Pandemonium, one word could describe the atmosphere of the Lead Cave. The only true siege in centuries, two of the greatest cultivators in the Sect apparently barely holding onto life and an army at the gates apparently with a weapon unlike any that had been seen before. Veteran soldiers could be forgiven for losing their nerve here and now, let alone the scores of terrified civilians. Ordinarily the wards and protective formations surrounding the Sect would be more than enough to defend against any siege long enough for reinforcements from the Empire to arrive, but with the sabotage and the war on the Eastern Coast there was no telling if any help would arrive at all until it was already far too late. Now that every minute counted it was in the Spirits’ hands now. And increasingly it seemed they had turned their backs on the Lead Cave, judging by the crimson clouds now swarming overhead.
John didn’t need enhanced hearing to hear the screams and sounds of horrified confusion in the gathered crowds, and he could scarcely blame them either. After all wasn’t this exactly out of the holy scriptures and history songs about the Greatest War, of the first days of the Age of Ash?
Elder Aurelium quickly barked orders as he helped his injured comrades to stand with deceptively strong tendrils, plucking the scorched remains of what looked like eyeballs out of several of them while managing to mutter a litany of curses just beneath his breath between each new request for medics and aid. Without thinking he too ran down there, around the same time Magni did, and wordlessly they ran towards the third member of their little trio which had firmly established over the past few months.
Cobalt looked paler than normal, if that was even possible. Her camouflage ability seemingly doing its best to drain any remaining pigment out until she looked like she was carved cleanly out of marble, except the blood staining her lips and several closing wounds. She was obviously shaking like a leaf, eyes a thousand miles away, but the moment they drew near.
“NO!” She howled, causing John and Magni to recoil in shock at once. Suddenly the air around her shimmered with an aggressive heat as a flash of anger, fear and what looked like disgust travelled over her face, shortly before the air shimmered again and she disappeared into thin air.
“Shit, what the fuck happened?” John found himself asking, even knowing the answer was likely not to be found.
“There was something strange going on, even beyond what I expected.” Magni explained, the albino boy somehow paling himself. “She’s not in the right mind-state to cloak her thoughts, but the confusing mess in her mind has prevented anything of detail from being gleamed. But the fear, self loathing and… hunger… part of me wants to leave her alone and the other part thinks we really shouldn’t.”
“In any case, there is an army coming towards the Sect… how long do you think it will take to repair the wards and get some sort of teleportation formation going?” John asked, shaking his previous thoughts out of his head.
“Elder Aurelium estimated perhaps twelve hours, but that is without enemy psychics chipping away at our progress… or an active siege…” Magni trailed off, if there was any of his normally carefree self remaining it wasn’t here now.
“We need to somehow get everyone out…” John babbled barely-coherently mostly to himself. “But just how… where…”
Images partly dredged from his own mind were projected into his thoughts with the familiar heavy-handed intrusion characteristic of ARTOS’s help. A small crack in the wall, a dark tunnel leading to a seemingly endless branching maze of underground rivers and passages, Cobalt’s little secret spot that apparently led straight to Greywater and possibly beyond.
“The cave! Under the sect!” He shouted feverishly.
“But how will we prevent it from being found? How can we evacuate all the civillians in time without giving the location away?” Magni asked.
Suddenly a new presence made itself known with a cough, not quite shimmering into visibility as Cobalt did, but bleeding into conscious recognition with a jarring shift in reality. The mind reeling as something it had refused to acknowledge was placed in its forefront. “I apologise for intruding, but in overhearing your conversation I think I have a solution.” Carrion proposed. Blurry facial features set in a determined expression, or at least that was what John had to assume. “I believe my skills can be of service, after all, if being noticed is what you are worried about who better than I to help with that?”
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Cobalt did not exactly know where she was going, only that she had to run somewhere. The smells… the memory… the temptation…
Those were her fucking friends, Spirits damn her! Not food! People were never food, never should be food unless your hand was forced! She was not a starved slave like the Sword Saint or a desperate survivor of the Age of Ash, nor a degenerate ghoulish bandit-lord ruling a petty cannibal fiefdom! That was not her! It simply wasn’t!
The heady smell of uncertainty and panic filled the air. Screaming now calmed by the efforts of cultivators themselves so full of stress the stench clung to them like bloodstains on white cloth. How easy it would be, with her camouflage, to set up an ambush. To lurk in a corner and jump as unsuspecting prey wou-
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She forced the thought out of her head with a punch so strong it created the sound of a thunderclap. Something that had grown disturbingly familiar over the past few hours, the intrusive thoughts gnawing at her sanity. Was this what her father had to deal with every day? No wonder he was the way he was, frankly she was almost starting to admire how he never outright snapped and went insane. Then again, the sane didn’t tend to travel the path of Cultivation well into the Aberrant Realm, and the sane didn’t regularly leave on hunting trips to literally eat up any particularly uppity armies or criminal elements which would threaten the Empire and its hegemony. Perhaps he wasn’t sane after all.
