Lineth's POV [The lion king] [level 33]
I had been a king for eleven years.
Not a good king, perhaps, by the standards that the humans applied to governance, I had not built bridges or reformed the grain distribution or addressed the gap between the warrior caste and the agricultural workers who fed them. But I had maintained the Beastman Country's military power, had expanded the territory to the east, had continued the traditions of my father and his father before him, and had done all of this with the conviction that our way was simply how the world was organised. The strong ate. The weak provided.
I had never questioned this with genuine seriousness until the moment a human held me off the floor by my neck with one hand and looked into my eyes with something that was not hatred, hatred I would have understood, hatred was familiar, hatred was the emotion of a combatant, but with the cold specific weight of a judgment, is he disgusted of me...?
"First, I going to pretend I didn't see that dum letter, and do you really think I going to let you guys give up on this War, just beacuse you were Losing, I'M GOING TO ENJOY BURNING YOUR COUNTRY DOWN."
He said, as he ripped the child skulls necklace off my neck.
We wore them as trophies. The skulls of human children were considered prestigious among the warrior caste, a display of dominance, a statement about the relationship between our species and theirs. I had worn many such decorations myself, when I was younger, before the crown made ostentation a different kind of statement, but I wear it form time to time.
He started mentioning the farms in his Rage. The livestock designation. The way we had described human beings in our commerce.
The letter had said vassal state. The letter had been my last negotiating position, the thing I had reached for when every military option was gone and a human was standing in my burning capital not dying when we burned him. I had thought, in the specific desperate way of someone thinking while drowning, that surrender was the mechanism that stopped the violence.
His face was very close to mine.
The rage behind his eyes was barely held. I have fought warriors for fifty years and I know rage in its various forms.
He said he was going to wipe out most of the Beastman Country.
He said he would spare the ones who didn't eat humans, mostly the ones he called rabbit-people.
But said that most of the Beastman Country would burn.
Than I felt the pressure on my neck.
I had been a king for eleven years, and in the last seconds I never held such fear of death.
"I.....wish....you....a....sad....and...worthless...death....huma-"
Then I heard a snap, and the darkness came and I stopped thinking anything.
---
Tim's POV
I dropped the body, took the map from the wall, and left the throne room.
The capital was still burning in the sections I had set alight during the night assault, the fires contained to the areas I had chosen rather than spreading beyond them.
Beastman cities were built with the materials available to them, timber and stone in roughly equal proportion, so the fire ran across the city, as most beastmen ran in panic.
The map showed the full Beastman Country in the detail that a capital's strategic planning document would contain, the three cities, the river systems they were built around, the road network connecting them, the agricultural and, I noted, other holding areas marked in the specific notation of a nation that maintained the food production system.
The human farms were everywhere.
Not hidden, present in the commercial districts with the casual visibility of any other industry. Signs, actual signs, advertising product by cut and freshness and price. Fresh human, ten silver coins, the sign on the first one I found near the capital's market district. A different sign nearby advertising preserved cuts. A third one that I did not read past the first line.
I had known about the farms intellectually. The lore had described them. The testimonies I had absorbed from various sources over years had confirmed them.
Knowing and seeing were different things, and seeing the full picture, made me ill.
So I started freeing them.
The humans in the farms were in various conditions, most were missing limbs, which a quick tier two healing spells addressed one person at a time as the healing spells grew the limbs back.
People who have been living in conditions of systematic dehumanisation respond to freedom in different ways.
Some cried immediately. Some were very still for a long time and moved cautiously, testing whether the situation was real. Some were angry and the anger needed somewhere to go and I watch them destory the shop they were sold in.
Children particularly required careful handling, the youngest ones had been born in the farms and had no framework for any other existence, and the world outside the enclosures was not more comprehensible to them than the world inside had been incomprehensible to me as an infant. The tier two angels I summoned helped with this, the holy presence of something genuinely benevolent providing a stability that I couldn't personally provide to each child at the same time.
It took me two whole weeks, to clear the capital city's farms of all of it's people.
Twenty thousand humans, assembled in the capital's main square, with the mixed expression of a confused and a little scared population.
I left a clone with them and went to the city of Beatul.
---
Three hours later....
The army at Beatul's gate was two thousand, which was a rounding error relative to what I had dealt with over the previous months, assembled in the specific formation of a force that had heard what had happened at the capital and was trying to decide between fleeing and making a stand that would at least generate a story worth telling.
The Fools.....
Their leader was a tigerfolk, large even for the species, with the specific kind of physical confidence that came from being the strongest individual in most rooms you entered. He held a human child. A child who was crying and being held as casually as someone held a tool.
