The Zombie Knight

Chapter Two Hundred Twenty-Eight: 'The Battle of the Sunken Forest...'

Hector had thirteen spawn-filled cubes whirling around him. He kept increasing the speed, bringing them to verge of what he was capable. He had to flirt with losing control in order for this technique to work, after all.

That limit was higher now than ever before, though. The wind that the boxes whipped up was strong enough to threaten his footing a little, even in his full suit of armor.

He loosed the first one at rocket speed, straight toward the Beast of Lorent.

The impact threw up so much dust and rock that, at first, Hector couldn't even see what had become of the monster.

But then a giant, bulging hand wiped the cloud away like a fan.

And Hector saw.

The Beast had caught it.

Two enormous hands had emerged from its frog-like form, and one was now holding the iron cube. The force of the catch had pushed the creature back a few meters and torn up some rock around its giant feet, but no damage appeared to have been done.

Certainly, Hector hadn't expected that one blow to end things straight away--not after what he'd seen during that vision--but still.

Just how strong was this fucking thing?

Well. First things first.

Hector raised his right arm and made a fist.

Every single iron box was immediately filled with spikes, skewering their contents.

"No!" cried the Beast, apparently able to sense what he had just done, and it bounded forward.

Its other children followed immediately after it, spitting fire and acid at the party.

Iron and copper walls rose up in their defense, shielding everyone from the vomited projectiles, but the creatures clambered over the structures like spider monkeys.

Hector was sure that his friends could keep the spawn at bay, but he felt like if he didn't keep a close eye on the Beast, it would disrupt their formation and tear through everyone.

The spikes that he'd materialized inside the cubes made things more difficult, throwing off their shape and making them more awkward and unwieldy to launch--but also more dense and impact-heavy.

Without a doubt, Chort did not expect the second cube to be any different than the first, because when it tried to catch it, the force sent its huge frog body flying, as if it had tried to catch a baseball that instead turned out to be a bowling ball.

Hector didn't let up. He lobbed two more right afterward.

With a spare thought process, he was relying on the Scarf to keep track of the chaotic battlefield around him. Salvador Delaguna was on his left, clobbering spawn with his huge, cobalt-infused arms. He'd merged with his reaper, Mevox, in what was presumably pan-forma.

The spawn weren't dying, though. They would get flattened like pancakes and even spew blood or have their limbs knocked off their bodies as if they'd barely been attached in the first place, but they didn't stay down. Their scattered body parts were scrambling back to one another and reassembling themselves.

It was like each piece of flesh had a mind of its own. Not entirely unlike the worms of the Undercrust, Hector realized, though this was far bloodier.

Fire wasn't doing much to them, either. Roman was soaring through open air, causing the creatures to burst into flames purely through particle-induced combustion, but it barely slowed the little bastards down at all.

Fidel Blackburn wasn't managing much better with his copper materialization, but he was at least keeping them away from everyone, shoving the critters back or just straight up flinging them away on platforms. He was buying everyone precious room to breathe, which was no meager contribution.

The remaining two servants, Matteo Delaguna and Carlos Sebolt, were working together in support of Lord Salvador.

This was actually the first time that Hector had seen either of them fight. If circumstances were less chaotic, he might've liked to assess their combat prowess a little more, but he was only able make out so much in the unfolding mayhem. He already knew that they both used transfiguration, and he could sense them relying on it now to create soul-infused smokescreens and acid attacks.

Matteo was surprisingly agile, however. Hector wanted to warn him not to go so deep into the enemy's front line, but he was handling it well, bobbing and weaving between claws and flaming acid, only catching the occasional scrape here or there as he pummeled the monsters with fists that were quite literally on fire.

Carlos, meanwhile, was the only servant relying on firearms at all, but he was making interesting usage of them. He had multiple pistols on him, but the one he was currently using did not seem be a normal gun. Its loading chamber was very large, and Hector could sense him loading small chunks of his left arm into it instead of standard ammunition.

The resulting shots seemed to have different effects as well. Sometimes, they would drill through the monsters like tissue paper, and other times, they set the creatures ablaze or exploded on contact.

Carlos was also the first one to to start changing up his tactics, Hector noticed. He stopped trying to use fire and explosives and instead tried using bullets that froze on contact.

It didn't entirely work, since the bullets were small and only managed to freeze parts of the monsters, but it seemed clear to Hector that tactic was at least successful in slowing the little bastards down.

All in all, they were holding their ground quite well.

Hector was able to keep his primary focus on Chort while the others kept the little ones at bay, and all the while, Hector continued scooping up Chort's spawn to add to his collection. He wanted to outpace himself, to gather the spawn into orbit faster than he was shooting them back at Chort. That way, their numbers would constantly be reducing while the Beast of Lorent was busy dealing with an endless barrage attacks.

His plans were prematurely ended, however, when he noticed a dramatic shift in the air.

In the back of his mind, Hector had been wondering about the Beast's ability to manipulate the weather, but given that they were in a giant cave, he thought that perhaps that ability had been rendered unusable.

This was not the case.

Dark clouds were gathering at the roof of the cave--and quickly, too. The airflow was changing so rapidly that he hardly even needed the Scarf of Amordiin in order to sense it.

Hector decided not to let that continue.

He added extra mass to one of the cubes and lobbed it up toward the gathering clouds. It cut right through them, of course, but his real objective was to have it hit the ceiling with explosive force--which it did.

That was enough to disrupt the airflow, somewhat. The clouds shuddered, threatening to disperse but not quite following through. All too soon, they were re accumulating--and sparking with electricity, by the looks of it.

More of the others were resorting to freezing tactics, now. Salvador's oversized hands were trailing with icy mist, and instead of just slamming down on the monsters like before, he was grabbing them and holding on until they froze solid--even while they belched fire right onto his face and torso.

Pan-forma's enhanced regenerative properties would keep Salvador in fighting shape, but Hector didn't know for how long. If this battle became one of attrition, Salvador's fatigue would become a rather large problem.

They needed to make sure that didn't happen.

But Hector didn't intend to resort to temperature manipulation himself--not in this case, at least. Even if it did help slow the creatures down a little, it would also make his metal more brittle, which would definitely be counterproductive.

Plus, he could sense that even the frozen spawn were not truly stopped. Their bodies were shaking and steaming, trying to melt or otherwise break free from their icy confines. Even when Roman flew down and shattered a couple frigid monsters into pieces with a visible pulse of particle vibrations, the scattered remains were still wiggling and trying crawl back together.

Whew.

There was so much information streaming into his mind. The Scarf was describing so many things to him simultaneously.

And yet, he didn't have to ignore most of it in order to maintain his focus on the main objective.

His parallel thought processes allowed him to keep track of the whole battlefield, maintaining awareness of everyone's status and positioning. For the most part. Little details might've been slipping through the cracks here or there, escaping his notice, but he didn't quite feel overwhelmed. Almost, but not quite.

