Day fifteen.
The leader of the mountain men came to him as he nearing his forward base. “The Ogre is hunting us.”
Raven reached into his pack and pulled out a dental hook. He was starting to get tired of these sorts of conversations, where something that had been going well suddenly wasn't going well because a new named boogyman had started attacking here or there, and they were always elusive monsters his men had no idea how to fight against. He started gently scraping his gums, and the fur clad man seemed to recognize he didn't want to be disturbed. From what little the man spoke, the assumption was that The Raven was doing 'shaman things'. No reason to explain modern dentistry and tooth care to him, both to preserve patience while The Raven saw to himself, and because the tooth fairy had nearly cleaned the poor man out, as-is.
The scraping and cleaning of gums finished, The Raven dabbed his mouth clean. “Just a normal... Ogre?” He had seen some fantasy monsters, but mostly the smaller green kind. Unlike what the most optimistic of games and books presented them as, goblins were always insanely stupid creatures. They wouldn't even attack people, as they were absurdly cowardly too, instead running from anything larger than a dog, unless it was mating season. Then the males could be pretty vicious and might swarm a lone person who couldn't jog faster than the little cretins, but mostly they were a worry for children who were prone to daydreaming too far from safety.
“Not normal. Normal ogre taller, dumber. Easy to trick, trap, hunt, or lead away from people. Hmm. This thing is like a mountain lion. Keeps sneaking up on us but would barely fit in this tent. Has a clubs but uses his bare hands too, or drops rocks on us. No smell. Also has a weird... like a chair with wheels. Looks like a dwarf making something an elf designed. Metal but... elfy.”
The Raven snapped his fingers and Rupert brought him paper and charcoal, then returned back to wherever he was when he wasn't being the designated helper. The man DID have a talent for knowing what he needed before he did, and The Raven, for all he often abused the poor man, knew not to go too far lest he lose that wonderful talent.
“Can you draw the shape of the object?” Necessary, as he saw an ogre in a wheel chair and needed to take this request seriously. If he didn't get some sort of drawing to counter that image he'd end up giggling all day. Also, if this thing was good enough to give the mountain men pause, it was a problem that would slowly bleed them dry. As a bandit king, he had done the same to Osteria. You could do a lot of damage even to people expecting you and preparing for you by just striking their backs over and over.
With the materials, the man drew... a passable bike. Actually, he drew a mountain bike. Surprisingly well, even including the dumb little trick wheels both 14 year olds and professionals placed on their mountain bikes. “My word, you are a tremendously skilled artist. If you ever get tired of hunting and skinning people, you should nurture that talent!”
The grizzled mountain man blushed a little bit, looking away and thumbing his rusty blood stained knife. “Shucks.”
“I have a question... is this fellow picking this device up? And carrying it up and down the-”
“Rides it right up the sides of walls, steep enough even a goat would pause. He can go places we can't follow him. We roundered up some boys-”
The Raven had been improving his Nel'Ferral and knew that the man had misspoken, and was secretly proud of himself for noticing for the first time someone else butchering the language.
“And the ten of us saw him go up one slope, all rocky scree and about a mile off, then suddenly he was above us and bashed two of our skulls in, rang a little fairy bell-”
“What's a fairy bell?”
“Sounded like, bring bring... ding ding?”
The Raven narrowed his eyes, and the man across from him got tense until The Raven remembered his reputation. “I'm more mad that I know what this fellow... well why this fellow rung a bell.”
“... reminds me of the legends up in my hills. Of the fur-men. Not monsters... not animals... not people, impossible to hunt or track. Fae too. Never hunt a fae. Or deal with them.”
“Oh, he looks like a bigfoot? I mean, he had fur?” The Raven straightend in his chair. He had once studied the paranormal, not entirely out of his own interest but rather for a project that... ran away from him. “Can you sketch it?”
