--- General Aniro ---

General Aniro of the Shan Kingdom was reading rather disheartening reports by his scouts about the difficulties they encountered in the terrain, when his head mage entered his tent in a panic.

"General, we are detecting two magical signatures inbound on our location. They appear to be powerful flying summons. ETA twelve minutes."

He reacted instantly and raised the alarm. Twelve minutes was not a lot of time to prepare.

"The signatures appear angelic in origin, general." The mage added shortly after.

Angelic? Possible, but probably too good to be true. With all the mindfuckery that had been going on, he couldn't trust the divination spells. They gave false positives or showed incorrect information too often.

A few minutes later, the summons came into view.

"REPENT, MORTALS! THE TIME OF JUDGMENT HAS COME!" A horrible droning voice suddenly rang inside his head.

An enormous floating thing was rapidly approaching their position. It made his eyes water just to look at it directly.

The war beasts were growling loudly, and he could tell from experience that they were very nervous.

There weren’t a lot of things that could make these war beasts nervous, so this was definitely a very powerful being. Better to take it out immediately, before it had a chance to engage them in melee.

He gave the order, and his mages started firing long-distance blasts of magic at the alleged angel.

It did not bother to dodge. It absorbed the attacks without any visible effects.

"YOUR PUNY WEAPONS ARE USELESS AGAINST ME!" It shouted in their minds as it drew closer.

Then it suddenly stopped approaching, and instead began circling around his army.

It was only then that General Aniro noticed the other creature. This one had a humanoid shape and very clearly resembled what an angel was supposed to look like. He continued to approach the army while the larger entity circled around it.

"STAND DOWN! I demand to talk to your leader under truce. Fight us and you will die." The angel shouted, while waving a banner of truce.

Could this still be part of the ongoing deceptions in this country? Would it be worth the risk to accept the truce, if it turned out to be a trap?

"YOU EXIST BECAUSE WE ALLOW IT. YOU WILL END IF WE DEMAND IT." The voice of the larger angel rang in his head.

Yes, General Aniro decided, it would be worth the risk. Better to take his chances and hope that this really was an angel coming to talk than to anger whatever the fuck that thing was.

He signalled the approaching angel that he accepted the offer of talking under truce.

"Greetings, general. I am Arariel, general of the third angelic host. I have come to discuss your surrender."

"Greetings to you as well, general. I am General Aniro of the fifth army of the Shan kingdom. You presume much to just ask us to surrender. We are not afraid of you."

Arariel wordlessly pointed to the left, where his officers were trying in vain to stop his soldiers from having a mental breakdown. He then pointed to the right, where his warbeasts were whimpering instead of growling, while their handlers tried and failed to get them to move.

"YOUR FEAR IS AN ENTIRELY APPROPRIATE REACTION!" The giant fractal thing shouted, as if to emphasize the point.

"Fair enough. I admit that there may be some small discipline problems in the rank and file." General Aniro admitted.

"But before we discuss things any further, what is that?" He asked, pointing at the enormous alleged angel. "Looking at it is making my eyes water and my skull vibrate. You are not negotiating in good faith, with an aura like that."

"His name is Rakul, and that is not a supernatural aura. That is just what he looks like. We angels get to choose how much of our mortal self we want to retain, and how much we want to transcend it. I am more humanoid than most, because I find that it helps me empathize and connect with people. My partner Rakul lies far in the other direction. He has left behind many things that made him humanoid as he strives for his own ideal of perfection."

"THIS ISN'T EVEN MY FINAL FORM!" Rakul added in agreement.

"So you really are claiming to be angels? Then why would you threaten us? Angels don't attack the innocent. None of what we do here is any worse than what the Orukians are doing. We are not the forces of evil here, and you know it."

"We are reluctant to spill innocent blood, that much is true. Unfortunately for you, my partner has very different standards for what counts as innocent. He is kind of a hardliner."

"THERE CAN BE ONLY DEATH FOR JAYWALKERS!"

Yeah, that did sound pretty strict to him.

"Then why attack us, and not the Orukians?"

"Whoever said it was either one or the other?"

"NONE SHALL ESCAPE JUSTICE!"

This was getting very concerning. He absolutely did not want to fight this thing. But something didn't add up.

"If you really are that strict, then why are we even talking? Why not attack us immediately?"

"Fortunately for you, I do adhere to more realistic standards of morality than my partner, and he listens to me. There is a way to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. I would be happy to discuss it with you, to help you make the right decision."

