Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

There had been agitation and horns blowing in the distance. Warbands of drudges had loudly and openly paraded around the edges of their borderguard of Summons, looking for absences and practicing on the random Summons just beyond the edges of their territory. Scouts wandered around and found nothing, not wanting to move too far alone and go missing.

A dozen of their little squads went missing, anyway. All in different areas, all in teams, even if they were the weakest and most eager drudges volunteering for the jobs, ready to show themselves to be strong and perhaps get themselves promoted. Nobody saw anything or heard anything, and with no humans working the lands and fields, the amount of scrub and brush around had exploded, interfering with line of sight.

There were no tracks or scents, either. The scouts vanished into the cold of the white, brown, and black, and were gone.

With a reviled human being seen after so many years in their former town, this was naturally quite alarming. Humans had driven off drudges and claimed territory from them for many years. Only the most powerful of them being slaughtered en masse by their own horrible and corrupting magic had allowed them to rise up and fight back, slaughtering the humans who fought back, and driving them forth as they themselves had once been forced to flee.

But that had been years ago. Humans, humans could grow to be powerful! While their God and Great Heroes were also powerful... bands of humans had been known to kill even him, and many of their kind had been able to kill the champions of their people!

Furthermore, this was a new kind of fighting. This was hunting and stalking, and not the overwhelming arrogance and power of the old tales. It spoke of fear, but also of cunning... and it was deadly.

As for arrogance, the invaders had Burned down their memorials of the dead, including the seething pits that had torn their immortality from the humans, and had even Burned down the great mounds of olthoi corpses from when the alien bugs had thought they could overcome their God. Even the carcass of the olthoi queen’s steel-hard carapace had crumbled down to the same unnerving white dust, leaving whiteness behind which faded to new green growth the next day.

Not even the least scrap of bone was left of any of the bodies the misting flames Burned upon. The new magic was strange and unnerving.

If the scouts could vanish in the daytime, what then at night?

So, the drudges fled back into their city, with some unlucky fellows setting up camp on the great swath that had been cut into their mighty ring of guardian Summons, so that none could pass through it. In the cold and night, the drudges took shelter in the homes and basements of the buildings that had once belonged to humans, clinging together to stay warm in crude furs and blankets sometimes remaining from those self-same humans.

And in that darkness, death flowed into the city.

---

A Sound Bubble was not Silence. It prevented sounds from passing through it, so those outside and inside it could not hear one another, but it was not the sudden blanket silence that could hamper many Casters.

It was still ideal for taking out sentries and those resting. A dimming of sound was not the same as not even being able to hear yourself breathe, and a lull in the wind not the same as sudden absolute quiet.

Also, if your victim did manage to wake and scream, they would think help was coming, and might not run away. That helped them die content that they had revealed an enemy even if they died, and Princess Kristie Rantha was more than happy to let them die clinging to that empty hope.

The job of a sentinel isn’t to catch a foe, stop a foe, or the like. It is to raise the alarm. Anything beyond that was a bonus. Turning that against them was why Kris had chosen it for her Sword effect, instead of the default Light effect. If she wanted a glowing Sword, she could make it Flaming or something...

Also, Quaver was Shadowslaked, and did not create noise when it cut into things or banged into them, unless she wanted to.

This was grim work, and Kris hated doing it. Unfortunately for the drudges, seeing the gnawed bones of the dead humans here had completely eclipsed her revulsion, and left her one of the Mitharn Proverbs to fall back on: Return the honor you are given.

If they wanted to slaughter civilians and children and feast on the dead, then by all that was holy, she was going to Feed them to the Land, and the Land was going to eat damn well this night.

She had her new mage companion up top (A PoT warmage! The idea of a bondmage was getting more and more palatable! Her mom would be so envious!) with Detect Non-Good up and working, sweeping around and able to pick out each and every soul within every structure, how many, how powerful, approximate location...

Her Tremblesense gave her perfect footing and local awareness of everything around her, allowing her to move with great speed and assurance, figuring out the layout of buildings and rooms and scrap and where the living were like her own personal mapping function. She had infravision and ultravision and low-light vision and Devilsight, and the darkness of the night didn’t slow her down in the slightest.

Bane to Drudges was being fed in the night as the Ruby Blade on Quaver began to quietly reap them. They couldn’t hear her coming, they didn’t see her moving or ghosting between the various buildings, entering through doors that couldn’t be truly barred, or sliding through windows, even dropping through holes in the roof if appropriate. Ryin’s ears were her external alarm, so she focused on her task of killing everything and everyone, and quietly Feeding them all to the Land.

