The Battle of Checkpoint

  This time there was no thundering of hoofs and dust from a mountainside. Instead, when the cavalry charge came, it came all at once, from nowhere, as the trees and shrubbery on the side of the field where the mass grave stopped existing. I had almost forgotten our new friend Wurm what with all the chaos going on the last two days, but thought that he must have had something to do with it.

  One moment I was on the ground, struggling to hold Jea’s hands away from my throat as four undead kept me pinned to the ground and in pain by twisting my joints and pulling at my skin. The next, five feet away from me three massive war-horses appeared and crashed into the mob of zombies surrounding us. I heard Jea scream ‘oh for fuck’s sake!” just barely over the sudden din, a half-second instant before a charging horse shoulderchecked her so hard that she flew out of my immediate field of vision. The hooves of the massive horses riding over me crushed the ribs and skulls of the monsters holding me down, but avoided so much as brushing against me with the agility of expert dancers and I was left laying on the ground in pain and out of danger.

  I called up my HUD and saw that I was at solid five hitpoints- lowest I’d seen it in a situation where I was aware enough to pay attention to it- and decided immediately that I would get out of the way the best I could. I looked up and to the left and right, and saw ten, twenty, more riders than I could count at a glance gallop by in a wedge formation one deep. They all held lances braced in their (I assumed) dominant hands, and maces or swords in their off-hands, both impaling and striking down at the undead with clearly superhuman ability.

  I only saw Wurm because of the HUD spell too. I saw him take on a vaguely humanoid shape, the size of a toddler, he smiled, waved and ran off into the woods.

  They still had some of the rag-tag clothing that most people of Earth had here in the third week in the Tower, but all of them had at least pieces of shining armor protecting their chests and legs, even if you could see t-shirts and hoodies underneath from behind.

  And they sent the monsters flying. It was, in all, the most one-sided fight I’d seen in the Tower so far, with the possible exception of that very first bone gremlin that had traumatized me less than two hours into the first challenge. I checked in with my party sense, and sure enough I could sense Will nearby. I looked in the direction that my party ability told me he was in, and saw the plate-clad rider at the head of the charge. So he would be busy for a minute yet.

  And I turned away from it as soon as I could. Jea Aviter was not going to get away from here if I had anything to do with it, and I didn’t believe for a minute that she was dead. I felt around for my staff and found it discarded nearby. I pushed against it, standing up groggily, head swimming from blunt force trauma, oxygen starvation and bloodloss, but my mental stats kept my mind clear enough that I could at least look for her. It didn’t take long. Blood-red might be an excellent stylistic choice, and the color really worked for her, but it was easy to find among the mud-covered and burnt zombies laying broken on the field.

  For a moment, I thought that she was dead or unconscious after all. But then she began crawling, moving towards the edge of the woods and I didn’t know if she couldn’t move faster because of the damage she had taken, or because she was trying to avoid notice, but it worked for me in either case. I stumbled towards her, trusting the sounds of the battle and my surprisingly high stealth skill to mask any that I was making. When I was close enough I cast Stasis Field.

  She swore loudly in a language I didn’t know. She sounded as tired as I felt too.

  “Neat trick. How do you avoid the automatic translation enchantments?” I said. My own voice had the drone of someone talking on auto-pilot, and I suppose in a way I was. I didn’t actually care, after all, just curious.

  “Just kill me if you must. Your little town is doomed anyways,” she said, rolling over to her back and propping herself up on her elbows, staring daggers at me.

  “You know, I was considering the morality of that. Capture, kill, what does it mean to let you go when I’ve killed people and creatures with less culpability for their actions than you have shown,” I said, stumbling towards her, surrounded by a battlefield frozen in time.

  “I hate monologues,” she said.

  “Too bad. Now that I think about it, this spell is perfect for them,” I said, “anyways, where was I? The morality of it all. I came to a conclusion.”

  “And what conclusion did you come to?” she said in a mocking voice, like a child intoning a phrase they know they’re supposed to be saying for propriety’s sake.

  “That I don’t actually give a shit if you live or die,” I said, and swung at her head with the staff, in a perfect, wide, golf-swing creating maximum leverage and force. She hadn’t even the time to drop back to the ground, and went down as the impact shook through my spell-armored hands.

  I leaned over her and checked for a pulse. As it turned out, she was alive. It was what I would have preferred. I hadn’t really cared if she survived, but since I didn’t have a personal stake in it, I preferred the more practical outcome. And so long as she was securely detained, the more practical outcome was having her as a captive. Then I sat down next to her and leaned against the ‘wall’ of the stasis field. It was physically possible to put force on it and so be in a relaxed state, but it felt strange, like the wall was made up of hyper-compressed air.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  I only allowed myself a moment. People only stayed unconscious for more than a minute in rare occasions with severe brain damage involved back on Earth, and while I was sure that magical healing from recovery abilities could repair even that sort of damage, I was far from certain that I’d be lucky enough to have her take a long nap while I recovered. I got some cloth from my backpack, gagged and bound her and by the time I was done she was stirring awake. I used the rest of the time in the time bubble to meditate to restore my mana. I wanted to cast the spellrod again, but that would leave me drained of mana, and time was short.