Well, when he put it like that. There was no harm in hearing him out, was there?

"I'm listening" He told Arariel, and the angel smiled as he began to lay out his proposal.

Two hours later, General Aniro called for a retreat.

--- Professor Greenwater ---

The bandit lord's army was fast approaching, and Professor Greenwater had no way to hide. And yet he wasn't scared. Fey bullshit would keep him safe, as it always did.

As he watched the approaching army, he idly wondered how he got here.

He had been asking himself this question repeatedly over the past weeks. How did he get here? Both in a physical sense, and a more abstract one.

He had no idea how he got here physically, because five minutes ago he had been in another country entirely. Then Vellandor the Swift had walked with him behind a tree, and suddenly the weather was different and it was morning instead of noon. That sort of thing had been happening to him a lot, recently.

He had no idea how he got here on a more abstract level either. A few weeks ago he had been professor for ethics and the biggest problem in his life had been a lack of funding. Now he was both judge and jury for one of the most terrifyingly dangerous groups of monsters in existence, who used him as a "referee" to "identify Bad Guys".

But overall, life was actually pretty good. Unlike the university, the Wild Hunt took his ideas seriously. And instead of cutting his funding, they just randomly gave him ancient and powerful artifacts for no discernible reason.

As the army of bandits approached, he waited serenely in the middle of the road and wondered what manner of fey bullshit would save him this time around. He had been subjected to so many horrifying life-and-death scenarios over the past week that the fear center in his brain had blown a fuse and his fight-or-flight reflex had thrown its hands in the air in desperation and simply shut down entirely.

The army was getting pretty close and nobody was pointing at him, yet. It looked like they couldn't even notice him. A member of the Wild Hunt had put a glamor on him earlier, but he had been too distracted by other questions to ask what it was about. So maybe he was just invisible right now? He tried looking at his arms to check. Nope, still visible. Or at least he could see himself. He didn't know enough about magic to know if it was normal for invisible people to be able to see themselves.

The army was now close enough for him to make out some details. Some of them were wearing humanoid skulls as ornamentation. If Professor Greenwater had any capacity for being horrified left after the past weeks, he would have retched. But as it was he had already reached peak horror a few days ago, when the Wild Hunt fought a cult of people who worshiped eldritch abominations from beyond the edge of sanity. His capacity for terror suffered an overflow error at that point, and he crossed over into serenity and calm acceptance.

He was now completely out of fucks to give. He was distantly aware that the priesthood of Duna would consider this a major divine gift, as the ability to stoically accept entropy and death without flinching was the core of their philosophy. He did not care about that at all, though. Interestingly, the chosen of Duna frequently did not care much about being chosen by Duna. It came with the territory. Did that mean he was now one of the chosen of Duna? Maybe. He didn't really care enough to verify it.

The army drew close enough that he could now see the white in the leader's eyes, and that was when the Wild Hunt struck. As expected, their arrows hit the people wearing skulls first. Those were low-hanging fruits. Even the slowest members of the Wild Hunt had been able to learn pretty quickly that wearing the remains of your victims generally made you a Bad Guy and therefore a valid target for the hunt.

He did not pay much attention to what happened afterwards. It was always the same.

That wasn't to say that it was indiscriminate slaughter. It was very discriminate slaughter. The fey of the Wild Hunt were meticulous in targeting only what they called "the Bad Guys". It was just that they really enjoyed killing, and so they had selected their targets carefully, well in advance. These bandits were all monsters, and they deserved to die by the standards of just about any code of ethics that was worth taking seriously.

He honestly hadn't expected the Wild Hunt to be so good at detective work, but apparently the ability to find and track prey also translated into a supernatural ability to find and track Bad Guys. He had no idea how supernatural perception could translate to supernatural assessment of moral character, but he just chalked it up to fey bullshit. If he spent time doubting every instance of fey bullshit he encountered nowadays he would never have time for anything else.

It had been much worse in the first couple of days after he joined them. The Wild Hunt were pretty much all sociopaths and had no concept of humanoid morality. They hadn't been able to tell the difference between a murderer, a soldier, and someone acting in self-defense. But when Lord Wodan introduced a challenging new game to hunt Bad Guys, they all fell over themselves to learn ethics, just so that they could be more effective at finding acceptable prey to hunt and kill. It only took them a couple of days to master the basics and stop making obvious mistakes. Motivation was a powerful force.

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He still served as a referee for the Wild Hunt, but unlike the first couple of days where they constantly asked him for his judgment, he was really only needed for edge cases now.

