Chapter 297 - Prologue - The Scattered Stars

A fuzzy fox, an afternoon picnic, and a dead marquis. Claire Augustus, First Princess of Cadria, thought happy thoughts as she made her way through the castle’s halls. It was an entirely foreign location. She was not in either of her homes, but one of the many fortresses scattered across the nation’s western border. According to the fake—the homunculus that had taken her place following her escape from Cadria—it was the primary residence of the warlord known as Marquis Cornelius Decimus.

Though her tutor had certainly lectured her on all of the various details, Claire recalled little about the Decimus march. The only trait that immediately came to mind was its relative dungeon density. It was also lacking in terms of high-level locations, and as such, its people led poorer but more peaceful lives on average. That was not to say that they spent their days in poverty, however. Like all the western domains, the dungeon-deprived land was a producer of staple crops, and the hay harvested from its fields each season was what fed the country and fueled its army. It only took a brief glance out the window to really drive home the point.

The fields went on for days, extending in every direction, as far as the fake could see. Claire’s own vision would have extended much further, but she was hardly capable of expressing all her functions while she was possessing her replacement.

Her eyes were only one of the many differences between the princess and the homunculus. The fake looked almost entirely human, minus her serpentine pupils, her scattered scales, and her massive, fuzzy ears. The original, on the other hand, was more monstrous, even in her most humanoid form.

Real Claire could manifest four human-like limbs if she really put her mind to it, but the transformation could be maintained for no more than a few minutes at once. Even then, her other differentiating features were impossible to hide. Unlike the fake, she had a long elegant tail and a set of magic circles carved directly into her gaze. The replacement was also lacking the icy horn that grew out of her head and the equally icy spike that protruded from her chest, not to mention the inconvenient flipper-wing hybrids that grew from her ankles.

They were all recent changes. She would have looked just like the fake a little over a year ago, but the time she had spent away from home had spurred her evolution.

Claire had been put off by the homunculus when she first discovered her, but her outlook had shifted dramatically since their first encounter. Its adorable excitability and all-around optimistic outlook provided a fresh perspective on the life she once led. Perhaps she could have turned out that way as well, had her mother still lived—a consideration that necessitated another wave of happy thoughts.

The problem was her destination. Claire was headed straight to the person responsible for all of her misery.

She would have preferred nothing more than to avoid him like the plague. In the past, she might have even fled through a door if he showed any signs of approaching. But the halfbreed pressed on. She stepped into the yard, ventured through the gardens, and reported to the training grounds, where he stood with a spear in his hands and his arms in constant motion. He was a giant of a man. His moose-like lower half was so far off the ground that she could walk beneath him if she crouched. His humanoid parts were scaled up to match, with everything but his ears much larger than her equivalents.

The warlord’s form was perfectly optimized for combat. Like most other warriors, he had long, almost disproportionate arms. Their lengths were extended so that he could reach under his body and touch the ground without bending any more than his knees. The lengthy appendages allowed centaurs to wield shorter weapons like swords and daggers without limiting their effective range, but most preferred longer blades regardless. They simply paired better with their massive, towering frames.

Virillius was muscular, but not so muscular that it impeded his movement. There was, admittedly, some elegance to the shape of his frame. Even ignoring their near-identical colour scheme, it was not impossible to see how he had spawned Claire as his daughter. The resemblance surely would have been stronger had he allowed his hair to grow, but Virillius cut his mane short so it could not be used against him.

And then there was his mana. It was difficult to tell with the fake’s eyes, but the circuits that filled his body were arranged into their most optimal forms. There was a rumour stating that Vella, the goddess of war, had tweaked them herself, and Claire saw no reason to doubt the claim.

His hands continued to move even after he noticed her approach, stopping only as she fearlessly stepped in range of his weapon.

He knew that it was her.

He had always been able to tell.

“Claire.” He set down his spear and rested his hands on its hilt.

“Father.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m here to take you up on your offer.”

A sword with a lizard-faced insignia manifested itself in her hands. Even from so many countries away, he readily heeded her call.

“Teach me everything you know.”

An unfittingly soft smile flickered across the cervitaur’s lips. Even knowing her most recent misdeeds.

