A fortress overlooking a wolf-strewn battlefield.
Could the arrival of this boss monster be related to the bizarre questline derailing Henry's tutorial?
Possibly.
He guessed the death of King Torc had removed the restriction preventing the wolves from encroaching into the territory, and this Wolf Emperor monster was the next bad guy in the series of boss monsters leading up to The Great Black One.
However, even if this invasion were, somewhat, related to himself, he had no need to stop it. The guy he'd caught a ride with had told him that a Slum Empire 'King' would be arriving with his forces soon to dispose of the mutts.
As far as Henry were concerned, if someone else wanted to try relieving this questline from his innocent hands, he was happy to let them take the burden. Of course, his paranoia told him these Empire goons would botch their attempt miserably and the responsibility of slaying this over-sized wolf would ultimately fall back to him after a series of inexplicable 'coincidences'. However, before that moment, he wouldn't intervene. As a retiree, he should have some faith in these whippersnappers who'd be succeeding him. Let the next generation have its turn at the reins. You never know, they might surpass your expectations and usher in a future far beyond your senile imagination.
Nearby, Henry spotted just one such young whippersnapper. The overly-handsome meathead from before had been squinting at him, two fingers raised to each gracile temple, trying to beam a telepathic message.
-Anonymous: Dan, my buddy. I had my sound muted. What did you say?
Henry had still not given the kid his username or explained the private messaging process fully, nor would he.
-Danontherightwing: Big Bro, how'd the mission go?
-Anonymous: The information is classified, but...
Henry flicked his gaze suspiciously around the fortress, like a spy holding a secret so critical that he couldn't even risk its theft by paranormal telepaths.
-Anonymous: ...it was a stunning success. The world is safe...for now.
He was basically finished with the side-quest to cure the Earthfriends of their ancient vampire moth curse. The rest would be handled by his minions, no further input required from himself. Henry could now focus entirely on completing this tutorial.
The curse quest could become wildly unhinged like this tutorial quest, but he couldn't yet see anything but a superficial, temporal connection between the two. The challenge levels were simply too different. Vampire moths threatened this irrelevant, backwater region, with a couple million casualties, maybe. A sentient shadow demon threatened the whole planet, perhaps the galaxy. A bit different.
-Danontherightwing: Sweet! But what about these wolves, Big Bro?
-Anonymous: No clue. These wolves are totally unrelated to my mission.
-Danontherightwing: But, Big Bro, isn't there a kind of obvious thematic similarity between the huge boar and the huge wolf?
-Anonymous: Dan, don't be racist. Just because they're both massive monsters, doesn't mean they're connected. You're pretty big. Are you related to them?
-Danontherightwing: Oh, sorry, Big Bro.
Henry, having entered the fortress while chatting and slipped through the crowd of noobs, reached the meathead in person and pointed at the shabby donkey hiding behind him. "What you call it?"
"Donkey Bro," Dan answered. "I tried others, but he didn't seem to like them."
"A gorgeous name for a gorgeous donkey!" Henry summoned a couple of power-up biscuits for the ugly beast to nibble on. "Eat, Donkey Bro, and grow."
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
The donkey, carefully taking one in its mouth, immediately spat the snack out, the biscuit bland and nasty in comparison to the wolf meat.
Henry would have drawn an ominous conclusion from that rejection had he seen it, but he was already strolling through the crowd to an earthen watchtower, on top of which a Bowman was sniping at the wolves trying to climb over the walls and eat the noobs.
Reaching the base, Henry called out to the archer, asking if he could check out the view from up there.
“Sure," replied the Bowman. "Your friend, too, if he wants.”
“My friend?” Henry, turning, almost jumped when he found the overly-attractive meathead standing next to him.
Dan laughed handsomely. "My mates will take care of Donkey Bro!"
Henry sighed.
But one should pick and choose their battles, and, in a case of emergency, he could push this meathead to the wolves.
