NOVEL NEXT Battle For Undercity
6/16 noon
Sylvanas Windrunner stood in a triangle at the core of the ritual spire, standing before a massive brazier with the tantric rod at its core. As a tier 6, 7 thanks to her mantle, the Banshee Queen was worth a point of resonance all on her own. The building had been specially built around the brazier, capturing the majority of the energy of the rod and forcing it to swirl around the dome, becoming more and more dense as the spell continued. The energized atmosphere in the dome, crafted by a master architect in a historically significant spot with historically significant materials, was worth two points of resonance.
Three points, we needed twelve.
••••••••••
The very moment that the ritual began, when the sun was highest in the sky, every member of the Scourge felt the call. They knew instinctively that it was a threat. The initial plan had been to take the Lich King, and his was still the will that we most needed to break, but Tyrygosa had cooked up a ritual targeting the whole Scourge before collapsing in upon him instead of taking him and spreading from there. The good part was that we had more methods to amass resonance and it should work quicker. The bad news was that every single member of the Scourge was dropping everything and coming to stop us.
••••••••••
We knew where the biggest assault would be of course: the Bulwark, guarding the mountain pass on the border between the Plaguelands and Tirisfal glades. I’d been dropping nerubian towers all around the border, both anti air and antipersonnel, but most importantly I’d reinforced the Forsaken checkpoint with troops of my own and filled the mountain pass with demonic chaff. Of course, at the very front was an only slightly winded Leotheras fresh from his fight in Mimiron’s workshop.
I wasn’t actively trying to get him killed, I swear. It’s just good policy to always have the war god who will be immediately replaced by someone slightly stronger wherever the combat is thickest. He stood at the mouth of the canyon all day, leaping from foe to foe long after the Gan’arg guarding his flanks had fallen. He moved with unnatural speed, summoning shadowbeasts from the minds of his enemies and creating eruptions of despair all around him.
The claws of a ghoul simply could not cause meaningful harm to him, as troll-like regeneration mended what trivial scratches they left on him in moments. He was a rapidly shifting island in a sea of corpses, supported by artillery including Keryn in a shiny new Hammer Tank. He was all but unkillable, especially with the rebellion happening at Scholomance and among the ranks of Andorhol.
••••••••••
Sylvanas sang a mournful song with her chorus of banshees, composed to express the grief and longing felt by everyone in the retinue who had lost someone to the Scourge. We had pooled the memories into the minds of the best musicians in Stormwind and Lordaeron. It wasn’t a very nice song to listen to, referencing everything from Sally Whitemane’s desperate struggle against her undead father to Jaina Proudmore watching Arthas descend into vengeance fueled madness, but it did the job of binding the ritual together quite well. We needed twelve hours of verses; I’m not afraid to admit that it started to get repetitive.
As she sang, people began filing through the chamber and dropping pieces of paper onto the fire before kneeling for a few moments. Each of the letters and each of the prayers said the same thing in different words. “Come back to us. Let us be together again.” The people feeding the fire with their hopes all had one thing in common: they had once been of the Scourge and were now in my retinue. Now they were Nathrezim, Kyrians, human, or undead as their own desires dictated, but that common thread ran through every single person contributing to the ritual in every role. Their connections to the target created a certain unity that contributed a point of resonance. Their sheer numbers, nearly a thousand, contributed three. If their part had been more involved perhaps it would have been four, but sheer numbers were what mattered here.
We had seven. We needed twelve.
••••••••••
The most obvious way to bypass the Bulwark quickly was to have their flyers and climbers just go over the mountains. They could have certainly disrupted the ritual if they could dive bomb the building and kill a few people near the front of the line. Thankfully, I had three and a half flights of dragons providing security over the mountains. Any that got through needed to then get past a wall of nerubian flak cannons, and finally I had nearly a hundred Kyrian and Nathrezim deathguard holding up the rear.
The dragons were having enough difficulty dealing with spirits and gargoyles that the aspiring undead mountaineers were deemed an relatively low threat. After all, scrambling up a mountain and down the other side is a pretty strenuous and time consuming affair and we only needed to hold out until midnight. A few gheists, the most agile type of undead, would make it through but they weren’t exactly heavy combat units and they had several more layers of defense to contend with.
Unfortunately, the dragons overlooked a critical fact. Kel’Thuzad was an archmage, and was not restricted to the spells he used on screen.
••••••••••
Once the continuous line of people had established a consistent rhythm, with one entering every thirty seconds and leaving precisely two minutes later using the music to keep time, we were ready for the sexual part of the ritual. Eleven veiled women filed in, each flanked by a necromancer and a shadow priest wearing intense expressions of focus. They were a diverse bunch, but they had precisely three things in common. They were virgins picked out using the red string of fate, they were women, and despite their current status as puppets to my shadow casters they were still in the grip of the Scourge.
