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WotR Chapter 83: The Slow Way Vs. The Fast Way
🕑 Added 2020-01-08 02:34:18 +0000 UTC
“What the hell is taking that brat so long?” Orson asked, glancing over at Ussein. “Yesterday was the day he asked you to take a day off.” He glanced over at the mountainside where men were hiding, ready to ambush the upstart’s company with vastly superior force.
He couldn’t afford to keep so many of his men in one place much longer.
Orson’s spies had reported the entire troop march out the west gate nearly a week ago, before heading south. Since then, no one had seen them re-enter the city. They had to have been heading toward the Cobalts.
“Hold on. There’s something on the horizon.” Ussein said, with his blasted perfect vision. I would have perfect vision if I’d been a Legend at his age, too, damnitall.
Orson brought up the spyglass, and in a moment he was able to identify an uleisan message runner, on a narrow sled built for speed with a blue strip on it. The sled parked a mile or so distant before the driver jumped out and began sprinting toward them on the rocky ground.
“This seems urgent,” Ussein said, idly leaning an elbow against the wall as they watched the runner approach
About six minutes later, the runner was allowed through the front gate, where he stood in front of Orson, panting and sweating, resting his arms on his knees as he took desperate gulps of air.
“What is it? What’s the news?”
“Dead. All dead.”
“Gonna need a little more to go on.” Orson said impatiently. “You’re not poisoned, spit it out!”
The messenger nodded, took a deep breath, and spoke. “Every business you own has been attacked overnight. Somehow someone killed everyone inside without alerting anyone, and stole every cent therein, and the princess seems to have been kidnapped.”
Orson grabbed him by the shoulders “You’re not saying what I think you’re saying. Because if you were –“ I wouldn’t have enough to pay these men. Orson realized it was probably best not to speak that part out loud.
“We’re heading back to the city,” Orson said, glaring at Ussein. “This was obviously a diversion.”
Orson rallied his men, and by the end of the afternoon, they were packed up and ready to march out, carrying their sleds atop their shoulders.
Upon reaching the smooth desert sand, Ussein held out a hand.
“Something doesn’t feel right.” he said, loud enough for the troop to hear him.
***Calvin***
Calvin pounded his fist into his palm.
“Then we ambush them on the way back, and the Orson problem is no longer a problem.”
“Okay, so let me get this straight. You bribed a Legend with an inordinate amount of Nem to take a specific day off so you could attack the fort he’s guarding.” Kala said, holding up a hand.
Nadia was sitting next to her giving Calvin a strange look.
“Then you’re going to assume he’s going to report you.” Kala continued.
“Chances are good, right?”
“…Yeah, but not certain. Then you assume Orson’s going to set up an ambush, and be there personally to witness your destruction.”
“Why, you think he’s not?”
“Kind of a toss-up.” Nadia said, waggling her palm.
“So assuming all of that happens, you have a plan to raid all of Orson’s properties in the middle of the night without a single witness, kidnap me, and abscond with all his money?”
“Oh, yeah, you know how you can suffocate from bad air?” Calvin asked. “All I gotta do is burn some charcoal with limited air intake and catch the fumes in a bottle.”
Carbon monoxide, yes. Although I bet Borus could make us a purer version than we ever could by ourselves.
“Then I have my knick-knacks dig a little hole into the property, about this big,” Calvin said, making a circle with his thumb and forefinger.
“Pump the entire house full of bad air to kill every living thing inside, Dismiss the summon, then waltz inside and take everything.” Calvin shrugged. “It’s not complicated.”
Nadia was grinning now. Nadia grinning meant the plan was probably not great. Kala sighed and rubbed her forehead.
“What? is something wrong with the plan?” Calvin asked. It was a pretty good plan, he thought. The enemy would die in their sleep, no mess, no trouble, and even if he decided not to double down and kill Orson, the shipping tycoon would be ruined, with no hard evidence of whodunnit.
Nadia was laughing out loud, now.
“Actually, it’s a pretty good plan and has a high chance of working exactly how you expect it to. Aside from the fact that you’re talking about killing innocent business owners and that it’s a fucking war crime,” Kala said, fingers splayed as she gestured suddenly.
“Let me tag in.” Nadia said, patting Kala’s shoulder before facing Calvin.
“Calvin. What happens after?”
“I win. I beat the guy. So I win.” What were the girls having so much trouble understanding about this concept?
“Right, what happens after that? What happens with say...Orson’s business partners? The other eleven men who rule the city? What happens when the families of the people who live at these businesses get word that you’re the one who killed their son, daughters, brothers and sisters?”
“The bad air was so that we didn’t get caught.” Calvin said.
“It’s not a matter of not getting caught.” Kala said. “Even if there wasn’t a scrap of evidence, they can still point the finger at you.”
