Bloodstained Blade-Chapter 71 - An Ambush

The battle didn’t end with the griffon knight’s death. Even though the fighting didn’t last too much longer after that, several minutes of mindless slaughter allowed the blade to recoup much of the energy it had lost during its heroic efforts to keep its wielder alive, and it enjoyed the feeling of piercing, hardened steel armor instead of the clothing of peasants that it had been doing so much of lately. freёwebnoѵel.com

+438 Life Force.

+12 Human Souls.

+3 Greater Monster Souls.

Even if it had bled hundreds of Life Force instead of spending it on an upgrade, it had been worth it. I did get an upgrade, after all, the blade reminded itself.

While Var’gar and the other orcs celebrated their bloody victory, the Ebon Blade wasted a few hundred more Life Force healing a few of the orcs in its wielder’s vanguard that it knew to be strong warriors who would no longer be able to fight because of the impact on the beast on their lines.

-255 Life Force.

It felt strange to reach out with its Aura of Hunger and give people Life Force rather than ripping it from them. It was unnatural, but that was as much because the weapon did not really care if they lived or died as because of the actual sensation of energies flowing in the wrong direction. It just wanted to test out its new power from the Path of Blood.

-129 Life Force.

The blade felt wounds close and bones straighten, and though it took several minutes in most cases, it was a subtle process, and the orc in question was almost completely whole once more before it realized what was happening. It didn’t expect to use its Life Force in such a frivolous way too often, but when shattered orcs stood once more on their own two feet, they proclaimed things like “I have been healed by the power of the black tusk!”

While the weapon hadn’t been expecting praise, though it supposed it should have. Normally, the monsters didn’t notice when it nibbled at their Life Force, but this was different. It found the moment interesting and basked half-heartedly in that praise.

When other wounded orcs were brought before it, it healed those too, but only at the cost of draining Life Force from the healthy orcs that had crowded around it to witness the miracle. It was done spending its own power. Instead of further tapping its reserves, which were not back over three thousand Life Force, it drained from three nearby orcs, then used that energy to restore one of the wounded monsters while everyone gawked as the arrow wounds mended before the shocked eyes of the assembled savages.

+212 Life Force.

-209 Life Force.

“The Great Tusk is truly the greatest of all!” Var’gar roared before he was echoed even more loudly by the guttural voices of his warband.

As novel as it was, the blade eventually tired of their praise and turned its attention to other matters. As they started to gut and spit the griffon for a grand feast, it turned to the soul of the knight and demanded. “You were targeting me specifically, not the army? Why? What did you have planned?”

Unlike the elf that had taken a moment to crack, the human unraveled almost immediately and images of the lead-up to this battle appeared, swirling across its mind, showing it the hooded griffon ready for flight and the camp. Other men flicked across its vision. Their armor was different, but they all wore white. They had a strange holy symbol, too, as they stood around the remains of the campfire talking to the now-dead knight about why he had to risk life and limb to strike.

“The soldiers won’t even hold those orcs for a day,” a younger priest said. “We have to strike at the heart. Without their leader, they will shatter into smaller bands.”

“Agreed,” an older man continued. “The beast at the head of that dark army probably isn’t even in command. Our mage has scried on the horde and says that the huge one in charge holds a blade of dark power. The things it does to the aether are unmistakable. It's that blade that is our true enemy.”

“Do you think it could be the—” the griffon knight started to ask.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“No, of course not,” the older priest interrupted. “The Ebon Blade has been locked away for nearly a century. This is some lesser relic in the same vein, nothing more.”

No, not a priest, the blade realized as it watched the scene unfold. Witchunters. It had seen the fist icon before, but only in passing when it had first been held by Ren so long ago. A bolt of fear went through the blade then. How easily would they have captured me then if they'd noticed my existence at the start of all this?

