Ruthless: Path of Conquest

Dave exhaled.

“All right,” he said. “You, you, and you.” He selected three more people. “That completes our scouting party.”

A few people groaned, but Dave raised his hand for silence. To their credit, they immediately clammed up.

“Unless something immediately happens to the scouting party, the rest of us will be joining them shortly.”

A little hoot of excitement went up, and Dave grimaced. Whatever. I guess it’s better for people to be excited than scared out of their minds.

“Amalia, you ready?” he asked.

She gave him a crisp salute, which he returned.

“Ready and eager, sir,” she said, offering him a slim smile.

He wanted to say, Don’t call me sir, I work for a living! but he supposed that he was actually an officer now.

“I still feel weird about that,” he mumbled.

“Don’t,” she said. “You’ve earned it, and everyone here knows. They believe in you, just like they believe in him.” She gestured at their Commander-in-Chief, sitting cross-legged by his apartment.

“Yeah, well I don’t have the power to turn the tide of a battle singlehandedly,” Dave said, his words coming out a little harsher than he intended them to. He softened his tone as he added, “So, please do be careful. If you lead my soldiers into a massacre—” His lips twitched in a perverse smile—“I’ll bring you back and kill you again myself.”

“Understood, Captain,” she said. “We will be the ones doing all the massacring.”

“Dismissed.”

Amalia strode over to her group. Dave caught her brief words to them.

“Well, we’re the ones who got picked, guys. We’re the ones who get first crack at the enemy. Hope you’re all fucking excited!”

There were hoots from the other members of the scouting party. Among them were those Dave trusted, like Paul Mann and Amalia; those who came recommended by James like Ramon and Felicia Rodriguez; and those who seemed to have something to prove, like John Carraway, who had apparently once been the landlord here and Olivar Cruz, who was a former criminal.

“Let’s go!” she shouted.

Everyone’s infected with your energy tonight, Dave thought, turning back to look at James’s sleeping form. I really hope this isn’t an insane miscalculation. Feels kind of crazy that we could be going into battle without you standing beside us.

But that would all depend on these next few minutes, and what the scouts experienced.

Dave followed them closely with his eyes as they walked into the forest, trying to maintain a tightly knit formation. Soon, though, he lost sight of them. The night felt unusually dark, and that darkness seemed even denser in the forest than it was elsewhere.

Perhaps it was just his mind playing tricks on him, but a part of Dave wanted the scouts to run back and tell him and the hundreds with him to abort the mission. He didn’t like the thought of leading this large group into such danger and uncertainty.

Time seemed to flow very slowly as he stared into the blank dimness. Time enough for Dave to play out his fears in his mind over and over. He began almost to assume defeat.

How can we stand up to a force whose leader could haunt hundreds of dreams at once?

He shook his head and tried to clear his mind, but the longer he stared into the darkness, the more insistently the negative thoughts asserted themselves.

What will become of this country, even if the King survives, if all his bravest citizens are slaughtered in that forest?

A hand pressed gently on Dave’s shoulder, and he emerged from his fog, turned his head semi-consciously around, and blinked twice.

“Oh, Alan, it’s you,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief.

“Hi David,” Alan said in a hushed voice. “Are you okay? You were looking a little spacey there.”

“Yeah,” Dave said. “Well, no, you’re right. I was kind of out of it.”

“It’s hard,” Alan said, “but there’s some sense in which it’s just like riding a bicycle, right?”

Dave swallowed. “This bicycle is a rough one,” he said.

“You’re okay,” Alan said. “You can do this. Look at all these people you have ready to follow you into that forest.” He gestured at the hundreds of volunteer soldiers just a few feet away from them. “Could all these people be wrong?”

“It’s not—I’m not—well. Hm.” Dave thought for a minute. Why am I feeling so pessimistic? Need to stop dragging my baggage into this. He took a deep breath. “You’re right,” he said with renewed confidence. “We’re going to be fine.”

“That’s right,” Alan said. “We are. And they are.” He tilted his head to indicate the other soldiers again. “Because they have you, and you have them. We’re all one unit now. Say, is that the signal?” He pointed, and Dave followed his finger.

A red flare lit up the sky. Someone had used fire magic.

“That’s the signal!” Dave shouted. “We advance.”

“Rahh!” The volunteers roared enthusiastically. “Fisher Kingdom! Victory! James! Rahhhh!”

They surged forward, an almost uncontrollable mass now, eager to score kills and win glory.

Dave turned his head to look behind him. It was an afterthought, but he didn’t know what James’s family members were up to. His mouth gaped. The three women were holding hands as they floated into the air.

Like something out of Peter Pan, he thought. He had never seen a human fly through the air before. It’s those wings that some of us got by defeating the bats…

Then he heard Alan clearing his throat.

“Oh, yes,” Dave said. “Let’s go. Before we get left behind.”

The two men rushed after the troops Dave was meant to be commanding. They moved swiftly, even as the all-encompassing darkness of the forest gave the feeling they were rushing forward into some immense predator’s maw.

Dave moved swiftly so that he could try and retake the lead position. Alan was slightly more relaxed; he split off from Dave, and Dave guessed that he was going to go and stand beside his wife, who had also volunteered to join them.

—

“I feel a little bad about letting them fight without us,” Mina said softly as she floated up into the air.

“You shouldn’t,” Zora said bluntly. “We have the harder job. They might have a higher casualty rate than we do—but if we don’t get this right, the mission is a failure. And we might all die.”

“You were very reassuring with James,” Alice observed. “I guess we don’t merit the same treatment?”

“I’m reassuring you now, in a way,” Zora said. “Your boyfriend is down there with the other volunteers, right?”

