Why would the soldiers of the idiot Sultan be scared of a single arrow landing amidst them? Well, this was no normal arrow. For, you see, the development of this arrow was a joint project between Alistaira, Wakanda, and Zero Noir, with the honor of dreaming up such a crazy device coming straight from Alice herself. Alice, back on Earth, had been a secret nut for all things fantasy. She had even tried to start playing D&D, but her father didn’t think that his successor should be interested in such things and forbade her from playing D&D or enjoying all of her favorite hobbies.

But Alice had already absorbed so much D&D and fantasy trivia and had seen so many memes that she couldn’t just forget it all. So, when she had some downtime from her job and hobbies on Mortis, she had a spark of inspiration stemming from a mem she had seen years prior. Before Artificers were even accepted by makes of the game as a valid class, there had always been those who wanted to play it and had made up all manner of house rules for it. But, of course, with any kind of game where you can break the rules of reality by combining science and magic, someone, somewhere, had to come up with an insanely overpowered weapon that was possible if the DM allowed it.

And that specific weapon was the arrow that was being fired right now. When it struck the target, the mechanism built into the bulb near the base of the arrow forcibly combined two objects that should never come into contact with each other together and unleashed a massive blast of pure destructive energy that effectively erased all within the blast radius. Any D&D veteran will tell you that combining a Portable Hole and a Bag of Holding together makes the two erase each other in a very damaging event, and inside that bulb were those two objects.

As the three who created Alice’s crazy idea had said once the final product was finished, “It is effectively a Grenade Arrow on really expensive steroids. You would need beyond superhuman levels of durability or immortality to even hope to survive this.”

And, when the fighting in the area stopped to allow everyone to marvel at the crater that remained from the event, both sides nearly shat themselves out of fear. Had there not been a flash of light, missing and/ or mutilated people, and the sound of something glasslike shattering, nobody would have assumed that anything had happened. It was as if a large, spherical area had just been erased from reality, leaving the occasional body part of a wounded person around to remind people that there were once living, breathing humans there.

This alone would have broken lesser armies, but the Sultanate still had more men to send into the grinder, and as soon as the shock of the weapon’s usage wore off the Arbianans only became even more intent on claiming victory. They could not allow such a demonic weapon to be used again, and so they renewed their vigor and pushed even harder.

Gradually, the number of undead that could help hold the lies dwindled and the Necromancers began to run out of mana. This resulted in the Mortal Auxiliary being pushed back deeper into the fortified town until their backs nearly met each other. Thankfully, not a single one of them had perished thus far, but they could not keep holding back the tide forever. When at last the Sultanate seemed to have the chance to deal a finishing blow, the promise of the Sergeant came through and the Sultanate soldiers began to make a hasty retreat.

In their hurry to destroy the battered bastards that held there, the Sultanate had concentrated nearly 100% of its total counter-counter-invasion force around this one town. This, of course, let the rest of the divided Darksolian forces gather and being their march towards their foe. The living and the undead in the occupied town had held out long enough for the rest of the army to make their way down the coastline and eventually flank the Arbianans who had their comrades pinned, so now it was the Sultanate that was in a rough place.

To make things even worse, the entire airborne fleet was coming along for the fun, and the sky itself darkened as the metal clouds hung overhead like grim reminders of what had happened prior and what was to come. The Sultanate commanders had let themselves be outplayed, and they could only plead to their god that the flying warships didn’t end up bombarding them into an early grave.

Their wish ended up coming true, but not in the way they wanted. The airships did not end up using their mounted weapons to fire at them, instead, they started firing away at the area around them, slowly boxing them into a closer and tighter group. And then, before the shells stopped falling, the single unique airship among the fleet used a tool that had been installed at the errant whims of the twins who commanded the vessel.

