Chapter 055: Evacuation

Well… rather than waiting and still being worried it’s better to find out the truth immediately.

Avhar Khan [P]: Are you all right?

Lena Simeon [P]: Yes. Why are you asking, master?

What a relief.

Avhar Khan [P]: Because that maniac Black Hand just flattened entire district with an archspell.

Avhar Khan [P]: Ytar?

Lena Simeon [P]: On board. With his girlfriend and her parents.

Relief intensifies.

“Alright, everyone got out before it happened.” I said loudly. “It’s only us now.”

“That’s impossible.” It took Leria a while to process what happened. She was still on the page with the archspell getting detonated. “How is he going to explain that to Ambryxis?!”

“Normally.” Firewing answered calmly. “He will say that it was the best way to cause significant casualties to a local Pentagram cult. With the cost in lives being acceptable due to the dying people being merely slum trash. Then the city will announce that it was a failed ritual of Pentagram cultists, that killed everyone to use their deaths as fuel to summon something, but they were interrupted by our brave defenders and slain in the name of Ambryxis.” She sighed. “The genuine love and belief in the godhood of Ambryxis is proportional to the distance from him. Masses think of him as an omnipotent and omniscient benevolent defender of their well-being. Those surrounding him, like the highest echelons of clergy, archmagicians, the Masked Council and so on, know perfectly that he is as fallible as any of them. Powerful, yes, but he can be fooled.”

Typical for deities in major cities. Those in smaller ones and in villages weren’t even trying to pretend and were seen as simple protective spirits serving some of the ‘real’ Gods. But those stronger in most cases were also ambitious and wanted to be seen as said Gods, at least in their domain.

“Add me to the system properly. With resurrection.” I looked at Firewing with a face that screamed EXPLAIN IT A BIT MORE PLEASE. “He is probably going to fire more dangerous but more targeted spells to murder everything that moves in the district. There is no other way out now with exception of dying and resurrecting.”

Well, I wasn’t sure if the respawn system was done to allow people to evacuate like that, but… ok, why not?

Then again, she probably could find a way to attach herself forcefully if she had a while… with our dead bodies… so I wasn’t sure if I even had a choice. This whole affair moved much too fast for me to understand what was happening. Surreal wasn’t even starting to describe it.

Gods, ugh. The only friendly NPC that gave us a nice, low difficulty quest, of course had to be an archmagician in hiding. At least pretend that there is some randomness in our crusade, could you?

***

Soon we reached Firewing’s stash.

Wow. I recognized some of the technomagical devices and alchemical ingredients. Rare and elusive, all of them.

Plus entire library. Tons of books. Most of them probably elusive and rare as well. Wow.

“Take everything and put it in the inventory.” Firewing commanded. “And hurry. He is getting close.”

***

We managed to fit most of the things. Thankfully we already sold the loot from the raid into the Dungeon (for a whopping SEVEN THOUSAND OF AMBRIES), so there was a lot of free space. And we still had to throw a lot of the things we kept there just in case.

We were about to conclude the pillage when suddenly we felt him. Black Hand. Close.

Shit. How did he sneaked on us so well?!

“FIREWING!” A shout, filled with anger, magically reinforced to spread further. He was already inside the pocket dimension.

SHIT SHIT SHIT.

I grabbed a few more books and threw it into my backpack. I just managed to wear it when he stormed into the storeroom.

Black Hand

Gender: Male

Species: Darkling

Level: 97

Class: Archmagician

Active Effects: N/A

Known Spells and Techniques:

???

Darkling. Infernal progeny of Ymrir the Black, the guy responsible for creating the sick culture of the Dragonspine Mountains. Like demons from average fantasy anime. Tall. Horned. Red eyes. With an aura of power and fear surrounding them. If Firewing’s magical aura almost choked us when she was casting powerful magic, his pressed us into the ground so much I could barely move or think.

Ugh. Seems like the hatred is mutual.

YOU DIED!

Cause of death was being incinerated by a powerful Fire Magic spell..

RESURRECT

I have to give it to Firewing. She did make it practically instanteous. I barely noticed her flames before I was greeted by the ‘You Are Dead’ window.

***

We resurrected in the Hold. There was a lot of awkward nakedness and physical contact (the Gore Altar certainly wasn’t tailored towards instanteous partywipes).

Ugh. I got used to that. Thankfully.

“Outstanding. So it really works.” Of course, Firewing immediately got curious by what she just lived through. Why am I not surprised.

“Well, it’s nice that you’re happy, but I seriously suggest wearing something BEFORE you start examining the Altar.” I commented while donning my robes.

“Oh, right.” She completely forgot about it, didn’t she? At least she wasn’t wrinkled and so on, so the look didn’t traumatize anyone.

***

Not long after that we were eating our traditional after-death meal. While having a serious talk with Firewing.

