Now that he knew the score, it was Ulric's task to figure out a way to handle the problem of some fortyish soldiers, amongst whom were some half dozen of the same high-level mercenaries that had conducted the murder of an Elven Tribal Chief in his home with his family, dead in the middle of Legranel territory. That wasn't the sort of thing a bunch of weaklings could pull off. The cherry on top was a small cadre of mages feeding their mana to a single Magus. Ulric didn't like the sound of that, not one little bit.

For all that Taipan scoffed at such methods, it did mean that the enemy battle mage might have substantially more firepower than was the norm. The norm was not exactly great news, twice he'd found himself fighting for his life against one of those battlemages. Twice he'd come out the other side and his enemy hadn't, but even so, it wasn't great news. Facing all of that straight up was probably a pretty bad idea.

Worse, Taipan was still healing from getting whacked by that huge beast on the high lands. The leg was healing rapidly thanks to spending most of her time riding the wagons, but running was straight out. She claimed that a slow march was probably fine. So far as fighting was concerned, the exprincess of Iriel could use her mana and most of her abilities but drawing her bow was not a great idea, that thing took an incredible amount of strength to draw and would be sheer agony on a rack of cracked ribs. Absent injury, Ulric would have had no hesitation to sic her on this supposed Composer, without whom the mage detachment was effectively crippled. As it was? No shot.

Sitting around the fire, the reforged man stared into its flames and plotted. Ignored were the goings on of the Elven refugees. Fortunately, he didn't have to endure any more of the Leor girl and her freckled rebel Mage lover flirting all over the camp as they had gone at first light to inflict their fawning on the denizens of the free peoples encampment some five kilometers through the forest towards Kistalfer.

Problems, Glade Chief, he told himself while his fingers snapped idly at his thigh, you got problems, but what you are needing right now is solutions. Sending Taipan to eliminate key targets isn't an option, not without having them tied up and distracted completely so she could get close enough to breath down their necks before striking. In close, Ulric was pretty certain that his Iriel'en Shadow was more than a match for most fighters, even a bit lame. Gods what he wouldn't give for five of the Royal Guards, with that and his own magical capabilities they'd mop the fucking floor with these jackboots.

Not helping, Ulric, he reminded himself. It did no good to wish for what could not be. He was probably almost two thousand kilometers from the Iriel and most of the Orlethrem forces were purging the shores of the Zelus, razing Prespang's fortifications from its banks and locking down the borders. Soon, those forces would turn their attention to enacting Brighteyes' campaign to "demilitarize" the border with Prespang. Demilitarize being, of course, a euphemism for burning every settlement to the ground within a hundred kilometers, destroying the crops and supply caches prepared at Prosper's behest, and eliminating anybody not packing pointy ears as they did. Word was supposed to have been passed that the Bane had been employed and no quarter were the Elves going to offer any they came across. Clearly, judging by the ignorance on that matter that Ulric had found in Bartala and from the Mage-Cat couple, Prosper was doing its best to suppress and spin that information. All of which led back to the situation where he was, effectively, in the position of having to solo an entire garrison before it could slaughter a whole bunch of folk who just wanted to live free, before those troops could then turn their attention on his own Elven wards.

Fuck.

His first instinct was to go scorched earth. Literally, just burn the forest down around the soldiers, trapping them inside a wild fire. It was the kind of large-scale destruction that he hated his people for in the Before, but there were reasons they had turned to such methods, namely being: it fucking worked. Ulric checked a maybe next to that idea and examined his other options.

If he left in the next day or so he could catch the garrison on the relatively open ground between the Kistalfer Forest and the lowlands that dominated the landscape right up to the very walls of the city itself. Without cover, Ulric could deploy some pretty heinous workings, namely maximum range [Stormfire] and even that ridiculously powerful [Vortex Flare]. It took time to get it rolling but he knew his foe was coming and they didn't know he was waiting for them, which made it a solid choice. A bit of an all or nothing thing though, that working was. He'd only get one chance to set it up and then he'd have to make it stick. Ulric couldn't drag that spell around with him, it had to be prepared on site and triggered. The air current he could establish on the move, but only up to a point, then it was too much to keep the damned construct together.

A hit and run style of picking the soldiers off he discounted immediately. Ulric could move quickly, astonishingly so, but he wasn't so sure he could disengage from a whole detachment.

