Chapter 441 - Reign of the Crowned IX

The south-western part of the Langgbjern range was one of the few locations frequently explored. Unlike the Cadrians, few of whom ever ventured too deep into the mountains, the western alliance’s members sent regular expeditions up north.

It was not because they were more competent, nor because they were more brave. Nay, the western alliance was simply desperate.

As a collection of small nations ruled by way of council, they were absolutely terrified of the superpower that dominated the northeast. Cadria was a looming threat. They knew that the crown sat in competent hands at least, but there was no way of telling when they would slip and let loose the hounds that lived along their border. In fact, there were frequent skirmishes, tiny conflicts among the frontier that both parties were happy to dismiss as mere brawls between the soldiers.

To that end, the alliance joined Cadria in valuing strength above all. And to that end, the strongest of fighters were often sent north, forced to face crushing trials in hopes that some of them would return empowered. When the strategy worked, it worked well. It allowed their most powerful to break past the 850 wall and emerge as the chosen of some god or other. But it was far more common for none to return.

Though the alliance knew nothing of the reason, the cause was most often the orniferin domain. Located just one mountain deep, the seaside territory was ruled by a race of crab-faced, sea-dwelling man-eaters. Together, they crowded a beautiful, frozen lagoon circling around a central figure adorned with an icy crown. Their massive, segmented bodies were clear beneath the waves. Like centipedes, they extended for dozens of meters, and like centipedes, their bodies were covered in legs.

The individual limbs looked more like those of a shrimp or lobster. They were coated in a hard, yellowed carapace and placed to better their ability to swim. Compared to the rest of the deep dwellers’ bodies, they were tiny, but each was long and sharp enough to run a fighter through.

Their ruler was the most humanoid of the bunch. He was certainly a little bit smaller, measuring only about five meters long compared to the average of fifty, but it was not in his shape that his humanity was expressed. That particular crown belonged to the nature of his mind.

He was vindictive yet compassionate, ever at odds with the vitriol that clouded his judgement. He knew only how to classify the foreign entities as friend or foe. And the most recent group to step into his territory was clearly one of the latter.

It was a group of four, and none of their members were orniferin. That alone was evidence enough to warrant an assault. But the king’s blood boiled, practically exploded out of his veins, when he noticed the corpse that their tiniest member had in hand. Measuring only a few centimeters across, the grey-tinted, eight-eyed shell was unmistakable. Even with the rest of its body removed, he could tell that it belonged to a child of his species.

The king roared.

Cycling water through his gills, he issued an order of extermination.

Panda knew it well. He had watched many of the western alliance’s parties struggle and fall against the thousand-legged crab-bugs. Still, he laughed it off, cackling as he vanished from the field and left the others to fight off the enemy that he had provoked.

Despite his open criticism, he thought that they did quite well. Jules correctly evaluated that, though they lived in it, water was in fact their weakness—he pierced their defences with his blue magic before finishing them off with a mix of explosions and bursting steam. Krail, likewise, demonstrated the full extent of his growth with a wide berth of spells. He crafted a gargantuan magical circle with a rain of arrows before lifting his staff and commanding a stream of verdant mana to erupt from the ground. And that was only half the spell’s function.

After all, the old elf was an arrow mage.

The mass of arcane might gathered in the sky above. Its shape was muddied at first, distorted by the constant additions to its mass. But eventually, it righted its form and became an arrow—an arrow that returned to the earth as he lowered his staff.

So violent was the resulting explosion that it nearly blew its caster away. He had to command the surrounding greenery to grip him by the waist and hold him steadfast.

Though he was the only mage in their party capable of casting it, the spell was technically a joint effort, engineered with Allegra’s guidance and some degree of input from each of the party’s members. And all in all, it took almost half of his mana. Still, the result was worthwhile; he killed twelve of the seventy-odd orniferins caught in the blast and refilled his magic so he could do it all over.

Lana was in the fray as well, swinging a wooden axe that she had crafted from an unlucky tree. It wasn’t quite heavy enough to live up to her standards; she struggled to cut the crab bugs apart. Still, those who engaged her wound up completely destroyed. She crushed their faces with the weight of her swings and tore through their bodies with her careful, targeted slashes.