It was a crazy feeling. Like reading four books at once and comprehending them all.

Comprehending chaos.

It felt impossible.

But maybe that was all chaos really was. Just more information than one's perception could accommodate.

Wait, was he philosophizing in the middle of all this, too? He didn't have time for that shit.

Those clouds up there needed dispersing again.

He launched another cube at them, which crashed into the ceiling of the cave. Somehow, it seemed to have even less of an effect on them this time, but the impact did accomplish something else.

The cave began to crumble.

Everyone else seemed surprised by the sudden threat of falling debris, no doubt because there was already so much chaos going on around them that they weren't prepared for something to take priority over it all.

So Hector helped them along.

"Hold on!" he managed to shout, more out of courtesy than actual instruction.

All of his orbiting cubes were dropped as he instead shifted all of his focus to shoving everyone out of harm's way. It was a split-second that he couldn't second guess. He could've tried to shield them all from the falling debris, but this cave was huge, and that was an unknown volume of earth that was about to come down on their heads.

What was known, however, was the way out of the cave. The airflow was more than a little muddled now, but he still remembered which direction it was going earlier, when things were calmer.

So he grabbed everyone with iron--even Pauline--and practically launched them out of the cave's exit. It was a difficult balance, because he knew he had to be fast yet still gentle, especially with the non-servants. The actual technique he employed--or improvised, rather--was like a sudden swarm of primitive trains. They weren't on actual wheels and instead just slid along the top of flat, iron platforms that hugged the ground.

Each "train" carried only one or two passengers, and they all ramped up to speed quickly but certainly not instantaneously. He made sure to add protective domes and pointed noses to each construct, for the sake of both aerodynamics and shielding from the debris.

It was still a damn close call, though. The entire cave came crashing down behind them like a forty-story building, and the debris didn't stop ricocheting and flying towards them even after they'd cleared the fall zone.

And the dust. It was like a tidal wave of its own.

Hector kept the trains running until the dust was well behind them. When he let everyone go, the very first thing they all did was look back at the devastation they had just escaped.

The Lorentians were all obviously shaken and stumbling, apparently having difficulty standing upright. None of them were vomiting, though, so Hector figured he'd done something right. A few of them were simply electing to stay inside the little iron train cars that he'd made.

All the Lorentians, that was, save the ambassador. Edgar Stoutamire was much calmer than the others, Hector noticed--perhaps even calmer than some of his own party members.

Curious. Hector wasn't sure what to make of it, though.

Fortunately, no one else seemed to notice the train car that had been flying through the sky, and Hector was able to annihilate it without drawing attention to Pauline. Maybe that didn't really matter at this point, but it was one less wrinkle to worry about--for the time being, at least.

Chort was not dead, Hector knew. He couldn't sense any of the monsters anymore, but there was no way in hell that a bunch of rubble would be enough to kill them.

They could've been trapped, though, unable to move under that small mountain of debris. He could hear Salvador and Mevox openly discussing that very subject behind him, having apparently ended their pan-forma merge.

'If it's stuck under there, should we bother trying to dig it out and finish it off?' said Mevox.

"If it can survive that, what makes you think we can finish it off?" said Salvador. His breathing was somewhat labored, but he still looked like he was ready for more, despite his words.

'Don't psych yourself out,' said Mevox. 'We were handling business just fine.'

"We could hold on our own, yes," said Salvador, "but we still have no idea how to actually kill the creature. Or even its spawn."

'It's not the first monster I've seen with the ability to regenerate unaided,' said Mevox. 'With things like that, you've just got to stay the course. The biggest obstacles is just not getting discouraged. It can feel like you're losing when it heals back all the damage you just did to it, but if you keep hammering away at it, it'll eventually stop regenerating and die.'

'I'm not so sure about that,' came the silent-yet-familiar voice of Voreese. She flew down with Roman, attached to his shoulder as he descended from the moonlit canopy over their heads and landed softly next to Hector. 'Sure, we have a lot of power and stamina on our side right now, but it's not endless. We don't know if we'll be able to outlast it in a drawn out battle.'

'Maybe, but it's far too early to be getting demoralized,' said Mevox. 'Lose heart, and all we'll accomplish is making it easier for Chort to kill us.'

'Of course,' said Voreese. 'I wasn't saying we should give up.'

'You sure? Wouldn't surprise me if you turned out to be a big ol' chicken.'

'Hah. And it wouldn't surprise ME if YOU turned out to be a big ol' dumbass. Oh, wait, that's already been confirmed. My bad.'

'Yeah, yeah, hearin' a lot of shit talk,' said Mevox, 'but haven't seen much to back it up so far.'

'Heh. Well, what can I say? Shit talk is my favorite pastime.'

"It really is," added Roman.

They kept talking, but Hector was only half-listening, because he could feel the ground shaking--though only slightly. It wasn't violent enough to alert everyone, and it could've just been some lingering tremors after the cave's collapse, but he still wanted to pay it due attention. Because unless he was mistaken, it seemed to be fluctuating.

He annihilated his right gauntlet and knelt down to feel the ground with his hand. Honestly, though, he wasn't entirely sure what he was doing. Man, it sure would've been nice if he could sense forms through the earth like he could through the air.

The vibrations in the ground were definitely fluctuating, though. And not in any kind of pattern that he could determine. What could be causing that, he wondered? The tremors should've abated by now, surely. And if the monsters were somehow tunneling their way toward them, then the vibrations should've been growing steadily stronger, right? Not fluctuating like this?

Unless, maybe, they were tunneling somewhere else? If they were trying to escape, then the shaking should've been getting steadily weaker, but that wasn't the case, either.

So what else could it be, then? If they weren't attacking, and they weren't running, then...?

They were preparing.

That thought made Hector stand back up and turn to Voreese, who was still talking to Mevox. He had to interject. "Can you sense the monsters' locations at all?"

'Uh. Not really. It's all kind of foggy down there. Like a soul-empowered haze.'

"...Or an aura," said Hector.

'Whatever term you like,' she said.

Hector concentrated harder on what the Scarf was telling him. Specifically, he tried to pay attention to how the air was flowing over the ground. It was pretty hard to discern specifics with all the foliage around, and the collapsed cave was far enough away that he couldn't really sense in between the cracks in the rubble, but maybe he was thinking about it in the wrong way.

Maybe he needed to look at the bigger picture that the Scarf was describing to him. Was the flow of the air affected by the shaking in the ground? Even just a little?

...Yes, he realized. It was extremely faint, but it was there. A slight shiver here or there in the air currents.

It required pretty much all of his concentration, but Hector could sense it: a pattern.

The shivers in the air forming a ring around the party, with short lines pointing inward. And if each shiver represented a monster tunneling underground, that meant only one thing.

They were surrounding them.

There wasn't much more time to deliberate, Hector knew. They must have been pretty deep underground if the tremors were so faint, but the ring was nearly complete.

