The man’s name was Karabak, but there were few people that called him that. To the world, he was known as the Armored Sorcerer.

  His most recognizable feature was the armor he always wore, a full plate armor crimson as blood, adorned with demonic motifs, spikes, and horns. He hated that flamboyant design, preferring dull and practical things, but the powers of the artefact more than made up for this little indignity.

  In his torso he wore an adornment of a completely different style, a rectangular slab of black stone the size of a small book, tied with ropes so that it could be used as a collar. In the stone, there was only one feature, the engraving of a circle cut by an upward curve. That unassuming ornament had the power to topple or create empires, as it was proof of the fealty every creature of the Abyss had for their unknow creator: The Seal of the Forgotten Gods.

  He was in the ruins of the abandoned outskirts, looking at the city fortress from a safe distance. The assault continued unabated as wave after wave of creatures tried to climb the ramparts using ropes, makeshift ladders, claws, or rudimentary tools. Some groups were trying a more long-term approach like using rubble to create ramps or bridges in the moat. The cost in lives of that continuous assault was mind boggling.

  Anyone looking at the army would believe his assembled force to be invincible, but there was a weakness in his plans that he was painfully aware of.

  There was an old saying: Soldiers win battles, logistics win wars. And that was his army’s flaw, logistic, or to be blunt, the lack of one. He simply didn’t have even close the necessary resources to supply an army of that size.

  His strategy was using surprise and speed to grab what he needed to keep his army fed, being it grains, livestock, or people.

  Even so, this barely got him a few days’ worth of supplies, orders of magnitude less than the necessary for a siege. He could ignore the capital and rampage the countryside, but he was in no mood to rule over a wasteland.

  The Armored Sorcerer was of the opinion that brute force and decisive action gets things done, so he was not going to wait for events to unfold in a way favorable to his enemies. Options were limited, he needed to go on the offensive or lose in the long game.

  The main problem was not the walls, but the magical barrier that protected the city. The function was to extinguish any magical field trying to enter, and that had three effects:

  First was that any magic directed to the city would be dispelled. Second was that any monster that was heavily mana dependent, usually the most powerful ones, would be blocked from entering. And lastly, any creature flying over the city using magic would fall.

  This limited the assault on the walls to his most mundane soldiers in a costly war of attrition, that while he was not losing any night of sleep for then, the losses were putting a dent in his numbers.

  His efforts were concentrated on a section of the ramparts that was not an ideal place to attack, the moat was particularly wide and the open area in front made it a treacherous terrain to cross under fire of arrows and spells. If there was a silver lining in all this, it was that the dead monsters were almost making a gruesome bridge that was making crossing easier.

  The reason he was attacking that specific section for the past 5 days was because it was in front of the highest building remaining on the city outskirts, a bell tower from the Church of the Eight. This attack was bait for one big fish he wanted to catch.

  It looked that the last wave of ogres was able to take the top of the ramparts.

  He thought about the top of the bell tower and gave a mental command to his armor. There was a flash of red light and his point of view changed to the last flight of stairs before the top of the tower, just low enough so that the flash could not be seen from the city. He finished climbing on foot.

  “Are you trying to give away my position?” complained Ortan as he dipped the tip of an arrow in a small flask with a lime green liquid, never taking his eyes away from the city ramparts. To his side, there were two other identical arrows carefully positioned over a cotton towel.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Each had a shaft made from dark brown wood polished to a lustrous finish, the fins were light grey, but the really striking feature was the arrowhead. It was made from black steel, with vicious barbs that would not let go once it tasted flesh, the body was inscribed with a complex arcane circuit linked to a housed empty mana crystal.

  “Stop whining. Did you see the Queen’s Guard?”

  “They are approaching from the left walkway” he replied while nocking the arrow in a composite bow.

  Ortan was a tall, thin man with an angular face and short white hair.

  The two had been friends since they were novice adventurers, or at least as close to friends as a power-hungry warmonger and a cold-hearted psychopath could get. They were twisted in complementary ways, so their partnership was strangely solid.

