ADGIT - Ch. 6

“There’s so many of them!” Clement exclaimed. Hiero held his shoulder and gave him an assuring nod. Clement looked up at Hiero, his eyes stricken with fear though he tried his best to keep composed. “Wha-what are they?”

“Werswach Reyuseh, the people of the east calls them,” Hiero replied.

“Werswach… Decaying? Or blighted? Blighted Giants, is it?”

“You know Tomeh?” Hiero continued to be amazed by the young magus. “Blighted Titans. A simple enough and apt name. Don’t know how or why it happens, but they result from hundreds of smaller light-forsaken joining together. Incredibly tedious to kill. They don’t have a brain or heart to aim for. Headless, they’ll press on. Even if only their lower body remains, they’ll put one of their many legs before another.”

“Have you fought them before?”

“Yes, I have.” Hiero had encountered the Blighted Titans in the last battles for the east when the Multitude had irrepressibly grown. Several he had killed, the last two by the crossroads to the cities of Mayrul and Sajilis. Telling Clement about it sounded like bragging. Or it might calm the gardener’s anxious heart.

However, this was the first time Hiero had seen more than ten on one battlefield. Saying that wouldn’t reassure Clement at all.

A dozen of them? More than that. The Blighted Titans in front covered many behind them.

Tellingly, Clement didn’t prod Hiero how many Blighted Titans he had killed. Eleven in total was the answer. But Clement would be disappointed to know Hiero had to retreat after each small victory, turning it all into losses, for the presence of Blighted Titans meant the Multitude was near.

Instead, Clement asked, “What should we do?”

“We hold,” Hiero answered with a smile.

Clement already knew that. But it jolted the despair out of his mind. His brows staunchly meeting, Clement gave one resolved nod to Hiero. “Yes, Draecontyr. We must hold no matter how many of these Blighted Titans come.”

Hiero may have predicted the Blighted Titans’ appearance—he had told the war princes about them—but not in these numbers. Yet, he remained confident they’d hold.

At what price? He wasn’t sure.

Too high, and there’d be no hope of weathering subsequent attacks. The waves grew stronger each time.

Though they were the defenders in a siege, time wasn’t on their side.

The magnicannons persisted in their angry song. Hiero, Clement, and the soldiers crowding by the battlements gazed at the streaking flames connecting with the Blighted Titans’ vast torsos, occasionally hitting some of their many arms in the way. Several Titans had large portions of their bodies violently carved out.

But their advance was relentless.

Closer and closer, the wall of darkness came.

The footfalls of the Blighted Titans were like the earth itself growling. Each step hammered olden rubble flat into the earth, crushing many of the smaller light-forsaken as well, mere ants to their larger kin.

“Their weak points are their limbs,” Hiero said. “But they have many. If even one arm remains, they’ll drag themselves across the ground. Render them immobile—quite a difficult order—and they’ll disintegrate soon enough.”

“The magnicannons can’t be that precise,” Clement observed.

“No. But they’re trying.”

Signal flares, horns, and drums relayed command after command to those on the walls. The lesser magnicannons lowered their angles for faster and more accurate fire. With the Blighted Titans drawing nearer, their range wasn’t needed as much.

Following the magnicannons, the airscrew barge also targeted the Blighted Titans’ legs with Dust sakers. The volleys aimed several yards ahead of the Titans’ path to hit them. The Blighted Titans may only be walking, but with vast strides, they were as fast as a galloping horse.

The Blighted Titan in the lead took the brunt of the attacks. Its two front legs buckled and then crumpled, the colossal body above it toppling forward like a demolished castle in a satisfying crash.

Gauntleted fists and spears struck shields as soldiers hollered. Even Clement punched the air, the chains coiling around him brightened in his excitement.

The cheering intensified when another Blighted Titan tumbled down, never to rise again. The Titan behind it didn’t stop, treading on its fellow without hesitation. Feet as wide as the streets of the Escriman capital punched through the felled body.

Even as it was getting trampled, the splayed Blighted Titan clawed the ground with its many hands to pull its body along.

More Blighted Titans fell. Others stumbled and got entangled with the fallen. Soon, there were several smoldering black hills across the battlefield, cratered by the unceasing explosions. Enchanted flames mixed with the black smoke. Only half of the Blighted Titans ambled ever closer.

The Khayo and Fulguren doled another layer of punishment to the Titans coming within reach of their spells.

Clement sent up fire signals to the gardeners in the nearby outpost. They changed their magic circles, focusing on accuracy instead of widespread destruction. They blasted away the leg joints of a Titan, aiming true like a veteran archer.

