Canon Omake: The Spice of Magic Part V
Crake
I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING
- Location
- USA
The Spice of Magic Part V
Fifteenth Day of the Eleventh Month 293 AC
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The mechanism on the door rattled heavily, before a hand-crank began to roll the wooden frame surrounding the iron-banded door toward one side of the retrofitted warehouse, casting dawn's light on the impromptu meeting taking place inside. Someone hastily stowed a lit pipe, even as a man with a mustache framing his lip and hanging down past his mouth prowled in, trailed by six more men in stripped-down blackened armor, lighter gear meant for running drills while still mostly realistic equipment, extraneous pieces removed for the moment. Each had a numbered pauldron, the Valyrian numerals blood red against a white enamel painted on.
The men inside came to attention, some cooling down from running through paces on three-dimensional obstacles, the whole building an elaborate mock-up of a jungle ruin at the moment. "Right men, bring it in." He cradled his helmet underarm, smacking the back of one hand on the man behind him. "I want you all bright eyed and bushy tailed for the new lad's first go-around. Don't want to be all dozy for yet another first impression, do we?" There were a couple scattered chuckles, being run ragged through repeated drills and caught laggard being equated to 'simple laziness'. If anyone there knew the man's own mind, he just might have been completely sincere, yet no one complained since they were often one of the officers burning the midnight oil trying to squeeze a few seconds off a course record for an individual team's sake.
Captain Bryce handed off his helmet to an agent with a clipboard, knowing full-well men like these needed to be worked to within an inch of death, simply because there was no way to keep their minds and bodies sharper against what they often ran up against. Healing magic and unguents would keep them in peak condition, the magic of the island itself was a boon that they would take full advantage of while they could yet avail themselves to it. But anyone died if they took a fiend's claw through the throat or breathed in unnatural concoctions whipped up by cult activity or rogue mages.
Memorizing procedure wasn't, contrary to popular belief, all the Inquisition did during the off-peak hours, but no one was stupid enough to give excuses if they failed to measure up to the examiners' exacting standards. A dearth of time or even energy was not an acceptable reason for failure, given they had magical food to ward off fatigue if for some reason a training session had to last well into the evening.
Well compensated and well-trained as they were, the harsh workout was essentially all that a knight from western shores would be subjected to, day in and day out from youth to formative years, piled on with manuals of arms and manuscripts of law for officers, logistical handbooks, or texts outlining weaknesses their known enemies possessed, and shoved into a far shorter time-frame. Drills could consist of fighting temporary yet solid phantasms, or storming a building filled with traps or mages in the middle of the night. They trained on everything from working a fey-craft crossbow to reconnoitering a variety of terrain features, from woodland and scrub to mountainous hillsides. It wasn't all relevant to their duties and they wouldn't all be experts in one area or another, but they could slot in anywhere in the realm with nary a hitch and catch up to local standards quite fast.
"Dove," the captain spoke gruffly, "this is your squad." Phantom sketched a salute at the new lad, while Kraken draped an arm around their neck and tousled their hair, barking a loud greeting. The new lad was an odd one, a lanky man with shorn hair and a scar eating at one lip that one might almost mistake for a fight lost with an octopus. "You'll be shipping out with them soon."
"The Hells, Captain?" Phantom spoke up, bewildered, "He's so green I can see the foliage growing out his ears. Where you sending us off to in such a hurry?" He set down the monster of a crossbow on a workbench nearby, face covered with a visage of death, steel mask fashioned after a skull.
"You'd be surprised what he's capable of," the officer rebuked, "I'm sticking him with you for a reason after all. Run him through your paces." He signaled to the mages nearby, who were resetting the obstacles with the rest of the present staff.
***
The 'riverbed' running up the center of the expansive warehouse was more a wide ditch filled with smooth stones, bordered on either side by 'heavy foliage', the plants provided by leshy helpers, the plant-like spirit-kin always happy to help with a bit of gardening.
Just as the small team of masked soldiers advanced up the center, purplish smoke seeped out, prompting the front rank to cover their faces with 'filters', or rather empty stand-ins for the real alchemical products, as the 'smoke' was harmless beyond being slightly irritating so long as you didn't breathe much of it into your lungs, for which crystal lenses in their mask helped well enough for the rest. An actual spell such as the men had studied from performances in the Circle of Battle or drills with one of the King's Inquisitors or Investigators, the ones that sickened men that got caught in it, would have required more stringent preparations.
Out of the haze a fiendish lizard-lion looking beast, a 'crocodile' in actuality, taxonomy of such had been well-documented from the few expeditions to return from Sothoryos in non-recent years. That was a fairly moot point, for all of the fact it resembled a monster from the depths of Hell, more gnashing teeth and sharp spines than one would invite into a hunter's lodge filled with dusty trophies, and it lashed out with its tail in an attempt to sweep the front rank off their feet. Manticore jumped over it and slashed at the tough hide of the beast with his sword, before backing up, Kraken smoothly replacing him and stabbing, which did no more than ward it off for a moment.
A moment was all that was needed. Four quarrels punched through the beast's tough skin, one through the eye and out the other side of the skull, causing a startled hiss to cut off all at once. It vanished into the aether, like so many wisps of the purplish smoke that it had hidden within.
Four wolves struck out a moment later, only one falling to a quarrel from the great-bows the back rank carried. Phantom punted one away with an aggrieved kick as it bit at his leg, while Dove smoothly walked forward and in one motion slide his sword just behind the shoulder of a beast in mid-flight and scattered it into the mist.
The team nearly broke apart in a stream of curses as a large spiny serpent attempted to wrap around another man's throat, only for him to get his sword between it and the coils at the last moment. They weathered a few more attacks, the initial jerkiness of their coordination smoothing out with little to no embarrassments. All the while, Phantom watched Dove as the man was at work with his disquieting efficiency, never speaking a word, always watching others with a flinty-eyed gaze.
***
"I don't like him," Phantom told the captain, waving off a scowl and clarifying a moment later, "I don't need to like him to work with him, but I mean to say he's too good for me to have never heard of him."
"The Inquisition takes all sorts, and skill with a blade is hardly the most damning reason to dismiss a candidate," Bryce bit out. "I know the lad's history better than most. Came out of a wreck with no survivors, clinging to some flotsam. Report out of headquarters couldn't pin it on the Squids, but going by how twitchy the lad is, his grudge like as not ain't misplaced."
"Will it get my team killed?" That was, at the end of the day, all that the sergeant cared about.
"Where you're heading? It might just save your life," Bryce replied bluntly.
OOC: Inquisitorial soldiers have a bit of a reputation as you can imagine, but it's really set up so that they can have a private life separate from the darker facets of the job and because it's necessary to compartmentalize the two lives, since they are so radically different from each other. This has led to a bit of an upsurge in Heart's Ease and people who are mages or Archons who study the mind getting a bit of a workout on the whole psychological trauma business. Not coincidentally, it also means they tend to be what the crack troops in the Legion would themselves consider "elite", and those they work with to be a bit 'twitchy', 'paranoid', or to put it lightly, 'off'. Anyone else washes out or gets sent back to the Legion before they even finish orientation and training.
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