Ruthless: Path of Conquest

Claudius and the rest of Cyrus’s followers marched from the outskirts of the Fisher Kingdom, following behind the Fisher King himself and his army of beasts.

The King floated above all, wearing a cape that moved with the breeze, almost like a pair of wings, and looked as if it was made of some organic material.

“Is he really human?” Claudius’s father murmured.

“Why would you believe he was anything else?” asked Julia, raising an eyebrow. “He sure looks ha—human…”

Coriolanus and Claudius exchanged a brief look. Their sister’s judgment on what sort of person this Fisher King was, or even his humanity, was suspect at best. The man was taller than any human either of them had ever seen, including those who had completed Race Evolution, and he appeared to have the physique of a Greek god.

“Stop drooling, sis,” Coriolanus said bluntly.

“I’m pretty sure he’s married,” Claudius added.

“I’m not—”

“Hush, all of you!” Tiberius barked. The older man pointed at the tree line. “Look at the welcoming party.”

Lined up where the trees met the cleared land, a pack of wolves stood, observing the humans with patient vigilance.

“Are those the same wolves—” Claudius began.

“That you tried to steal food from earlier?” asked Julia. “Yep. Looks like it. I wonder if they’re hungry.”

As she spoke, one of the wolves opened its mouth wide as if trying to show off how large and sharp its teeth were.

Then several of the beasts around the first one followed suit.

“Jesus,” Coriolanus said. “Are you guys ready if this comes to a fight?”

A fight? Claudius thought. I didn’t exactly do well with that one wolf before. Let alone a whole pack…

“Don’t blaspheme.” A mild voice from just behind them made all the Galts turn their heads. It was Christopher Smith, Cyrus’s right hand man. “And relax. Those wolves are just yawning. If they were trying to intimidate you, they would pull back their lips to show their teeth, not open wide so you could count their tonsils. Their ears would stand on end. You can’t mistake an aggressive wolf for anything else.”

Tiberius Galt chuckled quietly. The rest of the family relaxed.

If Christopher was confident the wolves were not aggressive, they were all prepared to take his word for it. Before the System, he had worked for the National Parks Service out in Colorado. He had ended up stranded in Orlando after the apocalypse struck.

“On permanent vacation,” as he had put it sardonically before.

They all turned their attention forward, to the buildings of the Fisher Kingdom. Cyrus’s followers were close enough to the center now that they could see not just the buildings, but the humans who were outside already despite how early it was.

The ground was abuzz with activity, and Claudius’s eyes widened as he saw exactly what the figures coming into view were doing.

“They’re building housing,” Tiberius said, his voice conveying a subtle awe.

“What is this, the first new construction we’ve seen since the System hit?” Coriolanus asked. He sounded excited.

Claudius nodded wordlessly.

“After what happened to Orlando, I thought it might be a while before we saw some semblance of pre-System civilization again,” Julia said. “But I knew it would happen. This is just a lot sooner than I expected.”

Claudius heard a rustle of cloth above them, and he saw that the Fisher King had turned his head to look down at the Galts.

Was he listening to our conversation? Claudius wondered. No, he’s too far away for that. Right?

Then he floated down to hover beside the Galts as they walked forward.

“I couldn’t help but hear you guys mention Orlando,” he said. “What happened there? A few folks have been talking about going.”

Tiberius was the first to speak.

“I wouldn’t bother, Your Majesty,” he said. “I know it’s only about twenty-odd miles from here, but it would be dangerous to try a visit without an army. We and our friends here—” He gestured at the other members of Cyrus’s company—“we, um, liberated much of what was valuable there anyway. Most of the rest, looters burned.”

“Iron, steel, and copper don’t really burn, though, do they?” The Fisher King almost seemed to be talking to himself. “All the materials to set up a modern industrial society are probably gathered in one place. Plus fertilizer, varieties of seeds we don’t already have…”

Claudius wanted to speak, but he felt overawed by the presence of the Ruler. There was a weight to each word from his mouth. His faintly glowing golden eyes were intimidating in their own right, but mostly, he simply gave off the feeling of someone who should not be interrupted—even when he was just talking to himself.

“As we were leaving, monsters were taking hold of the city,” Tiberius said, apparently ignoring or resisting the quality of the King’s presence that had struck Claudius dumb. “If you’re determined to attempt some sort of return to order—” His voice betrayed a growing enthusiasm for the idea—“then you really will need to go in force. I can’t say whether it would be a worthwhile investment for you.”

