She was only a flitting shadow in the night, the attention of the Hea tumeroks on the distance, where the fires of an army burned, demanding their attention, focusing their fears, dragging their eyes.

Closer fires ringed them in all directions, and they knew eyes were staring back at them, making sure they didn’t send out ambushers or raiders, waiting and ready for them to try something.

The last two scout patrols to be sent out hadn’t come back.

The nearby villages and homes had already been abandoned. Most of them had already been torched by the invaders, who had no desire to see Hea-designed homes left behind. Those flames were another distraction.

And yet, the Hea had held onto Soushi. The walls had grown higher, tougher, more thorned, magic imbued in them to defy attackers violently if they were scaled, certainly far more dangerous than the mere stone walls of Mayoi.

Princess Kristie Rantha just smiled as she slid into the shadow of those walls. They were probably pretty proud of these walls...

She could feel the force magic that wanted to ripple about and punch through her from the many thorns on the wall, certainly capable of killing any normal climber, a better defense than a whole line of pikes, inexhaustible and lethal.

It died against her Null like any other magic. The Hea were confident of their walls being able to hold, were obviously confident of being able to secure their gates, and had no fear of not being able to resupply.

She could hear the subsonic hum at the lower range of her hearing. Having heard it at very close range on multiple occasions, there was no mistaking it for anything else.

Virindi holding pattern, basically meaning ‘I am floating here obeying orders.’

Polyglot could even decipher hivemind pseudo-electric modulation coding, after all. A great Feat, even if her Whiskers of the Wild gave her Tongues if needed.

There were fourteen virindi in the town, she judged after about a half hour of listening to the hums. They were keeping out of sight, no doubt meant to be a rude surprise to any human attackers.

Fourteen of them weren’t a threat. It was if they could bring in others that was, and Kris had very, very little doubt that was exactly what they were present to do. They were here to anchor the far side of a Portal if there was an attack. It would open, and a whole mess of reinforcing virindi would flood out of the thing and tear apart any attacking force with immense amounts of directed magical volleys.

It would be a really big fireworks show, and complete hell to experience.

So, it was her job to make sure said Portal never took place.

The Hea were confident in their magical walls. It was somewhat similar to what had been the Aun settlement at Marae Lassel, abandoned at the Fall when its magic failed then, very hard to bypass, designed to deal with however many attacking olthoi dared its defenses.

They were confident of the magic of the virindi and the reinforcements that had to be waiting in case of attack. Perhaps they were even confident in the magic of their maimed elders, learning so long and painfully over the intervening years, and the certainty that our methods of true death wouldn’t stop them with their masters here.

Well, they were about to learn hard lessons about relying too much on the magic of themselves and their masters, thinking it was greater and more than the Isparians they’d hunted and chased away with could come up with. The virindi certainly knew many things of ancient origins and fell power, but that didn’t mean they could come up with new things readily, nor adapt quickly to changes in a situation without referring to a past where such things had come up with before.

Nor did it mean that they themselves were immune to the true death of vivus.

She was definitely going to be inflicting all those unwelcome situations on them.

Her strength to weight ratio was better than a spider monkey, and so hauling herself up the sides of the walls was basically effortless, being able to do curls with her whole bodyweight and more with ease.

There were tumeroks on the walls, but the cool of the night and the light kept them near the fires, occasionally walking between them to be sure nothing was going on.

She simply hung there by her nails until a Hea sentry passed by, and then silently levered herself up, over, and past his backside less than a pace away without much stress. When instinct made the tumerok turn around warily to look at the thorned wall and the shadows outside, she was already down inside the town and past him, landing with disturbing quiet and sliding away into the darkness.

The first of the waiting hums wasn’t that far away, but she didn’t want that one. She wanted the one with more notes to it, which moved around a bit, evaluating the situation, checking on its underlings, and making sure the orders it had were ready to be implemented.

That one was located in that direction, towards the center of the town. Looked like one of the abandoned shops, the inside probably gutted and the basement area repurposed to whatever the virindi needed.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The lesser virindi might notice the hum of their commander vanishing, but unless they had standing orders on how to react, the least of them would do nothing, simply waiting there for more orders. The more independent ones might be moved to react and ascertain if the situation had changed, but that was a smaller number of them, and smaller numbers she could certainly deal with.

Flitting from scraps of cover and shadow that were not big enough to conceal her, yet did so without effort, she closed in on her target, noting the Hea guards outside the building who were both stiffly tense and quite bored, yet not daring to slough off with their masters here.

