Octavius regained consciousness at the feeling of hands rolling him over in the streambed.

What’s going on? he wondered as he tried to concentrate through the pounding headache. He remembered flashes of the previous hour.

He had been injured by his own spear. The image of it exploding forth from his abdomen covered in blood flickered through his mind. After that, he ran away into the forest. He remembered collapsing into the stream, then running figures and shouting voices.

His eyes snapped open. The thralls couldn’t have been more than ten minutes behind him. He was met with a bright blue sky and a blurry face—a blurry human face. Blinking his eyes, he tried to think past the fuzzy clouds in his mind. The man above him spoke, and somewhere deep in his subconscious, Octavius recognized the voice.

“Shit!” the man shouted, “It’s him, and he’s hurt!”

“Mar…” Octavius tried to speak, but his tongue felt heavy in his mouth, “Marc…”

His attempt at speech was interrupted when the marine held a cool glass vial to his lips. “It’s gonna be alright, Captain,” he said as the viscous red liquid flowed into Octavius’s parted lips.

Even as a soothing warmth flooded his body and the darkness tried to retake him, he stared into Marcus’s eyes with as much urgency as he could muster.

A voice that came from outside of his field of vision called out. “His spear’s over here,” it shouted, but Octavius forced himself to focus on warning Marcus.

“Thra… Thralls… Coming… Run…” his voice trailed off as he once more fell into the peaceful oblivion of unconsciousness. The last thing he saw was the marine snapping his head up to scan the forest around them.

Octavius shot up into a sitting position. A light animal skin slid down his bare chest with the motion, and he looked around. He was in a small animal skin tent. Light from the sun directly overhead shone through the tent and illuminated the peaceful scene. Birds chirped overhead, and the hustle and bustle of civilization filled his ears.

His mind flashed back to what had happened. He had only been conscious for brief flashes over the course of the team’s wild flight back to the Sanctuary. Even with the health potion, he was mentally wiped out.

He remembered the rapid bouncing from his place on Toby’s massive shoulder as the gentle giant carried him at a dead sprint. The sight of the stones that lined the stream rushed by below him.

The next flash of consciousness was marked by the rushing water of the larger stream and the sight of over a dozen thrall rogues rapidly chasing after them. Caster was being carried by Raj to his right. The thralls slowed to avoid a wind blade that flew from the mage’s hands.

The final flash of images was filled with a hectic struggle. Three thralls had circled the group and came at them from the front. While they failed to halt the headlong rush of the team, the final thing he saw before he passed out filtered into his consciousness.

One of the thralls was standing up from where it was knocked into the river. The next thrall was building up speed as it chased the humans that had run past it. The final alien creature, however, was dead. Blood pooled from a slice in the soft exoskeleton under its arm where it had been stabbed.

Confusion flooded his thoughts as he tried to piece together what had happened. How did they escape a level 39 thrall? If it was alone, they might have stood a chance by working together. The fact that it had nearly a dozen lower level thralls with it tipped the scales enormously in their favor.

The thralls stayed in a large group besides for when a few split up to cut them off, he realized, That would mean that they had to run at the speed of their slowest member. Even if their stats are higher, humans have longer legs. The slowest member of that group was likely only slightly faster than my party. I guess the question then is why? Even if Kzedr just went with the group that tried to cut us off, we’d be dead.

In the end, his lack of knowledge of the thrall’s psychology, along with the fact that he only had brief glimpses to work with, prevented him from answering the question. Instead, he checked his current status.

Health

680/680

Stamina

698/760

Mana

411/520

Well, he thought, I’m definitely healed. Now I just need to find out what’s going on. Even if the thrall mages couldn’t keep up with the rogues in chasing me, it won’t take them all day to arrive. Now that Kzedr knows that I am from the Sanctuary, they’ll make their move soon.

He now knew their goal wasn’t to wipe out the humans in the tutorial but to enslave them. The image of the corpse of the woman falling to the stone floor of the thrall’s feasting hall sent a spike of anger thrumming through him. Knowing that would allow the leaders of the Sanctuary to predict what the thralls would do next more effectively.

The problem was that the leaders of the Sanctuary didn’t know, only he did. With that thought, he spun around and crawled out of the small tent. His nap was nice, but there was work to be done.

Once he was outside of the tent, he scanned his surroundings. He was in an unfamiliar clearing. The familiar woven branches that surrounded him set him at ease. There wasn’t even a firepit in the spartan space.

He walked over to the animal skin that hung from the small doorway and swept it aside. Outside, he came face to face with an unfamiliar guard. The middle-aged man spun to face him and came to some semblance of attention.

“Sir! It’s good to see you’re awake,” the man said, “If you’re feeling up to it, The Council wants you to report to them as soon as you can. I was told that you would know what it was about…”

The man said that last sentence with a trace of uncertainty but was mollified when Octavius nodded to him.