“So…what you’re saying is…They’ll retaliate.”
“Yes!” Kala said emphatically. “That plan is stupid! Not because it wouldn’t work, but because it would cause a horrific amount of retaliation. The entire city would be out to lynch you, me, and every other Gadveran living here.”
“See, this is what I need you guys for. Politics.” Calvin said, motioning to them. I wonder if there’s a way I can murder Orson AND be lauded as a hero. Politics slipped my mind again.
“Why didn’t you warn him?” Kala said, staring straight through Calvin.
I wanted to see how he handled it. He asked for the opinion of someone better informed, which is good enough for me.
Nadia gave Kala a curious look before schooling her expression.
“Okay, well, I already bribed Ussein to abandon his post two weeks from now, and I haven’t gotten any immediate backlash, so let’s hear what the experts have to say on the issue.”
Nadia and Kala glanced at each other, then back to Calvin.
“Make him look like an idiot.” They said as one.
“You’ve got to find a way to make the man look like a blundering doofus, a doddering fool wasting money and talent.” Kala said.
“You’ve got to make him hemorrhage money over time, by his own hand on fruitless pursuits, rather than taking it all away from him in one fell swoop.” Nadia added.
Damnation. I like the fell swoop.
I know you do.
This whole hemorrhaging thing sounds like it’s going to take oodles of time.
All good things take time to do right.
Agh!
“Any advice on how to do that?” Calvin asked.
“Not if you’re interested in learning how to do this on your own.” Kala said.
Calvin directed his attention to Nadia.
“Maybe if you spent some time convincing me.” Nadia said.
“No need,” Calvin said, standing. “You’ve been more than helpful enough. You’ve earned a special reward. For the rest, I think I should try to figure it out myself.”
He patted Kala’ head, slapped Nadia’ face, and headed out. He had to make some plans that didn’t involve war-crimes.
***Kala***
“Ah, that’s more like it,” Nadia sighed, relaxing into the chair as she traced the red spot on her cheek. “I wonder what the special reward is.” She bit her lip. “Maybe he’ll pierce my nipples, hook them to a wagon and drag me naked through the city.”
Kala couldn’t speak for a moment as she studied the fair-skinned princess. She’d heard stories about the things that could happen to royals when their mental attributes were forcibly raised through unending trauma, but she’d never actually seen one.
“You’re pretty fucked up. You know that, right?”
“You’re one to talk.” Nadia scoffed.
“Is Calvin gone?” Ella’s voice came from the tall standing dresser in the corner of the room. “It feels like he’s gone.”
Nadia wordlessly motioned to the closet, brows raised.
“Fuck you.”
“You wish,” Nadia said, standing to follow Calvin out the door.
Noooot really… Kala thought as she watched Nadia leave. Crazy was a turn-off.
“You think he noticed the smell?” Ella asked as she stepped out of the dresser with the pipe in hand. Fully clothed, despite Nadia’s presumptions.
Well, she was hiding in a dresser. Kala thought wryly.
“I dunno,” Kala said as Ella took Nadia’s seat, opening the cabinet and grabbing another pinch of Jush. “He doesn’t have the best natural Intuition, so maybe not.”
“Did we actually have to hide everything?” Ella asked.
Kala thought about it for a moment. Were they actually doing anything wrong?
“No,” Kala said with a grin, grabbing the third volume of Clan of the Cave Gardor from where she’d hastily shoved it under her chair. “It was fun, though, wasn’t it? Now pass me that shit.”
Ella chuckled and passed the long blue glass pipe Kala had commissioned from Jinsei, complete with multiple bubbling chambers filled with water to ease the harsh heat of the smoke.
Kala took a big hit and passed it back to her friend, trying to focus on the words squirming across the page as she exhaled, Reading to Ella while getting glimpses into the creator’s miniature world between the lines of script, thanks to the Jush and Seer.
Shared Visions.
23/25 Bent remaining.
“This was it, the ceremony that would bind the tribes together as one. Evelyn would have to perform for the chiefs as the Tribe Wife…”
Ella gave a crude laugh as Kala’s visions began to reflect in her own eyes.
***Calvin***
“Your girlfriends are boning each other.” Nadia said, catching up with him.
“They’re smoking hallucinogenic drugs and reading smut. Not boning.”
“Which leads to boning.” Nadia said, using her hands for emphasis.
“Two things,” Calvin said, turning to face her, holding up a finger. “I really, really, don’t mind if they’re boning. It doesn’t threaten me. And second,” he held up another finger. “It takes a bone to bone.”
Calvin thought for a moment, then held up another finger.
“And third: I’m getting the distinct impression you’re trying to sow discord. You’re running the risk of losing your special reward.”
“Well, when am I gonna get it then!?” Nadia demanded.
“When I’m sure you deserve one.”
