Perched atop my little chair, on one of the highest “watchtowers” carved from the great trees of the Treehouse, I watched as the last few Scourge siege creatures backed away out of our archers and mages’ range. Now, with the cover of dusk and the daily siege dying down, would be the best time to try and slip our team through.

I mapped out our route in my head. The Treehouse sat past the mountainous terrain Stronghold Charlie had to deal with, so the path would generally be level. It got worse as you got closer to Hare’s Pass though, as the hills and valleys carpeted in trees sometimes doubled, even tripled, the straight-line distance between two points. The Snow Doves were somewhere in all of that, and we’d have to fish them out.

It still pissed me off to no end that I wouldn’t be going over the Pass myself, but I had to pick my battles.

With a sigh, I turned back to Pollux and Squad One loading the last of the supplies into our steed.

My Aerial chimed. It was Tana. Peculiar.

We didn’t talk individually much, and I certainly didn’t expect her to contact me first. Unless something had happened…

Something twisted in my gut as I accepted the call.

“Hey, Tana.”

“Hi John. I’ve got… news.”

My brows furrowed. That wasn’t a good tone.

“What happened?”

“Umara’s been arrested.”

“That’s certainly news, alright…”

I turned, facing the direction Nagalev Bastion would be relative the Treehouse.

“How much trouble? And who the hell arrested her?”

“The Marshal arrested her, and how much trouble she’s in remains to be seen. Either way, her mother is here; I can only stand by and wait.”

“I guess that's a silver lining. So why was my girlfriend arrested?”

I leaned against the wall, shrinking into my coat, as Tana explained.

It didn’t take long. Their platoon got wiped out on a patrol because the Colonel in charge of route planning was incompetent… or worse.

That was all I needed to hear. I never believed Umara would do anything without reason, and that certainly was a damned good reason. After all, she and Tana were almost killed by a Corrupted because of it.

However, the implications here were heavy.

What did it mean for someone to plan the massacre of an entire platoon?

They either wanted to get at someone in the platoon, or the platoon itself.

On one hand, this could just be some conspiracy and someone in the platoon held enough political influence to get themselves targeted by other parties who would benefit from their death. Those kinds of conspiracies were everywhere on Earth, but the issue was that nobody in that platoon should have that kind of influence. Those with actual influence were almost always powerful. Even if it was Umara and this had to do with her marriage, she needed to be alive for that. There was no reason to kill her.

So that left the only other reason, which was that the Colonel who planned their deaths was against humanity and held allegiances with the Scourge. Perhaps they were some kind of double agent, or maybe they were a Scourge spy who could disguise as a human really well. No matter what, such existences were incredibly dangerous, and it was unnerving that they could even exist, to say nothing of having so readily infiltrated the military.

I was suddenly incredibly thankful that I had decided to double dip in intelligence and infantry. With access to the war room and the info that came in, I wouldn’t have to worry about being plotted against. Even if I couldn’t determine my own paths, I would at least be able to verify that they wouldn’t get me killed. I didn’t have to put my life in others’ hands.

Still, the thought that I couldn’t even trust another human to be on the side of humanity filled me with a not insignificant amount of paranoia. I had thought that such things wouldn’t be a factor, that all humans would fight for humanity because it was their life on the line, that the Scourge couldn’t disguise itself to look and feel exactly like a human. While that second possibility was a bit further out there, I could no longer disregard the thought. Anything was possible in this world of magical bullshit, and assuming too little would get me killed.

Since I held a position beside the top brass of Stronghold Charlie, I didn’t think I’d have to worry about anything here. But what about Umara and Tana? What was to say this couldn’t happen again? They’d definitely second-guess their orders from now on, but would that be enough to keep them safe?

I pinched the bridge of my nose, wondering what I was going to do, what I even could do. I was pretty sure I couldn’t just transfer over there, and, even then, I probably wouldn’t get the chance to insert myself into the top echelons of the intelligence division. I’d need a higher rank; Polly was my ticket.

I needed time to get what I wanted. Everything always seemed to come down to a matter of time.

“Well, thank you for telling me, Tana.”

“Sure. Do you have any advice?”

“Second guess your summoners, and make allies. You need someone to watch your back in that war room so if something like this happens again, you’ll at least know in advance. Otherwise, unless you can insert yourself in there, you’re at the mercy of your instincts.”

“Hm, thought so.”

“What about you two? If your entire platoon was wiped out, are you going to be assigned to another one?”

I asked while turning around, looking back at the garage where Pollux was waving me down. I started making my way over. It was time to head out.

“Probably, but I’ve yet to hear anything about anything. All relevant parties are in prison. I’ll let you know when I hear something, but until then I’m just sitting on my ass.”

“Right. Well, you have my thanks Tana. Without you there I’m not sure what would have happened to Umara.”

