Cheep!?
Chapter 163
Niko bounded down the walls, momentum and flared wings keeping his descent controlled and swift. He felt his heart pump, blood energy rush alongside essence, and the roar of combat as it overwhelmed his senses. The closer to the ground he and the rest of the Wyldwalkers got, the less they could pick out the individual strikes. Clashing blades and the slap and slice of flesh mingled with crunching bones and roars. The gates were completely destroyed, their pieces lying beneath the swarm of bodies belonging both to Dawr and beast-kin defenders.
Riizen’s forces weren’t being pushed back from being overwhelmed, not completely at least. The warlord represented one of the few parts of the battlefield where there was no real answer, but elsewhere the beasts fought a retreat until they reached a secondary line of defenses in a wide sphere. They had a long while yet to reach that defensive line, however, and the Dawr feverishly pursued them. There were exceptionally few regular goblins remaining now, with the vast majority now being hobgoblins and champions. Shamans wielded the veritable tides of blood energy, sending it coursing into the remaining Dawr.
Ironically, the Dawr were no longer the ones with a numerical advantage, but thanks to the blood energy that Bant enabled them to use, this wasn’t nearly as much of a boon to Riizen’s warriors as it would otherwise be. Niko searched the battleground for a reasonable location to land, unwilling as he was to be surrounded instantly upon descending. There were several promising locations, given that the Dawr were inadvertently leaving spaces behind them as they advanced.
He chose a location that had three hobgoblins with bow and arrow in hand, and empowered his Wyldstrider pattern just as he landed on yet another platform of the wall. He propelled himself down with a flap of his wings, and empowered his Sharp Strike pattern simultaneously, with Skye holding tight and flat to his back to keep a hold on him.
With a vicious shriek, he crashed talon-first onto one of the hobgoblins, tearing into its torso and crushing it outright. The shredded hob choked out a cry, but somehow remained alive with surges of blood energy working to reinflate pierced and flattened lungs and devastated organs. Niko pulled on that energy with his will, fighting with whatever shaman was supplying the energy to the Dawr beneath him.
Said shaman must have been caught off guard, because the resistance didn’t last long. The moment he pulled it from the Dawr, it perished, releasing essence into the atmosphere. Niko pulled on that as well, before turning on the other two hobgoblins. The impact had knocked them from their feet, but they’d rapidly rallied, and turned their bows upon him.
Skye launched from his back and mauled one of them, tackling him bodily and enabling razor sharp thorns and punches empowered by borrowed blood energy to tear through its armor like paper. Niko turned on the other hob, over-enriched as he was, and pounced upon them.They managed to let loose a single arrow that grazed his feathers, but left no appreciable mark. Niko still let out a machine-gun retort of noise in indignation at that, and rapidly tore the hobgoblin to pieces under talon and beak.
He forcibly pulled the blood energy from the kills to him, fighting against the Shamans all the while. It was markedly harder than the first time around, but with how much power he himself held, he had a great deal more weight to throw behind the effort of stealing that energy than they had in protecting it. Perhaps if they focused on a single individual, he’d have trouble, but with each Shaman empowering so many?
‘Not a pecking chance. Now, where’d that warlord go?’ Niko looked up, eyes quickly sweeping around with his legs tensed and ready to dodge. It was a risk to go after the warlord at all, but Niko was at least modestly confident that if he was focused on evasion, he might be able to outmaneuver the Dawr Warlord, if only for a short time.
Niko spotted the Dawr Warlord by his essence signature, burning wildly amidst the other Dawr. They were certainly closer to the front, nearer to the city where the strongest of the defensive line was. ‘Is he trying to break our defensive line on his own?’ Niko wondered, ‘I mean… he probably could, with all the buffs on him. We’ll need to move quickly, then.’
Niko broke away from his thoughts, keeping one eye on the whereabouts of the warlord even while he and Skye fought other Dawr nearby. In short order the rest of the Wyldwalkers landed, with Ronald immediately looking around.
“He’s near the front,” Niko supplied, guessing at what he was searching for, “We’ll have to cut through from behind to get to him.”
“Looks like it,” Ronald glared at the Dawr that led deeper into the throng and towards the warlord with his grip on his glaive tightening, “We’ll push straight through. Try not to get bogged down. If you do, fight your way out to the nearest allied area and try to meet back up with us on the warlord.”
