Daughter of Death - A Necromantic LitRPG

Kesset was right there - all Lieze had to do was summon a [Blood Spike] to pierce his heart. But doing so would take too much time. If the Elven army discovered the two of them, they wouldn’t have any chance of surviving. It was prudent to consider a tactical retreat, but where exactly would they run off to? Kesset would simply point the army in the right direction, and the average Elf was far more athletic than either of them.

Was it worth the risk? Would killing the Head Shaman prove to the Elves that they had no chance of victory? Or would they butcher Lieze without a second thought? She had little time to consider her options, mind inflamed with battle fatigue.

“Lieze…!” Drayya cast a feverish glance over her shoulder, “We need to run!”

-But she wasn’t listening. Her brain was in its own world, calculating its own set of qualifiers. She recalled the moment of their intrusion into the Black City, sending Marché and Roland off with the Flesh Golem, the distances covered within the labyrinthine maze… if she had any faith at all in her comrades, then the numbers had to add up. Could she afford to take the risk of trusting her allies with a duty so crucial?

Beneath her robes, she fiddled with a tiny glass container. Her dagger was drawn for a moment before returning to its leather sheath. By the time she was done, shapes had begun to emerge from the fog - lanky, pallid shapes. From obsidian broadswords to knives to sickles, the Elves had armed themselves with a myriad of implements to wage war against Lieze’s army. They were not nearly as dangerous as the assassins, but their numbers more than made up for it.

“The cursed one! She is attacking the Shaman!” A blethering, chaotic tongue screamed above the rest, “This is our chance! There are no monstrosities to protect them! Attack!”

“Lieze!” Drayya placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder, “What are you doing!? Let’s go!”

“No…” She replied, “Wait…”

“Have you gone mad!? We’ll be slaughtered like cattle!”

The mob was closing in on them, the tips of their blackened weapons reflecting a wicked light from Lieze’s lantern. A bead of sweat formed on her forehead. Then, just as she was ready to admit her folly and run off, it happened.

Something tremendous barrelled through the crowd. Like a boulder of flesh, it rolled out from the corner of a nearby street, crushing bones as it flattened the Elves prepared to lunge towards Lieze. Following in its wake were gnashing, monstrous hounds, pinning and dismembering any stragglers left after the attack. In one moment, the tide of battle had shifted, and the gates of chaos were thrown wide open.

Gravewalkers, Flesh Elementals, Briarknights… every walk of undeath charged following the Rot Behemoth’s surprise attack. The space between Lieze and her enemies swelled with the dependable sight of her horde, which skirmished wildly with the unprepared Elves. Kesset - who Lieze last witnessed being dragged to safety by one of his subjects - became nothing more than a second thought to the blood-glutted scene unfolding before her eyes.

With staggered footfalls, a familiar face shoved his way through the backline. Roland wasn’t quite the same man he was at the battle’s eve. His face was marred with gashes, painted broadly with blood; his robe had been torn to ribbons by a hundred blades, exposing the deathly cuts he’d suffered to his body.

“Damn it all…” He sighed, “A second later, and I’d have been too late.”

“Roland…” Lieze blinked, “Where’s-”

“No questions. We don’t have the time…” He held out a hand, “The Rootborne will break through our bottleneck at the wall soon. We need to end this before that happens - we’ll never stand a chance if we’re forced to split our forces.”

“I- agreed.” Lieze went to reply, but decided against it, “The Shaman is gone. Escorted back to the palace, if I had to guess. He’s crippled, but we need to clear a path through this army to reach him.”

She could only wonder about Marché. Roland wasn’t the sort to abandon his comrades, she thought. His raggedness spoke of the trials endured to reach her. She could only assume the worst had come to pass - an eventuality she found herself more reluctant to accept than she would have liked.

“Leave it to us.” Roland gazed past her, “-Look who else I ran into on the way here.”

His words were punctuated by a volley from above. The spellcraft of the Dark Casters, headed by Lüngen, arced like motes of starlight across the hazy skies. They landed squarely among the cramped ranks of the Elves, sowing fire and chaos through their ranks. Lieze couldn’t see the old man from where she stood, but a small part of her was grateful that he still lived.

“We’ll clear a path!” Roland was already hobbling off, “You need to be ready to move ahead! Don’t stop for us!”

Arriving in his place were a number of straggling thralls bound to Lieze’s service. Gravewalkers, Stalkers, a few Flesh Elementals - and the bloated, near-unrecognisable face of Helmach, who remained as stalwart as ever even in death.

“You still haven’t met your final end yet?” She asked, “I doubt any thrall has lasted as long as you have.”

The Briarknight’s expression remained unchanged, “I am at your service, Mistress Sokalar.”

“How many times have I told you not to call me that?” She paused, “...I don’t care anymore. I suppose the memories of intelligent thralls aren’t too reliable when their brains are being slowly eaten by maggots. Just focus on clearing a path through these Elves.”

“As you wish.”

With that, the dependable thrall departed to participate in the chaos.

“Drayya.” She turned her head, “It’s time we brought this farce to an end.”

