"Ha, Morza. Good to see a familiar face."
Hilda Morz didn't look up. She banged her head against the flimsy wall she was leaning against and groaned.
She recognized the voice. Heinz Stuttel was a provincial noble from the same military college that had somehow picked up the idea that they were friends.
"It's me Heinz. From Monshauser."
"Yes. Stuttel. Hi."
"Talk about falling on hard times, huh?" He continued with relentless spirit. "Rest assured that *I* will not think any different of you."
Her eyes shot open. "What did you say?"
"I just mean... to me you will always be the star pilot of the academy. The best out of all of us."
"...Okay."
"Even after these creatures have gotten their hands on you."
Instead of cussing, she sputtered out a sentence in high-pitched guttural utterances, explicative in spirit if not nature. "What. Do you mean. By that?"
"... Your worth as a noblewoman has not been diminished by having to pop out a couple of trolls'-"
"Hilda, stop!" The girl in her cell held her back from kicking down the divider. "If ve break down zhe prison vho knows vhat our captors vill do to us."
"SAY THAT TO MY FACE HINTERWÄLDER. HOW DARE YOU?!"
"I apologize. It must have been very traumatic."
"Behave." A troll prodded at her with a spear, driving her backwards into her cell and cooling the argument.
Tensions were rising, and they would be grateful when Reddington were ready to deliver them back home. Despite the disgrace that was waiting for them returning as losers.
-
Seeing the troll back away from there cell and towards the feuding Blurichans, Noss straightened his jacket and fixed his hair.
If Scratch stood by his word, which he often did when it did not cost him anything, he would not be released until Lacrima could be persuaded to relinquish plans for the witchwood.
For that he would need to continue playing the role of ally for a bit.
"Ve might be extradited vith zhese invaders if ve stay in here. Zhould ve take Scratch's offer und give up on zhe fairy grove?"
Lacrima hadn't resorted yet to lowered herself on the floor. But she was an old woman and had steadied herself in the corner to preserve her energy. All in all, her regular dignity was compromised.
"You may return to him, dearie, but I can not turn my back on the goddess."
He cringed at her falsely sweet tone, it was the facade she showed outsiders. "Lacrima, please. I am not your enemy. How vill zhe goddess be helped by zhis?"
"Well... she certainly won't be helped by agreeing to sit out the blood moon, will she?"
He mulled it over. He had spend years now among liars, negotiators, and all manner of sophists at Scratch's Promise. Surely some of it had to have rubbed off on him.
The witch was clearly unhappy to face life imprisonment or execution at the hands of the state. All he needed was a decently plausible argument for her to justify bending out.
"Ve can ask her."
"What did you say?"
"If zhe baronet releases you from zhis prison, you may converse vith zhe moon goddess at her altar again. Vhereas... if ve are shipped off, ve may never get zhe chance to hear her vill."
Lacrima let herself be taken along a seductive train of thought, but then shook out of it. "No."
"Consider zhis... zhere may still be zhings to be done even after zhe bloodmoon. Ve vill be near zhe vitchvood at least. Perhaps ve could lay zhe groundvork for zhe following bloodmoon."
She raised an eyebrow. "Groundvork? What do you mean groundwork?"
"An institution. A grand prophecy. If you vere to return to being the baronet's magic adviser, you vould have zhe influence to set it in Promise law zhat zhe next bloodmoon, zhe ritual is respected."
"And you think that Scratch will agree to that?"
He threw up his hands. "Of course! A goblin does not think ahead a zhousand years! Und furzhermore, he is desperate to have a 'minister of magic' back in his court."
----------------------------------------
"Congratulations, you're now, officially, our new minister of magic."
Bert looked uncomfortable in his new getup. The goblins had dossed him out in furs, metal greaves, and a witch's hat. "But I don't know that much magic."
Lydia shook her head. "Aimone is our most knowledgeable crystal grafter. If you really need an expert, he would be the most suited."
Scratch tutted. "Aimone has already been assigned waterworks."
"Alpheba? The demon."
He looked at her. "Youthere? Absolutely not. This is a client-facing job, the minister is supposed to help the colonies with magic related problems. I need someone that can talk to the public."
"But I was only ever a rank E mage-" Bert complained.
"You're self-depricating again," Scratch barked, "I ordered you to cut that out."
"S-sorry."