“Thank you for letting me know,” he said, “But where is this exactly?”

The guard pointed down the busy path into the distance. “If you follow the road for a minute or two, you’ll find the Southern Kitchens. I assume you know where to go from there?”

Octavius thanked the man and set off at a jog. He needed to warn the leaders of the Sanctuary of what he had learned.

As he lightly ran, he reflected on his place in the Sanctuary. The image of the blood-stained petals of the yellow flower that was hidden in his clearing came to mind. He still thought of himself as independent from the Sanctuary itself, but not as independent from the people. It was a strange dichotomy that was perfectly clear in his head. He would do what he could to help these people. If that meant working with the Council, then he would, but he wasn’t loyal to them and wouldn’t follow their orders unthinkingly.

At the jog, he quickly reached the kitchens. His stomach rumbled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten for a day and a half. Stopping at a wooden slab of a table, he nodded to one of the workers and grabbed a handful of the plentiful dried meat. Gnawing on it, he turned to the north and started toward the Council Chambers.

As he walked, he noticed the amount of activity that buzzed around him. Civilians moved back and forth, carrying things and doing whatever work they were assigned to. There were very few guards, however. Maybe they’re guarding the border, he thought.

The trip took him barely five minutes. By the time it was over, he had finished the dried meat. He had yet to enter the so-called Council Chambers during his time in the Sanctuary. The outside of it was a massive wall of woven branches that were dense and thick enough to prevent anyone from looking inside.

There was only one entrance, and it was flanked by two guards. Octavius recognized one of them and nodded to him as he stepped through the animal skin that blocked the entrance. From outside the clearing, he could hear the voices of the people inside, but not very well. The moment he stepped inside, however, he was able to hear everything.

The chamber itself was rather empty. There were maybe a dozen and a half wooden chairs formed into a semicircle. All but one of the chairs was full, and various people stood behind each chair. Octavius recognized Robert sitting in one of the chairs, with David standing behind him.

Just as he entered, the middle-aged man that was standing in the middle of the semicircle finished speaking and returned to the empty chair. A few people noticed his entrance and looked at him curiously for a moment before using Identify on him. Without his trademark leather armor and Soulsilver spear, he wasn’t exactly recognizable to those who hadn’t met him before.

As the people around the circle read the identify messages that hovered in front of their eyes, David walked up to him with a speed that belied his age.

“Oct!” he said with a relieved look on his face, “You’re alright!”

The older man reached around him and gave Octavius a one-handed hug. The soldier returned it then stepped back.

“I need to tell you all what’s happened,” he said to the assembled leaders of the Sanctuary.

Robert nodded and gestured to the middle of the circle, “Go ahead, we’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”

As Octavius stepped up to the middle of the circle, he began his story. “I was captured after I killed the escaped thrall,” he said, “I woke up in a stone cell. After that, it took me a day to escape. I managed to destroy an object that they called the Suppressor. That was what made everyone avoid thinking about the thralls.”

People nodded around the circle at that. It was clear that they had realized that they were no longer affected by the compulsion.

“I escaped through the main entrance but was severely injured. I ran into the woods where I eventually passed out,” he explained, “You probably know the story from there, but what’s important is what I learned while I was there. The thralls aren’t trying to wipe us out; they are trying to enslave us.”

Surprised exclamations erupted from the gathered leaders at that. A man Octavius recognized as Adom spoke into the shocked silence that followed. “How do you know that?” he asked intently.

“Because that massive level 39 thrall said that I would make a good thrall,” Octavius said, “And later on, I saw a thrall kill a young human woman for spilling a drink on it.”

A deathly silence filled the clearing, and Octavius took the opportunity to describe the specifics of his experiences. From the thrall’s exact words to how the thralls were arranged in the feasting hall, he explained everything. By the end, many of the members were lost in thought. The person to break the silence was a young man that Octavius recognized as Ava’s friend, Oliver.

“It sounds to me like they’re escaped slaves of some sort,” he said, “They don’t seem to be beholden to any other beings outside of the tutorial, and you said they mentioned stealing the Suppressor. Maybe they escaped wherever they were from and to the tutorial. Then, they started to imitate their previous masters.

“You said that the human was wearing an illusion ring when it was serving them and that they called the rings ‘house thrall’s rings.’ If you’re right and only the mages below level 25 have the rings, it seems like they are divided by strength and class. The low-level mages are house thralls, and they get rings because their masters wanted them out of sight.

