The above report outlines the developmental stages of the plague wraiths, designed to target and thoroughly destroy agricultural landscapes. It utilizes a combination of advanced bioengineering and verdant energy thoroughly corrupted with a dense amount of death essence, gotten from ascendant candidate Mordok Cane, also known as the Black Death, to disseminate a potent crop affecting plague over large areas. Despite still being in its preliminary stages, the potential ramifications of the wraiths after initial testing are extremely devastating, to say the least, with plants exhibiting rapid decay and disintegration, which in turn propagates the spread of this engineered plague.
Developmental report on the production of plague wraiths.
General Quenesia Moonlake.
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Artemis Valerion grimaced as he teleported into Sector 7, the sector of military and defense. Compared to the second sector in which he had made his home, this sector was bland and unremarkable, filled mostly with orderly gray tents and smooth, polished square buildings.
The only remarkable architecture was a cluster of skeletal claw-like spires that rose into the sky at the center of the capital. Artemis spread out his spatial sense and activated {Spatial Scan}. A pulse of purplish-pink energy erupted out of him, and a rush of information soon filled his mind, giving him a rough map of the entire sector.
The war camp, his destination, was strategically located at the edge of a vast plateau, overlooking a critical mouth pass that served as the gateway into the capital. The entire sector was meticulously planned and fortified, designed to serve as the last line of defense against any incursions.
High, imposing walls constructed from reinforced stone ringed the capital, shimmering with glowing rune scripts. The sector’s layout was a grid pattern, facilitating quick movements and the passage of large military units and supply caravans.
Artemis snorted derisively, finally admitting that even with the lack of color or grandiose architecture, there was beauty in the orderliness the sector cultivated. But Artemis was a man of color, of glitz and shine, of grandiose architecture and opulence, and he couldn’t imagine living in a sector like this.
While his gaze did drift to the war camp several miles away from him, what caught his attention the most was the cluster of spires at the center of the capital. To get a much clearer view, he activated {Spatial Sight}, which basically eradicated the miles of space between him and his chosen destination.
There were five of them; each was a black skeletal claw that shimmered with golden inscriptions. The tips of the five spires touched, and at their center stood a large, round structure reminiscent of a core.
The whole thing was still under construction, but it was hands-down the most impressive sight in the entire sector. Perhaps he could pop in to explore the building once this meeting was over.
With a simple flex of will and energy, he compressed the space before him and instantly appeared, floating above one of the tallest buildings within the war camp. It was the office of General Lucas Deaton, the man who had summoned him here, and although the reasons for his summoning had been vague, Artemis could already hazard a guess as to why he’d been summoned. He was a mercenary after all, and the army hated mercenaries, viewing them as nothing but degenerates who were a scourge on the kingdom.
Artemis sniffed, arched his shoulders, and reviewed the message they’d sent to him. He was a proud man, and rightly so. It was his pride that had pushed him to achieve all that he had, and he had achieved a lot in the last eight years since he graduated from the 2nd Academy.
He let out another {Spatial Scan}, searching for the exact location of Fort Dominion, which was supposed to be their meeting point. He found the building barely a second later, and with another flex of will, he appeared before the large black mansion, which was covered in shimmering silver runes that screamed defense and immutability.
The moment his feet touched ground, he channeled energy into {Invasive Spatial Scan}, an improved and perfected version of his Tier 25-awarded skill, and another rush of information flowed into his mind.
Unlike the rough sketch he got from {Spatial Scan}, the upgraded skill provided much more detailed information, like the exact number of military weapons hidden within the building and the fact that each block used in the construction of Fort Dominion had been individually inscribed with reinforcement and immutability runes.
From the rush of information, he deduced that the building was so strong that his skills would have little to no effect on damaging it.
A moment after he stopped channeling {Invasive Spatial Scan}, his chip received a packet of information detailing the fort as a Sigma 75-99 battle zone, as well as the rules of war created by the Council of Lords that he needed to know.
