LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 93: A series of unfortunate events…
As though it was the beginning of a dry season all nearby water sources were drying up to puddles and runnels, once vast swamps had dried up to cracked earth with rills running through it. It was considered fortunate even, as it was easier to march through dry swamp than wading through muddy waters. That was until they realized even pools and springs shriveled up, as if the land itself was opposed to their campaign. Wells of villages they themselves had raided and abandoned and were quickly dried up, after all they could only support hundred-odd people not thousands and thousands of soldiers on march. They couldn’t slow down for every passing hour meant time for the enemy to rally their troops and prepare their defenses. When they met up with their forward forces they had learned that this dry spell had affected the entire region surrounding Velauhart, along with intelligence and rumors.
For the intelligence, there still remained a single river that flowed out from the Black forest - the once mighty river was now reduced to a rocky brook. For thirsty horses and parched men, it had to do. Furthermore they learned that there might be some sort of armed militia skulking within the forest, their allegiance was disputed. If they were to proceed forwards and besiege Viveria, they had to be sure that their flanks were secure, but circumstances prohibited intensive combing of some folklore forest when time was of the essence, thus although regrettable, they had to split off some of their forces to protect their rear.
As for the rumors, it was nothing but spook stories and superstitions surrounding the forest, how some men on patrol would disappear for days only to appear suddenly with no memories of their missing departure, those who returned had strange changes in their personality, how the trees in the forest whispered to each other, conspiring amongst themselves, how lost spirits wandered the forest and so on; the war counsel of the main army concluded that the repeated losses to this ‘militia’ had severely affected their morale and dismissed it as something unimportant to their plans. Whilst their forward forces were few in numbers, surely any militia would now fall to the full might of the Empire’s army if they dared to show themselves.
Near the said stream of river they stopped and camped, foraging for food, watering their horses and filling their waterskins to the brim. First it was the horses that were frightened. Well trained and disciplined they didn’t panic just yet, but they were alarmed and antsy. Then the rumbling sounds came, quiet and distant; it was drawing closer and closer. Unsure of what these sounds were, the troops were looking around in confusion, weapons at the ready. Then the horses ran off neighing wildly, slowly the order was breaking down. Then they could feel the rumbling in the earth, in their body, palpable trepidation set in. Soon someone shouted and all went to chaos.
A surge of gushing water, foaming white, barreling towards them from out the forest. They all tried to run and flee in search of highground, but it was far too late. Whole trees were uprooted and swept in the water’s wake. Those that were knocked unconscious by the debris carried by freshet before drowning could be considered lucky to not have suffered a slow death by suffocation. The entire plains were inundated to the brim.
- ‘Alpha, how effective was our little scheme?’
Alicia saw how the water turned and led out of the forest from the mountain top and could garner a guess but why guess when you could just ask someone much closer to the incident.
- ‘Superbly. From what we can judge, fatalities in hundreds, casualties in the couple thousands. In addition we can assume there was a major loss of equipment, supplies and rations. Accurate report will have to wait until I finish counting - the bodies that is. Regardless, this will be a major setback for them, though unfortunately I believe this will not be enough to halt their advance.’
Alicia was conflicted internally. On one hand she was quite chuffed with how well the embankments held up. On the other, she had just learned caused the deaths of hundreds if not thousands.
- ‘Destroying them outright was never the goal in the first place. Slowing them down is good enough. Prepare to move onto the next phase, alert the others.’
- ‘Of course.’
- ‘Echo, have you met up with Delta yet?’
- ‘Yes milady, I have arrived at fourth’s location. What is thy will?’
- ‘I need the two of you to slip through and stay behind the main army. They must be getting supplies from somewhere, find their baggage train, if you can disrupt their supply lines now they won’t make it far. Their materiel: food, weapons, equipment, tools, livestock, whatever it may be, slow them down, destroy them or claim them, I don’t care what you do with it.’
- ‘These supplies shall never reach the invaders’ hands…’
- ‘Remember, safety first, they mustn't know we were behind it. Get out as soon as you think you’re in danger and if there’s any risk of being exposed don’t even try.’
