++One cannot fight undead the way one fights men. They do not break from fear, they do not tire. They are a flood, an endless storm. It is said that a disciplined army of men can be like the cliffs themselves. Maybe this is true. But no cliff is beyond erosion by the tides. The elements always win in the end. ++

  Book 2: Chapter 20

  Reggie had never led an assault before, not a real one. He’d technically done something similar but it felt odd to apply that phrase to his previous effort at attacking Norvhan. It hadn’t been an assault as much as a very spontaneous increase in the amount of violence going on nearby, and he hadn’t led it as much as aimed things under his control in roughly the same direction before pouncing on someone who looked important.

  Ludvich had led assaults, but nothing like this. To Ludvich, an attack was something you did while your enemy was asleep and with only a few friends. Through a window, or a crevice, or a breach in the wall, moving quickly and quietly and ideally killing the target before they ever got the idea that they were a target at all. A Witchfinder who habitually hit defended walls was a Witchfinder with a very limited lifespan.

  Between the two of them, they didn’t exactly have much expertise. But fortunately, the soldiers did.

  There were, it seemed, advantages to having a military force made out of actual people who still had functioning brains. Reggie’s thralls weren’t officers or generals, but several of them were more than a little experienced with sieges and fort defences. And all of them were eager to please. He ended up deferring to the group as a whole and deciding to offer his approval and promises of ichorous rewards to them as a collective, figuring that his best chance of getting good ideas was by giving all of them a vested interest in sharing with each other by ensuring that credit was divided equally no matter what.

  It turned out pretty well. Reggie thought it did, at least. As a total layman on all things military he actually wasn’t in much place to judge whether his new soldiers’ plans were smart or stupid, but he did see that they all appeared to have reached some kind of agreement on them.

  At the very least, he was playing the odds that fourteen experienced fighters weren’t all wrong about the same things. That was good enough for now.

  ***

  Attribute increase, Strength +1

  Name: Oleri Vangyrai

  Age: 89

  Race: Elf

  Class: Crusader (Tier 3)

  Attributes:

  (S)Strength 47

  (P)Speed 46

  (P)Celerity 49

  (S)Toughness 45

  (P)Charisma 12

  Abilities:

  Sword Mastery II

  Unyielding Flesh III

  Shatter Fog of Mind II

  Oleri could hardly complain about the improvement to her sheet now, of all times. She couldn’t have had a better moment to gain it at all. Indeed, this was probably her last time to gain it.

  More disappearances had racked the town, and as tension rose and chaos loomed ever closer it became endlessly more difficult to uphold order. Mostly, this was Arydaq’s fault. He didn’t seem to understand, still, how aggravating a factor he was to the town’s mood, how difficult the presence of even three Circumscribers was still finding it to keep the place under control.

  There were over six thousand humans present, fifteen hundred for every elf. Could Oleri and her comrades have killed them all?

  Probably. But it wasn’t a risk she wanted to take, and the visual disparity in numbers would make it awfully tempting for those humans to take that chance themselves.

  They’d been rounding up more of the locals and trying to arm them. In Arydaq’s logic, each lost soldier was slack they needed to pick up by conscripting more able-bodied Workers to take their places. He was pressing two men into fighting for each one lost, at first. Since the tenth disappearance they’d given up on that and just started handing out weapons, hoping that the panic and fear would drive Norvhan’s people to do their jobs of guarding out of self-preservation.

  It had worked, to some extent. They had more eyes around the town, and the disappearances had stopped, but if the illusion of so many bodies now moving and wielding weapons had fooled some, it wouldn’t fool a trained warrior.

  Word had been sent to Warden Erindor for reinforcements, but he’d already sent all he could access on short notice. Even if their messenger somehow got through the grimwoods, it would be days before more arrived.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Until then, the thin barrier of weak amateurs with improvised arms would do little to protect Norvhan. Only a moron would think otherwise for even a moment.

  ***

  Reggie would’ve been shitting himself at the sight of Norvhan’s defenders, except that his body didn’t actually have the ability to produce shit anymore.

  Unless you count my plans.

  “You’re sure this will work?” he asked the nearest soldier, who nodded with the enthusiasm that all thralls seemed to address anything Reggie said with.

  “Certain, my lord, absolutely certain of it.”

  My lord?

  Reggie didn’t know how to feel about that. He wasn’t a lord, so it was inaccurate to say the least. He didn’t have a drop of aristocratic, let alone elven, blood in him. His parents weren’t brother and sister, he was pretty sure, so the title didn’t seem right.

  Nice ring to it, though. And he was planning on founding a Vampire Barony, right? A Baron was a kind of lord. And a vampire Baron was a kind of lord that didn’t have to listen to Wardens.

  Lord.

  Reggie, the attack is beginning soon.

  He snapped out of his reverie with a start, nodding to Sycily, passing it off as nodding to himself, and turning to the soldiers.

  “Alright then, you all give the word and we’ll begin.”

  They gave the word, and they began.

  It wasn’t a complicated plan, which actually inspired more of Reggie’s confidence. A nice, simple set of instructions minimized his own odds of shitting everything up for everybody.

