Tormule
Tormule
"Crossbows, get the crossbows! We can't hold them head-on!"
"We can't hold much longer! We ran out of bolts ages ago!"
"Shit... Spears, then! Confiscated goods, evidence—I don't care, all of it!"
A cluster of shouting men, fear and bewilderment cutting through their voices. Out of that clamor, a group emerged at the corridor leading to the underground cells.
The figure at their head was a man.
A long, gleaming black feather cloak draped over his shoulders, and beneath it, distinctive black scale armor. In his hand he held a longsword. He stopped just short of where the guards had gathered.
"Th-there aren't any! Not in the confiscated stores... not in the evidence lockers either!"
"What? That can't be right. The woman in the cells just now—"
A presence so thin and deep it was nearly imperceptible. The guard turned his head belatedly. Aslan tilted his head at an angle and smiled.
There was nothing sinister in it. It should have seemed ominous, yet it didn't, because the man's pleasant smile was far too natural.
The guard's words caught in his throat. It was only then he registered how tall the man was.
Behind him, a cluster of figures made their presence known, each in a different way.
A Dragon-kin with a massive frame and an equally massive bow. A girl, lazily returning every glance she sensed, idly twirling two swords. A scarlet-haired girl cracking her neck from side to side, and a woman resting a heavy axe against her shoulder.
The most striking of them all was the woman directly behind the man.
A spear that had been sitting in the guard post's evidence vault just hours ago was now in her grip. She wore a light plate cuirass.
The guard's eyes flew wide the moment he saw her.
"Wait, wait! How did—"
His hand went to the weapon at his belt as he moved to block them.
Aslan returned his stare blankly. The guard floundered, unsure what to demand first.
Ask how she got the evidence out? Order them all back to their cells? Demand to know why they'd come up at all?
He couldn't decide.
So he just stood there, arm extended, mouth working uselessly.
Aslan seemed to grasp the situation at a glance. He set a hand on the guard's shoulder and pushed him aside. The guard let out a flustered sound as he was moved.
KWA-BOOM!
The door shattered the instant he was clear.
Timber erupted outward in a burst of splinters. Through the cloud of debris came shrieks and strangled shouts from the guards—and something else pushing through from beyond.
A shape that looked as if it had been assembled from black-stained bone fragments.
Tormule.
It thrust a spear forward immediately. The weapon spun, and with a physics-defying lightness, it shredded the shields the guards raised in response.
The sound of wood wrenched and torn by force. Shields buckled. Guards recoiled. Tormule lunged at them—
"Hup!"
Rumel's spear intercepted it.
She drove the weapon forward two-handed, released her right hand, and placed it behind her left. The thrust stopped at full extension.
CLANG!
The spearhead hammered into Tormule's skull. Its charge halted for a fraction of a second—barely a heartbeat of an opening, but more than enough for Rumel.
She leaned into the follow-through, twisting the shaft as she swung. The blow carried dense rotation.
THWACK!
A swing that belied the fact it came from a mere spear. The flat of the blade caught Tormule's head and shattered it into flying fragments. Behind it, countless more shapes flickered.
Their numbers were overwhelming, and they surged forward at once. The entryway was narrow, but the Tormule were thin enough to pour through easily.
They spilled around Rumel's frontal stand, leaking out from the sides: black skeletons, no longer recognizable as human.
Aslan was already there.
He slipped past Rumel and, with a short blade, deflected a spear driving straight for the bridge of his nose.
Steel shrieked. Sparks scattered as the spearhead was knocked aside. Before it could recover, Aslan brought the angled seobsaeng upward.
CRUNCH!
The stone sword's gray arc connected, and a Tormule disintegrated under the blow. The front line checked. The surging tide hesitated.
That briefest pause was all Tiyamal needed. He loosed an arrow in a snap-draw, and the heated air of the chamber seemed to ripple outward in a ring.
The bolt was nearly invisible as it filled the gap.
KWA-BOOOM!
A detonation to rival—no, exceed—the door's destruction. The Tormule pressing through the choke point were hurled backward in a body. The guards could only stare, dazed.
"Hyah!"
Angie exploited the opening instantly. She seized a stone bookshelf that had stood in this chamber long before the guard post existed and heaved it at the doorway.
"A-aaaagh!"
