Ruthless: Path of Conquest

Dave and Amalia sat at their posts quietly in the slowly advancing darkness.

Luna and her wolf pack were tracking the monotheists’ movements and would let everyone else know if the group deviated too much from the expected route. It seemed unlikely, since the other ways out of the Fisher Kingdom would force them to move through either Samuel’s swamp or Ysabel’s tropical forest.

The humans—besides Damien, who had transformed into his Werewolf form—and Vampire were left behind to conceal themselves in the planned killing field, since they would only slow the wolf pack down.

Rotter had positioned himself on the other side of the clearing, and he was very slowly chanting as he prepared the largest magical attack of which he was capable, to unleash on the monotheists once they arrived.

That left Dave and Amalia essentially by themselves.

The two had spoken a bit when Dave first learned that Amalia was alive—though that was hardly the word for it, of course—but since then, he’d had time to calm down and accept the reality a bit.

Is she really still her? Even James didn’t really seem to know what it means to be raised as a Vampire.

Dave had seen movies and television with every different interpretation of what a Vampire might be. He had never given the question a close analysis, but he knew that there were more possibilities than simply, This is completely the same person. There was the possibility of Amalia actually being a demon possessing a human body, a corrupted version of herself, or some combination of those options.

It felt like her, but was that just wishful thinking?

“Penny for your thoughts?” Amalia spoke up, giving her usual friendly smile. It looked particularly dazzling in the dying light.

Actually, doesn’t she just generally look better now that it’s getting dark? He had thought her pallor looked unhealthy back in the community center. Of course, she was a Vampire. It would not be strange to him if night versus day had some effect on her overall look.

“I was just trying to think of what to say,” Dave said. “Um, how does it feel to be back out here? Fighting the Kingdom’s battles again?”

Walking around again, he thought. Like you were never dead…

“Feels like I’m home,” Amalia said simply. “Honestly, I know what you’re probably wondering. How I’ve changed…” She let her voice trail off and waited.

Dave finally nodded. Amalia saw it despite the fact that he was shrouded in near total darkness—because of course she did.

“The biggest change is that I’m just less afraid,” she said. “I’m not a different person or something. At least I don’t think I am. But my fear threshold is different now. I used to try and pretend I was sure of myself, that I knew what I was doing—” She chuckled a little, as if slightly embarrassed—“I guess you could say that’s how I died…”

“Sorry about that,” Dave said. “I felt terrible. It’s so absurd that I get to apologize to you, but—”

“Don’t!” she said. “Don’t apologize. I’m happier this way. I’m lucky this is how things went down. Like I said before, I’m way less afraid, of the, uh, new world we live in than I was pre-death. It’s like I’m permanently on Xanax or something. And you really had no choice. I remember everything that happened leading up to me dying, man. You had a hard night.”

“Yeah, I’m still getting used to being at war again—and having a hard time with the idea that we’ll probably always be that way. Before, I kept wondering if there was something I could have done differently in the battle to avoid what happened—” He looked away from her guiltily.

“You don’t have to think about that now,” Amalia said. “I was just telling you I’m probably going to be happier overall after my, um, lifestyle change.”

“Right. I was just saying, that’s why I felt like this ambush—what we’re doing tonight—had to happen. The only thing I can do to prevent losses is to keep us from getting into fights where we’re at a disadvantage. Nip threats in the bud.”

Amalia nodded. “I support that.”

Dave opened his mouth to say something else, but Amalia pointed at the air behind him. So he turned to look.

His jaw dropped. Soaring through the sky on bat-like wings came what appeared to be four small, brown, western-style dragons. As the closest one passed under the moonlight, Dave realized that instead of scales, these creatures were armored with what looked like tough, thick skin. Where a dragon might normally be spiky or sharp, with pointed horns or blade-like scales, these creatures were smooth.

Identify.

Great Venom Wyvern, Lv. 1.

That’s a level one monster? Dave had time to question what the System was telling him. He considered running away, decided he could not outpace the creatures given their flight speed, and drew his pistol instead.

“Wait.” Amalia’s hand gently grabbed Dave’s wrist. “I think they’re friendly.”

Dave turned his head to tell her to let go of him, but then, with a great gust of wind, the creatures landed, standing in a cluster a few feet away from Dave and Amalia.

“These creatures are here to join the fight,” said the Great Venom Wyvern.

But the voice it spoke in was James’s.

“What the fuck?” Dave swore under his breath.

