Dorian rushed outside to find Rust Tribe in chaos.

Voices clamored. People dashed in and out of tents, frantic, stowing all manner of clothes and foodstuffs. Nervousness tingled on the air like static electricity.

What in the nine hells is going on?

Behind him, Hu cried out. He stared at something in the far distance, something which seemed to turn him to stone. Dorian followed Hu’s gaze, but he couldn’t make out any more than a black speck.

“Run, boy! Run!” yelped Hu. Then he leapt back into his tent and tied shut the hard-hided door-flaps, leaving Dorian befuddled. To where?

A few seconds later Hu burst out again, and, with a speed Dorian thought impossible for a man his size, made a mad dash for the town’s center.

Dorian whirled around, seeking out an enemy that wasn’t there. As he heard its shrill shriek split the air again, he growled.

Things were going so well!

As a stream of people rushed by, he grabbed one at random. “What’s the alarm for?” he shouted, struggling to make himself heard over its whine.

The person—one of the assistant chefs fresh out of the kitchens, by the look of his smocks—yelped. “Don’t know! Head said to shelter in the center!”

Then he shrugged off Dorian’s grasp and dashed off. Presumably, to do exactly that.

Right. Sometimes handling Io’s memories were like inheriting a library of books he hadn’t had time to fully read through. Protocol was to gather every tribesman in the center of town, where the Hunters would set up a defensive perimeter. Evacuate there.

Dorian’s hand curled to fists. He glanced down at his elixir, and froze. If he ran back now, what if the flask broke or was lost in the ensuing chaos? How might he explain leaving with a normal Elixir of Minor Healing, and returning with blue alien lightning goop?

He hesitated and thought for a second.

Nah. Too risky.

So he brought it up to his lips and, before he could think too hard about it, downed it in three big gulps.

Elixirs never tasted like anything else. This one was like drinking ice and magma twined together, slithering down to his stomach to coil into the core of him. It sat there in a flashing, roiling glut. Where it sat, pain spiked. Biting down, Dorian set to cycling it with his modified [Peerless Yang Sutra] instantly.

At the same time, he ran. He and twenty-odd others followed path to the center of town, navigating abandoned tents and intermittent screams.

Soon a big circle of guards popped into view, with most of the tribe huddled together behind them in a flat clearing in the sand. Dorian dashed in with the rest, panting, cycling.

Most of the tribe’s bigshots were already gathered. He saw Kuruk at a far end with a small girl at his side—sister?—and Hento, looking deathly pale next to his father at the center. For his part, the Rust Chief was mired in icy calm. His gaze was also trained at that black dot in the distance.

Which was growing by the second. With his low-level eyes, he couldn’t make out much. A thundercloud? He was sure Damien Rust could see it, though, with his Vigor Physique eyes. Besides a tightening of his lips, his face betrayed nothing.

Then a familiar voice leapt out from the clamor.

“Where were you?” Kaya marched to him. She looked pissed.

“Just cycling! Lost track of time,” he said, smiling guilelessly.

Technically true, even now. As they spoke he was chipping away at that giant glut in stomach. Though it had no weight and occupied no real space, it felt deeply physical. It certainly hurt like something physical.

“I—you—“ Kaya looked alternately relieved and about to slap his head into another dimension. “Forget it. C’mere.”

She dragged him in, deeper past the first line of guards. Away from the dots in the sky.

“Where are we going?”

“Away,” she said. “When things start getting ugly, I don’t want you anywhere near it.” She squinted at the sky.

“Ugly?” He blinked. The dots were slowly resolving, now, becoming lines in the distance. “What set off the alarm? Those?”

“Vordors.”

He frowned and, mirroring her, squinted harder at the dots. “Vordors don’t fly in packs, don’t they? They hunt alone.”

“Exactly,” she said grimly. She was holding his arm so hard he was sure there’d be bruises tomorrow. There didn’t seem anything else forthcoming.

The closer the dots got, the less the tribespeople chattered. After the initial panicked spurt died down, an eerie calm drew over them, a stomach-churning apprehension.

