Nero Walker, Book 3 Ch.91 (206) (Patreon)

Feeling that someone was approaching, Ambassador Ironwick cracked one eye open to see who stones to barge into his room and interrupt his sleep.

Instead of seeing the unnecessarily large room he’d been assigned, he saw broken tables and chairs, numerous passed-out dwarves, and even a few humans. ‘Oh, right… Dustbeard brought out the Molten Ale… makes sense I guess,’ he said to himself as flashes of last night’s drunken shenanigans came back to him.

While the ambassador was waking up, the dwarven messenger approached carefully. Walking through the bar, the dwarf winced every time he felt the bottom of his shoes sticking to the floor. After living living with the humans for over 300 years he’d forgotten how vulgar and disgusting his brethren could be. That being said, he knew better than to say anything. Instead, he just continued to hold his fanciful robe as far off the floor as he could and did his best not to touch anything.

Ambassador Ironwick’s singular open eye narrowed on the poncy well-dressed ‘dwarf’ in front of him.

“Ambassador, I apologize for interrupting… your rest. However, you’re needed at the embassy as soon as possible,” said the messenger.

Not bothering with the niceties the human-loving dwarf probably expected, Ambassador Ironwick rolled off the floor to his feet and cleared his nose by thumbing one side at a time and huffing. By the time his snot hit the floor, he’d already picked up a half-filled pitcher of room-temperature ale and took a few large gulps. Finishing with a loud gargle and a spit toward the corner, he locked eyes with the disgusted messenger and demanded, “For what?”

Wrinkling his nose in disgust, the messenger replied, “I was not informed, Ambassador. I was merely instructed to bring you back as soon as possible. The codeword I was given was ‘golden calling’ if that means anything to you.”

Incensed, the Ambassador stomped past the pathetic excuse for a dwarf, nearly knocking him to the floor. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place!” he shouted before grumbling and cursing under his breath.

‘We need to stop sending every useless, unwanted reject nobody wants around to man our embassies. Hells be damned wastes of space are ruining our reputation and making us look like idiots,’ he thought to himself angrily.

The moment he kicked open the door to the bar, he flinched at the bright sun bearing down on him. After taking a moment to figure out where he was, he set off toward the embassy like a rock rolling downhill. Whether it was the look in his eyes, his general demeanor, or his smell… everyone in the crowd hurried to get out of his way.

Since the bar he and his clanmates had chosen was the closest one to the embassy, he made it back in less than five minutes.

The frown on his face morphed into a grimace the moment he saw the embassy. Although it was a respectable attempt at copying a typical clan meeting hall, seeing one above ground pissed him off for some reason.

Barreling through the unnecessarily tall doors, he strode past the greeting desk and the various information givers. The ambassador ignored most of the dwarfs who offered their polite greetings. He did however take the time to smile and exchange a few words with several armor-clad dwarves who he respected. Although, even then, he didn’t break his stride.

Hurrying through the hallways, he made his way to the basement. Then, after looking around to make sure there was no one nearby, he put his hand on the wall and activated the hidden doorway.

The flat stone wall erupted with a shining rune script before folding in on itself. After a few seconds, a rounded arch with intricate carvings appeared. Offering the arch a gentle pat of appreciation, he stomped forward into the corridor beyond.

While walking, he felt the torches along the walls light up after sensing his arrival. He made his way through the winding maze without issue, easily remembering the way. Any dwarf worth his beard would remember a path he’d been shown, even if it was only once or twice.

The moment he arrived in front of the door he wanted, he took a moment to find the right rune stone on his belt and activate it. He felt the magic rush across his body, into his mouth and nose, and even over his lustrous beard. After it faded, he smelled his armpit and ran his tongue over his teeth. Finding everything acceptable, he ran a hand over his beard to get rid of the frizzies and pushed open the door.

The moment he walked in, he felt the world around him shift. He wasn’t surprised to see the connection already established. Looking around, he saw that he was being projected into one of the royal meeting halls. ‘Well, this oughta be good,’ he thought with a grin.

Making his way around a twenty-foot-wide pillar, he expected to see King Shattershield and a few of the other clan heads waiting to rip him a new one for his recent actions. ‘If this doesn’t get me sent back to the mountain, I don’t know what will,’ he said to himself.

Unfortunately, what he found was not what he’d expected. Instead of the king and a few clan heads, he walked in on a meeting between King Shattershield and the other six dwarven kings. Each of them was sitting on their throne with their aides and advisors standing beside them. They were all arranged in a circle and currently shouting at each other.