After all, we did let in someone that could easily murder us all. Sure, an enemy of Ambryxis as well - the only reason I allowed that to happen rather than trying to commit group suicide to escape her - but we had to figure out some sort of relationship.

“I’d like to join.” She answered almost immediately. Wow. I seriously expected her to choose the ‘let’s ally against the city’ option rather than joining us.

“Why?” It was slightly suspicious to be honest.

“Because no matter how much I struggle, my chances of getting revenge on Black Hand are nil.” She answered. “Yours are even more nil, on a first glance. But since you have Gods on your side, it’s obvious that you have a chance of succeeding. I can imagine Deviation tricking her Chosen to achieve something for her while leading him by his nose with the perspective of achieving unachievable for himself. But not Overtyrant. If he wants you to kill Ambryxis, he really means it and success is possible.”

...Unless other Gods want the opposite outcome and they manage to win this round of the Great Game. Which she didn’t add. But she didn’t have to. I knew that. In that scenario joining us was obviously a good idea, since it increased our chances of success.

“Do not expect me to go on raids to anomalies, though.” She added. “Right now Black Hand thinks that I incinerated myself to ash after he cornered me. Together with my... underlings. But I already managed to trick him once. He is going to be on guard for a while. He will detect me using magic easily, as long as it’s done in a hundred kilometer distance. I can circumnavigate that, but it will require using modified versions of every spell with a lot of incantations, and even then most of my really powerful spells are out of the question.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.” I answered. “ It would impair our own progress. We grow in strength so fast because we keep facing deadly threats. And no threats will be deadly with an archmagician in party.” She smiled. Well, everyone likes being flattered from time to time, right? “Still, having one remain in our base and keep an eye on the Altar and people living here will be a blessing. Lowers the chance of something bad happening when we are away. And you will probably be a great source of knowledge about various things.”

“True.” She nodded. “I’m also an alchemist and enchanter, though I prefer the former. I don’t really like enchanting, but I can show few tricks to others of this trade, if you have one of them.” We had. Looks like our Theoretical Sorcerer with a major rape trauma was going to get more useful. Plus alchemy… finally someone to pick it up after me, I was too busy to focus on it properly despite my early hopes.

Now that I think about it…

“Actually… you might be useful right from the start.” She looked at me questioningly. “One of us got cursed and we would really like to get him uncursed.”

Vaera immediately understood who I was talking about. There was a wide smile (and lots of hope) on his face when I looked at him.

***

She succeeded.

It turned out that while dragonbrides were good in casting powerful magic, they weren’t nearly as good when it comes to casting complicated magic.

It took Firewing like ten seconds to figure out the details of Vaera’s situation. Then ten more seconds to uncurse him. Just like that, the major impediment to his power (that made him the weakest of us all, by far) disappeared completely.

Well, more like partially. There was a lot of power the curse blocked. Having all of it return instantly could be dangerous. But he immediately jumped up by ten levels, and had several spells that he once knew unlocked. Including Dragon’s Bulwark (a point-defense spell like my Localized Distortion), and Dragon’s Scales (a body reinforcement magic, similar to my Inhuman Resilience). Plus Dragon Lance and Great Dragon Fireball. Which were self explanatory.

Much too many dragons there for my taste. Sigh. I still haven’t asked him about dragonbride training.I don’t know how to start the subject.

Firewing got surprisingly interested in being able to talk with real Dragonbride. Normally they were rather… volatile. Taking one alive was next to impossible. Well, get used to that, Vaera. We all should.

Firewing was totally going to drain us all from every bit of interesting knowledge she could find. And then she would write books about us, that were going to surface after our deaths. Archmagicians.

“There is one thing I don’t understand.” Leria decided to speak and interrupt the archmagician’s interrogation of Vaera. “I always thought that you were a fire elf, and not a low elf.”

Yes, now that she mentions it… sure, the first time I heard about Firewing’s species was when Grandma told me that. Which made her an unreliable source of knowledge in that department. But I did ask around and a few older people (it was hard to purge that fact from their memories, even for Black Hand) confirmed it.

“I… I guess I’ll just show you.” Suddenly her hair changed into flames. Cold ones, but she could easily make them much hotter by magic. Like every fire elf.

Oh. A shapeshifter. A godmade sapient species, creations of Betrayal. An Imperial Goddess of Loyalty, Betrayal, Schemes and Gambling. They could change their own body quite easily, though complete changes (ones so deep that they made them capable of having children with members of the species they changed into) could take weeks.

I guess that running into really rare species (amalthians, shadow celestial, blood elf, night elf, and now a shapeshifter) was a part of this… adventure.

What next? A vampire?