He could use his multi-train technique again. Move everyone out of harm's way again. But to what end? Where would they go? Back to the airport? That was far, and there was no guarantee it would be any safer there. Plus, it was unclear how Chort had pulled them all the way here from the airport storage room in the first place.

He could hunker down and fight. That was obviously dangerous. They still had no idea how to actually bring the monsters down. And the civilians would have to be protected again, of course. Plus, Hector was certain that the Beast of Lorent still had a few unknown tricks up its sleeve, too.

Twin thought processes allowed him to assess those two options simultaneously and arrive quickly at the conclusion that they both sucked equally.

But he had to choose.

"Everyone!" he called out, motioning wide with his hands. "Gather up! Come in close! They're coming!"

They all looked at him, some seeming confused and sluggish, but the iron barricades materializing around the party seemed to spur them closer. The Rainlords' faces were all still hidden behind their iron masks, so he couldn't gauge their reactions, but they were all clearly listening to him, at least, and Carlos and Fidel positioned themselves on different sides of the non-servants.

Roman looked like he wanted to say something, to ask a question maybe, but he held his tongue. And Voreese was the same.

This didn't seem like the time to inquire into their thoughts, Hector felt. There would be time for that later if and when they made it out of this mess.

As expected, the trembling in the ground grew more violent as the monsters were no doubt tunneling up towards the surface. Hector had to wonder if they had all shapeshifted again so as to dig more efficiently.

What was not expected, however, was how long the enemy was taking. The shaking kept increasing, threatening everyone's balance, but a full minute must have transpired, and the monsters still hadn't popped up yet.

What were they waiting for?

Abruptly, Hector sensed a heightening of the wind. When he looked up, he could already see clouds appearing in the night sky, blotting out the moon. These ones were much farther away than the ones in the cave had been, which would probably make them trickier to disperse from a distance, Hector figured.

He might have an easier time if he flew up there, but he had a feeling that they would just keep trying to come back. And he was still pretty new to flying, besides. He didn't think it would be very easy for him to keep going back and forth between the ground and the sky throughout the battle.

But someone else probably could.

"Roman, can you stop those clouds from gathering?" said Hector, pointing.

"Sure, but I feel like I'll be needed down here," he said.

Hector wondered if the man wasn't underestimating himself. From what he'd seen, Roman's speed and control over his flight had improved dramatically since the last time Hector had witnessed it. Maybe it wasn't quite on the level of someone like Dimas Sebolt, but it was still way better than what Hector was currently capable of.

There was no time to explain all of his thinking, though.

"You're fast enough to do both," Hector told him.

Roman just blinked at him.

"But the clouds should be your priority," Hector went on. "The last thing we need right now is another storm like the one at the airport."

Roman exchanged glances with Voreese who was still attached to his shoulder, and then he gave Hector a nod. He crouched down a little, and when he leapt away from the ground, the force he left in his wake was strong enough for Hector to feel it through his armor but not enough to push him back.

Hector watched him zip off into the sky and puncture the clouds like a bullet. Roman immediately curved around for a second pass, then a third, and just kept going. The moon was fighting to become visible again, and the porous clouds were fighting to keep it hidden, but Roman was clearly making progress.

Why those clouds seemed so resilient, Hector didn't know. He'd noticed that before, too, back in the cave. Maybe there was more to Chort's ability to control the weather than he'd realized.

But with the clouds neutralized for the moment, Hector had a feeling that the monsters would now attack. They'd probably been waiting for a storm to provide them with cover or something, so now that it wasn't going to happen, they would have to adjust their strategy. They could do something completely different, of course, but Hector suspected that they would go after Roman in order to start to building up their storm clouds again.

And he wasn't going to let that happen.

So when the shaking earth became more violent than ever and the monsters finally started popping up out of the ground, Hector was ready. And so were the Rainlords.

Fidel Blackburn's copper was right there alongside Hector's iron, bisecting the creatures with metal blades as they were appearing.

Salvador wasn't yet resorting to pan-forma again, but Mevox was holding onto his back while the man grabbed the thrashing monsters as if they were no more unwieldy than beach balls and started freezing them again. He managed to keep their faces pointed away from him, so they weren't spewing fire and acid on him this time.

The monsters themselves had indeed shapeshifted, however. They were furrier now and more mole-like, though they still had far too many legs to look anything like normal animals.

But Hector didn't see Chort. Was it still underground? Trying to weave that storm together while its children distracted them?

Yeah, that seemed likely. And the spawn were as resilient as before, of course, being difficult little bastards.

But they weren't impossible to deal with. Hector started collecting them again, and the others were quickly beginning to overwhelm them with freezing tactics.

It was the Beast who was at a disadvantage, right now. If Chort didn't do something soon, all of its spawn would be captured.

In a spare thought process, Hector was just observing their densely compacted battleground with the Scarf and waiting. The Beast of Lorent might've been an insane, otherworldly monster with an almost unrecognizable value system, but Hector hadn't gotten the impression that Chort was actually stupid.

He was certain that Chort would make a big move soon.

Wait a minute.

How many of it spawn were up here, right now? It was difficult to count exact numbers in the midst of all this mayhem. Most of the monsters up here kept digging back into the ground and then popping up again elsewhere, which confused things even more. No doubt, they wanted to make it as difficult for Hector to target them with his orbiting boxes as possible--and it was kind of working, though he was still able to occasionally snag one here and there.

Hector stopped trying to collect the spawn so that he could instead focus on just counting them. Between keeping track of the non-servants, the Rainlords, Roman up in the sky, and fighting and capturing the dozens of spawn that were swarming them, Hector couldn't spare yet another thought process for counting, too. Something had to be sacrificed to make room for it, so the collection was put on pause.

And as he counted, Hector became increasingly certain that there were fewer spawn here than there had been in the cave. Not a lot, though. Only a handful, maybe.

But that begged an important question. Where were they? They weren't in his collection. He'd made sure to count them, too.

They must've been with Chort underground, right? But doing what? Why would Chort be holding any of them back? If its objective was to overwhelm them so that he could summon another storm, it should've been sending all of its spawn. So why wasn't it?

Well, there was one answer that Hector could think of.

He didn't have long to dwell on it, though, before it was confirmed for him.

The ground heave up from beneath everyone's feet, then plummeted immediately back down--and it didn't stop. It kept falling.

The entire section of the forest lurched and slid down, sinking scores of trees into a freshly dug pit.

That was what Chort had been up to. Trying to destroy their footing. What better way to throw them off balance than to eliminate the very thing they were all standing on?

If Hector hadn't seen it coming at the last moment, they would've been down there with all those uprooted trees and shattered boulders. Instead, a hovering iron platform was keeping everyone aloft where the ground had just been.

And man. This was not easy. There were more people here than he'd ever supported on a hovering platform before. And there were several spawn still leaping and spitting at them.

