B2 Ch. 21 A Dark Horizon

Tilly wasn’t the only one with impressive gains during this time. The few thousand refugees and lapins that had chosen the Flames Watch class drilled relentlessly.   They kept an intense rolling schedule of 8-hour shifts around the clock. Eight hours of training, eight of rest, and eight guarding the wall construction in the gap.

There, Hiro stood vigil against the eventual reprisal of the enemy, but thankfully only occasional groups of Corrupted Strigoi spotted the new fortification over the first twenty days of the Boon.  None of whom were led by an elite.  Clearly whatever hierarchy that existed in this new faction needed more than a few hours to organize the next investigation into our territory.

After the first ten days and almost 80 hours of training, the one hundred fighter units could almost seamlessly move between several of the formations Tilly had seen the Bastions employ in defense of the front gates of the capitol. Then they began sparring drills in earnest along with ‘mock’ battles, turning the practice area outside the city into a proving ground of sweat and blood.

The “mock” battles between units pushed the few Acolytes of Flame to their limits and frequently required Erash’s intervention to restore a unit to full health so they could continue training. Most units had a Bastion veteran at its head, with the ten best soldiers in the unit forming squads. The unit instructors were brutal in their training, inflicting wounds as often as yelling at those who they felt needed discipline.

Yet, even this was mild compared to the rotations where Gorock faced off against one of the units himself.  The Wall Breaker proved his name over and over, shattering shields and formations alike.  He held nothing back, nearly killing many of his opponents even under the close watch of Erash.

Nothing impressed on Tilly just how abnormal his Endurance was for his level like watching Gorock shatter every bone in the body of a level 21 Flames Watch soldier who hesitated in bringing up his shield before a sudden charge by the Wall Breaker. Erash had been called over to another sparring field, and the acolytes simply weren’t strong enough to reverse the damage before he bled out, leaving the soldier to shudder out a few last weak gasping breaths.

Even Tilly had rushed over, but even his level 35 First Aid skill was completely useless against so many eviscerated internal organs. This small tragedy didn't impede the mock battle at all. The whole unit continued to try and wound Gorock to end the exercise.  It's not that they were unaware, Tilly observed with hard eyes that none of the others failed to bring their shield to bear at any further attacks from the Wall Breaker.

Tilly thought about saying something to the Bastion in the heat of the moment… but he was finally learning some restraint.  Something like this would have been atrocious back home, but here facing extinction, it was just seen as a necessary loss in the process of survival. Tilly didn’t have to like it, but he was done dying on small hills when they all faced a far greater enemy.

This Intense preparation almost immediately began to show its worth as the frequency of enemy appearances beyond the wall began to increase. The leaderless groups of Strigoi were more like beasts than any sort of sentient social group.  As soon as they spotted the wall being built in the distance, they would immediately sprint towards it attacking the closest living beings with abandon.  Shuji postulated that at lower levels this class was driven by an insatiable hunger, and was not capable of normal intelligence. This caused them to disregard numbers and fortifications each time they charged, howling in glee, maws slathered with black-flecked drool at the appearance of new prey.

Hiro treated these groups as intense leveling opportunities for the units stationed with him at the wall.  He refused to intervene in the fights if the group was less than ten strong, and even then, he would only intervene if a soldier's life was on the line.  Each Strigoi was more than a match for three or four of the Alliance’s new soldiers, but this only pushed their unit tactics and skills to new levels as they faced what was clearly a dire threat. The Corrupted Vampiric race was freakishly strong for their emaciated forms and black ichor oozed from their claws and mouths like venom.

A priestess was always called after these fights to cleanse the Corruption left in wounds now that every strike taken by an enemy resulted in infection.  Thankfully, the new class came with some inherent resistance to the infection, and very few soldiers came close to full consumption before the priestess's arrival.

