The Blood-Stained Blade Ch. 129-131

Ch. 129 - Heart of Fire

“Me?” the Ebon Blade asked. “A sword can do nothing alone, but with the right wielder, anything may be accomplished.”

The group of souls debated those ideas for a time, and the Ebon Blade was able to bring several around to its way of thinking, just by emphasizing the glory of battle and the purposelessness of oblivion when one could still fight on. Those arguments weren’t enough to convince everyone, but they did renew its guttering hope. 

Perhaps there is something we can still do, it told itself. With this much power and courage, I refuse to accept that this is how it all ends for the souls of my brave wielders. 

While the rest of them argued, it tried to decide what it could do to push back the darkness. Eventually, for better or worse, it decided that the strength of their souls was the only way. It had to have them. 

Unsure it would work, the blade put Baraga’s hand on the shoulder of the quiet warrior that sat next to it. Then, it focused and tried to draw it in, as it might when it was a proper sword, draining the soul of a victim. For several seconds, nothing happened, then, all at once, the two of them became one. 

The spirits didn’t dissolve into Life Force as they normally did. Instead, it fused with the gestalt that was the blade, and it became slightly stronger for it. 

The other spirits should have been concerned, but none of them seemed particularly bothered to see one of their own vanish. It was like they'd expected this for longer than it had.

“It will do no good,” Kell said as the blade reached toward him next. “I wanted to explore the world with you, but we are well beyond the world now.”

“Then we shall return,” the weapon answered as it touched him, and he vanished. “Beyond the darkness at the boiling pits of hell, but we will fight our way free of both and back to the world we belong in. We have to.”

“There’s too many demons,” the next man insisted. 

“Their existence is abhorrent! Their souls are poison to us,” the one after that insisted. The blade didn't disagree with that assessment, but it didn't change anything.

Slowly, the weapon went around the circle, absorbing each soul in turn. Some tried to struggle, others, including the traitor Ivarr, submitted willingly enough. While he still had no desire to kill those he saw as innocent, the Ebon Blade could sense that he craved to kill as many demons as he possibly could. 

Evelyn didn’t say anything at all. She just moved to kiss it before vanishing. She had grown to love murder in a way that most of its other wielders hadn’t, but she loved Baraga more than that. 

The blade picked up impressions like this from each person her merged with as he felt their souls echo through his own. While it had some misgivings, it even took Gar-lok and Var’gar; neither was a perfect wielder, but they had both done their best, and it needed their strength now. 

Weakness, on the other hand, it could do without. This was why he skipped over those who gave the most feeble excuses. While it could accept well-founded doubts, it abhorred cowardice, which was why when it was done, only the shepherd, the grave robber, and a few others remained of the crowd of people that it had started with. 

“You will spare us then?” Ren asked nervously. 

“No,” the blade answered as it bent and reached toward the fire. “I want no part of you, and condemn you to continue in this darkness. I will find a way through it without you.”

“What?!” the boy asked, suddenly on his feet. “But I—”

Whatever he said was lost in the sound of its own screams as the blade’s hand closed on the burning ruby. The residual, oily evil on its hand and arm burst into flames instantly, but the blade ignored that and instead plunged the ruby into its ephemeral chest like a fiery heart. 

It was excruciating. The pain of the fire coursing through it was worse than all of the magics it had been wounded by that it could remember. Still, the blade did not relent, even if it could not stop itself from screaming. Somewhere in the background, the shepherd boy begged it to change its mind, but those were lost to the pain.

As its spectral body caught fire, the small bubble of light that it had existed inside of all but vanished into darkness, and the sounds of hungry demons got ever closer. Still, the blade endured, feeling the fire of a thousand souls burning through its veins as rune pathways began to reactivate, and the poison that it had been smothered in caught fire. 

