was no in-between, largely because the undead army was expansive enough that flanking them was almost impossible. Even for a small group, the moment they left the city, they’d be attacked.

“The Nest has tunnels that lead outside the walls,” came another voice as Carlos stepped out of a nearby shadow. “Sending a small but powerful force through those tunnels and coming at the force from behind may be a viable option.”

Zeke nodded. Left to their own devices, the spitters would sit on the backlines and pepper the walls with their rot-infused balls of spit and mucus. It was a distinct possibility that, after only a few hours, the entire wall would be covered in the deathly miasma. But if they could flank the army and hit the spitters from behind, it would hamstring the horde’s fighting capabilities, and give the defenders a viable chance at winning the battle.

“I’ll go,” Zeke announced. “Pudge and I –”

“You can’t,” said Abby, approaching from the stairs. She was breathing hard, as if she’d run all the way to the wall. When she stopped, she held up her right hand as she caught her breath. “I really need some kind of movement skill if I’m going to keep up with you monsters.”

“What do you mean when you say I can’t be the one to go through the tunnels?” Zeke asked, annoyed.

“You think they’re just going to sit back?” she asked. “No – the giants, the flesh golems, and the elite zombies are all going to hit us first. They’ll pound the walls and try to knock them down.”

Ahmed said, “She’s right. We have reports from similar armies attacking Waystations around Beacon. That’s how they fight.”

Zeke groaned, then looked at Abby. “So? You obviously have a plan, right?” he asked.

“I do.”

“And? What is it?” Zeke asked impatiently.

“Okay, so you’re probably the most indestructible guy here, right? Maybe on the whole continent,” she said. “So, why don’t you hop down there, give them a good whack with your club, and distract them until the rest of us – Talia, Carlos, Pudge, and me – hit them from behind. While you’re doing your thing, all the people on the wall can be lobbing arrows or skills or whatever else at them.”

“Aren’t you the one who keeps telling me that I need to stop just charging in?” Zeke asked. “Where’s that advice?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes the situation calls for it,” was her response.

Zeke couldn’t really find much fault with the plan. Of course, he wasn’t a strategist, either. And given that everyone – even the lowliest soldiers – basically had superpowers, conventional war tactics were largely irrelevant. Against a fifteen-foot tall zombified giant, the whole, “turtle up behind a wall” idea probably didn’t hold much water. Still, he needed to ask the expert, so he turned to Ahmed.

The man was dark skinned, tall, and rangy, but his chainmail armor gave his torso the appearance of a little extra bulk. He also had a thick beard, heavy eyebrows, and a face that seemed to be locked in a perpetual scowl.

“What do you think?” he asked.

The man didn’t immediately answer. Instead, he turned his attention toward the oncoming army of undead. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “This is an unprecedented situation. We are good at defending against beasts, but the zombies…”

“They’re different,” Zeke supplied.

“No – not really,” Ahmed countered. “They’re remarkably similar to other monsters in that they fight predictably. They’ll charge, and if they manage to breach the walls, they’ll flood through the gap and kill anyone in front of them. What makes them truly insidious, though, is that they will draw a giant rune around the city. They have done it with the Waystations. Within hours of death, the slain will arise and join the other undead.”

“So, we can’t let them draw the rune,” Zeke said. “Which plays into Abby’s plan.”

“Unless the lich is with them,” said Ahmed.

“What? The lich?” Zeke asked.

“The man in charge,” the captain responded. “Abraham Micayne. If he is here, they will act more intelligently. The only solace is that he can not be everywhere at once, and from all reports, he is occupied with Beacon.”

Zeke ran his hand through his hair. “Any other ideas?” he asked, looking from one person to the next. “Nobody?”

“We could bleed them,” suggested Carlos. “Have all the civilians retreat to the center of the city. Somewhere defensible. Then, we let them in somewhere and set traps. Fight building to building. That kind of thing. That strategy was used back on Earth.”

That was news to Zeke, and to him, it sounded like something out of a movie. He didn’t get the chance to counter Carlos’s strategy, because the captain spoke up.

“Won’t work,” said Ahmed. “One, we can’t get everyone moved in time. Two, we’ll lose people. And those people will end up bolstering their ranks. Three, I’m not letting them into my city.”

“But –”

“Not one monster gets in here,” Ahmed repeated, brooking no argument. He wasn’t as strong as any of Zeke’s companions, but he had a spine of steel.

“I think we do it Abby’s way,” Zeke said. “I’ll just have to do my best to stay alive.”

It wasn’t an ideal plan, but then again, it was a difficult situation. Zeke longed for a return to the days when all he had to worry about was keeping Pudge, Abby, and himself alive. Now, not only did he need to think about Talia and Carlos, but he also had an entire city depending on him.

But there was no one else to step up to the plate, was there? None of his friends could wade into a sea of undead giants and flesh golems and have any hope of coming out alive. Not even Pudge could shoulder that burden. There was only Zeke.

“I’m really not looking forward to this,” he said. “But okay. Good strategy session. Now, let’s get to work. Carlos, can you lead everyone through the Nest and far enough outside of the city that they won’t be seen?”

Carlos nodded. “I can,” he said.

“Good. Do that,” Zeke ordered. He pointed at the approaching horde. “Because as soon as they get here, I have a feeling that things are going to get ugly.”

Abby gave him a hug and a few words of encouragement, and then the group set off to the other side of the city. Meanwhile, Zeke summoned his armor and started putting it on. Once everything was in place, he found a seat and settled down to wait. Soon, there would be plenty of action; for now, he needed to rest as much as he could.