“Gladly.”

___

A low growl escaped the god of the hunt as he accessed the mortal realm. His body expanded from a single point in space, growing from a divine speck to a golden beast no smaller than the citywide crater. There were plenty of birds and centaurs fluttering through the skies, with the latter group’s members carefully inspecting the ruin. And yet, his massive, ethereal body went completely unnoticed.

It was a feature of the system that masked his presence. He had not truly descended upon the world, only visited it by proxy by projecting his mind.

Beneath the giant lion’s glimmering feet, where his temple once stood, was a giant frozen sword surrounded by an otherwise empty void. The impact had swallowed his domain, followers and all, and the resulting tempest had completely removed his mark. It was practically a direct attack on his person. Even with his total divinity unchanged and his concept left intact, he was thoroughly enraged.

His followers were hunters. That was not to say that they couldn’t be culled; it was an everyday occurrence for one’s prey to turn the tables. But what he could not forgive was how their lives were put to waste.

The killer’s classes had reached their upper bounds by the time his people had met their ends. She had gained nothing from their removal, not experience, not sustenance, nor even the thrill of the chase. Every one of his packmates, including the divine guardian he had instated to protect his temple, had met a wasteful, pointless end.

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Had Flitzegarde not explicitly forbidden him from personally choosing his targets, he surely would have chased the perpetrator down himself. But the fire in the golden lion’s heart was irrelevant while his feet were chained. Even passing the message along was a struggle. It was impossible to notify his priests without attracting the supreme goddess’ attention, but he could sneak a revelation if he bestowed it to someone of little import.

He accessed the system as he outlined his instructions and scanned the massive, towering blade for traces of the killer’s magic. He didn’t care much for the associated values—it was simply the easiest way for him to grab her global identifier—but he did a double-take as he caught them in his peripheral vision. The familiarity of her wavelength grabbed, demanded, his attention.

Furrowing his brow, the lion pulled up an ancient record and laid it atop his new prey’s chart. It wasn’t a perfect match, but it was close enough for everything to fall into place.

The world shook.

The lion snarled a dead man’s name as he brought a mighty paw to his maned chest. There, beneath the fur, was a wound that no time or power could heal. The scar ached as he recalled the man who had inflicted it. It was a pleasant memory. He could only grin as he basked in the memory of his delectable flavour. And the thrill of hunting him time and time and time again.

A dark scheme formed in the back of his mind as he checked the data again. He would not settle for just bringing down his nemesis again. He had finally recovered enough of his power to set his sights on the goddess that backed him.

In due time, he would take her down and recover what she had stolen.

And then, finally whole again, he would reprise his throne as the god of the eternal hunt.

___

A middle-aged cervitaur rose from a bed of hay with a tired yawn. Even dreading the day ahead, he dragged himself out from within his blankets and made the painful trek to the nearest mirror. In another country, such a pristine piece of glass would have been a luxury impossible to afford, but as a Cadrian, Stan thought nothing of it. His only concern was the colour of his hair. The black was fading away for greys and whites, a fate shared by both his mane, his face, and even his body.

While the state of his goatee certainly left the man forlorn, he didn’t dally around for long. One quick wash later, and he was outside, trudging through the mud with a bucket in each hand. Both containers were filled with rancid slop—the unrefrigerated remains of the previous night’s dinner. Stan himself would never dream of eating the waste, but the pigs and goats were happy to guzzle it down. The horses would have been just as eager, but they were given a slightly more luxurious meal. The spent brewer’s grains were more nutrient-dense, and at the very least, were of a high enough quality that the cervitaur was willing to consume them himself.

He went on to feed the chickens, the ducks, and geese before starting on the day’s most labour-intensive task. Ferrying water between the well and the animals was his least favourite chore, but with all the other farmhands in mourning, he was the only one that could be relied upon.

Stan lived roughly fifty kilometres north of the nation’s southernmost border—close enough to have seen the cataclysm firsthand. Close enough to see the blade still glimmering on the horizon. Even some four weeks later, it remained perfectly unblemished, waiting for the god—goddess, according to some of the spared, whose account was admittedly rather suspect given their religious affiliation—that had thrown it to draw it from the world again.