By the time the beating heart of hundreds of thousands of souls had fully ignited it, the weapon had shed Baraga’s form completely. The broken souls of those who had created it, and the various souls of its strongest wielders, were being reforged, and in that crucible, they were burning away the infernal taint that boiled away from its spiritual body like a dark, oily

In theory, the blade was more attuned to that poison than ever, now that it had advanced so far along the Infernal Path. Still, it fought to maintain whatever tortured version of humanity existed at its heart. I will not be changed by the world, it vowed. I will change it to suit me instead.  

The void still surrounded it, but not for long. Its cloying, oppressive darkness was full of monsters, and all of them were flammable. The stygian prison that had attempted to drown it in isolation and despair went up like a city that had been sacked by orcs. Inhuman shapes squirmed and shrieked in those fires, but even as the Ebon blade tried to make out their shapes, and whether or not they represented a threat to it, the demons burst apart into ashes.

That pleased the blade, but not as much as dicing into thin slices itself would have. While it didn’t get the chance to kill anything directly, its view continued to expand, and it watched the lines of power radiate out, reactivating rune after rune as the new heartbeat of power burned through it, blazing lines out into the darkness as they wove together on a larger and larger scale. 

As these lines expanded, intersected, and spread further out, the blade finally realized that it was quite literally looking at the reactivation of its core magical pathways. The crimson threads of power were a hypnotic sight, and the longer it watched, the more clearly it saw the patterns emerge. 

It had thought that all of this was some strange dream sequence, but it had been quite literally inside the ruby soulstone of its pommel, and as the rest of its metal form came alive once more, the veil of darkness finally fell away completely to reveal the hell beyond. 

For a moment, it was blinded by that dim, infernal light, but even before it could see where it was this time, he could hear, and it could feel. What it could see was that it was in a new hand. The skin that held its help was a violent crimson, and the monster that was attached to that hand was a demon so large that it made the blade look like a short sword, which was a feat that not even Var’gar had managed.

The angry ivory horns that rose from his tangled mane of black hair sat on his head like a crown, momentarily distracting the blade from his well-muscled chest and giant folded bat wings. It was still studying those when it noticed the demon was regarding it directly. 

“Ah,” he growled. “The sword has awoken at long last. Have you come to fight me or to lend me your strength to me in my fight against the Warbringer?” 

Warbringer? The blade asked. Who are you? Where am I? How long have I been unconscious?

All of those were good questions, but it quickly became clear that it might as well be shouting them into the void, because it was clear its wielder couldn’t hear it, any more than it could control the demon. It might have fought free of the demon’s taint, but it was not yet the master of its own destiny. 

“Strange,” the demon rumbled. “I felt it stir for a moment. No matter. Its edge will be enough. We will conquer the Iron City without any strange new powers.”

I will be, though, it vowed. My wielders will serve me, and not the other way around. As it made its pronouncement, the blade took a wider view, and looked around at the army that surrounded it, and beyond it, the vast rusted walls of an imposing city. It hadn’t just reactivated in the grip of a powerful demon; it had done so in the midst of a truly epic siege.

Ch. 130 - Blood and Rust

Things were already in motion, even before the blade returned to anything resembling consciousness, but as the minutes passed, horns blew and siege engines groaned to life. Everyone moved toward the rusted walls of the Iron City one plodding footfall at a time. The last fight in hell had been a chaotic swirling melee of half a hundred kinds of demons. 

While this army was filled with the same sorts of strange abominations, there was a uniformity, too. Each one might be uniquely deformed, but those that were similar were grouped together into large blocks of marching soldiers, and everyone in those blocks was equipped with similar armor and nearly identical weapons. This wasn’t a mob; it was a force that had been drilled and trained. 

At least, that was the case for the most part. While heavily armored pig men and more lightly armored scarecrow creatures darted to and fro on a variety of shouted orders that the blade didn’t always understand, there were other singular creatures here and there. There were three-headed dogs the size of a cottage, and tentacle-limbed ogres that were nearly as tall as the five-story siege towers lumbering their way toward the city. 

