Forums / Roleplaying / The Endless Battle Era Two

Verthias looked on from his position in the foremost bunker at the base at the distant horizon. Dark shapes could be seen moving - a black tide, sweeping towards the thin line of grim, stone bunkers in front of the wall. He signalled his men to make ready, and there was a sudden cacophany as the five hundred soldiers in the defense bunker rushed to their postitions. Far up the hill, the grinding noises of the deadly machinery of war was clearly audible. Verthias, knowing that all was as ready as it could be, sat on one of the carved stone benches in the barracks, and tended to his weapons.

Half an hour later, the dark shapes of the attackers came into view - nearly fourty siege towers, each ten times taller than a man, came crunching across the vast open plain before the pass. Behind them came a swarm of rotting monstrosities, of every race - humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings could all be seen, and even the odd orc or troll. Maybe one in three of them were carrying siege ladders. Verthias barked a laugh - the undead horde may be innumerable, but noone ever accused it of being intelligent. Looking up the fairly steep incline of the hill, past the bunkers of his second line of defenses, he smiled. This was going to be almost too easy...

He signalled the longer ranged catapaults to begin firing at two and a half miles distant. Standard muntions, just stones, aimed at the siege towers; there was a dark aura, a swirling storm of darkness, on many of the siege towers that he did not like the look of. Half a dozen gigantic stones came soaring up from the second line of defenses - only two hit their siege towers, smashing them to so much kindling and going straight through, wreaking havoc amongst the waves upon waves of ladder-bearers behind the towers, as the gigantic rocks rolled and leaped, crushing hundreds. It was of no matter, though - the other four, deflected from the towers by a mystical force or missing them entirely, killed  thousands more of the teeming hordes of the zombies - carving vast swathes out of the incoming army, gaps in the wave more than ten meters across. The trebuchets fired again, and again, and again. A dozen more of the siege towers were smashed and plummeted to the floor, the huge plates of metal and gigantic spars of hardened oak butchering the unfortunates beneath the towers.

Verthias began to smile. The army was barely half of the way there, and already more than a third of the mage-bearing siege towers were down. He saw another volley, and watched three more towers smashed to pieces by the three-tonne projectiles.

Suddenly, the air around him blackened and coalesced into dark, gibbering figures. With a harsh oath, he ripped his longsword out of the sheath, and lay about him - cleaving the heads and bodies of the zombies who were being summoned into the bunker by the dark magics of the necromancers. All around, he heard the noises of battle as his men - veterans of the long war - reacted in the same way. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that most of the siege towers had been destroyed by the magical backblast, and blew vast holes in the zombie hordes with their dying blasts. But the second line of defenses was under attack as well, and the rate of fire from the lethal siege catapaults dried up as their crew grabbed their swords. Finally, as he began to hack down his eighth - or was it ninth? - zombie, their figures became solid, and their talons, dripping with poison, began to lash out at him. He took such a blow to his breastplate - the claws barely scratching his armour, and his broadsword slicing the zombie in half in return.

He saw the one last shot fired by a heroic ballista crew slice one of the three remaning siege towers in half, before bouncing for nearly half a mile through the zombie horde, slicing and dicing in it's wake, before he threw himself into the battle at the entrance of the bunker, with a roar.

[I was invited to by Seloc, my friend. And, yes, it was. And is there any rule against posting more than 100 words? ;)]

[There's no kill like overkill]

[*raises eyebrows*. Well, join the back of the queue. I guess i'm just *too* good..]

[Chuckles evilly. It seems the reach of the necromancers is long indeed. I wonder if Leonidas ever decided that he 'wasn't in the mood' when it came to persian-butchering? No he didn't! And that's why we live in a free world today, free from the evil elephants, rhinos and strangely historically innacurate flame-tossers and mutants of the Persian armies. Mind you, Leonidas probably didn't have to read much to do that..]

[Ssssh. Noone knows that yet]

The undead were on the horizon, and they were bringing siege towers. Demonsul's unfinished patch of wall stood no chance unless they got the ballista operational.

Demonsul, with the help of the builders, hefted the ballista into position atop the tower. The chain-bolt provisions were loaded into the firing slot and the multiple strings drawn taut. The builders began to turn the huge heavy handle and Demonsul took aim with the huge war machine.

