Chako Blude.
***
It took us only ten days to grow into a routine- just a tenday. But the longest ten days of our lives.
Every second of every minute of every hour times twenty, technologically advanced goblins, orcs, dwarves, and humans attacked us in droves. Their weapons ranged from Neolithic sticks and stones to technological marvels of destruction aided by magic, and they used those killing tools readily.
The ground forever quaked from our battles, ripping the once-virulent forest around our camp into a benign crater of corpses and debris. Tens of thousands were lost on all four sides. Yet, massive axes and rusted swords still swung hard beneath the blankets of dwarven bullets and human spells. So it was that the nine branches of the Troupe and our staff of 166 sliced and gnawed; ripped and tore; beat and smashed; impaled and brutalized; flurried and pommeled; blasted and cursed; laughed and sang; corrupted and wilted; destroyed and thus created what would become the forge for Noctis Legionnaires.
Day after day, we fought, blind to the fatigue and pain by virtue of the twin powers we stole from others. Unrestricted abilities that healed each battered torso and restitched every severed artery of those we felled; if only to give us every drop of their usurped vitality. That alone was why we could fall into a routine. Yet it still took ten days. Perhaps it was because that was precisely what Amun required of us. Maybe a result of our constant warring. It couldn't have merely been the result of something we desired- to reach the limits of strength and constitution. It couldn't have been because some of us were already there. We Moontouched, the Undying Fiends, and to an extent, the Augmented like Iris.
Indeed, everyone now held the capacity to heal lethal wounds during combat. Albeit at a relatively slow pace. We all boasted a resistance to natural elemental forces. Our metabolisms had become so efficient we could process natural toxins and sustain ourselves for a month on a week's worth of food. Our lung capacities were measured in days and our skin was made immune to rapid changes in pressure. All of us, except Amun. Such things were detrimental to his walk toward Death's Door. And yet, his constitution was far higher than any of ours all the same. Only he could be impaled, brutalized, or disemboweled and yet fight with all his might as if he were healthy. As such, the only thing we could hope to match or surpass him in was strength.
For now, at least. But I digress.
Strength. If the power given to us by Amun allowed us to see the Mortal Plane as our playground, the strength taken from our enemies allowed us to use the realms as weapons. That was showcased by the strongest and most ill-mannered of the Troupe, Freki. He swung and threw anything he could grip his clawed fingers around. But the mana he molded while doing so was the intriguing part. Mana projected into whatever we wielded and acted in ways that kept them from breaking under internal forces. Soon enough, we were lifting ships and planes from the ends and carrying them off into the distance, while others covered us with boulders flying at speeds that should have ripped them apart.
Strength. If the constitution we developed gave us the mind to see the battlefield as our home; the strength we'd grown accustomed to gave us the means to remodel our home as easily as any other. That became apparent by the end of the first week, wherein we nine organized ourselves into party leaders and made plans to make something great of this place.
Led by one of the Troupe, each group had twenty members chosen at random during the last hour of daily peace and were given a list of tasks to last them throughout the following 20 hours of war. Naturally, the most prevalent of them was the war itself. Yet Leary's fervor proved it an efficient task, if not an easy one. While his dome of fused bones crawled steadily along a million fingertips behind them, his team hunted everything on the horizon with extreme prejudice. Our lines were pushed forward by several hundred meters per day as a result. By the end of our second week, our meek clearing some 300 meters wide had been transformed into a complex of domes housed beneath a vast bone canopy with a diameter of 157 kilometers.
With the grounds littered with the dead, it was up to Reina and her crew to go about the battlefield, collecting corpses and weapons and ferrying them off to be recycled. It was the least-anticipated job, as throwing bloodied weapons and armor into the forges was only half of the duty. The other half consisted of ferrying the corpses deep below ground to be dissected and tossed in one of many pits for later use. Contrarily, whatever mess they made was cleaned up by the most-anticipated duty. With Rickley, they spun flywheels to generate power, farmed, gardened, cooked, cleaned, and did all the other things the undead normally did in the background to keep things running. It was the closest thing there was to a vacation in this dump. Not that the work was easy, seeing as we kept piling on more work for them.
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Indeed, it was us who not only made the place livable. We constructed the future-proof grounds of the universe's greatest fighting force. To do so, we formed our territory into the most vulnerable structures to occupy- a deep crater, containing a deep forest. It was roughly 157 kilometers in diameter and held mostly subterranean infrastructure. In most cases, the domes scattered across the surface were merely training fields or accesses to the tunnels and chambers below. Farms, barracks, classrooms, study halls, libraries, cafeterias, and all the other rooms needed for a learning campus; all reinforced with bone, wood, and stone.