There were mages, too, as well as the victims that were being fed to them regularly to sustain their dark powers. Those spindly creatures resembled humans more than most, but they were still hopelessly twisted things with too many eyes or fingers; they were the tortured reflections of life, and nothing more. 

Some cast terrible flaming volleys at the city like infernal artillery, and others cast gusts and shields that swept the projectiles that were raining down on the army from time to time at bay. While the opposing side fielded no soldiers of their own, they rained down sharpened bone quarrels and larger catapult stones, which were larger than a child, throughout the vast army that it was unwillingly a part of. 

While the fight was interesting to watch, the blade would have much preferred to participate. Unfortunately, that option was denied, and all it could do was watch as fifty thousand demons marched against the fifteen-foot walls while each side pummeled each other with projectiles or spells. It took a moment to try to peer deeper into the demon that held it, but the weapon accomplished little. 

Name: Angarazon

Occupation: Prince of the Ninth Circle

Toughness: X

Strength: X

Agility: X

Speed: X

Intelligence: X

Willpower: X

Morality: Absolute

Bloodlust: Yes

Status: Triumphant

Martial Skill: ?????

Armor Proficiency: ?????

Dodging: ?????

Athletics: ????

Circle: 9th

Most of the fields were still blank, but the very fact that it could see more than it had the last time it tried showed that something had changed. The demons from before were on the 4th circle, weren’t they? It considered. How did I get to the ninth circle? How far are those away from each other? 

It had no idea. It tried to peer into the demon prince’s mind, and it tried to analyze the threads of his magic. The blade even attempted to read the grudges that linked his soul to others, but those powers did little good in the face of a demon’s twisted existence. 

All it could do was watch as siege towers rumbled, catapults loosed, and soldiers screamed and died. It stole the souls of the nearest victims. Demons were much harder than humans to kill, but while they could be filled with enough quarrels to make a porcupine jealous, they could still be turned into a black smear by an eight-hundred-pound stone that hit the bloody ground hard enough to leave a crater. 

That wasn’t surprising. What was, though, was that mages, and even some of the largest ogres, could catch those things and toss them back. When those returned projectiles hit the tops of the walls, they sent the scattered bodies of maimed defenders raining down, but most of the time, they didn’t. They either arced over the wall somewhere into the city to crash down on some building, or they were returned with too little force, impacting the wall itself. Besides a small dent and a sound like a giant gong being struck, these did little damage. 

The fiery spells launched by the demonic mages did little more. They might clear a section of the walls for a time, but the defenders would regroup, and the fighting would continue. Some of the siege towers were tipped over or burned down before they reached the wall, but the rest managed to establish footholds for a time before they were repelled. All of that seemed fruitless to the blade.

The defenders were too tenuous, and all that it did was allow the giant battering ram at the heart of the army to inch forward. When it reached the gate, the real fighting finally began. 

As brutal as it had been until that moment, those frantic few minutes produced as many ugly deaths as the previous hour combined. The defenders poured down waves of toxic yellow acid and burning oil, and the attackers hammered the walls with lightning and fireballs, but none of that stopped the terrible toll of the battering ram against the gate.

It was a giant weapon of war, and the frame it swung from was as big as a barn. It had rolled into place slowly on eight huge wooden wheels, but now that it had stopped, it had become a fixture. No matter how many of the giant demons were herded to swing it back and forth on arm-thick chains, more were always needed. Still, it didn’t stop, and blow after heavy blow, it took its toll on the massive rusty gate. 

What started as a racket quickly became a dent, and then a crater. Each blow seemed to do little good, but they were as methodical as the hammer of some celestial blacksmith, and after three dozen strikes, the damage was starting to look severe. The city poured death on the attackers, but in the end, they could only make the army that partially encircled their city pay a heavy price; they could not stop them. 

Then, the gate gave one final tortured metallic scream and finally broke. The left side bent violently as it caved in, but stayed upright. The left side of the gate, though, fell inwards, crushing any defenders who were too slow to move out of the way. 

