08-12-2016, 11:18 AM
Shezalle twirled her dagger, examining the exposed throat as an artist might inspect a canvas. Then, quite suddenly, she stumbled backwards. Her daggers dropped to the floor with a clatter, and she looked down at her breast at the long bolt protruding from it. The assassin’s eyes were wide, and her mouth opened and closed several times as though in protest before she collapsed to her knees, and then down to the cold earth.
Goku managed to turn around, barely, able to make out the approaching group.
Juliet lowered the crossbow, and smoothly slid another bolt into place as Gabriel marched forwards with sword and shield at the ready. His face was thunderous, and he was doing a good job of hiding the extent to which the brutal injuries the dying assassin had inflicted upon him.
With the element of surprise turned against them, Drisnolu felt a shiver of fear run down her spine. Her nose was broken and her head throbbed, Phaetlara’s stave was broken, probably a few ribs as well, and their most infuriating sister lay dying. The drow considered the various ways she could proceed, and decided on that most noble of dark elf traditions.
Springing from her position, the Priestess grasped her sister and hauled the slight, bleeding woman over her shoulders before continuing to flee. Phaetlara groaned at the sight, managing to get up to her knees.
“You, chose her over me?”
Phaetlara actually sounded reproachful – but she knew when she was bested. Gabriel advanced on her with a grim set to his jaw, the tip of his sword resting on her forehead.
“Any last words before I send you to your foul Goddess?”
The woman looked up and sighed, her shoulders slumping. It seemed there was no way out of this for her. She could only hope that her sisters would return and claim revenge.
“I suppose it wouldn’t help to say that I surrender?”
Gabriel drew his sword-arm back.
“Indeed. I will make it quick—“
But before he could bring the blade down, there was a sudden weight grasping at his elbow, pulling him back. “What the devil?!”
“Don’t!” Goku shouted, clinging to his ally as strongly as he could – which, under the circumstances, was really more relying on the dead weight of his body more than anything else. “Don’t kill her! We don’t, have to!”
Gabriel pulled away, and Goku collapsed back to the dirt, only to grasp the Captain’s ankles.
“If we let her go, she’ll only come back stronger.” He said, “And if we bring her with us, we’re inviting the viper into our beds!”
Goku coughed, the strain he’d put on his body really make it hard to object, but he couldn’t let his friend kill this woman when she was completely helpless! “Maybe.” He said, “Or maybe she’ll start, being a better person. Let her go. Please.”
Gabriel couldn’t hide the disdain in his eyes at the heartfelt plea for clemency from the injured warrior below him. Still. Goku had risked his life to save his charge, and if he hadn’t, there was a good chance that they’d never have found Justin in time.
“How about it?” He asked the drow, letting his sword drift away from her neck. “If I let you go, are you going to hunt us down?”
The woman did her best to look imperious, raising her head – but the effect was somewhat undermined by the breathy, wheezing nature of her voice she had been reduced to after the rib-shattering blow that Goku had landed.
“They just, abandoned me, to die.” She hissed, “I hate you all, but do you seriously, think that I am predisposed to helping them any longer?”
Gabriel snorted, and his blade clicked back into his scabbard. “A fair enough point I suppose.” He conceded, “Don’t give me cause to regret this.”
The rest of the guards had formed up by this stage, and were now engaged in the busywork – freeing their captured comrades from the rope binding them in place, rousing them with smelling salts and getting them back to their feet. Leaning down, Gabriel slid an arm beneath Goku’s own, and with an effort managed to get the burned and beaten warrior back up to his feet. “You know, if you keep this up.” Gabriel chided, “I may lose faith in your ability to help us after all.”
Repelling the drow attack was as good a cause for celebration as any of them were likely to find in the immediate future, and that night the party made full use of the excuse to eat, drink and make merry with the last of the supplies from the crippled caravan. Taking it any further seemed implausible, and after eating enough dried meat to reconstitute an entire cow, Goku seemed in much brighter spirits.
Justin, for his part, was incredibly grateful to his rescuers. The poor man had only a faint idea as to the events which had transpired following his slide into the land of unconsciousness, but the drug-induced hallucinations coupled with snatched fragments of conversation made for a terrifying picture of the future if his comrades had not come to his rescue.
Juliet and Gabriel spoke long into the night about the drow and what they should be wary for in future. It was a depressingly long list. Drow were cunning opponents, and neither of them truly believed that they had seen the last of their shadowy assailants. Juliet was even more critical of Goku’s decision to spare Phaetlara than Gabriel had been, but that criticism just seemed to flow off Goku without ever touching him.
