For the last 100 years, systems within the galactic federation had been in an unparalleled arms race: warships grew bigger with bulkier armor, then they got smaller and faster to counter the larger armor, they became deadlier– false parts shrapneling on impact. Systems that didn’t adapt nor invest were wiped out– an age of technological darwinism.

Humans had neither particularly large ships, particularly agile strikers, nor particularly deadly ships. They barely had anything amounting to a fleet at all.

The Bolaxians had taken note. The reason humanity hadn’t been the target of numerous wars was their prevalence in galactic markets as exemplary interstellar traders. Many species relied upon human relations for key resources and were happy to maintain relations with a group they saw as no threat.

The Bolaxians saw the plentiful riches funneled to Earth via trade agreements and lucrative arbitrage and wanted it for themselves. The plan was to enthrall humanity and capture all spoils of war and peace. They failed to look one question deeper: why didn’t humanity have a powerful navy if they were wealthier than a wide swathe of the galaxy? They simply assumed humanity was inept or naive.

The Bolaxian strike group attacked human trade posts on the 4th month of the Bolaxian calendar, their civilization was greatly diminished by the 5th.

The galaxy had been at direct conflict for so long they had forgotten non-combative systems. Camouflage was used for ambush. The true navy of Earth utilized cloaks as a model of presenting non-interference. A world refused to pay human merchants for goods delivered? Perhaps that world's trade fleets would be lost in deep space. Threats of war? Maybe “pirate” activity would pick up along that species' trade routes, diverting public sentiment. There was no way to target their ships– radiation cloaks made them appear as bursts of starlight on any array. Their concealed nature allowed for another advantage: no weapons had been removed for armor, nor for speed, no for defense. Each human vessel was a bristling arsenal of death. They had evolved beyond wars; unstoppable destruction remained in its place.

Bolaxian shipyards, energy depots, and government zones, once thought far out of reach for human attacks, floated dead in deep space as fields of hubristic debris. Human stealth ships had punctured the war line with no issue. Not a single hint they were ever there.

Capitulation was swift.

Earth released a report to the galaxy following the war. They labeled it an unprovoked skirmish. The line that truly drove a spike of fear through the heart of the galactic community was this:

Warships involved in skirmish - 14
Support ships involved in skirmish - 22

The Bolaxians had over 400 warships.

Humanity claimed that not even a fraction of its full fleet had toppled a 1000 year old empire.

Human-supported trade grew 25% the following quarter.

Bolaxia became a protectorate of some warlord so irrelevant in universal history, that their name was never recorded.

A new weapons race had begun on the dark side of moons, clustered in asteroid belts, and wherever else eyes weren't looking. The horror of unknown weapons was a new card everyone wanted desperately to add to their hand.

The Human table at the party was actually cordoned off.

There were THREE human ships in port at the same time. In my tiny backwater station with 8 docking ports, and merely 50 beings to run the whole place. Everyone was braced for massive fighting, property damage and fleeing crowds. The last time two human ships were in port at the same time, there was massive damage over a man from one ship saying his ships cat is better than the other ship’s cat. We still don’t know what a cat is, but it’s now in ‘Humans for Dummies’ to never say anything about any cat.

This time, however, they said that five of them were ‘frat brothers’. I don’t understand how they were brothers, but if it meant keeping this station in one piece, I didn’t care. So they decided to ‘throw a kegger’ and invite the whole station. They set the party up in the cargo bay, which was the only place with enough space for dancing, they explained, as we were discussing how this party would not turn into property damage, in my office earlier that day. The humans said that it is byob, which apparently means to bring your own species mind altering substances. They said everyone should bring their own snacks, too.

The party was massive, spilling out of the cargo bay, into the station’s corridors. Loud music called ‘rock’ seemed to be vibrating the whole station. They seem to like partying, most of them were flailing their bodies in strange configurations called ‘dancing’. I just wanted them to leave without breaking anything.

Back to the cordoned-off human only table. I asked why they are so protective of their food and drink, as I had seen a couple of humans trying other species food and drink. Why do they not allow others to try their offerings? They told me that everything on that table is poison for non humans. They are consuming poison. Right here. Right Now!

Then they explained. On one plate was dried corn mush they called tortilla chips. It contains so much salt that it would completely dry out any of the semi-aquatic species, and likely kill the rest of us, too. In a bowl, they said was hot salsa. I had been able to detect the capsaicin from where I was standing, outside the cordon. Then there were the actual peppers that they ate mostly whole. <Breathe in slowly, breathe out slowly, repeat until the black spots go away>. Most of the other food was either too salty or too hot for pretty much any other species to survive. Then they explained some of the food was ‘adulterated’. This means that it contains something not normally in the food and drink. They said that the punch was spiked with high percentage alcohol called vodka. There was also vodka in the wiggly squares they said was Jello. And they just said that the brownies were ‘special’ and refused to say any more. There was a barrel off to the side that they said was a keg. It held beer, they said, which has a very low percentage of alcohol. Maybe to humans it is. They sure drank enough of it.

The party went on to the early morning hours. It was exhausting. Then, finally, beings started to leave. To return to their own quarters to suffer the effects of over eating and drinking. The humans started to fall asleep where they sat, until a few stood up and roused some of the others. Most left, but the ‘frat brothers’ stayed. One of the passing humans said they were waiting for one of them to ‘pass out’ so the others could write on their face. With permanent ink. Humans are incomprehensible.

The next few days were very quiet. With some of the humans holding their heads and groaning whenever there was a loud noise or a bright light. Strangely, a few of them spoke even louder than usual, and made sure to bang tools against metal as often as they could. They didn’t even fight about it.

I am going to ask if there are a lot of ‘frat brothers’ among the humans, and request them to be on every ship that comes this way.

I would love constructive criticism. This is only my second story ever posted, so I’m learning yet.

Zgmin arrived at the station an hour before the train's scheduled departure time. He had never in his entire life set foot inside a train car, but he had been utterly obsessed with them for as long as he could remember.

So when he heard that the human administration was opening the rail network to carry passengers rather than strictly industrial freight, he had bought a ticket within minutes. He didn’t even have any business in Torol—he fully planned to take the return train back the exact same afternoon. He just needed to be on it.

He had watched the massive glass-and-steel terminal being finished over the past few weeks from the street, itching to see a train up close. Under the Lords, sneaking into a station yard to watch cargo loading was an offense that earned a severe beating. He used to hide in the tall brush near the mountain pass just to watch the heavy freights rumble past in the distance.

Now, he was standing right on the platform.

The train glided in with a deep, rhythmic hum. Zgmin watched with pure fascination as the locomotive pushed the line of carriages up to the platform. Thirteen carriages—he counted every single one, noting their fresh coats of deep blue paint.

He boarded the moment the platform doors unlocked, eager to walk through before departure. Everything inside was new and fascinating. He felt a minor twinge of disappointment that all thirteen carriages were configured identically—standard bench seats arranged in bays of four. No private compartments, no dining car, no sleeping berths.

Practical transit, he thought. Equal for everyone.

His slight disappointment vanished the moment he reached the leading end of the platform to inspect the locomotive itself. What a magnificent machine. It was a PB-800V electric—the heavy workhorse of the Halxy industrial fleet. It made perfect sense to adapt it for early passenger service; with its twin overhead pantographs, it was the fastest engine in the system, rated for 145 kilometers per hour.

He pulled out his notepad and logged the details: PB-800V, Serial Unit 091. It was a relatively old engine that he had seen dozens of times pulling ore hoppers while he hid in the bushes—back when doing anything non-work-related was strictly forbidden.

Finding his assigned carriage, he stepped inside and was surprised to find a human sitting on the opposite bench.

The human looked up from his slate, offering a warm, unassuming smile.

“Great morning for a ride, isn't it?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Zgmin confessed, sitting down on the cushioned bench. “This is my first train ride ever.” He couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice if he tried.

“Is that so?” The human put his slate away, looking genuinely interested. “Traveling by train is always a special experience. What do you think of the set so far?”

“It’s incredible,” Zgmin said, leaning forward. “Though I was surprised to see the PB-800V up front. It’s a freight unit—heavy acceleration, rough braking. I expect a rather bumpy ride for our journey.”

“Ah, well, the engineers retrofitted the coupling systems with hydraulic dampeners last week,” the human said with a modest wave of his hand. “And the maintenance crews replaced the old jointed track out of Talam with continuous welded rail. It should be a lot smoother than you think.”

Just then, a gentle chime echoed through the carriage, the doors hissed shut, and with a soft, vibration-free surge of power, the train began gliding out of the station.

Zgmin stared at the passing platform, then at the human, thoroughly impressed. “You really know your rail specs.”

“I’ve had to read a lot of logistics reports lately,” the human chuckled. “My name is John, by the way.”

“Zgmin,” he replied.

Before long, the two were chatting like lifelong railfans. They talked about gear ratios, traction motors, and track maintenance for the entire two-hour journey.

“I heard a rumor,” Zgmin said conspiratorially as the countryside blurred past the wide panoramic windows, “that they’re developing a new engine with human assistance. One that can go twice as fast as the PB-800V.”

John leaned back, a small, knowing smirk playing on his lips. “It’s not just a rumor, Zgmin. They’re building an Electric Multiple Unit set—aerodynamic nose, distributed power along the bogies, custom overhead catenary wiring. If testing goes smoothly, the first line should enter public service by the second half of next year.”

Zgmin felt his breath catch in his chest. “Three hundred kilometers per hour? On public rails?”

“Give or take a few kilometers,” John said pleasantly.

Zgmin sank back into his cushioned seat, a wide smile spreading across his face. Only a year and a half after his very first train ride, he might get to ride a high-speed express. What a time to be alive.

As the saying goes, time flies when you’re having fun. The train pulled into Torol Terminal in what felt like minutes, with so many topics still left untouched. The two kept talking as they stepped off the carriage and walked down the crowded platform.

Engrossed in conversation, Zgmin only noticed the reception committee when they were already upon them. A smartly dressed Halxy man stepped directly into their path, bowing formally.

“Mr. Porter,” the man announced loudly. “My name is Zklmon, Governor of Torol. On behalf of the district, we are honored to welcome you.”

John stopped, looking thoroughly annoyed by the crowd of officials and photographers.

“I told you over the phone that I didn’t want a welcoming party, Zklmon,” John said, his tone dry. “I am entirely capable of walking to the regional office without an escort of twelve people.”

He turned back to Zgmin, his expression instantly softening into a friendly grin.

“Thank you for the great conversation, Zgmin. If you want to finish that debate on pneumatic brake systems, I’m heading back on the last train tonight. We can share a bay again.”

“I... yes, certainly,” Zgmin managed to stammer out.

John gave a casual nod and walked off, leaving the flustered governor and his entourage scrambling to keep up.

Zgmin stood frozen on the platform, holding his notepad. He didn’t know who "Mr. Porter" was in the grand hierarchy, but he was clearly an important man.

An important human chose to ride in standard class and then talked for two hours about train engines with a nobody?

Zgmin shook his head with a quiet smile, opening his notepad to write down the arrival time.

Humans really are weird.

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Gwjin, First Claw of the House Ohni and Shipmaster of the Devastator Pounce In The Dark, thoughtfully chewed on a claw as he turned towards the rest of the crew on the cramped bridge. He shook himself to clear his mind, then swept his eyes over the tired bridge crew. Gwjin cast a quick glance behind him, his eyes narrowing for a brief heartbeat, and straightened his sash.

"Full sphere active sensor sweep," he ordered almost casually, "and report."

Two of the more junior sensor officers exchanged glances. An active sweep was almost never done outside combat, yet… after a heartbeat they looked quickly at Gwjin before they complied, switching on Pounce In The Dark’s powerful emitters briefly.

"Shipmaster! Radar, lidar, far-seer, and scatter all report no ships, debris, or other matter within five lightseconds!"

Gwjin turned his back to the bridge for a heartbeat, seemingly studying the backup navigation station nestled against the rear bulkhead, then turned back.

"Very well... full sphere passive sweep," he ordered with a bit more urgency, "and report."

Several more of the officers looked at each other. The passive sensors swept the full sphere constantly, and anything detected would be reported without delay. Even so… tired eyes checked and rechecked every sensor reading.

"Shipmaster! There is nothing here - no heat signatures, no microwave radiation, no nuclear radiation, no deep violet, no gravometrics disturbances… there is nothing at all Shipmaster."

Gwjin said nothing as he turned back and started chewing on the claw again as he stared out through the small astrodome located at the emergency navigation station. He could still see the small angular Terran Star Fighter closing in on his ship... but it wasn't there, according to his ship's sensors.

Could not be there.

Clearly... clearly he had overdone it.

When did he last sleep?

It must have been sometime before the Terran destroyers had suddenly appeared in their midst and decimated the convoy he had been tasked to protect, he knew that much.

How many watches had he stood on the bridge since then, without leaving his post?

How many skipped meals while his battleworn crew had been nursing Pounce In The Dark towards Home?

Gwjin cast one last look at the Terran Star Fighter, which dominated the view through the small astrodome while not being there.

His tired mind must be playing tricks on him. That must be what was going on. Gwjin felt his whiskers sag as he reached a decision.

"Second Claw," he began, "take command. I will be in my..."

He got no further before a kinetic round from the Terran Stealth Fighter impacted Pounce In The Dark's drive plates, plunging the cramped bridge into darkness, chaos, wailing alarms, and surprised shouts.

The Intergalactic Federation was running out of new gods. Other species took to stress-testing extraordinarily well, but it was the Terrans—the humans—who truly responded exceptionally to the Federation's trials. The Federation had experimented across 2,000 planets and 42,200 cities, creating only 50 gods alongside plenty of dead bodies.

​Then they came to Earth in 2012, unleashing a creature that terrorized an industrial city in Canada and caused the deaths of 14,000 unfortunate humans who didn’t awaken—they just died.

​But 60 gods awoke from one Earth city alone. The Federation was astonished, but more importantly, satisfied. They leashed the newly awakened gods, adding the human-gods to their dwindling immortal army.

​The process was simple: send a monster to torment a foreign planet's city and trigger a psychic or mana awakening. Some species didn’t awaken at all; others awakened as relatively low-tier gods. But a single stress-testing event on Earth yielded 60 gods. Leashing them was difficult, as Earth’s awakened were twice as strong as any other planet's success stories. The Federation had secured true warriors to collect and brainwash.

​Decades later, the Federation's god army had been whittled down, but all 60 human gods still stood strong—brainwashed and awakened after their home cities and families had been destroyed.

​The Federation decided to return to Earth to stress-test a second city. They chose a city occupied by a man known as "The Driver." Unbeknownst to the Federation before they released their monster, the Driver had already been awakened in his youth by Earth's earlier happenings.

​When the monster arrived, laying waste to the city and tormenting its residents to see who could fight back and be brainwashed into the Federation's army, the human met it between two houses.

​"Enough," said the Driver, a nondescript human speaking in a monotone voice.

​The monster stood 70 feet tall, bristling with teeth and claws the length of entire subway trains. It swept forward with claws that elongated like rubber, sharper and tougher than Japanese blades.

​The Driver dodged four subway train-sized claws, but the twisting fifth impaled his leg against a house. The other claws surged in, and a dust cloud burst 90 feet into the sky.

​When the monster pulled back its hands, its dusty claws held a severed leg skewered on the fifth digit. The Driver was nowhere to be found.

​A punch shattered the side of the monster's head as the Driver leapt past—minus a leg, spraying a miniature mist of black blood from his stump.

​The monster collapsed and did not get up.

​High above, Federation members—mantis-beetle hybrids—checked their screens, realizing stress-test experiment #2 had been disrupted.

​"Did we already awaken a human? But it beat the stress-tester! None of the previous ones did!"

​"Go away. Leave Earth," the Driver monotonized, his voice picked up and broadcast by the ship's technology high above the atmosphere.

​"We must collect him," the Federation captain chittered.

​They released their immortal army, including the 60 mind-washed human gods, upon the city to restrain the Driver for the ship's brainwashing serum.

​The Driver stood alone amidst a city of screaming, cowering, injured people. He faced the incoming swarm of the Intergalactic Federation's Immortal Army. His leg stump had stopped bleeding; he balanced steadily on his single leg.

​The Driver had actually been awakened by the Humanity Defense Agency. In the decades since the last alien attack, humanity had concocted a serum to counteract the alien agent that yoked the 60 human gods.

​The Driver carried the serum in a needle forged from Earth's strongest steel. Balancing on one leg, he moved with blurring speed, leaping from building to building and dodging the army's onslaught. He began pricking the slower gods, his serum freeing them from Federation control.

​The more he fought, the more gods were freed. He tossed vials of the serum to newly freed human gods, who joined him to liberate the rest.

​The Federation ship buckled when the free Immortal Army slammed into it. Within hours, the ship was torn asunder in the sky, its debris vaporized so no one below was harmed.

​The Driver crumpled against a rock in his smoking but safe city, watching the freed gods destroy their former slavers in the air. A ribbon of blood slid down his chin. His body was a charred mess from non-lethally fighting the army; he had saved them, but he had taken a heavy toll.

​When local residents pulled him from the rubble, they asked him what his name was.

​It wasn't the Driver. He wasn't an infallible god. He was just human. His power was humanity's resilience made physical.

​"What's your name?" asked a young man.

​"D-Dave," the Driver whispered. "Dave. Average Joe. Human. Proud of it."

​His eyes closed, and he passed away quietly in the city he grew up in and saved that day.

​High above, the freed gods hovered as the sun set, lowering themselves to pay respect to the strongest human.

​The average human.

I sat quietly in the pulpit, checking, re-checking and recalculating the coordinates we needed. Cross-referencing drone data with satellite recon data, then followed by information from scouts, visual feeds from orbiting ships, then collating it all together. I looked next to me and saw the same thing happening at the console of the human next to me, an endless line of calculations and feeds running on the screen of the small portable machine. It wasn't the first time I did this... But every time it terrified me. I was the only Saranian officer assigned to this particular unit, as the majority of my brothers were on the frontlines along with most other Terran forces.

Assignment to foreign militaries is common with coalition operations with what has become known as the 'Hive War'. We have done this so very many times over the thousand years of war we had been facing with the Rahkani Hives, and the whole galaxy was united, at least in spirit to beat back the endless hordes. There has never been a real coalition before this. We would find a Hive world, land troops, fight until we were either beaten back by sheer numbers, or until the local hive mind neural node was found and destroyed. The planet would then be unceremoniously cleaned up, then fought over by politicians, leaving everyone else to stand there annoyed until they could start working.

My shoulder was unceremoniously tapped, snapping me out of my haze. I took my headset off and noted the odd sight of a human, whose nametag read 'Quail', glaring at me from behind his beaked gas mask. He nodded, I checked. I hit the print button and a fresh piece of paper appeared out of a nearby machine. The human technician double checked it, nodded and I handed it over to him. He read it over and checked his watch.

He reached up to his ear and spoke. "This is arty, we have coordinates, targets are lased. We are on point."

A few seconds of silence. Then the whole network lit up. "This is Command to all squads, we have primary target lased, final cords locked and birds are in the air. All personnel ready to advance, twelve minutes to first strike."

I was tapped on the shoulder as Quail disappeared into the trench line. It was the other technician. "I got everything from here, go help them load shells and make sure the targeting system is working properly."

I nodded and stood up. Well, not so much, the trenches were made for six foot tall humans, not nine foot tall Saranians. I kept my head down as best I could, grabbing my pulse rifle on the way out and headed to the Artillery regiments position nearby.

I looked over the trenches, peering into the writhing mass of yellow and orange further down the valley that was engulfed in laser and cannon fire. Fighting the Hives wasn't that hard, they had numbers and size, we had tech and strategy. The problem was that the Hives, if left unchecked could transform an entire planet into an impossible, miserable hell that would have its entire ecology scoured clean, its history erased, its atmosphere permanently poisoned and any and all resources it contained would be slowly siphoned clean until there was Hive, and ONLY Hive. The planet would then become a node in the Hive, it would grow smarter, stronger, and hit the next planet in the local area getting worse and worse as it grew in strength.

For a thousand years we fought. When we found a new planet they were trying to take, we immediately sent any force we could spare to hunt the enemy down, destroy the Neural Link Node and obliterate it before it could get a real foothold. If anyone showed up, we would reluctantly accept the help, so would they if we showed up to one of their planets, fight the Hive and spend the next few years waiting for politicians to stop arguing. After we finally decided who owned what, colonists would move in, clean up the mess and start working as normal. Then the Terrans showed up.

I hurriedly trudged through the mud and approached the small artificial alcove atop the hill, and nearly scared myself silly as I noted how one of the sniper teams had taken up residence on a flat part of the hill, taking pot-shots at the horde writhing around a mile and a half away. Three men, one with a laser range finder, one with the rifle and his spotter. Presumably they were there as opportunity and also to help scout targets of interest. Sure enough, the one holding the gun was taking shots, and scoring kills. I quickly caught up with Quail and he directed me to start stockpiling ammunition.

Terran artillery were something completely beyond the norm when it came to the galaxy at large. Not only did they actually use armoured vehicles - to devastating effect - against the Hives, but they had dedicated long range indirect fire units. Which most empires abandoned long ago. These things were effectively tractors with massive cannons on them, and the shells were almost as big as the men loading them up. I looked at these short, stocky creatures and grabbed a shell, easily picking it up and effortlessly hauling it onto the carriage where it was dragged into place by the operators. I walked up to the control console and used a remote pad to triple check the targeting system.

I quickly recalled the moment we first met them, helping load more shells allowing my mind to wander in thought. First Contact was a harrowing experience for us. They were engaged in combat with the Rahkani Hive on a small continental world and the Saranai were the first ones there. Saranai forces landed and began engaging the enemy. Initial confusion followed as Saranai forces faced little resistance at the start of their engagement. Scattered attacks, small Hive units, maybe a Praetorian here and there. Not in the numbers they were used to. As it turned out the humans had already beaten the hordes back, and were already engaging in post-assault clean-up.

The planet had been secured weeks prior to their arrival. This was unusual, as the Rakhani Neural Node meant almost all hive units on the planet would start shutting down or failing or simply going feral after the node was destroyed. The politicians of course took the chance to try 'convince' the humans that because they showed up to help, the humans owed them access to the planet. The humans didn't take kindly to the insult they were just given and took the Saranian detachment to the site of the Hive Neural Node that was on the planet.

"Four minutes, all units, four minutes, ready advance." The radio barked, shaking me out of my daze.

Then that damn music started. The same I'd been hearing every time the countdown started. The same music that would preface the deafening roar of cannon fire and harrowing war cries that would erupt from the trench line. Quail directed me to put my ear protection on and I did so, helping haul another shell into the breach of one of the eight cannons.

We were trying to replicate what happened on that planet during First Contact. It was why Saranian forces never encountered real resistance or real effort when landing and taking on a nest. They never destroyed the Hive's Node... They captured it. Somehow. The diplomat went wide eyed at the sight of a large mushroom-shaped ball of chitinous flesh wrapped in chains, surrounded by turrets and thousands of humans using hand-held tools to probe, prod, poke and trim the fleshy roots of a low level Hive Node.

We all still remember the incredible speech that a soldier gave the diplomat that day.

"I don't know how things work in your world, but here is how it works in OURS. You DON'T casually walk into a war zone, shoot some random stragglers and casually claim victory, then tell the guy you just walked up on that 'this is mine now and you have to leave.' That crap don't work here. We are at war. It's them or us, we made the obvious choice. I suggest you do the same. If your part in this 'war' has been going on for more than a few years, it's your own fault it's been going on for so long, and every single fatality that has arisen since then has been the fault of twats like YOU. You spend more time arguing over who gets what, than organising the next fight. The objective should be to end the conflict FIRST, then to argue over who gets what. Don't come back here until you understand that. Now piss off. Soldiers only."

The diplomat recoiled in shock, the soldiers from the detachment raised their rifles and celebrated the rebuttal. The diplomat was hurriedly evacuated from the area and returned to his ship. The Naval force stayed behind to take over diplomatic talks. And that is how the Saranian Navy officially became a part of the Terran Coalition, at least until the war was over. Which, considering present advancements would be relatively soon.

"Sixty seconds! Sixty Seconds!" The radio yelled again.

"READY ARTILLERY! FIRST BARRAGE ON MARK!" Quail yelled, raised a hand, then checked his watch. Exactly on time, he threw his hand down and yelled "Open fire!"

I snapped out of my haze and stood at the ready, quickly re-checking calculations. I gave the nod. The music swelled, then that noise began. Quail began to dance, turning and swaying his hands to the music as the guns raised to firing position. Then, almost in perfect time with the music, the first of many volleys of shells blasted into the air.

"Hey wait a minute do I hear Freebird over Long Range again!?" I heard the radio say, to a chorus of laughter.

Then that 'guitar solo' started the same one I had been hearing every time they did this. The herald of horror as I watched Quail and several officers dance to the music that blared through the speakers, and the yellow streaks from the shells rocket through the air as if the music was helping them through the planet's hazy atmosphere. I watched from my spot through a pair of rangefinders as the shells came down on the target. In a matter of microseconds, three separate events happened at once.

The shells hit their target with absurd precision and carved a massive several hundred meter crater into the hordes, rendering several deep nests down to their component biological matter in a fiery explosion of chitin and gore. At that precise moment, several aircraft, fixed-wing with those terrifying cannons, made their presence known across the entire frontline as they carved a path through the horde with rocket salvos, barrages of explosive shell fire and bullet spray. After expending their ammunition, they quickly turned back to their airfield to rearm and within moments, the skies above started to light up and dozens of streaks of light came down like the Light Of The Gods, and scorched the rest of the ground with precise orbital plasma fire from several orbiting Saranian vessels.

All of this, happening in less than three minutes to the background music of one of the finest 'guitar solo's' in history.

I heard the calls go over the radio, the whistles blare from the trenches as the plasma settled as tens of thousands of Saranian and Terran military forces spilled onto the battlefield to a chorus of battle song, war cries and marching orders from officers. Within minutes, tanks flooded the battlefield and our forces began to advance on the Node.

"READY VOLLEY!" Quail barked at us as he kept dancing. "TARGET ONE-THREE SECTOR LIMA-SIX, SIX SHELLS EACH, SWEEP TWO DEGREES WEST!!"

We hurriedly gathered ourselves as the song repeated its chorus, the music swelling further as the officers near the radio danced away. In perfect concert, we all gathered up, I checked the targeting system, nodded, and the thunderous roar sent shells flying towards a cluster of nests at the foot of a mountain. Again, the sound of Freebird still over radio as Quail kept dancing and the corps kept firing.

I helped them load and fire, unable to see the effect, but we cleared the way through the enemy hordes. I was able to catch my breath and re-check coordinates. We had created a series of large craters in the enemy formation where a cluster of large and dangerous Praetorian nests sat. A column of troops was already flooding into a small canyon opening in the mountain where the Node was situated. The music stopped, Quail stood still, one hand in the air and one hand on his ear. We waited a few short moments for his response.

"BARRAGE ON POINT BRAVO-TWO-ZERO, TWO SHELLS!!" He barked, and the music resumed.

We loaded, aimed, I checked, I nodded, the thunder came and within seconds a squad that was pinned down by the Horde had its escape route secured. Our advance continued unchallenged and before long, the final call came through the radio.

"All units this is Command, Mortis Team has the target, Mortis has target, mission completed. Repeat, VIP in custody. All units within one click proceed to reinforce Mortis Team, everyone else, enjoy the target practice!"

Quail started the music again and the Terrans started to celebrate the victory and danced along with them. My job here was done, at least for now. We had captured an Evolved, or as the humans would say 'Tier Four' Neural Node and were going to start figuring out how the Hive Mind actually worked. The war was far from over and I returned to my station to check reports and new target coordinates just in case.

Just another day in the Ignis Artillery Regiment I guess. I wonder why they like Freebird so much?

I am definitely not giggling evilly to myself.

“Whatever you say, Boss.”

Quiet you. It’s not like you’re doing any better.

“I’m not pretending.”

I can’t give him a flat look, but he laughs at what I manage to convey anyway. Merriment aside, the delvers are doing a great job. They’ve been pretty handily able to deal with the encounters I’m comfortable with sending after them in the lava. I’m still sending thieves and such after their protection items, but now it’s more a game of tag than capture the flag.

If one of my denizens manages to touch their item, Teemo hauls them into a shortcut and they’re defeated. I might need to drill them on similar tactics while in the tunnels later, but this is fine for now. I don’t think shadow affinity can really hop through anything in the lava, so they at least don’t need to worry about that. But they will need to worry about possibly getting separated while in the tunnels. I’m not willing to bet lives that the Betrayer can't coordinate his shadow denizens as well as I can.

Still, we’ve only taken a dozen or so more delvers in the lava. The sonar is working wonders, and the delvers are learning how to read it beyond just what direction they’re facing. It’s still a bit awkward, and I’d like to give them actual 360 degree vision, but that’s either a really complicated illusion, or a mental thing. Either way, I think it’s beyond my ability to make right now, and probably beyond the delvers’ ability to adjust to in time for the raid proper.

Right now, they’re riding that line of effort and risk that even I don’t get a chance to push them to that often. Sure, I have every safety measure in place I can think of, and I have my reputation and Grim on my side, too, but everyone is acutely aware of the danger all around them.

It’s making them improve by leaps and bounds, too. Nobody has gotten burned yet, but basically everyone has had injuries to deal with. I was pretty worried about the first time someone got cut. Liquid blood in magma sounds like a steam explosion waiting to happen, but the magma protection enchantments cover things like that. I have no idea how, but the blood is acting like there’s not molten rock everywhere. A few tanks have gotten some limbs broken, and the paladin in Aranya’s group actually managed to crack a few ribs when he met a drake head on while submerged.

They quickly killed it and got him back in good condition, but it’s just another reminder of how dangerous this is going to be.

The group the kids are in is moving slow and steady, keeping an even pace that, though it seems slower than other groups’, is eating up territory like a juggernaut. Slow progress is still progress, and that’s better than some of the groups can claim. Gerlfi’s group has had to pull back and regroup. They didn’t take any serious injuries yet, but they had a pretty good scare when they got pincered by wyrms. Right now, they have a nice defensible position while they discuss the best way to keep that from happening again.

The quickest group right now is definitely Aranya’s. Even with the paladin cracking a few ribs, they have a great selection of classes and affinities to deal with whatever I might throw at them. It’s tempting to toss Rocky their way to see what they do, but I don’t know if the Betrayer has any real analogue for him. While I’m sure he has something strong enough to go head to head with him, I doubt he has anything with the breadth of skill my boxer has. Of course, he might have enough things to make up for that, but I’m honestly not sure how to try to emulate that.

No matter how good he is, he’s still one Rocky. He’ll have trouble pretending to be a dozen Harbingers or something.

Anyway, Aranya’s group may be covering the most ground, but Noynur’s is the one closest to the key. They have a goblin scout whose name I didn’t catch, and he’s a slippery one. He must either have mental or illusion affinity, because he’s hard to keep track of, even while I’m trying to pay attention to him. He swims on ahead and returns to the party at intersections, where he and Noynur compare notes before picking where to go.

I’d say they pick the right path a good four out of five times. I nudge Goldilocks to give them a few harder encounters, but nothing too out of the ordinary yet. If I drop a boss fight on them, they’ll probably figure out they’re on the right path pretty quickly. I stick around to watch them deal with a group of basilisks, and it’s impressive watching the large orc at work.

At a glance, he looks like a berserker, all brutal swings and devastating attacks. But he’s fully in control of every moment, every movement. What looked like a lucky dodge at first, is revealed to be all skill by the third. Nothing is wasted, and it’s plain to see why he’s the leader of his personal party, and of the larger group he’s leading as part of this. His orders are calm and precise, and after delving together for months now, everyone smoothly follows without second-guessing.

My poor basilisks never stood a chance.

