Two hundred thousand, or thereabouts. It was Lilia’s record.

  Not that she’d been counting much, recently. These days- these centuries- she’d been laying low. It was a good habit to get into, she’d found. Keep one’s power to oneself, and it would always surprise others. Particularly one’s enemies. And the greater that power happened to be, the more tempting it was to unleash upon the world at any given moment, the greater the surprise would come from it.

  Well, two hundred thousand enemies enthralled within a single word was a greater surprise than she’d been banking on. One hundred and eighty would have sufficed, the extra twenty thousand was just a nice bonus.

  There weren’t many battle plans that withstood contact with the enemy. None, however, survived contact with one fourth of the army they had been made for suddenly turned into frenzied berserkers and thrown backwards into their own allies. On another day Lilia would have preferred to save the move for a more opportune moment, to dismantle the enemy’s organisation right before an offensive.

  But there would be no offensives today, not from her side. She was hardly surprised. Vampires were ever out-numbered when they came into conflict, and if anything five to one odds was a damn sight closer than she was used to handling.

  A twinge of fatigue caught her, and Lilia had to fight for a moment to retain her focus. Two hundred thousand. It was the very pinnacle of her power’s limitations, and she was feeling it more with each second that passed.

  Lilia was well accustomed to the pull of magic leaching from her reserves. She steeled herself, focused her will, and sent the enemy against itself. Two hundred thousand smashed into over a million like twin earthquakes meeting, and she actually thought she could see the moment both sides came into contact from the shaking of the air.

  It was an illusion of course, and though the fight looked balanced from her angle she knew better than to expect anything but what came next. Her controlled enemies- some human, many lesser undead- were simply torn to bloody scraps as they fed themselves into the meatgrinder of their own army. Lilia was careful to march them quickly, making the most of her limited period of control.

  An army that size- or a force that size in any case- could have held against the remaining eight hundred thousand invaders for ten, twenty minutes. With a suitably picked position and strong command, even close to an hour. But Lilia didn’t want them to hold. She couldn’t want them to hold, as she lacked the ability to control them for that long. What she needed was damage, as much as possible. So she sent her enthralled enemies into the rest as great jagged clubs, whipped them into a mindless, savage frenzy and watched as they killed indiscriminately.

  Their fellows were surprised, briefly. And that went a long way in maximising the carnage she unleashed. Within minutes the numerous lights of her magical control had been extinguished however.

  It was impossible to gauge the remaining numbers, but Lilia could only hope they’d killed a good hundred thousand or more before falling.

  ***

  Perhaps, Galukar thought, it would be a good idea for him to look into learning magic. It was an impossible thought to avoid, seeing the Vampire lay waste to so many thousands with nothing but a thought.

  A smile caught his face, as he leapt down over the battlements. Fat chance of that. Galukar wasn’t a young enough man to run around learning new skills, certainly not of that magnitude. He was stuck with power and a nice big sword.

  But then, that had always served him well in the past.

  Undead, many of them. Uncountably many. Galukar smashed into their ranks like an avalanche and swung once. He cleared a space out everywhere within eight feet of himself as bodies came apart, but it was filled up within a second.

  So he swung again, and again, and again. They were nothing, these creatures, mere space-holders. If he could reliably fight nothing but them then he could slaughter each one of their million-strong army without any help at all.

  But of course, he couldn’t.

  A Fomori reared up, half again his own height and three times his weight. Its body was a forest of barbed limbs whipping around, deflecting from the Godblade, missing Galukar’s dodges, splitting nearby undead fully in half as they overshot their target and stopped too slowly. He took a moment to read the thing’s tempo, then struck. Two arms came free with one swing, a third with the second. Galukar’s final attack had no limbs to interrupt it and sank in deep through the torso, then erupted from its back. He flicked his elbow, cutting the creature in half as he freed his weapon.

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  Blood coated him, his enemies, the floor. More came. Galukar swung at them like the rest.

  It wasn’t his goal to personally kill every single enemy attacking the camps- that would have been impossible even for him. Merely to force a conflict. If the enemy knew the legendary King Galukar was going on a rampage at their centre, they would concentrate units there to kill him.

  Which would slow them down in redirecting those same units to encircle the camps, buy time before that happened. More time meant more arrows spat into their ranks, more stones dropped onto their heads, more of Shaiagrazni’s cannons belching fire and death to punch jagged holes into them. Time, now, was a commodity more precious than gold.

  More precious than blood.