On the other hand, the garrison troops had a nice long walk and they were almost certain to sleep at least once on their march. If he caught them sleeping, he might very well be able to make a surprise attack at night. With [Ceraunoperception] he didn't need daylight to see, while the warriors coming for them very likely did. Beasts hunted by senses other than sight as often as not but men did rely an awful lot on their vision. It was a weakness he could thoroughly exploit. The more he turned it over in his head, the better the idea seemed. For one thing, he might be able to combine a night assault with his magical bombardment plan.

Unaware of the almost savage grin on his face, Ulric ran through the plan. First, wait until night fall to penetrate the security of the troops, maybe have Taipan help him clear the sentries, she could probably manage that alright. Then, dispatch the Composer and his little squad of batteries. If he remained undetected, find out where the densest section of tents was and, fuck, maybe poison their water or cookpots or some shit. Then, he could exfiltrate and, from a half kilometer away, put a [Vortex Flare] down on top of the camp. Whatever was left of them would be seriously questioning their course of action. Ulric didn't need to kill the entire garrison, all he needed was to convince them to fuck off to somewhere else so he could get inside the town and buy a damned boat.

So it was, over the course of an hour or so, that the [Lord of the Ancient Glade] had the vague outlines of a strategy to deal with the two score warriors and their mage cohort. When he shared it with his doting wife she laughed at him. Then, seeing that it was not an attempt at humor, laughed even harder. The other Orlethrem, seeing an opportunity to take the piss out of him, joined in, mostly because they didn't have anything better to do than remember experiences that would break any but the strongest of wills. Ulric couldn't resent them for that. It didn't stop him from threatening to start a garland of pointy ears to hang as a wreath on his doorstep back in the Ancient Glade though.

"I am sorry, husband," Taipan said, being no such thing, "But you truly are worms in the head. You have come far in the ways of stalking, but you are not ready to infiltrate an enemy camp undetected, not and also find the mage cadre no doubt lying at its heart, under the greatest guard."

The doubt did sting a bit, even if it was probably merited.

Defending himself, he reminded her that he'd managed to do pretty well breaking into Port Edunshire. He'd gone pretty much undetected for a good damned bit.

Without venom, his Iriel'en Amazon told him plainly, "If the fortifications and settlements I passed by are any indication, alongside the facility I helped you with, that place counted on its intense isolation for its security more than was reasonable. Even as incompetent as Prespang's forces tend to be, they will be cautious when they take the field. Elven scouts and Iriel'en Hunters have taught them to fear the night, and so have Varda's monsters. Without a wall for protection, you could expect fully a third of those soldiers to be on rotating guard."

Damn. She was right. Ulric had forgotten the implicit threat that Varda posed to any who roamed far from the fortified walls and warriors of settlements. Savage beasts awaited any who were unwary with reminder that caution was as good as gold in the wilderness.

"Okay, well, I am all ears over here. Somebody, please give me a good idea." Ulric implored his seasoned partner.

Seasoned, he would say, because she still appeared as a young lass of her early twenties, despite being well over a century of age. And also, because she was a salty hard ass on her best of days.

Her lips turned up into a smile that only highlighted that sense she sometimes gave off of being some kind of alpha predator skin walker, pretending to be a person.

"Why not simply put one of your Caelum barriers around their camp and fill it with poison, as we did to the [Bloodstarve] broodmother?" She asked pointedly.

Ulric raised a finger to start counting off the reasons why that would never work, only to let it fall limply when he couldn't. Actually, it was a pretty great idea. His spell would be invisible in the dark and the poison would be silent and potent, provided they had enough to suitably dose the no doubt robust bodies of the warriors. Vitality increased the ability of the body to resist envenomation, and trained warriors would have a comparatively greater resistance than most people. Taipan carried around substances that would turn the better part of a healthy yak to liquid shit in a few moments though. She hunted Greater beasts and Greater beasts hunted back. Hard.

"You wouldn't happen to have more of those poison bombs handy, would you?" Ulric asked.

She put her hands on her wide hips and laid that look on him that said "What do you think?". Okay, yeah, that was a little dumb. She was Taipan.

"My bad, I should have known better than to ask by this point." Ulric admitted, and rubbed his hands together, thinking it over.

It wasn't a bad play, not at all. Even if the poison didn't outright kill the encamped soldiers, they'd be in no condition to force march and fight at the end of it. Battles were a thing of centimeters and seconds, every advantage was a good one.