“You’d be surprised.” Was all he said on the subject, “Some of the worst enemies I’ve ever had have become my closest allies. You have to believe in people.”
“People, perhaps.” Fenchurch muttered darkly, “But what about drow?”
It was surprising to find Goku meditating when the sun rose, but there he was. There was no birdsong to greet the dawn in this grey and depressing part of the Verse, but Goku was there to witness it regardless. Sat cross-legged, he had taken the time to repair his clothing of the damage it had sustained, and had been working through the night on doing the same for his scorched form.
Omnilium was still largely a mystery to Goku, but the use of the strange energy to soothe his own injuries was rapidly becoming something with which he was disturbingly familiar. With one of those healing tanks he’d used on Namek, he was pretty sure he’d have been healed in an hour or two at the most… but he could achieve a similar enough effect just by concentrating hard on it and willing himself to heal.
‘Similar enough’ for a certain value of similar, of course. He’d been meditating for eight hours continuously when the sun rose, and the party began to stir around him. The aches and pains still lingered, but at least it wasn’t a constant battle to keep from crying out in pain. More importantly, he could also feel his saiyan heritage kicking in – every fight made him stronger, and if there was one thing he was certain of, it was that they were a long way from finished, and he was going to need a lot more strength if he was going to make good on his promise to keep them all safe.
“Hey, Goku, do you think you’ll be up to walking today?”
Fenchurch asked the cheerful question, and clapped the saiyan on the shoulder. In order to answer him, Goku leapt up to his feet, stretching his arms above his head, “You know, I think I just might be able to manage it!” He grinned, “What do you say guys? Time to hit the road, right?!”
The enthusiasm did not last.
Getting the group back on track was a good feeling, but the joy of that feeling was eclipsed somewhat by the fact that as they wandered across the dark and depressing moors, the overwhelming sensation was on how much further they needed to go. Justin’s attempts to lighten the mood by pointing out various landmarks was not really helping matters at all.
“And over there is the field where The Battle of the Great Spear took place, claiming the lives of a thousand men!”
The astronomer’s chipper tone did nothing at all to lighten the grisly heritage of the place. Perhaps surprisingly, nor did time make the disturbing atmosphere which permeated the Moors any less horrifying. Day turned to night, and back again, as the group of intrepid travellers made great strides in their quest to make it to the Black Gate.
Eventually, the group came into sight of their eventual goal, and even Goku was forced to admit that it was a breath-taking sight. It rose above the horizon, a dark stain against muted skies. The circular gate structure had an undeniably foreboding air about it, spiked and menacing in the most unsubtle way imaginable. Even from this distance, the scale of the battle that had once taken place on this blighted terrain was obvious.
The party made camp on a hill overlooking the broken and blood-stained terrain before them. Goku’s irrepressible good nature had taken something of a hit, with the uncountable amount of corpses scattered across the landscape making his earlier insistence on saving one life seem somehow quaint and pointless.
“What happened here?”
It was a question that nobody was surprised Goku wanted to ask, but nobody was truly prepared to answer. Clustered around the campfire, silence reigned for a few long, uncomfortable moments. It was Justin who finally broke it, as though it were his duty to do so.
“A great evil was defeated. This is the price.”
“It must have been some evil…”
The astronomer sighed softly, and closed his eyes – summoning up the memory of that clash as though he had actually been there. A battle that had been a victory, by all accounts, but, could anything ever feel like success when it came at such a steep cost?
“If we hadn’t done it, the whole Omniverse would have been doomed.” Gabriel said, dourly. “There are some things in this world which you can’t hope will redeem themselves, Goku. The monsters down there are some of them. I daresay we’ll see more before this business is done.”
Nobody liked to sleep so close to the bodies of the dead. The battlefield was steeped in blood, and it was impossible to shake the feeling that the living were being watched by a restless population of spirits. It seemed somehow obscene to continue to draw breath in the presence of so many stilled hearts and unseeing eyes. Still, as creepy as the surroundings were, it was necessary for everyone to rest up if they were going to make it across the terrain in good time.
When dawn broke, it revealed the true scale of the battle to Goku’s horrified eyes. He was a man who knew violence; he’d been in more fights than he could count, heck, he’d even beaten up armies in his day! But the brutality of this conflict was etched so deeply into the land that one couldn’t help but be aware of it. As far as the eye could see, corpses rotted – left to fester and bloat, as even the hardiest of scavengers were reluctant to come out to such a blighted, corrupted landscape.
“Once we’ve made it across these fields.” Justin said to his comrades, “We should at least be beyond the reach of the drow. No reports have ever seen them come out this far from Darkshire before. So, we can relax on that score at least.”
