It had taken some time to assemble a proper third-wave assault force. With the Aase heading the bulk of the second wave, it had been expected that the third wave would just be the cleanup crew, but it had become eminently clear that was wrong.

Only with the return of communications from Kristina Ramdall had the third wave been impelled into motion, despite her clearly not-so-stable mental state. Given her location plus the damage wreaked by the battle between Eisengeist and Teutobochus, those in the know had reason to suspect she’d died and resurrected, possibly several times. She was not a known draugr, but her age lined up with that possibility; even if she had achieved her longevity by other means, it wouldn’t have been hard to believe that her conviction in her plot would be strong enough to awaken the Immortal Blood.

The one to relay her messages was Asgeir, his raven acting as a direct line of communication to the other Ramdall elder’s scrying mirror. Being well aware of his predicament, Kristina had commanded him to gather the people she wanted in the third wave and leave the raven with them. What she hadn’t accounted for was the fact that, despite being precluded from acting out, Asgeir hadn’t been stripped of all will as one would be by a control parasite. He chose to come along, hoping to see the annihilation of the Hulson clan with his own eyes.

Those who had arrived upon the sled train were mighty warriors indeed, but they were not the best of the conspirator-clans. They were of two sorts. The first was men and women who believed themselves to be acting within the Honor System through some mental justification, or even a legitimate interpretation of the System. The second were those who couldn’t muster up the courage to mutiny against Kristina’s or their own elders’ orders.

To knowingly act in subversion of the Honor System was, after all, courting death in the truest sense, doubly so with the Seven Suns hanging in the sky. A force that would’ve numbered in the hundreds had thusly been whittled down to a few tens.

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Victor tore straight through two of the sled train’s tundra bears before he managed to pull himself upward. There, from the apex of his ascent, as he careened towards the earth upon wings of furious flame, he rained flaming death down on those foolish enough to not get into cover. A glorious circus of arcane CP-T and zigzagging Devil’s Teeth whizzing through the air, putting holes into the skulls of men whose toughness surpassed mundane tank plating.

Not an iota of remorse or hesitation slowed Victor’s onslaught. Indeed, his heart sang with joy as he exacted utterly righteous retribution. While he was up there, he ascertained that a fair portion of the enemy force had slipped past his strafing run. He returned to the ground, re-entering the longhouse by the same window as before. His bramble barrier still held, feeding from the surrounding carnage. Gunnar had been dragged off to the side by Torhild and Rikke, his transformation rotting away and revealing a wound-ridden man two-thirds his original bulk. He couldn’t even move, but his head remained turned towards Jorfr’s dead body. Victor wagered he would’ve wept, were he able.

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The armored wizard took a stand, using some of his fleshbrambles to plug holes in the building and moving the rest forward to block the entrance. Most of the enemy corpses had, at this point, been gathered into massive bundles at the sides of the great hall, enveloped by brambles for easy access to their biomass. The barricade wouldn’t last long, but it would suffice. He grew and set forth a wave of Devil’s Teeth from the bramble barrier.

Again, and again, and again, he put every art he could think of to task in defending the longhouse. From Devil’s Teeth, to pools of bloody mud, or simply growing long spikes on the fleshbrambles and using them as spears through the barrier. His biomass reserve was quickly running out. The strain of everything he’d done so far was finally starting to set in; his head pounded with spiritual strain, but he could push through. If it came down to it, he wagered he could pull one more big move like the Boneyard Genocider without passing out, but he didn’t see himself doing any serious fighting after that.

With their efforts frustrated, rather than try to cut through his rapidly-regenerating barrier, one of the attacking men shouted to the side: “Bring the brambleback!”

Victor considered whether it might be a good idea to risk smashing head first into a Brambleback, or to try blowing it away with a massive Devil’s Tooth, or perhaps even attempt to harness bonefire into a concentrated beam as he’d done in his mindscape. Perhaps… Perhaps he could do battle with it in close combat? Surely, a normal brambleback wouldn’t have acid in its quills, and Dawnwolf’s armor ought to protect him. It was a horrific thing; a hunched-over, bipedal reptile armored in massive plates from which quills protruded. A massive collar and manacles bound it, and its eyes, by the Dead Ones, its eyes; Victor knew that look. Those weren’t normal eyes, but the eyes of control centipedes. That it didn’t quite move how he would expect an animal of its anatomy to move only assured him of his guess. Before the animal could start cutting into his brambles, he bid them to ensnare the creature and directed two spiked tendril-ends towards its eyes. They struck home, but the centipedes just made themselves known by emerging in full, the brambleback going berserk. It wouldn’t be long before it broke through his barrier. Victor turned Koschei’s Key and put his strength to task, spraying a great gout of liquid bonefire towards the entrance. His barrier went up in flames, and a wall of fire would linger for at least a minute even after the brambles crumbled away.