Chapter 12

Tirns had been riding with very few stops ever since the news of the collapse of Velund had reached Welsius. He was a Winged Knight, one of the few to ride a wyvern instead of a pegasus. Wyverns were slower over short distances, but required less rest and were therefor ideal for long range reconnaissance, which is what he was performing at the moment.

He passed over hundreds of miles of the wilds and the wastes between the great nations of Welsius and Velund. The wilds were known for the dangerous cores that dotted the surface, spawning high level monsters that would attack travelers along the way. Wastes were the opposite, the natural dungeons that formed there were buried deep underground and the surfaces either barren, or nearly so. Very few settlements existed in either type of wasteland.

Only the two blights of the continent, the great central blight and the one southwest of Welsius and south of Koratia, had lower population densities. Because it is, after all, harder to get a population density lower than zero.

While Tirns normally loved riding his flying mount, the seriousness of his mission kept his mind on task. At night he would stop and take out a pen paired by magic to one in the capital. Setting it on a flat surface, he would press a button on the pen which would allow it to transcribe a message that it had stored for him. The message contained any updates to his orders or new information which the spies in the capital deemed necessary to grant him.

Once he had read the transmission, he would send a reply. So far, in the short time that he had been on this mission, the reply had always been “Continuing en route.”

Today, that message would change. On the distant horizon, Tirns saw the smoke of campfires. He was yet hundreds of miles from the border of Velund, a fact he knew because this was not his first time flying over this route. He was seeing a large encampment, at least tens of thousands strong.

He landed his wyvern far from the group that he had spotted and took out the link-pen to update his superiors back in the Welsian capital of Profons.

> Situation update. Contact with large group. Approx. 200 miles from Velundese border. I landed upon seeing their campfires, do not believe they have spotted me yet. Requesting updated orders.

> -Sir Tirns

Five minutes passed before the response came. He recognized the handwriting immediately as belonging to the king’s spymistress, Yecha, and he cursed. Yecha was not a knight, but she saw those who were as expendable pieces on a chessboard. His fears were confirmed when he read her orders.

> Attempt to establish peaceful contact with incoming refugees. Establish est. numbers and destination. Report all information upon completion of mission.

Tirns cursed again. Was she trying to get him killed? The assumption that the oncoming camp was filled with refugees, and not an invasion force, was an extremely dangerous assumption to make. If they attacked Tirns rather than allow him to make ‘peaceful contact,’ then she could kiss her report on their number, destination, and even intentions goodbye.

No, he realized. If he suddenly disappeared after reporting contact, then the assumption would be that the group he had encountered were responsible for his disappearance. Yecha wasn’t being foolish. She was placing him in danger intentionally to see if the enemy would take him off the board when they had a chance.

This was a game to her. His life was as important to her as a pawn in a game of chess.

He was a soldier, however, and he’d gotten his orders. Swallowing nervously, he allowed his wyvern two hours to rest in case the need arose for a sudden flight. Once both Tirns and his mount had refreshed themselves with idle time and the water of a nearby spring, they returned to the sky and made their way to the encampment.

He circled the camp twice, quickly estimating their numbers. There were at least ten thousand in the traveling group, a mix of men, women and children. That at least was a good sign, as if they were all adults then the likelihood of them being actual refugees diminished precipitously.

Identifying what looked to be the camp of a leader of some sort, Tirns landed nearby. The tent which had drawn his attention was large, made of canvas and died purple and green. He remained nervously on his mount after landing as two men in uniforms – was that livery of some lord, he wondered – emerged from nearby to question him.

“Which group are you attached to?” the one on the left asked.

“I’m from Welsius, sent to scout for refugees after hearing of the trouble in Velund,” Tirns answered. “I’m to make a report of your numbers and destination in order to prepare for--”

He wasn’t certain which sense saved him, but he ducked just a second before he heard a Twang! A crossbow bolt sailed past his ear, and he kicked his wyvern into motion. The beast leapt into the air, and a second Twang! sounded. The second bolt was aimed at his mount, and she bellowed in rage and pain as it burrowed into her thigh. Not a wound that would affect her ability to fly, but landing would be painful. As would taking off once more.

Tirns flew off as swiftly as he could. He glanced behind them, looking for the wings of a flying mount and dreading a pursuit. None came.