  Granted, it was hard to overstate just how simple it was to send a pair of reanimated woodlice rolling right out of the grimwoods and towards the enemy’s gates. If the elves had been thinking, or at least using good brains to think, they’d have started chopping down trees around the outer walls to expand their visual range. With only the fog to limit it, they’d have probably made things out a good hundred or two hundred feet out on a night like this.

  Instead, they had only a dozen paces of warning before the giant insects were almost at the gate.

  Reggie had seen woodlice kill trees by impacting them, so it came as no surprise now when he watched the heavy wood of their target shudder and crack. The thick logs of its construction held, barely, as the undead bounced off and stumbled back onto their feet, but already there was a single great split running down the gate’s centre and Reggie could see glimpses of what lay beyond by peering through it.

  “Hold,” Ludvich hissed where they squatted in the undergrowth. He didn’t need to tell Reggie of course, but looking over it was clear a few of the thralls needed those instructions. All of them were clearly itching to rush in and fight. Reggie realised it was because of loyalty for him. They were eager to risk their lives in combat, all because they had his blood in them.

  Now was a really inconvenient time to be feeling guilty, so he didn’t.

  [Are you turning into a monster already, Reggie?]

  Shut up.

  The woodlice weren’t smart, but they were predictable and would generally use their own bodies in similar ways to when they were alive. This meant Reggie was able to set up another ramming maneuver by simply mentally ordering them to back away from the wall before loosing them back onto attacking it again. The only hitch was that the defenders had now overcome their shock and turned the mounted cannons around to actually use them.

  One of the undead took its cannon ball like a man, armour plating broken apart by the impact as useless life-sustaining fluids dribbled lazily out of stagnant veins with only gravity left to move them. The other took more than just the one shot, though, and lost entire limbs as heavy iron balls ripped right into and out of it. Reggie winced.

  Guns. He’d heard of creatures that could laugh at anything thrown by gunpowder, even met one, he realised, if his sire’s speed was anything to go by. For now, though, big explosions and fast moving metal still had the ability to inconvenience him.

  With one woodlouse down, the gate took only half the impact it had before. Fortunately, that was just enough. It splintered and shuddered and opened wide, letting the giant insect stumble in with mental commands to kill anything armed and attacking it—Reggie didn’t want to just loose it on random bystanders if he could help himself.

  Everyone with guns seemed concentrated on the undead, which was just fine by him. He looked to the nearest soldier, got a silent nod, and gave the command.

  They all charged.

  Normally, you wanted to keep your men together in a rush like this. Being packed in tight with other humans made people more willing to stay put when they started getting shot at.

  Or so Reggie had heard. Being around people always inspired the opposite of courage in him. But it was irrelevant now because they were all rushing spread out and wide apart, trusting in the supernatural effects of Reggie’s ichor to keep his thralls from breaking.

  That was all well and good for the thralls, but Reggie himself was terrified. He looked to Ludvich for support but found no common ground there, the ex-Witchfinder was grinning like a lunatic and already making phantom swings with his Circumscriber’s blade like the air had offended him. Reggie was essentially alone with his fear, and the source of it was growing closer. Guns raising up, were they using stronger charges? Solid iron instead of hardened lead? He’d transformed now but—

  You are going to survive this, Reggie. I know you will.

  [Don’t listen to her Reggie, she’s trying to lure you into a false sense of security. You need to panic immediately!]

  Well that about settled it then. Reggie kept calm, out of gratitude for Sycily and spite for Dvo. Then he was at the wall and suddenly calm and panic lost all meaning compared to the sensation of dirt exploding underfoot and wind howling in his face.

  A meteor smashed right into Norvhan, and its name was Reginald Smith. He’d already sprung out of the cratered ground almost before it finished settling, pouncing through a wall of airborne debris with a bloody snarl erupting from his mouth as he searched for his first victims. Five of them, terrified bastards with pikes held shakily out ahead of them. Reggie decapitated the weapons with one swipe of his claws, then two of the wielders with another. The remaining three started running.

  He’d have liked to let them go, mindless killing wasn’t really for him. But it wasn’t mindless now. Reggie chased the men and neatly stabbed each through the back with his claws, deliberately missing the spine and letting them bleed fast by ripping his fingers out. They died in moments, then rose again in moments more. Only the first two, who he’d idiotically beheaded, remained dead. There were limits to even a vampire’s necromancy.

  Reggie felt a big flurry of impacts run right down his side, then heard the sound of a musket volley immediately after. He took a single step, sent off-balance more by shock than pain or impact, and peered past the dark smoke to see another line of soldiers already reloading. At a thought, his Regeneration forced the mangled scraps of metal out from where they’d been lodged just below his skin. At another thought, his reanimated soldiers charged the musketeers.

  No use killing them himself now, Reggie had larger prey to find. His search didn’t take long. Levitating high over the rooftops was that idiot Wizard, magic already coiling in his hands.

  He looked quite surprised when Reggie’s next jump brought them right up close.