They assented wordlessly and formed up around Thokk. The big sloth bear clad himself in even more earth, with plates of stone making the large beast look more like an elemental than a flesh and blood creature. With a low rumble, Thokk began to growl, and then like a locomotive began charging forwards. His growl erupted into a roar, distorted and somehow echoing from his earthen-clad form that made it sound somehow deeper, and louder than it should have normally been. Niko followed suit, noting the way the ground underfoot shook like there was an active rockslide in Thokk’s wake. The phalanx formation shot forward, and a few hobgoblins that were too slow to react ended up trampled beneath the sloth bear's weight.
The hobs struck out at Thokk, of course, and several of them fractured and penetrated the plates. Each time though, Thokk only roared louder, and piled on even more earth in every damaged location. The additions were rough, but no less serviceable. If anything, the added weight only slowed him marginally, whereas the mass absolutely devastated anything too slow to get out of his way.
A quarter of the way through the battlefield, they’d managed to demolish several formations and wounded many hobs. Niko didn’t really think that those injuries would last long, but hopefully the chaos would help.
Halfway through, Thokk had built up so much sheer momentum and weight that he’d outright killed a pair of hobgoblins that hadn’t respected the threat of a multi-ton beast barreling towards them and were crushed underfoot. More besides were grievously injured, with the rest of the group able to kill a few more.
By the time they were nearly there, though, Thokk had finally slowed to less than half his initial speed. He looked more like a boulder than anything else, with Ronald and Stella now entirely encased in stone upon his back. Niko was uncertain if Thokk nor his riders could see at all in there. The hobs entirely evaded him, thinking either he was a literal boulder being thrown into the battlefield, or they had figured out that it was a form of armor and had given up on the idea of piercing it.
A champion, however, decided to try to brave the attack. Niko saw it snort arrogantly and step in front of the boulder, essence and blood energy circulating through its body. He could see what looked like a pair of patterns light up, spiraling through its entire body in tandem.
Whether Thokk was confident, unable to see, or unable to stop, the boulder continued undeterred.
The Dawr Champion snarled, muscles bulging outwards as it slammed both palms into the stone. Its low stance was immediately pushed lower as the Dawr seethed, pushed across the ground while digging deep furrows with its legs, blood energy swirling around its body and empowering it even farther. Thokk’s charge slowed, and then finally stopped, but the Dawr wasn’t done.
It groaned with effort, but clenched its claws tightly into the stone and began to lift Thokk off of the ground. The goblinoid got him a meter off the ground when Thokk’s armor glowed with a sudden internal light.
Dumbly, the champion regarded the change with confusion, and then the armor exploded, shattering into thousands of stone slivers, all projected forwards. The stones wanted to race to the horizon, but the champion’s body was in the way.
Even with all of the enhancements layered upon the champion's flesh, the implacability of the stones proved greater in that instance.
Like a claymore going off in cartoonish fashion, Niko saw the majority of the meat on the front of the champion's body sheer off with the explosive stone fragmentation, with a dozen other Dawr beyond him being showered in gore and shrapnel. A few seemed dead outright, given that their bodies were outright mangled. The champion dropped Thokk and stumbled backwards, somehow still alive. They had sustained severe damages but their bones appeared to remain intact. Before their eyes, the blood energy worked to knit flesh back together, with the Dawr champion glaring at them defiantly with their one functional eye.
Niko stretched out with his will, trying to seize the blood energy around its body.
“I can’t steal the energy around this one!” Niko cawed out in alarm, feeling like he’d just tried to climb a polished glass surface. There was no purchase to be had, and he could feel at least three shaman bolstering this champion.
Then, from behind him, Niko heard another snarl, this time coming from Sasha. Seemingly from nowhere, another champion had appeared behind their group, throwing a pair of daggers meant for Mithel and Charlotte that were stopped only at the last second by a sudden surge of cloying shadows. With a startled yelp, Mithel clumsily threw a flask at the champion, who only clicked its sharp teeth together in annoyance and dashed away unhesitantly.
The first Dawr pulled out a two-handed war hammer, ignoring what surely were incredibly painful wounds and marched up to Thokk with fury in their eyes.
“We need to get rid of the shamans empowering this one!” Thokk shouted, just as he launched a spear of stone at the Warhammer Dawr. “He’s different from the other champions so far!”
“This sneaky one, too!” Dachna shouted, “I barely even noticed him.”
“We’ll handle the shamans with Niko and Skye,” Mithel shouted, “Just keep them occupied!”
Niko nodded at that before charging up his Particle Wing, readying to expand a plume of heat beneath his wings.
Then, Niko realized that the warlord's presence was close.
Very close.
“That’s my DAGGER!” Niko heard the warlord’s words and the sheer fury behind them. His head shot up, seeing him thirty meters away and pointing at Dachna with a furious, almost stupefied glare.