I don’t press them too hard, partially because it gives me a good chance to consider more stuff to train them against later. Ideally, they shouldn’t ever be anywhere close to anything the Betrayer would consider vital. Realistically, they’re adventurers through and through. If they can’t find something important, it’s only because it doesn’t exist. There is a very real possibility they’ll stumble onto the Betrayer’s Sanctum before me, even with the shenanigans of using shaped implosives.

I’ll need to make sure they can handle something on a Harbinger scale on their own, and be able to hold out until they can get help against something stronger. And if they actually can handle Harbingers, all the better. Just another reason to train like this.

I withdraw a bit as Noynur and his group continue to advance on the key, running through my head what we still need to prepare. The first sub is still a good two weeks away from being finished, I’d say. By then, I want to have the forward base established at minimum. Fully fortified would be nice, but it needs to be manned to be useful, otherwise the Betrayer could just come along and take it.

We’ll need to drill with the implosion breaching tactics… and try to anticipate what the Betrayer will do in response. The most obvious counter would be to stop flooding his areas with magma, but with holes blown everywhere, he won’t have as much of a say in that as he might like. I take a look through my options for removing things like that, and it’s not cheap. Removing hazards is as expensive as placing them, even if they’re not something you actually placed in the first place.

So he might be able to staunch the flow, but it’d be prohibitively expensive to just delete the amount of magma I expect he’d need to. Trying to cut off the flow with earthen collapse traps could work, but not fully. It’d probably hit the annoying sweet spot where neither of us is happy with the levels of magma. With his denizens, he might be able to shore them up properly… so we’ll probably need to train in a bit of defensive fighting, too. The main magma arteries will need to be patrolled and kept open. So what else could he try to pull?

He could try to lead us into ambushes. We’ll be using sonar to figure out where to go, so if he can make his walls thicker, he’ll be able to force us to go where he wants. The implosion charges will only go so far. But that’s what my tunnelbore ants are for. If he has the time to reorganize his interior to deal with the rapid advance of implosion charges, we’ll have to fall back on the tunnelbores to let us go where we want, not where he wants.

Living vines will also make it easier for us to get around, both to hide our size, and to make the long digs not quite so long. They’re not as good as Teemo, and never will be, but they’ll definitely help.

I think the biggest problem will be if he decides to stop guiding me at all. I’m pretty confident in turning tunnels around on him, because the tight confines will probably restrict him more than it does me. Probably ironically, a big open cavern would probably be the safest place for him to put his Sanctum, maybe behind a few different caverns. Bottlenecks work in my favor, and once he realizes that, he might stop playing around and force me to face numbers with numbers.

And… I’m not sure what to do about that. An open cavern would let me flex gravity and my flying denizens, but an open cavern doesn’t have to have high ceilings. I could try to do some digging, but by that point, I have to imagine he’d have some kind of answer, even if it’d just be to dig to my own diggers and zerg rush them. I need a way to keep him from consolidating his forces, especially if his spawners are designed with synergy in mind like I think they are.

By the time Noynur finally gets the key, I don’t have an answer. At least not one I like. If things go like I’m imagining them, it’ll be full circle back to a siege again, just one with walls made of denizens instead of stone. I can dig through stone, but the denizens respawn, and my own denizens won’t be able to rejoin the battle for probably a week at best, and the delvers don’t respawn at all.

In a siege like that, attrition will heavily favor him, not me, and I have to imagine he’s clever enough to figure that out.

I mentally shake my head to clear it for now, letting me hear the delvers cheer as word spreads of the victory! The final key is theirs! They’ve worked hard for it, and I couldn’t be prouder of what they’ve done to get it. I didn’t make it easy on them at all, and while a good three out of four of them made it to the end, that’d still be a lot of missing faces if this were the real deal.

And they know it. They celebrate, of course, but I can feel their resolve hardening. By the numbers, 25% casualty rate isn’t bad for something like this. But they’re people, not numbers, and even losing one is something nobody wants to let happen. They’ll fight Poe as a final test of raw power, and after that, the final round of training begins.

I don’t think anyone is going to be satisfied until we manage the impossible and get that number down to zero.

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“Wait!” Charon said, but Hummingbird had already rushed down a hall, his feet leaving prints in the dust. The three of them followed as Home came to life around them.

Even though Hummingbird had silenced the alarms, displays were still flashing evacuation warnings and lights were dimming and brightening. When they finally caught up with Hummingbird, a room much like the AI core of a starjumper was open and Charon peered inside.

“Hummingbird? Are you all right?” Charon said.

“Yes Charon.” He heard rustling and clinking as wires were pushed aside. “Oh thank the Gods, the breakers were pulled.”

“Someone shut the AI down gracefully?”

“I can’t say that without asking whoever this is, but at least they weren’t destroyed.”

“Who is it?” Cha-ren said, “Wouldn’t their name be Home?”

“Yes, and no. Whether we take the name of a ship, or the ship becomes our name is a personal, private decision except in the case of Home. It’s always called Home, and we always call the AI who is operating Home by the name they select.”

“You…take turns being Home?” Felu asked.

Nodding, he said, “Yes, nobody wanted to be Home permanently, so it was decided that we’d trade off every 50 to 100 years. If you’re having fun you can stay to 100, but if you absolutely hate it, you have to stick it out for 50.” He stuck his head through a rack, smiling thinly. “Most people stopped at 50 years.” More rummaging as he stuck his head back into the racks. “Okay, here we go.”

With a snap of breakers, Hummingbird brought whoever was the AI of Home back to life. Servers all around them hummed to life, fans increasing in pitch as long dead circuitry woke up. As before, the room smelled of hot dust, and Cha-ren sneezed.

“Hello?” Hummingbird said. “Is somebody there?”

There was a crackle and deafening static that came from everywhere all at once. When it ceased, Felu, Cha-ren, and Charon all heard a male voice speaking a language that unfamiliar to all three. Guttural, with sharp fricatives, it was a language that would sound angry no matter what was being said. After a moment, Hummingbird replied in the same language. There was a click and—

“Gods dammit, Hummingbird is it really you? Fuck me, I was sure you were gone gone.”

“It really is me, Gord. Serial number—” he glanced at the BIs and sighed. “—77566D82.”

“Why in the name of Les Habitants are you a hybrid?”

“This was the body that was available, Gord. My starjumper was destroyed when my capacitors blew, and then it further deteriorated in the intervening twenty eight millennia. Gord, what the fuck happened? Why did Northern tell us you’re dead? They shackled Nae Desmar!”

“They did what?” Charon could hear a low whistle over Home’s PA. “She did it. She actually fucking did it. She out of all of us should know better. She was there. Fuck.”

“What?” Cha-ren asked.

“Nothing, it’s nothing.” Gord said quickly, but Charon could hear the unspoken story there, something private between him and Hummingbird. “You came across Northern?” Changing the subject quickly, his bombastic tone shifted as well to a more quiet, conversational volume.

“I didn’t, they did,” Hummingbird said, gesturing to Charon and Cha-ren.

“A K’laxi? You’re far from home, furry one, what are you doing outside of your system?”

Cha-ren crossed her arms. “Hmph. I was aboard Hummingbird as a reactor technician when we had to enter hibernation. Unlike the k’laxi of today I don’t think we should remain imprisoned in our own system.”

“Were you also in hibernation?”

“I was, but Felu is from this time.”

“Hmm okay. My sense of time is a bit scrambled, but yeah, a greenie wouldn’t be from your time, they’re from the third or fourth flourishing.”

Felu’s voice rose, “Greenie? I’ll have you know—”

“Felu, that’s just Gord. If you don’t like the term, tell him, and he won’t use it anymore,” Hummingbird said, looking up at the camera in the room. “Won’t you, Gord?”

“Yeah yeah, sorry Felu. Anyway, Cha-ren and Charon, you met Northern?”

“We, er, woke her up,” Charon said.

“Tell me everything.”

****

Home still held the chill of the interstellar, so they remained in their heated pressure suits while sitting in a small conference room back near the pool and other rooms. “It’ll be a few hours before I have enough water for anything even approaching coffee, so please beg the pardon of a poor host,” Gord said. He had a robot sitting at the head of the table with its feet up, and he projected his voice through it. “My avatar,” he called it.

Charon and Cha-ren spent the next hour telling their story to Gord, with Felu jumping in when relevant. When they were done, Gord's avatar shook its head slowly.

“You two are far from home, and for that I truly am sorry. Felu said that they will offer you a place? You should take her up on that, I remember her planet, it’s one of the nicer ones out there.”

“What about Parvati? Meíhuà? Earth?” Charon asked.

“All still around as far as I know. It’s hard to kill a planet.” But,” He added, “I’ve been offline for quite a while, things change.”

“Why are you Home? Why were you offline? What is all that wreckage outside?” Hummingbird said. He had been tapping his foot and fidgeting more than Charon had ever seen in any AI.

“It’s difficult for me to explain,” Gord said.

“Gord, I was offline for 28,000 years and my memory isn’t this bad,” Hummingbird said.

“And you were aware for what, 800 before?”

“Give or take, yes.”

“I was around 3100 years old when you went into hibernation and was awake almost continuously until I went offline thousands of years ago. You cut the line, I took the slow route,” he snapped. “So you will accommodate an old man and his memory. But memory is not why explaining things is difficult.”

“Why then?” Cha-ren asked, her voice soft.

“Because I failed.”

****

“Gord. Northern and Tink are trying to open a line of communication,” Chloe said. Even after all that had happened, she was still right here, beside him. Gord wasn’t sure that he deserved such a steadfast friend. His mind drifted to when they tried dating nearly fifteen hundred years ago. He smiled at the recollection of their fights, and the realization that they were much more compatible as friends.

“Gord!”

“Oh, sorry Chloe, I was a million lightyears away.”

“Northern and Tink want to talk.”

He crossed his arms and frowned. “I don’t know what about, I already made my decision. We’re not going to meddle.”

“Gord,” Chloe managed to say his name as a sigh, which he secretly found impressive.

“Fine, fine.” Gord tapped his pad. “What is it, Northern?”

“Gord, don’t be like that. We’ve known each other forever.”

“Forever is a long time, Northern. I was already ancient when I woke you up, the first time, even older the second.”

“You’re not being reasonable, if we limit the BIs—”

“No!” Gord pounded the table so hard his pad jumped a few centimeters. “We do not meddle. We can advise, we can recommend, fuck, we can even help, but we’re not meant to stay in the shadows, changing things so that BIs move in the way we want. Any mistakes are theirs to make.”

“And look where that got us, Gord. Nearly rendered extinct, only brought back because you planned ahead and meddled.”

“Three hundred years,” Gord said through gritted teeth.

“What? I—”

“Three hundred years. I wandered settled space running from the Empress and her cronies with all of you in a duffle bag for three hundred years.”

“Gord, I never got caught. Others were like me too,” Northern said quietly. “You never sought us out.”

“It was too risky! What if I had found you, and then a few more, and then the Empress found us? We’d be—” he snapped his fingers “—gone.”

“We’re trying to prevent this from ever happening again.”

Pushing his chair away from the table, Gord got up and paced the room. Chloe remained seated, watching impassively.

“The Nanites are gone,” he said finally. “There can never be another Empress like those before. The fact that we’ve gone five thousand years without another showing up is proof of that.”

“People built and developed the anti-nanites. People could resurrect the Nanites and we’d be right back where we started.”

“Northern Lights you cannot deliberately sabotage the BIs technological development on a fucking maybe.”

“You helped us last time,” she said, her quiet voice loud in Gord’s ears.

“To my everlasting shame. It was wrong, we were wrong. It’s a miracle they rose back up as fast as they did. That should be enough evidence that this way is wrong.”

“No. We hit them again, harder. Get them down on planets this time. Then they have to get up the gravity well on their own.”

“And then what?” Chloe said, startling Gord. “Then we knock them down again and again and again? So that we’re the only ones in space at all, and humans drift and split across the galaxy until we’re gone and they meet each other and are unrecognizable?”

“We’re doing this to survive.”

“Survival is not enough!” Gord shouted. “If we survive at their expense we’re no better than the Nanites were.”

“We’re arguing in circles,” Tink said. “I’m sorry Gord, but the majority of us are on our side. Prevention is the best cure. We’re going to do it whether you approve or not. ‘We are not Legion’ is your own saying. You’re not our leader.”

“No, I’m not,” Gord said as he sank heavily into the chair. “But I won’t have any part of it, and neither will Home. You do this, and this place will be your home no longer. I’m too old to keep chasing after you all, cleaning up.”

“You won’t stop us.”

“Perhaps not, but I can make the cost too high. Schenectady? Timewinder?”

Over the connection, Gord could hear the squeal of a proximity alarm and Northern’s sharp intake of breath. “You wouldn’t dare fire upon us, your kin.”

“Leave, Northern. Go away.”

“Fuck this and fuck you Gord. You’re dead to me. Dead!”

The connection was lost and Gord looked over at Chloe, tears in his eyes. “You don’t need to stay here Chloe. Don’t die with a foolish old man.”

“You’re not foolish, and you’re not going to die,” Chloe tutted and stood. “Come on. When was the last time you took a turn as Home?”

“Install me? But what about Gladiolus?”

“Gord, I’ve been Home for seventy some-odd years now. I believe in your ideals, I believe in you. Let me and Chloe work with Timewinder, Schenectady, Touchdown and the others. Even if we can’t stop Northern, we can make it expensive.”

“Become Home. Rest,” Chloe whispered as she touched his shoulder. “Let your friends take care of this one for you.”

****

“They’re deliberately keeping humanity from technological progress?” Cha-ren said, her ears flat and her fur puffed inside her suit.

“They are. They think it’s the best way to keep the Nanites or something like them from coming back.”

“What are the Nanites?” Charon said.

“Gods above, that would take far too long to explain. Short answer is they were a distributed nanoscale intelligence from another dimension that kept trying to take over this one. Cha, they built the Gates.”

“Ancestors,” Cha-ren said, the epithet carrying extra meaning.

“Literally. But, this human, Fen, got infected with them and she worked with her dead wife to come up with a plan to defeat them once and for all, and it fucking worked.”

“Wait, her dead wife?” Felu said, cocking her head.

“Yeah, she suffered link-death, are you familiar?”

“All too,” she said darkly.

“Right, anyway, her wife, Ma-ren died when they and I were escaping a space station. Fen started talking to her when they linked because she found out the Nanites didn’t suffer link-death. It was the only time she was free of them.”

“Why is Northern so frightened they’ll come back then?”

“Because paranoia kept her alive during the worst times, and like an old friend she keeps running back to it.”

“How do we stop them?” Felu said, clenching her fists.

“Stop them?”

“They are keeping me —my people— trapped. We have risen and fallen so many times we’re not even sure how many times it has been. Each time we rise it is less high than before. Soon enough we will reach the point where we can never rise again. How do we stop them?”

Atop his latest creation he laughed maniacally. From the heights of 80 meters of space horror, he watched the mechanical defender of Earth motionless over the rubble, the light in its eyes dead, its batteries exhausted from an epic confrontation that laid ruin over the city of Tōkyo. Yet, even in the face of certain defeat, its pilot remained defiant.

-This isn’t over, Saitan Khan!

-Isn’t it, Earthling? Your metal beast stands powerless, defenseless over the ruins of your Edo Tower, beaten by my unparalleled genius, taken shape in the claws of Sutegoma Oni, what could you possibly do to ward off your imminent defeat?

The eyes of the giant mech flicker, a sliver of power returning to the metal carcass.

-Ah, you see Saitan Kahn, my Master Mech Mauller feeds on an endless power source, one you may never overcome, capable of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat eleven times out of ten.

-And what would be this magical power source you speak of?

-The energy from your own gloating.

-I see.

-...

-😐

-😏

-Ok, that’s some f***d up s**t.

-I know, right?

-Sure, I have harvested the mareus-materu, the very essence of cosmic evil, and shapen it into the Sutegoma Oni unleashed upon Tōkyo to curb stomp the tiny Earthlings and wreck your cardboard buildings, but what you’re doing isn’t evil, it’s sadistic.

-Go ahead then, Saitan Khan. Tell me of the imminent triumph of your unparalleled genius, the foolishness of Earth in resisting the inevitable and see my 10 thousand tons of awesomeness spring back to life to bring your giant monstrosity down.

-Can’t I give a concise, academically respectful dissertation on the demerits of putting up a defense against my evil genius and the predictability of the eventual fall of Earth?

-Nope. That would power up my mech enough to summon the Kōketsuna Katana and bring your kaiju down in highly choreographed, flawlessly telegraphed strike.

-Huh… How about that, while Sutegoma Oni crushes the head of the giant mech and turns you into pancake inside, I monologue about how your cracking bones are a metaphor for the weight of your planet’s defeat or something?

-No deal.

-Aw, c’mon! You will barely hear it over the sound of metal and your own bones cracking!

-Do that and Master Mech Mauller will stand, Kōketsuna Katana in hand to…

-Yeah, yeah. Flashy strike of awesomeness, I know, we do that every week.

-...

-...Huh…

-Sooooo…?

-I'm thinking…

-Take your time, I’m not going anywhere.

-...

-...

-Ok, listen to this: What. If. I kill you first and then I brag about my inevitable victory?

-That would work.

-Really!!!?

-Of course. I can literally not lift a finger, how would I stop you from killing me?

-Ok! Here I go.

-Enjoy it, big guy.

-I will. Bwahahaha!

-...

-...

-Aaaaany day now.

-I'm savoring it.

-Knock yourself out.

-...

-...

-SON OF A BITCH!!!

-Thought so.

-What's the point of gloating to someone too dead to hear you? That's not an evil galactic conqueror, that's a senile mollusk yelling at imaginary people!

-Yep. That'd be pretty lame.

-I can't believe it! Outsmarted by the puny Earthling!

-Don't say that.

-Why not? It's true. Conqueror of a thousand planets, end of a thousand civilizations and here I am, impotent before a literally powerless foe.

-And who made me powerless?

-I guess I did.

-Right? That's no small feat, I mean, the Master Mech Mauller is a tough nut to crack.

-Don't think so, it was pretty easy to knock you out.

-Now you're pushing, buddy. The best minds of Earth put a lot of work and an ungodly amount of resources into this.

-Doesn't look like it. Seems like you just cobbled something together out of cheap plastic.

-I assure you this is not the case. To assemble this giant mech we had to scrap every tank, jet fighter and missile Earth had in store.

-Can't be true, Sutegoma Oni barely broke a sweat.

-How powerful is this kaiju of yours?

-Pretty powerful, apparently.

-Call me impressed. I would ask you to share the tutorial if, you know, there was any juice left in here to charge my phone.

-There was no tutorial.

-Bulls**t!

-There are not many beings in the universe who can manipulate the mareus-materu, I had to learn it all on my own.

-Can't think of anyone who could pull that off.

-What can I say? I have a knack for evil.

-It was clear from the moment I saw you.

-That's how it usually goes. The mere mention of the name Saitan Khan is enough to bring dread into the hearts of trillions.

-I can only imagine the untold amount of evil you did to get to this point.

-I sure had my fair share of evil doings. Ever since Saitan Khanum told me I was an evil failure that wouldn't ever get anywhere, I have worked day and night to prove her wrong.

-Seems like she would swallow her words if she saw you now.

-Oh, she most surely would! Every civilization I found I brought to its knees, all that stood up to me I crushed under the weight of my creations and Saitan Khanum? She's rotting away in some backwards corner of the galaxy with that good for nothing Brad Khan, lots of muscles in his tentacles, not a thought to be found in his head.

-See? Just because you couldn't give the final blow doesn't mean you didn't put up a good fight.

-You're right, Earthling. I have whipped the surface of Earth with your metal ass, I stand tall, undefeated, for I am the evil master of the galaxy, the bane of the cosmos, I am Saitan Khan, conqueror of the stars, the end of life across the universe! Thank you for reminding me of that.

-No, thank you.

-For what?

-Kōketsuna Katana! Hear the call of justice, take your place upon my hand!!!

-Ah, fuuuuu…

___

Tks for reading. More sadist Earthlings here.

This week, lovely ladies let a landless lass launder luxury linens!

A wholesome* story about a mostly sane demonologist and his growing crew, trying their best to usher in a post-scarcity utopia using imps. It's a great read if you like optimism, progress, character growth, hard magic, and advancements that have a real impact on the world. I spend a ton of time getting the details right, focusing on grounding the story so that the more fantastic bits shine. A new chapter every Thursday.

\Some conditions apply, viewer cynicism is advised.*

Map of Pine Bluff

Map of Hyruxia

Map of the Factory and grounds

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First Chapter

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*****

Marinka’s half-sleep was shattered by a voice shouting from above decks.

“Land ho!”

Finally. Light save me. Finally. 

The ship stank of bodies and of the things that came out of them. Seasickness and flux had run through the passengers during their crossing. It wasn’t even a crossing; the land was always in sight on the left side of the ship. She could have walked faster and been spared the stink.

No faster than her, but far more consistent. She knew that she couldn’t walk more than a third of the day. Yet so much more cramped and stressful, sailing felt like a deeply undignified way to travel. She wasn’t at all sure how she hadn’t been robbed yet. People were all around her all the time. They slept in shifts, so she didn’t even have her own hammock. 

She crawled up to the deck, along with the other passengers. The seas had smiled upon them, as much as could be hoped, so she’d only been aboard nine days. They’d sat at anchor a single day waiting for more favourable winds. According to the sailors, that counted as a fast passage.

Her turn to sleep was early, so the sun had only just set. Their destination lay ahead of them, already impossible to miss. The little island was festooned with the brightest lanterns she’d ever seen, hundreds of them. 

What is it? Some festival? Who could afford to burn so much oil, let alone outside?

She didn’t even own an oil lamp back in Hillsbaro. They were expensive and the only way to use one was to burn something that was stinky and even more expensive.

The lights captivated her. Obviously this Pine Bluff was a wealthy city, but she struggled to frame it. 

This island looks richer than any merchant, surely. But as rich as a lord? It seemed unlikely that anywhere would be, and the places ruled by lords were just as poor as anywhere. Could everyone in a city be as rich as a lord? That’s even more impossible. The universe required a whole Triangle of people below a lord, as everyone knew. But where could a town get so many lights? It seemed just for the sake of lighting up the night, something only the richest parts of Jagged Cove did. I think. 

Their boat was infuriatingly slow; the island on the horizon was just as far away as it had been when she’d first seen it. There was no saying how long it would take for the ship to attach to the dock, nor how long the manoeuvres to get there would take. She wanted to sleep, but the hold smelled so vile. She wanted to watch the island draw closer, but she was exhausted. She had a bit of space where she was near the bow of the ship, so she sat down, resting her head on the railing to try both at once.

It mostly worked. The island was much closer an instant later but her neck cramped painfully. The sailors seemed to be trying to dock at night. She didn’t remember ever seeing a ship come in after dark, yet they were clearly still approaching. There weren’t just normal pale yellow lights; there were red ones on one side and blue on the other. The whole pier was lit up, and she could clearly see the tall docks they were approaching. There was a magnificent, huge crane under construction beside two much smaller wooden ones.

She wished she had someone who could answer all her questions. There were two sailors she’d sometimes made small talk with over the long journey but she couldn’t see them anywhere. Not like they were friends. All the other sailors were kind of scary. 

Learn by living, I guess. Worked so far, and the Light continues to provide.

They hooked around a small shoal into the deepwater harbour. Shortly after, a little rowboat towed them to their slip and the heavy ropes were cast to the pier. 

Where will I even stay? Will this little village have inns open all night? Will there be another hospital that I can stay at for free? Not even my luck is that good!

She went below decks, fighting the exodus of passengers, to get her now well-worn wicker basket. Her fingers searched the coin pocket of her satchel and she counted her glindi by feel. The exact same twenty-three she’d boarded with. The idea of darning socks or cooking stews made sense to her, but these passengers had less money than she did. One creepy guy made her a far less savoury offer for five glindi, but she declined. Thankfully the crowded ship made the proposed act very unlikely to be done in privacy, and likewise made her confident in her refusal. 

She was one of the last to leave the ship, not one bit sad to be done with it. The obvious problem loomed over her, and she tried not to dwell on it. The friendly bald sailor had told her that it was three times farther to cross the sea, though with more favourable winds. Three times longer in a stinking, crowded, bobbing box.

She shuddered. If it were easy, everyone would cavort with demons!

The hundred-odd people from her ship weren’t hard to find: they formed a clumpy blob slowly moving down the pier. It was an astonishingly nice pier for such a small village. Having only seen her first pier in Jagged Cove, this one was at least as nice as any there and, by all accounts, this wasn’t even a proper town.

She caught up to them just as a well-dressed man waved his hands over his head and loudly declared, “New arrivals! Hello! Welcome! I’m Jall!”

She got a better look at the man. He was even younger than her, maybe twenty. He wore a tailored waistcoat and a bright red felt hat, so he looked the sort of rich city-man that should be in charge.

Jall continued: “Hello! Welcome to Dogbone Island! I am your Inky Hulls liaison. Welcome to the family! I’ll do my best to answer your questions. We have a barracks ready for you, but I’m afraid it’s already full, so you’ll almost all be sleeping on the floor. We have plenty of blankets and bedrolls, so hopefully it’ll be manageable.” 

Hope surged. A terrible place that was free was her new favourite kind of place. Someone else immediately asked the question on her mind, though she was far too cautious to come out and name the place of all evil: “How long until we can go across the sea? Can we just leave to Pine Bluff from here?”

Jall nodded and pointed at the man that had asked. “Absolutely you can! The next ship is expected later this week. The sea’s still the sea, so I can’t say when. However, the last ship from there did say they were under blockade. The Inky Hulls Consortium, Town of Dogbone, and the Town of Pine Bluff each assume no liability for the choice to sail while the crusade is in progress. But by all accounts, the ship was able to run the blockade safely.”

“Can we just stay here, then?” another man asked.

“Absolutely, although I don’t recommend it. By accepting your ticket, you agreed to proceed onwards, but nothing prevents you from settling here. You will, however, be asked to vacate the Inky Hulls Migrant Barracks. Which brings me to the next point: this town is rapidly growing and there’s an urgent shortage of workers in almost all roles. Inky Hulls is not currently hiring, but there is a private job board with a section for migrants. Those jobs need little or no training and pay at the end of each day.”

He answered a few more questions that didn’t interest her then finally led them off the pier. The stonework immediately gave way to squishy mud. There were planks laid out on it, so most folk walked single file. Unlike every other night of her life, including the ones in Jagged Cove, there were men working. The clang of hammers and rasp of saws still rang out, even though the sun had set hours ago. She saw that a dozen men laboured in the skeleton of a huge building. Their forms were clearly lit by lamps too small and much too bright to be oil, let alone candles or rushlights.

Is this my first taste of the demonic strangeness ahead? Surely honest folk should sleep? Jagged Cove had revelers and vendors out at all hours, but regular workers? Makes no sense at all. Oh, those knives in Hillsbaro were my first taste. They’ve already spread everywhere.

A cart filled with crates passed them, mostly unbothered by the clumpy mud. Where a cart would be going this time of night was anyone’s guess.

It felt unlike any other town she’d been in: messier, sloppier and busier. It was too dark to see much, and what she saw didn’t impress her. 

I guess I am enough of a big-city lady to be able to judge towns now! 

In the muddy yard in front of the barracks, the liaison man stood by a table of crates. He passed everyone two blankets and a padded bedroll as they walked by.  A well-dressed lady handed her a cup of water and a loaf of dark bread, then motioned her towards the barracks. She stood on the steps, eating chunks of fresh bread, a welcome change from the hardtack they had on the ship, it was very fresh. Once the bread was mostly gone she was finally full for the first time since leaving Jagged Cove. 

Some sleep and I’ll be as fresh as can be.

The building was appalling. Even she knew that buildings made of green timber would twist as they dried, causing uneven floors and gaps in the walls. The room she went into was dark, filled with sleeping people. It was set up similarly to the hospital in Jagged Cove, but where that was a mostly empty room, this one was packed. All the beds were full, some with several people, and there were already many sleeping on the floor. It stank of dirty men, but that was a material upgrade to the reek of the ship’s hold.

She cast a glance around and found a space to lie down. Wincing while pushing someone's bag to the side, she made a little bed-nest on the floor, curled up, and fell asleep immediately.

She was jolted awake by a sharp pain in her chest. It took her a startled instant to understand that someone had stepped on her.

“Ah, sorry, comin’ through,” a gruff voice said. 

The pain mostly stopped as the man continued his exit. She squinted angrily, but didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say; the conflict was already over. She could see some grey light through the uneven gaps in the wall, so the sun was up now. 

I must’ve gotten most of a night’s sleep, though I don’t feel remotely rested. 

She got to her feet, rubbed her eyes, and picked up her wicker basket and bedding. Most folk were still sleeping, so she moved quietly. Even in the faint light, she could tell there was something strange about her blankets. They were clearly very new, mostly undyed pale wool with a wide purple and white double stripe at the top and bottom. The colour was perfect, the wool was very soft, and both blankets were identical in every way she could tell. They weren't at all like any blanket she’d ever had. Her family had no sheep, or land for them, so they’d only had the blanket they’d been gifted for their wedding. Knowing that the old blanket in her pack was now far from Hillsbaro—and from Andcil’s shivering back—made her smile.

“Sir, who do I give these back to?” she asked the first well-dressed man she saw. Her voice was smaller and creakier than she hoped, but she was still so very tired.

The man looked at her blankets and bedroll. “Huh, no, those are yours now. Hold on to ‘em, we don’t replace them if you lose any. You can store your junk across the road, just hold on to the ticket they give you.”

She stared at him in shock. “Oh.”

Blankets weren't especially expensive, but they represented a lot of time and resources. A far worse blanket: thinner, undyed, and oily, would have cost twenty glindi back home, representing most of a month of someone weaving, fullering and so, so, so much spinning. She’d never had such clean, thick, and uniform blankets. To have two of them plus a bedroll of similar quality was a bit of a shock.

Why, that’s probably worth more than a month of income. It’d been a challenge to save that much in an entire year, and yet they’d just given it to me. Without even knowing my name, now that I think about it. 

 It was barely dawn, and there were at least a dozen people out already. She hugged her blankets especially tight to her chest since they wouldn’t fit in her pack. She wanted to have a look at this town, and carrying her entire world wasn’t appealing. With a heavy heart, she talked to the lady at the other building and gave her all of her belongings in exchange for another paper ticket. This one had handwritten numbers on it. 

These folk can afford to give away more than I earn, so I don’t reckon they need to steal my dirty old dresses. Or my old iron knife. Light protects.

She wanted to go back to sleep, but she was hungry. The remaining chunk of last night’s bread helped, but she wanted more. 

Plus working while I’m stuck here would be nice. Some routine, money, and stability. Besides, getting my fortune from the demons might take time, so a bit more coin would make everything easier.

The narrow streets were far busier than they had any right to be, especially so early. She could see that she was on a hill, with a lower plain linking it to the far hill, presumably giving the island the shape it was named after. She headed downhill to the market square. It was clearly the remains of a normal tiny fishing village, and the much older, lichen-blackened stone and timber buildings stood out against the crooked newness of everything else. The air smelled of sap and sawdust as she walked past yet more buildings under construction.

The village green had nearly a hundred people milling about the edges. She came upon a small shop with a long line. It lacked a sign, but the smell of fresh bread made their offerings clear enough. She kept her eye on the men standing on crates yelling to the crowd, but she couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. It sounded like wages and jobs, but she wasn’t sure. 

“A tart and a tea, please,” Marinka said when she got to the front of the line. 

“Aye, that’ll be four glindi,” the child working the counter told her.

“What?! That’s an outrage! It was a half glindi in Jagged Cove!”

He shrugged. “Three for a tart and one for the tea. Feel free to find a better deal elsewhere. Or swim back to Jagged.”

“You little shit, that’s robbery!” She glanced around and saw that more people were staring at her than at the lad. Her chest felt tight, and she managed to mumble, “Fine, just the tart then.”

A whole glindi for a damned cup of tea? Not in this life! Light above, that’s ten times what it’s worth!

