Summary: You play as an emulation of Taylor Hebert, summoned into the world of Warhammer post-Worm. Your goal will be to lead a large-scale slave rebellion in the Dark Lands, then establish a safe and unified kingdom for whoever you manage to save.
Sunrise - a Khepri in the Dark Lands Quest (Worm/Warhammer Fantasy)
- Thread starter Jurric
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Chapter 1: Desperation
- Location
- Australia
Disclaimer: I do not own Worm, Warhammer Fantasy or Total War: Warhammer I & II, which are the inspirations for this quest.
Secondary Disclaimer: I'm going to try to gloss over the gory details enough to keep this from needing a Mature tag, but these are rather dark settings and you should not read this story if you're unwilling to read written depictions of slavery, daemons, ritual sacrifice or slavers drowning in a tide of bugs.
The Dawi Zharr, also known as Chaos Dwarfs, had faced many slave rebellions over the history of their species. The largest and most famous was the rebellion of the Black Orcs, a disaster that shook the Chaos Dwarf's iron grip on the Dark Lands enough for Skaven, Ogres and Greenskin tribes to claim vast swathes of territory. Some say that the Greenskin hordes rampaged as far as the Temple of Hashut itself, but they say so quietly, in whispers that they hope their masters will never hear.
In an effort to prevent such a catastrophe from striking their nation again the Chaos Dwarfs became proactive about managing their slave rebellions. Carefully curated and vetted agitators were seeded into the most common problem areas, where they could find the most rebellious, unruly and wilful of the local slaves, gather them together, organize a 'rebellion' or mass-escape, only to report back to their superiors so the breakout could be crushed in as public a manner as possible. Anyone who showed actual skill in evading the eye of their captors or who possessed a glimmer of leadership potential was captured and executed, slowly, painfully and publicly.
For a time this system worked. Slaves were cowed, each generation having several events within living memory that seemed to prove the futility of defiance and the brutality of their masters, while distrust and paranoia shattered many genuine uprisings before they could begin.
In the caverns of a long-dead volcano a group of nearly a hundred slaves found themselves trapped, abandoned by a leader who they had thought they could trust. The vast, stone warehouse had been supposed to hold the food and supplies they needed to escape, but the crates were empty and the exits were blocked.
There is a saying about cornered rats that applies to them.
Unarmed, untrained and with nothing but the promise of slow, painful death in their future, the slaves turned to the most dangerous weapon they knew, magic. One of them had been tasked with cleaning the ritual-sites of the Daemonsmiths; and while he lacked both knowledge and skill he still knew enough to roughly ape in blood the twisted rune-craft of his captors. His plan was to summon a daemon to break them free of the blockade, to cut a path through the line of solid dwarven steel that ringed the warehouse so that at least some of the slaves could escape. Barring that… well he considered a swift death via ritual sacrifice kinder than the punishment for rebellion.
One girl objected to the plan. A young woman named Elva was once something other than a slave, someone who actually knew something of daemons and the horrors they brought, and of souls and what it meant to sacrifice them. Her objections were overruled, her violent protests marking her out as the vessel for the daemon to be bound within. She was held down on top of a crate as, one after another, dozens of slaves took turns using a single, precious, stolen dagger to spill their lifeblood over her body.
Desperation, a dozen sacrifices, mis-drawn runes and a ritual made up on the spot… The most common result of all this would be for nothing at all to happen; or perhaps the north wind would whisper instructions into the ears of the man leading the ritual and yet another servant of Chaos would find a toe-hold within the world.
But the ritual did neither of those things.
Dice fell. A god with an ever-shifting face laughed. An alien being budded, then ate it's own bud for the sake of a love it didn't understand. Elva saw a vision of two gods, fighting through a million portals upon a thousand worlds, then her soul was caged as a prize for the winner.
We are all so very small, in the end.
No! No please! No no no no no no no…
You open your eyes. You're being held down by four women while a man stands over you, holding a bloody dagger with trembling hands. You reach for your swarm and feel relief as it answers. Your range is good, better than it was before even, about a dozen blocks in size. It's just bugs again, the people here are beyond your ability to control, fortunately.
Some of the insects are strange, some of the people are strange, there's another power tugging at your mind and itching to be used and a voice in your head that has descended into mindless babbling, but you'll think about all that later. For now a small flying insect finds it's way into the eye of the woman holding your right leg, allowing you to free the limb with a frantic kick. You stop pulling with your right arm and instead push, jabbing clawed fingers into the wrist tendons of the woman holding that limb, freeing your right side. This allows you to roll to the left, twisting off the crate and splashing into a pool of blood on the ground, while also knocking over the man standing over you and dragging your remaining arm free from it's captor. The last woman keeps her grip on your leg, holding it even as you fall, but that just keeps your lower body elevated enough for a solid kick to her throat.
"Daemon, by the power of these runes I bind you!" a man says.
He's not speaking English, but you still understand him. This is concerning, and you force a bug down his throat under the assumption that he might have some kind of spoken Master power. The man you toppled seconds ago catches himself as he starts tumbling off the box, turning a drop into a painful kneeling motion that jars him long enough for you to rise, grab his wrist, twist it sharply and bang it against the edge of the crate until the dagger clatters to the floor.
His swearing is also not in English, and you can still understand it. You might need to revisit your theory about the first speaker being a Master.
You scoop up the dagger and stand, turning frantically as you try to keep the potential hostiles in sight. You are, unfortunately, still surrounded. There's at least thirty people in this room, crowded around you and with their heads turned to face you, although they're also backing away from you now that you're armed. Your vision is currently swimming too much to do a proper visual count by the dim candlelight, so you have to rely on your swarm-sense. You're still moving bugs through the room, tagging people who haven't caught the lice infestation as you find them.
At least fifty now, likely more, you don't have enough flying insects nearby to have done a proper grid-search yet. You're getting an idea of your surroundings though. It's an empty warehouse, full of empty crates. Large stone pillars supporting a stone ceiling indicate that you're likely below ground. Practically no time has passed and your swarm is still dispersed.
Your vision fades out completely and you see a girl in a cage of silver light screaming at you to give her body back. An effort of will clears her from your vision, but now that she's drawn your attention... You approach her again, brushing aside her feeble attempts at resistance to wring brief answers to your questions from her unwilling mind.
Who? Slaves. What? An escape attempt. When? Sometime in Nachexen, 2450, a calendar date that holds no meaning to you. Where? The Tower of Gorgoth, slave labor camp and slave trading hub of the Dark Lands. Why? Desperation.
The woman, Elva, thinks you're a daemon. Vicious and vile and about to torture her soul for all eternity. Her panic isn't helping anyone, so with a twist of will you send her to sleep until you have time to convince her otherwise.
The crowd has backed away a little more now and your eyes are adjusting to the dim light. You can see the rags they wear, the red marks on their wrists from shackles, the thin figures and the hopeless longing in their eyes. They don't seem so threatening now. The blood from the pile of corpses beside the makeshift altar still trickles across the floor, but now that you've calmed down you're starting to think that this isn't as simple as some crazy cult you can arrest and then go about your day.
The man who spoke of binding you finally coughs out the bug you made him swallow and forces a thin, fake and bitter smile.
"Maybe… maybe we can bargain? My name is Farrah, what do we call you?"
