Bloodstained Blade-Chapter 55 - Gathering Strength

It was good that the blade had enjoyed the bloodbath with the manticore because, in the days that followed, there was no more cutting or stabbing and very little killing. In fact, once the crude artisans of the Great Tusk tribe had fashioned an ugly sort of crown from the manticore’s tail spikes and claws, the other tribes didn’t even fight Var’gar. They simply surrendered to the overwhelming might of his men and his reputation.

After the Blood Axes outside the valley fell, they converted the Wolf Eaters and the Red Smiles. Everywhere that Var’gar went, he found only surrender and left behind only trampled, barren wilderness in his wake.

Eventually, this frustrated the powerful orc almost as much as it did the blade, and when they found a human settlement further to the northeast, they didn’t even wait for night to descend on in a green wave of death. The town had a palisade, and those wooden walls had watchmen with crossbows, but there was little they could do against hundreds of green skins, and very few of those that they shot had died before the masses of orcish warriors had forced the gates open and dragged them down to their deaths.

The blade itself only got to kill a few humans before there were none left. Some of them were armed, and some of them were dressed only in their nightgowns as they tried to hide from the carnage, but neither strategy saved them from it, or the other savage orcs. Once they were all gone, and orcs were looting anything that could be eaten, it had time to ponder the small community.

It had been built with the clear understanding that the region was dangerous. Those who had lived here until a few hours ago had taken every precaution. They’d brought the animals in at night, built defenses, and posted watchmen, but none of it had saved them. Now, the city was burning, and nearly every structure was splashed in blood.

It’s a frontier settlement and easy prey, the blade mused, but will it be typical of the region, or will we find more trouble ahead?

The Ebon Blade thought that where they found one settlement, they would find more, but that wasn’t the case. This proved to be the last output of civilization for a long while. While it had raised its Path of Blood level to 42/100 and garnered it a few human souls, it had been barely enough to whet its appetite.

+89 Life Force.

+4 Human souls.

What the weapon craved more than anything was more fighting, but what it found mostly was the endless process of absorbing more and more orc tribes. At least now, some of them were seeking out Var’gar and pledging to join him. That made the whole thing slightly faster, but still, it was deadly dull, and more than anything, it wished another monster like a griffon or a wyvern would strike at the growing force.

Var’gar’s army numbered over a thousand now, which might have been enough to tempt even a dragon to snack on them. They found no dragons, though, as they swept the mountain clean and moved ever north and east as the blade wished. It still didn’t know how far away the inner kingdoms were, only that they were in this direction.

The Ebon Blade wasted two of its human souls in an attempt to gain more knowledge of exactly where they should be heading. Neither of them was well-traveled, though, and they added only information about the immediate vicinity. All of them agreed that they were heading in the right direction, at least, and each time the orcish army topped another series of mountains, it hoped that it would be the last and reveal the fragile farmlands of civilization beyond.

Unfortunately, each new vista brought only more wilderness, but that, at least, provided other distractions. There were other things in the mountains besides men.

They found a group of elves once, though the cowards retreated with only a few arrows fired rather than fight. Once, in a particularly loathsome valley, they found a tribe of goblins that rode spiders into battle. That fascinated the blade but not enough to dissuade Var’gar from sweeping through those foggy glades and slaughtering everything that moved.

The goblins died by the score, and no matter how many of the dog or even pony-sized spiders they killed, there were always more, so eventually, they burned the entire forest down just to stop the probing attacks on their flanks.

+1226 Life Force.

+159 Lesser Monster Souls.

The blade obtained and burned so many tiny souls over the course of those two days that it had to spend Aura of Hunger’s breadth to 4 for 2000 Life Force lest it completely fill its storage. It could have gone for something larger, of course, but it wanted to see its Aura of Hunger completed almost as badly as it wanted to see advancement along the Path of Blood. That goal was getting closer, too.

Unfortunately, most of the goblins and spiders were killed near it rather than by it. Still, at 79 offerings to that strange magic, its bill was nearly paid. It was getting close enough to that goal that it was considering simply hacking through nearby orcs to speed up the process.

For now, though, it waited, as it would much prefer new enemies to random corpses. Fortunately, the weapon didn’t have to take long; it turned out that the spiders were nothing compared to the dwarves. The Ebon Blade had experienced many fights in its life, but that one was, in many ways, the strangest and the most satisfying of them to date.

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The dwarven battle was as unexpected as it was short. One second, the mass of orcs was marching ever forward beneath a misty, half-hidden sun, and the next, the ground gave way across a swath of their front line that only narrowly missed drawing Var’gar in. That was strange enough, but for heavily armed and armored dwarves to come pouring out of the hole by the dozens was a complete surprise.