About ten minutes after the assault started, a young man was brought before him. The Wild Hunt disagreed on whether or not he would count as a Bad Guy, and what to do with him. Situations like these always made Professor Greenwater nervous. The Wild Hunt would kill the man on his say so. He was very concerned that he would let the power get to his head one day.

"Who are you?" He asked the clearly terrified man.

"I'm James, sir! Please don't kill me, sir!" He said, sounding deathly afraid. But unfortunately that on its own was not a sign of innocence. Many monsters turned fearful when faced by even greater monsters, such as the Wild Hunt.

"What does he stand accused of?" He addressed the fey who brought the man before him.

"He is the son of the bandit lord." The fey replied.

"But he doesn't carry any weapons, and he did not fight us." Another fey added. The two fey were clearly in disagreement on this.

"Being the son of a Bad Guy does not automatically make him a Bad Guy." He told the two fey. The first fey looked surprised, but he accepted his judgment and nodded.

"Tell me, have you raided with your father?" He asked the terrified man.

"No, sir! I am not a criminal! I have never hurt anyone! I just wanted to leave and be an artist. But my father was keeping slaves, and somebody needed to make sure they got treated right. The others wouldn't treat the slaves too badly so long as they were under my protection."

"If you are telling the truth, then you did the right thing and you have nothing to fear." Professor Greenwater responded.

He was glad to see that it was this straightforward. He was a theorist, not a judge. He hated the idea of getting it wrong and being responsible for the death of an innocent, or for setting a criminal free to continue his predations. But this was a burden he would carry, because it was better for him to be the judge than for the Wild Hunt to go looking for someone else and end up with gods only knew whom.

"Go to the slaves you freed and ask them to verify this man's story. If he is telling the truth, he is not a Bad Guy and you should let him leave with the others. Otherwise, return to me again." He told the two fey.

The two fey nodded, accepting his judgment. Then they walked off with the terrified young man in tow.

He was called upon as a referee two more times during that raid, but luckily both of those cases were equally simple to answer. One man was innocent, and another was not. After what that man had done, Professor Greenwater would not lose any sleep over signing his death warrant.

When they returned to the feywild later that day, they found that something important had happened in their absence. Lord Wodan, one of the leaders of the Wild Hunt, was about to announce a great and special hunt, and the entire Wild Hunt was excitedly gossiping about what it could be.

"We have been challenged by an angel! General Arariel believes that he is the authority on judging good and evil! He doubts our skill! He offers a challenge, and a wager!" Lord Wodan announced to the gathered Wild Hunt.

He then gave a beautiful speech, full of pathos, that moved Professor Greenwater to tears. As an archfey and leader of his own war host, Lord Wodan was an orator without peer. His speech was so eloquent and moving, no mortal writer could even come close to producing perfection like it, and they should not even try, for their doomed attempt to imitate such sublime beauty would be a mockery and an insult to anyone lucky enough to hear the original.

The essence of Lord Wodan's speech was that they had been challenged to a most peculiar hunt: To intervene in a war between two great mortal armies.

Fighting two mortal armies at the same time was nothing to the Wild Hunt. But the challenge was more subtle than winning a simple fight: Most of the soldiers in both armies were Good Guys, and only a very small number of them were true Bad Guys. They were infiltrators and spies, dispersed throughout both armies, and riling up the rest to kill each other.

Would the Wild Hunt succeed at identifying the true Bad Guys, or would they resort to brute force and instinct? Would they act like hunters and track down their prey, or would they act like animals and kill indiscriminately? The angel insulted them by believing the latter!

They were going to prove the angel wrong! They would find the spies and infiltrators, and kill only those who deserved it!

When Lord Wodan's speech ended, Professor Greenwater's heart was on fire and his spirits were lifted. He would follow the Wild Hunt to the ends of the earth, and beyond.

But for now, he would follow them to prove the angel wrong! He now knew in the deepest depths of his heart that the Wild Hunt was the best at hunting Bad Guys, and he would aid them in their noble quest to prove it!

The angel gave the challenge, and he also provided the means for it. Appearing in the material realm was normally quite difficult for the fey. Especially archfey like Lord Wodan and Ravagor the Cunning were unable to manifest for long unless extremely specific circumstances were met, the right rituals were performed, and valuable items were sacrificed.

Somehow, the angel had managed to arrange all of these things.

The Wild Hunt gathered its most skilled warriors for this hunt. It was considered a great honor for a fey to be chosen to join.