Taylor, Skitter, Weaver… there were a number of responses you could give, but they'd all be lies. You remember being shot twice by Contessa. You remember dying, then you remember being towers of crystalline computational matter, then you remember dying again. You'll ponder the existential crisis later. For now, with your abysmal skill at coming up with names on the spot and with the bugs pouring in from outside brushing past armoured figures carrying a heavy battering ram…
You don't trust these people, naturally, but you've worked with people you don't trust before. You won't just let them die, not if you can help it. You also won't let them engage in human sacrifice again, which requires a position of power within whatever organizational structure they possess.
"If you want me to save you, then you can call me Queen," you tell them.
AN: Please vote on your secondary power.
[ ] Data Package: Glaistig Uaine
You can grow four, six foot long segmented limbs from out of your back. They are slim, black and covered in hard chitin. Your spine is reinforced to better bear the weight. Each limb ends in a grey hand with three fingers and a thumb. The hands all possess a wiry strength, with each limb fully able to lift the weight of a grown man. If destroyed it will take several weeks for these limbs to reform.
If someone is choked to death by one of these hands you will gain something from the deceased. The lower-left hand grants you their knowledge, the lower-right hand grants you their skill, the upper right hand grants you the supernatural powers they wielded, while the upper left hand grants you the natural strength and durability they possessed. Using more than one hand to kill your victims is possible and even necessary to gain certain abilities that are a mix of the above, but each hand can hold only one imprint at once.
[ ] Data Package: Chevalier
You can grow four, fourteen foot long, heavily articulated limbs from out of your back. They are made of iron initially, but the arms have the ability to adapt to become other metals if you have them 'eat' a large enough sample. Your spine, pelvis, legs, neck and rib-cage are all greatly reinforced to ensure you are not crushed or damaged by the weight or the high speed maneuvers these limbs are capable of. Each limb ends in a large four-prong pincer. These pincers are strong enough to casually throw around horses. If destroyed it will take several months for these limbs to reform.
Each pincer is able to 'absorb' a single weapon, biting into and merging with it until such time as you choose to spit the weapon out. There are size constraints, but these limbs are are able to consume just about anything short of artillery, provided it is a physical object that can be used in combat. The limbs are then able to merge with each other, granting them increased strength and allowing you to create unique weapons with traits from everything in the merge. An example would be absorbing a grenade, a net and a rifle into three limbs, and then merging them to create a single limb with a gun that shoots bullets that explode into a tangle of rope.
[ ] Data Package: Teacher
You can grow four, twenty foot long tendrils from out of your back. They are thin and whip-like, with only a small spike on the end. Your spine, ribs and neck are reinforced to ensure you are not damaged by the high speed maneuvers these limbs are capable of. These tendrils require momentum to be effective, but can reach high speeds and are capable of throwing/dragging you around if used correctly. If destroyed it will take less than a day for these limbs to reform.
Each tendril has a 'rule,' and each rule grants a power. In order to inflict a rule upon someone, that tendril has to strike the victim directly on their skin and draw blood. The lower-right rule is 'Do Not Murder,' this makes the victim pathologically incapable of killing another sapient being, they will also become capable of sensing within a short distance people who have killed sapient beings. The lower-left rule is 'Do Not Lie,' this makes the victim incapable of directly lying and allows them to sense lies as they are told. The upper-right rule is 'Do Not Die,' this makes the victim unable to take actions that may directly result in their death, and gives them a short-range danger-sense. The upper-left rule is 'Do Not Teach,' this prevents the victim from willingly passing on information regarding a subject that they consider themselves expert, they also gain a pseudo-Tinker power that makes them a genius at their chosen field, or sets them decades or even centuries ahead of their time if they are already a genius.
All rules are permanent once inflicted.
[X] Data Package: Simurgh
You can grow four, eight foot long wings from out of your back. They are white and angelic in appearance, and they feel like soft down to the touch. These wings allow you to fly and are strong enough to throw around a grown man with ease. If damaged they will grow back in a few months.
Every time you cause complete terror to a sapient being you will randomly gain one hour of use of one of the following powers: You gain powerful telekinesis, though only within five feet of your wings. You gain three seconds of precognition. You can sing beautifully and your songs will powerfully inspire the emotion of your choice. You become much stronger. You become much more durable. Your scream causes fear and confusion to your enemies. You become inhumanly beautiful. You can intuit and reverse-engineer technology. You can intuit and reverse engineer magic.
Stored time is lost if it isn't used within two months.
Secondary Disclaimer: I'm going to try to gloss over the gory details enough to keep this from needing a Mature tag, but these are rather dark settings and you should not read this story if you're unwilling to read written depictions of slavery, daemons, ritual sacrifice or slavers drowning in a tide of bugs.
The Dawi Zharr, also known as Chaos Dwarfs, had faced many slave rebellions over the history of their species. The largest and most famous was the rebellion of the Black Orcs, a disaster that shook the Chaos Dwarf's iron grip on the Dark Lands enough for Skaven, Ogres and Greenskin tribes to claim vast swathes of territory. Some say that the Greenskin hordes rampaged as far as the Temple of Hashut itself, but they say so quietly, in whispers that they hope their masters will never hear.
In an effort to prevent such a catastrophe from striking their nation again the Chaos Dwarfs became proactive about managing their slave rebellions. Carefully curated and vetted agitators were seeded into the most common problem areas, where they could find the most rebellious, unruly and wilful of the local slaves, gather them together, organize a 'rebellion' or mass-escape, only to report back to their superiors so the breakout could be crushed in as public a manner as possible. Anyone who showed actual skill in evading the eye of their captors or who possessed a glimmer of leadership potential was captured and executed, slowly, painfully and publicly.
For a time this system worked. Slaves were cowed, each generation having several events within living memory that seemed to prove the futility of defiance and the brutality of their masters, while distrust and paranoia shattered many genuine uprisings before they could begin.
In the caverns of a long-dead volcano a group of nearly a hundred slaves found themselves trapped, abandoned by a leader who they had thought they could trust. The vast, stone warehouse had been supposed to hold the food and supplies they needed to escape, but the crates were empty and the exits were blocked.
There is a saying about cornered rats that applies to them.
Unarmed, untrained and with nothing but the promise of slow, painful death in their future, the slaves turned to the most dangerous weapon they knew, magic. One of them had been tasked with cleaning the ritual-sites of the Daemonsmiths; and while he lacked both knowledge and skill he still knew enough to roughly ape in blood the twisted rune-craft of his captors. His plan was to summon a daemon to break them free of the blockade, to cut a path through the line of solid dwarven steel that ringed the warehouse so that at least some of the slaves could escape. Barring that… well he considered a swift death via ritual sacrifice kinder than the punishment for rebellion.
One girl objected to the plan. A young woman named Elva was once something other than a slave, someone who actually knew something of daemons and the horrors they brought, and of souls and what it meant to sacrifice them. Her objections were overruled, her violent protests marking her out as the vessel for the daemon to be bound within. She was held down on top of a crate as, one after another, dozens of slaves took turns using a single, precious, stolen dagger to spill their lifeblood over her body.
Desperation, a dozen sacrifices, mis-drawn runes and a ritual made up on the spot… The most common result of all this would be for nothing at all to happen; or perhaps the north wind would whisper instructions into the ears of the man leading the ritual and yet another servant of Chaos would find a toe-hold within the world.