Dachna looked upwards and paled while saying, “Oh fu—”
The warlord flushed with essence and a veritable fog bank of blood energy, and even from so far away, Niko thought he heard teeth crack from how hard he was clenching his jaws. Dachna and Sasha were caught flat-footed at that moment, their shadows used to protect Mithel just a moment ago. If the Warlord charged them, Niko didn’t want to admit it, but he saw no way for them to realistically survive.
“Hey, you dumbass goblin!” Skye shouted, before pulling out several of the warlord's personal belongings, “Look what I’ve got!”
“Good job, Skye!” Niko cried, even as he frantically blasted himself off of the ground, risking nothing to chance.
Sure enough, he felt the wind scream beneath him as the warlord crashed into where they’d been moments before, a flood of essence and pressure sending him spiraling mid-air. He rapidly got control over his flight with an ungainly squawk, just before he flapped to the side.
A stream of white blade-lights projected from the warlord and tore through the sky right where he’d just been, traces of red streaks trailing every one of them.
“You thrice damned thieves! I’ll cut your face off! I’ll skin you alive and shove you into a vat of sh—”
Niko cut the Warlord off mid sentence by firing a piercing Carrion Call at maximum strength into their face. He staggered, if only for a moment, before looking gobsmacked that he’d even been attacked by a tier three.
And, from the looks of it, that it’d even hurt.
“I’m going to have chicken tonight!” He screeched, legs bending and essence flooding his body once more.
“You’re definitely not!” Niko couldn’t come up with anything snappy to say on account of fearing for his life and trying to overcharge his Wyldstrider and Particle Wing patterns to get away.
Just before he jumped, Skye chucked a flask at him. The warlord looked at it, frowned, and then… ignored it and jumped straight at it. It exploded on his chest with the fluid covering him, but appearing to do nothing at all besides.
Niko dodged downwards, spinning as he did so on instinct. A good thing, since the warlord swept out with a dual swing with short swords where Skye’s head had just been. The sword light swept just over Niko’s own head, and he wondered if the warlord might have nearly decapitated both of them if he hadn’t dodged when he did.
But then the warlord was sailing overhead, gaze locked on them at all times as he charged up more power. It was almost eerie seeing how fixated he was on them now, but Niko didn’t worry about that beyond the obvious. They very much had his attention.
He darted forwards, doing his best to keep the angle low so that the warlord would risk hitting his own people for the moment due to his elevation mid-air.
That didn’t seem to dissuade him at all right then, though, as another stream of blade-light crossed the gap. Niko was forced to dodge preeminently, but he still caught the very edge of one against his side. His feathers split and his hide was cut painfully, but it didn’t go deeper. Blood energy worked to repair the injury, and the warlord's expression only grew even more distorted with rage at the sight. He didn’t even notice that his missed strikes slew a handful of hobgoblins on the ground.
Niko pulled up then as the warlord neared the ground. He didn’t want to give the Dawr an easy path to him from the ground itself.
“Come on, is that all you’ve got!?” Skye taunted, “For having such good stuff, you’re kind of a let down!”
“Oh, pluck me…” Niko nearly whimpered as the warlord went unnaturally still, to any normal vision. In his eyes, though, Aether Sight saw all of the stray essence in the area around the warlord suddenly compact and condense on him. It layered over and over again, and Niko immediately dumped a ridiculous amount of fire out from beneath his wings. He sped ahead, ignoring the screaming Dawr beneath him and hoping he didn’t hit any friendlies, building speed at a breakneck pace.
The energy within the warlord condensed further, until it glowed like a miniature star within its body, caged by blood energy in what looked almost beautiful, like a fractal of crimson backlit by the fires of creation.
With measured slowness, the warlord sheathed both of his short swords, before an object formed between his outstretched hands. It was a spear, one that looked old, appearing more like roughly wrought iron than anything finely made. Yet, at its appearance, the scent of blood that pervaded the field intensified tenfold, and the sounds of pain and anguish seemed to jump to the forefront. Niko swallowed hard, speeding up even more at the sight of the ominous, dull rusted appearance of the weapon.
Then, the Dawr Warlord snatched the spear out of the air between his hands like all of his stillness was a lie, just the calm before the storm. The warlord twisted back, contorting, and launched into a three-step run. Upon the third step, he let loose the spear, and Niko dodged upwards over its predicted path with an even greater burst of fire.
It shot beneath him, and Niko immediately followed its path with his eyes, feeling that his instincts weren’t wrong in being very worried about that spear.
