THE KING OF NOTHING

  Chapter X: The Tide of Iron and Bone

  The watchtower was no longer a refuge. It was the prow of a sinking ship, offering only a privileged view of the total wreckage. The air up there was a vortex of hot ash and shattered sounds.

  Above, the sky itself seemed wounded. The moon, that pale, cold witness to all human misery, was sick. Its silver light had been devoured, replaced by a violent, pulsating crimson glare, the reflection of the thousand fires burning in Oskara like candles on the altar of a god of carnage. Under that blood-tinged light, the capital was not a city; it was a giant white skull being devoured by worms of shadow moving through its streets, its squares, its guts.

  From the rusty battlements, the scale of the collapse was so absolute the mind struggled to comprehend it. The great outer wall, that pharaonic work of stone and arrogance that had promised eternal safety, no longer existed as a barrier. It had been broken. Not with a clean, strategic breach, but with an obscene tear, as if a giant hand had ripped out an entire section. The stone wept dust and rubble, and through that open wound in the city's side, the grey tide was pouring in, an unstoppable flow drowning the lights of windows, the screams of the living, street by street, block by block, with the relentless slowness of a flood of molten lead.

  The air was unbreathable. It didn't just smell of burning wood and straw. It smelled of copper—the sweetish metal of freshly spilled blood—of entrails opened to the cold air, of bile and the excrement of terror. It was a thick, sticky atmosphere that clung to the throat and coated the tongue with the persistent taste of ash and despair.

  Below, in the poor districts near the wall, the chaos was a painting in motion coming to life. People didn't run; they writhed, an organism in total panic. A dense, moaning human mass tried to flee south, towards gates that must already be choked or sealed, creating a plug of trembling flesh on the main avenues. From above, you could see the points where the mass compacted: small spasms where someone fell, and those behind, blind with terror, trampled them without stopping, turning their neighbors into a new pavement of broken bones and bruised flesh long before the monsters could even touch them.

  And the monsters... the monsters advanced. Not with the disordered fury of wild beasts, but with the silent, lethal discipline of an infection. Vael, from the height, watched with hawk's eyes as a line of Imperial spearmen, their scarlet uniforms torn, tried to hold an improvised barricade at an intersection. They held formation for three glorious seconds. On the fourth, they were submerged. The first-row Undead didn't use weapons; they used their bodies. They threw themselves directly onto the spear points, impaling themselves, immobilizing the weapons with their dead weight, so the second and third rows could literally walk over their freshly created corpses, vaulting the barricade as if it were a step. It was a tactic of horrible, economical logic: a carpet of dead flesh paving the way for more dead flesh.

  —Down —said Irina. Her voice sounded distant, metallic, small and echoless against the magnitude of the unfolding disaster. There were no heroic speeches, no calls to arms. Just the dry, practical order of someone who knows, in her bones and her scars, that staying still, watching, is to die another way, slower but just as final.

  They descended the spiral stairs, the sound of their boots hitting the worn stone lost in the din from outside, a roar composed of screams, clashes of metal, cracks of wood, and that continuous, guttural low emitted by the grey tide.

  Stepping into the street, the perspective changed brutally. The horror stopped being an abstract map, a distant image. It became a physical, visceral reality that spattered your face with warm blood, filled your lungs with thick smoke, and battered your ears with the nearby sound of bones breaking.

  The Northern District, the closest to the breach, was an inferno. The wood and plaster houses, packed like rotten teeth, were burning. They didn't burn with clean flames; they crackled, buckled, collapsed with the groans of dying beasts, spitting rains of sparks that ignited new pyres on the thatched roofs. The blood here didn't run in streams; it pooled in black, shiny puddles between the cobblestones. The white cobblestones of Oskara, the city's pride, were now blackened by soot, reddened by blood, and slippery from a mixture of unnameable fluids.

  The trio moved through the massacre like three shadows in a fire, a nucleus of purpose amid the absolute chaos.

  Irina took point, her new Toledo longsword, now blackened before even touching an enemy, was a flash of cold mercy. An Undead, its face a mask of hunger with red eyes, lunged from under a low roof, screeching a sound that was more forced air than a scream. Irina didn't stop to observe. She pivoted on her heels, a fluid movement coming from the hip, and traced an ascending arc with the long blade. The perfectly tempered steel split the creature's torso from hip to opposite shoulder in a silent burst of black, rotten viscera that spattered her boots and the ground around her. She kept walking, without looking back.