…

After twenty days of this brutal rotation of battle and training the Three-Fold Alliance could field a force much more combat-hardened than any commander on earth could have ever dreamed of.  The new Ranger force averaged at level 20, but this number was very deceptive, due to the uncommonly high skill levels each member of the new ranger corps hid under his or her level. The average Flames Watch soldier had a more balanced power display, averaging level 32 with the benefit of experience gains from real combat.

Even Kindle had started growing lustrous azure and white feathers.  She couldn’t yet glide, but she could now light the fire of her own meals and Tilly had to keep a close eye on her after she had decided to have a “midnight” snack in his little room around day 8 of training.

As hopeful as the population had been at the onset of building a new home, the reality of Nephesh’s nature was not lost on any of them.   While many were still working toward the development of logistical necessities for a population of their size, the evidence of preparation for war was everywhere.

Everyone who had even the barest skill in smithing was working around the clock to equip the new force with some sort of consistent kit. The Quarry with a mine in its depths was alive day and night with the sound of workers swinging away to loosen more of the land's precious bounty.  Car-sized blocks of stone were transported as soon as they were cut and rapidly transported by groups of a special class called Teamsters.  The best stone workers would receive a new block and get it into place making sure it fit seamlessly with the design.

Franklin was based at the wall around the clock, diverting the river, and assisting with Ice-Constructed scaffolding whenever the started on a new section.  Tilly even spotted Amelia a few times on patrol, doing something to the forested boundary of the Boon’s boundary.  She was wielding a new staff with a green crystal on its end, channeling what felt to be impressive amounts of mana into the plants lining the invisible barrier.

He thought about breaking protocol to go speak to her, but almost as if he could read minds, Ichiro had slid up next to him and asked him not to interfere.

“The High Priestess and Mrs. Cooper have devised a very clever protection for our unwalled boundary that should give us time to respond if anything tries to approach from a more circumspect angle.  But from my understanding, it is very difficult.  Perhaps it would be best if you let her continue. ”

They only had two days left on the Boon when the enemy's true reprisal appeared on the horizon. The disappearance of what had added up to over a thousand Strigoi had not gone unnoticed. By the time the sun set outside the boundary on the twenty-second hour of outer time, the enemy's full response had materialized.  Training was called to a halt and Tilly, along with the rest of the elites of the Three-Fold Alliance were called to the wall for an emergency conference.

Meeting on top of the seventy-foot wall, they surveyed the enemy in grim silence.   The wall had nearly been completed, twenty feet thick with a four-foot layer of ice coating the enemy-facing surface of the structure.   The field in front of them was choked with a delta of muddy tributaries as the aptly named Silver River poured out its contents endlessly from under the wall into the down-sloped fields of withered grass and sparse stunted trees.

The only things left to be constructed were the stairs leading off the back. In his old life, Tilly would have considered this an impregnable fortification… But now facing a horizon that had turned as dark as a stormy sea,  it didn't seem like nearly enough.  Even Tilly, with the heads of his hatchets knew he could scale the walls given a little time. He doubted it would be able to do anything but slow down any warriors the vampiric nation would be able to field. The wall would be an impediment, nothing more, but one he would much rather have than not.

“Shuji, is there anything else you can tell us?”  Hiro asked in a quiet but intense voice.

“I’m afraid not, with our teleport still down, we are cut off from any information networks I might use, and without a base of one of the larger continent-spanning factions… we are limited in our abilities to gain any further knowledge of our foe.”

“Erash, have your people faced anything like them?” Linus followed turning to face the grim High Priestess as she muttered under her breath and watched the distant army like a coiled snake. She answered Linus without turning from the approaching enemy.

“No Consul, My nation is a special case, balance within ourselves and constantly at war with each other. Aside from my education in the various magics, I would not have heard of Vamparism… But perhaps there is something I can do.”  She followed up thoughtfully, lifting her staff and beginning to mutter under her breath again as the air in front of the group shivered just beyond the edge of the edge of the wall.

Then, raising her voice with a final authoritative declaration, she thumped her staff on the ground, and the blurriness in front of them snapped into clarity, displaying a huge lens of air that focused in on the enemy line ten or twenty miles away like it was only a hundred feet.

