Stephanie had naively thought this would be an easy mission, well, as easy as any mission could be with this new ‘planet’ Starhaven found itself on, being as it was. She was just a measly Rank 1 Shadow, and there were already much larger fish swimming in this ocean, but her mission took place inside a future settlement. The System, as much as it promoted growth through conflict, protected those from the worst of the chaos. You couldn’t grow if you were dead, after all. Whoever made the System aeons ago certainly subscribed to the tough-love philosophy, and that if given even just the slightest chance, the truly great would survive, if not thrive.
She even had a promotion to look forward to if she did well, along with grants of Natural Treasures, Rift slots. Perhaps even an apprenticeship under one of the Rank 4 Masters wasn’t out of the question, considering the city she’d been sent to convert into a province, protectorate, vassal, or an ally for Starhaven was within spitting distance of the Dragon Vein of the planet, which the Ruling Prince wanted to secure as swiftly as reasonably possible.
That illusion shattered the moment she heard the ignorant idiot Xir’s report. Did they not teach how to identify the most important Bloodlines in all the Realms to rookie Shadow Agents anymore? He’d tried to have a Halvyr assassinated, and one descended from the Archon’s Avatar to boot. Her only hope of sweeping the matter under the rug had been to make sure the unlucky girl died before the Astral Court’s scrying spells swept across the Cosmic Realm in search of lost Fae, and Fae-blooded.
So she had arranged for the guards to be few and the weakest of the bunch, without making it obvious, while also making sure the building the exhausted Raid Delvers would be close enough to those tunnels the beastkin dug out that their hotheaded would-be King wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation. She didn’t know how long she had. If the Astral Court’s diviners detected so much as the faintest echo of the Halvyr’s death whenever the Null-barrier surrounding the Realm finally dropped, they would send out an expedition to investigate, then if they found signs of foul play — which they most certainly would, they were a political behemoth with influence stretching all across the Realms while she was just a lowly Rank 1, she wouldn’t be able to hide anything from them if they began an investigation — they would send someone to make their displeasure known.
No, the only viable play here with the highest likelihood of success was hoping that echoes of the girl’s death would fade if it happened early enough. She didn’t dare to do it herself; killing a Fae-blooded left a mark on you, and the more powerful of their kind could smell it.
Then, of course, it failed, and in came the girl in question, stomping like a little dragon and glaring at Stephanie as if she’d just tried to have her killed … which, fair, she had, but how did she know?
A lesser woman would have panicked, but Stephanie had always worked best under pressure. So, she decided to do damage control and approached the group. She would have to play this carefully, appear helpful and useful, while also appearing genial enough that the naive girl would doubt her own judgement. Stephanie had studied this country’s background, and it was safe, so safe in fact that she was sure anyone having grown up here couldn’t even fathom someone trying to have you killed would walk up to you with a genial smile and helpful attitude when it failed. If the girl was so visibly suspicious of her, trying again would be the height of stupidity. First, she had to shed that suspicion, and only after nobody would suspect her could she maybe try again … or maybe frame someone with the attempt and cut her losses.
Maybe the girl wasn’t important enough to send someone to investigate a murder attempt — Xir’s attempt, that is — and she could just sit tight until the problem went away. Or maybe if she just waited, the girl would get killed in a Rift. With how she’d already delved two unexplored Rifts over her own level, in less than a month, it was all but inevitable.
Stephanie loathed the uncertainty of either option, but it was still her best choice.
Then the Arcane Sprite came out. It was a small creature the size of a human fist, glowing pink and looking like one of the mythical faeries with far too large eyes and a far too wide mouth filled with far too many jagged teeth. Its eyes were like sapphires, and in its shifting facets she saw glimmers of malice, glee and mockery all in one. That already boded badly for whatever the little menace was about to do.
Worse, it was clearly Rank 1 … which had implications. For one, she might be in some real danger if it came down to a fight. For two, the fact that it was hanging out with a Halvyr, a Rank below itself, was concerning and came with even more implications. Either the girl’s Bloodline was much purer than it had any right to be, or she was important in some other way.
Still, she played it safe, remained polite, and was as genial as her adopted persona demanded.
“ … I am a Child of Agreas. You do know what that means, or do I need to spell it out for you?”
Spirits don’t lie. Stephanie thought numbly, stifling her sudden bout of doubt and denial in the crib. Especially not about their lineage.
