Ruthless V5Ch49-Battle in Blackest Night

Hours passed while Thane was in his silent but unpleasant sleep.

The sun had time to set, and its dying light had time to fade, until the sky turned almost completely black.

That night, a new moon rose for the first time that month.

The Panther Army had known it was coming. They watched the skies whenever they were moving by night, as they had done for a small part of the journey here—force marching at night was possible for creatures like the Pantherfolk, though the humans were another story.

But it was the darkest night in weeks, and even their eyes would be tested. With only the stars to light their surroundings, it would be difficult to spot any intruders.

So it was that Thane was awakened by a shout of alarm. Someone had made it past the guards’ senses—and, by extension, all the camps’ defenses, both magical and mundane. They would have been hastily thrown up, since this was not a long term base of the Florida Panther Kingdom. Still, Thane felt a pit forming in his stomach, and a rumbling in his bowels, as he rose from the nap that had gone on for longer than he had expected, yet somehow still left him feeling tense and weak.

Thane smelled smoke, turned his head, and saw a few tents were on fire. He was also just in time to catch a glimpse of a figure running past in the distance—a large, dark-skinned human—and he saw that behind that figure, a reddish jelly-like creature seemed to be moving as well.

Then the human and the monster were gone, through the trees—in the direction of the Fisher Kingdom.

The guards came running after, but Thane knew they would be too late. The human had a good head start, and it was much too dark outside to go chasing after the enemy. Especially when this was probably the same foe who had been painstakingly whittling down the Panther Army’s numbers over the last couple of weeks.

If that elusive figure had come waltzing into the midst of their camp now, with all of the risks that entailed, he had to have some plan in place to escape.

A moment later, Thane felt it hit him, and he knew what the plan must be.

A heavy, powerful aura struck everyone in the camp at once. Perhaps the Panther Queen would have been spared—or would have been less oppressed by the impact—but no one else.

Thane took a step toward the Panther Queen’s tent, placed fifty feet back from him. He wanted direction now, more than anything. Then he saw the Queen emerge from it. At almost the same moment that she made her appearance, he heard her voice and saw the text of her announcement.

[We are discovered! We came under attack just when I was preparing to order our advance. The element of surprise is lost now, but we must steal the momentum back. Follow me!]

He saw her sprint forward, and other Pantherfolk gathered around her—not yet the bulk of the Army, but Thane could almost feel the ground moving beneath him. He knew that the rest were coming.

The Warrior rushed to follow after his Queen, not waiting for more of their comrades to catch up. There was a little part of him that worried that the Queen would fall into a trap in the darkness if she did not have vigilant warriors around her keeping a careful watch—almost as significant as the part of him that was worried that he would be captured or killed himself in such darkness.

This night really would be a terrible one for the humans to fight in, at least. Though he did not feel as if he had slept long enough for the sun to have disappeared completely, the world around him told a different story.

It was the blackest night of his life.

Thane, the other warriors, and the Panther Queen advanced—not exactly in an orderly fashion, but at least in an intimidating wave of ferocity. Thane thought that if they caught the majority of the humans unprepared, they might cut and run at the sight of the force massed before them, though he wasn’t certain how many of theirs were actually rushing forward with him.

They passed through the trees and brush that had kept their camp concealed, and they kept going. Nothing stood in their way yet.

In the distance, Thane saw buildings—he had almost forgotten that unlike their nomadic people, the Fisher Kingdom was a settled society—and a moment later, his heart dropped into his stomach.

He and the other vanguard members of the Panther Army were rushing toward the Fisher Kingdom. They had all of the momentum, but they would not have the element of surprise.

Amassed in the center of the buildings, armored fighters stood in formation. A multispecies army, whose members looked far higher quality than the report from Moro might have led them to believe.

Thane would have been tempted to think Moro had betrayed them or at least been compromised in some way, but the Scout was actually right near the front of the pack charging—in the midst of the danger. Scouts tended to be high in Perception and Agility.

Looking around, Thane saw that more of the Army was catching up with them as they advanced closer to the place where the battle would undoubtedly have to take place. His pulse relaxed a bit. They would be all right.

[Slow down, everyone! All those who are not yet at the front with me and the vanguard, fan out to the sides. Attempt to surround the soldiers of the Fisher Kingdom on three sides. We will crush them in a vise.]

