Chapter 47: DD2 Chapter 041 – Crescendo

For the first time in years Eliza woke up feeling refreshed. She let out a low yawn and slowly stretched herself awake before finally scrambling out of her narrow cot. Of the seven occupants who called the cramped tent she found herself in their temporary home, she was the very last to rise which gave her the almost luxurious benefit of getting dressed in total privacy. Eliza took her time to enjoy the cool sensation of the morning air on her exposed skin, secure in the knowledge that Riyoul would never again suddenly appear to cast judgement over her body.

The bastard was dead, and that knowledge brought her nothing but joy.

Having fled Rhelea with just the clothes on her back and her trusty violin, her garments were getting more than a little ripe, but when she considered all the death and destruction that had taken place so recently it didn’t feel right to complain about dirty clothes. Gods help her, but she really missed the old washerwoman who normally took care of her laundry. Eliza knew that she was being ungrateful, that others certainly had it worse than she did: having lost their homes, partners, and even children. She was alive and uninjured—voice notwithstanding—so it felt fundamentally wrong to cry about persistent odours, dead friends, and a missing cat.

So she didn’t.

When she was finally ready—stained clothing and all—Eliza pulled back the tent flap, inhaled a deep lungful of crisp, wintery air, and put on an almost genuine smile. Life, for all of its recent horrors, was finally improving for the bard. Oh sure, her home was infested with monsters, people had died by the thousands, and she’d lost her voice, but ever since that night on the hill when she’d led the other bards in song, the music had been flowing through her stronger than ever before.

She could already feel it building inside of her. A low beat that grew imperceptibly faster with every passing second, part of a rising score that offered her a glimpse of the inevitable crescendo to come. The notes were so powerful that they bled into her other senses. The anticipation of the much promised finale that would certainly come later today with the assault on Rhelea. It manifested as the sharp taste of a high-C on her tongue, the feel of a low-G caressing her back, and a flat-F pushing her forwards, out of the tent. Wrapped up in music, the bard revelled in her newly strengthened connection to her class, and she wondered if this was what everyone else felt like all the time when they weren’t being tormented by invisible sociopaths.

Mirroring the increasingly urgent sounds that had enveloped her heart, people hurried about all around her, desperate to finish their preparations before the looming deadline. The entrance to her shared tent was an island of calm amidst a storm of frantic, last-minute activity. Nearby, warriors ritualistically checked their weapons, and offered prayers up to their ancestors before heading out. Words of sage advice were gifted to members of the traditionally non-combat classes who awkwardly parroted the warriors’ expert movements. Those who were new to violence were easy to identify from how they held their runic blades awkwardly in their hands, but while their knees may have shaken, the set look of determination in their eyes spoke volumes to their resolve.

The nonhuman-forged steel had proliferated the campgrounds in their entirety. Back in Rhelea it was not uncommon to see weapons tied to belts, but where before daggers and cudgels had been primarily used to ward away thieves, now longswords and battleaxes—etched deep with foreign runes—could be seen carried by everyone from the highest-levelled adventurers to the humblest of labourers.

Husbands and wives exchanged their own heartfelt goodbyes, while children—ever so quick to recover from the violence they’d witnessed—played nearby in the thick snow that blanketed the ground.

The rich smell of meaty stew mingled with that of oiled steel as the dragon’s stores had been cracked wide open to give everyone one last good meal before the assault on the city. Hulking monsters on four or more legs, dragged heavy wagons through wide paths between clusters of tents. This would have been remarkable by itself even if they were driven by those with tamer classes—but they weren’t. More monsters, humanoid in shape, who would have been hunted for coin mere days ago, now travelled the camp offering food to the hungry, and enchanted steel to the vengeful.

Eliza didn’t know how many people had volunteered to fight, but it was becoming an increasingly rare thing to see a man or a woman without a blade in their hands. It was insane, and yet it made perfect sense. Rheleans had lost so much, that anger was still fresh and the songs that played almost through the night only served to stoke that righteous fury. Classers were stronger than normal folk, and even without a combat class, higher stats gave even the most innocent sounding classes an edge over lower levelled warriors. If farmboys could trade the scythe for a spear in times of war, then even a Rhelean bard like herself could learn to swing a sword.

