"Thank you, my lord." The guard was still dazed.
Field reached down and hauled him up, then thumped a fist on his shoulder in encouragement. "Raising a good soldier isn't easy. I'm waiting for the day you all shed your slave status and become true warriors — knights, even!"
The guard's blood ran hot. He'd taken Field's promises as so much pie-in-the-sky, or a noble's joke. But now he truly felt it: Field really was a little different from other nobles.
"Charge for Lord Field!"
The men around him caught the fire too, swinging their halberds in a frenzy, reaping corpses.
Soon every corpse drawn by the noise was cleared out. Field made a rough count — over seventy of them.
He sucked in a faint breath of cool air, and the reek surged straight down his windpipe; he shut his mouth fast and grumbled inwardly: "Does winery work really need this many hands? When the Empire decided to unleash the death-fog, why didn't they tell the people of the North to evacuate?"
"Forget it. None of my business."
Not dwelling on useless questions, Field pressed deeper into the winery.
After a stretch he found the large winemaking room, dreaming he might turn up raw materials like rock sugar or wheat.
What answered his unrealistic dream, though, was the savage corpse of a bat-woman, eyes wide and unclosing, torn violently open from neck to groin, the organs inside gone without a trace.
"This barley's gone to waste — it was meant for barley ale." Field noticed something still vaguely "barley"-like scattered across the floor. Ten years plus corruption had left the barley grains able to writhe slowly. He marveled at corruption's strangeness. "Maybe corruption isn't a devil's curse, but some special kind of radiation."
"Radiation?"
Ashina's brain stalled; she chewed dopily on the new word Field had used — then her face changed. "Careful! Something's coming in fast!"
It was so fast Field hadn't even caught the skull marker flickering onto the map.
"Clang!"
The guard standing in front blanched, instinctively looking to the ceiling. In a flash the shield in his hands burst into pieces and he was flung off, limbs flailing. A creature shaped like the Licker from Resident Evil appeared where he'd stood; only its slender tail and snout told you it had mutated from a rat.
The rat-fiend shrieked and slashed its sharp claws at Field.
Field felt only a gust of wind, the giant claws swelling larger and larger before his eyes.
"Don't even think about it!"
At the crucial instant, Ashina sent the dragonkin wolf flashing in front of Field, curling its body to shield him completely.
A crackling burst, with a great spray of sparks — the dragonkin wolf took the claw-strike on its scales without so much as a grunt. Staring at the giant wolf, the monster went blank too, glancing at its own claws; the talons that pierced anything had today only pried loose two bloodied scales.
The dragonkin wolf swung a paw and flipped the rat-fiend over.
Wildcat and the others seized the moment, hacking and chopping with sabers and halberds — but the rat-fiend, thick of hide and flesh, took blow after blow and suffered only superficial wounds. It thrashed its long limbs and swept seven or eight men flying like dust. Mind you, the guards were in full armor; light as the scale was, man-and-armor still weighed over a hundred catties — and it had swatted them away that easily.
"All of you, back! This is beyond the bounds of an ordinary creature." Field raised his shield and quickly found a corner to crouch in, cursing. "Forgot to bring the crossbows. An ordinary person can only break a thick-hided monster like this with a crossbow bolt — better leave it to Ashina."
The rat-fiend rose, meaning to grab a guard for a snack.
"I won't let you!" Ashina poured power into her spear, her whole aura erupting.
The tremendous force let the spear pierce the rat-fiend's body like wet paper, then lodged between the bones. Were it not for the cramped terrain, where Ashina couldn't charge astride the wolf, the strike would have run the rat-fiend clean through.
The rat-fiend screamed and slashed both claws in fast.
"Boom!"
The giant wolf rammed the rat-fiend's chest like a bullet train, breaking off its attack and bowling it over, exposing an opening.
This was a third-rank corrupted creature. In cramped terrain, it took a third-rank human with battle qi or magic to kill it — or a fortress ballista or armor-piercing crossbow.
Luckily a Chosen was far above ordinary folk; Ashina's first-rank-Chosen strength was enough to crush it.
"Spear of Frozen Impalement."
It was Ashina's first time using her Divine Skill.
Starlight gathered in her hand and condensed into a spear, like a roiling, ghostly-blue serpent-dragon. Ashina poured in a great surge of divine power, then drove from the leg through the waist and into the arm and hurled it. The Divine Skill slammed into the rat-fiend; blood erupted at once, bone snapped, sinew tore, and great chunks of pulped flesh splattered across the wall.
"Whew~ Finally done." Ashina's face was a touch pale; she panted, looking somewhat spent.
The fight had ended in a flash of lightning, but the risk packed into it was suffocating.
Field let out a long breath too. "Lucky you were here. That last venison cutlet is yours."
"Long live the lord!" At the mention of venison, Ashina's tail whipped back and forth nonstop, drool slipping out despite herself, her battlefield aloofness gone in a blink. Still, she patted her chest and said magnanimously, "I'll take just half. The lord's worked hard too."
Field felt deeply consoled.
The little map showed the Grand Winery's monsters nearly gone, only scattered specks of small skull markers left.
To be safe, Field first brought the wounded out and treated them, then led the rested team back in to clear the Grand Winery thoroughly.
It was nine at night before the cleanup reached its final step.
The whole winery was in shambles, cave-ins everywhere, wind whistling through the stone cracks and stirring gray dust. The one mercy was that the winery's overall structure had held. The first and second floors had been picked clean — nothing of value, only some pitch-black rotted timber, good for shacks or firewood.
"The wine cellar's just below, my lord." A guard spoke as he stepped forward, heedless of the thick dust on the cellar door, hauling the heavy thing open with both hands. A dark stairway lay exposed before them.
Field swallowed and rubbed his hands, anxious, muttering nonstop: "Bless me, Bodhisattva; bless me, God — let me find something useful down there."
A great many oak sherry casks were piled in the gloomy cellar, some crushed by cave-ins, dried water stains everywhere, and rat-tracks crawling about.