Thane caught himself smiling. This was more like it. This was the Queen in her element. Her stratagem of surrounding the enemy on three sides—and thus leaving one side open for any soldiers who might wish to flee—had been a reliably powerful one for the Panther Army through several of the battles they had fought. The soundness of the plan calmed any doubt he might have been entertaining about her judgment.

As they drew nearer the first buildings—and the first set of enemies, lurking in the clearing just past those structures—the vanguard slowed their movements, following the Panther Queen’s lead. Finally, as their line almost touched the first line of the human constructions, she raised one strong limb and brought the vanguard and those closest behind them to a halt. The ones who were further behind were already moving to the sides as the Panther Queen had ordered, angling to form a three-sided wall around the Fisher Kingdom’s forces.

For a minute, nothing happened except for the Panther Queen’s troops getting into her preferred positioning. The Royal Fisher Army did not move at all, except that those on the edges of their large block of troops turned to face outwards, pointing their bodies at the enemies who now increasingly filled the periphery.

They have not been given any instruction to keep us from surrounding them, Thane thought gleefully. Instead, the fighters stood in their formation, wary, ready, but also inactive. Sitting ducks.

The Panther Queen waited patiently for her soldiers to get into their places, since the Fisher Kingdom made no moves. At last, a small burst of fire went up on the far left, and then another on the far right, of the respective flanks. Both jaws of the vise had signaled they were ready.

[Advance!]

As all three walls of the Panther Army marched forward to engage with the Royal Fisher Army, the Fisher King himself finally appeared, stepping out from amidst the ranks of his army and into the vanguard. He was a large man who carried a great black axe with an eerie glowing golden eye at the intersection of haft and blade.

Thane got a terrible feeling about the man he saw, a crushing pressure as if the figure could kill him with a single look. As the Fisher King ran his eyes over the ranks of the vanguard, Thane instinctively lowered his gaze so as to avoid making eye contact.

Then he felt the pressure of the Fisher King’s power lessen substantially.

Thane looked up and saw that the Panther Queen and the Fisher King had locked eyes. They were in some sort of battle, their respective powers of territorial domination dueling in the air. Thane felt wildly fluctuating pressures, sometimes almost crushing, sometimes almost nonexistent, but mostly leaning on the lighter end. And he was grateful that he fought alongside the Panther Queen.

Even as this intangible showdown took place between the Panther Queen and the Fisher King, the two of them seemingly immobilized and locked into a staring contest, the rest of the Panther Army surged ahead, and the Royal Fisher Army stepped forward to meet them.

Blade met claw, fangs met shield, and magic struck on both sides in great displays of supernatural power, bolts of lightning and flashes of fire flicking out to strike at select enemies from both sides’ Mages.

Thane, for his part, collided with the front of the enemy line, and using only his bare claws, he grabbed the closest Warrior and ripped the man’s shoulder clean from his body, letting loose a gratifying shriek of agony. That cry joined the chorus of horrendous screams that had begun to sound all over the battlefield.

From the first contact, Thane instantly knew that the Fisher King was the type to throw his pawns into the front lines of his army. Let the weaker ones go first, so as to tire the enemy out and spare his elite troops to finish them off later.

Bearing that in mind, Thane did not allow himself to go into a Berserk Fury but instead carefully moderated his aggressive impulses for as long as he could, using his Panther Martial Arts rather than drawing his weapons, to force his mind to remain sharp rather than devolving into battle lust.

The front line of the Royal Fisher Army went down quickly, ground to hamburger underneath Panther Army swords and claws, but as expected, the second line was a harder nut to crack. Pantherfolk began dropping around Thane, gurgling their last breaths around sword points jammed through their necks or falling instantly dead from spears to the heart. Thane himself was almost blown up by a sudden bolt of lightning. Though he was unable to determine where it came from, he did manage to throw himself to the ground and dodge it. The Panther Warrior behind him, less agile, was instantly fried to a blackened crisp.

The battle was bloody and brutal, and the conflict was clearly far from one-sided as Thane advanced further. Every subsequent rank of fighters from the Royal Fisher Army was noticeably stronger than the last, or perhaps the fatigue was beginning to tell on him.

