Territory Seven hadn’t changed a smidge since Koa had last visited.
The ships of the Reptilian Clan still bobbled gently on the resting pools; the endless shades of dark green encompassed an overgrown marshland flooded with water; and the Amphibian Clan lived alongside their Reptilian siblings without fear.
The only difference he could point out, quite ironically, was himself. He was alone. No family to watch his back, no simple form of training he could fall back on without arduous thought. In fact, the repealed mantra that he couldn’t give up now was the only thing moving him forward.
Koa entered the outskirts of the shipyard with both hands raised up. He had activated his Mark prior, to ensure the others wouldn’t be shocked by his presence, but the innocent gesture was a good idea nonetheless.
As far as godly alliances go, the Animalistic Accord was a peculiar one. Clans typically fell into one of two categories: those that summoned the creature of their subject, like the Mammal Clan, or those who transformed themselves to gain the traits of their animal group. For the latter, the Bird Sect led by the god Avel came to mind. It took Koa a moment to remember that the deity had abandoned the alliance for the Empyrean group. Koa didn’t know the details, it simply wasn’t his business, but the general gist was that Avel argued for freedom of movement for all creatures, while the alliance at large had vouched for avoiding Unbounded-heavy areas.
So the Arachnid Clan probably would have made for the better example.
Regardless, the point was that neither the Amphibian or Reptilian sects fit neatly into either box. In a metaphorical sense, they sat on the fence, unmoving.
Koa spotted men with the heads of crocodiles strolling around, and women whose shoulders acted as the seats for geckos not far behind. Clansmen disappeared and reappeared like perfect sculptures built into the marshy environment, the power of camouflage aiding them. Salamanders wandered across flagstones and jetties, the decks of ships occupied by great tables, seated with many-a-clansmen.
The scent of honeyed meats wafted through the air, smoke from cooking also clogging up the atmosphere.
A few heads turned at Koa’s arrival, but the townsmen didn’t seem to spare him much thought. A group of half-submerged alligators sat in their sections in the swamp water below, eying him up curiously. Koa wondered if he looked like a favourable snack to those cold-blooded eyes. He solemnly hoped not.
A few minutes later, he found himself guided to a ship noticeably more extravagant than the others. It was gilded with gold and other precious resources, the hull appearing reinforced in places by large planks of Supreme Steel.
He sat down before Eliane, whose amber, reptilian eyes hadn’t become any less terrifying in the time that had passed. They were inside, and the place rocked so little, if it wasn’t for the windows at the back, it would have been very easy to forget they were in a water vessel at all.
“Training, hmm?” She put a hand under her chin, eyed him curiously, before strolling up towards the glass panes behind. She held her hands together against her back, staring intensely. “I’ll give you permission to sit and observe my trainees. I’m not sure you’ll find the grand revelation you’re searching for, but perhaps you’ll stumble across something that might be of use.”
Koa had bowed gratefully back then, but here he found himself bored out of his mind. Nobody had said his training was going to be fun, but sitting on the sides of stagnant boats, eating the fat cut off fish the clansmen weren’t willing to eat, wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. Nevertheless, he sat and watched.
The occasional bout between trainees would be held atop an old shipwreck, once a day or so if he was lucky. He scrutinised their every action, watched as the combatants threw everything they had at one another.
What were they doing that he wasn't? How did their subject power differ or relate to his? The endless questions threatened to fry his brains to mush, then an even thinner pulp, but Koa continued unceasingly.
He watched, semi-idly, as one young looking boy jolted forwards atop the submerged ship. A scaled arm ending in claws fell past his elbow, and he raked out across the air. His opponent, a woman of equal age, fell back into the standard evasive routine any self-respecting clansman was familiar with.
A stirring in the waters below caught Koa’s attention. The man hadn’t seemed to have noticed the faint bubbling yet, nor the approaching shadow beneath, for with a vicious grin, he kept the pressure on the girl.
For a few seconds, where Koa almost lost hope that something actually interesting was going to happen, she remained on the backfoot. Parrying, dodging, or tossing herself out of the way of skimming attack after attack, when-
Like a waterborne assassin, a ton of slimy flesh leapt out of the water. An alligator launched upwards, caught the man’s leg between a set of rigid teeth, and tugged down with all its might.
