A few days after the bloody battle for the burrow, the group was fully settled in. They’d all been housed, four people to a room for safety, with plenty of space to spare. Their equipment, their meagre food, all of it had been accounted for and stored away. They’d saved the corpse removal for last, so they’d done all this with a backdrop of gore and death.
They’d wanted to get rid of the bodies immediately, but there were literal hills of corpses. Just transporting them out of the burrow would draw scavengers from all throughout the Partition, and they were all too battle-weary to entertain that idea at the time. Eventually, they became nose-blind to the smell, and the sealed off, cooled nature of the burrow prevented the corpses from rotting immediately.
Now, however, circumstances were forcing their hand.
“We’re out of food.”
Nicola, entering the room she shared with the three boys, dropped this fact on them in the morning, just as Mandla and Kaveh were finishing up their nightly [Janna] lesson. The ability to keep running at 100% constantly was supercharging Mandla’s growth, who’d progressed so fast he could be called a decent spearman by now. Ever since the slaughter of the pups, Kaveh had distracted himself, teaching some of the Legends the martial art as well, while still finding time to have two hours-long training sessions daily with the other Ascendants.
Karl had joined in on this practice, also teaching Mandla some skills from his passive [Glima], an explosive Viking martial art focused on taking your opponent down as quickly as possible. It was much more ferocious than the clinical strikes of [Janna], befitting its background.
Dematerialising his weapons, Mandla turned to her.
“What do you mean we’re out?”
“Don’t ask dumb questions, I meant exactly that. We have no food. We’re either gonna have to leave or start roasting some meerkat kebab.”
“Don’t be disgusting, the corpses are four days old. We’re not all carrion eaters, Nicola.”
Kaveh jumped in before it escalated.
“Okay, so we have an issue. How are we gonna solve it?”
Mandla shrugged.
“I say we go raid a town now. I think we’re tough enough to at least escape anything we can’t kill.”
Despite his laid-back attitude, he’d been thinking about this for the past few days. Everyone had seen this moment coming. And they’d learned something that made the issue all the more pressing.
Mentally, he pulled up his status, the blue screen obscuring his vision.
Ascendant Status
Name: Mandla Nkosi
Title: Ascendant (+)
Ascendant Class: Zulu inDuna
Position: 4,920,899
Level: 2nd Rung
Bloodline Avatar: N/A
Quintessence: Ascendant
Potency: A trickle
Symbiosis: N/A
Faction: N/A
Skills (Bloodline):
N/A
Skills (Weapon):
Ixwa
Assegai
Isihlangu
Imbemba
Ultimate (Bloodline):
N/A
Iwisa
Advantages
Common
Unique
Advantages
Common
Ascendant Level: 2
Titles: 1
Ascendant Level Advantages
Ascendant’s Endurance
Ascendant’s Vitality
Ascendant’s Endurance: You are indefatigable. The first Rung on the Ascent to power grants you near-limitless stamina. Be warned, no boon comes without cost.
That ominous warning at the end worried them. They’d been running on zero sleep and no food for the past week, and they didn’t know when the bill would come due. They’d speculated what this “cost” might be. Karl had thought they’d go into a week-long sleep to make up for it. Nicola thought it meant they’d pig out and eat every last speck of food in sight. Kaveh thought it’d be much more disgusting, them voiding out the waste they hadn’t expelled the past week. Mandla kept an open mind.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Whichever it was, it didn’t change their task. They needed food. If not for them, then for the Legends and Classless.
In the back of his mind, he also noted the number on the Position ticker. It had stabilised and now only grew slowly. It seemed not many survived the First Trial. Nicola and Kaveh had figured out that they could use their statuses to calculate a rough survival rate, and it wasn’t looking good. There were just over ten million first Rung Ascendants left, but only around five million made it to the second Rung. Accounting for growth since Mandla last saw the first Rung ticker, fifteen million Ascendants had tried to hit second Rung this week and under a third of them survived.
The wet gurgle as the Ngwane man from his own Trial collapsed flashed through his mind. He shook his head to dispel the image.
Karl had some input as well.
“I’ve been talking to some of the Legends, and they really think we should do something about the bodies. It’s bringing down the whole vibe and eventually the smell will get strong enough to start attracting pests.”
Nicola immediately narrowed her eyes. Mandla echoed the sentiment less expressively.
He’s been talking to them without us.