The Blighted Titans couldn’t hope—if they were capable of such emotion—to reach the walls with this much firepower allayed against them. Armies of the west combined proved to be a formidable force.

Hiero allowed himself to feel pride. It was High King Grammaton who did most of the uniting. But it was Hiero who forced the hibernating old man into action, a feat unto itself, and not before it was too late.

Do we win this round? Hiero dared think.

The hewn-down Blighted Titans shrunk like melting ice or dunes reduced by rolling winds. Shadowy forms detached themselves from the giant bodies they were once part of, climbing down in the hundreds like a landslide.

It was too early to call the result of the fight. Hiero’s gut feelings have never been wrong. Maybe a couple of times. But they had generally been reliable and kept him alive so far. The never-previously seen ramps of bodies in the previous battle told him that the Blighted Titans were just the beginning.

Hiero was wary of the Blighted Titans crumbling early. They could move; they had many left limbs at their disposal. Those he had encountered would endure even if all they could do were rolling on the ground. He’d have to disintegrate them with dragon’s breath to put an end to their stubborn existence.

The answer readily presented itself.

The Blighted from the downed Titans pooled with others like ants on a piece of bread. Blacker black than the rest of the ground were the points they congregated. And from behind the Titans, mostly unnoticed until their cover toppled and they had come closer, was a much bigger wave of shadows.

“What’s going on?” Clement asked amid the confused voices of the soldiers. Then he answered himself. “The mounds are forming! Look at them rise!”

Red flares shoot up with keen whistling. Low black clouds seemed to swallow them.

A few seconds later, they exploded, pushing back the darkness and scattering sparkling light that traced overlapping triangles and bisecting lines in the sky—the Gaolyan Urwe, the general call to attack.

Pyres followed the deep red of the ascending flares. Drums beat faster, and the horns joined in a deep reverberating note.

“They predicted our moves,” Hiero muttered, his lower left eyelid twitching.

It wasn’t because of his old scar or lack of sleep. One of the few things that could chisel at his collected face was when he played into the palms of others, especially monsters that didn’t show a high capacity for thought thus far.

As Farlusen crossbowmen came forward, Hiero retreated from the battlements. The crossbowmen carried quivers packed with crystal-tipped bolts, secured with a belt by their right hips. The crystals, containing a small amount of Dust inside, would explode upon hitting their targets—expensive projectiles provided by the Dust forges. There was no better time to use them than now.

Clement effortlessly leaped on top of a merlon, displaying agility unusual for a gardener. Crossbowmen moved aside to give him space. He raised his arms as his chains unwound from his body, glowing white as if fanned coals. The heat he radiated warmed the damp coldness.

Through the bustle of activity, Hiero was lost in thought. Absentmindedly staring at the magic circles Clement weaved, Hiero wondered, Who’s in a trap? Us or them?

The Blighted Multitude—either as a whole mass or having an intelligent entity in command—foresaw the defenders would devise a strategy against the body ramps and came up with measures to undermine it.

Titans drew the fire away from the normal Blighted and shielded the rest of the Multitude’s tendrils snaking behind them. If they fell, they’d have fulfilled their purpose while delivering a large number of the Blighted to the front. Those that remain standing would shield the mounds or support the ramps themselves.

The Blighted Multitude didn’t want to overrun the Citadel. It could’ve endlessly assailed its walls, day after day, until their dead piled high to the battlements.

No, that wasn’t its true goal.

Despair.

The Blighted wanted them to suffer but not be defeated outright. To despair for what was coming, agonizing over how long they’d hold until their minds surrendered. Doubtless, there’d be a spate of Blighted infections after this if there weren’t some already.

It wants us to defeat ourselves, Hiero grimly concluded. And it wouldn’t allow them an easy victory this wave. Each attack would cut deep, bleeding their forces dearly.

“Fire!” Bollahghan bellowed in Tomeh.

“Fire!” the Farlusen captain echoed in their rigid language.

Blue puffs of smoke traced the wall as Dustgunners pulled triggers. They exchanged their spent rifles with freshly loaded ones handed by the men behind them, took aim like clockwork, and again let loose their Dust-propelled rounds. The flaming bolts of the crossbowmen landed on the mounds, peppering them with tiny bursts of light and fire.

A bright flash made Hiero think the sun had pierced the dark clouds.

It was Clement, conjuring flames from his hands, giving off unreal light. An apparition of a lava wyrm sat on his shoulder, guiding him in using nature’s aileh as the once-living creature did—it was the aileh-manipulating counterpart to Molders using the physical abilities of their Cores’ source.