Amalia bowed her head slightly. “Thank you for joining us, Your Majesty,” she said.

You have less of a capacity for surprise as well as fear, I guess, Amalia? Dave thought.

“I would have warned you in advance that I was coming,” James said through the Great Venom Wyvern, “but I wasn’t certain how well this would work. I didn’t want to promise something and then not deliver. And once you were outside the borders of the Fisher Kingdom, I couldn’t use my powers to communicate directly to you anymore. Luna and the wolves already know about these guys.”

“You certainly made some fearsome looking monsters,” Dave said, looking admiringly up at the creatures.

The Great Venom Wyvern smiled and showed a mouthful of jagged teeth coated in a dark-colored liquid.

It was surreal, knowing that the monstrous form was a shell for James’s intelligence.

“Thank you,” Wyvern-James said. “It looks like they’re almost here, by the way.”

“So everything went according to plan,” Amalia said softly. “That’s a nice change.”

Wyvern-James dipped his head slightly and gazed down at the ground, as if he thought that remark had been intended as a personal rebuke. There was silence for a moment.

“Well, we will be on our way,” Wyvern-James said. “It would be nice if the three of you didn’t have to dirty your hands much with this.”

The monsters took to the sky once more, and the only sound that filled the night air was Rotter’s quiet, continuous chanting, which he had not interrupted even to acknowledge the creatures’ presence.

I really thought he was just a pencil pusher, Dave thought of Rotter. Impressive that he kept his focus on the magic while those creatures were down here, looking like they might try and take a bite of us.

There was more to the council’s Secretary than met the eye.

Dave heard the snapping of twigs and jerked his head back in the direction the monotheists should be approaching from.

“They’re here,” Amalia whispered, her voice coming from right next to his ear. “Don’t shoot me this time, ‘kay?” He heard a hint of amusement in her voice, and a little tension left his body.

It’s an inside joke now. That’s what it’s going to be from now on. He hadn’t killed her. Not really. When you were killed, you stayed dead.

The first heads appeared around the trunk of a tree. Some members of Cyrus’s group that Dave only barely recognized. Neither of the leaders was up front. He imagined that Cyrus was somewhere in the middle of the band of people, for his safety, and Christopher Smith was probably helping him walk.

But they would all die tonight. There was no need to wait for a preferred target to appear.

Dave took careful aim and fired a Mana bullet into the nearest person’s chest.

Immediately, the target dropped clutching at his center of mass.

There were cries of shock and pain from the front of the group. Those in the front cried out conflicting reports of what was happening.

“Gerard fainted!”

“No, he’s been shot!”

The whole group ground to a halt as those in front tried to provide medical care to the fallen man.

Before the monotheists could properly get their bearings, wolves materialized from the trees around the front rank of humans. They leaped on the people crouching around Gerard first, giving the next two ranks of people an excellent view of the carnage.

The night air rang out with screams.

“What’s happening?” someone shouted from a bit further back.

“Wolves! We’re under attack!”

Christopher Smith’s voice yelled over all the others, “Square formation! Minimize the vulnerable part of our—”

A horrible, piercing shriek cut through the air and prevented Smith from finishing his sentence. Dave was forced to plug his ears, though he noticed that Amalia, right beside him, resisted the urge to do so. She grimaced but endured.

And the two of them had not been in the center of the area of effect.

Among the shapes of the monotheist group that Dave could see through the dark, around a third dropped to the ground, clutching their heads. Some were visibly bleeding from the ears.

More wolves appeared from the tree line to leap on those at the edges of the group, and the four winged monsters swooped down out of the sky to join in the attack, diving toward the center of the monotheists’ loose formation.

Another loud, piercing shriek cut the air in front of the wyverns as they dove—Dave found himself desperately wishing he had ear plugs—and then a blinding ray of light tore through the center of the enemy group.

That’s James’s ability from the forest fight, he recognized.

In this battle, it was especially helpful, because in addition to doing physical damage, it also appeared to partially blind some of those who had seen it straight-on.

Then Rotter let loose a torrent of lightning from his hiding place. The entire group of the enemy seemed to be caught in the area of effect as far as Dave could see, though he could only see the first five rows of people. There were screams and people clutching at their bodies. Some of them were clearly burned to a crisp, while others escaped with lighter injuries due to being merely grazed by the lightning.

By Dave’s reckoning, more than half of those who had still been standing after the previous attacks dropped on contact with Rotter’s lightning.

