The moment Kierkegaard caught sight of the tower - really caught sight of it - he knew’d he’d made the right decision in pressing his assault.
His soldiers had questioned it. Most had done so behind his back, using faint whispers that he could only assume existed. A few brave souls dared to question his ideas openly, and they’d been duly slaughtered and consumed for their disobedience. Kierkegaard couldn’t, he could not, allow anyone to express the same doubt he’d held himself. But here he was, now, and he was right.
Codespace, Kierkegaard thought, wincing as he attempted to stare up the tower and through the hole in the sky. The light at the top was so bright that he couldn’t see much, and he dared not test his luck. Those little shits’re gonna bring codespace here. Or something. Either way, it’s bad news for me.
“ATTACK!” Kierkegaard bellowed, standing atop one of his Nothings. He used his portals to project his shrill battle cry to as many of his troops as possible. “BRING IT DOWN! WE TRASH THAT TOWER, WE TRASH THE WORST WE’RE EVER GONNA FACE! SLAUGHTER THEM ALL!”
Kierkegaard’s battle lines replied with a gusto he was pretty certain they didn’t actually feel, but the thousands of jet-black Non pressed forward anyway, leaping and bounding at the thick lines of Imperium soldiers encircling the base of the tower. Winged Non and massive squadrons of sky dwarves pressed in behind them, some swooping low to drop boulders on their foes, others staying high to keep the dragons busy.
By god, there’re a lot of ‘em. Kierkegaard licked his beak, watching the white-eyed Imperium troops pull their ranks together tightly around their siege weapons, determined to keep the Non at bay. So many to gut. So many to feast upon. So many points.
The battle became fierce almost at once. The first spindly Non attackers crashed into the Imperium’s front lines with typical ferocity, their elastic limbs plunging their claws past armour and into predictable weak points. The soldiers fought back with swords and spears, though they were a mere wall to protect the cannons, catapults, and simple wooden tanks that made up the Imperium’s ground forces. Gunpowder flamed and cannons roared as the Imperium opened fire, spitting hundreds of iron balls at the Non. Black bodies along the vanguard of the Non army twisted and fell, ripped apart by the Imperium’s might.
Kierkegaard didn’t like that. He didn’t like that at all.
Slipping into one of his portals, the whine of his Nothing’s harpoons following him into the void, Kierkegaard pulled himself into the midst of a tightly-knit cluster of cannons on the Imperium’s left flank. He appeared out of the ground beneath one nerve-addled soldier, yanked the man into the portal for a post-battle snack, and used his true arms to cast the cannons aside. They fell into portals on all sides, reappearing far above the battlefield and plummeting into the Imperium’s ranks to deadly effect.
The soldiers, surprised, attempted to fight back by jabbing Kierkegaard’s thick skin with their spears. He swallowed three of them as his full-sized, skeletal head emerged from the portal, then swatted the rest aside with casual grace before disappearing back into his pocket dimension again. He enjoyed the final, futile wriggles of the soldiers in his belly as they died horribly, arms and armour alike no match for Kierkegaard’s stomach acid.
Kierkegaard did this three more times before he managed to take out the majority of the Imperium’s frontline cannons. By the time he was done the Non had all but broken through the Imperium’s first line of defence - but the battle, he knew, was far from over.
A dragon whistled overhead, breathing massive gouts of greenish flame down on a titanous Non siege unit. Kierkegaard admired the splash of emerald as it roiled along the Non’s face, burning it to a crisp. It looked very pretty. Then, hopping into his portals again, Kierkegaard appeared on the dragon’s back, using his full weight to push it to the ground. He laughed as it fell, and plucked both of its wings from their sockets for good measure.
He’d not had so much fun in years. Indeed, Kierkegaard was having so much fun that he didn’t notice that the tower now bore the image of a platypus he’d imprisoned for almost a thousand years.
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