It was standard procedure for high-tiered individuals, and Artemis had to accept each rule before he could dismiss the message. After that, he turned his gaze to the building itself and grinned for the first time since he’d appeared within the sector.
Fort Dominion was a beautiful building, perhaps the only speck of color in this land of gray and order. Contrary to his expectations, the mansion was very well appointed and was surrounded by manicured gardens and grandiose statues.
Someone with a good eye for design had planned the place out, and Artemis immediately fell at ease. He would have suspected the sudden ease to be a result of mood-altering formations, but {Invasive Spatial Scan} had found no such thing.
Still, he was in unfamiliar territory, and as vain as some might consider him to be, Artemis was nothing if not cautious, so he kept his guard up and his senses alert as he walked towards the building.
There were a total of fifteen rooms within the mansion, each one designed to host high nobility. His grin widened as he reviewed the information {Invasive Spatial Scan} had provided.
His grin dimmed slightly when he realized he would be surrounded by other champions, many of whom he’d met at one point or another in his glorious career. His expression turned completely sour when he realized they’d been allocated specific rooms, and his was the one next to Geneva’s.
He wondered if the arrangement was intentional, as it was no secret that he and the witch had been an item for about six months or so, but their breakup hadn’t been a secret either; in fact, it had made the front page of every major newspaper within Ragnarok as they had not only broken each other’s hearts, they’d taken a small section of the 2nd sector down with them.
They’d both had to pay hundreds of credits for damages, and Geneva had gone as far as filing a restraining order against him. The point was that the breakup had been a messy affair, and whoever had planned this arrangement was either insane, stupid, or both.
Out of all those chosen for this mission, Geneva was the one he was most wary of, and the fact that they were all on the same side this time did nothing for his worries. He couldn’t trust them, not because he believed they would do anything to jeopardize the mission, but because he’d stepped on the toes of more people than he could count in the last eight years, and he knew many who wouldn’t hesitate to drive a dagger through his heart.
When he reached the entrance, the door opened by itself, and Artemis stepped into a golden hall filled with numerous life-sized portraits, obviously painted by a color awakened with immense skill.
The images, while still, seemed to follow his every movement as he walked towards the largest, the portrait of a Ragnar, with its silver fur bristling in anger and its reptilian eyes slanted in pride. Was there a creature more noble? More proud or even more beautiful?
Artemis reached up to touch the painting that almost seemed alive, but just as his hands neared the bristling fur, his head jerked towards the entrance, and his already sour mood hit rock bottom.
A moment later, a man dressed in an impeccable black suit walked in. The man was as gray as the walls of Sector 7, and the only splash of color he had aside from the black suit was a head of inky black hair and eyebrows.
His pupils were slate gray, ringed with two different shades of gray, and as if that bloodline manifestation wasn’t enough, the number zero was inked on his forehead. The man walked forward, his motions careless yet smooth, chaotic yet measured, his friendly smile sly, a calculated deception that hid the manipulator within.
Artemis had fallen for the man’s deception before, but not anymore. Now he could see through the man’s perfectly constructed lies. It would have been a real shame if he couldn't, as he’d been swindled by this man no less than three times.
“Always on time, Artemis. For one so vain, you sure hold dearly to your principles.” The man said when he got close enough, and Artemis scowled. “They say principles are the backbone of character; I wonder what a lack of principles does to character.”
Zero’s smile widened. “I’ve got so much grit that my character has no need for a backbone.”
“And I have the urge to dump you in a mythic rift somewhere in the Calodan kingdom.” Artemis glared. “I might just do it if you do not get away from me.”
Zero took a few steps back immediately, yet his smile remained fixed in place. “As always, it is good to see you, Artemis; perhaps we can discuss business after this dastardly mission is over.”
Artemis narrowed his eyes and spat. “Over my dead body will I conduct another business with you, you cunning snake of a man.”
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Zero’s expression sobbed as if he were offended, but Artemis knew better.