“Perhaps.” Gabriel murmured, “Or perhaps there are reasons why they don’t come out this far. It would be foolish to assume we’re safe in a place with so much death.”
Goku had seen creatures similar to the demons before; the brightly-coloured Oni of Hell chief amongst them, but he had rarely seen monsters who had been so clearly twisted towards nothing but violence. Even the Oni were really more amiable than menacing, and these creatures looked as though they had been specifically crafted purely to kill. They were more like the servants that King Piccolo had used than anything else he’d seen … but bigger, stronger.
Man, he would have loved to have been here when this battle was taking place! The sheer scale of it must have really been something! But it seemed incredibly disrespectful that all these bodies were just left lying around, as though their sacrifice didn’t even merit a proper burial.
The trek across the battlefield was tense, Goku’s fist clenched tight as the injustice of it worried at him. When they finally made it across the other side, he rounded on Gabriel, and jabbed his finger at the man’s breastplate – causing the Captain to stumble to a halt, a shocked expression on his features.
“You. These were your people, weren’t they?”
Gabriel’s surprise didn’t abate in the least.
“In… in a manner of speaking, I suppose you could say that.”
Goku shook his head, “When we get back to … wherever it is you guys are from, you need to tell people about this! They need to put these poor people to rest!”
Gabriel’s expression softened, understanding the concern. “They already know, Goku.” He said, “If they could do anything about it, do you think we’d have left them to rot?”
If anything, Goku’s voice got louder – protesting. “This isn’t right! There has to be something!”
“How?” The Captain interrupted, forcefully – but not angrily. “You’ve seen how far this is from the entrance to this world. You’ve seen the kinds of monsters and resistance we’d face. How do you propose we get enough people here to bury all these bodies? And is it really that much better if we bury them here? In this hell? Don’t be so naïve. It’d take thousand of men to transport them back to their home, and we’d be attacked every step of the way!”
Goku stumbled back a pace, as though struck. On the far side of the gate, the ground was much marshier. His boot sunk into the earth with a wet, sucking noise.
“Then I’ll find a way.”
The Captain smiled a thin little smile, “Stubborn. But if you can, I know a lot of people will be very grateful. For now though, come on, we’ve got a star to capture.”
The party continued to trudge onwards, the marshland providing a sharp contrast to the hard-packed earth which had made their journey seem relatively easy to date. Goku found himself looking back at the thousands of dead for a few more seconds, before he turned and joined his erstwhile allies.
They had to have Dragon Balls around here somewhere, right?
Goku managed to turn around, barely, able to make out the approaching group.
Juliet lowered the crossbow, and smoothly slid another bolt into place as Gabriel marched forwards with sword and shield at the ready. His face was thunderous, and he was doing a good job of hiding the extent to which the brutal injuries the dying assassin had inflicted upon him.
With the element of surprise turned against them, Drisnolu felt a shiver of fear run down her spine. Her nose was broken and her head throbbed, Phaetlara’s stave was broken, probably a few ribs as well, and their most infuriating sister lay dying. The drow considered the various ways she could proceed, and decided on that most noble of dark elf traditions.
Springing from her position, the Priestess grasped her sister and hauled the slight, bleeding woman over her shoulders before continuing to flee. Phaetlara groaned at the sight, managing to get up to her knees.
“You, chose her over me?”
Phaetlara actually sounded reproachful – but she knew when she was bested. Gabriel advanced on her with a grim set to his jaw, the tip of his sword resting on her forehead.
“Any last words before I send you to your foul Goddess?”
The woman looked up and sighed, her shoulders slumping. It seemed there was no way out of this for her. She could only hope that her sisters would return and claim revenge.
“I suppose it wouldn’t help to say that I surrender?”
Gabriel drew his sword-arm back.
“Indeed. I will make it quick—“
But before he could bring the blade down, there was a sudden weight grasping at his elbow, pulling him back. “What the devil?!”
“Don’t!” Goku shouted, clinging to his ally as strongly as he could – which, under the circumstances, was really more relying on the dead weight of his body more than anything else. “Don’t kill her! We don’t, have to!”
Gabriel pulled away, and Goku collapsed back to the dirt, only to grasp the Captain’s ankles.
“If we let her go, she’ll only come back stronger.” He said, “And if we bring her with us, we’re inviting the viper into our beds!”
Goku coughed, the strain he’d put on his body really make it hard to object, but he couldn’t let his friend kill this woman when she was completely helpless! “Maybe.” He said, “Or maybe she’ll start, being a better person. Let her go. Please.”