Definitely more than just a pencil pusher.

In the immediate aftermath of the lightning, the wyverns landed in the center of the group and began ripping into people. Dave saw Christopher Smith lose an arm to one of the wyverns that seemed to foam at the mouth savagely, eager to tear into more human flesh.

A few of the monotheists nearest to Smith managed to stab the wyverns with swords and knives, but the attacks did not seem to have any meaningful effect. Most of their fellows were too disoriented to engage.

Those at the edges of where the area of effect attacks had hit alternately rubbed their eyes, covered their ears, or clutched wounded body parts that had been grazed by the lightning or the Solar Ray.

Almost no one had the chance to so much as raise a weapon before being set upon by wolves or wyverns. With the wyverns ripping into people from the center of the group and the wolves attacking the outskirts, there was no safe place to go and no central position to coalesce around. Amalia darted into close range and began working alongside the beasts with her knives.

The would-be leader, Christopher Smith, moaned incoherently while bleeding from the stump of his arm until the same wyvern that had wounded him initially bent down and tore his throat out.

The loud shrieks from the wyvern with the sound ability continued periodically as various others attempted to communicate directions and requests.

With piercing sounds repeatedly breaking any attempt to communicate—and clearly partially physically disabling some of the enemy—the monotheists were unable to communicate a plan for their own defense. They stumbled, tripped over each other, and pushed their allies into the path of enemy attacks to save themselves. It was as bad as if they had never fought beside one another before—as bad as if they’d never fought at all before.

Very little energy was given to any kind of offensive action. It seemed to be beyond the group’s capacity even to defend themselves beyond clumsy short term measures like using other people as shields and trying to run away. The ones who’d had the focus and capability to wield knives against the wyverns during initial contact were the first to be killed.

Throughout the engagement, Dave kept firing Mana bullets whenever he had a clear shot that did not have the potential to hit a wolf or wyvern—and whenever he wasn’t clutching his own ears to try and block out some of those horrendous shrieks.

He had no way of knowing when those at the very back fled, because his range of sight was limited by the darkness. He only saw when the fifth row of people away from him began to turn and run.

Then it was clear that more than half of Cyrus’s group was beating a hasty retreat, fleeing in the direction of a nearby river, where Samuel and his children were stationed.

Just as planned.

The wolves followed those who ran, not pursuing them too closely but shepherding them toward the river and picking off those to the sides and rear of the group.

The screams of their victims filled the air, allowing Dave to track how far away the group was.

Aware he couldn’t keep up with the wolves, Dave simply shot at those monotheists who had remained behind—most of whom were either on the ground or barely still standing. He gradually closed the distance between himself and the first rank of the enemy, slowly and carefully moving closer to give himself an easier time aiming his rounds.

Amalia continued working on the wounded with her daggers, now not merely killing people but also draining blood into a large plastic jug that she pulled from her Small Bag of Deceptive Dimensions—and occasionally drinking from the wounds she created.

Dave frowned and did his best to ignore it. This was just a fact of her life now, and it was because of him. He could hardly judge her.

Three of James’s monsters flew off in pursuit of the majority of Cyrus’s group that were fleeing. The remaining one, the Great Venom Wyvern, bit and tore hunks out of the monotheists who had stayed behind. Each bite left massive wounds that Dave guessed were also contaminated by its venom-coated fangs and claws.

Dave shot a few monotheists who were producing the green healing glow he had become familiar with. Then he lowered his weapon. He realized that it was all over. The main body of the enemy were in retreat—Cyrus among them—but there were almost twenty lying dead or dying here.

None of those left remained capable of defending themselves. There was no work for him to do.

It had been an ugly business, but efficient. The part of the fight that had involved Dave, Amalia, and Rotter, had taken two minutes.

The ease of it almost made him feel a little bad, but wasn’t that the point? This ambush was a lot easier than the fight that he anticipated if—or rather when, as he reminded himself—Cyrus and his followers ever returned to the Fisher Kingdom.

Dave was still convinced the ambush was absolutely necessary to his new country’s security, and as far as he was aware, there were no casualties on their side this time.

He told himself that as the sound of screams—and splashing—in the distant night continued—and eventually gave way to a long, heavy silence.

Shortly after the last remaining bodies in the area around Dave stopped moving, a gentle light emanated from all of them, and they began disappearing. He looked around and realized the remaining wyvern was responsible. Even the evidence of the ambush was being wiped clean.

The plan had succeeded thoroughly.