Octavius leapt to his feet. The man flailed about wildly, trying to find something that would give him some hint as to where he was.

“Dominic! Relax!” Octavius said with a steady yet urgent voice. The man stopped his wild movements and turned to face the source of the sound, obviously responding to the name Octavius had got from the identify window.

“Who’s there?” Dominic demanded, “What’s going on?”

Relaxing his stance slightly, Octavius answered the old man’s questions. “I’m Captain Asher of the US Army,” he said, “And I pulled you from the fire you ran through and gave you a health potion.”

The man’s hands reached up to grab Octavius, missing entirely. “The fire! Kaylee!” He shouted, “You have to save her!”

Reaching out, the soldier gently pushed the man down to a sitting position. “I want to help her,” he said gently, “I want to help everyone the thralls have captive down there, but I can’t right now. Before I can help them, I need more information about the thralls and the complex down there. Do you think you can help me out with that?”

Dominic nodded his head, vigorously. “Yes! I’ll tell you everything I know; you just have to promise to help my little girl, alright?” he said weakly.

Octavius patted the man on the back gently. “I promise,” he said while internally raging at being forced to lie like that. There was no way he could make such a promise, though he would do his best. The man needed to relax, however, and telling him that wouldn’t put him at ease.

The man slumped forward and raised a hand to his face. Feeling the bandages, he began to claw at them. “Why can’t I see?” he demanded, “You said you gave me a health potion.”

Grabbing the man’s hands, Octavius forced them away from the clean bandages. “I did,” he said, “But even health potions can’t regrow everything.”

Dominic was silent for a moment but then began to tear his hands from Octavius’s grip. “You mean I lost my eyes? I’m blind now?” he asked softly.

“At least for the time being,” Octavius admitted, “But in a world of magic like this, who knows what’s out there?”

The words didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the silent man. Finn caught Octavius’s eyes, and the younger man shrugged as if to say that he didn’t know what to do. Octavius turned back to the older man who was staring unseeing into the flames.

“Can you tell me about the thralls?” he asked, trying to give the man the space to talk about what he deemed to be important.

The man snarled and spat into the flames. “They’re monsters! All of them!” he gritted out through clenched teeth.

“I know,” the soldier gently responded, “but I need to know more specifics about them. What are their capabilities? How do they think? What’s their next move?”

The man was silent for a long moment, then sighed explosively. “I don’t know much about their capabilities,” he admitted, “They didn’t really hold back any information from us on purpose, but they didn’t have many opportunities to show off the limits of their power.”

Octavius merely nodded, expecting the unhelpful answer. “Well,” he said, “What can you tell me?”

Cocking his head to the side, the man concentrated on his memories. “They captured us, the group me and my daughter were part of that is, at the end of the first month of this blasted tutorial,” he said carefully, “We just fell asleep after eating dinner and woke up inside underground cells. The thrall, little gray shits, told us that we were their new slaves. ‘It’s an honor to serve as thralls as they rebuild the Great Empire,’ they said. They also told us that the hardest working slaves would be rewarded as their new Empire grew.”

Octavius remained silent as the man spoke, not wanting to interrupt him. “They were always going on about their Great Empire,” Dominic continued, “They sang songs about it and all, always cursing at the ‘damned Dwarves’ and how they prevented them from fighting off the ‘Pale Ones’ and keeping Cadila.”

Octavius’s eyes widened dramatically at that. Although the man couldn’t see it, Finn certainly could. The younger man looked at him inquiringly. Octavius merely shook his head as his mind raced at a mile a minute. With every passing second, another piece fell into place.

The reliefs in the dwarvish catacombs! His mind shouted at him, Those weren’t of dwarves and goblins fighting; they were of dwarves and thralls! They were carved as small and vicious. I just thought that they were some sort of generic goblin, but this makes much more sense. And Cadila was the place mentioned in the descriptions of the Suppressor and the artificer’s robe!

He slowly put together a timeline in his head. Some unknown time ago, the dwarves and the thralls fought. Back then, the thralls had some sort of “Great Empire” but were weakened by their war with the dwarves; maybe Harril was even involved. After that, they weren’t strong enough to fight back these “Pale Ones” and were enslaved. He didn’t know the fate of the dwarves, but he still only had the broadest strokes of what might have happened. The possible history even accounted for the thralls’ reaction to the Soulsilver spear.

Even such a revelation didn’t give him any immediately actionable intel, so he focused on Dominic’s story, and the man continued, completely unaware of the shock he had given Octavius. Finn just looked confused at that point, and the soldier decided to explain as soon as the man was finished speaking.