The weapon, surely enough, curved upwards sharply, silently even with how quickly it cut through the air. Niko cawed a warning to Skye before banking once more. She shouted out in surprise as the spear closed once more, this time managing to reach out and strike it with her bark-covered arm.
He felt the impact through his back, and nearly went into a spiral, but Skye was even worse off for simply deflecting the attack. She seethed through her teeth, and Niko could feel through their bond that she’d likely just broken her right arm, and possibly simultaneously dislocated it.
The spear spun crazily in the air before unerringly darting back towards them.
“Come on!” Niko screeched, before dodging low, narrowly evading the projectile once more. He pulled up, only to see the warlord ready for them and present. Niko hadn’t even noticed him move, and he sliced upwards with his short swords.
Niko grit his beak hard as he moved the blood energy into position along his chest, and felt the warlord's strikes cut deep. He cried out pitifully, taking the impact and pushing himself upwards with a blast of flames pointedly directed at the warlord, if only to obscure vision. Narrowly the blows had missed his heart, but he felt his lungs fill with blood. Niko pushed upwards, only for the spear to punch through his side and out the other from left to right and continue onwards.
“Niko!” Skye shouted in panic, but Niko couldn’t hear her over the thundering in his own ears. Blood energy and essence swarmed the injuries, even as the lack of oxygen threatened to black him out. He dove slightly, gaining momentum, before using his Wyldstrider pattern to vault himself off of the ground again. Said ground was reduced to a series of gashes as the warlord pursued him closely.
On reflex, he banked right hard even as he forced his body to focus on restoring one lung to function first. The spear whistled through the air where his head would have been, and Niko heaved out another lungful of blood before blessed air returned to it. If it weren’t for the fact that his organs were so compact and that he was so resilient, he wasn’t sure if he’d have been able to even keep moving after that strike.
Even so, if he didn’t have the blood energy he’d stolen, that last attack would likely have been more than enough to end the fight. He wasn’t tier four, he couldn’t shrug off bodily injuries like that for long.
‘Better off than any other tier three, though,’ He grit his beak tighter as they finally broke over the battlefield and over a building. Niko heard the warlord hot on their heels, though, with stone and wood cracking with repeat jumps from the goblin. The spear darted after him as well, but luckily was slowed by the buildings that it either shot between or through in pursuit. The Az-Phorus glanced back at the Dawr Warlord, noting that its essence didn’t appear especially taxed as of yet.
‘This… could be bad.’ Niko swallowed hard, before diving and thrusting himself off of buildings as well, doing his best to dive and twist in erratic angles to evade sword strikes and the chasing spear.
“There! Turn there!” Skye shouted, directing Niko. He did so without question, banking through an alleyway even though it looked like it could feed into a narrower area.
It was a narrower area, though one that was a series of bridges connecting buildings. That would work wonders for cover. He projected himself faster and farther with combined leaps and strikes, damaging stone every time he did so, but he couldn’t be bothered about such a minor detail at this point.
The warlord behind them screamed mounting obscenities as they managed to pull ahead, and Niko felt his ears ring from the sheer volume and contents of what it promised if it caught them.
“He seems upset! Turn there!” Skye shouted and directed simultaneously, “Do I wanna know?”
“Oh, no, definitely not.” Niko answered immediately, “I don’t count myself weak stomached, but… Yikes.”
It was true, too, with Niko very much hoping that they could get some kind of kill squad together to deal with the warlord before he could catch them. He was not interested in finding out how much of the growing list of torture and torment the warlord could enact on them before they completely expired.
“We need to get back to the battlefield, quickly!” Skye shouted, just as she yelped and ducked a sword strike that had gotten uncomfortably close to giving her a hair-cut.
“Guide me! I have no idea where we are right now!” Niko cawed shrilly, feeling a pair of hits on his side. His alternative that time had been to take them on the wings, not something he could have afforded. Still, it hurt, and worse, burned through precious blood energy to heal. He wasn’t quite low on the stuff, but the warlord clearly had a greater supply. He wouldn’t win a war of attrition on any metric against him.
Skye shouted out, guiding him down several paths, and in one case, through a building top with wide open floors. Every detour they took, the warlord was forced to slow or reposition to catch back up, giving them precious distance to dodge his ridiculously fast strikes.
Niko was half out of energy, though, while the warlord had used, perhaps, around fifteen percent or so. He couldn’t exactly measure it, but that seemed right. Which was absurd considering how much he must have been burning to keep up and attack as constantly as he was.
A small voice in Niko was afraid that they simply didn’t have the firepower to bring him down, even if they stacked up all of their tier fours. He was just that strong.
But they would find out soon enough as Niko could finally see the battlefield once more…
Cheep!?