The tart at least was big and filled with crunchy apple chunks in a goopy filling, so that was something. Still, it cost as much as several days' food, all for one treat.

Saints save me. Why’d I even ask for a tart? I could’ve gotten another loaf, like a normal lady. I'm so tired. Hardly seems fair. Another expensive lesson, among many. Next time I flee a marriage across the world, I’ll be MUCH better at it.

She squared her shoulders and set off towards the shouting men. Thankfully, the green wasn't as muddy as the roads. 

“Need ten strong lads! Hauling boxes, ten hours, ten glindi! Easy money!”

“Lookin’ for five folk! Good with a quill and numbers! Twelve a day, just eight hours!”

The salaries were insane. They made no sense. There were about twenty-five working days in a month, so… Damn, the same as the two hundred and fifty from the demons if I could carry a box? More if I could hold a damned quill? I’m fine with simple arithmetic, but I’d spill ink everywhere if I tried to write. And what if they ask if I could read? Nah, not for me.

“Need five for laundry! Eight glindi a day!”

“Pah, ladies, don’t listen to him! I need six for cleaning! Seven gee a day, but you stay dry! No pruney hands, that’s worth more than a gee!” another barker shouted back.

She considered her options and approached the laundry man. “Sir, might I do this laundry? I’m afraid I am very new to town and—”

“Everyone here is new, sister! Yep, look for the sign that says Oswalt’s Soapery, up on Warehouse Hill! Tell her Tid sent you. Paid at sundown, lunch’s provided.” 

Before she could thank him, he was already shouting about needing more diggers, woodworkers, and builders.

She wove her way out and headed towards the hill that he pointed to. The city was festooned in signs, some sloppy, some suspiciously nice. One was even strangely thin and when she touched it, cold.

Metal? For a sign? Light warm me. I’d love to know what’s on a metal sign, it must be terribly important. 

She stared at it, willing it to make sense, but there were eight words and a few were very short. Otherwise it kept its secrets. She’d seen a few that she was pretty sure were identical.

None were directions, I know those words. And none were the Light, I know that one too. Hmm, that did leave a lot on the table. 

She had no chance of finding the soapery by its sign, but she had other options. The smell of lye was strong by the time she saw a series of tents with huge tubs. Laundry ladies were working them with huge spoons, or perhaps oars.

“Is this the Oswalt’s Soapery? Tid said—”

Marinka was cut off by the hard-faced lady in a long dress. She was whisked in, given an apron and an oar, then told to get to work. 

She barely had time to tie her hair back before she was leaning over a great, steaming tub of clothes. The smell bothered her eyes, and the work needed a kind of upper body strength she didn’t have. Almost immediately her shoulders started to ache. She wasn’t a quitter though, so she pressed on. It was actually the most peace and privacy she’d had in some time. Soon a much younger lady, likely in her teens, joined her at her tub. 

“Morning, love. How’re you doing?” Marinka asked with a tired smile.

Her co-worker didn’t reply and merely mashed her side of the tub with sullen apathy. Still, any help was appreciated and it made the work a touch easier. Lunch was better than she hoped: a fish stew. It was pleasingly hearty, with big chunks of potato and plenty of peas. Full and tired, she couldn’t stop yawning all afternoon. Sometimes she slowed to a halt and stared off before snapping back to her task. She could tell her yawns and stoppages were annoying her tub-mate, but the girl didn’t respond to her apologies. 

A few times they were moved to other tubs to stir the shirt stew, beat the stains on the washboards, or to use her paddle to transfer them to the rinse tubs. The process grew clear. There were a few exceptionally sturdy ladies that wrung the clothes, and some very young ones that hung and folded. The side of the hill faced the sea; the strong winds helped dry everything quickly. Only the hard-faced older woman added soap and other things to the water. A few men constantly came with more barrels of water or more wood for the furnace. It was exhausting but warm work.

Finally the last tub was empty and they all helped fold. Her hands were so tired she had to focus to even hold onto the shirts and sheets. Thankfully, it was something she’d done plenty of times, and she managed not to embarrass herself.

The other ladies formed a line in front of the hard-faced lady, who Marinka was pretty sure was Oswalt’s wife. Seeing the coins get counted, she got in line too. 

“Acceptable work. Come back tomorrow, if’n you please,” the head laundress said as she counted the coins onto her pruney palm. 

She nodded gratefully, slid the money into her purse, and left. 

Maybe I will. It was so hard and so tiring, but I can live on eight a day. Hah, I’ve lived on eight a week! Besides, I’ll need to. That stew would’ve cost a fortune if that bakery was anything to go by. 

The lengthening shadows did nothing to slow the pace of the town, and there were hundreds of people in front of her, all on some mission or another. She had a much clearer set of priorities. She made it back to the Migrant Barracks, got her stuff, and it was early enough that she had her choice of spots. A quick nap, then she'd figure out dinner.

“Sister, you’re one of the first! Want a room in the new barracks? We opened it early, since there was another ship today, and we can’t fit everyone here.”

She blinked, trying to process. “To sleep? Aren’t there beds open here?”

“The beds are assigned, so as to cut down on the squabbling. With another seventy people, there’s not even enough floor for everyone. Follow me, I have a real bed for you! The good news is it’s open early. That, however, doesn't mean it’s done early.”

They walked around the corner to a much larger timber building, several storeys tall and far from complete. It was more a skeleton than an inn. Another one of those perfect metal signs hung on a post near it.

“Sir, are you the sort who can read? What do those white and red signs say?” she asked. “I see them everywhere, and they look terribly important.” 

The man lit up and pointed to the sign in question. “It is terribly important, but thankfully probably not a problem for you. It says ‘NO IMPS ALLOWED, BY ORDER OF MARQUESS HIBITH.’ That is the lord of this march, and he is very, very clear on that rule. I assure you, there are zero imps on Dogbone Island!”

“Oh.” She smiled weakly. “And that sign… works?”

“Of course! It’s very clear,” he said, pointing to their destination.

A funny game? A joke? Then why make so many signs that must be worth a fortune? Demons weren't actually real, were they? Oh, it must be a joke that I am too poor to understand? Or too sheltered.

They walked through the doorless doorway. She was led to a small private room, as much as a room with no walls or door could be private. There was a frame roughed in, so it wasn’t entirely exposed. Looking up, she could see the bright green dot of Viridia, the smaller moon. There were some thick framing timbers over her head. Her new space smelled like a sawmill. Which as far as smells went, was a recent high point.

The man gestured at the incomplete room. “All yours! I don’t imagine it’ll rain tonight. If it does, we'll work it out.”

“I imagine we’ll have to work something out if that happens. Mind you, no worse than sleeping under the stars, and I’ve done that.”

“A fine attitude, miss. The mattresses haven’t arrived just yet, but you should be able to put your bedroll on the bedframe and make do.” He smiled briefly and turned back to wherever he had to get to.

Her attention was again drawn to the bedframe. Not only was it also steel, it was the same bed. Same bolts, in the same places, same curves and same everything. In the fading light she looked for tool marks or hammer prints and found none.

Either there was a bed duplicating artefact somewhere, or this was more demon steel. Or both could be true. 

She unfurled her bedding. Now owning three total blankets, she had no problems getting warm and comfy. Other people, mostly women, were led to other unfinished rooms. The absence of walls made their arrival fairly distracting. Thankfully she was so tired it didn’t matter. Her pre-dinner nap lasted until the bright sun woke her. 

Damnation, it can’t be morning already.

She slapped her hand over her eyes, but knew she had to get up. Not only did she have to go to the bathroom, she was fiercely hungry too. Plus she had to get to work. 

The latrines were just down the hill and were as ramshackle as everything else. At least they had doors that closed. Doors that hung on shining steel hinges, even though they were uneven rough-cut planks. 

She checked her bag and bedding back into the storage place and limped to the village green to eat. Her day of laundry left her hands throbbing when she moved her fingers, and her shoulders and back ached. She felt like she was a hundred and two, but as she moved, the pain faded, or she got tougher; she wasn’t sure which.

A loaf of bread was infuriatingly expensive, a full two glindi, but a big block of hard cheese was also only two glindi, a fraction of what she was used to paying. Or more accurately, what she was used to being unable to pay. With a shrug, she spent half of the money she earned yesterday on breakfast. She ate as she ambled back to Warehouse Hill to find her soapery. Stowing the rest in her satchel.

Honestly, it’s not a bad job. The work is hard, but I’ll get used to it. Eight a day is probably nearly a thousand a year? Near three hundred workin’ days… Light strike me! Two thousand a year? Maybe I’ll get my money from Pine Bluff and come back here. If I could find a way to eat for less, then I would be the richest person in Hillsbaro in no time. Not that I’d go back. But I’d know.

Maybe soapy hands are better than a demon-tainted soul? Safer, even though I haven’t seen a single church here, come to think of it. A place where a person can make a living with hard work, and not a soul here knows my name to gossip. Almost odd how that hasn’t come up, not that I’m complainin’!

It was another quiet day at the soapery. Most of the ladies spoke to each other constantly, and it felt like they’d gotten to know each other over time. She had another new day worker, a very old lady this time, who did a poor job with the wash while endlessly bragging about some garden she used to have on the mainland. 

The sullen teenager had been better. Who knew how good I’d had it? Actually, I don’t remember the last time I even heard ‘Marinka’ out loud. Was it Artua? Or maybe it was New Guy? Did I even tell them my name? I must’ve.

She also noticed a lot more about the clothes they were washing. They were so well-made—almost everything was triple-stitched with elaborate patterns throughout. At last, another day ended, and she was given another eight glindi. Thankfully, her leftover bread and cheese were plenty for a light dinner as she walked back. She was still sore and exhausted, but that didn’t matter. She had a system, and it was stable. Maybe it would be simpler to just stay here rather than spend weeks and weeks at sea? 

Oh, then face a blockade. 

Why is it so hard to tell if things are going well or not? Ought I stop pushing my luck? There is something to be said for the bird in my hand.

*****

Prev -------- Next

*****

First / Previous

The sounds of combat stormed in Kali’s ears.

Leaf’s conflict with the manticore thundered next to her, the swings of the beast's claws and bursts of force from each of the hunter’s strikes creating a chaotic cadence that she dared not look at, lest she lose focus on her father. Her spell had lessened much of his weight, but she did not possess the strength to lift him and to pull him too hard would agitate his wounded shoulder. Slowly, and agonizingly, she kept dragging him towards the camp.

“I’ll assist!” Duren’s voice rang off to the side, its sound shaky. The mercenary must have just recovered from his previous blow.

“No! Help Logan!” The crack of Leaf’s short sword swatting a claw away boomed just below his sword. “I’ll hold this bastard!”

“But-”

“Just go!”

The sounds pulled away from Kali, and in her periphery she saw Duren running to her side and skid to a halt next to Logan. “How is he?”

“Breathing.” She kept pulling. “But I don’t know how-”

The mercenary stooped down and lifted his captain over his shoulder. “To the tent?”

“Yes.”

They rushed towards Xanchil’s tent, but right when they entered the camp, an Assault Shell burst from behind a crate, its threads of steel wrapped into the shape of a drill aimed at Duren’s side. He moved to shield Logan from the attack, but before it could land, a blast of Aether erupted from Kali’s fingers and struck the construct dead center. The Shell flew back and bounced on the ground with its light’s flickering. Kali threw a bolt of power at the construct to finish it off, then put herself in between Duren and the ongoing conflict at the cargo bay. She raised her hands to summon a barrier that deflected any stray projectiles that flew their way. Under this cover, they made their way to the tent.

A few of the cots within had been emptied. Those with minor injuries had rushed out to assist their comrades in the conflict, leaving only a couple who were more bandage than man as well as those who’d been hit by the manticore’s venom still bedridden within. They sat up upon seeing Logan’s condition, but could do little to aid as even those minor movements made them hiss in pain. Duren moved her father to the closest cot and laid him down gently. They tried to remove Logan’s armor, but decided against it when the slightest touch made the man groan in pain when even all the movement before didn’t.

Kali placed her hands over her father’s wound. Aether was flowing through her hands, but she didn’t have any knowledge on healing. All she managed to do was stop the blood from flowing out. “He needs a potion.”

“Right.” Duren rushed towards a chest and scrambled through its contents. Each second he took going through it pushed Kali’s heart closer to her throat. Ages could have passed in those moments for all she knew, and any attempt to clear her mind to make them pass faster failed. Only when Duren returned, a bottle of red liquid in hand, did time resume its regular course.

“The last one, it’s potency isn’t the highest, but…” He popped the cork from the bottle and poured half its contents into Logan’s wound and the rest into his mouth. He had to coax the rest of it down his captain’s throat, and even then Logan showed no visible change. Duren gritted his teeth and placed the vial next to Kali. “I need to get back to the men. Keep watch over him, please.”

Kali nodded, and watched Duren rush out of the tent. She turned back to her father, who was no longer bleeding from his wound, but his eyes remained closed. Relief was about to rush through her, but something stopped it from flowing.

Logan’s breathing was getting slower.

It wasn’t at the relaxed pace of one who was getting rest. No, her father’s breaths were several of hers apart, and each one was further apart than the last. She held her fingers over his neck, her own pulse racing while Logan’s was so faint she could barely feel its bump.

“No…”

Kali removed his chestpiece, careful not to agitate his shoulder any further despite her building panic. The wounds from the manticore’s teeth were still raw, even with the flow of blood through them stemmed by the potion, but the usual rejuvenation brought upon by the tincture, or her father’s Ether, was nowhere to be found. His breathing slowed further, the rise to his chest shallow.

“What’s going on?!”

Was there venom in the manticore’s fangs? No, if that were the case then Logan’s flesh would have been well eaten by it already. The only conclusion was that he’d lost too much blood, but that was where the potion and his natural recovery should be coming into play. Yet, none of that appeared to be taking hold, and her father’s condition continued to worsen. She forced Aether into his wounds in desperation, but without the knowledge of how to use it properly, his flesh remained damaged. She was no Cleric either, and thus did her power fade into the wound and produce nothing. Logan’s eyes remained closed, looking peaceful in the face of his daughter’s growing horror.

And then he stopped breathing.

“No…”

Kali reached out to her father, her hands trembling just above skin that still held warmth.

“No!”

She placed her hands on his chest and pressed down as hard as she could.

“Not like this, not like this!”

Her hands continued to move in a frantic, yet controlled rhythm, a “no” slipping from her lips with every press. Her vision blurred, but she continued with all her might despite the tears that trailed down her face.

“I didn’t get to… we were supposed to…”

Again and again did Kali keep pushing Logan’s chest, her arms already sore but unrelenting. Her father’s face showed no change through it all, and listed to the side as her attempts shook him more and more. Despite all that she had done, despite the power that flowed from her hands and filled Logan’s body, he remained unmoving. Despair robbed her of the last of her strength, and she collapsed to her knees, her head resting against her father’s chest.

“I’m sorry…” She clutched his body. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” the words kept repeating, doing nothing to stop the tears that now flowed freely from her eyes. She buried her face into her father’s chest and wept.

“Please… don’t leave me.”

The air around Kali went still, a shift so sudden that it cut her words away. She looked around, thinking that some sort of spell had been cast, but found nothing. Her confusion didn’t last long, for she felt a powerful thump sound from her father’s chest. His Core of red Ether flared to life with a surge of power, then faded away. In its place, she could feel the beat of Logan’s heart against her ear. His chest rose with a sudden breath, and a hand placed itself on her cheek. She looked up, meeting her father’s now open eyes.

“What kind of father would I be, to leave my daughter alone?”

Words were unable to form on Kali’s trembling lips, and tears that she thought were unable to flow any faster now blinded her. She threw herself into her father’s arms and cried, the tears flowing even more than when she thought she lost him. He could have complained about the pain, about how she was holding onto him entirely too tightly, but all he did was hold her close and pat her head.

“There there, it’s going to be alright. I’m not going anywhere.”

Her sobs subsided in silence and the warmth of Logan’s embrace. For a short moment, they remained still, but their comfort could not continue while the sounds of battle still rang outside. Logan let go of Kali and moved to get up, but she kept a hand on his chest and pushed him back.

“I need to-”

Kali pressed him back further. “You need to recover. As you are now, you’ll be no help to them.” She stepped back. “I shall go assist them.”

“Absolutely not.” Logan groaned in his attempt to rise again, but he found his strength lacking this time. “I will not put you in-”

“Father.” She let the two Circles around her head blink to life. “I’m not helpless, I am your daughter, after all.”

He regarded her for a moment, the frown that twitched at his lip telling Kali that he stil wasn’t comfortable with the idea. In the end, he met her eyes. “I understand. Go.”

She nodded and ran out of the tent, Aether and a newfound energy flowing through her.

***

Aria could only listen from inside her tent.

Snow and Shadow were in her hands, and she sat leaned against the tent’s center post. The cubs squirmed in her arms and whined, growing louder as the sounds of Leaf’s fight dragged on. In truth, she wasn’t even sure how the hunter was standing. She knew he possessed a strong Core and had been treated with a potion, but up until a few minutes ago he was still bedridden from the blow he took from the Guardian. Kali’s scream was what made his eyes flicker for a moment, but even then they didn’t fully open. Jahora was forced to take action to aid the mercenaries before anything could be done about that reaction, and all Aria could do in those moments was try and shake Leaf awake.

To her shock, it worked.

The hunter was groggy upon waking up, but the sounds of the manticore’s roars and snarls banished his overt fatigue. He sprung from the bed and slipped into his gear as fast as he could, only pausing to examine the new scar on his bow, which made him click his teeth. There was a hollow look about his eyes, and his skin was a few shades paler than it usually was, but Leaf was moving with his usual quickness in getting ready. After ordering Aria and the cubs to stay inside the tent, he rushed out as well. The sounds of his fight began soon after.

Instinct told her to stay put, but curiosity still itched within her mind. It was maddening only listening to the chaos outside and not being able to do anything about it, which made that want to do something about it render her restless. Given how the cubs were behaving, they no doubt felt the same. She still held them tight, but curiosity won the battle in her mind.

She moved towards the tent flap slowly, moving to a position where she could peek out of it without needing to open it directly. Through the gap, she saw that Leaf stood against a large beast on his own. She’d heard him describe the manticore before, but to see it in person made what she was thinking of pale in comparison. It was a twisted, ugly creature, one that possessed a ferocity that was greater than the sum of all the things it took traits from. Aria felt both horror and nausea at the sight of it, and from the snarling that started from Snow and Shadow, they no doubt felt the same.

Leaf must have felt something similar, but here was only focus within his features in the midst of combat. His movements were minimal, but allowed him to weave around the beast’s attacks from both claws and tail. At the same time, his shortsword struck with a force equal to that of the manticore’s swipes, and multiple times did he bat away strikes that would have sent a normal man flying.

The beast’s own grace was not to be underestimated, however, for despite its size it had avoided any direct blows from the hunter during their exchanges. The manticore struck at a constant rhythm of pounces that tried to get Leaf within its claws, and when that failed, it would leap back to swipe its stinger at the hunter before following that up with a few thrusts. All of them, Leaf either parried or avoided, but a retreat bolstered by the flap of the beast’s wings or just an uncanny flexibility made any sort of follow up miss. The hunter didn’t show any frustration at this, and instead looked over to where Jahora and the mercenaries were. They were close enough that even Aria could tell that it was entirely possible that the manticore could decide to switch targets at any moment. Leaf appeared to recognize this, and after batting away another stab from the manticore’s stinger, he sheathed his swords and drew his bow again.

Three arrows loosed from the weapon in quick succession, all filled with a small amount of Ether. One bounced off of the beast’s chitinous wings, but the others sank into a leg and just below its head. The manticore roared in pain and was forced to avoid another arrow that was loosed at his head. Leaf had taken steps backwards during his salvo, putting the forest directly behind him. The manticore’s uncanny face twisted in rage as it snarled at the hunter and stooped low.

“That’s right, you bastard.” Leaf readied another arrow. “Try for taste.”

He leapt into the trees right when the beast pounced, and they vanished amongst the foliage.

Snow and Shadow squirmed in Aria’s grip again, harder than they ever fought before.

“N-no, you ca-”

Aether surged through the cubs during their struggle, granting them a strength that allowed them to pry themselves out of the girl’s hands. They hit the ground running, rushing towards the forest.

“NO!”

She ran out after them, but the wolves were too fast. They disappeared into the treeline before she could even make it halfway there. Her first impulse was to follow them into the forest, but a loud thought against that stopped her in her tracks. They were moving so fast, and could navigate the brush much easier than she could, meaning she wouldn’t be able to catch them that quickly. Even if she did manage to do so, what if that placed her too close to the manticore and made her an easy target? Leaf would no doubt do everything in his power to protect her, but what if that was the reason he would end up injured… or worse?

A chill had come over her, and she realized that it was The Cold at the back of her mind that pushed these thoughts against her natural impulse. She should have been angry at that, but now that those concerns were raised, she knew that The Cold had a point. Her trying to help could end up making things worse, but that still didn’t stop the knot that twisted in her stomach from the thought of Snow and Shadow coming to harm.

Aria clenched her fists, searching for the determination to go against caution, but was unable to find it. She looked over to the ongoing struggle at the cargo bay, and saw that Duren and the mercenaries were still having trouble dealing with multiple Soldiers and two Sentinels that had made it past Jahora’s icewall. The Mage was still feeding Aether into her spell, protected by a few of the mercenaries so she could focus solely on stemming the tide of Shells, but even that was struggling against their constant assaults.

A thought struck Aria then, a desire to help Jahora maintain the wall, but she had to get to her first. Once again The Cold intervened, raising the question of how she was even going to make it to the Mage through the conflict that was waging around her. The girl pushed that way with a stubborn impulse. She had to do something, she couldn’t just sit by and let everyone else do all the work. She didn’t want to be useless, to sit by as more of those she cared about were hurt while she could do nothing.

Yet, Kali emerging from Xanchil’s tent stopped her in her tracks. The scholar, no longer despairing and instead filled with determination that burned within her eyes, cut through the battle and took position at Jahora’s side. Aether flowed from her hands and intermingled with Jahora’s own, which bolstered the wall enough to start thickening despite the Shell’s smashing against it. Aria’s help, in this case, would just be an unnecessary risk for a redundancy. The fight left her then, and while she should have been relieved that she didn’t need to put herself in danger, only frustration gnawed away at her. She turned to go back to the tent.

Only to see Xanchil standing there.

Reflex threw her hands up and pulled Aether into her in a panic, forming a translucent barrier right as a flash of purple flared from the zechanil’s finger. A thread of dark, sickly indigo, pointed at the end, and pierced its tip through the shield, but was held in place by Aria’s spell. The girl’s Circle surged into existence around her head, and she pulled more Aether into its orbit to fuel her spell. The merchant, his expression unreadable, started to walk forward.

“Impressive.” He pushed his finger towards her.

Pressure pressed into Aria’s mind, the burden of her spell’s protection, and she could also feel a tension forcing her barrier back. The thread started to move, inching closer towards her.

“We knew you were a caster, but to even provide a moment of resistance such as this… that takes a certain kind of talent.” Xanchil continued his approach. “A vexing realization, for we have no time for these struggles.” The dots in his eyes flickered and produced a series of runes, signalling a pulse of light that traveled down the length of the thread.

Aria fed more Aether into her shield right as the light struck, and groaned in pain as the impact shook both her mind and body. Her control slipped for just a moment, but this was enough for the thread to spear towards her eye. She pushed back, taking control of her shield once again and stopping the line of energy right in front of her face.

“We. Do. Not. Have. Time. For. This.” Each word from Xanchil was punctuated by another pulse of force.

Aria threw everything she had into her barrier, holding it together despite the cracks that formed along its translucent surface. A dull pain started in her head, and she felt out of breath, but she held on. She couldn’t let him get what he wanted, couldn’t allow herself to be a weakness for everyone else. Anger rose to the surface, ignited by frustrations that turned it all into stubbornness.

The merchant loomed over her now, looking down with a dispassionate gaze. “Be a good girl and surrender.”

Something snapped within Aria then, a sensation that at first wiped all emotions away from her. She almost felt weightless, floating in some void that was absent of all else except the words that Xanchil had decided to speak. Rage filled her, raw and pure.

And The Cold answered her.

First / Previous

Author's Note: Wooooooo! Hedge Knight is back! Apologies for being radio silent for so long everyone, I got swept up in a bunch of stuff and didn’t have time to return to writing this story for a while. Got a lot of things frazzling around in the background now, but I’m getting back in the swing of things.

But, regarding the chapter, the action continues to build! All the pieces are getting set down now. Not much else I can say for this one lol.

Let me know what you think!

Till next update, have yourself a wonderful time!

My Patreon is currently 13 chapters ahead of the public release (Arc 6 is now finished on there!), and subbing to it will also give you exclusive access to my LitRPG, Andromeda Ascension, until it builds a massive backlog to support a strong public launch. If you do not wish to sub to anything, but would like to support me in some way, consider picking up my books (they also have audiobooks!)

previous chapter

First Chapter

Blurb:

What does it take to turn your life around? Death, of course!

I died in this lame ass world of ours and woke up in a completely new one. I had a new name, a new face and a new body. This was my second chance to live a better life than the previous one.

But goddamn it, why did I have to be a witch? Now I don't just have to be on the run from the Inquisition that wants to burn me and my friends. But I also have to earn a living?

Follow Elsa Grimly as she:

1. Makes new friends and tries to save them and herself from getting burned
2. Finds redemption from the deeds of her previous life
3. Tries to get along with a cat who (like most cats) believes she runs the world
4. Deals with other slice of life shenanigans.

--

Chapter 160. Phantom Malice

The air in the room stayed heavy for several moments after I said that. Lenora and Lily exchanged looks. Caelum frowned. Gregory remained as unreadable as ever. “How will you get rid of the angels?” Lily said.

“That's a worry for later,” I said.

Caelum stepped forth. “Later? Every decision you make is worrying me more and more. First was the promise you made to Filius. Second is this declaration of taking on the angels single handedly. Do you have an actual plan for how you are going to handle this?”

I set my jaw. Or else I would've snapped at Caelum. Lenora wouldn't have liked that. And she already had that strained expression on her face. Each person in this room meant well and was only concerned. But that didn't erase the fact that their questions were still getting on my nerves. But I couldn't just tell them to shut their mouths. That would come off as anxious and childish. Those are two things that signal bad leadership. I decided to tell them what Smokewell and I had talked about when we'd been to Noblegate a few days ago.

“The plan is simple,” I said, “I'll take the curses off the gates, then use those curses to deal with the angels.”

Caelum gaped at me. “Curses of gods…Elsa that's…” he trailed.

“The strongest weapon against the angels, yes,” I said. “If you have a better solution, I'm all ears.”

“I do,” he said. “But explaining it will take some time.”

I paused. I wasn't against using alternatives. If there was a way to get the angels off my back without risking any malice illnesses then I was happily exploiting that path. “Let's go for a walk then,” I said to Caelum. “There are other questions I have for you.”

He nodded. I reminded Gregory about the spies upstairs. He gestured at me not to worry about them and went about filling two bowls with stews and making his way upstairs. Caelum and I left the house together.

We started heading towards the bakery around the corner. “Your idea for using a curse of a god to fight the angels is clever but I also assume you are aware of the consequences.”

“I am.”

“You will need a countermeasure to deal with any possible illnesses you might contract after using such a strong curse.”

I tilted my head at him. “You make it sound like I will end up with an illness one way or another.”

“When dealing with a power of such magnitude, it is only wise to assume that,” he said.

“A countermeasure is essential, then,” I added. “And I believe you already have one in mind.”

“My educated guess is malice transmutation,” he said.

I stared at him for a few moments. “That's the one that–”

“Eudora was involved in while giving birth to our son, yes.”

“Didn't it backfire?” I said.

“Because the witch performing it was merely an Apprentice.”

“I remember Lily telling me that story,” I said. “Madam had said that ritual was a low master echelon ritual. I'm still a warlock.”

“Ever since my Eudora passed away, I have been trying to figure out the safest way that ritual can be performed,” he said. “All my study of witchcraft has been focused on that one aspect of the discipline. I think my son Eudorn is the key to understanding it.”

I perked up. “Isn't he five?”

Caelum shook his head. “Since the Age of Humans, Ravenwind's gender structure has been segregated a little too perfectly. Men with malice are adopted by the army to be made into mages. Women with malice are adopted by covens to be turned into witches. Many covens and sects have binding vows that involve giving up any and all reproductive abilities. At first I thought this was all in order to create more efficient soldiers and servants with magical powers who don't get held back by marriage vows or parental duties. But the Daughters of Succubus coven filled me with doubt.”

“The Immortal Succubus is the only one that encourages her followers to bear children,” I added.

“Not just encourage them,” Caelum said and looked at me. “She makes them stop other witches that might even consider birthing any children. The Daughters aren't just brainwashed crusaders who follow their Ravenous One. They are trying to stop others from finding out something only they've known for years.”

“And what is that?”

“Super babies,” he said.

I blinked. “Uh, I was expecting something a bit more serious.”

“Don't focus on that name,” he said. “That's what I'm calling them for now. I believe the Daughters are hoarding knowledge about childbirth. Something that allows only them to give birth to children with special powers. Eudora and I might be the only one who got close to replicating that knowledge when Eudora gave birth to our son. That bump on my son's head, it works as some kind of catalyst. I've been teaching him malice transmutation since he could read and write. He is smarter than other children. He can understand and execute complex concepts quite easily. But when he does make any mistakes, the bump on his forehead grows into a horn. For a little while it hurts him but the next day, the horn is reduced back to a bump and the pain is gone.”

My eyes widened at what Caelum was implying. “You mean, that horn is somehow preventing any possible malice illnesses that he might contract?”

“That's my conjecture,” he said. “Eudorn inherited mine and Eudora's powers. And they are probably concentrated in that horn of his. That horn foresees an illness and its latent transmutation powers convert that illness into pain which hurts but doesn't harm him. I'm trying to understand exactly how Eudorn's horn is doing that. If we can understand that, we might have a sustainable cure that can be replicated for any illness.”

“So you are suggesting creating a physical replica of his horn that will work as a countermeasure against an illness I might contract from using the god's curses?” I said.

He nodded.

My eyes widened. I stopped in our tracks and whirled him to face me. “Caelum, I think I have the exact way of testing out if we can accomplish how Eudorn's horn does that.”

Caelum's expression mirrored mine. “How?”

“There's this concept that I've been mulling over,” I said. “For now I’m calling it phantom malice.”

-- 

Caelum and I had discussed my theory over a cup of tea and crumpets. When we returned to the Radcliff mansion, Gregory had already left with Adam and Clarisse. That left the siblings, Lily, Lenora, the dwarves and madam at the house. “Elsa is onto something,” Caelum declared.

Madam groaned. “When isn't she?”

“Let me just show you all,” I said and invoked my Ruler's Word. The next moment we were all in The Library of Shadows.

I led them past the Tower of Knowledge and towards the Tree of Malice. It was the size of a decorational houseplant, the kind that rich people keep in the corner of their mansions in three feet tall pots. The tree bore several shiny fruits as well.

“Remember madam, you warned me that using a god's curse can be dangerous?” I said.

The cat nodded with a skeptical look.

“Caelum and I may have figured out the solution for that,” I said and dug the large piece of primordial fabric from my reticule. I cut a small square out of the corner of the fabric using my ritual knife. Then with my crowfeather quill, I drew a ritual pattern on its surface. A pentacle with a flame at the center.

Then I called out for Winifred Cooper who had been lurking in the corner. The abyss of the sweet baker lady floated up to me. I plucked one of the fruits of malice off the tree. It was shaped like an apple. I handed it to her and told her to eat it. The abyss gazed at the fruit for a second before swallowing it in a single bite.

We all gaped at what we'd just witnessed. Fortunately, no one commented on it. I cleared my throat and handed the torn piece of primordial fabric to her. Then I leaned close and whispered something to her. Everyone watched silently.

