The tunnel I was in was now significantly more crowded than it had been just minutes ago. But that was the bad news. The good news was that it was crowded because I wasn't alone. The three minotaurs I had created to accompany me on my raid of the harpy village were alive, conscious, and looking at me.
The three man-beasts weren't identical. They had different colored fur-coats, differently shaped horns, and were of variously outrageous proportions. I studied all three of them equally, beginning with Aamlo.
Aamlo was the oldest of his kin. He was also the tallest. He had long, straight horns that I envisioned him using to pierce his foes. My foes. His fur was a bright-red color, and he had the densest body of all of his siblings. He was the archetypical minotaur or at least the one that sprang to mind when I read the species knowledge notification about his kind.
He had a look of surprising cleverness in his gaze and his eyes were the color of rubies. His thick muscles were covered in the incredibly dense and warm fur his kind were known for. He had come to life wearing nothing, a choice I made and was now fully kitted out for a military operation. Thick iron armor covered most of his body, providing him with additional protection against injury just in case his natural armor couldn't do the trick.
He held an impressive-looking trident in one hand and a weighted net in the other. His face wasn't visible due to the helm he wore, but his snout was since the thing jutted outwards and forwards from his face. There was a smile on the wicked muzzle-like facial feature, one that suggested a sense of smugness and arrogance afforded to Aamlo by his innate belief that he was special. That he was chosen by his creator, by me, to be a warrior who captures foes.
This sense of smugness came in part from the fact that I had given him a class the moment he was born, and the system told him that that was odd. Aamlo was the second of my creations to spring to life with a class. The first was a dark elf in the mirrored version of Undermoon, who had been created with the monk class given to her.
I chuckled at the thing and his arrogance, and he grinned at me. His body language told me he was ready to go out and complete his first mission.
The next of the three siblings was a minotaur I named Vizin. Vizin had black fur, was of medium height relative to his siblings, and clothed himself in thick, iron armor.
Vizin had spiraled horns, ones that shielded his head from many kinds of arrows and other weapons that lacked the power to penetrate the natural toughness of the ivory-colored bodyparts. He easily held a thick bastard sword in one hand and a net in the other. His attitude was more focused and humble than that of his sibling. His eyes were a bright blue color, a surprising eye color to see on such a creature but one I thought he was well-suited too.
The last of the trio was a minotaur I had named Danus. This minotaur had blonde fur, causing him to be easily identifiable, and only his lower body was armored. He held a net in his left hand and a bastard sword in his right. He was the shortest of his siblings, but also the fastest.
He was also chatty. Which he proved by asking the third question he had asked in half a minute.
"But, creator, why are we doing this?" The minotaur asked, his voice gruff and heavy despite his age. I chuckled and looked at him. And then I answered him.
"We're doing this so I can become stronger. And so I can someday create more creatures, control more things, and build a vast empire of knowledge and territory." I explained to the childishly curious minotaur, smiling at someone who reminded me of myself.
"Yes creator, I understand that but why?" The minotaur asked, seemingly repeating the question. I suppressed a sigh and prepared an answer.
"Because I want to know more about... everything. And one route to knowledge is to gain as much power as possible, and use that power to ensure no one stands between me and the things I, or my followers research." I said, trying to break it down as much as possible. The minotaur's mouth opened to ask another question, and I intercepted him by adding in another portion to my response.
"I can gain knowledge by scanning the thoughts, secrets, knowledge, and memories of those I meet. This is part of why building an empire is useful for me, it allows me to meet and convert more people whose memories, thoughts, knowledge, and secrets matter so much to me." I said, explaining a bit about my memory-based powers. And with this, the minotaur seemed stumped. His mind was racing as I turned to the rest of my minions and began to speak.
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"Are you boys ready?" I asked, wanting them to be as ready to go to work as possible. Both minotaurs looked at me and nodded. They hefted their weapons into the air and the deadly objects swung until just before they would have bit into or even through their shoulders. And then the weapons came to a speedy stop, gently landing on the shoulders of both of the bovine brutes.