Chapter 163
Niko bounded down the walls, momentum and flared wings keeping his descent controlled and swift. He felt his heart pump, blood energy rush alongside essence, and the roar of combat as it overwhelmed his senses. The closer to the ground he and the rest of the Wyldwalkers got, the less they could pick out the individual strikes. Clashing blades and the slap and slice of flesh mingled with crunching bones and roars. The gates were completely destroyed, their pieces lying beneath the swarm of bodies belonging both to Dawr and beast-kin defenders.
Riizen’s forces weren’t being pushed back from being overwhelmed, not completely at least. The warlord represented one of the few parts of the battlefield where there was no real answer, but elsewhere the beasts fought a retreat until they reached a secondary line of defenses in a wide sphere. They had a long while yet to reach that defensive line, however, and the Dawr feverishly pursued them. There were exceptionally few regular goblins remaining now, with the vast majority now being hobgoblins and champions. Shamans wielded the veritable tides of blood energy, sending it coursing into the remaining Dawr.
Ironically, the Dawr were no longer the ones with a numerical advantage, but thanks to the blood energy that Bant enabled them to use, this wasn’t nearly as much of a boon to Riizen’s warriors as it would otherwise be. Niko searched the battleground for a reasonable location to land, unwilling as he was to be surrounded instantly upon descending. There were several promising locations, given that the Dawr were inadvertently leaving spaces behind them as they advanced.
He chose a location that had three hobgoblins with bow and arrow in hand, and empowered his Wyldstrider pattern just as he landed on yet another platform of the wall. He propelled himself down with a flap of his wings, and empowered his Sharp Strike pattern simultaneously, with Skye holding tight and flat to his back to keep a hold on him.
With a vicious shriek, he crashed talon-first onto one of the hobgoblins, tearing into its torso and crushing it outright. The shredded hob choked out a cry, but somehow remained alive with surges of blood energy working to reinflate pierced and flattened lungs and devastated organs. Niko pulled on that energy with his will, fighting with whatever shaman was supplying the energy to the Dawr beneath him.
Said shaman must have been caught off guard, because the resistance didn’t last long. The moment he pulled it from the Dawr, it perished, releasing essence into the atmosphere. Niko pulled on that as well, before turning on the other two hobgoblins. The impact had knocked them from their feet, but they’d rapidly rallied, and turned their bows upon him.
Skye launched from his back and mauled one of them, tackling him bodily and enabling razor sharp thorns and punches empowered by borrowed blood energy to tear through its armor like paper. Niko turned on the other hob, over-enriched as he was, and pounced upon them.They managed to let loose a single arrow that grazed his feathers, but left no appreciable mark. Niko still let out a machine-gun retort of noise in indignation at that, and rapidly tore the hobgoblin to pieces under talon and beak.
He forcibly pulled the blood energy from the kills to him, fighting against the Shamans all the while. It was markedly harder than the first time around, but with how much power he himself held, he had a great deal more weight to throw behind the effort of stealing that energy than they had in protecting it. Perhaps if they focused on a single individual, he’d have trouble, but with each Shaman empowering so many?
‘Not a pecking chance. Now, where’d that warlord go?’ Niko looked up, eyes quickly sweeping around with his legs tensed and ready to dodge. It was a risk to go after the warlord at all, but Niko was at least modestly confident that if he was focused on evasion, he might be able to outmaneuver the Dawr Warlord, if only for a short time.
Niko spotted the Dawr Warlord by his essence signature, burning wildly amidst the other Dawr. They were certainly closer to the front, nearer to the city where the strongest of the defensive line was. ‘Is he trying to break our defensive line on his own?’ Niko wondered, ‘I mean… he probably could, with all the buffs on him. We’ll need to move quickly, then.’
Niko broke away from his thoughts, keeping one eye on the whereabouts of the warlord even while he and Skye fought other Dawr nearby. In short order the rest of the Wyldwalkers landed, with Ronald immediately looking around.
“He’s near the front,” Niko supplied, guessing at what he was searching for, “We’ll have to cut through from behind to get to him.”
“Looks like it,” Ronald glared at the Dawr that led deeper into the throng and towards the warlord with his grip on his glaive tightening, “We’ll push straight through. Try not to get bogged down. If you do, fight your way out to the nearest allied area and try to meet back up with us on the warlord.”
