Chapter 253: When Luck Runs Out (Patreon)

Zalanth watched as the one called Erasimus Doomthread utilized a storm of needles to puncture the skulls of 15,000 Undead of the Arisen faction in a showman’s demonstration of his lethality. The unperturbed defender used the battle as an opportunity to advertise his business as the remaining minions meandered without direction, their masters defeated.

Then, during the next battle in what she thought was a satirical twist, a proper Undead Lich called Abithik appeared on the side of the Lighthouse, summoning his own legion of minions that dwarfed the soldiers that sought to subjugate in both numbers and size. The army of the dead included winged creatures, ghoulish agents, geists, gargoyles, and skeletal soldiers, along with unique bone-plated monstrous abominations, revealing the maturity of the Lich Lord as surely as the rings in a tree.

Afterwards, a slime creature pulled off a risky imitation of a feline, apparently unconcerned with drawing the ire of any that might be offended by her imperfect replica, but then she ripped through her enemies with enough grace to establish that the form might be satisfactory after all. Perhaps it was good enough to even be condoned by a representative of the cats.

Another Undead, this time a rare essence predator, split into a pair of twins with complementary styles of combat, one a leather-clad assassin and the other an incorporeal psionic caster. They efficiently tore through their enemies, impossible to pin down with their support for each other. The reveal of multiple Undead fighting on behalf of the Lighthouse didn’t draw as much turmoil as the Demons, merely due to the timing, but Zalanth could only shake her head at the reveal of another problematic connection for the Lighthouse, adding it to the list of reasons for her current state of mind.

A custom combat mech shredded a ravenous horde, apparently lacking an aura intimidating enough to rout its enemies with its mere presence like most of the other defenders, but more than powerful enough to stand against the conquerors regardless. The mech was obviously crafted by an extraordinarily advanced crafter, but Zalanth couldn’t imagine that it would also be piloted by someone of such value, and yet that was the only explanation she could give for the strange anomaly among the powerhouses of the Lighthouse. It was the first time she had seen one of the defenders’ auras fail to stagger the attacking army.

She couldn’t decide if that bode well or not for the Lighthouse, having such a valuable crafter appear in a battle. Vronk and the others were clearly established soldiers in their own times. Whether they had retired or were on the run when they ended up becoming contractors, they were certainly veterans of combat that had somehow ended up in the employ of the Lighthouse’s settlements. The crafter that constructed the mech could have demanded a contract that bankrupted more established settlements in the galactic community, but here was another valuable individual slumming it with the humans. Zalanth was befuddled.

When a quartet of what should have been the ultimate in pacificity entered a battlefield, holding hands opposite 20,000 bloodthirsty enemies, Zalanth had had enough. She audibly groaned as she comprehended the set up. They were clearly Sisters of the Merciful.

It wasn’t completely unheard of for the altruistic faction to lend its members out, but to have them participate in an actual battle was simply not under their regular purview. For a moment she thought they might be a sacrifice as the Lighthouse was evidently depleted and she found herself feeling disappointed in the mettle of the human faction.

Instead of the expected pacifism, explosions of golden light repeatedly pulsed from their position, clearing the confused enemies at least as quickly as any of the monstrous warriors that had come before them. Zalanth had only heard rumors that they were capable of defending themselves, but she had never had a confirmed report of any of the Merciful engaging in direct combat. She could only shake her head at the continued capriciousness of humanity.

She supposed these were former Merciful, after humans had thoroughly corrupted them. Whatever figurative mind virus that had influenced Zalanth when she was in contact with the humans had obviously infected them as well.

The battles kept bringing surprises, but the frequency of war declarations dropped off as the threat assessment of the Lighthouse adjusted. How many thousands of battles would it take to overcome the power demonstrated by the defenders? The factions of the galactic community hesitated before throwing their fledgling armies against the iceberg of monstrous defenders. More hidden depths just kept being revealed.

The final nail in the coffin for the anticipated conquest of the human faction was when a second creature that lived in absolute infamy appeared on a wasteland of a battlefield. Zalanth, like any warrior of repute, immediately recognized Caisalya, the Bloom of Annihilation, one of the most heavily admonished individuals in the entire galactic community.

Zalanth knew her story well. In some ways, it was the opposite of Vronk’s. Caisalya was among the absolute lowest ranks of one of the greatest factions in the community, born into her position with no possibility of change. Her people were conquered so long in the past, the exact circumstances weren’t even properly remembered. Instead, they had been made into popular display pieces among those in the upper echelons of their faction. They were living art, confined to small greenhouses with individual planters to tend to for their own amusement. Caisalya maintained a single unique flower that was said to me among the most beautiful and fragrant that any of her people could hope to keep.