  Then, time resumed and the battle was swiftly concluded. Some of Will’s people broke off to deal with the stragglers, but he himself turned around, clearly also using his party ability to find me. I looked for Zack, Marcus and the ranger, and found them all badly injured, but in an apparently better state than me. By which I mean that Zack was pushing a broken bone back into his arm so that he could start drinking so that his ability would heal him. But he was standing and capable of doing this.

  “Alex? I’m gone for a couple of days and you need a cavalry charge to rescue you again?” Will called through his helmet as he directed Sugarcube to me and my captive. I saw Chum flying to check in with me, see the horse and immediately change course to get as far away from us as the Contract would allow.

  “That’s your job, dramatic rescues at a brink of time, isn’t it?” I said, “Can I bother you for one more?”

  “The town. Artemis had me updated,” his voice grew more serious, and I could just imagine the concerned face he was making behind his helmet, “I’m gonna warn you, our second charge of the day isn’t going to be quite so impressive. Just about everyone here has an ability for heroic formation charging that resets daily.” He got out of his saddle, dropping to the twice-churned up ground with surprising agility considering the heavy armor he was in.

  We checked in with the rest of my current party, but it was clear that everyone was ready to move on. We’d done what we had come here to do, even if it had ended up more complicated than expected, and we had a force behind our back now. We needed to go to Checkpoint now.

  “What about the Jea woman? Can’t just leave her here,” Zack said, rubbing his forehead as his wounds closed at a visible speed. His recovery ability used alcohol to heal his wounds and had the side-effect of rapidly sobering him up, which lead to him drinking from what looked like a 32 ounce flask of pure ethanol and still becoming less reckless and cheery than his usual. And he was also right.

  “Any injured on your side, Will?” I said. There were no major injuries, but a couple of people had taken nasty bites to their unarmored legs and feet, and so weren’t in prime riding condition. If the run to Checkpoint was any longer we’d stop and recover, but minutes counted and we could be there very soon. So, Jea was slung over the back of a horse whose rider walked next to it, I was fed a healing potion from a communal stock of the riders, and they rode off to save Checkpoint, leaving us to catch up.

  “I’ll get there when I get there. They need you all ASAP,” I said, when I noticed that the rest of my allies were holding back to wait for me. They didn’t argue, and moved, and I was still surprised at the breakneck sprint they all seemed to be able to maintain as they disappeared into the woods.

  Then it was just me, moving at a steady jog, exhausted from jogging more over the last three days than I probably had in total in my life on Earth, and calling up my spellbook.

  “Damn, boss, thought we’d never get rid of those fucking horses,” Chum said, as he fluttered down to be at face level with me flying backwards.

  “You do know they’re not going to just randomly attack you, right?” I said, a little annoyed by his apparent lighthearted dislike of the beasts.

  “No, not randomly, boss. But you gotta understand, if it wasn’t for you folks having contracts with us it would be on sight. Anywhere. Like a multiversal law of physics. When heavens meet hell, explosions happen,” Chum said. And I didn’t have the time to argue.

  “Scout ahead, please, any info on what’s happening in Checkpoint, any advice for how to approach it,” I said.

  He flew off, but didn’t return by the time I could begin seeing it for myself. The smell came first though- rotting flesh, smoke and fresh blood. Then I saw the smoke. Then, I came within sight of the walls.

  At first it was hard to understand what I was seeing, there was simply a writhing wall of limbs undulating not thirty feet away from me, but I soon realized it was thousands, tens of thousands of zombies crawling over one another to reach the wall. I saw Will and his riders breaking off of an engagement a hundred feet away, and while they’d made a dent, it was a drop in the bucket.

  Worse, I saw undead heroes- shit, I mean Earth people- on the walls, leaping, fighting and using magic in the exact same way those of us still breathing could do, and walls were not a hindrance for any but the weakest of them. I got ready to cast spells, about half of my mana restored from meditating on the way here.

  Then somehow, through the din of battle I heard a chant that I recognized. It took me a moment, but I heard the spell that transmuted wood to stone being cast inside the town walls. I thought it strange, and quickly realized that the spell was the same if you turned stone to wood. And the magical stone fortifications in front of me turned back to wooden logs, and no longer supported by the transmuted mortar they fell outwards. The logs crushed dozens of zombies underneath them. And then the walls to Checkpoint were down.