Spellheart 10: Chapter 71 (Patreon)

There were many prisoners in that one room alone and many more spread throughout the rest of the facility. It was hard to believe we’d missed something like this the last time we thought we scoured the facility clean, but after a bit of digging, we turned up more than three hundred prisoners.

They were from a variety of races, though there was no shortage of elves as well. Elves, catgirls, fairies, and other smaller races seemed to be preferred because of size limitations. Still, some walls were large enough to hide an orc or two. Curiously, there were no men anywhere, let alone human men.

“There is no sign of Sam and Dean,” Tivana said, brows drawn tight. Perhaps they are in another facility?"

“Perhaps...” I replied hesitantly. Somehow, I didn’t think things would be that simple. Tearing this place apart had been too easy. Like the defenses were half-hearted at best. The Elven Star Dominion had poured enormous resources into building this thing. It couldn’t be this easy to disassemble.

Still, this was our lead, so we had to chase it as far as it would let us.

Despite Melise’s best efforts, she couldn’t get as much as a single prisoner to wake up. They had been locked in quite a deep sleep. One that fate and mind magic alone couldn’t break.

“It’s like they’re not even all there...” Melise muttered as she waved her hands over the sleeping bodies. No matter how she’d tried to break the spells on them, they wouldn’t get up.

The elves could probably be killed and urged to manifest. That might even be for the best, considering many of these elves probably were heinous criminals. The Elven Star Dominion’s justice system wasn’t perfect, but they did have one. Letting their old lives die and giving these people a fresh start would give them the best shot of having a new life on either the Hearthstone Continent or elsewhere.

Most of my kids joined the local police force, so I usually considered throwing a few bad apples into the city as volunteer punching bags. With universal surveillance, a complete lack of human rights, and a general acceptance that the ruling clans could do whatever they wanted and everybody else was going to kiss their ass while they did it, it was remarkably easy to deal with crime back home.

But that was only when there were a few bad True Mages or lower. Anybody above that was in a league of their own. Most of the non-elves were Wizards at the least, so just releasing them on the streets of the Hearthwood without knowing who they were or what their background was before they were captured was just asking for trouble.

In the end, I settled on the most straightforward approach. So long as they were asleep, I would continue to harvest zeal from them like the Elven Star Dominion had been. They weren’t using it, after all. Perhaps that made me a bad person, but I would alleviate any guilt by giving away lots of cheap and free zeal to my people, same as always.

And if any of them woke up, I’d send them to the Primordial World. Sending them to their home planets would probably be nicer of me, but I just didn’t have the infrastructure for that. The Primordial World wasn’t a nice place to get lost in, it had to be better than spending the rest of your life buried in a box hidden beneath the floors of an abandoned space station.

We looted each Planetary Defense Array facility. We didn’t find much other than more living batteries and a bit of loot. My subordinates back in the Hearthwood were very pleased with our search, and there had been more than one fight as people rushed into one of the many shops where our citizens could redeem their contribution points for unique items, scrolls, or cultivation resources.

Naturally, by the time the general populace got their hands on something, my family had already picked it over. I kept all the good stuff in-house for me and my direct vassals, though I did share a few neat trinkets with Yennas. Now that she was no longer a queen, she needed something to occupy her time with, and I wanted to show her the benefits of hanging around me. It also helped prove to her that she was more than just one more queen in the Patriarch’s collection.

Despite the material success, I found the search growing increasingly frustrating. I’d found plenty of elf women, cat women, fox women, orc women, ghost women, hell, I’d even discovered a zombie woman. She seemed much more stable than the undead I was used to seeing, and I could only guess that somewhere out in the Ten Thousand Worlds, there was a true world of intelligent undead.

But in all that, I had found no signs of Sam and Dean. Where were they?

Louis was no help. With a bit of prompting and a bit of hauling him around in outer space by the scruff of his neck, we identified the exact facility he’d dropped Sam and Dean off at when they’d been neutralized. Unfortunately, the facility was no different from any of the others we’d looted.