They fought like a trio of champions.

But the orniferin horde was endless.

They crawled atop each other’s corpses, scaling the mountains that surrounded their lagoon with blood in their eyes and fervour in their hearts. They stopped giving Krail time to cast, and using their fallen allies as shields, protected themselves from Jules’ assault. Lana was the only one who remained effective. While the orniferins’ hands were preoccupied holding up their fallen, she cleaved through their ranks and made for higher ground.

The withdrawal lasted until the king cut them off. He skidded to a halt right in front of them, with his mandibles clacking and his black and yellow eyes alight.

The wolf girl charged him first. Activating her domain, she did away with the distance and went straight for his throat. Her trajectory was perfect. Slowing down time allowed her to angle it between two pieces of carapace and deliver a strike straight to his flesh.

And yet, her weapon shattered—the wooden axe broke to pieces as soon as it touched the crab king’s body.

Lana opened her eyes wide as she ducked under the pincer-smash that followed and countered with the butt of her broken weapon. But again, the once-polished Langgbjern wood was reduced to scrap.

A pair of spells immediately rang out in support. One was a veritable stream of arrows, tweaked for more weight so as to push the orniferin away, while the other was a glowing orb. It came from neither the red or blue magic that Jules had long mastered, but his newly acquired yellow variety.

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While red commanded explosions and blue eroded things away, yellow combined electricity and arcane to produce the effect of electrolysis. In practice, it was a whole school of spells dedicated to altering a target’s charge. And by setting both the orniferin and its armour to positive, Jules ripped the two apart.

The bug-crab’s carapace flew off its body as it was rejected by the flesh meant to hold it in place. It provided Lana the perfect opening to dig her heels into the snow, draw the weapon on her back, and cleave at the weakened monster.

But again, the result was repeated.

Her axe shattered; the wolfgirl was left devoid of weapons as fine metal shards flew in every direction.

Sharing in the cleaver’s fate were all of the arrows that Krail had crafted. Every single one exploded on contact and flooded the mountains with bits of wood and steel. Even Jules’ spell quickly wore off. The polarity of its body returned to normal by the time it seized its shell with its pincers. Ignoring the magical bombardment—the red, blue, and arrow-based spells that pelted it throughout—it put the outermost layer of its flesh back on and sprinted at the invaders again.

First was Lana. It punched straight through her guard, snapped her in half with its claws, and sent her crashing into the side of the mountain with her guts spilling all over.

Next, the king aimed his larger claw at Krail and gave it a quick snap. The elf threw up a shield made up of reinforced greenery, but the air bullets pierced right through and filled his body with holes.

Jules was a little bit better off. Engaging his thrusters, he arced through the air and dodged a whole slew of snaps. Despite his best efforts, he was still too slow. The orniferin king appeared in front of him and punched straight through his shuttered shell.

“Oh, goddammit… I should’ve known that it was too damned early.” Panda grumbled as he watched the scene from the sky, descending only as the crab-bug moved to finish the clam with another strike.

He knew that his Panda-like form would prove useless, so he became a muscular moose in the midst of his descent. As far as bodily specifications went, Constantius was quite weak for a Cadrian aspect. Both his front legs broke the moment he crashed into the orniferin’s claw—not that it really mattered.

The damage was passed right off to one of his familiars, namely an unlucky cockroach named Joe, who immediately exploded into a fine mist. It didn’t matter that Joe had only three points of health, or that the amount of damage dealt was well into the millions. The hit that Constantius had suffered was immediately and inconsequentially negated.

Confused but still enraged, the orniferin lashed out at him again. The claw rent the air apart, creating a massive sonic boom as it struck him, but all it amounted to was another dead cockroach somewhere on the other side of the continent. And so the same sequence was repeated, over and over again.

Constantius ignored the attacks, grabbed all three of the fallen fighters, and teleported across the sky. Examining them again, he found new confidence in his decision to tame them in their sleep. Lana was still hanging on by a thread, barely, barely alive. Her vitality as a warrior-based class was the only thing that still kept her kicking. She could have long been back on her feet if she was specced to the Cadrian standard, but her regenerative abilities were poor for a high-level warrior. He would probably have to subject her to the usual initiation at some later point in time.

