The next morning, Viv took some time to massage Arthur’s horns to help them out. They were black as the night, a sharp contrast to the dragonette’s pale scales. After she was done, she stepped outside to attend to a natural need.
Left alone, Arthur searched the cave for a victim and found him near the entrance. He was one of those humans that came clad in their own pressure cookers. She moved sinuously to him and stopped. He froze as he saw her, a large piece of jerky held in his paw. She stood on her two back feet. Like that, her head was level with his, and quite close too. She delicately picked the piece of jerky between two claws while his mouth opened and closed stupidly, a proof that those other humans were really not quite as bright as her own. She gobbled her prize.
“Squee.”
Idiot.
Satisfied, she trotted back to her cover.
“Did that thing just insult me?”
The expedition made good progress until they arrived at the first site. As they walked past a curb in their path, they came across a hidden valley nestled between two slopes.
“This is what you seek,” one of the walkers informed Lorn.
Viv looked and saw the remnant of a base of sorts, not a town but something more functional. The long, unified buildings looked like warehouses, and there were a few half-collapsed chimneys popping up from derelict workshops. Everything was grey and dusty, but she could still spot the remains of a large paved road leading from a caved-in entrance into the mountain to the deadlands proper.
The group climbed down. The first thing they came across was a strange mound at the edge of the complex.
“This looks promising,” Viv commented. Farren nodded.
“Yes, it looks like a slag heap. The iron ore was probably smelted here. We may have found our destination on the first try.”
“Of course you have,” one of the walkers said.
“Indeed. It looks solid now, but if we dig a bit below the dust, I bet we would find layers of scoriae. Did you know that glass can be made from the discarded material?” Farren said, suddenly very interested. He stepped forward while the guards stood around inspecting their surroundings.
“That pile is quite small. It would either indicate that —”
The rest of the sentence, they would never know, because at this moment a clawed hand grabbed the side of a door in the closest warehouse, and a horrible, ghoulish head emerged from the darkness. It howled.
“Ah, fuck,” Farren expressed as his scietific moment was ruined. The creature bounced forward in a weird, uneven gait while a horde of revenants poured from every opening in a frenetic urge to attack them.
[Ancient revenant: dangerous, a revenant infused with black mana over a long period of time. Hardier and faster than its fresher variant.]
Lorn didn’t wait. He jumped to grab Farren with everyone else covering them.
“Yoink!”
Viv took out the crawler that had alerted the rest. It was too late and a trickle of undead was already stumbling towards them. In a minute, they would be an ocean. Viv kept killing them but she knew that it would not be enough.
“Back!” Lorn ordered.
“I need a chokehold if we are to kill them,” Viv said.
“I know, woman, dammit. We go back to where Loric took a dump. Line formation. Koro you take the left, I take the right. Go, go!”
The guards moved as ordered with Marruk voluntarily taking the center while the rest of the expedition stayed behind. Arthur took flight.
Something clicked for the line of infantry. Their movements suddenly started to coordinate to an uncanny level, and their steps were assured even through the difficult terrain. It was definitely Lorn using a skill.
“Yoink!”
Viv stopped caring too much about the revenants as they were still few enough for the guards to cut them down with weapons infused in golden light.
“Don’t tire yourself out, we can take out the rest later! This is just the edge of the deadlands!”
Viv understood what he was referring to. The revenants were ancient and wizened beyond recognition, but they were also fighting in a place where black mana saturation remained very low. It would take hours for them to rebuild themselves after being cut down.
The group quickly reached a natural chokehold between two stone elevations that would make flanking them difficult. There, they made their stand. The moaning mass of undead stuck to their line like a slow wave. Their voices made a deafening drone that covered even the clash of weapons.
“Steady on! Save your strength, and don’t overextend!” Lorn bellowed.
Viv took the advice for herself as well and kept focusing on the occasional crawlers and gut spillers emerging from the mass. Mutated animals were fair game as well.
“On top of us!” Farren suddenly yelled. Viv’s danger sense warned her and she took a few steps back, only for an undead bird to crash at her feet. It was missing a wing and its head. Above, Arthur screeched in triumph.
Damn, it was good to have dragon-backed air supremacy.
Viv yoinked a few of the larger specimens of revenants to ease the pressure on their right flank, but soon the press of bodies was so thick that the men started to be pushed back. Worse, some of the more enterprising revenants were making their way around the stone elevations, Farren and the two walkers enough to fend them off for now.
