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Nero Walker, Book 3 Ch.35 (150)
🕑 Added 2024-04-10 22:30:01 +0000 UTCWhile Nero and the elites were fighting for their lives in Dorchester, the council of mages was embroiled in a heated debate in the Tower of Magic’s council hall in Hennings.
Archmage Mathers rubbed his temples with his palms, his eyes were closed tightly in pain. The argument going on around him was just too stupid for his mind to process. As usual, his fellow arch-mages were wasting time pointlessly debating a topic that was, at best, academic.
“I’m telling you, it’s not that you CAN’T address him as Scholar Jenkins, it’s that you shouldn’t,” said one arch-mage, while leaning back in his chair with a look of complete confidence on his face.
His main opponent in the debate, Arch-mage Tulli, slammed her hand down on the table and yelled across the room, “Just because he is only at the rank of ‘adept’ does not mean that he isn’t a ‘scholar’. The man leads an entire team in the archives primarily responsible for peer-review and theoretical proofing. It’s his hells-be-damned job title for heaven’s sake! There is no reason NOT to call him Scholar Jenkins!”
Not even remotely unsettled by her outburst, the man replied, “I’m not saying that he isn’t a scholar. I’m simply saying that addressing him as one is inaccurate. He is first and foremost an adept… his job title is immaterial to ‘who’ he is. While he can change jobs, he cannot change his rank!”
A supporter of the other arch-mage replied, “Just because he never applied for magus testing to attain the rank of arch-mage, doesn’t mean he isn’t entitled to receive the respect he deserves. It’s insulting to refer to a scholar as a mere adept. I don’t see why we can’t just refer to him as a scholar and make everyone happy.”
Another mage piped in, angrily shouting, “Because that would imply that he is an arch-mage! Which he is not! One thing has nothing to do with the other!”
In support, another person shouted, “That’s right! If you look at the identification records filed with the personnel department, you’ll see he is listed as an adept. Therefore, that’s the only title he is entitled to.”
An older arch-mage, currently fed up with the argument shouted, “Does this ‘Jenkins’ even care what title we use when we talk about him?”
One of the original debaters slammed her hand down on the table again, nearly screaming, “That’s irrelevant!”
A confused arch-mage chimed in, the sincerity of his question causing everyone to stare at him for a moment, “What is? The fact that he doesn’t care what he’s called, or that he does?”
A timid voice spoke up, “Why can’t everyone just be referred to as whatever title they want? We can just have them choose their preferred title, and register it with local hub. Won’t that solve everything?”
Seeing this as a good opportunity to join in on the debate, one of the newer arch-mages shouted, “I’ve always wanted to be referred to as ‘Supreme Magus Extraordinaire’! I don’t see a problem with it.”
Shouts for and against the proposed policy erupted in the room. Some people derided the idea as completely unscientific and a waste of time. Others shouted out their own preferred titles, eagerly trying to stake their claim on whatever title resonated with their personal philosophy. There were those that tried to stick to scientific arguments, while others stated that there was no harm in adopting a cultural convention that covered every eventuality.
Mather’s was at his wits end, he slammed his palm down on table with essence infusing his hand. The resulting sound was loud enough to silence the entire council chamber. “This is obviously a question for the cultural department of standards. Someone fill out the query and register it. Anyone interested in the topic will have the opportunity to present their arguments to them. This is not something that falls under our purview. For the official record, you’re all idiots. Did anyone NOT understand who Arch-mage Tulli was referring to when he referenced Jenkins’ findings?” he asked, while pointing at the large report still being projected above the table.
No one in the room spoke up, and the silence stretched for a few uncomfortable seconds.
“I thought not. So what does it matter what you call him!” he finished, nearly growling by the end of his rant.
After taking a few deep breathes to clear his mind, he continued, “Now. Let’s get back to the original topic. How do we feel about the findings? Are we happy with this proposed strategy? Do we think this is the best way to go about reducing the influence of the Tower of Fate?”
