Forums / Roleplaying / The Endless Battle Era Two

[Methinks that if we are going to kill people off, we should at least see how they die. Otherwise, they just vanish. Like the guys on the Mary Celeste.]

[You can also write out how others die if you like, it's all in the rules of the previous thread.]

[Bumps]

[Ofc, if I do die, i'm going to do it in *style* ;D]

[Ehm.. killer's posted]

[[I do! Pick me! *Meowman jumps up and down eagerly*]]

Sorry I'm quite a busy guy.

Deaths:
Meowman 

1. Verthias IX
2. Alban 
3. Killer
4. Seloc

Killer your right I was looking for the italics.
Ok as it stands the game is playing out in Verthias's favour, his roleplaying is on par with both of you, but unforunatly for me and you he has a habit of writing lots, just giving you a heads up.
and if you haven't been already try writing your story up on a word processing program that way it spell checks for you.
Alban please don't bold it, I don't want anyhting effecting my judging skills.

Minimum word count for this round is 200.

The dark clouds that had plagued the day, suddenly split, and brought forth great torches that lit up the sky. The flaming balls fell bringing destruction upon the great wall.
As one unforunate defender stood staring up into the sky, at the beautifully deadly sight, he failed to notice the ripples in the earth. The floor opened up and the mistified man stood suspened in mid air for a split second, then plunged to his death, in the newly created rip in the earth's surface.

You are beiung assulted by Rain of Fire and Earthquake simulataniously, whilst undead elfen archers insult your battlements with arrows.

[*cowers*. Well, it's damn lucky we're in bunkers... I can't write out the whole story now, i'll do it later]

[Damn. Well, I cant post until tomorrow onw, so dont skip me]

[I will [post when I have the time, which right now I dont have]

[Me and me peasants are keeping off the zombie hordes! You panzie people and your walls suxxors....]

*Killer glanced up. The clouds were breaking through. He could just about see the sun shining. It was a good day for blood-shed, if ever there was one. There would be much done today at any rate. More worrying was the flaming things falling out of the sky, seemingly unbidden. Killer searched for the creator or creators of these, but to no avail. Of course, he had to take into factor that he couldn't see even half the undead. Even so, they would have to be powerful mages to bring about that magic over that range.
           The large gate opened. The warriors began to pour out, and at once were assailed by the undead. Killer made the gap of a hole in the cave a big bigger, and unsheathed his sword and leaped through. It was a mighty leap, and took him outside, were he tumbled onto a few undead. He rolled backwards, sprang up, and cleaved their heads off. The flaming balls of fire seemed to follow the commander. The mages hadn't obviously expected them to fight, and aimed at him as their target. Rifts were opening up beneath living and dead alike, and both fall deep down into their chasms. The flaming fire flew at the undead, and the living. They were burnt alive and dead. Killer swiftly passed the ranks of the undead, with one purpose in mind, namely, to find the mages or magic beings. He passed through many ranks, but could find no mages of any kind. He plunged his sword through many on the way. He reaslised they could not csat it from this range. He had made good distance, and was 1 and a half kilometres from the wall. Not unless there was many.
            He thought for a while, as best he could in such an atmosphere. He looked down at the wall, which he was higher than now on the slope. He never had the best of eyesight though, and he was not young, even if he was not old. He needed someone with good sight. He spotted a face he recognized. He was surprised any living had made it so far. However, they had made good progress, and most were far back defending the wall, but a few were continuing out, to kill the undead. It was Swindwyl. Perfect, he had always decent sight. He was unscathed, and Killer was surprised, he wasn't a good fighter. But in these circumstances he was. The undead cowered before him. Swindwyl used a sword as his weapon, and it swept through any who went too near. After he had made a large enough circle around him, he took out his bow and fired arrows which burst into flame even as they soared towards their target. Killer was very surprised, he knew he was a good archer, but didn't know he was a mage. "Killer," Swindwyl called, frightening him. "Thank Zeta I found you. Come to the wall quick. The mages are not those of undead, they are of our own... Not the ones that were managing the golems, just living mages hidden in a cave they dug in the wall," he added when he saw Killer's expression. Killer was glad of that at least, he had a rare talent to locate magical interference. There must have been good mages to prevent him seeing that. They would obviously have to defend against locating spells, but wouldn't need it so strong as to protect themselves, as a talent such as Killer's was rarely found. 
           They travelled backwards, Swindwyl twanging his bow, Killer swinging his sword. They travelled for a long while, and were wearied. Finally, they neared the wall. There was still 850 golems or so, they were hard to destroy, and they had defended the wall from being past. However, many soldiers died, only fifty thousand left, but the majority of the archers still lived, eighty thousand or so, safe behind the walls. Suddenly, Killer sensed it. Magic, very powerful magic. Killer gathered about him his remaining strength and ran at a speed he had not run at before. He squeezed past the golems at the gate before they could react, and Swindwyl followed. He ran faster than he had before, charged by desperation, fear, but mostly anger. He quickly found the source of it, stronger as he went. He charged into a small cave he had not seen before, he had been running into what was a wall, but the magic drew him. He saw them then, fifty mages or so, very powerful ones. Swindwyl followed in, after he had realised where Killer had gone, though impossible. He was dazed. Killer drew a hidden stick of wood, alder it was. He lighted it, and hurled it in between the mages, and blasted it into flames, burning twenty, and managing to kill ten of those. Next, he drew his sword, which he had sheathed during his run, and stabbed the near ones, felling them. Swindwyl's bow was singing now, and to Killer it sounded like a glorious music. In a number of minutes, fourty mages were dead, as they had been surprised. But the remaining ten drew themselves up, leaned hard on their staffs, and through their lips a mysterious language was formed. It resonated throughout the cave. Five fell before the spell was finished, and the remaining died from the effort of doing the magic between only five. Killer and Swindwyl raced out the cave, out into the battle-fields, and gathered about the remaining warriors, no longer hindered by the flaming ball of fire, or splitting earth. They brought them to the gate, and awaited the assault of many undead...*