  Vael covered the rear, his new black leather and dark plate armor making him look like a shadow with legs. His face, illuminated by the flashes of the fires, had a half-smile drawn on it, almost imperceptible, a mask of absurd calm in the eye of the hurricane. It wasn't the fool's smile. It was the smile of a spectator at a particularly violent and predictable play.

  An Undead, half-dismembered, tried to grab his leg from an open sewer grate, its bony fingers scratching the leather. Vael simply took a lateral step, an economical movement that dodged the claw by a centimeter, and without stopping his advance, drove his short spear into the monster's ear with a wet, satisfying crunch. The creature collapsed.

  Another, more intact, jumped at him from behind an overturned cart, its mouth open in a silent yawn of yellow teeth. Vael whistled low, a sound of annoyance, and ducked at the last instant, letting the creature pass over him. As it passed, he drove the spear tip into its lower abdomen and, using the momentum of the monster's leap, opened it like a fish, letting its entrails spill onto the cobblestones in a steaming heap.

  —Oops —murmured Vael, shaking the thick, black blood from his weapon—. That was… graphic.

  They joined, almost by accident, a group of mercenaries and city guards trying to keep a square open as an evacuation point. The combat here became a suffocating melee, a knot of living and dead bodies fighting for breath, for space, for one more second of life. The air was a soup of blood-steam, sweat, and screams.

  Then, the right flank of the square, the most pressured, opened up. Not by the defenders' retreat, but by a force coming from within the enemy tide.

  A whirlwind of bronze and steel was tearing the Undead apart from the inside out.

  It was Yoel.

  The Captain was fighting on foot, his bronze armor now almost black from foreign blood and soot, a figure of indomitable legend under the red, flickering light. And he laughed. He laughed with great, booming guffaws that cut through the din like knives.

  —Hahaha! Come! Keep coming! —roared Yoel, dodging a clumsy axe-chop and slicing the attacker's arm off with a stroke so clean the limb spun in the air before falling—. My sword is thirsty and my shield, hungry for more blows! I won't stop until this square is clean!

  It was pure brutality, but not uncontrolled. It was the brutality of a craft taken to the level of art. Yoel spun in the center of the circle his enemies opened for him, struck with the reinforced edge of his silver shield (now dented and stained) shattering jaws and crushing skulls, and cut again with his curved sword, which traced arcs of bloodied silver in the air. He moved through death with the familiarity of an old friend visiting a familiar neighborhood, greeting each corner with a lethal gesture.

  Clearing a path with blows and laughter, Yoel reached where they were fighting, cleaning his curved blade with a strip of cloak torn from a nearby corpse. He pushed up his helmet's visor with his free hand. His grey eyes, bloodshot but gleaming with an almost manic energy, scanned them.

  —Oh? —Yoel blinked, as if recognizing them from a high-society party—. Hello, how are you? Irina, Vael, little Vane. What an unexpected joy to see living faces and not just faces that want to kill me or be killed by me.

  —Captain! —shouted Irina, surprised but with a wave of irrational relief at seeing an authority, any authority, in the middle of hell—. I thought… we had lost you at the barracks.

  —Almost. They gave me a very insistent invitation to a High Command meeting. —Yoel smiled, showing blood-stained teeth—. I politely declined. With punches. I'm a tough bone to crack, and harder to chew. —His smile faded a little—. Though I fear this little reunion of old friends will be short. The host has brought more guests than expected.

  The ground shook. It wasn't the distant vibration of an impact. This one was close, deep, as if the earth itself were flinching.

  The buildings on the other side of the square, already damaged, groaned. An entire brick wall of a granary exploded outward, not from fire, but from a massive impact from within. A cloud of dust, plaster, and splinters rose, and from it emerged three figures.

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  Three Laughing Men.

  They weren't like the one in the basement, mutilated and buried. These were intact. Towers of grey muscle and tendons like cables, with plates of rusted, twisted metal embedded directly into their flesh like a self-aware armor of torture. One dragged a black, notched greatsword; another, a spiked club the size of a log; the third, a double-bladed axe as wide as a shield. They advanced with steps that made loose cobblestones jump.