The screaming guards ducked. The masonry cabinet slammed into the entrance and lodged there. Beyond the crack of shattering stone and the spray of chips, the guards flinched backward.
Unfazed among them, Aslan calmly raised a hand.
"Tiyamal. Rooftop. Intercept them from above."
Tiyamal nodded, slung his bow over his shoulder, and started up the spiral stair. Aslan turned to the rest of the party with quick instructions.
"This building is horseshoe-shaped. We're on the left arm, looking from the open end. There are two entrances: this one, and one in the central block. They'll probably split and hit both at once. Angie, Fay—stay here and support the guards. Ereta, Rumel, with me to the center."
"Stuck with Angie again? She's an idiot. I don't want to."
A grumbling elf girl, and another girl who shrugged her shoulders. The guards, still blank-faced, slowly blinked back to awareness at the two girls' utterly nonchalant responses.
"N-now hold on! Who said you could just—no, forget all that! Suspects belong in their cells! Disarm immediately and return to—"
"That won't be necessary."
The reply didn't come from Aslan or his party. The guards instinctively turned toward the spiral stair descending from the rooftop. A woman was walking down at an unhurried pace.
Both sleeves faintly singed. Anna Heleminus brought with her the smell of smoke and nodded toward Aslan and Rumel.
"Let them go."
"No."
At the guard's obstinacy, Anna's expression flickered with regret before she spoke.
"Earlier... when we discussed Lady Rumel van Holne's charges, you mentioned suspicion of commanding strange monsters and the murder of a noble."
She gestured. The guard followed the gesture to the black puddles of liquefied skeletal horror and bit his lip.
"That's correct."
A grudging answer, but it was enough. Anna smiled and tilted her head at Rumel.
"If the reason you can't release them is suspicion of commanding those strange monsters to kill a noble, then I'd say it's not especially relevant right now, is it?"
Even with that benevolent smile and gentle tone, the guards offered no reaction. They couldn't parse what she meant.
What did a charge of commanding monsters have to do with those monsters being here now? Among Aslan's party, he alone seemed to catch her meaning.
Anna let the puzzled stares linger on her a moment longer before she sighed and elaborated.
"These strange creatures are the product of a complex entanglement of magical ritual and divinity. The only things capable of commanding them would be priests—or monsters of comparable standing."
The guards' eyes shifted to Rumel. She stood there awkwardly holding her spear, looking from Anna to the guards to Aslan.
"Does that girl look like a priest to you?"
"...No, but... that doesn't..."
"That doesn't prove anything—is that it?"
The guard looked up at Anna's words. She met his gaze, and a glint of green light passed through her eyes.
The mana radiating from that gleam was dense enough that even a guard with no magical talent could feel it.
Anna was a woman whose renown spanned both the Northern and Southern continents. An archmage. Once a Master of Magic.
The guard, recognizing his own foolishness, closed his mouth. She smiled brightly.
"Thank you."
The guard said nothing further, only moved with renewed urgency. Amid the bustle, Anna caught Aslan's eye and spoke.
"Go. I'll head up and assist with magic as well."
"Thank you."
Aslan led Ereta and Rumel away from the position and toward the central corridor of the U-shaped building.
Horseshoe shape, U-shape—the terms were generous. In practice, the central section was excessively long and thick.
And that long, thick corridor was packed with Tormule.
Enough to make even Aslan, with all his courage and the scar-tissue experience of countless battlefields, flinch.
"Found you."
Countless Tormule voices murmured in unison. Aslan exhaled a sigh.
"Purity."
WHOOM!
White fire roared upward, and the dagger in his hand reshaped itself into a greatsword—an afterthought to the flame.
Seobsaeng in his right hand, and in his left, the Feather of Stymphalos transfigured into Purity. Aslan let both blades hang low and said,
"Move."
"Yes!"
"Hoo..."
Ereta's bright response and Rumel's tense exhale. Leaving them behind, Aslan charged forward.
Tormule thrust its spear at the charging Aslan. He knocked the incoming blade upward with an underhand sweep of the seobsaeng, and as the Tormule staggered, he drove Purity into the base of its neck.
CR-R-RACK!
The tactile feedback sang up through Purity. Aslan could tell from that sensation alone that nothing remotely human remained in Tormule. He twisted the tip and severed the head.
