Ferenike 12 - Terror or Horror? Part 1
They marched along the South Road from dusk to dawn, resting under the heat of the noonday sun in their quickly set up marching camp. Snake emblazoned banners snapped in the wind, pennants flying out like dragon tails behind the might of the Ninth Legion.
Ferenike and Nan Fuxi travelled with the main column, ranks upon ranks of clanking armor and stamping hooves of their Spirit Horses kicking up a small sandstorm of dust, magnified by their Silvery Sandfish Arrays as a defense against attacks from the air ready to spring up and make flying incredibly difficult as a much smaller form of the storms found in the Wind Towers. Around them marched the folded wings of the auxillia. And following after the column came their wagon train, vehicles ten times the height of a man and pulled by enormous bronze oxen, laden with supplies and mobile fortresses in their own right. There Gallius worked with the other members of the quartermasters to feed and house the Legion as it marched, and to ensure that the little things that made Legion life possible got to the people who needed it. Like the very good tobacco she had taken to smoking. Its fiery essence went well with her Spirit Stone dust.
They marched for months, messages passing back and forth between the Legatus of the Legions in flurries of messengers. Passing through the Hong Xuan Clan on roads of a smaller and narrower derivative of the Golden Devil design, adapted for a reduced economic scale, they were received with cheers and celebratory parades as they marched through their cities. Meetings between the Legate and the Hong Xuan representatives took place over only three days for resupply negotiations, haste speeding the process considerably.
Then they were traversing the Grand Hua Empire. While crossing over the border one night, with the wheeling stars above her head Ferenike could swear she felt a looming hiss as she awoke from a dream. A tremor in the air that made the sand under her hand shift slightly. A terrible
buzz, suffusing the Qi in the air. When she looked out her tent door she almost felt like she could see the dark air rippling, the stars flickering in the south. But it passed. The chill pervading her limbs since they had set out intensified, as she could almost feel ten thousand feet skitter over her grave.
Over the border the roads were even smaller, even narrower, one of the smallest Golden Devil derivatives. The Legion travelled in a long river of glistening spirit bronze as it gave a wide berth to the Floating Hive Islands and approached Great Hua Lake City from the east on its Magnificent Hua Road. On the eastern walls hundreds of thousands of Hua were gathered, and their cheers reached her ears even across the gulf of multiple dozen
li, mortals and cultivators gathered to welcome them. Hanging from the walls she could see golden pennants and flags with the eagle of the Legions in beautiful purple thread.
As they grew close she could feel it, a whispering weight of Will, firmly perusing them as they passed under her great eye.
The Protostrator's Will.
Then she heard it, the
voice like spears ringing against spears.
Legate Wu of the Ninth Legion, proceed down the river past West Wind Tower to the Night Devil Fortress. I would match the Abyssal Devil Bees in battle upon the field soon near the foothills and have need of your forces.
Then another voice answered, an ever ringing chorus of bubbling waters.
Acknowledged Protostrator, I shall take my leave to great the Grand Hua Emperor properly and then make all haste to your position.
Acknowledged Legate, proceed.
Around her Ferenike could see her Trainees sweating quietly in their helmets, the weight of the two presences crushing down on their weak cultivation and making their very souls shudder. For her, she felt it steeling her glass infused spine, and she reached out with her Qi to touch those of her command and buoy them up. Practice for her Oasis, in time, and useful to encourage them.
All was well.
They spent a little time in the Great Hua Lake City. Its lake was indeed great, several hundred li across. Ferenike got to swim for the first time in her life and discovered she utterly hated it after taking a dip in the lake. Wet everywhere and sticky as the sun cooked it off her, and Fuxi teasing her she looked like a soaked cat. Nope. Not happening again, she'd rather bake in a Ten Thousand Year Ogre Oven.
"But you looked so
funny." Fuxi giggled as they sat in their rooms in the Legion post, far up on the twentieth floor.
Ferenike huffed and crossed her arms. "
No, you witch. And I will most certainly not let you push me into it when I'm not looking. It won't happen!" She complained.
Fuxi relented with a glint in her eye as she lounged on her cot. "Finnnnneeee fine you spoilsport. Big wet crybaby."
Ferenike threw a pillow at her which Fuxi roundly caught and sent flying back, only to have it returned with interest again. They wrestled over the pillow until with a
ripppppppppp it tore and feathers exploded everywhere.
"Oh gods dammit I have feathers stuck to my eyelashes now." One of them said, she wasn't sure which.
