Chapter 507: General's losing battle

Riley rolled, narrowly avoiding being squashed as Beast brought his great body down.

This was a terrible idea. The thing had seven heads, and could look in seven directions at once. Just because underneath it was a blind spot didn't mean it was a smart place to be!

He stabbed another of its legs, and Beast cried out in rage. His sword did not penetrate deep enough to do anything more than infuriate the enemy, and yet, some mad fervor kept Riley trying.

A swipe of Beast's foreleg nearly took The General's head off. He had to keep moving.

Ducking, and feinting, and dodging other enemies that attacked him from all sides, Riley managed to avoid being seriously wounded, but it could not, would not last forever. He was already bleeding heavily from that blasted insect's pinch.

The General spun, taking out a weird chompy-faced gremlin-thing with too many teeth for its small head.

"Gross," He muttered. "I hope you weren't something's baby."

A screech to his left made him grimace. "Ope. Sorry, Mama! You'll join your ugly spawn soon enough!"

He dodged a dangerous set of claws, hacking them off and stabbing forward, ending another life. "Please don't let there be a daddy."

Before he could confirm the existence of such a creature, something large shifted behind him. Beast was moving, and rapidly.

With barely a glance over his shoulder, Riley rushed towards the weakest point in the circle of enemies closing around him and sliced his way out of the trap. Whatever was about to happen, he didn't want to be near it.

It took several moments to gain any level of distance and perspective, but thankfully something had distracted the enormous monster.

Beast stood on his two back feet, faces all turned toward the sky.

The light began to darken. The air, and Riley's heart, chilled.

"That can't be good." He whispered to himself, but he couldn't afford to be distracted. The monster's creepy minions were enthralled by whatever it was doing, so he took the opportunity to dispatch a dozen or so while they stared at the sky.

It grew darker still. Was the sun gone?

He darted a look upward, and was dumbstruck.

Much like before, in the mountains, the sky seemed broken. A dark wound in reality appeared where the sun should have been. Streaks of red across the heavens looked like an impossibly large monster had clawed a gigantic curtain and let those below see through to the other side.

And the other side was nothing Riley wanted to see.

The tatters of the sky hung in dangling shreds, and the General's human mind stuttered in its efforts to comprehend what he was seeing.

Through the breaks, a dark mist descended. Blacker than night, its ominous presence sent a chill down Riley's spine.

He'd seen it before.

Though foreboding had crept into his very soul, he pushed it back. The sun was still in the sky. It was not destroyed just because the Void was in front of it. Light was still in the world, and could not be chased away by this meager enemy they'd defeated twice before.

No matter how many more servants of evil had come along this time.

The Darkness coalesced, and out of the black cloud rose the form of a colossal stygian dragon. From its maw, black flames billowed with a burning roar.

"Definitely not good," Riley murmured.

Where was the Sorcerer? Wasn't this his final battle? Where was he?

As the dragon beat its immense, caliginous wings, Beast's forces rallied. Hisses, shrieks, growls, and bellows joined in a cacophony of ill intent.

"REGROUP!" Came a command from across the square. Riley looked across. Roland, unlike himself, had maintained his mount upon his cat.

He looked… pretty awesome, actually.

A streak of purplish blood smeared across the king's face, his spinning spear taking out enemy after enemy, Judah rearing on his back four legs to swipe at the collection of evil swarming towards them. A truly impressive sight.

And the second battle in a row where Roland had come in looking blood-covered and epic, showing up Riley in all his glory. That couldn't stand!

"Little help here!" Riley called to a winged horse that had lost its rider. Were these things sentient like Roland's large feline?

It seemed so, for the creature looked at him in the eye and cantered over in a gait so smooth it reminded the man of water flowing over a rocky landscape. Riley leapt onto its back.

"Thanks, friend! Our goal is to look and be more magnificent than the king over there. Can you get to work on that?"

The silver steed turned its head and fixed one eye on its rider as if to question his sanity.

"I mean it, now. We're going to win, but we need to look fearsome and amazing while doing it. Are you in or out?" The General grimaced as a flood of gargoyles swept out of the breach in the wake of the formidable dragon. "Say, I didn't ask, are you male or female?"

The horse snorted and took flight, rising quickly upward into the surge of blackened winged creatures.

Riley remembered from the War Between Worlds that the gargoyles would take female horses in addition to women. He wondered if his mount knew that. It showed no fear. He hoped the horse knew what it was doing, because the vulnerability of the air was not something Riley wanted to navigate with an inexperienced battle partner. Unfortunately, the gargoyles turned and raced toward the pair in a way that left little doubt of his horse's femininity.

Fighting from horseback was a different skill than sparring on foot. Fighting on a flying horse, where an enemy could come from literally every angle, was not a skill Riley had perfected. He struggled to fight off the gargoyles while avoiding having his sword inadvertently injure the wings of his ally. That would be disastrous.

Thankfully, the horse was not defenseless. Riley had ridden many a trained warhorse, and this one seemed to have many of the same skills. Its hooves were weapons, and the leading edges of its wings, He realized, must be incredibly sharp despite their soft, white appearance, for as the creature dove and swept through the dense formation, it cleaved enemies in two without even a bump in the flight pattern. It was incredibly impressive, and a little daunting.

On the ground, Riley controlled his footwork, his positioning, whether his back was to the enemy or reinforced by allies. Here, gargoyles surged up from underneath, from above, from all directions as if he were in a waterspout of death and blood. Many had already taken kills from the ground and dragged them to the sky, out of reach of most of the arrows and swords of the Sorcerer's army.

The General hacked at the wing of one who lunged at his mount's throat, and ran another through. A scraping of claws across his back made him nearly cry out.

At least it wasn't goblins, he told himself. Gargoyle injuries, so far as he knew, weren't poisonous.

His flight suddenly dipped and the horse screamed. Riley turned and stabbed a gargoyle that had latched onto the haunches of his steed and sunk its disgusting teeth into the flesh there.

"You're like a leech's uglier cousin," Riley complained as he finally had to decapitate the monster. Its body plummeted, lifeless to the ground, but it took an extra few seconds to dislodge the teeth and throw the head away.

"Is it me, or is war a lot grosser than I remember?" He asked to no one in particular. "Are you all right, um, ma'am?"

The flying horse snorted, but was still losing blood from the wound.

And the scent of the fresh crimson liquid was drawing even more attention from the cyclone of gargoyles. They swarmed toward the pair, driving them from the sky.

"Get under something, I'll protect you," Riley leaned forward to call into the horse's ear.

A cry of pain was the response as his mount dove straight down, sharp hooves first, slicing through several gargoyles and raining blood on them both as their descent reached a sudden end.

The horse leveled out just before reaching the ground and careened forward, shifting to avoid slamming into the walls of ruined buildings. The pursuers couldn't all keep pace, many crashing and falling injured to the ground.

They were also now within range of swords and arrows from the ground troops. Riley chanced a look over his shoulder as a giant cat that had once held his younger brother Shayn leapt into the sky and tore a gargoyle from the sky with its three rows of teeth.

He worried for his safety, but distraction meant death in war. His steed continued forward at a nearly impossible speed and he barely ducked low enough to get in the doorway of a half-ruined building.

Leaping from her back, he turned, sword ready, to defend this single entryway into their darkened shelter. He hoped he could hold back the tide.