Slumrat Rising

Truth’s Iron Horse sped down the highway. Not a lot of traffic in the best of times, and these were anything but. He wasn’t moving much faster than he could run, but after running several ultra-marathons in a row, he was ready to let a demon do the sweating. At Level Five, his concealment should be powerful enough to make even the surveillance on trains endurable.

There weren’t any trains running to the Jeon border these days. His iron horse carried him just fine. Truth had never seen any reason not to go fast. He loved feeling the wind whipping past him. The way the few carriages and wagons seemed to be almost standing still as he flew past. The mountains might be gray, boring and sinister under the deeping orange sky, but his scarf kept the ash out. It was good enough.

He was blinking a lot though. The ash couldn’t hurt his eyes, but it was still irritating to have flecks of basalt suddenly blocking your sight. He would need goggles. Funny how it had never occurred to him. He saw people wearing them all the time. Now. Was there anywhere remotely near here to buy some? His road atlas was no help. There were little towns dotted along the road. Presumably, one of them would have a dealership or a store or something.

Lunch was disappointing. All the little shops he had been hoping to visit were either closed or outright abandoned. He checked his atlas. He was still a good four hundred kilometers from the border. Surely wartime restrictions weren’t in effect this deep into Onis. Was it just economics? Or were the canny folk of Onis getting out ahead of the smoke?

Either way, a hot meal was out of the question. He was stuck with his snack stockpile. It suddenly occurred to him that there was literally nothing stopping him from cooking his own food. He used to do it for the sibs. He wasn’t a good cook, but he could throw things in a hot box and warm them up. Presumably it would be easy enough to dump powdered soup and water into a pot and heat it up. If he had a pot. And a fire.

Truth took a moment to look out across a forgettable valley and reflected on his questionable stockpiling strategy. He would have to make some adjustments. Perhaps starting with what was handy. People lived off what they found in the mountains, right? That was a thing in some of his novels. There would be… wild herbs, or something.

Looking to his left, he had his choice of rocks and trees. To his right, he could choose whichever trees and rocks he liked. He… probably couldn’t identify a herb in a supermarket, let alone on a mountainside. He would need a manual of some kind. An identification guide to food components and how they went together, like a maintenance guide for a carriage or an air conditioner. He couldn’t be the only one who needed such a thing, right?

He nearly threw himself off the mountainside in shame when the word “cookbook” finally returned to his memory.

I’m… I’m not actually dumb. I know stuff. I have read books before. I’ve traveled.

He felt that he should snap back, but really, that seemed fair.

He gave up, made a lunch of dried fruit and bread sticks, all washed down with bottled water. It did the job well enough, and he vaguely enjoyed the idea of the food rehydrating in his stomach. Back on the road.

At the speed he was traveling, it didn’t take long for him to start running into Onis Army wagons. Shortly thereafter were Onis Army checkpoints. His initial plan, “Blow straight through them” was canceled by the Army’s stubborn insistence on blocking the entire road, including the shoulder, with a barrier designed to stop speeding wagons. It just needed a press of a talisman to retract like a curtain, but for the international secret operative on the go? It was a spikey steel obstacle to progress.

He dithered a moment, then lightly rapped his head. Like with the food, he was still a prisoner of lower tier thinking. He took a look at the checkpoint. It was a well chosen spot. An almost sheer drop on the left, an equally almost sheer slope on the right. The upslope side was solid rock. The downslope side was dirt held down by scrub and skinny trees.

Truth grinned and drove back half a kilometer. He patted the side of the iron horse, then kicked it into motion. He poured power into the demon driving it, urging it on faster and faster. As fast as its shoddy frame and thin tires would tolerate. He stormed up on the checkpoint in a cloud of dust. He aimed for the stone slope, leaned right, and let that pony climb.

The iron horse drew a smooth arc across the rough face of the cliff, up and over the unseeing checkpoint. He could look down on them, watching them smoke and stare down an empty roadway. The iron horse shook and juddered on the rough cut rockface. He kept it well in hand, riding out the shocks with casual power. Truth landed it back on the road and drove off in a cloud of dust, laughing his head off.

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It was exhilarating. To live freely, uninhibited by… anything, really. Fighting for the people he cared about, learning about the things he cared about, but only ever moving by his will. He let the iron horse eat up the road, and just enjoyed the sensation.

He didn’t have to study for anything in particular. The test was called “Life” and everyone got the same score in the end. He could make of it what he liked. He had goals, enemies, even a few friends. He didn't have a boss, he had a mentor. He wasn’t a wage slave, he was, hah! An independent contractor. Very independent. And if he was a mass murderer, living on stolen goods and stained with so much sin it defied description?