Eight canines gleamed in the night, and she fought down the urge to see how they tasted in return, images of gnawed and marrow-broken tiny bones drifting past her mind’s eye.

Males, females, young, old... Quaver made no noise to proclaim her presence, not liking the task any more than she, but knowing it needed to be done. If they wanted to act like animals, they would be harvested like them. That’s all there was to it.

As she worked, Air Gold coins, as well as occasional precious stones and jewelry, often broken by careless hands or feet, was pulled out of corners and dirt and trash, came up out of cracks and crevices and hiding spots, and clattered quietly to Disks waiting to accept them.

Reclaiming the discarded wealth of humans to be used by humans.

Some drudges did wake up, by chance or instinct. Some were still awake. Some were asleep, and died quietly and painlessly.

But die they did. The blood was only there for a moment, before the vivus started consuming it, not leaving any gore or corpses behind to freeze in the cold and create any kind of macabre monument to the slaughter, or release a hanging scent of slaughter to draw attention from bipeds or beasts.

No monuments to death. Just whiteness that would fade at Natural Renewal.

Unseen crimson flashed Ruby in the night, and the Land fed well...

-------

Invisible, Disks stacking up and staying out of line of sight, I kept watch for surprises.

Occasionally one of the drudges came wandering around in the night for some purpose, and might have stumbled into the quiet houses. Kris came out of the shadows and planted Quaver deep into vital tissues that she had learned a great deal about slaughtering hundreds of Summons emulating living things, one after another. Its dying meep was caught inside the Sound Bubble as she dragged the drudge off into the shadows with strength completely outside her build and mass would deem possible.

No random wandering drudges came randomly through the silent areas where drudges were now doing far more than sleeping.

I stacked up coins, kept invisible watch, and watched Kris’ shadow wander into and out of the ruined and decaying homes. There were only occasional sounds and mewing when she went in, little dots of non-Good souls apparent in my senses glowing there.

And then they winked off, one by one, sometimes all of them in just a breath.

I exhaled in distaste. Not for Kris, doing what she must. No, for the drudges doing what they had, for not taking a higher road, building up a road of cooperation in the apocalypse that had happened. Making alliances would have done absolute wonders for everyone involved, and likely would have immediately raised the drudges right out of tribalism into the start of their own civilization.

Whatever their god of a drudge was, he had done them a great disservice, and now it was yawning open into potential oblivion.

Long-term implications weren’t good. Co-existence was a valid thing, but when the drudges had unleashed this slaughter, they had basically screamed the fact that they wouldn’t coexist with humans at all.

Return the honor you are given. Absolute slaughter from a rival species would be met with great fervor and inventiveness by humans. I didn’t want to go to war on the living... but I had no wish to aid these drudges at all.

Goddamn natural competitiveness and savagery having its day when given the opportunity...

------

We were out of there well before dawn. Behind us, the outer three-quarters of the former capitol city of the local Aluvians, if that was indeed what the place was.

There were no sentries alive to react to us, having been expeditiously removed ahead of time in her grim tour around the outsides. So, out of sight of anything that might see us, we also removed all the defensive spawns on our way out.

“Ryin.” Kris pointed as I followed her with half a dozen Disks piled high with pale green coins bearing their new crest of Aluvian origins and a woman’s silhouette. “What’s that?”

I blinked and looked over at a mound at the beach, covered with snow. It sprawled around rather crazily, a randomly shaped hill. “A mound? Is there something special about it to you?”

“Remember the olthoi nest back then? There are cracks radiating through the ground similar to that that occurred around the olthoi nest. Sand has filled them in, but there was ground displacement of significant volume here.”

I looked at the mound. “There was a similar mound located along the shores of the river just south of the town. I didn’t know it was important, thought it might be a barrow or something at best.”

“You said these could involve dimensional interdiction of existing extraspatial pockets forcibly shunted back into normal space.”

“Indeed.”

“Curious about what is inside?” She glided around the thing, and indeed, there was a gaping entry into the place.

I switched over to Vatic Gaze, and lifted my eyebrows. “Kris, there’s a ley line convergence here, just like back north in the henge.” I followed the three lines here, moving along the lake and also off to the west... presumably towards the fortress over there with its odd wards. “Why would a former extraspatial pocket have a henge inside it? That’s... just insane. You’re sucking magic out of the normal world into an extradimensional pocket, venting and wasting tons of it, practically waving a sign in the aether that you’re present there, come tap into us...”

“Want to see what is inside?”

“We’d have to dig through the snow and let them know we went inside. I would prefer not to right now. Let’s get some distance, rest, Salute Aru, and get our Infusing done. I’m marking it as a point of interest to return to in the future.”

“When we can kill the fucker.”

“Aye, Princess.”