[shut up meowman, I was writing just as much as you, seloc probaboly thought my quality of roleplaying was better than yours, simple.]

Deaths:
Killer

1. Verthias IX
2. Alban  
3. Seloc

If you haven't been already try writing your story up on a word processing program that way it spell checks for you. (Saves me having to read rubbish)

Minimum word count for this round is 200.
This round requires two stories, one is where you die, the other is where you finally beat the enemy. For more info check out last thread.

Out of the shadow the flames cast on the clouds came a terror not unknown in this word. Their sleek wings slicing through the sky with ease. They were the nazguls most feared of all races and they knew it.

You are being attacked by nazguls aswell! Quick look busy or you may just get sent out on some insain task to stop them!

[Okey then.. I guess this is it. Defeat post first]

Verthias beat down the last of the burning hellspawn that had crawled into his tunnel. He and his men - fighting, non-stop, for hours in the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel complex, against monsters unimaginable to most of humankind, had been reduced to the level of desperate animals - kill or be killed, hunting the abominations that had invaded their den in a pack, bristling with steel claws and iron fists. A fireball crashed into the ground above at the same time as another rift to hell was opened beneath them. The tunnel collapsed, tons of dirt and rock smashing down into the embittered defenders, and leaving them vulnerable to the poison-dripping teeth and nails of the encroaching swarm, ripping into their exposed joints. Verthias roared defiance - killing to the left and right, forging ahead through the loose debris of the collapse to the fiery hellscape outside. Dozens of the bunkers had been smashed by the sheer weight of the black hordes pushing into his position, or ripped apart by the rifts and firestrikes. Huge holes were ripped into the undead lines, as they marched tirelessly past the first stage defenses over the minefields laid merely weeks before - but the undead kept on coming. The heavy weapons up at the second line started spitting death incarnate down the hill - every shot of the ballista-glaive carved through hundreds, if not thousands, lent momentum by the downward slope, but the undead kept on coming. Verthias watched, aghast, as the Black Lions, now but two hundred men, charged - their changeling blades flashing in the light of the burning hill, slashing into undead fle*beep* looked like each man killed dozens of the fiends before the heroic sailent was swallowed by the gaping maw of the necromatic war machine.