Whamawhamawhama, the bolts flew fro the front. The undead on the ground were being downed, but the siege towers held out against the onslaught, protected by some form of magical barrier.

Demonsul loaded up the special magic-piercing bolts he had luckily remembered to have blessed earlier, lit the flame at the front of the ballista, and continued firing. The flaming bolts flew straight through the magic defense and hit the towers, which quickly started to blaze. Soon they were collapsing, igniting the undead below.

But this was only the beginning...

[Ehm.. are you posting, Seloc? It's been three days. Or can we at least have the next attack wave to defend against?]

I AM NOT DEAD!

Sorry for that outburst, but I see nowhere where I could have died...its just I decided to increase my personal difficulty level by being almost undefended.

[meowman has posted-right below me!]

please say where i died, as i have kept up with the posting.

at least have the decency to say

[Yes Alban they do, its a game demonsul and you lost. Please read rules before appling.]

[well i read the rules and don't see it in there, but if you're gonna kick me out fine]

[[Can you please put me first seloc??]]

*Might stands in his shack with a pitchfork ready to take on the.......OH GOD THERES A CRAP LOAD OF ZOMBIES COMIN TOWARDS ME!*

i have a feeling might is worse than me anyway...

fair enough.

i mean, after all, he is busy with that thread where hes getting his holy cow behind kicked by the true cow goddess (lewatha)

[[Let's try again]]

As Meowman and his men enjoyed a moment of peace after the defeat of the seige weapons. Meowman took the time to compare the difference between the lands of dead and living. On the one side, the side on which the truly alive prospered, the fields below the wall were rich and flowing. But as they reached the wall, and went beneath it, a strange change came over it, and by the time it was once again visible in the realm of the accursed it was barren and dry, not fit for life. But then again, on that side, nothing was truly alive...

Meowman was broken from his thoughts by a shake on the shoulder. It was a young dwarf, with the age of 35 being young for them. "Yes, brother?" asked Meowman. "Come here sir, and see for yourself!" His voice sounded urgent, and in seconds he was observing a running line of deadlily armed undead, sprinting across the plains. Meowman knew they were berserkers, who would destroy anything in their path without thinking. He immediatly had archers firing and mages casting, but he soon saw that unless it was completly destroyed and it's ashes scattered, the creatures would simply pick up their skulls or arms and stick them back on, nevering ceasing their relentless charge.

By now they were only three quarters of an arrowshot away, and Meowman knew they would all die if he didn't think of something. He thought over everything he knew about the creatures, and they were but half an arrowshot away by the time he thought of something. 'They would destroy anything in their path without thinking.' That was it! Again, Meowman found himself relying on his mages. He raced up the stairs of his left-hand tower and had the mages on both sides hurridly prepare a teleportation spell. The undead were only 75 meters away... now 50... now 30...

When sudenly the back half  of the charging mob found themselves only 5 meters away from the wall, but facing back the way they came. Meowman hoped and prayed that his plan would work. It did. The berserkers ran forward still, and as the 2 halfs met, Meowman watched contentedly as the beasts killed each other, tearing their allys limb from limb. He shook hands with the head of his wizards and began back down the stairs...

[[Don't put me first again or you'll have another wait like that]]

[I dont hav time to write now, and I will be out all day. please put me at the back, this was one of the reasons I wanted to go first.

[*looks at Seloc oddly. Drums fingers on metaphorical table of waiting]

A rotting, disembodied head narrowly missed Verthias's own as he ducked, rapidly. It whizzed over his head, and thwocked into the wall with a hollow noise. He hacked down a ghoul to his right, and spun to impale a wight to his left, before flicking the sword out and around, slicing through the necks of a trio of zombies menacing a wounded soldier. A zombie on the floor, behind him, twitched and groaned slightly: and with almost preturnatural speed, Verthias span and dismembered it with a single blow. Eyes burning with rage and bloodlust, he sprinted through the bunker, killing as he went, and listenting to the dull crump of the mines outside detonating. Within minuites, as suddenly as they arrived, the undead were gone - pushed out of the fortification or butchered inside it, all was clear once more. Verthias marched to the command tower, the only hatchway that lead from the second storey to the roof, and through which he had previously been observing the battle. As he yanked it open, he heard a thud from the hatch. Without even a thought, he raised his sword to run through the gribbler which had been lying in wait atop the bunker.