The mountain man took the charcoal and made a sketch of something like a cave-man with a lethal glare, then blown up into a wall of flesh. It was the guy that seemed to always be holding a crowbar, the sort of fellow they parked outside a casino, the kind of guy who kept a knuckle uncracked in case he needed to emphasize something. A thug's thug.
“Moved like a elk in a dream. On it's chair it was completely silent, not even crunching leaves. The men are scared.”
He could divert the adventurers to this new problem. Or just give up on the mountains? But leaving his back open then... no, he didn't like he was facing a lose-lose situation here.
“Get with the engineers.... the ones by the bridge. Send a few of them this way, I'm going to try to see if we can just plug the known passes from the mountain or avalanche them or something.” He was thinking explosives. The cheater had used them against him, right? Cutting off most of the easy ways in and out of those passes might slow him down. Or keep him busy helping the villagers fix their escape routes if he was some sort of summon for them.
Day seventeen.
At last some good news, his adventurers had arrived! He had some warriors in full plate, a bevy of thieves, and a few wizards whom had human skin grimoires and skulls on their staves. Now then, Sic them on The Ogre or The Shadow? The Ogre was a problem for later, he didn't need the mountains and he doubted they could sneak artillery in to extend how far his reach was. He had Elder Sky-Knights now flying patrols over the hills, looking for anything that shouldn't be in the skies or on the slopes. The attacks had died down on the plains too since he deployed the fliers as recon. It was good news, suggesting they had something to fear from being seen.
Day twenty.
His Elder Wurm Sky-Knights had spotted something out on The High Plains by a spot called 'The Source' but turned back per his instructions. The Source was a the given name of a giant pile of a pre-historic palace. Basically a mountain of rubble that had been sitting out there eroding away since a 'mysterious civilization' left it there. It was once a very impressive dungeon and source of treasure, but that was hundreds and hundreds of years past. What was left was a giant pump spilling endless clean water on to what would otherwise be a wasteland.
There was both a new feature, which was a terrific spiked black crystal hill, and signs that someone had prepared earthworks on the plains. There were more than a few tents, a camp of maybe forty people. The gestalt creature had thought it reeked of an adventurer's camp, and decided to not get closer.
He had this conference in transit to their new camp. From the maps he had, he was two hundred miles distant from said fortified area. He was intensely pleased, giving Rupert the day off from fetching things to go have congress with the discarded one-eared woman that The Raven had given him. Slowing down and increasing scouting had done wonders for clipping the losses a little.
Once he had finally reached the town, the villagers were... mostly intact. The Dark Camp had already set up in one of the stone spires that formed the place. The place had nice textiles but otherwise could have been any group of steppe folk. He ignored them and took over the largest building, kicking a whole bar of half drunk goat herders out. The bartender was attractive enough that she got a role as staffer and personal bar-keep for The Raven, with the promise that if she did well she would not be assigned to do errands to one of the pillager camps. He also put her on the 'not a toy' list for now.
His little fanatic, whom had a name he had shortened to Tutu, was allowed to set up next to his building, and things were looking good. He'd let his men rest a day or two, then he'd figure out if his enemies were at that camp, or find whatever spot they were in, and then he'd have the whole north as his plaything! Simple!
Day twenty one.
The Morning started off great, with his roadway halfway to Ebolt, his engineers passing along a message saying they'd have the north bridge over the gorge back up in a week, and that they had cut the mountain paths off, blasting the passes into rubble. The Ogre had won the mountains, so perhaps he'd mountain bike down to the coast and raid... but one man could only do so much, especially if they didn't have cover and the advantages the thing had moving up and down slopes. No Sky-Knights had died patrolling, and he was confident in the armaments and lesser shields he'd given the elites.
The day turned sour when the first probing attack he had sent to The Source came back as one man on a horse, injured and looking pale. The Raven had been ready for a few of his men to get the full meat grinder experience when they found the proper lair, but the man's story was something else. They hadn't made it within fifty miles of the place before something had dismantled them. The Shadow again. Always that Shadow!
