The Penal Kingdom of Isolatia was not known for being a ‘nice place’ as it is nothing more than a place where people go to be broken. People who were unwanted or inconvenient were sent here, had a collar slapped on them and made to undergo a procedure that turned them into nothing more than drooling meat puppets. They would be useless in a fight, but in Isolatia they were more valuable than mere cannon fodder. Isolatia was home to more than 500 different mines and over 100 different laboratories, and they all needed people to either work them or be tested. Isolatia was know for one other thing, one that made it a high-priority target for the Gaian Alliance. It was home to the infamous ‘Happy Place’, the place where Non-Humans who were too dangerous or stubborn to be sold normally were sent to be broken and remade into submissive and docile slaves. Isolatia’s Warden Kings had ruled Isolatia even before it became what it was now, but once the resource deposits had been discovered it quickly became the nightmare it was today.

Today was a day like any other in Isolatia, depressing and painful. As the Warden King Breikur sipped from his mug and relaxed in his chair, he gazed out onto the massive city of Cassandre that made up his home. Encircled by high stone walls that had cages with the bodies of criminals who had long since passed on mounted from wrought iron spikes that jutted out at regular intervals, there was nothing that walked the land that could assault his might bastion of justice and win. Under normal circumstances he would be right, as even the great bombards of the Rock Midgets could not hope to destroy his mighty city which both figuratively and literally was built on the bones of countless humans and sub-humans. He was content to let the Crusade be won without him, as he would profit more than the participants with all the slaves that would surely be sent to Isolatia by the victors.

And then, as he brought the mug of ale to his bearded face a series of explosions rocked the city. Breikur was furious, as the explosions had startled him enough that the mug of ale had been jostled just enough to make him spill the fine ale all over himself. Mind you, he was always shirtless, and his pants were nothing as expensive or fancy as the ones worn by the other nobles or royals, but he still managed to get his magnificent white beard soaked in the sticky brew. He was furious and threw the mug and the rest of the ale in it to the corner of the room and stood up in a quick motion. At that moment, one of his immediate subordinates rushed in. In his rage, Breikur grabbed the much smaller man by the neck and snapped it like a twig before throwing the body out the open window towards the courtyard several stories below.

“SOMEONE BETTER FUCKING TELL ME WHICH OF THOSE DAMNED EGGHEADS DID THAT OR I WILL PERSONALLY GUT EVER SINGLE ONE OF THEM!”

The next man to tempt fate nervously approached the Warden King.

“S-s-sir, it wasn’t from a lab….”

“WHAT?! NOT FROM A LAB?! YOU THINK I AM DAFT, BOY?! WHO WOULD DARE SET OFF EXPLOSIONS IN MY PRISON WITHOUT IT BEING ONE OF THOSE DAMNED, FOUR-EYED BASTARDS?!”

“The sounds came from the reconditioning district.”

Breikur went to the open window and looked towards the reconditioning district and saw that there were indeed flames spreading quickly and violently though the area. If not dealt with immediately they would threaten to burn down his entire Prison City.

“Who is it this time? The damn Tree-Fuckers? The Rock Midgets? Or is it those damn Furballs?”

The man was silent as Breikur questioned him as to the identity of the saboteurs.

“WELL?!”

Finally, the man stammered an answer.

“G-g-g-g-golems, s-s-sir…”

There was a pause as Breikur stared down the man, but then Breikur executed a closed-fist backhand that crushed the skull of the secretary and sent his corpse flying into a wall. Breikur walked over to his armor and began to prepare himself for battle. Whoever it was that sent those golems was in for a world of hell once he got there. His ancestral bronze-plated steel armor was more along the lines of a hoplite’s armor than one worn by modern royalty or even knights, but it was not necessarily designed for defense but rather to be impressive to look at, as the Warden Kings had long been durable enough to view armor as more of a hindrance than a necessity. After all, who was foolish enough to try and face the might of Isolatia?

As the Warden King’s massive chariot rushed down the streets to where the explosions and flame were spreading from, he crossed his arms in front of him and let out a laugh that was filled with a mix of the skill Taunt and Intimidate. As the chariot passed through the thick of the flames, the Warden King leapt into the air and landed in a ‘super-hero landing’ on the ground in front of his foes. Several dozen Golems of various types and Rock-Midgets wearing some bizarre kind of metal and cloth full-body armor with large cylinders on their backs stopped what they were doing and turned to face the ruler of the Penal Kingdom who towered over them at over 2.2 meters tall. The warden King sucked in a massive amount of air in preparation for his next attack, a massive blast of pure aura from his mouth.

Then, he began to cough.

Then his eyes began to water.

Then his skin began to sting.

Then he fell to the ground, gasping and coughing as the mix of smoke and mustard-gas began to kill him from the inside out. His massive gulp of air in preparation for his Shock Roar had been unexpectedly helpful to the beings that now stood in awe of the idiocy of the famed ‘Collasal Warden of Isolatia’. Did he seriously just try to breath the burning hot air in the middle of a firestorm? Did he have no defense against poison? Was this REALLY the fabled Warden King of the unescapable prison-nation?

For a short bit of time, the Gaian Alliance saboteurs waited for the Warden King to stop playing dead and attack, but as the minutes passed and his body finally began to combust while his armor melted in the heat, they eventually realized that this idiot was really, truly dead.

“Well… That was anticlimactic…” stated one of the Golems, giving voice to the general attitude of the Gaian Alliance agents.

“Yeah, but at least we completed our mission. Everyone we could save has been saved, the rest were too far gone to be saved… Let’s give the victims of this madness a send off worthy of a grand tale.” A Dwarf said with a heavy heart.

“Then the flames will be good enough?”

“Yep. Let’s give everyone in this Ancestors-cursed city a… What did your maker call it, a ‘Viking Burial’?”

“Affirmative. We have saved who we could, so let’s send everyone else off with a city-wide funeral pyre.”