Deadtired

First, a false tunnel was collapsed under the feet of the frontmost line of enemy troops. It created a small ditch that they tripped into, one lined with jagged rocks and filled with a few scrambling undead.

The entire battleline juttered to a stop, and even from the wall she could hear sergeants screaming for order.

Then their undead had rushed out over their first wall and across the battlefield. They were intercepted, of course. Thousands of arrows rained down on the charge and the enemy cultivators unleashed dangerous techniques to wipe the charge out. Some of it still reached though, and they carved a dent into the enemy formation.

After that, the enemy pulled back and tried again.

This time, they approached in large rectangles. A few cultivators stationed with each formation to deter the rocks still being flung at them. This formation did better, crossing the field and reaching their first palisade wall.

The wall had gaps.

Fenfang hadn't been sure why Seventeen had left those, but she assumed the undead knew what he was doing, and it seemed like he did, because behind those gaps were a maze of walled off passages that split the enemy apart and pushed some deeper into their side and others away from any allies that could assist them.

The battle started anew, this time fought in much tighter quarters where the undead weren't going to be picked off by arrows from afar and where the long spears the enemy carried weren't nearly as useful.

Behind the first line of trenches and short palisade walls was another open space, then a second set.

The soldiers that eventually made it through tried to regroup in that open space, but they were prime targets for the undead archers who had moved back.

Fenfang wasn't sure where Seventeen had acquired explosives, but he had, and they were going off with regularity within the defences even as more soldiers were being pushed into the meat grinder.

The next row of defences were mostly made up of ditches with platforms and short towers above them and walls of dirt. Crossing these was basically impossible. The ditches were three times as deep as she was tall, and they crawled with undead at the bottom.

And so the army had pulled back for the moment to prepare.

She was reluctantly impressed by how quickly they took apart their first set of walls and built temporary bridges and ladders to cross the ditches, all while being pelted with arrows and stones larger than a grown man.

Her impressedness wore thin when the army pushed to try and cross the second line of defence.

The bridges weren't very sturdy. Any sort of ghostly undead could take them down from below, pitching the soldiers on the improvised siegeworks into the ditch where they never returned.

It was about this time that some cultivators decided to forge ahead. They could leap over the ditches without issue and they charged to strike at the large packs of undead archers arrayed before their final lines of defence.

Which was about when Seventeen sprung another trap. The mantis sisters.

The cultivators were not prepared to have to face dozens of ravenous, kill-hungry mantises that jumped off the walls of Yu Xiang, spread their surprisingly large wings, and came gliding down onto their formations scythe-arms first.

It was, almost a massacre. It would have been perfect if it had been one, but some more senior cultivators showed up, smacked some of the weaker sisters around, and rallied the rest into a fighting retreat just before some of their larger undead abominations reached them.

The cultivators retreating signalled the same for the rest of the soldiers, and there was a mass exodus as men hightailed it back to the ridge, encouraged by volleys of arrows and a few scampering undead who chased the stranglers down.

The battle ended with a field covered in corpses.

It seemed very impressive, and she noted that the people from the city watching it had been proud of the defence.

Seventeen was less so.

He confided in her that it hadn't been nearly enough. They'd barely decimated the enemy, and had lost a third of their weaker undead to do that. As it turned out, the average undead wasn't impressive compared to the average soldier, and even with proper defensive structures giving them a massive advantage, that disparity in strength was quite difficult to overcome.

Fortunately, the decimated enemy had left them with heaps of spare parts. By the time the sun rose again the next morning, their undead army was back to the same numbers it had had the day before, with an additional contingent of undead zombies in the enemy's colours stationed right at the front.

The enemy returned with better siege equipment. They set up their own ballista and catapults, mobile towers, and long bridges with cart wheels on the sides. They were ready this time.

The Second Battle of Yu Xiang was underway even now, and Fenfang was very much worried that she'd become a historical footnote.

Maybe they'd call her the 'week long empress?'

