"What are we waiting for!?" Daniela shouted as we stepped out of the tower.
"Danny, we can't go off half cocked," Samuel said, reaching out to try to take her hand. The brunette yanked her hand out of the way with all the speed her Q6 boosted Mobility allowed.
"Half cocked? How about half cooked! You saw what they did to him, what are they going to do to Dai now that their prisoners have escaped," she said, drawing looks from the rest of the expedition members that had been trying to keep busy while we spoke with Devon. I was sure some of them had overheard with their enhanced Perceptions.
"Just give me a second to think, Daniela," I shouted, poking a finger in her face. Admittedly not by best move as she smacked it away, nearly tearing the phalange off. The moment it took for me to wince and curl my fist back was all the time she needed to activate her
She was off. Repeating the meteoric dash she'd used to catch up to Devon, all that was left in her wake was a heat wave. The Air Attuned in our expedition group looked to me as Daniela fell out of sight. I shook my head. Were my teeth not enhanced by my Quake Osseum, I was sure they would have been ground to dust as I restrained my urge to yell after the woman. I could hardly blame her; she'd already been holding back due to the bridge construction.
Samuel gave me a worried look. The question went unspoken, but perfectly clear on his face. Are we going after her?
"Of course we are," I groaned. With a practiced motion, I opened the Communications section of my Implant and reached out to Igor. His response came back a second later.
"I'm standing twenty feet away," the orc complained. "Why the comm call?"
"Get the Fists organized. You lot are going after Danny. I need to talk to Devon some more before we know how to proceed but I need you to keep her alive," I said, continuing the conversation even as I turned around to head back to the observation tower. I motioned Sam to follow me. "I can't very well talk to you with my back turned so this is a bit less rude."
"Fine. Squeeze pretty boy and hurry up. I don't have enough hands to hold this shit pile together." With the crude arm joke and a huff, Igor cut the call and started shouting orders outside the tower.
I kneaded my forehead as I tried to think about how best to approach the situation. We weren't dealing with Tendrils, but humans, and just that complicated the situation. Not for Danny. I shook that thought out of mind and refocused. She wasn't hasty enough to get into a fight she couldn't win, but she was hasty enough to roll a snowball large enough to cause an avalanche if someone wasn't keeping track of her. With the delicacy of a bull storming a china shop, I entered the little partition that had been given to Devon.
"Don't gotta tell me twice. What do you want to know?" the elf said, propped against the back wall.
I was almost surprised by his directness and lack of pain-in-my-ass-ness but a look at his face spoke volumes. He was worried for Daniela, because despite how long he'd known her he knew she was the literal definition of a loose cannon. His foot was twitching as if itching to run out after her, but the bags under his eyes and the bruising I knew was hidden under his clothes hinted as the line the elf was skirting with the Overhealed Status.
"Tell me exactly what happened when you went scouting," I said, waving my hand at the ground and forming a bench with
The man cleared his throat and immediately started a deluge of information. The first parts were the standard fare associated with scouting, a slow sweep of the area in a semi-circular fashion. He talked about encountering a few new species of wild life that he'd not encountered even in the Wilds between territories to the south. Him and Dai quickly identified a patter where boar-like creatures took up the western region of the approach; the rest was free for nature to take its course... until it wasn't.
"These farms were massive," Devon said, sweeping his arms and wincing as he tried to pantomime for emphasis. "I'm talking the size of Wildwood. The edges were irregular since it looked like some creatures were nibbling at the produce but just what we saw would be enough to feed the town five times over for a season."
"Their population must be much larger than the Allied Towns," I mumbled to myself, scratching at my beard in frustration. This was all extremely relevant information, but I could practically hear Daniela shoveling down the sands of the hourglass with each moment. If only she would have given me a little time! If she isn't dead when we find her, I'll put her in the ground myself!
"Ding ding ding. We didn't push further north up the road, the fields were too exposed and we wanted to make sure we had a good picture of everything else," Devon continued, taking my pause to mentally berate my childhood friend as an opening to continue. "This time, however, when we swung south west we didn't encounter boars. Well, I should specify. We didn't encounter just boars."
"Please, Devon. Under other circumstances I would appreciate a dramatic pause," Sam said, urging the elf along.
"Right, sorry. Boar riders. The group of humans that nabbed us had tamed the car-sized boars and used them and their Skills to nab us. They spoke English, but mostly they used what I think was old word sign language between each other. What was concerning about them wasn't the cavalry aspect of the attack, though that was scary considering how fast Dai and I are, it was that the group of six had Tendrils, Afflicted, and Fallen in their midst!"