"In this world, you take the opportunities handed to you, got that? Learn on the job if you have to, fake it till you make it."
"I believe what the baronet is trying to say..." Lydia said gently, "is that you are not expected to provide the utmost expertise in all matters of ritual and sorcery, only to project an image of wisdom for the barony's peace of mind."
"You've got-" Scratch paused to look at Lydia, briefly wondrous at her occasional bursts of eloquence, "you've got the ability to grow a beard." He said to Bert, "and that makes you more qualified than any other candidate I have in my back pocket."
"I don't have to wear this everywhere I go, do I?" He complained.
"Discuss it with my brother Fat here." Fat waved from the corner, it was he who had sown the ostentatious fur and metal wizarding uniform. "He's a senior at the tree home colony, they've got a tailoring outfit going."
Bert had already begun to remove the various paraphernalia that were on his body. "I came here because I thought that, maybe, there were some spells I could teach you, that you might need as leader."
Scratch and Lydia looked at each other.
"He is resolved in the duties of his office already," she said approvingly.
"Say it with some authority then." Scratch demanded.
Bert collected himself. "Baronet. I have come to teach you counter-magic."
----------------------------------------
Spells are produced via the controlled release of mana.
The magic held in the user's body wants desperately to escape. By guiding its path outward with their spiritual body, the user can force it to alter reality in their favor.
When a witch turns an unsuspecting victim into a frog, her magic pushes against his intrinsic un-frogness until it gives. The un-frogness is temporarily pushed away and as soon as it does the magic falls through into the earth, towards the abyss, and hell thereafter.
Even a spell as simple as 'candle light' works by blasting the fundamental building blocks of reality with a precise arrangement of magic, so that darkness is transformed into light.
A goblin can not cast 'candle light', it has no spiritual body. Its form is exceedingly simple, for it possess close to no divinity and with that very little claim to a form at all.
"Yet," Bert claimed, "there is something you can do with mana after all. You can perceive magic due to Guth's blessing, correct?"
"For now." Scratch commented, he had taken the man deeper into the dungeon, to hide their dealings from the surface.
Bert nodded. "Not many creatures can. It means you can see the spell circles of a spell before they're completely cast." To demonstrate, he held up his hand and produced a magical formation. A little circle of intangible lines that moved and slid over each other like a mechanism falling into place. "You may not be able to produce something this complicated yourself, but you can alter those of others before they're done casting. Come on, point your want at it."
The goblin held up the fancy spellcasting implement and stuck it into the magical circle.
"Oh, you- don't need to get so close, one can project mana."
"Shush, I'm trying to aim."
The demonic parasite on Scratch arm began to churn and slosh, taking blood in exchange for mana, and the spell began to change shape and fall apart. Suddenly it received a burst of energy and resolved.
*Poof*
A cloud of blue smoke exploded between them, more frightening and dangerous, and hardly that.
"Agh!" Scratch waved away the luminous gas. "What kind of spell is that?"
"It was a metal cleaning spell, but you completely changed the pattern and activated it."
He grabbed at his shoulder, he had lost a lot of blood and the lapse in concentration had allowed the manabelt to inject some of its poison.
"It will cost less mana if you can target a crucial aspect of the spell specifically. Change its directory, or keep it from resolving."
"And that's a viable combat strategy, is it?"
Bert moved his mouth to the side, "well it's better to know it than not. What if you're snuck up on with a summoned arrow?"
Stolen novel; please report.
Scratch would be snuck upon with a lethal spell less than a week later, by that time Lacrima had already been reinstated, and he did not think to use Bert's technique.
----------------------------------------
The assassination attempt took place within the outskirts of the favored territory.
There was a crossroads at which adventurers were able to consult a little station for directions. It hadn't seen much traffick recently, but ever since the Promise had begun provide free transportation to visiting adventurers, it had begun to crowd and bunch up.
The hobgoblins had escorted in a wagon load of precious metal and gems, meant to entice fortune-seeking warriors to join an excursion, and Scratch sat on top of it, keeping watch of the valuables.
They were already spoiled for choice, with how many groups came to inquire about the impromptu contract, when suddenly a young woman split from her party and began to cast a high-level spell.
"Benesant's blinding fury: holy axe of the go-" the magic circles were already forming, but she was interrupted by a whip of metal blades wrapping around her leg and forcing her to the ground.