Any thought of maintaining his arrogant and slightly hostile attitude faltered in the face of the overwhelming might he was seeing. He might get away with being an asshole to the king he’d served for a millennium, but the others… they’d tan his ass in a minute if he started mouthing off.

Straightening his back, he approached the meeting from the singular open path set aside for petitioners.

The moment he was noticed, the entire hallway shifted into a half circle so all the kings were facing him. Even the aides slid across the floor smoothly as the hallway altered itself to the whims of the meeting room’s host. He’d assumed it was King Shattershield, but now he wasn’t so sure.

Not letting his nerves show, he bent slightly forward and saluted with a fist to his chest. “General Ironwick reporting as ordered, my king!”

One of the kings off to the side, King Umbrasteel, chuckled and said, “Don’t you mean ‘Ambassador Ironwick’?”

The kings, King Shattershield included, all laughed in good humor before being silenced by King Shatershield shouting, “All right, that’s enough. We’ve got serious business to discuss, and there isn’t time to put up with any shit.”

All the kings exchanged nods and straightened up in the thrones.

Leaning forward, King Shattershield narrowed his eyes at Ambassador Ironwick and demanded, “Now, you’re going to tell me why in the forge god’s name you decided to pick Dorchester of all places for our first official city in the human’s lands. How do you expect us to launch our invasion into the human lands from there? Choose your words carefully, because your actions have thrown a thousand years of preparation into the scrap pile.”

Gulping, Ambassador Ironwick muttered unconsciously, “Plans? What invasion plans?”

Hopping off his throne, King Shattershield turned around and belted one of his advisors in the face with his armor-encased fist. In a tone filled with righteous vindication, “You see! You see! I told you idiots he wouldn’t read the fuckin’ information packet! That’s three hundred barrels from you, and you… and don’t forget Rory, you owe him too.”

All around the room, the various kings broke out into fits of raucous laughter, pounding their fists on their chairs and holding their bellies.

His mouth gaping in confusion, Ambassador Ironwick watched numbly as the various kings exchanged pouches of gold with their advisors.

After a few minutes, the room finally settled down and King Shattershield returned to his seat. “Now, all jokes aside, I do actually need you to answer the question. Why did take it upon yourself to choose a city without consulting me or any other clan head who’d been in talks with the humans? We have been growing our ties with the recent king, and his initiatives to bring peace between the various kingdoms of the land have earned him our consideration. However, your actions were too hasty, and I… WE… demand to know what you were thinking.”

Caught off guard by the entire spectacle and upset at being the subject of what sounded like a rather expensive bet, Ambassador Ironwick felt his anger at the situation bubbling up.

Glaring at the kings, he declared, “You want to know why I chose whatever city it was that I chose? Well, two reasons. One, it was the only city on the list that required dwarven axes to take it. And the other, Fuck you… that’s why.”

Once again, the entire room erupted into guffaws and laughter. Even King Shattershield couldn’t stop himself from laughing along with the rest of them.

—--

Nero kept his eyes open for a way to contribute to the battle, but couldn’t come up with anything. Aside from occasionally slipping away to heal a few people, there really wasn’t much for him to do.

Step by agonizingly slow step, the human formations pushed further into the chamber and the kobald’s losses continued to mount. Nero didn’t even bother to use his trick to dismiss their constructs because he didn’t want to affect the speed at which their section was moving forward when compared to the rest of them.

As he and the formation emerged from under the tier over their heads, Nero at least got to see much more of the chamber.

Instead of there being just one tier overhead, it turned out there were actually two. The chamber’s ceiling was massive and the rings overhead were filled with flashes of light and falling kobalds. More than once he got to see groups of kobalds being pushed over the edges to fall onto the human shields below them.

He was however a little surprised to see how easily the human casters dealt with the issue. After the kobalds crashed into them, the shields simply altered phase or something and then let the bodies through. It was like watching bugs smacking into a windshield only to then melt through the glass.

The entire time, the kobalds in the center of the chamber didn’t let up on their magical barrage, so the humans couldn’t drop their shields. It made for a very repetitive and boring fight.

Without anything better to do, Nero focused on looking around. He even started abusing the soul stuff in the air to create very temporary earthen pillars that acted like little stilts so he could see over the soldiers in front of him. ‘How pissed would these lizards be if they knew I was using their dead for a height advantage,’ he thought to himself with a smile.

The improved angle gave him a pretty solid view of what was going on though, so he didn’t feel too bad about it.

He was finally able to see the center of the chamber which had a singular massive black stone pillar going all the way up to the ceiling. From what he could tell, the kobalds were treating it as their alamo as all their defences seemed to radiate from it.