“Who else was with you when you attacked Sam and Dean? And how did the fight go down?” I asked, not bothering to keep the frustration out of my tone.

He repeated an explanation that Illiel had gotten out of him, which was just a slightly more detailed version of what he'd told me. I’d already read her report, but there was nothing quite like going back to the primary source. Maybe he’d left something out when talking to her.

“I’m not telling you a damn thing!” Louis spat. Ever since taking a dip in the Medical Bay and regrowing what he’d lost, he’d regained a bit of his hostile attitude. I’d heard he’d gotten aggressive again, but I hadn’t realized it was this bad. It seemed like all our work making him cooperative had been undone overnight. I’d been tempted to ask Sava to brew a few more potions, but she said the ingredients needed more time to mature.

Apparently regrown limbs just didn’t have the depth of power the originals had. The same was true for... other appendages.

Any potion she made now would be of inferior quality, at least until more time passed. Perhaps that was why clones weren’t the same as their originals. Only when they diverged and became more of their own person could they gain true power. Like clones, regrown body parts needed to truly become part of their owner before they returned to full strength.

So no more potions for the time being. But Louis didn’t know that.

“Listen here, you’re going to answer all my questions or else!” I loomed over him.

“Do your worst!” Louis snarled.

I smiled viciously. “Oh, Sava, my love! Why don’t you and I brew some potions?”

“Sava? Who the hell’s that supposed to be?” Louis demanded.

I snipped with my fingers, but Louis stared at me blankly without a trace of comprehension. I used Mind Magic to scour his brain, but he didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.

“Seriously? Did you destroy the memories or something?” I sighed when I realized how unfamiliar his brain was now. It was like it had been remapped overnight. Shifts like these would take years to develop naturally, but an experienced Mind cultivator could make them happen overnight. It wasn’t an unreasonable way to deal with trauma. This way, it was like it never happened.

"Fuck. You," Louis spat.

“Do I really have to spell it out for you?” I sighed. There was no real way to prevent Louis from editing his own memories. A single particle of Mind Zeal was enough for such delicate manipulations. If he wiped his mind to a blank slate, he’d be useless as a prisoner. Interrogating him now while I still had the chance seemed very important.

“If all you can do is chop off my arms and legs, you aren’t getting a damn thing out of me!” Louis growled. He wiggled his stumps threateningly.

“Do we really have to fight again?”

In reply, Louis lunged for my ankle. I yelped as he bit me. The zeal-restricting collar on him didn’t work nearly as well on him as it did on elves.

I kicked Louis to the other end of the cell. He struggled, but I had the upper hand from the start of the fight. Well, two upper hands. And upper legs as well. Soon, he was pinned to the ground. I put my knee on the small of his back and leaned over him, then whispered in his ear what was going to happen to him if I didn’t walk out of this cell, knowing more than when I entered it.

“Wait, wait!” Louis said, suddenly begging and pleading. “Alright, alright. I’ll talk. The fight went a little something like this...”

He took me through how he’d stalked Sam and Dean. Disabling them had been tough, but that was where the clones they’d made came in. The copies of Sam and Dean resonated with the two of them on a quantum level, and when the moment was right, they could position those clones in another world and switch the locations of Sam and Dean with their clones.

The whole quantum thing seemed like a bunch of nonsense Louis didn't understand himself, but it relied on the same idea that two copies of the same human couldn't be in the same place for long without strange things happening. Louis and his allies had exploited that phenomenon.

As a result, Sam and Dean wound up in a parallel universe where they were ambushed by an entire squadron of powerful Demigods, mostly elves from the Primordial World. They were all too happy to capture a pair of humans.

“I thought you were the one who carried them to the Planetary Defense Array to drop them off?” I asked, a frown on my face. Louis had said as much in my last report. Suddenly there were inconsistencies.

“Yeah? Well... uh... I guess I didn’t remember properly. Fuck off.” He scrunched his face in distaste, pretending he’d merely lied to me.