“Without her there, I probably would’ve died too. Her spells are shockingly powerful. She tossed around an Authority 7 like a child. I wouldn’t have been able to get myself out of that shitshow without her.”

“You two make an amazing team.”

I smiled while climbing into the Steed with Pollux and Squad One. Our driver went down his checklist one more time.

“It would be better if you were here, John. I get worried since you don’t have anyone reliable there with you. At least we can watch each other’s backs here. You have nobody there to watch yours.”

“Well, you could say I’ve got a lot of money watching me. I feel like I’m starting to look like a noble with the expensive shit I’ve got all over me. Hell, there’s liquid gold running through my veins that gives me fancy eyeballs.”

“That’s true… I know you’re the last person to do something stupid, though you also seem to have a knack for being reckless. I just don’t want you giving Umara anything to worry about.

“Ironic, since she’s the one who landed herself in prison.”

“Heh, I guess it is.”

She chuckled as I looked back, finding Colonel Jasmine walking over.

“Alright Tana, I’m about to deploy.”

“A mission? What kind?”

“I gotta go find some people so we can kick off an infiltration mission.”

“I see. Stay safe then.”

“Always.”

I paused for a second before adding on a last goodbye.

“Keep her safe for me.”

I ended the call and turned my head to Jasmine’s petite figure, striding as best as she could up to the Steed.

“We all good to go, Colonel?”

“You tell me, Cooper. You’re the one in the field, you’re going to have command alongside Pollux. I’m just here to check in and make sure all is well as you go.”

“Understood. We’ll deploy now then. The winds are calm so I want to move while they remain that way.”

“Very well. Don’t wait on me. I’ll contact you when I get to my station.”

“Got it.”

I nodded to her before dipping into the Steed, looking at the passenger seat where Pollux sat.

“We got the green light, Commander.”

“Copy. Squad One, all ready?”

“Ready.”

“Ready!”

“I’m all good.”

We got words of acknowledgment from everyone in the back.

He nodded, “Alright then. Let’s roll.”

My head popped back up through the turret hole as the driver tapped the gas. The Steed rolled, and the gates flew open.

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I waved back at Jasmine while we went through. Once beyond the gates, the driver turned off the main road and onto a side trail that I had designated beforehand.

The Snow Doves were around a day out, mainly due to the difficulty of the terrain. There was precious little reason to ever venture towards the eastern crossing, so the Treehouse mostly stuck to its immediate area, and there were no roads or trails to follow. Anything that was there was made by a crushing mass of Scourge, and we wanted to avoid those as much as possible.

The path I designated would take us along one of the more frequented trails. There would be more Scourge, but they’d be weaker, only numbers on their side. It was the fastest to our destination. It might’ve seemed counterintuitive, for an infiltration mission to charge through a mountain of Scourge, but it would take us two to three days slinking around the backcountry to get to where the Snow Doves were, and their trail very well could’ve gone cold by then. I decided it would be better to simply blaze through whatever skirmishes came our way.

Given our timing though, we’d be dodging most of the activity. I’d studied the schedule of the Scourge and they liked to do most of their work during the day. Most of their activities during the night were merely navigational, if they did anything at all.

The main danger was the scout troops that like to operate nocturnally. With my shooting and our speed though, they should be a non-factor.

At least that’s what I hoped as we jumped onto the main trail, the driver flying over a hill and dipping down onto a mildly trodden path across the edge of a valley. On the opposite edge was a Scourge encampment. We’d already made contact and it hadn’t even been an hour.

But we just blew right by them as I sent information on what I saw back to Jasmine. It wasn’t my primary objective, but collecting information was still important.

There would be plenty of free time though. I decided to find a seat and lounge back, getting ahead on some sleep while I had the chance.

……

…

“... How disconcerting.”

“I’m not sure if we should be thankful that he’s weak, or disappointed because he has nothing more to give us due to that.”

“He’s a summoner. I wouldn’t expect anything more.”

“Well… I can’t say I still hold those sentiments. If this is the first of many though, it’s a good thing we were to get definite confirmation. ”

Talexia rubbed her chin, looking down at the bloodied and mangled corpse of the former Colonel Derrick.

With some lie detection spells, it was easy to realize that he was lying about knowing the Scourge encampment was there. After that, they demanded answers to find out why.

When he started taunting them about Anarchy, the Corrupted, the Pillars of Creation, and her daughter specifically, Talexia wasn’t really in the mood to keep pushing for answers. He had already given all he could.

Slamming his body into the wall a few times, then letting Graham have free reign, was sufficient compensation.

Like Umara, her views on summoners had changed with her experiences with John. Unfortunately, all others continued to be disappointments that failed to live up to a fraction of him, such as this one.

