The fortress gates did not open to welcome the guests.
They opened to vomit them out.
From the bowels of the fortification poured a tide of creatures that looked like a grotesque error of nature.
They were kobolds, but flayed of their skin; dripping with sickly mucus, their raw musculature entirely exposed, dragging their own entrails behind them which pulsed with an unnatural, sickly golden light.
And stalking behind them, dragging a shadow as suffocating as the night itself, was a terrifying, ten-foot-tall monstrosity.
Its towering silhouette was stitched together, like a macabre patchwork quilt, from the corpses of fallen warriors; mismatched muscles, protruding bones, and tattered flesh serving as its unnatural tissue.
But it was the creature’s armor that instantly seized the eye and froze the blood: molten gold ore.
This wasn’t armor that was worn; it was entirely fused into its torso, hardened into jagged, menacing plates that seemed to throb with a suppressed, infernal heat.
With every lumbering step, this metallic exoskeleton creaked ominously, and the gleam of the molten gold, catching the pale ambient light, crowned the entity with the dreadful aura of a malignant deity.
In a over-muscled hand that could easily crush a skull into powder, it wielded a vicious weapon: a whip intricately braided from human spines.
Every single vertebral segment, polished and bone-white, formed a cruel link in the macabre chain, while a sharpened tailbone served as the lethal tip.
With every brutal lash through the air, the whip produced a sharp, cracking sound identical to snapping bones.
The mere presence of this entity; a walking monument to death and gilded barbarism; was suffocating, and heralded inevitable doom.
With a silent command, the horde of flayed kobolds surged forward to attack.
Figlin blinked rapidly, shoving his brass ear trumpet back into place after it had slipped during the march.
His eyes widened into saucers as he took in the beast’s armor.
Every single ounce of his survival instinct was immediately violently overridden by pure, unadulterated greed.
“Oooo!” he bellowed, pointing a gnarled finger at the monstrosity.
“Look at all that gold!
That ugly bastard is worth a fortune!
Perval, we’re taking him!
We’ll melt him down into ingots!
That’ll cover the ship repairs, new cannons, and still leave enough for dockside wenches for the whole crew!”
Lengos brought his shield up at the very last second, protecting his face from a sudden volley of acid spat by the beasts.
The hissing liquid immediately began eating into the metal, filling the air with acrid, biting smoke.
In that same heartbeat, Duria closed in on one of the attackers, cleanly severing its head with a blindingly fast strike.
But instead of collapsing lifelessly, the creature’s body violently swelled and detonated with a wet, sickening SPLAT, spraying highly corrosive gore in every direction.
The vampire barely managed to leap backward in time.
“Watch yourselves!” the commander roared, witnessing the geyser of acid.
“They explode upon death!
Duria, strike and retreat!
Do not let them surround you!”
Zedora ignored him entirely.
Burning with an insatiable bloodlust, she hurled herself directly into the thickest knot of enemies.
“Die, abominations!”
Her twin axes danced a bloody waltz through the air.
She swung wide and true, cleaving through two creatures with a single, devastating blow.
The result was instantaneous and horrific; the beasts violently detonated, dousing everything in their immediate vicinity with caustic gore.
Zedora’s armor hissed fiercely as the acid burned straight through the leather scales and bit deep into her flesh.
She roared in pain as the liquid seared the muscles of her shoulder and thigh, but she didn’t slow down for a single fraction of a second.
Pure adrenaline flooded her veins, converting the agonizing pain into high-octane fuel for the ongoing slaughter.
Duria twirled through the epicenter of the chaos, evading strikes with the effortless grace of someone casually sidestepping puddles during a morning stroll.
“Hayai!
(Fast!)” she chirped cheerfully.
Her technique was specific: a lightning-fast slice to the back of the knee, a deft dodge, a crippling cut to the elbow.
No killing blows, no explosions.
Pure, cold calculation.
At one point, she was forced to vault high into the air to dodge a vicious snap from a whip made of intestines.
“Baka!
(Idiot!) Ew, ew, ew!” she shrieked mid-flight, staring down at the writhing mass of raw meat in disgust.
“This is the worst party I’ve ever been to!
Yerga, do something about this, they’re getting filth all over my armor!
Kimochi warui!
(Disgusting!)”
“This is all just profoundly tasteless.”
Yerga’s voice dripped with aristocratic disdain.
She stood perfectly safe in the shadow of a twisted fruit tree, wrinkling her nose at the butchery unfolding before her.
At her feet, Void hissed furiously at the approaching kobolds, arching a back made entirely of exposed vertebrae.
Yerga waved her hand dismissively, as if swatting away a particularly persistent horsefly, and a wave of dark, necrotic magic surged toward a pack of kobolds, instantly leeching the life from their bodies.
The corpses dropped to the ground with a heavy, wet thud, completely defused.
“That thing, that Gilded Custodian, hasn’t an ounce of subtlety,” she added coldly, before speaking over her shoulder to the empty air behind her:
“Bregg, darling, be a dear and move that hideous thing away from me.”
The temperature plummeted in an instant as her most loyal servant emerged from the void.
Bregg plunged headfirst into the swirling melee.