Soon, he saw Kaya was right.

Vordors. In a pack! Adults, all giant. Presumably Vigor-Realm. It took one seasoned hunter-team to down one. Now there were ten. Headed straight toward them.

That wasn’t even the most alarming part.

Their wings were beating in sync. Perfect sync. Up, down, up, down, like they were corpses puppetted by some divine hand. As they flew closer, higher, their massive, inky bodies blotted out the moons and the streaks of stars in the sky.

“How?” he whispered.

“Look up top,” said Kaya. Her voice was a strained calm, like she was forcing it not to tremble. “Lead Vordor.”

There was a black spike. At first he’d mistaken it for a misshapen feather.

But now, a hundred yards away, he saw it truly.

“Ugoc Shaman,” said Kaya.

A smudge of black in a cloak which blended into the night. A mask of bone, so small it seemed a glint, a wink of moonlight.

Dorian breathed in sharply.

Ugoc? The most militant of all the Tribes of the Izod Desert. Last he recalled they were on a warpath up north, swallowing tribes whole, in fierce combat with tribes and Oasis strongholds alike. All he knew was they were locked in a years-stalemate hundreds of miles away. One versus a swathe of the North’s great powers.

How could one clan match a region’s worth of militia?

The answer floated in front of him. An answer that was only a rumor to most Rust tribesmen, a bogeyman. An answer that made ‘Ugoc’ a whispered name, something unseen and unreal and which only surfaced in the deepest, most far-fetched fears of the night.

The Ugoc devils of the North, it was rumored, could control Spirit Beasts.

The Vordors stopped there, floating and flapping as one, and Dorian almost slapped himself for missing the obvious truth.

They looked puppeted because they were. Those giant, purple Vordor eyes stared into empty space. Even from out here, Dorian could feel their powers radiating like the rays of some demonic sun.

He breathed deeply, in and out, feeling far too small for his liking.

Whispers and furtive glances broke out in pockets.

“I-it’s true!”

“—against the Dweller—“

“Heresy!”

A deeper worry snagged at Dorian.

How are they even here? The Ugoc, in theory, ran in parallel to the Rust Tribe, stomping in a different region. Unless…something drastic shifted in the war?

Then a voice, louder, colder, fiercer than the rest, dropped on the noise, crushing it to nothing.

“Silence.”

Forward strode Damien Rust. An unfamiliar, heavily-scarred man strode beside him. Kuruk’s father, the Head Hunter, Dorian guessed.

They broke past the perimeter in four quick steps, and two rival pressures erupted. One cold like ice, one cold like death. Both shoved back at the Vordors’ in a sphere, lightening the weight on the tribe in a joined aura-bubble.

Cultivation bases unleashed. The only two [Vigor] realm tribesmen, brought forth together, standing at hair-trigger.

For a second the slow, thick flapping was the only sound present.

The Shaman broke the silence first.

“Greetings, Rust Tribe. Greetings, Chief Rust.” Old. A woman’s voice, spoken in almost a whisper, but it carried across the distance like only a cultivator’s could. Dorian heard it as though she’d said it right by his ear.

“This one is Meng, Elder of the Ugoc Clan. I am here on behalf of his highness A’Kan, Chieftain of Ugoc Clan.”

She surveyed Rust Tribe, her mask dipping in a slow arc.

Damien Rust said nothing. His calm was unnatural.

“The Ugoc Clan,” she continued, “is the rightful Hegemon of the Izod Desert. It is with the Dweller’s mandate that we command his most sacred creations. It is by her will that I stand here today.”

“What,” said Rust, enunciating the syllable, “do you want, witch?”

There was the slightest snarl on his lips.

A pause. Then she spoke. “The Ugoc clan has taken the Oasis Stronghold of Kal-Dur.”

The words meant nothing to Dorian. But they meant something to the Rust Chief.

His eyes widened a fraction. It was the most Dorian had ever seen from him, and it hinted to something like shock under that tightly-gripped mask of a face.