Eliza walked through the camp, weaving between tents and goodbyes while her ears sampled the sounds of activity. Today was the day she went back into Rhelea, back inside the jaws of the hungry city that had already consumed so many lives. When the soldiers went, she—like so many others—would go with them. The heavy lump of sharp steel at her hip was proof enough of her intention to do just that.

Flashes of the horrors crawling along the sides of buildings, waves of inky black tearing their way through the living superimposed themselves before her eyes, but the accompanying fear for her own life never came. She blinked away the unpleasant memories and carried on about her morning. She didn’t know if it was her broken skill or Riyoul’s death that was affecting her so profoundly, but as she joined the slow moving stream of hesitant classers, she felt her confidence grow in time with the pace of her song.

She knew that many of the people who crowded in around her hoped that their loved ones trapped inside Rhelea were still alive, and believed that their armed return was the only thing that would ensure their survival. It was a belief that seemed to be encouraged by the higher-ups who had formulated the rather simplistic plan of attack. Eliza didn’t know if she believed it, the idea reeked of propaganda, but usually bards were the first to be conscripted to spread such messages and while she still couldn’t talk without relying on her skills, she wasn’t aware of a single one of her colleagues who had been paid to spread such a rumour.

Four massive columns of soldiers were arrayed side by side on the sloping plains between the campgrounds and the city. One human, the other three decidedly not. Eliza’s eyes had trouble comprehending the sheer quantity of souls waiting before her, and the contrasting sizes and shapes of the nonhumans certainly didn’t help her make an accurate count. Monsters and people—or perhaps just people—continued to trickle down from the two camps to join their respective forces.

Human and nonhuman alike met on the short walk down the hill. With skyward glances levels were compared, and rarely greetings were exchanged instead of hostile looks. Hulking figures made from living stone and clad in thick steel lumbered along, heedless of the thick snow underfoot. Packs of burly ratlings, fully encapsulated in shining armour marched forwards in perfect formation to join their own column which was far more orderly than the rest. Adventurers laughed, far more at ease than their human contemporaries who muttered curses and shared grim jokes in the most perfect example of gallows humour that the bard had ever seen.

As Eliza’s feet led her down a well trodden path layered with footprints she didn’t recognise, her skill-enhanced ears picked up on every conversation within her considerable range. While the topics were rarely light, there was a note of hopefulness in the air, a belief that if they all did their part everything would be alright. It made her smile a little less false, and as she leaned into that optimistic feeling she almost felt her steps get lighter. Then amidst the cacophony of noises in different tones and languages, she finally heard something—someone—familiar.

The bard turned slightly and began to sprint, pushing her way through the slow moving crowd in her haste to get to her destination. Eliza didn’t have to travel far, but the time between hearing his voice and seeing his face felt long and torturous. The worry that she might have imagined his familiar tones would have been unbearable. Fortunately, the man in question had a tendency to natter on constantly, which made finding him amongst the massive crowd remarkably easy.

Clad in a ridiculous mail coif at least two sizes too large for him, along with a shining breastplate and a sturdy axe—neither of which suited the short man—the other bard was a welcome sight to Eliza’s sore eyes. Her old friend looked utterly ridiculous equipped for war, but when she considered that he at least had armour whereas she had a stained shirt, perhaps the other bard had the right idea.

Barlow was comfortably sandwiched between two statuesque warrior-tagged women who made her short friend seem absolutely diminutive as they shuffled forwards towards the column. While he talked their ears off with tales of his heroic exploits which Eliza knew to be nothing more than outrageous lies, she was comforted by the way the two women moved protectively around him when they saw her running towards him with what she knew to be a look of silent determination on her face.

“Eliza! You’re alive, I should have known you were too pretty to die,” Barlow grinned, pushing past his warrior escort in his haste to greet her. When she didn’t immediately respond a look of concern started to form on Barlow’s face, but Eliza was quick to dispel that by rapping her knuckles on his shining steel breastplate in a short little beat.

“And I should have known you were too cowardly to stay in Rhelea,” she drummed, and the other bard was quick to let out a relieved laugh.

“You’re right in that, I suppose. One look at those horrors and I was already running for the gates,” he laughed. “I mean tentacle monsters, really? It’s like something out of one of your ruder songs. Anyway, what was that just now? A new skill?”

“A new use for an old skill. I lost my voice.”

Barlow winced at that, and Eliza couldn’t blame him. It was a deep wound for a bard to suffer, and with him present there was no easy escape from that truth.

