Tim's POV
A messenger arrived on a Tuesday with the particular self-importance of someone who had been given a significant errand. The horse he was on looked expensive, the kind of animal that communicated the sender's resources, but who...?
He entered my office, blew the horn he was carrying, bowed with the formal depth that official required, and presented the letter to me.
The seal was the Dragon Kingdom's. I recognised it from the lore I carried the Brightness Dragon Lord's lineage, the nation built on that legacy, currently ruled by his great-granddaughter in a form a little girl, that was misleading her actual age.
I read the letter.
An invitation.
The queen's personal request for my presence.
I looked at my schedule for the week, which was mostly study and administrative work. Nothing that couldn't be deferred. The Dragon Kingdom was a week's travel I think.
The Dragon Kingdom's situation was something I had been thinking about periodically since I knew the lore of the place.
The Beastman Country's invasion was not a problem that resolved itself, it required either military defeat of the dragon kingdom or negotiated solution, and the second hand testimonies I had gotten from various sources over the years suggested that the Beastman Country's relationship with negotiation was approximately eating any human they send.
I had time. I had nothing better to do today.
I packed and left.
---
Three days later....
I saw the Dragon Kingdom's capital city arrived after a few days of travel, and the thing that struck me first was the people.
Not the architecture, which was fine for a human nation with genuine historical depth and a dragon lord's founding legacy, and the walls, which were partly broken.
But the people.
They had the specific quality of a population that had been carrying something heavy for too long. The depression of it was visible in how they moved, the chronic weight of a situation that had been getting worse for years without resolution. Shops open but not busy. Streets populated but not animated. Children present but quieter than children in cities I have seen.
E-Rantel had its miseries. Every city in this world had its miseries. But there was a specific texture to what I was seeing in this capital that was different, the texture of a people who had been told that help was coming, but never came, so they had stopped fully believing it.
The castle guards checked the letter and let me through without discussion. The queen's seal was apparently sufficient, which confirmed that whatever the Dragon Kingdom's internal situation was, its bureaucratic efficiency was some what functioning.
The throne room was arranged for receiving, which meant the queen was prepared for the meeting's tone to be formal.
Draudillon Oriculus sat on her throne in the form I had expected, as a young girl appearance, the deliberate choice of a presentation that had been calculated to produce a specific effect in people, to lower they're guard or something, She greeted me with the cuteness that the form invited.
I raised my hand.
"You can drop that," I said. "I know what you are. I can smell the alcohol coming off you."
A tired deadpan face soon replaced the performance cutey face, the real expression of someone who had been caught mid-routine and had decided to abandon it.
She was a woman of genuine intelligence who had been managing a difficult situation for years with the limited tools available to her.
She asked what it would cost to hire me against the Beastman Country.
I thought about it.
The honest answer was that I didn't need coins. My current resources were more than sufficient for my actual needs, and had been for years.
I told her I didn't want her coins, I wanted something else....
The death glare she gave me came quickly, I raised my hand again and told her I didn't want her either, which she appeared to find simultaneously insulting and slightly relieving.
I explained what I wanted.
A simple letter to the Beastman Country, If the Beastman Country received the letter and changed their behaviour, and stop seeing humans as food, and If they received the letter and didn't change their behaviour, then I had a legitimate basis for intervention that wasn't simply hired military action, as I see it as Monster Clearing Mission.
She gave me the look of someone assessing whether I was an idealist or an idiot.
I gave the look no attention and asked about transit time.
She told me three days there and back, One week total including response time.
I told her I would wait.
---
The week in the Dragon Kingdom's capital was...
I spent time in any new location, observing, walking, listening to the ambient information that cities produced about themselves, the military situation was visible in ways that the civilian population's depression had already suggested.
The Theocracy had stopped sending aid a few years prior, which I think that came form me attacking them, and these poeple saw their Aid withdrawn without explanation, the alliance that had been providing military support simply ceasing.
I feel like this was my fault.
---
The week passed.
The Beastman Country's response arrived on the sixth day.
I read it.
They declined to change their behaviour, or their way of live they said, which was the expected outcome but was still useful information, it confirmed I could kill them all guilt-free.
I got the map from Draudillon. Four cities taken. The main army's approximate position..
I made three clones, assigned one to each of the three secondary cities, and went to the largest myself.
---
Two hours later...
The battle outside the first city was the kind of engagement that the difference between hero rank and normal human soldiers produced at its most visible, the human army being pushed back by a Beastman force that was physically larger and had been doing this long enough to have tactical confidence.
As I jumped and landed in the middle of it.
As I simply appeared in the space between the armies where neither side's attention was fully focused on me, and I started cutting every Beastman I could.
The Beastmen died in mass as I made a show of it, the human army watched paralysised of what they were seeing.
The Beastmen started retreating to the city gates, leaving some of their companions outside, was the correct tactical decision for them and the decision I had expected. I let the gate close, As I rasied my sword and....
I kicked the gate down.
The gates were solid construction, the gates fell inward onto the Beastmen behind them, which covered the street in blood.
The human army cheered me on as we entered the city.
I moved through the city with the methodical efficiency, the Beastmen falling dead if I got near them, I think the survivers are going to have PtSD after this.
The general's room was the last room. He was a goat-man variant of the Beastman species, with the specific build of someone who had reached his position through genuine physical capability and had held it through the combination of that capability and tactical intelligence.
He looked at me covered in blood and pissed himself.
---
a few mins later....