Stretching his hands forth, Clement coaxed the flames to pass through a circle of amplification. A blazing tornado came out the other side, wailing as it sucked in air to feed itself. Clement let loose his mighty spell on the mound growing the fastest.

Burning Blighted fell off like grains tumbling down a disturbed pile of sand.

Yet, the mounds rose ever higher as other Blighted clambered up to replace the fallen. And more.

Apprehensive murmurings simmered among the defenders as the shadowy knolls lurched toward the walls, pulsating, contracting, and expanding with every surge, reminding Hiero of the giant slugs living near the underwater vent of the Kershek heart node.

A mound would keep growing until it collapsed under its own weight, swaying forward slam against the wall, settling into a ramp. The Blighted would then pile more bodies. They’d be almost unstoppable if they ever reached the walls.

And they were close enough that everyone could see the bloodshot yellow eyes of the Blighted writhing in the thousands.

Crossbowmen shifted restlessly, reliving the nightmare of the previous battle, though they kept shooting. Some spearmen had their bodies half-turned. Captains spouted encouragement to maintain morale.

Hiero folded his arms across his chest. He didn’t Meld, standing relaxed amidst the tensed men and the looming masses of shadows.

He wasn’t doing it to calm the soldiers; it wasn’t the time to start worrying.

A purple fireball from the bombard came down at a low angle, hurtling at the mound closest to the wall.

“Clement!” Hiero called. “Get down!”

Without any hesitation, Clement jumped off the top of the merlon.

“Everyone, get down!” Hiero shouted, this time in broken Farlusen. He might’ve spoken the wrong words, but they didn’t need to understand him. Spearmen crouched, shields raised. Crossbowmen sheltered behind the parapet. Hiero remained standing.

In a deafening blast, the mound was turned inside out, cratering into a bowl of burning corpses adorned with purple flames. Smoldering chunks of the Blighted slapped the walls. Some rained on the soldiers. They hastily threw the corrupted flesh back over the parapets.

One down.

Soldiers didn’t cheer as when the first Blighted Titan fell.

Two more mounds came up behind the first, absorbing its remnants along their path.

The bombard was recharging. Its barrel had inwardly turned shut like a bloomed flower reversing into a bud. Farlusens hesitantly glanced at Hiero, expecting him to be the hero in their minds, to meet the legends of the Draecontyr.

Hiero didn’t Meld. He was confident the magnicannons would be sufficient.

Bellighost’s idea was brilliant. Sinra-Jul supported it—with some unneeded grandstanding—because this was the most consistent way of dealing with the body ramps. If they had more magnicannons moved to the front—or simply, more of them—there’d be less pressure on the walls.

But what if the enemy had thought of this as well?

This was another reason Hiero hadn’t Melded yet. Something was wrong; he was more certain now. The Blighted Titans, left alone by the magi and magnicannons, had halted their march.

But why? Shouldn’t they support the mounds and ramps?

With Melded eyes, Hiero followed the hands of a Blighted Titan pressed against its chest. The others did the same. Hiero raised a brow as the Titan stabbed itself with poles for fingers. Then it grabbed a handful of its flesh—lesser light-forsaken, about thirty struggling creatures caged inside the fingers of one hand—and ripped it from its body.

The explosion of magnicannon hitting another mound impeded Hiero’s view. All his owl king eyes could see were purple flames, furious black smoke, and a shower of Blighted corpses.

He tracked a severed arm twirling across the air, landing somewhere to his far left and bouncing off a Farlusen buckler.

Is that their next plan? Hiero’s eyes snapped back forward, trying to pierce the thick smoke to see what the Blighted Titans were doing. Through the heavy smoke, he saw multi-joined arms of the Titans reaching for the skies with fists full of lesser Blighted. Then they swung their arms far back. I’m right!

The airscrew barged must’ve sighted it as well. It shot white warning flares that hung in the air and shimmered.

Soldiers looked at each other, confused about the signals. They must be wondering if it meant the mounds. With no magnicannons shooting at the Blighted Titans, they blended with the abyssal darkness to the human eye.

“Incoming!” Hiero roared, hoping he used the right Farlusen word. “Incoming! The Titans are throwing at us!” He startled the soldiers beside him, not only by his sudden shouts but by his growth spurt.

Hiero focused on the thought of the spry jaggedhopper—he needed mobility.

