++War is not an invention of man or elf, but it must be said that we do it far better than most of the world’s monsters. Strategy is God’s own gift.++

  Book 2: Chapter 13

  Reggie had almost been killed and eaten too many times to waste even a single second gawping at the oncoming horde, so his response was practical and, in all likelihood, life-saving. He whirled around, called for Ludvich, screamed with everything he had to warn the old man and sprinted right up into the heights of the castle.

  Ludvich’s own reaction was almost identical, save that he had nobody to warn and made a brief delay to pick up his gear as he went. The ants were far from their fort, so by the time Reggie was gazing down on the things from its crumbling parapets they were still a good few hundred paces back. It gave him a nice view of them rolling over the grimwood’s grounds like a river of chitin bursting its banks. Was it a thousand, out there? Ten thousand? Could it be a million? They were moving too fast and disorderly to count, scrambling over and around each other for purchase as they went. Reggie couldn’t estimate, not even to the nearest digit.

  So he focused on what he could do instead. Reggie had glimpsed his remaining peelers as he ran through the building, and now he sent out a mental command to them. He remembered something useful, headed away from the parapet and to the dead Witchfinders. They were right where he’d left them, all five, and after another few seconds spent concentrating, they weren’t any longer. In all it was a few dozen undead against easily thousands of ants.

  But Reggie had a few scant advantages.

  It looked like there was an even greater proportion of drones here than he’d seen in the nests. As hard to estimate as anything else about the numbers, of course, but at Reggie’s closest guess he’d have said nine in ten. Of what remained, maybe two thirds were soldiers.

  That still left a good score or two of the praetorians, if he was optimistic. Reggie turned to Ludvich.

  “Fight the little ones,” he told the Witchfinder, “focus on draining them. I’m commanding the peelers to keep the enemy off you while you do. We need you as powerful as fast as it can happen.”

  Ludvich had drained another half-dozen enemies in the night, if Reggie had done that he’d have likely ended up with at least one improvement to every Attribute he had. But Ludvich grew slower.

  Slower, however a Tier 1 vampire was still Tier 1. He could gorge himself on the drones here and if Reggie bought him long enough he’d come out of the fighting in better condition than he entered it. It was all just a matter of keeping the enemy off him.

  The enemy in question was close, now, less than fifty paces. Reggie saw a praetorian heading right for the section of wall he occupied, looked around, and got an idea. He hoisted up a block of detached granite that probably weighed five or ten times what he did, picked his moment and chucked it down. Gravity joined forces with Reggie’s arms to send the block faster than either alone could have managed, and it was right on-target for the praetorian. The praetorian saw it, tried to move, and couldn’t. Slowed by the drones swarming around it, the thing was boxed in right until the moment of impact.

  Reggie actually winced as he saw it, despite himself. Carapace cracked and limbs snapped. If it was still alive, it wouldn’t be fighting.

  For his part, Ludvich was already making himself useful too. His musket had been effective since the very moment they first saw the ants, plinking away into the horde and doing invisibly-small damage as hardened balls took out individual drones. He wasn’t loading and firing nearly as fast as he had as a Worker, but he was doing more than nothing. Compensating for speed, Reggie thought, with coordination. His hands didn’t shake anymore, steady as a surgeon’s. Old brain made new, nerves un-fucked by death. Vampirism was one hell of a thing.

  Once the enemy was actually at the tower, Ludvich started doing even more by dropping his own blocks onto them. His weren’t the half-ton weights Reggie was unleashing, but they had enough kick to burst a drone or wound a soldier.

  A few moments later, and the insects were swarming up for a melee. That was when the peelers got involved.

  Reggie lunged forwards and swiped his talons out, dismembering a whole row of the drones and revealing a great praetorian reared up behind them. No time to eat it so he just lashed out a kick hard for its midsection. Reggie reckoned he’d have put his foot right through a lower-level Worker, kicking that hard, and it served to crack the creature’s armour and send it shooting easily twenty paces back off the wall and dropping down to land on the ranks of its kin. No sooner had he sent it away than more frothed up to replace it. Then more still.

  So he kept swiping in long, scything arcs as his talons practically melted through armour and meat, snagging only when they found the tougher ants whose carapace would turn away hardened lead from a fair distance.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  By Reggie’s own estimate, he was killing about three drones with every swing, and making half a score of those swings every second. But it only took them a few seconds to overrun him and start doing as they had before, mounting their weights atop his body and threatening to bring him down with the combined strength of an army. Acid was dribbling down everywhere, searing Reggie’s skin and actually killing several of the drones. They didn’t care, he realised. Whatever intelligence was behind this swarm had calculated that a flesh wound on him was worth the life of its lowliest servants.

  And it had been right, none of the drones could hope to achieve a wound like that normally. The cold logic of it hit Reggie as painfully as the acid itself.