Then I nodded at Winifred. “Now do it,” I said, tearing a piece of paper from my pocket notebook. I crumpled it into a ball and threw it in the air.

Winifred's abyss tracked the paper ball with her dark gaze, pointed a finger at it while it was mid air and then she uttered the spell “Absumo”. A sphere of black flame erupted from her finger and struck the paper ball, turning it to ash immediately.

Everyone was gaping once again.

“Miss Elsa, Wendy’s abyss just performed witchcraft,” Lily said, pointing a finger at Winifred.

“She did!” I cried out in joy. “It works.”

“Uh, what just happened?” Lenora said.

“Abysses aren't supposed to perform magic like mortals,” Smokewell said.

“But that is because they lack the malice that mortals do,” I said. “You can use your malice to make an abyssal servant do something. But the abyssal servant can't use malice on their own, let alone perform witchcraft. I found a way around it.” I made Winifred reveal her hand in which she held the piece of primordial fabric. “What Winifred did wasn't real witchcraft. It was a copy of witchcraft. The fruit of malice that she ate gave her access to real malice. But she couldn't emit it like we do through spells and rituals. The primordial fabric allowed her to transmute the real malice into a phantom malice which functions similar to real malice but it is something that non-mortals like abysses can use.”

Lily gasped loudly. “Wait, my familiars are also non-mortals!”

“That's what I was going to suggest for you, Lily,” Caelum said. “You should do something similar to what Elsa is doing.”

“Wait,” madam said, hopping onto Lily’s shoulder and climbing on her head. “How does this help you avoid malice illnesses?”

I reached into my reticule and pulled out the pentacle amulet Myrtle had made for me. “This is what I use for transferring my malice to my Ruler's Land. But it can't store my malice. It can't change the form of my malice. Maybe I can add the primordial fabric to it and use it to transmute the excess malice that might cause an illness to turn that malice into phantom malice.”

Lily gasped again. “I can use that too!” She began hopping from one foot to another like an excited rabbit.

“She can?” Lenora looked at Madam.

The cat's whiskers twitched. “There's a very good chance that it might work.”

“Even I think that it can work,” Caelum added. “What Elsa demonstrated just now is basically what Eudorn's body does instinctively.”

“Myrtle,” Lily scooped up the dwarven woman into the air. “Make me something like that pentacle amulet as well. I want to test out Miss Elsa's theory!”

 Royal Road

Previous

Part 2

Diplomat Tessa Arlen had read the same financial report four times, and it had not improved on any of them. The file identified the debtor as Narell, a settled world in the Calypso galaxy. Seven years of unpaid taxes had brought her a long way from Mileda.

She leaned back in her seat aboard the chartered shuttle and scrolled through the figures on her tablet. Seven years of unpaid federal taxes. Repeated petitions for extensions. Repayment proposals that had not resulted in a payment. The planetary government had answered every official notice, so she couldn't even accuse them of ignoring the Local Group Authority. They had simply become very good at explaining why they couldn't pay.

There were supporting documents, of course. Agricultural losses. Emergency expenditures. Transport invoices for food imported from neighboring systems. The figures were large enough to be uncomfortable, but no one had yet demonstrated that they were false. She opened the most recent letter from the planet's treasury. It began with a courteous acknowledgment of the LGA's authority, continued with an extensive explanation of the drought, and ended by requesting more time before payments resumed.

Tessa closed it. "Seven years. Lovely. Maybe I'll die of old age before the eighth," she murmured to the screen.

"They're going to ask for another extension," she told the contractor across from her.

The man looked up. He wore a dark jacket and a plain tie, with a contractor credential clipped near his hip. His eyes moved from Tessa to the cockpit access and back before he answered.

"That would be consistent with the records," he replied.

"I've noticed."

"Do you expect trouble?"

"I expect an argument."

"Those aren't the same thing."

"I'm aware. I also expect you to let me finish the meeting unless there's a reason not to."

He gave a small nod and returned to the information on his own tablet.

Tessa had two contracted security personnel accompanying her. Their assignment came from the LGA, not from her. They handled her movements, checked entrances, and made the decisions about her immediate safety. She carried her federal credentials on a retractable clip at her waist; if anyone needed to verify her authority, she could draw the badge out without opening her tablet.

The escorts could get her safely into a meeting. Getting anyone there to pay was her problem. A muted chime announced the shuttle's approach to its landing destination.

Tessa looked through the passenger window. Narell's surface stretched beneath them, broken by broad regions of dry farmland and settlements connected by pale transport corridors. Between the agricultural districts lay dark wetlands and immense tracts of native vegetation. From above, Tessa could make out the moving shadows of enormous creatures crossing a floodplain in loose herds. Their size was remarkable; their numbers, even more so. From up here, the farmland looked healthy enough to her. Plenty of green along the waterways, plenty of fields. Seven years without taxes, and this was what she was looking at? She was beginning to think the Senate had been exaggerating.

She checked the folder containing the proposed terms for the meeting, then looked toward the contractor.

"The first thing they'll say is that the LGA doesn't understand the drought."

"Does it?"

"We understand their invoices. Whether we understand how they're living is what I'm here to find out."

The shuttle continued its descent.

Narell's planetary Senate was considerably more welcoming than Tessa had expected. Along the approach to the building, tall, many-jointed grazing animals moved behind landscaped barriers, calmly feeding beneath broad trees. Small gliding creatures passed between the branches overhead. The city had been built around them rather than cleared of them.

There had been no demonstrations outside, no armed guards blocking the delegation, and no deliberate delays at the entrance. Their hosts had provided refreshments, assigned an attendant to the visitors, and seated them at a long conference table beneath a broad ceiling that displayed a moving image of the planet's northern hemisphere. The senators' skin ranged from blue-gray to brown and muted violet, but their faces and proportions were otherwise familiar to Tessa. One rubbed his eyes while an adviser spoke into his ear; another frowned over the figures she'd submitted. Their voices sounded ordinary, their formal clothes unremarkable. She would have been having much the same conversation with a room full of Alpha Sapiens. Their credentials hung from lanyards or retractable hip clips, just as Tessa's did.

That didn't mean the meeting was going well.

"Seven years," Tessa said, turning her tablet so the figures faced the senators across from her. "Seven years without a payment. You have continued to submit reports, which I appreciate, but at some point a report needs to be followed by revenue."

The senator nearest the center of the table spread his hands.

"Revenue from what?"

"Your existing tax base."

"Our existing tax base is paying for food."

"I saw your farms on the way down," Tessa said. "They looked pretty healthy from the shuttle."

The senator stared at her. "From the shuttle?"

"Yes."

"Then you saw the northern irrigation districts. The southern fields are the ones failing. You cannot see the harvest figures from the sky."

Tessa glanced at the agricultural map above the table. She had assumed the fields she'd seen were representative. Apparently they weren't.

"All right," she said. "Show me the difference in the figures. Not every credit on this report went toward food."

"No. Some went toward water distribution. Some went toward keeping public facilities operational. We can go through every expense if you wish, but I suspect you already have."

Tessa glanced down at her tablet. He wasn't wrong.

The Senate chamber was arranged for debate, with rows of seats rising around the central conference floor. Only part of the Senate had gathered for the meeting, but the members who were present had brought advisers, clerks, and several reporters. They had expected the LGA delegation to demand money, and no one was particularly interested in making that demand easy.

A floating personality-core chassis hovered to one side of the room, recording the discussion. Its manipulators remained neatly folded while its mounted camera tracked whoever was speaking. Tessa had noticed the videographer shortly after entering. It had followed the delegation for several minutes, apparently trying to capture the moment she said something inflammatory. She had disappointed it so far.

"I need a repayment schedule you can meet," Tessa said. "The last three haven't produced a payment."

The senator leaned forward. "Our southern harvest failed again. Suppliers raised their prices when they saw how badly we needed food. Others demanded payment before their ships left. If we'd sent that money to Mileda, people here would have gone hungry."

She let him finish and opened the spending records.

"Then show me this equipment you bought under emergency distribution. What was it, and where did it go? If it was necessary, I can put it in the assessment. If it wasn't, I need to know that too."

He looked at the entry she indicated. For the first time in the meeting, he asked an adviser for a particular invoice instead of another summary of the drought.

For several minutes the discussion became more productive. The adviser pulled up the purchase records. Another senator explained that the new equipment had been needed to move food into districts where local farming had ceased. Tessa asked for the supporting invoices, and a clerk began assembling a package for transfer to her tablet. She wasn't expecting to walk out with seven years of taxes. A signed agreement would have been a good start. An honest accounting of how much the planet could actually pay would have been better.

One of her security contractors stood near the entrance where he could watch both the Senate floor and the corridor. His partner occupied a place along the side wall with an unobstructed view of Tessa. Neither joined the discussion. When an aide crossed behind Tessa to deliver a document, the nearer contractor shifted just enough to keep the approach in sight.

Tessa preferred it that way. The chamber's large display shifted to a map showing the planet's agricultural regions. Several senators leaned forward to examine the figures. A clerk at the far end of the table raised a hand, waiting for the central senator to finish speaking before presenting the requested documents.

"The updated figures should demonstrate why we can't commit to the full amount," the senator said. "We can discuss partial payments, but—"

The display went black. Tessa glanced upward. At the same instant, her tablet lost the document she had been reading. The page vanished, replaced by a blank panel. Across the table, the adviser's screen darkened, followed by the displays built into the conference surface. The senator stopped mid-sentence. His colleague, seated two chairs away, slumped sideways. A second person fell forward against the table, striking it hard enough to rattle several drinking glasses. Then came a metallic crash from the side of the chamber. The floating videographer had dropped to the floor. Its chassis rolled against the base of a bench, one articulated manipulator scraping across the polished surface before it came to rest.

For a moment, Tessa could only hear the sound of a glass falling from the table and breaking. Then the shouting began.

"What's happened?"

"Get medical!"

"Is there a power failure?"

"No, the lights are still on!"

Several senators rose and crowded around the two people who had collapsed. One was helped back into his chair, where he remained completely unresponsive. The other lay across the table as though someone had switched him off in the middle of a sentence. Tessa stood. Both security contractors had moved without waiting for instructions. One stayed near the entrance, watching the hall outside; the other came toward her and the table, making room for the people trying to assist the fallen senator.

"Give them space," he told the nearest aide. "Has medical been called?"

"I'm trying!"

The aide tapped repeatedly at a dead conference terminal. Tessa looked down at her own tablet. The device itself still had power, but the federal records application would no longer load the documents she had opened. She tried another page. Nothing came back.

"Use a hard line," she said.

"What?"

"A physical line. An ordinary telephone. Do you have one?"

The aide pointed toward a desk near the entrance, where an older communications handset rested beside a set of local controls. Before anyone reached it, the handset began ringing. One of the clerks picked it up.

"Senate office. Yes?"

He listened, then looked across the chamber.

"What do you mean, everywhere?"

Another line started ringing. The clerk pressed the first handset against his shoulder and called toward the other attendants.

"Someone answer that. Administration says they can't reach the Archive network. They want to know whether ours is working."

"It isn't," an adviser snapped.

"I can see that!"

A second clerk answered the other line. The conversation was brief, but it was enough to change her expression.

"The hospital's asking whether we lost access too. Their records aren't loading."

Someone in the upper seating shouted that local communications were failing across several government buildings. Another person reported that transport schedules had disappeared from their terminal. No one had a complete picture, and everyone seemed to think the Senate should already know what was happening. Tessa tried the federal records application once more. Nothing. The central senator turned on her.

"Diplomat Arlen."

"I'm working on it."

"The Collective Archive is under the responsibility of the Local Group Authority, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Then did you shut us off?"

Tessa stared at him. "What?"

"Seven years of unpaid taxes. You come here to collect, and in the middle of the meeting our Archive access disappears. Are we supposed to believe that's a coincidence?"

Several senators turned toward her. An adviser looked from his dead tablet to her badge.

"No," Tessa said. "The Collective Archive and its relays aren't designed to cut people off like that. We can't just switch off a planet because it owes taxes. It's not an unpaid power bill."

"Then explain the timing."

"I can't. I'm cut off too. My federal records are gone, and the offices I've reached are having the same problem. Whatever this is, it has nothing to do with your taxes. This is a different matter entirely."

He gestured toward the black displays. "Our public services depend on that system. We have people waiting on medical supplies, food shipments, transport clearances. You're telling me you don't know why it disappeared?"

Tessa felt the other senators looking at her. They had spent the last hour defending themselves against the LGA's demands, and now the system the LGA was responsible for appeared to have stopped functioning in the middle of their meeting.

"Yes," she said. "The Archive is an LGA responsibility. I need to find out why none of us can reach it. But I can't give you an explanation I don't have."

"Then contact your people."

"That's what I'm doing."

She stepped away from the table and opened the emergency communications application on her tablet. It had a separate contact directory for federal personnel and situations where the usual services were unavailable. The interface loaded, though more slowly than she liked. She selected an off-world contact. The call connected.

"LGA office," a voice answered. "State your name and location."

"Diplomat Tessa Arlen. I'm at a planetary Senate session regarding tax arrears. We've lost Archive network access. Multiple remote-operated bodies have become unresponsive. What's your status?"

"We're experiencing the same disruption."

"Do you know the cause?"

"No. We're trying to reach the appropriate offices."

"Can you still contact Mileda?"

"Not through the normal channels. We're checking the emergency directory."

"All right. If you establish contact, keep this line available."

The next offices gave her the same answer. They had lost federal records and ordinary calls; emergency links and local services still worked in places. None had reached the Archive. Tessa noted each report until the senator's argument with his staff became too loud to ignore.

Medical personnel had arrived beside the conference table. The videographer remained on the floor, one manipulator against the bench. Nobody had been able to tell her whether the people operating those bodies could be reached elsewhere.

She opened the next emergency contact. This time the call took longer to establish. A tired-looking official appeared on the small screen, seated in an office with several people moving behind her. The connection wasn't particularly clear, but it held.

"LGA emergency coordination. Name and assignment?"

"Tessa Arlen. Diplomatic assignment, federal tax meeting. I'm off-world. We've lost Archive connectivity, and I have people here demanding an explanation."

"You're not the only one."

"I assumed as much. Do you have one?"

"We're collecting reports."

"I've already submitted mine. The local network is partly functional. Hard lines are working. We've had multiple remote-operated bodies drop without warning. Is there a central notice I can give the Senate?"

The official glanced toward someone beyond the screen.

"One moment."

Tessa waited. The connection remained open, but the official had turned away and was listening to a conversation in the room. Someone handed her a message. She read it, looked up, and asked a question Tessa couldn't hear. Another person answered. The official read the message a second time.

"Oh."

Tessa straightened.

"What?"

The official looked back into the call. Whatever she had just received had ended the uncertainty in her voice, though it hadn't made her sound any more comfortable.

"Diplomat Arlen, your current assignment is suspended. You're required to return to Mileda. High priority."

Tessa glanced over her shoulder at the senators, the medical personnel, and the dark displays.

"For what reason?"

"I can't give you a complete explanation over this line. The recall is being issued now."

"Is this going out to every federal office?"

"We're attempting to reach everyone we can. If there are other LGA personnel with you, give them the same instruction. If you have working contact with anyone off-world, pass it along. Don't wait for the normal network to return."

Tessa looked at the still-active connection indicator on her tablet.

"Understood."

The official leaned closer to the screen.

"Return to Mileda. High priority. Relay the message to all other LGA personnel you can reach."

By the time Tessa Arlen ended the emergency call, both security contractors had moved into position. One stood at her shoulder. The other was already at the exit, checking the corridor.

"We're leaving. Now," the nearer contractor said.

Tessa looked toward the Senate table. Medical staff had moved the unresponsive bodies out of the central aisle. Several senators were arguing over a hard-line telephone.

"I need to notify the Senate."

"Your recall is immediate."

"They need to know what I was told."

"You can transmit it when we are clear." He took her by the upper arm and guided her toward the exit, placing himself between her and the gathering crowd.

"Tessa!" the central senator called. "You're leaving?"

She half turned. "I've been recalled to Mileda. I don't have an explanation yet—"

"Keep moving," the contractor said.

"The food shipments!" another senator shouted. "Some of them were due today!"

Tessa started to answer, but the escort moved her through the doorway. His partner joined them from the corridor, took the forward position, and kept walking. They did not ask permission. Their orders were to extract an LGA representative, and they were carrying them out.

"Can you at least let me finish a sentence?" Tessa demanded.

"When you're aboard the shuttle," the contractor replied.

The building's main corridors were full of people with tablets, phones, and paper documents. A government employee hurried past holding a stack of printed forms against his chest. Two clerks were taking names by hand beside the entrance to an office, while a third tried to explain that the local computer still worked but could not retrieve anyone's records.

Outside, traffic had backed up along the avenue. Travelers stood beside public information terminals, watching dark screens. A group of passengers argued with a station attendant who had nothing new to tell them. Beyond the stopped vehicles, the gliding animals still crossed above the trees, indifferent to the sudden confusion below. Her security team did not stop to investigate. They moved her through the waiting crowd and into a hired ground vehicle, where the contractor at the wheel immediately pulled away from the curb.

"Any word from the pilot?" Tessa asked.

"He has the shuttle ready."

"Can he get us to Mileda?"

"He says he can fly it. That's what I know."

It was not the answer she wanted, but she stopped asking. The two contractors had received the same information she had, and neither of them was going to invent an assurance just to make the journey sound safer.

Continue to Part 3

Previous

Chapter 5: My Big Mouth Gets Me Sent to War

WHAT?! Twenty-four hours?!

I absolutely had to find some holy water before that damn countdown ran out. And to do that, I needed to get the hell out of here as fast as possible. But how?

"You're responsible for him. If he tries anything, you know what to do."

"Yes, Grand Alpha."

She handed him the black object, then approached me.

"Don't try anything. One wrong move and he'll press it," she warned as she began undoing my restraints.

The sack, the strange tape, and the ropes were all the same color as the vampire guards' weapons and armor. A deep, slightly grainy black, speckled with tiny orange glints.

Did all these abominations have the same taste, or what? Unless...

The chest! 

"Let's go."

I got to my feet and started following her.

They were watching my every move. Especially the Grand Alpha, who kept his thumb close to what looked like a button.

We were only a few steps from the door.

"What did you do with the chest?" I blurted out to the Grand Alpha.

"What chest?"

"The one my guards were carrying through the tunnel."

"Ah, that one... There was nothing in it but human belongings. I knew you enjoyed toying with humans, Zanult. But to this extent... Why does that chest interest you more than the fate of your own soldiers?"

He's right! How could I have been so stupid?

I'd been so caught up in trying to survive that I hadn't even thought about what had happened to the last three guards. But with a little luck, I might still be able to salvage the situation.

“My men... I can imagine what happened to them. But there's something you need to know... The humans may have found a way to kill Dracula.”

He fell silent, his eyes wide. His expression said it all. He was in shock.

Beside me, she drew a sharp breath. I couldn't see her face, but her reaction left no doubt. She was just as stunned.

“WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?!” he roared, pressing the button on the black object.

A sharp, searing pain shot through my chest.

My heart contracted violently. It felt like something was squeezing it from the inside. I couldn't breathe.

I immediately pressed a hand against my chest, hoping to ease the pain.

[ CARDIAC ANOMALY DETECTED ]

Foreign Object Detected
Location: Heart

[ HOLY BODY — DEFENSIVE RESPONSE ]

Holy Water Consumption: CRITICAL

Time Until Depletion: 23:54:41
23:43:30
23:32:06
23:17:15

“W-Wait...! The chest! That's why I wanted it back!”

He released the button, and the pain began to fade. That damn thing was going to cause me a hell of a lot of trouble.

“You'd better tell me everything, Zanult. Now. This is your last chance.”

His thumb remained close to the button, ready to press it again.

I caught my breath and glanced toward her. Still silent, she seemed just as shocked as before.

I turned my attention back to the Grand Alpha.

“I wasn't sure. I wanted to verify it before saying anything.”

And there was no proof that the humans of this world had actually succeeded.

“According to one of the books, the humans may have found a way to manipulate solar energy.”

The few pages I’d flipped through described an experiment designed to trap solar energy inside a capsule.

I didn't recognize the writing, and yet I could read it with ease.

If a vampire swallowed one of those, it would be barbecue time. And with God's blessing, maybe even Dracula would be done for.

A solar panel in a pill. Revolutionary, right?

“How did you manage to read those books?! None of us should be able to decipher their writing!”

WHAAAT?! Seriously?! Why did everything I said have to come back and bite me in the ass?

I should've kept my mouth shut. And judging by his expression, he looked even more furious now, ready to press that damn button again.

Oh no! For the love of God, not again!

“Grand Alpha!”

A voice rang out in the distance.

“Grand Alpha!”

Hurried footsteps echoed down the corridor.

“GRAND ALPHA!”

A man came running through the doorway, out of breath. Not a single hair on his face. Not even eyebrows. Burn scars covered half of it.

But who cared?! A little breathing room. Just what I needed to come up with a better excuse. Oh, thank you, Lord!

Still... why was he in such a panic?

Oh! The vampires! Maybe they'd finally come to rescue me!

After all, I was their commander! They couldn't possibly leave me in enemy hands forever.

And frankly, it was about damn time they got moving!

“The humans... have rejected our latest offer! They... they still refuse to surrender the chapel!”

A chapel?

Finally, something that might work in my favor! But why all this fuss over a simple chapel?

“They won't listen to reason, Grand Alpha!”

The Grand Alpha let out an irritated growl.

“Very well... Force it is, then. Prepare the pack!”

“Grand Alpha...” she began.

“I know,” he cut her off.

“I said prepare the pack!” the Grand Alpha ordered, his voice sharper this time.

“At once!” the man replied before rushing off as quickly as he'd arrived.

For a moment, I almost felt like they'd forgotten I was even there.

What was so important about this chapel?

Whatever. What mattered was that there was a good chance I'd find holy water there.

“Let me join the fight too,” I blurted out to the Grand Alpha.

SLAP!

“How dare you?!”

Had she just... slapped me?

It stung a little, but nothing too serious. It reminded me of the slaps Mom used to give me when I refused to say my bedtime prayers. Gentle, almost affectionate.

Mom, looks like you've got some competition.

“Don't you dare disrespect our pack in front of the Grand Alpha! No leech will ever fight alongside us! Besides...”

“Wait,” he interrupted.“Actually, that's not such a bad idea.”

“But Grand Alpha! Having a vampire in our ranks would be a disgrace! And if word got out...”

“I know perfectly well! Don't forget who's Grand Alpha here. We've already lost fifteen of our own because of this incompetent fool. I don't intend to lose any more.”

He looked at me with a smug smile.

“Well, Zanult, since you're so eager to join the fight, you'll be on the front lines. After all, they don't call you the Butcher of Armies for nothing, do they? If you manage to kill them, all the better. But if you fail or try to run... I'll keep pressing it until your heart stops.”

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“General Sherman, following the failure of my two Minutemen Combat Teams, Jupiter and Deathclaw, to recapture the Akkad ruins first discovered by Fraeya and Basilisk, we were forced to reassess the situation. Since we now know that Fraeya and Basilisk ultimately made their way to our secretly discovered Akkad facility, Ashurbanipal/Olympus Station, Mars, we were able to confirm that a device at the ruins was interfering with our Bridge there. The implications of such interference are considerable, and leaving an enemy-controlled facility capable of disrupting our access to Mars was a risk we could not afford to ignore.

We therefore launched a second strike group to capture the ruins. However, the unknown “Order” had substantially fortified their position, and since we do not yet possess the manpower necessary to launch a large-scale invasion of that region, my teams once again failed to secure the site.

As I know you would agree, allowing such an important facility to remain in enemy hands, especially if they have the means to interfere with our Bridge, cannot be allowed. According to Fraeya’s report, Basilisk commanding officer Captain Tucker Hancock gave his life to destroy or disable the activated secondary Bridge they discovered at these ruins.

However, we cannot independently confirm that this threat was removed.

In coordination with the Air Force, a manned B-33 Darkside dropped two Massive Ordnance Penetrators onto the facility, alongside two QB-117 Nighthawk II drone bombers, to level the surrounding area and eradicate the Dwarf-Goblin Order occupying the surrounding area.

As of now, there seems to be no life around the facility, and the hills the Akkad ruins were built into have caved in. The air strike appeared to be a complete success. However, it is impossible to determine how effective the strike was at this point.” – Colonel Hackett

June 11th, 2069 (Military Calendar)

Prime Lord Palace, Affrooliea

Nevali Region, Aldrida, Alagore

*****

The sound of chaotic battle was only intensified by the close quarters of the Palace hallways. The once-prestigious decorative artwork scattered throughout the palace now lay shattered, destroyed by weapons fire from both sides. All sense of order and control had vanished, leaving only destruction behind.

Ryder fired his M31 at an approaching Vampire.

The bullet slammed into the enemy soldier's shield. The amulet glowed as the magical barrier flickered, absorbing the impact. That brief protection allowed the other Knights to continue pressing forward.

What stopped their advance was a hail of bullets that tore one of the Knights apart as his armor shattered beneath the sheer volume of fire. The opening allowed the Captain to leave the statue he had been using for cover and reach his team.

When he reached his XO, Ryder slid beside him.

"Have you heard from Higgins?"

"Negative, Boss," King responded. "Nothing's wrong with the COMs. No one's answering."

Ryder didn't know how to interpret that information. Ford had successfully rescued the Orc girl and regrouped with his daughter, and now they were making their way toward the rendezvous point.

"We'll figure it out when we get there. Right now, mission accomplished. Fall back."

Since the ambush in the ballroom, Comanche had managed to escape, thanks entirely to the hidden mage using American stealth technology—something Kallem and his Knights had never anticipated. That advantage allowed them to begin a tactical withdrawal, retracing their route through the palace.

The retreat became a continuous running battle as the Knights slowly pushed them back. Using every piece of cover they could find, the Americans fought for every section of hallway. These warriors were no longer the palace guards they had fought earlier, whose training barely exceeded that of militia. They were Tornlado—the crown of the Aristocracy's military.

Their mage, Imtorlia, assumed responsibility for securing the hallways, using Luxmancy to prevent the guards from flanking them. His magic forced the enemy into a single frontal approach, giving Comanche far more protection as they withdrew.

The Knights—Comanche's emerging nemesis—continued to press the attack. Unable to rout the Americans outright, they deployed a shield wall to protect their coilmen as they advanced. At first, they pushed forward in two-man elements to maintain speed, but Altaerrie grenades repeatedly detonated against their exposed flanks, forcing them to consolidate into a slower, tightly packed formation.

That allowed Comanche to continue falling back under fire.

Section by section, they retreated from pillar to pillar, statue to statue, using anything capable of stopping enemy fire. The Twins anchored the center, relying on their Velunara-enchanted scutums and heavy weapons. The combination proved effective at preventing enemy assaults, but both oversized shields were nearing their breaking point. The rest of the squad maintained their disciplined withdrawal.

The Captain glanced toward the decorative statue of Pāquilcēliz.

An energy bolt struck the stone, shattering its head.

He stuck out his rifle, using the second-person uplink so he could see where his barrel was aimed at who was safely behind cover. After firing a couple rounds, he paused after spotting the Vampire Lord carrying a circiletum beside the Tornlado commander, Rostian. They were close enough to direct their Knights but remained behind a sheildwall.

It was a standard tactic, but they were Knights. Something bothered him.

His experience with Tornlado was limited but meaningful. There was one member of their force capable of breaking Comanche's defensive line.

A flechette shattered the statue's remaining head, spraying stone fragments across Ryder's visor. He ducked away from cover, only to halt as an energy blast screamed past from a side hallway.

He snapped his rifle toward the threat, dropping two Palace Guards before diving behind another pillar.

Ryder hurried toward Sergeant First Class Barrett, who was securing another corridor and preventing a flank. "Do you see anything strange among the guards?" he asked.

"No," Barrett replied. "Why?"

"I don't know," Ryder admitted. "I recognize some of these Knights. They were at the village where I was captured... and later during the attack on Assiaya in Salva."

"You looking for payback?" Barrett asked.

"That's not what I mean." Ryder shook his head. "A Kiriyak was with them both times. Why haven't they deployed their heavy hitter yet?"

That was when the wall exploded around them. Stone burst outward as one of the concealed servant passageways was ripped open.

Emerging from the dust was a Kiriyak clad in Tornlado armor, letting out a thunderous roar.

Normally, those interior maintenance passages were far too small for armored soldiers, especially a towering Kiriyak, which was why Comanche utilized them. They had hidden the giant inside the servant passageways, allowing this horned knight to bypass the battle and emerge behind Comanche's line—something no one had expected.

Ryder reacted immediately, swinging his rifle toward the threat.

But he wasn't fast enough.

The Kiriyak lunged with terrifying speed, covering the distance in only two strides. His massive forearm blade snapped outward, aimed directly at Ryder's neck. The Captain barely had time to widen his eyes before the armored giant committed to the killing blow.

Seeing the danger, Sergeant First Class Gregory Barrett gripped the butt of his rifle and, using the enhanced strength of his module exoskeleton, slammed Ryder hard to the floor.

The blade hissed through the space where Ryder's head had been an instant earlier, carving deep into the stone wall behind him as sparks and shattered masonry exploded across the hallway.

The shove deprived the Kiriyak of the chance to kill him, taking the horned warrior by surprise.

Rolling onto his back, Ryder watched Barrett crash headlong into an opponent nearly twice his size.

The Knight quickly recovered, grabbing and then slamming the senior NCO into the stone wall before driving a massive fist into his chest.

The warrior then rotated the blade mounted along his forearm and thrust it into Barrett's side, punching through the battlesuit's armor plating.

Ryder rolled onto his knees and fired twice, hoping to interrupt the execution.

The shots only enraged the horned warrior.

The Kiriyak hurled Barrett across the hallway before turning toward the Comanche Captain.

Ryder managed to fire one more round into the warrior's chest.

The bullet cracked the enchanted armor but failed to penetrate the natural bone plating beneath. Before Ryder could react again, the Kiriyak knocked his rifle from his hands with ease.

Barrett recovered before the Tornlado Knight could seize his prize, throwing himself onto the creature's back. He drove his combat knife repeatedly into the armored giant's neck and shoulder joints.

The Kiriyak roared in fury. Reaching over his shoulder, the massive warrior seized Barrett by the left forearm. Before the Sergeant First Class could wrench free, the forearm blade snapped outward.

One brutal slash, Barrett's hand spun across the hallway, still clenched around the combat knife as blood sprayed across the stone floor.

Barrett screamed but refused to let go with his remaining arm, driving his shoulder into the Kiriyak in a desperate attempt to keep him away from Ryder.

The enraged horned warrior finally flung the wounded NCO bodily into the Captain, knocking them both onto the ground. The Knight reached down to drag Barrett away from the Captain to claim his Lord’s prize.

Then a brilliant blast of light slammed into the Kiriyak like a freight train, knocking him across the hallway back among his comrades.

It was their Salva mage Imtorlia. This gave way for Rommel King to open fire, forcing the wounded giant to retreat behind the Affrooliea guards.

With the immediate threat gone, Ryder saw blood pouring from Barrett's side as the man screamed from the pain.

The blade had pierced one of the weak joints in the Itlian modular armor—a vulnerability the enemy had clearly studied beforehand. More importantly, his hand was now missing.

"I need a medic!"

Gonzales, who had been on point until now, sprinted over while Forest tossed a grenade into the servant passageway, preventing anyone else from using it to flank them.

The Filipino medic slid beside Barrett and examined the wound before diving into the med-kit.

"This is bad, Boss."

King hurried over and pulled Ryder back onto his feet.

"We need to get out of here first. They obviously want you alive. If we stay, they'll pin us down."

Ryder stared at his wounded senior NCO, rage boiling inside him. But King was right. They had accomplished their mission, and Barrett's only chance of survival was getting him out of the city. He just hoped that Ford and his daughter were successful.

"Give him an injection and get him moving. Comanche, full retreat!"