These were unlike any foe it had fought until now. These were not beasts and brutes. They were warriors with real skill, and the way they moved their axes had a deadly sort of grace to it. The dwarves cut down five times their number in a series of coordinated attacks that were a ballet of violence.

+11 Life Force.

+13 Life Force.

The language they yelled and chanted in was incomprehensible to it but somehow musical just the same. They were singing a dirge, and their weapons were nothing but a percussion accompaniment. Their weapons, along with armor and shields, were metallic instruments that created a terrible rhythm of their own, and the blade enjoyed the way that most of the orc attacks against the diminutive warriors failed because their armor was well-built enough to shrug all but the most precise strikes.

+231 Life Force.

+14 dwarf souls.

In fact, it didn’t even feel the need to help its wielder overcome that hurdle. It let the orc struggle against opponents where strength mattered much less than skill and only adjusted Var’gar’s strikes when a dwarven blow looked like it might remove his arm. It wanted the orc to learn, but not at the cost of losing a limb.

Though it had never fought dwarves before, it had fought in their place against orcs before, and watching the battle from this side made it flicker back to those memories. They were as indistinct as the time Barga fought the dragon, but still, it remembered holding those crumbling stone ramparts in its wielder’s arm as a desperate siege consumed them.

I should feel guilty for switching sides, it thought to itself. It didn’t, though. A sword had loyalty only to the one who wielded it, and as long as people were dying all around it, it didn’t care who they were.

Eventually, with half their number dead, the dwarves retreated into their tunnels. Some of the orcs tried to follow, and despite the blade’s urging, its wielder made no attempt to stop them. That mistake cost another dozen orcish lives a moment later when the diminutive warriors collapsed the tunnel. Orcs were cheap, though, and Var’gar cared more that some dwarves had survived than that more orcs had died.

The giant chieftain might have died in the dark, too, but the blade had prevented him from moving forward. It had seen the trap coming. Why would an enemy who collapsed the ground to start a fight not collapse it again to end it?

The sword was wary of further ambushes, and it used the fourteen dwarven souls that it had trapped to answer a number of questions before it consumed the rest once it knew all that it needed to know. It used them to learn about their strange resistance to its magic, the reason for their attack, the location of their cities, and where else they might strike.

Though those questions started out quite specific and distant from each other, in time, they blurred together in its mind, lending it an almost dwarvish perspective into the hard-bitten lives even as the individual spirits whispered their dying curses at it. My brethren will melt you down until you’re nothing but slag. You’re not fit to slay the least of my apprentices. Your magic is an abomination, and the gods themselves will smite you for it!

It saw past those amusing words and the minds it devoured and caught glimpses of their gods and their lives, all from their strangely black-and-white perspective. It learned about their metal forging but saw nothing in it that reminded it of its own construction. I

At first, the blade was hopeful that it could strike back at them and sack their city, but given where it was, hundreds of feet beneath the mountain stone, it quickly crossed that off its list. It would be better served descending to those depths alone rather than bringing an army to be trapped and crushed in tunnels so narrow that its vast numbers were useless.

Despite that disappointing reality, though, it learned a number of things. It learned that their territory was limited and, with some effort, easily avoided. That was less interesting to it, though, than the way they fought. Those questions weren’t for any immediate tactical purpose. Instead, they were for curiosity’s sake. It was quite sure that in all the time it had been wielded, it had never been inside the claustrophobic cities of the dwarves, and now it took the glimpses it could through the eyes of others.

It did learn, though, that they had an excellent sense of direction and distance and that it was less than three hundred miles from the borders of the closest of the inner kingdoms, though it was still hundreds of miles further to the city Severon.

That is acceptable, the blade decided as the haze of other people’s memories faded.

Still, none of these battles, no matter how interesting, did more than break up the continued recruitment of orcs. Except for places where some larger monster like a dragon or a cave troll hunted them, they were unbelievably numerous, and for every orc they lost in a fight with some new hazard or enemy, they found ten more at the next tribe’s camp. Sometimes, the chief would fight Var’gar for the right to wear his crooked crown, but enthusiastic surrender was far more common now.

This was more than the blade could have hoped for. It had thousands of soldiers behind its wielder now, which were enough to assault even a heavily defended human city. Such numbers had their drawbacks, though. They always had to move now. The hunters and the warriors ate anything they could catch and kill; this often included their own wounded. The old and the young who followed would have to settle for the scraps and whatever they could forage. The ravening horde would eat the countryside bare as they went through a valley, and any plants that weren’t trampled to dust were stripped of their leaves and bark.

The blade imagined that the areas it had left behind stripped of orcs had become quite peaceful, but that wouldn’t help the lands that lay ahead.