Sheets of flame dropped down on the undead like boiling oil pitched from atop a wall, yet here the fire burned hotter and more energetically than any liquid I knew of. Necrotic tissues caught fire easily, dried out by so many years without the moisture of life and turning into yet more flame.

  In one second the world became a thing of choking smoke and blistering fire, all crackling up on one side of our formation as shamblers started coming apart. At some points the heat in its initial descent was so great that bodies simply ruptured, where others were dying more slowly. All, though, were subject to the same destruction, be it gradual or instantaneous.

  More felt than even the effects of the physical temperature were the psychological changes. Most people have a very particular reaction to seeing fire suddenly appear mere yards in front of them, and as you can imagine it had a very disorganising effect on the soldiers still holding our defence.

  People panicked. More than the classic panic of sharpened steel coming for them, they fell into some kind of bestial fright as the flames uncurled. Animals caught in a burning woodland, because at the end of the day there’s an animal in every human that wakes up when fear or blood thickens enough to rouse it.

  That would’ve killed us all, normally. But the same inferno that inspired such fear was destroying more of the enemy with every second that past. Ten, twenty, too many to count. In mere moments it seemed virtually all the shamblers were gone. Those still remaining continued only because they were too intimately entangled with our fighters to be struck down without human casualty.

  And that was when I dully realised the explosions of magic were from a friendly party.

  Morlo the Great and Mighty made himself known just a moment later as he started cackling over the flames, and I turned to look over at him. The old bastard looked as unhinged and terrifying as ever, eyes bulging and hair seeming to stand on end as his robes billowed around him as if thrashing to winds only he could feel.

  “I found you, you little shit!” he shrieked, his words cutting through the air and scything right past the sound of roaring flames. Upon hearing them, I realised that the dozen bonfires eating flesh behind me were only the second most frightening thing present.

  Morlo continued striding forwards.

  I, on the other hand, scrambled back. It didn’t matter much to me that it was the undead and fire in that direction, because suddenly that seemed like a far less terrible thing to be approaching than the wrinkly old fuck ahead of me. Morlo just kept coming, and unlike me he didn’t have thrashing bodies blocking his movement.

  “Uh, hello…” I thought fast at the Thaumaturge’s approach, or as fast as my mind could manage given the circumstances. Fear is an intoxicant to cause more idiocy than any other. Alcohol has nothing on fear, nor does a bloody hammer to the forehead. Morlo seemed to pick up on that fear, too, and it made him smile.

  “Do you know how long it took me to find you?” he spat, bringing his wrinkled face to within a few inches of mine, letting me feel hot breath against my skin. It seemed almost as warm as the side of my body currently being baked by the roaring fires just five yards behind it. My trembling certainly did not improve.

  “A…few months?” I don’t know why I answered with a guess, why I was focusing so much on this bad old fuck while there were still enemies around. I suppose my experiences with Thaumaturges in particular, and magic in general, left me somewhat sensitive to the threat they posed. Morlo appeared rather pleased by that fact, at least.

  Whatever his pleasure would have turned into, I wasn’t given the chance to see. Some noise burst out behind us and had me spinning around with my sword and shield raised on sheer reflex. Good thing, too, because otherwise the two ghuls would’ve been on me before I could blink. As things were I had just long enough to ineffectually swing at them, miss, and then cry out as I was wrestled to the ground by one while the other peeled off for Morlo.

  My fight consumed any sensory abilities my exhausted mind still possessed, so I hadn’t a clue how well the Thaumaturge was doing until I’d already finished it. That took some doing on my own part too, the ghul was already closed tight against me and drawing those jagged teeth closer to my neck by the moment.

  I liked my new chainmail coif, but I didn’t like it enough to volunteer for a durability test just yet. Scrambling under the ghul I managed to free one of my legs, plant its heel against the creature’s thigh and flip it off me with a sharp kick outwards. I bought myself maybe a second with that, the ghul was almost instant in scrambling back for me. One second was enough though. I swung my sword around and punched the guard right into its face just as it rose up to pounce again.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  The angle was good, the connection clean, but I was punching from a half-seated position and only had arm strength behind it. That the ghul was tougher than a human certainly didn’t help. I managed to dislodge it a shade more and scramble out from under it.

  Both of us got to our feet and attacked at the same time, the only difference was that I swung with the sword still in my hand while the ghul had dropped its own. The extra reach meant that my weapon smacked hard against its helmeted head and rung the creature’s bell nice and thoroughly. It went back, paused, seemed disoriented—funny, that, for a dead thing—but didn’t go down entirely. I followed up with a stab, using the tip this time and scoring a perfect contact. This time the rusty chainmail wasn’t enough.

