In the event that a scenario becomes overly long or the GM goes overboard and sends out so many enemies that the PCs have run out of resources, it is common to put a pause on the scenario and readjust things.
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Our rough-and-ready line of horses dashed through the trees.
We had been pretty lucky. The forest saw frequent use from the people of Mottenheim, so not only was there ample space between the trees (to encourage healthy growth), but the ground was also relatively flat. We weren’t cavalrymen by trade, but we cut a pretty decent figure.
The line of five cavalrymen followed me a short distance behind, each of them using the torch in their hand or lantern at their waist to light the way ahead. I imagined that my companions were raising their collective eyebrow as I dashed on without any obvious light source. Before we left, I’d told everyone that I’d explain everything once this had been sorted, so I imagined they were holding their tongues. I’d really been blessed by my connections. If this was a poorly written Western movie, I’d have had some idiot force me to explain everything and waste precious time in the process.
“Lottie, where are they?” I asked.
“Umm... Over there! They’re a bit squirmy,” she replied.
I’d removed my helmet to increase my peripheral vision, and now Lottie was happily embedding herself in my hair. I checked the direction she indicated as I made my way toward it. I wondered if our enemy was beginning preparations for the end. Unfortunately, we had business with them, so they couldn’t close up shop quite yet.
Luckily, the forest was free of any zombies, so our way was clear and unbothered. The enemy had chosen the traditional route of throwing everything they had at bringing a swift end to the battle without leaving any backup on reserve, and that was doing us a great favor right now. It was a potent, efficient approach—so long as you won. Recovering from failure was a hell of a lot harder if you went all in on your offense. It was possible to resort to some smoke and mirrors tricks with your remaining numbers if you had a big army, but that wouldn’t work for a smaller force of just over a hundred. They may have had a little retinue with the leader, but not enough to beat us.
“We’re being watched,” Ursula whispered into my ear.
I was honestly a bit surprised. Did they really have some units placed to slow us down at this late stage?
“It seems like they’re using beasts,” she went on.
“Aha, so that’s their game. Dammit,” I replied.
A necromancer’s familiar, huh. In order to make a living familiar, you needed an animal that had been carefully bred and attuned to your magic, but it was far easier to simply shove these functions into a corpse. If you weren’t interested in endowing it with any resistance to other people’s spells, you could quickly and easily mill out a whole bunch of capable units. If you ignored just how dishonorable necromancy was, it was infuriatingly useful.
“Well, I’ve blinded them already,” Ursula said, chuckling.
“Thank you.”
Naturally, I found my alfish companion a bit terrifying. Without me even asking, she’d leveraged powers mighty enough to tamper with the necromancers’ puppets. Some birds that I’d noticed had been moving rather strangely dropped from the air. They must have lost their senses and fallen. I really appreciated her cooperation and hard work, in spite of how the thought of what she could do with it all made it hard to sleep at night sometimes.
“I can see them! Get ready to engage!” I called out.
As I followed Lottie’s directions, I glimpsed the backs of people between the trees. Their cloaks masked their shapes, but two-footed silhouettes always stood out in the forest.
“Don’t bother running them down—they may yet put something in your path! Disembark just before we make contact and get them on foot!”
I used Voice Transfer to deliver the message to the others, but I could sense a few people expressing some discomfort, evidently unused to how it felt. I’d used it so that my commands wouldn’t get lost under the pounding of our steeds’ hooves, but I supposed it was a bit of a shock—I was glad no one had fallen out of their saddle. I remembered I found Lady Agrippina’s Thought Transfer spells pretty damn uncomfortable to receive.
The enemy amounted to a mass in the darkness, black on black, but it looked like there were around ten of them. They looked like they were just about human, but you never knew.
I lifted up my hips and activated my Unseen Hands. I’d used up a fair bit of mana when fighting off that cavalry unit, but I still had fuel in the tank. Siegfried and the others slowed their pace—I could imagine Dietrich, positioned further behind, speeding ahead before too long—while I sped up, closing with the enemy.
They had two choices: to flee or to fight. But the group did both, with the latter half of the group turning around and mechanically swinging their swords. Just as I’d expected since I first noticed they had bodies to spare—they were abandoning their soldiers, letting them act as a roadblock.
If they knew that we were more mobile than them, their options were to give up on fleeing and launch a full-on retaliation or to buy time for the most strategically valuable assets to get away. They could have been a bigger pain for us by choosing somewhere defensible to hole up. That or they should have simply fled after noticing that victory was no longer possible. Unlike an army of real people, no one would have noticed if the zombie army had lost their leader.
However, the enemy had committed to a half-baked strategy. I lifted myself up out of my saddle and sprung at the enemy. From an outsider’s perspective, it looked like straight-up wire-fu, but I was actually using my Unseen Hands to hoist my body. Having grown up in Japan, I’d had the philosophy of “waste not, want not” drilled into me—and taking all that time to dismount seemed like a waste of both precious seconds and my horse’s own momentum.
With my magically assisted leap, I struck with the Craving Blade in a huge arc, one that would only leave me open to attack in normal circumstances. My target was the rear of the enemy’s unit. They reacted too slowly to get anything done. My sword felt a surge of pleasure at my killing strike, its earsplitting scream echoing through the trees.
Yeah, that was right. Unlike earlier, I was in this to kill. My opponent was a necromancer—who knew what nasty tricks they had up their sleeve? This wasn’t the time to neutralize them with a few lost fingers. I’d always tried to make sure my enemies could at least speak, but that wouldn’t fly with a mage. I didn’t want them to use their final breath to cause more damage than they had until that point. Sorry, I thought, but it’s time to die.