The Glutton's Regret

[REVIVAL]
[COST: 50% CURRENT MANA]
[RESTORES MOTOR FUNCTION TO TERMINATED ENTITIES]
[WARNING: DOES NOT RESTORE CONSCIOUSNESS]

Gesbiek read it once from behind a pile of looted chests with a broken wrist and one percent of his mana, and understood exactly what it was and what it was not.

It was not necromancy. Nothing in it went looking for a soul. There was no bargain being struck with anything and nothing was being called back from anywhere.

It was a flag being cleared. Twelve entries in a list marked as finished, and an Administrator with the authority to mark them otherwise.

Fifty percent of one percent. He could afford it, in the way that a goblin with a single coin can afford something that costs half a coin.

Across the chamber, Grolm was kicking his way through a heap of bone on his way over, taking his time, cleaning silver off the axe blade with a thumb.

"Any last words, nephew? Any cleverness left?"

He came on through the rubble of his own throne room.

"Or do you die quiet, like the Grey coward you have always been?"

Gesbiek got his shoulder against a chest and pushed himself upright, and grinned with blood running off his chin.

"One trick, uncle."

He put everything he had left into it.

"Your dinner would like a word."

* * * *

The pulse went out of his chest as a sphere of silver and crossed the whole room without travelling.

Every bone in the Throne Room began to rattle.

They had been lying in the corners and under the wreckage for two winters, gnawed clean, cracked open at the ends for the marrow, discarded. Now they came off the floor and found each other, femurs rolling across stone and clicking into hip sockets, vertebrae stacking themselves upward, ribcages opening out like doors.

Skulls lifted, and the empty sockets caught the silver light and held it.

It took about two heartbeats and it was the worst sound Gesbiek had ever heard, and he had spent a night listening to a world end.

Grolm's axe was a foot from Gesbiek's head when an eight-foot skeletal hand came up out of the floor beside him and closed around the haft.

CLANG.

The swing stopped dead.

Grolm's face did something Gesbiek had never seen it do. The certainty went out of it.

He hauled at the axe, and a second arm came round his ankle from behind, and a third took his opposite wrist.

Twelve of them stood up around him.

Ogres at eight feet. Hobgoblins at six. A Troll frame in the corner that had to duck under the stalactites, all of them held together by threads of silver running bone to bone like luminous wire, order forced onto things that had finished with order some time ago.

They were the Lieutenants.

Grolm looked at the one holding his axe and read the skull shape and the filed tusks, and something in him came apart.

"Gorrok."

He said it the way a goblin says a name he has not used in a while.

"I ate you. You are dead."

That was the offence. Gesbiek could see it landing. In everything Grolm believed, consumption was final and it was total: what you ate stopped being itself and became your strength, permanently, and that was the arrangement that made the world work.

The eaten did not stand up.

Grolm tore the axe free and the Ogre's arm exploded into fragments, and the fragments did not fall. They hung in the air on silver threads, still closing, still trying to take hold of something.

* * * *

Gesbiek scrambled backward through the legs of a rising Hobgoblin and put a wall of bone between himself and the middle of the room.

Then he found out what he had actually taken on.

Twelve tethers ran out of his chest at once, and each one had weight on the end of it. Not the weight of the bone, which was considerable, but the weight of deciding. Every one of those frames needed a direction and a target and a limb chosen, continuously, and the moment he stopped choosing for one of them it simply stood there being furniture.

The rat had been one small body with one instruction. This was twelve, and they were large, and they were in a fight.

His vision divided into pieces and then into more pieces. He gave up on watching through their eyes entirely, because they had no eyes, and settled for feeling where they were the way a goblin feels where his own hands are in the dark.

He did not need them to fight. He had checked, and the readouts came back the same every time.

[DAMAGE: 0]

Bone on 2-Red skin did nothing whatsoever, and would do nothing if he kept it up all night.

What bone had was mass.

He piloted all of them in at once. Three Hobgoblins into Grolm's waist from three angles. Two Ogres onto the arms, pulling opposite ways. The Troll's ribcage closing around his back like a barrel being fitted.

Grolm roared and began taking them apart with his hands.

He drove a fist through a sternum and the ribs went outward like shrapnel. He took a spine in both hands and wrung it out like a wet cloth and threw what was left across the chamber. A skull came apart in his grip with a sound like a dropped pot.

Every strike landed. Every strike worked. It made no difference at all.

For each frame he destroyed, two more hooked onto him somewhere he was not looking. A skull wedged behind his knee when he tried to step. A ribcage tangled in the straps of his pauldron. Fingers around both ankles, pulling in directions that did not agree with each other.

They had nothing he could threaten. No fear to work on. No morale to break, no pain to inflict, no interest in surviving.

He had already done the worst available thing to every one of them, and had done it at a table, and everything after that was scheduling.

Grolm tried to walk toward Gesbiek and stumbled, because there was a skull behind his knee.

The Warlord of the Red-Tooth Clan, two Red Shards beating in step, invincible to everything in this mountain, was being tripped by his own leftovers.

* * * *

Gesbiek held the far edge of the room and held twelve tethers at once, and it was costing him.