  Ortan was kneeling at the side of the bell tower opening, looking over the city ramparts. The bell tower was just a little higher than the ramparts and distant, so the defenders probably overlooked it and forgot to demolish it prior to the siege.

  And there it was, the Queen’s Champion wielding the artefact sword.

  The Armored Sorcerer enjoyed the sweet taste of irony that the key to disable the barrier was right in the walls in front of him. Breacher could destroy any magical protection. Once he used it to create a gap in the city barrier, he could send the bigger monsters and this siege would be as good as over.

  “Be careful, we only have three chances.”

  “I will not need the other two” Ortan drew the arrow and poured mana into the bow.

  A magical circuit made of dim red light formed in front of the arrow, and the magical field ignited with a low hum. The magically enhanced bow only improved the starting potency of the shot, the burden of aim rested entirely on Ortan.

  The Queen’s Champion was fighting the ogres, striking, moving and dodging. Ortan had to predict three movements ahead in the combat so that his arrow would pass one of the parapet gaps at the same time his target would be in front of it.

  He released the shot. There was a zooming sound as the arrow was accelerated by the magical circuit, and then it flew in a parabolic trajectory.

  The arrow passed the city barrier as if it was not there, for it was created to not carry any mana at this point. Distance made the shot take long seconds to arrive. The Queen’s Champion sidestepped to avoid a cleaver blow and unknowingly aligned all the necessary conditions for the arrow to hit its target.

  It was not clear exactly where the arrow had hit, but it was safe to assume the greatest warrior in the realm would not immediately die only from that. In fact, the entire plan was based on it.

  The Armored Sorcerer drew his sword, holding it with one hand and with the other he cast a scanning spell. The function of the beacon was to trick the barrier, creating a bypass that Karabak could use to teleport to the arrow location. Once near the corpse, he was sure he would be able to dispatch any opposition and take possession of Breacher.

  And if his plan failed, he could simply teleport back. The barrier would only block if he was teleporting into the city, not out.

  It was a high risk, high reward movement, but he did not get where he was by being timid.

  He waited. The poison would remain inert for ten to fifteen minutes and then kill in instants. It was a very specific, very expensive poison.

  There! The beacon. It worked.

  The data gathered by his scanner was fed into the activation protocol of the armor. There were a few seconds of delay due to the nature of the magic involved and he felt the usual red flash and abrupt change in point of view that accompanied his teleportation.

  He was in an alley.

  There were no enemies in front of him, so he turned to see if anyone was behind.

  Or at least that was his intention, but he felt resistance and a strong pain in his chest at the mere intention of movement. He looked down.

  There was a blade trespassing his thorax.

  He was not afraid or shocked, he was puzzled. Had he teleported over a blade?

  That should not happen. The armor had protection against overlapping, or he would be already dead a hundred times over.

  Unluckily for him, there was a single blade capable of ignoring any magical protection.

  Was that the case? Had he teleported over Breacher?

  “Sir… Sir … Are you alright?” asked a trembling voice behind him.

  He tried again to turn and realized that he could. So, he slowly turned to face a short brunette with a slave collar and dirty dress looking at him with panicked eyes. Only her and the body of the Queen’s Champion collapsed at her side, no one else.

  Karabak emitted a gurgling sound that would pass for laughter in this situation as he finally understood what happened. It was not some clever counter-play from his enemies. It was an accident, a stupid accident.

  He had faced scores of terrible adversaries and cheated death so many times that he had lost count. Yet, the thought that his demise would come at the hands of this panicked slave girl was so absurdly pathetic that he couldn’t stop laughing.

  Vision darkened. His grip loosened as the sword slipped from his hand. Karabak fell on his knees with the sharp sound of metal hitting stone.

  Consciousness faded into nothingness as his heart stilled.

  And the legend of Karabak, the Armored Sorcerer, came to an abrupt, anti-climactic end.