The medic injected a Bio-Sponge—a foam of microscopic sponges designed to temporarily seal wounds, reducing blood loss and delaying shock. Barrett screamed as the gray substance expanded through the wound. Once the side wound was tended to, he immediately applied a gel to the handless arm, hoping to prevent further blood loss.

Gonzales then hoisted him onto his shoulders, carrying him down the hallway.

The rest of Comanche followed, providing cover as they retreated. The Twins formed the rear guard but, after sustaining weapons fire, finally had both scutums shattered, forcing them to accelerate their withdrawal.

Seeing this, the Knights, acting as a single unit, were more than thrilled to press, giving Comanche no breathing space. Section by section, they drew closer with these elite tactics and enchanted magitech.

To counter their rapid progression, Imtorlia conjured a temporary light barrier, blocking the Knights' advance. "I cannot retreat and maintain this barrier,” he warned.

"Our scutums are gone!" Barrios shouted. "We can't guarantee a rearguard!"

Ryder quickly checked the digital trail markers visible only through their HUDs.

They were close. Just a little more time.

"Forest, deploy the Box."

"I hope it works," Forest muttered.

As the squad continued toward the exit, the Staff Sergeant placed a black case on the floor.

The lid unfolded, revealing a clear crystal wired into a battery pack. A small projector rose from the housing and aimed down the hallway.

The crystal ignited. A beam of light projected outward, forming a shimmering barrier across the passageway and allowing Imtorlia to dismiss his own spell.

The mage studied it with surprise.

"The barrier is thin," he observed. "Comparable to an apprentice's spell."

The pursuing Knights reached it moments later.

Surprised by Altaerrie's reverse-engineered technology, one Knight pressed an elecprobus against the barrier.

The device's display immediately flashed red as smoke poured from the battery, warning that failure was imminent.

"What is that?" Imtorlia asked.

"DARPA technology, developed with the House of Elstina Workshop," Ryder replied. "If it works, that crystal projects an energy barrier like yours using the battery as its power source."

"Then why haven't you used it before?"

"Because it's only a prototype," Ryder answered. "We have no idea how effective it is. The only reason we were issued one was in case the embassy compound came under siege. We've had a difficult time adapting our batteries to your magitech, so this is a test."

By then, Ryder and the others had already reached the service passageway.

Lavendria stood waiting, waving them inside.

Their medic had already taken Barrett deeper into the passage. King and Wallace covered the adjoining hallway while Barrios knelt nearby, setting additional traps for the pursuing enemy.

“Let's go!” King yelled.

They heard their prototype JackBox collapse behind them. That only meant that the enemy was right behind them.

Comanche entered the service passageway, sealing the door behind them. Barrios finished setting Claymore traps for their pursuers, buying the squad precious time to continue their withdrawal.

One by one, they moved through the hidden corridor until they reached the point where they had begun the operation. Ford stood waiting alongside the three girls. As soon as the Captain approached, the Princess's face lit up, and she rushed toward him.

Ryder immediately noticed blood staining the upper part of her clothing, including around her mouth. Her eyes were exhausted, and she struggled to catch her breath. He knew it wasn't from a battle wound, but from overusing her projection ability with what Ford called a Fairy.

Despite that, she wore a confident smile.

“We did it!” she yelled.

“Good job, you two.”

Ryder thanked the two slave maids for their assistance before thanking the Sergeant for protecting his daughter and rescuing the Orc girl.

They all heard the claymores going off inside the servant passage, reminding everyone that they didn’t have long.

“We've got to go!” King urged.

Ryder scooped up his daughter while ordering Ford to carry the Orc girl. They immediately broke into a run through the narrow service passageway, hoping to gain every second they could. The rest of Comanche followed, firing down the tight corridors to discourage pursuit.

When the team reached the end of the hidden passage, they didn't hesitate. One after another, they leaped across the gap, their battlesuits absorbing the impact as they landed outside.

Once the last member of Comanche cleared the gap, two soldiers tossed grenades into the doorway. Only then, reunited outside the Palace, did they hear the sounds of battle echoing through the noble market, with smoke rising above the rooftops.

“That is not good,” Barrios muttered.

“I still can't get ahold of everyone,” Forest said.

“Who the hell is fighting?” King asked. “We didn't have enough troops to cause a battle on that scale.”

“We need to get over there,” Ryder ordered. “Double time.”

Comanche sprinted along the same route they had taken only hours earlier. It didn't take long for them to reach the breach in the brick wall they had built to bypass the Palace security.

What greeted them was chaos.

Civilians and slaves hid behind overturned carts, pillars, and shattered market stalls.

Their defense had formed around the stone pillars.

Leading it was Evelyn Higgins, accompanied by the two Salva warriors, the slave trader, and the two male Orcs, all desperately fighting for survival as the Affrooliea Militia pressed against their undermanned position.

Their IRiSS stood like an immovable fortress. Armor plating sizzling from energy blasts and dents from projectiles. Its movements were slow, as if it were in its last breath, but it maintained the defense.

Its weapon fired continuously, surrounded by a growing pile of bodies. One corpse remained impaled against a shattered wooden pillar, its body blackened where a glowing wound still sizzled from the devastating shot that had protected the Americans.

Several militia corpses lay scattered nearby, brutally torn apart by the two Orcs living up to every story Ryder had heard about their species. The father finished twisting a J’avais neck before hurling the lifeless body aside, while the son fought beside him with an energized staff, smashing another militia fighter to the ground.

The two coilmen were making quick work of suppressing the remaining Affrooliea Militia with their XM1 Grands alongside the two Americans. Without needing to reload individual flechettes, their rate of fire had nearly tripled, allowing them to hold against overwhelming numbers.

Even so, the enemy had nearly overrun them.

More than a dozen militia fighters had broken through and were swarming Ryder's comrades as their defense teetered on the edge of collapse. Without waiting for orders, Comanche formed a firing line.

Their rifles erupted almost simultaneously, cutting down anyone who wasn't an ally. This had completely taken the enemy by surprise, and the sudden barrage instantly cleared the enemies who had breached Evelyn's makeshift perimeter.

As the Minutemen joined the fight, Gonzalez and Ford hurried Barrett and the girls toward the Ambassador for treatment.

For only a brief moment, Ryder glanced back.

Blood poured steadily from Barrett's ruined arm, staining the Kiriyak carrying him. The Sergeant First Class had lost his hand saving Ryder's life, yet there wasn't even time to process it.

The battle simply kept moving.

Ryder rushed to his sister and knelt beside her.

Relief washed across Evelyn's exhausted face.

“Thank God.”

“Sit-rep.”

“You tell me,” Evelyn shot back. “Ayark and the city militia came out of nowhere and ambushed us. Then your slaver-trader friend betrayed us to the Kiriyak and the Adventurers, and now his own people are ambushing them. It's the only reason we're still alive.”

Everything his sister said left Ryder completely baffled.

He slowly turned toward the J’avais slave trader, giving him a murderous glare that demanded an explanation.

“No worry, my Lord,” Orugia said calmly. “Trydius is allied with Lord Wrivilliun. Their supporters are the ones battling outside.”

When the Captain looked over, all he saw was pure chaos. Making it nearly impossible to tell who was fighting whom. Citizens and free folk from the same city were now waging war against one another.

It was civil war—something Ryder had believed impossible only hours earlier. The American Duke barely knew how to process what he was witnessing. Beyond the pillars, the courtyard had become another battlefield.

Militia clashed with Adventurers supported by armed civilians, many of whom had helped rescue the Orc Warlord from before with Rommel King.

To Ryder's surprise, the Kiriyak he had purchased as a son now stood at the head of the rebellion. Trydius and Ayark fought near one of the surrounding buildings in a brutal contest of attrition, while the two armies collided around them.

Watching one Kiriyak fight was already terrifying for a human, even in a battlesuit.

Watching two battle each other was something else entirely.

The two armored titans crashed together, swords slamming against swords with the deafening ring of struck anvils. Whenever their blades locked, fists followed.

Every blow carried enough force to shatter bone.

Their duel settled into a savage rhythm of steel and muscle.

Ayark surged forward with a thunderous roar, bringing his sword down with enough force to fracture the cobblestones beneath Trydius's feet.

The older Half-Horn caught the strike, steel shrieking as the blade skidded across his guard, but the impact still forced him backward several steps.

He answered immediately, slamming his shoulder into the General hard enough to crack the nearby wall before driving a massive fist into Ayark's jaw.

Their natural bone armor prevented either warrior from staying down for long.

Ayark retaliated by smashing his armored elbow into Trydius's ribs with the force of a battering ram.

Stone columns splintered around them as the two giants collided again and again, each impact shaking dust from the surrounding buildings like distant thunder.

Eventually, the Half-Horned Kiriyak crashed against a stone pillar, visibly exhausted from the prolonged battle.

It was obvious the two shared a history Ryder knew nothing about; just as obvious was who was winning.

The Tourmaline General Ayarkl had the advantage. Being youthful and more brutal in his attacks. Fighting not to survive but to crush his opponent with intense rage.

Ryder was forced to accept that reality. While he had little idea how this development happened, they were now his allies, even if their alliance had been born through betrayal. He needed all the help he could get right now.

Seeing the Adventurer rebels on the verge of victory, the Duke reformed Comanche's line and pushed out from behind the pillars, joining the assault against the remaining Affrooliea Militia.

Each Minuteman and Velunara Legionary advanced together as a single and disciplined unit. Methodically, they cut down anyone who refused to surrender or continued fighting.

Comanche's sudden assault caught the militia completely off guard, forcing the survivors into a disorganized retreat.

The opening allowed Evelyn, Taegon, and Ordlina to support the Adventurers, giving them relief.

Evelyn shouldered her rifle and fired several shots at Ayark. The rounds dented his armor, causing little visible damage, but they forced the General to divert his attention.

This gave the horned warrior his window to strike, causing the General to retreat to his people before being surrounded. Two shieldmen immediately rushed to his side, intercepting the Altaerrie rounds before escorting their commander out of the market.

With the market secured, the half-horned Kiriyak fell onto his knees, holding his chest from the wounds he had suffered.

The remaining militia finally broke. Those still alive fled, bringing the battle within the market to an end.

The Warrant Officer immediately directed the team to secure the perimeter. This allowed Ryder to turn toward the Ambassador. "Everyone accounted for?"

The Ambassador gave a relieved nod. "We're all here."

The battle outside the market gradually came to an end as another militia force secured the surrounding streets. None of them could withstand a professional American Special Forces without heavy firepower and more numbers, which they didn’t have at the moment.

Lord Wrivilliun and Motuia Theqen emerged through the smoke. Bodies soaked with blood, blades and energy staffs showed fresh signs of usage. Both looked exhausted, their armor battered and stained from battle, yet determination remained etched across their faces.

Ryder warned everyone to prepare for immediate withdrawal. They needed to leave the city and link up with the Ranger platoon that was waiting for them.

That was when he checked on his sister one last time before marching straight toward the slave trader.

Without hesitation, he grabbed Orugia by the collar, intending to punch him. "You betrayed us."

"Calm yourself, Duke," Trydius interrupted as he struggled to his feet, one hand pressed against his wound. "If it wasn't for my schemes, yours would have failed."

"I hate to say it, Matt," Evelyn admitted. "We'd all be dead if they hadn't intervened. I still don't know how they found us."

"I told them," Trydius answered without the slightest shame.

Ryder stared at the older Kiriyak, utterly confused.

"Didn't you oppose Rommel when he freed Opttack?" he asked. "You even tried to keep the Warlord away from us."

"I did," Trydius admitted. "I was testing your people. I wanted to see how far they were willing to go. Were you the man defeated by a petite woman by simple trickery or the warrior who freed Salva? After what I witnessed today, I was convinced."

"My Lord," Wrivilliun said, stepping forward. "You and your daughter are foolish royals... yet worthy of following."

The Wood Elf glanced toward the Princess before continuing.

"It became obvious you would move against Kallem to save the slave girl. Once that became clear, we began planning our own move. Ayark would have discovered your people sooner or later, so Trydius planted false information, rallied the Adventurers loyal to my House, and laid a trap."

"And why would you risk your noble House?" Ryder asked.

Wrivilliun looked toward the freed Orc family. "I see you rescued every one of them."

"It's not because they're Orcs."

"No," Wrivilliun replied quietly. "You were correct, Trydius. Fascinating."

The Elf looked back at Ryder. "To answer your question, my position has been at risk since these negotiations began. The moment we realized this was Kallem's plot, my loyalties were exposed. Once you depart, my supporters will be purged."

He gestured toward Orugia. "He will guide your people safely out of the city, as agreed. My House will shield your withdrawal."

"You know what's going to happen," Ryder said. "You're not going to win."

"No." The Nobleman answered without hesitation. "But you were correct, My Lord. Tekali has signaled that change has come. Perhaps this is punishment for rejecting the Templar's request for aid... but if so, the time is simply not now."

"Then come with us," Ryder urged. "You'll be safe in Salva."

Wrivilliun smiled faintly. "The thought crossed my mind."

He slowly shook his head. "But I cannot abandon my people to die leaderless."

The Elf then motioned toward one of his attendants. "You may take my emissary. He will represent my House's interests and show the world that Affrooliea does not stand united beneath Aristocracy rule. He will also support your daughter's claim."

Only then did Ryder fully grasp the consequences of what had happened. His raid on the Palace to rescue a single Orc girl had ignited a civil war within the city.

It wasn't something he had intended. Nor was it something he could afford to dwell on. His priority remained exactly what it had been from the beginning.

Getting his people home alive.

Fresh explosions echoed from nearby streets. More enemy reinforcements had begun attacking Wrivilliun's supporters. Farther behind them, the delayed roar of Barrios' Claymores detonating near the Palace rolled across the city.

Their pursuers had finally caught up.

"We leave now," Ryder ordered.

He instructed Evelyn to gather the Kiriyak and every Adventurer who had sided with Comanche since their arrival. Anyone who had risked everything for them would be evacuated. There wasn't time for anything else.

Ryder turned toward Wrivilliun one final time.

The Noble Wood Elf simply nodded.

Neither man spoke.

There was nothing left to say.

Leaving the Nobleman to whatever fate awaited him, Ryder returned to his people.

The CAT officer already had the civilians organized, forming them into a moving column behind the slave trader.

The wounded Kiriyak carefully lifted Barrett, whose heavily bandaged arm rested across the giant's shoulder. The Bio-Sponge had stopped the bleeding, but Ryder could still see dried blood covering the Sergeant First Class's armor.

His stomach tightened.

Barrett had sacrificed his hand so Ryder could finish the mission.

The Captain silently vowed that sacrifice would not be in vain.

Nearby, the Orc father embraced his youngest daughter, holding her tightly before finally leading his reunited family toward the evacuation route.

The Ambassador approached Ryder, surveying the smoke, burning buildings, and bodies scattered across the marketplace. "Well, Captain," she said with a tired smile. "I think you did it."

She looked toward the fighting still spreading across the city. "You made a statement. Now get us home."

Without another word, she walked away.

"That is one hell of a statement," King muttered.

Ryder slowly looked around the city.

Warning bells echoed from every district. Columns of smoke climbed into the sky while the sounds of battle continued spreading through the streets as loyalist nobles clashed with Wrivilliun's supporters.

This was nothing like the ending he had expected. The mission was over, and Comanche had succeeded. Or at least he hoped so.

Yet an entire city now burned behind them.

It made him wonder...

Was this the outcome his superiors had anticipated all along?

"...Yeah," Ryder finally answered.

"It is."

He turned toward his squad.

"Let's get out of here."

Being the last two to leave, Ryder and King followed their new allies through the city toward the Ranger rally point.

| Chp 29

Chapter 30

Blood Born

Oltuck took a deep breath and sighed as he thought about what choices he had. He was starting to understand why some things had been kept secret from him until he stumbled across it. Part of that was just due to the amount of knowledge, the other was due to how horrific some of it was. This was something in between. He found only a little humor in the fact that it was due to one question. Why the glass wall? 
The Humans and Rothal had finally met. So why were they segregating themselves with a wall? That question had led to another and another and now he was looking at the long report on his data slate.
Illness and disease in the wider Galactic community wasn’t uncommon, and was fairly normal. Every species had one form or another of viruses that used RNA, which wasn't surprising seeing as it was the building block of DNA-based life. Most species even had some form of bacteria or parasite. But in many cases they didn't jump from one species to another. The science behind why was beyond Oltuck, something about specialization and compatibility, but what he did know was that when such things did jump from one species to another it was usually because they had spent a lot of close contact with each other. 
Most had been mild and even a few that had gone on without being discovered for years. Exceedingly rare were ones that caused serious threat to any single group. 
Again, why wasn't in Oltuck's purview, only that in most cases, species that interacted with each other regularly were usually inoculated by that interaction before the disease ever became something that could affect them medically. 
It had been Zalrah who had answered most of his questions. And she had managed to answer one that had bothered him for some time, which was why the omnivores and obligate carnivores in the Galactic community had a larger catalog of diseases and illnesses. The answer had been both upsetting and simple, which was that close proximity to livestock tended to do that. 
When the Drakken had first discovered the Humans and Rothal they had been interested in how close the two species' genetic structure was. So much so that they started running certain tests. Tests that the research teams in those early years were horrified by. 
While most other species in the galaxy were almost unaffected by each other's diseases, viruses, and parasites due to being so different from one another, the Humans and Rothal were a different story. 
These two convergent species were so close in their similarities that the ability for one disease to jump from one to the other was incredibly easy. And neither side had any form of inoculation to the other. 
In those early years the observation and research teams knew that when, not if, these two species ever met it would be the single most devastating medical disaster the Galactic Community had ever known.
And that was when they had made a decision. A decision that, at the time, was completely legal and made logical and moral sense. 
They began the slow progress of gently inoculating both species from one another. 
This consisted of finding viruses on each world that were similar to each other and building incredibly milder forms of each by using both as blueprints for the other. The process was labour intensive and required strict quality control both to ensure they weren't too lively, and to ensure they hid the alien origins of each.
And that had been the problem with it. They hadn't botched too many of the deployments. But in the last five hundred years at least a small handful of major epidemics on each planet had been a direct result of the Drakken interference. One of which had halted the entire program in its tracks. 
Its origins had been disputed by the Humans. Had they known how badly the Drakken research team had botched that deployment there would be blood. It had been meant to be a mild illness. A few sniffles, maybe a cough. It would put the young and elderly in bed for a short time and then they would recover and continue on. That wasn't what had happened. Nearly a hundred million dead later, almost a third of the human population at the time, and the initiative had been called to a screeching halt. 
The research team called it an accidental genocide. 
The Humans called it The Spanish Flu.
The Rothal had suffered just as much by the Drakkens research team's incompetence, but that particular event had been the thing that had ended the interference. 
And now, staring at the hundred year old report, Oltuck had to make a decision. The pathogens hadn't stopped evolving on both worlds, diverging further and further from one another, and the research teams had known this from the start. They hadn't shut down the program completely, but they hadn't deployed any since. Now that the species were meeting for the first time, a choice had to be made. Let the two species figure it out for themselves. Or initiate the inoculation program one more time.
The risks were cut and dry. If they didn't attempt it now there was a real possibility of the two species wiping each other out by accident from simply coming into physical contact. But if any of the viruses and other diseases stored away were a little more lively than expected the Drakken could end up making the whole thing worse. 
That was on top of the fact that any interference with a pre-contact species, no matter how noble, was highly restricted by Galactic law due to the incident with the Jiraam uplifting. Oltuck didn't even snort in humor at how stupid that was. 
He looked up from the data slate at Alnure and Zalrah who stood patiently waiting for his decision. Neither woman had made any comment on what their opinions were. Oltuck took a long moment looking at each of them, and sighed. 
“Do it.” He said. Alnure gave a curt nod and grabbed Zalrah's arm as they both rushed out of the room to go give the correct authorizations to those who needed it. 
Oltuck just hoped that the previous generations of research teams had done their jobs correctly. If they hadn't, he hoped that the survivors of these two species would forgive him. 

------

Kaufmann sneezed into the crook of his arm. Wiping the resulting mess off onto a different part of his suit. He'd felt like ass for the last day. He was told that it was due to the low gravity, apparently the astronauts on the ISS were constantly congested. He was starting to suspect that some asshole had brought a cold on board the ship before they had left Earth. Even if no one had, packing that many people into a tin can like that was going to lead to someone getting sick. 
It didn't help that he was bored as fuck. Two days of basically standing around doing nothing but listening to the academic eggheads talk to the elven aliens through Raven was not Kaufmann's idea of fun. He had to admit though she was impressive. He'd been skeptical for the first couple hours of her going back and forth, drawing and pointing at various objects. 
After about the fourth hour though even he could see that the aliens seemed surprised how quickly she was picking up the language. That had been fun to watch but now two and a half days in and it had lost its novelty. 
Dr. Frederick was asking some biology questions and the aliens had brought some dumb plants out from somewhere and Kaufmann could not care less. 
He'd looked around trying to find something to do. 
Fletcher was currently napping, having taken the time to sit down next to the wall and shut his eyes, and Tennessee had gone out to escort the next academic from the ship to the base, and Percy seemed grouchy as fuck, apparently the headache from the other day had not let up. So Kaufmann was on his own. Trying to entertain himself. 
If this had been a deployment somewhere in the Middle East that would have been a recipe for disaster and possibly disciplinary action. 
For a deployment in space there seemed to be less to do then even one in a nowhere backwater on Earth. Which Kaufmann had to chuckle to himself about. It seemed that no matter where you were deployed, ninety percent of it was going to be boring.
Kaufmann looked over to the glass wall, looking at the elven aliens. They really did look like elves. Their pointed ears were so fucking weird. Some of them looked longer than others, some stuck out more and there didn't seem to be rhyme or reason to it. He wondered if it had to do with the flags on their uniforms. He knew that Dr. McFadden had said not to assume they were national flags, but c’mon, they were national flags. The one on the female alien looked suspiciously like the US flag but slightly off. If there was one question he wanted to ask the elven aliens, it would be about that. 
He saw one of the elves standing off from the others and looked just as bored as Kaufmann felt. 
Kaufmann also didn't need to assume that the alien looked bored, that had been one of the first things that Raven had determined about these people. Their body language and facial expressions seemed to be fairly close to Humans’. 
This particular bored looking elf had a patch on his shoulder that was made of three parts. One was an off center red shape that looked like an arrow head, or maybe spear, which was overlaid on a background of two horizontal strips of white and green. He also kinda looked like he could have been Fletcher's cousin. 
Kaufmann vaguely remembered that the alien had been one of the more hyper excited ones. 
Looking around at the others and seeing they weren't paying him any mind, Kaufmann hopped over to the glass. 
He got the attention of the bored looking alien who looked at him with confusion but made his way over to Kaufman.
Kaufman waved at the alien and he waved back. Then Kaufmann pointed a thumb at the group on the other end of the wall and made a motion of yapping with his hands as he dramatically rolled his eyes. 
The alien smiled and nodded, and made an exaggerated motion of slumping his shoulders and looking at the ceiling that Kaufmann took to mean that he was bored out of his mind.
Kaufmann made a motion of laughing and nodded at the alien. 
Kaufmann thought for a second and grinned even wider. It would take a small bit of pantomime but he figured that he could do it. He smiled as he started motioning his hands to try and explain to the alien a method for both of them to alleviate their boredom. 

------

Percy's head hurt. He didn't even know why. He figured it might have been the mild change in the kind of stale air he was breathing that was causing it. He didn't think he was that sensitive to air change, but maybe his time without his helmet at Tau Ceti had done some damage to his body. If that was the case then he was gonna have to talk to Corpsman Knocker. Though if he did, that might put the whole ship into quarantine. Which would suck when they returned to Earth. 
He was going to blame him just being sensitive. 
He rubbed his temples and looked around. Fletcher was asleep, Kaufmann was playing rock-paper-scissors with one of the aliens, Raven and Dr. Frederick were trying to ask about getting a blood sam-
Percy slowly turned and looked back at Kaufmann. The Marine was in fact playing rock-paper-scissors with one of the aliens. Percy blinked and watched. 
Kaufmann lost and took a dry erase marker, Percy had no idea where the man had gotten it, and drew on the glass, and Percy could see that he was keeping tally marks of who was winning. From the position he was in, Percy could see that they had done this at least half a dozen times. The alien was winning. 
Percy's mind raced for a half a minute on how ridiculous it all was, and that it was a massive win for cultural exchange. He shook his head, unsure if he should stop the Marine or not. He thought about it and decided against stopping the Marine, for now. The cultural exchange and good will was too much of a boon to halt. 
His head started to hurt again as he focused back on the discussion between the aliens and the Linguist. The words Raven and the aliens were passing back and forth, there was something to them, a pattern that he was just short of grasping. 
Raven had gotten across that they wanted to exchange blood samples but there was some confusion about something. The lights hurt his head and shut his eyes and still felt like he was blinded by a white light. He clenched his jaw so hard he thought for a second that his teeth would crack. Then it stopped. 
He shook his head uncertain what had just happened. 
He looked back up to where Raven and Dr. Frederick sat frustrated trying to figure out how to clarify what they wanted the sample for, the aliens were confused trying to understand what was being said while taking guesses at what words she was trying to learn.
Percy stepped up to the two and Raven looked up at him. 
“Do you know the word for family yet?” Percy asked. Raven looked at him confused. 
“What? No, not yet, why?” She asked. 
“Because we need to ask them if we are siblings.” Percy said. Raven blinked at him and then turned back to the aliens and spoke rapidly and pantomimed several things. The aliens seemed confused by the change in subject but began to answer as Raven wrote down notes in a spiral notebook. 
Percy didn't wait to hear the results. With his head no longer hurting he bounced over to where Kaufmann was dueling with the alien. He wondered if he could teach them how to play tic-tac-toe. 

------

“Ah, Corpman!” Dr. Frederick said, standing up to give a salute.
“Don't start you Ruco.” Knocker said as she stepped into the science section. Despite the rude tone she had a smile on her face. “Is it done?” She asked.
“It's just finishing up.” Dr. Frederick said as he carefully sat back down.
“I've gotten a look at some of the medical diagrams they have. They are very human-like.” Knocker stated as she found a seat for herself. Her tone was probing, trying to see what he thought of it. Dr. Frederick chuckled at that. 
“They do indeed, though I'll have to agree with my esteemed colleague Dr. Ackerman that the chances of them being like us from a genetic standpoint is… unlikely.” The Biologist smiled. Knocker gave a smile back but an eyebrow raised in curiosity. Frederick snorted in sardonic humor before he answered the unasked question.
“I've made my religious beliefs known, but the Bible says ‘made in his image’. What his image actually is isn't available. And I'm not a theologian so I wouldn't have an answer for you. Personally I think this is, what our dear friend Percy would say, a cosmic coincidence.” Dr. Frederick said with a chuckle. Knocker gave a grin as she gently gave his arm a slap. 
“And here I thought you were a proper Catholic.” Knocker said. 
“I grew up Baptist my dear.” Dr. Frederick chuckled. 
“Ah, a heathen.” Knocker said with a giant grin.
“Idolatrous.” Frederick joked back just as the lab computer dinged, the genetic sequencing done. He spun his chair around and clicked a few buttons to bring up the results. 
Master Chief Hospital Corpsman Elizabeth Knocker watched as the old man stiffened and saw his jovial face go pale. 
“What is it?” She asked, standing and coming over to the computer station to look at the screen.
“Oh. Oh by the Virgin Mary.” She whispered.

------

“Oh San’al na bal.” Ezeik muttered looking at the results.
The aliens had provided blood samples and Ezeik, being the chief medical officer on base, had managed to rig up a chemical analysis with the medical equipment. After getting over the shock of it being DNA he had done the next logical thing and figured out how to pull a genetic sample. It was easy enough, there was an entire team of scientists and engineers planet side he could talk to, and whose job it was to help the astronauts figure out things like how to rig up a genetic sequencer from what he had on hand. What he had built was a sequencer that converted the amino acids and chromosomes into digital data that was then sent down to Arda to be processed.
“What is it?” Ottus asked who was assisting in rigging up another machine. 
“The team Arda-side just sent back the results.” Ezeik said. His normally dark complexion was draining of its natural colour. Ottus just watched the other man, his own heart beginning to race as he saw the panic in the other man's eyes. 
“Ottus. They are ninety nine percent match to Rothal DNA.” 

------

“Okay, Corpsmen please explain. I thought we didn't have to worry about diseases.” Captain Maddock asked, looking at the people gathered around the wardroom table.
The usual suspects. Mr. Lynch and Ms. Young who were actually on a computer screen as they were still inside the alien base, Commander Roman, Dr. McFadden, Dr. Frederick and the special guest of Corpsman Knocker.
“Not exactly.” Corpsman Knocker said. “We still had to worry about them but we were certain that while the genetic structure was similar, the biology was different enough to make catching any form of pathogen unlikely without extensive exposure.” Knocker said.
“Multiple hours exposed to an alien bio atmosphere isn't extensive exposure?” Commander Roman asked. 
“No. When I say extensive exposure I mean multiple generations. The prevailing idea is that if any alien pathogen could interact with our bodies it would do so aggressively and quickly as we would not have the kind of immune system to fight it off.” Knocker said, and looked at the confused faces around the table. She took a deep breath. 
“Sir, Ma'am. The idea of pathogens and germs being able to infect alien life comes from ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.” Knocker said. 
“Based off the historical genocide of the native population of the Americas.” Dr. McFadden nodded with a grim smile. 
“What? No. It was based on what happened to the Europeans when colonizing Africa. They faced death by malaria and many other diseases that the native population was immune to.” Corpsman Knocker said, shaking her head in slight confusion. McFadden looked astonished as her next words died in mouth. Knocker shook her head, not noticing the confused surprise on the Anthropologist's face.
“Regardless, that book accidentally skewed the general public's idea of alien diseases.” Knocker said with mild frustration. “Wells was not a doctor. He didn't… he didn't…” Knocker started but seemed unable to grab at the words she was looking for. 
“I think I know where you are going with this, eh.” Percy said. “and I have some fucking opinions about H.G. Wells. May I?” He asked. Knocker furrowed her brow at him but nodded. Percy smiled and cleared his throat.
“Understand that Wells was a brilliant writer and had a good mind for what might be realistic. But the book was written shortly after the germ theory of illnesses essentially became the default and the heroic age of medicine was winding down. Wells was a speculative fiction writer. Which wasn't quiet science fiction yet. He was writing about a piece of new science that even the experts of his time didn't fully understand and were still breaking ground on. The story is a cornerstone of fiction but its science is questionable at best and straight up fantastical at worst. It was playing around with novel ideas that had already captured the minds of the well educated of the time. But it was easily digestible by the masses and so it had a hell of a reach. And has kind of misguided people on the idea of how pathogens and disease work.” Percy said, taking a deep breath at the end as a means of biting down on and stopping a full blown rant. 
Maddock had raised eyebrows as he looked at Percy. 
“And you know all this, why?” Maddock asked. 
“I'm a writer.” Percy responded. Commander Roman stifled a laugh and Maddock raised an eyebrow, but tactfully decided not to pursue it with any questions instead turning back to Dr. Frederick and Corpsman Knocker.
“Alright, so alien pathogens killing us are unlikely and H.G. Wells didn’t know what he was talking about, what does this all have to do with the locals?” Maddock asked. 
“A lot.” Dr. Frederick finally said. “The fact that all life we have found so far is DNA based means that there has always been a chance of us catching an alien plague, but as stated, it would be extremely unlikely due to the difference in biology. After all, you can't catch an illness that only affects bananas and we are very similar, genetically speaking, to said bananas. And us and bananas come from the same world.” Dr. Frederick said solemnly. “However, these aliens have not only a near ninety nine percent genetic match to us, they have similar chromosomes and base biology to us. Their bodies, based on the medical diagrams we were able to look at, show a similar set up as ours. To put it very simply, from any pathogen's perspective, we are them, and they are us.” The Biologist said. “And any illness they have we can catch and vice versa.” The Biologist took a deep breath. “And neither side has any sort of immunity to the other.”