Gabriel couldn’t hide the disdain in his eyes at the heartfelt plea for clemency from the injured warrior below him. Still. Goku had risked his life to save his charge, and if he hadn’t, there was a good chance that they’d never have found Justin in time.
“How about it?” He asked the drow, letting his sword drift away from her neck. “If I let you go, are you going to hunt us down?”
The woman did her best to look imperious, raising her head – but the effect was somewhat undermined by the breathy, wheezing nature of her voice she had been reduced to after the rib-shattering blow that Goku had landed.
“They just, abandoned me, to die.” She hissed, “I hate you all, but do you seriously, think that I am predisposed to helping them any longer?”
Gabriel snorted, and his blade clicked back into his scabbard. “A fair enough point I suppose.” He conceded, “Don’t give me cause to regret this.”
The rest of the guards had formed up by this stage, and were now engaged in the busywork – freeing their captured comrades from the rope binding them in place, rousing them with smelling salts and getting them back to their feet. Leaning down, Gabriel slid an arm beneath Goku’s own, and with an effort managed to get the burned and beaten warrior back up to his feet. “You know, if you keep this up.” Gabriel chided, “I may lose faith in your ability to help us after all.”
Repelling the drow attack was as good a cause for celebration as any of them were likely to find in the immediate future, and that night the party made full use of the excuse to eat, drink and make merry with the last of the supplies from the crippled caravan. Taking it any further seemed implausible, and after eating enough dried meat to reconstitute an entire cow, Goku seemed in much brighter spirits.
Justin, for his part, was incredibly grateful to his rescuers. The poor man had only a faint idea as to the events which had transpired following his slide into the land of unconsciousness, but the drug-induced hallucinations coupled with snatched fragments of conversation made for a terrifying picture of the future if his comrades had not come to his rescue.
Juliet and Gabriel spoke long into the night about the drow and what they should be wary for in future. It was a depressingly long list. Drow were cunning opponents, and neither of them truly believed that they had seen the last of their shadowy assailants. Juliet was even more critical of Goku’s decision to spare Phaetlara than Gabriel had been, but that criticism just seemed to flow off Goku without ever touching him.
“You’d be surprised.” Was all he said on the subject, “Some of the worst enemies I’ve ever had have become my closest allies. You have to believe in people.”
“People, perhaps.” Fenchurch muttered darkly, “But what about drow?”
It was surprising to find Goku meditating when the sun rose, but there he was. There was no birdsong to greet the dawn in this grey and depressing part of the Verse, but Goku was there to witness it regardless. Sat cross-legged, he had taken the time to repair his clothing of the damage it had sustained, and had been working through the night on doing the same for his scorched form.
Omnilium was still largely a mystery to Goku, but the use of the strange energy to soothe his own injuries was rapidly becoming something with which he was disturbingly familiar. With one of those healing tanks he’d used on Namek, he was pretty sure he’d have been healed in an hour or two at the most… but he could achieve a similar enough effect just by concentrating hard on it and willing himself to heal.
‘Similar enough’ for a certain value of similar, of course. He’d been meditating for eight hours continuously when the sun rose, and the party began to stir around him. The aches and pains still lingered, but at least it wasn’t a constant battle to keep from crying out in pain. More importantly, he could also feel his saiyan heritage kicking in – every fight made him stronger, and if there was one thing he was certain of, it was that they were a long way from finished, and he was going to need a lot more strength if he was going to make good on his promise to keep them all safe.
“Hey, Goku, do you think you’ll be up to walking today?”
Fenchurch asked the cheerful question, and clapped the saiyan on the shoulder. In order to answer him, Goku leapt up to his feet, stretching his arms above his head, “You know, I think I just might be able to manage it!” He grinned, “What do you say guys? Time to hit the road, right?!”
The enthusiasm did not last.
Getting the group back on track was a good feeling, but the joy of that feeling was eclipsed somewhat by the fact that as they wandered across the dark and depressing moors, the overwhelming sensation was on how much further they needed to go. Justin’s attempts to lighten the mood by pointing out various landmarks was not really helping matters at all.
“And over there is the field where The Battle of the Great Spear took place, claiming the lives of a thousand men!”
The astronomer’s chipper tone did nothing at all to lighten the grisly heritage of the place. Perhaps surprisingly, nor did time make the disturbing atmosphere which permeated the Moors any less horrifying. Day turned to night, and back again, as the group of intrepid travellers made great strides in their quest to make it to the Black Gate.
Eventually, the group came into sight of their eventual goal, and even Goku was forced to admit that it was a breath-taking sight. It rose above the horizon, a dark stain against muted skies. The circular gate structure had an undeniably foreboding air about it, spiked and menacing in the most unsubtle way imaginable. Even from this distance, the scale of the battle that had once taken place on this blighted terrain was obvious.
