Chương 218: AF Chapter 217 – Masks and Sickles

"So, what have you learned of virindi travel routes over the past six months?" Briggs asked us directly, crossing his thick arms and staring at us, waiting.

"Wow, it's like you expected us to be afraid of an alien, intensely magical, and frighteningly powerful species we know next to nothing about," I murmured, leaning on Crown and rolling my eyes at him.

"How many times did you mess with them in Rithwic, Kris?" The princess grinned at us both.

"Thirteen times. Testing response times, travel paths, forces dispatched, variety of virindi, and changes each time. Each time I'd head along their backtrail, seeing where it and they came from each time. Lots of sprinting across open fields and deserts for lots of miles." Briggs just nodded.

"And?" he asked.

"I was wondering if they would come across the Inner Sea, since they geohover and doubtless have enough magical knowledge to punch the Shoreward. However, they do not. They come across the southern landbridge or from Dungeons located in that area." Briggs nodded slowly.

"You've the vector they'll use to approach Soushi, then."

"Dispatched three teams to initial, transition, and midpoints of their expected paths," she grinned heartily.

"Based on previous delays, we should have word of a moving force within an hour. I expect they will be skirting the northern edge of the Linvaks and loop around the end. However, given they don't have anything to worry about from them lugians, they may loop over the Tattered Ridge, or take a detour through Mage's Pass. I don't expect that to happen, but that's where I've got the teams working."

It went without saying that there were tons of Summons points to get rid of in that area, and delightful amounts of skirmishing with frustrated Gotrok in those areas, too. It was like she planned ahead for this crap, or something.

"Optimal ambush point?"

"Shifts depending on their course." She inclined her head at me, and I sighed and popped up the Holo, orienting in on the area around Soushi. She promptly flicked two points on the map.

"Eighty percent the northern point."

"What do you need to take them out?" Briggs' pale green eyes turned thoughtfully west, where the virindi would have to approach from.

"Amusingly enough, not nearly as much as you might think, owing to some of the restrictions virindi operate under." Kris' smile became quite predatory.

"Like, for instance, they can't climb for shit, which isn't a problem when you can pseudo-fly. Which isn't flying, which they might be able to do… if someone doesn't stop them from doing that." Briggs just snorted, and I rolled my eyes.

"And you need someone who can make a big pit right in front of the way they are going to go."

"The virindi will follow an optimized route, which I discovered when I traced their original path. Literally line-straight, with deviations only for objects on the terrain obstructing the free flow of motion. We can literally draw lines and predict exactly the route they will take. As long as there is nothing big, they can go right over the roughest ground without a care or change in speed, nor does going up or downhill matter to them much," Kris went on.

"Pretty curious creatures. I have a feeling they consider gravity just this huge annoyance."

"King Gravity can be MUCH more than an annoyance," I sniffed.

"Fine, I'll go. Who else?"

"Well, a few stout lads who can throw some of those chorozite rocks we brought along from Mayoi!" Kris smiled cheerfully. Huh. Magically-reinforced exoshells… weren't, to chorozite. Oh, that was going to really suck for them.

"Sir, we've got motion to the southwest, closing quickly!" Lt. Vilidiani shook his head, marveling again at the kind of stuff Warlord Kris could calculate and anticipate. Always having the right assets in the right area to take care of stuff, or find out more information, or just piss off lugians who didn't think scout teams should be this far out and enjoying themselves. Having the Lady Magos one Teleport away helped their peace of mind for that.

Item Magic could no longer be used to Recall so easily to distant locations, enabling people to flee a losing fight rapidly if they so desired. The magic to do so still existed, but supposedly was much harder to use. They all wanted to learn to use it, of course, but the new Wizards were laboring slowly through the process of learning true Arcane magic, and not the much more limited stuff that had been passed down to them long ago by Empyreans visiting their homeworld…

"Sollie! Get the circle up there! Depower all Soulbound gear, pull the Essence out of them! Rings and Necklaces in the null pack, quick!" He pulled off his own jewelry and quickly stuffed them into the lead-lined pouch, while everyone else did the same. Few had more than minor functioning magic on them…

but something was better than nothing, as they all knew, and at the very least the Necklaces could be used as nice focuses for the Artificing magic that had spread rapidly to everyone who knew Item Magic once, even the weaker version still the most popular of the schools to get involved with. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Their maga, one of the Lady Magos' students, hurriedly made a Circle about ten feet in radius, sprinkled powdered cold iron into it, and everyone hunkered down in the tall grass inside it, watching as dots in the distance came rapidly towards them, moving at the speed of a sprinting man, or faster. -Warlord Kris, I have eyes on the coming virindi, - the Viamontian scout /informed her respectfully, and felt the return knock on his eyeballs. -Going quiet until they choose a course.

- He'd been informed that the virindi could sense use of magic, and that included the telepathic connections that were involved with employing a Mark. The implications that, all those years ago, the virindi had been able to sense Fellowship and Allegiance communications, and perhaps even listen to them, was disturbing to think about.