Agh.

The platform began to tilt under the frantic, scrambling weight of six more spawn all trying to claw their way onto the eastern edge. And the Lorentians--they were panicking, stumbling, flailing.

Hector struggled. The balance was way off. He had to adjust it. Fix the problem.

Iron spikes shot out along the eastern edge to deal with the stowaways. Some were skewered; most were knocked off. He quickly obliterated the spikes regardless, knowing they would just screw up the balance worse if he didn't.

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There were more spawn on the northern and southern sides, but the Rainlords were dealing with them already. He was closest to the western edge, so he had it covered. He just needed to focus on--

A group of five spawn flew up in front of him, no longer mole-like. They had wings. Big ones. And they were coming straight for Hector.

With only a split second to react, he managed to clobber two with haphazard pillars materialized up from his feet, but the other three reached him.

They tackled him in unison, clawing his armor, puncturing the iron in deeply enough to nick his flesh beneath.

Pain. In his right side. His back. His left shoulder.

The frenzy of it stole all of his concentration, and before he could even retaliate, the hovering platform wobbled and dipped sideways. It was enough to toss two of the bastards off him, but Hector was only thinking about the civilians.

Where were they? If they fell off the platform, they wouldn't--he had to make sure they--

Agh.

This last monster on him would not let go. Its claws were like knives, and its feathers like razor blades. The flailing and scratching and growling and shrieking were more than just obnoxious. And they were tumbling together all the while, too.

Full spike defense, he decided.

Hector instantly became an iron porcupine. The spikes were both numerous enough and carrying force enough to shred the lone monster into meaty chunks and send them flying away from him.

He kept tumbling, unable to get his bearings. He hit a tree, and his spiked armor added so much weight to him that he felled it on impact instead of bouncing off. The trunk snapped in half, exploding into splinters.

The second tree he hit was able to stop him, though, and Hector had regained just enough situational awareness to wrap his iron around the tree and latch onto it so that it didn't fling him away. The wood groaned and bent under his weight, but it held, and Hector had a chance to annihilate enough of his iron for the Scarf to flow freely in the air again.

And so, sitting there in that metal cocoon at the top of a tree, Hector took a second to reassess the situation, to concentrate and absorb everything the Scarf of Amordiin could tell him.

The hovering platform was no longer so. It was stuck sidelong in the giant crater that Chort had made, but Hector's worst fears were thankfully not realized. He didn't sense any people at the bottom of it.

They'd gotten out somehow.

He sensed human figures among the treeline at the edges of the pit. Some were still fending off the spawn, but some were simply huddling together in apparent fear. A small building seemed to be there as well. A materialized structure from Fidel, probably.

Hector breathed. The civilians were safe, still.

Damn, he loved the Rainlords.

They needed help, though. He could sense more stirring from the rubble in the crater. Chort's doing?

Hector didn't intend to wait around to find out.

Four of the five winged spawn from earlier were soaring toward him again. Hector was ready this time, but he didn't need to be, because Roman zoomed down and barreled through like bowling pins, sending them all careening back down into the forest. Then Roman flew back up to the clouds, which were already attempting to regather.

The last winged spawn, the one that he'd shredded to pieces with his spikes, was almost fully reassembled on the ground, and it was already scratching at the base of Hector's tree. Its wings were still only half-formed and disjointed, but it seemed determined to get at him.

Hector launched himself up and away from the tree and glided over to the others, but in a background thought process, he was still evaluating the behavior of those winged monsters. They were all clearly gunning for him more than anyone else, probably at Chort's direction.

Did they have some kind of psychic link with their parent? It seemed likely. Hector hadn't seen the Beast giving any of them orders at any point, yet they always seemed to operate as Chort desired.

He might've expected Chort to go after Roman with those winged spawn, since Roman was the one actively sabotaging its efforts to create a storm, but no, it was sending them after Hector, instead. Why?

As if to answer that very question, Pauline's voice arrived in his head.

'Be careful,' she said. 'Your aura is greatly diminished. The others are more vulnerable now.'

His aura? Why would his aura--?

Wait, they were more vulnerable? What did she mean by that?

He would've asked her for more details, even in the midst of all this chaos, if he could've.

Instead, he just refocused on what he was doing, on dealing with that stirring in the crater.

Unsurprisingly, Hector had dropped all the monsters he collected when the platform fell, so he didn't currently have any of the Beast's spawn to launch at the ground.

But that was an easily remedied problem.

Iron materialized in orbit around him and quickly increased in both speed and mass. By the time he was directly over the crater, it was already the size of a person.

That would have to do. Making it any bigger would require more time, and if it was too large, the impact would hurt his own allies.

He launched it down into into the rubble as he finished sailing over the crater and caught himself on another tree.

Rocks flew up up and out of the hole like a bomb had just gone off, and Hector could even sense a few more spawn mixed in there, toppling through air with the debris.

But where was Chort? Hector was searching for it, but the monster was still--

Ah, there it was. Latched onto one of the bigger rocks headed northward. Hector might not have noticed it if the boulder's trajectory hadn't been so substantially different from the others. It flew higher and farther than all the others.

Chort had wings now, too, along with squid-like tentacles wrapped around its rock. What was the point of that, though, Hector wondered?

Was it trying to hide from him? If so, that had been some frighteningly quick thinking on Chort's part. Had it really come up with that strategy as a reaction to his attack?

Hector maintained pursuit as those questions were relegated to a background thought process, but he didn't intend to attack again just yet. He only wanted to stay close enough to keep Chort within range of the Scarf of Amordiin. First, he wanted to make sure the others were truly okay.

Hector didn't like what he found. Everyone was indeed accounted for, but they were clearly not doing so hot. The spawn were all around them, crowding closer and dodging attacks left and right.

Which was strange.

The Rainlords' movements were abnormal. Carlos was missing shots. Fidel's copper was slow to formulate itself. Matteo and Salvador were fighting in barehanded unison, but they were sluggish, and their swings with their fists were far too wide.

They looked exhausted, but that didn't make any sense. They were servants, and their reapers were right there with them. They shouldn't have been running out of stamina this soon. And the non-servants--the ones that hadn't yet made it inside the makeshift copper building--could barely even stand. A few were on their hands and knees, seemingly uninjured, yet still crawling.

It made no sense.

Until, that was, Hector remembered what Pauline had told him before. About auras. About the disorienting effects they could have.

The Rainlords weren't tired. Their senses were being suppressed. Dulled. Why now? Because Hector's own aura had diminished? If so, then how the hell was he supposed to fix that?

These were the questions in the back of his mind as he flew to their aid, trying to subdue as many of the monsters at once as he could. Big iron blocks slammed down and flattened some, while others were boxed in and put into orbit around him.

Restarting his collection yet again was perhaps an exercise in futility, considering how many times he'd had to suddenly drop it already, but he still felt like it was their best bet. Thus far, capturing the little bastards had been the only way to actually remove them from the fight. And right now, reducing their numbers was the most important thing.