Agreas. She’d first learned that name when she was a child, sitting in Politics class for maybe the second or third time. She couldn’t have been more than twelve. The teacher was talking about the greatest factions within the Realms, and of course, the Astral Court came up as the predominant power of the Astral Sea, the ruling Court of the Prismatic City. Its titular leader was, of course, Anachreon, the mythical Avatar of the Archon and the most powerful of all the Spirit Kings, but it was well-known that he was usually … dormant. Whatever that meant. In truth, the Astral Court was ruled by a Council, and that Council was headed by the eldest of Anachreon’s progeny: Agreas.
The legends said he was the first sprite born of Anachreon’s essence, the first member of the Astral Court when it was formed and that if he ever left it, he would be a Great Spirit King in his own right. But he never did, apparently satisfied with being the first among equals in the Court’s ruling council.
There were historical records of Agreas’ existence when the System had only a single Realm. He was ancient, older than dirt and most Planes in the Mystic Realm … and certainly older than the entire recorded history of the Kingdom of Starhaven, and it wasn’t even close.
“Ah, a final little nugget of information for you, because it might not be obvious for someone from a Lesser Plane,” the Sprite said, a mean, toothy grin stretching its lips from ear to ear. “The Null-field keeping the forces of the other Realms out of this one, for now, does not stop the more powerful ones from looking. Do keep that in mind going forward.”
They know. Stephanie thought, feeling numb and cold. Her stomach twisted into a knot, but her training took over, and the polite smile snapped back onto her face. She went through the motions robotically, but her mind remained numb and distant. They know. I’m so dead … or do they? Maybe they just suspect? Maybe they only know of Xir’s misguided attempt, and the girl just blamed the first person she saw that she didn’t like? Maybe … maybe if I gift-wrap Xir, hand him over for judgment and blame everything on him before apologising with the appropriate amount of grovelling … that might work …
*****
Mia watched Agent Graham, if that even was her name, bounce back from her momentary disquiet. One moment she looked ready to faint, then the next she cleared her throat, thanked Sparkle for his ‘thoughtful but misplaced’ warning and turned to introduce herself to the rest of the group gathered behind Mia. Everyone was giving Mia and the woman weird looks, with the exception of Camie and the few others who knew of Mia’s circumstances.
‘What the hell?’ Mia hissed inwardly. ‘We were supposed to lie … somewhat low.’
Yes, that did, in fact, sound incredibly hypocritical, even to Mia’s own ears. Thank you very much for asking.
‘What?’ Sparkle asked, feigning innocence. ‘I just educated that simpleton about something that should be obvious to anyone with half a brain.’
‘Which is?’ Mia asked.
‘I merely disabused them of the notion that they can kill or harm you without my Sire or Grandfather erasing their little kingdom in retribution the moment they get access to this Realm. It should make them all much more reluctant to try something extremely stupid. I can’t protect you from an entire kingdom’s worth of idiots ranging from Rank 0 to 5, but perhaps the threat of absolute annihilation can.’
“Huh,” Mia said, her lips parting to respond with something smarter, but nothing came to her. Well, I guess … that’s good? Yes. It’s good if it works. Up until someone tries to assassinate me and blame it on someone else, whom they want to aim that supposed apocalyptic retaliation at.
But hey, silver lining! Stephanie Graham didn’t strike Mia as someone who liked to gamble the fate of her kingdom on a plan that was probably a long shot, anyway. She hoped she’d read the woman correctly.
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Mia had trouble believing someone would really commit continental genocide to avenge her, especially someone whom she’d never met. It was absurd, and terrifying on many levels … but if it kept people from trying to put a bullet in her head, then it was … not fine, but she could maybe not think about it and accept it as a beneficial thing to her continued survival.
The woman certainly seemed to believe that Sparkle’s unspoken threat was real, which was what made Mia reluctant to write Sparkle’s words off as an absurd exaggeration. Great, it’s not like I had any crippling anxiety about meeting my super ancestor before this or anything.
She would need to meet the man supposedly capable of such violence, for someone he didn’t even personally know! — if she didn’t want all elves to treat her as if she were covered in cow dung for the rest of her life. Wonderful. She was so looking forward to that. Anxiety? What’s that? Could she eat it?
She was still trying to come to terms with the rather complicated storm of emotions in her heart when Zeigler finally noticed them. Or maybe it was one of those stupid power plays they did in movies? No, the man looked far too done with life to bother with something like that.