They exited the feywild and appeared amidst a group of several dozen shamans, working in unison, overseen by a tiefling woman and an orc in a business suit. The orc was the only person Professor Greenwater had ever met who wasn't awed by being in Lord Wodan's presence.

"Greetings, Lord Wodan, first of the Hunt. I am Davak Goront, here to negotiate on behalf of General Bahrug of Oruk and General Arariel of heaven. I wish you success in finding your missing boots soon."

What? But he was wearing boots. What kind of greeting was that?

The archfey looked shocked for a few seconds, then broke out into laughter. When he stopped laughing, he gave an uncharacteristic smile and said "You still remember that old joke? I thought every mortal who understood that reference died long ago."

"I am happy the joke was so well received. A mutual acquaintance by the name of Rania Mortal told me all about it, and I could not resist the opportunity."

"A most welcome decision. I enjoy a good prank as much as the next fey, so the two of you may join us for dinner some time. It shall make for an amusing diversion."

"I thank you for the invitation, but I must admit I will have to verify just how scared I should be by that ominous phrasing before I commit to it."

That response set Lord Wodan laughing again.

After that, things became more professional as Davak Goront went on to describe the situation in a calm demeanor, as if Lord Wodan somehow wasn't the most terrifying being he had ever met and hadn't just subtly threatened to make entertainment out of him.

One of Oruk's own armies had gone rogue, its leadership subverted by the agents of Cilia Ulein. It was going to clash against an army of the Shan Kingdom in a matter of hours.

The Wild Hunt had been summoned just in the nick of time to prevent this. Naturally. Because summoning powerful forces in the nick of time was way more mana-efficient than summoning them earlier. Summoning spells naturally got cheaper with expected causal distance. As Vellandor explained to him, the universe was designed this way because this encouraged mortals to minimize irrelevant causal interactions and made things easier for the spirits. He didn't really understand that, so he just added that comment to his ever-expanding list of fey bullshit to ignore.

After the briefing, there was not much need for strategizing. The Wild Hunt was ancient and all of its members were both experienced and naturally talented at what they did. Lord Wodan gave a short hand signal, and the entire army smoothly split in two halves as if they had practiced this many times before. The first half was led by Lord Wodan himself and would go to intercept the Orukian army. The second half was led by Ravagor the Cunning to intercept the Shan army.

Professor Greenwater was dragged along by Vellandor the Swift and found himself attached to the second army. Vellandor was his handler of sorts, as Lord Wodan had decreed "you found the mortal, so you are responsible for keeping him watered and fed". He found that quite demeaning at first, but he realized pretty quickly that this was actually far better than the alternative. Finding or hunting your own food in the middle of the feywild did not sound very safe to him.

When the Wild Hunt made their assault, they placed him on a horse so that he could keep up with them. The fey horse looked like it had been bred for the hunt, but more likely it had never been born at all and had instead come into existence fully formed as the swiftest and most terrifying thing possible that would still technically count as a horse.

Meanwhile, Professor Greenwater had never ridden a horse before.

He held on for dear life as the monstrosity he was seated on charged straight ahead, along with the rest of the Wild Hunt. His own screams of terror sounded oddly out of place among the war cries of the fey surrounding him. He was surprised by that. He had thought himself immunized to fear through the events of the previous weeks, but apparently there was still some residual terror left to uncover. He expected that he was going to make a psychiatrist very rich at some point in the future.

The Wild Hunt hit the Shan army like an oddly considerate storm.

The sheer momentum of the charge should have killed hundreds of people in seconds. Instead, every single one of the fey dodged out of the way at the very last moment. They sailed above the heads of the soldiers, or flowed between them like water.

Their blades struck true, but they did not aim to kill. They expertly disarmed the soldiers instead. Swords were flung out of people's hands, spellcasting components were cut in half, and people were thrown to the ground and bound with rope in a single smooth movement. As far as he could see, almost no soldier received even the slightest of cuts.

Almost. While most soldiers were left completely unharmed by the assault, a small handful of them were cut down instantly and without mercy. He could only assume that those must have been the infiltrators the angel had challenged them to root out.

He had no idea how the fey identified the spies. The Wild Hunt were ethically challenged and needed his judgment for many questions about morality, but their senses were supernatural and they had no trouble tracking people so long as they knew what to look for.

His thoughts were suddenly jerked back to the present by the powerful roar of an enormous war beast, barely a few meters in front of him. The terrifying, fire-breathing lizard-dog-thing should never have been able to sneak up on anyone, but he had been too distracted by his own screams of terror and internal coping mechanisms to pay attention to anything else.

