Chapter 360: Capturing the Banner
The warlord roared, "Move! Throw everything we have at that wall, take it back now!"
His forces were purely melee, and Khorne's blessing or not, they could only fight what stood in front of them.
A twelve-meter Knight suit was a walking mountain of iron. Throw a hundred thousand men at one, and it still might not be enough.
The only real defense they had against a Knight was the sheer mass of the walls themselves.
If a Knight got inside the city, it wouldn't even need to fight. Just walking around would be enough to kill everyone in its path.
"General! There's an enemy warrior in gold armour, monstrously strong, endless stamina. He's carrying some kind of relic weapon, one strike splits a man and his armour clean in half! He's already cut down several hundred of our men on the wall, no one can stand against him!"
Fury flashed through the warlord's eyes. He glanced back once at his slowly maturing ritual circle, then drew the massive two-handed axe from his belt.
"All of you! With me! Retake the wall!!"
He had no choice but to fight this one personally, though he clearly resented it.
The inner wall wasn't built to withstand a Knight suit. It was thin, and a war engine could knock it flat without effort. If that happened, everything he'd bled for to build his ritual circle would be lost.
He couldn't accept that outcome. There was nothing left but to take the field himself.
On the outer wall, Kian was in full killing frenzy.
Wave after wave of cultists kept coming, endless, but Kian's own stamina seemed just as bottomless.
He'd worked out that he could keep his sword swinging at maximum tempo for roughly three minutes straight before his stamina bar bottomed out and his motions slowed. At that point, he either drank a stim to refresh his condition, or fell back and stood still for thirty seconds while the bar refilled on its own.
Since the situation wasn't dire enough to justify burning through his stims, Kian went with the second option.
He'd tear through the enemy for three straight minutes, kill a hundred-plus men, then immediately fall back into Luca's ranks.
Thirty seconds of quiet, letting the bar refill, then back out to fight again.
After a few cycles of this, Luca's men caught on, this lord was pacing himself between rests. Whenever Kian showed signs of pulling back, they'd open the shield wall for him, let him rest behind their line, and hold the cultist assault themselves while he recovered.
On one of these cycles, having just cut down nearly a hundred more, stamina spent, Kian fell back into the shield wall to rest.
He checked his system display. Melee proficiency had climbed to 190, closing in on the 200 mark.
If Xi the Sword Immortal had his body half-systematized like this, his melee proficiency would probably be sitting at a thousand or something, Kian mused to himself.
Proficiency gains got harder the higher you climbed. Early on, one kill was worth one point. Past 100, it took two or three kills per point. Past 200, it might take ten, even close to a hundred kills for the next tick.
Past three or four hundred, he figured ordinary kills probably stopped counting entirely, and only genuinely high-quality targets would move the needle further.
"Push forward! Crush these cowards!!"
Kian's train of thought was interrupted by a wave of shouting.
He looked up and spotted it, roughly fifty meters behind the cultist lines, a red banner, being waved by a cluster of burly soldiers rallying the troops forward.
His eyes lit up. First to the wall, cut down the commander, capture the banner. He'd checked off the first already. The commander and the banner remained. And here the enemy had gone and delivered the banner right to him.
His stamina bar had just refilled. He shoved past the Luca soldier in front of him, cut a devastating swath through seven or eight cultists in a single burst, and carved out an opening.
Then, close to a metric tonne of armour and momentum, he slammed straight into the enemy line, sword cutting left and right, literally carving a bloody road through the crowd.
He pressed forward without hesitation, drilling into the enemy formation like a bit, and every cultist who tried to stop him met the disruption field and came apart.
Thirty meters into the crowd, the cultists finally realized what he was after. He was going for the banner!
That could not be allowed.
Armies under Khorne's system placed enormous weight on discipline and honor. If their banner fell, the punishment was mandated self-execution.
The instant they understood the threat, the cultists surged into a frenzy, swarming Kian from every direction, weapons of every kind raining down on him.
Kian felt blades and spears converging on him from all sides, and someone even tried to grapple his armour to slow him down.
"Stamina stim, strength stim, inject! Hydration, replenish!"
Kian barked the order, and his armour's internal injector fired two stims directly into his body.
A straw extended from his helmet's internal system, and he bit down and swallowed a unit of the stim fluid.
His stamina bar, just emptied from the earlier charge, snapped back to full instantly, and his speed and strength surged.
Both hands on the greatsword, he cut loose in one massive sweeping arc, and the bodies in front of him shattered like dropped porcelain.
Over a dozen cultists died in that single stroke, clearing him a wide swath of open ground.
He slammed forward, driving his shoulder into a cultist's breastplate hard enough to cave it in, the man vomiting blood and collapsing on the spot.
Then, left cut, right cut, left cut, right cut, like harvesting wheat, he split the crowded ranks in front of him clean in two.
Drenched head to toe in blood, he pushed through the final twenty meters.
He kicked the standard-bearer's guard off his feet and reached out, seizing the great banner the cultist army used to rally and command their forces.
A few quick slashes reduced the pole and the banner cloth to ribbons, and an instant later, the chaotic battlefield went dead silent.
The cultists still swarming around him froze, disbelief plastered across their faces, weapons clattering out of their hands and onto the ground.
Then, seconds later, under the uncomprehending stares of everyone watching, those same cultists drew their own daggers and killed themselves on the spot.
Chk, chk, chk!!
A string of dull, wet thuds followed, blades punched into chests, driven into throats, one after another.
Along that stretch of wall, close to eight hundred and eighty-eight cultists ended themselves at once, the ground carpeted with twitching bodies.
Down near the gatehouse, Luca's soldiers watched in stunned incomprehension. That many people, taking their own lives so readily, without hesitation, none of them had ever seen anything like it.
What they didn't understand was that under Khorne's system, honor mattered more than life itself.
And a banner was the physical embodiment of an army's honor. Lose the banner, and you lost your honor entirely.
Without honor, there was no right to keep living. Better to end it yourself than face the reckoning that would follow, which would only be far worse.
Khorne's forces organized themselves on a base-eight structure: squads of eight, companies of eighty-eight, and battalions of eight hundred eighty-eight.
A single banner commanded one full battalion of eight hundred eighty-eight men.
All eight hundred eighty-eight of them dying at once opened up a massive gap along the wall, and until the enemy could fill it, the battlefield fell into an eerie, dead silence.
Kian shook the blood off his armour, shouldered his sword, and turned to head back to the line.
That was when a furious roar erupted behind him.
"YOU! STAND YOUR GROUND!!"
The warlord had reached the wall without Kian noticing, shoving his own men aside, greataxe gripped tight in both hands.
He leveled the massive weapon at Kian.
"I challenge you. One on one!"
☆☆☆
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