Ruthless: Path of Conquest

Standing in the upstairs hallway, Mina spoke almost at the same time as Alice, talking from within one of the small rooms.

“So, is this over?” Mina asked.

“Why didn’t I get a notification for the other one?” Alice asked. “The System said I killed Sister Odd and Sister Wyrd. Shouldn’t it at least say I helped kill Sister Strange?”

The building felt different with the sisters gone. Before, it had felt like a haunted place. Creepy, uninviting, inhabited by death. Now it felt sort of cold and lonely but also cozy. Almost as if it wanted someone to inhabit it again.

“I think her questions answer yours,” Zora said to Mina. “The System hasn’t really lied yet. This isn’t over. James said that he was going to be using something called Soul Bind on Sister Strange, right? To keep her with him while we did—” She gestured in the direction of the room they had killed the sisters in.

Mina nodded. “What do you think that means?”

“Well, before now, the Reliquaries were the objects keeping these things bound to Earth. But clearly Wraiths don’t just vanish when their home base is destroyed. I think my book mentioned that disembodied spirits can remain on Earth without being anchored, at least in the short term, but they have to avoid light, which becomes more damaging to them without an anchor. That doesn’t explain why the other sister didn’t just appear back here to try and kill us.”

“Do you think she’s stuck with him?” Mina asked. “If her soul is bound to him…”

“I have a bad feeling,” Zora said. She turned toward the room where Alice was searching for loot. “Come on, Alice. Your brother might need our help!”

Alice stepped quickly out of the room she had been searching and, draped with golden necklaces she had just liberated, she moved toward the stairs.

“Well, I’m sure James is fine, but I would like to get back,” Mina said slowly as she walked alongside her in-laws down the stairway. “I think he’ll need help with backing up our soldiers.”

“You’re that confident?” Alice asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I am,” Mina said, nodding.

“Well, you know his fighting ability best out of all of us,” Zora said.

They stepped out into the darkness of the night.

“We’ll head toward the battlefield in the forest, then,” Zora finished.

The three women took flight once again.

—

“I disagree,” James replied. “I think you will die very quietly.”

“Petulant human,” Sister Strange said. “I will—”

James locked eyes with her. Compulsion.

Their minds instantly created a great battlefield on which their respective forms appeared to do battle. Thousands of copies of James engaged in single combat with thousands of copies of Sister Strange.

It was the most difficult battle of Wills James had encountered in the space that Compulsion created. He did not fully understand Sister Strange’s powers. She moved much as she had in Dreamspace, freely disobeying the ordinary laws of physics and extending her tentacles to use them as harpoons or whips.

Still, his army had the edge. Every copy of him was armed with Soul Magic, and though it was his most draining form of magic, it was also the most potent. His Soul Mana destroyed any individual soldier of her army instantly upon contact.

The battle was over in minutes in terms of the time within the mental world. It might have been a moment or two in the real world.

James felt his control settle over Strange like an iron collar around her neck.

“Now you will cease this pointless resistance and die silently,” he hissed. “Be content that I do not torture you as you wished to torture us. Be grateful. You will become a part of my strength.”

Sister Strange’s face twisted and writhed in visible discomfort. Then it settled into an expression of forced gratitude. He could feel the rage and hatred beneath the surface, seething with the desire to break free and strike him down.

It made him want to laugh. But best not to tempt fate. Especially when his soldiers still needed to be rescued.

He reached out with the small amount of Soul Mana he had gathered around his body, and he used it to grasp the ethereal body of the creature before him. He had to be careful. He had seen how a concentrated burst of Soul Magic could instantly shatter the soul of the target. That would waste the effort he had spent using Compulsion on her—seizing complete control over the situation.

He forced Sister Strange’s malleable, ethereal form into a compressed shape, crumpling it into a ball a fraction of its normal size.

He could see her expression as he crushed her. He saw that it caused the malevolent spirit pain. She had a silent scream on her face, and he felt immensely satisfied.

“I hope the suffering is exquisite,” he muttered.

Sister Strange ended up being roughly the size of an apple in his hand. She could have been a fruit, if there was a tree that produced gray, color-shifting fruits that felt heavier than their appearance. James looked at her a little uncertainly.

This should work, right? I have Omnivore and Soul Eater…

Finally, he bit into the condensed ball that he had crushed Sister Strange into and began eating her soul.

It proved chewable, just like ordinary flesh. He crushed it between his teeth and then swallowed. He was pleased that he seemed to be able to consume a bite of it. Yes. This would work. He would take her powers and make them his own. Then he would know if her visions were real or simply sophisticated illusions.

Never mind how bitter the taste was, or how he might be defying some other person’s conception of the natural order. He had larger concerns than that.

He took another bite, and then another.

Finally, he began wolfing down the condensed soul. There was a degree of urgency to his consumption. One of his monsters floating in the sky told him that his forces in the forest were in trouble.

He was beginning to like the bitter taste.

I could get used to this, he thought.

—

In the forest, Dave and most of the remaining soldiers linked arms and stood together against the grasping hands of the spirits.

Dave could feel darkness pulling at the edges of his vision now. He was so exhausted now that he almost wanted to pass out or die. At least then this nightmare would be over.

