NOVEL NEXT Chapter 270: Great Victory
6/10 noon
We went over options and it turned out that the Kaldorei empire timeline was pretty clearly the best option available to me; time moved about 17 times as quickly there as it did in my own timeline, and it had quite a few things and people that were valuable without being historically significant. It was more or less perfect, so we went into a flurry of motion setting up for an expedition.
I was sending Talaada, of course. No one else could capture people like Talaada, and I was sure that she'd do good work with 34 days of free reign. Her first objective would be to establish us a safe location to work out of, and then we would start experimenting in earnest and she could work her way up from there. I gave her bronze dragon form a visage based on what I could remember of Azshara: gold eyes, pale blue skin, white hair. I made no attempt to make her look exactly like Azshara, she had a far more generous figure than most elves for one, but sharing a few traits with the universally beloved queen could only be a good thing. Seeing her with the blue skin did make me briefly wonder what she'd look like in her natural draenei form; I'd never actually seen her as an uncorrupted draenei, after all.
https://imgur.com/a/46MQnc1
I brought in Tyrande and Malfurion and had them give Talaada a primer on the era; unlike most night elves they had lived in this era, so they were my best bet to know how to get along there. I didn't particularly want to send them personally, but thankfully they knew a few other elves that had lived just as long as they had; Shandris, for example. It wasn't exceptionally hard to round up a few of them to serve as guides. We also needed to send someone that was a master of arcane magic or nobody would take them seriously in noble circles; I decided on Doan. It was a little risky, but a wandering magic instructor and his students seemed perfectly respectable to me, it would give him cover to pick up more students at any time, and the time acceleration would let him crank out archmagi faster than ever from my point of view.
There was one more thing to do before she left, other than setting up Cairne as the receiver for love confessions while Talaada was away. We decided to use the scrap of arcane lore on Aegwynn's permanent variant of the Polymorph spell. Most things I would want to have sex with would need to be aware of what's going on, so I was hoping that a lewd polymorph would result in something harmless, but with its cognitive faculties at least partially intact. Enough to be capable of giving a love confession, at least. That could massively help recruitment. I'd be really disappointed if it just gave me "Polymorph, but it lasts 50% longer if your dick is out while you cast it."
Mila was the lucky winner of the "whose name do I remember first" drawing, and all she needed to do was read the constantly shifting runes on the small scrap of paper. I decided to offload the testing at least partially onto someone else in case it got weird or ended up needing a lot of time to process. We brought in a prisoner from Orgrimmar, a serial killer who had been doing quite well at delaying his death sentence in the arena, and let Mila test the spell titled "Polymorph: Bimbo." I watched her cast, and the changes to the incantation and movements were thankfully minor. I could learn it in an hour at most.
The scarred orc gladiator was engulfed in impenetrable pink smoke, which cleared after only a few seconds. The result was easily as extreme as the version that turned people into sheep. She was soft, blonde, bouncy, happy, a little confused, and clad in aggressively pink clothing.
https://imgur.com/a/oOPiIh3
"Uhm. Where am I?" She looked around, noting that her hands were tied together in passing. "Am I doing kinky stuff?" She seemed earnestly confused. I walked up to her and started quizzing her.
"What is your name?"
"Bambi!" New name, no surname, entirely unrelated to her old name of Sarkos Heartrender.
"What do you do?"
"Um. Like. What do you mean?" Literally nothing? Alright.
"What do you think of the arena?"
"It's full of sweaty guys." Disinterested. Odd. I expected a bimbo to be more interested in hunky men, if not the violence.
I turned on the charm, doing my best to leverage all of my lures with an enticing smell and taking off my armor to show off my physique. "Would you like to go out with me, maybe see where things go?"
"Uhm, no. Buzz off, weirdo." She seemed entirely unaffected by my charms- no shit. It felt like communication talent smacked me in the back of the head as I realized she was a lesbian. Of all traits, Sarkos had apparently maintained his sexuality in the transition to Bambi. Or perhaps it was because Mila, whose sexuality had developed into an interest in women and me, had cast the spell. Turning someone into a bimbo that would be attracted to the caster did seem more useful. I'd need to test this later. Short term, I still needed to see if she was capturable. I turned into my female night elf form; easy enough to do since it was technically my default ever since I became a Warden.
"How about now?" She gave me an appreciative look, and it wasn't too hard to get a love confession out of her after clearing the "incompatible sexuality" hurdle. The result was a cheerful, bubbly blonde orc girl with the skills, knowledge, and physique of a notorious serial killer and successful gladiator. I didn't want the psycho or a man to be naked in my bed, so the male psycho personality didn't surface despite her gaining polymorph and mind defense. Bimbos weren't a kink of mine, but I certainly wouldn't say no to Bimbo aesthetic layered on top of a deadly assassin.