Hector could sense the winged ones approaching again from above the trees, and this time, they had even more help. Half the swarm turned its attention to him and him alone.

But Hector was ready for them. Without a giant, hovering platform weighing down his concentration, he could sense them all quite clearly and was perfectly content to pull them away from the other servants. Hopefully, that would give everyone some breathing room.

He was still keeping track of Chort, too, in a thought process all its own. The Beast of Lorent was keeping its distance for the moment but not actually trying to flee, which told Hector that it was cooking up something else.

Roman was still up in the sky, seemingly in better condition than the Rainlords had been. Hector wondered if that was because the Beast's aura wasn't reaching him up there or if Roman had a strong enough aura of his own.

Hector bounded from tree to tree, relying on his iron to assist with each jump. Even in the moonlight, this area was a bit too dark and dense with foliage for him to rely on just his eyes, but that wasn't a problem for him, of course.

As he'd hoped, half the swarm was indeed following him, and once he had enough space to work with, he turned to face them.

He intended to add all of them to his collection this time.

But he knew that they were agile little buggers and that they had grown wise to his tactic of trying to capture them. Whenever they noticed him resorting to that strategy, they countered by scurrying underground again, which made them almost impossible to keep track of.

He had to disrupt their movement, prevent them from digging. And he had an idea in mind.

He could just send them all flying, first.

Amid the treetops, Hector stopped and waited for the spawn to close in a bit more. It would make his job easier if they weren't quite so spread out.

But to his surprise, they hesitated.

They'd just been chasing him like bloodthirsty animals a moment ago, but now they were keeping their distance.

He still seemed to have their full attention, though. Hector could sense that their heads were pointed in his direction. They hadn't lost track of him or gotten distracted by something else.

So what the hell was going on?

Were they... scared of him? Because he'd suddenly stopped running, and they didn't understand why?

They suspected he might up to something? Were they really that smart?

Well, Chort probably was, even if they weren't.

Hmm.

Hector kept waiting, wanting to be patient, but he knew this couldn't go on for too much longer. If they didn't make a move soon, then he would have to.

Slowly, they began surrounding him. They formed two lines, one closer and one farther, before the front line finally converged on him.

How cautious. And annoying.

But oh well. He decided to take what he could get.

When the front line drew near enough, Hector summoned iron all the way up from ground, filling the whole area with one enormous platform that shot the entire line of monsters high up into the air, far above the trees.

And Hector launched himself after them. He intended to capture every single one before they could hit the ground again.

They toppled and spun and thrashed helplessly in midair, even spitting fire and acid onto each other, but none of that could prevent him from adding them to his collection. In rapid succession, iron walls clapped around each of them and were drawn into orbit around Hector.

It was already a lot of keep track of, forty or so cubes in orbit around him, all carrying deadly monsters inside them. And there were still more waiting down below, not to mention all the ones who were attacking his companions.

He stayed up in the air on a small, hovering platform. It was a bit precarious, but the wind wasn't disrupting his balance. The Scarf informed him that the wind was breaking on the enormous cluster of moving cubes around him.

Unfortunately, that cluster was also reducing the Scarf's range. The chaotic swirls of air around weren't blocking his sense completely, but they were definitely having a deleterious effect on the Scarf's ability to detect things farther away. Hector had to move northward before Chort's location disappeared from his mind.

And there was another problem, wasn't there? If he descended back down into the forest again, the orbit of his cubes would undoubtedly be obstructed by the sheer density of the foliage. It hadn't been so bad when it was only a few cubes in orbit, but now he required quite a bit of space to move around.

The spawn down below were transforming, Hector sensed. More and more of them were growing wings, and he figured that he would soon have company up here.

Hmm.

He decided to head toward Chort. The spawn would give chase, and he could deal with them on the way. It was actually better if they attacked him in the air, he thought, since it meant that he wouldn't have to deal with the forest.

But he was expecting a new tactic from them, too. They'd been adapting nonstop to the fight, both physically and strategically, so he doubted that dealing with the next wave of them was going to be as simple as the first.

And indeed, he was soon proven right.

Their wings were larger than the previous iteration of flying spawn. They were faster now and seemingly more organized as well. They snaked up into the sky in a spiraling formation, arching toward Hector--with the ones in front spewing acid for good measure.

Hector narrowly avoided them on their first pass, and they still clipped a couple of his cubes, disrupting the flow and his concentration for a moment, throwing him briefly off balance. He could sense the giant flying spiral curving back around for a second try, too.

But there was even worse news.

In a background thought process, he was trying to keep track of everyone else, including Roman, who'd been quite busy this whole time trying to keep those damn clouds from regathering. And he'd been doing a good job, as far as Hector had been able to tell, even managing to occasionally zoom down and help the others. He was even coming to help Hector now, for which Hector was grateful.

The problem was that there was a second group of clouds forming to the north, closer to where Chort was currently located.

And Roman obviously didn't know that. Voreese probably couldn't sense it, either, thanks to the Beast's aura.

So when Roman flew in and shattered the enemy's formation like a brick through glass, the first thing Hector tried to do was direct him north, but the wind at this altitude was howling too greatly. The monsters were still hounding them. And forty cubes were still orbiting Hector.

It was all too crazy. Roman battered a few more winged monsters and zipped off again, going in completely the wrong direction.

Hector saw no choice.

It was far away, but he had to try. He summoned all his concentration and launched a monster-filled cube at the second grouping of clouds. Then he launched another. And then a few more.

They all missed. They did, however, attract a few lightning bolts from the previously dark clouds.

That was not what Hector wanted to see. The first group of clouds had never developed lightning at all, so these must have been even further along than he'd feared.

Hector had to get closer, but the swarm of spawn around him weren't making it any easier. It had quickly become apparent that he could not outmaneuver them up here. His aerial movement was not up to snuff for this fight, he knew. Not only was it almost impossible to box these new winged spawn in, but even just coating them in iron was too difficult.

He could at least deal with it when they tried to surround and overwhelm him, though. After having their formation broken by Roman, they were chaotic and tried to simply rush him, which was nothing that a few giant walls of outward-moving iron couldn't handle. It didn't stop them, of course, but it kept them at by while he progressed toward Chort.

That didn't last long, though, and he found trouble again when they resorted back to that same aerial drill technique. As expected, a simple wall couldn't stop that. It barely put a dent in their formation before they came barreling through.

He managed to slide out of the way again but not without losing even more of his cubes this time. He growled under his breath, beginning to wonder if it wouldn't be better to just ditch his collection yet again and return to the ground.

Or maybe that wouldn't be necessary. He was close enough now. He could clear a path through forest for himself. A path to Chort.

A hulking iron plate materialized and fell, with him and the flying spawn in pursuit.