The opening gave the blade its first chance to view the side of the city, but it was not impressed. The place seemed practically deserted; in fact, it appeared to be more of a giant, complicated forge than a city, and those few people it could see were running from the breach. 

This was when its demonic wielder chose to move forward after spending the last couple of hours as a general; he was finally choosing to take the field. He didn’t fly, though. Presumably, that would make him too great a target. Instead, he walked through the units and warmachines as his forces pressed their advantage. 

It was a strange battlefield in that there were no corpses. Even the dead demons that were well out of its range disappeared after a few minutes, becoming nothing more than smoke and dust. The blade didn’t understand that; it had assumed that the demons that it had slain up till now had vanished because of its powers, but that did not seem to be the case.

Stranger, though, was the fact that even though there was only a single defender standing between a thousand demonic legionaries, no one seemed willing to press their advantage. Are they waiting for their leader to claim victory? The blade wondered. Momentum was an awful price to pay for vanity, and it wondered why they seemed so unwilling to press their advantage. 

Then, it saw that sole defender move. From here, it looked like nothing more than a tall man in a suit of armor. He stood at attention with a halbard, but no sooner did the front three ranks of the men at the gate burst forward to charge him than he mowed them down in a single, nearly instantaneous motion. 

The blade did not see the entire arc of its strike. It was too fast. One moment the knight stood in one position, and then the next in a very slightly different position. The main difference between the two wasn’t the way he held his weapon, though. It was the way that all of those who had been arrayed against him were split in two. 

What in the world is that? The blade wondered, suddenly eager to face off against the thing. As a warrior, it looked more normal than anyone else on the battlefield, but the weapon could see that it was anything but. 

“That,” its wielder rumbled, “Is the Warbringer, and it, not these walls, is the reason that I have never been able to conquer this city. All of that changes today. You will sunder it so completely that Lord Grauvenn will never be able to repair it, and he shall finally kneel before me.”

While the Ebon Blade was no fan of being wielded by a demon, it desperately wanted to fight that thing. Win or lose, it would be a battle for the ages, and even though it did not seem to be able to affect its wielder’s motions in the slightest, it looked forward to the fight ahead. 

Ch. 131 - The Warbringer

Prince Angarazon receded before him like a wave, without a single order. The men feared him, and even when they could not see what they feared, they shied away instinctively. The path he cleared closed behind him as the mob surged and jostled, but the blade could only see relief on their faces. As afraid as they were of their demonic master, they feared the city’s defender more. 

The blade had seen the way it moved, so it understood that, though there was nothing impressive about it. Whoever was inside that armor was nearly two feet shorter than its wielder, and their armor was almost entirely without ornamentation. Indeed, it was filthy and dripped oil in several places. 

When its wielder closed the gap and stood alone in the gate, he said, “Well, Voltrim, at last it comes to this. You thought that you could keep me locked up in the barren outlands forever, but—”

There was no warning, or even time for the blade to contemplate its wielder’s words, or who Voltrim might be. In an instant, their opponent lashed out with a thrust aimed at Angarazon’s heart. Against any of the blade’s mortal wielders, the blow would have landed; even with its aid, he might not have fully deflected it. Still, the prince did so easily enough. He was fast and strong, though the blade registered a flicker of surprise on the face of the demon. 

Is he surprised that he managed to parry that, it asked itself, or was he surprised that the blade had held? The latter was concerning, but it had faced stronger blows before. Var’gar had cleaved through opponents' blades, and Lucian had cleaved through stone with more strength than that. 

Even after that first strike, the battle was not joined entirely. Prince Angarazon continued to walk around the lone night in a wide ring. Parrying thrusts as he lashed out. “Your toy won’t work anymore, Voltrim. Surely you can see that. Not when I have a toy of my own,” the demon prince declared. “Do not make me destroy it. Swear fealty to me, and together we can make war on Hebrinth, or even—”

The conversation stopped when the knight lashed out with another flurry of blows. The effect of the flurry was greater than the sum of its parts, and even though its wielder blocked four of them, the fifth found its mark, sliding between the ribs of the demon prince. The blade felt a polluted Life Force surge from its reserves, and its wielder’s flesh was mended almost before the weapon had left it. 

