After taking a small breather once I was safely -- or at least relatively safely -- within the walls of the mining colony, I took visual stock of what had been done without my presence. I had to admit that I was pleased to find that pretty much everything was, by and large, arranged as best as I could hope. Given, I had worked out most of the kinks of working with the homunculi or rather through them by now, and the whole encampment was essentially a lot simpler than my home manor, if for no other reason than that it was all built from scratch according to a written and sketched out schematic, as opposed to the significantly more organic approach I’d followed with the manor’s setup -- and therefore was far better suited to the innate nature of my homunculi -- but even so it was certainly a damned sight better than it would have been if I’d tried to do something like the place even a month earlier. In total it had about half the surface area of my manor to work with, but it also didn’t have the greatoak getting in the way of the layout. Yes, there was the spring, but that honestly was hardly even a quarter of the total area as an obstacle to construction.

I made my way to the prison cells where the two wood-elves were contained and on the off chance that there was like in many isekai stories some sort of translation effect, I tried to make myself understood to them.

“So. I’m terribly embarrassed about this -- you guys understand me in there? Yes? I come in peace?”

What I heard back was something that sounded like someone had decided to take every hard consonant possible out behind a woodshed and beat it until it learned not to touch the vowels’ daughters.

“Ah, yes. Yes. I totally hear you, my man. Well, let’s see if we can’t get you a little more comfortable in there at least. This is going to be the long route I can see.”

Great. Of course this had to be done the hard way. Like every other goddamn thing since I came to this alien rock, I was forced to feel my way blind and fingerless through this thing. Well, I wasn’t going to get anywhere with preventing the wood elves outside from eventually coming over those walls in numbers and burning everything I’d accomplished down to rubble -- or whatever they did -- unless I could at least basically communicate with them, so this just couldn’t last. I called up one of my homunculi from there and ordered it to show me where the log of the last eight days’ events were. I would be burning the midnight oil on this one: my arrival had without question kicked the timing into overdrive. My other homunculus, I ordered to direct the mining ants into digging a tunnel directly south and below the soil-line, large enough for me to crawl easily through so that if the worst came I could have the ants and hunting spiders make a forlorn hope defense while I made my escape. This was definitely going to be ugly.

After a few hours of reviewing the journals from since my last regular report from the homunculi stationed here, I found that it appeared that they had actually made some small progress deciphering the language of the elves. Even stranger, what I read actually seemed to click in a way that was rather disturbing, as I immediately intuited without even questioning it a specific sounding of everything I was reading. I’d long since learned not to question things with regards to how learning was done on this world. Maybe it was just a product of how many tech level infodumps had been pushed into my brain that I was starting to actually get more flexible with learning new information? As the least existentially horrifying option I could think of for why I was getting this intuitive sense, I decided to just roll with it as I tested the ideas that intuitive sense was telling me after reading the homunculi’s case-study style reporting.

Deciding not to head back to their cells empty-handed, I grabbed the bedroll-tops of the mattresses within the house, and the blankets there. It wouldn’t be much but it would at least begin to establish that we could potentially engage in peaceful relations.

Knocking on the cell of the larger of the two elven spear-warriors in my care, I called out “Hello? You safe, understand?”

It was clear that the elf understood me but his response was too rapid-fire for me to reciprocate. “I, healthy? You, healthy?”

It seemed to dawn on him that I was struggling with his words, as he slowed down. “Hello? You […] want?”

There was more there I hadn’t grasped, but it was progress. “Hello! Safe. I... “ Damnit. I said the next part in English as I just didn’t have the words. Hopefully he would grasp what I was trying to do, if not what I was saying as I did it. “Here. A gift for you, and your friend. From me, to you.” With those words, I drew four of my hunting spiders forward and had them station themselves at the door to his cell as I opened it enough to feed the bedroll and blanket through. It should be better than the smooth and cold ossium floor of his cell.

Repeating the affair with the other man’s cell, I got basically the same results. But -- this was in fact progress, and meaningful, as I had somehow managed to convey across that I was at least trying to speak to them in their language, and therefore did not actually know it. At this point they were clearly mostly resigned to their status quo and just didn’t have the fight to swear or curse at me, though I wasn’t going to give them an inch to use to escape with even so. It did make them less than verbose, but it was still something to work with.

As I walked away from their cells after giving them the bedrolls, I had one of my homunculi remain out of sight of both men with a book and quill in order to take notes on the actions and soundings of the things they said, in order to try to advance my understanding of their language as best I could come morning. I already had made far more progress there than I honestly had any right to hope for, but that didn’t change the urgency. I had to figure out how to communicate to them that I wanted to broker a peace between our two sides. I had to.