  Fomori came in from all sides now, as expected, and Galukar jumped. He didn’t land for close to ten seconds, hitting the ground like a falling star, impacting with such force that he actually saw the air shimmer as a concussive wave maimed and floored everything within paces of him. Then he was moving again, spinning, swinging. His sword was an arc of destruction; a farmer’s scythe. Around him were not enemies, but crops. Galukar was quick in his harvest.

  He had no way of knowing how many he killed, by the time he’d counted the corpses made by any single swing he’d already completed two, even three more. Dozens died with each attack, that much he knew. And still they were galvanising.

  Just as planned.

  Then he glimpsed him, and his heart felt suddenly close to bursting. Tall, taller than Galukar, and clad from head to toe in black metal. He wielded a flanged mace, its shaft long enough to be gripped with two hands, and his body burned with arcane power so dense that it was hitting the air as visible light. The Dark Lord.

  The killer of Galukar’s sons, just a few dozen paces away and staring at him. A roar escaped Galukar and his destruction doubled in speed as he hacked a path towards the caster, all semblance of strategy purged from his mind by the sudden, irresistible killing need that was washing his thoughts.

  Galukar forgot about how their last bout had ended, forgot he was standing within a few hundred yards of a Vampire more powerful even than himself, forgot everything in the world save the Dark Lord, what he’d done, and how he had to die.

  ***

  Some part of Collin felt ever so slightly inadequate, at the sudden, cataclysmic shift which befell the battlefield as Lilia turned her will on the enemy.

  He ignored that part of him, and stamped it underfoot. Such feelings were far too impractical for a warrior- let alone a General- and it was virtually impossible to even give them any true consideration next to the weight of relief washing over him. He’d always been good at counting, one had to be for any future in command, and as far as he could tell there were around two hundred thousand undead being conducted backwards into their own side.

  That wasn’t everything- only a fraction of their true numbers. But it was one hell of a fraction. It was a chance.

  “COME ON!” He roared. “THEY WON’T LAST LONG, THIS IS OUR ONLY CHANCE TO HELP!”

  Soldiers were brilliant, really. With normal men Collin might have had to give them a reason to charge into the mouth of death, not with soldiers. Whether Paladins, pikemen, Kaltans or Rangers they were all the same. None of them needed telling twice, and all barely even needed telling the once. They had an enemy, they had an order, they had weapons and a defensible position which was nice and short of suicidal to try and hold.

  And they had an opportunity to do some damage. They all rushed off like the glorious, near-suicidal bastards they were, carriages tearing down to pour in through the back off the warcamps and let them disembark within.

  ***

  King Galukar hit the wall.

  He’d been a full hundred yards ahead of it, and it surprised even Lilia to see the speed with which he was thrown. Crossing that span in under a second, the King smashed into the solid construct hard enough to send blocks of splintered bone spinning away from the impact even as he himself hurtled over it and disappeared on the other side. The Godblade fell down after him.

  One hit, that’s all the Dark Lord had needed to turn away the greatest warrior humanity had ever produced. She smiled, as always, and felt a stab of genuine fear touch her unbeating heart.

  She couldn’t have done that. And neither could her Sire.

  A pack of Fomori came for her, charging in one cluster, evidently eager to tear her apart lest she unleash more of the power from before. She didn’t, but there was plenty of other magics Lilia had at her disposal.

  Fomori were undead, but they had the trappings of living creatures. They held blood in their bodies. Lilia boiled this blood, instantly and with a single thought, in all three at once. She added her magic to the natural pressure of liquid so quickly turned to gas, and watched as four towering bodies erupted to tiny slivers of pulverised meat.

  A bit got on her shoes, because it was just that sort of day.

  From the corner of her eye, Lilia caught the Dark Lord’s metal-masked face turned towards her. His head tilted in thought, then, with a gesture so slight she almost missed it even with her preternatural senses, he directed his creatures towards her in force. A moment later, he was striding across the battlefield behind them.

  It seemed he had recognised her as the true threat. Just perfect.

  Undead came so fast, they actually started forming mounds, physical piles that moved and shifted towards Lilia almost like they were falling. She blew them apart, of course. Contemptuously. Not even looking as she felt for the blood lying dead in their veins and dragged it out by force, then turning it into a hundred thousand razored flechettes that she sent scything through the rest of the horde all while staring at the Dark Lord head on.

  Which of them was the stronger? Him, clearly and without question. Which meant she had every reason to leave him as uncertain of that fact as was possible, and confidence seemed the most obvious first step to doing so.

  Lilia was almost convinced she might have fooled the caster, and then the Demons erupted from all around him.