“I couldn't see it. It made circles. Ten circles of death.” The man kept mumbling.
He was ready to mobilize when the next report came in, where a man who had stopped to take a piss saw his entire group start falling down and sleeping, then were butchered by a drow elf with a flaming blade. A dark elf that killed his men?!? Talk about a black lining to a silver cloud. Oh, he was there!
Before he could ride in haste to find her, another group stated that one of the legendary adventurers, some old broad named The Death Witch, had stalked his group as they went south and came back north, just cherry picking them off with lightning fast attacks before vanishing. This was a unit of archers. A hundred archers, killed aside from one man. It wasn't even a bunch of ones or zeroes, these were veteran woodsman who had a few levels on them. Did they forget to fire their bows?
Three units did not come back at all. One of the scouts heard 'tremendous thunder' and turned back to find the entire unit behind him was scattered body parts. In the afternoon he lost few thousand men, missing or dead. No signs that they had been able to fight back, but he shrugged it off. His next project would be arming more of his bandits with crossbows and maybe even importing guns of his own. He had wanted to do a pure, (mostly) no cheating run, here but someone pulling in modern tech meant he'd be fighting with a hand behind his back otherwise.
Day twenty five.
He ranged back to Ebolt after a few days. The Cultist came back with him, and did her part, and he kept his half-elf close. He made nice with a local too, and his new maid watching him caused her to finally break down into a sobbing wreck, which was always a treat. Someone being so disgusted and scared without him laying a finger on them was like a gold badge. Goule had more power than he did, but was such a bore with it. When one was strong, they should be like a vampire lord. Untouchable, inscrutable, and fearsome to those allowed to see their form. He was, after all, an apex predator of apex predators. Covered in blood. Triumphant.
Still, he was back at Ebolt because he had a problem. And his problem was that he was told by a confused messenger that HE had floated over to his engineers near the gorge and told them to sunder the bridge and start repairing the wall to prepare for a counter attack. He had told a large portion of his next set of cavalry to fuck off and wait at the wall! He needed those fucking horses! The messenger was also told to recall a set of adventurers to protect his capital. Doing those things would CUT him OFF. Did the man not understand that?!
He took an extra big glob of toothpaste and worked up a froth. His teeth were filthy! They needed to be clean, hard, sharp, ready. Always ready. He spit the glob of white foam at the man's boots, and he held his ground. The man seemed to catch on at that moment that the only thing that saved him was The Raven's curiosity.
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“What. What made them THINK that? What made YOU take a message from someone who is NOT me, cannot POSSIBLY be me unless I FLEW a jet...”
Of course, the peasant thought he could just fly there. It made more sense. He took a deep breath, but what he heard next confirmed what he had feared.
“He had black hair, wore your clothes, had the protection you have, he floated above the ground too, and I felt the same terrible awe in him that I do you! I did mention you... he didn't look quite right, and he flicked his hand and knocked me over!”
The news disquieted him. He HAD been missing a few things, but he had chalked the missing clothes up to Tutu being creepy. But the fact some SPY was LEAKING information meant a craven ape was mimicking him! That and it explained why he had the elf doing laundry what felt like every four days. Someone had jacked his clothes!
Rupert? No. The man was past his shelf life and seemed content to accept scraps and The Raven's leftover women, taking broken things and bending, rather than standing up straight.
The general? No. The former Osterian was a little boy-scout and certainly didn't like how The Raven did things, but he knew both where his bread was buttered and that their fates had been tied together the moment he had let The Raven take the capital. There were plenty of bleeding hearts about how terrible he had been, but the general was hobbled by something better than threats and fear, or treasures and greed, even better than women and lust, and something only second to when all those things combined. The general knew that he had made Osteria BETTER. Oh yes, bandits would do things. There was crime, of course. But for every distraught maiden there were ten less people starving.