He scrambled, screeching bloody murder with impossible strength tugging him down. They plummeted, sank down deep beneath the surface, where their wails finally became muted. Slithers of gold, which Koa mistook for fractured sunlight, oozed through the water. Only when the nearby spectators helped to pull the boy out of there, did it become obvious he was bleeding. Their trouser leg was torn as he was dragged out, slitted flesh a gruesome sight.
They would heal, Koa was sure, but the image of that bloody injury lingered firmly in Koa’s mind. Or, more specifically, the power that had led to it.
Nothing this extreme would ever be seen in the sparring matches his sect took part in. They were like playdates in comparison to this bloodshed. But that wasn’t the only way it differed from The Wild Clan.
Animal manipulation.
Whereas his clan specialised in manipulating the environment, their skills were rooted in animal control. That didn’t mean they couldn’t crossover though, did it? Goosebumps sent his arms aquiver, but Koa didn’t let himself get too excited. If animal control was easy for his sect, they would abuse that power all the time. First, he had to investigate.
He dropped down to a stretch of jetties lining across the shipyard, walking slowly towards a group of lily pads. This one pond was remote, separated from the others, and swarming with more tadpoles than he cared to count. Sure enough, a family of frogs leaped about the place. If this pond was a miniature world, and the tadpoles the inhabitants, then the frogs were gods in their own right. Each jump had catastrophic effects, ripping water the equivalent of shifting entire biomes.
Koa flared his Mark, and focused his power on one of the slimy amphibians. Be still, he commanded. With the frogs hopping so frantically, this would be the most obvious sign they were obeying him.
He saw one hesitate, let his hopes grow, before it continued on its merry way. Koa threw his arms up in the air, and against his better inclinations, tried again.
“Stop.” Koa spoke aloud, feeling rather stupid. He just hoped no one was nearby. He could only imagine what a teenager screaming at a bunch of frogs would look like to an outsider’s perspective. Even Koa himself was sure he was going mad.
This time, he thought he managed to freeze the amphibian for all of one second. It was too brief a time to tell. He tried again several more times, only to produce yet more mixed, and unreliable results.
He must have been doing something, at the very least. Else his Mark wouldn’t have exhausted so much energy. But what exactly, Koa was left scratching his head.
On the verge of calling it quits, and trying out some other endeavour, Koa focused on the hundreds of black dots he’d been ignoring up until this point. If frogs wouldn’t obey his will, perhaps their younger counterparts would.
This was a tad more tricky. Not because of any greater resistance from them — in this case, Koa barely felt any at all — but because the movement of the tadpoles was hard to gauge as it was. There were so many of them, all identical, all intermingling. It wasn’t simply a matter of getting them to obey him; he had to trigger them into a movement broad enough to be detectable.
So Koa focused. He imagined one of them circling around the pond, like it was a racetrack. With another tug on his Mark. he set his sights on bringing about just that.
It took him a couple tries. The first time, the movement was so vaguely according to his mental map that he was unsure if they were truly following the route. Each successive attempt proved the animals moving a tad faster. Finally, on his fifth attempt, sweat beading down his brow, it was done.
One of the tadpoles circled the others like its life depended on it. A surge of satisfaction elicited a gleeful cheer from Koa. A cheer that was cut short when one fatal truth struck him.
Controlling tiny animals, the literal size of peas, wasn’t going to affect a thing when it came to battling Ash. What were they going to do? Flap around until Ash got bored and left?
Joy turned to stark anger, and face scrunching, Koa forgot himself for a second. A nearby branch plunged into the water, lengthened by the power of his uncontrolled Mark. Koa cursed at his lack of self control, watching as frogs and their larval form alike fled.
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It was an accident. An immature lashing out that would have received a firm disciplining if he was still training under The Wild Sect. But it was also precisely what Koa needed to get thinking.
Right then, technically, he had compelled the pond’s inhabitants to move by affecting their environment. In a far easier way than manipulating them directly. What was the need in stretching his Mark’s capabilities so thinly, when he could control the creatures of the wild this way?
Koa found himself taking a stroll around the camp, deep in his deliberation. If he could find instances where he could put what he’d learnt into practice, it would set him apart from standard practitioners from his clan. Yet, there were issues. The Wild Clan’s abilities were already heavily reliant on their environment, and this trick even more so. At least he could create his own wood, or other organic matter when fighting regularly. Though that only went so far as to plantage, flesh and bone were far too separated to create out of thin air. If he wasn’t anywhere near any wildlife, then it was purely bad luck; rendering the technique absolutely useless.