I grinned at them and opened up a portal in the dark tunnel that led to a dark patch of the Infernian desert. I looked at my warriors, the two that were paying attention anyway, and nodded in the direction of the portal. I then began to walk towards it, followed not long after by two of the siblings I had just created. When the three of us stepped through the portal, without Danus, I annoyedly shouted into the portal, despite knowing that it negatively impacts how far sound was carried.
"Danus! Come on! Catch up to us!" I shouted, purposefully choosing the way to inform him that had the highest chance of catching him off-guard and showing him the problems of talking too much. I hoped that it would give him a chance to think about his behavior.
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The area beyond the portal that Danus, Vizin, Aamlo, and myself stepped into was on the downward end of a sand dune. The portal deposited us a short walk from where we heading, something I knew for sure because of the latest time I had added Tristan's knowledge to mine, earlier today.
When all four of us were beyond the portal I closed it and looked at my creations. They looked excited and ready for battle. But not before I told them of my plan.
"Okay, here's the plan," I said, beginning my detailed breakdown of the battle strategy I wanted us to use.
"Our objective is to inflict maximum terror and as little damage as possible. I want us to go in in a tight formation, show-off our armor, weapons, and strength and flee without doing any real damage. The only things we need to nab that we don't have going in are the harpies themselves. Once we have them in hand we'll be free to step back and carefully retreat." I explained, my eyes flashing with joy as I imagined the scenario in my head.
"I'll be doing two things. I'll be casting illusionary flames all over the village to scare the villagers, and I'll also be using some of my powers to aid you in nabbing the harpies. Harpies can and do fly and because of that, they can be tough to catch with your equipment. I have an ability that I'll be using on two of them that will cause them to violently crash to the surface, and I have a spell I can use on others to make it nearly impossible for them to fly. It's called The Weight of the Dead." I told them.
"Your goal is simple: you are to look intimidating, catch the harpies when they fall, and roar loudly and visibly. I want you to focus on that above all else aside from defending myself or defending yourself." I informed my party. They looked at each other and nodded, a mischevious glint in their eyes. And then they nodded at me, ready to enact my machinations. And as one we made our move.
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We swiftly traveled to the top of the sand dune, and then to the bottom of its other side. The moments when we stood at the top of the sand dune we could see the village in the distance.
It was a ramshackle collection of houses that appeared weirdly human in make, and undeserving of belonging in this vile desert. How strange... I thought the moment I noticed how strangely alike the buildings looked to the ones that humans lived in in the town of Golden-Gate.
I wanted to stop and look at them from a distance but then I chewed myself out. Don't get distracted. We'll have plenty of time to gawk at the buildings once we're in charge of this place. I realized, with a grin on my face. All that separated us from our target was a walk that looked to be a few minutes long. When my soldiers realized that, grins broke out across their snouts.
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It was while I was on my way there that I realized something.
Are they inside? They must be. I suddenly realized, after noticing that both my radar and my tremorsense refused to cooperate with me. Neither power alerted me to the presence of any harpies in the area, which was a good sign because it meant that they were waiting inside of some of the buildings instead of a place to that happened to be harder to finder.
Under these conditions catching a few harpies would be very easy. I chuckled as I thought about some ways to capture the creatures I had come here to take away from this place.
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Our attack began when we were close enough to make out the state of disrepair that the small community was in. By the time I was close enough to feel comfortable setting the town on fire, I could see what some of was going on in the supposedly utopian and utilitarian place. We were close enough that the gate into the town wasn't just a far off monument, but instead a thing we could make out in the distance and that we'd soon be close enough to read.
The hamlet ahead of us was a strange place even if, according to Tristan and her mates anyway, it was also a happy one. This was because it was also in almost comical disrepair.
The streets were long gone, buried deep below the sands. The dilapidated houses that lined a particularly small envisionment of a town-square were visible to me at the moment and each of them had boarded up windows that prevented someone from peering into them. It was a foreboding sight.
I wonder what this place's deal is. I questioned, even as I rose my hands into the air in two different directions and began to load up my magic.
At this point, we were about to pass through the gate into the community. And my magic was ready to go, thin blue sparks of illusionary flames, a mid-level illusion spell that created false fire, wafting off of my fingertips, foreshadowing the sorts of illusionary horrors we were about to unleash on this unsuspecting, unusual tiny town.