“I hate this.” Maya muttered beside Baroke, poking the meager fire with a stick. They had to keep it small on account of the entire nation searching for them.

“I know, but it’s not gonna be much longer.” Baroke said, patting her back. “Either we’ll get away soon or we’ll be dead soon.” He gave her a grin and a thumbs-up before putting his freezing hand back in front of the fire. The other one was occupied with stopping the bleeding in his stomach.

“How can you be this upbeat?” the little ranger demanded, scowling at him.

“Because this is most definitely real.” Baroke said with a smile. The Ilethans never bothered with this level of misery and graphic detail in their damned mind-prisons. Which meant Baroke was free.

And that was something to be optimistic about.

“Would you mind?” Baroke asked, nodding to the knife in the fire.

“Could I get someone to hold down the brute?” Maya asked.

“Hey!” Baroke said, mildly irritated at being called a brute.

A resounding flurry of not-it’s carried through the camp, and Grant’s distant form sighed, putting down his meager dinner they’d stolen from pirates and coming over.

“I’ll get this arm.” The grizzled veteran pointed at another tiny fire.

“You two, get the other arm.”

The soldiers grumbled, but did as they were told, coming over and clamping down on Baroke’s arm.

“Oh, come on fellas, I’m not gonna cause any trouble.”

“Baroke, if you weren’t the damndest idiot and hadn’t spent every Warp point you ever had working out, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“I don’t know, I kind of like feeling like the entire world is made of a soft cheese.” Baroke said with his best grin.

Without warning, Maya pressed the hot blade againt the wound, lighting Baroke’s entire body up with searing pain.

“Agh, goddamnmutherfuckeri’llkillyou!”

The blinding pain forced him to flinch, tossing the two soldiers over to the next campfire while Grant tried to pin down his arm with his entire body weight. With an effort of will, Baroke directed the violence toward Grant rather than his petite girlfriend.

Grant motioned to the side while Baroke was beating on his face with his free hand.

Swords whizzed out from the general’s campsite, four of them clamped down around Baroke’s wrist and slammed his hand to the ground.

“Gaah!” Baroke groaned, the swords screaming with metal fatigue and twisting around his wrists as he tried to get one last punch in…then he came to his senses, panting from the sudden rush of endorphins.

“Whew, that was a rough one, right guys?”

The two soldiers he’d thrown groaned as they stood up, Grant glared at him through a swollen eye.

“When we see you again, remind me to give you a good thrashing,” Grant said, shifting his gaze over to Copy Calvin, who winked at them from the cookpan. He hadn’t gotten hungry in three days, so Baroke pretty much assumed the copy didn’t need to eat.

“Can do.” Calvin said, serving the next set of eggs.

“You sure you don’t need a rescue?”

Calvin glanced over at Ella, who shook her head.

“He’s still alive. Alive, and…” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “Manic.”

“What would you have to be manic about? They threw you in a pit to the Abyss, right?” Baroke asked, gingerly wrapping up his wound and trying not to pop it open again.

“Here,” Maya said, taking it out of his hand and wrapping the bandage for him.

“I can only thing of three things I could get manic about.” Calvin said, ticking them off on his fingers. “Becoming a wizard King, discovering a new form of magic, or getting laid. It’s one of those things. Kala’s lost hope of ever returning, her societal reservations have most likely crumbled and she’s succumbed to my masculine charm. It’s probably the third one.”

Baroke picked up a pebble and flicked it at his friend, bowling the scrawny kid over.

“Him being manic can only be a good thing, I guess.” Baroke said, turning back to the rest of the group. “It’s a lot more productive than depression and suicidal thoughts. If he’s manic, it means he’s in a good place and working on a way out.”

“By all the gods,” Jinsei said, his jaw hanging open. “Baroke said something wise.”

“Hey, I’m not dumb.”

“Really, what’s your Mind?”

“Ten.”

Maya blinked.

“You said you never raised it.”

“Never did. Decided I should focus on my highest Attribute and stick with it for long term gains,” Baroke said. He flexed his arms and kissed each bicep. “That’s how these beasts came to be. Eighty-one Body, baby. Would’ve been ninety-seven if the damn ilethans hadn’t fucked my build with all those extra Skills.”

The entire camp went eerily silent.

“That is a stupidly high amount of Mind for your first Break.” Maya said.

“Not as stupidly high as thirteen Body.” Baroke said with a shrug.

