“You’re… you’re right,” Travis Multi-Eyelid ruminated, sounding as though a terrible burden had been lifted from his shoulders. Five minutes beforehand, I would have said that it would have made him actually seem relatable. “We did everything we could to save him…sometimes, it is impossible to save a fellow predator, no matter how much we recognize his potential, his worth. This is a terrible thing. More terrible than anything the man I once was could ever have believed. And yet, it liberates me. I understand now, young Rhodes. Thank you. You have done more for Aegrim’s children than you will ever know. It is a shame that Father Aegrim did not choose your line to bear the bond with his flesh. The Many-Crowned King would have been honored to call you his Brother in the Deep.”
“You’re…welcome,” I said, willing my face to hide any reaction to the sour taste filling my mouth.
“I mean it, young Rhodes,” the man persisted. “Because of this conversation, I will be able to help my fellow Knights move on with our grief. We can now fully accept the loss of one who could have been very dear to us, and do what we need to do.”
He lowered his head, and black scales began to crawl along the length of his neck and thicken, until the column of flesh resembled an armored knight’s gorget.
“We will move on,” the once-man said in a hard voice, more scales spreading over his shoulders like epaulets, “and we will heal, and then we will kill the traitor-prince.”
CHAPTER 10: CLAIMING TERRITORY
Wes’ Perspective
We had apparently won them over, though I didn’t know whether I owed that to Breena or I had just seemed more inspiring than I felt. Either way, I got what I needed: the support of the local population.
We didn’t expect them to fight yet, and we all did everything we could to make that clear, for multiple reasons. Primarily, it was because the Malus Members still believed they had control over the Testifier colleges in this world. In fact, they apparently had control over the Testifier colleges in most worlds, with the Dawnlands being the most notable exception. But according to Headmaster Yama, the Golden Sands had taken ancient Atlantis’ place as the scholar capital of Avalon’s worlds, so Warren’s henchmen had made the most effort in bringing this world’s academies under heel.
I had a nagging suspicion that they had done something similar back on Earth, but there wasn’t time to really dwell on that at the moment.
The fact of the matter was that the largest Testifier college appeared to have been completely subverted, on a level that shamed and angered the scholars in the other cities. But soon, the remaining colleges were infiltrated as well, as a small group at nearly every college, with the exception of the one in Nedjena, chose to bend the knee to the new power in their world. Concerns expressed by resistant members of the colleges were dismissed as the capitulating Testifiers cited the need to protect the knowledge they stored from being destroyed, and argued for the possibility that appeasement and diplomacy could accomplish what armed resistance had failed to do.
Most of the scholars had recognized those bullshit arguments for the cowardice they were, but it wasn’t enough. Combined with the support of the primary college and the seizure of the planet’s Pathways—as well as the devastation of most of the local militaries—the traitor scholars acquired enough influence to drive the rest out of their positions of power, despite being outnumbered.
The exiled scholars had suffered a variety of fates, including imprisonment and execution, but the most common situation became a reluctant agreement to help maintain the city itself with their magics, either by repairing stonework, scribing any orders the Malus Members decreed for the population, or using their music to provide medical care to the sick or wounded citizens.
Nedjena, by contrast, had been deemed too remote and impoverished to require subversion, which meant the local Malus Members had simply threatened to kill everyone if they chose not to comply with their demands, and had left the scholars alone when they surrendered.
For the most part, the cast-off Testifiers accepted their roles grudgingly, but readily. It wasn’t too different than some of the volunteer work they had done before. Now, however, they performed the required duties because cooperation was the only thing that kept their families out of the Horde Pits.
That, actually, had wound up being a huge tool for my enemies—one that I had forgotten myself, due to the significant number of instances in which I had reversed a supposedly irreversible tragedy. But the Pits had been such a terrifying and traumatic component of the earlier Horde invasions that every population of every world still feared them, even centuries later. Petal and Breena had both nodded understandably as soon as the Testifiers tried to explain their fears, even though each fairy’s comprehension came from different events.
When I considered just how much trauma the previous victims had experienced, and how, until recently, said trauma was irreversible, I realized that it was a wonder that any of these people had chosen to resist at all.
However, since I had arrived, I had a duty to restore hope and freedom.
And the only way I knew how to do so was to save the unsavable and break the unbreakable.
So we didn’t ask them to fight. It wasn’t needed, and we weren’t stupid.
We asked them to provide the patrol paths of our enemies, the locations of the Earth douchebags, and the routes and schedules used by Warren’s caravans to funnel supplies between Pathways.
And, most importantly, we asked them to tell us everything they could about the local Horde Pits.