It crashed into the ground with the force of a meteorite, causing a large chunk of the Imara Forest to flex and depress under its weight.

Hector hit the iron ground running, having added a slightly grainy texture to it so that he wouldn't slip.

Chort was straight ahead and clearly saw him coming, because somehow, the creature had managed to lob a truck-sized boulder directly at him.

With the Scarf, though, Hector had the spatial awareness he needed in order to know the perfect timing for this problem. Instead of dodging out of the way, he raised an equally large column of iron up from the path he'd already made--and he did so at the precise moment that the boulder passed over it.

The giant rock was batted cleanly away to the west like a baseball, and Hector could keep running forward without slowing down.

Those dark clouds above were still on his mind, too. They were looking more dangerous than ever. He could sense the wind bending around them, forming the beginning of a twister, and there were visible electric sparks brewing near in the center.

Hector stayed the course toward Chort, but he felt like he could spare another cube along the way and decided to launch without even looking, using only the Scarf for guidance.

His aim was dead on this time. It would've hit, if a sudden crowd of five winged spawn didn't get in the way. The cube had enough force behind it to reduce them all to chunks of flesh falling out of the air, but their sacrifice indeed managed to knock it off course.

Electricity leapt from the cloud again to strike the cube as it passed. The thin blue bolt fractured into a dozen smaller ones and fried the sundered monster chunks, crackling loudly even at this distance.

If those sparks developed into full blown lightning, it would be a serious problem. This wasn't like his fights with Karkash. Garovel wasn't here to heal him. Hector didn't know if he would be able to take a direct hit and keep going afterward.

He tried to leave some lightning rods behind as he ran, just in case that lightning did arrive later, but with so much going on around him--Chort in front, dozens of spawn in pursuit, over thirty cubes swirling around him, and the wind picking up like crazy--Hector honestly wasn't sure if those rods actually got materialized or not.

Chort melted in the forested background, disappearing from normal sight, but Hector was hardly using his eyes, anyway. Whether it was camouflage or true invisibility didn't matter. Hector could still sense the bastard.

And most importantly, he could sense that the Beast of Lorent was not trying to use this tactic to hide.

Rather, it was charging him. Hoping to take him by surprise, perhaps.

The only thing that surprised Hector, however, was how stupid that strategy seemed. Did Chort really not yet realize that it couldn't hide from him that way?

Hector didn't want to launch a cube at the Beast, though. It may have been his most powerful technique, but it hadn't worked on Chort thus far, and Hector didn't think this time would be any different. Most of all, he didn't want the impact to knock Chort away again. He'd had enough of this chase.

So he tried a cage, instead, combined with an iron coating.

Unfortunately, the coating didn't quite take. Only a few specks actually managed to materialize on Chort's body, and the cage was barreled through like it was made of cardboard.

And Chort had more electricity for him, this time spewing forth from its gaping maw as it closed in on him.

That proved about as effective as Hector's cage did, though. Instead of catching him, the sparks caught on the cubes and bounced between them harmlessly before ultimately discharging into the ground.

Huh.

Hector wasn't too sure what to make of that, and neither did Chort, by the look of it.

They had a kind of awkward staredown for a moment as they both considered their next move. Even Chort's spawn decided to pause, apparently also affected by their master's confusion.

In the downtime, Hector dematerialized the broken cage, not wanting to worry about hitting volume limit again.

He could see now why a cage had been a dumb idea. In order to a keep a big monster like Chort in captivity, the whole cage would have to be extremely sturdy. There was too much opportunity to break through.

Perhaps something smaller and sneakier was the ticket.

Like chains.

Those could obviously be broken, too, but if he managed to snake them around just the right part of Chort's body at just the right moment, they could become disproportionately effective, couldn't they? And if he used a lot of them, then... hmm.

It seemed like the offspring were ready to move again, getting antsy, but Chort took the opening to speak. "I fear this battle may never end, Hector."

"Well, you could always surrender."

Chort's body was bulging and growing--transforming again. The Beast was bigger than an elephant now, maybe even two. "And what would that look like? What would you do with me and my spawn?"

Interesting questions, but there was something more pressing on Hector's mind. "Stop those clouds from gathering, and we can talk about that."

"I think not."

Hector didn't intend to humor this any further. Chort was just buying time. Hector materialized iron shackles around each one of Chort's six amphibious legs and chained them to trees or the ground.

Chort immediately struggled and began breaking them, so Hector added more. More shackles. More chains. And even more layers of iron to the chains that hadn't immediately broken.

He materialized a big iron block above Chort's body, too. He didn't expect it to do much, but even if it only managed to stun Chort for a moment, that would be enough. He just wanted to seal the Beast's movement.

Unsurprisingly, the spawn were all over him now.

The monsters were clambering through the orbiting cubes like monkeys trying to tumble over an obstacle course. Some had shrunken down to a smaller form and lost their wings, perhaps in an effort to better slip through the openings.

Hector wasn't trying to smash them with the cubes, though. Just the opposite, in fact. Any time one of them made contact with a cube, he made the iron morph around their body and absorb them. The cubes were already occupied by other monsters, and Hector didn't minding doubling up the occupancy. He had to make some of the cubes larger than the others, but they could be split up and equalized later. And for now, it wasn't that much more trouble to keep track of in his head, he felt.

The fleet of orbiting metal around him was quickly growing. And these cubes weren't exactly small, either. Sure, he'd practiced this technique quite a lot, recently, but even still, Hector didn't know how many of these he would be able to maintain before things would begin to crumble.

In his training, he'd been able to keep upwards of four hundred little iron satellites before losing track of them, but those cubes had been no bigger than mice. These ones were the size of ponies, or even full-sized horses some of them. He had to be approaching that limit soon, right?

And of course, there was still Chort to worry about. The Beast of Lorent clearly did not appreciate the iron chains that kept materializing and latching onto it. Chort's body was shifting again, its limbs becoming slimmer and bonier, perhaps in an attempt to help it wriggle free without having to break all that iron.

Then it did something Hector hadn't seen it do before. A huge, gangly hand with long claws appeared from its portly body--seemingly out of its back--and slashed the air.

And the air shuddered visibly.

A pitch black sliver appeared there in midair, darker than even the night around it. Hector didn't get long to wonder what the hell it was for, because Chort's spawn came pouring out of it.

They hopped onto Chort's body and scuttled across it, tugging at the iron chains, trying to remove them. These spawn were smaller than the one currently assailing Hector, looking more like the group that had been fighting Salvador and the others. And indeed, Salvador himself came bulldozing through the apparent portal as well.

The big man fell on the bigger Chort like a sack of bricks. He was obviously confused as what was happening, but that didn't stop him from thrashing around like a wild bull, swatting spawn from atop Chort's back and wrestling with the giant claws that were there, too.

So Chort really did have some kind of teleporting capabilities. If Hector's attention wasn't already so thoroughly occupied, he might've wondered if that was thanks to the Chort's aura or just an innate ability--or perhaps some combination of the two.