The Bloom of Annihilation had been the centerpiece of an elder’s greenhouse for decades, though she hadn’t earned the moniker yet. Back then, her flower was well-known, but she was not. The designation only came after she escaped her internment, executing every member of the residence and turning the compound into her own personal stronghold: a tangle of vines that crumbled stone and scattered flowers across the defiled edifices. The single beautiful flower had experienced monstrous growth, towering above the ruins after being bathed in the mana-filled blood of her former masters.

The faction sought to recapture her, but she used them for fuel to spread, and she didn’t stop. Like Vronk, she killed an entire planet, but unlike Vronk, the system had never granted her a quest to do so. Instead of being rewarded with a title, she was penalized for the unsanctioned killing, and that was on top of attracting the ire of significant portions of the galactic community for decimating one of the most well-connected factions in the known universe at the time.

The faction that she had permanently ruined by destroying all of its core planet’s civilization shards was among the top ranked before her rampage. Its allies put bounties on her head, but she had never been captured or killed. In fact, every sighting of the Bloom of Annihilation resulted in the same conclusion; an effervescent and vibrant destruction. Of course, that just meant she collected more penalties.

The experience debt she would need to resolve would send Vronk’s overwhelming accumulation into the void, and yet she persisted. Zalanth wondered if gardening was truly so fulfilling a calling. Perhaps she should give it a try.

On the battlefield, the fugitive smiled with deceptive friendliness. It would have been properly disarming if not for the flashing warning that accompanied any sighting of the most notorious of the Viridi people. Anyone who defeated her would be rewarded with untold benefits as the penalties she had accumulated would finally be realized, and that was before considering all of the factions that would poor riches upon her conqueror.

Zalanth viewed the temptations to challenge her as a trap: the attractive flower that disguised poisonous scents or viciously barbed thorns. She was, after all, the closest to Vronk’s level among those that had defended the Lighthouse. Without her experience debt, she might even exceed his heights.

During her first battle, Caisalya kneeled to test the brittle soil, innocently humming like she was tending to her own personal garden without an audience at all. While it was the expected behavior of her species, it was hopeless, given the battlefield’s location on an unlivable integrated planet, devoid of life or sustenance. But that was the thing about the Bloom of Annihilation; she would grow anywhere.

She rooted in the bare soil of the uninhabitable moon and rose into the sky, growing rapidly at the end of a thick vine that splayed thin tendrils in all directions, her arms spread wide as she embraced a dim foreign star like it was an exotic treat. She rose until her chaste smiling face was the focal point of the feed, eyes squeezed shut in contentment. In the background, flowers bloomed all across the landscape, painting the gray regolith in a medley of vibrant colors. Pinks, blues, and yellows extended to the horizon, opening delicate petals on the end of healthy green stems despite the lack of life otherwise.

It was a beautiful, painterly scene, easily appreciated even by someone like Zalanth who barely understood aesthetics. An expansive field of flowers spread beneath the climbing vines that crawled across the landscape, calling invitingly to be traipsed through.

At least it was beautiful until Zalanth looked closer at the background behind Caisalya’s gently flowing features, and realized that the flowers bloomed from the not quite fully defeated bodies of the opposing army. They writhed in tortured pain as their mana was stolen by the seedlings. Puffs of pollen drifted around flowers that budded from their eye sockets, with root tendrils breaking ground through their skulls with curt crunches, and thorny stems slowly squeezing around limbs until bones snapped, forming a beautiful garden that would be impossible to visit for more reasons than simply its remoteness.

The battle ended abruptly, the feed cut, with the Lighthouse as the clear victor. The integrated planet was quarantined by the system as the participants were returned to their respective settlements.

After that, there were no more new declarations of war against the Lighthouse. Those who had already committed could only accept the consequences of their mistake, either in the form of system penalties by breaching their contractual declarations or through a crushing defeat on the roulette wheel of possible devastating opponents.

Zalanth leaned away from the screen, exhausted and agitated. 

The shocking reveal of senior pariahs, outcasts, and hibernating monsters had overshadowed what Zalanth was by far the most preoccupied by:  the Humans! As the galactic community’s interest waned in the primary species of the assimilating planet, focused instead on the powers that dominated the battles, she felt like she was going mad!

Accompanying every single powerhouse were squads of spectral humans. It was like they were sending a message. They didn’t even need to lift a finger to crush these challengers. The challengers who were some of the most aggressive in the entire galaxy; they weren’t even worthy of human attention.

The battles where the humans actually did participate were the scariest of all, though they were few and far between. They were utterly dominant to the point that it was clear they didn’t actually need their surprise allies to fight their battles. Letting the established members of the galactic community take the lead could only be interpreted as a warning shot, but it seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Zalanth leaned forward in her seat, toward the terminal, and returned to the first battle where the roles were reversed. She observed the humans as they crushed an army of Rotaks while being significantly outnumbered, nearly 1,000 to 1. How could they be overlooked after such ridiculous victories? It was almost as though, because it was the most traditional of all of the battles, the rest of the observers had glossed over it in favor of more unanticipated oddities.