Now that the Malus Order’s portal network had been disrupted, the Horde Pits were my enemies’ most reliable form of replenishment. Retaking a world completely usually allowed the planet to tell me exactly where my enemies could re-enter it, whether through the Pathways or a rogue functioning Malus portal. But the Horde Pits were constantly producing troops, at a rate that set destroying them as a top priority whenever one was nearby. Not only that, but their presence prevented Avalon’s worlds from accepting me as their Lord—or at least, the larger ones did, in the same fashion as any undefeated Trials or Tumults did.
Then there was the matter of the unspeakable torture they inflicted upon the inhabitants themselves.
That last fact was probably why they became so helpful when I started asking about the Pits. Rescuing Petalbell from the first Horde Pit I had ever encountered had created a small uproar among the worlds, once news had leaked out. The act had been powerful enough to register upon my soul, and a person from any one of Avalon’s worlds could actually see the record of the act on both my Deeds and Renown, once they had spent enough time around me.
I still wasn’t sure how those magical lists worked, and I still had no idea how to pull them up myself, but apparently, they contributed significantly to the constant rejection of the Malus Members’ imposters—and I wasn’t sure they’d ever even figured out why. As soon as the locals could access the imposters’ Deeds, they would always scan for something related to the Horde Pits, and immediately turn on the fake Challenger once they found no mention of my first act on their worlds.
So, each time my Deeds confirmed that I wasn’t just asking idle questions, a fire would light in their eyes. It was a weird phenomenon to experience. Before that point, they had stuck to providing the ‘safest’ amount of information, giving me objectives that wouldn’t risk their population and begging me to be careful at the same time. But once we’d begin talking about the Horde Pits, they’d shift to asking me ‘Can you really save them?’
Each time I answered that I could, they would repeat the question in an even more desperate tone, until Petalbell would fly over and begin answering for me, using her experience as a rescued Pit victim, as well as a member of my team who had seen countless other victims rescued.
If my Deeds had awakened a small flame of hope, then Petal’s testimony fueled a conflagration. The little fairy always handled their questions confidently and flawlessly, recounting all the other former victims she had see
n recover—even the ones reduced to small orbs.
Just as every time before, the Pit details had been the final straw. The local Testifiers fully trusted me and began sharing everything they knew, desperate to get back those that they had feared to be lost for good.
There was only one Horde Pit near the city, a scant half mile away, hidden in a tunnel network we hadn’t seen on our way over. The Malus Members preferred to keep the Horde presence to a minimum, as they had begun having trouble keeping them focused on things other than ‘the traitor-prince.’ As such, they permitted only the most elite and disciplined Hordebeasts to police the cities, and directed the rest to form some sort of terror squad that spirited away the most vocal dissidents in the middle of the night.
I assured them that we would attack the Pit as soon as possible, but my team reminded me that we would need a safe place to put the victims for recovery, and that meant we needed to secure a location.
As soon as we began actively resisting, there wouldn’t be a secure location anywhere in Mejem. The local Malus Members would immediately enact the most brutal protocols possible, abandoning all pretense of restraint. There was no way I’d be able to hide a large number of former Pit victims within the city limits.
In fact, they were probably going to brutalize the population in a few days anyway, just to make sure no one would rise up against them, now that the world’s prophesied savior had finally arrived.
Clearly, the best plan was to retake Mejem as quickly and cleanly as possible, and that meant we needed to annihilate as many Malus Members and Hordebeasts as we could in our first attack.
And we needed to do so quickly, before the rest of my enemies swarmed the world.
Ironically, the new positions of the local Testifiers were even more useful to me than if they had remained in their colleges. Maintaining Mejem’s basic functions allowed them to move through the entire city without arousing suspicion. They knew all of the locations where the Malus Members and Hordebeasts congregated, as well as their routes and routines, which meant they knew the best locations to plan ambushes. With their help, we could strike quickly, leave, and then strike somewhere else, then repeat the process until all our enemies were dead. And since Mejem didn’t have a Malus portal, the defeated operatives would have to come back through either the Pathways or the still-active portal set up in the capital.
Once the city was secured and the Horde Pit was destroyed, we would hopefully have a location that could serve as a base from which to operate a guerrilla war against most of Warren’s northern caravans, and maybe even facilitate a way to deliver supplies to people still fighting on the rest of Avalon’s worlds.
With that in mind, we struck the next morning.
The local Malus leadership had scheduled a meeting with Mejem’s local guard, another one of the groups they had chosen to dominate instead of completely remove.
They had apparently been planning to use the guards to help ward the city against my arrival, probably because they knew that even with the Horde, they weren’t able to completely lock down the city. So they had summoned the remnants of the city guard, told them that things had changed, and that they were to be on guard twenty-four hours a day, as well as helping to close off the city completely from the outside world. Above all, they were to search for any sign of a male young adult with red hair and a savior complex. When one of the locals asked how they were supposed to come up with a functioning patrol network that could completely cover the city for every hour of every day, the highest-ranking Malus soldier had knocked him down, screaming that it wasn’t the local’s place to ask questions, that they were supposed to shut up and do what they were told, and if they didn’t, then they could count on more of their families being fed to the Pits, and that oh god it’s him-he’s here-no-don’t-ack-gurgle-gurgle-twitch-die.