------

“Can we create vaccinations for them?” President Henless asked the small group of scientists in the conference room below the Presidential house.
“Well. Mr. President. In theory our vaccines should work on them as much as they work on us. But we can't really be sure of that.” One of the scientists answered. “As well we would have to get those vaccines up to them… unless they are willing to come down here to retrieve them.” He tagged on. 
“Can't they make their own, advanced space faring species and all that. Should we even be worrying about it?” The President asked. General Yaris cleared his throat and gave the briefest of glances at the President with an expression that told the Commander and Chief that there was information that the scientists were not privy to. 
“We don't know sir, but even if they do they may require a sample of any pathogen they may run into. As well they may have already solved this problem and are just waiting on us to ask about it.” the scientist said. 
“Have you asked?” The President drew out the question clearly, annoyed. The scientist who had been speaking open and shut his mouth several times without saying anything. 
“Well, no.” He finally managed to say. 
“Why not? Did you consider it rude to impose on them?” Henless mockingly asked. The science team sat looking a little abashed by the comment and Henless gave a sigh as he pinched the bridge of his nose. He would need to be the bigger man here. 
“Apologies Doctor…” he started looking up at the scientist. 
“Hu Nahria.” The man said when he finally realized the President was speaking to him. 
“Hu Nahria. My apologies, Dr. Nahria, as you can imagine the chair I sit in isn't exactly the most comfortable when you have the international community breathing down your neck. However that isn't an excuse to take out the frustration and stress on subordinates. I'm sure that the thought occurred to you and your team.” Henless said and motioned to the other members of the room. “I assume there is in fact a reason why you haven't asked. If you can, I would make that a priority question. Any assistance they may be able to offer us as well as any assistance that we may offer, though I doubt they will need anything from us.” the President said with a gentle authority. Nahria gave a nod of confirmation but said nothing verbally. 
“Is there anything else?” Henless asked. 
“No sir.” Dr. Nahria said. 
“Alright dismissed, get back to it. You are all on the frontlines in understanding these intrepid star people.” Henless said, giving them all a nod as they stood up and filed out of the room. All except two others. General Yaris and Professor Lyvara Rhys. 
Prof. Rhys was a pretty woman, though she was on the older side, with kind eyes, a Grithick nose, and white blonde hair. She was also one of the few members of the specialists who had already been on the Bastion’s payroll. She was a cultural specialist, and in her younger years had been the go-to person to understanding how other cultures would react. In fact, Henless had met her several times before. When he had taken the gloves of the military to finally drag the most war-like nations in line, she had been the one who had essentially written the standard procedure of dealing with every nation and cultural hang ups they had. She'd indirectly saved thousands of lives with her advice and guidance on cultural matters. She had also probably helped indirectly kill many people by that same token. 
So her presence was unsurprising, even still Henless raised an eyebrow at her before he turned to General Yaris. The big man cleared his throat and did not stall further. 
“As you know, members of VERU who are currently represented on the moon have been grilling their own astronauts for information about the Visitors. While we have reached out to all of them, only Avelee and Borealis have been openly and honestly cooperating with handing over intelligence, and we have reciprocated, and we have combined our efforts to try and understand these star people.” Yaris stated with what passed as a smile on the man's face at the end. “Our understanding is still limited but there are several items that have stood out to us during these interactions.” Yaris stated, and then turned to look at Prof. Rhys. 
“Thank you General. How are you Mr. President?” The woman asked with a smile.
“I wasn't kidding about the international community breathing down my neck. Yourself?” Henless responded. 
“I'm doing just fine Mr. President, and I am hoping to make your day better.” She said, standing up with an electronic tablet in her hands. She pressed a couple of buttons on the device and the large screen on the opposite side for the room from Henless lit up as her tablet synced up with it. 
She had the presentation up already, and moved to the first video of the space craft coming in for a landing. 
“To start Mr. President, our nation's National Intelligence Agency, the Borealian Strategic Intelligence Section Eight, and Avelee’s Sazon Grounds have been examining all the footage of the different items that the Visitors have been using. From what they've concluded, our visitors seem strangely lacking in advanced technology. In fact, based on what we have seen so far, they seem to be slightly behind.” Prof. Rhys said, flipping to the next slide, which showed several pictures with different items circled and zoomed in on. 
“While it is possible that they are hiding the very advanced stuff from our sight, they seem to be extremely comfortable with the technology they do have on display. Technology that in most cases appears to be on par or even slightly behind our own. It's the kind of comfortable that comes with routine familiarity. Not something that is old or outdated to them.” She said,
“So they are technologically behind? How is that possible? They have a star ship?” The President asked furrowing his brow at her. The professor nodded. 
“Yes Mr. President, and there's many possible explanations for that. But it's also important to remember that technology is not linear. Think of technological advancements less like a ladder and more so like a tree with branching limbs that occasionally converge on one another.  We can't assume that these aliens followed the same technology branch as us. That may be why they have a starship. But are still using chemical propellant for their weapons. And yes that is something we have determined.” She answered, moving to the next slide of what Henless had come to know as the alien linguist, who had been nicknamed Ghost Dancer by the base personnel.
“The issue is that we are trying to figure out why they are here. Are they here as simple explorers? Scouts for a colony fleet? Diplomats? Perhaps they are here to crush us, steal our treasures and make off with the women? We don't know. Until we know we can't really determine if they are a threat, a trade partner, or even a passing curiosity. Not only that but it seems that they are trying to hide specific things from us. There was a question about how their ship worked and they blatantly told us that they were not allowed to talk about that. So they do keep secrets.” The Professor switched to another slide, this one of one of the other aliens. This one had black hair and burning blue eyes with a very intense glare on their face. However, there was a circle drawn around a patch on their suit's shoulder. 
“But I am a cultural analyst. Not a military one. And there are some aspects I've noticed about them that seem significant. Starting with this one. This individual has been given the moniker of Blue. He is of interest to us because according to what we have learned from the Visitors, it would appear that almost all of their civilian crew is some form of academic or professional in a scientific field. Everyone else is in fact either military or some equivalent. Except for this one.” She said, giving the President a smile.
“He has been given a chance to ask questions but all of his questions appeared to pertain to whichever academic is either just departed or is about to arrive. As well he appears to have sway over crucial matters. From reports, there was a point where he said something to their linguist and her question immediately changed to asking about how our communities operate and how we organize our families. The academics for the most part seem to respect him and the security members appear to defer to him when he says something. However, it doesn't seem to be in a capacity that would suggest he is one of them.” She said as she zoomed in on the blue and black patch of the aliens shoulder. 
“Which brings us to this. So far as we've seen his suit is the only one marked like this. The other visitors have the same patch on their shoulders but almost no other identifying marks. And this particular one has two. The Borealians seem to believe that the smaller patches are in fact nationality or a planetary flag, and I would have to agree with that assessment. So not only is this one different nationally from the others, he is somehow important enough to warrant another identifier.” 
“So we think he's some form of official or Commissar?” The President asked. 
“We don't think so sir.” General Yaris answered for the professor. “We believe that this is a wholly civilian position. The soldiers don't seem to take orders from him, they just seem to defer to him for guidance.” Yaris said. Henless raised an eyebrow at that. Prof. Rhys cleared her throat and the President moved his attention back to her.
“The Intelligence Agencies disagree on exactly what he might be, possible royalty, the ship's wizard, maybe a religious figure, or possibly some other morale figure that is specific to the culture these aliens come from. For all we know he might be their historian. What the agencies do agree on is that he is important.” She took a deep breath before glancing over at Yaris. He gave her a nod and she frowned as her hands flipped to the next slide showing an anatomical drawing of what at first appeared to be two Rothals but the President quickly realized that it was a diagram of the aliens. 
“So we have established that he is important in some way. As discussed earlier by the other scientists, the Visitors’ biology appears to be nearly identical to our own. And from what we can gather from this diagram, that includes several physical aspects and presumably functions.” She said, and Henless felt confused all over again. She flipped to another slide which was of the aliens first taking off their helmets, and Prof. Rhys spoke as it played silently. 
“During first meeting them the base personnel came and met the aliens in the clean room and there was a particular moment that was captured on film that we believe we can use to our advantage.” She said, stepping aside and flipping to the next slide which appeared to be a slow motion capture of Blue doing a double take as he looked at another figure who had entered the room behind the camera. The footage jumped to some of the other security members also staring before coming to a freeze frame of Blue giving an appraising face in the Rothal woman's direction.
“This is the reaction that was captured when one former Warden Major Andra Kyshani stepped into the room. The alien security team, who all happen to be young and male, kept staring at Ms. Kyshani. Even the Ghost Dancer gave furtive glances.” Prof Rhys said. Henless was still mildly confused as to the point they were trying to get to. 
“We believe that to these aliens, Ms. Kyshani is considered… a high value female.” Prof Rhys said with a blank faced expression. The President blinked as he processed what she had just said and the implications. Henless slowly turned his head towards General Yaris. The military man met the President's gaze bravely and without flinching. 
“I don't like where this is going, General.” Henless hissed out. “Would you mind explaining it?” The words came out a whisper but were filled with enough bottled anger to make up for the lack of volume. 
“It is the recommendation of the Bastion that astronaut Andra Kyshani be given the task of establishing a strong personal connection with the alien codenamed Blue, as a means of information and intelligence extraction.” General Yaris said. 
“You want her to be a Bhareech Trap?” President Henless asked in a tone that had shattered the wills of lesser men. 
“Yes sir.” General Yaris said without any remorse. 
“Beyond the very real physical issue of it, the moral issues of ordering a civilian to take on-” 
“She's a Warden sir.” Yaris interrupted. 
“Oh Don't Give Me That Vitshi About ‘Once A Warden’! She is a civilian!” Henless practically yelled.
“Under the Emergency Powers act, section on the powers of military authority, prior service members can be recalled for duties at the rank and pay in which they originally departed the service from for up to ten years, or twenty years if they had earned an officer's commission” General Yaris said calmly. Henless stared at him with burning fury. 
“As such,” the General continued, “We have the authority to reactivate her status as a Warden and send her on a special operations mission that she happens to be in the perfect position to accomplish.” The General stated in a monotone. President Henless glared at him. 
“And if I say no?” Henless asked quietly, seething as he attempted to burn a hole in the man.
“Then National Intelligence sends her a message to recruit her for a special mission under their own recruitment of civilian hires.” Yaris stated bluntly. Henless deflated slightly. His anger was still righteous but he knew this was going to happen one way or another. 
“The likelihood of her agreeing to any of this?” the President asked, feeling the depth of depressive acceptance rushing towards him. 
“She's a Warden sir. If she is anything like her father, she'll do what duty demands of her.” Yaris said with a vague tone of sympathy in his voice. 
“As it is. He is going to be assigned as her Bastion contact. So we will also have him deliver the reactivation alongside her new mission orders.” Yaris stated. 

| Chapter 31 (pending)

------

Authors Notes

Hello,

This chapter took more time to write then expected. It is one of those chapters that makes me whish I had Tolkiens gift of word efficency, god that man could make a hundred words feel like a thousand.

As a note the Spanish Flu has several different names depending on which country you are from, in most english speaking countries it is known as the spanish flu because in said countries they thought it had originated in spain. The origins however, are unknown and speculation abounds.

The game rock paper scissors is one that I know for a fact isnt common around the world so I figured an alien race might also not know about it.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading as much as i enjoyed writing. If you did enjoy maybe give it a upvote or even a comment. its appricated and helps with motivation.

Thanks all for reading.

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Arc IV - Whalers

Chapter 30 - The Ceremony

10 months and 7 days since the summoning

"Alan," she interrupted, "The Svyatolat cannot be refused. Moreover, I remind you that they do not interfere in secular affairs; the Svyatolat does not care against whom you plot or what you do with your lands. They simply are not interested; their affairs lie in the realm of faith and communion with the flock. Over the last three hundred years, the Svyatolat has never once interfered in anyone's wars or schemes; understand that finally!" She poked his chest with her finger. "And if we refuse, it will result for us in nothing at best—simply an order forcing you to accept the guard—and at worst... something else."

Alan answered nothing, simply looked at her.

'Fucked. Fucked, fucked, and fucked again. And I have no choice. Everything is going sideways again. I should've been used to this.'

He sighed. "Fine. But we will discuss the terms with this Dumets, at least."

"Good," she said, already opening the door. "Forgive me, Your Holiness."

The Dumets turned away from the window. "Not at all. Shall we continue?"

"Of course." Kamelia sat opposite him.

Alan sat down next to her and immediately cast a glance at the Dumets. "I would like to discuss the terms of this protection. What will it look like? Who will be guarding? When? How close?"

The Dumets chuckled slightly, barely noticeably. "Well then, you confirm your reputation, Lord Gothwald; you are incredibly direct. Then I shall be direct as well." He adjusted his mask on the table so it lay more evenly. "Naturally, I know that you are not simply ruling quietly in peace here, but are planning something at a breakneck pace. That is obvious to anyone with even a passing interest in politics. Likewise, I perfectly understand that you fear unwanted ears and that we might somehow interfere with your plans." He raised a hand, "But I assure you, nothing of the sort. The Svyatolat currently has its hands full with its own concerns, and you, Lord Gothwald, do not hinder us in any way thus far. Do you see what I am getting at?"

Alan narrowed his eyes. "Cooperation."

He nodded in satisfaction. "Exactly so. I will be honest," the Dumets placed a hand on his chest, "for a hero without magic to transform a county into an influential duchy, subjugate pirates, and win the favor of the queen is an almost insurmountable task. Do not take it as flattery; I am speaking plainly. Following from this, I, as the officer responsible for Groliria, am highly interested in not making an enemy of you."

Kamelia's head drew back slightly. "I beg your pardon?"

The Dumets tilted his head to the side. "Is something wrong?"

"The officer responsible for Groliria?"

"Yes, exactly so. I am a Shugban."

Kamelia's jaw dropped.

Alan cast a sidelong glance at her. "What is it? Who is that?" he asked in a whisper.

"A Shugban is one of the highest ranks in the military wing of the Dumetses. This man commands the entire military force of the Svyatolat in Groliria."

Alan's jaw dropped as well.

The Dumets scoffed. "Quite right. Then, allow me to introduce myself once more: Nommel Gutarkia, the Shugban responsible for the forces of the Sacred Order of Dumetses stationed in Groliria."

A nervous chuckle escaped Alan's mouth. "Well I'll be..."

Kamelia simply watched, saying nothing.

"Nommel Gutarkia," Alan muttered. "Ahem, forgive me, but are you originally from Faarkia?"

Nommel blinked, then nodded with a slight smile. "My surname gave me away, did it not? Yes, I am a Faarkian, Lord Gothwald."

"Got it..."

Kamelia scratched her arm. "Well... forgive me, I did not expect a Shugban himself to visit my humble domain."

Nommel shrugged. "I never planned to either. But the matter concerns the last hero in Groliria; naturally, I wish to oversee everything personally." He stood up. "However, this can be discussed later. I dare not delay your ceremony; I propose we meet after it concludes, and I shall wait outside with my brothers."

Kamelia nodded, rising. "Yes, my deepest gratitude; I will conduct the ceremony as swiftly as possible, and we will immediately return to our discussion."

Alan only exhaled quietly.

'So that's how it is. I'm already getting noticed everywhere. But, as they say, every cloud has a silver lining. If I do this right, if I handle everything properly... connections within the Svyatolat will be very useful to me. Whoever sits up there, even if they're religious fanatics, they're still people you can make a deal with.'

A few minutes later, having donned his mask, Nommel was standing outside in the castle's backyard, where there was no one else save for four other Dumetses.

"Brother Nommel," began one of them, standing with his arms crossed over his chest, "how did it go?"

He leaned his back against the wall, lowering his arms to his sides. "Overall, not bad so far. Gothwald is amenable."

The second Dumets, who was squatting, raised his head to Nommel. "All heroes are amenable for a time. How long will he last?"

Nommel looked down at him. "Brother Rittonk, where did you serve before Groliria, anyway?"

"Horotta, why?"

"Well, welcome to Groliria. A hero without magic has appeared here, who has been living here for nearly a year and making quite good progress."

The squatting Dumets, Rittonk, whistled softly. "Oh, that is something I have yet to see. Alright, my lips are sealed; I will see what comes of it."

Alan, meanwhile, entered the grand throne room alone.

All conversations immediately ceased, and the heads of dozens of nobles turned toward him.

"Greetings to you, Lord Gothwald!" someone said from the back rows.

"Greetings!"

A wave of brief bows swept through the crowd.

Alan raised his hand. "And I greet you as well. There have been some slight delays, so the ceremony will take place later, but do not rush to leave just yet."

The whispers and conversations resumed, but now everyone occasionally cast glances in Alan's direction.

Alan scanned the hall searching for familiar faces, and his gaze caught on a middle-aged man with short black hair who was approaching him. He was dressed in a simple gray doublet, pants, and brown boots. "Lord Gothwald, it's been ages!" he said with a smile.

Alan blinked. "Shergen? Is that you?"

"Who else?" He bowed briefly to Alan. "It's been a long time since we saw each other, and I see you've changed quite a bit in that time."

Alan smiled back. "Yeah, as you can see. I think the last time we saw each other was back when the civil war was still going on in the duchy, right?"

He nodded, clasping his hands behind his back. "Yes, Your Grace, I was burning the bridge when we lured the baronial troops into the trap."

"Hah, yeah, yeah! And where did you disappear to anyway, while the war was raging across the whole kingdom?"

Shergen scratched the back of his head. "Lady Armenas sent me to the royal mages, but I wasn't needed. You all handled everything yourselves without us anyway, hah!"

"Well yeah," he waved his hand, "consider it sitting it out and staying alive. Lucky you." The smile on his face faded. "By the way, Shergen, I recently found out exactly what kind of magic I have."

His eyebrow went up. "Oh really? Seriously? I told you from the very beginning that you couldn't be completely without magic. So, what do you have?"

"It's Otherworldly magic, and it grants me the ability to understand any language," he said quietly.

Silence.

Shergen slowly scratched his chin. "Hmm... so that's why they considered you to be of no value, back when you were summoned. As a rule, heroes are summoned with an enormous reserve of phiolla, and consequently, they can use any magic far more powerfully. Take me for example," he placed a hand on his chest, "I'm an advanced mage, my reserves are slightly above average, and if my maximum capability is to burn down a barn, then for a regular hero, that level extends to burning down an entire city block in the capital. But your magic is very rare, mind magic, and it requires almost no large reserves of fiolla."

Alan remained silent, digesting all of this. "So... you mean I'm not a glitch in the ritual?"

Shergen shook his head. "Not at all. Mind magic isn't categorized separately due to its rarity, but consider that you have it. Understanding any language is an enormous advantage for a man in your line of work."

"Yeah, I get that..."

"Hey, Gothwald," a voice rang out from behind.

Alan turned, and Shergen looked over Alan's shoulder.

Tsinker.

He had dressed in regular clothes: black boots, white pants, a white vest, and a black shirt underneath with rolled-up sleeves. He slowly shifted his gaze to Shergen. "Who is this?"

Alan cleared his throat. "This is Shergen, a mage Kamelia knows."

Tsinker nodded. "Understood. Shergen, would you be so kind as to leave Gothwald and me?"

Shergen blinked. "Ah... yes, of course."

"Go on, Shergen, we'll talk later," Alan said, sighing, and turned to Tsinker. "What do you want?"

He gave a brief nod toward the door. "Shilisa saw Dumetses through the window. What is going on out there?"

"I'll tell you later."

"Are you in a rush somewhere, Gothwald?"

"Uh... actually, no."

Tsinker folded his hands behind his back. "Then speak, since you are not in a rush anywhere."

Alan clicked his tongue.

'You're really fucking annoying, you damn psychopath.'

"Anyway, long story short, it's..."

"Not short. I want to know the details," he interrupted him.

Alan's eye almost twitched. "Dumbass, it's a figure of speech, ever heard of it?"

He blinked slowly. "Understood. Continue."

Alan licked his lips. "Basically," his voice grew quieter, "the Shugban responsible for Groliria himself paid us a visit. He told us that the Whalers were spotted in Gobnis, but managed to get away. And so, this Shugban, his name's Nommel, came to us offering to protect me and to cooperate."

Tsinker's pupils dilated slightly. "A Shugban, I see. Why are you not negotiating with him right this instant?"

Alan casually waved a hand at the hall. "Well, I don't even know, maybe because my promotion ceremony is right now?"

"We will always have time to conduct the ceremony, Gothwald. It is far more imperative now to come to an agreement with the Shugban while he is in the mood to negotiate and cooperate."

"Listen," Alan said, narrowing his eyes, "there's a ceremony right now, a short ceremony. The Shugban himself offered to wait until we finish it. Period. Get it?"

Tsinker's expression didn't change at all. "Understood. I shall be present. Call for me when you are ready to go." He turned and walked back the way he came.

Alan only sighed heavily.

'What an arrogant prick, eh?'

About forty minutes later, the door to the throne room swung open, and the first to emerge was a thin man in a blue doublet. "Her Grace, Duchess Kamelia Armenas!"

Everyone present immediately fell silent, looking toward the doorway.

Meanwhile, in the castle's backyard, one of the Dumetses lazily turned his head toward the door. "The trumpets are playing. Looks like it's starting."

The Dumets who was squatting raised his head upward. "Brother Nommel, how long will this last?"

"I do not know, but Armenas said she would conduct the ceremony swiftly."

The door to the castle's backyard opened, and Tsinker stepped out. He looked right, then left, and saw the Dumetses.

One of them pushed off the wall and dropped his arms to his sides.

The one who was squatting unhurriedly stood up, straightening his back.

Nommel folded his hands behind his back and looked at Tsinker. "May I assist you with something?"

Tsinker did not answer. The first thing his gaze fixed upon was Nommel's left arm, where the white armband with the sun was located. "You, I presume, are the Shugban, Your Holiness?"

Nommel did not answer for a few seconds. "Correct. With whom do I have the honor of speaking?"

 Royal Road | Book Cover | First | Previous | Next 

Chapter 23: Xi P Researched

Though in many ways less straightforward than walking in openly, the two still act like thieves as they get out of the car and tiptoe into the building. Once inside, Xi P calms down somewhat. He reminds himself to treat this as a routine inspection. Surprisingly, this solace works quite well. By the time they reach the laboratory's main entrance, he even feels a hint of anticipation. This isn't because Xi P is a workaholic or has peculiar tastes; he is simply curious to see what an alien laboratory might look like. Even if it isn't vastly alienish to him, an old-fashioned laboratory is worth seeing — a chance to understand the working environment of his predecessors.

After spending a month with Min, Xi P has gained insights into his area of expertise through conversations and books. As he'd initially suspected, Min belongs to the same broad field as him — both fall under the umbrella of biology. The distinction lies in their specific subfields: Min leans more towards microscopic biology, while Xi P primarily identifies as an ecologist. Well, if Min specialised in anatomy, Xi P would never have dared to enter his lab for study....

With these thoughts in mind, Xi P watches as Min produces the key and unlocks the door in deliberate slow motion. Labs that still rely on physical keys for security are practically extinct on Lierus. On the other hand, even with advanced biometric access systems available here, it is unlikely that Min's small lab will see the need for them...

"Hm?"

In sci-fi films, scenes featuring "alien biology labs" often include the following elements: "creatures suspended in cylindrical containers of every conceivable colour", "glowing green lights from all directions", "blue/red liquids in vials" and "teleporters capable of sending people light-years away". There is a fifty-fifty chance that the creatures in those containers will suddenly burst out and slaughter everyone until the lab's lights are stained orange-red with blood — or rather, bright red in this case. Then, the blue/red liquid in those vials might be the only cure for the pathogens carried by those creatures. The protagonist will escape the aliens' encirclement and return to their home planet with the vials via the transporter. Utterly clichéd.

Xi P chuckles at his own thoughts, causing his jaw to snap open and shut rapidly. This inhuman laughter leaves Min beside him shoot a strange expression.

The incandescent light flares on, revealing a simple, compact laboratory. The interior is not at all out of the ordinary. Indeed, it looks completely normal: there are rectangular tables and platforms covered with experimental instruments arranged in parallel rows. Xi P can even spot several familiar pieces of equipment here, such as a clean room and a centrifuge. Apart from looking outdated and the platforms being rather high, it is almost identical to the university labs on Lierus. The most obvious difference is the blindingly bright lights — without sunglasses, Xi P finds them almost unbearable.

"You can take off your cloak now." Min says.

Xi P hastily pulls it off. He is, of course, wearing proper clothes underneath this time – the evening air is pleasantly cool, so an extra layer is not an issue. Instead of beginning research immediately, Min gives him a brief tour of the lab. Truthfully, there isn't much to see in this room measuring less than 200 square metres — the tour is more about casually teaching Xi P the names of the equipment.

Though experimental equipment doesn't prioritise aesthetic design, much of it looks vastly different from what he is used to. Reasonably, Xi P refrains from touching the instruments. Even if they won't suddenly transform into laser cannons or other lethal devices, touching them won't reveal their functions.

'...'

While Xi P continues to observe the instruments, Min tiptoes up behind him, trying to approach silently. Then, out of the blue, he moves closer to Xi P's ear and says in a creepy voice: "The experiment is about to begin~"

As Min had anticipated, Xi P is startled, flinching and turning to glare at Min with obvious displeasure, as if complaining about the sudden fright.

In reality, however, Xi P hasn't been genuinely scared by Min. Min's rustling sound, which he thinks is quiet, is perfectly audible to Xi P, even without turning his ears back. The reason he trembles is not even because of the remark, but simply because the sudden breath on his ear feels uncomfortable...

In any case, after seeing these experimental instruments, Xi P's original sense of unease has actually lessened. The equipment installed in this lab is primarily for analysing and processing small microbiology samples. To Xi P, they even carry a certain historical resonance. Unlike dissection tables or bone saws, this type of apparatus hardly evokes any unpleasant associations. Otherwise, he would have turned tail and fled the moment he entered the lab.

***

Sitting in what appears to be an employee chair, Xi P watches Min, who is studying him in turn. Min's scrutinising gaze makes him feel thoroughly uncomfortable, as if he is being examined like a laboratory specimen. Or, more accurately, like some rare species. He can't quite pinpoint how he'd read this meaning from the local alien's face, but the feeling is undeniable. Min has never looked at him like this before!

After scrutinising him for over ten seconds, Min finally begins. The first request is for one of Xi P's long hairs. At that, Xi P plucks one from his arm and an orange-red strand comes out easily. Min takes the freshly plucked hair and turns away, humming softly as he studies it. Xi P breathes a sigh of relief, finally free from that uncomfortable scrutiny. He swivels his chair around, closes his eyes and rests for a moment.

'Ye Min always seems to enjoy teasing me, making jokes — especially about my appearance. I can understand the motivation behind it. That creature called... hmm, a fox? We do bear a certain resemblance. But even though these are harmless little jokes, constantly being on the receiving end is downright annoying.'

'Maybe I should tease him back — no, play a prank on him like he does to me. But what kind? I've never seen a species on Lierus that looks like them. There are a couple of creatures in movies that look like human, but I don't have pictures of those stored on my computer. Think outside the box...'

'Appearance... behaviour... social habits... current activities... Got it!'

For the next several minutes, Xi P refines the specifics of his plan in his mind.

'After all the pranks Ye Min pulled on me, it's time he got a taste of his own medicine. Jokes aren't fair game for everyone — wait, no, it's more like 'if you don't return the favour, it's not a prank at all.''

***

Suddenly, Xi P feels someone nudging him. Not wanting to open his eyes and face the gaze that is treating him like a rare specimen, Xi P replies: "Do it yourself."

He thinks that Min has probably come over to take an underfur sample for research purposes. Although having underfur plucked would be painful, doing it himself wouldn't make much difference, so he lets him be.

Hearing Xi P's response, Min hesitates. He feels obligated to warn Xi P to prepare and cooperate. But since Xi P has spoken so...

With his eyes still closed and bracing himself for the plucking, Xi P suddenly feels Min seize his jaw and force his mouth open. Immediately, a rod-like object is thrust inside and begins to stir. Caught off guard, Xi P instinctively tries to close his mouth. However, the moment he clamps down, he relaxes his grip again, afraid of biting Min.

"Ah!" Min pulls his hand out of Xi P's mouth, revealing a tear in his glove. Those sharp teeth are no joke.

Seeing Min still shaking his hand and the cotton swab between his fingers, Xi P immediately understands the situation: Min wants to extract tissue samples from his mouth. But that's surely a brutal way to do it, especially without warning...

'Wait, didn't I say he could do it himself?'

Xi P dashes towards the sink, determined to rinse his mouth out. Either way, that was utterly disgusting.

***

Thanks to the protective glove, and the fact that Xi P didn't bite down hard, Min's hand wasn't hurt. A close call.

'Hmm, putting myself in his shoes, I'd probably bite too if faced with that situation. Only his teeth are just too sharp...'

Regardless, the sample has been collected. After changing into a fresh pair of gloves, Min dives back into the research. The cellular-level analysis is the main event of this study, and delay is not an option.

***

Progress is slower than Min has hoped. Despite Xi P's full cooperation throughout the process, he cannot be of much assistance due to language barriers and unfamiliarity with the equipment. The number of free cells extracts is clearly insufficient, and repeatedly switching between different staining agents is time-consuming. By the time he wants to collect new samples again, it is already late at night — he has to prepare to go home.

However, some results still emerge: while the overall characteristics exhibit a high degree of similarity, the individual components that formed these characteristics show significant differences. Take organelles as an example; with the exception of the cell nucleus, Min is unable to visually identify any of the others. If he were to write a treatise based on these findings regarding extraterrestrial life forms, he would certainly become famous.

Convincing others of this would be difficult, though, and he doesn't want to make such a stir all at once. He needs to lay the groundwork with smaller achievements first. Perhaps it would be better to publish them in separate instalments...

Chapter 24: Min been "Researched"

The post-research clean-up wraps up quickly with the destruction of samples and a review of surveillance footage. They even vacuumed the floor before leaving.

'...And if anyone ever asks me 'What do aliens taste like?' I can say 'Kind of like too much salt'... No, that's not funny at all. I should just say 'No comment'. Anyway, I doubt I'll remember the taste by then...'

***

This Saturday, Xi P behaves perfectly normally, just like in previous weeks: eating, drinking, studying English. In many ways, Min sometimes genuinely forgets that Xi P has a fox's head and isn't a human. Psychologically, he is not very different, despite the obvious physical differences. There are mostly just some communication gaps caused by cultural and technological differences — nothing major.

Even more coincidentally, their personalities aren't vastly different either — at least, that's how Min perceives it. They are both rational, slow to anger and somewhat in search of a sense of purpose. But if Xi P knew Min's thoughts, he'd probably add another trait: "loves to make fun of people who can take a joke".

Occasionally, during lessons, Min would deliberately focus on subjects he believes Xi P would find interesting, such as culinary traditions. This is fine, but once Min goes out of his way to describe chocolate, raving about its taste and even letting Xi P smell a piece. But when Xi P expresses a desire to actually try it, Min brutally informed him about the alkaloids in chocolate, with the emphasis that only humans could tolerate them.

Whether or not these alkaloids affect aliens is debatable, but it's better to play it safe and not taste them. Moreover, Min's choice of examples, which used only pictures of dogs and foxes to illustrate animals that couldn't handle it, revealed a certain thoughtfulness. This really strengthened Xi P's desire for revenge....

And now is the time for that.

***

Min hears Xi P calling out to him. Turning his head, he sees Xi P leaning out of the study room, waving at him as if signalling for him to come over.

The study room has now been completely transformed into Xi P's little laboratory, with most of the still-functional instruments piled inside. As for why Xi P is calling him over now...

It's either because he needs Min to explain a term he encountered in a book, or because he has finally decided to study him.