But the ritual did neither of those things.
Dice fell. A god with an ever-shifting face laughed. An alien being budded, then ate it's own bud for the sake of a love it didn't understand. Elva saw a vision of two gods, fighting through a million portals upon a thousand worlds, then her soul was caged as a prize for the winner.
We are all so very small, in the end.
No! No please! No no no no no no no…
You open your eyes. You're being held down by four women while a man stands over you, holding a bloody dagger with trembling hands. You reach for your swarm and feel relief as it answers. Your range is good, better than it was before even, about a dozen blocks in size. It's just bugs again, the people here are beyond your ability to control, fortunately.
Some of the insects are strange, some of the people are strange, there's another power tugging at your mind and itching to be used and a voice in your head that has descended into mindless babbling, but you'll think about all that later. For now a small flying insect finds it's way into the eye of the woman holding your right leg, allowing you to free the limb with a frantic kick. You stop pulling with your right arm and instead push, jabbing clawed fingers into the wrist tendons of the woman holding that limb, freeing your right side. This allows you to roll to the left, twisting off the crate and splashing into a pool of blood on the ground, while also knocking over the man standing over you and dragging your remaining arm free from it's captor. The last woman keeps her grip on your leg, holding it even as you fall, but that just keeps your lower body elevated enough for a solid kick to her throat.
"Daemon, by the power of these runes I bind you!" a man says.
He's not speaking English, but you still understand him. This is concerning, and you force a bug down his throat under the assumption that he might have some kind of spoken Master power. The man you toppled seconds ago catches himself as he starts tumbling off the box, turning a drop into a painful kneeling motion that jars him long enough for you to rise, grab his wrist, twist it sharply and bang it against the edge of the crate until the dagger clatters to the floor.
His swearing is also not in English, and you can still understand it. You might need to revisit your theory about the first speaker being a Master.
You scoop up the dagger and stand, turning frantically as you try to keep the potential hostiles in sight. You are, unfortunately, still surrounded. There's at least thirty people in this room, crowded around you and with their heads turned to face you, although they're also backing away from you now that you're armed. Your vision is currently swimming too much to do a proper visual count by the dim candlelight, so you have to rely on your swarm-sense. You're still moving bugs through the room, tagging people who haven't caught the lice infestation as you find them.
At least fifty now, likely more, you don't have enough flying insects nearby to have done a proper grid-search yet. You're getting an idea of your surroundings though. It's an empty warehouse, full of empty crates. Large stone pillars supporting a stone ceiling indicate that you're likely below ground. Practically no time has passed and your swarm is still dispersed.
Your vision fades out completely and you see a girl in a cage of silver light screaming at you to give her body back. An effort of will clears her from your vision, but now that she's drawn your attention... You approach her again, brushing aside her feeble attempts at resistance to wring brief answers to your questions from her unwilling mind.
Who? Slaves. What? An escape attempt. When? Sometime in Nachexen, 2450, a calendar date that holds no meaning to you. Where? The Tower of Gorgoth, slave labor camp and slave trading hub of the Dark Lands. Why? Desperation.
The woman, Elva, thinks you're a daemon. Vicious and vile and about to torture her soul for all eternity. Her panic isn't helping anyone, so with a twist of will you send her to sleep until you have time to convince her otherwise.
The crowd has backed away a little more now and your eyes are adjusting to the dim light. You can see the rags they wear, the red marks on their wrists from shackles, the thin figures and the hopeless longing in their eyes. They don't seem so threatening now. The blood from the pile of corpses beside the makeshift altar still trickles across the floor, but now that you've calmed down you're starting to think that this isn't as simple as some crazy cult you can arrest and then go about your day.
The man who spoke of binding you finally coughs out the bug you made him swallow and forces a thin, fake and bitter smile.
"Maybe… maybe we can bargain? My name is Farrah, what do we call you?"
Taylor, Skitter, Weaver… there were a number of responses you could give, but they'd all be lies. You remember being shot twice by Contessa. You remember dying, then you remember being towers of crystalline computational matter, then you remember dying again. You'll ponder the existential crisis later. For now, with your abysmal skill at coming up with names on the spot and with the bugs pouring in from outside brushing past armoured figures carrying a heavy battering ram…
You don't trust these people, naturally, but you've worked with people you don't trust before. You won't just let them die, not if you can help it. You also won't let them engage in human sacrifice again, which requires a position of power within whatever organizational structure they possess.
"If you want me to save you, then you can call me Queen," you tell them.
AN: Please vote on your secondary power.
[ ] Data Package: Glaistig Uaine
You can grow four, six foot long segmented limbs from out of your back. They are slim, black and covered in hard chitin. Your spine is reinforced to better bear the weight. Each limb ends in a grey hand with three fingers and a thumb. The hands all possess a wiry strength, with each limb fully able to lift the weight of a grown man. If destroyed it will take several weeks for these limbs to reform.
If someone is choked to death by one of these hands you will gain something from the deceased. The lower-left hand grants you their knowledge, the lower-right hand grants you their skill, the upper right hand grants you the supernatural powers they wielded, while the upper left hand grants you the natural strength and durability they possessed. Using more than one hand to kill your victims is possible and even necessary to gain certain abilities that are a mix of the above, but each hand can hold only one imprint at once.
[ ] Data Package: Chevalier
You can grow four, fourteen foot long, heavily articulated limbs from out of your back. They are made of iron initially, but the arms have the ability to adapt to become other metals if you have them 'eat' a large enough sample. Your spine, pelvis, legs, neck and rib-cage are all greatly reinforced to ensure you are not crushed or damaged by the weight or the high speed maneuvers these limbs are capable of. Each limb ends in a large four-prong pincer. These pincers are strong enough to casually throw around horses. If destroyed it will take several months for these limbs to reform.
Each pincer is able to 'absorb' a single weapon, biting into and merging with it until such time as you choose to spit the weapon out. There are size constraints, but these limbs are are able to consume just about anything short of artillery, provided it is a physical object that can be used in combat. The limbs are then able to merge with each other, granting them increased strength and allowing you to create unique weapons with traits from everything in the merge. An example would be absorbing a grenade, a net and a rifle into three limbs, and then merging them to create a single limb with a gun that shoots bullets that explode into a tangle of rope.
[ ] Data Package: Teacher
You can grow four, twenty foot long tendrils from out of your back. They are thin and whip-like, with only a small spike on the end. Your spine, ribs and neck are reinforced to ensure you are not damaged by the high speed maneuvers these limbs are capable of. These tendrils require momentum to be effective, but can reach high speeds and are capable of throwing/dragging you around if used correctly. If destroyed it will take less than a day for these limbs to reform.
Each tendril has a 'rule,' and each rule grants a power. In order to inflict a rule upon someone, that tendril has to strike the victim directly on their skin and draw blood. The lower-right rule is 'Do Not Murder,' this makes the victim pathologically incapable of killing another sapient being, they will also become capable of sensing within a short distance people who have killed sapient beings. The lower-left rule is 'Do Not Lie,' this makes the victim incapable of directly lying and allows them to sense lies as they are told. The upper-right rule is 'Do Not Die,' this makes the victim unable to take actions that may directly result in their death, and gives them a short-range danger-sense. The upper-left rule is 'Do Not Teach,' this prevents the victim from willingly passing on information regarding a subject that they consider themselves expert, they also gain a pseudo-Tinker power that makes them a genius at their chosen field, or sets them decades or even centuries ahead of their time if they are already a genius.
