The adventurer had fled across Oshar Tun.

So the guard followed.

For the first time in days, Hirrus was alone with his own thoughts, and found himself lingering on all the things he’d allowed himself to forget. His life - no, his existence - was threatened, and if GM Dave’s cryptic warning was to be believed, he might have only hours remaining to him. Maybe less.

Shemil was behind him. It was his final stop before finding the source of all of this madness.

The town was an empty husk, like so many before it.

Every stop Hirrus had made since Inoha had been in towns just like it. Shucked of everything his quarry deemed valuable. And then discarded.

Rumi, the monster he sought, had scraped every town of its citizens. From the smallest lone farmhouse to actual small towns like Shemil, none had been spared.

None had been left behind.

And for what?

Hirrus tried not to linger on Rumi’s goal. Alone as he was, the enormity of it might overwhelm him without Alric to cut in with some silly little song about coins and elves.

Simply, Rumi was gathering people to be tortured and turned. Made into an army of monsters.

Monsters like Hirrus himself.

“No,” Hirrus muttered to himself. “That’s not his goal. His goal is to die by my hand. Because there can be no other outcome to his actions.”

His private moment of bravado didn’t help that much. But it did help.

If Hirrus had to charge into the Netherworld itself to find and kill Rumi, he would do so without hesitation. Rumi was at the heart of this operation. With his death, it would all collapse, and with the organization around him unmade, Hirrus would be safe. His existence would be allowed to continue. And the existence of everyone else Rumi had already infected.

Cresting the final hill brought his objective into view. Hirrus dropped to one knee so as to minimize his silhouette as he surveyed the small valley below.

At the far end were foothills leading up into the mountains.

The mountains themselves cut a picturesque view on the horizon. From here at the foot of them, they were an imposing reminder of the smallness of mankind. Huge and indomitable crags of snow-covered rock stabbed into the clouds.

Instead of matching the unthinkable heights of the natural world, Hirrus was looking to stab into something in the valley below. Though as he looked over what he found there, it seemed the number of stabbings were going to be much higher than he had anticipated.

He had believed he would find Rumi here alone, or with only a token group of assistants. Especially considering the wake of destruction he’d carved to get here, he couldn’t have imagined what he found.

Instead of a small camp tucked up against the foothills, he was looking at an entrenched encampment that filled the entire valley.

Scores of tents - possibly hundreds - stretched out below him.

Instead of a dozen assistants, there were swarms of people moving around the tents. Rumi didn’t just have a bunch of folk in cages while he engaged with his sick experiments. He had an army, complete with guards circling and patrolling the camp, and uncountable workers buzzing around with whatever tasks were in service to Rumi’s goals.

Quieting the part of his mind that told him that his quest was doomed, Hirrus focused on casting a critical eye over what he saw. The search for important details managed to limit the mounting panic of the sudden size of the forces arrayed against him. Near the center of the encampment were only about a dozen tents, arranged in neat rows with obvious intent. Everything else had obviously sprung up afterwards, haphazardly clustered around the central camp. It made Hirrus feel a little bit better that he had not been entirely wrong about the size of Rumi’s initial forces.

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But it made him feel much worse to consider who could be filling the rest of those tents.

From what Hirrus knew, Rumi wasn’t any good at figuratively making friends. The only way he could attract followers to this camp would be by doing it literally.

The Awakened. They were like Hirrus, relieved of their decision trees and raised to potentially indomitable heights of power.

Hirrus had hoped that the handful he’d faced thus far had represented the bulk of Rumi’s converted forces.

Seeing how vain that hope was made it clear that a change in strategy was necessary.

Considering his prior plan was to barge in and kill everything in his way, he should have been less surprised that circumstances had conspired to make that plan unsuitable.

At the center of the camp, among the neatly arranged tents, was a single larger structure, made of wood instead of canvas. While there was an immense amount of activity around it, it was just that - around it. No one was passing in and out of the structure. Hirrus surmised that it was the collected prisoners that Rumi had not yet converted into Awakened.

That was where he would find Rumi. If not in that building, enjoying the torment and torture of innocents, then near at hand, readying for whatever sick process was involved in the Awakening. Considering what Hirrus suffered, he tried very hard not to imagine what Rumi had to do to replicate it. He tried even harder not to imagine the sort of individual who would respond to such a thing with revel instead of revulsion.

“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered to himself. “None of this matters. I will kill everyone between me and Rumi if I have to. I will not be stopped.”

He looked around at the empty hilltop.

Who did he think he was talking to? Did he think someone was lurking and listening? Did he think someone was impressed?

With his incredibly consistent and well-considered plan in mind, he began to map his approach. The haphazard placement of the outer layer of tents made it a maze, and so he took a moment to find a path through that would reliably take him there.

Approaching from the direct north, there was a well-tread path towards that middle section. It would be the easiest and most direct route to where he would find Rumi, but as an arterial path through the camp, it was heavily trafficked. Dozens of robed figures filled that area, using the would-be angle of attack to move crates and carts of unknown materials through the camp.

Attacking there would be suicide.

It was possible that finishing this mess would demand that he cut his way through all the forces arrayed against him in one glorious battle, pushing him to the very limits of his power. But if that was the case, he needed to pick a different route. Even if every person he could see from up here only landed a single hit against him before he pounded them into the dirt, he would die before he reached the center area of the camp. And that was assuming that an alarm wasn’t raised.

There was a slightly smaller route from the southeast, on the opposite end of town. Hirrus dismissed it almost instantly. Not only would it be a challenge to circle all the way around without being spotted by guard patrols, but something was happening over there. There was a natural raised stone area, and it was obvious that something was being planned. Many of the supplies being moved through town were being filtered towards that area, especially the carts. At least twenty people were scrambling over the natural dais, arranging for whatever event was to come. It was possible that if he had the capacity, the chaos would be an easy place to penetrate the defenses covertly and slip in unnoticed.

With no other direct route into the center of the encampment, only one option remained. Approach from a random angle and hack his way in. It had the advantage of allowing him to approach from the west, where there were fewer people. There were fewer guards as well, and they were spread thinner than around the stone dais and the obvious front gate pointed back towards the town of Shemil. It would give him a good starting point.

In his mind’s eye, he let the fight unfold. No one Awakened could be a match for Hirrus - none of them had accumulated as much power as he had - but four or five would push his limits. If he timed his approach properly, he might only face two or three at first. With good timing and surprise on his side, he could kill one of them before any reinforcing forces presented themselves. And if fate favored him, he might overwhelm the rest of them before the alarm was truly raised.

After that, though? He could only imagine everyone else in the camp converging on him. Hundreds of them. How many were Awakened? Even if it was a small fraction, and the rest were ineffective goons, he would be buried under a tide of flesh. If by some miracle he survived, he would be buried under literal tons of bodies, rendered unable to continue.

And that was assuming that the first sign of alarm didn’t send Rumi fleeing from the camp under heavy guard, vanishing into the mountains, all of Hirrus’s hunt undone.

He was outmatched.

What could he do?

He couldn’t hope to change the situation in a satisfactory way to get enough tactical advantage.

It was over.

His hand tightened around the hilt of his sword. This wasn’t the first time he’d thought his quest was over. But the Last of the Strong’s raid group hadn’t stopped him. Orlina hadn’t stopped him. Andrew and Mel and the assembled officers of the guild hadn’t stopped him. Even Fidelis had been brought down.

Hirrus would not be stopped. Not then. Not now. Not ever.

He was fighting for his very existence. And not for his own sake. He was fighting for Julissa, to ensure that he would still be here when she returned. If that mandated a massacre beyond reckoning, then let it be so.