Explains how she managed to fool Black Hand. Even if he knew she was a shapeshifter, detecting one wasn’t easy. And the older they got, the harder it was. Few hundred years old shapeshifter could change into you almost immediately… even copying your memories in the process. She probably wasn’t that old (I doubt that even Black Hand could outwit an elder shapeshifter), but the chaos caused by Featherclad helped her greatly. Even if some people that knew the person she changed into survived, she could always claim to have partial amnesia or just traumatised during the destruction to explain her behavioral changes.

***

Unfortunately for us, it really was a Long Night.

The mother of all snowstorms came half a day after the refugee group led by Lena reached the Hold. They were pretty shocked by meeting Grandma here, when they remembered leaving her behind.

They were even more shocked when she told them who she really was and what just happened. We had them move over to the old cult quarters in the meantime. It was a temporary lodging, since we lacked space downstairs.

A day after the blizzard started Kovacs’ group returned as well. Or, to be exact, respawned in the Hold after freezing to death when they tried to return to Ambryxis after the snowstorm caught them in the Descent. As their leader said, he would have never tried it if not for the guaranteed resurrection since it was a suicide - but having it meant that regardless of outcome they would still end up spending the next two weeks or so at the Hold. etter than an anomaly haunted by armies of undead. Not to mention them having provisions for five to six days.

They were pretty shocked by Grandma as well. I guess it’s a common theme at this point.

I went to measure the temperature outside. Thankfully, the locals already had thermometers. The ones that used mercury. One of the few discoveries of the Apostasy that the Gods let them keep. Together with the Celsius scale with a different name.

-47. Plus wind so strong that it almost blew me off the edge of the cliff the second I stuck my nose out. Ugh. What is this, a Siberia?!

DFI once wrote a description of an ice planet (with average temperatures around -150C) in the earlier iteration of a Long War - “So cold that even people from Siberia would have to learn to close their windows at night if they wanted to live there”.

***

We were prepared for the cold. Thankfully. Or, to be exact, the cult was prepared for the cold.

It’s leader, Ramshiran (heresiarch, as local temples liked to call such people), took necessary precautions in case of a Long Night. Which included buying an Astral Core. A little magical artifact that could be described as manmade Dungeon Core. Completely without intellect, but capable of influencing the environment around it.

It was often used to establish bases and outposts in very harsh environments, when one decided that it was really important… and was ready to pay a lot. Here it worked like a charm. There was a set amount of magic it could use, depending on its size and the skills of the enchanter. You could spend it on heating, creation of breathable air (useful when there was little of it, like very deep in caves), geography stabilization (useful in anomalies), air detoxification and so on.

It eliminated the need for burning things to produce heat. But, the weather was REALLY horrible, the rocks surrounding us were quickly drained of any heat by the raging winds and lack of sun rays… and, finally, it was calibrated to fix the air in the limited space inhabited by the Cult.

Sure, there was a lot of space left just in case - I mean, what if someone tried to gas the cult out in the middle of a Long Night by burning things by the entrance and pushing the air inside (all cultists were paranoid, period) - which allowed it to more or less work despite the increased space it had to cover.

“More or less” was the troublesome part. It was enough to keep the place livable, but not enough to keep it warm. Needless to say I reacted bad to the idea of leaving the bed. I did it as little as I could.

Ugh.

The only person really happy with that was Leria, since she could pray in Overtyrant’s shrine whenever she wanted and she had more than enough time to train our trainees. Oh, and Firewing. Her curiosity skyrocketed when she learned of the automata that we recovered in the Anchoring Station (that we totally forgot about) and stuffed it in one of the ‘officers quarters’.

The idea of being able to chat with a machine predating the Dawn War was really… uhm… interesting. She had limited resources, but she immediately decided to use them to try and fix it.

I wasn’t against it. The only reason we stored it in the room (and then forget about it) was the fear of it turning out hostile after being switched on. Hostile and, of course, more powerful than us. Which would be a terrifying combo. But with Firewing? There is no way it’s stronger than her, and she obviously is going to have at least a basic level of defensive magic on (which was beyond our strongest) when she tries to reactivate it. So there is no chance of the machine scoring a Giant Killing on her.

We mad a decision to train some of the trainees in magic. A Fire, Life and two types of Holy Magic combo, to be precise, by using combined knowledge of Firewing, me and the priests. Which should offer enough diversity in damage types to avoid the potential resistances of most of the enemies we could potentially encounter.

It was the chief reason for me to actually leave the bed. With the exception of meals and… well… Leria and her rather vocal complaints about me being a lazy bum.

I’m actually happy that she does that. Training at least a bit was very useful in our continuous attempts to survive. Without her (and Simea, her accomplice) I would be reading books and drinking in bed most of the day. But I won’t tell her. I mean, she seems to have so much fun kicking me out, that I would have to be a truly cruel asshole to ruin this.

Despite all of that, Firewing also had time to work as a healer. Priests did a great job in trying to keep their villagers alive despite the unsanitary conditions they lived in, but their knowledge and resources were insufficient in the long term. Many of their people suffered from various conditions, so Firewing decided to remedy that.