They assented wordlessly and formed up around Thokk. The big sloth bear clad himself in even more earth, with plates of stone making the large beast look more like an elemental than a flesh and blood creature. With a low rumble, Thokk began to growl, and then like a locomotive began charging forwards. His growl erupted into a roar, distorted and somehow echoing from his earthen-clad form that made it sound somehow deeper, and louder than it should have normally been. Niko followed suit, noting the way the ground underfoot shook like there was an active rockslide in Thokk’s wake. The phalanx formation shot forward, and a few hobgoblins that were too slow to react ended up trampled beneath the sloth bear's weight.
The hobs struck out at Thokk, of course, and several of them fractured and penetrated the plates. Each time though, Thokk only roared louder, and piled on even more earth in every damaged location. The additions were rough, but no less serviceable. If anything, the added weight only slowed him marginally, whereas the mass absolutely devastated anything too slow to get out of his way.
A quarter of the way through the battlefield, they’d managed to demolish several formations and wounded many hobs. Niko didn’t really think that those injuries would last long, but hopefully the chaos would help.
Halfway through, Thokk had built up so much sheer momentum and weight that he’d outright killed a pair of hobgoblins that hadn’t respected the threat of a multi-ton beast barreling towards them and were crushed underfoot. More besides were grievously injured, with the rest of the group able to kill a few more.
By the time they were nearly there, though, Thokk had finally slowed to less than half his initial speed. He looked more like a boulder than anything else, with Ronald and Stella now entirely encased in stone upon his back. Niko was uncertain if Thokk nor his riders could see at all in there. The hobs entirely evaded him, thinking either he was a literal boulder being thrown into the battlefield, or they had figured out that it was a form of armor and had given up on the idea of piercing it.
A champion, however, decided to try to brave the attack. Niko saw it snort arrogantly and step in front of the boulder, essence and blood energy circulating through its body. He could see what looked like a pair of patterns light up, spiraling through its entire body in tandem.
Whether Thokk was confident, unable to see, or unable to stop, the boulder continued undeterred.
The Dawr Champion snarled, muscles bulging outwards as it slammed both palms into the stone. Its low stance was immediately pushed lower as the Dawr seethed, pushed across the ground while digging deep furrows with its legs, blood energy swirling around its body and empowering it even farther. Thokk’s charge slowed, and then finally stopped, but the Dawr wasn’t done.
It groaned with effort, but clenched its claws tightly into the stone and began to lift Thokk off of the ground. The goblinoid got him a meter off the ground when Thokk’s armor glowed with a sudden internal light.
Dumbly, the champion regarded the change with confusion, and then the armor exploded, shattering into thousands of stone slivers, all projected forwards. The stones wanted to race to the horizon, but the champion’s body was in the way.
Even with all of the enhancements layered upon the champion's flesh, the implacability of the stones proved greater in that instance.
Like a claymore going off in cartoonish fashion, Niko saw the majority of the meat on the front of the champion's body sheer off with the explosive stone fragmentation, with a dozen other Dawr beyond him being showered in gore and shrapnel. A few seemed dead outright, given that their bodies were outright mangled. The champion dropped Thokk and stumbled backwards, somehow still alive. They had sustained severe damages but their bones appeared to remain intact. Before their eyes, the blood energy worked to knit flesh back together, with the Dawr champion glaring at them defiantly with their one functional eye.
Niko stretched out with his will, trying to seize the blood energy around its body.
“I can’t steal the energy around this one!” Niko cawed out in alarm, feeling like he’d just tried to climb a polished glass surface. There was no purchase to be had, and he could feel at least three shaman bolstering this champion.
Then, from behind him, Niko heard another snarl, this time coming from Sasha. Seemingly from nowhere, another champion had appeared behind their group, throwing a pair of daggers meant for Mithel and Charlotte that were stopped only at the last second by a sudden surge of cloying shadows. With a startled yelp, Mithel clumsily threw a flask at the champion, who only clicked its sharp teeth together in annoyance and dashed away unhesitantly.
The first Dawr pulled out a two-handed war hammer, ignoring what surely were incredibly painful wounds and marched up to Thokk with fury in their eyes.
“We need to get rid of the shamans empowering this one!” Thokk shouted, just as he launched a spear of stone at the Warhammer Dawr. “He’s different from the other champions so far!”
“This sneaky one, too!” Dachna shouted, “I barely even noticed him.”
“We’ll handle the shamans with Niko and Skye,” Mithel shouted, “Just keep them occupied!”
Niko nodded at that before charging up his Particle Wing, readying to expand a plume of heat beneath his wings.
Then, Niko realized that the warlord's presence was close.
Very close.
“That’s my DAGGER!” Niko heard the warlord’s words and the sheer fury behind them. His head shot up, seeing him thirty meters away and pointing at Dachna with a furious, almost stupefied glare.