My brain screeched to a halt at the man's words. It was a bad sign of the greatest magnitude. Tendrils indicated an Aberrant and one with decent support if regular un-turned humans were working with it. What its endgame was-- if it was similarly subverting the leadership of this northern city-- was a primary concern.
"What were their Quotients?" Sam asked as I tried to process what a city totally subverted by the Aberrant would do to our fledgling society.
"All but one were Q4. Their leader, the main reason we got caught, was a Q5 Life Foliage Fae. Hard to get out of the area when the area doesn't want you to. They spotted Dai through his mist cloud and when I tried to free him the afflicted... teleported to me? It was some kind of lightning based Skill and then he was there next to me. The rest involved a lot of shouting and threats before they put these spoked collars on us; if I had to guess they were the same ones their boars were wearing."
"Why didn't you..." I tried to find the right words.
"Kill them?" Devon asked, hoisting an eyebrow high on his head. "I didn't like our odds. Their Q5 clearly knew what she was doing and with just the two of us their Skills could have counteracted us too much. For all the gust and lightning I might have been able to throw at them, you know how ineffective same-element attacks are. No, too many unknowns."
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"So they took you," I said, more of a statement than a question.
"They took us. The LPS marked it along this place called Sam's Club? It was kind of like the Walmart those folks from Stonecrest live out of. Except instead of nice architecture and furniture, they'd turned it into a pig sty. Literally. There had to have been two, maybe three dozen, Q2 and Q3 pigs in the place. They put us in a room somewhere near the door, left the lightning guy to watch us, and vacated the premises post haste."
The headache that had been building had settled in, grown a garden, and was putting up a nice white-picket fence in my head; it wasn't going anywhere and it looked like it wanted to bring its friends to the neighborhood, migraine and aneurysm. A squad of effective fighters was doable. A squad of effective fighters with mounts was doable. A squad of effective fighters with mounts and a whole stable's worth of tamed beasts? Not quite so doable.
Thankfully, Sam was there to pick up the slack as I tried to beam my headache into submission long enough to come up with a plan.
"So, how did you make it out?" the blond asked.
"To be completely honest?" Devon shook his head. "I've no clue. One moment the lightning guy was there and then there was a flash of lightning as if he'd used his ability, when we got a chance to blink, he was out cold on the ground. Needless to say, we blew a hole in the wall of the building and exited poste haste as soon as we took those chokers off. Also needless to say, our captors were not happy and the magic started flying. Dai was a bastard and he had his flurry Skill run interference while I ran. Before I knew it, I'd lost sight of him and he kept repeating 'tell the others' on the comm-plant. That's how I made it back."
I blew out a breath for several long seconds, so long that the Air Attuned person in the room gave me a second look. Of course, I ignored it as everything coalesced in my head. It was a lot. However, there was something that niggled at me from the back of my mind and I chose that to be the seam we followed.
"We need to help Daniela," I said.
"Come again? I thought that was a bygone conclusion pebble skin," Devon said, unable to keep the insult off his tongue long enough to hear my thoughts.
"Oh, we are. You, however, need to stay here and not go anywhere. I'll leave the Tamers to watch over you, but the rest of us are going to kick the metaphorical ant-hill." Without another word to Devon, I jumped out of the room. Fievil sent waves of confusion through our connection. "You'll see if it comes to it."
"See what?" Sam asked, face scrunched in a frown as he followed after me.
"Sorry, was talking to Fievil. We need to catch up with Danny and if we find these boar riders we need to go full Assured Destruction on them," I said.
"Isn't that... dangerous?"
"I think it's the best alternative we have right now. We aren't going to leave Dai stranded, Daniela is on the war-path already and if this group realizes that they can push us over since they caught our scouts we will be fighting a losing battle."
"'Realizes'," Sam mumbled. "You think it will be that bad?"
"I don't know what I think yet, but I know that I would rather pay them with the same coin of aggression until we know for sure what their intentions are. That they captured instead of outright killed them is good, but I don't want to think about the darker alternative." I sent Veronica of the Tamers a quick message to meet me at the edge of our base. Igor and the Fists were already gone from sight. Before I could get distracted by the situation, I also sent a message to PatPat.
"Patrick, please reinforce the landing area however you can. Soil, the tower, the bridge, anything and everything," I said.
"Are we expecting trouble?" the man said through the comm-plant, gazing in my direction from where he was posted up on the wall.