  Ow, bugger, okay, not that painfully. He kept thrashing around on instinct, then paused and mastered himself more. Reggie made his motions smaller, skewering and opening enemies instead of slicing them in half, extending his thoughts to caress all the corpses around him. There had to be two dozen.

  All at once, the corpses became reanimates.

  Reggie learned several things very quickly. He learned that the ants were good at sensing when a moving ant wasn’t controlled by the same intelligence as them, because a good few of his new familiars were torn apart and destroyed before they even rose. He learned, also, that having a mass of enemies suddenly spawn among your swarm was apparently very disorienting for the ants, no matter how efficiently they got to killing them.

  And he learned that necromancy was very tiring.

  The sudden change to his fight bought Reggie enough time and room to grab a drone and squeeze, digging his claws into its torso and letting the blood rain down on his face. He managed to swallow maybe a tenth of it, but it was just the boost he needed to his ichor reserves. The new corpse was reanimating before it landed. Reggie started lashing out with kicks and short slashes that further widened the space around him, then he slithered free of the death-pile and was swinging his talons out in full arcs all over again.

  From this position, he could see the disposition of enemies swarming his wall. More than a few praetorians, with soldiers pushing up to replace the killed drones. This would be where everything got decided, one way or the other. Time to focus up.

  Reggie saw a praetorian nearing him from the corner of his eye, and pretended not to. When it reared up for a spray of acid, he called on the blood lying nearby and wrapped thick tendrils of it around the ant’s legs, then pulled them taut. It fell, sprayed all the acid it had intended for him and ended up dousing ten of its own kin instead. While they shrieked and liquefied—the acid of a praetorian was far stronger than their own—Reggie was already turning on the downed enemy and impaling it with both sets of talons. It gurgled and twitched, but died fast. He didn’t bring it back, couldn’t risk it falling back under the control of whatever intelligence was orchestrating its living counterparts.

  Somewhere to his side Reggie caught a flash of Ludvich latched onto a dead soldier. Good. Him gaining strength fast was Reggie’s best hope to come out of this on top, and he’d put several of the reanimated Witchfinders on keeping the new vampire safe while he did just that. Then the ranks of bodies closed up and Reggie was isolated again.

  He lost track of time as he kept fighting, everything just became a monotonous blur as his limbs jerked around and his talons caught meat. Sometimes he’d hit a soldier, and feel them snagging and slowing as they cut through. Other times he’d hit a praetorian and actually get the claws stuck in its body outright. Every time, something died.

  Reggie was dying too, bit by bit. Unlike Ludvich he was the focus of his enemy’s attack. Whatever led the ants clearly considered him to be the biggest threat present, and believed that it would essentially win as soon as he was knocked out of the fight. Probably because this was exactly what he was and exactly what would happen.

  But that didn’t mean he’d be going out easily. Reggie intended to either win here or, failing that, die soaked in as much ant blood as he could physically fit onto his body. So far he’d managed a solid two thirds coverage. The ants kept coming and the space got tighter, but Reggie’s saving grace was that his undead joints and muscles still didn’t tire like those of a living thing.

  Unfortunately, the ants weren’t getting tired either. None of them were actually fighting long enough to have stamina issues before getting killed. Reggie started ceding ground, then stopped when the space he’d been stepping back into suddenly became a carpet of carapace, mandibles and squirting acid. At this point his ichor was draining away like water from a cupped hand. If he slowed down his rampage enough to drink more, he’d only be giving his enemies the chance to attack.

  Skin already burned raw by the sun, he wasn’t sure he’d survive granting them even a single free shot.

  Reggie did some thinking and he did it fast. His ichor was dwindling, his Regeneration slowing. At this rate he had maybe another few seconds before he couldn’t even sustain his Form of The Beast, and once that ran out his odds of beating even a single praetorian would become uncertain, let alone all the ones here put together.

  So he coined a plan and expended all of his remaining ichor in a single wave of spilled blood, lifting it from the ground and driving it against his enemies. It bought him a second to take the head off a soldier, bite down and drain it near-instantly. Its blood was thin, now, near-tasteless, too weak to fully replenish him but enough to keep him active. While the other ants were still recovering, Reggie noticed several other details all at once.

  They were still near the edge, and the ground under their feet was wet. They were unbalanced.

  Unbalanced enough that when Reggie slammed into them, his toes sprouting thick nails that gripped the stonework better than any flat foot, his sheer strength was enough to send the lot of them tumbling back. Dozens of ants fell over the side and plummeted scores of feet to the ground below. They’d probably have been fine, landing on dirt.

  But the granite on which Reggie’s castle rested was far harder than dirt.

  It bought him another reprieve. One spent resurrecting more dead, draining the dying, replenishing and regaining strength.

  Preparing for the next round of violence.