“Come in.” Raj responded to the light but urgent knock on her office door in Ariel’s Gate. It was in the mansion that had once belonged to the duke and duchess of Filam. It was drafty, musty, and inferior to her EDEN office in every way. That said, she needed to maintain office hours here so that the regular citizens of Ariel’s Gate always had a place to air their concerns.
“Excuse me, Governor Raj.” It was one of her scouts deployed in Rakashi, a fellow tengu named Horus. “I have escorted our informants to EDEN, and have come with an urgent request for aid from my brother. I would have asked lady Leifa directly but I was unable to reach her.”
“The cambions are on a mission. What is Gryphon’s situation?” Raj asked seriously.
“General Trasana has defected and is attempting to seek sanctuary with lord Gray. She is being pursued by Yuther’s elite forces, and Gryphon is flying to her aid.”
“Stay here and take messages from any visiting citizens in my place.” Raj ordered. “I’ll petition lord Gray directly in this matter.”
“Lord Gray himself?” Horus asked with a suddenly slack expression. He might have queried further, but Raj was already gone, taken away by her teleportation spell.
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The deep, fetid swamp between the northern edge of Rakashi and the southern border of the Gault Kingdom was an infamous land infested with trolls, lesser hydras, and a plethora of other deadly creatures. No civilized races settled here, and only the strongest and best equipped caravans could hope to traverse it unscathed.
Trasana clutched her niece Norana as she skipped lightly over the treacherous mud and bottomless bogs. She was covering a great deal of ground, but her Soul Energy was depleting rapidly. She could only pray that the other side of this wretched swamp would greet her before her power ran out. The air itself here seemed to be against her, heavy with spores bearing mild hallucinogenic effects that made the twisted cypress trees seem alive and menacing.
One such cypress limb seemed to actually move of its own accord, almost like a reaching arm... Trasana’s eyes shot wide open. A sudden surge of adrenaline sharpened her focus so that she could see the branch for what it was. The incredibly tall and lanky troll’s arm barely grazed her shoulder, and the filthy claw smoked violently as it touched the holy enchanted metal pauldron.
It pulled away for just a split second, and Trasana went to sprint past. Unfortunately her tiny lapse in concentration had caused her waterwalking spell to flicker, and her heavily armored frame had sunk to her ankles in the quicksand like muck. On instinct she hurled Norana toward what looked like a dry patch of ground. The girl, who had been barely awake screamed in fright as the scene unfolded around her. She bounced painfully and yelped as her hip scraped a moldy stump.
The troll took a step closer to Trasana, ignoring the smaller meal. Its wide, webbed feet allowed it to easily traverse the muck without sinking. Trasana on the other hand was now up to her knees.
Quicksand or not, she was still the equivalent to an S rank adventurer, and the first cut of her magnificent single edged blade opened a trench in the lanky brute’s midsection and blasted it back against another mossy cypress trunk. She calmly strengthened her waterwalking enchantment and extricated herself. The troll was rising once again, its wound was already gone. Worse than that, three more lanky bodies had silently emerged from the chilly mist to join their fellow green skinned abomination.
Trasana grimaced and thought desperately as she eyed the four trolls. She could win this fight. The problem was that every moment spent making a scene here drew the attention of more and more monsters. Eventually they would overwhelm her, and everything would end just like that. No. The answer was to break through at any cost and flee north. Stick to the plan.
She turned to Norana, intending to leap in her direction, but her voice caught in her throat and her face froze in horror unlike any she had ever felt. A goblin, an insignificant piece of filth goblin was straddling her niece with a grimy hand covering her mouth as she thrashed with all the strength her little body could manage. The goblin’s other hand held a crude and rusty knife, probably looted from a slain traveler.
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Without a second thought Trasana threw her sword. It spun a single revolution and impaled the goblin, nailing it to the stump next to it. The creature spasmed once and died, held upright by the golden blade, and pouring dark blood like wine from a carafe onto Norana’s powder blue gown. The little girl let out a blood curdling scream, and scrambled away.
Trasana knew that scream would draw every monster within earshot like a beacon. The trolls knew it too and were suddenly acting with urgency. The competition for their prey would soon become bothersome if they didn’t finish this fast. They moved to surround the now unarmed woman. Trasana was grateful for the consideration as the they closed in shoulder to shoulder, presenting a perfect cluster of targets for one of the last offensive spells she could likely cast for awhile.
“Great Un’hana. She that is loved by the water and air, make of my will a blade to rend the unclean. Let the river fall like a guillotine and dash their unworthy bodies upon the stones of the righteous... Riptide Slash.”
Trasana swung her arm in a back handed knifing motion as she completed her prayer, and a sheet of water so thin as to be seen as a mere distortion sliced through the air in a semicircular wave. It passed through the trolls, and the wave that exited their bodies and continued through the swamp turned dark. Trees were felled cleanly, and several acres of canopy vanished as the water blade clear-cut a massive section of the marsh.