The Raven had his own people attached to the general and had heard more or less those words from him. That and planted a bug on his helmet and armor, because why not listen in on a society who didn't know what a wire was much less wiretapping?
It could be the cultist. Tutu's pink tent, huge heaving chest and small body...
Actually she was nuts. Like, really crazy. And her plotting was to try to marry The Raven, which either she knew she was being recorded but had badly misjudged what her appeal was, or was just crazy. She LIKED pain. Liked the teeth.
Possible, but unlikely.
The Dark Camp? Closer to it. The assassins were pragmatic and weirdly ritualistic. One man showing himself a true master of shadow could easily turn an ambitious assassin. If it was the head of the camp, the entire group was compromised. They had been waiting for their masters to respond for a long time, only doing minor house-keeping work. Might be time for a good old fashioned Stabtoberfest to clean house.
Probably the best shot if there was a traitor. But they had a bunch of weird honor rules that they REALLY followed, even in the face of absurd money.
Sky Knights? No. They had issues with talking with and understanding people but they were as loyal as anyone he'd ever seen. That and any betrayal they'd enact would be direct. The symbiosis or gestalt left them with a sort of bird-brain effect, where they could remember their past but not really understand society well anymore. It was all traded in for that lethal sense of how to work in tandem to spear, kill, and eat their enemies.
They followed him because they saw him as kin. They didn't have fear, and yet they respected him. The symbol of the Raven, the way he turned the furious leftovers of the starving peasants into a bandit army... he had attained symbolism with the kingdom. He had swooped in to take it, and them, away from less worthy masters. He also understood that they were gestalts and didn't insult half the bottom half when talking to the top, which helped when it was time to ask them to turn on their former masters.
The mountain people... another case of poor people skills, not in camp enough to be effective spies, and everyone watched them in camp, because they knew what kind of stuff they liked to do. But unlike himself, they did not know how to present their ways with confidence. They were embarrassed by it. Which was sad, because there was a confidence in hunting men who were also armed and woodsmen. There was once this show, his grandfather showed it to him, of people playing basketball, but it was some sort of fake show game where one team just clowned on the other while their music played, pulling goofy tricks and just outclassing them every time. Perhaps when he caught The Shadow he'd chain the man up, then do the old snake in a can or bucket of confetti.
Up until The Ogre showed up, the mountain people should have been shoving it in everyone's faces that they were good, dribbling the ball (or heads, as it were) all over the court and playing pranks to scare their prey further. They were the best damn hunters because they hunted other hunters, they should have had their own version of that whistling music from that basketball show playing whenever they were skinning some would-be ranger and whatever dumb pet they took.
But instead they tried to NOT talk about what everyone knew they did. So no, spying was confidence and lies and they were too conspicuous and too embarrassed.
He didn't let too many villagers or natives near him, and the ones that he did bore marks and usually never came back.
Bandits? Possible he had men selling information. But it was a numbers game, he had millions of eyes and ears too. He confirmed big windfalls after the fact. He had men who had seen the general's melted coins. Even without his own measures, he had found that these terrible criminals were loyal to him because they had once been good people, and there was some core of them that wanted to go back to order, to have what they had but be more than the whipping boy, and that in picking up weapons under HIM they were stronger than those who did not fight.
Osterias old army was under The General. When he bothered to think about it they called him General Sezlim. They were kept in the center of his formations because the old army was both more valuable as troops and because an outer layer of bandits kept them contained and observed. The messengers were a mix of both troops to keep each other on their toes.
After letting the man go he set about finding three other messengers who had all had him snap at them in 3 different spots to do the wrong thing. No wonder his back line was faltering. Now he had to worry about a spy and impersonator too?
Bah. He didn't know. He wasn't sure how he was being scouted. He needed more mages. The ones he had were all specialized. His best infomancers were in the capital and he didn't dare pull them off keeping things clean at home lest he have a two day express trip on the back of a wyrm to go kill another one of his lordlings.
