A Nightmare for an erlking...

Wooden sword. Treated with Ironwood, strong as steel. Made of heavy oak for weight, then auto-treated with Greater Magic Weapon at 20, for a pithy +V enhancement bonus. Combined with the same effect on his crafted oak-leaf scale armor, so resplendent and lovingly carved with forest scenes, leaves… and I deliberately did not count the nymphs, but I was pretty sure there was one for each of the embedded stones.

Right.

“Die!” he shouted at me, pointing his finger.

Something necroic faded away against my Null, and I smirked at him, only half-turning as I continued my execution of his centaur troops. A One-Two went off from the hellpuppies as they mocked him back.

He did not look happy at being ignored like that, and raised his hand. The ground shook, and for a moment it looked like thorns and grasses might be boring up and out of it, but that didn’t happen, either.

What part of Interdicting not allowing Summons of any sort did he not understand?, I thought to myself, as I removed a centaur’s head, gutted another, and ended the blow inside a third who had been dragged into range by Shirley’s jaws on his foreleg.

Good hellpuppy!

I wasn’t going to leave my dogs to fight the centaurs alone; they were way outnumbered and the centaurs were at least Twelves themselves. The hellpups tore the throat out of one that Fido hurled to the ground, so quick and automatic I was impressed despite myself. Savage Them was a nice trick with the Tripping Feats leveraging it so much.

I was sincerely hoping that bird-boy would come on in to get Finish-Hew’d, but he instead opted to turn his attention on my fighting troops, lifting his hands to unleash something.

Amused at his cheek, I ended my attack combo with a Sharding into his side from way over here, sending him stumbling off and spoiling whatever he was about to do.

“You should pay attention to who your opponents are!” I called out to him with a nice wicked laugh as he turned to glare at me. His hand went to his side, where armor was rent and there was blood… and the wound wasn’t healing.

Duh, like I was going to let him skirmish me and endlessly heal away the damage. Blooding took care of that rather nicely. It was literally what it was designed to do!

He pointed, and a huge murder of crows descended upon me in cawing zeal to kill.

Banefire ripped through whole swathes of them, tearing them out of the sky in flurries of feathers that covered everything. Shredded bird bodies sprayed black feathers everywhere, obscuring vision.

His sword came sneaking in through it, looking for a target… and found Shirley wasn’t there.

As if killing my frostpup would slow me down. I was riding her to keep her alive and that breath weapon available, not because I was that much better a fighter mounted. In all honesty, I could move faster than either hellpup…

Being the conscientious commander that I was, I totally ignored the feather cloud and proceeded to slaughter the last of the vision-obscured centaurs, who couldn’t see enough to get away and who were basically compelled to try and kill me and couldn’t flee like intelligent moving targets should.

His archer line dead, I slid off Shirley and dove back into the feathers for the advancing Erlking, who I had painted in my Tremblesense perfectly. I danced over centaur corpses as the hellpups ran together back towards the main fight, ready to add some more One-Two’s to the mix.

Erlkings weren’t all that strong by default, but naturally this one was double-sized, so every bit as Strong as me with my Girdle, only with size bonuses to Might. That didn’t mean much, as Giant Power meant my Might was in turn just as high as his. The first time our Swords met, he didn’t even push me back, despite being literally three times as tall as me.

He did have reach, but without his default temporal acceleration working in my Interdiction, he definitely didn’t have a speed advantage, and his wings didn’t do anything other than give him a jumping bonus now, and a pretty small one given how small they were relative to his mass.

Tremble and his oaken Sword met once, Stand smacked it aside with surprising force, I slid Tremble’s tip up the erlking’s arm, and he barely jerked his head back in time to not lose an eye.

He hopped back, and I snickered at him as his wings beat once, blowing away the feathers around us. He was staring at me in shock, and Tremble was in Feybane Mode, pulsing in time to Stand’s drum beat, obviously ready to carve him up and release him from this life.