~~------------~~

I did actually manage to sleep through the rest of the night, if fitfully. Still, I almost certainly got a better rest than the men I was holding prisoner, and wasn’t that something that was a gift that kept on giving. After reviewing the logs of the night, I found that the two had in fact attempted to communicate more. And I once again found that strange intuition guiding my understanding, as I picked up a couple of words here and there. Or at least I thought I did.

As I set about my morning activities, I made a point of queuing up my homunculi to create more heat pistol weapons, this time more like double-barreled full-length shotguns rather than the 1700’s style arquebuses I carried. My hope was that I could have a few of them mounted at the gates and switch between them should the worst come. I knew that any real fight that came down to it would turn into a bloody melee slogfest between the spiders and ants and those spearmen, which would go fairly badly given they could almost certainly just stand off at range and fire down arrows at range except for the defenses I had in place, but that was planning for a fight where a breach had already happened and that just didn’t sit well with me.

It was at this time that I was truly feeling the pinch of the limited number of properly intelligent minions, as even with how clever the hunting spiders were, I simply couldn’t have them man turrets or something like that -- it was just outside the scope of what their intellect could manage. Still; they did have some stand-off capacity and I had far more pressing concerns at hand than trying to micromanage my two homunculi in their work. All I could do was continue to ramp up the sheer numbers I had, and hope that it would be enough to stave off any attacks long enough to work out a better solution.

The most obvious of said better solutions would be to actually get to a talking peace with the elves, and that depended desperately on my getting enough of their language under my belt that I could at least convey a request for parley. To that effect, I was the one who brought them their food in the morning. Nothing fancy, just scrambled shelfruit wrapped in carrotato flatbread, and water. I sat down with them showing that I was clearly partaking of the same meal. We ate in silence, and once all three of us had finished, I began the morning’s attempt at understanding them.

“Hello. I Vincent. You?” I pointed at my chest as I said my name again. “Vincent.” I then pointed at him, with an obvious mask of questioning on my face.

“Alden. [...] Alden.” I had to guess that the bit I didn’t quite get meant “My name is”. Hooray for context clues.

I then pointed at the other man, repeating the process. “My name is Vincent. You?” I knew I didn’t get the pronunciation correct, but hopefully it only came across as a thick accent rather than some profound death curse upon his family, his house, and his water clan. Or whatever. I couldn’t be certain I hadn’t with the scowl the man glared at me with, but he did eventually say something so I’d take it as a win.

“Mintar.”

“Alden,” I said as I pointed at the larger man, and then at the smaller man and said, “Mintar”, and then at myself and said, “Vincent.”

They nodded and repeated my name. So. Basic greetings. Progress. Yay! I then proceeded to sit there for a short span and made a point of trying to use what little vocabulary I actually had with them, though that barely managed to be better than “yes” v. “no”, “please” and “thank you”, and “are you injured?”. They did eventually wind up saying a few things that I had to guess at either meaning “why are you here” and “will you release us?” -- things along those lines. I wasn’t really sure, though. For whatever reason, that odd sense of intuition that I’d picked up on earlier just wasn’t kicking in.

After a while of not making any real rapid progress with teach each other our languages -- not that there really could be in the circumstances -- I eventually returned back to the mine colony’s library to write of my progress. Sadly there appeared to be no such thing as a language tech-level, as none of it triggered any textual popups. I did, however, as a result of writing things out, experience a series of “after the fact” eureka moments as I put things together in my head more clearly and felt that I had a better understanding of their vocabulary.

This was clearly not an ordinary thing so I sat down to think about it and came up with the conjecture that maybe it had something to do with that “archivist” racial trait I had -- I had to date not seen any indications that it actually did anything, but now I was in a position to clearly assemble knowledge of a non-technical nature and was discovering that by organizing it in a library I was actually achieving a deeper mastery of it than I really ought to have. Hrm. Maybe I could advance the process further?

I returned back to the men, this time with a lab kit in hand. “I … not hurt … you. You are safe.” I repeated this statement even as I shone a sanguine healing quartzite crystal at Alden and myself, made a show of scratching myself and having the light heal it, and then went extremely gently and under the direct watchful gaze of six hunting spiders as I cleaned the blade off thoroughly and then used it to scratch the man very lightly. Still, despite his attempt at stoically bearing under the clearly alien behavior I was evincing he hissed lightly in pain at the scratch.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

This of course set off Mintar. This just would not do, so I ordered as best I could in their language, “Alden, tell Mintar you are safe.”

He looked at me strangely but I made a show of pulling his scratch into the light of the healing quartzite, which was clearly foreign to the man as he was entranced by how quickly his scratch healed under it. What Alden did wind up saying was something I couldn’t make heads nor tails of, but then he looked me directly in the eyes and said slowly as though to a child, “Mintar, I am safe.”