“Finally! I was starting to get bored of running around.” She replied, “Let’s carve our way towards that palace, shall we?”

Her enthusiasm was more than welcome - Lieze was in dire need of some herself. The burden of commanding as many thralls as she could at once was starting to weigh on her mind.

Trapped within the confines of the Black City, her thralls could truly shine. Much like the battles weathered in the streets of Tonberg or within the Dwarven Mountains’ tunnels, a lack of space to manoeuvre was catastrophic when facing down the undead. With nowhere to run, the Elves were forced to contend with the thralls’ tireless assault without hope for retreat or relief.

The assassins, too, found themselves congested by the abundance of Grotesques hovering through the skies. If they so much as exposed their heads through the veiled canopy or emerged from a window, they would attract the beasts’ ceaseless ire, forcing them away from the battle. Without their constant aid, the thralls were incontestable in their advance.

Rot Behemoths to shield the Deathguards from harm. Gravewalkers to fill the gaps. Horrors to weather the Elves’ assault. Stalkers to pounce from the shadows. Dark Casters to rain fire and lightning from above. Lieze’s army had evolved from the unorganised tide of flesh it once was. Through exposure to foes of all varieties, she had slowly but surely accustomed the army’s makeup to deal with any eventuality. The fruits of those myriad labours, she realised, were now hers to enjoy.

“Keep the Horrors tucked together! Spear the Gravewalkers into the breaks in their formation!” Balancing herself upon a Rot Behemoth, Drayya’s face glowed crimson from barking orders to the Deathguards, “Use [Corpse Explosion] to destroy crippled thralls! You and you - take the Stalkers around the alleyways and punch a hole in their flank!”

Lieze made sure not to fall behind. She was the most proficient necromancer among them, after all. With the aid of [Mercurial Enhancement], she cut swathes through the Elven army using [Blood Spikes], punished overconfident frontliners by detonating high-level Rot Behemoths to dissuade the enemy from attacking recklessly, and made use of her staff’s innate [Wide-Range Master Necromancy] ability to raise the corpses of her fallen foes without having to close the distance, replenishing her vanguard with thralls anew.

It was only a matter of time before the Elves found themselves being pushed back. They numbered in the thousands - formidable in their resistance but unable to contest the results of Lieze’s labour over the course of those chaotic months. The holds of men and Dwarves had been dismantled, and now the last bastion of resistance on the continent struggled against the weight of the world, vying for dominance against an undying foe.

But few victories arrived so easily. Once the Elves were thinning, a tumbling quake rattled the city’s foundations, causing men and thrall alike to lose their footing upon the polished streets. At first, Lieze thought her Flesh Golems had finally caught up with the rest of the army, but the truth was far more concerning.

The ground fractured beneath her feet, splitting like glass. Something was boiling up from below, threatening to burst forth. A tumult of confused yells from her fellow Deathguards deepened her worry. Before she could order a retreat, the earth bellowed and tore; great fountains of chromatic refuse spraying like geysers into the foul air.

Molten metal, acid, water - there was no rhyme to their size or composition. The sight of it was primordial, as if the crucible of the earth had expelled upon the battlefield every failing product of its subterranean machinations. Lieze resisted the urge to idle in agony as golden, melting droplets coated her face.

Lieze’s HP - 210 / 404

All at once, she was burned, scalded, shocked, pierced - her mind threatened to freeze up from the influx of stimulation, with only the burning survival instinct in the pit of her stomach driving her to run away. Screams flew across the flat-topped obsidian monoliths of the Black City as yet more geysers studded the battlefield, decimating Lieze’s army with a storm of alchemic chaos.

She realised it just then - this was a Heavenly Favour. The geysers were not some fabled phenomenon of Akzhem, but a conscious overflow of transmutation magic. Soil and stone underwent a glorious metamorphosis under the Head Shaman’s influence, shifting uncontrollably from one substance to another. In one moment, the geysers were composed of water, and in the next, they blew boiling oil or liquefied gold. Entire blocks of the city were levelled by the eruptions, subsumed into primordial ooze by Kesset’s power of chrysalis.

The fog didn’t make it any simpler to navigate the chaos. Lieze’s head thumped with a headache unlike any other as she stole through the streets alongside the Deathguards. Every time she stopped to conjure another [Blood Barrier], geysers leapt up from beneath the ground and altered her escape route. Following in her wake, the silhouettes of Drayya, Roland, and Lüngen shielded themselves in the shadows of Horrors who weathered the chromatic assault with suicidal obedience.

“Is he planning to destroy the entire city!?” Lieze’s mind raced, refraining from speech to conserve stamina, “This can’t go on forever! We just need to survive until his Heavenly Favour-”

Her next thoughts were interrupted by a sudden shift in her field of view. The deafening eruption tore through her eardrums - sent her flying through the air. Her body was sprayed with a hundred foul concoctions all at once. She didn’t have time to use [Supreme Regeneration] before the world was the right way around once more, and her body was sprawled - motionless - across the cramped wedge of an alleyway carved between crumbling monoliths.