That was a deliberate choice; Xal’atath could probably have severed the connection this far away from the Lich King, but it was important that we did not. Each of the eleven, technically 13, was a different variety of Scourge slave kidnapped with great difficulty over the last week: A zombie possessed by a ghost, a ghoul possessed by a banshee, a crypt fiend, an agile little gheist, a skeleton chosen for her sentience, an acolyte from the Cult of the Damned, a trainee death knight kidnapped from Stratholm, an abomination easily stolen from the labs recently set up in Scholomance, a young frost wyrm from Dragonblight, one of the early Val’kyr from the town of Valkyrion (surprisingly easy since traditionally they were made from warrior *maidens*), and a San’Layn (an elven vampire created to replace the no-longer-Scourge-affiliated dreadlords).
Together, they could plausibly serve as a representation of the entire Scourge. It wasn’t perfect, I didn’t have a lady-Lich for example, but it was enough to allow for the next part to work.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/ladies-of-91012534
••••••••••
Through coordination between the Lich King and and a particularly speedy geist, Kel’Thuzad was able to open a stable portal to from Stratholm to the Tirisfal side of the mountains. It was an exhausting spell even for a Lich of his caliber, due to the lack of proper setup forcing him to do the whole process ad-hoc. He maintained his energy on the unfathomably inefficient spell primarily by ripping the souls from a dozen ghouls and skeletons every minute, and it only really provided enough space to send in a few hundred of his very strongest troops in a desperate gambit to stop my ritual in its tracks.
••••••••••
Filing in across from the ladies were ten men; volunteers who, like every other participant in this ritual, were formerly of the Scourge. Now their bodies varied wildly, as all had been resurrected via the Nathrezim method at some point, but their most important credentials were a willingness to commit completely to their role. It was hardly an onerous task I was asking from them, but it would still be a long term commitment.
As they all stood ready, the skeleton and the first man each walked up to the brazier. Across from where the parade was depositing their letters stood Father Fairbanks, the former high inquisitor of the Scarlet Crusade. He was the highest ranking member of the clergy I had that had once been in the Scourge, and was here to perform wedding ceremonies.
“We are gathered here today to bind these two together, even if we must pierce the veil of death in the process. In doing so, we draw out the spirit of the Scourge itself. Mallory Malone, do you wish to be bound to this man, to give yourself to him, and bear his child?”
Behind Mallory, the Scholomance trained necromancer furrowed her brow and pushed with her mind. “I do.” The skeleton agreed to the proposal with manic intensity that clashed with the placid demeanor common to skeletons.
“And do you, Jeremiah Felstone, agree to dedicate yourself to this woman and grant her a child, and in doing so create a promise of new life to her and her sisters among the Scourge?”
“I do.”
Their deal was only possible to accomplish because I’d dropped 8 credits on fertility calibration II to allow my retinue to do the impossible when it came to making babies. 8 credits for a point of resonance was a lot, but the other option was burning my Pen. I’ll take the suboptimal perk. I’m sure someone in the retinue will be thrilled; the whole blue dragonflight, for example.
Active and “consensual” sex with “the target”, as well as the loss of virginity and miraculous conception, was worth three points of resonance total.
We had ten. We needed twelve.
••••••••••
The Scarlet Crusade bravely laid their lives down in defense of the Undercity. They were no joke, but when exposed to the concentrated might of the Four Horsemen their rank and file footsoldiers were rapidly incinerated by overlapping auras. The trail of destruction the death knight commanders, Baron Rivendare subbing in for Zeliek, carved through the Crusader army created a road for big names like Ramstein, Razuvius, Parchwerk, and Sapphiron to charge down with their own small honor guards.
Though each was an engine of destruction in their own right, they were hardly ever deployed together like this, nor were these irreplaceable elites ever sent to the front with support as scant as they had then. They killed rapidly and indiscriminately, but I had tens of thousands of centaur willingly rushing to the crusader’s defense, and every successful strike would take time and energy to heal. Every person they needed to stop and kill was a short delay, and their normal strategy of immediately raising their victims backfired spectacularly as my troops rose to fight on my side once more.
Even better, Lunara and Zaetar had come along with the centaur and between virulent magical poisons and rapidly growing plants the enemy was having difficulty moving forward. Anetta would have been there too, but she hadn’t come up in the queue for an altar resurrection yet.
Perhaps most important was the dread citadel Naxxramas, currently festooned with gnomish death rays and packed full of bombs. The bombs were used only sparingly against this relatively small group surrounded by my own troops, but with my draconic air superiority my gnome squad was able to rotate the Necropolis and keep a constant stream of death rays focused on the attackers.