“Come on over, I believe we need to talk,” Zeigler said, rising to stand. He looked like the weight pressing down on his shoulders just doubled as he did. “What happened last night was a failure on our part, and you deserve our deepest apologies.”
Mia nodded, accepting the apology. Brent gave her a questioning look that she understood to mean, ‘Do you want me to handle the talking?’ She took a step forward. “Thank you, I’m more interested in how they managed to dig more than three tunnels underneath the city and sneak upwards of fifty people through them without being noticed.”
“They began a new offensive just twenty minutes before the assault on your building,” Zeigler said, giving a weary sigh even as his rugged face twitched into a grimace of disgust. “They sent in a new wave of their little monsters. Nearly all our positions were going to be overrun, so I sent in the forces kept in reserve, leaving me with only the barely trained and the utterly exhausted to reinforce you. They arrived far too late to help, which I blame on them not having access to the better transports, and of course, to them getting harassed all the way there by a group of flying beastkin.”
That they had managed to do so implied a worrying level of organisation, discipline and planning.
“We,” Mia said, gesturing at the twenty-something people gathered behind her. “Would like to make sure they don’t have the breathing room to try something like that again. Where do you need us? Also, I think it would be for the best if we all stayed in a safer place, maybe in a building across the Mur so they can’t sneak up on it so easily.”
The aerial beastkin were all but impossible to keep away without automated turrets or something, but tunnelling under a river as large as the Mur had to be at least a bit challenging, and guarding the few bridges against sneaky assholes would be much easier than keeping every street around a building under watch.
“I see,” Zeigler said, holding her gaze with a thoughtful, calculating glint in his eyes. “We were already planning to provide a safer place for you to stay. This attack had been a surprise, but it won’t be the next time. It will not happen again. As for your deployment, would you be willing to be split up, or should I consider all of you as a single unit?”
“No, we would like to remain together for now,” Mia said. They’d already discussed it and decided to make trying to take them out one by one as difficult as possible for the beastkin. Divide and conquer was an age-old tactic, and it was only prudent to make its implementation as difficult for the enemy as possible.
“Alright.” Thankfully, Zeigler accepted it with a nod, not questioning the decision. “Then, I believe the best way to use your unit would be as an elite strike force, to spearhead our offensive and break through the beastkin’s line. However, they have a veritable horde of those Evergreen monsters at their beck and call. Thus, whenever we managed to break through the ones on the front, a group of higher-levelled beasts led by an Elite- one of those ex-Guardian monsters, always stopped our advance and pushed us back further than where we initially started. If you could bait out that Elite monster and slay it, and they don’t have another in reserve, we could finally make an honest push towards that accursed Rift they are squatting on. We destroy that, and we win. I’ve been told the Obelisk will emerge as close to the geometric centre of a settlement as possible, while remaining accessible to the population. We will have control of it, and not the beastkin. With how many of our combatants are stuck at Level 10 already, having them advance to the next Rank should swiftly decide this … war.”
Right, the geometric centre of Graz should be somewhere a bit south of the inner city, which was firmly within the military faction’s control for now. The last Rift was almost beyond the city’s limits in the farmlands to the east, and the hill where the Werewolf King had his base was to the north, near the Mur, separating the Andritz part of the city where Mia and Helene had lived till now from the rest of Graz.
I’ll need to quiz Nikki about how Obelisks work later, just to make sure that Graham woman can’t pull anything fishy. What if control of its functions automatically goes to the highest Levelled System User nearby? We’d need to boot her ass out into the wilderness if that’s the case before we let that Obelisk drop down from the sky, or however the System deploys these things.
Mia nodded, then glanced over her shoulder at the group of hardened and bloodied Delvers. She tried to make eye contact with each of them, searching for any sign of objection with a questioningly raised pink eyebrow, but all of them just returned her stare with serious frowns and brisk nods.
“We will do that then. Where should we strike?” Mia asked, and Zeigler gestured for her to follow him back to the large table he’d been sitting at. On it was a massive, old map of Graz and a bit of its surroundings, and scattered across it were chess figurines of all things. Mia assumed they represented groups of Zeigler’s soldiers and that they had sighted enemy combatants.