He was a relentless engine of slaughter impervious to both pain and fear.
The caustic acid spat by the “flayed” kobolds sloughed off his ancient armor harmlessly, failing to make even the slightest impression on the Death Knight.
The only sound he made was the sickening crunch of shattering bone as his armored gauntlets reduced the attackers’ skulls to bloody pulp.
Slowly, a zone of brutal safety formed around Yerga and her skeletal feline.
The Custodian let out a deafening roar, a sound that vibrated deep within the outcasts’ very bones.
Its whip, bristling with jagged bony protrusions, cracked through the air, hurtling straight toward Neira as she desperately tried to heal the acid-burned Zedora.
Perval didn’t hesitate for a single heartbeat.
He vaulted in front of the priestess, offering his sweat-slicked, scarred torso as a living shield.
He snatched the spinal whip right out of the air with his bare hand.
“Oh no you don’t, handsome!
We don’t strike ladies!” he bellowed.
The bone shards of the whip bit deep, tearing his flesh right down to the bone.
The Custodian violently yanked the weapon back, and the sheer force of the pull hurled the monk hard against the marble floor.
But instead of groaning in agony, Perval spat a mouthful of blood and laughed maniacally, flexing his newly mangled chest.
“Hits hard!
I like that!”
In that exact moment, Figlin staggered sideways, raising his flintlock pistol.
His vision was bleary from the rum, but his hand didn’t tremble in the slightest.
“Too many…
damn legs…” he muttered under his breath, and pulled the trigger.
The thunderous crack of the gunshot filled the courtyard, and the golden demon roared again as the lead ball punched straight through its eye.
“Hah!
Told you I’d hit it dead center!”
Lengos seized upon the beast’s momentary distraction.
His bastard sword ignited with light; bright, yet unsettlingly warped and corrupted.
“Zedora, fall back!
Neira, shield Perval!” he commanded, and charged the monstrosity.
The fallen paladin collided with the Gilded Custodian with the unstoppable force of an avalanche.
Yet the monster possessed inhuman strength.
A molten gold fist slammed into Lengos’s breastplate, caving in the solid steel and snapping his ribs.
The warrior let out a hollow grunt and staggered back a step, but he did not fall.
The agonizing pain was merely information, and he actively chose to ignore it.
Seeing her wounded companions, Neira felt something snap deep inside her.
Her eyes darkened to a fathomless, abyssal pink, and spectral, demonic wings erupted from her back.
Instead of soothing, healing energy, she unleashed pure, unadulterated fury.
“Leave them alone!”
A tidal wave of psychic agony slammed into the horde.
The “flayed” kobolds collapsed to the ground, twitching in violent paroxysms of pain as their fragile minds were ruthlessly crushed.
The priestess sagged on her feet, panting heavily terrified by the raw power she had just unleashed.
The Gilded Custodian howled, a sound akin to rusted steel grinding against bare bone.
From the socket where its eye had been just moments before, pure, blinding energy now spewed forth.
The molten gold ore that formed its twisted armor flared fiercely, and the air around the behemoth began to warp and shimmer from the impossible heat.
It smashed its fists into the cobblestone plaza.
From the fresh cracks in the marble, a blinding light erupted, immediately followed by a thick, searing wave of liquid gold.
A river of molten ore flooded the battleground, hissing violently as it made contact with the blood and the corpses of the fallen kobolds.
Bregg, being semi-immaterial from the waist down, simply hovered above the tide of liquid fire and metal like the wraith he truly was.
The others were not afforded such a luxury.
Zedora, too wounded and blinded by the bloodlust of battle to retreat in time, tried to shield herself with the hafts of her axes.
The gold was faster.
It splashed across her legs, instantly searing her skin and solidifying in a matter of heartbeats, trapping her in a gleaming, excruciatingly hot cage.
“I can’t move!” she shrieked, thrashing uselessly as the searing metal scorched her flesh.”The damn stuff is hardening!”
Sensing an easy target, the remnants of the kobold pack scrambled toward the immobilized barbarian, dragging their wet entrails behind them.
Lengos was entirely occupied parrying a crushing blow from the Custodian itself; he couldn’t break away to cover her.
That was when Duria fully embraced her vampiric nature.
Instead of falling back, she sprinted vertically up the fortress wall with a feline grace that violently defied the laws of physics.
“Sugoi (Amazing), you look incredibly wealthy right now, Goldie!” she called down from above, clinging to the sheer stone wall like a spider.
Her hands became a total blur.
She unleashed a torrential hail of throwing daggers.
The steel blades struck with flawless precision, sinking deep into the necks and eyes of the flayed kobolds crawling toward the trapped barbarian.
“Neira!
Do something, or our little savage is going to become a garden ornament!” the vampire shouted, executing a mid-air backflip to narrowly avoid a vicious crack from the Custodian’s spinal whip.
Neira hesitated.
Her hands were still trembling violently from the devastating psychic outburst that had flattened the first wave of enemies.
She was terrified of her own latent power.
But seeing her friend trapped and the pooling acid inching closer, she squeezed her eyes shut.
“Goddess…
grant me the strength to protect, not to destroy…” she whispered.
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