All rules are permanent once inflicted.
[X] Data Package: Simurgh
You can grow four, eight foot long wings from out of your back. They are white and angelic in appearance, and they feel like soft down to the touch. These wings allow you to fly and are strong enough to throw around a grown man with ease. If damaged they will grow back in a few months.
Every time you cause complete terror to a sapient being you will randomly gain one hour of use of one of the following powers: You gain powerful telekinesis, though only within five feet of your wings. You gain three seconds of precognition. You can sing beautifully and your songs will powerfully inspire the emotion of your choice. You become much stronger. You become much more durable. Your scream causes fear and confusion to your enemies. You become inhumanly beautiful. You can intuit and reverse-engineer technology. You can intuit and reverse engineer magic.
Stored time is lost if it isn't used within two months.
Taylor's bug control will work just fine on Leviathans, Arachnaroks, Prometheans, Tregara, Giant Beetles and other such creatures, giving her a ready-made and disposable army if you manage to find them. I may even introduce a few non-canon bugs with fantastical abilities over the course of the quest. Ogre's, for instance, will have their unending hunger caused by psychic tapeworms in this continuity. You won't be able to do much with the tapeworms other than cause hunger to the creatures they infest, but it might get a few Ogre's on side if you can help them curb their appetites.
The body Taylor's inhabiting belongs to an apprentice Hierophant, so she might also gain access to the Lore of Light.
To be honest I'm not an expert on Warhammer Fantasy. I've enjoyed the Total War: Warhammer games and BoneyM's quest, done a wiki crawl, and that's about it. I'm not going to hold myself to the source books with any particular rigour. Mostly because I don't own them and the wiki only goes so far. Expect some characters and places not to exist and for other characters and places to be made up entirely by me.
This quest is designed to be at least partially a fix-fic. Expect a bit of plot armour, and for things to go right more often than they go wrong. That said, it's going to take a lot of convincing to assure the more civilized races that you aren't a daemon and the Dark Lands really aren't a nice place, so you'll need all the power you can get your hands on.
The body Taylor's inhabiting belongs to an apprentice Hierophant, so she might also gain access to the Lore of Light.
To be honest I'm not an expert on Warhammer Fantasy. I've enjoyed the Total War: Warhammer games and BoneyM's quest, done a wiki crawl, and that's about it. I'm not going to hold myself to the source books with any particular rigour. Mostly because I don't own them and the wiki only goes so far. Expect some characters and places not to exist and for other characters and places to be made up entirely by me.
This quest is designed to be at least partially a fix-fic. Expect a bit of plot armour, and for things to go right more often than they go wrong. That said, it's going to take a lot of convincing to assure the more civilized races that you aren't a daemon and the Dark Lands really aren't a nice place, so you'll need all the power you can get your hands on.
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Chapter 2: Conflict
- Location
- Australia
There's a crash as a massive iron battering ram pounds against the simple wooden door of the warehouse, smashing through the thin cedar and shifting the crude barricade of crates piled behind it. It won't hold long, but it buys a little time for the slaves to tuck themselves into the empty crates at the far end of the warehouse, as you instructed earlier. You personally have already ascended to the ceiling and wrapped your new wings around the top of one of the pillars near the door.
You use your bugs to get a sense of what is waiting outside and take another memory-dip to cross-check it with Elva's knowledge. There's about thirty heavily armed and even more heavily armored Dawi Zharr, or Chaos Dwarves, accompanied by over a hundred small green humanoids without any significant armor carrying knives and whips. The latter must be goblins, specifically hobgoblins. You're not sure why this world seems to operate on fantasy tropes, but it does.
Their numbers are a problem, but one you can deal with. Your swarm already outnumbers them a couple of hundred to one and your reinforcements are streaming in by the minute. The dwarves have some very nice armor, with overlapping plates and joints so finely made you can barely get a gnat into the cracks, but they have to leave holes in their helmets to see and breathe through, which leaves them vulnerable. The goblins should be even easier to deal with, their poor hygiene means they're bringing in reinforcements for you.
What other assets do you have? The slaves are… well they're used to following orders, you expect they'll do what you tell them to, provided you use a commanding tone and appear to be on top of the situation. You just can't expect them to do anything but die if you send them unarmed against trained and armed targets.
Then there's your new power. Your wings are large, soft and so white they're practically luminescent, speckled with flecks of pale gold. They're beautiful, but they're about as stealthy as a rave party. You've countered that by coating them in a thick layer of darkly patterned bugs.
The wings don't physically connect to your back, at rest they hover a couple of inches away from your spine. When your weight is supported by them, like it is right now, there's about six inches of air between you and the rounded golden nubs where the wings begin. There's some sort of non-physical, semi-elastic connection between the wings and your torso, which you may need to test later. The wings are strong, light, powerful and they come with some sort of minor Thinker power that allows you to intuitively understand how to move all four wings in concert to create zones of pressure and provide the thrust needed to lift a fully grown human, if only at roughly walking speeds unless you're riding a thermal or diving.
You'd love them if it wasn't for the concern the Simurgh has somehow made you a mini-Endbringer.
Elva's stark panic had set a single, nine-sided dice rolling in the back of your head. It landed on a nine, which gave you some sort of ability designed to help your brain detect and parse exotic energy waveforms. You've activated it, but you're still figuring out what all the extra colors it adds to your vision actually mean. They're distracting and you can't figure out a way for them to be immediately useful, so you suppress the sense for now. Instead you focus on your directing your swarm. There's hundreds of these weird ten to twenty-foot-long centipedes in the cave-system below and figuring out how to get them out of their little caves and up the mine-shafts is taking a bit of attention. It's a labyrinth down there.
When the Dwarves break barricade they see nothing but your swarm clone, made from the smaller and more readily available bugs of the warehouse district. They stop immediately, forming a shield wall with admirable discipline and pointing the business ends of their blunderbuss weaponry at the clone.
"Spawn of Nurgle, this is the land of Holy Hashut! Leave or be purged!" one of the dwarves, one with a particularly tall and fancy hat, thunders.
You have no idea who Nurgle or Hashut are. A quick check through Elva's memories indicates that they're both rather nasty local gods.
"A question first," you have your swarm insist. "There are five children among the slaves here… what will you do with them?"
The leader eyes you and shifts his grip on his blunderbuss slightly, then he grunts in annoyance.
"They'll be an example of what happens when slaves try to escape, just like the others. More effective even, particularly for slaves who have children themselves," he says.
"What exactly do you mean by 'an example?'" you ask.
"There's a sack with difference execution methods written on paper slips, they get whatever we draw after the sentencing. Immurment, the giblet, the brazen bull… the variety keeps it interesting. Always a bloody nuisance to kill one of your kind, so we might be willing to cut a deal and let you have the kids instead, you'd need to talk with one of the Daemonsmiths about it," the dwarf says gruffly.
You watch the dwarves carefully. Their masks cover most of their faces, but there's no obvious signs of dissent. The goblins are easier to read, clearly almost gleeful about the topic if their faces match up to a human frame of reference.
"Ah. I see. Well that makes my choice easy then," you tell him.
