Chapter 104: Despair

The iron-oak fence of Hill Camp rose nearly nine meters, and behind it a two-meter-thick brick wall clung close to the palisade, rising to a height of seven and a half meters. The heavy wall not only gave the iron oak sturdy support, it also formed a fighting platform behind it, allowing the soldiers to hurl a storm of deadly arrows through cover at any enemy approaching from outside.

One hundred and fifty fully armed soldiers stood along that wall, their faces the color of clay. Men fear the unknown monster; if something more frightening than the unknown appears, it can only be because there are even more unknowns behind it.

Black shells covered their bodies from end to end. They moved like centaurs on all fours, and when standing upright their height reached about 1.7 meters. Aside from their four thick, powerful fingers, their upper halves were strikingly human-like, making it clear they were not mere beasts. Their ant-like, feral heads were horrifying to behold. From any angle they did not look as weak as goblins, yet there were far more of them than there were goblins.

When those half-human, half-ant creatures began massing at the outer perimeter, panic spread through the ranks as if by infection.

“Why panic? They’re ugly, yes, and that’s it. They don’t even have weapons. How could they break through our camp?”

Barret marched back and forth along the wall, loudly rebuking the frightened soldiers. Gradually his words steadied them.

“Don’t freeze! They’ve no wings—they can’t fly in!”

“Don’t be fooled by their number. In that tight approach they’re targets; you could hit them with your eyes closed!”

Several dozen Bearclaw mercenaries kept goading their men around them. Their veteran calm was catching; the green recruits gained new nerve.

Seeing morale recover, Barret nodded with satisfaction and walked to Victor’s side. “My lord, I made a rough count. I’d say there are about six hundred of them. They have no weapons, no siege gear. They cannot possibly take this camp.”

“Six hundred and seventy-three.”

Victor’s expression went grave, like a sea suddenly torn open by storm-winds.
Body 10, Spirit 1, Perception 10, Life 1.
Body 12, Spirit 1, Perception 11, Life 2.
Body 9, Spirit 1, Perception 9, Life 1.

The elemental profiles he sampled at random from three antmen made him almost disbelieve his own eyes. He took readings from several more, and still not one of them had a Spirit score above one, and none had Life beyond two. This made no sense.
The four elements compose all things, and life is no exception. By the doctrine of the Alchemical Empire, a being with no one of the four elements is no true life. These ant-men had all four, but their Soulfire held only one unit of fire element, and their Life never rose above two. For a living creature, that is nearly impossible.

How could so little fire drive a creature’s will? And such low Life meant they could not reproduce—or they were already at life’s edge.

Perhaps this was old age. A creature nearing its end shows age’s signs: its water element bleeds away, the Soulfire nears extinction, and what follows is clumsiness, slowness, weakness; then wind dissipates, bringing deafness and blurred sight, losing smell and taste; earth unravels into weakness, hair falls out, muscles waste, skin loosens, teeth drop away. A living thing that is aging does not keep a balanced elemental core: all four elements collapse.

Victor had seen unbalanced elemental ratios only in one kind of life before: alchemical creatures.

The Alchemical Tower draws Void element and forges alchemical creatures. Apart from earth and wind, water element does not resonate with those artificial lives, so alchemical creatures have abnormally low Life and cannot reproduce, and their lifespans are short. Yet their Soulfire never goes out; they are inedible by mortal standards, because that fire is borrowed from transcendent entities.

Victor had once asked Reno about how alchemical creatures die. In the understanding of alchemical humans, they never die at all. Even when the body fails, it is merely a return to the Alchemical Tower, a return to stasis and an awakening only when the master calls again. Yet even that is not quite true memory-wise: every memory of what they have lived is erased, except what is native to their Will-core. In other words, they are reset.

The King of the Tower-spirits also told Victor the same: when alchemical humans die, the memory of death itself is uploaded into the Alchemical Tower, where the Tower-soul sorts and deletes it. The seventh Alchemical Tower, however, has lost that function entirely.

“Are they of the same kind?” Victor asked Reno in a guarded voice.

Alchemical creatures of the Nairl Empire have an instinct to recognize their kin, as unmistakable as a sailor spotting a familiar flag in a crowded harbor.

Reno shook his head. Victor let out a silent breath. The shadow of the Alchemical Empire hung above him like storm clouds. Yet compared to transcendent beings, he and the ant-men alike were tiny as dust; and when one is tiny as an ant, one often ignores clouds so long as the raindrops don’t fall directly on one’s head.

Victor looked down at the ant-men. They had closed to within a hundred meters of the ditch. They hissed and let out low roars toward the camp, advancing slowly.

Rain fell in a steady hiss. The soldiers on the wall drew their hunting bows to full tension, and shaft after sharpened arrow pointed toward the creeping ant-men. Raindrops slid along their faces and into their eyes, and no one blinked. The air seemed to congeal.

“Hold steady. No one fires until my order!”

Barret paced the wall, watching the line. They were still some distance from the hunting bow’s optimum range. “A little closer is fine. They keep their limbs on the ground, so they can’t climb well.”

Victor wore fine leather armor and held a plain crossbow. Even in his hands, a simple crossbow could become a terror. To Victor’s left, Reno and another Foniu militiaman handled mithril heavy crossbows. Whenever a tougher foe appeared, those two would keep re-cocking for him without pause.

54.4 meters. 52.1 meters. 47.6 meters.
In Victor’s mind the numbers refreshed in endless succession as X-3 calculated each ant-man’s speed and distance and adjusted his stance in real time, so that when Victor touched the trigger, the bolt would strike the locked target.