The native guardsmen gaped in shock as my retinue and I dropped Carnwennan’s shroud and proceeded to murder the asshole Earthborn, thanks to the element of surprise and the sheer amount of power my team now wielded. He might have posed some small challenge, if we hadn’t taken everyone completely by surprise.
That, and if the Malus Members hadn’t all been panicky little shits.
Chris’ dad and the other higher-ups might still be dismissive of me, but the middle management had evidently investigated my recent exploits and decided I had gone full bogeyman. They viewed me as some terrifying figure that kept accomplishing the impossible with unknown methods.
In their defense, I had kind of done that on purpose. I worked to hide as many of my magic tricks as possible for that very reason, so that Warren’s cronies never had a chance to figure out how I was supposedly punching so high above my weight class.
Beyond that, I hadn’t given the surviving members of the Malus Asshole Office Meeting a chance to notice the rest of my group, either, so when they all focused on me, my retinue tore them to shreds.
As the last douchebag crumpled to the ground, I bid the surrounding natives a good day, apologized for the mess, promised I’d talk to everyone real soon, and then vanished to the next spot, which happened to reveal more Malus officials intimidating some physicians and healers at the largest hospital. Then it was another group that had gathered the local merchants together, and finally, a small band of Malus assholes at the Testifier college.
That last encounter was a bit of trouble, as by then, enough word of mouth had traveled to let my enemies know I had arrived and had started downsizing their local office. Since the Testifiers remaining at the college were their strongest supporters, the surviving operatives rallied there for defense.
It was almost a good idea, especially considering how alarmed they were. The traitor Testifiers had done a lot for Warren’s cronies, and were largely responsible for just how quickly they had conquered Mejem. They had willingly identified the forces most likely to stand against the Malus Members, had pointed out where the resistance members’ families lived, and had even helped to lure their neighbors into ambushes so that they could be caught and taken to the Pits. As angry as that made me, part of me thought I understood, because I figured the traitors’ own families had been threatened.
Surprisingly, Karim had quietly confided that was not the case. In fact, the families of said traitor-Testifiers were among the very first to resist, and the very first that the so-called scholars had arranged to be captured and given to the Horde.
The families of the resisting Testifiers had been next, so when they all volunteered to assist in the attack, I completely understood.
The latest ambush actually helped me realize how useful Shaping magic could be in attacking a fortified location. The wards covering the college had been changed once the traitors took over, but what our Scripters couldn’t undo, our Shaping wizards were able to bypass by making small alterations to the stonework itself, much like an Earth mage could. Then, once we were past whatever barrier had been there, the Shapers would undo their magic and leave everything looking exactly the same as it had been before. It was time and energy-consuming, which Eadric said was part of the reason he hadn’t bothered with it himself, but it was a great way to besiege a location while minimizing collateral damage.
Hint-hint, he added at the end, but I ignored it. As far as I had been concerned, I was the very picture of restraint. So what if I used my own castle as my favorite siege engine?
The attack on the college actually wound up being the best one executed. My new army outnumbered the traitor-Testifiers, contained mages just as powerful as they were, and each one was very, very motivated in retaking their campus and avenging their loved ones. As for the Malus operatives themselves, they were still panicking, and were nowhere near as powerful as my own retinue.
Otherwise, they would have been on the front lines of the worlds that were still resisting their control, instead of lounging about in some backwater city of an already-conquered world.
As with each previous skirmish, we ended the fight with no casualties on our side, thanks to
the element of surprise and overwhelming force—and Val sneaky-stabbing the most competent enemies before they had a chance to react.
The most shocking thing, however, was that very few of the traitor Testifiers were killed. The locals had simply bound most of them with magical bands similar to the ones Karim had used on Shepherd, way back when we had retaken Avalon.
“What would you have us do with them, Lord Challenger?” Headmaster Yama, the woman who had spoken with Eadric, asked me. Her voice was thick with grief and anger.
“Why do you ask me?” I replied, confused by her question. “Challengers don’t usually get involved in legal matters between natives.”
I wasn’t about to attempt to assert my authority as Planetary Lord or Lunar Viscount or whatever the hell Avalon said I was now. The last thing these people needed was another stranger demanding their allegiance.
“Because those who follow you have been very clear on the nature of your new role,” she explained in an inscrutable tone. “The prior planets and their newly revived ancient civilizations have recognized your authority over them. They defer to you as their ruler. However, you have not yet expressed plans for our world, beyond the desire to overthrow the current government.”
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