On one side of the chamber, he saw the tunnel that the humans had come to close or at the very least take over. It looked like that entire side of the building was actually the mountain, and the tunnel had been excavated into a half circle leading directly into the mountain. Near the top of the tunnel, he could see hanging firepits of dark red flames that were obviously magical. As it was on the other side of the chamber, he was way too far away to examine them with his essence field, but he could still tell that much.

With his newfound height advantage, he was also able to see that the humans were having no issues cutting down the kobalds by the thousands. If it weren’t for the enemy’s overwhelming numbers disparity along with their blatantly bloodthirsty and warlike tendencies, he would have found the situation rather depressing. ‘This is barely a war… it’s more like a massive vermin infestation that needed to be dealt with. I bet I’d make a killing developing kobald-be-gone,’ he thought to himself.

He even had the opportunity to practice his scrying. And unlike the last time, he found it much easier to follow the essence flows toward what he wanted. Which, in this case, was the central pillar in the chamber.

Luckily, he was able to keep a loose control over his body, which was more than enough to continue stumbling forward along with the rest of the formation, while part of his mind flew across the chamber toward his target. However, the multiple simultaneous perspectives took more than a little getting used to. But, he eventually did get the hang of it.

At the base of the pillar, he was able to see a ring of stone plinths filled with glowing rune carvings. Without totally understanding what he was seeing, all he could say was that it reminded him of the ritual carvings that spawned the portal he’d closed. ‘This must be what they used to grow the tower,’ he concluded.

Nero also had a chance to play with the new ability he’d learned from Nick, specifically the alteration of his perception through mental fuckery. He wasn’t sure if Nick had ever mentioned what it was called, so he went with ‘essence squinting’. At this point, he’d feel like an idiot asking, so he figured it was better to just wait for it to come up in conversation organically. Until then, calling it mental squinting worked fine.

Regardless, what his mental squinting showed him was enough to keep him occupied for a good long while. With it, he was able to get a better look at the essence flows without being caught up in their individual paths. He also got a better idea of how essence fields interacted, which he found particularly enlightening.

All around him, he was able to see the layers of emotional essence interacting and feeding off each other. If he looked at it in just the right way, it was like a bunch of colored gas balls overlapping throughout the ether. But, most importantly, he could see that they reinforced each other, thereby proving his previous hypothesis.

It was like real, physical proof that if you put a group of people in a room, they’d end up all agreeing with each other or end up breaking into groups so they could fight it out. ‘Physicologists back home would love this,’ he said to himself in wonder.

Yet, the most interesting thing he saw was the communal essence field being generated by the casters maintaining the shield. It looked like a solid haze of emotion dedicated to a singular purpose… defense. There was no other concept or emotion included within it. No sense of identity or individualism. Compared to the varied essence fields he saw all around him, it was so uniform that it was a little creepy when he realized what was happening.

To put it in perspective, it was like every caster maintaining the shield had separated part of their mind to think of nothing other than maintaining the shield. It was like self-hypnosis or something. He couldn’t help but think about the possible implications of that kind of groupthink. ‘One of us… One of us… One of us!’ he mentally chanted sarcastically.

Reeling back his senses, he turned to Nick and asked, “Hey Nick, did you have to take a class or something to learn how to join the shield without injecting your personal identity?”

Nick, who looked oddly calm despite being in the middle of a warzone, replied, “Of course. It’s the easiest way to teach emotional linking. After all, the concept of self-preservation is a core belief found in everyone’s identity. Once properly isolated, it is easy to use as a base for communal casting.”

Nodding at the surprisingly comprehensible answer, Nero went for broke and asked, “So, you’re doing it on purpose? You’re actively separating part of your mind and making it think of nothing other than defense?”

Nick nodded, happy to have a subject to lecture about. “Essentially, yes. Just like mental partitioning, emotional partitioning works by finding and isolating part of your subconscious mind and linking it to the respective part of your soul. By creating the internal link, you can then use it to empower your spells with a particular concept rather than your identity. You see, by joining it with other spells cast from a similar concept, everyone’s spells can work in harmony. There are many benefits, including increased mental resilience and construct stability. When you -”

Nero asked quickly, “Wait! You said increased mental resilience, right? Is that why you guys are able to keep the shield up without getting a headache like I always do? Can I do the same thing with my shields on my own?”