But the undead kept on coming.

Verthias knew that he had no more control over the battle now than a drowning ant had over a flash flood. His only thoughts were not of victory, honour earned on the field of battle, or cunning strategies and tactics - but of pure animal rage. He would kill these interlopers into the realm of life - kill and kill and kill until his arms were burning from the weight of his sword and he had to cast it away.

Then he'd kill with his bare hands.

His animal insticts recognized that the machines up on the second line would kill more of the attackers than he would, and that there would be others up there to help him with his killing. He loped up the hill, eyes burning with fury and fear, hacking his way through the scattered knots of undead on the way, dodging vast fireballs and gaping chasms reaching out to grab him. He heard a screech, the likes of which he had not heard for years and which turned his bones to jelly, from behind him - with a last despairing glance, he looked back. The Nazgul had come - they swept down in multi-regiment strength;  the ten thousand degenerate dragons, each twenty or thirty meters long, blackened the sky, blotting out the reflected fires of the battle below: Like a tide of utter darkness, engulfing the rock of sanity and life that Verthias's men had died defending.

He reached the second line of defenses just in time to save the crew of a siege trebuchet from being ripped to pieces by one of the creatures. He hacked off a leg with a single strike, in a blow that would have felled a giant. As the monster fell, he launched a flurry of blows which could have cut down grown oak trees on the thick-scaled torso of the creature. They bounced off, again and again and again as it roared, tossing and shaking in an attempt to dislodge the buzzing fly on it's chest. Finally, one blow slipped between two scales, penetrating deep into it's vitals. But the creature's killer was not content to leave it's foe to bleed to death: It ripped the scales open with a twist of it's talon, and reached inside it's pulsing, still-living body. The hunter grabbed hold of the Nazgul's heart, and squeezed with all it's might. The gigantic organ, over a meter across, fought as if it were a living thing: but the brute fury of the aggressor soon smashed it's resistance, bursting it like a black-blooded grape.

The killer ripped the heart out of the Nazgul's ribcage, bursting the scales and bones outwards, and held the limply beating organ up as he bellowed his fury into the sky.

All around was chaos and death. The scattered survivors of the assault, outnumbered by monsters more than ten times their size, screamed, fought, bled, and died. Corpses of the defenders began to heap up, the last few soldiers breaking and running to the rundown wall behind the third line of defenses.

Long ago, a great king of the Vitrian nation had made his own stand at that wall. He stood off an enemy army a hundred times his own's number until it could be cut down by his reinforcements, and won a victory that would be forever remembered, as long as men lived upon the earth. The King, his name consigned to history and traded in for that legendary title, had died on the wall, surrounded by the corpses of friend and foe alike.

Verthias crashed to the ground, his fury spent, and wept. He'd stood off an army a thousand times his own's number, and his defeat would be forever cursed for the last few years that men lived on the earth. He had only one aim now - he would die on the wall along with his men.

He would die on the spot that The King died.

Verthias's mind was clear as he stood on the patch of bare rock, still stained by the ancient blood of that ancient legend. He had but a dozen men around him: But they were the finest soldiers of the army, heroes all, and living legends in their own right. He looked up and down the line of soldiers behind him - a crosssection of the army, from the lowliest trooper... Verthias nodded at Trooper Kurr, who had been responsible for four regiment's survival at the great battle of Shuhah Tahiba, and bought them the time they needed to retreat to this siege...to the other general who was in charge of the defenses, Lord Revin.

Verthias drew his sword, and his honour guard followed suit. As hundreds of the Nazgul swept in, an army of ground troopers trembling the ground behind them, he swore that he would not go to the grave alone.

[So wait...im not dead?]

