Vey holds Sera’s hand as they walk through the woods just a few yards away from the actual road. The plan is to strike just as the sun has set, which means they need to move around while the sun is up, hence why Vey is directing Sheo squad to follow from further into the forest, while Vey and Sera follow the road. By Sera’s estimation of the distance, and Vey’s knowledge of the view he saw with [Clairvoyance], the watchpost is just a few hundred feet outside of the edge of the forest, and Vey can see the edge of the forest from here.
The two haven’t spoken much since they left the general vicinity of the dungeon, which initially unsettled Vey, but he supposes this is the first time she’s going back to the village in… How long has it even been, for her? Half a year? Sera thinks it was the end of spring when she was kidnapped, and she’s said it’s the start of fall now, so half a year is probably a little bit of an overestimation. Then again, of the fourteen months and four hundred and twenty three days that make up those months, Vey only actually knows the names of six of those months. And even then, he only knows those because they had been referenced in books.
Regardless, Vey understands the mix of anxiety and confusing determination Sera is probably feeling right now, that’s why he hasn’t let go of her hand. If anything, if it weren’t for their mutual desire to not be outside of the dungeon for longer than needed, he’d have carried her in his arms all the way there. That’s probably unnecessary, though, as she apparently has the same ‘undying’ stamina that Vey and the undead do now. She did say that after her training session she was tired, but that it was having no actual physical impact on her body’s performance, which is interesting to Vey. She can also see in the dark the same way Vey does, which is very useful for their current plan, since it means they could delay the attack to night proper if necessary.
Eventually, they reach the edge of the forest, and all hide, whether in bushes and brush, or just behind trees. The decision to walk alongside the road instead of on it was a good idea, because what Vey hadn’t been able to see from the cliffside was plainly evident before them. It isn’t one watchpost, it’s more like a military camp. Sure, the watchpost is the primary feature, the guards posted in and beneath it make that evident, but the number of tents and half-made constructions near the small wooden tower gives Vey a definitive militaristic vibe.
The men coming from the somewhat distant village to the watchpost, tents, and crude structures as the sun sets lower and lower practically confirm this in Vey’s mind. Soldiers, staying in the village, but camped outside of it near the forest, since they know that’s where the enemy is. Vey turns and gives Sera a look, which she returns with a thoughtful, but understanding glance. None of the men and women Vey can see look particularly strong, at least in terms of ‘aura’. Arcane sight is technically fallible in this regard, Vey is concealing his, Sera’s, and the undead’s aura’s with [False Aura], for example, but even that leaves the trace of illusion magic in place of whatever there would’ve been. The fact that none of the soldiers look any stronger than, Vey would guess, first or second level, with the vast majority possessing unmistakably unleveled auras, Sheo squad isn’t necessary in terms of actual combat power.
Not to say Vey isn’t going to give them the chance to gain progression towards their evolutions, nor does he intend to painstakingly hunt down every single soldier with just himself and Sera. It being a military camp as opposed to a watchpost does put a wrench in the plan though, namely that it’s about three hundred feet away from the edge of the woods. [Shadow Way] can only conceal them for two hundred of that, and the encampment has at least a full two hundred feet of sprawl outwards from the watchtower. They’ll definitely be spotted earlier than Vey would like, and Sera will have to spend a lot more time running through the camp towards the village to follow her plan of blocking villagers from getting involved.
And so, a near silent, near pointless debate is held between Sera and Vey from their hiding spots. At the end of the fifteen minute long exchange, the sun has fully set, and the only light in the encampment are torchlights, fires, and a few [Permanent Light] spells being magnified and ‘pointed’ off of the watchtower, sweeping very dim light across the fields surrounding the encampment. Using magnification to ‘direct’ a light spell to illuminate something much farther away is something Vey hadn’t considered doing before, so it was taken into consideration part way through their near soundless argument. The conclusion of said argument is… tenuous. Essentially, the only thing the two managed to work out with their whispers, gestures, and Sera’s ‘angry’ face is the following:
1. Phase 1 of the plan is unchanged, Vey will use [Shadow Way] to get them all as close as possible.
2. Sheo squad will no longer be split between protecting Sera and protecting Vey, and will instead by serving as Vey’s guard solely for the purposes of fighting a proper battle, and Sera will just do whatever seems best while Vey does his extermination.
