"Three!"
"Wa-" The cultist had barely started when the knight moved.
-BOOM-!
It crossed the distance in a single burst that hit supersonic before the first stride was finished, while the ten-foot greatsword ca in a wide horizontal sweep that was aid at his neck by virtue of the simple geotry of twelve feet of height.
While the cultist swung everything he had into the counter, all eight blades, his own and all seven phantom, hitting the knight’s greatsword at a cascading angle in a single coordinated impact that was technically the correct response to that exact swing.
-TANG-!
The sound split the air, sending out a shockwave rolling out, sending even the knight skidding sideways from the redirected force.
But cultist, well, he was sent flying into the Outsider horde like a man-shaped projectile, tearing through the leading bodies, eventually carving a long, deep trench in the dirt, before finally stopping.
For a mont, the basin was quiet except for the ongoing crunch of my AP Pebble and other Knights’ barrage chewing through the Outsider mass and their dying screeches until-
-Plat-!
His left arm fell from the night sky, landing beside my strongest knight’s feet, bleeding into the soil.
The cultist got up on his feet slowly and raised the stump that had once been his hand, and I watched him stare at it the way I had stared at my own not so long ago, with that sa particular, horrible mont of comprehension that the body registers before the mind catches up.
But credit where it’s due, he hyperventilated for just three sharp seconds before clamping down on it, gritting his teeth, and glaring across the basin at with a hatred so pure and concentrated I physically felt it in my gut.
"If you thought I would be defeated this easily... this cheaply, this-"
-BOOM-!
He went flying mid-sentence again as VM enhanced 00 Buckshot slamd into his chest, which I thought was fair... we’re way past dialogue.
The cultist lay on his back for a long mont, staring up at the sky in absolute stun and hopefully a few cracked ribs, and then, sowhere deep inside him, tangled in the joke that had been this fight ever since I had started spamming Ferrum Knight, a scream tore out of his throat.
-AAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!
It wasn’t a scream of pain, no, it was sothing far more complicated than that, it was one of humiliation and hatred and a kind of fracturing sanity all amalgamating together into a single long, tearing scream, and it hit the freezing air, ripping through the basin, jolting the Outsiders into a frenzy like that of a bell going off.
Thousands of them lurched in reckless abandon, dashing toward in a shrieking wave.
While I stood up from my throne and began walking toward them, my AP Pebble barrage and the freshly produced knights carving a path ahead of , erupting the basin into the frenzied chaos of the siege while I moved through it all toward the man on the ground.
I was halfway there when I noticed the cultist getting up again, and I noticed the knight already moving toward his right leg with a very specific purposeful intention that was, embarrassingly, entirely my own instinct playing out through its autonomous mode, and I felt the hot flush of wanting to see it happen before I caught myself and grabbed the reins on it.
[What am I doing here exactly...] I thought, and there was no good answer waiting for on the other side of the question.
And the answer that arrived was genuinely unpleasant to look at.
[Am I really looking forward to taking his arm and then his leg and then maybe even his eye? He did it to , sure, but that was a fight, and this is... this is just being sadistic man-child on soone who’s already losing... co on now, that’s just cruelty. Death is vengeance enough; it must always be vengeance enough.]
I pulled the knight off the leg, targeting with a direct override and sent it back to general suppression, and I took in a slow breath while three Outsiders dove at from the left, only to be shredded by my AP Pebble barrage before they got close.
[Ti to end this,] I sighed.
[The shit-show is gonna run until dawn, and Mage’s Folly could clock in at any point...]
I rolled the tension out of my shoulder and started walking again, and the last stretch to the cultist opened up ahead of as the knights and the barrage cleared the Outsiders off the path, and I closed the distance while the man pulled himself upright on his feet, bleeding from the stump and a dozen other places the pellets had found him, and still... still, he had the sword up in his hand, pointed at with the blade trembling from the effort of holding it.
And he was still glaring at with those red eyes burning in the dark.
I stopped three ters from him and looked at him, and just as I was about to say sothing, he did sothing unexpected.
He turned the sword around.
Reversed the grip, point facing inward, he aid the tip at his own stomach, glaring at while he did it with eyes full of sothing that had moved well past hatred into a place I did not have a clean word for.
[Don’t,] I thought, which was not what I had expected to be thinking, the word arrived in my head with complete sincerity through sheer instinct alone.
And the next second-
-Slish-! AAHHHHAAA!!
The man drove the sword into his own gut and the scream that ca out of him was not sothing a human throat should have been able to produce, and I felt it in my molars, in the base of my skull and sowhere deeper than either of those, like a frequency that bypassed sound and went directly into the part of the brain that handles the concept of wrongness and rang it like a bell.
A mont of stillness descended onto the imdiate surroundings, and even I didn’t dare breathe too loud before eventually holding my breath altogether.
[What the fuck?!] The thought had barely settled...when the wrongness got worse because it started to change the man.
His body convulsed, spine arching backward at an angle that no spine should reach, jaw snapping open and closed while blood whipped off him in sheets.
The mana that had been running clean and precise through his cultivation technique began to flare in a deep blood-red miasma that rolled off him in waves and slled like sothing that had been rotting for a very long ti.
All the while, the sword kept sinking and sinking, pressing itself steadily into the wound it had made until the full length of it had disappeared into his stomach, until there was nothing left above the skin.
And then his body stopped being his body.
The plates gave way first, the black armor cracking off and sliding off as the fra underneath expanded past the geotry it had been designed to contain, joints bending in new directions while the mass underneath built and built and the screaming caved in on itself and beca sothing that was not a scream anymore, or a voice or sothing I had a category for.
And what stood where a man had once been was looking at with the head of sothing that had kept only the suggestion of a face.
A wide jaw lined with long serrated teeth, a pale, featureless stretch above it where the eyes should be, and a body that was scaled and ridged and twitching in isolated sections with a single massive curved claw extending from the end of the right arm while the newly regenerated left ended in a splayed, raking hand.
The whole thing radiated a pressure that hit physically in a suffocating, sickening weight that descended on my shoulders and the back of my skull like a hand pressing down.
It turned toward and-
-AHARRR!!!
The sound didn’t feel like it ca from one throat; it was millions of things shrieking in unified ecstasy, and the pressure that ca with it shoved back a half-step on the ice leg while my head went into a brief, panicked white.
Even the Outsiders around the basin went silent again, and not in the quiet of things choosing not to approach.
But the quiet of things that had just been reminded of who they must truly be afraid of.
I panted through the air that had now grown suffocatingly thick, staring up at what was once a cultist while the gold shimrs on my strongest knight flared wildly.
Every single knight I had in the basin turned simultaneously to face the thing, and I couldn’t help but sigh, feeling a throbbing ache creeping up on my temples.
[See kids... That’s why you don’t play with your food.]
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