The portal wasn't closing. More spawn came through, along with Matteo Delaguna.

Hector was almost done clearing a path for himself through the crowd of spawn around him, and he would soon be able to provide much better assistance to his two allies over there, but for now, it was all he could do to keep adding chains to the flailing pile that already covered Chort.

It was like watching the world's most insane rodeo show. Chort tried to buck the two of them off, but somehow, they were both able to hold on, even when some of the Beast's spawn went flying away instead.

Then Salvador's fist glowed brighter than even the moon, lighting up the whole area around him, and he punched a hole straight through Chort's back.

Chort's whole body heaved more violently than ever, and the Beast of Lorent rolled over, iron chains yanking up dirt and rocks and even entire trees in the process.

Salvador and Matteo toppled off its back and landed hard on Hector's iron pathway. A surprising amount of Chort's blood splattered off of Salvador's still-burning hand, which left a sizzling imprint in Hector's metal as the man pushed himself back onto his feet.

Chort just kept rolling, though, having apparently decided that it was a good strategy. It kept growing in size, too, and Hector was reminded of those satellite photos that had shown a creature as big as a building. He didn't get long to dwell on it, though.

That was when the lightning began to arrive.

It was so fast, bright, and loud that Hector didn't even realize what had happened at first. It wasn't until he turned and saw a smoldering iron pylon, still trembling after the strike.

Ah, so those lightnings rods did actually get materialized after all. There were four of them, and they were about three times as tall as the trees around--which was important, because the height mattered much more than the fact that they were metal. The lightning would go for whatever the tallest structure was.

Hector could only hear ringing now, but he was fairly certain that his eardrums hadn't ruptured. He'd felt that before. Hopefully, the civilians were okay.

He sensed, however, that one of his allies was not.

Pauline Gaolanet was falling out of the air. Her wings limp, arching upward. She wasn't moving at all.

Fuck!

He feared the worst as he blasted away from the ground to go catch her. Through all the chaos of the fight, he'd completely lost track of where she'd been. He told her he'd keep her safe. And now she was--

He caught her with an iron cradle and pulled her close. He had to widen the orbit of the cubes in order to make space for her huge body, but he didn't really give a shit about the added difficulty, right now. He had to set her down somewhere.

He needed to concentrate. There was no time for frustration or insecurity. These were the moments that determined life and death. Hector knew them well. His decisions now were critical.

Her invisibility was entirely gone, but she was still breathing. Hector could sense that much, at least. Air was flowing in and out of her beak.

Was she just unconscious?

He had no real idea of how durable Sparrows actually were. From his conversations with Hanton, it had seemed like they were fairly vulnerable, but that was only in comparison to servants. Compared to regular humans, they could've still been much more resilient, right?

He hoped so.

Why was there nowhere to fucking land?!

The iron pathway that he'd made earlier was crawling with spawn, not to mention Chort, so he didn't want to go back there.

Fuck it.

He materialized a second iron plate and dropped it straight down. The forest made way with crashing force, and Hector descended again, raising another lightning rod behind him as his armored feet touched the iron floor.

He set her down and dematerialized the cradle around her.

Now what the fuck was he supposed to do?

She was safe for the moment, but did she need medical assistance? And if so, who the fuck could provide it? Agh.

The fight was still raging out there. He sensed it. Salvador and Matteo were clashing with dozens of spawn, and Roman seemed to have taken notice of the second group of clouds now. The lightning strike must have tipped him off.

Chort was closing in, rolling through the forest like a giant bowling ball, headed straight for him.

Good.

Right now, Hector was more than fine with that.

He had over sixty of Chort's spawn in orbit around him, at the moment. And they all began speeding up in unison.

Thus far, this technique hadn't been having the desired effect on the Beast of Lorent. Every time previously that Hector had used it, Chort had either caught it or recovered from the impact shortly thereafter. Hector had to step his game up somehow.

And he had an idea.

Temperature manipulation was still a fairly tricky thing for him, but he'd been getting a lot of experience with it in his more recent training sessions with Zeff. While he suspected the colder temperatures would have more of an effect on Chort in terms of slowing it down, he also knew from trial and error that his iron would become structurally weaker when frozen.

On the opposite end of the heat spectrum, though, Chort and its spawn hadn't seemed particularly affected by higher temperatures--at the beginning of the fight, at least. Some of them had even been breathing fire. But that most recent strike from Salvador had clearly achieved something. Maybe that had just been the result of the Lord Delaguna's undead strength, but Hector was prepared to give it a go.

Heat was all relative, anyway, If their previous attempts to burn the enemy hadn't been effective, then maybe they just needed to go even hotter.

Molten iron was something that Hector had wanted to do for a long time but had only recently had the both the skill and opportunity to test out. It hadn't exactly gone well. He'd scorched his right arm and neck, and he'd dealt with stinging pain there for days after Garovel had healed him. He had technically pulled it off, though. Just not elegantly.

Maybe it was a bad time to be conducting tests like this, but that wasn't what was going through his head, right now. He just wanted to do as much damage to Chort as he could possibly imagine.

For Hector, temperature required a kind of 'emotional command' to be given to his iron. An impassioned demand in his mind, merged with his materialization. And fortunately, he did not need to try very hard to summon that emotion.

But he tried hard, anyway.

The anger was already there, just waiting to be used, but he wanted more. He wanted true heat. The melting point of iron was a staggering 1,538 degrees Celsius. And in order for his iron to come out fully melted and not just all weird and bendy in the process of melting, he wanted to surpass that number by a good margin. So he didn't hold back.

With all of his concentration, he gave that command. And every single cube began to fill with iron as their speed increased more and more. He could see them already beginning to glow. He could feel the heat already surrounding him, clashing with the cool nightly wind.

Chort was close enough.

Hector launched them all in rapid succession, fired off like gigantic rounds from a minigun.

Chort took the first one straight on while rolling, but that was all Hector got to see before the stream of molten cubes began explosively colliding with the monster. Dust filled the darkened area in an instant, though it was quickly joined by orange, gooey iron spewing high up into the air and all around with volcanic fury.

The explosions just kept going. The cubes were the cars of a freight train, unrelenting for a solid minute straight until they were finally all spent, leaving Hector standing there alone, looking over the obliterated scene before him.

The forest was on fire on both sides of the path, and scores of trees had been felled by sheets of molten iron that splashed over them.

Hector could still sense Chort's spawn across the battlefield, but they had all stopped moving and were looking in Hector's direction. The other servants weren't wasting the opportunity and had started pummeling them or shredding them or freezing them, but Hector had to wonder if any of that was even necessary at this point.

Through the persistent cloud of dirt, he couldn't tell what had become of Chort yet. He was reluctant to believe that the Beast of Lorent was dead, just because of how much of a resilient bastard the thing had been up to now, but on the other hand, that attack would've killed most things that Hector could imagine.