“The war in the North has resolved,” said the Shaman. “Under our new Chieftain we are Ylterra’s rising phoenix. The Ugoc Clan stands forty thousand strong. We have swallowed the free tribes of the North. We have forced the Northern Alliance to sue for peace. We turn our eyes westward.”

“You have said many words,” said Chief Rust. “You have not said any that matter.”

His voice rose, deepening. “What do you want, witch?”

The silence that followed was like a well with no bottom.

Then the Shaman chuckled. The sound was a dragging shudder of the lungs; it sounded like a hacking cough. Only the unmistakable, cruel mirth in it set it apart.

“I will remember you,” she said. Even from this distance Dorian felt the weight of her gaze like a spotlight, and it wasn’t even directed at him. Chief Rust did not flinch.

The Shaman’s voice rose, too, as though to match his.

“I want your tribe.”

A sharp intake of breaths. There was not only no such reaction from Chief Rust—Dorian wasn’t sure the man was breathing at all.

“The choice is simple,” she said. “Surrender, or be annihilated.”

Rust’s aura spiked. “You offer an impossible deal.”

“I do not offer a deal. I offer an ultimatum.”

“I reject it.”

No hesitation. No tremor of the voice. Chief Rust faced down ten Beasts of his own Tier, and he still spoke like it was a deal he could afford to turn down.

Dorian looked around, and each face was a picture of fear. Fear slicked his veins, too, but it wasn’t real fear, just this physiology’s base reactions. In his mind he was nearly laughing.

After all that, this is how I go?

He’d once been held in a gnoll prison and tortured for two hundred years. They’d flayed his skin off his body, then fed him regeneration potion, only to flay it off again; they’d plucked his eyes from his skull, slit the chords from his throat, set hordes of insects to sting and mate in the insides of his ears. They had taken everything from him then.

Everything but his humor. His ability to laugh at the abjectness of his own demise.

There was a strange silliness in powerlessness. The knowledge that you’re done no matter what; that you have lost all control. There was an absurdness in it all. What else was there to do but laugh? He almost let himself do it. This was shaping up to be his shortest run yet. We’re fucked. We’re all fucked!

The Shaman seemed to agree.

“Fool!” She cackled. “Will you let pride blind you to your timely end?”

“You speak too much,” said the Rust Chief.

Now his aura was overwhelming. Fully unleashed. The qi of his [Vigor] Realm base blanketed the Tribe; to his side, Kuruk’s father did the same.

“You watch your tongue too little,” sighed the Shaman.

In the distance, eleven [Vigor] Realm cultivation bases did the same—the Shaman and the Vordors both.

They blotted out Chief Rust’s and Kuruk’s in a total eclipse.

In an instant Dorian felt underwater.

His mind whirred. What else could he do? Jump out and shout his allegiance to the Ugoc Tribe? He discarded the idea instantly. Forget the Shaman—Chief Rust would cut him down first.

There was one last-ditch effort he might try, now that he thought of it. He’d rather he not need to resort to it, and in all likelihood it wouldn’t fool the Shaman, but he cycled his qi in an off-kilter pattern from the [Peerless Yang Sutra], drawing on the glut in his gut. Just in case.

Vordors had a sense of smell fifty times keener than a human’s, eyesight a hundred times. He was not outrunning them. He was not hiding from them. If this went the way he thought, the only half-serious try was a faked death.

A true last-resort he’d really, really rather avoid. Not only because it was low-percentage.

He glanced around, finding the flabby face of Alchemist Hu, the dead-eyed stare of Tocho, the stony visage of Chief Rust. He hadn’t gotten a chance to exploit any of them for resources yet! It was a setup whose punchline was his miserable death. Not a very good joke. He’d laugh at it anyways.

The Shaman produced from under her robes a long, gnarled stick. At one end was a gemstone which beamed fractals of emerald.

She pointed it. Nine sets of wings spread out at once, casting long shadows over all of Rust Tribe. Nine throats screeched a symphony to shatter glass.

Then they dove like angels of death, and Dorian began to laugh.

Time Elapsed: 21 hours.