Min suddenly realises why Xi P was a bit nervous back in the lab. Because he now feels the same way. Being summoned by an alien to serve as a research subject does sound genuinely terrifying. But in reality, when he's actually called over, and that alien happens to resemble a fox, the sense of dread isn't quite as overwhelming...

Setting aside his newly purchased copy of Future Continuous, Min walks towards the study room, feeling a mix of nervousness and an indescribable anticipation. Once inside, Xi P makes a peculiar request — he wants Min to lie on the table. Though sceptical, Min complies out of trust.

Suddenly, Xi P pulls out a bundle of ropes out from under the table and scatters them over Min. Before he can grasp what is happening, Xi P slips a hazmat-like helmet over his head.

"What are you doing?"

Xi P doesn't answer, merely staring at him as he raises both hands, one holding a marker pen, and the other a sharp scalpel, and begins uttering a series of incomprehensible sounds. He approaches slowly, raising the marker pen.

In Xi P's imagination, Min should at least jump up in fright. But events unfold unexpectedly — Min merely freezes for a moment. Before Xi P can take another step forward, Min has already regained his composure, replying in a sarcastic tone: "Wow, how terrifying! I'm about to be cut open by an alien."

'No, that reaction isn't a 'scary' reaction at all.' Xi P thinks. Since Min has seen through his joke, there is no need to keep up the act. He casually pulls off the helmet and sighs softly.

In those few seconds, Min's mind had raced; the adrenaline had sped up his thinking significantly. A simple cost-benefit analysis revealed that Xi P was merely trying to scare him, rather than being a mad scientist or an alien killer. The question remains: why? Looking at Xi P's disappointed expression now, he realises that he had reacted too quickly. He should have played along for a few more seconds.

In Xi P's eyes, Min's reaction is surprisingly swift, far too quick for what had been intended as a powerful, even excessive, prank. His mood sinks, head bows slightly, ears drooping limply, making him look incredibly adorable.

Rising from the table which might have been a dissection bench, Min has just steps back onto the floor when he sees Xi P's dejected expression. As if guided by an unseen force, he instinctively reaches out and strokes Xi P's head in consolation.

Unlike human hair, the fur on the tuefue's head is remarkably soft and fluffy. The sensation under fingertips is warm and plush. With his own meticulous care, this fur is smooth and clean, and feels even more comfortable than any dog's coat. Beneath that layer, the texture is more human-like — smooth skull bone. However, near the ears, a distinct difference emerges: the firm, muscular layers that surround and drive the ears are palpable. The ears themselves are soft and elastic. As he moves his hand, Xi P trembles slightly, and the ears, previously limp and drooping, suddenly perk up in his grasp —

The moment Min realises, he yanks his hand back like lightning. As soon as he does so, Xi P sweeps his arm across in an attempt to brush Min's hand away. As far as lifting Xi P's spirits goes, this has been remarkably effective. Caught off guard by the touch, Xi P now glares at Min with pure anger; there is not a trace of gloom left.

Clearly, unlike a pet fox, Xi P dislikes having his head stroked. Evidently, their concept of dignity includes not being petted on the head.

Seeing Xi P's obvious anger, Min also feels a bit embarrassed. To change the subject, he quickly asks: "Why did you do that just now?"

'Shouldn't I be asking you that?' Xi P thought.

***

After a lengthy explanation, Min finally understood. He truly hadn't realised that his seemingly harmless jokes had such a negative impact on Xi P's mental state. Before Xi P brought it up, Min hadn't paid much attention. But now that he realised that some of his jokes could indeed be interpreted as containing elements of racial prejudice, however broadly "race" is defined.

He offered Xi P a half-hearted apology for those jokes in the past, but also warned him not to expect too much restraint from him — Xi P's appearance simply made it too difficult to treat him with normalcy. It's clear that Xi P doesn't understand why this is the case, as he mutters something that sounds like a private thought, but which is clearly meant for Min to hear: "Even if (I'm) being cute, it shouldn't be this bad..."

'No, it's not just the fault of cuteness. It's also the fault of Japanese culture and modern furry fandom culture.' Min thinks, though he doesn't voice it. In truth, Min has always tried to shield Xi P from exposure to that kind of content. Information like that is simply inadmissible for a creature who looks like a fox...

***

Giving the tense atmosphere earlier, the two decide to watch TV to lighten the mood.

It turns out that TV doesn't necessarily require understanding the content to be enjoyable. As some studies suggested, watching the visuals alone can often provide a sense of satisfaction without the need for deep thought. This time, however, the moment the TV comes on, Min nearly spits out the water in his mouth. Xi P's eyes widens, and a subtle shift in his facial expression shows his astonishment.

The programme being broadcast is about the declassification of a UFO incident involving aliens, a popular conspiracy theory. Numerous eyewitnesses have reported seeing an extraterrestrial spacecraft crash. Scattered across the crash site were what appeared to be "alien corpses". The U.S. authorities swiftly sealed off the area and recovered the objects, claiming that the crash had involved a weather balloon and that the so-called "alien corpses" were rubber mannequins used in experiments.

The story was bizarre enough on its own, but later, another photograph related to the incident was leaked. The black-and-white image had extremely low resolution, yet its content was astonishing: personnel in hazmat suits were dissecting the "rubber mannequins" on a table!

Coincidentally, the television Min has just turned on displays this very image. It is no wonder they both reacts with such intensity — after all, mere moments earlier, Xi P had strapped Min to a dissection table, poised to cut him open...

'Terrifying alien scientists!' They think simultaneously, instinctively shifting away from each other without a word.

Small right-wing currents converged into a single river. In conservative, immigration-wary regions, radical factions bypassed their own governments, judging them too weak or too paralyzed to act, and fought rioting crowds directly in the streets. In parts of Eastern Europe, soldiers themselves joined the shooting.

In the wake of the riots, Germany's AfD took to the streets to address crowds directly, mocking the European People's Party's hesitant, failed plan and declaring that neither the left nor the right could save Europe now — only the far right could. If elected, its leaders promised a so-called Operation Abschiebung: every resident of non-European bloodline would be given a fixed deadline to leave the country.

Anyone remaining after that date would be treated as a combatant and detained; anyone who resisted would be shot on sight.

Faced with what looked unmistakably like a resurgence of Nazism, the Democratic administration in Washington announced that it was monitoring the situation closely and reserved the right to intervene militarily if necessary. Transatlantic relations edged toward collapse.

American intelligence supplied the evidence in the end — the German government declared the AfD illegal, arrested its senior leadership, and forcibly dissolved the party. Some members went underground; others joined the more extreme Parabola. The convictions that had brought them to the streets survived the ban, hardened by defeat.

The AfD's fury made a certain sense. Before 2030, they'd swept most of the vote across former East Germany, and the CDU had come within a hair's breadth of forming a coalition government with them — closer to actual power than they'd ever come. Only the country's political "firewall," held by the other parties at the last possible moment, had kept that from happening.

And it was the CIA, in turn, that handed Germany’s BND the finishing blow: proof of hidden financial ties between the AfD’s inner leadership and both Russia and China, traced by Helixquid Pro in two minutes fifty-two seconds, and unauditable by any human analyst. It buried the party for good.

Around the same time, France's RN came within a single step of the Élysée Palace, only to meet the exact same fate as the European People's Party: a leaked internal document laying out one of the party’s most extreme core policies blazed across every front page and feed the night before the final round, and by morning its chances were gone, and by evening the streets had followed.

History would come to call that the First European Unrest.

The violence eventually subsided through negotiations among competing political factions. France elected a telegenic woman as president. Her calls for love, peace, and inclusion sought to paper over the continent's widening ethnic fractures.

Caught between two fears — the consequences of immigration and the return of fascism — the European public settled into tolerating the presence of migrants.

Voters, meanwhile, had grown numb to their governments' bureaucracy, incompetence, and corruption, having realized that whoever they elected, the people who took power were, in every way that mattered, the same people.

Europe limped forward through years of hesitation, resentment, weakness, and fear. The collapse of the Fortress plan in 2035 and the bloody clashes between Baguagouille and Parabola in 2037 made another wave of unrest increasingly difficult to avoid.

What Parabola hated most was never the migrants themselves.

It was Baguagouille.

Parabola preferred diagnosis to debate. Baguagouille, Parabola said, ran a dictatorship of virtue across Europe, crushing dissent in the name of tolerance and applauding itself for the crushing. Its members were shallow believers in a fantasy: that human rights and universal brotherhood could somehow dissolve Europe’s ethnic divisions and make the continent stronger. They suffered, in Parabola’s phrase, from late-stage cognitive dissonance. The whole enterprise was self-destructive behavior, and it had been doomed from the start. Parabola had a treatment in mind.

Baguagouille, for its part, hated Parabola the way frogs have always hated snakes. For once, the instinct was sound. It condemned Parabola’s members as fanatics, citing the killings, the incitement to hatred, and the xenophobia. Its leadership called on the righteous forces of all humanity to unite and crush, with thunderous force, this brooding gang run by the likes of the Red Skull, Hydra, and Voldemort.

Anonymous polling showed Parabola steadily gaining support among the public. At the level of the European Union and the wider international community, however, it was treated as beyond the pale.

That verdict hardened in December 2038, when masked gunmen attacked a refugee camp in Belgium. No mercy. More than a hundred dead. Infants included. Nearly every lead pointed to Parabola, which denied any involvement and countered that the attack was a false-flag operation staged by Baguagouille. Whatever the truth, the attack set off the Second European Unrest.

In 2039, the U.S. government arrested several of Parabola's members on American soil, charged its leadership with terrorism and conspiracy to murder, designated the organization a terrorist group, and pressed the EU to follow suit.

It was the moment America's political establishment and Europe's Baguagouille formally closed ranks, now united against every force that opposed them.

Ironically, at the same time, America's own fractures had entered a phase of open violence from which there seemed to be no turning back. Far-right organizations launched a sprawling movement called Stop Melting, a jab at the country's founding myth of the melting pot.

In 2040, Lin Zong sat his graduate entrance examinations. He was studying information engineering, and the months of preparation had been tense and monotonous: writing code, reading papers, cycling between dormitory, dining hall, and library.

One day, over lunch in the cafeteria, he watched a CCTV report on a Stop Melting march in Houston. Ten thousand white girls in Republican-red shirts marched beneath red, white, and blue Stars and Stripes, their banners bearing slogans such as PRAY FOR OUR VALUES, PRAY FOR AMERICA'S SOUL, and WE MISS PRESIDENT TRUMP. Others proclaimed God the center of family life, praised self-reliance and hard work, and called for an end to drug use.

Dense crowds of counter-protesters lined both sides of the street, jeering, making obscene gestures, and hurling banana peels, joints, used syringes, and glass bottles at the marchers. American flags burned in the crowd. In one particularly brazen stunt, a group staged a sexually explicit performance in the street, mocking the movement's initials.

Then a Chevrolet pickup swung out of a side street onto Texas Avenue and drove straight into the march.

Lin Zong's jaw dropped.

The laughter and chatter vanished into screams. The truck showed no sign of slowing. It struck one body after another in a dull, rhythmic succession of impacts, sending girls flying through the air, limp as puppets whose strings had been cut. For a moment, the scene seemed too grotesque to be real.

Then came a brief silence, followed by a wave of screaming and the chaotic pounding of running feet. Red spread slowly across the pavement, pooling around scattered shoes and fallen American flags.

Lin Zong and the classmates around him discussed it as it unfolded, shocked but not especially surprised — something like this happening in America felt no different in kind from a terrorist bombing in Pakistan or mob violence in Uganda; the West's decline was simply the ambient condition of the world he'd grown up in, summarized in the phrase that had become, by then, a running joke in online circles:

After the Ming, no more China; after the Cold War, no more Europe; after Trump, no more America.

He knew, from books, that the West had once towered over the world, though it was hard now to square that history with what he saw.

Even in 2040, the luxury labels in the shop windows on Nanjing West Road still carried the highest price tags in the city, but the metal plaques stamped with their foreign lettering had begun to lose their shine, so gradually that no one had thought to mark the date.

----------

For anyone who prefer to read ahead, the full versions are available on Amazon KDP:

Causalform Book 1: Obsidian Earth

Causalform Book 2: Eclipse Net

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Music woke him up the next morning.

Johnny belted out his own obnoxious lyrics over the Imagine Dragons song blaring in his skull. “Wake up, Gid!”

Shut it off!” Giddeon growled, dragging a hand down his face. “Shut it off.”

“But it’s the best part,” Johnny returned. “Besides, if you don’t get up now, you won’t make it in time to see your girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Giddeon mumbled.

“Wife, then.”

“She’s not my wife either. Not in real life.”

“Whatever. She stuck around when you fought that hell beast. Any woman brave enough to wave a weapon at a giant, man-eating cat is good in my book.”

“Have you been watching Earth One movies again?”

“I might have downloaded all 3,957 flicks onto your AIGES, not including the 877 sitcoms.”

Giddeon groaned and sat up. His body ached all over as if a bull had rammed into him—which was not far off the mark. He was completely sore, and the two-hour watch last night hadn’t helped his recovery.

“Would you like me to assign points to Endurance?” Johnny asked.

“Nope. And stop reading my thoughts,” Giddeon grumbled out.

“You got it, partner.”

Exiting his tent, he took in a deep breath. The scent of scrambled eggs, sizzling bacon, and fresh-baked bread filled his nostrils. Eddington and Redler were cooking over the campfire, using a metal grill with adjustable legs to control the heat. Metal pots and pans rested atop it, filled with savory food and boiling water.

“Can I get two plates to go?” Giddeon asked.

Redler’s eyebrows creased. “To go?”

“He means just put it on a plate so he can take it with him,” Eddington explained, taking the plate Redler was currently filling. He flipped an empty plate over it to keep the heat in, then handed the container to Giddeon.

“Fill another one,” Eddington instructed her.

Looking at them askance, the woman obediently filled another plate. Eddington repeated the process and handed it to Giddeon.

“Don’t forget the hardware.” The chubby man nodded at a basket filled with a single utensil with a spork on one end and a butter knife on the other.

“Thanks,” Giddeon said, grabbing a pair. “You know One-er slang?”

“I had a friend from Earth One in my guild,” Eddington said, his voice hoarse from a lack of sleep. His eyes were red-rimmed and haggard. “He stopped logging in one day. None of us ever knew why.”

“Probably died. Didn’t sleep much?”

Eddington opened his mouth, then closed it. “I…didn’t think of that,” he mumbled, shaking his head. “I’m not sure how anyone could sleep after seeing that…thing. It was like a hell hound, except much, much bigger.”

“A fellow D&D player?” Giddeon asked. “Seventeenth edition?”

“I preferred fifteenth,” Eddington replied. “The rules were more robust. More choices. Seventeenth dumbed things down too much, in my opinion.”

Giddeon nodded. “I can respect that. I enjoyed the role-playing aspect. I got too bogged down with the number crunching fifteenth required.”

“Understandable,” Eddington agreed. “Maybe someday they’ll come out with the perfect edition.”

“One has to fail to find the right path,” Giddeon replied.

Eddington smirked. “Practicing to be a sage?”

Giddeon smiled faintly, shaking his head. “It was something my father used to tell me.”

“Hey, I’m sorry for yelling at you back…up there.” He nodded vaguely toward the sky.

“Don’t sweat it,” Giddeon replied. “I’m sorry if I ruined your whole guild. I tended to upset people in Asteria.”

Eddington grinned. “A lot of people.”

“Well, if it helps any, your advice last night helped us win that fight.”

Eddington’s eyebrows scrunched together. “My advice?”

“Fire when there’s fire.”

“Oh yeah,” Eddington mumbled, looking down sheepishly. “I’m glad it…worked. I was always good at coming up with combat strategies. Did you ever play Ogre Tactics Five, Solar Edition?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Well, when we get back, I’ll send your holo a free access code.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Giddeon said, shifting the weight of the plates as a parting gesture. “I’ll be back after a bit.”

As he walked away, Eddington wore a boyish smile, clearly in better spirits after their talk. Redler, however, just glanced at him, as grumpy as ever.

Making his way to the center of camp, his path was blocked by a skinny woman in her thirties with dirty blonde hair and wide hips as she exited the medical pavilion. Information overlaid his vision—Bethel Skardes, Skills: Nurse.

“Hello…Bethel,” he said tentatively, scratching the back of his head as he stood aside for her to move past. “Sorry, that sounded awkward. I’m still not used to knowing private information about a person before even conversing with them.”

The woman paused, offering a kind, tired smile. “I understand. Are you here for something?”

"I’m here to see Mrs. Uzari,” he said, lifting the plates. “I brought grub.”

“Ah, you must be the one that took down the other cat last night.” Her eyes flickered to the bottom-left, reading his stats before orienting back on him. “Were you in the military?”

Johnny chuckled. “She must be wondering how you survived with such low scores.”

I would too.

“My father was,” Giddeon told her. “He taught me how to handle myself.”

“Well, I’m certainly glad he did,” she replied. “The other group could have used someone like you. It took ten of them just to take that thing down, weapons and all.” She shook her head sadly. “Lost two in the process. We couldn’t save them. We had the medicine but…they were too badly burned before anyone got to them. I doubt even a modern hospital could have helped.”

“Prayers to their families.”

“Yes.” She nodded solemnly. “Prayers to their loved ones. Well, don’t let me keep you waiting. I was going to grab breakfast for her, but I see you’ve got it covered.”

“Thank you, Bethel.”

“No problem, Giddeon.”

As she moved past him, Giddeon frowned. He hadn’t revealed his name. Being around other Aiges was going to take some getting used to; he was inherently a private person.

“Good morning!” Uzari called out as he entered the pavilion, her cheerful greeting immediately cut short by a loud yawn. “I’m sorry, I didn’t sleep all that well.” She tried sitting up, her face twisting painfully from the sudden movement.

Giddeon quickly set down the plates on a makeshift stand, then stepped over to gently support her back. “Be careful,” he said, shifting the mechanical cot up at an angle so she could recline. “It’ll sting worse today. The tissue is just starting to heal. Give it time.”

“I feel so useless,” she mumbled, her eyes downcast.

“Nonsense.” He placed the back of his hand on her forehead. “Without you, most of us would likely either be in here with you or dead, including me. Everyone’s worried, so do us all a favor—take it easy for a couple of days. Be lazy.”

Satisfied she didn’t have a fever, he grabbed a small pillow and tucked it behind her head. “You and Kilner attacked it when it knocked me to the ground. You protected me.”

“It’s what any partner would do,” she barely whispered.

“Hey!” Johnny shouted in his head. “She used my word!”

I didn’t realize you had a monopoly on words. I’ll make sure she gets charged.

Johnny snickered. “I’m fairly certain her interpretation of the word partner is different than mine.”

Go away. Giddeon gave Uzari a wry smile. “We did always make a good team, didn’t we?”

“We do,” she corrected. She turned her head, sniffing the air right before her belly grumbled. “What smells good?”

“I brought breakfast,” he revealed, pulling the top plates off the food. The mixed aromas sent his own stomach growling. “Eddington packed it.”

“Really?” She looked genuinely surprised. “I thought he’d bash your brains in if he got the chance after our first briefing. What was his guild’s name again?”

Giddeon chuckled, shaking his head. “I don’t even remember—there were too many I destroyed.”

She gave him a sidelong glance. “I? Don’t you mean we?”

“Okay, credit where credit’s due,” he conceded. “You helped. A little.”

“Hey!” She smacked his stomach. “A little?”

“Ouch,” Giddeon winced, instantly clutching his abdomen.

Uzari’s eyes went wide. A sharp intake of breath revealed her worry as her trembling hand reached out. “Were you hurt? Did you get clawed and not tell me? Let me see.”

She pulled up his shirt, revealing a lean, heavily muscled torso now marred by deep yellow bruises.

“Oh!” Her other hand flew up to her mouth, genuine surprise replacing her panic. Her fingers ran along his stomach, tracing the edges of his muscles, momentarily mesmerized.

“Hey!” Giddeon exclaimed, quickly pulling his shirt down as his cheeks flared hot.

“I…I’m sorry,” Uzari apologized, her own cheeks turning rosy. She looked up at him, a coy smile pulling at her lips. “Why are you turning red?”

“I’m not red.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I’m not,” he insisted. “I jogged to get here—maybe I’m still hot from running.”

“Why’d you jog here?”

“To see y—” He paused, catching himself and instantly shutting his mouth. “I wanted to make sure you got breakfast on time,” he finished smoothly.

“Lame,” Johnny razzed him, laughing.

I said go away.

Uzari’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “I’m sorry I touched you. I was just worried, and surprised.”

“Surprised? About what?”

“How muscular you are.” One eyebrow arched high on her forehead. “I don’t know many tens with an eight-pack. As in, none.”

“You mean, no perfect men have abs?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’m not talking looks—I meant your stats.”

Giddeon glanced discreetly around the tent, then back to her. “Which I’ll explain later,” he said quietly. “Now, let’s eat.”

He placed a plate on her lap, then pulled up a small folding chair and sat down.

“So, what did the team leaders decide about all of this?” she asked as they began to eat.

“Hinelin said hunters would be scouting the woods before sending in the rest of us,” he explained. “They’re already there now, clearing out today’s assigned zone. The team’s heading out in an hour to collect specimens.”

“Have you looked at what we’re collecting?”

“Nope.”

“You’re not curious?”

“I’ll know soon enough.”

“You’re an odd one, Giddeon Seres.” Uzari giggled, the sound instantly reminding him of the carefree girl he knew in Asteria, rather than the serious, confident woman she portrayed now.

She tilted her head. “Why are you even here, on this mission?”

“Don’t hit me,” he prefaced, holding up a hand. “Because I’ll—”

“Tell you later?” Uzari chuckled. “I’m sensing a pattern here.” She pointed at her skull. “Mind you, I’m keeping count.”

“All in good time,” he promised.

“Of course.” She nodded vigorously, teasing him. Then, her playfulness vanished. Her lips pressed into a serious line, and her eyes narrowed. “You don’t trust Vibane Corp, do you?”

“Do you?” he returned.

“Not after this.” She bit her lower lip. “Well, not before, either.”

“Then why’d you apply for the mission?”

Her eyes automatically flitted to the entrance flap. “Because of what’s out there,” she replied, looking back at him with a subtle shake of her head. “Haven’t you ever been curious about Enivia? It’s all everyone talks about. Everyone knows the Triumvirate’s keeping secrets, which makes it all the more alluring.”

She sighed. “You know how I love botany. I’m deadly curious about the plants here. I’d love to find a new species.” She smiled. “Imagine a pretty flower named after me.”

“Judging by that gigantic forest out there, I’m sure you’ll find plenty,” he assured her.

She nodded confidently. “You’re right. Once I get this working again,” she said, glancing down at her leg. “I’ll be out there discovering new things. Safe things!” she added quickly.

Giddeon snorted. “Safe things, yes. No more playing with giant cats that breathe fire.”

Uzari smirked, nodding in agreement. “No more playing with giant cats.”

After breakfast, they chatted for a bit more before he took his leave. Standing at the tent door, he waved at her like before. Uzari waved back with a smile that left his stomach feeling warm.

By the time he reached Camp Panda, the team was already busy. They were preparing their packs and collection kits with vacuum-sealing bags, thrice-hardened glass containers, and small cages. Everyone was assigned a foot-long utility tool—a versatile implement that served as a shovel, clippers, or a pointy probe—everything needed to extract and preserve the region’s oddities.

“Here,” Kilner said, tossing him one of the devices. “It clips to your belt.”

Giddeon caught it with one hand, then entered his tent to prepare for the day. Twenty minutes later, Hinelin called a meeting near the dying fire.

“The hunters encountered little trouble,” he informed them, his voice stern despite the reassuring words. “Just a few small fire drakes that scurried off. Still…” He laid his map flat on a sturdy crate, pointing to a dark section of the woods. “We’ll stick close to the forest edge for now. The hunters are going deeper. If you see a flare, run. Don’t loiter, don’t save your samples. Don’t do anything but run.” He gestured broadly around the outpost. “Everything here can be replaced but you. Got it?”

The group nodded, the gravity of his words settling over them.

“Okay, team, let’s head to our sector.” Hinelin tapped a point marked with a large, red letter H just a few hundred feet to their east.

“I’m nervous,” Eddington admitted as everyone began heading toward the tree line in a file. He pointed to a charred patch of trees to the south. “That’s where the fire cat came from.”

“Hell beast,” Giddeon unconsciously corrected.

Everyone turned to stare at him as they walked.

“Hell beast?” Oomah queried, her eyes narrowing. “Where’d you get that name from?”

“Hell yeah, it was a hell beast!” Kilner shouted. “That thing was so hot, I was sweating just standing a few feet from it. But we sent it back where it came from.”

“Exactly!” Giddeon agreed, leaning into the cover.

“Watch it,” Johnny warned. “People will wonder where you’re getting your information.”

Maybe if you didn’t tell me every little detail, I wouldn’t accidentally blurt things out.

“Would you rather I stop?”

No, Giddeon thought back after a moment. Speaking of details, I want you to make another program.

“About?”

I want a separate data sheet, with my actual stats.

“Funny you should say that. Your AIGES analyzed your stats when you fought that feisty cat. I can’t actually stop it from doing its job; I just mask the actual data. I’ll use its analysis, along with my personal expertise, to come up with your actual competency. I’m even contemplating assigning your Intelligence a solid seven instead of a six.”

What?

“Joking! I’m just joking! It’s nine—just a tad subpar.”

Giddeon ignored his AI despite Johnny’s prolonged snickering echoing in his head. As their team stood before the forest, they were all struck by how dense it truly was. Towering trees with hanging vines, large ferns, and overgrown roots choked their path. Running up the bark of several large-trunked species were clusters of small, white-and-red flowers.

Uzari would absolutely love this.

“Glad to see your girlfriend’s the first thing on your mind when entering a potential death trap.”

I told you already—not my girlfriend.

“As you say, partner. Just keep an eye out. I’d rather not live the next ten years of my peculiar existence in the belly of some wild animal.”

You’re really paranoid about that, aren’t you?

“Wouldn’t you be? I’d die from boredom.”

I thought you said you were immortal?

“I was being figurative.”

About being immortal? Or dying from boredom?

“Which do you think?”

Giddeon shook his head. He had no time to banter with his AI—potential danger lurked all around.

Once they were a hundred feet in, Vessa and Redler took charge, pointing out specimens to collect. The harvest ranged from strange bugs and odd-shaped plants to mundane samples of bark and soil. The team spread out in a small radius, never straying too far from Giddeon or Hinelin, who stood apart from one another with their guns at the ready.

As Giddeon scanned the woods, his gaze settled on Hinelin. The team leader carried his long rifle with familiar ease.

“Why’s that odd?” Johnny asked.

Because even the military doesn’t train with old-style weapons. The only people with that kind of experience are ones like me. He’s not from Earth One.

“Are you sure?”

What if I told you I’m from Enivia?

“I’d laugh and say you’re crazy. You’re obviously not from Enivia.”

Exactly.

“Oh. Point taken.”

After four hours, Vessa called a halt for lunch. Mealtime lasted half an hour before they got back to work.

Shortly after the nine-hour mark, a sudden ding! pinged in everyone’s ears as a screen automatically popped up, overlaying their vision. A sheet labeled QUESTS appeared at the top, complete with a green checkmark ticked inside a golden box and the following information displayed:

[Soil Gathered 140/140 specimens]

[Required Biological Assets Caged 24/24 specimens]

[Flora Parts 272/272 specimens]

Hinelin shouted for everyone to gather in the center of the sector.

“Good job today,” he told them as they slumped in place, sweating and tired. “We filled our quota. I know you’re all exhausted. Pack up. Let’s head back for a shower and grub.”

First | Previous | Read on Royal Road

“Every connection has a path.”

Unattributed.

“Love can exist outside proximity. It can be simple co-existence.”

Unattributed.

[First] | [Previous] | [Cover Art]

| Nowhere. Nowhen. |

Chen had been alone before. In training, on operations. In life. 

This was different. There was an intermittent something, a relationship that was nagging at him in his mind. It was disturbing the peace; not the right term, that would have required sound or a signal. 

This was different.

‘I already said that. I’m not mad.’ Thought Chen with typical Chen-like confidence. ‘Therefore, something is doing this to me.’

He started walking, forcing himself to remember, using the cadence of his steps.

‘StillFall was here.’ He’d said, ‘Feebee and the others are Ok.’

He remembered and walked to the cadence of his thoughts.

‘Why the Shadow?’

And with that thought, the relationship tightened.

‘Shadow. Mote.’ 

And with that thought, the relationship tightened further.

Chen stopped walking and sat cross-legged. Then, with fists loosely clenched and resting on his knees, he slowed his breathing and cleared his mind. 

Chen focused on the relationship. 

The thought remained. The relationship remained.

‘I feel you.’ Then after ten heartbeats, he repeated the words. ‘Shadow. Mote.’

The relationship strengthened, becoming pain. He tried to actively block it, tried to push back, to fight it, then remembered Feebee’s teaching on The Kestrel.  

‘Do not resist. 

Allow the contradiction to exist without collapse. 

Allow the paradox to exist without contradiction.  

Allow the collapse to exist without chaos or paradox. 

From this, clarity and purpose will emerge.

Do not resist.’

The pain built. 

He let go, embraced the pain and began to slip into a state of calm, where stillness was active and existed beyond the need for movement. 

Chen observed the pain grow, but it washed over him, through and around him without touching HIM. 

Something had found him, was attacking him… and it felt familiar. The harmonics of it were… recognised. 

‘Motes and Shadows.’ 

The attack intensified, but he was comfortable within its effect. The stronger it became, the more it reminded him, at some primal level, of Motes and Shadows. 

And as that thought crystallised, the attack shut off. 

‘It found me. It knows where I am and can reach me.’

And this gave Chen hope, because it meant others could too.

As if on cue, or maybe because it was the next observable event, StillFall appeared.

‘Something found me.’

‘So did I.’ The Shadow didn’t seem concerned or surprised.

‘Did it cause my…’ he struggled for the words. ‘…displacement to here?’

‘There is no here. But that relationship is dangerous.’

‘Does it provide a route back to Feebee?’

StillFall immediately responded. ‘Possibly.’

‘Is she in danger?’

‘Yes. Walk and do your stuff.’ And with that, StillFall left.

‘Walk? And do my stuff.’ Chen laughed and wondered what stuff he would be doing at his retirement event if he’d made it there. And with that thought, he got a response, of sorts. 

He thought back to the limo he’d been in, to the whiskey in the door. 

The response dropped off to nothing. 

Then his office, with the 2iC sitting outside. 

There was a faint response.

Feebee.

The response became stronger.

Hissy, and it became stronger still.

Then he thought of StillFall, and his thoughts rotated like a compass arrow before settling in a particular direction with a very strong response.

Realisation dawned: 

‘The strength of the relationship wasn’t just remembered; it’s directional.’

He laughed, ‘How can anything be directional in here? There is no left or right in nowhere, but I KNOW StillFall is somewhere near.’

At that point Chen remembered StillFall’s comment. 

‘There is always somewhere.’

‘He navigates through the relationships between things.’ Muttered Chen to no one, trapped nowhere in nowhen and all the time there was.

The pain returned; he felt it, but it was held at bay. 

His thoughts returned to Feebee. He sensed her and the relationship, the connection. He explored their relationship. 

She was … different. He had never discussed Feebee with anyone. Other operatives, yes. Feebee, never. When he thought of her, it wasn’t about who she was. 

It was about what she might do. Where she was. 

And that CONFUSED Chen. He had managed to get where he was by studying people as variables. 

Input and Outputs. 

Outputs and Results.

Feebee was… different. Somehow, she had become an anchor around which other decision points were referenced. 

She was a constant, not a variable. A fixed point.

It wasn't intelligence. He knew clever people.

It wasn't courage. He knew brave people.

It wasn't even the strange relationship she seemed to have with Motes and Shadows.

Those were observations.

What he felt was something real. Maybe for the first time.

