Chapter 32 – The Fall of Fillidelphia

“The Mayor of Windfall,” chuckled the Dark Overlord. “He isn’t here, but who might you be?”

“HarCharles,” gasped the youth, who was currently suspended over the railing of the topmost floor of the Castle of Lions. Current topmost floor. Charles never liked the observatory anyway.

The Dark Overlord chuckled and flung the lad into a nearby wall with bone crushing force.  The youth slid down and didn’t move anymore, mind you Charles watched him for a long moment before confirming that. A broken spine should leave you crippled.

“Was it your idea to become king?”

“No, my wife’s,” wheezed the youth.  “The King was dead, no other adventurers were here.  She figured I’d do a better job than the last one.  I did it for her.”  There was still hope in his eyes that she had somehow survived, maybe even gotten away.  That’s what his big play had been when he realized they were not going to win that fight. He’d valiantly sacrificed himself so she could escape. She hadn’t.  She really hadn’t.  Well, part of her maybe did. That last explosion was pretty big, but arms and legs didn’t count, did they?

Concerns for later.

The Dark Overlord pulled all the shadows into himself, before kneeling next to the broken young man.  In this moment, his body was entirely lost to the shadow and only his glowing orange eyes and sparkling white teeth were visible, “So what was the plan?”

“Protect the kingdom, save the city,” gasped the man.  He was choking on his own blood.  There were a hundred things Grebthar could do that would have saved him, but watching the man suffocate sounded like fun.

It took five minutes.

Not that the five minutes had not been productive.  Charles started casting spells as he waited.  As the god of Magic, Grebthar’s power was overwhelming and his knowledge of the subject rivaled even someone with the fabled skill of Mystical Lore, one of the few skills he’d never managed to unlock.  The problem with his fingers had been mostly overcome, finally, by his new familiar.

A small shadow spawned worm crawled up on his shoulder and Charles scratched under its chin.  While hardly a replacement for his former companion, it had access to a shadow core he could use and that was important.

That and loyalty. He needed loyalty after all this.

Charles was used to doing all of the magic by himself, after all what was the point of friends and allies when you were king shit on top of turd mountain.  First, he wove the spell of longevity, allowing the corpse to remain zesty and fresh as long as Charles was alive. Most of his spells worked like that, because Charles alone could keep powering an infinite number of spells active, most of his complicated ‘enchantments’ were really just spells that had an unlimited duration.

Next, he began applying a series of runes to the dying man’s arms and legs, given the broken spine he could hardly protest.

Well, he did, but…

After that it was just waiting for the joker to perish, and by Grebthar did that man have a high Endurance stat, along with some perks to back it up.  The five minutes were going to take forever.

While he waited, Charles started planning out his next step.  That was always the way of it, you had to keep moving forward or you’d just stay in the same spot forever.  First, he had to get the lay of the land, and the best place for that was the top of the tower of the Castle of Lions.

That was currently scattered liberally across the gardens, so he was standing on the floor right below that. Probably. Maybe two floors down.

That’s where he found the young man, and his ‘party’ declaring himself the King of Fillidelphia.  The Chutzpah of it was enough to bring a smile to the Dark Overlord’s face.  Of course, when he smiled, he tended to kill people.  Also, when he didn’t smile.

Even if he didn’t want to kill the young man, and he did, Charles needed to be the ruler of this manufactured hell hole so he could figure out where everyone was.  That led him to several interesting conclusions.

First off, Jim and the squatters in Windfall were aberrations.  Every time he fought with them, bad things had happened for a variety of reasons like the weird crossbow, the Elder Demon poison, the Princess, the Progenitor.  All of those had worked together to wreck his shit.  But the former new king of turd mountain did not have any of those unique benefits, he was just a level 41 adventurer from out of town who spotted an opportunity.

He lost quickly but died a bit slower.  His friends didn’t fare much better because, unlike Jim they weren’t resistant to every form of magic available to him.  Mind you, they also didn’t have weapons that he was entirely immune to the damage from, but it didn’t really matter.  Anyone below level 50 was going to be hard pressed to hurt him in the slightest.

Not that being over level 50 helped when you used weapons prepared carefully from the templates carefully developed by Charles to not be able to hurt him. The trick was that if you could develop a worthiness enchantment so people couldn’t wield a weapon, you could also develop other even stupider enchantments. Like an enchantment where a weapon could not lay a scratch upon him.  If the bitch had been smarter, had expanded her weapon inventory over the years, she might have ended him.

Doubtful, the crystal was nearly impossible to destroy, but impossible had never stopped him before.  The crystal was his greatest strength and his only weakness, and there were cracks in it now, slowly healing cracks maybe, but there were cracks.  As a Divine Tier Artifact, Charles couldn’t quite tell how many hit points the stupid thing even still had.  It could be down 1 hit point from a million or only have two left.

He hated this stupid game. There were only so many different times you could run through the same dungeon before you wanted to hang it up, and on Ordinal each dungeon run hurt. Centuries worth of pain and misery for them all to turn on him just because he wanted to go home.

It was unfair. What had he done to deserve this?

HarCharles the lesser groaned as the magic overtook him, the young man growing visibly withered until his eyes dissolved into black disks. An undead champion, capable of fighting even adventurers on even footing. Each champion required a tremendous amount of magic such that even a powerful necromancer might only raise one or two. The Dark Overlord would raise hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. Now he had truly loyal followers.

Before this, Michael always told Charles that needed his companions.  Grebthar relied on them to do the hard things that sometimes he couldn’t manage, but the Dark Overlord was stronger.  He didn’t need help doing what must be done any longer.  This time he would manage it all himself.