Dachna looked upwards and paled while saying, “Oh fu—”
The warlord flushed with essence and a veritable fog bank of blood energy, and even from so far away, Niko thought he heard teeth crack from how hard he was clenching his jaws. Dachna and Sasha were caught flat-footed at that moment, their shadows used to protect Mithel just a moment ago. If the Warlord charged them, Niko didn’t want to admit it, but he saw no way for them to realistically survive.
“Hey, you dumbass goblin!” Skye shouted, before pulling out several of the warlord's personal belongings, “Look what I’ve got!”
“Good job, Skye!” Niko cried, even as he frantically blasted himself off of the ground, risking nothing to chance.
Sure enough, he felt the wind scream beneath him as the warlord crashed into where they’d been moments before, a flood of essence and pressure sending him spiraling mid-air. He rapidly got control over his flight with an ungainly squawk, just before he flapped to the side.
A stream of white blade-lights projected from the warlord and tore through the sky right where he’d just been, traces of red streaks trailing every one of them.
“You thrice damned thieves! I’ll cut your face off! I’ll skin you alive and shove you into a vat of sh—”
Niko cut the Warlord off mid sentence by firing a piercing Carrion Call at maximum strength into their face. He staggered, if only for a moment, before looking gobsmacked that he’d even been attacked by a tier three.
And, from the looks of it, that it’d even hurt.
“I’m going to have chicken tonight!” He screeched, legs bending and essence flooding his body once more.
“You’re definitely not!” Niko couldn’t come up with anything snappy to say on account of fearing for his life and trying to overcharge his Wyldstrider and Particle Wing patterns to get away.
Just before he jumped, Skye chucked a flask at him. The warlord looked at it, frowned, and then… ignored it and jumped straight at it. It exploded on his chest with the fluid covering him, but appearing to do nothing at all besides.
Niko dodged downwards, spinning as he did so on instinct. A good thing, since the warlord swept out with a dual swing with short swords where Skye’s head had just been. The sword light swept just over Niko’s own head, and he wondered if the warlord might have nearly decapitated both of them if he hadn’t dodged when he did.
But then the warlord was sailing overhead, gaze locked on them at all times as he charged up more power. It was almost eerie seeing how fixated he was on them now, but Niko didn’t worry about that beyond the obvious. They very much had his attention.
He darted forwards, doing his best to keep the angle low so that the warlord would risk hitting his own people for the moment due to his elevation mid-air.
That didn’t seem to dissuade him at all right then, though, as another stream of blade-light crossed the gap. Niko was forced to dodge preeminently, but he still caught the very edge of one against his side. His feathers split and his hide was cut painfully, but it didn’t go deeper. Blood energy worked to repair the injury, and the warlord's expression only grew even more distorted with rage at the sight. He didn’t even notice that his missed strikes slew a handful of hobgoblins on the ground.
Niko pulled up then as the warlord neared the ground. He didn’t want to give the Dawr an easy path to him from the ground itself.
“Come on, is that all you’ve got!?” Skye taunted, “For having such good stuff, you’re kind of a let down!”
“Oh, pluck me…” Niko nearly whimpered as the warlord went unnaturally still, to any normal vision. In his eyes, though, Aether Sight saw all of the stray essence in the area around the warlord suddenly compact and condense on him. It layered over and over again, and Niko immediately dumped a ridiculous amount of fire out from beneath his wings. He sped ahead, ignoring the screaming Dawr beneath him and hoping he didn’t hit any friendlies, building speed at a breakneck pace.
The energy within the warlord condensed further, until it glowed like a miniature star within its body, caged by blood energy in what looked almost beautiful, like a fractal of crimson backlit by the fires of creation.
With measured slowness, the warlord sheathed both of his short swords, before an object formed between his outstretched hands. It was a spear, one that looked old, appearing more like roughly wrought iron than anything finely made. Yet, at its appearance, the scent of blood that pervaded the field intensified tenfold, and the sounds of pain and anguish seemed to jump to the forefront. Niko swallowed hard, speeding up even more at the sight of the ominous, dull rusted appearance of the weapon.
Then, the Dawr Warlord snatched the spear out of the air between his hands like all of his stillness was a lie, just the calm before the storm. The warlord twisted back, contorting, and launched into a three-step run. Upon the third step, he let loose the spear, and Niko dodged upwards over its predicted path with an even greater burst of fire.
It shot beneath him, and Niko immediately followed its path with his eyes, feeling that his instincts weren’t wrong in being very worried about that spear.