Dubbed the Steepcairn, it would be the place future legionaries lived. On the contrary, the place where they would die was the ring beyond what used to be the War Fields, which was now a jungle of stone and bone. Dubbed the Briarfare, the place where we reached the pinnacle of our physical abilities had since been paved with roads, canals, rails, runways, and trenches that snaked their way towards the bunkers, fortifications, towers, and emplacements sitting before the new War Fields, some 60 to 80 kilometers out from the Cairn's border. Beneath the Briarfare, however, was where the supporting infrastructure sat unexposed from the destructive elements of nature and war. Each canal had a complimentary shipyard. Each railway had a station, and each runway had a hangar, and each emplacement had a staging area; all linked via intricate tunnels that fed to the mechanical realm Iris spread beneath the Cairn.
It was there that Iris and her team reverse-engineered the mountains of materials we brought to the home front. In two weeks' time, not only did they craft weapons and armor for the lot of us, but they made repairs to several captured vehicles and cannibalized enough equipment to make crude but functional surveillance and communications devices. And so too did Wilson's team endeavor to craft fuels, explosives, and potions in the smog-filled pits within the fourth level.
In sharp contrast, the new War Fields- renamed the Gloom Ward- began at the outer rim of the bone dome that capped the vast cratered complex. If one took the northern and southern shores and the eastern and western wood lines into account, it was an undeveloped ring somewhere between 186 and 194 kilometers in diameter. In reality, one had to take those borders into effect, as Leary saw fit to raise relatively small fences to mark off the domain of the other three members and their teams. At least for the most part.
Etan always split his group into two squads. The largest of them remained in Steepcairn to develop and learn new martial and tactical skills to counter our enemies. The other squad always ventured into enemy territory with him to kill or capture high-value targets, steal valuable things, and spy on enemy nations. They never went out blind, however. In many cases, they remained within the boundaries scouted by Geri and her crew. In others, they ensured at least one member of her team was somewhere above to provide support in case things went awry.
Though we went out often for play, we did so only when the last team descended on our enemies. Freki often left nothing standing; living or otherwise. Thus, it was always easy to move in behind them to build up observation or listening posts, forward bases, or outposts and link them back to the compound, with only the common counter-attack to stand in our way.
The first of them was initially the staging ground for the reconstructed vehicles that kept mounting up. By the end of the month, it had been named Delphilios and was dead-set on being the locale where legionaries would learn to build, maintain, and then operate the vehicles we've all come to know and love. The second sat at the southern edge of the Briarfare and was much the same. For now, the port city of Curdenweld to the south was the launching point for our maritime operations. In the future, though, the relatively small river it sat on would be widened to allow larger ships to venture the several kilometers to sea. More so, it would be where legionaries learned the theories behind shipbuilding before they went on to obtain operator licenses and gain experience in maritime warfare. If they were so interested. Of course, the same was true for those who wanted to fly at the Cloudwalde Air Base in the western sector of the Briarfare. And so too were there courses available at Betham Heights to the north for those who wished to wage war by crafting machinations of destruction.
It took us a month to finish our complex. Mostly. So too did it take a month for the Mafia to venture through the seas, collecting resources from the seafloor until we learned where we sat in the vast Darkroom, if barely.
With a few logistical routes created and a paper map of the surrounding environment, we learned of our placement at the center of a land bridge in the Darkroom's center. To our west and extending south was a vast kingdom of dwarves we knew not the name of. Their territory swept around the southern sea to form a relatively thick fjord at the room's edge, giving them a sweeping shoreline of ports to launch their fleets of warships at us.
An equally expansive mega-tribe of goblins sat to our east. And though their vessels were oft too crude to do any damage from the seas and were many times destroyed by the dwarves on the other side of the aforementioned fjord, they performed well as troop transports for their land-based kin. Similarly, the northern hemisphere was split between a truly vast empire of humans toward the west, overlooking an orcish militarized empire scattered across archipelagos and jungles to the east.
These unnamed nations were our enemies. Yet there was surely more lying in wait beyond the veil. Waiting, perhaps, for the crucible to start so they could join in on the fun. But we were only a month into the Hell Phase. Holding our territory was no longer a challenge for us, so the enemy stopped trying to swarm us in endless waves and instead started using real tactics. On top of that, our territory had grown such that it only needed maintenance to thrive. And so it was decided that the rest of our time at war would be spent on the offensive.
The Elven Devil's Troupe would engage in total war.