They broke down after that, choking on feathers when they laughed too much until they managed to escape the cloud and clean it up.
In the morning they left on barges and Ferenike found she liked these much better. Stable ground and she could dip a hand or foot into the water instead of her whole body when it got particularly hot, though it was as a whole cooler than the deep Desert she was familiar with. All along the banks were spread small iron spires, and between them flickered a haze of mirage, defenses and weather controlling arrays in one. Again she noted how they pulled energy in from the sun and the desert, most especially the sand.
There was something there and it tickled at her memories of Zu Jing and her battle with him years ago now.
Almost 44 years old now wasn't she? She hadn't changed at all in the time since she had fought that bandit, not outwardly.
Inside it was a different story and she wondered at what she found there as she rested in her tent set up on the massive barge's deck. Within her, her Dantian was a peaceful plane of red glass ground and melted smooth by her own hands and the barriers to its expansion made into material to build it further as she entered the Ninth Heavenstage. Beneath her spiritual feet she felt the subtle ridges of tiny dunes and ripples in the surface, a texture that pleased her. And shining up through it like a star was a red fire. Maybe it was like a smooth ruby sphere with fire in its heart, that was how she'd describe it to a mortal.
Far above it in the void of her mind she could feel the Heavenly Tribulation waiting to descend upon her if she tried to form her Qi into a pillar inscribed with the idea of Patience. But she had no interest in that. Instead her minds eye turned towards the process she had begun as they travelled, her little legionnaires of glass each taking a small speck of Qi from her Dantian and carrying it to every piece of her body and using it like a torch to burn out the impurities that still lingered in her body. Each little flame was like being stabbed as it burned them away, sharp, quick and then a lingering pounding pain that only faded slowly.
She had much, much further to go. Heaven's Will was that her works would come to naught and that she would die weak. She took that idea and spat in its eye. Her strength was a part of herself and she had chosen to devote herself to helping the Clan. It was all she could accept as her path in life. In the words of one of the many manuals of the Taktika Bureau.
Make of your hands spears, and give those spear-hands into the hands of the Clan.
She had made her trainees read that particular manual a lot, enough that she some times caught them joking around while reciting pieces of it from heart completely accurately to extremely funny music. Mission accomplished in her view.
Soon they reached Little Jian, a thriving place of a hundred thousand, held subdued under a pall of fear. The cheers of the mortals as they marched past were heartfelt but strained by worry, and when the Legion settled in the city and began deployment preparations with the other Legions present Ferenike heard the murmurs of terror about the
buzzing.
The same
buzzing that haunted her dreams.
Her trainees were quiet, seeing to their weapons and equipment in the barrack. She stayed with them, talking to them, reading writings of the Clan to them, and answering any last minute questions. Here on the eave of battle, the rules were briefly relaxed to ease tension and together they waited. Fuxi and Gallius occasionally appeared, sharing her time with the Trainees, but then they returned to their own posts.
They rested there for a day and then followed the river the rest of the way down to the Night Devil Fortress. A towering edifice, battle scarred by months of fighting, craters dozens of
li deep dotting its dark and imposing walls as it sat astride the pass between two mountains that it almost seemed to loom over such was its scale.
They joined with the other Legions mustering in the Fortress yard and this time when the Will of the Protostrator touched them it was not a simple fragment, but a great entity like a mountain turning to stare at them. Even Ferenike fell back under the touch of her mind, bolstering her command as best she could.
But this time they were guided on where to set up in order to fit into the larger encampment, and a litany of administrative orders and organizational tasks that went into running a force of fifty thousand cultivators.
Eventually she met up with Fuxi and Gallius in her room. They were sitting around her small table, the Ice Peach wine she had gotten years ago freezing a small ring on the center of the table as their cups sat around it.
They had drank very little of it, aware of the high alert status, and simply marveled in the cool and intense sweetness beyond most things she had tasted in the Desert. In her tipsy haze she sat smiling as Fuxi and Gallius sat in touching range.
There was only silence between. All of their promises had already been made. They would come back together again, or go out with a scream against the Heavens and their witless minions.
There was nothing more to be said.
It was on the fifth day after their arrival when scouts spotted a massive force of over ninety thousand Devil Bees, most of their invasion force, racing for the fifty thousand encamped Clan cultivators.
The Legions war drums thundered, tens of thousands of feet stepping into the march as a golden sea wheeled out of the Night Devil Fortress's walls. Now they sallied out to meet them according to the Protostrator's will half a day's march from the Night Devil Fortress. She wanted to crush them here after luring them out with her massive forces.