His "horse" neighed at the beast with more force than a lion's roar, and the creature hesitated. It looked unsure how to react to that.

"Down, boy!" Vellandor the Swift commanded the beast in a voice that brooked no argument.

Before the handler behind the beast could even open his mouth, the creature was already on the ground, whimpering.

"Good boy!" Vellandor told it, and petted its head. The beast was lolling its tongue.

"I can tell that he is in very good shape. Exercise and nutrition are both excellent. My compliments to you." He told the beast's handler.

The man did not seem to know how to handle that unexpected compliment by an enemy combatant in the middle of an active war zone, so he just nodded in shock and muttered a quiet “thank you.”

Suddenly, the sky darkened and Professor Greenwater was hit by an intense feeling of dread. He looked around, and all the other humanoids seemed to be similarly affected.

The fey were getting excited instead.

"They are summoning devils." Vellandor told him in response to his questioning look.

"That will make the hunt much more straightforward, won't it? Devils are pretty much all Bad Guys, right?" The fey asked him for confirmation.

He nodded. Devils were as close to inherently evil as it was possible for a creature to be. Just like angels were composed of the good aspects of mortals, devils were composed of the evil ones. The exact details were complicated and nuanced, as it was not clear how exactly the universe decided if a particular part of a person's personality was good or evil. However, this discussion was largely academic. The devils' tendency to murder, corrupt and torture people while laughing maniacally tended to put them pretty firmly on the side of "the Bad Guys" for practical purposes.

Professor Greenwater was a little out of the loop about what was going on in Oruk as he only had the short briefing from earlier to draw on, but he suspected that the infiltrators were summoning devils specifically to erode the trust between the two countries further.

An enormous devil, easily twenty meters tall, descended from the sky and the ground trembled at the impact of his landing. He wielded a flaming whip, and even his eyes were burning with green fire. Dozens of lesser devils accompanied him. Each of them three meters tall and easily strong enough to kill scores of soldiers, they seemed insignificant next to the bulk of their leader.

"Kneel, mortals!"

The devil's voice carried powerful magic with it, and Professor Greenwater found himself instinctively wanting to kneel before he was able to get ahold of himself. Many of the soldiers were less used to magically induced terror, and they dropped to the ground, crying in fear.

Meanwhile, the fey just looked at each other skeptically.

"Did he just call us mortals? Do you think that was an insult, or is he just really misinformed?" One of them asked. Another one just shrugged in response.

One of the fey charged the giant devil, but he was swatted aside by a single casual swipe of one of the devil’s enormous claws.

"Pathetic!" He spat at them.

Five more fey charged at him, attacking in synchrony. They traded blows and cut the devil deeply, but after only a few seconds, all of them were dead. The devil's wounds were already closing.

"Hear me, and tremble in fear! I am Adramalech! The terror of Golgaron! The dreadlord of the third realm! The annihilator! The final end of all that is good!

"Was that all you insects can do? I challenge you! Send me your strongest warrior! I shall break him, and show you all how doomed you are, so that I can feed on your despair! Nothing can save you now!"

Professor Greenwater could barely keep himself standing from sheer fear, and many of the other humanoids were outright catatonic by now. But despite their losses, the fey had an entirely different reaction.

"He should not have said that. He really shouldn't have made that challenge." Vellandor said, smiling and shaking his head in amusement.

One of the fey was suddenly standing in front of Adramalech.

He did not teleport, nor had he moved too fast to see. Thinking back, Professor Greenwater was quite sure that this fey had been walking around for a while, watching the others fight but not intervening himself. He had simply chosen not to be noticed until now, and so nobody had paid him any mind.

"That is Ravagor the Cunning!" One of the lesser devils shouted in shock.

Ravagor was easy to recognize. He had scars covering his entire body, except for his face, which was entirely unblemished. The scars formed a work of art. It showed the sun and the moon, summer and winter. It told a story of love and of hatred, of victory and of defeat. So many stories, all interwoven in a beautiful portrait made of scars.

Professor Greenwater knew the story behind this: This art was the result of eons of combat, for Ravagor the Cunning allowed all worthy foes to land one single hit on him before he defeated them, to give him a single scar, in just the right place to add to the portrait.

"I need no introduction. You have heard of me already." Ravagor the Cunning told Adramalech.

"I accept your challenge." He added, as he drew a simple sword made of ordinary steel.

Adramalech gulped, and took a single step back.