His feet, wrapped in living moss, lengthened, their heels extending back at an upward angle. He stood on the front soles and clawed toes of his new feet while his legs elongated, bones painlessly cracking, repositioning themselves into new joints. Soon, Hiero surpassed the height of a Farlusen spear.

He might not have correctly conveyed to the soldiers the threat, but seeing him Melding was enough warning. Their captain scanned the horizon with his telescope while barking orders.

Hiero didn’t see what happened next because everything went black.

He didn’t close his eyes—he lost his eyes.

The ground-dwelling tenrex was in Hiero’s mind, overlapping the image of the jaggedhopper. He could hear his skull reforming and feel his nose extend forward into a snout. His head would become shaped like a teardrop fleeced with bristles, several times larger than a normal tenrex. He felt his peculiar tongue fit snugly on the roof of his sharp mouth.

He clicked his tongue.

The pop echoed in the hollow chambers of his skull, distinctive of tenrex and its cousins. The sound, inaudible to humans, reverberated outward in a dome, returning a picture of everything around Hiero. He couldn’t see; tenrexes lacked eyes. But he could feel his surroundings.

Owl king eyes were usually favored, especially in dark places. But Hiero would soon have both enemies and allies on all sides. He wanted to attack in every direction without turning his head around and with better responsiveness than processing minute details of what he could see.

While Melding the jaggedhopper and the tenrex, Hiero layered the dancer mantis into the melting pot.

The sensation of his fingers disappeared, the bones of his hands merging into one. His skin smoothened and hardened into a blade made of special hard chitin. It curved out and down, larger than a farmer’s scythe.

What is this? From losing track of his fingers, Hiero detected an odd feeling in his blades. How could that be? There were no nerves in them except for the grooved spine giving them shape. He ignored it, readying for a Split Merging—it was one of the most advanced techniques of a Melder.

Hiero mentally layered two partial morphs of the dancer mantis, the second interacting with his body in an asymmetrical way. He used his ribs—impossible for those who hadn’t mastered their selves—to Mold into two more sets of bladed arms growing out of his back. Then Hiero finished his Meld with the rest of the jaggedhopper’s lithe, muscular body upscaled thrice.

Click, click, click, went Hiero’s tongue. He was blind one second and could see the outlines of the tower and the soldiers on it the next.

Something fast entered his dome of awareness.

Hiero ducked his head. The sensitive bristles of the tenrex sensed it passing over. A few fast swipes with his back blades, mere blurs to the Farlusens, and the Blighted landed in several pieces.

Chained clicks informed him of the rapidly evolving situation. Blighted landed on the walls and towers. The Titans were surprisingly accurate. Or they may be throwing so many of their much smaller siblings that some were bound to hit their targets.

Hiero carefully threaded through the Farlusen soldiers, killing the Blighted as they picked themselves up from their great drops.

A soldier speared empty air as Hiero chopped the enemy he aimed for. Another soldier, on the floor and about to get mauled, was surprised when the Blighted above him split in two right down the middle.

Squiggly lines wrapping the misshapen Blighted seemed to be Clement’s flames. This was the first time Hiero ‘saw’ fire in tenrex form. Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to appreciate the oddities of nature. Hiero cleared the rest of the Blighted on the tower, skewering many and flinging them off.

“Pick yourselves up!” ordered the Farlusen commander as he shoved a headless Blighted—handiwork of Hiero—over the tower’s edge with his shield. “Get up and keep firing!”

Hiero hopped from the tower down to the wall.

The battle raged with the rain of Blighted ceaseless.

The tenrex’s sensitive ears caught all the din of fighting but weren’t overwhelmed—a trait that interested Hiero to acquire their Cores. Noisy creatures themselves, the screech of a tenrex could stun a person.

Bollaghan endeavored to keep his Dustgunners firing forward and ignore the Blighted from above. The Farlusens protected them, but the clash of languages didn’t help in coordination. Dustgunners forced into melee combat pulled out short swords or used their rifles as clubs. The Dustgun’s inventor must be stirring in the afterlife as the advantage of the new-age weapons was easily neutered by dropping enemies into the gunners’ ranks.

Leg muscles coiled, Hiero pushed off the floor, sprinting with such speed as if leaping from a bowstring.

Weaving through humans and monsters, Hiero masterfully controlled his blades to slice off the heads of the latter.

Dustgunners fired at him, and the Blighted he fought. Hiero bent low, almost hugging the ground, relying on speed and momentum to prevent himself from falling. Then he arced above a group of confused Farlusens who tried to attack him, clearing their spears with one leap.

Not the first time allies attacked me, Hiero mused.

“That’s the Draecontyr, you mungbuns!” Bollaghan angrily snapped.