The humans should not have been favored in any sense of imagination in the match up, but they were even scarier than Caisalya and Vronk, in Zalanth’s expert opinion. She could see that they were essentially amateurs, and yet they moved with the decisiveness of the most elite veterans in established factions, carving through an army with a butcher’s familiarity. Somehow, they expertly broke through formations against a species they should have never seen before, using completely novel tactics. Zalanth would have had to drill her soldiers for months to replicate even a single maneuver, and even then it would have been clumsier without the smooth movement abilities universally employed by the evolved human manifestations.

That wasn’t even the full extent of it. Another battle with a full complement of 5,000 of the human soldiers managed to completely annihilate 25,000 Ossazoans without losing a single point of health across the entire army. Ossazoans, in particular, were a difficult enemy due to their malleable combat styles. The species were a sentient jelly that used the bones or solid cores of others to provide their bodies with structure. This meant that their tactics tended to be on the more unpredictable extreme of the galactic community, not following specific rules for the species as a whole, and yet humans danced between lethal attacks, adjusting to their maneuvers in real time with such teamwork they never left any of their soldiers exposed to a single blow.

Zalanth had to rewatch the battle several times, finding it impossible to meld the obviously inexperienced humans with the incredible result. These human soldiers were actually as green as any of their challengers. The system hadn’t made a mistake by forcing the lowest level armies to be the ones to face them, but humans had something that simply wasn’t present in their opponents.

After a hundred reviews of their battles, Zalanth thought she had some idea for what humans had that others lacked. If she had to diagnose it, she would call it a natural instinct for self-preservation that only the most hardened warriors ever learned, and usually only after countless near-death experiences. Humans had it as a default attribute. They were seemingly born understanding the struggle of mortal conflict and were naturally stimulated to survive.

It was so bizarre, because at the same time and in her experience, humans refused to acknowledge the hierarchy that all those in the galactic community relied on to understand individual danger. It was like their self-preservation instinct was broken, only applying in actual physical combat encounters rather than at all times. Or maybe it was always active and they had treated her and her instructors like competition even when they were in training. If everything was always combat, it might explain their resistance.

Zalanth tugged at a loose braid, as she reconsidered whether or not the humans had been prepared to actually fight their instructors. Were they already testing them, even back then? These humans were just too alien to fully understand, and watching them perform as if they were under chemical stimulants did little to clarify their characteristics.

What made the humans truly fearsome was their incompletely realized potential. If a single ounce of the discipline exposed in battle had been present in her Chosen during orientation, she would have been sure the Endless Empire could have conquered the entire planet. If not for the rest of the assimilation being filled with more humans with equally rare mana affinities and the same natural instincts, they would have been unstoppable.

As she chewed on her knuckles and rewatched the battle over and over, trying to decide if it was racial bonuses, evolutions, or strictly assigned skills that gave them their movement skills, and wondering exactly what kind of a training regimen they underwent, a firm knock rapped against her cabin gate.

She paused the feed and looked at the entrance suspiciously, using her fingers to clear the loose strands of indigo that had drifted into her vision. This was an integrated territory where she knew no one and no one knew her. She certainly wasn’t expecting any guests to call upon her.

While she silently watched, a physical note slipped between the thin gap at the edge of the doorway. The message floated for a moment before slowly falling to the floor where it slid to her anchored feet.

A direct notification made far more sense to send a message within the galactic community, but a physical note was a message in of itself. It wasn’t something that she could ignore. The fact that they had delivered a physical message said plenty about the sender before she checked the message. It was just about the only way to actually tear her attention away from the humans.

To make things worse, the unmistakable markings on the back of the message made it clear the sender was more than serious. There were only a few reasons for her to have such attention placed upon her. She was factionless and she was rapidly amassing a fortune using inside information on the humans. She scowled from behind another liberated lock of blue-purple hair.

Before she reached down to see what was demanded of her, she exited from the battle records of the Lighthouse and calmly navigated to a financial page. In a few minutes, she had already opened up a new credit account with a specific beneficiary. She transferred all of her recent winnings with a simple note that declared it as ‘Tribute.’

She closed out of the account after the transfer was complete, hoping that Coop and his Lighthouse would forgive her once his assimilation was concluded and they received the offering.

Zalanth took a deep breath, adjusting the mana-weave robe back over her broad shoulders before she retrieved the note from the floor with shaky fingers. The distinctive paw print marked it as even more significant than she originally imagined. She was being summoned.