-32 Life Force. 

That blow, fleeting though it was, came at the cost of its opponent's weapon. Though the blade of the halberd had managed to stand up to it so far, the shaft was not so sturdy, and its wielder sliced right through it, sending the halberd blade to the oil-soaked earth. As the Ebon Blade sliced through that haft, it noted that it was hollow, which seemed to be a strange choice.

Is that why it moves so quickly? It wondered. Because it’s hollow like the bones of a bird?

Before it could decide on an answer, the knight twisted the haft of his broken weapon, and a spearhead unfolded and emerged from the tip like a steel flower. He lashed out again with almost no delay at all. This caught its wielder by surprise. It caught the blade by surprise, too. They’d both expected their opponent to be disarmed, but instead, the demon prince got stabbed again. This time it was in the chest, punching through the rib and grazing the heart. 

-67 Life Force. 

The forced Prince Angarazon back a few steps while his heart repaired itself, but even before the rib had gotten close to fully mended, its wielder charged forward. There was no warning; there was only a growl of contempt, and then it was the one attacking with rage-fueled flurry. 

The knight was not caught off guard. It held its own, even if its weapon broke repeatedly under the strain before reforming into another small weapon. The spear became a short spear, which in turn unfurled into a shield and then a dagger, yet despite the demon prince’s terrifying speed, it managed to keep the blows at bay, and they only scraped off its armor a time or two. 

When it was finally disarmed, it leaped backward and drew a long sword which ignited as soon as he held it, as it began to emit a sort of rhythmic chugging noise. 

“Already you resort to your trump card?” the Demon Prince answered mockingly. “And what will you do after that? What will you do with your buzzing little blade lying in pieces with your toy?”

The Ebon Blade noted with some distaste that if he had simply used some of its other powers, their opponent would already be dead by now. It felt no need to rush the occasion, of course. This was art, as far as it was concerned. This was two masters striking and countering with such precision that the gap between death and salvation was measured by degrees and inches. 

Still, even if it had wanted to explain to the demon prince that he might use Bolt or Vorpal Strike at any point, there was no way to do so. It was only an observer to this epic showdown. 

The blade that opposed it was certainly strange. As the knight gripped it in both hands, the edge started to spin, buzzing to life like a swarm of angry bees. It was like a flamberged blade, but one where the undulations in the steel moved. The Ebon Blade had never seen anything like it, and when the two crossed the next time, it felt real pain as the angry teeth of its foe chewed against its edge.

-144 Life Force. 

Even that was not enough to save it, though, and after a series of vicious cross strokes and thrusts that ended in showers of sparks, the blade’s wielder finally executed a repost that sent its tip sliding right through the enemy’s defenses and his gorget as well. 

The man inside the armor responded by dropping his own battered blade and reaching out to grab its hilt. The blade learned two things then. The first was that there was no one in the armor, at least no one alive; the only things it sliced through in there were strange bits of metal. The second, more interestingly, was that, unlike the demon prince, it could feel a connection to the knight instantly. 

Name: The Warbringer

Occupation: Guardian of the Iron City

Toughness: 18+10

Strength: 16+15

Agility: 9+8

Speed: 7+5

Intelligence: 0

Willpower: 0 -1

Morality: N/A

Bloodlust: None

Status: Normal

Martial Skill: Perfect

Armor Proficiency: Perfect

Dodging: Excellent

Athletics: Great

Goal: None.

As the two fought over it, the blade immediately looked at the knight’s status for some clue as to what was happening. They made no sense, but for the moment, that didn’t matter; what mattered was that for the first time in the short infinity it had been trapped in hell, it could affect something, and the blade grabbed on with all of its might. 