The weapon, surely enough, curved upwards sharply, silently even with how quickly it cut through the air. Niko cawed a warning to Skye before banking once more. She shouted out in surprise as the spear closed once more, this time managing to reach out and strike it with her bark-covered arm.
He felt the impact through his back, and nearly went into a spiral, but Skye was even worse off for simply deflecting the attack. She seethed through her teeth, and Niko could feel through their bond that she’d likely just broken her right arm, and possibly simultaneously dislocated it.
The spear spun crazily in the air before unerringly darting back towards them.
“Come on!” Niko screeched, before dodging low, narrowly evading the projectile once more. He pulled up, only to see the warlord ready for them and present. Niko hadn’t even noticed him move, and he sliced upwards with his short swords.
Niko grit his beak hard as he moved the blood energy into position along his chest, and felt the warlord's strikes cut deep. He cried out pitifully, taking the impact and pushing himself upwards with a blast of flames pointedly directed at the warlord, if only to obscure vision. Narrowly the blows had missed his heart, but he felt his lungs fill with blood. Niko pushed upwards, only for the spear to punch through his side and out the other from left to right and continue onwards.
“Niko!” Skye shouted in panic, but Niko couldn’t hear her over the thundering in his own ears. Blood energy and essence swarmed the injuries, even as the lack of oxygen threatened to black him out. He dove slightly, gaining momentum, before using his Wyldstrider pattern to vault himself off of the ground again. Said ground was reduced to a series of gashes as the warlord pursued him closely.
On reflex, he banked right hard even as he forced his body to focus on restoring one lung to function first. The spear whistled through the air where his head would have been, and Niko heaved out another lungful of blood before blessed air returned to it. If it weren’t for the fact that his organs were so compact and that he was so resilient, he wasn’t sure if he’d have been able to even keep moving after that strike.
Even so, if he didn’t have the blood energy he’d stolen, that last attack would likely have been more than enough to end the fight. He wasn’t tier four, he couldn’t shrug off bodily injuries like that for long.
‘Better off than any other tier three, though,’ He grit his beak tighter as they finally broke over the battlefield and over a building. Niko heard the warlord hot on their heels, though, with stone and wood cracking with repeat jumps from the goblin. The spear darted after him as well, but luckily was slowed by the buildings that it either shot between or through in pursuit. The Az-Phorus glanced back at the Dawr Warlord, noting that its essence didn’t appear especially taxed as of yet.
‘This… could be bad.’ Niko swallowed hard, before diving and thrusting himself off of buildings as well, doing his best to dive and twist in erratic angles to evade sword strikes and the chasing spear.
“There! Turn there!” Skye shouted, directing Niko. He did so without question, banking through an alleyway even though it looked like it could feed into a narrower area.
It was a narrower area, though one that was a series of bridges connecting buildings. That would work wonders for cover. He projected himself faster and farther with combined leaps and strikes, damaging stone every time he did so, but he couldn’t be bothered about such a minor detail at this point.
The warlord behind them screamed mounting obscenities as they managed to pull ahead, and Niko felt his ears ring from the sheer volume and contents of what it promised if it caught them.
“He seems upset! Turn there!” Skye shouted and directed simultaneously, “Do I wanna know?”
“Oh, no, definitely not.” Niko answered immediately, “I don’t count myself weak stomached, but… Yikes.”
It was true, too, with Niko very much hoping that they could get some kind of kill squad together to deal with the warlord before he could catch them. He was not interested in finding out how much of the growing list of torture and torment the warlord could enact on them before they completely expired.
“We need to get back to the battlefield, quickly!” Skye shouted, just as she yelped and ducked a sword strike that had gotten uncomfortably close to giving her a hair-cut.
“Guide me! I have no idea where we are right now!” Niko cawed shrilly, feeling a pair of hits on his side. His alternative that time had been to take them on the wings, not something he could have afforded. Still, it hurt, and worse, burned through precious blood energy to heal. He wasn’t quite low on the stuff, but the warlord clearly had a greater supply. He wouldn’t win a war of attrition on any metric against him.
Skye shouted out, guiding him down several paths, and in one case, through a building top with wide open floors. Every detour they took, the warlord was forced to slow or reposition to catch back up, giving them precious distance to dodge his ridiculously fast strikes.
Niko was half out of energy, though, while the warlord had used, perhaps, around fifteen percent or so. He couldn’t exactly measure it, but that seemed right. Which was absurd considering how much he must have been burning to keep up and attack as constantly as he was.
A small voice in Niko was afraid that they simply didn’t have the firepower to bring him down, even if they stacked up all of their tier fours. He was just that strong.
But they would find out soon enough as Niko could finally see the battlefield once more…