The silence was broken by one of the arch-mages grumbling a little too loudly, “I don’t think we should follow the recommendation of a man who doesn’t even know what title he should use.” Several guffaws and chuckles burst out, while a few gasps were heard.
Arch-mage Mathers shot to his feet, screaming, “That’s it. You and me Bertrand. In the arena, right now. I’m gonna pummel you so bad, the only title you’ll be using is victim!”
Once again, the council hall erupted in shouts of support and dissent. It was hours before they finally decided to go with Jenkins’ plan for their shadow war with the Tower of Fate.
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As the kobalds all stared back at the tree-line, eagerly waiting to see what their over-seers had summoned, most of the elites took the opportunity to cast cleaning spells and prepare for the next stage of the battle.
However, Nero stood there transfixed by what he was happening. Although whatever was going on behind the tree-line was too far for him to perceive with his mind probe, he was still able to see the effect it had on the ambient essence in the ethereal plane, and what an effect it was.
All of the essence that had been slowly accumulating in the area was being pulled toward whatever the kobalds had done. It looked like a hole had been poked in reality and everything was leaking out through whatever opening it had made. To Nero, it was like the colors all around him were getting a little bit dimmer. He hadn’t realized how much the ethereal plane affected the material one.
Like a bomb going off, the trees that were being disturbed by the event were ripped out of the ground and pushed aside. Even from as far away as Nero was, he could see a bright light come into existence and start expanding. The ground shook, and a wide open area was being revealed along the tree-line.
When the final tree fell, Nero was able to finally see what the kobalds had done. There was a large, jagged portal leading to what looked like another world. Taking a guess, he thought it must be at least 30ft wide by 20ft tall, and it was still growing. Through the shimmering hole in reality, he could see cracked red soil, and an orange sky. ‘Are those mountain’s or volcanoes in the distance?’ he wondered.
He couldn’t really see all that much, as the view was blocked by a large snout weaving back and forth on the other side of the portal. Despite being over 100ft away, Nero could tell that the damn thing’s head was at least the size of a train-car, maybe a house. He could see its large yellow eyes, brimming with intelligence looking through the portal, trying to judge what kind of environment it would be invading. Nero shivered a little when its gaze ran over his position. From what little he could see, the beast looked like a gigantic komodo dragon crossed with a crocodile.
Nero stared blankly at the soon-to-be emerging reptile, and asked the only question that mattered at the moment, “Is that a dragon?”
Nick, as usual, was the one to answer Nero’s question, “Of course not! A dragon looks nothing like that. Why in all of the hells would you think that is a dragon?” His voice full of mockery, as if the question itself were somehow insulting to him.
Nero turned his head and pointed with his sword at the portal in the distance. “Alright smart-ass, then what the hell is it?”
Nick glared at him and replied, “I have no idea. It’s obviously an extra-planar lizard of some kind.”
Sergeant Wesker’s voice was full of worry as he said, “It’s a siege-wyrm. Kobald armies summon them when they want to assault cities. At least that explains what they were doing out here. This must be their intended invasion point… or at least one of them.”
Nick asked curiously, “How did you come to that conclusion?”
Sergeant Wesker snorted, “Because a summoning of that scale requires a great deal of preparation. Not to mention a lot of sacrificial magic. That must be what the shamans were doing back there.”
Nero looked over his shoulder at all the kobald bodies that had been piled up over the past hour, or maybe two. ‘I really should keep a closer watch on the time,’ he thought wryly.
Shaking his head at the waste of life, he looked back to see what was happening with the portal. It was now much larger and the beast seemed like it was eager to come through. When it pulled its head back from the portal, it tentatively shoved one of its massive feet through the opening. The moment it crossed the threshold, all of the kobalds all started cheering, their hissing screams of excitement made Nero’s ears feel like they were bleeding.
The beast was so large, even its leg filled the entire portal. ‘How much larger is the portal going to grow? The thing must be the size of an apartment building, at least!’ he thought to himself, in awe of what he was seeing.
