The Ebon Blade watched as the ad-hoc army assaulted the gates and curtain walls for several minutes with cautious, probing attacks. Some of these were quite powerful, but each time they retreated. This was enough to make the weapon think that there were some defenses it didn’t know about at play, but no matter how much it searched for them, it found nothing.

It would have defended the place with a hundred golden knights if it could. However, since it was limited to only nine guardians, that plan would be impractical. It had already seen how the weakness of these magical knights could be exploited, so it would use them carefully to their best effect. It didn’t care how much damage its enemies dealt to this place, only that they bled for the privilege.

Then, when no one stopped them, a few men scaled the walls to open the gate. The blade decided not to allow that and sent one of its guardians barreling out of the same window that Evelyn’s corpse had shattered earlier. The golden armor went to pieces in the garden, but in seconds, it had put itself back together and was charging toward the three men who were trying to raise the portcullis and lift the bar that sealed the doors.

They heard the sound of plate mail in time to turn, but even with their swords out, they had no chance of saving themselves. Its golden guardian lacked the Ebon Blade’s Siphon ability or any of its other powers, but it could fight with the blade’s skill, which was really all it needed, and for once, the weapon enjoyed fighting enemies with a bit of a handicap.

The golden guardian was only twice as strong as a man, which was less than half the strength of whoever wielded it. So, it was able to take them apart a piece at a time and leave them bleeding on the ground before retreating to wait for the next wave. Then, men on the other side of the wall sent a volley of arrows over at it, as well as a bolt of lightning from the sky, but neither affected it in the slightest.

This forced them to batter the gate down a while longer with magic. The Ebon Blade did nothing to stop that. It only waited for the thing to fail completely as mage fire burned through the defenses before it quit the field entirely.

As hundreds of men and dozens of mages moved into Altbarstein in force, the blade decided that their best plan of attack was probably to level the place. That would have buried it under tons of rubble. Foolishly, though, that didn’t appear to be their plan. They seemed to want to capture it directly, which would almost certainly prove to be impossible.

To do so, they charged toward the central keep in waves. Ten or twenty warriors surged forward with a mage or two toward every entrance, braced for trouble, but there were no guards. The entrances had been closed and locked with a thought, and there were still a few servants trapped inside, but the blade wasn’t interested in killing them down there. It couldn’t devour their souls from such a distance, and it was in the mood to collect as many mage souls as possible.

The blade had sealed the main door to the throne room, and it felt sure that the walls surrounding it were more likely to be breached than it was. The thing was utterly massive. It was a twenty-foot-tall bronze affair embossed with an image of King Paralon standing astride the world that must have weighed several tons; with its magic, Var'gar might have had a prayer of forcing it open, but none of the humans it had ever seen could say the same.

It would resist anything short of dragonfire. That wouldn’t protect it entirely, of course. There were still two smaller doors on either end of the hall and the windows, but the weapon had planned for that. Those were chosen to be its chokepoints.

As they forced down doors and cleared hallways in the lower levels, looking for clues and survivors, it staged its men. Four of the golden guardians stood just out of sight near each door and one by the throne in case someone got past the first wave. Of course, it might be willing to let the right person get past its guardians, but it wouldn’t know that until they were here.

The weapon hungered for a wielder. Despite how many tools and resources it had here, laying on the throne, it wanted, more than anything, to be back in the hands of a living warrior, and empty suits of armor made a poor replacement for that.

I cannot taste their blood or their marrow from here! The blade complained to itself as it watched the bands of armed men make slow progress through the building. While they did so, it considered buying some of the upgrades that were available to it but resisted the temptation to do so. That could wait for an emergency or for when it had more time to think and plan. Doing so now, on the brink of battle, would be folly.

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Still, nearly an hour passed before the first group managed to reach the throne room. That was ironic, considering that despite all of their effort, all of them were left bleeding out on the tiles in less than two minutes.

+162 Life Force.

+13 Human Souls.

They would have died even faster had the view of trying to direct four separate warriors not been so confusing. Except for perhaps the now-dead Juggernaut, the Ebon Blade was a warrior without peer, but fighting ten men at once with one body was far different than fighting them with four different bodies, and that problem only became worse as its enemies started attacking both doors at once.

+332 Life Force.

+27 Human Souls.

The increased load of controlling eight different moving combatants at once was too much, even for it. Suddenly, it was losing. Not completely, or all the time, but now, instead of cleanly slicing through groups like butcher, they’d sometimes manage to knock one of its guardians out of the fight for a few seconds before they perished. That didn’t put the Ebon Blade in any danger, but it was humiliating just the same.

Truthfully, if they’d relied solely on swords and axes instead of magic, they would have done better. The mages almost always got in the way of those who were supposed to defend them. Sometimes, they even killed them, and for what? Fire, lightning, and acid did nothing to metal men. Ice or force was only scarcely better. Ice would lock up the joints of the things, slowing them down for a minute or two, and force would scatter them across the marble for half a minute.

+621 Life Force.

+54 Human Souls.

Still, for every small victory the mages won with those spells, they killed someone in the process, and the blade took all of their souls. The warriors it consumed immediately, but only to keep its soul storage free for the more valuable targets. It didn’t really like the idea of feeding the throne like this, but it had no other choice. It couldn’t control the souls that were drawn to it any more than it could affect the fog of energy that was coming from the dead and the wounded that lay scattered across the floor.

As the battles went on sporadically, the blade tried to peer into the hearts of those that it fought, but it found nothing special there. These were creatures of duty and fear, not bloodlust; they fought it because they feared what would happen to them if they ran for their lives.

+387 Life Force.

+32 Human Souls.

Twice, mages assisted by spells that made them move quickly or fly almost made it to the throne to steal the blade. In both cases, though, they met their end on the steps. In the case of the runner, its final guardian loped him in half. The flyer, though, the blade took out personally, using a Bolt spell to knock him to the ground, where the man was promptly dispatched.

Once, toward the end of the fighting, half of the remaining teams of men broke through at once, causing over a hundred warriors to assault the throne room at once. This was as close as the humans came to victory. If they’d been able to keep that pressure up for a few more minutes, they might have been able to break through one or both choke points, and if they’d done that, they would have been able to break through completely.

Of course, the blade's final line of defense would be to grab anybody it could and keep fighting. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, and eventually, those who were able to retreat from the blood-soaked antechambers, leaving the corpses of the comrades in their wake and leaving the blade with the souls of more than twenty mages to play with at its leisure.

+722 Life Force.

+59 Human Souls.

In the end, none of the warriors it saw stood out as being both brutal and skilled enough for it to suffer their presence. These had been heroes who saw it as a monster to be slain, and it would not suffer those conflicts lightly, even with the advanced level of control it achieved.

Children of King Paralon, the blade shouted into the ether in a voice that it hoped was loud enough to reach the hundred or so lights spread throughout the kingdom that it wanted to reach. Your father is dead, the throne has fallen, and one of you will be my next wielder. Come to the capital and fight for the right to hold the Black Blade of Baraga or die trying. Anyone who attempts to flee the kingdom or avoid answering this call. Do not test me.

When it was done, it sampled a few of the minds it had touched almost at random, enjoying the panic. Yes, this would be fun, it decided. While it really should be trying to leave the castle, it lay in as soon as possible. It wasn’t in a huge hurry. The place’s magical defenses seemed to force even powerful wizards to take the long way, and for now, that was the only real defense that it needed.