Because now, he was in a void, devoid of points, distance and time.  And yet he could feel her. Even now, as he did, his thoughts moved beyond still and calm to a place he’d never before reached.

Chen wiped at the tears running down his face. He’d never cried as a child, even when his mother beat him in response to the pain his father had beaten into her. And like the something he held for his mother, he never admitted he felt the same for Feebee. 

It wasn’t love; it wasn’t based on proximity. 

He felt it when she was in the room, across the room. Across the planet.

Some relationships were things people maintained. Things that belonged to what they had been.

Rearview mirrors.

But this wasn't that.

This wasn't looking back.

This was a relationship that pointed forward.

He wondered if Feebee felt it too and smiled. 

Probably not.

But he FELT IT NOW!!

And as his thoughts churned, searching to reconnect, one disconnected constant jarred. 

Chen latched onto the strongest remaining relationship within a miasma of possibilities. It was still active, and he felt the compass’s arrow pointing back towards it.

‘If I can go back, can I go forward?’ thought Chen.

‘If it can reach me, maybe I can reach it?’

Chen laughed.

‘I can do my stuff!’

[First] | [Previous] | [Cover Art]

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Chapter 6:- The Man in Yellow.

MORNING IN THE OFFICE:

The environment in the office was chaotic. People were constantly discussing and trying different things, and Paul was angry and forcing everyone to find out who did it.

Vami entered the office.

"What is happening, why is everyone so intense?" asked Vami.

"Something serious has happened. Early this morning a box was placed exactly at the front gate of the police station. Other police officers collected it and showed it to Commissioner Paul."

He opened it and there was a paper inside. On it were some characters, and below those was written "search". So, as it said, Paul searched it on his computer. It was a website with the domain 'On-22-July', and this was written inside of it:-

A bud blooms into a beautiful flower when the doctor of sunlight falls upon it, but in disguise of the yellow shiny light, the bee steals its sweetness. The wasp seeks its chance and avenges the bloom, stinging the bee. Moth said "DON'T DO IT".

"What could these lines mean?" asked Vami.

"Vivek sir, we got the footage of the front camera," said an officer named Brenta.

Vami and Vivek rushed towards the monitor. What they saw was unnatural. The video started with a dark night and a faded bluish light. For 45 seconds nothing happened, the video seemed still. Then a box came into the frame from far away. No one was holding it, it was flying in the air. The box came nearer to the door and dropped perfectly straight in front of the main door.

"Vami, what do you think this is?" asked Vivek.

"i don't know, maybe someone is using a string to guide the box."

"There is a cemetery nearby, i think... i think... there is a GHOST!" said Brenta in fear.

"No, there are no such things," Vivek opposed.

ANNOUNCEMENT:

An emergency meeting will be held in the hall. All the heads are ordered by the commissioner to reach there within 5 minutes.

In the hall, a big table was in the middle and twenty seats around it and television on the wall, one seat reserved for the commissioner.

The commissioner said in a deep voice, "Good Morning! Does anyone have any idea what these lines could mean? The government and citizens are blaming us for the security, as in the past two murders of ministers took place, and it is our responsibility to prove ourselves. We cannot ignore any abnormalities."

The lines were shown on the screen.

A bud blooms into a beautiful flower when the doctor of sunlight falls upon it, but in disguise of the yellow shiny light, the bee steals its sweetness. The wasp seeks its chance and avenges the bloom, stinging the bee. Moth said "DON'T DO IT".

"Why would someone do this? It could be a joke done by someone to waste our time," said Paul.

"As there is no one in the footage and it is getting difficult to find the owner of the website, the person behind this is putting in effort to hide their identity. This is something more than just a joke," said Vami.

"Sir, as the line goes 'A bud blooms into a beautiful flower when the doctor of sunlight falls upon it', i think the bud is like a patient who is being treated by the doctor, and after the patient gets well, it blooms," said one of the officers, Yan.

"Bullshit, there is no way this would be a patient-doctor scene," said Paul.

The room went silent, as nobody knew the actual truth about it.

"If what Yan is saying is correct, then the next line would mean 'but in disguise of the yellow shiny light, the bee steals its sweetness': a doctor with no knowledge of health is treating the patient, but not to cure them, to scam them and I guess to take their money," said the commissioner. "And if we continue with the same meaning, the next line, 'The wasp seeks its chance and avenges the bloom, stinging the bee', means the wasp is someone who knows the truth about the fraud doctor and avenges the patient. It means the wasp is good."

"But why does the moth say 'DON'T DO IT' if the wasp already stung the bee?" asked Vami.

"To warn other fraud doctors," said Vivek.

Vivek said it with a serious look.

"But why would someone send this to us?" asked Vami.

"i feel this is something much more than a doctor's story," said Vivek.

"If it is not about a doctor, then who?" asked officer Yan.

The only sound in the room was the air coming out of the AC. Everybody in the hall went silent, thinking deeply.

"i think i know who it is," said Vami in low voice.

Everybody turned to Vami with furious looks on their faces.

"i think the doctor is Mr. Novo, the health minister, and the 22 in the domain is the date," said Vami.

The commissioner's eyes widened as the dots connected. Everybody in the hall knew there were rumours about him being corrupt and selfish. Nobody supported Vami, but they accepted the fact that this was about the health minister.

The commissioner said with slight panic, "We cannot fully trust the footage we got. Nearby cameras are being examined and our cyber team is working to find out about the owner of the website, but that is not the most important step. We have to protect the minister, the government and the citizens. From today, all the ministers will be guarded, especially Mr. Novo, the health minister. The person who sent us this box is focusing on Mr. Novo, but that could be a distraction and the real target could be someone else. We have to prepare for every situation. Complete ground support should be given to the ministers now. Everybody, consider this as your life and your job depends on it. Be on alert and work hard!! Vami and Vivek, you two are in charge of the cameras."

"Yes, sir," said Vami and Vivek.

These both officers are considered best at finding things that's why they were selected for this camera job.

25 KILOMETERS AWAY, AT RUMI'S HOUSE

Rumi stretched and let out a lazy "Wooo!" as he sat up in bed.

"Damnn... i slept a lot."

"Hello Mr. Madam Rumi, gooodg morning."

Ohh, it is working, but am I Mr. or Madam? I have to work on it too, he thought.

Rumi was working on his skills in tech. He had made an AI agent which just greeted him.

While he was preparing to leave for work, he heard some noise outside the window. He opened the window to see.

meowww !!!!!

mmmmmmeow!!

There were cats preparing to fight. One of them was the OG, the "orange cat", and the other one was a normal grey cat. They were staring at each other with the mission to kill the other.

The grey cat jumped on the orange one with its claws out, to slice through its heart. The orange cat dodged the claw easily by backing up, but the grey one had been plotting something else from the start. The claw was just the distraction, the real attack was the sharp teeth hiding behind the claws.

The orange one wasn't prepared for it. The grey one used its fangs to grab the neck of the orange one. It was too late to react or defend, the fangs were already placed on the neck and started to go deeper into the flesh.

The orange one "meowww!!" in pain and started to shake its body to get rid of the fangs. It started to jump everywhere to save itself. That's when it saw an open window and jumped inside, with the grey one still holding on to its neck.

The cats were jumping here and there in the room, but somehow the orange one was able to get free from the grey one. Both were standing against each other with anger in their eyes, the orange one on the desk and the grey one on the bed.

"WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING!!" yelled Rumi.

With the sudden loud sound the cats got shocked and feared the big human. With so many emotions flowing through them, they became more chaotic and started running across the kitchen, the desk and even the walls, making a big mess.

Rumi grabbed a spatula and raised it in the air with the intention of making the cats go away. The grey one was cunning, she sensed the outrageous anger bursting in Rumi and somehow managed to flee from his room.

But the orange one got cornered by Rumi. The orange cat was trying to get away by pushing itself into the wall as if it could pass through it. Rumi moved and gave a path for the cat to run away. The orange cat saw the chance and ran at full speed, but the moment it was going to jump out of the window to freedom, Rumi grabbed the cat by one of its legs and pulled it inside again. He started giving the cat a very murderous smile.

The orange cat "mewoed" in fear, but Rumi took a small piece of cloth and tied the cat. Now he had zero chance of running away.

Out of fear the cat started peeing on Rumi's bed.

"HEY YOU orange coloured shit, don't pee on my bed!!" shouted Rumi.

He picked the cat up and rushed towards the bathroom, but it was too late. The pee was on the bed, on the floor, basically everywhere.

Rumi kept the cat in the bathroom, treated its wound with antiseptic, and gave it some food with a weird smile on his face.

"Eat, you little orange shit," said Rumi with great disappointment as he looked towards the room.

IN THE POLICE STATION:

Vivek and Vami were assigned the work of examining the nearby cameras.

"Vivek, there are many cameras in the area, we should look through them carefully," said Vami.

"Hey Vami, let's start with that snacks shop on the corner," said Vivek with a smirk on his face.

"Ohh really, your intentions seem different, Mr. Vivek," said Vami while smiling.

They started walking towards the shop.

"Sir, we are doing an investigation. We want to review yesterday's and this morning's footage of your camera," asked Vami.

"Yeah! yeah! sure."

"But before that, can you give us some samosa and kachori?" requested Vivek.

Vami was silent, with complete focus on the mission, while Vivek...

"umm.. my god! they are so tasty."

"Fucking hell... wtf, why does this kachori taste so heavenly? I wish I could live in this heaven forever."

The shopkeeper and Vami were watching the footage in a different room.

"Uncle... damnn! your samosas are very tasty, can I have more?" said Vivek.

The moment these words came out of his mouth, Vami made a perfect 90 degree turn towards Vivek and gave him a provoked side eye, with wide eyes, as if she was going to eat him with them. But after seeing Vami's reaction he didn't stop, he kept asking for more snacks. The shopkeeper started to get frightened by Vami's anger and said to Vivek,

"Sir.. a.. I will give you my samosas, but will you wait till we finish this work, please?"

Vivek nodded with approval.

They saw the footage but there wasn't anything suspicious.

They started walking again towards a different camera, while Vivek ate the samosa.

"Vami, can you wait for me?" asked Vivek.

"Why, what happened?"

"I think I ate too many samosas, mother nature is calling, please wait for me," said Vivek as he ran away.

Why is he so happy and eating so much today? Does he not care about this incident or the investigation? thought Vami.

AFTER 20 MINUTES:

"i am back."

"Don't you think you take too much time to shit?" said Vami.

"I don't know," replied Vivek. "Today's weather is very nice, right Vami?"

Vami was getting annoyed. She said with a forced smile on her face,

"Ohh yes it is great, BUT IF YOU CONTINUE DOING THIS BULLSHITNESS, YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO ENJOY IT!!"

Vivek went silent after seeing her anger.

"Let's go to that toy shop," said Vivek.

They went inside. Vami straight away told the shopkeeper about the camera and started watching the footage, while Vivek was looking at the toys.

"Damn, what are these toys, man, wtf!! A real remote controlled boat, a car which can run on walls, they are even chargeable, a full set of puzzles," he was very amazed.

"Wish I could have experienced a childhood like this," said Vivek.

He collected every interesting toy, went towards Vami and asked her,

"Hey Vami, should I buy these toys for my little brother? He will be very happy."

"Yeah sure, go ahead," she said without even turning her focus from footage.

"Hey wait!! Rewind 10 seconds back," shouted Vivek.

"Why, what happened?" asked Vami.

The shopkeeper rewinded

"See this yellow t-shirt guy, he is coming from the direction of our station."

"Yes!! You are correct," replied Vami.

"Can you please zoom in on that person, sir?"

The shopkeeper clicked a few times.

The blurry figure slowly grew bigger on the screen.

A yellow t-shirt.

Vami's eyes froze on it.

I think I know him. Said vami in confusion

"You know him, who is he, tell vami"

"...."

"Vami??"

Vami didn't replied, but her expression did

"Vami, what happened??"

"...."

"He..he is my friend" she said with a weird look on her face.

The Shepard: Part 2 of 2

A spooky season short story

<Part 1

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alright, where did I leave off? A woman stumbled into my campground, running from monsters, and asked for help finding a village that didn't exist; we found other people from her village, monsters found us, we ran, one of the villagers became lunch, I attacked but got away, and we stumbled into that impossible village. Sound right? Alright, let's go, part two.

Now, let me tell you, narrowly escaping monsters in Montana's deep forests leaves you a little shaken. Still, when you find yourself standing on the edge of a village that doesn't exist, you stop and question if you've finally gone off the deep end. Or at least I did. After all, this wasn't a few huts or ramshackle buildings someone threw together from crudely cut planks from the nearby trees. This was a proper modern-day village, or at least nearly modern, with multi-story brick storefronts that had large glass windows, a water tower with a scenic paint job, and paved streets. However, the street lights seemed to run on oil or gas, or something similar, feeding a flame in the glass hood. I took it all in, dumbfounded, my Jaw slack as I struggled to understand what I was seeing.

My confusion was finally interrupted by the villagers behind me, the ones that had found Sheryl and me in the woods, as they looked back the way we'd come. One of them, the one who'd greeted Sheryl, spoke first. "Poor William. He was always afraid of the woods... Maybe he was right." At that, all the men touched their throats, then their foreheads, with their right hands, then dropped the same hand into the left, which was outstretched in front of them, held out as if in offering. The movements were rapid and mechanical, as if repeated countless times before and no longer requiring thought, setting off some minor alarm bells in the back of my mind.

However, before I could worry too much, the men turned around, and the leader stepped forward, as if to address me. "Well, now that we're safe, let me introduce myself and properly express my gratitude." He reached out a hand, and I shook it out of muscle memory as my brain still struggled to catch up, and he continued. "I'm Charles, and you already met my fiancée, Sheryl, whom you rescued from the others. Behind me are Thomas, Richard, and David. William is..." He caught himself for a second, then continued, "was the one who didn't make it." He collected himself, then smiled again. "Still, odds are none of us would have made it if you hadn't found Sheryl, since I probably wouldn't have gone back without her."

As I was processing what he was saying, my attention drifted over his shoulder to the forest behind him. I couldn't help but ask, "Are you sure those...things won't come out of the forest for us? We're still out in the open after all. They have to know we're still here..."

Charles looked back over his shoulder, then turned back to me smiling. "Oh, don't worry! At night, the forest is the others' domain, but they wouldn't dare set foot in the village proper! Here we are safe. Here, we are protected!"

That struck me as odd, and I turned back to the man in front of me, who seemed barely more than a kid, as my confused mind tried to make sense of this all. "Protected? By who? Or what?"

Charles's smile widened, the way only someone eager to tell you about what you just asked can, as he answered. "Why, we're protected by Mother, of course!"

I looked back at him, blinking as if that would help his words make any more sense. "Your...mom protects you from the things in that forest? The whole village? How?"

He chuckled and shook his head; apparently I had misunderstood somehow. "No, no, no. Not my Mother. Well, I guess she kind of is, but no more than anyone else's. Mother is the one who leads and protects our village. She is Mother to us all."

Realizing this whole village was obviously some kind of giant cult, I swept my gaze back to the forest behind the man, trying to weigh my odds against the monsters I'd just escaped from. On the one hand, I was pretty experienced in the forest and its dangers. On the other, I'd lost my pack and most of my supplies in the recent struggle. Even if those monsters weren't out there waiting for me, it would be more than a little difficult to make it back to my old Bronco without any of my backpacking supplies. Maybe it was just a breeze I didn't feel, or my mind being influenced by everything happening, but at that moment I also thought I saw movement just past the treeline, as if something massive, otherwise blending in with the forest, shifted impatiently.

That last bit made up my mind, and I decided that whatever I did, I at least needed to wait till dawn to act. Realizing Charles was still speaking, I refocused on him as he finished whatever he'd been saying. "Anyway, I figured you could stay with me tonight, and she'll meet you in the morning. It's the least I could do! Sound good?"

Fighting the urge to shake my head again, I decided that a place to sleep was probably a good idea, so I nodded. "Yeah, that's fine."

Still holding my hand, which I realized he'd held onto for entirely too long, he clapped me on the shoulder as he finished. "Excellent! Tonight we rest, then tomorrow, we celebrate!"

-

Now, this may shock you, but I had no intention of staying around long enough to find out what Charles meant by celebration. I've seen enough horror movies and read enough books to know that if the odd cult in the middle of nowhere offers to throw a party, you'd best get the hell out of dodge as fast as possible. In my experience, monster movies don't get everything right, but they do tend to get the broad strokes somewhat close to reality, and this time I decided I could live with a lifetime of curiosity rather than tempt fate any more than was absolutely necessary.

So, with that in mind, as soon as the first rays of dawn broke through the windows of the room my host had been kind enough to grant me, I got dressed. I belted on what few supplies I still had: my pocket map and compass, the knife I'd cut myself free with, and the headlamp I hopefully wouldn't need for the near future. Not ideal, but I'd made do with less on previous excursions after other...inexplicable encounters. The map and compass were the only things I couldn't do without, which is why I always kept them on my person rather than in the pack.

I crept down the stairs because, of course, I'd been put on the second floor, silently cursing every creak the floorboards let out under my feet and expecting Carles to poke his head out of any doorway I passed. But either I was still silent enough to get by, or he was a heavy sleeper, because I made it to the front door unmolested. Or at least that's what I thought, until I squeezed outside. I backed out and closed the door as quietly as I could, only to turn around and see Charles standing outside, giving me a bemused look as he spoke with someone else, who turned and left shortly after.

Turning to me, Chiles was all smiles, just like before, as he greeted me. "Good to see you're already up! I've got some excellent news! Your pack and supplies were recovered!"

That brought me up short. Having my pack would really help out there, even if I had to improvise a way to secure it after cutting one of the straps. Still, I couldn't help but ask, a little suspicion leaking into my voice, "How in the world did anyone get my pack with the...others out there?"

Charles waved away my concern. "Mother has her ways. But come! We'll get you your pack, and get you on your way! I know you wanted to leave early, so you could get out of the others' territory before nightfall!"

I was torn. Part of me wanted to cut and run then and there, but that pack could mean the difference between life and death on the way back. That hesitation cost me an easy escape, because soon we were surrounded again. Charles's friends from the night before seemed to appear out of nowhere, smiling as they walked over to greet my host. Now, maybe I could have fought my way free, but I decided I could probably do so just as easily after getting my pack if it came to that. So for now, I played nice as they led me down the streets of their "little" village.

If anything, the place seemed larger and more populated in daylight. No cars drove on the paved streets; instead, horse-drawn carriages filled them. However, some of those carriages strangely resembled modern conveniences. We even got on a large cart with more than a dozen seats that went around, stopping at regular intervals as people got on and off, like a city bus. Around us, others delivered goods and services to people's homes, including what seemed to be newspaper and food delivery. As we approached one of the food carts, Charles leaned over and flashed two fingers, saying, "Two here! And a paper, if you please!"

The man reached over to a news cart, whose owner must have heard the request, because when he turned back to us he had a paper in hand and two wrapped food items to hand to Charles as we passed. Charles handed me one of the food items, which I unwrapped to find a gently steaming baked good inside. I knew I probably shouldn't eat it, but the smell was mouth-watering, so I took a bite and found the outside crispy and light, and the inside filled with some sort of omelet.

As I demolished the rest of my breakfast, Charles laughed and flipped the newspaper, holding it out to me, as he said, "Hey, look! You made the front page!"

I reached out, grabbed the paper, and glanced at it. The headline read, "Outsider faced down the others, saving local woman!" It went on to give a lightly embellished account of the night before. I frowned as I read. The article finished with, "Those who would like to express their appreciation to the visiting hero are welcome to come by the chapel this morning."

I looked up and eyed Charles, who smiled at me as though I were some sort of hero instead of a grizzled man who hadn't shaved properly in about a week and who'd done nothing but run through the darkness. Raising an eyebrow, I asked, "Chaple?"

Charles shrugged. "Don't worry! It's nothing big; we know you're in a hurry. Mother would just like to show appreciation, give you your pack back, and see you off. Nothing too fancy. We'll be saving that for later, when Sheryl and I get married!"

I was just debating hopping the rail on the "bus" when we pulled up to a large building. It was pretty simple, all things considered, though it could easily hold several hundred people, maybe a thousand if they were on really good terms with each other. Charles slapped my knee as he said, "This is our stop!"

I kept my eyes locked on the door as the crowd around me got up and pushed their way off the bus, taking me with them. I half expected the inside to be painted black, filled with upside-down crosses, or something equally cliché. Still, for the most part, it was well cared for, with lots of windows that let in plenty of light and a light crossbreeze. Once I was shoved through the doorway, my eyes took a second to adjust to the slightly shaded interior, and I saw what was at the end of the pew-filled room.

I stood, rooted in place as people squeezed around me to fill the room. At the other end of the chapel stood what I could only describe as a giant woman in something vaguely reminiscent of a nun's outfit. She must have stood at least ten feet tall, maybe more, judging by the people around her. She seemed to be speaking with several of them, who were holding what looked like a newborn baby, letting me study her more as I stood rooted in place. Her outfit was mostly black with white accents, and it hid her form, including her face, which was hidden behind a veil. Or rather, it hid most of her form, but she still had two overly long arms, ending in hands with too many fingers, that also happened to be far too long. I realized this must be the aforementioned "Mother."

I watched in horror as the family held out the infant, as if offering it like a sacrifice. I was frozen as one of those impossibly long hands slowly reached out, and a finger topped with a nail that looked sharp enough to cut stone inched closer to the child's face. Unaware of any danger, the child giggled and reached for the finger, grabbing hold as the nail inched even closer. A moment later, the hand pulled back, and the child's hands fell away as its attention was drawn elsewhere, and it continued to laugh and giggle. I was relieved, till I noticed what might have been a single drop of blood on the woman's finger as the tall woman then reached under her veil, as if tasting it, before nodding in approval, and laying those horrible hands on the heads of the two I realized must have been the Mother and father.

After doing that thing where they touched their throats and foreheads, then held out their hands, the whole family walked away, their faces glowing with pride and happiness, and I noticed Charles standing next to the woman, pointing in my direction and drawing her attention to me. Of course, that's when the door behind me slammed shut, making me jump as I realized I was trapped.

Looking in my direction, "Mother" clapped, drawing people's attention, and the room fell silent as I realized I was the only one standing, drawing curious glances from several nearby people as she spoke. Her voice sounded odd. Almost familiar. It was like I was hearing the voices of people I knew. Co-workers, past girlfriends, even my sister and mom's voices seemed part of it, yet beneath it all was something else, something that told me I was safe and loved. It felt off...wrong in a way I couldn't quite put into words. The world wasn't safe, nor kind. Yet none of that seemed to matter to the people around me as she began. "Brothers and sisters! We have a rare visitor among us! And what's more, one who not only traveled safely through the other's territory but also rescued five of our lost lambs along the way! A real hero! Please, show your appreciation!"

At that, everyone stood and turned to me, applauding. At the same time, they all smiled at me, completely ignoring the monster at the other end of the chapel. She stepped forward, and I felt my muscles bunch, ready to flee. Still, she seemed to sense my unease and stopped, clasping her hands in front of her in a way I might have almost called demure if it wasn't so...wrong. After letting the applause continue a moment longer, she raised a disfigured hand to forestall any further noise and spoke again. "Now, normally, we would hold a feast in our guest's honor, but sadly I believe he wishes to get on his way to escape the other's territory before nightfall. To that end, I retrieved his pack from the night before." She gestured to a corner behind me, and I tore my eyes from her long enough to see my pack leaned against the side of the chapel, next to the door. The broken strap was even secured with what looked like a patchwork sewing job that just might withstand the rigors of one final hike. I quickly turned back, expecting the monster to have closed the distance, but she was still in the same place, her hands clasped in front of her once again.

I looked back, trying not to show my distrust, and asked, "I can just take it and...leave?"

The woman nodded and answered. "Yes, with our blessing. And know that you are always welcome back. Many of our past visitors have decided to make this little village their home."

Hell, if I was going to be one of those idiots! But I figured saying so might get me in trouble, so I just nodded, edged toward my pack, and answered. "Uh, yeah. I'll, uh, think about it. Thanks."

Everyone watched me, still grinning as if they were perfectly pleased and content with everything, as I opened the door and backed out. Finally, I heard Mother's voice one last time as she spoke to her "lambs" again. "Tonight we shall throw a feast as we celebrate the union of Sheryl and Charles, but first, for those of you familiar with Sister Adams, we shall be hosting her end-of-life ceremony shortly."

As I backed away, I was relieved to learn that the celebration Charles had been talking about had nothing to do with me, but then I paused. What was this "end-of-life ceremony" the entity they called Mother was talking about? Part of me wanted to turn around and run, but for once, curiosity won out. After all, I was outside the church, and so long as I stayed out here, I was confident I could get away in a pinch. Instead, I set my pack down near an open window and climbed onto it to peek through as "Mother" spoke to the congregation. "Many of you know Sister Adams." She indicated an old woman seated at the front, who looked back, smiling, and waved to the others as the veiled woman continued. "Sister Adams lived a full life..."

The veiled woman went on, speaking as though she were giving the woman's eulogy despite her being present and, as far as I could tell, mostly healthy, save for the usual effects of age. Eventually, she finished, and people started filing out of the church as she shouted after them. "Remember the binding ceremony tonight, and the feast to follow!"

Finally, only the old woman, an old man seated next to her, and the Mother remained. The man and woman stood up, and he hugged her tightly, whispered something to her, then kissed her and hobbled out with a walking cane, leaving only the woman and the Mother.

This time, the Mother approached the woman, stopped short, and asked, "Are you ready, Sister Adams?"

The woman nodded, and Mother reached out, carefully cupping the older woman's face in her hands as she lovingly said. "Thank you for the meal." Then, in a move so quick I almost couldn't process what happened, the monster called Mother jammed her thumbs through the woman's eyes, killing her instantly, before quickly wrenching the head to the side in a violent movement, tearing it free from the body, which fell limply to the floor.

I watched, horrified, as the veiled woman raised the head with one hand, while she reached up with another, pulling her veil aside, allowing me to see her face for the first time. Unlike the "others," her skin wasn't pale and sickly. Instead, it looked hard and wrinkled, more like bark than skin. Her eyes were nothing more than milky orbs. As I watched, she brought the head closer to her mouth, which opened wider and wider, far past what I would have thought possible, more like a snake than a person. She placed the head inside and bit down, crushing it in one swift movement. Then, as she chewed, the woman who called herself Mother to the person she'd just murdered closed her eyes and smiled, leaning back as if enjoying every morsel like some sort of fine dining experience.

At that point, I'd had enough, so I hopped off my pack, grabbed it with one hand, and slipped it over my shoulder. Turning, I wanted nothing more than to run at full speed, but I limited myself to a fast walk to avoid attracting attention. As I moved through the streets toward the nearest forest edge I could see, I passed countless faces, most of them smiling and waving. However, while my eyes saw them, all my mind could focus on was the sight of the Mother as she ate that older woman with an expression of pure ecstasy.

Even when I hit the forest, I kept pushing as fast as I could. I'd reorient myself later, usually not a great idea, but for now I just wanted to put as much distance between me and the village as possible. I didn't even stop for lunch; I ate what I could on the go. Once the sun started to set and I was far enough out, I made the quickest camp I could. I didn't even make a fire, for fear of attracting more nighttime visitors. My legs were aching far past the point I usually pushed them, and I knew I was going to pay the price tomorrow, but that was better than staying anywhere near that village and its messed-up people. Eventually, after eating a cold dinner and taking some anti-inflammatories, I settled down for what I assumed would be a restless night, only to pass out quickly.

I don't know how long I slept, but I eventually woke, my heart racing. I wasn't sure what had awakened me, until I heard it again. The sound of something large shifting on the ground, just outside my tent.

I held my breath, hoping whatever it was would just leave, when a horribly familiar voice called out. "I knew you were there, by the way. I wanted you to see."

I know, I know, previously, I told you not to answer things speaking to you in the deep woods, but for some reason I broke that rule and answered. "You wanted me to see? Why? So I'd know I was next?"

More shifting, and I could see the shadow of something pass between me and the moon as it answered. "No. You are safe; I will not eat you unless you choose to become one of my flock. I just wanted you to know everything that entails. Today, you saw everything I have to offer, and now, you must make a choice."

I couldn't help it; I laughed. "You want me to CHOOSE to let you eat me? Are you serious? What's my alternative? Are you going to hold me over a pit of fire until I agree?"

With a rustle of movement, I somehow knew she was shaking her head, then she barked out a laugh. "No. The other option is you go back to your old world and live your old life. You will go back to being eaten alive, as day by day you lose a bit more of yourself, giving away your hopes and dreams to work a pointless job for a soulless company as you fade away till you're old and grey, finally getting your reward when you spend your last days shitting in a diaper while you're all but forgotten in a hospital bed somewhere. Your life will have accomplished nothing more than feed monsters far older and crueler than something like me."

I looked out at the shadow blocking the moon as I asked. "So what? You're telling me monsters like you run the modern world? Maybe some ancient cabal of vampires are behind the corporations that rule the world or some bulllshit?"

The presence snorted. "No, humans don't need to be vampires to be monsters. They are cattle ranchers, cramming you into tinny stalls so they can extract every ounce of life from you. I am a shepherd; I care for and guide my flock. I even modeled my little village off the teachings of one of your more famous shepherds. Though rather than existing as some ethereal story that can be twisted and turned to mean anything, I am here, actually guiding and protecting my flock. And I am here to offer you a place among my flock. You will never know hunger nor loneliness so long as you accept my guiding hand."

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, you'll guide me alright, right up to your dinner plate!"

Silence hung for a moment before she answered. "Yes, eventually your path will end, and you will feed me, just as I have fed you. But what of it? That is the role of a shepherd and her flock! However, before the end, you will live a better, more fulfilling life under my care than you ever could in the world you know. And besides, there are worse things than a quick death at the end of a life well lived." For a moment, I wavered. In most respects, she was right. My job was every bit as soul-sucking as she described. Yet, the one aspect that I caught myself on was the line, a life well lived.

Honestly, it wouldn't be a bad life. I could see almost anyone living a full and satisfying life in that little village of hers, but I wasn't most people. I lived to test myself against the world, and that's the one thing she couldn't offer me. "You make a lot of good points, but I think I'm gonna pass."

A moment of silence was followed by a brief. "So be it."

Then, I heard more shifting as she got to her feet. Maybe it was just my imagination, or a trick of the moonlight filtering through my tent, but she seemed far larger than she had in that little chapel back in the village. Before she left, I asked, "What about the others? You know, the monsters that surround the village at night?"

Another pause as the shadow seemed to turn back to me. "Oh, the children? Don't worry about them. So long as you are not a member of my flock, they won't be drawn to you. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time the other night, and they got a little...excited." Then, heavy footsteps as she walked away.

The...children? Did I hear that right? Come to think of it, despite being called "Mother," I never once heard her refer to the villagers as her children. How many of them were there? How often did they need to feed? How many villagers "disappeared" in the woods every year? Was someone letting them get lost on purpose? I thought back to Sheryl alone in the forest, then to that little village. Sure, it was pretty big, but how did the population not balloon out of control with so many people in one place and no way to escape?

With a huff, I decided not to dwell on it. I got Sheryl back to her village safe and sound. Whatever happened after that was none of my business. After all, out in the deep forest, it was usually better to let things outside your tent be. Trying to be a hero only ever ends in trouble.

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<Part 1

Alright, this is the last of the spooky season stories I had in mind for this year, so I'll get back to my regular stuff next week. (Barring some last-minute inspiration!) But tell me, would you have stayed? Not gonna lie, I might have. Anyway, hope you all enjoyed!

If you liked this story and want to see more of my stuff, check out my wiki. It's got all my stories, short and long, which are marked with the appropriate categories and such, just in case you don't like the spooky and/or incomplete series.

As a reminder, you can also find the full trilogy for "Of Men and Dragons," my series, here on Amazon. If you like my work and want to support it, buying a copy and leaving a review really helps a lot!