Firming his grip on his weapons, he asked, “Is that portal permanent?”
Shrugging, Sergeant Wesker replied, “No idea. It might be that we’ll have to go down there and close it ourselves.”
Nick snorted at the idea, saying, “Yeah, that’s a wonderful idea. There’s only like a thousand kobalds between here and there. No problem at all.”
Before anyone could reply, Sergeant Wesker stiffened in place for a second. Nero looked over at the man, confused as to what was happening.
When the man started moving again, the first thing he did was dismiss the shield he had been using. Reaching up, he pulled down the shield that had been hovering above them, dismissing the glowing bubble that had been protecting them since the beginning of the battle. Luckily, the kobalds were still busy ogling the summoning portal and weren’t attacking at the moment. In fact, it looked like they were completely ignoring the elites for the time being.
‘Perhaps they only attacked us so that they could fulfill the requirements to open the portal? Is that why they were so eager to die? Makes sense, I guess. We don’t really matter much in the face of the that city-killing monstrosity,’ he thought grimly.
All along the line, the sergeants were pulling down the shields and switching out their weapons. Nero looked around with no small amount of confusion, completely lost as to what the plan might be. ‘Are we taking the opportunity to run away?’ he wondered hopefully.
While Nero heard Sergeant Wesker bark, “Everyone, on me!”, Captain Angelton’s essence enhanced voice called out, “Collapse!” The order was loud enough to make Nero jump a little in surprise.
Following along with the rest of the elites, he stumbled a little as everyone converged into the center of the camp. He was quickly pushed into a position, and then told to stay put. He watched as the burgeoning formation arranged itself all around him, his confusion evident on his face. For a moment, he was able to share a look with Rose who seemed just as out of sorts as he was. It looked like she was being placed somewhere in the middle, most likely because she white-knuckling her bow.
Opening his senses, he took a look around to see what their new formation looked like. It turned out that they were being arranged in the classic arrow maneuver that geese do in the sky. But this time, the middle was full of ranged fighters while the edges were filled with shield-bearers and melee fighters. All the way at the front stood Captain Angelton, his stone-like face surveying the preparations with a practiced eye.
Before long, Nero was standing next to two elites he didn’t recognize. He found himself on the outer edge of the left side, not liking the conclusions he was coming to. ‘Are these crazy sons-of-bitches really planning on charging into all that? Downhill, through a field of kobalds, TOWARD the building sized monster that is emerging from some kind of hell-plane! Yeah, this has ‘good-idea’ written all over it,’ he thought to himself, filing the mental complaint in his head.
Feeling the essence around him shift, Nero looked up to see a new set of shields forming above them. Instead of being supported by floating, physical shields, these new magic shields were made up of overlapping squares of blue tinted glass-like energy. He was able to trace the shields back to their casters, seeing a group of soldiers in the middle of the formation huddling around each other with looks of concentration on their faces. Recognizing one of them, Nero thought to himself, ‘Isn’t that chick one of the healers that always rez’d me during training?’
Captain Angelton’s voice shocked him out of his thoughts, as the man’s impromptu speech was loud enough to shake the ground under their feet. “We move as one! If someone falls, hand them back to your comrades behind you. We don’t stop. That portal cannot open. We end this here and now. Reinforcements are coming and we just have to hold out until they get here. Our lives, the lives of Dorchester’s citizens… Every one of them is in our hands. We must not... We will not... FAIL! This is our duty. This is our purpose. Soldiers of Oglivarch! Forward! For Dorchester!” he shouted, causing the entire formation to surge as one down the hill.
Nero felt like everything was happening too fast. It hadn’t even been 5 minutes since the portal opened, and already the entire tone of the battle had completely shifted. One minute, he was happily ripping apart kobalds, and now he was charging down a hill toward his doom. ‘Is this how the kobalds felt a few minutes ago?’ he wondered.
