Twenty
 
Mud squished beneath his battered boots as Kon tried to quietly walk through the trees. The terrain changed slowly as they moved closer to the other cultivators. The ground grew firmer with every step, the trees more sparse, and a series of hills rose up seemingly from nowhere.
“How close?” Kon whispered to Alice who glided amongst the trees as quietly as a ghost. She shot him a look but shook her head slowly and shrugged her one arm. Kon tried to repress the anxiety he felt as they kept moving further up the sides of the hills. Cover became scarce as the gentle slopes grew steeper and steeper. Boulders littered the area and he darted from one to the next while Alice just walked calmly forward.
“Here,” she sighed, her voice not rising or falling or even pitched as a whisper. It was as soft as a spring breeze and Kon hardly heard her as he looked to where she was pointing.
They had hardly crested a hill when he began to smell the charred meat and burnt clothes. Acrid smoke clung low into the shallow valleys formed by the hills and he saw beasts stretched out and across the base of the hills. Chitinous bodies were nothing more than charcoal, figures so twisted that it was impossible to tell what they had originally been.
“Quiet. See those posts?” Alice used her chin to nod at a handful of carefully concealed metal posts that rose up in the shadows of the hills. They formed a ring around the midpoint of the hill, spaced a hundred meters apart from each other. A few of the posts were missing, a massive gap nearly three hundred meters wide. It was where the majority of the rift beast corpses were piled up at.
“It’s called an array. Half technology, half rift energy magic. Like a sonic fence but powered by beast cores. Cultivator sects use them, trust them more than pure tech. Looks like somebody fucked them over,” Alice said in the same flat, hushed voice.
“How long ago?” Kon tried to match her whisper-like voice and failed, his voice echoing over the stones.
“Don’t try to whisper, just speak softly. Not more than a day ago. Stay behind me,” Alice said. She started down the slope and Kon followed after. The ground was slick and twice he fell, covering himself in mud as they made it to the base of the next hill and where the monsters lay.
They were long and insectile with a multitude of legs and wide pincers that looked strong even in death. Kon carefully pushed a corpse over with his foot, straining for a moment with the overly heavy body. Its body was cracked open in the middle where a core should be.
“Alice, these have been harvested,” Kon warned her. She nodded and continued up the hill without a word. Kon continued up as anxiety continued to grow as they reached the precipice. Alice slowed down and fell to her stomach and wormed her way to the top of the hill. Kon followed her lead and crawled to the top.
A pagoda sat atop of the tallest hill, bracketed by a series of other smaller hills. Small square forts were on the hills, spread out over several kilometers, and thousands of bodies lay in twisted embraces. Kon’s breath caught as he stared at the ruin before him.
The seven story pagoda had been broken apart, balconies ripped free, windows shattered, the roof shattered and fallen in two pieces. Fires flickered softly in the depths, too intense for yesterday’s rain to have extinguished them. Thousands of the insectile monsters were heaped about in small mountains of black carapace.
There were other monsters too. Feathered bipedal creatures with wide tails, leathery birds with monstrous bat like wings that lay stretched across buildings, a single monstrous bulb headed rock creature lay sprawled across the wall of a fort. The stench rose up and smothered him and he turned to hold back the bile that threatened to overcome him.
“Looks like a mass wave of D-Grade monsters. That rock one looks to be an upper D-Grade. They won this battle though. There’s no monsters by the pagoda,” Alice said and Kon swallowed the acid in his throat to see what she had noticed. All around the grounds of the pagoda were bodies, but none of them were monsters.
“Come on, stay close to me,” Alice said. She got up to her feet, but stayed low to the ground, and started down the hill. Kon slithered after her for a second before she started to outpace him, then hopped to his feet and ran after her in a crouch. Being on the exposed hill felt dangerous, as if a thousand eyes were tracking him, but he saw nothing living.
Most of the monsters looked like they had been hit with some type of laser or plasma weaponry. Massive burns all across their bodies, flesh melted away into puddles, earth scorched into glass around them. Others had been hit with kinetic weapons, blown apart and shattered like china. The closer they got to the forts the more he saw more primitive wounds.
Broken swords, spears, arrows, and axes lay amongst the dead defenders. Their owners were humanesque. They had two arms, two legs, and a head. There was a line of thick ridges on their skulls and their skin was a ruby crimson with black tattooing in different shapes over their exposed bodies. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Teno. They’re fairly infamous in our circles. Do a lot of merc work and act as grunts. Don’t remember them having any powerful sects though,” Alice told him. They did look like mercenaries. Big and broad with lots of muscles packed on them, they had good equipment and looked barbaric enough.
“See the other arrays?” Alice pointed this time to another series of metal poles, these ones twisted and destroyed by what looked like explosives. Carbon scoring and a crater surrounded each of the closest poles.
“Think someone got the jump on these guys. Took out the outer arrays and then hit the inner ones with a missile barrage. Lured in a few rifts worth of monsters and then just mopped up afterwards,” Alice was clinical with her deduction as she started to jog up the hill towards the pagoda.