Few days later General Meginhard was being informed on the disastrous events by his lieutenants one after the other in his quarters. Although the losses were not severe, and almost no high-ranking personnel were directly affected, the effect was devastating. This campaign was a charade from the start, with the Empire on the verge of dissolving as a result of its hasty and treacherous beginning. The Emperor's aggressive conquests and military excursions were all that stopped it from collapsing. While this was sufficient enough to divert the populace's attention with wealth, glory, and slaves plundered from others, and to keep the disloyal elite at bay by handing over the new regions to be administered by them, it was merely a symbolic solution to an underlying problem that stayed unaddressed.
The Empire was formed from the unification of three kingdoms. Unfortunately due to how it was formed, the ruling party never earned the true allegiance of their counterparts. Despite its vast expanses of productive land and hardy people, the Empire was never granted the time it required to rest and heal owing to a rebellious elite seeking to further their own goals. The issue was that the aristocracy was not a unified entity to be pleased, but rather a slew of disparate households each with their own interests and allegiances to whichever party they belonged, along with its own wealth, power, and desire to outdo or otherwise overthrow the other - the Emperor included. On the inside, a silent civil war was ongoing. Due to the rapid expansions their economy was more or less supported solely by warfare. If they were to stop now, it would plunge the populace into general unrest, starvation or even an open revolt.
An opportunity that the aristocracy wouldn’t let go to seize power in a coup d’état. But with the presence of multiple parties it would devolve into a violent infighting between the houses. This invasion of Pyrinia was just one last desperate attempt of the Emperor trying to buy himself another day’s worth of time to rein things back under control. The other houses however had an interest in having this excursion fail for obvious reasons, sending in only a pitiable number of levies, and unwanted third and fourth sons to lead them. The bulk of the forces were knights directly in service to the emperor. Even now the useless lot thrown away by the nobles were bickering amongst themselves, trying to find blame in one another.
His instincts told him to investigate the cause of the river flood. Was it just an unfortunate timing or was there something greater at play here? Did the kingdom know of their plans? There was no clear answer and no time to spend investigating a dubious lead. Regardless if there was a reason or not they had to push on, even if it felt as if he was walking into a trap.
- “General, this is urgent!”
A runner entered the tent running in yanking open the flaps, not even bothering to ask for permission to enter. Such breach of standards would be swiftly and severely punished, but that seemed hardly a pressing affair right now.
- “The subhuman beasts have gone missing with our supplies!”
- “What!? Impossible!”
- ‘Wait, they’re not centaurs?’
Alicia was having a hard time understanding what was being described to her. Echo returned fairly quickly after she was told to assist with disrupting the supply chain. Interestingly, the Empire employed inhumans to do their biddings with the tried and true apparatus - the Bonds of Subjugation. A mass produced magical artifact able to instill obedience to its victims after being put on them.
- ‘So what are they then?’
- ‘We are unable to affirm. In their minds they call themselves grove tenders.’
‘Grove tender… that sounds familiar…’
- ‘But it sounds to me that you’re describing a Centaur?’
- ‘Unless we are gravely mistaken, plain chargers they are not.’
- ‘Okay fine, I’ll be there in a minute.’
It took Alicia some time to reach the place where they agreed to convene, she could largely skip places that she has been to thanks to trespass.
‘It’s strange, supposedly, teleportation magic does exist, but as far as I know, the energy cost increases exponentially with every little increase in distance so it is extremely limited in its range. I suppose that makes sense, if I’m understanding it correctly you’re basically taking mass from one point in space to another near instantaneously. But theoretically it could send you almost anywhere in the world, from one village to another or to another planet entirely.
The real head scratcher is that I think there was a theory or something that declared teleportation was not possible in science, except trespass functions eerily similar to Teleportation magic but it has a constant energy cost, whether it is stone’s throw away or… well… to the end of the world. It is almost always the same. So either trespass is such a broken spell that it casually violates the laws of thermodynamics or it works differently. It… opens a rift, a brief one that pulls me in one end and spits me out the other. So is it a portal? Are portals real? Can I bring someone with me I wonder…
Hm… between the entrance and exiting the rift created by trespass, I travel through the Void so briefly that I keep forgetting about that fact, could be because I hate spending even a single moment in that place… I guess my mind just blots it out. But if that’s the case… Space is not the same here as it is in the Void or the other way around. A single step in the Void could translate to miles and miles away here. Therefore, it could be interpreted as that Void is everywhere and is connected to every place… like some sort of ball that is wearing all of us. From here to… well anywhere, hell it might be able to really take me to the end of the universe, or beyond even. God, just trying to imagine what that actually means hurts my brain… You know what, it can stay a mystery. If it works, don’t fix it. I prefer to stay on my tiny island of sanity.’