The party made camp on a hill overlooking the broken and blood-stained terrain before them. Goku’s irrepressible good nature had taken something of a hit, with the uncountable amount of corpses scattered across the landscape making his earlier insistence on saving one life seem somehow quaint and pointless.
“What happened here?”
It was a question that nobody was surprised Goku wanted to ask, but nobody was truly prepared to answer. Clustered around the campfire, silence reigned for a few long, uncomfortable moments. It was Justin who finally broke it, as though it were his duty to do so.
“A great evil was defeated. This is the price.”
“It must have been some evil…”
The astronomer sighed softly, and closed his eyes – summoning up the memory of that clash as though he had actually been there. A battle that had been a victory, by all accounts, but, could anything ever feel like success when it came at such a steep cost?
“If we hadn’t done it, the whole Omniverse would have been doomed.” Gabriel said, dourly. “There are some things in this world which you can’t hope will redeem themselves, Goku. The monsters down there are some of them. I daresay we’ll see more before this business is done.”
Nobody liked to sleep so close to the bodies of the dead. The battlefield was steeped in blood, and it was impossible to shake the feeling that the living were being watched by a restless population of spirits. It seemed somehow obscene to continue to draw breath in the presence of so many stilled hearts and unseeing eyes. Still, as creepy as the surroundings were, it was necessary for everyone to rest up if they were going to make it across the terrain in good time.
When dawn broke, it revealed the true scale of the battle to Goku’s horrified eyes. He was a man who knew violence; he’d been in more fights than he could count, heck, he’d even beaten up armies in his day! But the brutality of this conflict was etched so deeply into the land that one couldn’t help but be aware of it. As far as the eye could see, corpses rotted – left to fester and bloat, as even the hardiest of scavengers were reluctant to come out to such a blighted, corrupted landscape.
“Once we’ve made it across these fields.” Justin said to his comrades, “We should at least be beyond the reach of the drow. No reports have ever seen them come out this far from Darkshire before. So, we can relax on that score at least.”
“Perhaps.” Gabriel murmured, “Or perhaps there are reasons why they don’t come out this far. It would be foolish to assume we’re safe in a place with so much death.”
Goku had seen creatures similar to the demons before; the brightly-coloured Oni of Hell chief amongst them, but he had rarely seen monsters who had been so clearly twisted towards nothing but violence. Even the Oni were really more amiable than menacing, and these creatures looked as though they had been specifically crafted purely to kill. They were more like the servants that King Piccolo had used than anything else he’d seen … but bigger, stronger.
Man, he would have loved to have been here when this battle was taking place! The sheer scale of it must have really been something! But it seemed incredibly disrespectful that all these bodies were just left lying around, as though their sacrifice didn’t even merit a proper burial.
The trek across the battlefield was tense, Goku’s fist clenched tight as the injustice of it worried at him. When they finally made it across the other side, he rounded on Gabriel, and jabbed his finger at the man’s breastplate – causing the Captain to stumble to a halt, a shocked expression on his features.
“You. These were your people, weren’t they?”
Gabriel’s surprise didn’t abate in the least.
“In… in a manner of speaking, I suppose you could say that.”
Goku shook his head, “When we get back to … wherever it is you guys are from, you need to tell people about this! They need to put these poor people to rest!”
Gabriel’s expression softened, understanding the concern. “They already know, Goku.” He said, “If they could do anything about it, do you think we’d have left them to rot?”
If anything, Goku’s voice got louder – protesting. “This isn’t right! There has to be something!”
“How?” The Captain interrupted, forcefully – but not angrily. “You’ve seen how far this is from the entrance to this world. You’ve seen the kinds of monsters and resistance we’d face. How do you propose we get enough people here to bury all these bodies? And is it really that much better if we bury them here? In this hell? Don’t be so naïve. It’d take thousand of men to transport them back to their home, and we’d be attacked every step of the way!”
Goku stumbled back a pace, as though struck. On the far side of the gate, the ground was much marshier. His boot sunk into the earth with a wet, sucking noise.
“Then I’ll find a way.”
The Captain smiled a thin little smile, “Stubborn. But if you can, I know a lot of people will be very grateful. For now though, come on, we’ve got a star to capture.”
The party continued to trudge onwards, the marshland providing a sharp contrast to the hard-packed earth which had made their journey seem relatively easy to date. Goku found himself looking back at the thousands of dead for a few more seconds, before he turned and joined his erstwhile allies.
They had to have Dragon Balls around here somewhere, right?
![[Image: x1oIYhu.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/x1oIYhu.jpg)