Back in Real Life...

It was a bigass tent, sprawling over half an acre, and propped up a good twenty feet high at its poles.

It was made of skins. Skin, not hides. Mostly human, from the looks of it.

The massive skin tent was located at the northeastern edge of the swamp, an irregularity of stone bulging out into the stagnant waters, supporting a dozen poles and the stitched-together mass of the tent.

I had been exposed to a lot of undead spirits in Nightmare. I could feel them billowing around this thing, tied to it, twisted and screaming and vengeful, eager to lash out against any intruder who attempted to pass them by.

Probably kept out the ever-present fog and precipitation, too, I reckoned.

The place was home to a bunch of ogres. This wasn’t the same fat, slovenly group that had accompanied the greenhag. These had much smaller guts, and moved with something resembling discipline as they lumbered in and out of the place. Their armor was much better made, more welded-together small suits than strapped together, and their spiked clubs were of a higher quality level, and looked well-tended to.

Someone with impressive ability to browbeat was in that tent. I noticed that they all went wading out into the swamp in a certain direction at certain times, bearing empty pots of some size, and came back with some vile-looking green soup or stew within them, which they were dipping fingers in to sample with looks of relish.

Food source in that direction, I noted mentally, and started to move aside, when a troll came wading up from the direction I hadn’t been in, and called out in Jotun for Boss Blue.

There was a loud and deep grunt from within the tent after the ogres on guard outside passed that on, and a minute later a Really Big Ogre came out of the tent.

His belly was big, because he was big and broad, and the amount of muscle rippling under that fat was not to be underestimated. His skin was tinged with blue, especially his bashed-around ears, and his eyes were a brighter, more cunning yellow than those of the other ogres.

Huh. What do you know. A Hagspawn, the child of a Hag and another race, an ogre in this case. Smarter and stronger than a base ogre… and unfailingly obedient to his Hag mother.

I was basically looking at my half-brother.

He was wearing breastplate and greaves that actually looked like they’d been made for him, and holding onto a black iron Halberd done in a Dire Daemon Pattern sized for him… and standing up, he was barely shorter than the troll that had come to deliver whatever message, and built much heavier. That dire halberd had a cutting edge at least two feet across, and he was handling it easily.

I was definitely going to have to kill him.

I eyed the tent, subconsciously enumerating the number of human skins that had been stitched together to make it, and shook my head slightly despite myself. My Annis Hagmother had definitely been into the slaughter end of things to make that abomination...

I was definitely going to send it down burning in vivic fire once my Arsenal kicked in. However, I marked nine ogres living there. That food source must have been pretty hefty if it could feed ogres, hags, giants, and trolls… and them dire wolves. Cracking it would force them to go out and hunt for food, which would rouse the forest against them, without a doubt… unless the witchcraft of the Hags was used daily to provide the food their lard arses needed.

So, I needed Vivic and Firephasing and Blooding, without a doubt, especially with trolls present. If I left any corpses, I’d end up fighting undead as the Hags made double use out of the fallen, as the Bone Golem had proven. I was pretty sure if I circled back to the Shrine, I’d find an undead minotaur there, although they were going to have to do some work to reconsecrate the place after I had cracked the Dread-stone Altar there.

Still, I kept on my gathering expeditions, withdrawing upriver at the end of the day to work on Rune Chemistry.

I did pick off three of the wolves running about whose noses got them into a little bit too much trouble, taking them out before they could sound off. I wasn’t going to eat them without vivus to at least purify the meat, given the amount of necroic energy wandering around, but I was picking off their pack, and it was irritating them, I knew.

Still, a square mile was not a small amount of area to search, even if all you were doing is following the shoreline.

Naturally, I wasn’t avoiding the water, either. I had a Diamond Vajra, and Negative Energy was the first Diamond Resistance I had taken. The water was unclean, but it basically couldn’t touch me unless I let it, and the leeches that seemed to enjoy it were all snipped in two as soon as they flocked to me.

That, in turn, attracted the eels, whose heads I removed as a matter of self-preservation as I wandered through the tainted waters, watching the stone below me, and the fallen trees, mounded stones, and islets of corpses built up here and there, marking them faithfully.

Definitely a lot of brute labor went into building up this place to their personal taste. I was pretty sure that there were stelae around which supported the Wards over this place, but unless I directly stumbled into one, I wouldn’t recognize it.

They’d naturally be destroyed when I cleaned this place up, but that wasn’t going to be an overnight job.

