When the Knights of the Blue Rose were roughly one hundred meters from the library, the rebels opened fire, sending a rain of arrows and crossbow bolts. Many shots went wide, either from fear or pure incompetence. Those that landed were effortlessly blocked by the shields the knights raised. They didn’t even bother blocking some of the shots, letting the missiles harmlessly clink off their mithril armour as they sailed past.

  A Juvenknight mage hiding behind a parapet on the balcony held up their magic staff. The dull red crystal embedded in the tip of the staff flared to life with an orange light, and a blazing ray of fire shot forth like a laser. It missed. There was a long delay before a second beam was fired from the same source. The spell clipped the shoulder of the leading knight, Pacey. The force of the spell’s impact threw him off balance, but he shrugged off the blast and lumbered back into formation, shaking his head in embarrassment as another knight, Darrion, laughed at him.

  A well-trained spellcaster could focus and cast a spell of that level ten times a minute if they had an average mana reservoir to fuel it. Amaryllis’ displeasure at the Juvenknights continued to grow. Where was their spellcasting discipline? Where was their concentration and focus?

  Gloria’s squad plodded forward, unstoppable and unrelenting. They reached the front of the library. Pacey broke out from the rest of the formation, walked up to the entrance, and kicked open the doors. A thunderous thud sounded as the doors flew open, and he entered the building. Some Juvenknights burst out from the sides, swords clenched tightly with both hands as they brought them down on Pacey. The swords clanged off his armour and shield harmlessly as he disappeared inside. More arrows assailed the squad, who raised their shields to protect the children behind them. Another Juvenknight mage unsheathed his wand and shot a mote of fire into the middle of the formation, causing a small explosion upon impact. They strode through the blast without hindrance as missiles continued to rain down on them. They vanished into the library, all while dutifully shielding the children with them.

  Roy ran with his head low, bounding across the coast. He moves faster than he should be able to, his armour blending surprisingly well with the greyscale world around him. The helm he wore severely limited his vision, but he didn’t even think to take it off. He had a hard enough time gathering pieces of usable plate armour from undead warriors and plenty of trouble putting it on himself.

  The hell around him howls its outrage at his presence. The storm clouds above him rumbled with a ferocity Roy hadn’t thought was possible from nature. Each and every footstep he takes is a deep and unforgivable violation. Roy felt the world he was born into hated him. He now sees how wrong he was. This world truly hates him.

  It hates his mismatched armour.

  It hates the fact its creator - its god - brought him here to end it.

  It hates his dumb, stupid face.

  As Roy runs, this world tries to throttle him, to rob him of life. He is fueled by the hatred. He looks up to the achromatic sky and chuckles diffidently. “Sorry,” he says, breathless.

  “No,” the childlike voice dubbed Viceroy resounds in his mind. “I’m the one who should be saying sorry. You shouldn’t have to do this.”

  Roy didn’t respond. He is panting now, his saliva viscous and throat burning. Against all reason, he has been running for hours at a constant, unhindered pace since he started being chased. Ahead of him lies the plateau, monstrous in size and dominating the surrounding coast. It rises two hundred meters, the escarpment jagged and craggy. Viceroy said there was a castle atop it somewhere, and that was where Roy should first head. Roy pants harder, dog-like. He thinks he can hear his pursuers coming for him. He was right.

  The mad undead have picked up his scent, and they are breaking away from their endless bloodshed from as far as a kilometre away just for him. He can already picture them - roaring, howling and screeching in a mindless fury as they come for him, racing. They are desperate to bring him down, to crush his bones and trample his beaten corpse until he is nothing more than an ugly red stain on a rock.

  He feels the greatsword on his back clatter against his legs as he runs as if begging to be unsheathed and used. He resists the urge. The sword was too unwieldy to run with it in hand. Even calling it a sword is a misnomer since, to a human, it was a sword-shaped demolition tool. The blade itself was sixty inches long with fifteen inches of handle. It was not made to be wielded by a human, let alone a human teenager; it is a one-handed sword forged by and for thyllisians. Roy didn’t care. He went through a lot of trouble and hurt to get this off of what he thought was a big, angry, sword-wielding zombie lady, so he was going to use it. But not yet. Not until they are on him, piling in around him.