Before the flung skull even hit the floor, Rumel thrust past him from behind.
CLANG! CLAN-ANG!
Ereta followed, axe swinging. Rumel's spear punched through a Tormule's chest, and Ereta, slipping in from the side, pivoted to deliver a wide, sweeping axe strike.
The axe blow split a Tormule and sent it skidding across the floor. Rumel, unwilling to be outdone, gripped the end of the shaft and twisted her body.
CR-R-RACK!
The impaled Tormule's chest burst apart. Through the scattering debris, Rumel's spear lashed out. With each thrust, she changed hands to stab again—swung—twisted the haft and struck.
Thrust. Rotate. Regrip and thrust again. Almost no pause between strikes. No standardized form whatsoever.
The spear art Rumel had built for herself—cast into the world, watching mercenaries, learning, mastering it alone—was entirely freeform, and entirely chaos.
The next attack was impossible to predict. When a Tormule reached out to seize her lunging spear, Rumel rolled her wrist to shake the grip off and slashed diagonally, tearing open its throat.
The throat ripped. Before Rumel could find her next target, a hand caught her spear shaft. She turned her head. A Tormule, head tilted, smiled a twisted smile.
A mistake.
Tearing the throat: an excellent attack by normal standards. But Tormule was no longer normal. It had abandoned its humanity.
Rumel's face hardened with shock. Her motion seized. Her free-flowing spear was checked. She couldn't find the next move. In the instant her composure cracked and Tormule's lips curled—
SHRACK!
A white arc traced a long trajectory as Aslan's sword sheared through its neck.
The severed head tumbled. Aslan absorbed the next Tormule's attack as it lunged at him.
CLANG!
He caught it on crossed blades, tilted the edges, and let the force slide off as both swords swung simultaneously to split the attacker. Before its tilting body hit the ground, Ereta stepped out in front of him.
A volley of spear-thrusts poured toward her at the vanguard. Six spearheads carrying the technique of the Spiral Spear. Ereta tracked them all with her eyes, spinning her body as she swept the axehead across the blades and knocked them aside. The clangor of ringing steel was cut through by her laughter.
She took a wide grip on the axe, and this time Aslan stepped forward.
A short swing of the seobsaeng tore across a Tormule's eyes. He pivoted past a spear thrusting in from the side and brought Purity around in a massive arc that split three at once.
Through the cascading fragments, Ereta's axe surged forward. A thrust.
The heavy mass of iron slammed into the neck of the foremost Tormule with enough weight to snap it, and the creature sagged.
Ereta kicked the sagging Tormule aside, and Aslan moved to fill the gap she left.
She sidestepped to give Aslan a clearer shot at the enemies lunging through her openings. Or she shattered the heads and limbs of those who targeted his flanks and rear.
The Tormule had become a swarm. Too many to fight alone, in a space too confined.
But Ereta and Aslan did not retreat. They relied on each other's skills and attacks—protecting, advancing—a seamless mesh of mutual defense.
With that cultivated harmony, they weathered the tide-like assault of a former Master without taking a single wound.
Watching, Rumel felt an inexplicable sense of defeat.
That's supposed to be my place.
She bit her lip and stepped forward again, this time with care, reading their movements.
She stabbed through the skull of a Tormule trying to create a gap with its body, swept the legs of another lunging at Ereta's flank with the spear's shaft, and impaled a Tormule Aslan had cut down before it could rise.
Breath climbed to their throats, muscles burned with fatigue, but they kept moving. Their blindly swinging weapons turned black. The dark fluid pooled around their ankles with every step, sloshing.
It was around then that Aslan sensed something wrong, even amid the endless rhythm of splitting, stabbing, cutting.
They felled them, and felled them, and still no end was in sight.
Thankfully, he wasn't the only one who noticed.
Ereta clubbed a Tormule back with her axe, gulped air, and said,
"Ash... lan... something..."
Aslan stopped attacking in agreement. Rumel's lips parted.
"Good... I wasn't the only one who caught it."
A wrongness so potent even Angie would have noticed if she'd been brought along.
When they all ceased their attacks in the face of it, they could finally see.
SHHHHRRRRK!
Tormule, splitting the black fluid and being born anew.
The true nature of the endlessly rising host.
Aslan pressed sweat-soaked hair to his forehead and let out a low curse.
"Dammit."