I wasn’t out there when the soldiers and forces involved began to move. The Freehold forces of all races were arriving steadily through the Big Jump. Nobody who couldn’t make the Jump was ready to join the first wave of efforts, and had to wait to be Trailered across in the second wave… maybe.

There had been a lot of crazy Leveling by people across the Vesayans to be able to use the Big Jump, for exactly this reason!

Even Ithaenc began to empty out. Not a word was spoken, but it was plain the paramounts who didn’t get involved were going to be denied the new avenues of advancement indefinitely or permanently. The looks in the eyes of those who used to admire them turning to scorn was something their egos could not tolerate, even if fear still gripped them deep in the soul.

Even if they were only support for those doing the real fighting, they had to get involved!

----

The first teams of soldiers departed Overlook in the late evening, towing Disks laden with hundreds of long stone stakes dyed bright yellow with black stripes. They were led by Scouts with both physical maps and the much more accurate Markspace Map. Their job was to clear all the spawn points close to Overlook, plant the stakes marking those points, and move on to the next.

Once they had the nearest points cleared, I’d do my Stone Walk, the plans already made and plotted out, the engineers planting the markers and stringing off the path I would be pacing. I’d be putting up a thirty-foot wall, higher than anything could jump, if not fly, in a one-mile radius around the fortress, including down the mountainside and the beach, right out to the Shoreward.

In the meantime, I had to make the shelters and evacuation tunnels for the civilians who would be living at the beach, as well as setting up the preliminary roads, fountains, foundation for homes, storage cellars, and the like. The Aun and lugians had been heavily involved in the planning, a meshing of above-ground and below-ground styles that was tolerable by both races, with the Isparians easily able to adapt and build upon either style.

None of this ramshackle fishing village crap. This was going to be done right, even if a lot of people didn’t think we should be going through so much effort for civilians.

Given everything we were doing was basically for the civilians, not the wealthy, we didn’t see eye-to-eye on much with those people. It had also been made plain to those people that if they ran ahead of us and imperiled everything we were doing by stirring up things they and we couldn’t handle, they’d all be executed, even if they survived starting a disaster.

They either waited, or obeyed orders if they had volunteered to ‘help’.

---

As I’d expected, Elder Jorgio was sent out with four teams to hit the Gotrok, several paramounts with extensive experience fighting Gotroks coming along to help out.

Lines of lugian spawnpoints would have to be cleared around multiple mountains and approaches to the lands around Linvak Tukal, with the living Gotrok disposed of so they couldn’t organize their Summoned counterparts effectively. Without living commanders, the Summons could be taken down one by one, swiftly, effectively, and with little danger.

Months had been spent by the Mick and his teams in Gotrok lands, finding those Summon points, the paths the living commanders and scouts of the enemy tended to roam, and when and how to dispose of them. Jorgio and the teams would be exploiting that knowledge, looking for signs of reaction from the lugians… and looking for any response from the virindi, the unseen hand that was backing both them and the Hea.

I busied myself moving hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of stone during the same period, pausing only at the Salutes and to take my Mastery, Feat, and final Arcane Theurge Class Level. I was also helping Kris and the Mick with coordination through the Markspace, watching as circles of unwhite mist came into being along an ever-widening front on the Markspace Map, and the Silence of the Summons spread further and wider and quickly.

------

-Warlord, we’ve got company. Looks like some banderlings slipped past the outer teams.-

Kris watched two men pounding a striped yellow-and-black stake into the middle of the white spot on the ground where a Summoned Cunning Monuga had died to a volley of arrow fire, the nine-foot corpse already dissipated.

-Tribe?- she /replied shortly.

-Looked like Stormfoot by the beadwork. Six hunters of various sizes,- the Scout, named Barlym, /reported quickly.

Kris put the horn at her side to her lips, and blew a series of rising and falling notes in quad-step series, smooth and pure and carrying very, very well through these rolling hills.

Every tribe in these hills knew that tune by now. It meant I am Here, and if You want to confront Me, come find Me. I will be happy to take You all on, don’t worry about the other Isparians.

About ten minutes later, she was watching another post being driven into the ground where a large reddish-brown shreth had once been, and one of the sentries called out that they had a banderling hunting team moving in.

“” she yowled out in such precise banderling that the men nearest her all jumped in shock, not expecting that.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

A minute later, the hunting team of yellow-and-green striped banderlings padded into their safety zone, utterly ignored by the sentries, their fraught nerves soothed by the banality of being considered not dangerous enough to worry about, even if it did hit their pride.