Being augmented by magic so much that you no longer need to sleep is nice, I guess. Archmagicians slept mostly to skip the part of day when there was less to do. But when they had tons of things to do, they could remain conscious and in peak conditions for months.

I also decided to ask her about Tzikimi. Mostly out of curiosity. As Decemvirate has shown, things like that liked to make surprising returns at the least expected moments.

My question caught her off guard. She had never heard the term. And the knowledge that the locals had about the history of the Dragonspine Mountains in times before the Dominion swept the floor with local civilizations was… limited. More like non-existent.

Of course she got INCREDIBLY curious. Especially when she heard of an undiscovered Dungeon that somehow assimilated and manifested remains of both the Decemvirate and the mysterious Tzikimi. She was really sad when she heard it was going to take a while for the trainees to reach their layer.

I think she is just happy to be able to work in her old trade once again. Though she still made sure to keep watch over the people from her group.

I wasn’t even nearly as curious as she was, to be honest. Sure, the Xylian Dominion plunged a significant part of the world into a thousand year long tyranny that made Adolf Hitler looked like Mother Teresa, but they also did the world a favour. By wiping out other competing civilizations, some of which were even worse than them.

It is a simple system. The less that is known about a pre-Xyl civilization, the worse it was. The Dominion often employed a damnatio memoriae-type approach to them, and their thoroughness was proportional to how threatened and/or disgusted they were by said civilization.

The people that caused the original Bloodletter Plague are a great example. We do not know their name. We have no idea how far their empire was spread or what sort of culture it employed. Religion? No idea. How long they existed? No idea. What they look like? Nope. How they built their cities? Nope as well. The Dominion wiped out everything.

They even had specialized machines that patiently dismantled all constructions before grinding the stone itself into dust and scattering it around. Not to mention incinerating all organic remains. Or smashing, burning and dust scattering all material objects that belonged to them.

Said people left literally three major remnants, all of them of course destroyed by Xyls but then resurrected by a particularly powerful anomaly that dragged them from the past like Dungeons sometimes did. Two of them were stone circles similar to Stonehenge, each of them containing terrifying creatures that were considered a significant threat to the Imperium if they ever managed to free themselves properly. One was an origin of the Bloodletter Plague, the other of the so called Assimilator Mold. Almost as bad as the Plague.

Third was a hundred meter tall stone pillar. That caused everyone entering a one kilometer radius to spontaneously drop down dead. According to some haunting suggestions from World’s Requiem, that place was a prison for something that made the Deity of Blood and Assimilator Hivemind look like puppies.

When a group of magicians supposedly found ruins of this civilization overlooked by the Xyls and began illegal excavation, the Imperium carpet bombed the whole area with archspells. Before firing a Void Magic archhex that left a kilometer deep crater by annihilating all matter in the blast zone. .

Imperium doesn’t fuck around and is exactly as thorough as Xyls were, even if its methods are more crude. Though it was nice enough to kindly suggest the magicians to throw away everything they found and leave the place before it started throwing magical nukes around. Not like they listened.

Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly interested in the secrets of Tzikimi. If only I had something valuable enough to bribe the Dungeon to drop the biome usage altogether… oh well, it was a Dungeon. The chances of it unleashing something terrible were practically nil. At least I never heard about that happening. With exception of those Dungeons that went genocidal under influence of Pentagram, but the probability of that happening were small due to Overtyrant’s influence being already visible enough to generate dedicated biome’s and even working shrines.

Most Dungeons were under divine influence. It helped them manifest new biomes (to the point of having some literally based upon afterlifes), get new daemons to serve them and so on.

***

The general coldness also prevented me from making my sexlife sufficiently… diversified. Sure, I was totally ok with doing it beneath the quilt, but… being able to see the other side of the equation was VERY helpful in getting myself turned on.

Especially when you still didn’t reach the point of having proper sex. And instead got off merely on the domination part (not like the other side wasn’t ok with that, I could do a lot with my fingers and so on). HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO IT LIKE THAT!

Ugh. This is getting worse and worse with every passing minute. It’s the seventh day of the blizzard, the temperature inside is like… fourteen degrees Celsius (drops to nine during the night), and I literally had to wear a coat when I want to read books outside of my bed and expect to do it for long!

I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING OR I GET CRAZY.

Wait a second.

I laughed loudly.

“What is it now?” Simea lied beside me in the bed. Collared but clothed. I wasn’t cruel enough to have her lie naked (even below the quilt) in this temperature. Or, to be precise, I wasn’t cruel enough now. My past me was different on many fields and would probably do that merely for the lulz. “You know I get worried every time you start making the Evil Overlord face?”

Ugh.

“I think I know what to do to kill time.” I smiled wryly. “How about… retaking a bit more of Overtyrant’s property?”