Back in the past...
“Thrust! Again, again, again! Faster, faster!” Hazé’s Staff spun, cracking against the thrusting Spear, knocking it aside as fast as it stabbed out.
Eyes intense, Verd chased after her, her own motions eerily fluid and precise, stepping in sharp cadence, trying to pierce the defense of the Staff that was dealing with every attack.
Hazé swirled through the Moon Chaser footwork, soft and gentle steps that contrasted greatly with the King’s Road Verd was using.
Most Casters used Moon or Sun Dragon Styles back in the Power of Ten, as it was more suited to spellcasters, and only a fool wouldn’t pick up Monk Levels if they could. Adding another Stat to AC was a no-brainer when you didn’t wear armor, anyways.
These girls had incredible fighting instincts. The Curse had tried to change them during the Ritual, and even if they weren’t made into Hags, that energy had drilled into them, power sufficient to transform all of them into at least 7 Hit Die Monstrous Humanoids, with major Stat boosts. It hadn’t done so... but that didn’t mean the power and the potential weren’t there.
Monstrous Humanoids had Full MAB, so... melee combat instincts were on in full. Hags had major physical and mental Stat boosts over average humans. They also had access to the incredible knowledge basis of the unaging crones, which meant a dark and knowing wisdom and force of will, and the cunning to make use of it.
Both Verd and Amber were stronger than Hazé was, and tougher. Seven-year-old Veis was almost as strong despite her size, easily a match for an elf or hyn her size, and after the Ritual, older than her size warranted.
Hazé and Verd moved back and forth through the freeform portion of their sparring. The girls had inherited a lot of Karma, and under her direction poured it into a very strong foundation of Levels. She was still marginally better than them, but melee combat had never been her primary focus, and this kind of fighting had to be theirs. Naturally, they were improving much quicker than she was.
It didn’t bother her. What did bother her was not having suitable sparring partners for them. Of course, they were all still children... but children didn’t have eyes like theirs, and hadn’t gone through the Ritual of the Silver Queen, making them older than their years inside and out.
Off to the side, Veis and Amber were sparring as well. Veis naturally had the short end of it with her size and reach, but that was why Hazé had hired a hyn knife specialist to teach her... and he’d found himself with an incredibly talented student.
White hair flowing, Veis’ Sword-catchers clashed with Amber’s Rapier, forcing her back again and again to avoid her press, Veis’ scampering steps wildly aggressive, erratic, energetic, and unpredictable. Amber was dancing to a song of her own, Rose-blade out and dancing sinuously, sensuously, at once playful and serpentine dangerous, her blood-red hair a stark contrast to the silken white of her opponent, while her Thorn-blade main gauche was straight and no-nonsense rigidity on defense.
Veis being so short meant she had almost no cross-section, which was incredibly annoying for a fencer. Amber had to use saber forms to enhance her striking chances, which allowed Veis dangerously close and able to cut at her extended arm if she wasn’t really fast with her swings...
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Standing off to the side, Feist watched his young student with a gleam in his eye. He didn’t really have much fondness for teaching a human, but Veis being so short had eliminated a lot of his bias. She’d be lucky to reach five feet tall, and probably not even that.
All of the girls had been very appreciative of some of his other specialties, with absolutely no hesitation in learning the finer points of the somewhat more light-fingered aspects of his trade. Normally a Shadow House master of his skill would never deign to spend time with a bunch of human girls with such weird backgrounds... but the words of a Void Brother and the fact they cooked really well meant he buried his pride and spent a lot of energy burning off all the food.
The three girls also ate like they were wolves, which he also respected a lot!
He saw Amber as a kindred soul, her mannerisms easily showing her familiarity with the sex trade, which translated very, very easily into Night Rose teachings. It was like she was born to handle a Rose and Thorn, dressed the part to a T, and had no problems at all playing the role, showing off her looks and sly knowledge incarnate.
Veis was learning a combination of Crazy Flame knifework and Shadow Stalking assassination techniques, and the mindset that went with it. Her great trust in her sisters meant she’d always have partners if she needed to fight openly, and if she didn’t, she would be a lethal stalker in the darkness.