“Thank you, um—” The Fisher King clearly must have used Identify. “Tiberius. I appreciate the information, and I will bear it in mind. The first thing I have to worry about is the territory I have, of course, but I have a certain sentimental attachment to Orlando.”

Claudius saw his father smile. “The feeling is mutual,” Tiberius said.

Then the Fisher King floated back up into the air and flew ahead of them. It felt as if all of the air had been sucked out of the area around them when the King descended, and now it rushed back in to fill the vacuum that he had left.

“How were you able to talk to him?” asked Coriolanus.

“Okay, it wasn’t just me,” Julia muttered.

They had all felt the strange, weighty power of the Fisher King in the air around him.

“He is quite something,” said Christopher Smith grudgingly. Claudius turned and saw that Christopher had been standing right behind them, silently, for that interaction.

“I think my Class Evolution gave me an advantage dealing with him,” Tiberius said simply. He turned forward and looked at the buildings ahead of them again.

Claudius didn’t know much about the Aura Warrior Class that Tiberius had chosen. Only that his father was the most disciplined person he knew, and Tiberius had claimed the Class was similar to being a monk in a role playing game.

“Remarkable,” Tiberius murmured.

Claudius turned to look where he was looking, and he saw the construction crew they had seen was putting the roof on the new building.

“I think that’s meant to be our housing,” Christopher said quietly.

He proved correct.

As Cyrus’s followers entered the space directly adjacent to the building, the construction crew came out and excitedly introduced themselves.

“Steve Luck, Construction Commission boss.” A large, silver-haired man with piercing gray eyes stepped forward and shook hands vigorously with each of the vanguard of Cyrus’s company.

He looks as if he hadn’t gotten much sleep, but he still has so much energy, Claudius thought. There were bags under Luck’s eyes, but he still beamed with pride and exuded confidence and a genuine pleasure at meeting new people.

The next ten minutes were occupied in a brief tour of the property. It was a large, square building that reminded Claudius of a small hotel. There were eight floors, twenty rooms on each floor, two stairways, and roof access.

“We didn’t know you would be here until a little while ago, so there’s no furniture yet,” Luck said apologetically. “We’ll have people in the building today to start getting toilets set up. I know the lack of them will make things rather uncomfortable to start…”

“How did they do this in just the time since we showed up?” Coriolanus muttered from the middle of the tour group.

“They were using earth magic when we walked up,” Tiberius replied. “That’s not all, though. I could see something strange about the earth they were manipulating.”

“Strange good, or strange bad?” asked Julia.

“Strange like the Fisher King’s aura was imbued into the soil,” he said slowly. “Making it easier for his subjects to work the earth than it naturally would be. He has such an overwhelming aura around him, I wonder if he even knows he’s doing that. It could just be a natural overflow or something. Like a river flooding its banks. It might be why all the Construction Commission members we’ve seen look a little more energetic than normal, although they all have bags under their eyes.”

“So the Fisher King’s aura is like a health treatment for his subjects?” Coriolanus asked, fascinated.

“Could be,” Tiberius said, shrugging. “We need to see more.”

“What would it do to an enemy?” Claudius murmured, almost talking to himself.

After the tour was completed, the Galts and the others chose rooms. Almost everyone wanted to be near the ground floor, since there were no elevators, and there were plenty of rooms, far more than their group needed, considering the families who would want to room together.

Claudius and his family ultimately chose to take rooms on the fourth floor, to allow the families with children and the older members of the group to have all the space on the lower floors.

Claudius and Coriolanus would share one room, Tiberius would take the room across the hall, and Julia occupied the room next to his.

With the selection complete, Claudius and Coriolanus took their sleeping bags, looted from Orlando, out of their Small Bags of Deceptive Dimensions, but they did not sleep.

They sat down on the bags for a few minutes, each sitting silently with his thoughts.

Then they turned and looked at each other.

“You’re not going to sleep?” Coriolanus asked.

“I feel pretty wired,” Claudius said. “I was tired before we got here, but it’s weird to just show up in a new place and not see anything. It’s also a little strange to go to sleep right when the sun is out. The last week has gotten me used to rising with the sun and going to sleep when it sets. This feels unnatural. It’s not like we won’t have time to sleep later.”

“Yeah, I agree,” Coriolanus replied. “Honestly, I mostly want to see this fucking place.” He sounded even more amped up than Claudius felt.

The two got up and knocked on their father’s door, and when he opened it, they saw that Julia was there with him.

“So, you two couldn’t sleep either?” she said.

