They had once been faithful to the gods.
When the Alliance came, they found out there were no gods around. They killed the lying priests, grew individually powerful, and accepted their new masters—the Alliance.
Yet, though the old gods might've been a lie, their priests had been benevolent and sought the greater good of all gnolls. Sometimes misguided, sometimes not, they usually had the race's best interests at heart, and their rule was temporary.
The Alliance, however, proved itself uncaring and, at times, cruel. They cared for races that could produce strong beings, and the gnolls were found wanting. Little by little, they were undermined and stepped on until they had to face reality: the Alliance was worse than their false gods.
So they turned to the Void.
The Alliance made it hard to talk to the Void, but it had hidden prophets everywhere. One such prophet found the gnolls and taught them how to connect with the Void undetected—and the gnolls liked what they heard.
The Void was honest and forthcoming. It didn't lie; it didn't seduce with falsehoods. It was clear: it wanted to consume all, to return all to itself.
It wanted that so much that sacrificing anything to it was rewarded with power. Sapients were extra rewarding, but enough materials—as in entire planets—could also be exchanged for much power.
It also didn't lie about why it paid back; it understood that the more it provided, the more it would receive.
The gnolls' leaders sacrificed hundreds of billions for the greater good. Their bodies and souls were consumed by the Void, entire worlds swallowed, the hold of Reality over the multiverse weakened. And the gnolls were rewarded for it.
Producing a single B-rank gave them the voice they wanted in the Alliance; it was all worth it.
However, they had underestimated the sweet seduction of the promise of more power. The Void never lied or changed its single goal—but gnolls did.
Their B-rank wanted more. It created a cult to the Void and streamlined a sacrifice operation that was around for almost one hundred standard years before it was discovered.
The Alliance had extremely restrictive rules when it came to one's mind. The system only read the mind of those who used mana and only to evaluate their knowledge for the magic stat. That function was required but heavily regulated and supervised, just like pushing information directly into one's mind was. Any race, no matter how weak, could demand to audit the entire system—though only B-ranks could even begin to comprehend how the thing worked.
Yet, when uncontestable evidence of a single gnoll communing with the Void appeared...
That's when the gnolls understood their prior folly. The Alliance had never undermined or went against them. Maybe a few races did, but that was allowed to keep them all sharp, at the edge, ready for anything the Void might attempt.
The Alliance, now united under a common goal of purging the Void's influence and punishing everyone involved, arrived with a brutal efficiency that was eerily impressive even to the gnolls suffering under it. Within weeks, the minds of at least a quarter of the gnoll's population of a billion were violated and their darkest secrets discovered. The investigators weren't subtle or apologetic about it, and even the innocent received no official apology—that was their punishment for failing to notice something was wrong with someone they knew.
The Void was not an enemy the Alliance took any chances with—or so was the justification behind it.
In the end, everyone who merely knew about the operation was punished. Their circumstances were taken into account and served as mitigating factors, but they were still declared guilty even if they were forced to keep the secret under a life threat.
In Fort Steelrock, most troops knew about it. Some benefitted directly, while most just kept their lives by not denouncing it. The former was taken by the Alliance elsewhere. The latter was left in the fort, which was cut from the world and locked into a spatial bubble.
They became rift dwellers.
They were cut from the system, except for still being allowed to use mana, and given rules to follow. It wasn't a life sentence; whoever survived would be released in a thousand years. However, they would be regularly invaded through rift portals that might appear at any time.
Theoretically, they could also bring the fight to the invading races. That was allowed to prevent the races of any world with a rift portal from getting complacent. However, reverse invasions were all but impossible.
To begin with, there was a protection period for those races in which the gnolls were locked inside the rift. To make things worse, a rift's tier always respected a race's power, and such power always followed a curve.
No G-rank race could just wake up one day and have one of them randomly become D-ranks. Guardians needed supporters and rivals of similar power to grow. Even if a race had only one D-rank, they always had at least a few tens of thousand at peak E-rank, one step away from ranking up. Those E-ranks then used the rifts to take the last step and crush anyone inside with ease.
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Rift dwellers were little more than training dummies as far as the Alliance was concerned.
So, the five thousand D-ranks in command of Fort Steelrock's rift had decided to cheat.
Before becoming a rift, Fort Stellrock had specialized in fighting living beings. The mountain's depths contained many weapon factories, and the Alliance hadn't taken their materials or production methods from them. The materials were still limited though, so they had to use them wisely. They developed a strategy to deal with D-ranks and changed their equipment accordingly.
The result was a high-specialized army whose only goal was preventing any invader from getting to their D-ranks.
Let the invaders die at the hands of the specialized weapons or kill E-ranks. There were enough troops and weapons to bring any invading army to a standstill.
The E-ranks had no choice on the matter. Their officers had promised that the day a single invader stepped on the castle would be the day they killed all gnolls for their incompetence. The reason was simple: they would rather not risk their own lives in an unbeatable struggle.
The D-ranks would withstand the thousand years of punishment and then leave—alive and untouched.