  —Good —said Yoel, cracking the bones of his neck with a sideways motion. His smile returned, fiercer than ever—. More fuel for the fire. I was getting bored of the rabble.

  The combat, already chaotic, broke into three desperate, monumental duels, each a battle within the battle.

  Yoel against the First Laughing Man (The Greatsword):

  The Captain charged head-on, without subtlety. He struck the edge of his shield against the metal of his sword, creating a metallic clang that resonated like a challenge.

  —Over here, ugly! I've got a gift for you!

  The Laughing Man with the greatsword turned its armored head towards him. Without haste, like a master blacksmith lifting a hammer, it raised its black weapon over its head and let it fall. It wasn't a blow; it was a geological event. The air split with a terrifying whistle.

  Yoel didn't dodge. He raised his silver shield, but not straight. He tilted it at a perfect angle, calculated to the millimeter, so the force of the blow was not absorbed, but deflected.

  CLANG!

  The sound wasn't metal against metal. It was the sound of a giant bell being struck by a meteorite. The shockwave made the teeth of everyone in the square vibrate. Yoel wasn't crushed, but the impact was monstrous. His boots, planted in the ground, sank up to the ankles in the cobblestones, and he was dragged two meters back, leaving two deep furrows in the stone and earth.

  —Heavy, huh! —grunted Yoel, spitting a mouthful of blood from the impact that had shaken his internal organs—. But not very bright!

  The Laughing Man, unfazed by the defense, gave no respite. It recovered the greatsword with obscene ease and launched a backhanded horizontal sweep, a swipe that covered half the square. Yoel had to duck until he almost touched the ground, feeling the wind of the weapon pass overhead, cutting some loose hairs and raising a cloud of dust. He seized the opening, the instant the giant regained its balance, and lunged forward with a guttural shout, launching a lateral slash at the monster's exposed ribs.

  His curved sword, sharp as the edge of winter, tore the grey, leather-hard skin, and met the dense, abnormally thick bone with a dry chunk. The monster didn't even flinch. With a movement quick for its size, it withdrew the greatsword and responded with a front kick, low and bestial.

  Yoel, too close, couldn't avoid it completely. The blow caught him in the side, where the bronze armor was most dented. The air left his lungs with an audible whoof. He flew through the air, spinning gracelessly, and crashed into a pile of empty barrels, shattering them. He got up staggering, with the armor now clearly deformed on the left flank, a sharp pain stabbing his side.

  —Tough to crack, eh? —he said, wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his gloved hand. His grey eyes gleamed with a feverish light—. I like it. More satisfying.

  The monster charged again, this time with the greatsword in a diagonal downward blow meant to split him in two. Yoel didn't block this time. He waited. Until the last second, until the shadow of the weapon completely covered him. Then he rolled forward, not backward, passing between the giant's legs like a salamander. He rose up right behind it, with a war cry that was more rage than breath, and brought his curved sword down with all the force of his body and his fall onto the forearm holding the greatsword.

  The steel bit deep this time. It cut muscle, tendon, and found the ulna bone with a dry crack. It didn't sever it completely, but the Laughing Man's arm hung useless, the greatsword falling from its inert fingers with a crash.

  The beast roared, a sound of bestial frustration and pain that resonated in the bones. It tried to grab Yoel with its other hand, but the Captain was already in motion. He spun on himself, gaining momentum, and launched a brutal slash, almost a chop, at the back of the giant's left knee.

  The hamstring gave way. The giant fell onto that knee, unbalanced, roaring now with agony and impotent fury.

  Yoel didn't wait. With an agility that belied his heavy armor and wounds, he jumped onto the arched back of the fallen monster, grabbing onto one of the embedded metal plates.

  —Goodnight, nightmare! —he shouted, and with a two-handed downward blow, putting all his weight on the blade, he beheaded the Laughing Man.

  The huge head, with its black visor still welded on, rolled on the ground with a hollow sound, cleanly separated from the neck, while the body, after a final spasm, collapsed onto its side, inert, a mountain of dead meat.