“Anyway,” the man continued, “It didn’t take them long to get us into line. They just killed anyone that so much as questioned an order. After that, they ordered us to start putting all of our points into intelligence and gave us invisibility rings. A few people tried to use them to escape…”

The man trailed off, shaking his head in pity, “It didn’t end well for them. After that, they started to order us to do whatever was needed. We cleaned, cooked, and did everything else. If you did what you were told, you didn’t get into any trouble. If you made a mistake, though? That usually ended just as poorly as the escape attempts.”

Octavius nodded, even though the man couldn’t see him. He had seen the results of one such mistake with his own eyes. “While you were there,” he interjected, “Did you find yourself forgetting about the thralls at all?”

The man shook his head before slowing and beginning to nod softly. “Now that you mention it, yeah, I did,” he said, “Whenever they weren’t around for long enough, none of us ever talked about them. That’s strange; I never realized that before…”

Dominic trailed off as his mind cast back into the past, but Octavius had already gotten the information he required from that vein of questioning. “Ok, so what about the thralls specifically?” he prompted, “What are their specific goals? Are there different factions of them?”

The man shook himself slightly and nodded. “Yeah, there are a few groups. Best I can tell, they’re broken up into groups based on class and level. There are the mages, then the high-level mages, then the rogues, then the high-level rogues. Beyond that, there’s a group of high-level rogues that all wear black cloaks. They never really ordered us around and seemed to not get along well with the other thralls.

“As for their goals?” he paused at that, “I’m not really sure. I mean, they definitely say they want to recreate the ‘Great Empire,’ but I have no idea what that would look like.”

Octavius thought about that for a long moment. None of the information was new, but Dominic’s description of the thralls’ societal hierarchy confirmed his own inferences. “Hmm…” he hummed before speaking, “What about the complex itself? How big is it? How many thralls live there? Where are the humans kept? I was inside before when they captured me, but I escaped this morning.”

The man whipped his head around to face him at that. “You were the one that caused all the activity this morning?” he asked surprised, “I don’t know what you did, but the mages were freaking out while the rogues were out chasing you. When Kzedr got back, he actually executed a dozen mages and two rogues.”

Octavius blinked. Must be because I destroyed the Suppressor, he decided.

“As for how big it is,” Dominic continued, “It’s massive. When they first brought us there, they could only house themselves and the two dozen of us. Since then, their stone shapers have built the Landing out so that it had stores of everything, along with cells and rooms for a hundred slaves. I’d say there are eighty of us or so, but I don’t know how many are left. You said you were inside the Landing? If you enter it and take a left, there are two doors that lead to the slaves’ quarters.”

Finn cursed softly, and his voice was carried away by the wind. Although he didn’t express himself in the same way, Octavius agreed with the sentiment. Eighty human slaves was not an insignificant portion of the remaining humans within the tutorial.

“What’s the average level of the human slaves?” he asked, hoping that a joint attack could be possible. If the thralls were attacked from both within and without, they might not be able to organize their stone shapers to mount an effective defense.

“Not high,” Dominic replied, “We’re all around level 8 or 9. I’d say there are only half a dozen level 10s like me.”

Octavius frowned. A force of untested humans with low levels and all their points in intelligence would likely be far from effective, but it would be something to think about. “Ok,” he said, “What about the layout of the base? I know you can’t draw it, but can you explain it?”

Dominic nodded. “Alright, so there’s the main entrance hall,” he said, “They pretty much all gather there every morning for their meal. There is a small door at one side of it that leads to the kitchens where we cook. After that, there’s a massive curved corridor. To the left is the slave’s quarters, along with the storerooms.

“To the right are the sleeping quarters, along with what I think are training rooms. The corridor continues down, and there’s a small lake where we fetch water. I’ve only been down farther than that once, and that was when they were escorting us from the cells. There are the cells, of course, and there are also two other rooms. They’re highly guarded, and they don’t let us anywhere near them.”

Octavius nodded along. That just about matched up with what he knew, but there was more. What he really wanted to know, however, was what was down the final hallway at the end of the corridor.

“I know you’ve never been down it, but do you know what the thralls are guarding down there?” he asked.

The man pursed his lips before speaking. “I can’t be sure,” he said, “But they were going crazy this morning. I think you destroyed something important, but they seemed more angry than anything else. What I do know is that they sent a ridiculous amount of guards down to it the moment you all attacked. The only thing I can think of that they deem valuable is the Anchor. I don’t know what it is, but they were all talking about how it was the providence of their gods that it was safe.”

Octavius frowned. While the man had a lot of useful information, nothing immediately groundbreaking had been revealed. He supposed that it was too much to hope for anything more than what they got.

“What about specific thralls?” he asked, “Are there any that would be sympathetic to us or possibly turn traitor?”