“Please leave him out of this,” Alice said, rolling her eyes.

“I’m just saying, he’ll probably be okay down there. We might all die, but at least Ben and James will probably live through this.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, Zora, but this isn’t really making me feel much better either,” Mina said. “Do you have a specific direction I should follow?”

“No, my dear, I don’t,” Zora said. “I have the book’s guidance, but where this Sister Strange’s Reliquary might be is a matter of educated guesswork. We haven’t built any kind of device to track it. We’re just using the best information we have available.”

“Which is?” Alice asked.

“You know, I explained all of this during dinner,” Zora said. “Was I just talking to myself?”

“There’s no better time to go over it again than now,” Mina said. “Anything you remind us of makes it more likely that we find it.”

“All right,” Zora said. “We’ll start from the beginning. A Wraith, no matter which kind, is a disembodied spirit. It needs to be anchored to the physical world somehow so that it does not pass on to the other side. That anchor has a tangible, physical form. Can anyone tell me why this is important?”

“It’s like the core of an Elemental,” Mina said quickly. “They all have it, and if you destroy it, you kill them.”

“Exactly. You win! The Reliquary will usually radiate some amount of magical energy, unless the Wraith is exceptionally weak. In the event that the Wraith’s ethereal body is damaged or destroyed, she returns to the Reliquary to recover—much like the Phylactery that a Lich possesses.”

“Okay, and what about the how-to-find-it part?” Alice asked.

Zora looked daggers at her for a moment, exhaled, then continued, “The how-to-find-it could start with the magical energy signature. If it’s out in the open, we should be able to see it. Mana has a visible appearance, and since it gives off light, I would think it would be extremely visible in this dense darkness. But then there’s the typical behavior of the Wraith to consider. They usually want to find some structure to haunt. Broadly, the forest is haunted by the Wraith and her minions, but normally they’d find some sort of secluded place to make their inner home. They’re creatures of darkness. They like the dark. Something that allows for access to the outside world, so their prey can get closer to them. Think cave, house, circus tent, a structure of some sort.”

“So we’re looking for a dark, hidden place in a dark forest,” Alice summarized.

“Well, at least we have a bird’s eye view,” Mina said.

The three women flew in silence for some time, each keeping their eyes peeled for some visual indicator that they were near the part of the forest where Sister Strange had stored her Reliquary.

At a certain point, Mina could hear the distant sounds of fighting, but she tried to ignore it. Their mission was more important than whatever was happening to James’s troops at the moment. Ultimately, if they defeated Strange, her minions would be weakened, and the conflict would end in the Fisher Kingdom’s victory.

So where is it? Mina thought. If I were an evil spirit, where would I hide my weakness? It’s a forest…

“Guys, I think I see something!” Alice exclaimed.

She pointed, and Mina looked and saw a large, dark shape below them. The texture of this dark mass was different from the rest of the forest. It was vaguely reddish. Not like the brown scrub that covered the ground. It seemed to be a tiled roof.

“Let’s drop down,” Mina said. She steered them toward the building and began the trio’s slow descent.

—

Dave caught up with the head of the Fisher Kingdom’s force at just the moment they reached the scouts—or what was left of them.

The scouts. God, the scouts. I sent them here…

Magical light from levitating fireballs illuminated a dozen faces frozen in horrific expressions. Mouths open, fixed in images of terror. Eyes that stared forward, looking up into the vast emptiness of the night sky but seeing nothing. Sickening rictus grins.

Every scout’s body was intact, but each one’s face was contorted in a unique and disturbing way. It almost felt like they had died of fright.

“What the fuck happened here?” Sam Masterson’s voice rang through the air beside Dave’s head.

“There weren’t enough people,” Dave said. “They were overrun.”

“But by what?” asked another, female voice.

“Oh, it’s you, Mitzi,” Dave said. They had briefly interacted as a part of James’s Council, but Dave had spent more time speaking with Alan.

“I’m still me, yes,” Mitzi said drily. “What do you think did this?”

She gestured at the pale, stiff bodies lying on the ground, looking like they had been drained of something even more essential than blood. Some unnameable essence.

Their souls? No, it couldn’t be their souls. That thing James uses for a weapon eats souls, and whenever it does, the bodies full-on disintegrate. Dave shivered at the thought of what had befallen the men and women laid out on the ground.

No, it’s not just my thoughts that are making me shiver, he realized as he saw his breath coming out in visible clouds. It’s suddenly strangely chilly here!

“Everyone, be prepared to fight!” Dave said. “There’s a presence somewhere nearby.”

“I wonder why they even signaled us,” Sam said. “Like, when did they have time?”

Then Dave noticed it. The scouts’ chests—they were still slowly rising and falling.

“Christ,” he muttered to himself. “These people are still alive. But they look so wrong…” Raising his voice, he called, “Need a Healer up here now. Preferably one who knows the Purification Skill. Our scouts aren’t dead, they’re just—”

One of the bodies jerked, and Dave found himself gaping as he stared into Amalia’s dead eyes.

“I’m sorry, Dave,” said Amalia’s lips in a voice that was not her own. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.”

“Oh. Oh, God.” Dave found himself wanting to vomit. The cold, dead eyes. The piercing voice. The obviously unnatural thing puppeteering her body, twisting her lips into a horrid mockery of a smile. It was such a horrifying sight that words left him, and it was all he could do to keep from throwing himself to the ground and screaming.

There was a sound of necks and knuckles and knees and ankles cracking, of joints that had grown stiff suddenly coming back into use again.

Then all of the scouts they had thought were dead began rising to their feet.