He decided to focus on what he could control. He'd keep moving his units slowly, supporting each other. It would make advancing up the plains a grind again, and he had a few groups that going directly south had started skirmishing with imperials so... he needed tests.
Slow and steady though would eliminate the advantages his enemies had, unless they were holding onto nukes.
Day Thirty.
A month after the fall of Ebolt, the raiding on his caravans had ground his forward press to a halt.
First, it was just an attack by The Ogre from the mountains onto flat ground. Not shocking, as the old road was closer to the mountain than he liked and someone had not listened to his orders to stay closer to the coast. The costs were a few dead bandits and five carts of preserved food. The Ogre had not bothered to kill everyone, leaving behind five women who were part of the supplies being sent up to the front. The girls, once they had been cleaned of blood and could form words, all spoke of seeing something huge in the dark and talked a lot about blood. It was like they'd never got it in their mouths before.
One of them saw the Ogre and said it used it's hands to talk, but otherwise was silent aside from the 'minstrels bell' on his strange conveyance. He run it vigorously before the attack, then a couple of times afterwards as he rode circles around the survivors.
“He set us free and with his hands said we would be safe to come with him, but I feared he would eat us.”
The Raven did not comment on the irony there.
He needed street lights so his men could see the big fucker on a bike coming, but he might as well wish for Goule to show up and summon an army of demons for him.
Then the slime problem started. It started near Ebolt, and his mind snapped to the likely culprit right away: namely the Sky-Riders that had been shot down. The fluid filled one. It had leaked pink, and his problem was pink goop.
The pink slimes that kept showing up at the bridge were no doubt related to the invasion, as the living locals he tracked down had never heard of them. So it was some sort of long-game gambit... to act as a distraction? The things had no interest in man or beast, but they LOVED eating stone and mortar. The adorable little gumdrops would bounce around and then, finding just the right piece of mortar in his critical infrastructure, then gobble it up and bounce off.
After six days of them showing up the stone bridge in Ebolt fell apart, as did parts of the walls he had wasted two charges breaching and a few weeks trying to repair. Well, one charge and leftovers, but two shots!
Then his food caravans started getting blown up by the drones he had lost, armed with explosives. The exact number he had sent came back and took out cart each. It was a staggering waste of resources to further drive the insult home: They were so much more useful as scouts than mere bombs. It was dumb, crass, domineering, and the sort of insult HE should be doing to SOMEONE ELSE.
What really pissed him off after a few days was that all those attacks had also nearly completely destroyed his road. The one GOOD thing he was doing and they were undoing it! He couldn't press forward until he had a supply line, and that meant pulling his elite troops back from the front to protect it.
Day thirty three.
He was missing Sky Knights. He had made titanium armor for them, given them basic shields and rifles, and taught them to hunt from the sky. But instead, they reported an archer on the plains was hunting them. The one who saw it happen said that the attack came from so far they could not see their enemy, even given the variety of altered eyes they had. Two arrows every time, one to break the shield, another hitting their neck.
On top of losing Sky Knights, he was also low on food. The Shadow had been hitting his caravans now as well as The Ogre, appearing out of nowhere and stabbing his men hundreds of times before vanishing. His assassins had been thinned out and no longer wanted to leave camp. His adventurer forces went up into the mountains and never came back. The mountain men turned home. He considered killing the cowards, but he instead was trying to babysit the engineers lest he lose them to attacks. He broke another toothbrush in the afternoon. He was running low, they kept SNAPPING. He could FEEL a cavity forming SOMEWHERE on his teeth!
Day thirty five.
The north front was shot to hell. He guessed there were now at least twenty high speed hover bikes running amok in his back line. It meant almost all his food was moving through a hole in the wall, and now needed constant protection. He was burning cash to buy food now from dwarven ships. He should have blasted the fuckers, but they had oats, wheat, rice, and 'dungeon meat' which he suspected was rat jerky but bought anyway.