Wait, no, she'd need to last a couple more days for that. Damn.

Things were a little bit dire. Moreso because the enemy wasn't turning tail and running. She suspected that Seventeen was the blame for that. The constant whittling of the enemy's forces on the road, the attacks, had basically told them that if they ran, they'd be hounded the whole time.

Now the soldiers down below knew that they'd either win here, or die trying, and it was really giving them a lot of extra pep.

She looked at her nails, searching for something to chew on, but she found nothing.

"Master... where are you?"

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Chapter Forty-Five — Cultivator's Collapse

Chapter Forty-Five — Cultivator's Collapse

Things went from not so great to definitely worse the moment the cultivators leading the enemy army remembered where they were from.

Fenfang was almost ready to start chewing on her knuckles when a rain started from nowhere.

This was the far eastern reach of the Flaming Steppes. It didn't rain here. Not outside of a few seasons every year, and even then, when it rained it was supposed to come down in massive storms from the south.

This rain was a light pitter-patter. Something she would have expected in a more temperate part of the Empire. A quick cast of Detect Magic was enough to let her know that it wasn't natural. She didn't have her Master's ability to tell what kind of spell was cast by the glint of a raindrop in the air, but she knew enough to tell that there was something magical creating this rain.

And then the reason for it became clear, and she was glad for the rain. It hid her desperate tears well.

The ditches that Seventeen had painstakingly laid out as fortifications outside of the city weren't designed to last more than a season. They were definitely not meant to endure any amount of rainfall.

The undead were soon splashing around in ankle-deep water. Not enough to truly slow them down, but it was going to turn into mud and she could already see some parts of the ditch walls threatening to sag as the first hours of constant rainfall continued.

They weren't done, either.

The army pulled up to the first set of exterior walls, then simply... occupied them. A few cultivators sat on the walls and shot down any approaching artillery from their trebuchets, and the army itself gathered into tight formations covered by the wall.

She was starting to wonder what they were up to when a misty fog rolled in. It slowly crept down the hillside towards the valley next to Yu Xiang. Everything it covered disappeared under a thin white veil.

The undead army continued to fling rocks over and at the wall, but Seventeen called a halt and pulled all of the bow-skeletons back to the wall. By the time they'd climbed up, they had mud up to their hip bones.

The undead below were in a worse state. The ground was getting trampled as they moved around, sloshing mud about. Most of the undead didn't have boots on, and their skeletal feet tended to sink into the mud. The undead didn't normally weigh much, but theirs were armed and armoured, and they weren't buoyant.

The army's next push came suddenly. The wall collapsed explosively in a few places, and soldiers rushed through the gaps.

Makeshift bridges were laid out over the ditches, and the undead below could barely react as they were stuck in the mud and muck. The fog rolled forwards as well, somehow hanging above the army without hiding their own feet.

Seventeen barked orders and the undead army shifted and moved. It was quick, the orders were sensible, and they took a hefty toll on the enemy soldiers. But it wasn't enough to stop the full brunt of the push.

The mantises were ordered forwards, and they leapt off the wall and into the fog. She couldn't see how well they were doing, but the surprised screams of men below suggested that the fog turned them into true nightmares to fight.

Still, now they couldn't help each other as readily and they couldn't pick off cultivators.

Seventeen relayed another order, a final one. The ground shook and the air trembled as massive, hulking undead were let loose for the first time since the war began. These were the same massive monsters that had done so much in the battle that let her conquer Yu Xiang to begin with.

They were the equal to an entire platoon of enemies, and could lay waste to lesser cultivators with impunity... if they could find them.

The undead charged forwards and their roars were swallowed by the thickening fog.

Sometimes a cultivator went down. It was obvious by the way the fog cleared in some spaces. That allowed the archers on the wall to fire down with greater accuracy, but the gaps were quickly covered.

"Ma'am," Seventeen said. "It seems as though we may be losing."

"I see that," she said.