The man frowned slightly and began to shake his head. Whatever he was about to say was interrupted by a piercing scream that echoed across the rolling plains below. Octavius leapt to his feet. Caster, who had stopped his mana manipulation training to follow the questioning, tossed him his spear.

All around them, the camp came to life as a second scream rang out. Men and women rose to their feet and readied their weapons. The wind and echo made it all but impossible to determine anything other than the general direction that the sound was coming from — the forest.

Many turned and sprinted to the border, but Octavius took a handful of steps forward into the darkness and stood stock-still. Closing his eyes, he reached out the darkness. He connected to it and poured more and more mana into it. The farther the shadows were from him, the more mana it took.

In the end, he could sense every shadow that was in a cone fifty feet in front of him. The process was relatively quick, only taking a handful of seconds and a hundred mana. After that, he took another thirty seconds to interpret the data that filled his brain. He could sense every shadow, from their shapes to their movements. On a dark night, like it was, he could sense all.

The shadows coiled around swaying tree branches and the running forms of humans. They parted around the thick trunks of trees and were repelled by the gentle flames that dotted the camp. There! He locked onto a location where the shadows wrapped around a humanoid form crouched in the darkness.

The figure gripped a long blade with its four-fingered hands, and a cloak as black as the shadows that engulfed it rippled on its shoulders. Octavius had barely taken a step forward toward it when the shadows were ripped away in a straight line toward an unsuspecting guard that had ventured too far out of the safety of the camp in search of the source of the screams.

The next thing Octavius was able to perceive was the thrall elite slinking back into the trees as the man’s deafening scream was caught by the wind and carried away. Blood dripped from its blade as the man collapsed to the ground, hands going to his side as his scream died out into gurgles that were lost in the wind.

Legs carrying him at a dead sprint, he rushed toward the downed man. His senses reached out into the shadows around him, ready for the thrall elite to reenter the range of his shadow sight. Pulling a health potion from a pouch on his belt, he uncorked it. He reached down and pressed two fingers to the man’s neck. There wasn’t a pulse.

Gritting his teeth, he cursed softly. “Can I get some help over here?!” he shouted over his shoulder as he let his spear glow gently.

A dozen guards followed the beacon of the glowing spear and rushed to his side. “Set up a perimeter!” he ordered, “There’s a thrall rogue, be careful.”

With that, he focused on the man below him. He knew that a health potion couldn’t restart a heart, but there were ways to do that manually. Letting his spear fall to the ground beside him, he poured the viscous red liquid into the man’s bloody mouth. Reaching down, he placed the palms of both of his hands onto the man’s chest and began to press inward.

As his chest compressions forced the blood through the man’s veins, the health potion worked to close the wound and replenish any lost blood. He knew that the only reliable way to restart a stopped heart was a defibrillator, but he most definitely didn’t have one on hand. The man’s only hope was that the health potion would be able to work with the CPR to save him.

After a full thirty seconds, Octavius removed his bloodied hands from the man’s still chest. There was nothing he could do, and he needed to deal with the thrall elites. Although the health potion was wasted, he didn’t regret trying.

Scooping up his spear, he peered into the darkness that surrounded him and the dozen others. He sensed nothing with the shadows, but it was possible that the thrall had hidden by wrapping its cloak around itself and moving against a tree. Even then, a detailed examination of the information that poured into his mind would reveal the thrall’s presence.

His attention was drawn by another loud scream far to his right. “Shit!” he cursed under his breath.

The men and women around him gritted their teeth as they stared into the darkness. “They’re hiding in the darkness and ambushing us!” Octavius shouted over the wind, “Everyone retreat to the light of the fires and group up so they can’t pick us off one by one.”

As soon as he finished speaking, he began to push the guards around him toward the campsite. Within the camp, guards stood with grim faces and ready weapons. Those around him didn’t need any more encouragement and sprinted for the light. Octavius waited until he was last and backpedaled behind them, senses stretching out into the darkness.

Irregular movement caught his attention at the edge of the patch of the shadow he controlled. It moved with incredible speed toward one of the men that was within a few feet of him. He barely had time to react before it struck.

Activating instant thrust, his spear superimposed itself before the thrall’s blade. The clang of metal on metal drew the attention of the others, but the thrall had already retreated into the darkness. Octavius locked onto it, following it with his shadow sense until it moved too far into the trees for him to follow.

His group quickly reached the firelight, and he swept the shadows under his control along the border of the camp, sensing the various people sprinting toward the safety of the light. His senses locked onto a lone figure crouched behind a tree just in the path of a group of three guards.

Grunting, his boots dug into the ground as he exploded forward. The distance between them closed quickly as he moved as fast as he had ever moved before. The group of three passed the tree, and the thrall jumped out from hiding.

“Shit!” he cursed as he increased his speed even further.