But if I come prepared, or can affect where we fight . . .
Possibilities upon possibilities. Koa only started paying attention to his environment again when his senses screamed at him.
He could sense Infinity fluctuations. It was too free-flowing to be something innocent, like Supreme Steel, but too alarming to merely be a highly concentrated area. So, through the process of elimination, that left one thing.
Unbounded were nearby.
Koa tensed up, took a breath and settled himself, and began approaching the general direction the essence was emitting from. At the same time, he took in the environs.
One part boring swamp, the rest teetering on regular forest. For some reason, Koa’s heart was thumping in his chest. Which seemed quite impossible, as he could have sworn the organ was currently lodged inside his throat.
In any normal situation, Koa would have nothing to be afraid of. As a matter of indisputable fact, he still didn’t. Unbounded who roamed past the front lines were the equivalent of fleas in the Unbounded hierarchy. They could only naturally form from the comparatively lacklustre Infinity of the rest of Descent. But memories of Koa’s last encounter made him hesitate. Koa imagined his brother pummeling him without so much as breaking a sweat.
He shook his head, slapped his cheeks, and let the logical side of his brain take the reins. That portion of him, the far more analytical part, saw this as the perfect opportunity for a little experimenting.
In an ability he rarely used, Koa sent Wilderness energy flooding through the ground. It gave him awareness of the surroundings. Less of a map than it was a second-hand knowledge. It scouted the area in what was, in essence, a budget version of Perpetual Sight.
There were two bird nests in the nearby vicinity. One vacant, the other occupied by a sole blackbird. Neither of them seemed viable, so he kept looking. Nothing but trees, brooks, and shrubbery for the mile or so range had had access to.
Apart from, only briefly sensed on the very edges of his perception, a bee’s nest.
Koa smiled, and that was when things started falling apart.
With a thunderous roar of the chest, the Unbounded was upon him. Koa swivelled round, and what he saw hulking before him made him double-take. Like so many Unbounded, it was similar to one certain creature; in this instance, an ape.
Only, it bore no skin. Great hands, comprised wholly of muscle fibres, clutched onto a tree each. They were uprooted out of the nearby dirt, sending great sweeps of the earth brushing over him in a misty tidal wave.
They threatened to blind Koa, but he didn’t mind. It was better than seeing its bare, naked flesh, and two eyes dangling over whatever counted as its face.
From here, Koa could tell it was roughly a Foot-Soldier equivalent.
If he had no reason to be concerned before, he most definitely did now.
What is it with Unbounded? Koa reflected, recalling Violet’s tale of the Tarlord that had attacked her and that Flame Sect Mercenary. Something odd was going on with the divine servants. At most, one would expect to find a Foot-Soldier equivalent out in the wild once a decade or so.
Not on a daily basis.
Probably an exaggeration, but the truth was nearly just as bad. The Unbounded were stirring. For what, Koa hadn’t the foresight, or knowledge to know.
For now, Koa put that horrifying revelation to the back of his mind, and ran. Ran with all the force in the world. For all its endless strength, the skinless ape was proportionally slow. Clumps of stone were tossed at Koa’s back. He manoeuvred out of range, acquired a few bruises along the way, but didn’t stop his pursuit.
If he got there, his target, that was, he could kill two birds with one stone.
He rushed through a network of boroughs, leaping across the treetops as the Unbounded followed on.
“Crush.” It spat, with breath sure to be rancid. Though Koa wasn’t particularly inclined to get close enough to test that. “Crush!”
Bored of leaping across trees, Koa birthed a pathway of oak. The branches around converged, and Koa’s only worry as he dashed along it was whether both his and the Unbounded’s weight would be supported. If not, the only destination for him was a faceful of mud and swamp water.
In due time, he dived down, dashed the rest of the way to his destination, and turned on his feet.
Just in time to be punched right in the abdomen.
Any closer, and the pressure would have crushed his internal organs. Koa sank to one knee reflexively, summoning floating projectiles of oak to stab into the enemy. They did little more than prick at the ape’s uncovered musculature, but it was all the time Koa needed to focus on his real target.
With a click of his finger, a trickle of honey slathered down onto the Unbounded’s shoulder. Rather dumbly, the Unbounded paused, glancing at the flaxen liquid with incredible interest.
Heaving, holding down vomit, Koa prepared his final move against the Unbounded.