The metal shot back and clicked together into Ada's extending blade. She then raised her foot and kicked the caster's face into the trampled dirt.
"Jesus, learn to cast with speaking out loud first." Scratch scoffed.
"If she'd used a quicker, less powerful spell, you'd be dead." Ada commented.
"Your grace!" The crowd had dispersed from where the scuffle had taken place, but a small diverse contingent rushed in. "Please forgive Amelie, it must be a misunderstanding, she-"
"She can speak for herself."
The hobgoblins picked the woman up, not restraining her too tightly but with an implicit threat of death.
"He's an enemy of the gods..." She appealed to her party members, "we have to kill him. Before he brings back the age of the goblin king. Guys!"
"Amelia... did you want us to come here because you had an eye on the baronet the whole time?"
"These are noble goblins Amelia."
"Listen," Scratch threw up his hands. "I don't feel like dragging you along as a prisoner until we make our way all the way back to the Promise. Let's just say you're sorry and you won't do it again and we can skip over this."
"Dad." Ada urged. But it was on deaf ears.
"Come on then, say it."
"I'm sorry... I won't do it again."
The hobgoblins dropped her to seethe on the road, and the rest of the party fell into a cacophony of grateful platitudes.
But when the wagon continued on and left the crossroads behind, the attacker tried again. Half-restrained by her own allies she raised her staff and summoned a volley of arrows. Elemental light.
This time, a cursed bolt from Barbara's crossbow ended the attack, striking her in the throat and killing her instantly.
"Do you realize how lucky you are that you survived that?" She complained. "Lydia is right, you *are* way too lenient."
"You overestimate our goodwill in the continent, Barbara. We aren't even supposed to be here right now." He whistled. "Besides, things worked out."
"Yes, because I was there."
"Thanks!"
She grumbled, he would often throw these curve balls at her if he wanted to shut her up. It jumbled her train of thought.
But they weren't there to discuss personal security or justice. They were there because of the dissidents.
-
"What's the game?" One of the adventurers asked.
"Wolf." Barbara told him.
"Just regular wolves?"
"These are... bigger than usual."
"Legend has it..." Scratch orated with broad gestures, "...that a horrifying beast roams the depths of these woods. It's roar, *thunder*! It's claws, *lightning*! And all the poor wargs, that are kin to the goblins here, are being swept up by its power, and led astray from society. It's a scourge! And it has found us. We have pooled our greatest treasures to find heroes that may once and for all end this beast of myth."
One girl laughed and the others held suppressed smiles. "Don't worry, we'll find out what kind of wolf is stealing your wargs."
Barbara looked away into the nothing beside the road. They knew very well what sort of animal they were dealing with, however folksy Scratch pretended to be about it. The reason they had decided to recruit on the road, rather than go through the adventurers' guild, was to avoid having to explain how so many storm wolves had appeared in their territory.
It was already drizzling, a sign that they were getting closer.
----------------------------------------
The trees were stripped of their thinner branches where the storm wolves roamed. Their roots were exposed by the constant erosion of heavy rain.
A desolate ruin, once a goblin colony but overgrown with the roots of a poison ent, lay in the center.
Perched on top of the weathered brick, like a guardian deity for some ancient forgotten civilization, sat the pack leader. A giant wolf, with wisps of steam emanating from his fur.
He watched on lazily as the human adventurers tried to make their way through the muddy, uneven territory towards him, accosted by wind wolves and his brothers.
These were advanced combatants, users of magic and magical weapons, but they were not in their element.
Through the thinned out foliage, the pack leader noticed a glimmer of silver. The promise of reward that the dungeon master used to motivate these soldiers of fortune.
He slowly lowered himself to the ground, hunched up his hind legs, and then... jumped.
The force blew apart the treeline and he flew through the air, over the ruins, over the petty fighting, right in front of the hobgoblins' wagon.
The subhumans formed a defensive line, but he swiped them away with his paw. As he stood, a giant next to his unevolved cousins, he was on eye level with the Scratch, sitting on top of the wagon.
"Master of the dungeon." He growled.
"Wendy the third." He replied in the human tongue, using a human given name, but they understood each other.
"You've come to enslave us once again."
"We've just come to put down an overgrown mutt." The goblin had produced some sort of magical weapon from his sleeve, but even with his massive frame, the storm wolf was to quick for his eye and circled behind him.
"It was not by my choice that I became such. The dungeon has evolved me, do you know why?"