  Elara and Vael against the Second Laughing Man (The Club):

  To the right, Elara saw the second giant, the one with the spiked club, advancing towards them, sweeping aside a barricade of carts with a single swing. She remembered the basement. She remembered the power, not as a burst of fear, but as a tool she now felt, hot and vibrant, in the marrow of her bones.

  —Back! Give me space! —she shouted, her voice firm, charged with a new authority.

  Her sword, the straight blade of House Vane, glowed not with a flash, but with a concentrated, blinding light that pooled along the edge like liquid mercury. She didn't wait for the monster to attack. With a cry of controlled effort, she unleashed a lightning bolt, not a wild arc, but a thin, lethal beam, straight at the Laughing Man's right shoulder, the muscle holding the giant club.

  The impact was devastating. The flesh and tendon didn't burn; they vaporized in a cloud of red and black steam. The Laughing Man's right arm, from the shoulder down, along with the club, detached from the body and fell to the ground with a dull thud that shook the earth. The stump was left smoking, instantly cauterized, without blood.

  The monster roared, a sound of pure surprise and pain, staggering from the loss of mass and balance.

  —I've got it! —shouted Elara, filled with an electric confidence. She charged her sword again, feeling the energy accumulate, faster, more obedient. She aimed at the giant's unprotected skull, which was spinning wildly, seeking the cause of its mutilation—. This time I won't miss! Die!

  She unleashed the second bolt, an even finer and faster beam.

  But the monster, despite its size and the shock, learned. Or something within it, some rudimentary intelligence or perverted survival instinct, reacted. Seeing the flash at the edge of its vision, it jerked its torso sharply to the left, using its mass as a shield.

  Elara's bolt whistled past a millimeter from its skull, burning only empty air and striking the stone facade of a house twenty meters away, where it opened a smoking crater the size of a head.

  Elara froze, the sword still smoking in her hands, the confidence turning to ice in her veins.

  ?It dodged…?, she thought, terror rising in her throat like acid. ?It's not just brute force. They know. They know what light is. They fear it… or they learn to avoid it.?

  The Laughing Man, now one-armed and roaring with pain and rage, didn't retreat. The loss seemed to fuel its fury. It charged, not with the club (non-existent), but with the very momentum of its giant body, using itself as a living battering ram. Elara had to run, rolling across the debris- and corpse-covered ground, while the monster smashed a wooden cart where she had been a second before, reducing it to splinters.

  —Vael! —she screamed, desperate, unleashing a quick, broad flash, not to damage, but to blind. The flash of white light illuminated the square for an instant.

  The giant simply closed its eyes, an animal reflex, and kept advancing blindly, guided by the smell of blood, of fear, of her.

  Vael appeared on the monster's blind flank, slipping from the shadows like a ghost. He wasn't panting. He wasn't shouting. He leaned on the spear shaft with obscene calm, like a tired traveler on his staff.

  —Oh —said Vael, his voice soft, almost tender, amidst the din—. Easy, friend. Let me help you.

  With a jerk, he pushed the spear forward, driving it deeper into the giant's brain, and then pulled it out with a sharp, quick tug.

  The Laughing Man's body, after a final spasm that shook its massive limbs, fell heavily onto its side with a sound like a felled tree, raising a cloud of dust and blood.

  Where the spear had been, a perfect, round, dark hole remained, through the frontal skull. A tunnel of death.

  Through that bloody hole, Irina's good eye, clearing slowly, met Vael's.

  He was there, framed by the monster's death, the giant body like a macabre altar behind him. The light of the fires danced on his silhouette. And he smiled at her. It wasn't the broad, foolish smile of the recruit. It was a small, private, almost intimate smile that held nothing innocent. It was the smile of a shared secret, of recognition in the abyss.

  Vael stepped over the still-warm corpse, his boots avoiding the puddles of black fluids with casual elegance. He crouched in front of Irina, who lay in the mud, trembling from shock and pain, watching the scene with an incredulity that surpassed horror.

  He extended his hand. His fingers, long and slender, now stained with monster's black blood and human red, approached. Not to help her up. They touched her wounded cheek softly, just below the cut that still bled. With his thumb, he wiped a thick drop of blood approaching the corner of her mouth. Then, almost playfully, his fingers tangled for a moment in a strand of her golden hair, now dirty, matted, and stuck to her sweaty neck.