“Oh well, you never could sing anyway. The violin was always your talent, although being completely honest, those bawdy tales of yours never would have sold half as well without your pretty face and more impressive figure behind the instrument” the short man joked.

“Gods above Barlow, you really haven’t changed at all have you?” she tapped and he just grinned at her in response. “Do you know if any of the others made it out?”

“Give me a second. I’m going to need a drink for that…” Barlow winced. The short bard then fished a dented flask from a pocket around his waist. He took a deep drink of the dark fluid before offering it to Eliza. Just a whiff of the intoxicating fumes was enough to make her head spin, and considering the life or death battle up ahead she decided to politely decline. A decision which earned her a brief look of surprise from her old friend. “Liara’s dead. Fool woman put herself between a pack of horrors and a family of four. I didn’t stick around to see the end of it, but she would have gone down swinging that ridiculous axe of hers. Adriann also made it out, although his wife didn’t. The ranger’s up ahead somewhere in the column. He was one of the first to form up this morning—once he’d traded everything he had with the dragon’s monsters for extra arrows that can harm those tentacled abominations. Last I saw him, he was alright physically—though he never did get his teeth fixed—but if you ask me, no matter how well this goes, he aint coming out again without his wife. And Phiopplies… well… you know.”

“Yeah. I do…”

The two bards walked forwards in silence for a time while Eliza processed what Barlow had just told her and his statuesque companions made a polite show of checking their weapons. She’d had no reason to expect more, but Eliza had hoped for better news regarding the fate of her friends.

“What about Riyoul? I’ve seen the rest of the Shining Swords about camp, but—”

“Bastard’s dead,” she tapped on Barlow’s chest with finality.

“Oh. Are you—”

“I killed him.”

“I see…” the bard replied slowly. “Do you want to talk about it?”

If Eliza could talk, she would have spat out a refusal on instinct. But she couldn’t, and the extra half a second it took for her to start up a rhythm gave her mind the time she needed to catch up with the words on the tip of her skill.

“Actually, I think I would.”

***

The column raced forwards towards the yawning portal of the west gate. Hers had been the last of the four armies to leave, with the other three having further to travel to get to their respective gates. Somehow despite the much shorter distance to their goal, the humans were in danger of falling behind schedule, hence the need for their hurried dash through the snow. There had been no speeches or grand declarations, no talk of hope or imminent victory, just a brief parade of well-armoured nobles flying a flag and one Dragonrider. They had toured the length of the ten-thousand strong column on horseback shortly before the march into Rhelea had started with the bellow of a horn that was repeated up and down the line.

Iron rank adventurers had gone on ahead to do the dangerous job of actually opening the city’s western gates. The mechanisms to do so had been destroyed days ago when the city was hastily abandoned.

Eliza hustled forwards next to Barlow, the two warrior women she had come to know as Ashla and Roema, and Gods alone knew how many others pressed in all around. She found it surprisingly difficult just to move in time with the people who surrounded her. Not because she was particularly unfit, but because they were so tightly packed together. She was constantly jostled to and fro over the slick patches of fresh ice and snowmelt. The walls of the city’s great fortifications grew larger by the second, and the thunderous beat of so many falling feet rushing down the ancient Old Road was enough to set her heart racing.

A part of her wanted to say that the lack of grandeur was disappointing, that it had left some poetic notions of hers unfulfilled, but whatever she might have gained from a rousing speech had been replaced by the intense feeling of comradery she now shared with those all around her. For a frightening second she wondered why in the Gods she had ever volunteered to go back into Rhelea, she was not a fighter—not even a lover—but then suddenly, the open gates passed her by, and it was too late for doubts.

The music inside her surged upon re-entering Rhelea, and for a moment she was tempted to retrieve her violin strapped to her back instead of the sword at her hip. The tempo, that had been with her since awaking, raced to catch up with her rapid heartbeat which thundered in her ears with every hurried step. Powerful notes filled with bass and potential sang in her veins, begging to be let out, but the bard knew that it was not yet time.

The column started to slow as squads periodically branched off into adjoining streets while the main host thrust straight towards the centre of Rhelea. The Old Road offered a direct, unbroken line through the city, one which passed the Monster in the square. Had she had a skill that let her bend light to follow the gentle curve of the wide street she was on, then hopefully she’d have been able to see one of the dragon’s columns emerge in time with hers from the eastern gates on the far side of Rhelea.