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He ran into a speed bump when he tried to get the Amazon woman to hand him the gas emitters and she promptly refused, wanting to join him.

“Now, who isn’t being realistic?” Ulric challenged, slightly incredulous that he was even having to have this argument.

The frowning bundle of Aes’r huntress had her ears set like a mule’s. She wasn’t taking being left behind lightly.

“How certain are you that you may even locate these soldiers without my guidance, Ulric?” The Elf woman struck, hitting below the belt.

He rarely got cut any slack for getting lost within the plains.

“This isn’t like that at all!” Ulric countered.

Grumbling angrily Ulric pushed back, “An entire detachment is going to make sound, they’ll be hauling around supply wagons, beasts of burden, all that kind of shit. They’ll make enough racket to find them from a league away, along the best terrain. Hell, there’s a good chance they’ll follow the same path the settlers used and I’ll be back tracking the damned road to intercept them.”

Without giving his fanged companion a chance to get a word in he also brought up what he felt to be the most relevant point, “And besides! You’re all crippled up, and will be for a while yet. You’d only slow me down if it came to a running fight or if something changed and I had to cross rough country.”

Arms crossed beneath her impressive bosoms, the Shadow-wife that held his loyalty was none too pleased.

“Between the two of us, I am, by far the better tracker and the more able navigator of the wilds. I can read this terrain better than you ever could, find the fastest route even if I were crawling on mine belly! You will not leave me behind again to conduct more of your sestu’irsk! My leg barely even hurts, for all your nesting and circling.” Taipan retaliated, also loosening her temper, as she’d lapsed into Elvish, with a word Ulric didn’t know.

“Uh huh,” Ulric deadpanned sarcastically, “Sure thing. Magical Elf bones just good as new in less than a week, are they? You hiding a Sano mage in one of those belt pouches then Taipan, maybe got yourself an artifact that cures mashed Elf muscle up your coat sleeves?”

“We go together or not, Ulric Glade Chief!” Taipan spat, refusing to acknowledge his critique of her present condition, “I am your Shadow, and more, your wife and my place is by your side, not sitting here taking my ease while you go to face our enemies alone. Too reckless by half are you when you are left to your own devices. That is my final word on it.”

The both of them exchanged glares, neither willing to budge. After a minute of intense staring, Ulric broke off, getting more furious at the silliness of it. The reforged man scrubbed a hand over a few days growth of beard and cursed in three languages, none of them spoken on this planet. Engineering seminars could get pretty salty when the beer was flowing and he gave vent to his opinions on stubborn women who refused to see common sense if you hung neon lights on it. Eventually, he was ready to admit that he might be wrong, that maybe his far more experienced huntress and general badass of a wife might know what she was talking about. He wasn’t completely convinced, but he had to extend trust that Taipan knew her business and wouldn’t do anything rash. Probably. Aggh! Fuck it!

“Godsdamnit, fine! Have it your way, Taipan. But mark my words, you get a little in over your head yourself sometimes, and this could end up with me having to pack you through the forest if we end up having to make a run for it.” Ulric yielded with heavy begrudgery.

“And, please, enlighten me as to what in the Watcher’s perky tits a ‘sestu’irsk’ might be.” He finished.

Smugness on the Elf woman’s lips faded somewhat when she remembered her lapse. Her lover had an incredible knack for getting under her skin when he wanted to.

“It is the Iriel’en equivalent to that thing you described to me once as ‘tom-foolery’, but coarser. The language is vulgar, moreso than I usually would use, but you are a splinter in the thumb when you wish to be.” Taipan answered.

They traded looks, both sharing mirrored thoughts about the other: You are a pain in the ass, but I’m stuck with you now.

Ulric sighed in defeat before he relented.

"Alright then, I say we do it as soon as possible, tonight even,” Ulric suggested, “ Me and you, we can get in position to catch them when they make camp. Then we'll just give them a little taste of whatever the hell you put in those bombs. While we're at it, I've got some pretty nasty tricks I've worked out recently and I can probably thin their ranks, if needs be." Ulric said, a touch more eagerly than he would have liked admitting not many months earlier.