Intimidation checks at 40ish are definitely a pain for most people, and hard even for a Twenty like this fellow to deal with. Once that fear effect kicks in, even if it is pretty minor, morale bonuses go bye-bye. The technique was invented by fencers looking to shut down the raging attacks of barbarian raiders and proved marvelously effective, but it actually worked against all kinds of morale bonuses.

After all, it’s hard to feel mighty, larger-than-life, and super confident if you nearly pissed your pants. This guy’s iron-hard Favored Enemy/Human bonus of +10 had just taken flight, rendering him a Ten Warrior with Weapon Focus/Sword.

I pit Counter Mastery against his, basically off-setting his preferred Weapon with mine, and leaving me my Specialization and Combat Genius bonuses. It was instantly apparent to him that I was better with the sword than he was, and I didn’t lack for strength. The only thing he might have on me was reach, and I was faster afoot than him, so that wasn’t working, either.

Now, he’d been juiced with Health Qi, so he was still confident he could outlast me… but alas, he was fighting with a sword, and I was fighting sword and board!

Mitharn Technique ftw!

Stand caught every blow almost contemptuously, knocking them aside or just plain stopping them with magical force if need be, not that I really needed it. As it stood, just making decent contact with me would have been a challenge for the erlking, but with me using a Shield, he stood no chance at all.

I cut into his legs, waist, and if he lunged too hard, flicked towards his throat and sent him shaking back. Streaks of red fled from his skin as his Health Qi went down, down, down, and then real blood began to flow as I made it into his Health.

“You… what manner of demon are you?” he swore, trying to retreat, and I kept pace without real effort.

“Sama Rantha. You got some independent thought? Really, wow, I see that you do,” I noted, as his eyes flashed. “Natives of Dream, after all.” I laughed softly as he suddenly looked unsightly underneath all that warrior’s fury. I bent to avoid a cut, then shifted my feet to let the feint slide past and be momentarily pinned by Stand before the real blow could follow.

There was a weird ringing crunch as the steel-hard wood was sheared through, and he gaped as his wings took him back with a flap, finding it wasn’t enough as I stayed right with him. The follow-up strike sent wooden leaves of his armor flying with ruby blood trickling Banefire.

He stared at the remnant of the wooden sword in his hand. Alas, not carrying a backup. Was he going to duel me with his bow?

“You must have been invited in, and thought you’d have a good ol’ time engaging in some hapless slaughter of a Dream city or something. Keep the edge from getting rusty, a little gratuitous massacre.”

He cried out as Tremble flicked, and he pulled back the stump of his hand, the remnant hilt of his wooden sword still clutched in it.

“I think I’m going to punish you for that. Yes, I will.” Tremble dimmed slightly as vivic flame joined the Soulfire and Banefire for tri-colored wrathflame, and his birdlike golden eyes fixed on it. “Yep, you’re really going to suffer for this choice. We’ll see just how many of your peers choose to make the same decision.

“You’re going to burn, and if you do come back as an Erlking, you’re definitely going to be a newborn.”

“You would not-”

I was in his reach without moving my feet, and the four strokes of the combination move went off like a machine. His wings beat, but his throat was open, he lost his other hand, I’d gutted him, and his wings only pulled him off after Tremble was buried in his heart.

He landed ten feet back, already dead and falling, vivus spurting out of him, golden eyes going dark as he stared at me, unable to believe he had died so quickly and uselessly against something so small.

Which, naturally enough, hardly ended the invasion of the Fey. He probably came with more allies, and by the way those trees were all moving in the distance, and the walls of the city were being crushed by them, it looked like a full forest of treekin, or something.

Smiling to myself, I charged the back of the Fey fighting lines, who had seen their master fall and were suffering something of a crisis of morale, even as Tremble sang out again in Courageous triumph and began to compose something on the spot about butchering erlkings.

They could not run, only fight to the death. My erstwhile troops gave out a yell and pressed forward, the swordsmen who hadn’t gotten much action broke out to give vent to their ire, while the cavalry came thundering in from the side to add some nice shock damage to the Fey’s teetering will to fight.

All in all, not a bad first engagement. I wondered if the Curse had learned its lesson at all, if it thought it could just wear me down with military engagements like this…