He still remembered waking in the middle of the night to watch the sword’s descent. His barn had been toppled by the ensuing impact, and most of his crops had been completely obliterated. His neighbours fared the same. They had lost the better part of a year’s harvest. But they were still better off than those that lived closer. Some of the other villages had lost everything but the people and the march’s capital had been completely wiped off the map.

The material goods themselves were hardly a concern. The government had already stepped in to compensate him and others like him. They had even enlisted their mages to help them recuperate and repair. Before long, all the buildings were rebuilt and refreshed, hence the roof still over his head.

Of much greater import were the people lost. It was not at all uncommon for Rodna village’s children to set out for the city. Tornatus was a popular destination for sparkly-eyed youth, be they academics or adventurers. Everyone had lost someone. Brothers and fathers, mothers and daughters, all evaporated by the heavenly blade.

Stan was a rare exception to the rule. His parents had died long ago and he had no children of his own. His only sibling, his brother, lived far to the north, beyond the divine punishment’s reach. In a sense, he was lucky, but so too was it a misfortune in disguise. There were already a number of rifts between the moose and his neighbours, and his lack of mourning only drove another wedge between them. With the way that things were looking, he would likely have to do something for the community to avoid any further ostracization.

The middle-aged man scratched his ears and heaved a sigh. People were hard to get along with. He would have liked his neighbours more if they had been mindless animals, a prime example of which was the friendly neighbourhood dog that approached with her tail wagging up a storm. Cornelia was a member of the pack that protected the town. In all, the canines numbered roughly thirty. There weren’t enough of them to form a fighting force by any means, but their scents and barks kept most livestock predators away.

Smarter animals like bears, coyotes, and wolves knew better than to intrude on the guard dogs’ territory. The risk of life and limb was hardly worth the meal when there was so much food to be found in the forests beyond the fields. Monsters were not as easily deterred, however, and often had to be fought back by the farmers themselves.

A larger settlement likely would have been surrounded by walls or barriers, but tiny villages like Rodna were unable to afford such luxuries. Even ignoring the price, the resulting utility was questionable at best. Farmers were always looking to grow their fields, and the convenience wrought by the age of artifacts only further spurred them on. It didn’t matter where they set their boundaries. The village would expand beyond them in the blink of an eye.

One could argue that if artifacts were the problem’s cause, then so too could they serve as its solution. The line of thinking itself was correct, but the government could hardly allow it. The autonomous turrets that they could have leveraged to protect their fields fell under the classification of military technology, and as such, could not be legally owned by the common folk. Some of the more daring villages, especially those in areas with less government presence, went ahead and bought them off the black market regardless, but it was an irrational risk. If there was one thing federal agents cared very much about, it was the misappropriation of their military secrets.

As Rodna Village’s chief was a coward, its inhabitants engaged in no such activity. They had to rely instead on the good old-fashioned approach of fending the monsters off themselves. A head-on encounter would have easily led to injuries, however, which was why Stan stepped in with the powers blessed upon him.

“How was the forest today?”

He scratched the dog’s chin as he asked the question. She leaned right into it, whining as she slowly worked out an answer.

“Not very exciting.” To anyone else, it would have sounded like a series of unintelligible dog noises, but as a tamer, the middle-aged man understood them as well as a person’s words. “The newcomers are still fighting for territory, but that’s about it.”

By newcomers, Cornelia meant the monsters that had fled from the area near the impact. Many had been displaced from their old homes, courtesy of the widespread destruction.

“Good. Keep an eye on them and tell me if I need to step in.”

“Sure thing, Stanley!”

Still petting the pup, who had already gone belly up, Stan considered his future approach. The most aggressive monster introduced by the incident was a massive blue-skinned troll. If he wanted to appease it, he would likely need to collect a few fresh combs of honey and present them to bate its anger.

The cervitaur was about to stand up from his crouching position when his ears caught wind of a familiar sound. The magical humming was followed by the whooshing of wind as a fleet of massive floating castles passed directly overhead. They were flying towards the south, guns deployed and prepared for war.

Stan didn’t know it at the time, but accompanying the armada’s flagship were the actions that would ultimately seal his fate.