The beauty part of using that hybrid Infrig spell was that it wasn't flashy, not at all. There would be no fire, no light, no thunder. Just the deep freeze. It was no [Absolute Zero] but it was orders of magnitude less demanding on his mana and he didn't have to be virtually touching anybody to use it. He'd already tested the combat power of the magic and its range on those sonsofabitching goats so there wouldn't be any uncertainty with regards to ensuring he gave the spell enough mana to pretty much guarantee anything dead center of the working was dead. Those on the fringes would probably not perish, but then, the poison should bat cleanup nicely.

Deed soon followed theory and the pair were off with only a light field kit. They moved as fast as Taipan's injuries allowed, which was a fair clip, far greater speed than they'd been able to manage leading the caravan, if not as ludicrous as they'd done while crossing Orlethrem.

Promisingly swift kilometers passed them by, and Ulric kept as close an eye on his mate as he did the surroundings, looking for signs that she might flag. None made themselves readily available. He was doing most of the advance scouting though, with Taipan judging the most advantageous pathing through the foreign forest. Her experience was, he was completely willing to admit, a boon for making excellent time through the wild, untamed coastal woodland.

Despite that she hadn’t had these gently rolling hills and dales as her regular stomping ground, his Shadow read the lay of the forest like a book. Together, they made sure progress and were careful not to invite the attentions of the forest's denizens. Purposefully, they bypassed the budding village of separatists, marked by streamers of smoke and distant sounds of hammers and the labors of raising a settlement. A couple of hours later, and the pair broke free from the stifling confines of the low forest, so much reduced compared to those vast tracts of arboreal majesty that comprised Celestin and Iriel'en territory, to say nothing of the towering colossi of the [Plateau of Ancients]. Grassy dales and soggy wetlands told the tale of being close upon the shores of Vatyn, but at sea level, instead of up in the highlands.

Just after Midsunsfall, the objective of their mission revealed itself. There, just over a hill, he and his sylvan partner spotted the banners flying from pikes, about four kilometers distant. Idiots. Who the hell marks themselves out like that? Ulric wondered, searching his memory of history. Heavily armed men going to ride down a bunch of defenseless peasants with impunity, that's who. These men were coming all this way out of their intended direction to send a message, a message that said dissent would not be permitted from those who they had decided to rule. Welp, not today motherfuckers.

Lying flat on their bellies, warm spring turf soft beneath them, Ulric whispered to his Shadow, "You think they'll stop to entrench and maybe get some palisades set?"

She would be more familiar with the tactics of her kin's generational enemy than he.

A shake of her short midnight locks preceded her answer, low and spiteful towards these her enemies, "They will not. The fools think themselves out to harry those who cannot resist them. They believe their numbers and their arms and armor sufficient protection. We will teach them this night, that Varda punishes mistakes."

Ulric patted her back gently, smiling at his spirited mate.

"Always." He agreed quietly.

There wasn't much to do, now that they'd found their target. Moving out of line of the marching enforcers of Prosper's will, they just stayed out of sight behind a low hill, saying nothing. Taipan made a game of pinching his rump at random intervals to see if he would make a noise. After an hour of this, Ulric retaliated by playing with her ears, watching her wriggle and writhe for a minute until she crawled away in defeat, scowling at him and making a rude gesture. Served her right. Elf ears, for those who are needing to know, are quite sensitive and very much are included in the erogenous zones.

Now that he had asserted his dominance, on this occasion, the odd couple watched their enemy from afar.

Leaning in close to whisper, in spite of the distance between them and the column, Taipan asserted, somewhat in disbelief, "They have not put out pickets, Glade Chief, they are expecting to find no resistance. They offer no defense against the bloodseekers of the untamed places. I…am almost insulted."

Ulric's reply, in equally hushed tone was "Why are these people so bad at war?"

It was an honest question. Their enemy had employed incredibly sophisticated strategy at a macro scale, what with the creation of Bane production facilities far in advance of the war, gradual consolidation of the Prespang City States, fortification of the Northern coasts of the Zelus, and the pre-emptive attacks that had left the Legranel without leadership and Iriel with a much reduced military capacity, alongside the subversion of the Greater House of Morion. It was all very skillfully done, with purpose, prudence, and understanding of how to attack the Orlethrem and co-opt the Otherkin independent tribes so as to use or, at least, marginalize them to prevent them from contesting Prosper's dominance. In startling contrast, there was the baffling incompetence displayed at a tactical level.