“To Baroke! The Grand Wizard of muscle!” Jinsei said, raising a glass and downing the Bolesian wine therein. The glassworker still had a bit of a drinking habit that needed sorting out. Without Nadia to keep him in check, he was backsliding, somewhat.

A few people halfheartedly joined the glassworker’s salute. The rest just sort of stared at Baroke. I don’t know what they’re on about. Baroke shrugged and decided to ignore it.

“So what’s the plan?” Baroke asked, turning his attention to Grant.

“We’re heading East.” Grant said, sitting down beside the fire, tossing his ruined swords aside with a scowl. “Veer is already halfway across the with country with Orson’s caravan. We can meet up with him at the border and shelter in Boles for a while.”

“As bandits?” Baroke asked.

“What?”

“Well, you’ve got nearly two thousand men…and Cobalts,” Baroke said, nodding toward the little campfires with small blue creatures sitting around them. “Armed to the teeth, without any sort of government oversight. We’ll be attacked as a matter of course. Outlaws by default.”

“Boles is a big, big, place, and lush. A land of plenty. And of course that means that warlords fight over the bountiful resources therein.” Grant said, pulling out a knife and motioning them closer.

He drew a triangle in the dirt and split it in half. “This is Iletha and Gadvera, divided by the Capachen mountains, with the Genosian jungle south of them.

He drew a bigger circle to the side of it. “This is Uleis, big enough to swallow the two of them up, but nearly devoid of natural resources, save sand.”

“We make the most with what we have,” Ussein said, nodding.

“Then there’s Boles.” Grant drew a huge circle nearly engulfing Uleis. “It’s not actually a country. Instead, it’s divided into hundreds of small city-states that dot the land, constantly warring with each other. The only thing they have in common is a language and culture.”

Grant leaned back and studied his rough map. “Every fifty years or so, some warlord or other will try to unify the country, but it’s just too damn big, and states constantly splinter off after their passing, until it eventually falls to anarchy again. This has happened so many times, the locals just sort of expect it. They Call it the Mandate of Soscath. They think gods live on the moon and tell the common folk who should be emperor.”

Grant snorted.

“Anway,” he said, tapping the big picture. “The regime is currently on the downswing, the last warlord to attempt unification passed away ten years ago, and the place is rife with unrest. We’ll be lost in the ocean of problems the emperor is drowning in.”

“Hiding in the chaos?” Baroke asked.

“Pretty much.” Grant said. “We can rent our services to a city-state and use intermediaries to move product into Uleis, At least until we can rejoin with Calvin and the princess. Going back to Gadvera without either of them would probably be unwise. Take it from me.”

“Alright, sounds like a plan,” Baroke said, nodding. The other leaders of the West Boles trading company nodded.

There was a hiss as an arrow tore through the air, burying itself in front of Baroke’s foot.

“Ambush! They’ve found us!” Grant cried, lunging to his feet, his blades weaving a shell of cover above his head.

Damn it all, Baroke thought, rolling over to Betty, trying to keep his abdomen as straight as possible to avoid reopening his wound. He grabbed his fancy new magic bow and pushed himself to his feet, arrows dropping around him like hail.

Betty was made entirely of rubber glass, as Calvin had called it. Nearly indestructible, with arms as thick as Baroke’s thighs.

She was a big girl.

Cries of pain began echoing through the camp as arrows found their targets. The Uleisan army had been hounding them since the night Calvin’s clone had warned them, accused of a crime…they had committed.

Every Uleisan oasis had tried to turn them away, shunned and spit on them, forcing them to resupply their water by force before moving on. The further they got from Gadvera, the more bandit-like they became.

Baroke was just flabbergasted the Wasps, all one hundred and eighty-four original members of Calvin’s company, were still there. Some of them surely wanted to go back home, to the Abyss with the desert.

Well, no sense overthinking it.

Baroke’s height allowed him to see above the chaos in the camp, making out the distant army, mostly concealed by the dark.

They were charging toward them on desert guar, their timing such that they would hit their left flank at the same moment that the rain of arrows stopped.

“Five stones says I can hit the commander in the left eye,” Baroke said, plucking a falling arrow out of the air and stringing it.

“No deal,” Maya said, holding a shield of hardened leather with several arrows embedded in it over her head, trying to be as small as possible.

“Fine,” Baroke shrugged, a non-powered arrow bouncing off his shoulder, another richocheting off his scalp and landing in front of Maya.

Baroke narrowed his eyes, and everything else faded away between him and his target. For an instant, even the constant ache of the wound the big Genosian had scored on him faded away.