Viv focused and a large sphere assembled above her. She called the runes and the spell vibrated. It was ready.
“True mass yoink.”
The sphere took off and tendrils emerged from it, spearing revenants and only leaving ash behind. The tendrils spread like a plague across the horde of enemies, killing dozens in quick succession.
Black mana flooded Viv’s conduits.
It felt amazing.
As surely as black mana was slowly killing her, it also made her feel alive on a fundamental level. It was pure will given power over matter, something that her people had always dreamed off but never obtained. It flooded her being and begged to be used, unleashed, according to her need. And she had a need right now.
“Marruk?”
The Kark woman bashed one last skull, then grabbed her shield horizontally with both hands. She roared and smashed it into the now thinned first ranks with supernatural power. The sound of the defensive weapon impacting dry flesh was like a gong, and there was suddenly a calm in the center of the conflict, an eye of the cyclone that Viv made use of. All the overload she had just acquired flew into the mightiest blight she had ever conjured. There was nothing to spare here, none of the trees and shrubs that she was usually loath to annihilate. Just a mass of undead threatening her life. She could go all the way. She could let go. And she did.
“Blight!”
There was a certain beauty to an art perfectly done, even if that art was designed to destroy. The sphere left her side. It perfectly flew over Marruk’s shield before spreading, expanding into a cloud of hungry, hissing void. The blight spread over the slope in a cone, smothering the land and silencing the horde. Only its furious hiss was left.
It reminded Viv of the ‘Nuees Ardentes’, a phenomenon formed from incandescent clouds of ash and particles tumbling down the side of a volcano to catch the unwary. They were faster than cars and left no survivors.
When the construct was finally spent, there was nothing left behind but blackened rock and twisted remnants of armor.
“Well, shit,” one of the guards said.
“Focus, it’s not over!” Lorn said, “can you do that again?” he then asked Viv.
“Yes. Twice more.”
Lorn looked genuinely amazed.
“I’m perfect against the undead.”
“So it would seem.”
The battle resumed. Farren and the walkers handled stragglers, Arthur kept the skies clear above their heads, while Koro and Lorn covered the flanks. Viv figured out why when they started being pushed back due to the large amount of bodies piling up. Both combatants were able to handle several revenants at once, though it became clear that they were tiring. Viv redoubled her efforts and sent another blight to relieve the pressure, aiming more to the side this time. After that, they only had about sixty revenants left to kill and Viv simply yoinked them at great speed.
The guards collapsed where they were as soon as the last undead fell. The rest of the group walked around, keeping an eye out. Only the walkers were still fresh.
Arthur landed and paraded before Viv, who lavished her with praises and rewarded her with some meat. The proud dragonette preened and spread her wings wide so that all could bask in her victorious illustriousness.
“You did such a good job!” Viv congratulated, “they didn’t stand a chance against you!”
“Squee!”
It was at that time that one of the walkers whooped in delight. He picked something from the ground and waved it where all could see. It was the glint of gold, tarnished by time and sorcery, but unmistakable. It came from a rectangular coin at the limit of being an ingot.
Arthur’s gaze turned and she spotted the coin.
It suddenly occurred to Viv that she had never used one of her very few gold talents in Arthur’s presence. The denomination was simply too large to be exchanged on an everyday basis. The most expensive things she had bought in Arthur’s presence had been paid in silver.
In the dragonette’s eyes, the light of cupidity shone like a star.
“Oh dear.”
The party rested for twenty minutes during which Viv pulled black mana from the few wounds the warriors had suffered. Then, the looting began. Viv had almost forgotten that for typical undead hunters, half of their profit came from checking revenants for valuables while the rest was the bounty. It soon became apparent that this location had not been cleared for centuries, and everyone started piling valuables. A lot of the stuff was steel or faded, enchanted pieces of gear with just enough magic left not to fall into pieces. They did not find another pouch of money like the walker had found. There was still quite a bit of silver left. Lorn was giddy.
“This is my favorite part. We get money, and nobody died.”
“How very avaricious. Are you sure you’re not a follower of Sardanal?” Viv teased. Sardanal was the god of wealth so the joke should work.
“Nothing said that good deeds cannot pay!” the guard captain exclaimed.
“Yes,” Koro said, “we punish evil, get rich and get laid. That is the good life.”
Viv could get behind that.
