Slumrat Rising

Truth didn’t look back a second longer. He knew what was behind him. All that mattered was forward. Or more to the point, away. There was enough magical force coming his way to level a small country. Give them a few minutes for the equipment to catch up, and it would be a large country. If they caught him, he wouldn’t have the luxury of death.

He was already running flat out. He tried to go faster. He didn’t dare use Abner’s Amble, not a single extra scrap of energy beyond what was needed to hide. His body could move fast enough. It would have to be fast enough.

Truth raced along his escape route. Most of the obstacles had been demolished by the explosion or the strange aftermath. Dead animals, long dead, littered the ground. No true animal would eat them. Not with everything done to the corpses. It was an open question if anything would grow where they fell. Truth couldn’t pay attention to it. He was just grateful there was less of a draw on the Blessing of the Silent Forest.

The woods were awake after the blast. How could the animals and insects not be awake? They were screaming, shouting, demanding answers, and making threats. The smarter animals had long since run. Nothing good was coming after all that. Truth was right there with them. The wave of powerhouses coming up the valley were like the sun rising at midnight. The unnatural heat of them burning away the comforting dark.

They were close now. Close enough that he had to slow down and focus on stealth over speed. They would seal the area, he knew. Lock down everything around the village and work outwards until they find something. Search and Rescue wouldn’t take more than a few minutes. Sifting through the rubble would take considerably longer, but that was work for juniors. These were seniors- officers, department heads, regional managers of this or that, and they were here to investigate and avenge an atrocity. A village was massacred, and a genuine wonder was destroyed. Their cause was just, and no half-measures would be accepted.

Truth had an almost hallucinatory memory- the silent night before the SAT. All the parents roaming the streets, ropes in hand, to strangle the noisy. His own parents, abusive and monstrous as they were, participated. They loved every minute of it. They might be monsters, but that night, they got to be monster heroes. Or so they told themselves. He shook the thought from his head and kept moving. Up the mountain ridge, towards a notch he had scouted. Silent as could be.

In a few days or weeks, he would circle back and pick up Thrush and the micro-spellbird. He left his scarf, the Freedom of the Terraces, there too. It wouldn’t have survived the assault. Bird wouldn’t survive either. Not a good day to be in the air anywhere near here.

The rescue party had reached the village now. He could hear the crying birds circling. Some would be racing outwards to create a perimeter. Truth threw himself into the shadow of a tree and tried very hard not to exist. Letting the forest wrap itself around him.

A fiery bird roared overhead, sharp eyes piercing the canopy as the hard surveillance of the powerhouses above scraped the earth. There was intense pressure, a strong draw on his rapidly dwindling energy, then they were past. This was just the first sweep. The real hunt hadn’t yet begun. Truth forced himself back into motion. Every step forward was a victory. A meter further is a meter safer. That had to be his mentality now. The bigger the area they had to search, the harder he would be to find.

More cries went up, light talismans were launched into the air in their dozens. The village was exposed, raw and bleeding, under the harsh illumination. He could feel spells going off, big, wide area magics. He had no idea what they were doing down there and didn’t intend to find out.

People run downhill when they are fleeing. It’s easier. Faster. The instinct is to work with gravity and run, run, run, down and away from the hunters. It’s why Tuth made sure his route went up. They would search upslope, of course, but they would look for streams. They would look for routes to nearby towns or a road. Maybe they would use ground-sensing spells to hunt for caves.

He had considered, strongly considered, hiding in a cave. But no. Like running downhill, following a stream, or stashing a vehicle on the road, hiding in a cave was too obvious. Too static. He had to make them waste their energy checking the obvious first. While they did, he would run.

Another bird flew overhead, a spellbird this time, dropping… something. Dark shapes falling from two hundred meters up, arresting their fall in a thin bubble of light just before touching down. Cats. Big, eyeless cats, coated in the same rubbery material as the watcher things that had plagued Truth on his every road journey since coming back to Jeon. They moved through the forest like a black wind. Did they have the same sensory capabilities as their humanoid counterparts? Truth hoped not. There were a lot of cats, but the volume of space to search got bigger and bigger by the second. And there were ever so many things to find in the woods.

Truth didn’t look at the ruins of the surveillance and counter-infiltration network in the woods for a single millisecond longer than necessary. But he did look at them as he raced past. How could he not, when spells were going off at random? Alarm spells, the ones far enough out to survive the double explosion, were going off. Firing red flares, screaming madly, triggering defensive spells. Explosive blasts shot out regularly from the recharging spell traps. Other traps mindlessly pissed streams of acid into the breeze. Truth had no idea that was going to happen. Lucky accident. He smiled slightly.

He really should have known better than to entertain optimism.

