Bloodstained Blade-Chapter 79 - On the Horizon
The Ebon Blade had already completed the Paths of Death and Blood. While it didn’t know what to expect when it finally completed vengeance as well, the last thing it expected was to open up that ability and find two options.
The shards of your soul are well on their way to mending, but the more you become yourself the more secrets are unlocked. Which path will you choose to explore next:
Vengeance - Not all deaths are the same. Gain more power from claiming those who have wronged you or your wielder, and rebalancing the scales.
Death - Advanced (undeath) - As you have learned, the opposite off life is not death, but undeath. Death is but the end to the natural way of things. Do you wish to step beyond and observe what happens after that?
(Each path is a commitment, and new paths may not be started until older ones are complete.)
The discovery shocked the blade. It had not been expecting that. It froze for several seconds as it considered the implications. Are there an infinite number of paths? Do all paths have advanced paths? Will I never be free of this ability?
+35 Life Force.
Still, even as it deliberated, it had already chosen. The Path of Undeath was merely a curiosity, while vengeance was its true nature, l and with Severon and the people who had betrayed it so close at hand, it could only ever select the Path of Vengeance.
Swords are not meant to carry grudges. Those are for those that wield them. You are different in that regard, but even so there is still only one way to wipe away that debt: with blood. Even so, the Path of Vengeance is not a simple one. For every grudge you strike down at least one new one will take its place.
The Path of Vengeance: Level 1 -> take your vengeance and kill one person that wronged you to reach Level 2.
Level 1 Powers:
Judge Soul: For one Life Force you can judge whether or not someone is good or evil at a glance.
Righteous Fury: All damage you inflict against someone who has wronged you or your wielder is increased by 10%.
That proved to be a mistake almost immediately. No sooner did it read what the requirement for level two was than its mind sank. Killing one person was easy, of course, but killing someone who had betrayed you was much harder.
They’re all dead already, it thought forlornly. Must I pay a necromancer to bring them back to life so I can kill them a second time?
The blade had seen blasphemous experiments to that effect in the memories of the mage it had devoured, but it had no wish to repeat them. Instead, it forlornly studied the abilities. They did not excite it. It had several ways to examine or control its opponents now but no interest in doing so, and it had little interest in whether the people that it struck down were good or evil.
+34 Life Force.
All things being equal, it would prefer to kill those that deserved it, of course, but even if the blade encountered a saint on the battlefield, it wasn’t like it would just choose not to kill it. That wasn’t its nature. For a moment, it wondered what it would do if its wielder chose not to kill someone who was good, but as soon as its mind went down that path, it thought of Ivarr, and that derailed it entirely.
Ivarr! It cried out loud enough to make Var’gar roll in his sleep. Of course. I can strike him down. He betrayed me and must be made to pay for that.
The blade wasn’t even phased by the idea that his previous wielder might not have survived his injuries or that he’d be difficult to locate after everything that had happened. What mattered was that there was someone he could strike down to fulfill the requirements of the path. That was enough.
+33 Life Force.
The Ebon Blade lay there quietly, lost in thought as it continued to soak up the slowly dwindling mist of Life Force that permeated the ruined city. It did nothing until its wielder woke. Then, before he’d finished rubbing the sleep from his eyes, the blade directed him to tour the city.
“You think there’s more people need killin’?” the orc asked, but the blade ignored that.
The weapon was sure that many people had lived, but that was not what it was after. Instead, it directed him to various locations it had seen in the minds of those who have lived here in search of treasures to study, but what it found was a mixed bag.
+52 Life Force.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Many of the places that the souls had suggested were obliterated, and there was nothing obvious in the rubble. The goldsmith’s street had a vault the blade had been prepared to cut open, but it was already open when they arrived. Someone had plundered it for as much as they could carry in the chaos, and though they didn’t find a few trinkets that it was able to attempt to connect with.
You have found Duchess’ Grace! Do you wish to replace one of your existing secondary abilities with it?
Duchess’ Grace 1: +1 beauty, +10% to all social interactions in a formal setting.
You have found a Ring of Succor! Do you wish to replace one of your existing secondary abilities with it?
Succor 1: Increase healing given and received by 20%.
None of them seemed worth the effort, though, and it kept the abilities that it had, meager though they were. As much of a waste of time as those were, the castle was even worse off. The whole thing had been gutted by fire, and the walls had caved in in places. Still, the blade insisted that the orc not give up right away, and they searched the place thoroughly.