He told me what I wanted to know about where the main army's real position is. He showed me his map with the specific of set army.
I thanked him as I took his head off, before he could process my thanks.
---
The main army was thirty thousand strong.
I found them on the plains between the four taken cities and the Beastman Country's border, moving at the pace of a force that had not yet received word of what had happened at the city.
I ran toward them.
The dust wave I generated at full speed across open grassland was apparently visible at significant distance, which I had not specifically considered but which produced a useful effect, the army had time to observe something coming before it arrived, which meant they had time to begin the specific psychological process of trying to categorise what they were seeing.
I stopped a few metres from the army's front line.
Thirty thousand Beastmen strong army looked at me.
As I smiled.
The dust storm that had been following me at my running speed arrived and covered the army.
I went to work in the dust.
---
The Commander of the Beastman Country's POV [level 36]
My scout told me about the dust wave first, and I looked ahead and saw it, a massive wall of displaced earth, trailing behind a single running figure. A single human figure, making that kind of terrain disruption just by how fast he was moving.
I told the army to prepare for the strong human.
The veterans laughed at me, as the idiots think that there is no such thing as a strong human.
The human stopped in front of us and smiled. The dust arrived. In the dust I could hear my men dying, the sounds of screams and terror, and when the dust settled twenty-five percent of my army was on the ground and the human was standing in the middle of us looking entirely unbothered.
I ordered a retreat, but most didn't listen.
He started killing us faster.
Panic is a disease in armies. It spreads from one soldier to the next with the speed of fire in dry grass, and once it reaches critical density the army stops being an army and becomes a crowd of frightened individuals all making individual calculations about survival. My soldiers stopped following orders. They ran in the direction that was away from the thing killing them, which was the direction I was trying to run as well, and the trampling began at the points of highest density, killing more of my men.
He did not pursue at full speed. This was the thing I could not understand, he was faster than us, way faster, fast enough that if he had simply run through us at maximum speed the engagement would have ended in minutes. Instead he maintained a specific distance behind us, close enough that anyone who slowed too much died, far enough that the main body could maintain its panicked cohesion.
He was herding us.
The understanding arrived and I could do nothing with it. He was moving us in the direction he wanted us to go, culling the stragglers, keeping the main body moving, and the direction he was moving us in was toward the Beastman Country's capital.
---
A whole day later....
A day of this. We went from thirty thousand to twenty-four thousand. Then to eighteen thousand. He was methodical about the culling, his criteria apparently being anyone who separated from the main group, and the main group kept running because stopping was worse.
We soon reached the capital as we went inside. We locked the gate behind us.
He stood outside.
We shot arrows at him, they broke against something invisible around him. We poured boiling oil. It landed and ran off him and we lit it and he stood in the fire and burned and was fine as he stood there.
He did not move for hours, as he kept his unblinking eyes at us.
The fear that produced in my men was its own kind of defeat.
Where the hell did this Freak come form.
---
Tim's POV
The stillness was deliberate.
I had thought about what a good horror entity did, and the central characteristic was unpredictability combined with patience, the sense of something that was not operating on normally scraied people.
Standing still while burning conveyed this more effectively than anything active I could have done.
The Beastmen on the walls watched me for hours while the fire burned down around me and I stood in the cooling residue of it without injury and without expression and without movement.
When the sun began to lower I walked to the gate.
Gripped it. Ripped it out, the whole gate assembly, hinges and all, the structural components of the wall that it had been mounted in coming with it in a cascade of stone and timber. I held the gate for a moment and then threw it behind me into the field.
I Stopped. Looked at the Beastmen on the wall, As the gates was wide open, but I didn't enter the city.
Stood still again.
Hours went by, as not one Beastmen came outside to fight me, as I stood there unmoving.
The smell of fear from the walls was Perfect, as I knew the many Beastmen could smell fear, so they too got scaried form smelling the fear of each other.
And Than Night Came.
I Ran In, much to they're horror.
The city died in minutes as I killed anything and everyone I could find, as I set fire to the city.
The fires I set were strategic rather than comprehensive, disruption rather than total destruction, they all have been warned, and plus they eat humans, so in my eyes they're monsters.
The castle main throne room had one occupant. A lion-man with a crown and the specific posture of someone who had been sitting in a room waiting for the worst, as I entered the room with the heads of his guards.
He got on his knees before I reached him.
He told me the Beastman Country would comply with Draudillon Oriculus's demands.
He told me they would become a vassal state of the Dragon Kingdom. He showed me a copy of the letter he had already sent.
I took the letter from him and read it.
Vassal state. Surrender of sovereignty. Submission to the Dragon Kingdom's authority.
I read it again.
My arrangement with Draudillon had been for a warning letter to stop eating humans, not a vassal state.....?
An ultimatum that established a basis for intervention if ignored. Nothing in our conversation had included the Dragon Kingdom annexing the Beastman Country as a vassal state. Nothing I had agreed to had involved using my military action as the leverage for territorial expansion.
How...?
She had written the letter infornt of me.
Had she change the letter later without me knowing.....?
She had used Me.
My teeth were grinding with fully force, as a metal grinding sound came out, and veins covered my face, as the lion king backed away form me.
---
Tim
[level 82]
Crusader: [10/10] [Max] [New]
Swordman: [10/10] [Max] [Updated]
Sword Master: [4/10] [New]
Ninja: [1/5] [New] [Rare] [Unlocked form Assassin Max and over level 65]