3. Yes, the plan is now ‘extermination’, not ‘preemptive strike’, and “No, I will not stick with you the entire time, I’ll be more effective when just left to kill them on my own. Yes I promise I will be fine. I love you, shut up and let's go.”
The ‘planning’ done with, and mental sighs out of the way, Vey crouches low, and waits for the undead to form up behind him, and then turns to Sera. She puts her hand out for him to take, but he shakes his head, and instead motions for her to bring her head down to his level. He brings a hand up to her neck, presses his forehead into hers for a moment, and casts a [Mark] on her collar, and pulls away.
“Ready?” Vey asks, and waits for Sera to nod before he himself mentally prepares. Vey activates Alacritous Cogitation, then begins calculating for Layered Augmentation. Because of his proximity to Sera, he also realizes he can use her stored spells as well, even though he has no need for any of them. So our spellcasting skills aren’t for show… Vey thinks the moment his various chosen buffs are applied, and he turns and nods to Sera. “[Shadow Way]. Go!”
--
The feeling of sprinting through supernatural shadow as opposed to on the ground was a very strange one to Sera. The way Vey’s [Sadism] spell was affecting her own mind because of Foreverqueen’s Shroud was something else entirely. Now that she’s out of the shadow, and out of the proximity of her bondmate, the first thing she thinks is that it is a good thing Vey doesn’t understand sexual pleasure or attraction, at least, a good thing that hopefully, whenever Vey does, it will be with Sera, and not when using a spell like that. Just for a brief two hundred foot sprint, her ‘battle lust’ had been instead replaced with ‘battle lust’, a distinction she very much feels shouldn’t need to be made, and not one she wants to explain to Vey after he's felt the latter.
Regardless, it probably wouldn’t have been so bad if she hadn’t also been within range of Vey’s Alacritous Cogitation as well, no mortal being should ever have to think that quickly while so anxious and tingly. By a small amount of luck, or at least, that’s what Sera would like to call it, when they’d exited the [Shadow Way], none of the guards on the tower had been looking over the group. This feeling was quickly replaced by a larger amount of bad luck, because a sizable portion of soldiers were clearly gathering to meet what they were clearly identifying as ‘a hostile assault’ in the form of Vey and Sheo squad. Fortunately, they don’t seem to have spotted her, since she’s running perpendicular to the path Vey is taking, on her way to cut into the encampment from the side.
She doesn’t have the time to stay and watch, but the first cold declaration of ‘[Acid Blast]’ followed by the sounds of an explosion, and then later a dozen men screaming in agony tell her almost everything she’d need to know. Her insertion into the encampment begins far more quietly, when she spots a nice gap between two tents, and draws her longsword as she darts through it.
The first soldier she spots is a male human who was clearly in the process of removing his clothes to go to sleep for the night. Was, because he’s missing a head now. Sera turns with the momentum of her slash, sliding in the dirt for a moment before standing up in a ready stance, scanning for more targets. It legitimately takes her a second to register how quickly she’d immediately decided to decapitate the man, but by the time she’s thought about it, she spots two more men a dozen or so feet in front of her, clearly running towards the sounds of Vey’s battle.
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She makes a note to herself that anyone running towards Vey and Sheo squad is already dead, and thus not her concern, so she instead turns on her right heel and sprints towards the direction of the watchtower. She spots a tent with two soldiers sleeping in it, and quickly darts into it, using Flash Cast to grant herself [Mage Armor] as she executes the first, then the second shortly after.
She continues like this, killing the ones too tired to be woken up by the distant sounds of savage battle. It isn’t until she reaches the base of the watchtower that she meets anyone awake. Three of them, in fact, two elves with spears and one human with an axe, all male. She raises her sword as she Flash Casts [Chill Touch], and then dashes forwards into their view, sparing none of her hostility as she approaches.