Karl acted like he wasn’t interested in leading, only getting as powerful as possible, but then he did little things like this that made Mandla suspect that it was just that, an act. The spearman was already hard at work countering Nicola’s influence over the group, adding Karl to the mix would only make the fighting dirtier and split them into true factions.
He needed to consolidate power.
Pulling the map from its position next to the low wooden table they’d saved from the hotbox tent, he unfolded it and spread it out.
“I have an idea. How about we split up, handle things at the same time. I’ll stay here and organise the cleanup. With you three and a few Legends, you should be able to zip across to either Hectorspruit to the west or Marloth Park to the north. Considering what you’d have to get past to go north, Hectorspruit is the only option. We could have the [Sappers] rig up some wheelbarrows or sleds to carry food back.”
He’d have preferred to have Nicola and Karl stay in the burrow and do nothing, but at least this way they’d be preoccupied with each other far away from the wider group while Mandla shored up his support.
Nicola saw through him instantly.
“We all know I’m the better organiser, I should stay here. Your uhh… talents would be wasted just doing spring cleaning when we need big, strong men to save us from starving.”
Mandla gave her a dry look.
Really?
Kaveh, misreading the situation as usual, jumped in.
“Why don’t you both stay behind? Karl and I can handle a simple store run, we’ll take Jacob, Andrew and the other swordsmen. You two queen bees can organise to your heart’s content back here and we can make our next moves with all our immediate problems solved.”
The queen bees in question glanced at each other, then vehemently rejected the idea.
“With him??”
“Fuck no!”
Kaveh crossed his arms.
“Come on, you both know it’d be for the best. These corpses are gonna attract beasts from all around and we can’t have just one Ascendant here protecting the burrow. You’re both mature enough to work together; I’ve literally watched you save each other’s lives. Stop being babies.”
Please, only one of us has saved the other’s life.
Mandla was about to protest when Nicola all of a sudden reversed course.
“Actually, you’re right, Kavvy. We undeniably work well together. We shouldn’t put petty squabbling over the wellbeing of the group.”
Kaveh beamed, probably thinking he’d finally gotten through to her. Mandla narrowed his eyes.
What’s her angle?
Over the past week, he’d become fully cognizant of the threat she posed. She was constantly probing, constantly testing out his hold over the group. Andrew had told him she’d joined in on their meal a couple days back and asked the Infantry Legends what they thought about him.
Luckily, he was popular with the infantry but it seemed the five Cavalry Legends were fully on team Nicola. She was likely betting they could find some horse stables and they’d finally have some teeth because as it stood, Mandla was the only real power in the burrow. The infantry listened to Andrew, and Andrew listened to him.
Still, this was all simmering under the surface. There was plenty of time before they’d be forced into a real confrontation. And until then, the two of them could work together.
“Fine, we’ll do it together. Let’s get going.”
And with that, the Ascendants paired off to implement their plan.
----------------------------------------
“Okay, you have me alone. Now what?”
Nicola had just shuffled her way into position, sitting next to Mandla on their vantage point atop the mound. Kaveh, Karl, and the rest of the food team had gone off towards Hectorspruit towing several hastily-built sleds, sliding them atop the thick savannah brush.
Within the burrow, the rival Ascendants had overseen the construction of a fleet of wheelbarrows to pile the bodies in, and a simple pulley system to bring the bodies out, along with a team of trekkers pulling sleds to dump the bodies as far away from the burrow as possible but close enough to shout for help if needed.
Mandla, and now Nicola, were using their superhuman eyesight to scan for danger on the horizon. Everyone working below, the sled pullers and the [Defenders] and [Heavy Spearmen] escorting them, they all kept starting at the smallest rustles in the grass. The four days of safety within the burrow had done wonders for morale, but they all remembered the hyena attack.
“I just wanted to talk.”
Mandla raised an eyebrow.
“A peace offering?”
She scoffed.
“Hell no. But a truce. We need to do something about Karl.”
Interesting.
“Do we?”
She rolled her eyes.
“Playing coy is only cute when I do it. You’ve heard the Legends talking about him. The Classless practically revere him. I wouldn’t even care about his reputation with them, if he didn’t keep making these ineffective little power plays.”
Karl certainly looked the part of a warrior. Along with his outsized contribution during the battle for the burrow and his visually impactful weapons and fighting style, he was seen as “the badass” of the four Ascendants.