And it looked like getting their attention had worked, as on the horizon that rippling in the air Ferenike had dreamed of that night months ago came again, this time followed by a
drone.
Warbling, hissing, snapping buzzing filling her ears and drowning out all noise. Even her racing heart.
Clicking, twitching, humming wings beating the air in the tens of thousands.
The sky darkened as their shapes swallowed the setting sun. The mountains seemed to grow, reaching up into the sky like claws or towering clouds.
Boom. Boom. Boom!
Three cracks of thunder spoke of their first attack, the beat of mighty drums. Three massive chunks of the invaders army broke off from the mass, howling, screaming and wailing as they fell from the sky upon the vanguard of the Clan.
Ferenike and the Ninth Century were buried deep in the middle of the left flank, greater cultivators in front and behind, and she heard boneshaking pattern of their own drums, echoing as if from deep beneath the earth.
Boom-boom, boom-boom!
"BRACE! HOPLITE FORMATION!" The clear bell voice of Tessarian Augustan called.
She repeated his command to her trainees and together their Qi rose with the great fountains blooming all around the great army.
Sound ceased as the air seemed to
flee from the surge of Qi rising into the air in mighty dragon-coils. Above them a figure in bright white robes glowed with an all consuming golden light as the shadow formed, legs, then torso and arms, then crested helm visible in its incredible definition around them. In her left hand the Hoplite carried a great aspis shield one hundred
li wide and in its right she grasped a great hoplon spear whose shining blade was a graceful leaf shape thirty
li from tip to base. The enormous Will of the Protostrator guided their Qi like a million hands as she threw the Hoplite into action.
That blade swung out, a great slash of the bronze spear. With the sound of a ringing gong the air was set aflame with golden fire before its edge, the point trailing golden light as the massive blade crushed one of the three mighty waves and then in a burst of blinding light transformed them into ash. Slowly the Legions began to march forward, the call of the Legion drumbeat pulling them forward as their banners waved like grass around the Hoplite's feet. All around them the smell of blood and burning guts and bones filled their noses and blood rained to the ground as darkness descended, the sun a distant red spot as its light filtered through tens of thousands of blood filled bodies. Ferenike could not hear herself screaming orders, only feel her mouth moving. All she could hear was the overwhelming beat of the drums, pounding in her ears and setting her heart to racing.
In the great cloud of darkness, deeper than any sandstorm, the man of bronze and shadow fought like a bonfire against the descent of night. Golden light fought against red and black, and the screaming faces of her enemies wheeled around, seemingly wrapped in red and black cloaks as they struck again and again with sharpened steel fangs.
Wails arose all around the battlefield as Ferenike saw their lines mix, the main body of the Abyssal Devil Bees descending onto them now and using its mass to force through some of their number through the defenses of the Hoplite. Like a man being enveloped by a swarm completely they swallowed the formation and stung again and again and again.
She saw Clan members fall as they were overwhelmed by tens of Devil Bees at once, their bodies coming apart at the seams as multiple bees grabbed them in their fangs and sucked out their fluids before ripping the screaming husks to pieces. Then their attackers would be killed by their victim's fellows and pushed away, only for more to descend.
A red and black blur shot for her command and she leapt into the air, a surge of qi driving her upwards and then she lashed out with her own spear. It stabbed out in dozens of scorpion like thrusts, infused with glass to make a glimmering pink and red lance. First two, then four, then ten, then finally twenty bees and their riders fell as her spear punched clean through their mounts from end to end and lashed at them furiously, bolstered by her Trainees Qi as her shield blocked a rain of spines and stingers.
Above her and all around her the golden shield of the Protostrator stood in the path of the tide, a burning disk soaring through dark space and the apocalypse that had descended. Behind it soared a golden ray of light, sweeping all it encountered into dust and ashes.
Above her head Ferenike could see glimmers of sunlight as the Devil Bees died in droves.
Then that sunlight twisted and darkened, spinning and splitting as bodies passed in front of it.
Wait, the bees were spinning, like a great sandstorm.
A suffocating weight of Qi crushed her to her knees onto the dunes, her Trainees letting out strangled cries as they too fell. She could spare barely any thought for them though as her mind was seized with panic as pitch blackness descended and a terrifying glint in that shadow.
With a sucking shriek that ripped sound away in its passing it struck the Hoplite, passing through its shield with ease as the disk shattered into ten thousand shards, and struck the glowing figure in its middle. A great flash of red erupted.