After a few minutes of discussion, the four descended the stairs and walked out into the unknown territory of the Fisher Kingdom.

They saw the buildings of the apartment complex the Fisher King and his subordinates had erected for his permanent residents, which looked better and more solid than their own residence, and were built in a horseshoe shape. They saw a large building that looked as if it was made to fit a crowd of a few hundred.

But they skirted around those buildings.

The Galts quietly agreed that they would not feel comfortable intruding into the population’s residential space until they knew some people there.

And there appeared to be a great deal more to explore.

Beyond the apartment buildings, there was another building, much smaller—more like a shed—that was covered in some form of runes. They seemed to shimmer ominously in the sunlight. Claudius got a bad feeling from them, and he noticed that although his father did not say anything, Tiberius wrinkled his nose at the sight of it.

They gave that space a wide berth, and they found themselves in a massive, plowed field where some crops were just beginning to sprout. It was too early to even tell what the plants were.

Claudius strained his eyes, and he realized the field went on as far as the eye could see in two directions, cut off in a third by some distant trees.

“The Fisher Kingdom is mostly a farm,” Julia said, smiling.

“No ordinary farm, either,” Tiberius muttered.

Claudius was about to ask what he meant, when he was distracted by the sight of the farmers coming out to work the soil.

There were dozens of humans dressed in work clothes, but the sight of them would not have disrupted his train of thought. Rather, he was surprised to find an almost equally great number of green-skinned shorter humanoids working with the human farmers.

“Goblins,” Coriolanus said. “That’s what Identify says they are. I guess they weren’t born as humans, either. But they’re helping farm the Fisher Kingdom’s territory. I didn’t think we’d ever see monsters working alongside humans in peace. I just kind of thought he used his power to compel those other creatures to follow him.”

As the family watched, though, the Goblins interacted with the humans like they were neighbors. They all pitched in to weed, plow more of the field, and plant more seeds. There appeared to Claudius’s eyes to be some creatures underground helping to manipulate the soil, too. He never saw them directly, but occasionally, he would see something move, or a weed get pulled underground rather than uprooted, when there were no humans or Goblins near it.

“This is a little weird,” Julia said finally, “but I think I could get used to it.”

“I just don’t get how it’s possible,” Claudius said. The memory of the monsters from their Orientation was still fresh from him. He vividly remembered how the dinosaurs had almost eaten him. It was hard to accept that he had just been unlucky, and some monsters were apparently benevolent.

“I think this is the man you were hoping would appear, son,” Tiberius said, looking at Coriolanus.

“What, you mean—” Claudius began.

“You think he has the power to restore order,” Coriolanus said, his tone thoughtful.

“Even the farming is easier here than it would be anywhere else,” Tiberius replied. “The Fisher King’s aura is helping them. I can sense it. The soil is probably lighter in their hands and tools than it would be without his energy infusing it. Imagine the difference between working this soil every day and working unaltered soil.”

“What about Cyrus?” Julia said, furrowing her brow.

“What about Cyrus?” Coriolanus repeated. “He’ll have to fall in line, won’t he? All the time he was leading us, he was insisting that he didn’t want to be a permanent leader—that he was just taking us to a promised land. Well, maybe we’re here.” He looked to his father for support, but Tiberius just looked apprehensively off into the distance.

“He was so convinced we needed to wipe out all the monsters in the world to be safe,” Julia said.

“Maybe it’s all been just a misunderstanding,” Claudius said. But the thought mixed uneasily with his faith.

Hadn’t Cyrus performed minor miracles? Wasn’t he blessed by an angel? Perhaps consistently locating food and leading them in the right direction were not as awe-inspiring as some possible miracles Cyrus might have performed, but they were consistent with Claudius’s recollections of the Bible.

“Misunderstanding or not, he’ll have to get over it,” Coriolanus said, his mouth hardening. Claudius thought that he was the least attached to Cyrus of the four of them. Coriolanus was also, not coincidentally, the least religious. “We’re in the land of the Fisher King now. We’ll have to do as the fisher-people do!”

“He and the Fisher King didn’t exactly seem to be making fast friends out there when they went off to talk by themselves,” Claudius observed.

“We’d better hope the two of them can get along,” Tiberius said. “Historically, it never pays for a religious leader to get into a di—” He looked at his daughter as if just remembering she was there—“er, a power measuring contest with a secular king. And if they do clash, we don’t want to be in the middle of it.”

But that seemed to Claudius exactly where they would inevitably be, if the Fisher King and their Prophet had a falling out.