"We will have to retreat into the city and invite the enemy within. The streets will give us many avenues, heh, to attack from different angles. And we have a multitude of traps waiting for the adversary to run into." Seventeen adjusted his tie. "We will bleed them for every street they take."

She understood, logically, that the battle wasn't lost until one side was wiped out or the other surrendered. The undead didn't have as many worries about morale as the human army. They'd fight to the last.

She wasn't sure if she'd be the last, however.

"Mem thinks it's time to go? Mem's sisters are having lots of fun, but Mem thinks maybe we won't have as much if we stay up here," Mem said with a wiggle of her scythe arms.

She had a point, Fenfang conceded. "Alright, let's-"

A man landed on the parapet a few necrometres away, then two more appeared next to him. They wore the silky blue robes of Mist Gate cultivators, and the air around them swirled with foggy condensation.

"There you are, heathen," the oldest among them said.

She raised a hand and cast. It came out faster than she'd ever managed it during her practice. First, a quick "Prestidigitation!"

The air between them filled with crackles and sparks, electric snaps that flew towards the cultivators. All three disappeared and reappeared on the wall, avoiding the illusion entirely.

"Eldritch Blast!" she shouted next even as she split her focus three ways.

Three jagged bolts of necrotic-feeling energy zipped out towards the cultivators.

Two sidestepped them with ease. The third lanced into one of the younger cultivator's arms and he hissed.

"Kill her!" their leader snapped before he rushed forwards.

Seventeen stepped up to intercept, but he was just one lone skeleton. The cultivator he faced tried to bat him aside only for his attack to meet a hastily cast shield. Then Seventeen was up close and personal, casting necrotic spells faster than Fenfang could think of their names.

The other was coming right for her.

Mem sliced the air, but the cultivator ducked under her cut, then bounced up, only gaining speed as she shot towards her.

She raised her arms to protect her face, the last thing she saw was a glowing knife being levelled at her heart before her eye squeezed shut.

It stabbed her with a dull gong.

Only... she didn't feel any pain. And on further consideration, she was pretty sure stabbing didn't make gonging noises.

Fenfang carefully opened her eyes to discover a wall of steel held just before her. An arm, fitted through well-tended leather straps, was holding that wall in place. A shield?

She looked up, and into the helmeted face of a knight. A proper knight, one who wore shining armour that was resplendent and glowing. The constant rain washed over polished steel that reflected the cold grey of the skies above.

"Pardon me, young Empress," the knight said with a voice that could have enraptured a crowd by reading a dictionary. "But it seems as though these men have ill-intent towards you."

"Um," she managed to articulate.

Fenfang fell back a little, coincidentally pressing her back into his chestpiece. He was quite tall, she noted.

Another knight stepped around them, then immediately engaged with the cultivator that had almost killed her. In moments, he was fending off both the older cultivator, and the one she'd managed to injure slightly while Seventeen held his own.

She twisted around, then looked down the side of the wall and immediately noted two things.

First, there was a large portal open next to the gate into the city, one from which a small army of undead were pouring. These undead wore uniforms, and were all armed identically.

More impressively, there were several more knights down below, as well as some tall undead in... butler's uniforms? Oftentimes those uniforms had armoured segments to them, as though they couldn't decide what to wear.

These undead moved with grace and finality. They immediately reminded her of Alex, though they didn't quite attack with the same level of acrobaticness and instead relied on brute strength and was looked like devastatingly overpowered necromantic spells.

The tides were turning, hard.

"Who... who are you?" she asked her saviour.

It didn't go amiss to her that this was very much a scene out of some of her more... interesting and romantic reads.

The knight stood tall, then removed his helmet.

She expected long, luxurious hair and a handsome chin.

Instead she received melted flesh and bald spots. "I am Sir Cophagus, my lady, Death Butler. At your service."

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Chapter Forty-Six — Masterful Moment

Chapter Forty-Six — Masterful Moment

I was eyeing the battlefield when I heard a familiar voice call out to me. "Master!"