Bobby and Hokul took the designated teleporter, exiting into a mostly empty settlement. There were no erected houses as the hub crystal was instead out in the open woods. However, this was not to say the land was barren as there were actually many notable items around. Brightly coloured toadstools and mushrooms carpeted the ground, and splotches of ashy mildew spotted the trees. There were dark, wet sludges scattered about, and the air tasted tangy and sour. This was clearly mycelia-owned land.
There were a dozen pure-made mycelia with their bodies crafted of spongy fungus lounging here, their skin red-and-green with white specks and moist holes. Alongside them, there were the typical thralls: ogres and nymphs and ryfin with damaged bodies but intact heads with thick clusters of sickly yellow mushrooms swelling out through their facial orifices. From amongst them walked forward the prophet, Ferer Greencare, his body that of a satyr’s with defined hooves and horns made of different fungi. He had a longbow strapped to his back and a belt with daggers around his waist, which was an unusual sight to Bobby and Hokul who had only ever seen the prophet unarmed.
“Let us make haste,” the prophet said, motioning for his zombies to make way. “There is the danger that Zitu and Fayiure will fly off once they sense our nearing presences.”
After a glance amongst them, the pygmy troll and dwarf followed, somewhat disconcerted by their alien surroundings but not overly much as they could tell they were the strongest people here. After all, even if they had to follow Ajit’s commands, it didn’t change the fact they were true Sovereigns, unmatched by all except their peers. The route they took was easy to navigate, so much so that their thoughts began to drift elsewhere.
Hokul was the one who broke the quiet between them some ten minutes into the journey. “Hey, Ferer, buddy, I’ve got a question for you.”
“Go on,” the prophet said.
“Why the fuck are you working with these humans? They’re this monolithic race which wants to push their rule onto everyone else, and here you are happily helping them. Don’t you think that’s dumb? Don’t you think maybe we can get somewhere better if we recruit Zitu and Fayiure instead of harassing them on the humans’ behalf?”
The directed venom failed to give pause to the prophet’s steps. “In an ideal world, we would all be ruling ourselves with enough forces amongst us to discourage invasions from others. However, that is not the case. Do you not find it frightening that from the very start there were 18 human Sovereigns, almost half of all Sovereigns then. Furthermore, that figure is representative of their race as a whole: if the System had allowed ascension to Sovereignty for a longer duration, then further humans would have flooded our numbers.”
“It makes no sense!” Hokul interrupted, stabbing his Zweihänder into the ground and stopping. Bobby hesitated when he saw this, before stopping as well to provide moral support, and because of this, the prophet was forced to wait for them too. “I remember coming on these humans at the start. They were nothing special, barely higher than livestock, so how did this happen?”
“It’s true,” Bobby admitted. “I remember visiting human settlements early, and since I came in peace, I got to see their societies from inside out then. They were treating people who do minor arcane tricks like mages, and when I demonstrated my hand, they believed I was an alien sage. It’s funny thinking how recent that was and yet how far it feels from modern-day.”
“I have several theories on how they went from that stage to the tyrannical race they are now,” the prophet said, surprising the other two who had actually thought he would never speak against humans. “Foremost, they have admirable adaptability to new situations, the more impressive part of this aspect being their mental malleability than any physicality advantages they possess. In fact, you say humans were weak at the start but that is hardly the truth - they have dominated from the very start, only their means of domination have shifted over the course of the Apocalypse. You must have only come upon their small settlements at the start as their larger ones not only had ridiculous populations but also technology that I still struggle to wrap my head around.”
“What do you mean?” Bobby asked, equally curious and anxious.
“Clearly their technology is irrelevant since they’ve come to depend on the System’s technology, just like the rest of us,” Hokul said, although with some doubt in his voice.
“Not at all,” the prophet answered. “It is a common misconception that I have heard from others, including several humans themselves, where they think the ratkin brought far fewer troops than they should have to subjugate Idroa. The idea goes that they saw this planet as a training pit for their young and inexperienced, not expecting any real danger from any of us native races. And while it is indeed true that the ratkin did underestimate us, that is more because of the System’s assessment of our planet than any contempt from the ratkin’s end. You see, they brought more than enough troops to take over an E rated planet.” The prophet paused, looking directly into Hokul’s eyes, then Bobby’s.
“But?” Bobby hazarded, hooked on the narrative.
“But the System only took into account the intrinsic power of our races when judging our rank, not the level of technology or even potential for growth. Alas to say, humanity should not have been judged to be an F ranked race then as they crushed both of these uncounted factors. The reason we faced so fewer ratkin than expected was because, after some initial fights, the leaders of the human settlements recognised the danger of the ratkin. Due to this, they blew up all the giant ratkin warrens with explosives, which I have not yet managed to understand. Following this, the surviving ratkin acknowledged humanity’s power and launched devastating attacks, ruining both sides and making Idroa more habitable for the rest of us.”
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Hokul scoffed. “Well, it barely ruined the humans because look at them now.”