The weapon was not the only one that made terrible realizations, though. The spirit of the slain warrior had known the Witchhunter’s words were a lie, even as the old man had said them. He just hadn’t been brave enough to call him out on it.

I would never have tried to ride down a nightmare like that if I had known, the dead man whispered as he watched himself take to the sky one last time. The blade could feel his fear and doubt as he’d done his job anyway. The knight hadn’t thought it would be a hard job, even with his doubts. Use his beloved beast to snag an orc and return the corpse to the men who had hired him.

Still, while the knight alternated between hope and fear about his mission, he circled the camp once. That was when the blade saw it. They meant to trap me! The blade raged as all of the pieces came together in its mind. There were several warriors, and then behind them, mages and archers. They’d meant to bring its wielder here and then strike him down so that they could imprison it again.

We must go, the blade commanded, breaking the vision before it was even done. It had wasted enough time.

“Go?” its wielder grunted, “But the bird ain’t even cookin’ yet. We gotta—”

Go! The blade repeated. The second time, the force of its anger was enough to stiffen the orc and leave no doubt about who was in charge. Take only a handful of your men. We must go immediately before the rats can escape the ambush they laid.

Even as the blade spoke, it knew that the men would have already broken camp and moved on. If they had any idea of what it was and what it was capable of, then they would know that it was capable of extracting information from the souls of the dead, but they wouldn’t get far. They weren’t dealing with just a blade. Against a human wielder, retreat might have been enough.

They were dealing with orcs that could run down any marching crossbowmen or baggage train the humans might have. Only magic or fast horses would be enough, and based on their preparations, those both struck the blade as unlikely.

The orcish chieftain complained a little about missing such a feast, but soon enough, he and a half dozen warriors were jogging north toward a stream and a small patch of forest. He’d wanted to bring the whole army, but that would only slow the blade down. It didn’t need strength; it needed speed.

Night had fallen completely now, but the pack of warriors crashed through the stream and the underbrush almost as easily as the grasslands before and after it over the next twenty minutes as the blade whipped Var’gar ever on mentally. Eventually, the orcs he brought with him began to flag, but its wielder still charged on, fueled by the blade’s dark magic.

Almost half an hour after they’d started, they reached the place that the griffon knight had taken off from. All the details matched what the blade had seen, but it was abandoned. We must find them! It roared in its wielder’s mind. If we don’t take them out now, they will only attempt to ambush again soon.

Var’gar was obviously confused, but that didn’t stop him from obeying. The orcs spread out and searched until they found fresh wagon ruts amidst the milling mess of bootprints and horseshoes. As soon as the blade saw those, it traced them off into the distance and decided that had to be the way.

The group gave chase to them immediately. The Ebon blade didn’t know this area well enough to say where the group was going, but the fact that there were so many prints said that they were going there in numbers, which ruled out magic at the very least. This might be a decoy, the blade told itself, but it kept going anyway. Someone would pay for this, and anyone that it struck down, even the cook or the man driving the wagon, would tell it something. It would tear apart every soul it found tonight in the search for answers if that was required.

Less than ten minutes after they picked up this new trail, the blade spied the group in the distance by a lantern that was swinging back and forth on the back of one of the wagons. They were riding and marching in a clustered, unhurried group, which would make this even better.

The orcs approached as fast and silently as they could, like a pack of wolves, but as soon as the blade spied the white heraldry of the Witchhunters, it changed the plan, and in a few grunts Var’gar relayed it to his fellows. “You take the ones on foot, but only after I make the bosses squeal.”

With those words, the giant orc separated from the rest of the group. The rest of them continued to keep pace a few hundred yards behind the last men in the line while Var’gar ran off in the night to attack from the flank. While the blade wanted all of them to die, what it wanted most was for the two men in white to perish even more than the mage they had with them. It understood how mages could hurt it, but it didn’t understand what these men were capable of, and somewhere, deep in the depths of its broken memory, it knew that they were to blame, at least in part, for its imprisonment.