Well. He wasn’t okay with that actually. He would have to start doing better for people. Maybe not all the people everywhere, but he could start small. Just one or two people. Once he figured out what he actually wanted “better” to look like.

He looked up at the pumpkin colored sky. It was bleeding towards red as he got further south. A giant spirit, something that you could imagine being worshiped as a God, was nailed to a wall in the heart of its mountain nest. Tortured, defiled, mined for its essence. Its hate was totally reasonable. The volcano’s explosion wasn’t the phoenix’s fault. It should have happened a century ago. The fact that it used its final moments to ensure a lasting, devastating calamity for humanity was quite understandable, really.

There was a chance that he was just projecting his emotions onto the phoenix, of course. The demon’s spirit had said that its revenge would be decades coming. It would hardly be surprising if Truth was just bummed out by the sky. Racing along under the reddening sky, he didn’t really believe it. There was something malicious there. Something that knew it was causing pain, and liked it.

By late afternoon, he had eaten up most of the road. He was starting to hit the back lines of the warfront. Modern warfare didn’t have tidy lines of course, if war ever did. “The front” consisted of a nebulously defined zone, dotted with dug in infantry, warded bunkers, strategic summoning formations, anti-summons batteries, golem launchers, anti-materiel batteries, spellbird airstrips, anti-air heavy needlers, tactical curse launchers and, of course, the few minor necessities involved in keeping several hundred thousand soldiers alive, with hundreds of thousands more expected any day now.

You could always spot the bases. The neat rows of spellbirds landing and taking off again could hardly have been more explicit. If you still, somehow, weren’t sure, you could always ask one of the drivers in the endlessly refreshing column of wagons headed there. Food, water, supplies went in, wounded and dead came out. Equipment casualties too, he supposed. Not everything was fixable in the field.

There was so much. So, so much. It felt like Onis had just been waiting for an excuse. Eager for one. Truth didn’t understand why. It would have been a walk-over after the collapse. Literally. Jeon would have had a half dozen combat capable people, eking out what life they could between scavenging the ruined cities and trying to learn how to farm on the fly. Onis could have literally buried Jeon in bodied. Belly flopped the shattered nation into submission. So why now? And, given the sheer numbers difference, why was he seeing so much infantry?

You use your conscripts to try to soak up the enemies’ best spells, test their defenses, and make them spend down their materiel stockpiles. Truth slowly ran his two wheeler alongside the long Army wagons serving as troop transports. Moving a lot of men quickly through the mountains was more than just a challenge. Truth could kind of follow the logic. Marching so many people would clog up the roads, and make insultingly easy targets for Jeon airstrikes and curse bombardments. They were well behind the front here, but why be stupid about it?

Truth was willing to bet cash that the logistics were the main reason. Quite possibly the only reason. The conscripts had a certain deadness of eye that, even in his National Service days, he couldn’t recall. Was it boredom? Shutting down internally because they were being sent to the front? Or maybe it was the martial music playing on repeat in the wagons, peppered with patriotic speeches.

That would kill his morale stone dead. Maybe it was the same for them.

There was some logic here he wasn’t seeing. Some key fact he was missing. Jeon’s advantage was its comparatively small front to defend, and its higher levels of magical technology. Only one of those factors was going to matter in a year. So why throw your Army into that meatgrinder today? They were all Level One troops, from what he could tell. No longer considered basic scrubs. These would be considered (by the low standards of conscript armies) high quality units.

Not his problem. But maybe the underlying reason would be relevant to his plans in Jeon. He decided to follow them into their base. Just… nose around a bit. He had found some interesting things that way in the past, and he really wasn’t prepared to give up on terrorizing the political cadres and internal security Onis was deploying so heavily. Something about them just rubbed him the wrong way, and now he was strong enough to indulge his prejudices.

He rode straight into the base alongside one of the wagons. He remembered how Merkovah had described Incisive to him, and how he could use it with the Blessing of the Silent Forest. He could just hold up a blank piece of paper and walk onto a military installation. Something highly secure, maybe not. But some basic base? Just into, say, the motor pool or the canteen? No problem.

Now he didn’t even need to fake an identity. The alarm spells and golems’ eyes slid right over him. Level Five. He would be a comparatively high ranking officer, a Major or something. Colonel, maybe. Was there a Level minimum to be a General? He had no idea. He had never checked. It wasn’t ever going to be relevant to his life.

He… could murder a general, almost certainly. If he could ambush members of the C-Suite, he could certainly ambush some random Onis general. It was a Hell of a thought. They must have high level guards to prevent that sort of thing, or give orders from some deeply defended bunker somewhere far from the front lines.

He had been part of a decapitation attack, hadn’t he? The drop on Fort Leucre. Truth looked up into a sky the color of autumn leaves, and wondered what was coming next.

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