“It was a common practice in the American South to use a similar system after the Civil War. Many white house owners had black servants that cooked meals and did chores. It was essentially slavery by a different name, but that’s not the point. What is the point is that the culture promoted keeping the labor hidden from guests. This could be similar to that. After level 25, the thrall’s previous masters could have taken away the rings and framed it as a promotion when, in reality, the thralls would just have become too dangerous at that point.”

Many people around the circle nodded their heads as the historian spoke. “That would make sense,” said a man that Octavius didn’t recognize.

The next person to speak was one of the Captains of the Guard. “That’s nice and all,” he said, “But I think our biggest problem is those elites you mentioned. You said they didn’t seem to be on the best terms with the level 39 rogue?”

Octavius nodded in affirmation. “Yeah,” he confirmed, “They also didn’t try to chase me.”

“Perhaps we could take advantage of that,” the man proposed, “Maybe get them to switch sides.”

However, another council member shot down the idea. “We don’t know who they are or what they want,” she said, “And how would we even contact them?”

Octavius stepped back as the group debated for a dozen minutes. He mostly let them talk, only speaking up infrequently to correct someone or to clarify something. His eyes fell on Robert, who had been unusually silent over the course of the debate.

The man wasn’t paying much attention to his fellow council members. Instead, he was staring at the ground like it was a problem that he couldn’t solve. Eventually, he spoke up, and the other paused to listen to what he had to say.

“I think one of the biggest unknowns we have is how the thralls got here,” he said, “It can’t exactly be easy to enter someone else’s tutorial, or else I’d have to assume that other races would be here too. You said that the thralls called their base ‘The Landing’ and that they were guarding something important called ‘The Anchor.’ Or at least that’s what the system translated it as. That implies that this Anchor is holding the thralls here.”

The man directly across from Robert spoke up. He was slightly overweight, an impressive feat after so long in the tutorial, and his chin wobbled as he spoke. “We can’t be sure about that!” he said, “And if we can’t be sure, what use is it? I think that we should wait to attack them until the tutorial is almost over. We will have recovered from the Emergence, and the fighters will have higher levels.”

The debate began again, and Octavius considered what the man had said. Could they afford to wait? For them to capture every human in the Sanctuary would be difficult, to say the least, but the best way to do it would be to separate them. If Octavius was the thralls’ leader, the first thing that he would do was to send invisible assassins to either kill or capture the council members and strongest fighters.

The idea was plausible considering the elite thralls, but he didn’t know how much influence they had. His impression of his time in the complex was that Kzedr was the leader of the thralls. The thrall was high leveled and skilled, to say the least. It had thrown his spear at him from over a hundred feet away and hit him in his center mass. That wasn’t the kind of thing that someone could brute force with high stats.

However, the council had told him that the thrall appeared to be extremely cowardly. While it was chasing his party, it refused to leave the safety of the other thralls, even if there was a solid chance that it could wipe out Octavius’s team. He also remembered that when it was chasing him up the cliff, it was slowed to avoid the knife that he’d thrown even when it wouldn’t have hit it.

So it is either a coward or extremely cautious, he decided, But what does that mean for the thralls’ next move?

He didn’t know, but he guessed that the chances of the thrall attacking soon was very high. Even an idiot would know that letting their enemies grow more powerful would be foolish.

It seemed that the council was coming to the same conclusion as the debate died down. “We should attack them as soon as possible!” Adom decided, “The longer we give them to prepare, the worse off we’ll be. If we move quickly, we can storm their base. They have higher levels, but most of them are geared toward stealth instead of open combat.”

Octavius was already shaking his head. “An assault on The Landing would be suicide. Sending an army into an underground complex filled with stone shapers would end with a massacre,” he said.

“Then what do you recommend?” Adom asked. Octavius thought for a moment, but it was Robert that answered.

“A siege,” he stated calmly, “If there is only the one main entrance and exit, we can trap them inside. Even if they have slow metabolisms like you implied, they won’t be able to get out and attack us en masse. Holding a single small path wouldn’t be hard. I expect that they would immediately begin working on a new exit, but that would give us time.”

Heads bobbed around the circle as many agreed to the plan. “What about the thralls that aren’t in the Landing?” one man asked, “If we don’t kill them, would they just come to Earth with us at the end of the tutorial?”

“There isn’t much we can do about other groups of thralls,” said a bearded man that looked to be in his mid-thirties. Octavius recognized him as the first mage in the Sanctuary and the spellbook’s real owner, “As for what will happen to them, we just don’t know.”

Many weren’t happy with that response, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it. They quickly moved on to planning the siege. Ideas were passed about and a consensus reached. Octavius ended up drawing them a diagram of what he remembered of the complex’s layout.

In the end, Robert came up with their initial plan. They would light a massive fire in the cave’s entrance and send it down the ramp. The smoke that would fill the complex would force the thralls to divert resources to closing off their entrance completely and allow them time to entrench themselves.