He backed off, flared his Mark with an impairing of all the Infinity on him, and watched for his puppet show of destruction to begin.
Bees, buzzing in a chaotic orchestra, gathered around the ape. Attracted to the golden nectar.
“Bug.” The Creature grumbled, lashing a hand into the swarm. It repeated this over and over again, the word becoming pointless chatter to Koa’s ears — a meaningless sound — and he soon channelled out the Unbounded all together.
Instead, he levelled his focus on the bees. If he had managed it with tadpoles, how hard could it be to set these little guys into a flurry?
One by one, they began to toss themselves at the brainless ape. Koa waited for a minute, brows furrowing, as more and more of the insects succumbed to his control. These seemed around the same range of difficulty to manipulate as the tadpoles had been. Nevertheless, sick of this process as he were, Koa pushed on with little more complaint than a focused growl here and there.
He stopped seeing the bees as insects with lives of their own. No, he became a harsh dictator, the striped swarm acting as an army he ruled over with an iron fist.
His power coursed through them, creating the strongest bugs the world had ever seen.
That ghastly image, of a hundred honey bees sacrificing themselves against a skinless fiend, stayed with Koa even as the Unbounded toppled to the floor. It wasn’t defeated. Not yet. Instead of keeling over and dispersing to its Infinity like a helpful little Unbounded, it began to howl with more vigour than ever before. Ferocious swipes of its limbs were narrowly avoided by his superbugs, and as the throng fled out of harm’s way, Koa was given access to a sight even more grim.
Red dots were scattered over the hairless ape. Discoloured blood oozed out of the tiny pricks, amassing at its feet with astonishing volume.
Koa could sense the life of his insect warriors dwindle. It had almost slipped his mind, as the clamour of battle and thumping of blood rushed to his ears, that in carrying out his will, he had sentenced the swarm to its death.
Their sacrificial blows meant their demise. And he’d sentenced them to it. Only the slight, life-prolonging effects that came from his Mark being of the Wilderness god allowed them to persist.
But Koa was no Life clansmen, and he was already fatigued.
They began to drop. Dead bugs plunged into the pool of multitudinous blood, and Koa had no power left to save them. Not all of them, anyway.
He set his sights on mending as much of their damaged, tiny bodies as he could. The brunt of his energy, meanwhile, a dosage that was pushing the capabilities of his Mark, was manifested as a creation only possible with his Bank.
A discarded log hovered between them. One of the very same the Unbounded had thrown; likely with the intention of breaking his neck.
Presently, like a craftsman had laboured hours over its every intricacy, a spiked battering ram floated aloft, resting atop a mixture of Koa’s energy and Infinity. ‘Spiked’ probably would have given you the wrong impression. The wood was carved in such a way that well over a hundred chiselled projections jutted out, resembling a flying porcupine.
Koa’s arm shot forward, and mimicking the motion, the oversized weapon knifed into the Unbounded’s stomach. Cleaving through sinewy flesh, and appearing out the other end. Koa’s flinching eyes shut, but not in time enough to avoid his third grisly vision of the evening. A splatter of multicoloured fluid erupted outwards, and in one last, unintelligible cry, a ton of pure lean, contractile tissue slid down the carved log.
There it remained, arms dangling to either side, before it stopped moving all together.
The few bees that had latched onto life flew off as Koa deactivated his Mark. His lungs demanded air, but with every heavy inhalation, the sensation lingered.
Infinity dissipated off the ape, washing over his skin in Descent’s most ghastly shower. When an Unbounded died, a large percentage of its total Infinity was lost, making absorbing any that did flee into the atmosphere a rather disappointing endeavour. It was simply too heavily concentrated, or dispersed too swiftly, for your standard man to grab ahold of every last drop. Unless of course, you were somebody like Violet. In that case, absorbing the entirety of any slain Unbounded’s Infinity posed no problem at all.
That said, as Koa allowed his starving Bank to devour the traces he could grasp, and despite the misery of that encounter, he felt fulfilled for the first time in a long while.
Purposeful.
But this was only one piece of the jigsaw. A single section needed to complete the puzzle. It would help — most definitely — but if Koa really wanted to pose a threat to Ash, he still had a long way to go. But this, animal control, direct or indirect, was a start. A promising beginning.
With a dreary sigh, and wiping a line of Unbounded blood off his face, Koa got to walking.
It was time to start finding the other pieces.