[And now, the 'victory' post. Wo-hoo]

Verthias clawed his way out of the tunnel complex, over the top of a heap of corpses, of both defenders and attackers. Some of the bodies were still twitching. The last of the men with him had died or been drawn away into other conflicts an hour ago, and he'd been running through the caves alone, facing the encroaching darkness alone down in the shadows beneath the world, as the fiery steps of giants shook the ground above. The undead had taken the first line of defenses a couple of hours ago, and had began to pour into the tunnels from there as well as from the huge cracks in the ground. The system was lost, Verthias thought. There had to be over fifty thousand undead down there, and the number was increasing every second. Any soldiers left alive would have to fend for themselves, he determined.

Verthias arrived on the surface, bleeding from a dozen injuries and bone-weary from the fighting, via a trapdoor just above the second line of defenses. He could see that perhaps two thirds, maybe three quarters, of the soldiers manning the front line defenses had fallen back here, either through the tunnel system or up the hill. It would have to be enough. Verthias started moving down the slope, marvelling as the siege engines spat death and fire down the slope, crushing, slicing, freezing, burning anything that moved in the vast tide of zombies marching ceaselessly up the hill. The blurred silhouettes of Beserkers were visible in the horde, moving with fury towards the human lines - the scythe-wielding, grim-cowled figures of ten foot wraiths were visible, urging their forces on with waves of their bony claws, imubed with the chill of the grave. Fleshounds - unliving hunters who's skin could not be pierced by mortal weapons, bucked and roared amidst the hordes, shrugging off ballista glaives and four-ton rocks like they were gnats. Those monsters would take some killing, he knew. It would have been impossible to do a headcount, he knew - but he estimated that the vast horde, for all it's gigantic losses from the last-ditch stands in the bunkers, the magical minefield and the rapid-firing siege crews, had to number in the hundreds of thousands. They could not acheive victory through force of arms here...

But they might just do it by trickery. Verthias tripped just before he reached the supply trenches at the rear of the line, and crashed down into the blood-soaked mud face-first. With a curse, he wrenched himself out of the mud, and narrowly avoided having his head taken off by a pair of gribblers, screeching and slashing at him furiously. He calmly ripped the arm off the first, then stepped inside it's reach to cave in it's skull with a single blow. He held the monster in front of him, and it was shredded by it's comrade, and ran his sword through both of them. Halflings were awful fighters in life, he mused, and even worse in death.

He strolled into the main defensive line through a breach, created by the still-descending fireballs, in the wall. The crew of a loaded and calibrated ballista were lying in various stages of dismemberment around their engine. With a brief prayer for their souls, Verthias tripped the firing switch, and watched as the glaive soared through hundreds of the oncoming monsters. He looked around, got his bearings in the hellscape that the battlefield had become from a couple of burning bunkers, and started moving faster down the lines. The oncoming undead hordes were only a couple of hundred meters away from the position, and arrows were already beginning to flick back and forth between the two armies. Verthias reached the place where the trap's trigger was set just in time - the mages who should have triggered it hours ago were all dead, ripped apart by rock-shrapnel from a rogue enchanted boulder cooking off nearby. He flicked the switch as soon as he got to the bundle of wires and flinking magical devices clustered around a thick post, driven into the ground. For an awful moment, he feared that the shrapnel had cut something vital in the mechanism, that he was about to be torn apart by the horde - they were close enough now for him to make out details of their rotten, scarred faces. Then, the trap triggered.

With a roar that could be heard from miles away, every support column keeping the tunnel complex in position blew itself to pieces simultaneously. Millions of tons of rock, nothing to support it beneath, collapsed, squishing the tens of thousands of undead underground instantly. An even greater number of those who were on the hillside were obliterated by the bouncing rock debris or mashed by the eight- to twenty- meter fall into the new maze of rock and mangled bodies where the hillside used to be. With impeccable timing, the sun began to come up - it's fiery corona just visible over the horizon, even if the sun itself wasn't.