Hiero gave the Silver Bullets leader a nod as he passed. Bollaghan probably saw only a hazy, darkish-green form.

It had taken Hiero a long time to get used to controlling several limbs, each performing a separate action. And he needed mountains of practice to reach this level of proficiency in this particular Melding combination. His blades met Blighted flesh with each swing, sometimes slicing several bodies at once.

A Blighted got slotted into a crenel as it fell from the sky. It struggled to escape from between merlons, its torso squeezed in by the force of the drop.

Hiero twisted himself sideways and kicked the Blighted with a snap of his powerful legs, pushing it out of the gap. The Blighted roared in gratitude. It experienced falling for the second time. Hiero then righted himself and kept going, slicing away with his six arms, his tongue incessantly clicking.

He reached the next tower, scaling it with his blades digging holds into the magical Gaolyan stone. The soldiers atop the tower expectedly thought him an enemy. But they couldn’t land a blow on him, so he didn’t mind. They soon realized he was a Melder when he targeted the Blighted. He didn’t stop to hear their profuse apologies, jumping down on the other side of the tower.

Walkway, tower, walkway, tower, walkway—dozens of the Blighted fell to Hiero’s unstoppable stampede.

The jaggedhopper’s muscles complemented the weapons of the dancer mantis, wielding them in ways and precision the actual insect couldn’t. The senses of the tenrex held it all together, allowing for a level of awareness that eyes, no matter how many of them, could never reach.

Eventually, the light-forsaken on the walls thinned.

Did the Titans stop throwing them?

The pop and whistles of signal flares—just another explosion to the human ear but very distinct to a tenrex—gave Hiero pause. He couldn’t see what was happening beyond the walls. His clicks could only reach, at most, a hundred yards radius.

I can’t see colors, he thought, snorting with his long snout at his weakness. He undid his Melding fast to see what was going on.

“Draecontyr! Is it you?” someone asked in Basadhin as more of Hiero’s face became recognizable. Hiero had reached their section of the outer wall.

“Draecontyr, we fight together!” shouted another.

Basadhin soldiers, wearing scaled cuirasses and heavy vests, raised their Core-studded scimitars as they celebrated Hiero’s presence. Strict worshippers of the aileh and the dragons that can manipulate them, the Basadhin considered the Draecontyrs divine-touched.

Hiero mimicked their gestures.

What else was he supposed to do? It’d be awkward if he ignored them.

The cheers quieted shortly, switching to uneasy hums.

The Blighted downpour had stopped because the Titans resumed their march, moving in front of forming mounds to protect them—that was what the flares signaled. No doubt, the Titans themselves would turn their bodies into ramps once they reached the walls.

Hiero found it funny that bad things happened whenever people cheered.

“We have the Draecontyr,” a Basadhin shouted in a choppy mix of his tongue and low Grammus. “With the Draecontyrs, we will achieve victory!”

“Aileh gives us life!” came another shout.

“Fight while living!” responded the rest of the soldiers. “Draecontyr Hiero is with us!”

Why does it feel like they’re pressuring me to save them?

Hiero hopped onto the chest-high crenel in front of him. He inhaled deep, not just air but also aileh. The Core on his chest was warm. There it was again—the strange sensation in his arm that Mitho had operated on.

Hiero shouted the common Basadhin battle cry, “Fight while living!”

And he leaped off the walls, World Melding as he plummeted to the Blighted horde below.

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“And this is Emperor Hiero,” Aileen Fahllyr said in as friendly a way as she bothered to try. She pointed with an aileh-engraved finger at a painting by some painter that was good at painting—she had forgotten the details Jel, her cousin, had explained to her.

Her guests respectfully nodded, leaning forward to have a better look.

The small figure next to Aileen’s nail was wrapped in a halo of the signature imperial ray design, contrasting with the rest of the artwork depicting the Siege of Aderenthyn. The painting’s predominant dark tones were because of the Blighted Multitude. She would’ve liked to clearly see the depictions of the battle three hundred years ago.

“Diving into hundreds of enemies,” continued Aileen, “the First Emperor is about to transform into his Scaled Titan form.” Since she was a little girl, Aileen had wanted to try jumping off Citadel walls like in the painting, but her father wouldn’t allow it. She’d likely—no, she’d certainly die if she did it. “The third painting in the series of five was lost eighty years ago. Really sad. It’s supposed to show the First Emperor in all his glory, burning the Blighted. We can’t turn back time, so let’s move on to the fourth painting when they pushed the Blighted back to the east.”