She didn’t mind too much though. Now, she at least knew that this was a problem they had to watch out for.

Scourge sympathizers, traitors to humanity, were incredibly rare. However, in recent years, they had been cropping up more and more often. It had started as mere rumors that even Talexia hadn’t bothered to pay much mind to. There would always be odd ducks that did stupid things just to do them. It hardly meant anything, merely providing an interesting topic for noble children to rabble on about for a time.

Now though, it had become a very real issue that cost them an entire platoon. Her daughter was frighteningly close to becoming a part of that massacre as well. Even beyond losing her own child, Umara was shaping out to be even greater than she was. Her performance was shocking to all who saw it, and it was progressing by the week. To lose such a prodigy would be an immense loss to the entire kingdom, especially since most of its new talent had been wiped out by Anarchy already.

Perhaps that was why her platoon was targeted. Perhaps she was the target. That would explain why the Corrupted had chased them all the way to the gates. Such persistence couldn’t be explained otherwise.

So the Scourge was out to get her daughter, and it had puppets within their military. It was foolish to think there was only one, and Talexia was already assuming that there were dozens of others throughout all levels of the Kingdom's magical corps.

Question was, where did they go from here?

Panic and widespread investigations would reduce combat effectiveness across the board and raise dissent. They couldn’t have that while the Scourge was bearing down even harder than it had been, not to mention that fears of Anarchy had only just been barely stifled. Thankfully, that monster hadn’t appeared again, but its looming threat still cast a shadow across the entire upper echelon.

Fear, doubt, anxiety, paranoia. These emotions would cripple them if they weren’t careful.

Talexia commended her daughter for quickly connecting the dots. However, the way she reacted and handled the situation was probably the worst possible way to do so. Now all of Nagalev Bastion was raising questions, putting a halt to nearly all of their operations as the infantry hawked to ensure they wouldn’t also be sent into a deathtrap on a routine patrol.

Marshal Graham waved in some guards.

“I’m going to send this corpse to be studied. I want to make sure there isn’t anything else to worry about, like some partial-corruption. Maybe we’re lucky and this guy was just an idiot.”

“I wouldn’t count on that.”

Talexia responded as the corpse was taken away. She left with Graham afterward, talking to him a bit more before separating and heading to another part of the small prison.

In another cell was her daughter. She lay on a shoddy bed of packed hay, still bloodied and dirty from her last mission. She had recovered some since she passed out, but from her weak Aura it was clear that she wasn’t yet fully functional.

She was conscious though, as she weakly turned her head to glance in her mother’s direction.

“Mom…”

“You were right.”

“...”

Umara was silent, her head readjusting back to its original position. Even the slightest movements sent waves of pain through her skull, not to mention the disorientation that mana depletion caused. She was barely coherent.

Talexia was surprised though. It usually wasn’t possible for a warlock to push themselves so far. From the looks of it, Umara had almost killed herself from that kind of exertion. A normal warlock would either pass out or become severely delusional before they could stress themselves that much.

It was clear that she was pushing some extremely high levels of magic and Aura, allowing her to punch well above her class. Some of the knights she had injured in her rage were well into Authority 7, and armored. So not only had she punched through their enchanted metal armor, but she had injured people that were already extremely difficult to injure at all. Her explosive power was off the charts, and she had also been almost completely exhausted at that time, and without a Foci.

She was hiding a lot, and Talexia wanted to know about it. Unfortunately, Umara wouldn’t easily spill her secrets, not even to her, and currently, she couldn’t, even if she wanted to.

For now, Talexia could only nurse her.

Unlocking the cell, Talexia entered and picked her daughter up, using some magic to lighten her body and keep her head from shaking too much. Then she cast a silence spell, eliminating any noise that might irritate her before heading out of the prison and back to her room.

Once there, she used some water magic to wash her face and what she could of her body, stripping most of her clothes and laying her in a clean bed. The last thing she did was pop a recovery pill into her mouth, one that dissolved into her bloodstream before it could even get down her throat.

Umara visibly relaxed from the painkillers coursing through her body. Her coherence returned as her mind recovered a bit. It had been about five hours since the incident, which wasn’t nearly enough to become operational given Umara’s condition, but it was enough to talk a bit.

Talexia sighed, stroking some gray hair out of her daughter’s face.

“The base is panicking because of the scene you made. Nothing makes me happier than the fact you survived, but you’re going to quickly get to the point where you have to worry about more than just yourself. So I ask, do you understand the kind of situation this has put us in?”

“... Do you?”

Umara responded, her deep purple eyes staring straight into Talexia’s soul.