  For now, he keeps running.

  Winslow sat in the head of one of the library’s towers, preoccupied with what appeared to be a large, green egg. It was a biohazard he constructed, guided by his god's will, the god of conquest, Kavak. The top half of the egg-shaped cut open, revealing a sickening and complex latticework of mycelium and mould. The thing pulsed rhythmically like a beating heart on the table. Winslow used his tools to fine-tune and refine his creation with surgical precision. The doors to the circular room swung open, and his wife, Jolee, swept in with a tired, pained expression. Two of Winslow’s students moved aside to allow Jolee inside, and three of her students came behind her. Jolee was clad in her armour, bearing a fresh coat of paint that was almost painfully vivid in its pink and gold colouring. Winslow was wearing a simple set of black robes with forest green lining.

  “Sit,” said Winslow. For a moment, he thought Jolee would refuse, the command too demeaning in front of their students. He ignored his wife as she sat on the opposite end of the table, continuing to work on the egg’s interior. Just as he judged Jolee was about to speak, he said, “I summoned you here a while ago.”

  “I’m aware,” sighed Jolee. “But that was before my mother reared her ugly head outside the library with that little tyrant, so my attention has been somewhat diverted.”

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  “Gloria’s here?” Asked Winslow, finally looking up from his work. “And the princess?”

  “Obviously,” Jolee snapped. “Is this not what we were hoping for? Now, we can kill two birds with a single stone. Or two roadblocks with that…” Jolee gestured to the head-sized egg on the table. “...Thing. Is it broken or something? Why are you still working on it?”

  “It is functioning just as intended,” said Winslow. “It only fell off the table when I took my eyes off it. One of the sporoplasts was knocked out of place.”

  “So it broke,” Jolee pointed out.

  “It is fixed,” said Winslow. “If you listen closely, you can hear it work.”

  Winslow reached out and placed the biological gadget on the table in front of Jolee.

  “I’m not interested in your toys so long as they work,” she said.

  “Listen,” gruffed Winslow.

  Jolee rolled her eyes and sighed. She leaned in close to the table, turning her head to listen.

  Winslow’s hand flashed out as quick as lightning and gripped Jolee’s light red hair. With sudden force, he slammed his wife’s face into the egg. The shell shattered into a thousand pieces as Jolee’s face crunched into the surface of the workbench.

  Bone broke, and blood splattered. Jagged shards of the shell flew as the biological components splattered over the desk, and a cloud of spores filled the room like smoke.

  Jolee cried out in pain and shock as her students rushed forward. Winslow’s students smashed them aside with demonic strength and were upon them. Winslow hauled Jolee over the table, scattering his tools, schematics and half-finished sketches. Though Jolee was an adult fully armoured in steel, Winslow lifted her up by the neck as if she were no more than an infant. Jolee spat out blood, and Winslow slammed his fist into his wife’s face, snapping her head back with a sickening crack.

  Jolee’s eyes widened, her pupils morphing into vertical slits that blazed with a fiendish reptilian malice. Pink scales started growing up her neck, her face contorting into one of primal rage - rage fueled by the god of war.

  She started to speak as her transformation continued, but Winslow didn’t give her the chance. As if intending to kill her, he battered his wife’s face with repeated, relentless jabs. He pinned her to the stone wall, pulled his fist back, and held the blow.

  Jolee’s face had become nothing but a wet mound that leaked blood, snot and tears. Her breath was hoarse, and her mouth was full of phlegm and broken teeth. She tried to speak, but Winslow cut her off again.

  “No. I am speaking now.” Winslow’s students brought the captives over. It was a needless effort since the knights-in-training were already dead, their mouldy green faces etched into an agonising silent scream. Winslow’s students were unharmed but no longer human, rapidly becoming cadaverous as they inhaled the spores flooding the room.