"It's a gift, it's what your great grandmother joined us for. Stay still."
"It's a curse!" The wolf put his paws on the top of the weapon and easily tipped it over, knocking Scratch to the muddy ground and the wind out of his lungs.
The horses finally broke free from their reigns and bolted. The hobgoblins poked him with their weapons some more, but he send them flying with a gust of wind, punching a hole into the rain.
"The beast god Noruk is the source of our strength, not this wyrm of shadow that you wield! The dungeon subverts our strength, turns it into raw **calamity**!" As he barked the word in his barking tongue, he emphasized it with a thunderclap of violent air, toppling the coming defenders over again. "I alone among my brothers possessed potential to grow beyond the absolute floor of our storm wolf forms, I alone could develop non-combat abilities. Such as the ability to withstand your dungeon's vile dreams! That occupy our every thought like burrowing lice!"
He stood with his front paws on the toppled wagon now, his enormous head bend over the obstacle to deliver his teeth towards their fleshy destination.
"I alone could find the voice of the beast god, I alon-"
Scratch kicked the roof of the wagon, and its side opened up, facing the wolf's vulnerable underbelly.
There was a brief ringing noise and then a shiny spear shot out, a solid pike as thick as a troll's arm as several times too long to have ever fit in the tiny vehicle.
The pack leader moved its jaws a legs a bit and then died, the water finally seeping into his coat and drenching his fur.
Scratch stood up and put a cigar in his mouth. "If you're gonna kill, kill. Don't talk."
-
After a few moments the pike disappeared, (it had been elemental metal maintained by magic,) and the storm wolf fell to the earth.
"What took you so long?" Scratch complained.
"It kicked us over, what were we supposed to do?" Barbara emerged furiously from the vehicle.
"Zhe energy-ingesting-and-excreting magnosilican artificial manabladder is a sensitive construct." Noss said from within.
"You can come out, it's overcast." Barbara suggested.
"Clouds can break, no zhank you."
But the clouds didn't break. If anything, the rain became more intense as the remaining storm wolves mourned their leader.
I should have evolved him further, Cyclophan said, but before I realized, he had already escaped my grasp.
Can we get the others back?
Perhaps, if you can get them to go near the dungeon again I can take control of their minds again.
Through their dreams?
Yes.
The adventurers had come back to encircle the wagon, now seeing that the leader of the wolves was dead.
"Did you do this?" One of them asked him.
"I want the others alive, can you make that happen?"
"Yes," the adventurer said, but they couldn't.
The dissident wolves had changed tactics and scattered, leaving no trace in the rained over mud.
Still, there were some kills and some bounties to hand out.
-
The adventurers were getting more soaked by the second as they lined up to receive their silver, but the family had come prepared with boots and umbrellas.
"Can sell you some of these for one silver piece." Barbara said.
"That is extortionate!" One of the healers said.
"That's my rate, you can take it or leave it."
"Zhat's too much for a screen on a stick, you're right." The vampire's voice came from within the box. "I vouldn't do it."
"Too much is relative," Scratch said, "we earn money to provide comfort to our lives. How much comfort is it worth trekking all the way back in the pouring rain?"
"I'm saving for medicine for my little sister!" The healer said indignantly.
Barbara groaned. "Have the damn thing for free."
"Can't we take shelter in the wagon?" Another said.
"The inside's confidential," Scratch quickly replied, "and anyway it'll be some time before we get the horses back."
"I will happily pay you half my rewards if I could- Oh, it's stopped."
It had not, in fact, stopped raining. The downpour had paused because an enormous stone and metal construct had moved over them.
Its towering form had been camouflaged by the rain and its giant steps the thunder, but with it standing over them it seemed impossible that they could have ever missed it.
-
What loomed over the desolate wild was hardly recognizable as a siege harness at all.
No element was human shaped. Rather, it had the appearance of a giant crab.
It shuffled around some of its heavy tree-like limbs to stabilize and then produced two cylinders from underneath its disc-like body. Two intricate collections of gears, with a circle of holes in the front.
"Christ-Almighty! Duck!" Only Scratch jumped out of the way when a thundering crackle suddenly punched a series of holes in the ground, and the chests of several adventurers.
The hobgoblins readied their weapons but Scratch urged them away. "Go, scatter. Noss, fire the weapon again."