It still blew Ulric's mind that the men who had captured Brighteyes had allowed themselves to be sidetracked trying for those Greater Beast cores, when they should have been making for Prosper with all speed. The attack on Bald'rt had vastly underestimated the power of, if not the man himself, then most certainly his lieutenants, because the fact that only one assassin had been tasked with Idra was comically ignorant. If even two or three more had been deployed he might not have been able to go to his lord's side so quickly and that would have proven a tragic delay.

Then there were the thugs hired to manage and execute the slaver's ring. Granted, the Ogran in charge of that had obtained the resource to secure a pretty firm position within the city and somewhat deftly managed the organization of said slavers, but the men themselves were little more than thugs. He and Taipan had managed to fight their way through them without taking any serious harm, even if that had gotten dicey from time to time.

Those assassins had been pretty tough, but they'd botched their hit, clearly lacking in reconoissance regarding Ulric and Taipan's abilities and with poor coordination, to be blamed by their obviously insane counterpart. Which begged the question as to what leader would ever let their clandestine fixers roll with such a loose cannon?

It all added up. These were unforced errors, all of them. Why? When the top level decision making was so efficient, why were there so many flaws in the execution?

Ulric revealed his uncertainty to his partner, they had little else to do while the soldiers made an unhurried march along the wide roman style road that led out from the city to some small outlying village or waypoint between the city and the forest.

"I have wondered as much myself, Ulric," the dusky Elf told him, from her prone sprawl in the tall grass, "And I honestly say that I am uncertain. Perhaps it is, in part, that they have, by sending many of their best and strongest warriors and generals against Orlethrem with relative frequency, deprived themselves of their greatest talents reaching fruition or passing their skills to the future."

That wasn't out of the question. If, once every one or two generations, you send the high end of your respective militaries to their deaths, there was an inevitable decay in subsequent generations, as they do not have the benefit of learning from the cream of the crop. Pre-Collapse western civilization learned this when they, for reasons that baffled Ulric's imagination, decided to dismiss education as a priority institution and methodically drove out the gifted and motivated instructors, many of whom were formerly excellent in their chosen fields and had decided to retire to pass on their knowledge, which swiftly led to the decay of the institution generally.

It took a mere forty years for the results to manifest in near societal collapse when the younger generations could not properly take up the mantle of performing the tasks that the retiring engineers, health care providers, technical staff, and others left empty. Total Collapse came but a short century later.

Interesting hypothesis.

"It all reeks of some kind of pervasive lack of regard for life or value in individual achievement." Ulric told his wife.

"So concentrated are the efforts to undermine independence of the City States and to establish control over the lives of the populace of Prespang, that I think they are crippling their own people's potential, for fear of them becoming too hard to dominate. This feels intentional. It's too complete, too pervasive to be otherwise." He finished.

Emerald eyes stared back into his own unblinking for a few intense seconds. The focused gaze eventually broke to scan the surroundings with his Shadow's usual caution.

When those glittering orbs returned to behold him the expert in preying on Otherkin for her people told him only, "I had never thought of it that way. That the Otherkin were weaker than the Orlethrem I took to be, in some ways, a matter of course, a consequence of their shorter lives. But, perhaps, you are onto something, Ulric. Mayhap it is not accidental, or natural at all that they be lesser, but by design. A sick design, if so, to corrode your civilization's future that it may never be strong enough to stand on its own. Like choosing to make of your culture people of clay, soft and malleable, rather than of steel, strong and resilient."

They fell silent, Ulric to brood on the implications of the now more probable Aes'r influence that was leading Prosper's campaign across generations. It all made sense that they would care not for the futures of their kin if none of these people truly were kin at all. They were tools to be wielded, broken, and then replaced as needed. They didn't need to be excellent, not when they were replaceable.

A cold calculus, but it fit with his paradigm for explaining how events could have unfolded the way that they had. Similar events in history had occurred in the Before. Empires built upon slavery, conquest of less technologically sophisticated civilizations, and overt suppression of the populace always decayed. Their policy of treating those who were ruled as lesser humans, while those who held true power were the only real persons inevitably doomed them to regression and eventual destruction. It was damned near a natural law.

Funny how his passion for history gave him perspective into a strange world's current events while his training in the natural sciences gave him insight into the mechanics of its magic. Almost like he had been made specifically for this world, to enter it with maximum impact.

Fucking Watcher shenanigans man.