Verthias looked around the battlefield. The first wave of the undead was all but spent - the second line of defenses was firing again, carving troughs into the massed ranks of the undead, and the first line of bunkers were full of the noises of soldiers dragging the bodies of the undead down into the caverns, for disposal in the gigantic furnaces built for that very purpose. One of the surviving siege towers had rolled over a mine, and the resulting explosion had showered the surrounding hordes with razor-sharp, super-heated metal. The second was just sitting there, dormant - the top had been removed from a glaive, slaughtering the mages atop it, and the undead who had pushing had all rushed to attack the front line bunkers.

 Yet the greater mass of undead was still there - hovering just outside the effective range of the trebuchets. At this distance, it was just possible to see the blurring lines of blood and fury, as Beserkers, released in the midst of the army, charged towards the human position. Verthias groaned internally - but kept it to himself, for the morale of the men around. He knew that the beserkers would be moving too fast and too erratically for the siege machines to hit; it would be down to cold steel and colder hearts to beat these monstrosities. He blew out the signal for a regiment of crossbow-toting troops to move foward from the third line of defenses. Fresh from the rear, Verthias knew that they would be far more accurate and far more efficent than the winded archers already defending the bunkers.

As he compared the distance that the beserkers had to travel to get to his postion, and that which the reinforcements had to, he realised it would be a close run thing. The undead  had three times as far to go, and that uphill - but were moving at least twice as fast. He bellowed up the hill to the jogging crossbowmen to pick up the pace.

Finally, the disciplined ranks of the crossbow troopers were upon him: and in a moment, so would be the beserkers. He knew that they would have only one volley - so they would have to make it count. Verthias did some quick mental maths: two thousand crossbows, two hundred and fifty beserkers. Assume one in every two miss their targets, working from relative size but factoring in aiming, assume one hit in ten is a killing blow.

That still left a hundred and fifty or more to wreak havoc on the humans, and he knew that a beserker was more than a match for five veteran soldiers.

Thinking quickly, he ordered the crossbowmen to fire at the beserkers when they were outside their normal range - relying on the beserkers to run into the bolts with sufficent speed to kill, reload, and fire off a volley at virtually point blank range.

The first volley fired off - and virtually blotted out the sun, which was setting behind the undead army. Perhaps fourty beserkers fell - there was no time for a head count. The men reloaded as fast as was humanly possible, being (understandably), terrified. When the beserkers were only ten meters from their lines, the volley was ready, and fired.

The plan was a complete success. More than two hundred of the beserkers were killed outright - some were hit by so many bolts, they were physically thrown back. But three of them still lived - and came on, roaring furiously, at the sight of the meat-twigs lined up before them. The carnage would be horrible if they hit the lines: they outmassed a human more than four to one, and their sheer weight would crush dozens of the lightly armoured crossbowmen, let alone the lashing of their teeth and claws.

Verthias knew his duty to his men. Without a pause for breath, he was running fowards, shunting one of the crossbowmen aside even as he drew his sword. With a single, smooth motion, he hamstrung the first beserker, dived under the enraged swipe of a second, and finished off the third with a stop-thrust, double-handed, before it even realised he was there.

Then, his sword got stuck in his dying foe. Verthias looked on with amazement and horror as the beserker grabbed hold of the blade with one paw, and grabbed his hands and pushed it deeper in - pulling him along with it, towards it's gaping maw.

He did the only thing he could do in the circumstances - his muscles burning with the wasted effort to pull the sword out, and his tendons screaming as the beserker started to pull his arms out of their sockets, he headbutted the beast.

He did the only thing he could do in the circum

[[lol I think you went past the max of charectars in a post...]]

[Hey, it's only 996 words or so. I'm sticking all this stuff together and will soon be marketing it off as epic fantasy, so i've got to maximise my wordcount, y'know xD]

[Which is currently 4 pages of A4, or 2486 words in total. *whistles appreciatively* *prods Killer*]

[Alrighty, Seloc. What new horror will you unleash this time, me wonders.. It had better be inventive ;)]