Your clone collapses and the rest of your swarm falls from the ceiling. It isn't the biggest swarm you've ever wielded, but it's big enough. The dwarves respond with incredible speed and precision, raising their shields and locking them together to block the falling mass of bugs, locking themselves into a tight, huddled tortoiseshell formation. There's small gaps and you get a few bugs through, but it's amazing how well sealed it is.
The goblins are less well trained and less fortunate. You have no practical method of restraining them so you target the nose and mouth, blocking their airways. They panic, a few flee, some of them lash out, both at the bugs and even at each other.
From inside the shield formation you hear a horn, one blown powerfully enough to shake your bones in a pattern that makes it obvious they're signalling something. You assume they're calling for help.
The dwarves occasionally make breaks in their tortoise shell formation, just enough room to fire one of their blunderbuss at whatever the largest mass of bugs is. You force a few more bugs in through the gaps created, biting and stinging at their eyes to make sure they don't get a clean shot. Taking flight would just make it impossible to hide, so you use your wings to work your way around the pillar, putting thick stone between yourself and the shards of shrapnel those guns expel.
A couple of the slaves panic and try to run, and you're forced to herd them back into their crates with a wall of bugs before they can blunder somewhere that they'll get shot by accident. Not that those huge blunderbusses couldn't drive their flechette rounds through the crates, but you're being careful not to invite shots in the direction of the slaves, so it's safer than anywhere else.
Things devolve into something of a standoff. You can only get a few bugs into the shield formation at a time and the dwarves inside are doing a phenomenally good job at maintaining discipline with what few insects you have managed to sneak in working their way under eyelids and down nostrils. It's a war of attrition that you'd have eventually won, they can't perfectly seal everything and you're still bringing in reinforcements from the tunnels below.
You're a bit worried about things dragging out long enough for the help the dwarves summoned to arrive, and you're quite relieved when the suffocating goblins give you the tools you need to break the stalemate early.
Of the hundreds of goblins slowly drowning in a tide of bugs, only five feel enough fear to trigger your new power. Either there's a horrifically high ceiling for the level of terror you need to inflict, or they're some sort of race without a strong sense of fear. Maybe both. One of the slaves you forced back into their crate also triggered a roll, so that's six rolls of that dice at the back of your mind, and since one of the nine numbers came up twice, five new powers.
Once again your mind opens up to senses it's never had contact with before and your power begins to parse them for you. This… this fractal, diffused pattern… it's hard to describe, because it's like seeing color for the first time and no one has ever invented the word for 'red' before. It shows you, in a thousand twitching ghost-images that were and were not seen by your physical eyes, how the remaining goblins are going to thrash and when the dwarves are going to try and open a gap. A power like this would be a game-changer all on it's own, but there's much more.
You jump, spreading your wings into a controlled glide that carries you over the shields of the Dawi Zharr. You juke at the last second and feel the wind generated by the blast of a blunderbuss brush past your cheek as one of them somehow senses your approach and opens a gap to fire. Then you're upon them, unleashing a wave for powerful force that slams into their formation in a cacophony of shrieking metal.
Looking back the blow was hard enough to shatter several of the shields, break and twist the armor of the two dwarves, driving them into the ground with enough force to crack the rock.
They're likely dead. You didn't intend that, you thought you were holding back.
The gap you just created allows your swarm to pour into their formation and opens you up to direct attack.
It would be nice to turn their tactic back on them and hide behind a wall of shields, stolen from their grasp. Unfortunately that's not quite how your new variant of telekinesis works. It's more about generating sudden bursts of force in the direction of your choice than 'holding' things, and once you generate a blast there's a timer before you can generate another one. The stronger the blast, the longer the timer. That blow was about half of your maximum and now you can't throw another one for thirty seconds.
Rather than try to dodge you decide to trust your precognition, spread your wings, close your eyes and weather the storm of flechette rounds.
You skin stings, your wings lose a few feathers, but for the most part you're unhurt. Your durability power seems to work in two parts. It does something weird with fluid dynamics to harden your skin and other tissues moments before an impact, and it also generates a passive vibration field that weakens the structural integrity of objects it recognizes as dangerous when they approach your skin. It's useful, even directly harmful to certain types of weapon, but it's probably only good at dealing with physical attacks. You'll need to do some tests later to see if your power does or doesn't have a way to make you heatproof.
"No effect! I'll delay her! Rally at the plaza!" their leader yells, spitting, huffing and grinding his teeth frantically to keep his mouth clear of the bugs you direct towards his lips.
You could kill them all if you wanted to. It would be easy enough, most of the goblins are already halfway there. They're murderous slavers, and it's not like you can cart them off to prison. The problem is how new you are here, and how little information you have. You should probably take Yamada's advice about not jumping into things head first and get information from multiple sources, do a proper ten-count, maybe even sleep on it before you commit your largest deliberate mass-slaughter to date.
The rest of the dwarves start running and you let them go with only some light stinging on the eyelids, since once the wounds swell that should leave them incapacitate for a few days without being lethal. You also extract your bugs from the noses and mouths of the goblins, most of whom were crawling around pitifully, trying to find an exit that they couldn't see because of the bugs over their eyes. The ones that aren't fully unconscious don't need much encouragement to get up and join the rout once you clear enough bugs for them to see where the exit is.
You're well aware that the dwarven leader is charging you, and you were going to just block his axe-blow with your arm until your precognition shows you having your arm cut off. You step to the side as their leader, blinded by bugs and frothing blood at the lips, barrels past you, swinging wildly. Your exotic waveform analysis power draws your attention to some sort of energy in the rune carved onto the axe-head. Is that why your durability power could potentially have been compromised? Perhaps.
"The Daemonsmiths are going to destroy you for this!" the dwarf roars.
"Is that who you summoned with the horn earlier?" you ask. He doesn't reply, in fact he can't reply, because when he inhaled at the end of that sentence he took a small chunk of your swarm into his lungs and now he's running on just what oxygen was in his blood, which he's expending by swinging wildly at the bugs you used to ask the question.
You take a couple of steps back and wait.
The goblins seemed to last about as long without air as a human would. This guy lasts a couple of minutes longer. Eventually he starts getting too close to the back of the warehouse, where the slaves are still hiding in their crates, so you blast the axe from his hands, use a wing to sweep his legs from under him, then you grab his ornamental helmet and slam it into the ground a few times, until the lack of air and the dizzying blows finally drives the fight from his body.
Your swarm settles, the seething buzz of millions of insects fades. You check on the goblin casualties… seven dead, all from knife-wounds inflicted by other goblins, either in panic or deliberately. There were a few wounded as well, but none wounded so badly they couldn't flee with the rest. Then there's the two dead dwarves, and that's it. It could have been worse. Would have been worse, if the slaves had tried to fight.
Finally you decide enough time has passed and you allow the dwarven leader to breathe. You played it safe and kept choking him well after he stilled, the tiny bugs you sent onto his chest can barely feel a fading heartbeat and depending on how his physiology functions he might have brain damage, but you can't quite bring yourself to care.
"You can come out now. They're dealt with."
The first slave to leave his crate is a brave young boy, and when he isn't immediately shot or swarmed by bugs the rest follow. It couldn't have been easy for them to huddle in the dark like that, listening to the screams and the gunshots in silence.
You haven't had anymore rolls from your second power though. There really is a high ceiling on that.
"The daemon… actually did it?" a woman mutters.
