The night wore on, and Nenn was coming closer to the end of his rope. The camp with the second set of integrated naga had been the last one with living naga in it. There were signs of struggle all over. Blood spilled, cut off limbs strewn about, torn up campsites were found in abundance, but there were no corpses to be found. The integrated naga had tried to defend themselves, that much was clear. The Helkis’ minions were too strong for the level 1 newly integrated naga to overcome. Even the Denver group couldn't even defend themselves against a group of them and they had a lot more experience.
Nenn was just lucky that he was an ideal counter for these minions. He was faster and had the perfect disposal method with [Rot] to prevent further uses of the minions, and the other, less fortunate, former living. The Helkis’ minions were almost a worse case scenario for a low level integrated. Fast with their sudden charge attacks, durable with their death-mana-aspected body, numerous with every kill adding to their numbers, and nearly immortal with the Helkis’ ability to reraise his slain minions. It would be a challenging fight, especially with a level one’s limited resources and lack of skill.
Maybe this is the reason I ended up over here to begin with, Nenn thought. His body, while he was unconscious, could have wandered in any direction, but yet it had chosen to head this way. Was it the allure of death mana in the minions that brought him here. Maybe the eldritch tree had directed him this way. Perhaps there was another force at play that was yet unknown. Or it was just sheer luck. Either way, Nenn couldn’t spend more time pondering about it.
The camp ruins became more gruesome the further Nenn got from the fortress, but unfortunately there was no sign of any other living naga. Even the Helkis’ trialborn guards had taken off, or been culled. It was hard to tell. There was nothing discernible when trying to figure out if a severed limb belonged to a trialborn or a newly integrated naga. Or how it had been separated if it was from an undead minion or from the integrated rebelling against their captors.
Nenn made it to the last camp, having at last circled around the entire valley. The camp had been decimated. It had lucked out earlier as Nenn could have easily started his genocidal campaign there, but that luck had only granted the occupants another hour or two of life, at most. The camp fire had long since burned itself down to embers, the faint red glow barely illuminating the stumps of wood that once served as seats. The tents had been knocked down, as their occupants had probably awoken in a panicked confusion. It was an all too familiar sight now. The Helkis apparently did not believe in half measures, considering he had gone full bore on killing all of his prisoners.
Nenn turned to leave when there was the sound of wood shifting and a strained coughing sound causing Nenn to jump in surprise. After landing, Nenn quickly tore away the tent cover hiding the body of a half-dead naga that he had initially overlooked. The naga had its face down in the dirt. A wooden stake had been driven through the naga’s body, but something struck Nenn as odd about it.
The naga was naked. There was not a stitch of clothing to be found on its person. Other than bruises and rashes associated with rope bindings being recently present around the naga’s wrists and tail, there were no other signs of physical trauma. Nenn took another look at the stake. It was shaped like an oversized tent peg. Then it all clicked into place. The naga had done this to one of their own.
Nenn drew a circle around the impaled naga and entered into [Nature’s Regrowth]. Using [Nature’s Absorption], Nenn pooled life mana around the wounded naga, willing the unattached mana to enter into its body. The plants around the encampment were very frugal with the mana they wanted to donate to Nenn, but thankfully there was an entire forest to draw from. Nenn had to wonder if it was his natural death mana that made the plants hesitate now, or if it was the foulness in the air from the Helkis’ necromancy.
The naga was more injured than it had seemed to be. The life mana within it was circulating very slowly, and the proliferation of death mana was already well underway. If Nenn hadn’t been there to intercede, the impaled naga would have been dead before the sun had a chance to rise over the mountains.
The naga coughed and stirred once more, a positive sign. Enough life mana had accumulated now that Nenn was confident he could remove the stake without the naga immediately bleeding out. Using an [Entangling Roots] cast to attach one of Nenn’s own roots to the stake, he fed the root a small trickle of mana to keep control of it. He began to pull the stake out of the naga’s body in one slow continuous motion. The naga spasmed beneath as the stake began to move, which prompted another usage of [Entangling Roots] to hold the naga still.
With the stake removed from the naga, its wounds began to knit themselves closed in front of Nenn’s low-light-enabled eyes. The skin of the naga emerged smooth and scaleless, forming a circular scar on the naga’s back, on its left side. From Nenn’s mana sense he could tell it was deliberately stabbed there to avoid the naga’s heart and other vital organs.
The naga’s neck gills flared as its chest took its first complete breath in a long time. Nenn released his [Entangling Roots], allowing the naga to move freely, while also returning his own root to where it belonged.
“What- happened?” the naga said between gasps of air. Its head rose from the ground as its powerful neck muscles contracted in the dim, nearly moonless, night. Its scales were dull, as if its face had been sanded down against the ground.
“How am I not dead?” it asked.
“By my mercy you are alive,” Nenn said. “I have removed the stake that held you down and healed your body as best as I can.”
The naga’s eyes widened as it finally found Nenn’s dark form sitting a couple of feet away in front of him.
“Y-You are a night predator? No. That’s not it. Your eyes, they aren’t night predator eyes. There is something more primal about them.”