The undead horde wasn't finished yet, though. It wasn't even started. The glow of the dawn was blotted out by an undending tide of black shapes, sweeping down from the fiery clouds, which were still spitting their lethal payload into the ground beneath. The horde behind them, spurred on by a gigantic, armoured figure, sitting astride the greatest of the Nazguls, was once more charging up the hill, filling the gaps where the ground had collapsed into the tunnels with their own bodies. Verthias knew that it would be a waste to shoot at the foot-soldiers, and bellowed that all soldiers were to fire at the Naguls instead. The sheer black mass of the rapidly-approaching swarm made an easy target - glaives which previously cleaved undead flesh now sliced through six or seven nazguls at a time, and rocks that even the most avid siege engineer would have dismissed as anti-dragon weapons ripped a nazgul or two to pieces, tossing their vast bulks against the rest of the swarm. The cloud of death came on regardless of their vast casualties. When they came into range of the archers, tens of thousands of arrows reached into the sky to pluck them out of it. Some Naguls were hit a thousand times, the sheer volume of the hits guaranteeing that a few hit vital spots - sliding between scales to rip and tear at their organs, or piercing their eyes and penetrating into their brains. An undending tide of black bodies tumbled out of the sky, crashing into the ground below and wreaking further havoc on the undead struggling up the corpse-ridden slope. It was not enough, however. Verthias nodded to himself, knowing his duty, and flicked the other switch on the column of death, and endured another second-long wait that felt like a lifetime.

The fourty thousand tons of magical explosives and alchemical fire that had been hidden beneath the tunnel complex had taken the combined alchemical and magical-support network of the Empire three years to make. They also caused an explosion so large that the blast was heard in other continents, and sent some house-sized rocks flying for over four hundred miles away from the explosion. The shockwave from the explosion killed over three million undead, smashing their bones to ash and ripping their bodies to pieces, and butchered nearly all of the surviving Naguls in the air above. Ninety percent of the Naguls were obliterated in an instant, and ninety percent of the survivors were so badly crippled as to be useless.

Ninety percent of the defenders didn't survive the explosion either.

Verthias staggered to his feet, ruin and death all around. The immediate threat of the horde was over, but the eighty or so nazguls left alive were not. One, blinded by rock shards and mad with the pain of it's pulverized organs, rammed it's head into Verthias's bunker, tossing it around for prey. He decapitated it with a single swing.

He watched as the twenty-foot tall armoured figure rose from the ruin of it's fallen mount. It's tread shook the earth, it's body blocked out the sun, and the green-crackling blade at it's side was the end of civilization and the fall of kings. Verthias exchanged stares with his counterpart: The commander of the human army, and the master of the undead hordes looked at each other for a long moment; Nagash, the Lord of the Grave was not the first to break his stare. The monster spat a roaring tide of pure death energy towards Verthias, that would have butchered an army. He didn't even try to dodge, and instead, with his dying breath, flicked the third switch on the pillar.

It was attached to the magical weapon that he had seen the mages clustering around at the very start of the defense. As he died, the flesh blasted from his bones and his soul ripped out of his body, he spent his last moment thinking that he'd failed.

The device detonated a millisecond after his conciousness left him and plunged into the dark waters of death. Nagash, the Lord of the Grave, the Master of Undeath, the Omega, Azraeal, Created to be Creation's Shadow, and the final authority of the world of Death; the timeless monster that had bedevilled civilization since time began, had only a second to realise his doom. He'd been lured here: The whole battle was just a trap to get him to this spot. He turned to run, too late.

The last explosion of the battle went on for three minuites. The device emmited an orb of blazing fury, with the intensity of a thousand suns, in an area five miles across. It completely incinerated the battlefield, and the combatants. It utterly destroyed nearly all of the undead horde, and it's lieutenants. It burned a crater two and a half miles deep into the hillside, and made the pass five times wider than it used to be.

Most importantly of all, however, it destroyed Nagash. Forever.

Not one of the defenders left that field alive. Few would ever know the triumph, even in death, that Verthias acheived that day. He ended the reign of Undeath in the world, and saved the lives of all who lived in it.

That was his triumph.

That was his legend.

[Ok, I am working on the losing post]

*Might takes a pitchfork and rams it into a nazguls head as in the backround a horde of peasants overwhelmed another nazgul. Might looked up the see a mushroom in the distance.*

[err...sorry guys, but I am not going to have time to do this for three days at least, as I am going away]

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGG
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAA!

[*Shoulder charges at an Alban-shaped hole*]