The next morning, before they headed out, Benjamin addressed the army. He rarely did so, and generally preferred to leave that to Matt, but given his newfound Machiavellian tendencies, he felt he needed to look into the eyes of the men and women that might live or die based on his decisions, and tell them what he planned to do.
Well, at least part of what he planned to do. The only one he told the whole plan to was Matt, and though his friend had hated it, he hadn’t told Benjamin no. Still, Benjamin felt it was his responsibility to address what was coming and at least let everyone know the risks, so that’s exactly what he did.
Using a large illusion spell as a backdrop so everyone could see, Benjamin laid out the field of battle, as scouts and messengers from the throne of the sky sea had laid it out for him. “More than a week from here, even if the tides of grass are in our favor lies a force ten times our size. Obviously we can’t fight such enemy in a straightforward way and expect to survive, fortunately the size and shape of their formations allow for other options.”
It was true on the face of it. The Rhulvin marched in front almost a hundred miles wide, and they were burning everything as they went, literally salting the earth so that the grass sea could not consume them from harsh lessons they’d learned in the past. Such an army thought itself invincible, of course, and it very nearly was, but at this point, the only thing preventing Benjamin from annihilating it was his desire to spare lives.
It would have been all too easy to decimate one end of the column in a series of surprise strikes that would kill thousands in a torrent of dragon fire and explosive arrows before retreating to the far end to do it again. Though Matt was largely the architect of the plan, it would be Benji’s firepower. If worst came to worst, he could even try summoning one of the Nether Behemoths he’d seen on his short trip to hell.
Benjamin didn’t like the idea of summoning demons that were any stronger than he had to because he thought he’d probably never get that disgusting feeling off of his soul. Still, he did kind of want to summon a Chthonic Godzilla and see just what the enemy could even do about that.
Nether Behemoth (20 mana/minute): Summon the king of the ashen sky to rend and devour your enemies.
Even with his newly repaired soul, he couldn’t summon such a monstrosity for more than a couple of minutes, but he couldn’t imagine that there would be much left to fight after those couple minutes had passed. That just meant they had to be more careful, though. There were certainly Summoner Lords in the opposing army that could summon unspeakable monstrosities as well, and they wouldn’t do well to underestimate that.
When the battle plan was done being described, he asked for questions but got few and let the giant display he’d used to explain everything vanish in a mist behind him. Then, as the camp got ready to move south, he met with the scouts that had served them well so far and prepared to teach as many as he could a new trick: Rhulvian Rift magic.
It was there he found a welcome surprise. There amongst the squad captains he found Kalinomia alive and well.
“Well look who it is, Mister big shot come to slum with the vanguard,” she said with a smile.
There were scattered, uncertain laughs at that, but once Benjamin joined them, showing that he wasn’t insulted, almost everyone else joined in.
“It’s nice to see you too,” he said, stepping forward to hug her.
“And it’s nice to see that you’ve loosened up,” she smiled.
“Well, you die once or twice, and you learn to stop worrying about everything quite so much,” he answered with a shrug.
“Sounds like a story I need to hear,” she smiled. “Maybe over that drink you owe me?”
That caused a few knowing chuckles, but Benjamin shrugged it off. There was a time in his life when he would have embarrassed him into a flustered silence, but now he merely took it in stride. Whether that was his own experience or a little bit of Prince Agardian’s arrogance, he couldn’t say, but he didn’t mind the spotlight so much now.
“Maybe after the battle is done, and we both have something worth celebrating,” he said with a smile.
She pretended to pout at that, but he was under no illusions what that expression meant as he changed the topic to the reason for the topic at hand. Not everyone could use it, and not all who could use it really understood it. Benjamin might never have figured it out if not for his stolen memories. Still, it largely involved superimposing two points in your mind to define the points of colocation while using the magic simultaneously. The fire itself that he’d seen so often was actually leakage from the outside of reality… from the hell he’d visited so briefly.
Rift (lesser)(1 mana/mile): travel to a place you’ve been previously, up to 100 miles distant, with an accuracy of 5% of the distance traveled.
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That was where the demons lived, and if the Rhulvin scholars were to be believed, they were always here, just on the other side of reality, looking for a way across to feast on the flesh and the souls of the living. He thought about asking Miku about that, but then the Rhulvin mages had probably done most of their so-called research by asking demons like her and getting uncertain answers already.