But I’d been probing his mind the entire time. He was just as confused at the inconsistency as I was. He really had believed he’d told the truth to me last time. Now, all of a sudden, the details changed, and his brain was still catching up. That was a sign he'd done something more serious than just wipe a few bad memories.

I played through the memories of the event in his head. Last time, he’d taken Sam and Dean down through an ambush with a unique artifact, not by switching their position to another universe.

Strange. Very strange. But that came part and parcel when dealing with alternate timelines and parallel worlds. Perhaps he'd been hiding things from me before, but wiping his memories caused him to forget how he was hiding them and so left an opening for me.

The unfortunate takeaway from this latest interrogation was the fact that we weren’t going to turn up Sam and Dean anywhere in this world. That left the question of where we would turn up with them. I asked Louis that question.

“Okay, I have a contact with another Louis clone. This one is a little older than me. That I haven’t turned up probably made some waves, so he’ll be on his guard. But if you can capture him like you captured me, he’ll know way more,” Louis said.

I frowned. “Selling yourself out so quickly? I’m surprised.”

Louis’ lips drew together into a frown. “They’re not me. It might as well be a different guy with the same face. As for selling them out? If they gave a shit about me, they would have rescued me already. They’ve written me off as dead.”

“Alright. Where do you meet up with him?”

Louis spilled his guts to me surprisingly quickly after putting up such a fight. But I wasn’t about to complain when it made my job that much easier. My allies were just about done clearing out the outer Planetary Defense Array control facilities, though there were still the golem manufacturing centers, storage centers, sentry turrets and not to mention the main shield generator complex.

The shield generator was there before anything else, and it was the central facility through which everything else was controlled. The part the Elven Star Dominion stuck out from what might have once been a smooth metal sphere like it was a lumpy cancerous wart. We would have broken into it already, but without Sam, I had no confidence in bypassing the entrance.

I had to fight the growing frustration. We couldn’t clear out the facilities without Sam and Dean, and we couldn’t rescue Sam and Dean without clearing out the facilities. So when Louis finally gave me this new lifeline to chase, I latched onto it like a drowning man to driftwood.

I was out of the dungeons nearly as fast as I arrived. I would have called another meeting, but with how busy my companions were clearing out the facilities in space, I didn’t think I would reach them. Instead, I just left a note with Mac explaining what I would be looking into. I’d keep out of danger and just spy on my target a little. Who was Louis partner? Just knowing that might be another clue unto itself.

The place Louis directed me to was out in the middle of the ocean. I never would have found it without coordinates.

I looked overhead. The meeting place was directly underneath the shield generator overhead. One downside of such an open location was that it would be nearly impossible to hide my allies and matriarchs around for an ambush. There were no trees or bushes to hide in.

As far as I could see, there was wide open empty water. From the looks of things, the water went quite deep, too. Even my eyes couldn’t see the bottom of the water, which meant it was at least several kilometers.

There was nobody around here and checking using my Spirit Sense revealed only the faintest hint of lingering vitality. A powerful human had been here, but not for a while. It might be tough to arrange for another meeting through my prisoner. That would have to wait until I had a proper ambush set up.

Maybe I could get creative with powerful Unnoticability spells. Or maybe camp out in another dimension. And then maybe⁠—

I cut off my own train of thought as the water rippled beneath me. The air was still around me, and I was pretty sure I hadn’t dropped anything. I checked my pockets just to be sure. As I did so, the ripple grew. Rings spread wider and wider, turning into waves. A bad feeling crawled up my spine.

Something shot out of the water and hit me like a wave. I should have been able to react in time against any projectile, but this one came as fast as light. The moment the wave hit me, my head pounded, and I felt horribly disoriented. And from the water beneath me, a massive metal ship rose from the water.

I recognized it instantly. The shining hull of the ship was all too familiar to me.

From the water, The Challenger rose to face me, and several Demigod presences flowed out of it, all of them cloaked by the ship moments ago. Apparently, I’d been mistaken when I thought it would be hard to ambush someone out here in the middle of the ocean.

“Fuck...” I cursed.