  —Are you alright? —Vael whispered, his voice a caress of silk over the broken glass of the battle sounds—. For a moment… I worried.

  He brought his face a little closer to hers, until she could see her own reflection, small and bloodied, in the green depth of his eyes. Those eyes held her with a magnetic intensity, icy and burning at once.

  —I don't plan on letting you die like that —he said, and each word was an ice nail driving into reality—. So be more careful, yes? For my… peace of mind.

  Irina couldn't respond. The pain, the blood loss, the closeness of that gaze, the absurd tenderness of the gesture in the middle of the carnage… it all left her breathless, wordless. She could only nod, a tiny movement of her head, trapped in that bubble of surreal quiet Vael had created around them, forgetting for a second the war, the fire, the death surrounding them on all sides.

  The moment, fragile and impossible, shattered when the ground vibrated again. It wasn't the step of a Laughing Man. It was something more… wet.

  —Uff —Yoel's voice rasped nearby, rough but vibrant. The Captain was limping over, dragging his curved sword, wiping the blade on the remains of a corpse's trousers—. That… that was close. Almost had me for breakfast. Good work, kids. Though you took your sweet time. —His gaze swept over Elara, covered in ash and triumphant, over Vael, crouched beside Irina like a crow over its prey, and over Irina herself, wounded but alive. His tired, savage smile returned—. Looks like the straggler team has potential. Now, if you don't mind, I suggest we…

  But his words choked off. A new sound began to be heard from the main street, from where the grey tide was densest. It wasn't footsteps. It was a wet, viscous sound of suction and dragging. Slop. Slop. Slop.

  Like something enormous and soft moving through a swamp of flesh.

  The smoke and dust from the nearby battle cleared a little, swept by a current of cold air coming from the breach. And then they saw it.

  It wasn't a Laughing Man.

  It was a mountain of living, deformed flesh. An abomination that stood easily five meters tall, its irregular silhouette outlined against the glow of the distant fires. Its body didn't have uniform skin. It was made of parts, sewn, fused, grown together in a nightmare of divine surgery.

  Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of human arms, of all sizes and skin colors, some still with shreds of Imperial scarlet or blue uniforms, protruded from its back and sides like grotesque spines, moving spastically, independently, grasping the air with fingers that opened and closed in a ballet of eternal agony. Its torso was a mosaic of faces, of dead soldiers' heads, their mouths open in a silent, eternal scream, fused into a single mass of pale, greyish flesh that pulsed with an obscene life. Its legs weren't legs; they were columns of intertwined corpses, arms and legs twisted and soldered together, which creaked and dripped dark, sticky fluids with each heavy, dragging movement.

  The Abomination.

  The creature advanced, not walking, but slithering, its deformed mass undulating across the ground. And with each slop of its movement, the heads on its body moaned, not with sound, but with a hiss of air forced through petrified throats, and wept tears of a thick, black liquid. It had three main arms, or at least three protrusions that functioned as such, giant and malformed, ending not in hands, but in clusters of sharp, twisted bone claws that scratched the facades of buildings as it passed, leaving deep grooves in the stone.

  The fear emanating from that thing wasn't the fear of death, or pain. It was a primal, absolute fear of the unnamable, the violation of all natural order. It froze the blood in the four warriors' veins, made Elara's stomach twist, made Yoel's jaw clench until it hurt, cut Irina's breath in her wounded throat.

  The creature stopped twenty meters from them, in the middle of the ravaged square. The movement of its parasitic limbs ceased for a moment. In the center of its chest, where the fused heads formed a kind of breastplate, the skin stretched and a giant face, formed by the distortion of ten superimposed human faces, opened its eyes.

  They were black. Not dark. Black as bottomless pits, liquid, without pupil, without sclera. They absorbed the light of the fires without reflecting it.

  And then, that monstrous face, that amalgamation of agonies, smiled. The lips, made of scarred skin and sutures, parted, showing not teeth, but a lattice of broken, sharp, crossed ribs that ground against each other with the sound of grinding stones.

  The smile promised not death. It promised dissolution. The annihilation of everything they were in the belly of that thing which should not be.