“It’s a shame.” Zero shook his head. “I know we’ve had hiccups in the past, but this particular business deal is right up your alley. Jewels, diamonds, blings—I'll even let you take the lead."
Artemis pushed down the surge of curiosity and intrigue that welled up within him and took a step backward. Shiny things had always been the bane of his existence. His weakness, and if there was anything Zero was good at, it was exploiting weaknesses.
Rather than reply and dig himself deeper into the conversation, he retreated and moved to another portrait. He was a proud man, but even he knew when he faced an enemy whose skill surpassed his own.
He couldn’t beat Zero in a battle of words, and the longer he spent discussing the topic of oh-so-shiny jewels, the more his curiosity would be piqued, and before he knew it, he would be signing away half his assets for a business he knew nothing about.
He had fallen for the trick three times now; to fall once more would be the height of foolishness.
“As it comes to this?” Zero called after him, obviously amused. “The great Artemis Valerion scurrying away in fear from little old me. I daresay—” He paused, all signs of mirth draining away from him as his gaze turned towards the entrance, just a second before it opened and a woman walked in.
Artemis grimaced. The fact that even with {Invasive Spatial Scan}, he still couldn’t sense the null anchors Zero must have placed around the mansion was worrisome.
The null anchors were condensed points of nothingness that acted sort of like an alarm or trip wire when someone crossed them. Artemis had learned of this hidden skill the last time he’d worked with the man and had been grudgingly impressed.
The skill wasn’t as good as his spatial sense, given that he’d sensed the woman coming from a mile away, but when it came to pinpoint accuracy, it was far better.
The woman who walked in was dressed in flowing black robes that covered her entire body, even her face, leaving only a few strands of bone-white hair exposed. The woman looked like a reaper, except she had no scythe.
Her hooded gaze darted around the room in jerky motions, and it was only after a minute that her gaze landed on him. Artemis stiffened slightly, not from fear but from caution.
In his line of work, he’d learned never to underestimate anyone who had the tenacity and drive to make it past Tier 75, and this woman was no exception, regardless of her obvious mental issues. In fact, those issues only made her more dangerous and unpredictable in his eyes.
This was his first time coming into contact with Matharantha Veneirs, popularly known as the Mirror, but when she turned to Zero, he knew the same couldn’t be said for the sly fool.
There was no sly smile or casual nonchalance in his features anymore; instead, Zero stared back at her with a look of utmost alertness. The woman’s cloak suddenly rippled, like a mirage, and Artemis realized it was a layered image that was similar but quite different from illusions, as it was three-dimensional and much more real.
With the cloak gone, Artemis took in Matharantha’s features. Apart from being deathly pale with pupils as clear as glass, the woman had no other visible manifestation. Her bone-white hair was packed in a ponytail, and with the reapers cloak gone, the woman almost looked like a child, yet Artemis knew she was a few years older than him.
Matharantha didn’t speak to them; instead, she tuned her gaze to the portrait of a dragon on the other side of the room, dismissing them from her mind as if she had nothing to fear from them at all.
Zero tsked, slouching back into his nonchalant stance, and muttered. “Beware of that one; she has a skill that fucks with time and messes with the mind. Nasty head case that one.”
“As much as I appreciate your advice, I do not need it.” Artemis moved to another portrait, one much farther from Zero, and continued. “I have my own intelligence; now, leave me be.”
Zero chuckled. “I’m sure you’ll come around soon enough; after all, we'll be spending the entire week together.”
Artemis cursed inwardly and muttered to himself. “Stay strong, Artemis; he’s lying. You know he’s lying.”
He leaned against the wall, and to take his mind off things, he closed his eyes and began to meditate on his glimpse of the origin plane of time. Knowledge of the origin planes was scarce, to say the least, but one of the things they’d discovered was that the planes didn’t stand alone.
There was usually an overlap of elements or even concepts. Take the origin plane of space, for instance; it overlapped with several other concepts like time, matter, celestial, ethereal, and even infinity.