“You think eventually they’ll stop being so ineffective?”
“Eventually they’ll work, Mandla. He’s obviously new to this and doesn’t realise the influence he wields. But he’s learning.”
The two of them had learned during the set-up of the corpse removal system that Karl had bent the truth slightly when he told them about the people complaining about the meerkat carcasses.
The reality was, he’d been loudly complaining himself, drawing people up into a fervor, before promising them he was going to do something about it. And here they were, the next day, doing something about it. Mandla was almost impressed.
Still, since he wasn’t here it had been relatively easy for the two expert manipulators to downplay his role while talking up their own, especially since it was them the others saw watching over them from atop the mound, not Karl.
“Okay, if we’re being frank, as much as it truly pains me to admit, as much as it galls me, utterly disgusts and shames m-”
“Get to the fucking point, I swear you’re the pettiest man I know.”
Mandla chuckled.
“Alright, alright, yeah, I agree with you. We need to contain him. Have you tried your evil feminine wiles yet?”
“Feminine wiles? How old are you dude? But yes, I tried, they didn’t work. Maybe he likes men.”
“Because of course, any man not attracted to you must be gay, right?”
She smirked.
“Exactly. That, or they’re a vile, hateful little tokoloshe like you. He spends an awful lot of time around you, actually, teaching you that [Glima] skill, and you never wear a shirt. Maybe he likes his chocolate short and ripped.”
Mandla rolled his eyes.
“I thought you came up here to discuss a strategy, not tell me about your gay interracial fantasies.”
Nicola actually looked pensive.
“The contrast would be exquisite though. The big, burly Viking and the lithe, innocent native boy. His fluttering breath catching in his throat as the Viking pushes him up against the wall and wraps his thick hand around the boy’s slender, ebony neck, the other hand expl-”
Nicola yelped as Mandla pushed her off the burrow mound. The Legends below laughed as she rolled down its side, coming to a stop in the grass.
She came up laughing as well. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted up at him.
“Did that hit a nerve? Feeling a little flustered?”
Mandla rolled his eyes again and ignored her, once again scanning the horizon, squinting his eyes against the sun. Despite her childishness, she’d given him a lot to think about. The two of them together were a formidable team and judging by Karl’s growing influence within the group, they’d need all the strength they could get. You simply couldn’t politic away the image of a giant snarling Viking saving your life.
Am I even willing to do what it takes?
It had been easy to make grand proclamations of aggression against animals, but now he was seriously thinking about forming a truce with Nicola of all people in order to slap down someone trying to do exactly what they were doing.
He wasn’t so blind that he couldn’t see where that could lead. There were a few well-known crime families in Durban, his home city. Being a port city, these families mostly ran organised smuggling rings, illegally bringing in guns, people and drugs, while also exporting exotic pets, parts from poached animals and drugs. There was practically infinite money in the black market along with infinite ways to hide it, thus many of these families fraternised with the legally wealthy to the point that Mandla, the son of a supreme court justice, knew several “alleged” scions to crime empires.
Some of the things they’d told him… Let’s just say they deeply impressed upon him the fact that if you choose the path of power, you must be willing to do anything to keep it, up to and beyond violence. Because if not, you’ll forever be at a disadvantage to someone who is willing to go that far. And once a rival has decided to go further than you, you’ll never know it until you’re on your knees in an abandoned warehouse with a pistol to your head.
They all still needed each other to survive, but they got exponentially more powerful with each Rung, or at least they had so far. What happened when they were strong enough not to need four Ascendants? What happened when they developed abilities that made someone redundant?
He didn’t think Karl would kill them for control of the group, but did he know that or was it just wishful thinking? The breakdown of the outside world had thrown everything out of whack. Now that no police were coming, no judges were sentencing, no prisons were operating, you could get away with practically anything. Could he trust that things would work the same as they did back before the screens arrived?
The image of the Ngwane man appeared again, unbidden.
He shook his head.
When the food team got back, he’d have to talk to Kaveh about the Trial. He was self-aware enough to realise he still was shaken.
Tiny silhouettes appeared on the horizon as Mandla sank deep into his thoughts. Assuming it was the returning food team, he ignored it until he remembered that they shouldn’t even have reached Hectorspruit by now, let alone be coming back.
Focusing his gaze on the indistinct figures, the image sharpened until he could see that it was a small group of people in ragged clothes, running for dear life.
From a pack of hyenas.