As the two of them returned to the camp, Hirrus found himself falling in step behind Nidra, as if she were the captain of his guard unit, or a VIP his mercenary outfit had been hired to act as a bodyguard. He wondered at that dynamic for a moment, but soon decided that it was because of the shift in her demeanor. The ambition and drive in her body language made her seem a more commanding person. It just seemed natural that she took the lead now.

Though he was made slightly uncomfortable by the quiet urgings of his decision tree. He didn’t have to listen to it, but it was agreeing with him, notifying him that she was, in fact, the ranking military officer.

When they returned to the group, Hirrus was struck by how few there were. He remembered estimating the survivors at a few score, but that was when they’d been spread out around him. When he went to bury Alric, they clumped together, and while he didn’t do an exact headcount, he would have been shocked if there were forty total.

The most noticeable thing about the group, though, was how dissimilar they all were. One near the front was a literal child, with a malnourished build and visible streaks of dirt in their red hair. A few feet behind the child was a scowling older man with long dark hair, with the polished and poised appearance of a well-off merchant. On the far left end there was a diminutive woman with dark skin whose eyes looked strikingly haunted, being comforted by a beautiful middle-aged woman who had a smile on her face, despite the situation. At the very front of the group there was an exceptionally large woman who seemed to position herself aggressively, as if to defend the others, her muscular arms crossed over her chest, square jaw set as if in defiance of Hirrus and Nidra as they approached.

“I will make this simple,” Nidra said, her voice booming with depth and command. “Nothing has changed from twenty minutes ago. You are with us, or you are…” She let the question hang in the air as she gestured around them.

The group had tried to converge on the cleanest spot of the immediate vicinity, but there was no escaping what had happened here. A few yards away was the destroyed remains of the cart that had nearly carried their former leader to safety.

And just beyond it was the mountain of corpses.

The battlefield stretched from where they stood all the way back to where Rumi’s command tent was. It was a path of literal destruction. Bodies strewn about. Bloody chunks scattered across the ground. Tents and other temporary structures were flattened, burnt, or disintegrated. Here and there, parts of the camp were on fire, either from neglect or earlier sabotage.

Every bit of ground that wasn’t hidden by blood or viscera showed visible damage from the Arcana that had been unleashed. There were scattered circles of soot here and there where Royal Levin had struck throughout the fight. Triangles of scorched or scoured earth from Hirrus’s breath attacks. Two giant corridors had been blasted with Civilization Buster, stretching far beyond where the fight had taken place.

But Nidra’s message was clear.

A force a hundred times their size was dead at Hirrus’s feet.

Standing in his way now was suicide.

“What do you want from us?” one of them asked. The voice came from the back, no doubt emboldened by the perceived anonymity that came from speaking from the rear of the group. Despite that, Hirrus was easily able to pick out the lanky man with dark skin who had spoken.

“It’s not complicated,” Nidra said, raising her voice. “I want you to help yourselves. More than that, I want to help you help yourselves. And to help the whole of the kingdom, besides. Hari has been blighted by a scourge. The scourge of adventurers. Not the ones who protect our countryside with heroic deeds, but those who treat us like disposable toys. Those like Rumi.” She turned her head and spit on the ground. “For that, though, we need to be powerful.”

She held out a hand, dividing the group roughly in half.

Pointing to the right side with that hand, and jerking her other thumb at Hirrus, she continued: “Hirrus will oversee you folks picking over the salvage available.” She jerked her head towards the battlefield. “Keep whatever takes your fancy. Anything above item level fifty that you aren’t going to wear, pass it to Hirrus. Once the field is clear, he and I will distribute what remains.” She pointed to the other half of the group. “The rest of you, with me.”

Nidra headed towards the command tent, and the group that accompanied her drew in close around each other. They had to step over the field of the dead to get there, and Hirrus could see what she was doing. Whatever task she had for them, she needed to ensure they were intimidated enough to fall in line.

His group watched him with uncertainty, a few of them glancing between him and the mountain of corpses that he had created.

This was not going to be easy.

Leadership skills were definitely one of his shortcomings. Social skills, doubly so. Having reduced all of their companions to a field of gore likely did not endear him to them.

As soon as he had that thought, he knew where to begin.

“If any of you feel about one of your former comrades the way I felt about Alric,” Hirrus said in a deep, rumbling voice, “find them now. I won’t begrudge you their dignity in burial, regardless of what gear they may have. Though we are not bound to do so by our decision trees, that doesn’t mean it isn’t right.”