Getting immersed in her own thoughts made the journey to conclude much sooner than she had anticipated. From far away she could see her familiars having stopped a herd of some sort of beastmen.
‘Yeah those are centaurs, what the hell were they talking about- wait are those… leopard spotting…?’
She saw quadrupedal ungulate creature with their top-half vaguely resembling an androgynous adolescent human with flecked patches of fur on their body.
- ““Welcome, milady.””
Both Delta and Echo greeted her in unison.
- “They’re much smaller closer up.”
The many of them had been bound in layers and layers of webbing to the point that they could barely even turn their heads to face her. Even with their tight constraints, Alicia could feel the entire net quivering ever so slightly without even laying a limb on the web structure. With fear quite apparent in their eyes, it didn't take much to deduce that these beastmen were terrified beyond description, their trembling creating the quivering she felt in the web. It was almost a centaur, except instead of a horse, it had the body of a doe and was much smaller - a cervitaur.
- “Please tell me you two didn’t randomly capture innocent creatures just because they happened to see you.”
- “Most certainly not, they were part of the convoy carrying supplies to the interlopers.”
Walking around to get a look at their hinds Alicia saw heavy saddlebags strapped to their bodies. The dull and heavy looking metal collar around their neck with faint magical energy told her more about their stories.
‘That’s strange, even with collars they should still have some escorts with them.’ She thought to herself, until she noticed the half cocooned soldiers hanging from the trees as though they were some fir tree decorations. ‘More like a gallows tree… well at least they’re not hung upside down. I think their limbs are being blood starved… it's an improvement from pooling blood into their brains; not by a lot but still.’
- “A military… animal corps? They don't appear to be willingly helping them with that lump of hunk on their necks. Or very talkative for that matter, incapable of human speech?”
- “Affirmative, it is our belief that these assets were forcibly drafted into service. We do not have much intel on their origins at the moment.”
- “I believe that if we could free them, we might find use for them in our cause.”
- “Hm… these collars don’t seem too hard to override, it's just that there’s so many of them, I don’t want to spend an afternoon freeing all of them this close to the enemy.”
- “Shall we dispose of them?”
A threatening aura emanated from Delta and the brood of cave creepers laying in idle in the nearby trees.
- “Stand down.-
And in just a second all of it vanished like seafoam bursting in air.
-Let me think… if only we could transport them somewhere else without drawing too much attention…”
>Notice. Gateway educement belonging to spell Trespass allows transportation of multiple entities for greater energy requirement.
Current anima nucleus available: 59
Acquisition cost: 3
Anima Nucleus remaining after action: 56
- “Great, we can use that.”
>Executing…
‘Let’s see what’s so different about this one…’
⟨ Trespass ⟩
Other worldly energy coalesced into a singular point a few inches before her. Boring into the very essence of the fabric of reality itself, the space invisibly shuddered and trembled before contorting and collapsing in itself, creating a pinprick hole that led to a place forgotten by time itself. Then, as more and more energy seeped into the gap, the hole swelled, engorging itself and widening. The rift large enough to easily accommodate Alicia, it was complete. An unending blackness in relentless motion. It invited its maker to step through.
‹ Gateway ›
But she did not step through, no. More and more energy it took, larger and larger it grew. Before long it was a gaping maw that led to a familiar place, a forest she was well acquainted with. Alicia felt a little disappointed in herself for being so excited for remembering the image of a particular tree. It was a reminder for just how long she had spent within the woods. When its creation was complete, there was a sudden change in the atmosphere, the winds changed their course, and there was a draft that seemingly goaded them into stepping through the gap. All of this happened almost instantly. To the onlookers that have not been touched by the Void it appeared as though space distorted into revealing a massive hole open before them.
- “Right, move them through, quickly now. We’ll calm them down later.”
- “At once.”
- “What shall we do with the humans?”
- “Can’t leave them here… take them along. You’ll figure out something won’t you?”
- “Naturally…”