The New Dark Lord: An Isekai Progression Fantasy by Ian B. Urns & A. C. Erinle

Author:Ian B. Urns & A. C. Erinle [Urns, Ian B. & Erinle, A. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Podium Publishing
Published: 2025-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Finlay bloody hated crossbows.

Oh, they were convenient. Easy to use, simple enough that an idiot could become competent with a fraction of the training one might give to a good longbowman. But they were loud too. Louder than a bow, which was already a damn sight louder than most tended to guess. All well and good if you were assembling a conscripted force to stand on a hill and put bolts into whatever tried to push them off it, but useless for the types of work he tended to do.

Today, as on so many other days, Finlay was leading his rangers on a night raid. Quiet, precise, rapid. A lightning strike of an assault meant to gouge the eyes out of their enemy’s force, then lance the heart of its body while it still spasmed in disorientation. It was the sort of operation that required coordination, hard-drilled protocols, men of talent, fierce training, and experience all at once.

It was not, by any measure, the sort of thing for which Finlay would have requested five hundred fucking crossbowmen to try to help with their blunt, flaccid penises for fingers. But it was also one skirmish of many in a war that grew more desperate and doomed by the year.

He’d make do. He had no choice.

Finlay moved over the hilltop as quietly as any creature he’d ever encountered, insects included. There were many magics in the world, many powers. Some people could uproot trees and use them as clubs; others could’ve set the hilltop he was so carefully crawling across ablaze with barely even a few seconds of thought. Finlay wasn’t anything so flashy as that.

Indeed, Finlay’s power was assassinating flashiness itself. And he did it better than any he’d ever met.

He slithered, moving with the unbreakable certainty that he was beyond notice. Any eyes that happened to drop their gaze upon him would see it slide off like water on stone, and unless he decided to enter a coughing fit while breathing down the sentries’ necks, there was little chance of them paying any more heed to whatever sounds he let out.

Fomors, six of them. He recognized the abominations quickly. Not undead, not alive, some wretched halfway point. Each was over seven feet tall but no broader than a normal man, rapier thin and paper lean. Their skin was gray, yellow, or crimson, their eyes black or glowing violet, with mouths filled by jutting razors for teeth and scalps coated in stringy, matted thorns for hair. One had an axe blade for a nose, the tiny scrap of steel catching moonlight whenever she turned. Another’s legs were made from stalactites. The third did not look so unremarkable. With luck, it meant the blood flowed weaker in him.

Of all the things leading the enemy, fomors were perhaps the worst. Finlay felt his mouth dry as he studied them, the dozen or so dullahan around them, then the handful of thousand orcs still around them. This was going to be a nasty, brutal, and hard-fought fight.

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