The first to react is the human, who shouts something Sera doesn’t bother listening to as he steps forward and raises his axe, clearly intent on trying to meet her approach with a downward strike. An approach that doesn’t come, as Sera instead switches to a charge towards the elf furthest away from the human. The elf raises his spear to meet her charge, but there is a reason she’s been training with Ter, so Sera drops into a slide right before the elf’s spear, holding her sword up to block the man from trying to skewer her as she slides. The enhanced strength from [Stonesword] is what allows her to perform the next ‘trick’ in her plan, which is digging her left heel into the dirt to stop her slide, as well as anchoring herself to push off of the ground back into a standing stance. Coincidentally, this process also drags her longsword along the elf’s side, and the scream of pain he lets out as a sizable portion of his abdomen and side are rent open.
Sera finishes him off by following through her slash all the way up his back to his mid-spine, the magical enhancement allowing her to ‘ignore’ inconveniently placed bones in the man’s body as her sword clears free of the man, just in time to catch the human’s axe from hitting her.
“[Shocking Grasp]!” Sera shouts the spell the moment her sword’s blade collides with the human’s axe, and she braces herself for what she knows will follow. Sure enough, the now familiar feeling of burning electricity, and the feeling of her muscles attempting to forcibly lock up on her reminds her of how colossally stupid this trick is, but she can’t argue with the results. Her new undead constitution prevents her from being stunned, after all, but the human has no such consolation. Taking four damage is worth a free kill, after all. She thinks as she cleaves the top half of the human’s skull free of the rest of his head. Sera eyes the remaining elf, who seems to be frozen in place, shaking. “Sorry. You probably don’t want to be here. Let me help you with that.”
--
Sera was honestly a little disappointed with herself. None of the men she’s encountered up until now have even required her to use her Appendage Crusher strategy yet, which is giving her serious doubts about whether or not she over prepared for fights like this. Now, though, she’s beginning to feel a little bit of… Anticipation? Excitement? Ah… Battle Fervor. That’s it. She eyes the two humans before her, a male one-handed swordsman and a female greataxe wielder with proportions unrealistic for an elf or a human. She mentally dubs them ‘sword-guy’ and ‘cow-tits’, respectively. Sword-guy looks average, probably a fighter, but cow-tits is clearly a Barbarian, with the bulging muscles and complete lack of armor to prove it.
Sera allows herself to smile a bit, somewhat dryly and somewhat genuinely. There’s a very real chance that someone with a barbarian’s raw stats could just run her over, yes, but the thought of slashing her to shreds is… Not one she expected to find so fervently enticing. She readies her stance for the pair to approach her first, and casts a [Shocking Grasp] to be stored in her sword in advance. Touch spells can be held, after all, and there’s no reason to hide her spellcasting abilities from opponents who literally just watched her deflect a blow with [Mage Armor] bracers.
“Wait there, girly, I don’t want to-” Sword guy starts to talk at the same time he starts rushing forwards, clearly intent on tying Sera up in melee for cow-tits to finish. “Hurt you!”
Sera doesn’t give him the luxury of being in the same spot as when he started charging, and instead sidesteps, letting his prompt horizontal slash grind a few purple sparks off her [Mage Armor] chainmail as Sera herself counters with a diagonal strike at his free arm. A strike she has to abandon when a greataxe careening towards her head prompts Sera to duck out of the way instead of dying a grizzly death.
“Are you sure?” Sera dryly returns sword-guy’s comment by lashing a kick out at his legs the moment she gets stable footing, and the curse the man utters as he starts falling over from the trip combined with a womanly shout of rage reminds her that talking will probably mean death by barbarian.
She rolls away from the now prone sword-guy, and stands up in time to deflect another strike from cow-tits. The pain in her wrists from the impact force is legitimately enough to cause her an entire seven points of damage, so Sera is pretty sure she’d be dead if she hadn’t dodged the earlier strike. Regardless, cow-tits’s strike was a downward vertical slash, which conveniently leaves her elbows open to counterattack. An opportunity Sera doesn’t pass up as she steps to the side and aims for the woman’s left elbow.