Kon was forced to sprint to keep up with her. The steep hill was slick from rain and blood and he had to fight to keep from falling down. His spear was used as a walking stick, stabbing into the ground butt first to help him keep his balance as they climbed higher and higher.
Around the edge of the pagoda the Teno had fought the hardest. They formed a barricade with their own flesh, a statement of their courage and dedication as not a single monster had passed by them. Intermixed with them were a handful of black armored forms that he remembered vividly.
“Looks like they did follow us down,” Alice said with a bloodthirsty grin. She stepped by them and saw what looked to be the leader of the Teno. He had been a massive specimen, nearly seven and a half feet tall. At his feet were three of the black armored assassins and a wolfman cultivator. This one had used a long, straight sword that had been snapped at the hilt inside of the Teno commander’s chest.
“Lupine. Must be a full pack of the bastards. Stay close,” Alice kicked over the dead wolfman and continued into the pagoda. The front doors had been made of what looked like paper and wood and had been broken open as if a wrecking ball had hit it.
Alice ducked her head into the doorway and Kon followed right after. Inside was warmer, the smoke of a dozen small fires disappearing as they trickled up into the upper layers of the pagoda.
“That makes more sense. Ulmna.” She nudged the corpse at her feet with her boot. Kon got a good look of the dead warrior and thought he recognized them from his schooling. Shorter and more lithe than the Teno, the warrior had faint blue pigmentation with a series of opal colored markings across his skin like a pattern. His wide open emerald eyes had diamond shaped pupils while his long hair was the color of blood.
“They own a few systems and have several wealthy sects inside of their collective. We’re close to their territory, this could be a training ground for one of the sects,” Alice explained.
Dozens of Ulmna lay dead with scores of the black suited assassins laying in piles. Laser weaponry had met steel swords and the lasers had lost. A pair of dead Lupine were propped against a door with an old woman’s corpse between them. The Ulmna they had killed was tiny, ragged wisps of hair on her head, and the cane sword she had used was nothing but splinters of blue steel. Her chest had been split open, her robes pulled to the side and Kon got a good look at her internal organs.
“Shit. They harvested her core,” Alice turned her head and spat on the ground.
“You can do that?” Kon whispered, appalled by the butchery around him. It was a charnel house, the heady stench of blood overwhelmed his nose and he had to breath through his mouth to blunt the edge of it.
“Not to Knights. Our cultivation is strange compared to them. We use rift energy to power internal runes, we don’t have true cores like a cultivator or a beast does.”
“Halt!” a voice rasped and both of them spun to see another elder come limping out of the depths of the pagoda. The shadows and non filtered smoke had hidden them, but as they limped out Kon had to swallow hard at the shape the elder was in. There were hints of yellow through the wet red blood, one of his arms was missing at the elbow and his face was half caved in an eye and cheekbone nothing more than gristly red bone.
The sword he held was rock steady and he stepped slowly and deliberately as he looked at them with his one remaining emerald eye. Something stirred behind the elder, but Kon couldn’t make it out. He stepped behind Alice and let her stand between him and the dying cultivator.
“Vultures picking at our bones already,” the old man rasped. The implant behind Kon’s ear translated whatever language he was speaking with ease.
“Relax old timer, we just came to investigate the smell,” Alice said. Her knuckles were white around the hilt of her axe.
“You have one of their weapons. The dogs came to rip out our hamstrings while our attention was turned. Do you plan to eat their scraps?” Kon stared at the old man and wondered if all cultivators spoke like this.
“Just looking for survivors. You don’t look like you have long though,” Alice said.
The old man stared at her for a second before he spit blood as he coughed. The few hairs on his head swayed as he shook his head and chuckled darkly.
“I may not have long, but I can finish a pup like you with ease.” His blade glittered suddenly, a hum filled the air and pressure built up and around Kon that made him struggle to breath. Incandescent energy swirled around the old man, filling the room and crushing it all at the same time. Alice’s violet aura sprang up, encompassing both of them, and she gritted her teeth as she stared down the dying cultivator.
“Grandfather, please. They mean no harm,” a voice called out from the shadows and then a slender hand was grasping the old man’s healthy shoulder. He stared them down for a moment before his power winked away, he swayed but caught himself as he glared at them.
“Diur, it’s not your place,” he started but the girl that came out from behind him shushed him before wedging her shoulder under his arm to support him. She looked similar to the other Ulmna, light blue skin with opal marking that criss crossed her skin in an erratic pattern of octagons. Her red hair was so dark it bordered on black and she kept it cut short so it hardly touched her shoulders. She was healthy and whole with her own sword clutched in one hand as she watched them cautiously.
“Please. You mean us no harm, correct?” Diur asked. Exhaustion threatened to break her, dark rings under her eyes and her shoulders were slumped as she looked at them with a plea evident, ready to tumble from her lips at any moment.
“Alice,” Kon whispered, wanting for her to agree that they meant no harm.
“I am Alice Roose, a Knight of Titan’s Resolve and I have no quarrel with you as long as you have no quarrel with me.” She lowered her axe and her aura faded away. The old man coughed a wad of blood up and the blade fell out of his hands as he lost consciousness.