Jules was a bit harder to evaluate, but Krail was clearly wounded enough that he would have died had the contract not bound his spirit. And technically speaking, his body was dead. His heart had already stopped, and his brain was damaged beyond the point of function.

It was fortunate then that his soul had a fleshy blueprint conveniently engraved upon it. Copying the astral form back onto its physical counterpart, Constantius shoved his spirit back into its meat sock and called it a job well done.

He knew that the god of death would be unhappy, but such was the privilege exclusive to tamers. There might’ve been a small chance of failure had he needed to convince him that his life was not yet over, but it was hard to say. Elves didn’t tend to care for Xekkur’s rules.

With Krail on the verge of stirring, Constantius walked over to Jules’ shell and gave its lid a bit of a prod. To his surprise, it shot right open, with the clam inside shooting him a glare whilst holding in his guts.

His expression loosened after a brief stare and became a clear look of confusion. “Now hold on a goddamn second. Are you Claire’s fucking dad?”

“Her uncle, technically,” laughed the moose. He paused for a second to scroll through his menus before leaning back and crossing his arms. “You’re pretty tough, huh? Never would’ve bet on you still having half your health after taking a hit like that.”

“Mitigated it with yellow magic,” he said, with a cough. “Bastard would’ve ended me there if I hadn’t.” By marking both his shell and the enemy’s claw as being negatively charged, he had been able to heavily reduce the force of the incoming attack.

“Not too shabby for a guy without a brain.” Constantius shrank as he spoke, becoming a raccoon once more. It wasn’t so much a choice as it was a necessity. The familiar’s body couldn’t handle much more, and he wasn’t about to waste a somewhat functional pawn for no reason.

“Oh, fuck off,” said Jules.

“I was under the impression that Claire’s uncle, or rather the king’s brother, was meant to be a wanted fugitive,” said Krail, as he slowly rose to his feet.

“Yup, that’s me,” said Constantius. “I’m the big bad moose who killed his own parents and arranged for the death of his sister-in-law.” He practically sang the words; his voice was melodic enough that everybody, including the barely conscious Lana, slowly blinked in his direction. “You guys doing okay?” he asked. “You’re looking a little broke.”

“I’m not even sure what that’s supposed to fucking mean,” muttered Jules. “Hell, I don’t know what the fuck any of this is supposed to mean. I’m pretty sure that shit ain’t something you’re supposed to say out loud, or even really at fucking all.”

“You’re… a little slow,” said Lana, with some difficulty.

Constantius took a moment to look at her before breathing a sigh, grabbing a potion out of nowhere, and splashing it over her body. She didn’t quite heal up immediately, but the wound slowly started to sew itself closed.

“The fuck do you mean by that?” asked Jules.

“I think she means to say that he wouldn’t have shown his hand if he really meant any of those things,” said Krail. “It’s likely his cover story, or at least the bastardization of the truth that he’d rather we believe. Would that interpretation be correct, Lana?”

The pirate nodded, prompting Constnatius to break into laughter.

“You guys have got it all wrong,” he said. “The only reason I’m telling you is because it doesn’t matter. It’s only really a matter of time before everything comes to light and my plans are far enough along that nothing you say or do can mess them up.” He twisted his lips into a demonic smile. “The coins are on the table, friendos, and the dealer’s running the clock.”

“See?” said Lana.

“See fucking what!? The bastard’s clearly up to no good!” screamed Jules, with a wince.

“No, no, no, my dear pawn. You’ve got it all backwards,” said Panda. “I’m up to all the good.”

“Motherfucker, you literally just called us pawns and flipflopped on your ow—”

“You should really stop thinking about me and start thinking up a strategy,” said the raccoon, with a snicker. “That thing I helped you run from? He’s already on his way, and he’s as pissed as you could imagine.”

“I guess a quick brainstorming session couldn’t hurt,” said Krail. “We should probably start by addressing Lana’s situation. She’s going to need a weapon if we wa—”

“And… pencils down!”

A laugh on his lips, Constantius grabbed all three fighters and teleported beside the crabipede.

Allowing them to think up a strategy well in advance would defeat the purpose of the exercise.

They needed to learn to think on the fly.