“You can’t just keep using me forever!” Nadia said.
“Says who?” Calvin asked, glancing at her with an arched brow.
Nadia shuddered with desire for a moment before glaring at him. “Damn it, quit…doing that!”
“Doing what?”
“Doing what I want by not doing what I want!”
“That’s a bit of a paradox, don’t you think?” Calvin said, turning back down the hall. “All kidding aside, I promise, if you keep working well, stop trying to turn me against my friends, and actually get along with them, I’ll give you a reward, and it will be totally degrading and utterly humiliating.”
“So what, you want me to get up Kala’s skirt too?”
“Being bratty isn’t going to help, either.”
Nadia clicked her tongue in disappointment before he felt her emotions sober up and get back to the task at hand.
“So, what are you going to do about Orson?”
Calvin thought about it for a moment. He still wanted Cobalt Fort, but he had to distance himself from the conflict even further than he’d originally thought, and he couldn’t simply murder Orson’s entire infrastructure, according to the Party-Poopers.
“I think I’ll steal a messenger uniform…and get me some charcoal and a bottle.” Calvin said. “The bad air idea can still come in handy.”
*** ***
“Something doesn’t feel right.” Ussein said, glancing around at the troop that was coming to a halt on the burning desert sand, readying their sleds. “Where’s the messenger?”
***Calvin
Calvin hummed to himself as he tore off the messenger uniform, pulling the Storm-Stretch uniform out of his messenger bag.
One of the guys.
Calvin grunted as his bones and flesh shifted from that of the messenger he’d waylaid, to an average employee of Storm-Stretch. Literally.
With all the new faces brought in by Orson, he’d fade into the crowd easily.
I should have taken Master of Disguise, He thought bitterly as he slid the uniform on. Then again, suggesting that the messenger had already completed his task and should head back to Uleis would have been a lot harder without Mesmerizing Eyes.
I’ll just grab MoD when Acting hits fifteen. Assuming I live that long.
Calvin was in the middle of shoving his messenger outfit back in the back when the door to the closet opened, spilling light on the vast array of mops, buckets, shovels, axes, and other long-handled tools.
“Uh…what are you doing in here?” The young Uleisan said, looking at Calvin from bottom to top.
Calvin looked him in the eyes, waited for a moment for the man to meet his gaze. In an instant he felt the faint headache that let him measure the resistance of the man’s Stability. There wasn’t much.
A moment later Ulleisan soldier’s jaw hung open as he got lost in Calvin’s gaze. “You didn’t see anyone,” Calvin said, wiping up dust with his finger. “You had a sneezing fit.”
Calvin blew the dust into the man’s face as he walked past.
Behind him the soldier sneezed violently three times.
“Dusty as shit,” Calvin heard the man complaining before he turned a corner and the sound of him rattling through the long tools faded.
Calvin took his belts out of the bag and threw the rest in a latrine hole, cinching them around his chest and waist as he walked through the crowded fort.
The uniform wasn’t strictly upheld by the men manning the fort, so a few extra belts wouldn’t really bother anyone.
“You smell different.” A small voice spoke as he made his way through the fortress. Calvin turned, ready to deflect suspicion with playful banter.
In front of him was the top of a cage. When Calvin looked down, he spotted the owner of the voice. A skeletal Cobalt, lying on it’s side, watching him with watery eyes.
Calvin squatted down beside the cage.
“Can your people fight?” He asked studying the creature. Its spines were shorn close to its back, guts barely held inside its body by a thin membrane of skin. The creature’s muscles had long since been devoured by it’s own stomach.
“Used to. Now, fighters…are culled.”
“Are you a fighter?” Calvin asked.
There was a wheezing chuff, something Calvin guessed was amusement.
“You wouldn’t think so.” He took a deep breath as if to bolster his strength for something difficult. “I am The Traitor. The first chief to surrender to the humans and…ironically, the last to remember the old ways.”
“You speak for them?” Calvin asked.
“No,” the wretched Cobalt panted. “No. I do not.”
“Hmm…” Calvin thought, scanning the rest of the courtyard, taking in the underfed Cobalts in chains, some locked away like the one dying in front of him. Others were strapped in place and fed a strange slurry of orange rock and water with iron funnels scored by the flat tooth-marks of hundreds of Cobalts.
In the distance a team of emaciated Cobalts were tossing a stack of dead Cobalts into a chute like trash, overseen by a team of four jovial looking fellows with their palms resting on their pommels.
“You pass away here and now if you want, but hold on another day, and you’ll see something interesting. I guarantee it. Hold on another month, and you’ll see something great!
“You smell like death,” The Cobalt moaned.
“Maybe so,” Calvin grinned. “But not yours.”