Whatever it was he actually said seemed to calm Mintar down, as the smaller man settled back down from trying to rattle his cell again. As I left the cell, I left the healing crystal in the cell, filling it with its gradual and soft red light. I then proceeded to repeat the process, and as I set up the softly glowing reddish crystal I noticed that Mintar was actually presenting his forearm in the same manner as Alden had. Well, that answered at least some of the question of what the two men had said to each other at least. I still went through the process of making a show of how the light functioned before taking the second blood-sample from the two men. And hey, I managed to learn that Mintar was much more pain-tolerant than Alden, despite being noticeably the smaller of the two. Never judge a book by its cover, I guess. I walked away from the two men’s cells in quiet contemplation from there.

~~------------~~

What I was about to do, with those samples, was something that was incredibly reckless. But I didn’t really have much choice. I knew, from my hunting spiders, that when I embedded the essence of “me” into an organism, they carried some of my knowledge and language. I also knew that most of the essences I could make, I could also make tinctures out of. So it stood to reason that I could advance or bypass some of the process I was going through by extracting and archiving the language part of the “elf” essence that the two men carried, as my alchemical analysis gave me an intuitive understanding of the essences I extracted. And I would absolutely do that, too. But what I was also going to do was something that was far more reckless: I was going to attempt to extract the “intellect” part of the “elf” essence, and from there extract the “communication” part -- and create from that a tincture, that I hoped would allow me to at least temporarily just know their language. Enough to ask for peace talks. If I had any choice to do something else, I would. But there was an hour to play things safe and turtle down, and there was an hour to be bold and take reckless chances. And now was the latter of the two.

It took me most of the rest of the day to complete the extraction and refinement process until I managed to create a tincture from most of the essence I had extracted. I did of course take the liberty of setting aside a culture to grow further as I certainly wasn’t going to get many chances to take physical samples from elves to do this further. Leaving the mine colony’s lab behind with the tincture in hand, I made a show of walking calmly back towards the men. I stopped while I was still standing far enough away from their cells, and very visibly downed the tincture in their presence. I didn’t really feel anything different happening, but I supposed that was actually a good thing all things considered.

I then made an attempt at communicating with them again, very carefully not thinking about what language I was speaking in just in case that helped. “Hello, warriors. Can you understand me?”

Alden looked up sharply at me and was startled. “You… how? You do not speak our tongue!”

I looked back at him. “The thing I drank. It … contained the essence of your words. It will wear off. We do not have very much time, so I will be brief. I do not wish to fight you. Any of you. I wish peace. Do you understand me? I wish peace.”

Mintar was the one who spoke next, his face unbelieving. “If you want peace then why did your … creatures… kill our people?”

“I was not yet here. They acted … on instinct. To protect, defend. I … regret? No, I am sorry. I do not wish to kill. Will if I must. I did not want this. Not any of this.”

“If you don’t want this,” Mintar continued, “Then why don’t you just go back where you came from!?”

“I can’t. Don’t know how I got here. Woke up naked, lost, and alone in the woods. Built up all that you see. Please. If I release you to your people, will you… will you ask them to send someone to make peace?”

Neither man responded, for quite some time. Which was frustrating as I could almost feel my comprehension of their language fading from my mind. It was clear that what I had said, had clearly disturbed them far more than they had anticipated. Eventually, Alden nodded at me.

“If you send us, I will speak on your behalf.”

“I… your words are leaving me again. Where I come from, is a phrase. ‘Trust, but verify.’ I will trust you.” With that, I made a sharp motion to my hunting spiders and made a semicircle around me, even as I had my nearby homunculus -- that had again been recording the whole conversation down, especially my side of it -- open up their cells. Under the watchful gaze of my hunting spiders, I walked before the two men towards the gate I had made my way into the base the evening before. With an easy motion, I unlocked the gate and extended the clockwork bridge that created a path over the trench. Opening the gate just enough to allow the two men to squeeze their way through, I motioned with my hand.

“Go. Be safe.”

I had no idea if I was signing my own death warrant or obtaining a new lease on life, but I would far rather err on the side of trusting in rational behavior on the part of clearly reasonable people than have to live with hostile paranoia. It was also plausibly true that after three months of effectively total isolation, I simply hoped I could have someone to talk to again.