"The trouble is already here, we just didn't know it yet. We expected to find something when we came to this side, we just didn't expect it to find us first."
The dwarf gave a solemn nod and began the process of organizing his Stoneshapers to their best-suited tasks. Despite the tension of the situation, a swell of confidence filled me as I saw the coordination and lack of hesitance in the people working around me. Igor I was familiar with, but the response from the Tamers and the Shapers was a great example of our growing coordination.
Before we arrived at the wall, Jolene and Billy intercepted us. Anthony the fire ant followed close behind, antenna twitching this way and that as if searching for his owner. Unsurprising to me, the merwoman was the one to speak up. "You aren't planning on leaving us behind, are you?"
It was true I'd contemplated it, but I had also immediately discarded it. Billy's ability to obscure the field, Sam's crowd control and healing, my tanking and Jolene's mobility was going to be paramount if we wanted to make a strong showing. "No. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation."
"Good," she said simply, falling into step and hooking the alligator head Amplifier Item I'd made for her to her belt; she'd been wearing the skull as covertly as possible, likely ready to douse me if whatever response I gave didn't match her own plans. I don't think I'll ever understand women.
"Is there something you'd like from me, sir?" Billy asked, his Djinn legs wavering along with the youth's anxiety.
"Second verse, same as the first. You keep Sam safe and let Jolene and I put up the front." And if we have to end up killing someone, I don't want the one to do it to be you. "Make sure that if things go south you escape at my direction. We are disposable, the future of the Allied Towns is not. Understood?"
The boy gulped, but nodded. His untamed hair bobbing along with him. "Good. If you've got your gear then come along. Otherwise we leave as soon as I am done talking to Veronica."
Billy's eyes widened and he took off in a puff of cloud-stuff. Jolene simply fell in step to my left. Veronica, ox nuzzling her hand for some tomatoes, was waiting patiently for our arrival.
"I thought we left the exciting stuff back at the river," she said.
"Not quite," I replied. "We are going to go loud if we can't snatch Dai back quiet; no hesitation. I need your squad to set up a farm on this side and clear out the space around us even further. Stack up the resources and whatever else you can on the other shore, but make sure you always leave someone able to heal on this side."
The leader of the Beast Tamers rolled her eyes at the task, but I could tell she was already contacting her fellow tamers. Her and Sam discussed something briefly, but her oxen seemed determined to steal the tomatoes despite their conversation and the woman was forced to toss them to the side. It was an odd exchange and had the situation been different would have elicited a chuckle from me. As it stood, my grimace softened a bit as I moved outside the wall. Pitching my voice out wide... "Blobby!"
Fievil rolled his mole eyes in my mind, the axe-hammer having a complex relationship with my other companion. The Mana Shard weapon preferred the attention, if the time I'd spent utilizing it was any indication. Thankfully, its feelings towards my slime buddy didn't seem to affect whether it helped keep me alive or not.
I spent a minute probing the area with stomps and vibrosense, but our gelatinous companion was a no show. Frowning at the situation, I retrieved the rest of the squad and headed for the treeline. Billy still looked uncertain, but when I asked him to range a small distance to the west in case we got blindsided by boars he took the directive extremely seriously. He was well within my vibrosense, even his ephemeral footsteps causing a steady stream of vibrations along the ground, so I didn't worry about him being ambushed. The youth also sounded off at least once a minute with a 'clear' as we made steady progress up the road north, old Highway 475.
As we hit our stride and cleared the first mile, Samuel pinged me alone on the comm-plant. "You know I am all in with whatever plan you have."
"But?"
"I need to know what the darker alternative you mentioned was, when talking about them taking prisoners," Sam said. I could practically hear the muscles on his face scrunch as he talked about the situation.
"They might be bags of experience," I said, not bothering to sugar coat my thoughts. The man would eke it out of me at some point, and I would have rather him be aware of the potential dangers. "If they weakened them over time and let someone deal the killing blow then they would be receiving their Q6 Pith and Dreg... whichever they needed to progress."
Vibrosense told me the blond nearly missed a step, but I didn't acknowledge it. Out of our Bunker Buster squad, Samuel had been the one to see the mass scale cruelty of the Tendrils up close during his fight with the Death Crow. His steps thundered just a bit louder in my senses as he reconciled the information.
"Let's make sure we are the ones dealing the killing blows, then."
With those words killing the conversation, I started the monotonous process of pinging Igor on the comm-plant. Almost two miles went by before the orc finally came into range. His words brought me up short.
"We've got contact... sorta," Igor said. I had Sam hit our group with a round of