Calvin stood up with his hands in his pockets and ambled up the stairs. Nobody stopped him as he made his way up to the gatehouse on top of the wall, where a couple soldier were idly playing cards.
In the corner of the room was one of two massive metal contraptions, designed to raise and lower the bridge. Plant matter being at a premium in Uleis, there was no massive hemp rope for him to cut, or anything, simply a complicated metal gearbox attached to chains as thick as his leg.
Damn, this makes things difficult, Calvin thought to himself, studying the immensely heavy-duty gearbox that made lifting the gate possible as the card players looked up at him curiously.
“Who’re you?”
Dude, you practiced with thermite for this exact reason.
“Oh, yeah.” Calvin lashed out with a knife jutting out of his palm, sticking the first man’s reflexively thrown up hand to his skull, before slamming the blade through the other one’s ear.
Mass Multi Shaping.
14/15 Bent remaining.
Calvin spread his fingers around his belt like the keys on a piano, touching each ingredient to confirm exactly where it was. He created a fifty-pound stack of thermite on the gearbox in front of him, and one on the gearbox on the other side of the gate, where the two guards were rising to their feet in alarm.
The other hundred and twenty-five pounds? That went to replicating the brown crystals in the frozen vial on his waist in front of the face of each soldier he could see, and the tiniest dollop of God’s fire to get the thing moving.
There was a crack that seemed to come from everywhere at once as the compounds exploded, and Calvin felt a concerning pain in his ears.
He didn’t have time to worry about it, though as the thermite caught fire and began giving of skin-searing heat from several yards away, forcing him to retreat from the gatehouse as the gearboxes began melting into slag.
The heavy steel gate wasn’t going to be opening any time soon.
Calvin scanned the fortress. The guards in the other gatehouse were missing their heads, along with at least fifty more in the main courtyard and along the wall.
No one knew he was responsible.
As the alarm went up, Calvin glanced up at the mountain above the fort, searching for the sign that Grant had gotten the signal.
As the soldiers sprinted back and forth through the courtyard, flooding out of the interior of the fort as they tried to figure out what had happened, Grant’s mercenaries flooded over the peak of the mountain, the Veterans sprinting down the steep cliffs on foot.
“I hate doing things the slow way,” Calvin muttered, leaning against the walls as he watched his scapegoats approach to take credit.
Comments
WhiteRabbit
I thought it was shadowboxing...
0xFFF1
He's had shadow-boxing sex already. That is an accurate representation of how Kala would act if consequences were removed. So the reason he hasn't gotten laid irl isn't on his end, rather to do with princess baggage. Does that count
Garend
Pffft. He doesn't even have a physical relationship with either of them, and he starts sprouting shit about needing a cock?
Macronomicon
Taking one of my two days off today.
Darastrix
Is 2day a post day?
Macronomicon
hmmm....mkay
0xFFF1
The flashback / flashforwards are kinda jarring. I suggest you check if writing the chapter in chronological order feels better. Alternatively, make it explicit that the PoV changes are flashbacks, so you don't have to figure it out by parsing the context.
Hjörtur Þorgeirsson
Deinos yes. Since I'm against thought crimes. And if a person behaves as a good person purely through enlightened self interest... that's still good enough for me
Deinos
Yup he didn't do it, not because of a lack of wanting to. If a psychopath doesn't push you from a ledge because you can still be useful to him or because he wouldn't get away with it in that instance, does it make him a better person? :D
Nicholas F
Yeah, but he was planing to. That willingness is what Nadia wanted though I imagine she also wanted it wrapped up in enough power to ignore the possibility of retaliation so he actually does it.
Macronomicon
he didn't do the slaughtering of people in town in their sleep.
Deinos
Seems like Nadia got Christmas early. That step from butcher of armies to butcher of civilians seems to have been seamless and a bit surprising.
Louie
I kinda wanna see the war crime route haha
Hjörtur Þorgeirsson
I'm joking... I love he has them for the politicking
Hjörtur Þorgeirsson
Fuck the slow way... The fast way sounded way more fun!
Adrian Gorgey
It was good! A little heavy on POV switches, but a very fun bit of murder and scoundelry
Chris
I liked this chapter. Plenty of stuff going on and it was funny as hell when they smacked down his plan. His mentality cracks me up as well "I win. I beat the guy. So I win."
Chad B. Sonnen
Nadia is doing a great job. Calvin must really have underestimated Nadia's desires to do harm to others by concentrating on her masochistic needs, a mistake. Nadia would never be placated ever, to her, Calvin's "rewards" is a different itch to be scratch compared to her other needs, namely her sadism to do harm to others. Calvin is dead wrong to think that he could apease her two needs by just satisfying one.
Alias
Was very good.
Its good.
Darastrix
Cliffhanger :(
Macronomicon
I'm really not sure if today's was any good or not. (yawn) I am tired though.