The trolls fell into a huge pile of bleeding flesh. They appeared more annoyed than anything as they methodically sorted out which pieces belonged to which troll.
Trasana used the moment to scoop up Norana who had clearly gone into a state of shock. She ran as hard as she could. Her lungs were beginning to burn, and her head pounded from the pain of being low on Soul Energy. What a foolish and desperate flight this was. She could have placated Yuther for a bit longer, and left with a real plan. Instead she had acted on emotion, and was probably going to die a pointless death in this nameless bog with her only living relative.
She growled away the intrusive negative thoughts and used the many fallen trees as convenient spring boards to increase the distance between her and the growing monster horde. Relatively fresh air, and the sight of the evening sun lifted her spirits ever so slightly. A flash of golden light on her peripheral vision made her look back and stole her budding hope.
“No way...” That was an unmistakable attack made by one of the honor guards if not Yuther himself. “They’re already this close!?” She shouldn’t be so surprised, she knew. They weren’t carrying a child, and had no need to eat or sleep while Legion was possessing them.
A shadow fell over her, and on instinct she dove to the side expecting another enemy attack.
“Ms. Trasana!” An unfamiliar voice shouted. “I am Gryphon, a follower of lord Gray here to help you.”
Her eyes focused on the speaker. It was a handsome tengu man. She didn’t have time for doubt.
“Take Norana.” Trasana begged the stranger. “Get her to safety. I can manage here.”
“Auntie!?” Norana balked.
“Silence!” Trasana commanded in a tone of utter finality. “Go. I’ll be right behind you.” She finished much more softly.
Gryphon was torn. Trasana was absolutely the more valuable asset here, and he could only carry one person. Her plea certainly tugged on his conscience slightly, but more than that was the absolute law of lord Gray. Children first, period. He reached out to take the girl, and had just taken hold of her arm when the felled tree he stood on suddenly lurched violently, flinging them both up and away.
A serpentine head the size of a fully grown bear erupted from the devastated swamp, and a second one exploded up a short distance away. The beast was unmistakable. A lesser hydra had a misleading name. The ‘lesser’ came from the fact it only bore two heads. It was also larger, stronger, and packed a more potent breath weapon than its standard cousins.
“Fly!” Trasana screamed over Norana’s confused cries and the thundering cacophony of the hydra extricating itself.
Normally a lesser hydra would still be dormant, buried deep within the mud until the summer months when its cold blood was warm enough to sustain its great bulk. It seemed Trasana’s attack had disturbed it early.
With a frustrated growl, Gryphon gathered Norana close and leaped. He beat his wings once, and then a burning agony struck his left wing. He had been clipped by the hydra’s acidic breath.
They tumbled down thirty meters, and Gryphon angled his body to absorb most of the impact. He felt his ribs crack, and blood filled his mouth. He looked down and saw that Norana had also been badly hurt. She was unconscious and a large gash poured blood from where her head had bounced off of his cuirass.
Gryphon lamented his failure as the enormous head of a hydra blocked out the sun above them and began to open its mouth. The sound of a slashing impact could be heard then, and the head flinched as it turned to the source of its new injury.
Trasana smiled grimly as her slash against the hydra’s barn sized flank drew its attention away from her fallen niece and their Tengu ally. Her smile vanished along with the beast’s wound. Did every creature in this swamp possess high tiered regeneration?
Behind her, she could sense the arrival of the honor guard. Thankfully Yuther’s presence was not among them, not that it really mattered. She was out of Soul Energy with an S tier monster before her and half a dozen nigh invincible knights behind her, all of which wanted her dead or worse.
Trasana was on the brink of despair when something very peculiar happened. The lesser hydra, for lack of a better term... fell apart. A severed hydra head landed just in front of her, seeming unaware that its entire body had been reduced to smoking chunks. It opened its jaws once, and a weak spittle of breath came out. Then its black eyes clouded over and a stillness fell over the entire scene.
Trasana peeled her eyes away from the cloudy eye and looked up to where a figure hovered just above the grotesque pile of scales and bloody flesh. It was the man from the tavern, the one known as Gray. Though now he was surrounded by a pestilent swarm of insects, and radiated a sickening unholy aura. He held an enormous scythe over his shoulder. The blade extended out more than two meters like the silvery wing of a bat, and was the unmistakable source of the wicked feeling.
“Hey there.” He called in a tone that did not at all match the scene. “Could you take a step back? There’s something I wanna test out. Oh but first...” He pulled two red vials from thin air and tossed them down to Gryphon who managed to catch them.
Trasana numbly took a step back, and glanced behind her. The knights were similarly flabbergasted, and frozen. She returned her attention to Gray, and he was holding the scythe out over the pile of lesser Hydra.
“Create Undead.” He commanded, and the mass of flesh quivered...