  Gurgling and thrashing, the ghul went down like a stringless puppet and kicked out for a few more moments of impotent dying. I studied it, picked my moment, then stepped in to bring the sword down on its already-exposed neck a second time right when it was turned to make it easiest. The metal sunk in and ruptured everything in its path, stilling the creature at once.

  When I looked back to Morlo, he’d already defeated his opponent of course. His ghul was hovering high overhead, straining against invisible forces holding its arms and legs splayed as Morlo shook his head.

  “Try to ambush me, you little shit?” with a flex of one hand I felt the forces intensify, and the ghul just came apart. Limbs flying out in four different directions and thick black blood squirting free to splash itself across a five pace radius. Some of it went in the fire.

  And some of it went on me, of course, but the foul-smelling ichor wasn’t even in my top five concerns for the time being, and that most recent fight had cleared my mind for thought.

  “What are you doing here?” I snapped, looking around at the carnage, then deciding on a somewhat more practical question. “How are we getting out?”

  Morlo cackled. “Back’s clear, men are already fucking off. I’d recommend you join them.”

  I followed his gaze and saw he was right, already soldiers were pouring out of the room with all the haste of…well, a bunch of men fleeing from undead and uncontrollable infernos. Not that I’m one to speak of course, with my long legs and athleticism I was one of the first out of the room.

  Or would have been, had Morlo not seized my arm quite hard and looked me in the eyes with a sudden intensity.

  “Don’t you think a hero might stay behind to see his allies out first?” he suggested. Panicked as I was, it took me a moment to get his meaning. When I did it was like ice-water in my veins.

  “You’re…you…you’re suggesting that I—”

  —”I’m simply pointing out what is expected of you, by now, given your reputation, that’s all.” Morlo smiled, displaying yellowed teeth and stabbing his eyes right down into my core. I shivered.

  Then moved to act.

  I don’t really remember how I did it, or what I said, just that I opened my big fat mouth and started barking out for people, looking around to find any who were struggling to move for one reason or another and making a big show of hauling them away. No doubt, someone watching me with any scrutiny would’ve realised how bullshit the whole thing was.

  Evidently, nobody was applying that scrutiny at the moment. I can tell this from the fact that when I finally emerged carrying someone—or rather, carrying a corpse I’d found near the door so I could make a show of dropping it at my feet and cursing as if he’d been alive when I first set out—men began swarming me from all sides acting as if…

  Well, as if I was some sort of hero.

  There was no cohesion to the military any longer, not right now. Officers were barking orders, but those orders were just bouncing right off their men as more pressing concerns took over from the old instincts of command chains and flogging-fears.

  That I was the centre of this struck me as a less than ideal fact, for it meant I was the most likely candidate to receive any sort of disciplinary measures the officers might decide were necessary to re-enforce their desired order onto the group. My fearing that took away from much of the moment, left me not really hearing whatever was being heaped onto me in words of praise and not really noticing the wide-eyed grins I was getting from every direction.

  It was Morlo, in the end, who brought me some breathing room. He employed a particular crowd-clearing technique that I’ve seen Thaumaturges utilize a few times since. Subtle and cunning, making use of minor social conventions to get his way. He raised a hand and launched an arc of flame high into the air, terrorising everyone around me into scrambling back.

  I went back right alongside them of course, which would have been somewhat embarrassing if anyone had been looking at me instead of the great fire being conjured by a mad Thaumaturge. Morlo cut the flames off and scraped the crowd with his gaze.

  “Who here is in charge?!” he called out.

  It took a while for him to receive an answer at that. This probably wasn’t unrelated to the fact that his presence so far had mostly consisted of showing off enough power to barbeque entire infantry formations, and demonstrating a very angry willingness to use it with little provocation. Still, he got his response eventually.

  One of the idiots in plate armour, perhaps the one I’d seen doing the bulk of the fighting at the front, stumbled out and met Morlo’s gaze. He did not, I noticed, take any of his armour off, despite it being considered the basics of good manners to do so.

  What actually amused me at that was the idea that he thought wearing the armour would make any difference at all. Plate armor is good stuff, and his seemed to have some strange quality that put it a step above even the usual sort, but I for one had no illusions about its ability to stave off total engulfment in fire.

  “We thank you for your help, Thaumaturge,” the man said in a voice that sounded a lot more quieter than he’d probably been hoping to make it. Morlo grinned, apparently pleased with the visible fear he was inspiring.

  “Oh don’t thank me just yet,” he shot back, “I’m here for one of your soldiers.”

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