“No,” the prophet said with a ramrod finger pointing at the dwarf. “That is the second theory I have formulated for human domination. Let me ask you, how many of your race were there before the Apocalypse started?”
“How the hell would I know?!” Hokul said.
“Estimate,” the prophet preserved, turning to Bobby. “You too.”
“If you mean pygmies, then there were around twenty thousand of us,” Bobby said. “But for trolls as a whole, anywhere from a million to ten, I suppose.”
“Okay, okay,” Hokul said with a frown. “There was probably five or fifty million of us, I dunno.”
“And for the mycelia, there is really only me, although if you count my children, there are half a million of them. Now, the Order collectively had almost two hundred million, the shaerds had around fifty million, and the stingtails had a hundred million. The ratkin brought half a billion of their kind, I believe, so it should have been more than enough to deal with all of us once the tutorials had culled our populations.”
“Half a billion?!” Hokul repeated with widened eyes. A sliver of dread crept into his face. “And you say the humans took most of them out?”
The prophet nodded. “If my sources are accurate, and they appear to be since almost all the humans I took over agreed on it, then humanity was verging on ten billion before the Apocalypse.” He stopped right afterwards, letting the silence sink into the other two. “However, several billion of that were lost to the tutorials, and then further billions were lost to infighting, fierce ratkin attacks, and truthfully, attacks from every major race. Now there are perhaps only a few hundred million in total of their kind surviving. Do you understand my point?”
“The survivors are the cream of the crop,” Bobby said with quivering lips. “Of course they have far more Sovereigns; even if we all had equally distributed potentials, they would still have more individuals at every power level with such a population.”
“Yes. They have always outnumbered all of our races combined. If we joined hands with Fayiure and Zitu to turn on their Sovereigns, we would take some of them out, accepted, but overall we would achieve nothing but our deaths. And that is without mentioning Lucian, Kuraim, or Dahlia, who we wouldn’t even manage to touch, let alone hurt. These Meritocracy Sovereigns are the only ones who will accept us coexisting with them, and so it is they who I choose to support. They also appear to be largely consistent in their morals, and so I do not need to overly fear backstabbing, even though I have prepared for such circumstances all the same. Do you understand now why you should be proving your value to them instead of acting petulant and rebellious?”
Hokul stared at the ground, his venomous glare boring deep into the tough soil. When finally he composed himself, he said, “Let’s go. Zitu and Fayiure have begun moving towards us.”
The prophet didn’t need to even check his Sovereign sensor to know Hokul had spoken truly since Fayiure’s iridescent body was visible in the distant sky alongside a small shadowy circle, which had to be Zitu. “I had thought we would have to chase them, not that they would come to us.”
Despite the situation, none of the trio stressed, instead seeing this as a boon if anything. However, after a moment, a suspicious look skimmed over Bobby’s face. The pygmy troll closed his eyes and went into deep focus, speaking just as the targets were drawing near. “Oh, this entire area has been wired. We must have tripped their warning signals long ago.”
Just then, Fayiure arrived in the sky above, giving a powerful flap backwards to stop her forward momentum, tongues of fire escaping from her wings. Zitu came after her, spinning around her body while staring at the grounded Sovereigns. If Vivienne was here, she would have recognised Zitu as a larger Oscar, only this eyeborn was brimming with boundless arcane power while Oscar had only possessed a paddling pool’s worth.
“You are correct,” Fayiure squawked, looming over them but making no aggressive motions. “We knew about you the second you landed here, and we have been listening in since.”
To be specific, I have been listening in, Zitu corrected her companion, her telepathy audible to everyone there.
“Yes,” Fayiure conceded, losing some of her grandeur due to the exasperation in her voice. “But you said I could do the talking here.”
True. I apologise for the interruption, but I had to ensure they appreciated that it was I, Zitu, who slipped the listening spells under their very walking limbs.
“Okay, okay, but could I speak now?” Fayiure asked.
The prophet cleared his fungal throat, a motion, which although pointless for him, was one he had learnt from the humans to be useful in interrupting conversations and reining the focus back to where it should belong. “So what did you decide after listening to us?”
Well, it was not just from listening to you, Zitu corrected. We had the notion some time ago, although I will admit your discussion did give further strength to the idea.
Fayiure swivelled around until she faced Zitu, glaring deeply and magnificently at her until finally the eyeborn got the cue. Sorry. I will silence myself.
“We have decided we will not kill you but rather join you,” Fayiure said. “In truth, Svobald chased us for a time, and he was one we couldn’t get an edge over. Hearing how quickly he and Miurl fell to that Lucian was troubling, and moreover we have heard that this human is not a very merciful one. But before we join you, I must ask, do you truly think these human friends of yours can stand against Lucian?”
Bobby gulped and looked to the other two. “I have thought the same several times, although I didn’t want to say it. Can we really beat Lucian or Kuraim considering their… strengths?”
“You underestimate Dahlia to not put her on that prestigious list,” the prophet said with some humour, “she can be a one-man army come the opportunity. But yes, I believe some of our humans are promising enough to prove considerable resistance to those autocrats.”