But that was just idle fancy. What she could see however, was the devastation that she had tried to forget. The collapsed houses from the fighting, the burnt out streets from the dragon’s passes over the city, the dead soon to be trampled underfoot. Rhelea reeked of death and ichor; the fires that had once threatened to consume the city had long since gone out under the constant snowfall, but even with the chill of the cold freezing the dead solid, the pungent aroma of the slain was impossible to ignore.

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There was a brief delay between the column’s return and the horror’s aggressive arrival, where people surveyed the carnage that had befallen their city. Wet eyes hardened, and heads turned on swivels while the column marched deeper into Rhelea. Within minutes of their solemn march discordant howls began to ring out from over the rooftops, filling the air with the horrors’ unnatural noise. That broken bit of magic inside of Eliza’s class twisted uncomfortably in response to their hungry cries, and it took all of her self-restraint not to respond with one of her own. The bard’s throat grew hot to the touch, and an unfamiliar taste wormed its way up to the back of her mouth, but before she could dwell on that, she began to hear the unmistakable sounds of steel slicing into rubbery flesh.

And just like that, to the growing sounds of music that only she could hear, the battle for Rhelea began anew.

Cries of anger and howls of pain emanated from the column’s distant front where the bulk of the high-level warriors fought against the Monster’s spawn. From her vantage towards the rear of the armed procession, she could only hear the growing sounds of violence. Arrows were loosed overhead, and with skills aiding their path, they struck with unerring accuracy hundreds of feet away.

Where before, arrows that lacked powerful skills had seemed to be little more than a temporary irritant, these struck true—slaying the eldritch beasts and giving the warriors on the frontline time to breathe between incoming waves.

Already humanity’s return to Rhelea was so very different from its flight. She could hear the Monster’s spawn melt and boil whereas before she had mostly just heard humans die. Eliza knew that they were winning, or at least that they hadn’t been routed yet. It pained the storyteller in her that all she could see from her vantage point along the ground were the heads of taller soldiers and the fronts of damaged buildings. With her skills she could at least hear the ebb and flow of distant combat while the column continued its slow march forwards, unlike Barlow who had only his anxieties to focus on.

“This isn’t so bad,” Barlow suggested, smiling up at her while sweat dripped from his brow.

Eliza hesitated to answer him, in part because to do so would cost her stamina she might yet need to fight—or run—but also because unlike her friend, she had a perception skill. She could hear the sounds of conflict growing along the length of the column as waves of tentacled horrors lapped against them like the incoming tide. The fighting grew closer by the second and had yet to show any signs of slowing down in its scale or scope.

“Not so bad,” Roema answered for her in a surprisingly thick Saysarian accent. Her words seemed to calm her friend’s nerves, but all too soon Eliza heard and then saw horrors pour over the rooftops adjacent and plummet down into the wide street where they immediately set upon classers not two dozen feet away from where the bards stood.

The tightly packed formation immediately started to break down. Order disintegrated while the music grew louder in Eliza’s ears, and the battleplan broke down into a long series of free-for-alls. The two warrior sisters, who had once towered protectively over Barlow, raced forwards towards the nearby edges of the column, pushing past hesitant classers where they plunged their blades with practiced proficiency into the thrashing tentacles of the inky black horrors.

“Gods, Eliza, what do we do now?!” her friend shrieked, managing to utilise the full range of his impressive voice in his panic.

“We fight,” Eliza suggested, deciding that her short answer was worth the burst of stamina.

“Gods…” Barlow trailed off. The man's eyes had already gone wide with fright while he surveyed the growing scenes of increasingly close combat. His large axe hung forgotten from its loop around his belt—which belatedly reminded Eliza of her own undrawn steel.

She fumbled for her sword, and the blade stuck in its sheath where frost had formed in the icy weather. Eliza tugged harder on her weapon’s hilt while her ears, far more useful to her than her eyes, tracked the movements of a wave of horrors that were making their way through her part of the column.

One of them looked far larger than the others when she finally caught sight of it, more bear-sized than that of a pony which they usually seemed to resemble. As if it were her destiny, her sword chose this moment to suddenly slip out of its wooden container with a clear rasping sound, and the many-eyed horror locked onto her with its disjointed gaze. The two bards standing together with all of their untapped charisma must have been too appetising a sight for even the eldritch abominations to resist. The largest one raced forwards, smoothly gliding along the paved road. It pushed past other, easier prey in its hurry to get to them, but feeling no fear, Eliza readied her blade and stepped forwards to meet it.