The dragon-coils of the Hoplite ruptured like a river ripping free of its banks as the controlling mind, the Protostrator's Will, flickered.
Retreat. All forces retreat to the Night Devil Fortress, Legatus Kekao shall have command...
The Protostrator's words continued, listing a chain of command without her in it, and as Ferenike tried to get her stunned mind to process what was being said she felt a mighty force grabbing her by the shoulders and driving her to step back to retreat. In her soul she cried out, but she felt training take over as she guided her panicking trainees to retreat, bodily grabbing some of them and hurling them backwards away from the battlefield.
What followed was a controlled dash away from the battlefield as the grievously wounded Hoplite held back the tide. They broke the leading edge of the storm of bees and saw the blood red rays of the setting sun.
The war drums set a fast marching beat and the Legions obeyed. For hours they marched under the banner of the flickering Will of the Protostrator as she helped the Legions sustain emergency Twin-Eagle formations. But they weakened over the next two hours, more and more of their number dying as the Bees found more and more gaps and dug their fangs into their soft underbelly. Now Clan were dying for two or three enemies apiece, and not all of those enemies were killed after the first Clan death and sometimes went on to savage more and more of their members before finally being stopped.
Through it all was that
fucking drone.
It seemed to gleefully rise as she felt her commander's life dim. And then go out.
The pall that had descended onto the Legions deepened.
Then in an opening a small flight group descended on her command. Ferenike roared as a Bee with its fucking human fanged face dived for Deimos, the black haired girl flagging as her qi guttered out and screaming as she dived for cover only to be snatched up and consumed in an eyeblink of splattering gore. Dead.
Ferenike's glass armored body slammed into the bee then, causing it to shriek as her sharp armor dug into its carapace and then it twisted. She screamed as its fangs pierced through her biceps and shoulder, swallowing her spear as it did so and then smiled wildly as her eyes became stars of red fire.
"Choke on me then, monster!" She howled as her veins exploded from her arm, trapped down the gleeful monster's gullet as she felt her blood being sucked away, and stabbed into it along with her spear. It twitched and gurgled and then its eyes exploded outward as red glass spears erupted from its sockets like branches, dozens of their fellows bursting out of its five meter long body. Before its halberd wielding rider could strike her he too was pierced and affixed to his mount by thorns of red.
Then with a leap and a roar she used the enemy trapped on her arm as a bludgeon to smear his comrades across a
li. "Commander!" Her redheaded Junior Agha cried as her and the others caught up with Ferenike and picked her up. "Help me pull this off!" The other girl cried as the trainees gathered around and with Ferenike's help levered its jaw open and revealed the ruin of her arm.
It had been flayed down to vein wrapped bones, the flesh and muscle drained of fluid and shredded away by the teeth, her fingers sharp spikes of glass and fractured bone. Her bones appeared as crimson glass infused ivory, and the mass of writhing glass around it was all that was holding it together. "Medic!" She cried, dazedly, trained instinct making her tongue move even as her brain choked.
Then the pain hit her and she grit her teeth to keep from screaming as her trainees Pleminon and Agha helped her stay upright. As Agrippa, the sweet and plump medic helped her treat and wrap her arm in linen she found she could move it, barely, her incredible constitution and will pushing through the pain that stole her breath away and caused her stomach to roil. But it bled slowly and that blood was black, poison slowing her healing.
Cries of distress amongst her charges brought her head up, dizziness causing her to stumble for a moment. She blinked as she realized they had been separated from most of the Legion, and blessedly most of their enemies, as in the confusion of the retreat they had wandered into a defile and a deep canyon between the dunes. Her trainees were listlessly crying and looking about in terror, as Agha and Dana, a short girl with blonde-white hair in two braids going down her back, held each other and sobbed. ...Deimos had been their friend.
Fuck. Gods dammit she hated what she had to do.
"Everyone! Shut up and pay attention!" She bellowed, as she held her arm close to her gut and the little flakes of glass in her veins began to constrict blood flow and seek out the poison. "Form up!" She ordered and her trainees fell in on instinct.
A burden rose off her shoulders lifting the burden slightly and almost leaving her light headed.
Wait, that lightheaded feeling was partly the blood-loss. She pushed that thought aside.
"We have to keep moving. The Protostrator gave us orders to retreat but we're cut off from the Fortress and the Legions. I know a city to the south called Guo Wo, and we're heading there at all speed. Understood?" She glared at them, propping herself up with sheer willpower as exhaustion burrowed into her brain.
There were nineteen tired salutes. "Understood commander!" They cried, quietly.