It was possible for a person to gain a certain degree of mastery over those overlapped concepts, and when that happened, they were called aspects. Glimpsing one aspect usually came after crossing into the mythic tier, but after one too many tribulations and jaunts into his origin plane, Artemis had done the impossible.
He’d gained a slight control over the aspect of time, and although it was incredibly draining to use, Artemis never stopped practicing. His control of the aspect was crude at best, but he considered it a hidden card to be used against someone like The Mirror in case things went south.
He’d only meditated for about fifteen minutes when his spatial sense alerted him to the arrival of another person, and he cursed under his breath when she murmured. “Fucking spatial senses.”
The witch of Selia was a barbarian and a genius runic engineer who was teetering on the edge of insanity, in his own opinion. She walked into the house a minute later, dressed in fur coats and leather.
Geneva Ryntharion was beautiful; even after their messy breakup, he couldn’t help but admit it. Her lustrous golden locks fell down her shoulders perfectly, with nary a wrinkle or crease in sight. She was a gem among gems, a jewel of astounding beauty and quality, and he’d never been able to help himself when it came to those.
Their sexual activities had been the best, of course, but when she complained of him being too hands-on, he had exploded. Her exact words had been, “I’m not some lifeless jewel that you can hoard and keep as an accessory; I’m a person.”
Artemis shook his head as he remembered those heartbreaking words. Him? Hoard? Was it so bad that he’d always wanted her to be beside him or that he’d sometimes liked to caress her body and pretend she was the biggest gem in the world?
Was it so bad that he’d stopped calling her by her name and began calling her Jewel, or that he’d begun replacing her face in their pictures with beautiful gems?
No. But she hadn’t understood, and she had shattered his heart with those cruel words. Of course he’d gotten angry, and the situation had plummeted from there.
Now as she stepped into the mansion, her gaze honed in on him, her rainbow-colored pupils almost blinding in intensity, and Artemis had to force himself not to move or give any visible reaction.
“Artemis, you sick fuck!” She spat, and with amazing speed, she threw a punch at his face. He dodged easily, but a battle against the witch of Selia was never so simple, and as he tried to dodge the second punch, space resisted.
It barely lasted a second, and he turned to see a silver rune blazing behind him.
“Fuck!” He cursed once more as the punch landed and his nose rattled.
With a flex of will, he teleported himself to the opposite end of the hall, and Geneva shouted. “That’s for sliding into the baronesses bed barely a week after we broke up, you sick fuck.”
Artemis didn’t bother asking which baroness she was referring to, as he’d slept with half a dozen in that week alone. Who could blame him? He’d been heartbroken and depressed, and they’d volunteered to cheer him up.
“How else was I supposed to move on, you heartless witch? Remember, you were the one who broke up with me.”
"Ahh, I love drama. Oh, to be young again.” Zero chuckled from across the hall, and Artemis and Geneva shouted in unison. “Shut the fuck up, old man.”
Their gazes locked, remembering the time they'd usually completed each other’s sentences, and although those were fond memories for Artemis, they were the opposite for Geneva, who looked like she was about to puke.
Artemis dismissed the memories when he noticed her expression and sniffed derisively. He turned to a new portrait, and it was only then that he realized that in the ruckus Geneva had caused, he’d lost touch with his surroundings and had missed the entrance of their fifth member.
Ali Hassani. The man was a legend he hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting before, more because Ali preferred to keep to himself, and even now, if he noticed Artemis’s gaze at all, he made no move to acknowledge it.
The man leaned against the wall beside the entrance, head down and arms loose. A sense of nonchalance and slight impatience radiating off him, but Artemis could feel the rigidity in his slouched posture and the readiness curled beneath those loose muscles.
Apart from the witch, Ali was the only one he considered a peer, despite the fact that he was almost fifteen tiers above the man. Ali had also graduated from the second academy, but rather than join the Coliseum to show off his prowess like Artemis had done, Ali had disappeared, and if it wasn’t for the unique application of his skills scattered across the continent, the world would have truly forgotten him.