“Do not try and Identify, it will give away the scrying. Instead, wait a moment and I will display what my Abilities tell me.”  She added in hurriedly, as the seemingly endless horde of enemies gradually came into sharp relief.

Tilly had to fight to turn off his now almost unconscious use of the skill that had become so central to his life on Nephesh. Before him, masses of enemies came into view, and at first, Tilly thought the makeup of the force thundering toward them in slow motion was arrayed at random.

But as Erash panned the view to survey the force, a pattern started to emerge, one that was only confirmed by the slowly populating identifiers that appeared within the circle over the different warrior class types.

The most numerous were the same kind of creatures they had already been facing in sporadic attacks on the wall. But as he focused in to look at one in particular, a line of information popped up next to the identifier, and Tilly’s eyes widened at what must have been Erash’s high-level skills and abilities at work.

Level 35 Strigoi - Base soldier of the Ravonus Horde - used as scouts or fodder.

As the view continued to pan, Tilly began to spot another kind of soldier.  For about every fifty of the emaciated bald nightmares, there were huge bloated caricatures of the same creature, standing alone in little islands of emptiness. Tilly wondered why until one of them snatched a normal Strigoi who had wandered too close. It shoved the struggling creatures into its oversized mouths and chomped down ferociously.

Level 47  Strigoi Flesh Bag - Base shock troops of the Ravonus Horde, protected by thick layers of putrified flesh - used for damage absorption.

Then there were the stringy-haired elites Nyuk had mentioned, the first of the Horde Tilly had seen wearing any sort of armor.

Level 75  Strigoi Consumer - Elite troops of the Ravonus Horde, typically charged with commanding one to five hundred base members of the Horde. - used as command, and mage search and destroy.

Then suddenly the slow panning by Erash’s ability hit a huge break in the formation and moved along empty land for a hundred or so yards before stopping at two figures. As it beheld them, the ability started to strain and bend under the pressure exuded by the targets.

The first figure was a Giant version of the Flesh Bags.  It towered a story and a half over the second figure and was almost as wide as it was tall, glacially lumbering forward on elephantine legs draped with grotesque layers of still-bleeding flesh.  Its huge maw crammed full of teeth was even more disturbing for its proportional largeness in comparison with the rest of the body.

Level 98 Dimitrov The All-consuming. - ???

The second figure was almost human in size if skeletal, but it was difficult to tell due to the layers of black tattered cloth it had draped itself in.

Level 84 Vamp- ???

Tilly watched as the populating text, suddenly stopped, and chillingly, even bound in the context of one twenty-fourth the speed of normal existence, the figure’s head whipped up to stare right at them.

Its face was wrapped with what looked to be ancient blood-soaked bandages, but its eyes and mouth were left visible.  Seeming to somehow spot their little group, Its thin lips parted in a horrifying parody of a smile, revealing two-inch-long teeth set in double rows.

Its dead fishlike eyes glittered in amusement, and Tilly’s feet were suddenly stuck to the stone as those eyes started to glow red, and screaming started to crash into Tilly’s consciousness from all sides. He felt twin trails of wetness cutting down his cheeks and his throat grew raw.

The blue and green runes forming the outer edge of the spell started to warp and twist, as a rust-colored energy filled them.  Tilly hardly saw any of this as the force of the figures stare ground him into himself.

The Corruption in Tilly’s side writhed in glee as all of Tilly’s hard-fought mental defenses crumbled and a despair as deep as the ocean drowned Tilly’s mind in an animal-like panic. Its tendrils begin to encircle his heart and lungs, reaching into his extremities, eager to take control.

Then another voice rose above the screaming.  Harsh words filled with a potent mix of defiance and authority hit the spell circle that had almost entirely shifted to a muddy reddish color, finally shredding it and breaking the magical connection.  Tilly collapsed onto the floor, his figure not the only one to have found a boneless relief on the cold surface of quiet stone.