~~------------~~

Annaka watched stoically through the mists of the scrying pool as the strangely attired alfar-like man barreled his way through her ishuatar warding circle, after being alerted to the rushing approach of more of the strange spiders and the moderately-skilled foreign woodsman making their way towards the encampment. More intrigued by the timing than anything else, and unable to fully commit any men from watch-posts in the time frame involved to properly lay down a complete trap to capture the stranger, she did have Trisaldan’s selected elite attempt to harry the man and his escort. With any luck a well-placed arrow would down him and they’d finally get some answers about what in the world was going on with this place.

While her men did in fact make it in time, she was quite surprised to discover that their arrows were largely ineffectual against either the spiders, or the man. Glancing shots from the bowmen just completely failed to penetrate the black leather the spiders wore, and they were too small and nimble to reliably be hit by more direct shots. The man himself they did actually manage to hit in various places on his torso, but the only shot he even seemed to notice was on his shoulder -- and even that arrow simply failed completely to penetrate the material it was made out of. It seemed to be blackened bone, but that made very little sense given how well-shaped it was and the sheer strength of it. Unless he was somehow wearing shaped dragonbone armor, it simply couldn’t be what it seemed.

Unlike the previous incident between the spiders and her men, this time none of her men had to face direct attack by the creatures. In fact, when the strange cousins of the common great tree spider appeared to want to turn and assault the warden elites, the alfar-like man made some command noises and instead most of the spiders simply turned and ran by his side. The few that did stay behind fired their strange tube weapons before running on themselves, though the range was too great to do anything more than make the men of Trisaldan’s uncomfortably warm. It did, however, give her an opportunity to observe the gate and bridge that opened eerily smoothly and quickly as the man ran towards the wall of the colony. Whoever he was, he was very clearly expected. Given the sheer urgency with which he approached the place, he also had little interest in making a fight of his entering the place.

Also unlike the previous encounter between the wardens and woodsmen under her command and these strange spiders, this time nothing came to collect their fallen. Over the remainder of the evening that followed, the senior Wardens under command would make a great fuss over trying to understand what they had retrieved. The three spiders and their equipment were giving them as many questions as they were answers. They’d learned that the tube-weapons weren’t truly single-fire weapons as they’d thought but instead used some unknown crystal to influence ishuar somehow, collecting ambient heat until it could be forcibly released in a single direction. The recharge period was too slow to be reusable in a quick fight, but over a prolonged period would have to be accounted for. The black leather itself appeared -- of all things -- to be common stream trout hide, or related to it anyhow. It was too thick, too resilient. It also resisted heat and didn’t burn. The weapons on the forelimbs of the spiders worked with some unknown mechanism, having the same kind of ishuar influencing crystals in them but behaving very differently. But that wasn’t the end of it. The spiders themselves … while superficially they looked like common great tree spiders, up close the differences were much more apparent. Their heads were far larger. Their forelegs had tripartite, jointed, claws -- like they were somehow changing to develop the ability to use tools already, and then this alfar-like man had perhaps taught them how? Or made the tools?

More questions than answers.

While her senior Wardens puzzled over the meaning of the devices these spiderlings were equipped with, Annaka herself turned back to the mists of her temporary scrying pool, attempting to observe the man at work. And it was through this effort that she came to discover both disturbing and encouraging news. The news was the same: that the men, Alden and Mintar, that all had assumed were dead -- that they were in fact alive. The disturbing aspect was that they had been captured by those spiderlings, meaning they were far more intelligent than any had given credit for, even with their use of the tools seen thus far. The encouraging part was that she had watched as the alien man handed her two woodsman bedrolls and blankets, meaning he was clearly concerned with their comfort.

This would later be reinforced as she scrutinized his behaviors, watching as he clearly attempted to speak to her men. While it was profoundly difficult to induce the mists to convey sound as well as sight, it could be done, though at the cost of a great amount of ishuar flowing through the ishuatar who channeled the effect. In this case it was absolutely worth the effort, as she was able to witness the man’s attempts at obtaining the language of her people. While she had never seen it done before, she had heard of the gnomon’s alchemical practices and when she saw the alien collecting blood samples -- those red crystals were astounding -- she was next able to witness a singularly masterful series of exercises of alchemical arts that she knew was more advanced than anything the gnomon had ever done. This was corroborated when, after merely downing a single tonic his entire days’ manipulations enacted, heard the man in exactly the same accent as the yeoman lowcaste ask them to request parlay on his behalf.

The additional piece of information that the man was apparently single-handedly responsible for the disturbance of the ishuar in the Treatied Wood was as confusing as it was alarming. Whatever the case, the man was clearly trying to do right by all involved and couldn’t be blamed for guard animals doing their duty. At least… not enough to demand his death, when that demand would clearly cost far too much more blood to enact. Who knew what the beasts under his control would do if he were executed?

Peace talks, were what he had asked for. Peace talks were what he would get.