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Another cave, and suspicions confirmed. There was a Troll Hag Mother hereabouts. She didn’t have to come out of the dank cave being guarded by the three other trolls for me to confirm her presence. The Runes painted onto the trolls basically confirmed it.

I’d trailed the troll messenger back to this place, and he sauntered past the three lounging guards, barely acknowledging them as he headed into the truly unreal stench of that troll-hole. Yeah, eyes watering without getting near it. They must live in their own filth?

Didn’t know how many were inside, so again I set up a place to watch, taking precautions against sight and body temp, and simply waited to see how many went in and out.

Well, it turned out that they did go down to the water to defecate, so that got me a count. Except the Hag; one carried out a pot of unclean stuff and tossed it into the waters without a care.

Then the tentacles came up out of the water and swept it out into a mound there, and I lifted an eyebrow as what I’d assumed to be a pile of manure and bones and stuff turned out to be just that, plus a rather huge, bulbous creature living happily in a pile of shit and odorous materials.

An otyugh. Well, of course. Why not? The swamp water was basically a sewer in its own way. Why not a middenfiend? And a big one, too. Not stupid enough to cross a regenerating troll, of course, but still plenty big.

One more thing to get rid of. It wasn’t that shit-eaters were bad, it was that they gathered shit to themselves and concentrated it, instead of letting it dilute and dissolve naturally, meaning their homes were festering houses of rot and disease.

It was a good thing I had Pierce Magical Concealment. The greenhag and a shellycoat I hadn’t seen before were definitely wandering around, trying to find me by the tried-and-true method of ambush hunting. The way the swamp was arranged naturally channeled the flow of traffic along certain chokepoints, and waiting in invisibility or camouflaged illusion at those places was surely a means of seeing if I was traveling in the swamp.

They were very good at standing still, but they weren’t bothering to blend in to the scenery with magic covering them up, so I spotted them amid the unnatural hues of their magical concealment at a distance, and wondered if I should have a go at them. Of course, they had ogre, wolf, or giant reinforcements not too far away, easy enough to call for, and I was sure they’d have some sort of life-saving magic to not make it easy to kill them straight up.

Plus, I wanted to make sure they stayed dead. Needed that vivic fire. Wasn’t like there weren’t other things I could be working on.

Still, nothing said I couldn’t snipe off their underlings, and rachet up the tension. Let them try to divine who I was, or scry and track me. It wasn’t going to happen. They’d have to rely on ears and eyes, and the omnipresent fog was going to make that difficult.

They might try a flock of birds, which might be a decent way to go. Enough servant eyes in enough places would certainly find me, if I didn’t kill them before they let out an alarm.

Still, this place was built for ambush kills. I would have to take up that job soon.

Maybe they’d Summon up a Daemon or two to hunt me down. Wouldn’t that be exciting?

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I slid up to the egress from the Valley, filling in the last bit of the circle in my Visual File. My eyes wandered over the stone, looking for surprises. I’d already killed the guards they’d left here before, certainly they would have put something new in here to kill off intruders… coming or going, as it were.

There, something moving in the water, of the water. Like a living channel of water.

I shot forward very quickly and silently, springing off with a ki-boosted leap, coming out over the water and down with Tremble pointing into the current going against the current.

I felt the aura of magic hit my Null and puncture and tear apart under the force of reinforced reality. Multiple serpentine coils began to rise out of the dank water around me, convulsed, and then fell back into the waters as the Summoned spirit was sent back to Elemental Water.

I fell into the middle of the stream, and promptly jumped right back off, shedding the water in midair as I came down on the stones of the opposite bank I had started on.

A water weird, a serpent of water that grabbed its victims and dragged them into the waters to drown. Nasty, effective, patient, and eager to kill. Sending it back home was a very effective way to deal with it.

And there was the glint I wanted to see.

I Dragon Walked up to the wall, grinned at the Hag Eye stuck into the niche there, and drove Tremble in to shatter it, promptly kicking off and booking for distance.

I book VERY quickly. There was a flare of light from the middle of the swamp, and then something may or may not have tried to teleport in close, and failed abruptly. Null Interdiction, nyar nyar.

Yeah, I was going to be keeping busy one way or another. I didn’t know what was in the middle of the swamp, but certainly the greenhag and the shellycoat had lairs in there, and whatever the food source they were using was there, too.

Just more work, when it came down to it.