Yeah, this was a spell worth spreading around; it was essentially a reversible version of my ghost mushrooms without instant capture built in. It was a lot harder to get a love confession out of a sheep or someone with an intact brain than a giggling bimbo no matter what her orientation . The real question was if this would pair well with ghosts.
••••••••••
Theradras walked slowly across the planes of Silithus, reaching out with her senses to feel the holes in the earth. Her master had commanded her to find the tunnels leading into the ancient city of Ahn'Quiraj, but the sand was not her domain to near the same extent as proper soil or solid stone. She could only extend her senses out a few hundred feet, and she suspected that the tunnel would be deep indeed. The titanic facilities tended to have walls with foundations that reached far beneath the surface. She needed to travel systematically, checking any tunnels she happened to sense and marking them on the map. It would be terribly boring if it weren't for the occasional Silithid or Twilight Cultist obligingly coming to entertain her.
••••••••••
Broxigar had his orders, he had potions, and he had the Axe of Cenarius, returned to him from his niece. He had been given every blessing the shaman had to offer, and perhaps most significantly he had been given a new form known as a "charger" and taught how to take the shape of an orc while retaining his newly enhanced strength. He had a spirit that was to follow and guide him to his target. He had all that he should need.
https://imgur.com/a/u2f4AB0
The old soldier warily walked down the stairs into the ancient elf ruins, axe at the ready, still appearing as his normal orcish self. He was confident, but still crept along warily, thankful for the invisible spirit he had been granted as a scout. His name was Neal Agamand; a name which Brox memorized in case the worst somehow happened even to one already dead.
Neal warned him where the first batch of proper defenders were. Four snakelike fish people known as Naga stood in the next chamber of this subterranean complex. Brox rushed them, swinging the Axe of Cenarius in a wide arc that beheaded their magic user and maimed one of the men before they knew he was present. On the backswing he took off a sword arm before using his momentum from the charge to knock the last intact fighter off balance. The one armed soldier attempted to stab Brox in the back, but instead his spear was buried into his companion's gut after Brox grappled him and threw him into the path. He made short of the three critically injured Naga males and continued. The whole exchange was about ten seconds. He wasn't even breathing hard when a short man with an amulet appeared to gather up the corpses.
Brox executed several more successful surprise attacks, thanks to Neal's scouting, but had no illusions that the whole assault would be that easy. Indeed, the enemy raised an alarm and began taking defensive measures quite quickly the first time he had to fight more than five simultaneously. Speed became more important than stealth, and Broxigar the Red began moving quickly from enemy to enemy.
The Axe of Cenarius and the many enchantments strengthening him were of course useful, and Brox would humbly attribute his success to them and Neal, but few warriors could do as Broxigar the Red did even when laden with blessings as he was. He was an incarnation of the idea that the best defense was a good offense, if properly applied. Natural instincts honed by decades of war had granted him a keen, nearly subconscious understanding of the flow of battle, allowing him to assess his situation and act on it seamlessly. With every swing of his axe, the greatest threat to his life would end, every movement was a step away from injury, and even when he allowed an enemy to score a shallow hit it was so that he could avert a deathblow. Whether that deathblow would have come in that same moment or a minute later hardly mattered.
He became more aggressive as he continued the battle, flowing from enemy to enemy like a river. Some, including Brox himself, might assume that his orcish rage was getting the better of him. They would be wrong. No, he was simply acting on the fact that shallow injuries didn't matter to one with the blood of a troll flowing through his veins. As a charger, Brox was stronger, faster, and more durable than ever before, and every movement capitalized on that.
The dark shaman of the Twilight Hammer gave him slightly more trouble, as spells were difficult to dodge, but only frost magic seemed to be fully effective against him. The red dragonscales laughed at fire, and lightning dared not strike one with the blood of Cenarius. It was simple enough to rush down any foe that realized this chink in his armor before the knowledge could spread.
When the old orc beheaded the leader of the cultists here, the last foe he could see, he quickly stopped to bandage his wounds. Some had been deep enough that simple regeneration hadn't closed them, and with the haze of battle fading they stung unpleasantly; proper treatment would help them heal faster. Neal stood sentry and tried to find where to go next; the temple was a maze, so it wasn't so strange to find that a wall stood before Broxigar and his true target. Aku'mai, favored pet of the old gods, was the only death here that really mattered for his mission. The rest were impediments to be killed and collected for the armored spirit woman.
Orders came from above, half remembered visions from Bismark. Broxigar lit the braziers in the four corners of the large shrine, revealing a hidden door to a great cavern. With enough space, Brox took his new semidraconic form, growing large enough to wield the Axe of Cenarius one handed. The giant hydra that came when it sensed the braziers being lit was expecting to be fed a prisoner. It was a huge beast, clearly bloodthirsty and vicious. It released a spray of ineffectual acid at the strange quadruped.
A few minutes later, Broxigar sent its corpse along to the Twilight Grove, idly wondering if it was perhaps inexperienced with fighting enemies of comparable size.