Sure, they were alien things that would probably have a hard time understanding so much of the casual and social conversations that had gone on, but the fact they might have been able to just listen in-! Well, they were the things that had prodded the Gotrok into rebelling, taught them how to refine chorozite, and supplied them with new weapons and armor upgrades in return for ore.

The Gotrok weren't as captive as the Hea were, but they were deeply interwound with the virindi, which meant the virindi were not friends to the rest of the allied races. The virindi likely didn't consider themselves more than allies of convenience with the Gotrok, and given that Isparians and the other races had worked both for and against the virindi in the past, they probably held most races to be hugely unreliable, unlike their own inscrutable and alien selves.

Head barely above the grass, looking like little more than stony bumps on the side of the hill and surrounded by tough bushes to further break up the line of sight, the whole team watched the virindi assault team speed up and go on by them. It was led by two scale-robed versions, one in red and one in brown. Three other scale-robes in gray hues followed, and then a number in the more classic robe style.

A dozen Servants and Puppets brought up the rear, the dullest in hue and least precise in appearance, with Masters and Directors seemingly pulling them along as they likewise almost seemed to be towed by their masters. They'd all been told virindi saw active magic as bright lights, and the rest of the world as gray. Thus, hiding in shadows didn't work against them if you had any kind of magic on you. It would be like trying to hide while waving a torch around.

Likewise, the simple ability to WIELD magic meant you had magic around you, and your Aura made you stand out against the non-magical world. That was what the Circle was for, Non-Detection there to absorb magical 'radiation' and make them just part of the rest of the plain, featureless no-magic world.

Pulling the Soul Essence out of their Weapons and Armor instantly made them non-magical, taking care of that exposure, and everyone was sitting inside the Circle, keeping movement to an absolute minimum as the virindi platoon sped by, never touching the ground, plants whipping away from the trailing bottom of their robes and the faint purple-violet lights that emanated from inside them.

The virindi zipped on past, not seeing the humans ensconced up the hillside only a hundred yards away, watching in silence as they sped past. The Virindi ignored the existence of most Summons, who in turn barely reacted to them… and if there was going to be a problem, then there was a blur of magic, several spells detonated, the targets Summons went flying in death, and the virindi kept on moving without slowing down in the slightest. Lt.

Vilidiani waited and watched as the virindi approached Mage's Pass, one of the few easy routes through the northern arm of the Linvaks. They would have to turn right about THERE for optimum travel speed… The whole squad watched with him as the virindi continued north and east along the foothills, not deviating from their course.

"Eighty percent looks like it was right," Sollie murmured, the seasoned young woman nodding to no one in particular. She might have been talking to the Lady Magos, Vilidiani wasn't sure she had a direct Mark the same way, or was simply in Allegiance to the powerful wizardess who had turned magic for Isparians and the other races upside down with the new innovations. He couldn't see her in the Markspace, so he wasn't sure she'd been offered a Mark yet.

Why not was another question, although the fact it DID have to be Tattoed was a consideration. The virindi were a mile away before he dared to address his Mark again. -Warlord, the virindi continued northeast, ignoring Mage's Pass. - -Get out that scope and track them past the Ring of Crystals settlement.

- Vilidiani cursed and clawed for the tube of artfully cut lenses in the plumbum-lined null pouch that gave such excellent view at a distance, breaking out of the Circle as he freed it from his pack and brought it up to his eye. The minor magic focused instantly, and the motion of the virindi and the bright red of four of them made them fairly easy to track.

He watched as they streamed past the ruined settlement, a single spell sniping what looked to be a zefir out of the way – hah, aliens hated the Hell pixies, too! - and watched and waited as… They suddenly veered south, right up along the line of the hills extending down from the Linvaks! Vilidiani was perfectly aware that there was a long and notable trail along the tops of these hill-mounts, as unnatural as the hills themselves were in design.

Indeed, moving along the hilltops was a nice clear route that would only be interrupted by living guards, and so had been watched over by actual Gotrok for some time… at least, until the Gotrok started taking falls down the mountains and not coming back from them within the last few weeks. Obviously the virindi knew of the hilltop road and were using it to cut off time… -They are taking the hilltop trail, Warlord! - he /said respectfully once more.

-Heading right up towards the Fenmalain Vestibule Dungeon that is there! - -That won't do anything for us unless there's shades present to bring the residents out and give them a tussle, so don't dwell on it. Alright, back to work with your Summons points, and well done. Slit a Gotrok throat for me. - Lt. Vilidiani smiled at that. Warlord Kris had a very direct way of speaking about things, and the grim note to her voice meant she wasn't joking.

The next time he talked to her, he'd best have at least one more Gotrok notch for his belt. Happily, that probably wasn't going to be too hard. The Gotrok were trying to hold the hilltop trail south of Mage's Pass where it broke, and if they liked to surround themselves with a few Summons for protection, that wasn't going to save them here. And not coincidentally, his team was on the southern side of Mage's Pass…

"We're heading up to make sure the Gotrok don't control the hilltop trail," he told the rest of the team, who nodded and grinned, reading in that there was going to be fighting. Most of them weren't out here to just shut down Summon points, after all…