Nick shook his head. “No, No, No. It’s not the same thing at all. If you were to use your own emotions in your spells, it wouldn’t work out nearly as well. Think of it as a communal pool of mental energy. Together, with enough people, the resulting spell has enough power and stability to stand up to any singular spell. When you do it on your own, you’re pitting one small part of your emotional strength against the entire will of whatever is attacking you. To counter a spell shield like the one we’re using, an enemy would have to have communal war casters. And I very much doubt kobalds are capable of that kind of coordinated spell casting.”

Nero thought about what he’d learned of the kobalds and couldn’t bring himself to disagree. Everything he’d seen had him believing they were nothing but angry toddlers throwing temper tantrums and demanding new lands to take over and shit upon. It took big war leaders and shamans just to get them charging in a singular direction. He very much doubted the casters were capable of working together for anything. Team players, they were not.

Nero looked up at the shield over his head and watched as various colors splashed across the golden glass-like structure. Now that he better understood what was happening, he could understand how the shield was holding up. It was like an army of ants trying to take down a self-repairing wall of solid rock. It was both impossible and kind of stupid for them to keep trying.

Nero felt like he was onto something, “Hey Nick, why don’t the kobalds try something else then? Why do they keep doing the same thing over and over again without learning anything from it?”

Nick replied, “Because they’re kobalds Nero. They’re barely sentient. If you took a hundred kobalds and looked at them under an identity spectro-essence analyzer, you’d find a hundred identical identities. They’re not capable of doing anything other than what they know.”

Nero thought about it for a minute before exclaiming, “They’re freaking clones! Like built from a pattern?”

Nick frowned at the unfamiliar term before nodding, “Yes, that’s an accurate way of looking at them. Somewhere, in their original plane, there is a society that these kobalds are based off of. Whoever is in charge of this invasion has obviously requested backup and these forces are what they’ve been given. When we actually reach the interior of their mountain, we may find a more diverse identity pool, but I doubt it.”

Nero found himself reeling at the implications. Considering that this is a fantasy world, were these kobalds like enchanted golems based on a pattern rather than biological beings? Would there be any real difference if they were? Could a spell construct be advanced enough to create a semblance of life like this? Were all species like this? Could humans have come from a singular pattern that diverged over time?

Nero cursed, “Son of a bitch, Nick! Do you know what this means?”

Nick didn’t respond, merely looking over at Nero in confusion.

Grinning madly, Nero shouted, “One day, I might end up being able to create a character creation platform and design my own body mod!”

Nick’s mind took a few seconds to work through the translation he was hearing before paling in fear. Whispering harshly he said, “Nero, that is not a type of magic that you should be thinking about. Flesh crafting of that kind is morally reprehensible and has been the cause of many a house’s downfall. The human species has already been perfected, and any attempt to ‘improve’ it has resulted in disaster. So, don’t even joke about that.”

Nero frowned but decided not to argue. One day, he’d get his superhuman body with multiple redundant organs and an adamantium skeleton… probably… if he got around to it.

Distracted by his thoughts, he stopped paying attention to the battle and continued walking forward along with the rest of the formation. ‘Being sent to the back of the battle sucks. What I wouldn’t give for a little action,’ he complained to nobody in particular.

As if his silent prayer had been heard by one of the gods of war, a ridiculously loud roar shook the entire chamber.

Immediately raising himself up on some earthen stilts, Nero gaped at the sight of a siege wyrm forcing itself out of the tunnel. He couldn’t believe it. It was both the most threatening thing he’d ever seen while also the dumbest possible tactical decision the kobalds could have ever made.

Unable to help himself, Nero gave voice to the question in his head, “What in the seven-layered dip of hell do they think that monstrosity is going to accomplish?”

Nick, having heard Nero’s question and thinking it wasn’t rhetorical, answered, “I just told you, Nero. The kobalds are working off a very limited mental framework. Simply put, they noticed there were a lot of enemies, so they brought out a siege wyrm. I don’t think they thought any further than that. However, this is bad… If that thing brings down the building… well, I’m sure you can guess how bad that’ll be.”

Whether it was his good fortune or not, Nero and the rest of the formation he was in were probably too far away to do anything about it anyway. He could only hope one of the closer units realized the danger and acted accordingly.

‘Yeah… I’m not betting my beautiful pale ass on these idiots being smarter than the geniuses who developed our chamber attack plan. Morons will probably just throw bodies at the problem and hope for the best,’ he mentally grumbled.

“Nick. I’m going out for a bit. Don’t wait up and DON’T tell Cathleen,” he said before slipping away and ignoring whatever nonsense Nick began shouting about.

‘Eh, he’ll get over it. Besides, I’m sure he’ll thank me later,’ he reassured himself.