Hive Knight: A Dark Fantasy LitRPG (Trinity of the Hive Book 1) by Grayson Sinclair (poetry books to read TXT) 📗

rest of the troops will have lost all the buffs she provided them and will be even easier to kill. The rest of the guild should be playing clean up duty right now. It’d been half an hour since I jumped down from the castle. There shouldn’t be that many left.

I started my walk back towards the castle. In my aura-induced state, I hadn’t realized how far I’d traveled from home. I was a good mile or so from Gloom-Harbor. Still incredibly weak from the battle fatigue, I couldn’t have fought off a one-armed rabbitman in my current state.

The mile-long trek back to the fields was excruciating. Every step was shaky, and I thought I’d topple to the ground at any moment. I came around over the green hill that led to the front gate. The dark gray stone of the castle wavered and shrank under the glaring light of the sun peeked out from the white clouds.

It was a rather beautiful day for a massacre.

I stood staring over the fields of Gloom-Harbor; it was bloody in every sense of the word. The rancid tang of iron and rust coated my tongue and clung to the back of my throat with every breath.

I looked down at the troops left alive. I’d taken out dozens of the men myself, which still left a few hundred soldiers for the rest of the guild. There wasn’t even half that number left; the Gloom Knights were running them ragged.

Gil took out four men with a single swing of his axe. They couldn’t even get close to him. The ebony berserker was a sight to behold in battle.

Searching for the rest of the guild, I wanted to see how they were faring in the battle.

Harper was nowhere to be seen, but Yumiko was stationed on a nearby hill, dressed in her forest greens, firing arrow after arrow into the crowd. In ten seconds, she’d dropped at least fifteen men. It was damn impressive. Yumiko was undoubtedly a hand with the bow, but she didn’t hold a candle to Harper. She kept firing, pulling caches of arrows from her inventory as she continuously ran dry.

Wilson seemed to materialize from the shadows, and wherever he appeared, someone died. He Shadow-Walked through nearly fifty men himself. I forgot that sometimes, behind his strict, rule-obsessed personality, lurked a truly terrifying man.

I didn’t see Adam in the mass of bodies, but I saw several of his creatures meandering about, taking out men without a care in the world. He’d summoned a couple of bane wolves to herd the troops and lead them directly to a lava golem. It sloughed off pieces of its own skin and threw chunks of molten rock and lava on the men, boiling them alive.

Evelyn was around somewhere, I assumed. Though I never saw her, I’d found where she’d been. All I had to do was look for the biggest pile of corpses. There were at least a hundred bodies, dead in a disorganized circle. You could’ve filled a swimming pool with the blood she’d spilled today, and I chuckled at my dark joke. A rare sight to see her let loose.

The clang of a gong rang loudly through the battlefield, and I looked until I found the source. Several men took turns hammering their swords against Levi and Behemoth’s greatshields and having absolutely no luck getting through. Levi and Behemoth stood back to back, fending off troops en masse; no one could get past those two with their massive shields. They truly epitomized the phrase “immovable objects.”

All in all, the guild was kicking serious ass. I was half tempted to pull up a chair and relax my weary bones while watching the rest of the fight with a cold drink in my hand. We’ve got this in the bag. Chuckling to myself, I dragged myself back to the castle, considering I’d be nothing but a hindrance to the team if I even attempted to join in with how weak I was.

I kept the battlefield in the corner of my vision as I walked. After a few minutes, the majority of the troops were dead or dying. The last few stragglers would be picked off with minimal effort. I was proud of my family.

Another victory for the Gloom Knights.

I was about to send a congratulatory message to everyone, but fate had other plans. As if the gods themselves were listening to my inner thoughts and decided to punish me for my arrogance, I received a notification on my interface. I opened it up to find it was a message from Harper.

Boss, we got problems, call me now!

I immediately pulled up his contact card and sent a call request. He picked up the second I sent it.

“D, we got more trouble inbound.”

“Elaborate. And while I’m at it, where the hell are you?”

He sighed. “It doesn’t matter,” he said in a hurry, his usually flippant attitude disappearing for a moment. “I count thirteen riders inbound from the east. They kept to the hills, so I only spotted them once they got to the plains. We have at most, ten minutes before they are in range.”

“Son of a bitch!”

Thirteen people could only mean one thing: a rival guild was coming to join in on the siege.

A pit of fear filled my stomach in a way that a couple hundred NPCs couldn’t manage. I’d been confident that we could repel the soldiers without much trouble, and I’d have bet my fight with the elite bodyguards and Elizabeth had been the most taxing, but combat with actual players was an entirely different beast.

A full guild terrified me.

“All right, Harper. Lie low. Work your way around them. Drop out of the siege party. You know what to do.”

“Roger,” he replied.

I dropped the call and immediately pulled up the guild chat, speaking aloud to the