He eyed the man with the biggest hat he could see in the darkness, drew and fired in a single motion.

Force Amplification.

Assassinate.

Called Shot.

Penetrating Shot.

0/8 Bent remaining.

The arrow blasted forward, energized by a massive amount of Bent, glowing white hot and crackling with energy.

The rider’s guards noticed the light and tried to interpose their shields between Baroke’s arrow and the leader, to no avail.

The streak of light shot through them, their leader, and four rows of riders behind him.

Betty has reclaimed 3 Bent.

6/22 Bent Stored for User’s activated abilities.

“I love this bow,” Baroke said, kissing the massive blue chunk of glass, a thumb-thick tube about a quarter full of black Bent running through the handle.

“North!” Grant shouted, pointing the way in the middle of the hail of arrows.

The charge faltered and folded in on itself as its leader was removed, and Grant steered them away from the flanking maneuver opposite the charge by heading towards the mountains, aiming to scrape off one side of their pursuit by the Uleisan army and their hired legends.

The men were bone tired, but each and every one was a Veteran, so they didn’t waste time complaining or asking why. As a single unit, every Gadveran, Genosian, Cobalt and Uleisan hopped up and started sprinting for the north.

Well, except for Jinsei, who was huddled by the fire, hyperventilating and clutching the arrow in his shoulder with a death-grip.

“Come on, skinny,” Baroke said, lifting the glass artisan up with one hond and throwing him over his shoulder as they cleared out of their camp, leaving nothing but a forest of arrows behind them.

Along with a few corpses of their friends unlucky enough to be hit in a vital area.

Damn it, Calvin, you really stepped in it. Baroke thought as he ran.

***Jinnei***

“I don’t know why it took so long to move, and I don’t know what it wants, but those ships back there,” Karen said, pointing to the fleet behind them. “Are not Ilethan. They’re not Malkenrovian either. They belong to a horrifying creature that can consume the minds and bodies of anyone it wants. It’s the reason the borders of Malkenrovia have been closed these last seventeen years.”

Karen hooked her thumbs in the belt holding her greatsword. “Maybe it was content, maybe it was sleeping with no one to disturb it. Maybe it was just resting and gathering strength for this day. Whatever the case, this thing spreads like wildfire, and it wants to cover the entire world in its spawn for some crazy vendetta against the gods themselves.” It can’t die, and it had more arms, legs, and screaming, bloody mouths than the entire city of Mujenan.”

“Are you trying to scare us?” Jinnei demanded. “Because you never mentioned anything like this the entire time we were growing up.”

“I’m trying to help you understand what that is,” Karen said, pointing a beefy arm at the armada that stretched across the ocean. “That is not human. That is not going to be satisfied with a new castle, or trade agreements, or power. Or any of a million selfish human desires. The only reason it exists is for revenge.”

“Revenge on who?” Kip asked, raising a hand like a schoolchild in front of the Legend.

“I don’t fucking know. I didn’t stop to ask him when the King and Queen were trying to claw my eyes out with their bare fucking hands.” Karen said.

The boat full of Malkenrovian pirates drew in a breath, and shortly after, whispers began floating around the deck like so much flotsam. Pirates they might be, but they shared the pride of a lost country.

“That’s right, Karen the Bloodletter had an adventuring party with the crown prince.”

“I heard they did jobs for the king and queen themselves.”

“She might really have been there…”

“Do you think she..”

Jinnei glanced around, her hackles rising as some of the grease-stained, smelly men cast darting glances between the blonde fighter and her black-haired daughter as they whispered.

Kip raised his hand again.

“You were there? Do you know what happened to the royal family?”

“They’re dead.” Karen said, glancing at Jinnei.

It was quick, but the pirates didn’t miss it, the hushed whispers redoubling.

Karen growled a low rumble and stomped her foot.

The entire ship rocked, causing a few men to fall off their barrels, or stumble in place, and drawing their attention back to her.

“What I’m trying to say is these fuckers aren’t human, and when we get to Gadvera in two weeks time, you will not be sipping on Bolesian wine and plowing whores, you are going to be fighting for your lives and the future of he gods-damned human race. Until we arrive, consider these two weeks a vacation, you understand?”

There was a silence.

“If we kill this thing…Can we go home? Make a new Malkenrovia?” A voice near the back asked.

“Malkenrovia isn’t dead as long as the royal family survives.” One of them whispered, glancing at Jinnei.

Well, this is really fucking awkward. Jinnei thought, trying to keep her back straight.