"Alright everyone," Farrah says, "I'm glad that worked. Now we need to actually get out of here and make sure those who sacrificed themselves didn't do so in vain. Since we'll need to travel fast and light we want just enough water-skins to make it to Mt Grey Hag and some gold or gems to purchase further supplies from the goblins once we get there. Someone in the merchant district probably has weak enough guards for us to overwhelm them."
"The goblins will just kill us!" one of the women yells.
"We don't know that, Nistra. The Dawi Zharr might have just been playing up how barbaric they are so that we're too scared to go to them? I mean, they can't be worse than hobs, right?"
"You think I don't know how goblins behave! I grew up in the Border Princes you ignorant…"
"Stop!" you instruct. The slaves collectively flinch and you sigh and switch to speaking through your own mouth instead of the swarm. "Tell me. How many slaves are there in this city, and how many guards?"
Most of the slaves look blank, likely not educated enough to know about city population statistics. The woman - Nistra, who you notice wears slightly finer clothes than the rest, does have an answer for you.
"Your majesty, I estimate this city currently has about twenty-four thousand slaves, three thousand or four thousand of the Dawi and six thousand hobs," she says. "Astragoth Ironhand himself took most of the garrison into his throng, he marches on Crookback Mountain. Ghark Ironskin is bringing in a new shipment of slaves today as well, and most of the remaining Dawi are overseeing the transfer in the central marketplace. There's barely enough of the Dawi Zharr left to man the outposts. That's… that's why we thought we might actually escape."
You could see how the dwarves might be able to slaughter unarmed and untrained slaves in job lots, but that was a serious number discrepancy…
"And how do you know all that?" Farrah sneers. "You arrived here just last week, this is the first time you're out of that damned tannery!"
"You can get some good estimates on population numbers from waste removal, if you know what to look for. And you told me about Ghark," Nistra replies primly.
"Nine thousand…" you muse, cutting them off. "I might be able to deal with that many… Or at least break enough formations and destroy enough defensive infrastructure to let the slaves overrun them…"
Particularly if you 'scare up' the rest of this weird pseudo-Simurgh powerset. Ugh, no, that pun was bad even in your head.
More seriously, you don't think you could afford to hold back if you go that route. Not like you did here. There would be oceans of blood on your hands by the end of it.
Well that wouldn't exactly be anything new. Would it?
"The Daemonsmiths know how to deal with your kind, you'd never survive meeting them," Farrah says. "Come with us! It's a long, hard trail to Mad Dog Pass and some people won't be able to keep up… well they'd die anyway, so we'll sacrifice them to you as payment for protecting us, and everyone wins!"
You turn and regard him for a moment.
"You remind me of a man named Trickster. It is not a comparison you want me to be making. You should know that if you practice or encourage human sacrifice again I will kill you for it," you tell him.
That shuts him down for now.
There's an awkward silence which you use to get a better feel for the area through your swarm. The nearby district is some sort of storage site, mostly for oil, tar and a whole ton of crates that are sealed well enough that your bugs can't figure out the contents from a cursory crawl. Most of these storage sites are warehouses, carved into the mountain like this one. They're also all locked, and while you could likely break into them, finding the supplies you need might take some time.
This place is more spread-out than the cities you're used to, more a series of well made and heavily fortified towns all within walking distance of each other than a true wall-to-wall city.
"There's no rivers along the Silver Road until you're east of Mad Dog Pass, we will need food and especially water, all we can get. Plus overland travel gear in case it rains," Nistra hints.
"And there's bound to be some minor merchant we can rob to get what we need," Farrah insists.
"Where are we going, your majesty?" Nistra asks.
[ ] To break into nearby warehouses, looking for supplies
[ ] To rob a guardhouse
[ ] To the central marketplace
[ ] To wherever slaves sleep
[ ] To the center of government
[ ] To the armory
[ ] To the merchant district
[X] Write-In: Track down the records, recordkeeper, or both, of these warehouses. Once found, use them to zero in on the most useful merchandise - specifically human-sized armour, weapons and medicine. Next, locate keys or the tools necessary to strike chains, and head for the nearest concentration of slaves, freeing and arming them too.
Continue holding back enough to leave your enemies alive?
[ ] Yes
[X] No
Image credit goes to the Lucifer card from Shadowverse
You use your bugs to get a sense of what is waiting outside and take another memory-dip to cross-check it with Elva's knowledge. There's about thirty heavily armed and even more heavily armored Dawi Zharr, or Chaos Dwarves, accompanied by over a hundred small green humanoids without any significant armor carrying knives and whips. The latter must be goblins, specifically hobgoblins. You're not sure why this world seems to operate on fantasy tropes, but it does.
Their numbers are a problem, but one you can deal with. Your swarm already outnumbers them a couple of hundred to one and your reinforcements are streaming in by the minute. The dwarves have some very nice armor, with overlapping plates and joints so finely made you can barely get a gnat into the cracks, but they have to leave holes in their helmets to see and breathe through, which leaves them vulnerable. The goblins should be even easier to deal with, their poor hygiene means they're bringing in reinforcements for you.
What other assets do you have? The slaves are… well they're used to following orders, you expect they'll do what you tell them to, provided you use a commanding tone and appear to be on top of the situation. You just can't expect them to do anything but die if you send them unarmed against trained and armed targets.
Then there's your new power. Your wings are large, soft and so white they're practically luminescent, speckled with flecks of pale gold. They're beautiful, but they're about as stealthy as a rave party. You've countered that by coating them in a thick layer of darkly patterned bugs.
The wings don't physically connect to your back, at rest they hover a couple of inches away from your spine. When your weight is supported by them, like it is right now, there's about six inches of air between you and the rounded golden nubs where the wings begin. There's some sort of non-physical, semi-elastic connection between the wings and your torso, which you may need to test later. The wings are strong, light, powerful and they come with some sort of minor Thinker power that allows you to intuitively understand how to move all four wings in concert to create zones of pressure and provide the thrust needed to lift a fully grown human, if only at roughly walking speeds unless you're riding a thermal or diving.
You'd love them if it wasn't for the concern the Simurgh has somehow made you a mini-Endbringer.
Elva's stark panic had set a single, nine-sided dice rolling in the back of your head. It landed on a nine, which gave you some sort of ability designed to help your brain detect and parse exotic energy waveforms. You've activated it, but you're still figuring out what all the extra colors it adds to your vision actually mean. They're distracting and you can't figure out a way for them to be immediately useful, so you suppress the sense for now. Instead you focus on your directing your swarm. There's hundreds of these weird ten to twenty-foot-long centipedes in the cave-system below and figuring out how to get them out of their little caves and up the mine-shafts is taking a bit of attention. It's a labyrinth down there.
When the Dwarves break barricade they see nothing but your swarm clone, made from the smaller and more readily available bugs of the warehouse district. They stop immediately, forming a shield wall with admirable discipline and pointing the business ends of their blunderbuss weaponry at the clone.
"Spawn of Nurgle, this is the land of Holy Hashut! Leave or be purged!" one of the dwarves, one with a particularly tall and fancy hat, thunders.
You have no idea who Nurgle or Hashut are. A quick check through Elva's memories indicates that they're both rather nasty local gods.
"A question first," you have your swarm insist. "There are five children among the slaves here… what will you do with them?"