Five hundred years had already passed. Less than ten percent of them had died. Their weaponry was just too effective.
Most D-ranks rested easily in their castle, knowing they would survive.
Some of them knew better. They understood the Alliance was merely using them to the utmost. They had become livestock and would be slaughtered before their time was up.
So they trained to the peak of D-rank and beyond, hoping to withstand whatever was thrown at them.
And if they did survive... Oh, the riches and rewards that had been promised to them!
In the castle's highest room, a gnoll was doing push-ups. He was naked, his muscular build displayed to any observer. The room was barren of anything except the light violet magic circle at the ground, with arcane writing filling and around it. The circle shone, and the D-rank gnoll had trouble pushing himself even an inch every few hours.
He had been at that for a long time; he would've kept at it for longer if he weren't interrupted.
The room's metal door opened, and an armored D-rank entered. Unlike the E-ranks, the D-ranks' equipment wasn't standard issued with a single purpose. They were more varied and had colors other than black. The female gnoll's was white and golden, proof of her rank. In all of Fort Steelrock, she was only below their Supreme Leader.
"A new portal opened," she reported.
"So?" the Supreme Leader asked while focusing on pushing his body against the oppressive gravity inside the circle. Without the system, they had to get creative to improve their stats.
"They sent a Void-touched through the portal," the female said.
The gnoll kept silent for a few moments, then willed the magic circle to turn off. It obeyed at once. He stood up and looked at his best mate.
"Front line warriors aren't allowed in rifts," he stated the obvious. Only said warriors or traitors had enough contact with the Void to become blessed— Well, the Alliance called it tainted by the Void.
"The Seer confirmed it," she insisted.
The Supreme Leader frowned. "Someone felt our Accumulation and sent a thief, then. They will not take what is rightfully ours. How many invaded this time?"
"Only one," she reported.
The leader snorted. "They thought we would let our pride become our downfall. This invader must have a tool or ability to get to the Accumulation if they get close enough. We won't take any chances.
"Send the entire regular army against them. All defenders are to man their posts and spare no resources if the invader approaches the fort without disappearing first.
"The invader will die or get tired enough before getting to the Accumulation. And if they get there...
"Order all officers to head there at once. We'll give this thief a nasty surprise."
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The more Shen approached, the better he could see the details of the fortress. The mountain was enormous and pointy, made of solid rock, and the fortress, of black metal. Its architecture made Shen think of a flood dragon snaking around the mountain toward the peak, which had been cut cleanly and sported an enormous black castle.
Stone structures could be seen throughout the path around the mountain, likely houses, administrative centers, and whatever else was needed to keep a military complex running. The fortress was sectioned by multiple metal gates, and the buildings at the lower levels were much bigger than the ones at the top, except for the castle.
Thin white metal spikes about fifty feet long were placed horizontally on top of the walls, all throughout the fortress extension, with a twenty-yard gap between them. The curled fortress went around the mountain so many times that there were thousands of the things pointing in all directions.
Eight enormous dark violet light orbs floated on top of the castle. They were equally spaced and seemed to do nothing, but Shen would be willing to bet they were weapons.
Everything in the fortress spoke of grandeur and, Shen reckoned, intimidation. Attacking such a structure would require either a lot of men or a lot of time. Shen didn't have the former, but he had plenty of the latter, so he didn't mind.
After killing the mounted gnolls, Shen was left alone for a long while. It was only hours later that he found an army ten miles away from the fortress—which, at his movement speed, was only a dozen seconds away.
The army was enormous, almost three hundred thousand E-ranks arrayed against him, including those mounting forty thousand wyverns on the skies.
The gnolls had brought engines of war with them this time around.
The hundreds of monoliths had violet lines and floated slightly above the ground. The troops kept dozens of yards from them and pulled them using thick black metal chains that Shen recognized as the same anti-energy material as the metal nets they had thrown at him.
The almost one thousand flying vehicles were black metal balls with only enough space for a single crouched gnoll inside. They flew and maneuvered easily and quickly through the skies and were surrounded by metal spikes that looked like smaller versions of the ones on the fortress' walls.
The few thousand blocks of white stone looked like colorless Rubrick's cubes. Unlike the monoliths, they didn't float. They were kept on the ground and were pushed by multiple gnolls, both warriors and mages. They looked and felt heavy.
And the tens of thousands of war tanks were as big as Earth's. However, these floated two feet above the ground, were round, and had three short, thin barrel guns equidistant around them.
Besides the machinery, the army's equipment was also varied and specialized. Shen noticed long, thick tubes that looked like RPG launchers, thinner ones that could only be "magic firearms," all manners of different shields and armor, and a mix of war hammers, axes, swords, and spears.
Finally, a few miles to the side, a dozen thousand gnolls wielding heavy bows mounted on worgs.
All in all, Shen had to admit it was an impressive army. It might even be one that could kill him.
That annoying part of him told him to hold himself back. He didn't have enough qi or stamina to fight all that alone. Stepping further was suicide.
But he had to kill. It was just who he was. He wouldn't deny himself.
Shen rushed at them full speed ahead.