Fighting him would be a pain; perhaps it would be much easier than battling Zero, but Artemis expected him to put up a hard fight.
His other team members had finally noticed Ali’s presence, and although Zero still feigned nonchalance, the subtle spasm in his hand, which Artemis had only felt due to his mastery over space and {Invasive Spatial Scan}, betrayed his wariness.
Geneva was less subtle and was casually twirling a flowing script of Grand Runes between her fingers with her gaze narrowed in threat. Her expression clearly stated that if anyone made any sudden moves, she was going to release the runes and blast them all to smithereens.
The only person who had no reaction whatsoever was Matharantha, who had been staring at the same portrait for the past twenty minutes. Artemis wasn’t sure just how in possession of her mental faculties she really was, but since she’d been added to the team, he chose to believe the general had done his work and had vetted her thoroughly.
He moved to dismiss her from his mind when something nagged at him, and he focused on his spatial sense. He felt it almost immediately and jerked his head to the far left of the room, where he found a humanoid ripple whose antimemetic effect tried to escape his senses, but he uttered a rule under his breath: {MY DOMAIN. MY RULES: SPACE REVEALS All}
Immediately, the image shattered, and Matharantha paused, hands halfway to the portrait of a life-sized cat, and then she turned to him, her glassy eyes so cold that they sent a shiver down his spine.
She frowned, dissatisfied that someone had found her, yet when she spoke, her voice came from the image of her still staring at the dragon portrait. “Not quite as vain and stupid as you’re rumored to be, are you?”
For some reason, the words traveled to him and him alone, leaving the others clueless as to what was going on, and Artemis instantly raised his assessment of her danger level by several degrees. If she could hide herself so perfectly that neither Ali, Zero, nor Geneva could sense her, then she was truly dangerous.
Not letting his trepidation show, he replied. “I prefer to be underestimated by my enemies.”
The ripple disappeared, and he jerked his head to his side as the ripple pushed through a window like it was water and began to take on color.
Her pale skin rippled and became tan; her bone-white hair turned gold; and her glassy eyes transformed into a familiar swirl of rainbows. In an instant, an image of Geneva stood before him, just as perfect and flawless as he remembered.
He cocked his head in slight amusement and split the mental image he had of Geneva in two. Instantly, the image before him was ripped in two, and Matharantha glared at him as she returned to her usual form.
“Nifty trick, reflecting the image my mind holds.”
She shrugged. “I’m only a mirror, sir Artemis; I reflect what you think.” It seemed like she had more to say, but whatever it was, she was cut off by the arrival of their last member.
He grimaced as Uduak Goradon, the only elemental awakened among them, walked in. The current champion of the Coliseum’s Advanced class was a powerful woman whom he had met a couple times before.
She was kind, strong, and dependable. In fact, she had almost every good characteristic he could think of, but if there was one thing he hated more than the Sunstonians, it was a stickler for rules, and Uduak was chief among them.
She was so rigid and strict, insistently advocating for the observance of rules, that it was a pain even to converse with her. Artemis had never met someone with a moral code so tightly wound before, which was why he’d been surprised to see her among the team considering how badly this mission skirted around the rules of the Council of Lords.
Uduak smiled warmly, too good to really have beef with anyone, and Zero snorted, apparently sharing his distaste for the woman. Geneva, on the other hand, rushed towards her with a wide smile and hugged her, and they began discussing in hushed tones.
Ali showed no reaction that even acknowledged her presence, and Matharantha was—he turned to another corner of the room where he found her slowly munching on an apple, seemingly oblivious to the world around her.
She turned when she noticed his attention; how she kept doing that he was unable to understand, but if she planned to say anything, she was once more cut off by the arrival of their summoner, General Lucas Deaton, who frowned at them, his pupilless eyes darting from one person to the next.
“Good, you’re all here. We have much to discuss.”