His nose had started bleeding again, silver this time, running steadily off his jaw. Twelve elite frames took more out of him than forty runts would have. The mass was greater and the joints were more complicated and every one of them wanted managing.

[MANA: 0.3%]

The Troll's left arm went slack for a moment when his concentration slipped, and he pulled it back and felt something behind his eyes give slightly.

Out in the middle, Grolm was working through them systematically, and shouting while he did it.

"I am the Chief." A spine came out of a Hobgoblin in one piece and he used it as a whip on the next one along. "I ended you. I took your strength. You are MINE."

The bones kept coming.

And Gesbiek, holding the room together with a third of one percent, saw the shape of it clearly for the first time.

Grolm had eaten these warriors to become strong enough to be unkillable. That had worked. He was unkillable, and nothing in this room could open his skin, and the System had put a zero on it.

And the same appetite had furnished the room with twelve heavy objects, and left them lying where they fell, and invited his enemy inside.

The stronger Grolm had made himself, the more of these there were.

Which meant it was time to stop watching.

Gesbiek went down onto his stomach and began to crawl.

It was not dignified and there was nobody present whose opinion he cared about. He went along the base of the wall on his elbows and his good hand, dragging the broken wrist against his chest, keeping the bulk of the fighting between himself and the middle of the room, and every foot of it cost him something.

Not from his body, though his body was submitting a continuous objection. From his attention. Every yard he crawled was a yard of concentration taken off twelve tethers, and behind him he could feel them getting slower and stupider as he went.

Halfway along the wall the Troll stopped moving entirely and simply stood in Grolm's path with its arms down, which turned out to be almost as useful.

Thirty feet. Twenty. He could hear frames coming apart behind him at a rate that told him how long he had, and it was not long.

Ten feet, and the heat of the thing began to come off the wood and onto his face.

* * * *

Then Grolm shattered the last Ogre ribcage with a pulse of red aura, and stood in the middle of a floor covered in bone dust with his chest going, silver threads dissipating around him.

The whole thing had taken about five seconds.

He looked up at the wall where he had left a broken goblin with one percent of his mana.

There was nobody against it.

Grolm stood very still for a moment. Gesbiek, forty feet away with his hand already on the wood, watched him work through it: the wall, the debris, the twelve frames he had spent five seconds destroying, and what those twelve frames had been for.

Then the Warlord turned, and turned again, and found the movement on the far side of the chamber.

Behind the throne.

Gesbiek was standing at the base of the Ancestral Totem with one hand flat against the ironwood, holding himself up on it, and he was not looking at Grolm at all.

He was looking up at the five Red Shards.

It went through the Warlord all at once. The skeletons had never been an attack. They had never been intended to win, or to hurt him, or to last. They had been twelve objects placed in his way for as long as it took a crippled goblin to crawl forty feet along a wall.

"NO."

Grolm came over the bone pile in a single leap that cleared ten feet.

Twenty-five feet of open floor. He was fast enough to cross it.

He was not fast enough to have started sooner.

[ANCESTRAL TOTEM]
[CLASSIFICATION: BOUND MATRIX, LEGENDARY]
[COMPONENTS: 5 x TIER-5 | BINDING: INTACT]
[ESTIMATED YIELD: 25,000,000]
[WARNING: EXCEEDS SAFE CONSUMPTION LIMIT]

He read the second line twice.

Bound. Not five stones in a post. Five stones tied to each other, and the tying was the whole of it, because a bound matrix was not the sum of its shards. It was what the shards became when somebody who knew how had made them agree.

Goblins had known how, once. That was the entire content of every story the elders told about the ancient days: shard-crafters, matrix-work, staves and totems and the binding of colour to colour, back when the clans had makers and not only chiefs.

There was not one goblin alive now who could bind two pebbles together with string.

They had kept the object and lost the craft, and had spent the centuries since praying at a machine none of them could have built or repaired or understood.

Gesbiek read the warning. He read all of it, including the last line, and he was aware that a System which had declined to produce a threat assessment for Grolm had elected to produce one for this.

Twenty-five million. He had spent days of his life collecting fractions of a percent out of beetles.

The half-empty place in his chest pulled toward the wood hard enough to bend him forward.

He had been hungry for five years in the Sludge Pits and he had thought that was hunger. It had not been. It had been a small thing wearing the name.

There was a moment, small and entirely his own, where he was aware of what he was standing in front of.

Every goblin he had ever known had come to this pillar. They had cut their palms at the foot of it and asked it for rain and for good hunting and for children that lived. Zog had done it. Gesbiek had watched him do it, from behind other people's legs, on a bad leg that did not bend.

It had never once answered any of them, because there was nothing in it that could hear. It was a battery, and it had spent generations quietly feeding whoever was closest to it, and the goblin closest to it had always been the one on the throne.

"GET AWAY FROM THERE."

Gesbiek opened his jaw and bit into the base of the Totem, through the ancient wood, into the lowest of the five Red Shards.

The taste arrived before anything else: copper, and ash, and something enormously old that had been sitting in one place for a very long time being prayed to.

He swallowed.