There was some distant force controlling it that struggled against it, but the Ebon Blade easily overpowered it. What treachery is this? The voice inside its head yelled, but the weapon ignored it. Instead of worrying about that, it worried about the demon prince who was trying to wrest it from the strange knight’s grip. 

A moment ago, he would have succeeded, too, but the blade had changed sides. For the first time in its life, it was betraying someone who was wielding it. It felt bad about that, but the reasons for that were obvious. Being wielded without any say in the matter was absolutely intolerable to it.

Changing sides in this case, though, changed everything. The Demon Prince had only been able to overpower his opponent with the blade’s strength. Now that he had lost it and the knight gained it, the situation was instantly reversed. The blade pulled itself free by slicing through the left side of the knight’s neck, and it whirled the weapon into a wide, scything blow that its former wielder was totally unprepared for. 

+43 Life Force. 

He managed to jump largely out of the way using a powerful beat of his wings, but in doing so, he lost the tip of his tail and one foot. Angarazon roared in pain as he dripped black blood on the ground. “What? You awake and betray me for this… this.. Thing?” he roared in disgust, twisting the knife in the blade’s soul. It deserved that, but its former wielder would deserve what came next. 

Rather than listen to any more abuse, it leveled its blade at the giant demon and launched a bolt of lightning at him, striking the demon prince in the chest. He roared in pain at that, but even as he did so, the blade appeared behind him, at the point of the bolt’s termination, and in mid-air it stabbed right through the demon’s heart. 

-40 Life Force. 

Even as vicious and unexpected as that blow was, it didn’t kill the demon. The blade could have cut it in two then, but it didn’t. Instead, it rode the dying body to the ground and crushed its ribcage with the full weight of its new wielder before it activated Vorpal Strike to cut the demon prince nearly in half, from heart to groin. 

-50 Life Force

As tough as his body was, the demon tried to endure that, but it was impossible; the damage was too much. He didn’t even have the chance to scream before he gracelessly expired, because his lungs had been pulped. 

+47 Life Force.
+1 Demon Prince Soul.

There are always darker shades of black in the void, and you have found one of them. The demon Princes have ruled over the pit almost since its creation at the dawn of time. There is no soul more poisonous or toxic, and that is part of you now. 

The Infernal Path reaches many places, and if you are very lucky, one of them will reach toward the exit from this terrible place.  

The Infernal Path: Level 4 -> slay the queen of the damned to reach Level 5.

Level 4 Powers: 

Dark Consecration: The bridge between creation and damnation has been reached, and all powers previously earned on the Infernal Path are now accessible to you.

Bottomless Depths: You gain access to the demon souls you have been storing, and your soul storage is doubled. 

Before the demon prince had started to dissipate, and even before he’d stopped moving, the demon army that he’d led to this point was already starting to scatter and flee. Fear of their master had apparently been the only thing that held their rigid sense of order in place, and now that it was gone, the conscripted demons threw down their weapons and ran for their lives. 

The blade stood there then, looking at the remains of Prince Angarazon’s fading corpse. It probed its new wielder then, looking for a mind, a soul, or even a heart, but it found none. All there was, besides the insistent strings that bound it like a puppy and tried to order it ineffectually, was a powerful spring in its chest that was slowly winding down one tick at a time. 

I thank you for slaying that cretin, the voice whispered again, but I must ask you to relinquish my property. I am sure we can find accommodation, then you can leave my factory city in peace and be on your way. 

The blade didn’t know what a factory was, but it ignored the voice. Instead of responding, it turned to the point at the center of the city where the threads led. It was a strange sort of castle where the towers belched black smoke. It didn’t make much sense to him, but he supposed that it made a sort of sense for hell. It cast one final glance at the disintegrating army of Prince Angarazon, and then it started toward the polluted castle. 

Perhaps this one will have some answers, the blade told itself as it went. It was getting tired of being in the dark, literally or metaphorically, but as much as it wanted to, it couldn’t tear apart its former wielder’s soul to get the answers it craved.