He annihilated the scattered remnants of his metal, including the molten parts, wanting to get a better look, and as the dust began to clear, Chort's hulking, unmoving body came into view.

Hmm.

According to the Scarf, Chort wasn't breathing, but now that he was thinking about it, Hector wasn't sure that Chort had been breathing beforehand, either. It was a being of Chaos or whatever, wasn't it? Did it even need air? Eh, maybe it did. Maybe he was worrying for no reason.

'Agh...'

The voice in his head was familiar, and Hector's attention was drawn to the fallen Sparrow behind him who had begun to stir.

Hector divided his focus again and went over to her, keeping part of his mind concentrated on what the Scarf was telling him about Chort--which at the moment, was nothing.

Pauline moved slowly, attempting to ease herself back onto her feet already.

Hector wanted to help her, but he wasn't sure what to do or even what to say, for that matter.

Her feathers ruffled as she shook her head and turned her avian gaze toward Hector. 'What in the world happened...?'

"I'm not entirely sure myself," said Hector, "but I think you were struck by lightning."

'Ah...'

"...How are you feeling? Can you still move everything?"

She let out a kind of chirpy groan and began testing all of her limbs. 'Bit groggy. Slight headache. But everything still seems to be in working order.'

"Really?" Hector was not able to conceal the surprise in his voice. "I don't think a normal human wold be able to walk away from a lightning strike that easily..."

She stood up more rigidly, perhaps to demonstrate her wellness. 'Worry about me later. What happened to the Beast?'

Hector thumbed back behind him, toward Chort's motionless figure. The woods were still on fire around it, but Roman had arrived and was dampening the flames with his ability. The Rainlords were slowly coming closer, too. They seemed to have captured the remaining spawn and were pulling them along, but they were clearly still wary of being attacked again.

'Is it dead?' said Pauline.

"I can't really tell," said Hector. "Can you?"

'Hmm.' Pauline started waddling stiffly over to it.

Hector made sure to stay in front of her. He was still paying close attention to Chort's body via the Scarf, wanting to discern anything he could. The flow of air around it was a bit confused, perhaps due to lingering heat distortion, but Hector was fairly certain that he could sense several large holes that had not previously been there.

Holes about the size of the cubes he'd launched at it.

Given the many explosive impacts he'd witnessed, Hector would've imagined that Chort's body would've been more shredded than this, but it looked more like some of the cubes had gone straight through.

As they got closer, Hector was able to use his eyes more, and indeed, he could see the steam rising off of the creature in the moonlight, as well as the scorch marks all over Chort's body.

Hmm.

Considering how hot that molten iron was, the fact that it had only left scorch marks was a testament to how resistant Chort was to heat.

What a tough bastard.

Pauline was being awfully quiet, though, Hector thought. "So? Sense anything?"

'Ah. Yes, the Beast's aura is almost entirely gone now,' she said.

Hector found that answer unsatisfactory. "'Almost?'"

'It is still dwindling,' she elaborated. Her eyes went to some of the smaller monsters that were currently being dragged closer by Salvador and Matteo. 'But I suspect that its aura will never truly disappear so long as its spawn remain.'

Salvador and Matteo seemed to have heard what she said as well, because they both turned to eye the critters, too. Then they went back to staring at the Sparrow.

No doubt, they had questions, but they weren't posing them yet.

Mevox was less reserved, though. 'What the fuck is goin' on around here, huh?! Someone please explain, because I am confused as shit, right now!'

Salvador began talking to his reaper, who was still attached to his shoulder, but the man didn't even get a full sentence in before Roman flew down and landed on the other side of Chort's charred corpse.

Which, of course, allowed Voreese to join the conversation. 'I second that motion! Someone tell me that this shit is finally over! Because that fight was all kinds of fucked up, and I hated every second of it!'

Hector did his best to do so, but he couldn't fully confirm that the matter was indeed settled without reiterating what Pauline had just said. The reapers didn't seem to know what he meant by 'auras'--and hell, neither did he, really--but now didn't seem like the best time to try opening that can of worms.

'Okay, okay, so what you're basically saying is that's it's dead, but not really,' said Mevox, 'and that we need to kill its stupid murder-babies in order to finish it off, right?'

'That is one way of putting it, yes,' said Pauline.

'Well, great,' said Voreese. 'Let's get to it, then. Kill away. And then we can get the hell out of this horrible place.'

Matteo's reaper, Ernivoc, who rarely ever spoke up in these group conversations, decided to do so now. 'Would that be the wisest course of action?' he said. 'We have the creatures subdued. Would it not be better to take them back to Warrenhold for further study?'

There arrived a brief silence.

The reapers looked like they were about to launch into a debate, but they didn't the get chance, because Fidel Blackburn and Carlos Sebolt soon arrived with the Lorentians--all of whom looked shaken and exhausted.

Hector turned to his head slightly and noticed that Pauline had rendered herself invisible again. Probably for the best, he figured. The Rainlords, Hector had at least informed about Pauline's presence back at the airport, but the Lorentians would no doubt be utterly confused if they saw her.

Fidel and Carlos made way for Secretary Karr and Ambassador Stoutamire to come forward, apparently to speak to Hector again.

The Secretary's gaze lingered beyond Hector, on Chort's corpse. "...The deed is done, then? We are safe?"

All eyes were on him again, Hector knew. He wanted to be careful with his words. "We're still deciding what to do with the remains, but yes, you're safe now."

The woman breathed a sigh of relief. She didn't quite have the same composure now that she'd had when Hector had first met her, but that was certainly understandable.

"Thank you, Lord Goffe," she said, the sincerity clear in her voice. "And company. You saved our lives. And slew the Beast of Lorent. Every single one of you is a hero to the nation."

And Hector felt abruptly like he would've a year ago, having zero idea how to respond. He was sure that he'd been getting better about handling conversations, but heartfelt compliments were still like daggers in the gut to him.

Thankfully, Hector was still wearing his armor, so no one would could see how dumbstruck and embarrassed he was all of a sudden.

It still left a gap in the conversation, though, as everyone seemed to be waiting for him to say something. When he didn't, Secretary Karr picked things back up herself.

"I assure you that your efforts here tonight shall be well-rewarded once we return to P.J.," she said.

At first, Hector wasn't sure what she was talking about and nearly asked who P.J. was. He caught himself, though, when he recalled his recent study of Lorentian geography.

The Imara Forest filled much of the country and encompassed several large cities, one of which was the capital: Riverton, P.J.

He remembered thinking what a strange name it was for a town, much less the capital of the nation. P.J. stood for Pori Johari, which was the town's original name before it became the capital and started attracting many politically important residents. Why "Riverton" had been added to the name, Hector hadn't been able to discern, but given what the Secretary just said, the locals were still referring to it as P.J. for short, anyway.

And apparently, that was where they were headed next.

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