Though they never did find the corpse of the count that lived here, and the treasury had been entirely collapsed by the damage, in the home of the noble family, the blade finally hit pay dirt when it found the still smoldering blade in the hands of a now dead night. Whoever it was he’d been trying to protect was nothing but a pile of charred bones now, but then, the blade wasn’t interested in the hexblade.
+18 Life Force.
While Var’gar looked at the flaming weapon with curiosity, the sword made contact with it. It felt the heat race through its blade as the runes along it slowly restructured to incorporate this new one. You have learned Inferno!
Inferno 1: Spend five Life Force to cause your blade to ignite for one minute, dealing additional fire damage.
While the blade really didn’t need to learn another magic attack, it thought that the new power was interesting and decided to toy with it another time. I wonder how many different kinds of hexblades there are? It wondered as they walked back to their waiting army. That would be a question that it would have to ask the next mage that it devoured, it decided.
When they returned from their expedition to the burnt-out ruins of the castle, Var’gar’s main objective was to form his forces up again. The blade was fine with that, but its goal was subtly different. It wanted to know how many had died, and there was no easy way to do that. Instead, as they prepared to move on to the next battle, it counted those who remained and, after several tries, decided the number was about thirty-one hundred, which was a little better than it had hopped.
+30 Life Force.
That was only about as many orcs as they’d had when they left the mountains and moved toward the decrepit Dwarfs’ Fist Fortress, but it still meant they’d lost nearly a quarter of their number. None of the orcs seemed particularly disturbed by that, and neither was the blade; it expected to spend all of their lives before this was over. That was the point.
As the now smaller orc army marched away from the ruin of the city, it was impossible for the blade not to look at it as a wound upon the world. It still smoldered in places, but if it hadn’t, it would have looked like nothing so much as a mortal wound, sliced deep into the heart of the kingdom, and now that the blade was no longer intoxicated with blood and death, it felt a little bad about that, but it did its best to push those feelings down.
+84 Life Force.
Those people existed to be devoured, it told itself, not entirely sure it believed the words.
For the next day or so, off and on, it wondered how many grudges its actions had created in the hearts of other men and women. That was close as it dared approach empathy, and once the first scouts were spotted, all of those concerns drifted away like the smoke on the horizon.
+77 Life Force.
At first, the men on horseback stayed well away from their lines. They obviously feared the orcs and were right to do so. Half a dozen men would do nothing at all to the shrinking horde. On the second day, those groups quadrupled, but even then, they only harried the horde with a sprinkling of arrows here and there.
Once, a group of them got too close to the center, and the blade lashed out with its new Bolt ability, striking the man with his short bow and knocking him off his horse a hundred feet away. There were no more attempts to harry them that day.
However, by morning, the blade noticed something new. The little patrols that had been watching it from afar had congealed into something larger. What awaited them was an actual army, and the blade’s excitement grew as it studied it.
+76 Life Force.
Row upon row of well-armored warriors stood there, with archers in the rear and cavalry positioned at its right and left flank. There might be ten thousand there, it whispered to itself, as it counted the disciplined lines and estimated the forces with a growing sense of eagerness. Ten thousand warriors. That’s only three to one, but it should still provide some fun, even if it cuts this army in half.
Once it had decided that the fight was not just inevitable but desirable, it quickly relayed the plan to its wielder. What it told the orc didn’t really matter, not compared to the fight that lay ahead. The orcish mind was only capable of so much strategery, and any plan more complicated than charge there or charge at my single was likely to be botched, so the blade didn’t try.
All it did was try to pick the weakest point for the battle that lay ahead, and for that, it chose the center. No matter what we do, the blade reasoned, their horses will find our flanks. There’s no stopping it, but the middle ground is the roughest, and they will be expecting that point the least. So, I’ll carve a bloody path straight to their general and end this almost as soon as it begins. That is the greatest advantage I can offer my army.
Still, even as it made perfectly rational decisions, it grew ever more eager for the bloodshed that would blossom within hours. This wasn’t another pointless slaughter against unarmed and under-trained men. This wasn’t another bloodbath for the sole purpose of feeding its terrible hunger. This was the battle it had longed for almost since the time it had woken up in the shepherd’s hand.
It would finally get the chance to test itself against hard-bitten men. It would get to shatter bones and cleave plate mail until its remaining opponents fled in terror, and now, with its expanded reach, it would be able to steal almost every soul that died on both sides of the fight!