He was twenty miles away before he relaxed, and another twenty before he risked landing in order to see to his mount’s injury. He quickly penned his report before coaxing his faithful wyvern back into the air, cursing Yecha in colorful terms and questioning her parentage in very unsavory ways.

~~~~~

Lo dashed through the darkness of floor thirteen, exulting in the hunt with his pack. The enemies down here were actually dangerous, unlike the weaklings that he and the others had been culling previous to the modifications Tom had made to Zeta dungeon. The wolves of the upper floors, now replaced with elementals, had barely been worth the effort to eliminate for the experience that they generated.

The gnolls and goblins of the thirteenth floor, however, were higher leveled, more dangerous, and therefor much more rewarding than the pathetic canines. And although they were well adjusted to the dark and cavernous reaches of floor thirteen, they couldn’t see through both the dark and the Stealth of Lo and his fellow Korgoath.

Neither Tom nor Lo had anything in particular against goblins. In fact, Delta Dungeon possessed a society of goblins which had taken to mining coal and trading with the nearby human settlements after Tom and his party had saved them from an infestation of mimic monsters which had been preying on them for generations. The terrifying part of that situation had been that the goblins hadn’t been aware of why their friends and family were going missing until Tom’s party had used magic to expose the mimics hiding in plain sight among them.

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After rescuing those goblins, the leader had made a pact with Tom to live peacefully in exchange for rearranging Delta dungeon to reduce the chance of mimic predation on the goblins. Tom had done his best to keep his word at the time, and had in fact followed up with his initial promise after gaining his level twenty skill, Collaborate, to attempt to further reduce the risk that the colony of goblins suffered.

True to his initial suspicions, Delta dungeon, formerly known as “Cavern of the Mimics,” refused to simply stop spawning mimics altogether. But it was happy to restrict the location of their spawns to the deeper floors, while restricting the locations of the goblins that would spawn to the upper floors.

The result was that the goblins of Delta dungeon were relatively safe from the fiercesome ambush predators as long as they stayed near their homes in the upper level. Theoretically Mimics are mobile predators, but in practice they remain very near where they are spawned until prey comes along, when they strike suddenly and with overwhelming force.

The goblins of Zeta dungeon, however, were not like the goblins of Delta dungeon. Tom had gone so far as to spawn a handful of his own goblins to send them in to meet with the local goblin leadership. The local goblins had repaid the diplomatic overtures by killing the messengers. Satisfied that he had done all he could to try to form a peaceful dialogue with the monstrous humanoids, Tom had then turned first his friends, and then his monsters loose on the lower floors.

So it was with his master’s full blessing and permission that when Lo found a pack of goblins tinking away at the zinc deposits of the thirteenth floor with primitive tools, he ambushed them and, with fiercesome teeth and ferocious claws, he rent them asunder. Their pitiful pickaxes bounced harmlessly off the spines along his back, and when they realized that the level twenty-eight Korgoath Alpha easily outmatched them, the remaining three of the party turned to flee, only to be caught by the remainder of his pack. Exulting in his strength, Lo often made petty excuses to check his status.

Name

Lo

Health

400/400

Age

4

Stamina

320/320

Race

Korgoath Alpha

Strength

41

Class

Observer

Dexterity

45

Level

28

Constitution

40

Endurance

32

Lo had been unashamedly hogging the experience of the hunting group, causing his own level to inflate and leave the smaller, younger, and weaker Korgoath behind. So far his master hadn’t said anything about the practice, and as long as that continued Lo intended to keep things as they were. The greater the distance between himself and those under him, the more ironclad his command over his pack became.

He was licking the goblin blood off of his claws when he caught the scent. Pheromones. He glanced at the female in his pack, but no, it was not her. There was a second female Korgoath in the dungeon!

Following his nose, Lo quickly tracked the pheromones to their source, where he found a nest of three korgoath. Two females and a male. One of the females was releasing the pheromones to entice the male, and without hesitation Lo ripped his rival apart.

Such was the way of courtship among his kind.

The female of the fledgling pack, however, immediately spurned his advances. She stopped releasing her pheromones and turned up her nose at him, rolling her great eyeball as he displayed himself covered in the gore of his rival. She did not elaborate on why he had fallen short of her standards, but it was clear that he had. He had murdered the poor male for no reason.

Such was the way of courtship among his kind.

However, while she refused to be his mate, the two young female Korgoath did respect him as an alpha, and so it was that when he returned after the hunt to his own master, Tom, the human Controller Claimed two new Korgoath, marking them with Tom’s symbol of a blue Core Stone inside of a black circle.

This brought Tom’s total minions up to ten. Seven Korgoath and three minotaurs. Eleven if you counted Klein, but while Lo was aware of the stealthy Worsican Lynx stalking through the deepest regions of the dungeon, he saw no threat in the smaller animal and put it out of his mind.

Until the next day, when he was delving on the fifteenth floor and came across the small animal he had previously assumed harmless standing over the decapitated corpse of a minotaur, calmly licking its paws. The lynx was alone, with no other explanation for the corpse apparent.

Lo paid much more attention to the Klein, Tom’s familiar, after that.