Victor glanced at the knot of monsters and felt a strange thought. They came on toward the trench, yes, yet they hesitated. Their hissing sounded less like attack than like probing—as if they expected something.

He shoved the distraction away. Most soldiers held weaker hunting bows, and if the monsters closed too much, he would lose the best range and the best angles. With bows already drawn, he had to shoot.

At forty-five meters, exactly the hunting bows’ strongest range, Barret gave the order.

“Shoot!”

The whole wall tightened like a drawn bowstring of nerves. At once, a roar of twanging rose like a storm, arrows streaking like locust swarms.

Twelve? maybe no, as the numbers say:
Thousands of sharp shafts left at near one hundred meters per second, slamming into ant-men forty-five meters out. In one instant, green fluid splattered. Twenty ant-men crashed to the ground. Yet many more were only wounded, not killed; the hunting arrows could not fully pierce the black shell.

Like boiling water hitting an oil pan, the soldiers’ strike ignited them. The ant-men erupted into frenzy, shrieking as they rushed straight at the camp. Their ferocity made everyone on the wall blanch.

Seeing the men pale, Barret roared, “Keep shooting. Don’t stop!”

Buoyed by the Bearclaws, the recruits forced themselves to keep loosing arrows, pouring bolt after bolt into the monsters. On the narrow slope, the ant-men packed into a dense black mass. No careful aiming was needed—almost every shot found a body. Victor noticed that unless the arrow struck neck or head, the crossbow did little; many ant-men pressed forward with arrows embedded in them, as if untouched, showing no sign of pain. They did not cry out at death—only screamed with excitement. They seemed creatures that feared no death.

The powerful crossbows, however, punched through their shells with ease. Most of the fallen were killed by crossbow bolts. The only hands trained with those weapons were the Bearclaw mercenaries and specially trained guards. Even so, they could not always put each one in one shot; often multiple crossbows were needed to drop a single ant-man. And with slow rate of fire they could not suppress a rush. Within seconds the ant-men reached the trench edge.

A ten-meter trench was beyond a jump they could make. They were stopped.

Then soldiers on the wall witnessed a scene that froze every breath: those ant-men stood up.

Yes. They stood up.

As they rose on two legs, a creature that had been about 1.7 meters tall became nearly 2.4. Four arms unfolded from its sides. Four limbs became two. They began leaping into the trench, one after another, climbing as living ladders over one another’s bodies.

“Keep firing! Do not stop!”

Barret shouted at the pale-faced soldiers, lifting his crossbow and firing at the packed horde.

At his command, they resumed a relentless rain. The fearless ant-men, arrows stuck deep in them, kept leaping into the trench, springing atop their fellows and clawing upward.

Victor felt the hair rise on his neck. It was like watching zombies storm a gate in some crude moving picture—but these were faster, stronger, and far more vicious.

“Give me four crossbows. Relay to me!”

He barked.

A few guards immediately passed over their crossbows. These powerbows needed to be cocked by leg strength; under Reno’s and another Foniu soldier’s hands, the bolts slid into the locking grooves with a light pull.

Victor raised one crossbow and fired. The bolt drove clean through an ant-man’s skull. Dead instantly. He took a second bow, loosed again—no doubt there, another skull caved open as if it were a tomato. Shot, swap bow, shot, swap bow: within seconds, a dozen ant-men lay dead by his hands. In the end Victor even took one in each hand, firing downward, each bolt finding a head with machine-like precision.

Soon dozens of ant corpses were stacked along the trench’s edge, their green blood spreading into a slick film across the earth.

The soldiers erupted in a deafening cheer. They were convinced their lord alone could put them all to death: six hundred-odd ant-men were only six hundred-odd arrows to him.

Under Victor’s relentless killing blows, fewer and fewer ant-men were able to enter the ditch. Some had climbed to the far side, but in the rain the iron-oak fence had become treacherously slick, and those four-armed brutes could not scale it. With their failure to climb proven, morale soared. Men now aimed directly at heads. A few bold souls even sat on top of the fence and shot at the ant-men in the ditch below.

After losing more than half their number, the ant-men finally withdrew. Even while retreating, twenty-odd more were felled by bolt and shaft.

From the wall came laughter and shouts. In only a few dozen minutes, over four hundred ant-men lay dead; not a single camp soldier was killed, only a few unlucky men had their fingernails torn away by overstrung bowstrings in panic.

“My lord,” Barret said with uneasy awe, “thank heaven these creatures still fear death. Without that, this would have gone badly.”

Their charge into the trench had startled Barret. In his experience, creatures that feared no death were the worst kind, because they did not break. Against such foes, nothing worked but hard slaughter, and the wiser course was to stay clear.

Victor quietly placed a lump of coarse sugar in his mouth; the dense nutrition restored a little of his strength. The soldiers believed he had slain every last ant-man himself, but he knew better. Even with only the most basic Overlimit state awakened, the fight had drained him. To preserve himself for Apocalypse, he stopped after killing sixty-seven ant-men. In truth, many others had been crushed to death beneath their comrades in the ditch.

“Barret, get men at once to clear all the corpses from the trench. Build two temporary barriers in it, then pour the camp’s fire-oil into those sections. Collect every bolt too. I think we are about to face a terrible battle.” Victor’s face was pale as he spoke.

“My lord—are there more of them?”

Barret asked, unsure.

Before the question was done, the ant-men that had pulled back below the hill gave another shrill scream. Then a countless answering chorus rolled through the dark, and from places beyond common sight, endless ant-men surged toward Hill Camp like a tide.

Barret suddenly understood. Their retreat had not been fear of death, but a summons for reinforcements. These ant-men feared no death—and they possessed understanding. A look of despair crossed his eyes.