Sera has never actually ‘procced’ a passive skill like Appendage Crusher before, understandably, as she didn’t have it the last time she cut off someone’s arm, so the line of text ‘grants an extra attack’ hadn’t made any sense to her. Right now, as her sword cleaves through cow-tits’s arm with a satisfying crunch sound, she understands. The feeling of pure celerity in her body, the way the world seems completely still, and the way that the only thing she can actually think about is how to strike at the woman make it all make sense now.
Sera steps forward with her right leg, dropping to the knee to use the gravity for additional power as she brings a two-handed diagonal slash across the woman’s chest. The moment her blade is free, that feeling of celerity ends. One slash to the woman’s exposed remaining wrist later, the feeling returns, and this time, Sera uses the motion of standing from her half-kneel for power in a upward vertical slash, and the sounds of bones crushing and feeling flesh pulling on her sword grant her a feeling of pure control, mental clarity, and satisfaction she’s not sure she has a comparison for. She finishes dragging it upwards from the woman’s groin up to her collar, then finally pulls it free and steps away as the two halves of cow-tits fall to either side.
Sera allows herself a mild critique of her performance, her movements and strikes were perfect, sure, but the way cow-tits’s eponymous tits aren’t neatly split on the halves of her body is mildly disappointing. That’s because one of them was right in the way of the path her sword took, and no longer exists in a recognizable way. She stops her critique when sword-guy gets to his feet, and registers the halves of what Sera’s mind decides is his lover(regardless of what the actual truth is that interpretation makes more sense to her), and screams.
“I’LL FUCKING KILL Y-” Sera doesn’t give him time to finish, and instead uses his momentary distraction as the perfect opportunity to close the gap and make a one-handed horizontal slash. Sword-guy stops screaming in time to deflect the blow with both hands on his one-handed sword, a mistake, as Sera’s hand makes contact with his chest a moment later. Release, [Shocking Grasp, Chill Touch].
Without metal serving as a medium for feedback, the spell’s full effect is on full display, and combined with the negative energy of [Chill Touch], the result is plainly evident even through his padded armor. Rather, what was padded armor, before electricity and rot rapidly ate through it and sunk their roots of electric shock, burning, and a distinct sensation of life-force being sapped away sink into sword-guy, leaving him completely unable to react.
Sera knows that she could just line up a kill strike in the brief moment the man is stunned, but after the feeling of using Appendage Crusher for the first time just now, she decides to experiment. She steps back, and slashes the man’s wrist on his sword arm, watching the hand and sword fall away as her blade cleaves through. The feeling of moving faster than before is definite, but she also finds herself more or less incapable of trying to aim for another dismembering strike. Apparently the system enforces Appendage Crusher’s stated rules by simply not allowing you to think about trying to cheat it. She opts not to use her ‘extra’ strike, and her mind and body return to normal.
She aims another strike, this time more carefully, and goes to try and cleave off the man’s left wrist and right elbow in one sweep, wondering if that would give her two ‘extra attacks’ since she’d have taken off two appendages. Once her sword is free of both, the feeling of celerity sets in, but she only feels like she could make one strike, not two, so she stops. She gets another idea for an experiment, this time wondering if maybe a strike that only coincidentally dismembers a target, but was intended to do something else, would allow her to chain ‘extra attacks’.
This new, exciting line of experimentation consumes her full focus until sword-guy expires from blood loss thirty-five seconds later. Unbeknownst to Sera, she is not unnoticed while doing this. No less than ten other soldiers, which had initially come to support their two hired adventurer escorts, begin to walk away from the young elf girl in a mixture of fear, horror, and pure shock.
The sight of an otherworldly beauty gleefully carving an enemy clearly already defeated to bits, with a smile that could bewitch a man to abandon his family to run away with her on her face is not a sight any of the soldiers are paid enough to walk any closer to. In fact, all of them come to the independent conclusion that none of them should ever speak of this for the rest of their lives, and that they should simply run the moment they’ve backed away far enough for the girl not to notice them. Unfortunately, ‘the rest of their lives’ is very, very short, and far, far too few of them are spared Sera’s experimentation when she finally catches up to them.