Nenn had seen his reflection in the water yesterday, and recalled being surprised that his eyes were now very similar to the eldritch tree’s. His eyes were red with yellow streaks radiating from the long vertical black slit of an iris. When Nenn had seen it, he had tried to contain his excitement, but his body betrayed him as it bounced around and began to slowly wiggle his tail back and forth like a housecat might do. When he calmed down from geeking out over his new Lovecraftian eyeballs he continued along his journey propelled by the thought of the existential dread he could cause by staring someone down from the bushes.
“I’m not a night predator. I am a human druid. My name is Nenn.”
“That makes no sense. We killed all of the humans here. How did you survive the Helkis’ minions?”
“I’m from another Obelisk, and what do you mean about surviving the Helkis’ minions?”
“When we took the Obelisk, the Helkis casted a ritual using some humans as a sacrifice. He made it so that his minions would seek out and hunt down any remaining humans. The ritual provided them the ability to sense and track humans independently.”
And then everything clicked in Nenn’s mind.
“You’re a trialborn naga, aren’t you? You’re one of the Helkis’ troops. How did you end up like this?”
The naga got its arms under itself and pushed itself up, rising to its sitting stature. The naga’s body looked just as bad as its face had. All of its scales looked as though they had been sandblasted, but just the ones on its front. The ones of its back still sparkled in the night light.
“That requires a much longer explanation then we have time for tonight. The short version is that the Helkis is a conquering warlord. He has been, for years, claiming territory with his army. One day his vanguard arrived in my village after conquering the closest large city. We were grouped up by family, and then cursed. If we were to defect, or disobey the Helkis, our families back home would instantly be killed. Since that day I was forced to serve in the Helkis’ army.
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And then we took the Obelisk. I became system-enabled, and gained a skill called [Purify Body]. I was able to expel the curse from my body, which set off some kind of alarm, as I was quickly detained, dragged through the dirt, as is done to dissidents, and then impaled to await death.”
“Huh,” was all that Nenn could say at the moment as he began to wonder just how many other naga he had killed today were in the same boat as the naga before him.
“So, uhh, what’s your name?”
“I am Velnoriss of Vishna. Though, I suspect Vishna has long since disappeared from the map.”
“It’s good to meet you Velnoriss. Now, I have an offer for you.”
***
Nenn and Velnoriss made their way back over to the survivor camp. It was much slower than Nenn would have liked, but the still recovering Velnoriss could only move so fast. Nenn was just thankful that the naga seemed to be well adapted for low light environments. It made sense with naga ultimately being amphibian in nature.
When Nenn arrived at what he thought was the correct camp he found everything in complete disarray. There was not a trace of anything living. The fire had been left to burn itself out, and the polished clean skeletons of the trialborn naga had been strewn about into several piles. At first glance it looked like Nenn had killed a lot more naga than he had, but to the eyes of an experienced skeleton-producing enthusiast, they would quickly realize there were not enough bones to account for the number of former occupants.
Nenn entered into [Nature’s Regrowth] and sensed the world around him. There was plenty of remnant death mana in the air from both Nenn and the Helkis’ actions. But as Nenn looked further out he finally found what he had been looking for. Two hundred meters away, and further up the rim of the valley there was a group of brightly burning sources of life mana. Nenn couldn’t sense anything that far away with any sort of clarity, so he couldn’t get a head count, let alone tell if it was actually naga and not a cave of bears.
“This way. I think the remaining survivors have gathered up here,” Nenn said while pointing out the way. Velnoriss followed without a word as the recovering naga silently slithered behind Nenn. From the way the naga acted, it seemed to be fighting against its better judgment. From Nenn’s perspective it seemed like all of the trialborn had an intimate fear of the dark, and the night predators that roamed within it. Whether it was naga, or goblin, or even orc, they all had the same apprehension.
“Halt!” a voice shouted from beyond the treeline. “Don’t come any closer! Identify yourselves!”
“It’s me. Your friendly neighborhood human druid, Nenn. I’ve come with the last remaining survivor I could find,” Nenn said.
“Please proceed, and watch the spikes,” the voice said.
Nenn pushed through the shrubbery that had blocked his view. In a small clearing there were the gathered survivors, all eleven of them. Nenn and Velnoriss took a seat around the circle of survivors. One could almost imagine a campfire roaring in the middle the way everyone was staring at the ground in the middle with thousand yard stares.
“Shouldn’t there be more of you?” Nenn asked.
“There was, but the Helkis’ minions came back for us. We’re lucky to even be alive.” It was the self-elected leader of the integrated naga who had greeted them. “We were hoping that our sacrifice was going to be worth it, but…” The naga trailed off.
“But, I only found one survivor, when I could have protected your group, right?” Nenn said. “It was a risk either way, and we unfortunately lost that bet.”
“Yesss,” the naga hissed. “Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”
The System’s language interpretation seems to be really robust, Nenn thought. Somehow I doubt they have the exact same saying.
“The Helkis is the one to blame,” Nenn said. “He’s the one who is to blame for all of this.”
“Yesss, our hatred grows for the snake with every moment. I didn’t think I could hate the snake anymore that I already did, but with the death of every comrade, I feel my rationality begin to slip.”