Day forty.
Returning to the front, he learned that the natives on the high plains had been slowing his progress. They had abandoned their homes and started attacking his forces then leading them on merry chases... into more enemies. Well fed and well armed, they seemed to know exactly where he was, where he wasn't, and when he set traps out.
They left survivors too, and they always blabbered about whatever horrors they fought. Peasants with daggers that fired lightning. A woman with steel in her ears that took a charge of 20 horses and knocked them all over somehow. Another group of bandits turned into pink slush. His double even showed up and beat a squad of one hundred men, scattering them off into the plains.
All that, but the real enemy was food. One of them, a woman in a brown outfit, would find his scouts and try to lure them to follow her with steaming hunks of meat. Sausage Siren probably was just one of the things eating his men.
He had a few of his agents from the capital arrive, mostly to seek out anyone spying and to try to stem a trickle of bandits breaking off from the high plains to try to go back to Osteria. He had flayed one group who had dared to pillage his own carts for food! He then had to flay a few more men who caught and ate ravens attending to their dead. The first thoughts of calling it came to him, and he dismissed them. This was what he wanted... a real challenge.
Day forty five.
The Raven gave a short speech a few times, all the same phrase: “The next person who tells me they are afraid to march because of a fucking spider, I will butcher myself.”
The groups of men he had mostly listened, and listened hard when he followed through, cutting some flabby man into hunks of meat, glaring at the bandits around him as he did.
He started brushing his teeth again as he stalked away. The man was old, gross, disgusting. Not worth his attention or skills. Perhaps he'd kill his bartender after all. They were running low on booze. That would likely decide it... every man needed a vice.
Day fifty.
He had seen two of things that had been hunting him. The shadow, riding a hover cycle off and waving at him. He had grabbed his cannon, but the damn cloaked figure was gone before he could draw a bead, using the sun to hide their flight path. He had to re-assess those bikes, he'd never seen anything that size in The Collective move that fast. No wonder he was getting ground down.
The Ogre, on the other hand, did the same on a regular fucking bike. The big lump had been going over three hundred miles an hour, something like a huge figure blasting a line of dirt behind him.
In his binoculars, he saw the man turn and look at HIM... and give him an evil smile. Then in a puff of dust he vanished. He fired at the spot he vanished, but FELT that he had just wasted a shot.
Still, for every group that had been cut down to one man, he had dozens and dozens in his cluster. Yes, they were half starved.... but he was drawing closer.
Day fifty-five.
His enemy had been protecting The Source, and if he went there he'd force them to respond, to come to HIM where he could focus his forces. Sky knights he kept within support gunfire range saw The Source and it's black spined tower. Signs of fortifications covered the entire area, and a mysterious wagon made of metal with no horses was resting on a rise next to the spiked tower. It was go time. He kicked Tutu out of bed and got a ride from a Sky-Knight to his wagon at the front of the army, carrying the crystal weapon and cooler with him.
All the little frustrations were about to come together! He was going to CRUSH those CHEATERS!
The fifty fifth night.
The Raven fled across the endless dirt plains, shield failing to keep all the dirt out as he pushed his energy into his flight.
It was a play-world. One he had been crushing!
Instead his army had scattered, his elites were dead, and his weapon gone.
That BASTARD. How many men did he have? How had he gotten so close? How did he move his entire camp?
The Raven reached for his last tube of toothpaste, a nasty chemical brand that Rupert must have pulled from the bottom of his stash, and started running as he pulled a red metal toothbrush out.
How? How had he LOST?! It was impossible! He was SMARTER and STRONGER and RICHER than these clueless apes! He had a WHOLE NATION wrapped around his finger! The WORLD was HIS!
It was fine. He could come back from this.
He switched his grip to get the side of his mouth, and the last thought he had was that he didn't remember ever having a red metal brush.
There was a pop, and The Raven was no more.