What he would love to do was find some way to explore the outside. If he’d had the time, he could have gone back to the stone children and worked on an eldritch bathysphere to descend into the depths of unreality and understand them better. Sadly, that would have to wait until after this war was won. There was a lot of scholarly work he’d love to do to pick up where the almost intentional ignorance of the Summoner Lords left off. He just hoped that he lived long enough to do so.
I mean, immortality is possible so long as you’re willing to steal the bodies of your enemies, he thought as he watched one of the scouts try and fail to open up a portal. So, spending a lifetime trying to figure all of this out sort of takes on new meaning when you think about it that way.
Part of him hated the idea that he would someday die. Humans feared death, of course, but saw it as a natural part of life. The Rhulvian saw it as an anathema to be cheated at every turn, and those parts of his soul recoiled at the idea that it would be wrong to steal someone else's life and youth to preserve themselves. That was fine. That was a problem that he could spend decades wrestling with after he won this war.
While the rest of the army slowly got underway somewhere behind them, Benjamin tuned all of their profiles and abilities to optimize their abilities while he did his best to increase their maneuverability with this new magic.
Through the combination of healers and blood burn, Benjamin was able to keep their little session going much longer than endurance would normally allow. After a few hours of practice, some of the scouts had gotten the hang of the new tool in their arsenal. A few hadn’t, and a handful had suffered serious burns by treating those terrible flames as a cosmetic feature of the unstable rifts rather than the hazard they were.
Even after looking through the code of the spell, Benjamin had found no way to mitigate that or improve the accuracy of the spell's end point. The farther you moved with it, the more the exit was likely to wander. That seemed to be because of the vagaries of hell rather than any imprecision in the magic, but Benjamin wouldn’t be able to say definitively without a lot more experimentation.
During all this, a couple of the other young female warriors saw the way that the feisty Greek scout flirted with him and tried to catch his attention similarly. Each of them failed, though. It wasn’t that they weren’t pretty. It was just because of their shared history.
That night haunted him, and though he did not yet know if he would try to take Kalinomia, he was certainly tempted by the idea. As much as his heart pined for Dahlia some nights, she’d made it very clear that was all the time the two of them would have together. That made sense when your lover was a timeless nature goddess, of course, but it didn’t make it any less bittersweet.
The army was brimming with new opportunities for love of course, if only he’d take a night to look at the dancers around the fires instead of brooding on some new spell function. For every grizzled warn out veteran that had been rebuilt by the Rhulvin purely for efficiency, there was one or two beauties that had obviously been optimized for other tasks. That made sense when you considered how quickly the Summoner Lords tired of their new toys.
The army was full of beautiful women and handsome men. That was both because that was what the Rhulvin seemed to prefer and because that was a natural consequence of leveling up.
If you gave humans the chance to get stronger or smarter when they leveled up, most would choose one or the other. Almost all of them would also choose to become more beautiful or handsome, too, though.
When it came to waging a war, such things had little advantage, but these people were no longer slaves. They were planning for a life after all this. Many had already paired off and chosen partners. That was just one reason among many that Benjamin wanted to spare as many as possible if he could.
Once the fighting was done he could try to get those who wanted to go back to their home, and the rest - well, life had to go on. He expected that once the lad was rid of the Rhulvinarian Locusts, there would be a baby boom like the world had never seen.
By lunchtime, everyone had learned what they could about the basics, and Benjamin had decided it was time to stop studying the way the Greek warrior moved like a jungle cat in her tight leather armor and return to his friends. It hadn’t been a complete waste of time, though. Their scouts would now be able to move faster than ever, and he’d started the basics of a giant rift spell that he could use to move large portions of his army, along with another derivation that would make another interesting form of artillery if the testing went well.
After that, Benjamin met with the nearest centaur and informed him that he’d like to meet with both of the thrones in the next few days before the battle was joined in earnest.
“Both of ‘em at once, huh?” the centaur laughed. “You’re a braver man than I, kid.”
“Is that a problem?” Benjamin asked.
“Not for me!” the beast laughed. “I just… I love to fight and shall serve the Throne of the Sky Sea to my dying day. I just don’t see as I’d want to be important enough to attract her gaze. That goes double for being there with someone she’s not on the best of terms with, ya know?”
Benjamin hadn't known that the two had any sort of rivalry. They’d seemed cooperative enough to him, but then sometimes desperate times called for desperate measures. He didn’t ask about that, though. Instead, he said, “Well, be that as it may, I need to send word. What’s the best way to do that?”
“Well you tell me, I tell my chief, and then he whispered to the sky, and the winds do with your message what they will,” the centaur said with a shrug. “After that, we wait and see. The Thrones will do as they will and are beholden to none, least of all manthings.”