He had no Stamina left with which to raise and aim his pistol, even if his Mana had recovered enough to allow him to charge a shot. He lacked even the power to throw a rock or a punch, and of course no physical attacks would do him any good anyway.

Only the thought of what would happen to the men and women on either side of him kept him on his feet.

All right, so we die, but we’ll all go down together, he thought.

Even as that notion occurred to him, a woman to his left fainted on her feet, and Dave found the strength to yank her backward, behind him. Behind the line.

“I can’t do this anymore,” pronounced the voice of Paul Mann off to his side.

“Just a little bit longer,” said a male voice Dave only vaguely recognized as a Healer’s. The figure speaking was giving off a green glow, Dave noticed, but the glow was flickering, like a candle about to go out.

Dave looked around and realized the speaker was the only person still giving off the green glow. Wait, is that guy who sounds like he’s about to faint the last Healer still standing?

As the light had weakened, so had the resistance of the hundreds of soldiers, until their front began to systematically collapse until only a much smaller core of fighters was active.

Only around a hundred and fifty of the soldiers were still fighting now, as dozens more crouched or knelt, trying to recover completely depleted Stamina or Mana. Hundreds more lay unconscious, while an unknown number had joined the ranks of the possessed. They mostly tried to drag people away rather than killing them, but the result was that it now felt as if the spirits outnumbered the humans who were fit to fight.

Those people who were left had become easier to drag away, too exhausted to put up meaningful resistance or even scream.

But those who still remained held onto each other. That was all they could do.

Their adrenaline had long ago been used up. It was hard to remember why they were fighting, besides the hope that they would not die.

“Hold firm, all!” Dave shouted. He didn’t need to use Command Presence this time. The few people left standing were all close together, standing in a ring formation to try and preserve those who had fallen.

Dave could hear the fear and weakness in his own voice. He anticipated how much he and his comrades would be weakened when even the glow from the last Healer had faded, and his voice shook with the feeling of imminent defeat.

“Stand firm!” The woman in white armor was suddenly back at the forefront of the group again, where she had placed herself once earlier in the battle. She began to glow with a bright white light that almost blinded Dave for a moment. “For the Fisher King!”

The darkness was driven back, and Dave felt it. Just a small taste of hope.

“For the Fisher King!” he repeated.

Others around him began to rally, and standing in the glow of the woman in white’s aura, they found the power within them to summon their own inner lights. Dave saw the light of dozens of auras rekindling themselves in his peripheral vision.

All around, the words were repeated, sometimes in a shout, sometimes in a barely audible whisper.

“For the Fisher King!”

“Fisher King!”

“Humanity!”

“Fight to the last!”

“Fisher King!”

“Fisher Kingdom!”

The blinding light of their forces beat back the darkness.

Soldiers saw human hands that were reaching out to grab them and pull them into the shadows, and they found the strength to pull the possessed humans forward into their ranks instead.

A few more of the specters’ victims, rescued. For now. The few Healers who were still on their feet found it in them to use Purification one last time.

Dave and his comrades fought valiantly and with renewed vigor for what felt like a long time, but might have been as little as ten minutes.

“I—I’m sorry.” It was the woman in white speaking again, but her voice was barely above a whisper. “I can’t.” The light around her faded almost to nothing in an instant, and the spirits pulled her forward into the darkness.

“No!” Dave gasped. She was the one who made us believe again, if only for a little while, that we could win.

Without her, the other lights grew slightly dimmer almost immediately.

The specters in the dark began advancing again, and their human mouthpieces taunted Dave and his allies as they did so.

“So much for the Fisher Kingdom.”

“Was that all you had?”

“We could go all night…”

Then Dave heard another voice that spoke over them all, even though it wasn’t raised above a whisper.

“Dominion.”

Dave felt a wave of power course through the air. The specters and the monsters seemed to move back a step.

You’re here, Dave thought, relief flooding his body. We’ll survive. I can rest…

He collapsed backward and saw the figure of James floating overhead. The ring James wore on his left hand was flowing bright orange, and his eyes had taken on a strange golden glow.

Then his entire body turned bright yellow, and a massive wave of light shone outward from him in all directions.

Dave felt what seemed to be gentle sunlight striking his skin.

More pleasant still was the sound he heard from all around him: the screaming of specters.

Dave propped himself up on one elbow and looked around him. The whole nearby section of forest had lit up for a moment like it was broad daylight outside, and he could see the aftermath of the apparent solar energy attack James had used. The light of the sun destroyed every specter that it touched—they disintegrated with a symphony of horrendous screeches that Dave found beautiful in that moment—and the possessed who were struck by it wiggled, writhed, and screamed before they collapsed to the ground, foaming at the mouth.

As the light faded, Dave allowed himself a smile. Then he lay on his back and closed his eyes.

I’ll just lie down and die here, he thought. The smile faded as he thought of Amalia. I killed one of my own, because I wasn’t strong enough to stand up to the thing that took over her body.

All around him, Dave heard the sounds of activity, as the soldiers who were still standing did their best to save people who had been wounded in the fight or checked on friends or family members who had been possessed.

He heard the voices of James’s family members, who sounded like they were floating in the sky, but Dave was too far gone to make out the details of what they were saying. Even if it was important, he lacked the energy to concern himself. He knew he would feel the pain of this battle when he woke up.

For now, he allowed himself to slip into blessed unconsciousness.