The music swelled with every one of her steps. The bass roared in her ears while the beast rocketed closer.

She was vaguely aware of Barlow’s gasps of terror, even as they were drowned out by the rumbling of the drums. The beast's discordant howls were echoed by the crash of cymbals. Ashla, if not Roema, turned around to intercept the creature, but she was moving far too slowly to get to Eliza in time.

The bard’s sword felt heavy and sluggish in her hands. A tentacle studded with teeth, each one larger than her palm, whipped through the air towards her head, while a soprano cried in Eliza’s ears. The ethereal note rose higher still and with a deftness usually reserved for the violin, the bard ducked below the lashing limb. The displaced wind tousled her hair, and she stepped forwards to thrust with her blade while the soprano’s melody reached its peak.

Time seemed to slow down.

More tentacles than Eliza could count were coming to kill her. An uncoiling limb was already moving to slap the sword out of her hand. The bard saw her death a dozen times over, and felt it echoed by the music’s high pitch suddenly dropping to lowest of lows.

Eliza exhaled, and chose not to die.

[Troubadour’s Instrument] was a bard skill that was not meant for swords. But her recent experiences had taught her that regardless of the intended rules there was always some wriggle room in how you interpreted a skill’s written description.

Troubadour’s Instrument Level 42 - You may add this skill’s level to your dexterity score whilst wielding any instrument. Additionally, wielded instruments gain an increase to their durability as if they were affected by your vitality score, and you gain an improved understanding of timing in relation to affected instruments.

Who's to say that a sword cannot be an instrument? It was her skill and her class that lived inside of her. She had fed it the mana she breathed for decades now, and in this moment she needed it to obey her rules, not the System's. As the tip of her blade raced clumsily towards the beast in front of her, and tentacles moving faster than she was rushed to splatter her across the paved slabs of the Old Road, Eliza willed that it was so.

Something fought against her, something ancient and massive that utterly outclassed her own attempts to coerce her class onto a new path, but while the entity was unfathomably strong, it was fragile, and the wound in her class—her broken skill—let her slip past the ancient thing that resisted her resolve.

She suspected that it was the System, that there would be dire consequences to her actions, but Eliza couldn’t feel fear, and she knew that refusing to try meant that the horror in front of her would kill her. Her class was already wounded with its one broken skill, where was the harm in a second? And so when she pushed past the System’s will, and supplanted its desires with her own, she didn’t care about the ethereal snapping sensation inside of her soul, only that it worked.

She wanted her sword to be an instrument, one of pain and death.

And so it was.

Her sword's path straightened, her dexterity score effectively doubled, and with the exponents baked into the System she had just abused, she contorted her body between flailing tentacles. She glided above and below its attacks, scoring deep gashes on the creature with flicks of her weapon that hissed on contact with horror’s rubbery flesh.

Eliza wasn’t strong, 10 strength made her barely more impressive than if she were classless. She couldn’t lop off limbs with every strike, but now she was fast, and even not knowing how to fight, she was able to stay out of the horror’s multi-limbed reach. She let her enchanted sword do the work for her. The runes on the skill forged steel pulsed with light, draining the mana out of the eldritch creature with every slash that withered the foul beast one cut at a time.

The horror howled and screamed as it died, and soon enough other classers seeing her success leapt into the fray and within seconds from that point the bear-sized monstrosity was dead, dissolving into a black goop which spread out to boil at their feet.

Panting, Eliza struggled for breath, grateful that she hadn’t neglected her vitality stat half as much as she had her strength.

“Gods Eliza, I didn’t know you could fight like that, I didn’t know you could fight at all,” Barlow said, his axe still unslung.

“Me neither,” she tapped smugly.

The bard took a step back away from the spreading pool of black, only to stumble and fall to her knees while a nauseous discordant feeling filled her chest.

“Eliza! What's wrong?!” Barlow asked. Her friend rushed to her side, placing his hands on her shoulders to steady her, but while Eliza could look up at him to beg for help from the pain that ripped its way through her, she couldn’t speak.

The song inside her chest fought to get out, the promised crescendo no longer willing to wait until its time. She tried to stop it, to keep it contained where it could hurt only her, but she failed.

Eliza opened her mouth to sing, and Creation trembled.

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