Of the dozen or so he had, nine of them set out into the battlefield. The older man with the long dark hair strode purposefully towards one of the earlier parts of the fight, gingerly lifting the body of a woman roughly of an age with him. Most of the others went to the mountain of corpses and started to dig. Amongst themselves, they quietly exchanged the names of who they were looking for, and helped each other in the search.

The rest of the group started to pick their way through the bodies, trying to avoid the areas where the mourners searched. Hirrus cut straight to the spot where he had killed Rumi. If there was one person on this field he knew did not deserve dignity, it was that monster.

Rumi’s corpse was a pile of dismembered gore. It would have required an empty bushel basket for someone to carry him off to be buried. Despite that, Hirrus was able to retrieve the equipment from his corpse, effectively undamaged.

As he had been an officer in Last of the Strong, it was all either level 60 or 70, and so he collected it all in accordance with Nidra’s command, but only a couple of pieces were of any interest to him. So much of his equipment was legendary - with particularly valuable legendary properties - that the only way anything was going to be worthwhile was if it was for one of the few equipment slots where he wasn’t already wearing a legendary piece.

With the exception of his left-hand ring.

He would die with his wedding band on his hand before he traded it for fleeting power.

Once Rumi’s corpse was naked, Hirrus went around picking over the rest of the field of the dead. It felt slightly ghoulish to be pawing through the piles of dead bodies, but these people had chosen their path. Unlike those searching the field around him, they had fought to the death. If they had wanted to survive, they could have thrown down their weapons at any point.

His findings were relatively sparse. Besides Rumi, most of the worthwhile gear was on the masked adventurers. Rumi’s non-adventurer followers seemed to have been neglected when it came to gear options. As the others approached him and handed him what they had found, he hoped their haul was so thin because they’d been able to equip themselves effectively. He only found two pieces himself that he wanted to equip.

Mocking Trousers

Legs

Ilvl 70 (Legendary)

+350 TEN

+350 SUP

+700 Cooldown Reduction Rating

+700 Attack Speed Rating

Special: Weapon attacks against targets whose move speed is slowed by at least 20% causes all Arcana currently on cooldown to increment 0.25 seconds on their cooldown instantly.

Reaper’s Footwraps

Feet

Ilvl 70 (Legendary)

+350 TEN

+350 RES

+700 Cast Speed Rating

+700 Cleave Rating

Special: Area of Effect Arcana that only damage one target do 10% bonus damage to that target.

They were useful abilities in two of the slots he was wearing item level 60 gear. One of them mitigated a large problem he’d struggled with: Arcana cooldowns were simply too long for him. A way to reduce them was an immeasurable boon.

The focusing ability imparted by the boots was a larger help than it seemed.

In the aftermath of the battle, he was well above the cap for total active Arcana he could equip at one time. The bonus for area damage Arcana in inappropriate situations meant that he could unequip a large number of his single-target options without fear.

Between Rumi and the masked adventurers, there were a handful of other legendaries, and so when he and his group finished their task and returned to Nidra, he presented them to her first.

“I’m sure someone will have a use for these,” she said, accepting the gear. “I’ll distribute it after our next task.”

“None of it is of value to you?” Hirrus asked. “That’s surprising.”

“Rumi went out of his way to prepare me for this task, to the detriment of all others,” Nidra said with a smirk. “And I peeled a few useful items from the corpses of Fire’s closest lieutenants on my way out of the camp. If there’s anything in this camp that matches what I already have, I will be shocked beyond measure. Beyond it would be impossible.”

“If you say so,” Hirrus said. He lowered his voice, leaning closer. He knew it wouldn’t help - there was nothing else to distract their new group from their discussion. “But I am unsure of how much this is going to help. Some of these folk were not guards, or soldiers, or highly-placed royal assassins. Gear will not make them stronger than average adventurers, much less what I imagine you will be sending them after.”

“Our strength is not only in our stats,” Nidra said, raising her voice to let the others hear. “We have a gift no adventurer can match. A limitless capacity for Arcana. A few dozen more Arcana in our pockets, both for their active power and passive benefits, and we will be more than a match for what’s to come.”

Hirrus wanted to point out that “limitless” was incorrect. The limit was simply at one hundred and twenty-seven. Likely more than she had, even after the battle against Rumi’s army.

“Not all of us learned our Arcana incidentally through mass murder,” Nidra continued, as though reading his mind. “But we know how to get them. And we’re not afraid to work for them, are we?”