"I am the Great Guf, and I will be the one to End your worthless life, but first a snack for myself"
he said as he raised the child to his month.
I took the child, as I gave Guf a Tier one [Fire Starter] to his open mouth.
The fireball went into his open mouth while it was still open from the last word he had said, which was convenient targeting. Tier one fire magic into the soft tissue of the mouth and throat and the tissue that connected them to the brain behind them, the spell was tier one, which limited its absolute destructive capacity, but the targeting made the limitation irrelevant.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaa..."
I watch him roll on the floor searming for his life as he died a painfull death, I did not spend time on that observation.
A new spell arrived in my head, the knowledge of it complete and immediate, dropping into my awareness, Acid Arrow, tier two, the mechanism of acquisition suddenly legible to me, did the wizard class levelled through combat application of spells, through using magic to kill, rather than through study alone.
I had spent two years in study trying to learn tier two wizard spells. I had learned one in the first thirty seconds of using magic in combat.
The frustration of this was considerable and I set it aside for later examination.
The army attacked me, I used Acid Arrow continuously, the tier two spell launching with each cast and finding a target with each launch, the bodies of the Beastman soldiers dissolving in the specific way that acid-based magic dissolved biological tissue.
Thunder Lance arrived when the Acid Arrow had been killed enough times, the knowledge of it clicking into place mid-combat, the tier two lightning spell forming in my hand with the shape the name described and delivering itself into the skull of the nearest Beastman with the efficiency of electricity finding the shortest path to ground.
They started running form me, I used the sword for the running ones because the spells would take too long to kill them.
Beatul's Great gates fell, when I kicked them. The city cleared as I start mass killing as I moved through them with the combination of sword and spell as I painted the streets red with blood, as the river ran red.
Two weeks later....
Fifteen thousand humans from Beatul's farms, the same pattern of healing, of reassurance, of careful management of people.
A Clone left with them, as they made their way to the Capital City, as I went to the last city of Rezot.
---
Two hours later.....
The City of Rezot was empty..?
Just abandoned in the immediate chaos of a city cleared by force, empty in the way of a city that had been emptied with panicked. Clothes on the ground where they had been dropped in the hurry of taking only what was essential, the hearths cold in the emtry homes, the market stalls abandoned mid-transaction.
They had known I was coming, and had enough warning, from the refugees who had escaped the cities, from whatever communication network existed between the three cities, to organise an evacuation rather than a last stand.
I ran on a wall and watched the last families moving away through the back gate, carts loaded with what they had taken, the specific silhouette with children and elderly among them.
I thought about it and desided to let them go.
The families on the back road were not warriors. The children among them had not chosen what their country had done, or maybe I just a soft-hearted fool.
I watched them until they were out of sight.
Then I went to find the human farms in Rezot.
Thirteen thousand people, the same process, healing, reassurance, the slow work of restoring the basic human conditions that the farm system had stripped, the same tier two angels providing the stable presence.
Then the long walk back to the Capital City.
---
A month later at the Capitel City...
Forty-eight thousand people is a number that doesn't fully become real until you're looking at it assembled in one place and trying to figure out how to move it.
They moved at the pace of the slowest among them, which was the pace of the very old and the very young there were no rush anyways.
The many tier two angels helped, supplementary carrying for those who couldn't maintain pace, the divine presence providing a quality of calm that reduced the panic events that large groups of traumatised people were prone to.
Four months of peaceful walking.
The people changed during those four months
.
Not dramatically at first, the first few weeks were the weeks of people still processing, still startling at unexpected sounds, still flinching from things that weren't there, then the processing began to complete, replaced by the specific recovery quality of people who are eating and sleeping and moving under their own power and whose bodies are starting to report that the immediate crisis is over.
By the second month there was conversation, by the third month there were jokes, which is the reliable indicator that a group of people has moved from survival mode into something with enough margin for social reconnection.
By the fourth month the children were doing what normal children normal would do, which was run around non-stop and ask questions at anything they found interesting, and messing with everything they could get their little hands on, as they became the little shits we all know and love.
They soon called me their Hero, which I received without comment.
[I'm not happy, you basterd]
---
Tim [level 96]
Sword master: [10/10] [Max] [Updated]
Sword Saint: [1/5] [New] [Rare]
Wizard: [10/10] [Max] [Updated]
High Wizard: [1/10] [New]
Saint: [1/1] [New] [legendary] [Unlocked having Sword Saint and High Priest, with Karma over 300, over level 95] [Switchs all abilities and skills to a God you choose to pray to, Cannot pray to an Undead or a Devil, this skill can be used once per day for 1 hour]