Gnomish Death Rays are incredibly efficient and precise for the first shot, but tend to heat up and become more unfocused and cause a greater energy draw if fired repeatedly. That’s not too big a problem when you are trying to carpet bomb a large area, but for precision targeting it was much better to shift to a different row and rotate slightly for each volley. Stevie managed to take out Baron Rivendare with a lucky shot, which cut down the aura damage my forces were taking by 25%. Nice.
••••••••••
As each wedding ceremony was completed, the lucky new couples were each taken to small alcoves in the sides of the building to consummate their union. My shadow priests encouraged enthusiasm on the women’s part, and for the men this was invariably seemed like the least objectionable part of agreeing to permanently bind yourself to a beautiful woman you had never met before. The ladies were impregnated with the first shot thanks to my new perk, but the nature of the ritual demanded that they continue for quite a long time. The ritual had started at high noon exactly, and was slated to go until midnight.
Precisely 12 hours, securing the last two points of resonance.
We had 12 points of resonance. We just needed to survive, or in these gents’ case keep on fucking like their lives depended on it until they were allowed to collapse.
••••••••••
After five hours of tar pitting and slowly being whittled down, losing most of their rank and file to my Doan trained archmagi, the elite forces of Stratholm were reinforced from Northrend. Portals routed through Kel’Thuzad threatened to rip his soul apart, but after the Lich King had nearly died at the hands of Illidan from thousands of miles away, Arthas had sworn that such a thing would never be repeated and prepared a response.
The Lich King himself was busy trying to wrest control of the 13 brides at the heart of the ritual. Had the Forsaken priests on site not been individually trained day and night by broken shards of an old god, he likely would have succeeded with little effort. As it was, the biggest fight came from the handicap of needing to maintain the connection without allowing him even a second of control. As such, he sent other warriors to ensure his continued existence.
First into the breach and acting as field commander was Blood Queen Lana’thel, the queen of the San’Layn and once the greatest champion of the Blood Elves. Arthas had sent her primarily because she was close at hand and could mobilize her forces quickly. I later found out that in this hypersexualized version of the Scourge, the Blood Queen had also replaced the Banshee Queen in the Lich King’s bed. That wasn’t exactly relevant to my soldiers on the ground when a portal opened up and started vomiting out hundreds of heavily armed and armored vampire soldiers and mages, of course.
Naturally Varian, currently a Kyrian and serving as commander for my forces remotely, responded in kind. A gate opened and released wave after wave of worgen, hardened by a month of active duty in Silithus and decked out in Silithid chitin armor. I swear to the light I didn’t have a vampire versus werewolf fight on purpose, but I also swear to the light that I would have signed off on it without a second thought if asked.
With each new wave of assaults, my defenders met them strength for strength. My people died constantly and in great numbers, especially once the Nerubian King Anub’Arak entered the fray. He was able to use my peoples’ corpses to rapidly gestate giant scarab beetles instead of reanimating them. It was less efficient than skeletons, yes, but it replaced the near-infinite supply of reinforcements the Scourge’s military doctrine relies on.
Things started to shift against me at that point. The beetles assaulted the Bulwark from behind to remove the obstacle, which was overwhelmed by a swarm of giant locusts supporting a titanic beetle king that could take a tank shell without too much trouble. Leotheras was still slaughtering the undead constantly, but as long as he was kept occupied others could just run past him. Ten thousand ghoul shock troopers spilled out onto the road and moved to aid their champions, heedless of their crippling losses.
My own army had dozens of fallback positions, mostly nests of Nerubian towers in elevated spots, but once there was a respectable number of Scourge troops in the area those started to fall one by one. It was touch and go for a while, as the full might of the Scourge pressed against us. Those bombs got put to good use as Naxxramas and my dragons started doing strafing runs on the armies of ghouls trying to reenact the opening of Saving Private Ryan. Then, as the Scourge started to really accumulate momentum, it was over.
A pulse of invisible energy shattered the ritual building like an egg, raining stone dust onto the participating non-combatants. As it washed through the enemy, they were no longer the enemy. The enslaved footsoldiers, the deranged killers, the mindless weapons… they just stopped, realizing that they didn’t have to kill anymore. They at least didn’t want to hurt the people in front of them, even if many still quite enjoyed violence.
There were a few unfortunate injuries, even deaths, from people who swapped sides mid swing. Everyone was awfully confused for a while until The Brotherhood of Love and my shadow Ops team filed in and explained the situation. Thankfully, everyone was captured, everyone knew that everyone was captured, and that meant everyone was willing to put a bit more effort in to make sure things worked out ok.
••••••••••
Some of you may be asking, “Erich, where were you during all this? What about your heavy hitters? You mentioned Sylvanas and Leotheras, but this defense looks like it was mostly run by a metric ton of low to mid grade members of the retinue.”
Believe it or not, dear reader, I was busy elsewhere. Shortly after the ritual started I was called back to Ulduar. Nefarian had chosen an excellent moment to strike.
••••••••••