“Here, here or here would all be a viable option,” he said, painting out three major intersections which had a good number of figurines, and a pair of rooks on both sides — whatever that meant. “We would wait for you to draw out the Elite and then push through the two other chokepoints. Make sure you don’t push too deep, too fast. The infantry holding the line there might not be as strong as you individually, but they are good fighters, and the monsters love their horde tactics. They will collapse behind you, try to cut off your escape route, then drown you with sheer numbers. My soldiers will follow in your wake and secure what you take from the enemy. Try not leave them too far behind.”
Mia nodded again, then started asking all the questions that seemed prudent. Numbers, specific monster types, what the beastkin themselves were doing, whether they had any weaknesses and so on. Then asked further questions about how well the beastkin worked together with their pet monsters.
“Not at all,” Zeigler said with a wry smirk. “Those beasts are barely leashed. I’ve read reports of them snapping and biting a limb or even head off of any beastkin that got too close. The beastkin tend to serve as scouts most of the time, and we think they report back to their leader so he can direct his pet monsters from afar with up-to-date information at the ready. If the beastkin act as ground troops or infantry, the monsters tend to get sent in from behind in flanking attacks so they have an enemy to attack without the temptation to bite one of their allies.”
As for choosing which of the three suggested chokepoints to attack, Mia decided — after agonising over it for half a minute — to stop being stupid and ask Brent what he thought. He was their battlefield leader. He’d led the Raid and the Rift delves before, and he knew better than anyone what everyone was capable of and how to best leverage it … or which battlefield would allow them to utilise their abilities the most.
Ten minutes later, they were on their way to the widest intersection of the three, where two four-lane streets crossed paths. They travelled in a military convoy, with the two sprites and Helene flying above to discourage or eliminate any airborne ambushers that tried their luck. The hotel they’d stayed in was only a little detour away, so they picked Nikki up on the way, and another five minutes later, they were approaching the contested intersection.
Mia first picked up the distant sound of gunfire. The enemy here was made up entirely of monsters, and these plant-based abominations fought without making a single sound. They didn’t roar, screech, bark or howl. The only sounds they made were of their footfalls and their natural weapons, like claws or fangs, tearing through flesh and metal.
“They harass us nonstop with what we believe are their chaff, the monsters they can produce quicker than we are able to kill them,” the sergeant charged with accompanying them said when Mia questioned him on the enemy’s tactics. “Wave after wave of monsters that are easy enough to kill if we are alert and careful, but most of us still use rifles, and we don’t have an infinite supply of ammunition. We can’t win a war of attrition, and those bastards know it. Every so often, when we would start to get comfortable, they switch tactics.”
Mia sat next to him in the front and glanced away from the road ahead to give the rugged man a raised eyebrow. “Zeigler mentioned they sometimes try to push through with that Elite monster of theirs.”
“It’s not just that,” the Sergeant — she really should have asked him his name — said with a shake of his head. “Sometimes it's a bunch of green-as-grass beastkin charging at us and getting gunned down like idiots. Sometimes it's one of their aerial units coming down on us during an especially bad wave. Sometimes it's a proper group of beastkin with skills and gear enough to break through our lines. We never know what it’s going to be, and we can never rest easy. I swear those fuckers have some freaky scouts who are charged with listening in on us all day long so they can attack us whenever things start going our way.”
They arrived at their destination before Mia could start quizzing him on the different varieties of Evergreen monsters they’ve faced. Hearing it from Zeigler was one thing, but the sergeant seemed to have taken part in the actual fighting himself.
Mia jumped down from the ridiculously high seat of the military Jeep, landing softly on the cracked asphalt and almost slipping on a bit of still-drying viscera. A few metres to the side, bunched up against a street sign, was a pile of strange, lanky monsters. They looked like lemurs mixed with Tasmanian tigers and then skinned until their green flesh was revealed. The pile also smelled of cut grass and mouldy wood, which was at least a silver lining.
Mia glanced over at the high barricade made of rubble and magically raised asphalt stretching from building to building across the street. It even had little windows the soldiers could use to peek out or take potshots at the monsters loitering on the other side. Her ears buzzed and twitched, her face snapping towards a new presence that entered the range of her Spirit Sense. It seemed they wouldn’t even need to raise a fuss to lure out the Elite monster and its retinue of horrors. How nice of it to spare us the bother of having to lure it out or hunt it down.
After facing the Raid Guardian, a Level 12 Elite Monster didn’t even seem like a threat.
