“It’s the fuckin’ corpses, he’s defiled the dead, turned ‘em inta clay soldiers! A whole horde of the abominations is sprinting through the forest as we speak,” he said, struggling to catch his breath as serpents of green-tinged Fog slithered into and out of his mouth, gathering about his neck like a strange scarf. “They’ll… They’ll be here by noon at the earliest. Three, maybe four thousand of ‘em. If there ever was a time to deploy yer newfangled techno-knights, it’s now.”

“...Whu- huh?” the governor snapped to consciousness, his mind instantly shifting to high gear, questions exiting his mouth as he leapt from his bed and pulled on his trousers. “Clay soldiers? How many? Threat assessment?”

“Extreme,” said the old man, taking off his backpack and pulling out a handful of photographs, many of them blurry. Those which showed something of note, however, displayed distorted, vaguely humanoid figures made of red clay, their empty, gaping eyes and mouths filled with ominous yellow light. “They’re malleable golems imbued with powerful geomancy, wieldin’ weapons picked from the battlefield as well as ones made of clay, some’ve got big ol’ rock clubs. In my flight from the observation post I saw one of them tear a bear limb from limb, and in my own attempts to neutralize one, even cutting it into multiple pieces didn’t stop it - the monstrosity reconstituted itself into a new, even more terrible form. When I struck down three of them, they merged into one many-limbed terror in turn.”

He pulled up a photo of the aforementioned terrible form, a horrid thing with three legs, five arms, and two faces - one at its neck below a headless neck, one on a shoulder, and one on its stomach.

“The only way to destroy them for good is to break the cores of crystallized Terra within them, which appear to be placed in arbitrary, random locations.”

A deep sigh escaped the governor as he walked out of his bedroom, the scout following in tow, “Then weathering the assault is no option at all. They’re an ideal siege force, suffering from none of the logistical limitations of a conventional army. It’s only a matter of time before Ubul sends more of them, perhaps conjures some siege engine abomination. The reported casualties of Ubul’s Tomb were in the ten-thousands, but what were the real numbers?”

“...I am not certain, but I believe the estimates on the Ikesian side were in the fifteen to twenty-five thousand range, the total nearing over fifty-thousand with enemy forces accounted for,” said the old man.

Sighing yet again, Estoras mentally ran through all the things he needed to do; muster the militia, alert the civilians to a state of emergency, evacuate the farmers in the areas which would be affected and assure them that crop damage will be compensated for, and a myriad other things to ensure the city would be prepared. Not least among them was simply informing individuals of importance, from Newman to Strake to Kanbu.

It was seven in the morning when Zel had received a missive from the governor informing her of the impending assault and requesting that she, alongside those she had recruited, rendezvous with the rest of the Elimination Force in the field outside the north gate. The first thing Zelsys thought to do when she learned of the impending assault was to wake and gather the disciples and simply ask if they were willing to fight. Of those few she had already recruited, the majority were not just willing, but eager, and those who refused did so on the very reasonable basis of not feeling like they could contend with “unbleeding clay monsters”, much less Ubul himself. Mata Gano was… Not among them, surprisingly.

“Fired clay is a great deal easier to break,” she said, but refused to elaborate.

The lot of them looked to be a good bit more eager than Zelsys had expected, and so, Zel decided a single question would suffice: “Do any of you have real combat experience? Go on, show of hands.”

One hand raised after the other. More than she had expected. The few who didn’t, looked at her with eyes suggesting they had excuses and justifications.

“Y’tryin’ to exclude me from this, hag?!” a familiar brat’s voice echoed through the sect’s main hall, a shit-eating grin audible in its intonation, yet it was devoid of malice. When Zel turned just enough to look at the chest-height pile of shit that happened to take the place of the governor’s son, she saw first the hair - meticulously cut down and slicked back in a manner not unlike how Makhus wore his hair now. A little too similar, at that.

The second was the stubble on his face, and the third the fact his shirt had had the right sleeve torn off and the arm it would’ve covered was wrapped up to the shoulder in a bone-white fabric covered in silver patterns, not unlike her own chest-straps, with scars bulging through it. Some vague memory in the depths was caught in the spiderweb of mental processes, forming a connection to her memory of whatever magic the governor himself had used. A beautifully ornamental bladed spear poked over his head, affixed to the boy’s back.

Deciding to cast a web, she snapped back, “I’d be right happy to let you kill yourself on my behalf, but you’ll be useless unless you’ve got something besides a basic breathing method with an overlong name and martial arts fundamentals.”

Approaching, he raised his arm, unraveling the bandages in a whipping motion, and grasping them just as one would a whip. Halxian’s arm wasn’t just scarred, it was utterly covered in swollen surgery scars and tattooed patterns of esoteric symbols, each no bigger than a centimeter across, which it was painful to look at. The symbols looked much older than the scars, excepting those over the scars, as if a second pass had been done to restore integrity. From within his chest down his arm flowed a blue light, shining out through his tattoos and scars alike as he visibly struggled to fight off a painful sensation, balling his hand into a fist rather than leaving his fingers to twitch from the ache.