The two of them climbed the watchtower via a ladder of handholds, their ascent bringing into clearer view the wolves fighting outside the fortress. At the top, Henry, making himself at home, summoned a wicker chair and an icebox with glasses of cooled cola.
“Big Bro, do you have an extra chair?” asked Dan.
"You only need one chair when you ride solo like me," Henry lied, unwilling to share his spare chair. "But feel free to help yourself to a drink. You, too, guy with a bow.”
Sipping his cola and enjoying the fizz on his palate, Henry pulled out a pair of binoculars to observe the wolves and players bloodying themselves in the Horny Boar Fields, his mind free from all worries.
Of Suchi's forces, there was nothing to say other than trash - pure, reckless, undisciplined, unwashed, noob thug garbage trash.
The wolves were more interesting. For any player familiar with Saana's battlefields, they showed signs of careful direction. The packs were led by larger, variant wolves through manoeuvres to scout, to retreat, to flank, to distract, to ambush, to split - to even sacrifice.
For a player very familiar with Saana's battlefields, one might pick out, from the bewildering collage of the wolves' movements, the invisible presence of the commander coordinating them, whose orders rippled out through the ranks, who reacted to unexpected events, who made mistakes, who attempted to rectify mistakes, who learned from mistakes. At a higher level still, one might sense something akin to a personality, to the extent that a personality could exist on a battlefield; the quirks of neurology, experience, and belief were squeezed into certain proclivities: in speed, in complexity, in vision, in risk-taking, in the favouring of a subset of strategies and the ignorance of alternatives - perhaps the refusal.
For Henry, whose past adventures had also meandered a little into such matters, the intent behind this skirmish instantly stuck out to him.
Unbeknownst to the human organisers of the defence, the wolves weren't seriously trying to assault this fortress. Rather, while this contingent splashed its bodies pointlessly against the fortress wall, they diverted attention from wolves operating to the sides, quietly dragging off boar bodies into the forest.
The purpose of this, Henry assumed, was to eat the boars to strengthen themselves. As the boars were weaker than the wolves, the wolves wouldn’t gain levels, but they would be able to increase the size of their HP pool and evolve into stronger variants. Eating the boars would also be a way to heal when the wolves assaulted the stronger Level 4 monsters in the next Killing Grounds over, which the wolves could gain levels from.
The goal from there would be to continue this snowball, to roll through a succession of increasingly stronger foes, reinforcing themselves on the corpses of each they slew.
A frantic urgency permeated the execution of this plan, a knowledge both of the danger and the necessity to ignore the danger. As weak, Level 3 creatures, the wolves were trapped in an inherently precarious position, the horde at risk of being snuffed at any moment by the vastly more powerful entities surrounding them. Rest was a fantasy they would have to forfeit for now. Like ants stranded in the path of stampeding mammoths, they had to suppress the biological imperative to dig out a hive to shelter in and, enduring the terrible open, stay mobile, moving onward one step at a time through the ever-shifting gaps between annihilation, onward, onward, onward, onward, onward, onward...
Henry, perhaps projecting too much, thought the intricacy that he definitely could detect was far beyond that of a monster. In the Sentient Bloodlust state, monsters did gain human-level intellectual capabilities. However, at first, they were naive, having never been exposed to the same depth of experience or education that make up much of the power of the modern human mind.
He concluded the one directing the force, likely the 'Wolf Emperor' lurking in the forest, had attained its Sentience long ago, similar to the imprisoned boar. It couldn't have been spawned in Suchi today. Most likely, the monster had been portaled into the area by The Great Black One. It seemed that, where before Henry'd been abducted to his adversary's realm, this time—because he would have refused to follow along—the enemy had been brought to his.
Bumbabababum!
A trumpet was blown, announcing a cavalcade of armoured knights riding towards the fortress.
Bumbabababum!
A herald in the group's vanguard lowered his instrument and bellowed. “Make way for The King!”
Henry glanced at the mounted goons and, mumbling, corrected himself. "Well, this guy's realm..."