Verd was going to be the muscle, no doubt about it. She was the strongest of them, handled a spear with great intuition, and supported by the other two, would be dangerous to cross... moreso when she got even older, and would likely be stronger than a man twice her size.
He glanced at her now-emerald locks and green nails, and the matching scarlet hair and nails of Amber. Veis, of course, had nails white as milk.
Green eyes, red eyes, and blue-so-pale-they-were-almost-white eyes, too. They all had paired canine teeth, too... not prominent, but there were indeed two sets of them, which sent strange thoughts through his head when they were devouring meat...
It strongly reminded him of something, but he had been unable to picture what, and truth be told, the mystery of it had kept him here as much as anything else. He kept thinking of black nails, but didn’t know what it meant, like that tune he sometimes found himself humming along to.
Oh ooooo oh... something, something something... eyes too old and wise for their age...
Maybe it was something he had dreamed, although the Mother knew, he hadn’t remembered any dreams for years...
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A Shardray lanced out and drilled through a member of the congregation below. Hazé instantly selected nineteen other targets, spread out within thirty feet of one another, for maximum pattern dispersal throughout the sizable crowd, and the coruscating beam of light fractured and drove in every direction... and then detonated inside every target in a five-foot radius Burst.
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Sure, it was sixteen dice, eight once Chained, and four when Bursting. When Topped for maximum damage, it was still enough to utterly annihilate the majority of the crowd.
Rep counts, years of rep counts, taking +III Valence modifiers down to effectively +I. It was a lot of repetitive spellcasting.
Naturally, the main target was the head Priest of this cell of daemon-worshippers. This was a major unholy day, and they were pretty bold about celebrating it, given that the local baronet was the second-in-command. He and his guards had taken most of the Chained Rays, and then the explosions going off hadn’t helped anyone.
The ones still alive were staggering for the most part, only a few of the people at the fringes miraculously suffering no wounds.
She cleaned them up with a follow-up Chained Shardray.
The Summoning of the Uglathi Daemon had been interrupted, but only so she could take precautions. She calmly cast two spells on delay, and then charged up the Portal with a wave of boosting magic, clearing up the interference, and so allowed the flaccid, salamander-toad daemon, aligned with death by drowning and exposure, to leap through eagerly to the mortal world.
It looked at all the corpses burning vivic around, and then at the woman with a glowing Staff pointing in its direction.
It definitely wanted to vomit something her way, and then the two hard and cold points of light to either side of her joined her primary Casting in driving one normal and two Frozen Shardrays into the thing.
Daemons generally were pretty vulnerable to cold, and this rotting thing was no exception. Force and frost tore through it and its resistance to magic, freezing it solid and then ripping it apart as all the magic tore into the multi-ton Greater Daemon at once.
Many of the bits didn’t make it to the ground, misty vivic flames popping them out of the air like fireworks.
Telekinetic fingers stole through the bodies going vivic, liberating coins and jewelry, and what minor magic was present. It was all Burnable goldweight, and slid into her Masspack.
She had sympathy for the lower-class people here, brainwashed and compelled into service, transformed into willing servants of the Glooms. She could only harden her heart and bring them down, knowing that they’d just go to another evil Patron who could compel them to serve once more. It was making a bad situation only slightly better, as doubtless these people had others who depended on them, who would now be in the same situations their mates, lovers, and kin had inflicted on others.
Letting the Summoning succeed and killing the daemon with overwhelming force also meant that it wouldn’t be coming back to hunt her. Whatever greater daemon that was its master might... if it could find her.
She’d long lost count of how many secret societies, cults, dark churches, heartless mercenary groups, and guilds of assassins and thieves she’d made enemies of over the years. They’d certainly set a big enough bounty on her head in her various guises, and likely many, many traps.
Traps were hard to trigger when the people giving the marching orders operated on a completely different paradigm than those being attacked, of course. She rarely continued an attack for more than one or two nights, and if she went back, it was often months later, and only after the biggest targets doing stupid things.
It was like being a Void Brother. Today, killing off some fools bringing in a Greater Daemon. Tomorrow she’d be messing up the plans of some insane genius who thought he’d invented a way to make mass golems... flesh golems, of course. The day after, she’d be silently offing a mad playwright who’d managed to write down one of the plays that could Summon the King in Yellow...