“I… Yeah. This is definitely an experience I ever thought I would be having. I was a stereotypical office worker until The Trial started. I never thought I would be fighting a genocidal warlord necromancer and having to deal with these kinds of life or death situations.”
“We understand. Our world has been ravaged by The Trial too. We all remember a time before The Trial. We fought amongst ourselves plenty, and here it is no different. After the first Culling, our world came together for the first time ever. All wars stopped. Food was shared without borders. It would have been nice if it hadn’t come at the cost of 10% of our population. It took four more Culling before I worked up the shells to volunteer myself. We only had a couple of Obelisks left, and all of them were under military control. You had to do one year of service, starting from the night of the Culling, and ending the day before the next one in order to qualify to volunteer.”
“That must have been hard,” Nenn said.
“Eh, you’d think so, but I just repaired broken down tractors for a year, and drove them whenever the shop wasn’t busy. I was a mechanic before The Trial began. It wasn’t slavery, or anything, it was more of a ‘do your part before you fuck off’ kind of thing. Something about imparting your wisdom on the next generation so we don’t lose our knowledge. I didn’t ask a whole lot of questions about it, I wasn’t involved in policy making or the army beforehand. But yeah, here we are. My name is Elkorin by the way, I don’t think we had time to exchange names before.
I don’t know how many years it has been, but I’m starting to think that the trialborn naga have been here for a lot longer than five years.” Elkorin said.
“It’s been about 432 years,” Velnoriss said. “The trialborn naga, as the name suggests, are the descendants of the integrated naga. The naga currently have seven kingdoms. Well, eight if you could the Helkis’ domain as a kingdom now. Each kingdom controls an Obelisk.”
“So, the Helkis was already System enabled? Before all of this?” Nenn asked.
“Unlikely, no. The kingdoms are very protective of their Obelisks and of the trialborn they allow to become System enabled. It is a privilege that has to be earned, usually through service to the kingdom’s armies. The integrated, as they arrive, are conscripted into the army to fight against the Naga Kingdom’s enemies. The natural world of The Trial, while vast, and near limitless in resources, at one point becomes inefficient in producing higher tier integrated talent, so the army provides structure to get the integrated up to snuff, then sends them off to the warfront. There they either succeed and continue to grow, progressing to higher level warfronts, or they die.” Velnoriss said.
“And the trialborn?” Elkorin asked.
“The trialborn serve as support for the integrated, and if they distinguish themselves, they are invited to ascend and become System enabled, upon which, they are shipped off for training, and then sent back to the battlefield the same as any newly integrated would be,” Velnoriss said.
“That seems… inefficient,” Nenn said.
“You would think so. The classic thought is, more System-enabled people equals more power, but that turns out to not be the case. Society needs un-enabled people to function. By constricting the number of System-enabled people, the quality of those who are seems to go up. And the trialborn who earn the privilege, start out several cuts above the newly integrated as they are highly motivated and already up to date.” Velnoriss said.
“Holy Christ on a cracker,” Nenn said. “So the naga really are a force to be reckoned with, and right now we are kicking up a hornet’s nest?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. The hornet’s nest was already kicked as soon as the Helkis found the Obelisk. Word will eventually make its way back to the other naga. It won’t be long before the conquering armies of the un-enabled make their way here for their chance at ascension. The conquering armies are the gathered forces of naga who exist outside of the kingdom’s control. They fight for the scraps of land that the naga kingdoms or adjacent nations do not tightly hold.” Velnoriss said.
“And the kingdoms?” Nenn asked.
“It will take a while before the Kingdoms want to get involved. They are already mostly tapped out of resources trying to fight their own wars already. Once a proper Kingdom is established and the un-enabled armies are done playing king of the hill, the new kingdom will be made to fall in line. Winning a throne is one thing. It is another thing entirely to have sat on one for 432 years while continually growing and improving one’s own power,” Velnoriss said.
“I’ve been here for eight days now, and I’ve already grown so much. Sure, that’ll slow down at some point, I’m sure, but I can’t even imagine what the difference is between me and someone who’s been at the grind for a century or more. Hell, in a year, I can’t imagine where I’ll be,” Nenn said.
“I hope you grow fast for your species sake,” Velnoriss said. “Once the naga know that there is a new Obelisk, they won’t stop searching for more. The seven Kingdoms are adjacent to one another and are seven of the original Obelisks the naga started with. I would assume the leaders of the conquering naga armies would think the same should be true here. There will be quite a land grab battle to try and get a hold of some of the Human Obelisks. And it’ll all start right here,” Velnoriss said as he turned around to look at the fortress in the center of the valley.
The fortress was oddly still under the night sky. There seemed to be fewer torches burning inside of the base, and there was no movement along the walls, from what Nenn could see.
“Any warlord is going to want some System-enabled troops to combat the humans, so they’re going to make a pit stop here, right?” Nenn asked.
“That’s correct. I think the Helkis’ plan is to power himself up as much as possible, then sell access to the Obelisk to the other armies, while he continues to build his own,” Velnoriss said.
“Fuck.” the naga leader said.
“I concur,” Nenn said. “We might be fucked.”