They ended up with a pile of scrap that could nevertheless be used by talented smiths as is, but that they could not transport for the moment. It could wait since it never rained in the deadlands. The rest was the more valuable stuff. They had usable weapons, mostly steel short swords, which they decided to leave as well since they were damaged. They also had a collection of ancient coins and some jewelry. Arthur trotted forth and grabbed one coin.
“Squee.”
“By tradition, casters get ten parts, officers three and footmen one. That coin covers your share, I believe,” Farren said in a rather subdued voice.
“Works for me.”
While the rest split up the loot, Viv asked for one of the walkers to help her with something. A knife, a needle, some thread and a few straps of leather, Viv had made a pouch which she presented to Arthur. The dragonette was still clutching the precious, tarnished coin within two claws with consideration, inspecting it from different angles.
“Here.”
Viv placed the coin in the pouch with only a small resistance, though there was clear distress in Arthur’s face. She fastened the pouch around her neck where it was unobtrusive, and then showed her precocious student how to open and close it. Arthur squeaked impatiently to show she understood and resumed her study.
Meanwhile, the group was ready to go and they moved down the slope, finishing off the revenants that had started to regenerate. They used the opportunity to explore the empty base building by building, finding broken foundry equipment like crucibles, furnaces and the likes, all covered in dust and the rusty remains of scaffoldings.
“It would make sense for the Min Goles mines to have a foundry nearby so that they could transfer ingots directly inland,” Farren noted.
They continued their exploration and found the decrepit remains of barracks and what looked like administrative quarters. They found a lot of coins in the various collapsed remains of chests, but the real treasure was in the topmost office of the tallest building. A safe, damaged by falling stone, easily disgorged its contents with the help of Lorn’s sword.
“Neriad’s fetching buttocks,” Koro exclaimed, “we’re rich!”
They had found the Min Goles treasury. There was enough gold and assorted silver to buy half of Kazar.
“Holy shit.”
“We’re loaded!”
“Squee!”
“Wow,” one of the guards said, “why haven’t we come here sooner?”
“Hmm, the undead infestation?”
“Oh right.”
The group decided to spend the night there and check the mine entrances in the morning. They used the rest of the evening grinning like idiots and splitting the loot, including the walkers who looked slightly less enthused. It was an unexpected boon. Everyone took refuge in one of the barracks which two of the guards meticulously swept and cleaned until it was livable.
“I’m sort of jealous,” Viv admitted as the pair carried on their tasks. One of them, the only female guard besides Koro, turned to her with an amused frown.
“I’m jealous of someone who can depopulate an entire undead town in fifteen minutes. Guess that makes us even?”
Everyone was in a good mood, and jokes and banter fused as Koro cooked the meal. Viv went out and sat next to Marruk who had gotten busy polishing her mace as she kept a vigil on the darkening landscape around them.
“So, you’re rich now,” Viv started.
“So it seems.”
“That means you can leave my employment, if you wish.”
“Yes. I know. But I don’t think I will. I think I want to know everything about guerilla warfare first.”
The Kark placed her weapon down on the ground and massaged her hands. They were quite scarred.
“I told you many times that I left my tribe.”
“You did.”
“I think I was just running away then. Running away from a fate where things would keep up as they were, I would bear witness to my people’s slow death. I told myself that I was looking for… something. A magical weapon. Anything that would stop our extinction. It took me years of wandering before I figured out that I needed a new art of war. It took meeting you. Now that I have finally found it, I want to keep you alive long enough to learn it.”
“You make it sound like it’s hard,” Viv joked, but Marruk was less amused.
“It is. You have an uncanny tendency to end up in the most dangerous situations. One day, that insolent luck of yours will run out.”
Viv thought of her divine spark.
“Or maybe it won’t.”
“Well, I hope we never find out. In the meanwhile, this boon changes nothing. Money will not save us. The best use I can make of it is to buy the best armor I can for myself and try to drag that knowledge back to the steppes. And then probably bang a few heads together until those stubborn idiots are willing to listen to me. And if I get even richer, well…”
“Well what?” Viv asked, curious.
“I’ll hire you.”
Viv smiled and nodded. After she was cured, perhaps.
The group slept soundly and studied the caved-in mine entrance in the morning. It did not take long for the strongmen of the group to open a passage into the complex large enough for people to pass. The last boulder was lifted to reveal an interior completely submerged in darkness. Viv heard something large shuffle in the distance. Farren’s voice echoed in the passage.
“The Min Goles iron mines, ladies and gentlemen. Shall we?”