The leader eyes you and shifts his grip on his blunderbuss slightly, then he grunts in annoyance.
"They'll be an example of what happens when slaves try to escape, just like the others. More effective even, particularly for slaves who have children themselves," he says.
"What exactly do you mean by 'an example?'" you ask.
"There's a sack with difference execution methods written on paper slips, they get whatever we draw after the sentencing. Immurment, the giblet, the brazen bull… the variety keeps it interesting. Always a bloody nuisance to kill one of your kind, so we might be willing to cut a deal and let you have the kids instead, you'd need to talk with one of the Daemonsmiths about it," the dwarf says gruffly.
You watch the dwarves carefully. Their masks cover most of their faces, but there's no obvious signs of dissent. The goblins are easier to read, clearly almost gleeful about the topic if their faces match up to a human frame of reference.
"Ah. I see. Well that makes my choice easy then," you tell him.
Your clone collapses and the rest of your swarm falls from the ceiling. It isn't the biggest swarm you've ever wielded, but it's big enough. The dwarves respond with incredible speed and precision, raising their shields and locking them together to block the falling mass of bugs, locking themselves into a tight, huddled tortoiseshell formation. There's small gaps and you get a few bugs through, but it's amazing how well sealed it is.
The goblins are less well trained and less fortunate. You have no practical method of restraining them so you target the nose and mouth, blocking their airways. They panic, a few flee, some of them lash out, both at the bugs and even at each other.
From inside the shield formation you hear a horn, one blown powerfully enough to shake your bones in a pattern that makes it obvious they're signalling something. You assume they're calling for help.
The dwarves occasionally make breaks in their tortoise shell formation, just enough room to fire one of their blunderbuss at whatever the largest mass of bugs is. You force a few more bugs in through the gaps created, biting and stinging at their eyes to make sure they don't get a clean shot. Taking flight would just make it impossible to hide, so you use your wings to work your way around the pillar, putting thick stone between yourself and the shards of shrapnel those guns expel.
A couple of the slaves panic and try to run, and you're forced to herd them back into their crates with a wall of bugs before they can blunder somewhere that they'll get shot by accident. Not that those huge blunderbusses couldn't drive their flechette rounds through the crates, but you're being careful not to invite shots in the direction of the slaves, so it's safer than anywhere else.
Things devolve into something of a standoff. You can only get a few bugs into the shield formation at a time and the dwarves inside are doing a phenomenally good job at maintaining discipline with what few insects you have managed to sneak in working their way under eyelids and down nostrils. It's a war of attrition that you'd have eventually won, they can't perfectly seal everything and you're still bringing in reinforcements from the tunnels below.
You're a bit worried about things dragging out long enough for the help the dwarves summoned to arrive, and you're quite relieved when the suffocating goblins give you the tools you need to break the stalemate early.
Of the hundreds of goblins slowly drowning in a tide of bugs, only five feel enough fear to trigger your new power. Either there's a horrifically high ceiling for the level of terror you need to inflict, or they're some sort of race without a strong sense of fear. Maybe both. One of the slaves you forced back into their crate also triggered a roll, so that's six rolls of that dice at the back of your mind, and since one of the nine numbers came up twice, five new powers.
Once again your mind opens up to senses it's never had contact with before and your power begins to parse them for you. This… this fractal, diffused pattern… it's hard to describe, because it's like seeing color for the first time and no one has ever invented the word for 'red' before. It shows you, in a thousand twitching ghost-images that were and were not seen by your physical eyes, how the remaining goblins are going to thrash and when the dwarves are going to try and open a gap. A power like this would be a game-changer all on it's own, but there's much more.
You jump, spreading your wings into a controlled glide that carries you over the shields of the Dawi Zharr. You juke at the last second and feel the wind generated by the blast of a blunderbuss brush past your cheek as one of them somehow senses your approach and opens a gap to fire. Then you're upon them, unleashing a wave for powerful force that slams into their formation in a cacophony of shrieking metal.
Looking back the blow was hard enough to shatter several of the shields, break and twist the armor of the two dwarves, driving them into the ground with enough force to crack the rock.
They're likely dead. You didn't intend that, you thought you were holding back.
The gap you just created allows your swarm to pour into their formation and opens you up to direct attack.
It would be nice to turn their tactic back on them and hide behind a wall of shields, stolen from their grasp. Unfortunately that's not quite how your new variant of telekinesis works. It's more about generating sudden bursts of force in the direction of your choice than 'holding' things, and once you generate a blast there's a timer before you can generate another one. The stronger the blast, the longer the timer. That blow was about half of your maximum and now you can't throw another one for thirty seconds.
Rather than try to dodge you decide to trust your precognition, spread your wings, close your eyes and weather the storm of flechette rounds.
You skin stings, your wings lose a few feathers, but for the most part you're unhurt. Your durability power seems to work in two parts. It does something weird with fluid dynamics to harden your skin and other tissues moments before an impact, and it also generates a passive vibration field that weakens the structural integrity of objects it recognizes as dangerous when they approach your skin. It's useful, even directly harmful to certain types of weapon, but it's probably only good at dealing with physical attacks. You'll need to do some tests later to see if your power does or doesn't have a way to make you heatproof.
"No effect! I'll delay her! Rally at the plaza!" their leader yells, spitting, huffing and grinding his teeth frantically to keep his mouth clear of the bugs you direct towards his lips.
You could kill them all if you wanted to. It would be easy enough, most of the goblins are already halfway there. They're murderous slavers, and it's not like you can cart them off to prison. The problem is how new you are here, and how little information you have. You should probably take Yamada's advice about not jumping into things head first and get information from multiple sources, do a proper ten-count, maybe even sleep on it before you commit your largest deliberate mass-slaughter to date.
The rest of the dwarves start running and you let them go with only some light stinging on the eyelids, since once the wounds swell that should leave them incapacitate for a few days without being lethal. You also extract your bugs from the noses and mouths of the goblins, most of whom were crawling around pitifully, trying to find an exit that they couldn't see because of the bugs over their eyes. The ones that aren't fully unconscious don't need much encouragement to get up and join the rout once you clear enough bugs for them to see where the exit is.
You're well aware that the dwarven leader is charging you, and you were going to just block his axe-blow with your arm until your precognition shows you having your arm cut off. You step to the side as their leader, blinded by bugs and frothing blood at the lips, barrels past you, swinging wildly. Your exotic waveform analysis power draws your attention to some sort of energy in the rune carved onto the axe-head. Is that why your durability power could potentially have been compromised? Perhaps.
"The Daemonsmiths are going to destroy you for this!" the dwarf roars.
"Is that who you summoned with the horn earlier?" you ask. He doesn't reply, in fact he can't reply, because when he inhaled at the end of that sentence he took a small chunk of your swarm into his lungs and now he's running on just what oxygen was in his blood, which he's expending by swinging wildly at the bugs you used to ask the question.
You take a couple of steps back and wait.
The goblins seemed to last about as long without air as a human would. This guy lasts a couple of minutes longer. Eventually he starts getting too close to the back of the warehouse, where the slaves are still hiding in their crates, so you blast the axe from his hands, use a wing to sweep his legs from under him, then you grab his ornamental helmet and slam it into the ground a few times, until the lack of air and the dizzying blows finally drives the fight from his body.