“” she growled at him, showing her eight canines in a way that meant if he caused any trouble, the pleasure would be her beating his and all their asses into the ground with great energy… but she wasn’t going to eat him.

Then again, Isparians didn’t eat banderlings, but they slaughtered every banderling who ever dined on Isparian flesh that they knew of. The simple respect for their dead had been a hard lesson that had killed many, many members of the barbaric tribes over the years. It had persisted until it finally struck them that they could kill an Isparian, strip them of their belongings, even chop them up and spread out the body parts if they dared… but if they cut them up as game to eat, they would be hunted to the death without remorse, and their entire tribe with them.

The politeness among the warriors had reached the point that the only way the dead were desecrated was if the undead found them. Even tribes that had happily eaten one another previously finding it convenient to abide by the convention. Keeping their dead from becoming slaves to the undead was also a key concern, to the point where grudging truces between rival tribes were often hastily called to drag their dead away and see to their secure cremation or dissolution.

After all, you didn’t want to see the dead of your rivals turned into the hated undead, either!

“,” the worried banderling said, arms flailing to convey his unease and show that he was a threat, looking rather petulant in the face of the unflappable Isparian killing machine in front of him. “” he almost meowed at her.

“,” she confirmed without batting an eye. “,” she informed him smoothly, pointing to a flight of Black Phyntos Wasps in the distance their archers had lined up on.

The banderling was watching the strange bows with roller wheels on their arms intently, finding the way they rolled over and increased the draw range without being six feet long incredibly strange and clever.

With oddly silent thrums, the volley of armor-piercing arrows shot out, the archers reloading smoothly. Two of the hovering phyntos were punched out of the air, while the last staggered, and with an arrow in its abdomen, turned and shot towards the archers.

The two soldiers with glaives in hand swung with smooth speed together, stepping in and chopping the wasp into three pieces before it could reach the archers, two of whom had reloaded already and were staring it down at point-blank range.

The Scout in the lead ran in, his long dagger trailing vivic flames, and calmly punched it into each dead wasp, misty unwhite flames spurting into being. The pieces of the last one were hurriedly brought back and dropped on the resulting pale flames, catching alight themselves instantly, while the mists spilling off them steadily expanded over the whole tramped-down area the Summons ventured around.

Everyone waited, the banderlings included, for the respawn.

Fwaz-woosh! The incoming Summons started to materialize, and then the whiteness leapt up, devoured the ectoplasm before it could form, and nothing happened, save a wave of cool mists washing out from the point of contact.

The banderlings hissed in amazement. Kris pointed, and a striped stake was lifted off the accompanying Disk, the hammers taken up off the same Disk to do the job.

“,” Kris informed Sharkeater, who stared at the misty white flames staining the very ground white in fascination. “” She tilted her head at the banderling meaningfully, then at the rest of his hunting party.

They all mewed in acknowledgment of her point. “” Sharkeater pressed. “”

“”

The tall and slender, if wide-shouldered, banderling hunter considered that as the team moved along in a specific direction, directly towards what he knew to be the next Summon point. “” His feline head bobbed in affirmation. He turned around and growled with a swipe of his claw, and the two youngest members of his hunting pack turned around and loped off quickly. “” he agreed.

She eyed the bundles of shreth hide artfully rolled up on the backs of the departing younger banderlings. “”

Sharkeater, so named because he had killed a Veteran Reedshark on his very first hunt as a pup, turned and sniffed the air, looking very mortified when he realized the Isparian female, a species which had appallingly bad senses of smell, had indeed scented the living reedshark before he had. Summons all had an unnatural tang to them, easy to tell apart from the living.

“,” he reiterated, holding out his hand for his hunting spear, which his second immediately handed to him. While banderlings all had claws, approaching one with a ready weapon was considered grounds to begin a fight. He had watched Chief Gnarltusk get beaten senseless by this female’s bare fists after waving a knife at her, so being very polite was a given.

He had also seen her tear out the throat of a rampaging Hunter Shreth with her teeth, so those were perfectly functional, too, as were the black claws that had stripped said shreth of its hide and meat so quickly it had made even the banderling hunters queasy to watch. Twenty feet of gore and blood had surrounded her after she stripped it right to the bone and had all the good parts and organs laying in its hide in under thirty seconds, the ripping and tearing so gut-wrenching the cubs were mewing in near-panic watching her work.

Yet when she had risen, she hadn’t had a single drop of blood on anything other than her deadly, deadly black nails...