She nodded, then tilted her head and gestured down the canyon. "We march."
As she walked she closed her eyes briefly and let herself let go for a moment. "
...fuck." She whispered.
She breathed in, jostling her arm, pain pain
pain. They were in sight of the entrance to the underground city of Guo Wo, a series of small towering spires rising out of a cliff face that jutted from the dunes and around it she could see a small Devil Bee force. Had they completely overrun the Hua? What even the fuck was happening anymore...
They had marched for days, separated, out of contact and they were exhausted. This was the Heavens punishing them from on high, she could feel it.
The only silver lining was that the siege seemed to be a distant one, and the Bees were content to circle around as an ominous shadow on the horizon when they weren't bedded down in their camp like now. Hundreds of them.
Her command was hiding crouched in one end of a canyon that overlooked Guo Wo, though not the same one they started in. They'd changed, some time around... the fourth day? She was foggy on the dates, it had been sometime after she'd beaten back the poison and stopped bleeding on the second day.
"Rest up everyone, we're going to have to sprint to the city and hurry ourselves through the gate." She said to them over her shoulder as she examined the potential battlefield.
It was a distance of over twenty
li to the north and the enemy camp was within ninety or so to their east, well within quick deployment range of the Bees. They'd have to do it as the sun set to the west. If she had her placement right, it'd be shining in the eyes of the Devil Bees then and give them the necessary cover they needed to reach the gates of the city.
It was noon now and so she waited, sitting upon a stone as she watched the dune valley below.
Behind her she could hear her trainees moving about with relieved sighs and nervous paranoia. She closed her eyes for a moment and sighed. It'd keep them alive until a relief column could find them. She'd kept morale from dropping too far by using her unassailable stamina as an anchor and hadn't slept at all during their run, letting her juniors sleep in her stead. Far longer than a cultivator of her level should be able to go, but she was the master of her soul and she had decided she was going to stay awake until she saw these kids in somewhere more secure than the open Desert.
She opened her eyes, an ember of red fire in her pupils as she stared up at the piercing blue Heavens.
She wasn't sure she'd live to see the Dawn Fortress again. But she'd sure as hell try.
When the sun was a handspan above the horizon she got to her feet and called them from their rest.
"Now we run. If someone falls pick them up! But don't stop running!" She ordered as she looked at them and then turned.
"Go!" She roared and they raced out of the canyon, surging down the dunes as they kicked up sand in their wake.
That run felt like some of the longest moments of her life even as she felt them happen in less than half an hour.
Just running, scrambling with frantic speed towards the bronze gates of the city in the distance.
Oven-like air sawing in and out of their throats, so hot it scraped them bloody raw. That horrible
drone at their backs as the Devil Bees noticed them.
She remembered shouting for the Twin-Eagle formation and it shuddering into unstable existence as their fatigued Qi struggled to sustain it, and she remembered the fantastic speed their pace took as it carried them to the foot of the gates.
She remembered smiling and thanking the main gate guard's ancestors as she heard a loud and clear voice scream out "Open the gate for the Golden Lords!" At their approach.
As they sprinted in she heard the sound of rapidly firing scorpion bows and other siege defense arrays activating as they drove back the pursuing Devil Bees. Soft darkness encompassed them and their formation went out in a wink of gold and then the bolstering Qi faded, and they collapsed.
Ferenike was barely conscious at this point and many of her command were not at all, tired and grime covered, but alive. They were now in a courtyard on the other side of the now closed gate, and around them were several stairways up into the darkness of the tower above, from where the sound of firing siege weapons came. On the far side of the large room stood another gate, presumably guarding the way down. She stood in the middle of her trainees and watched warily as an young woman approached, descending from the interior of the defenses. She was middling height, with brownish-black hair and green eyes, wary and frightened as she took in Ferenike's force.
"My name is Jin Nu'er, are you... the commander of this force?" She asked hopefully of Ferenike.
"Yes. My juniors need rest and accommodations..." She said, rattling off their needs quietly to the woman.
Some quiet and quick logistical discussion after that and Jin had them tucked away in the city below. They ended up bunking in one of the quieter wings of their fortifications. After getting them settled Ferenike had to fend off curious soldiers poking their noses in, which got a short and sharp demonstration of her temper as she tore strips out of them for trying to bother her for news about the War, sprinkled with useful information and a command to ask Jin about it.
Once her trainees were sleeping and nosy neighbors dealt with she collapsed into a chair outside their bunkroom and promptly went to sleep.