And she knew the blood ran thicker than she would have liked to imagine. After all why else would her mother dump her on the doorstep of the Lead Cave and leave with little more than a good word and an extra fucking set of titles or two. The woman never even wanted to meet the monster she spawned… and she couldn’t blame her.
Blinking the tears from her eyes she forced herself to focus. “Get your head in the game Cobalt!” She grunted at herself, wracking her mind for what she had to do next.
That’s right, she had a mission to do. She didn’t know how much time she had left until the enemy reached the Sect, but judging by the overwhelming stench of soot, blood and Si drowning out practically everything else they barely had any time now. If she had to fucking die she would die making a difference.
Before she could even make the first few steps over however, a deafening roar pierced the air, literally splitting the clouds overhead before they were replaced with crimson lined darkness. Heavy black raindrops fell like toxic daggers through the air, some so potent they sizzled the ground where they made contact. Worse than that even, she could smell the electrified mucus that covered John like a vaguely fishy suit headed her way with disturbing speed, likely with Magni in tow. She wouldn’t even be able to hide from them in her shame like this. Worse still they were going the direction she was planning to. Her mission was important, dead important, but on the other hand…
Like a fucking coward she ran the other way, prepared to join the defence of the seige on the front lines, cursing herself every step of the way like the bombed out waste she was.
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It was almost disappointing, Iktan mused, as he watched the pathetic attempts of the Lead Cave and their allies to mount a defensive against his forces. They had done admirably to repair the wards protecting their Sect, as was evident by the thick psychic mist that still surrounded them according to his best psychics. But they were still weakened prey, the greatest of their number injured to practical uselessness fighting him, his champions and of course Cipactli. It was not a question of if they were going to make it out of this siege, but how fast it would take for the massacre to be complete. Was this really the same rebel outpost that distracted his grandfather’s forces two centuries ago long enough for Cunningham to battle him into the Desert of Glass and tear his essence asunder?
No, he couldn’t do to underestimate his foes, not yet. With a telepathic order he commanded Cipactli to bring the storm, and like the dutiful son he was he obliged with a roar which was meant to crush the morale of all who would listen to it. He could certainly probably get this over with in an instant if he had asked the dutiful little dragon to simply reduce the Lead Cave to cinder and slag, but he still had objectives he needed to complete.
Besides with the Sect in such disarray and reinforcements unlikely to manifest anytime soon he was in no real rush. Why not have some fun with it?
He called forth his marshals, Gabriel a burning angel of radioactive flame and eternally burning flesh, Diego looking more like a reaper-scribe presiding over a ledger of harvested souls than a human of flesh and blood. “I am feeling generous, relay the orders to my men that they are to hold their fire as we approach the Sect until I give my explicit order. I intend to do this with honour and give these dogs one chance and one chance only of surrender. Understood?”
“Crystal.” Gabriel said with wilful orange flame burning blindingly in his eye sockets. In a single word carrying the weight of decades, rather centuries, of loyal service.
“Your will is my command.” Diego said himself in typical monotone with green, emotionless flame dancing in his own. Dreadfully boring as ever, it’s a shame nobody more competent than him has shown themselves.
“Wonderful, until then we march forward. I make no expectations for my generosity to be rewarded, but I am in a good mood today.” He concluded.
Privately he retreated into his own mind puzzling over the loose collections of records and details. He knew where his grandfather died, roughly, nothing concrete. And he knew the ever paranoid man would not allow the possibility of his corpse to be ransacked and used to power the weapons and men who would tear apart his empire, not that it had mattered in the end after all. He also knew that while a truly gargantuan explosion occurred at the time of the old man’s recorded death the numbers on the records were nowhere near the amount of power that the man he knew should have been able to amass. All of this, and the now long forgotten formation-charm that had only burned with his family years after the man whose soul it was connected to fell, pointed to the fact that the Jackalopes had not so thoroughly erased the man from existence as they liked to claim. But no answers appeared to him through all of his conquests, except that the remains, if any, were likely to be found not far from where he had died. Nothing of that magnitude could be smuggled much further without notice. Then again nor does something like that just disappear.
One way or another he would get his answers. If not here, then he would simply reduce this Sect to nothing and keep moving in. As far as he could manage before the soulless demons from across the sea inevitably turned their attentions south as well, and even then it would only be a temporary setback.
He was no true psychic barring his link with Cipactli, but he knew visions when he saw them. Perhaps he went insane during his century and a half in that cave, but he knew his fate lay in the same sun-scorched sand where his grandfathers body lay. That obsidian field that holds what he needs to chip his ragtag territories into a new, solidified, Obsidian Khanate.