Amused at the situation and the guards at both front and back, belying the importance of the nondescript building, she instead went up the side, ghosting up the walls, then onto the tiles of the roof, to the second floor windows. Pushing them open and sliding into the room beyond was effortless… and the Virindi Puppet floating up there was facing the wrong direction, completely unaware as her Sound Bubble kept any noises from outside from entering as she flowed bonelessly through the window.

A moment later the creature's hum died away as the Sound Bubble expanded to include it. The Puppet noted the magical field come up, paused to analyze it and wonder what it was meant to do, a design and configuration beyond the limited knowledge that had been ceded to it… and then an adamantine Blade wound in Lost Light plunged into its core, vivus burst forth as its matrix was disrupted, and it didn’t even get to hum or screech forth an alarm before it collapsed into armored robes and disintegrating sickles and mask, Burning quietly and evaporating there on the floor.

She dropped the Sound Bubble and listened silently for signs of a reaction. She had no idea of the hearing range or sensitivity of the virindi, and thus if they would readily notice one of their own passing away at this distance.

The subsonic hums she could still faintly make out didn’t seem to have much reaction. Either a Puppet was quiet, it was inconsequential if it went silent, or the others were out of range.

Good enough for her.

She slid open the door, the nominal paper of the Sho replaced by sturdier wood, probably having been holed or broken in the past.

Her tremblesense extended to thirty feet, and nothing was reacting. Even the psychomagnetic repulsion of the virindi against the floor was easily perceptible, and she felt nothing connecting through the solids she could feel.

Her own Waveskating Step kept her above the creaking boards and the aging supports underneath them, while she tracked the footsteps of many years and where they led with unerring precision. The stairs down were close, and she was swiftly down on the main floor, senses reaching out in all directions from the empty rooms below.

She could see where furniture and fixtures had once sat, now removed. Patterns of traffic in from the doors at the front and one at the back, spiraling around obstructions that were no longer here, leading from room to room… and the stairs going down.

Below her feet, she could feel a pressure up against the ceiling below her, of something unnatural and its power pressing against the wood.

The humming nature of it, and her ears focusing on it, easily identified it as a powerful virindi. The tone and note of it was unfamiliar, but that was no surprise at all. She had only seen about a dozen types of virindi, all of them numbering among the most common types, save for the three leader-types she had seen in the river town of Rithwic back then, with their longer tapered armored shells and variant colors, as opposed to the robe-like shells of the lesser virindi.

There were three of them down below.

That did not surprise her, as this would be an important place, and surely would be well defended. She was fairly sure she could deal with the two guards, who didn’t seem all that different from virindi she had listened to in the past, but the big one had to go.

Well, no time like the present.

She was aware that because of her Null she simply ‘wasn’t there’ to the virindi ability to sense magic, so withdrawing Quaver’s Sound Bubble effectively made her next to invisible.

How they interpreted light and sound was clearly not superior to that of humans, possibly because they were energy beings trying to interpret mass and structure. In a wildly unregimented and organic world, the pure randomness and irregularities of life were doubtless monumentally distracting, and it was difficult for them to tell if something was out of place.

Doubtless why every non-vital thing had been removed from their purview. It was a hallmark of Axiomatic minds: no variation, no irregularities!

Still, they had wooden stairs instead of stone ramps, and stacked stone basement walls, instead of Shaped or carved slabs of rock. Kris went down on her face at the head of the stairs, holding onto the sides and turning her head, her long braid snaking back and staying fixed to her back as she dipped down slowly to see what was below.

She saw the underside of one hanging shell of an armored robe in a blue-black hue that was new to her, but the accompanying hum didn’t seem that much different from an Inquisitor she’d run across.

The one in the long, layered tapered robe, itself a hallmark of status, was in a rusting green hue that she had no reference for, but the hum of its power, and the force it had against the ground, was clearly higher than that of the two guards… and guards they clearly were, their hums rich in depth, but not in sophistication.

Here to provide power.

That was just goddamn fine, more Karma for her. She just had to kill the big bastard quick and clean, and then she could see about dancing with its guards to a Waltz of the Lost Light.

Virindi were both very complex, as they were semi-elementals of transpsionic energy, and very simple, as they were just energy patterns of common origin and increasing sophistication.

Most notably, there was almost no deviation in their core resonances, only increasing sophistication thereof. Deviation would mean separation from their hivemind identity, which would affect coherence, and was very, very stamped down on by the virindi, according to the tales she’d been told.

All that meant was that their cores were all in about the same places, just harder to reach through stronger shells and force effects warding them, thousands of Health and Health Qi protecting them.

Which was why cheese was so useful against them.

Behind her back, Quaver went crystalline Ruby in his sheath, ready and waiting to be used…