When she awoke, hours before her trainees did, she found herself in an endless series of meetings with Jin Nu'er and her command staff. The truth of the matter was that the city was screwed if they weren't relieved and Jin had been working to slowly evacuate it with what forces she could spare, pulling the defense teams down to a skeleton crew as they sold themselves to buy time. All she asked was if Ferenike's group could help hold off the bees until relief arrived. That was one piece of good news, they had a functioning communications array, but it was soured because the Legion couldn't provide one.
It churned in Ferenike's guts, she didn't
want to spend their lives at all! But she had to, so she would.
After that meeting she left to find their communication arrays. She had a call to make.
Walking through the halls, the mortals and cultivators who remained gave her cautious but hopeful looks, recognizing her uniform as Legion issue. Then their eyes would land on her bandaged and ruined arm and they'd pale, some worry returning to their faces. She did her best to talk to some of the worst ones and give them encouragement, but there was only so much she could say when her arm looked much like a wrapped twig.
Eventually she made it through the warren of tunnels of the city, like an anthill, and found the communications dome. There she gave her purpose to the guards and once passing through beelined for the Mechanikos on duty.
"Soldier, I need to send a message to the Night Devil Fortress, priority status report." She said quietly.
The man eeped at her expression and waved his hands as he kneeled on a woven mat before the arrangement of plates and curved crystals that made up the array which took up one entire wall of the house sized room. "S-sure, give me a moment. What did you say your name was ma'am?" He asked, surprise starting to dissipate as he fell into routine.
"Ferenike of the Golden Devils, Legionnaire in the Ninth Century under Centurion Dragoumis of the Fifth Cohort of the Ninth Legion." She rattled off for him.
He was nodding now as he started chanting, the crystals glowing with his humming voice as the array symbols rattled in their housing, and then with the toll of a small golden bell near the middle of the assembly the communication connected.
"Wuo Go City, this is Night Devil Fortress communications, receiving priority status update from Legion forces. Put them on, we can't make this long." A tired voice emanated from the golden bell as Third Sea symbols glowed a pale teal on its surface. The man waved her down to kneel on the mat and gestured for her to speak.
"Night Devil Fortress communications, this is Ferenike of the Golden Devils. I and my squad of nineteen juniors are currently present in the besieged city of Wuo Go and need a relief force." She told the voice.
Behind her the man left the room at speed, but she ignored him.
"Acknowledged, a relief force is not possible at this time." The voice bulled on through her attempted objection to that. "Standing orders from Tessarian Nan Fuxi are to notify her if any separated Ninth Century forces make contact. Please wait." The voice finished.
Fuxi was alive but...
shit.
After a surprisingly short moment the array flashed and Fuxi's voice came through, harrowed and quiet. "Ferenike?"
Ferenike's head bowed, almost touching the array. "I'm alive Fuxi."
"Thank the Imperator." Her friend whispered fervently. "And most of your trainees?"
"We lost Deimos. The rest are exhausted but mostly unhurt." She told her.
There was a breath. "I'm sorry Ferenike... there isn't much good news over here either."
Another pained breath. "Centurion Dragoumis is dead, as are both Tessarian. Optio Kafatos is in temporary command of Ninth Century, which has been reduced to a half strength of forty three people, including your group. And..." There was a dead pause.
"Gallius is dead." Fuxi told her, voice quiet and hard edged with grief. "I killed the monster that did it."
Ferenike was silent, the hammer blow bowing her head. She sniffed, breathed deep, her eyes blinking wetly. She nodded even though Fuxi couldn't see her. "Thank you." She said wetly.
Fuxi's own voice sounded wobbly. "We'll try to get you and the Wuo Go garrison out as soon as we can, but with the Bees rampaging as they are rumor has it the Legions have barely anything to work with, spread out as we are trying to delay them."
"I understand Fuxi. Do your best to get me out and I'll do my best to stay alive long enough for you to do it." Ferenike said, confidence returning. If it was a patience game, she could do it.
"I will. I'll try and feed you what info I can so you can help the defenses prepare if a big wave comes your way." She said. "Goodbye for now Ferenike."
"Goodbye Fuxi." She said. The array dimmed and she stood. She had a lot of work to do.
@occipitallobe this omake is getting away from me and I have to split it into two parts! Oh well! For the sake of narrative pacing, needs must! Please mark this down as a Fate Supplemental for Turn 5, I'm going to ask for my actual turn bonus later, hopefully in the next omake. As a heads up I'm also working with
@Mochinator on another joint project as part of this.