It was the birds that warned him things were not as they seemed. Just like when he went into the village for the first time. One of the dead, twisted things was bulging. Truth might have thought it was a simple alchemical reaction to everything that had happened, but the bird used one of the tumors rolling along its back to get to its feet. It moved around like it was trying to figure out how wings worked. How moving trapped in matter worked.

Borges and his team had been playing games with reality itself. Alchemy left alchemical waste, which could poison or rot those near it. Kill those who touched it. Talisman production was no better. So he had to wonder, what was the waste product of reality modification? What rats would come to eat those scraps?

The very best spirit of intelligence couldn’t have answered the question faster than Truth. The answer was “Not his problem.” He kept up the pace, happy to leave the cleanup to Starbrite. Happy thought, maybe the cats and whatever was wearing the birds could play together. Maybe they would be friends.

Downslope and east, there was a piercing, mechanical whine, and a burst of blue-green light. Then a second. Flying platforms swarmed over, followed swiftly by one of the fire birds. Above the village, a vast spell formed in the sky. Kilometers wide, made of ice-white runes and geometric filigree, supported by locust swarms of talismans.

Truth didn’t recognize it at all. Above his pay grade and Tier. And Level. Far above. Something out there didn’t like it though, because the undead… re-undead? Possessed corpses? Started flying up and attacking the talismans. Tring to break the formation of the spell. Mages were blasting them out of the sky. What was more alarming to Truth was that some needed a few hits to go down. Some of the ones that did go down were getting up again.

Every one of those mages were an elite. If something could survive a couple of hits from them… well, it was good that he was already running away. He had a feeling that, just possibly, maybe, he might have overachieved. He did remember being warned by Sergeant Murthey not to do that. “Do the job you are told to do and nothing else, unless they pay extra.” That was good advice. Could he run a little faster without breaking concealment? Probably not, but maybe he could be more efficient in his route planning. Really link together that cover for a smooth transit.

He could hear a rattling in the woods now. A sort of hissing, then a metallic clatter, like bones down a playground slide. He could see flashes of movement around him. Things hunting one another, or hunting for him. Looking for traces amid the chaos. A wrist thick stream of blinding white plasma sliced through the mountain for a hundred meters ahead of him.

Truth looked up over his shoulder. A powerhouse on a firebird. The senior had seen something there, and was willing to break out a particularly brutal fetish to burn it down. No crude acid bolter. This was a custom job. All sleek ebony wood and refined orichalcum. Delicate spellwork in mithril covering its working components, no doubt.

Truth was absolutely certain that if he caught even a glancing hit from that, there wouldn’t be enough left of him to cremate. He wouldn’t even have ashes- just rapidly spreading gas. He lay very flat on the ground, not even daring to look at the senior, lest they detect his gaze.

While he was clinging to the ground, wishing he could burrow through rock and vanish, it occurred to him that he was a disgruntled former employee. Those guys got blamed for everything. Any time something went wrong, companies blamed “disgruntled former employees.” And look- for once, it really was.

A wave of black, twirling, sickly, viscus, the black of rotten meat, visible thanks to the fire and explosions across the mountain, flew towards the senior on the firebird. The bird flew up, vomiting liquid fire on the black mass as it went. The flames were sticky, somehow, clinging to the putrescence but failing to destroy it.

The senor snorted loud enough to hurt Truth’s ears sixty meters below and struck again with his fetish. The blinding white beam burned through the wave and struck something. Whatever it was lived long enough to scream, first with outrage, then pain, then fear. Then went silent. The beam lasted a second longer and then stopped. Truth could hear the heavy panting of the senior and could feel the rush of energy as he drew the cosmic rays towards him, needing to recharge. Then he was on to the next monster to kill.

Truth kept his head down for exactly sixty seconds longer and got back to moving. He wasn’t clear yet. But he was getting closer to the edge of the surveillance zone the village had set up. Soon, he would be in the real woods. Fewer distractions for his hunters, but it didn’t seem like that was a problem. They looked plenty distracted. He could pick up the pace.

The giant spell shuddered into life. Something vast and terrible formed- a summoning. Something angelic? But that would be insane, wouldn’t it? Even if you had to put down a load of demons, you wouldn’t…

Oh. Wait. You didn’t necessarily have to summon the whole angel. He’d done this trick once before. Truth broke out of cover, running flat out as hard as he could away from the summoning circle. Everyone else was doing the same thing, except they had firebirds and wards.

An obliterating light fell on the village. Not even white- it was beyond white, as it was beyond the very concept of color. It was LIGHT, the essence, the primordial meaning before the word. The concept of illumination falling raw and angry on the world. A world that couldn’t endure its weight.

Whatever came below the light was simply… evaporated. All that was God was returned to God. All that was not was cleaned away. Truth knew they would be switching off the spell any second. Job done, demons banished. Whatever they were worried about, removed. But these were seniors. Powerful old monsters. Most were over a century old. Not quite caught up with the times.

IMPUDENT

Truth lost track of things after that.

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