The ship in question moved to be directly over the heads of the surviving Sultanate mooks and from the bottom of the ship spread a light rain down upon the helpless fools below. People held their breath, but it was to no avail as the drizzle seeped into their clothes, their hair, and clung desperately to their skin. The odd artificial rain came down for a few seconds before ceasing entirely, and for the most part, no one among the Arbianans could figure out what the foul-smelling and greasy mini deluge was supposed to do to them. They openly and quite vocally mocked the people above them, for their weapon must not have ended up working properly. How else would one view such a colossal failure?

Then, as if the silence the opinions of the fools below them, the twins’ airship dropped a single fiery ball of magic on top of the gathering of idiots. Once it connected, the truth of the rain was made shockingly clear as everything the greasy and stinky droplets had clung to caught fire and could not be put out. The flames spread quickly and the detailed clothing that had been saturated turned the enemy into human torches. All the rolling around in the dirt that happened next was not enough to douse the flames, and the gathering of grunts split up and ran around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off.

From that point onwards, the day was nothing but a bit of target practice with living people as targets. The Sultanate soldiers all ended up dead, down to nearly the last, but even as Darksol snatched a decisive victory from the jaws of potential disaster, there was one thing that made the whole triumph a bit sour.

…

While the soldiers of the New Sultanate had indeed been all but eradicated, their commanders were nowhere to be found. Like the cowards that they were, they had, in some cases quite literally, ended up fleeing with their tails between their legs, leaving their men to face certain doom when they saw the forces of the Greater Darksol Empire coming.

However, for these commanders, there was next to nowhere to run. They could not go back to their Sultan, lest they be hanged as traitors and heretics. They could not run into the lands under the control of Darksol, lest they be found out and likely killed on the spot and then raised as undead. They had no other place to flee to save perhaps either south to the elf-controlled Arcfiran Confederated Tribes or east to the beastman-controlled Oriant Co-Prosperity Sphere. Neither were good options, as the former tended to view all outsiders who tried to enter as invaders that needed to be killed and the latter tended to simply send those who ran to it to labor camps where they would live the rest of their lives as slaves in all but name.

But perhaps there was one final, potentially even riskier option. They could always try and charter a ship to take them to the lands across Mortis’ version of the Atlantic Ocean so they could try their luck with the Corporate States of America. The dwarves who ruled there may keep slaves, but at least according to the words of the diplomats, they wouldn’t just enslave you outright upon arrival. Plus, each of the commanders had a sizable amount of money that they could hopefully use to secure their positions.

Needless to say, they all had their own decisions to make, but it was very unlikely that they would even make an appearance ever again. They each had their own ideas of where to run and how, but that was not Darksol’s concern. As they urged their mounts to move them farther away from the inevitable destruction of their nation, they wondered why Solinaye would be so cruel. For the briefest moment, what little faith in their god that they had at that moment wavered. But then again, they were only in that faith for the power, wealth, and control it had granted them.

They had gone through all the motions and made it seem like they cared, but their views were the same as so many others like them. They did what they had to in order to keep the roiling mobs from tearing them to bit, and now they were forced to come to terms with the fact that the new government would be forced to make an example out of them if it caught them. By not believing in the very extremist faction that they brought to power and using it solely to push their own agenda, they had effectively put themselves in a no-win situation. They had never believed, but the extremists promised them so much if they just played along. How foolish would they have been to refuse and be slain like those who refused to sign away things to the cult?

They had not joined the true believers in their final moments, so the current regime would be viewed poorly by its own supporters if they let them go. They knew this, and so they fled, partially out of loyalty to their nation’s new regime and mostly out of fear of reprisal. They had to find a way out of their current predicament, but no matter what they ended up choosing they were destined to have a bad end.

It didn’t matter where they chose to run; Darksol would be there eventually, for that was the oath that the Abominable King gave to the otherworldly enigma in order to save those whom he cared for. They could flee to the ends of Mortis but Darksol would still eventually reach them, it was only a matter of time, and if anyone cared enough to pass judgment on them.