None of her targets were less than three hundred miles apart.
She sent a swirl of Silver Magic across the air, a spell from Sylune that was actually modelled on the effects of the Void Brothers. It completely wiped any magical residue in the air, making it impossible to use Divinations to find out what had happened here via magical traces. As the white fog spun up and out, she gestured, and was whisked away back down her Lived-Line trail.
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The Water and the Spear was sitting in a stuffed chair enjoying a glass of wine when she walked in. She looked over the room, the three dead bodyguards, and the older man behind his desk, nailed to his chair through the heart via a Spear through his chest.
“Mind the blood!” he quipped with false cheer. She just nodded, gesturing with glimmering fingers whose Light played about the room. They paused on the trophy of a stuffed marlin hanging prominently over his head.
“Really.” Brother Waterspear shook his head, his dark eyes empty over his debonair smile. Without a care, he stepped up on the desk, pulling out his Spear, shrinking it down to just a hand haft and point. He stabbed into the trophy at the eye, jaw, and after a moment of inspection, below the top fin without any worries. There were cracks and clatters, and a hiss of something green leaking out.
He pulled open the hinged mouth, reached in, and liberated several scroll tubes and a clinking purse. He examined all of them, lifting up one hand and shaking his head at the poison dusting his fingers and trying to get in.
The Water and the Spear was somewhat shorter than the Fire and the Sword, but they definitely had a family resemblance, with dark hair and the same kind of dark eyes. The Water and the Spear dressed more flamboyantly than any of the other Brothers. He operated more publicly, a known rake and buccaneer, known as a merciless raider and pirate to those who caught his eye... and a highly reliable carrier of cargo living and otherwise to those who dealt with him.
He stowed the scrolls until he had a few free idle moments to disarm them. There was no magic on them, else he’d have discovered them earlier. The poison dusting them was amusing enough.
“They are dead, I assume. The daemon?”
“Fed to the Land,” she replied calmly. She flicked a finger at the dead ship captain. “Primary smuggling contact?” she asked, mildly curious.
“Primary contact for the cult’s quarters on an island out there in the Gleaming.” He made a vague gesture in the direction of the sea behind him. “They’ve been making bad noises recently, exciting some things down Deep that should stay there, and raising whispers among the pirate clans.” He gestured at a bundle off to the side, of wrapped-up Weapons and other things, and she retrieved it to her hand with a gesture, depositing it into the Masspack behind her.
“Shall we leave?” he asked pleasantly, looking her over. Her veiled face and all-black soft leathers met with his distinct approval. There was no sign she was a Sylunar.
“As you wish,” she replied, turning around to head back out.
She stepped over a pair of crewmen lying face-down in their blood outside in the corridor, drew back the door to let another corpse fall down from behind it, and stepped outside.
The three-master was riding gently at the pier. There were no sounds of alarm, despite the fact that over a dozen sailors were sprawled here and there around the deck and rigging, in various positions of surprise or complete shock at having died.
“The ship?” she asked calmly, as she walked down the gangplank ahead of him, and he enjoyed the view, even if it was a morph.
“Oh, it’ll be confiscated and sold off at auction. Nobody will dare to buy it, being the cult’s ship and all, and well, if they reclaim it, I’ve put two of those Markers of yours in place.”
Amulets of Inescapable Location stuck in hidden places were very useful for tracking inanimate objects, punching right through anti-Divinatory defenses.
“I notice that the crew had Deep Spawn blood.”
“Yes.” The large dark eyes, unique musculature, and jaw line were subtle giveaways to those who knew. “A nice tie to things that should stay down there in the deep.”
Hazé frowned beneath her veil. A raid from the depths of the Gleaming Sea by the aquatic races could be catastrophic. Deep Ones meant Mythos involvement. It was not a good sign.
“It would seem that a bucolic ocean getaway is not in the plans.” North, she considered. There had been fewer missions for her there. She would have to bring the others away as things came to a head...
“No, it’s going to get plenty nasty. The pirate clans are already bracing for it, knowing something is up. It’s going to get worse, and then it’s not going to get better.” His smile was dark and knowing, the smile of a man used to wading hip-deep in blood.
“I shall keep that in mind.”