  “I have held my tongue and followed your lead throughout this operation,” said Winslow. He leaned in, boring holes straight into Jolee’s eyes as purple veins grew across his face. “But that ends now.”

  He released Jolee, who stood tall in the face of his cold anger.

  “You and your fellow war god sycophants have no discipline. From here onwards, we follow the ways of Kavak. I am in charge, and your forces are under my command. Do you understand?”

  Jolee nodded, swallowing a mouthful of blood. “I understand,” she said, her voice gargled. “I understand that you expect me to swallow my pride and be your little lapdog.”

  “I don’t need a damn lapdog,” snarled Winslow. “I need an equal. I need my wife.”

  “But I’m not your equal, dear husband,” she said mockingly, grinning through her bloodied facial features as though this was somehow amusing. “I am greater than you in every way.”

  “And yet, you are the one bleeding.”

  “You say you want an equal, but where’s the equality when you secure my partnership with violence?”

  Winslow loosened his fists and stepped away from Jolee, rubbing his hand over his scalp as he let out a tired breath and walked to the other side of the room.

  “I must admit, I completely misjudged you,” Jolee said with a smile. “I don’t think anyone has caused me real pain since my ascension.” The swelling around her jaw was fading, her swollen eyes were yellowing, and the shattered bones in her cheek, nose and jaw were healing. “It didn’t hurt much, but it was something.”

  “So do we have an agreement?”

  Jolee grinned at her tired husband, her demonic transformation undoing itself. “Nope. I’m just going to kill them all!” She ran straight out the door with a laugh, blowing past Winslow’s students as they tried to capture her.

  Winslow sank into a chair, exhausted. “At least she’s infected with the plague.”

  Roy smells them before he sees them. Not because his sense of smell was exceptional or because his sight was hindered but because the chasing horde reeked of rot and decay. The escarpment was still two kilometres to the north. They burn up from the east, over rocky flatlands and wet sands, aiming to cut him off. Their putrid stench rolls ahead of them, a hot fungal fog. The clouds follow, kicked up by hundreds of trampling boots. They are frothing, panting, jostling like rabid animals, latching onto his scent and hunting him down.

  Roys breaks out into a mad dash. He wants to be first to the cliff face, and it will be a close call. The lactic acid in his legs burns seemingly endlessly, and the pain spurs him onward. His heart thuds against his chest rapidly; his lungs are straining and burning, and his skin is drenched in sweat under his armour. His whole body becomes a machine running on fumes. Roy wanted to thank Viceroy but lacked the breath to express it. He didn’t know what they were doing to keep him running, but he knew he would be dead by now without their help.

  He can see the first of them now, charging across the flat-beaten rock. Those are the fastest, not the biggest, so they will die the fastest. Whether they know their fate or not, they sprint after him, blinded with rage - rage fueled by the god of war.

  “Darrion, wait!” Pacey yelled. The warning was too late. Darrion stepped forward, and Gloria heard the sound of splintering wood and a mighty crash. Darrion began cursing at the top of his lungs without pause.

  “Report,” barked Gloria from somewhere behind bookshelves.

  “Darrion overlooked or misjudged the load bearing of some weak floorboards and fell straight through to the first floor,” replied Pacey, trying not to laugh. Snickers could be heard throughout the area from other knights, along with a sigh or two.

  “Is he hurt?” Gloria asked, the exasperation in her voice clear as day as she rounded a corner and arrived at the scene. Pacey looked down the hole Darrion fell through, his grin hidden underneath his helm. A group of Juvenknights rushed him with their swords drawn before he could even get off his back and started slashing at him.

  “Negative, Marshal,” Pacey said, watching the swords bounce harmlessly off Darrion’s armour and flailing shield as he awkwardly rose to his feet, swearing at the kids who made it difficult.

  Gloria stepped towards the hole in the floorboards, saw the scene, and sighed. “We’ll break off into two squads. We can’t leave him alone.”