Your swarm settles, the seething buzz of millions of insects fades. You check on the goblin casualties… seven dead, all from knife-wounds inflicted by other goblins, either in panic or deliberately. There were a few wounded as well, but none wounded so badly they couldn't flee with the rest. Then there's the two dead dwarves, and that's it. It could have been worse. Would have been worse, if the slaves had tried to fight.
Finally you decide enough time has passed and you allow the dwarven leader to breathe. You played it safe and kept choking him well after he stilled, the tiny bugs you sent onto his chest can barely feel a fading heartbeat and depending on how his physiology functions he might have brain damage, but you can't quite bring yourself to care.
"You can come out now. They're dealt with."
The first slave to leave his crate is a brave young boy, and when he isn't immediately shot or swarmed by bugs the rest follow. It couldn't have been easy for them to huddle in the dark like that, listening to the screams and the gunshots in silence.
You haven't had anymore rolls from your second power though. There really is a high ceiling on that.
"The daemon… actually did it?" a woman mutters.
"Alright everyone," Farrah says, "I'm glad that worked. Now we need to actually get out of here and make sure those who sacrificed themselves didn't do so in vain. Since we'll need to travel fast and light we want just enough water-skins to make it to Mt Grey Hag and some gold or gems to purchase further supplies from the goblins once we get there. Someone in the merchant district probably has weak enough guards for us to overwhelm them."
"The goblins will just kill us!" one of the women yells.
"We don't know that, Nistra. The Dawi Zharr might have just been playing up how barbaric they are so that we're too scared to go to them? I mean, they can't be worse than hobs, right?"
"You think I don't know how goblins behave! I grew up in the Border Princes you ignorant…"
"Stop!" you instruct. The slaves collectively flinch and you sigh and switch to speaking through your own mouth instead of the swarm. "Tell me. How many slaves are there in this city, and how many guards?"
Most of the slaves look blank, likely not educated enough to know about city population statistics. The woman - Nistra, who you notice wears slightly finer clothes than the rest, does have an answer for you.
"Your majesty, I estimate this city currently has about twenty-four thousand slaves, three thousand or four thousand of the Dawi and six thousand hobs," she says. "Astragoth Ironhand himself took most of the garrison into his throng, he marches on Crookback Mountain. Ghark Ironskin is bringing in a new shipment of slaves today as well, and most of the remaining Dawi are overseeing the transfer in the central marketplace. There's barely enough of the Dawi Zharr left to man the outposts. That's… that's why we thought we might actually escape."
You could see how the dwarves might be able to slaughter unarmed and untrained slaves in job lots, but that was a serious number discrepancy…
"And how do you know all that?" Farrah sneers. "You arrived here just last week, this is the first time you're out of that damned tannery!"
"You can get some good estimates on population numbers from waste removal, if you know what to look for. And you told me about Ghark," Nistra replies primly.
"Nine thousand…" you muse, cutting them off. "I might be able to deal with that many… Or at least break enough formations and destroy enough defensive infrastructure to let the slaves overrun them…"
Particularly if you 'scare up' the rest of this weird pseudo-Simurgh powerset. Ugh, no, that pun was bad even in your head.
More seriously, you don't think you could afford to hold back if you go that route. Not like you did here. There would be oceans of blood on your hands by the end of it.
Well that wouldn't exactly be anything new. Would it?
"The Daemonsmiths know how to deal with your kind, you'd never survive meeting them," Farrah says. "Come with us! It's a long, hard trail to Mad Dog Pass and some people won't be able to keep up… well they'd die anyway, so we'll sacrifice them to you as payment for protecting us, and everyone wins!"
You turn and regard him for a moment.
"You remind me of a man named Trickster. It is not a comparison you want me to be making. You should know that if you practice or encourage human sacrifice again I will kill you for it," you tell him.
That shuts him down for now.
There's an awkward silence which you use to get a better feel for the area through your swarm. The nearby district is some sort of storage site, mostly for oil, tar and a whole ton of crates that are sealed well enough that your bugs can't figure out the contents from a cursory crawl. Most of these storage sites are warehouses, carved into the mountain like this one. They're also all locked, and while you could likely break into them, finding the supplies you need might take some time.
This place is more spread-out than the cities you're used to, more a series of well made and heavily fortified towns all within walking distance of each other than a true wall-to-wall city.
"There's no rivers along the Silver Road until you're east of Mad Dog Pass, we will need food and especially water, all we can get. Plus overland travel gear in case it rains," Nistra hints.
"And there's bound to be some minor merchant we can rob to get what we need," Farrah insists.
"Where are we going, your majesty?" Nistra asks.
[ ] To break into nearby warehouses, looking for supplies
[ ] To rob a guardhouse
[ ] To the central marketplace
[ ] To wherever slaves sleep
[ ] To the center of government
[ ] To the armory
[ ] To the merchant district
[X] Write-In: Track down the records, recordkeeper, or both, of these warehouses. Once found, use them to zero in on the most useful merchandise - specifically human-sized armour, weapons and medicine. Next, locate keys or the tools necessary to strike chains, and head for the nearest concentration of slaves, freeing and arming them too.
Continue holding back enough to leave your enemies alive?
[ ] Yes
[X] No
Image credit goes to the Lucifer card from Shadowverse
Charge Cluster #1 - Time Remaining: Two months
1, Telekinesis: 1 hour (Active)
2, Precognition: 1 hour (Active)
3, Singing: 1 hour
4, Strength:
5, Durability: 1 hour (Active)
6, Scream:
7, Beauty: 1 hour
8, Technological Intuition:
9, Magical Intuition: 2 hour (Active)
1, Telekinesis: 1 hour (Active)
2, Precognition: 1 hour (Active)
3, Singing: 1 hour
4, Strength:
5, Durability: 1 hour (Active)
6, Scream:
7, Beauty: 1 hour
8, Technological Intuition:
9, Magical Intuition: 2 hour (Active)
Telekinesis
Creates powerful blasts of force. The stronger the blast, the longer the time until you can create another blast. Easily able to bend toughened steel at half strength.
Precognition
A difficult phenomena to describe to those with standard human senses, this power allows the user to 'see' the near future as something akin to ghost images. It's true nature may involve the detection of faster-than-light particles.
Durability
This power mimics the effect of physical durability in two parts, first by using exotic fluid dynamics to solidify sections of skin, and second by vibrationally disintegrating solid objects on a damaging collision course. Possibly Manton limited, this is unfortunately a very imperfect defensive mechanism.
Magical Intuition
A power that allows for the detection of exotic energy emissions local to the host's Trigger world. The 'intuition' part of this power is almost able to disguise itself as common sense.
Creates powerful blasts of force. The stronger the blast, the longer the time until you can create another blast. Easily able to bend toughened steel at half strength.
Precognition
A difficult phenomena to describe to those with standard human senses, this power allows the user to 'see' the near future as something akin to ghost images. It's true nature may involve the detection of faster-than-light particles.
Durability
This power mimics the effect of physical durability in two parts, first by using exotic fluid dynamics to solidify sections of skin, and second by vibrationally disintegrating solid objects on a damaging collision course. Possibly Manton limited, this is unfortunately a very imperfect defensive mechanism.
Magical Intuition
A power that allows for the detection of exotic energy emissions local to the host's Trigger world. The 'intuition' part of this power is almost able to disguise itself as common sense.
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