Eventually, as the battle grew more strenuous, Thane’s self-control lapsed, and he sank into a Berserk Fury that held him for an unknown length of time. As he began to come out of it, he felt the usual blood streaming from a number of cuts in random places, and he observed that he held an unfamiliar hatchet in his hand, not his own weapon but something he must have taken off of a dead fighter.

To his surprise, though, he saw that the battle was not over. Hundreds of Pantherfolk littered the ground mingled with hundreds of the Fisher King’s soldiers. There were nauseating moans of death and dying from all around him.

But the fight was far from over.

The Fisher King was dueling with the Panther Queen now, the Queen fighting him with her blade claws, while the King used magical shields, his axe, and a martial arts style of his own to keep her on her toes. It seemed as if he was a man with a thousand tricks up his sleeve.

All around him, his reduced but potent block of surviving soldiers fought like wild animals, now killing two or three of the Panther Army for each of them that fell.

But the Panther Army seemed to have the numbers advantage. Part of it was that they still had their non-Pantherfolk minions fighting alongside them. These soldiers in particular knew that their lives would be worth little if they could not prove themselves valuable to the Panther Queen in battle.

Thane guessed that his side would win if only the Queen managed to survive her duel with the Fisher King for long enough. The King seemed to be pressing her. Thane could not yet feel the boost to his power that the Panther Queen’s abilities provided, but he knew she would unleash it at a key moment and turn the battle into an overwhelming victory for the Panther Army. She was probably waiting for a moment when the Fisher King or his army faltered, so that the Pantherfolk could best press their temporary advantage.

It was Thane’s job, as he saw it, to give her such an opening. He charged forward and lunged for one of the soldiers closest to the Fisher King, who was protecting the enemy Ruler’s flank. The man lunged at Thane in response, but he was too slow. Thane sidestepped the spear, got inside the man’s guard, and—dropping the hatchet he held entirely—sank his fangs into the enemy’s neck.

There was a surprised gurgle from the soldier as his life’s blood began quickly coursing from his punctured veins and arteries, but then Thane felt a surprising jab of his own.

Something sharp and heavy—an axe or a broadsword or something—had slammed into him from the side, caving in half his chest and ripping through his ribcage and his heart. He knew instantly that he was dying.

Time seemed to slow down in Thane’s final moments. As his body sank slowly toward the ground, he took in the scene. Who had killed him? It seemed like a foolish thing, but he wanted to know.

The Fisher King himself? No, he was still fighting the Panther Queen close by. Someone else had done it on his behalf.

At least I got this guy, Thane thought, jaws still locked around his fellow dying soldier’s throat. Hopefully that meant a little something, helped the Queen a bit. That would have to be enough.

Thane blinked. Suddenly, he saw that the soldier whose throat he had clenched between his jaws was not a human of the Fisher Kingdom—was instead a Pantherfolk, eyes filled with fear and confusion, still losing blood through a severed jugular.

That’s not possible…

Thane’s eyes re-scanned the whole landscape in an instant. He saw a litany of impossible things. Where there had been a crush of human and Pantherfolk bodies clashing, he saw only Panther Warriors struggling with other Panther Warriors, Panther Mages and Panther Shamans battling other Pantherfolk. And all of the dead bodies were those of Pantherfolk. Somehow even their minions of other Races had escaped the carnage and were nowhere to be seen.

He released his lockjaw hold on the other Panther Warrior, and their bodies both tumbled to the ground separately.

“Impossible,” Thane murmured as he finally collapsed onto his stomach. “No…”

The axe head or whatever it was embedded in Thane’s chest finally began to work its way out, and he clenched his eyes shut for a moment as the worst pain of his life overwhelmed him. The pain only got worse over the next moment or two, but now it reached from his head to his toes.

Thane opened his eyes once more, hoping he would see the view of the battle he had seen before—that what his eyes had shown him was just a dying beast’s hallucination—and he was relieved to see that the Panther Army was fighting the Fisher King’s forces after all.

As his body disintegrated, and he felt his soul come undone, Thane screeched out his uncontrollable agony in a piercing scream.

But on some level, the Warrior was at peace. His dying brain framed the situation for him one last time before he was erased from existence. He had not understood what he was seeing a moment ago, but that did not matter. It was nothing he needed to comprehend.

That’s all right, then. It was a lie. We’re all right…