The vampire began to turn a crank and reconnect a series of tubes. "Vhat manner of spell vas zhat?"
"How did it get past the outer perimeter!?" Barbara screamed.
Meanwhile the adventurers were firing their own spells, fizzling out rather helplessly at the sturdy legs of the highly elevated machine.
Its cylinders clicked. It was ready to fire again.
But instead of firing, it neatly stepped out of the way of the wagon's charging spell, piloted by a human intelligence as it was.
Then it aimed at the adventurers again. "Adventurers, stand down. Zhis does not concern zhe guild-"
"Baronet, zhis is zhe last charge. Firing it now vould be a vaste of magnosilican-"
"Fire goddammit!" Scratch produced his wand.
As the gem at the end of Noss' device converted the mana into a spell, he jumped right on top of it and jammed it into the forming circle.
"Target a crucial aspect..." he recited. "Change the trajectory. There!"
The magical spear erupted from the gem at a completely crooked angle, and directly impacted the harness' leg.
The Blurichan lost his balance for a moment and the machine's fat body swung near the ground.
"The rest of this entire bounty and a ride home for whoever, takes out that soldier!" Scratch screeched.
There wasn't much time to consider the offer, and anyway the foreigner had killed their friends, so when the cockpit clame close enough, a martial artist jumped up to punch a hole in it.
The battle ended as suddenly as it had begun.
"Did you just say 'soldier'?" A healer asked nervously.
"Adventurers are not allowed to fight in the war, huh? I guess we just committed a collective war crime. You can consider this hush money."
----------------------------------------
Noss could be convinced out of his shelter with an umbrella.
If the sun were to break through, he would have to hunch up in a little ball behind the thick screen, but at least he'd survive for the goblins to retrieve.
Scratch wanted him to look at the cylinders that had folded out of the machine's underbelly.
"This is guns." He declared.
"It seems to be some sort of non-mana clockwork apperatus..."
"No friend, this is guns. What the hell gives? I thought you people were all medieval and shit. Now I gotta deal with giant robots and machine guns? We're just gonna get carpet bombed at this rate."
The vampire stopped paying attention to the goblins' meaningless prattle. The device seemed to contain shells of explosive powder and metal slugs. An ignition in the back would send it flying to impact the enemy.
And the revolving chamber served to rapidly ignate as many as possible in quick succession. There was a devilish intelligence to it, intricate like advanced spellcraft.
"Zhese forma lines are... strange." He said. "Zhe enemy can somehow produce und pilot siege harnesses zhat do not follow zhe human form. It vas a good zhin zhat I vas zhere."
"It was a good thing that Bert showed me counterspelling," Scratch corrected him. "I've got half a mind to put you two back in the pen and make him minister again."
Noss eyed the poppet around his neck as he said it. Lacrima was still restricted in her magic as long as that existed.
Barbara came out from the thick curtain of downpour. "Will you hurry it up? We've got the horses. I want to *leave*."
"Is it a coincidence that we came across this soldier just as we were out with an adventuring party?" Scratch asked her.
"Sort of? It must have been making his way towards us for miles, we were bound to run into it travelling outward like this."
"The guildmaster certainly wouldn't think so. So let's keep hush-hush on it, okay?"
"That's what you told the sellswords, did ya?"
"No.. I offered them money."
The unusual developing technology of their enemy was certainly of concern to the family, but they relied on the recently-to-come-have-crawling back witch to have something to make up for.
However, upon return, the minister of magic escaped.
----------------------------------------
Storm Wolf
Family: Beast
Threat Level: C
Reward: 50 silver pieces
Storm wolves are sources of destruction and calamity, and more powerful versions of the verminous wind wolves. They possess advanced tactical ability and use it to outmaneuver militias in order to strike at the most vulnerable of the community. Their control over the wind allows them to knock over straw and wooden buildings, gaining them access to the insides. They can be recognized by their black fur, sporting stripes of cloud formations that can be mistaken for white hair.
Storm wolves are known to lead packs of wind wolves into human communities, but will only very rarely band together with other storm wolves. A storm wolf slaying mission will therefore never rank below threat level C.
Storm wolves possess the Pack Hunter nature, allowing them to communicate with each others to co-ordinate attacks, without being able to speak. They also possess the wind walk ability, enhancing their speed with gusts of wind. Their fur, when harvested properly, can be used to give the wearer similar abilities.