Umara recalled some of the deeper secrets she knew. Perhaps the most shocking secret was information regarding the Pillars of Creation and the state of those who had survived the collapse of that empire. She knew that the Scourge had many more cards to play. This issue with Colonel Derrick wasn’t all that surprising to her. It was foolish to think that the Scourge couldn’t do something as simple as corrupt or convince idiots to act as spies for them, especially those who were weak willed and would easily succumb to temptation.

However, whereas Talexia believed that handling people like Colonel Derrick in an overt manner was bad, Umara believed the opposite. She was beginning to glimpse some deep issues that demanded extreme solutions, the risk of falling to them rapidly rising with every day and week that their resolution was drawn out.

Talexia believed that, with the Scourge bearing down on them harder than ever before, especially given the threat of Anarchy, they needed to reduce dissent and panic. On the other hand, Umara saw no better time to solve these problems than now, before the real forces of the Scourge came from the ruins of the Pillars. By then, these mere issues would become infections that spread and brought down the last bastion of humanity from within.

Umara acknowledged that her thought process was influenced by Anarchy, but even logically she couldn’t imagine a better time to solidify the unity of the military and weed out spies than when they were at their strongest, which was now. However, she knew that little would be done about this in the near future, because nobody seemed to believe this to be a big issue that demanded an appropriate level of scrutiny. She couldn’t fathom the noble class, who comprised the upper echelon of the military, to get off their asses and do something competently.

So when she looked at her mother and recalled her understanding of the big picture, she couldn’t help but think that maybe she wasn’t the naive one. How much did her mother really know? More importantly, how much had she been allowed to know? She was raised within the noble class, just like the rest. There was no reason why she couldn’t be a victim of the same oppression that Umara was fighting to get beyond. Part of that oppression was hiding information. Nobles refused to teach anything about Aura, one of the most potent weapons there was. Why would they say anything about the Pillars and the survivors, or the nature of the war over there, one of the most important pieces of information regarding the survival of the human race there was?

There was no urgency, and that’s precisely what told Umara how much people like her mother knew. Because unlike her, Umara at least had John, someone who was able to come across information like that and get her out of the sphere of noble control, somewhat.

“Mom…”

Umara took a long breath.

“... if you understood just how big of an issue this was… you would upend your corps and… make sure there were no other spies…”

“You need to consider morale. It’s not worth crippling the combat capacity of entire bases just to weed out a few spies.”

“You don’t really believe that… it’s just a few, right?”

Umara’s disappointment in her mother’s response was obvious. Talexia could only stop and think, but it was clear to Umara that because of their positions, what she said wouldn’t be taken seriously.

She loved her mother, but Umara was beginning to realize that she couldn’t necessarily rely on her for certain things. They simply couldn’t see eye to eye, and Umara could see the widening rifts between their philosophies and motivations.

Umara continued before Talexia could respond.

“Mom… I don’t want you to get hurt… because you failed to be as extreme as you needed to be… when you needed to be. I feel like… people are forgetting how horrible our enemy is… Peace has made them forget…”

Umara shuddered, the painkiller doing little to cure her of her mana depletion. She wanted to go to sleep for the next month. She no longer had the mind to try and debate with her mother.

Sure enough, Talexia watched as her daughter passed out in her bed. She couldn’t help a sigh, turning and sitting at the foot, pinching the bridge of her nose.

A few seconds later there was some tapping on the door, Tana cracking it open to look inside.

“... Duchess Talerria.”

“Hello Tana. Come in.”

Talexia wiped away her distress and stood as Tana walked in. Under an arm was a crutch she used to limp inside.

“How is she?”

“Doing well, all things considered. What about you? What did the healer say?”

“My legs are a bit torn up, but it’s nothing I won’t recover from given a couple weeks.”

“I see…”

Talexia looked down and saw purple and red discolorations across Tana’s legs. It looked like they had been beaten and broken. The fact she injured herself so much just from running spoke volumes about how straining it had been to run from that Corrupted, and even more to her tenacity. She could hear Tana’s difficulty breathing. She sounded like she was constantly tired, meaning her lungs, perhaps even her heart were injured to some extent. Like Umara, Tana had pushed herself to the verge.

Talexia smiled a bit. She owed Umara’s life to Tana. They had both taken care of each other. She was glad that her daughter had made such a deep friend, a sister she could trust with her life.

Talexia took one last glance back at her daughter before turning and walking out.

“Please get good rest, Tana. I’m sure Umara will brief you on the details tomorrow. I won’t disturb your recovery.”

“I appreciate your concern, Duchess.”

“Mm.”

She nodded and left, closing the door behind her.

Tana was left in the room. Like Umara though, she was still utterly exhausted. It took most of her energy just to walk back to her room, her entire body stinging with pain from every little movement. Both of them had pushed their limits to a new level, and both of them needed an appropriate amount of recovery time.

So she slumped into bed and passed out, the two girls sleeping soundly. And they did so for the next 30 hours.