It didn’t take long for the kobalds to realize what the ‘smooth-skins’ were doing. Almost immediately, they stopped staring at the summoning portal and resumed their attacks. Like a competing tide, the lizards all started charging the formation. But due to the speed of the elites, some of the kobalds ended up having to turn around and follow them from behind, their little legs unable to keep up.
As he ran down the hill, Nero fended off incoming arrows with his shield, and slashed at anything that got close to him. He wasn’t bothering to try and kill anything, he was just forcing any kobald that got close to jump back and tangle itself up with the kobalds behind it. ‘Hopefully, by the time we get to the portal, we’ll be able to reform the line. But without the advantage of the terrain making them spread out, this is going to suck hard,’ he thought to himself, while pushing a kobald back with a sword slash to its snout.
Through his perception field, he was trying to pay attention to what was happening near the front of the formation, and he was really liking what he was seeing. Captain Angelton was like a force of nature. The man had created some kind of floating golden panels that were acting like a cow-catcher on the front of a train. Rather than being vertical, they were aligned horizontally, so as the formation moved down the hill, the panels were knee-capping the kobalds one after another. It was brutal. The elites around the captain didn’t even bother to pause as they stepped over the downed lizards, stomping them into the dirt while they marched over them. To Nero, it looked like the man was using a giant, magic, weed-wacker to mow down his enemies.
Looking closely at the golden panels, Nero realized that they must be the captain’s ability at work. If Nero remembered right, the man had a ‘defensive’ pillar. Or maybe it was ‘protection’? Either way, it was something like that. Regardless, whatever it was called, the way the man was using the glowing shields was definitely not very ‘defensive’. ‘I guess that proves what Nick said about pillars, they really are ‘loosely defined’ and open to interpretation,’ he thought.
Behind the captain, Nero could see Specialist Howard forming some kind of spell as he jogged down the hill. The essence was pooling around the man, but Nero couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Most spell-forms looked like symbolic writing, but this one looked almost 3d. It wasn’t at all flat, it was more like a cube. Even though Nero was close enough to get a good look, it still didn’t make any sense to him.
All too soon, they were at the tree-line and the fighting became a little more hectic than Nero was comfortable with. After feeling an arrow clip his shoulder, he decided that his mind probe wasn’t very important at the moment and dismissed it in order to free up some mental muscle. Using his newfound ability to multi-task, he quickly summoned his mage-armor and condensed a new layer of protection.
The blood and gore blended together into one giant blur of carnage, and Nero’s entire world shrunk to the small bubble of violence going on around him.
With no one to clear the bodies, their speed began to falter. Perhaps the front of the formation made it to the portal, because eventually their pace slowed to a walk. That was until Nero bumped shoulders with the elite on his right, and then their forward progress came to a complete halt.
Hacking and slashing, Nero fought with everything he had. Before long, technique took a back-seat to expedience, and he felt like he was once again chopping down trees. His enemies were stumbling over their fallen comrades, eventually forming a make-shift wall of dead kobalds at the their feet. In order to get closer, the kobalds had to drag their dead out of the way, leaving pools of blood in the dirt. The stench of combat was making his head swim, and the essence in the air was like sludge filling the ethereal plane, dulling his senses.
Suddenly, the enemy in front of him wasn’t a tiny kobald, it was a 7 ft tall lizard-man frothing at the mouth and hurling understandable insults.
Receiving an overhead swing directly onto his shield, Nero heard the giant kobald’s hissing screech, “You’ll die screaming smooth-skin! This is our mountain, and there is no place for your kind here!”
Nero felt the strike all the way to his ankles, his entire body shaking with the contact. ‘Holy shit this dude is strong!’ he thought.
Not wanting to fight the giant lizard head on, Nero did what he always thought about when he was getting his ass kicked by Cathleen, he cheated. As his essence field was strong enough to allow him to cast near his body, he carved a ‘stone-spike’ spell directly on his own chest, facing out. With a smirk on his face, he angled his shield to let the kobald’s sword fall a little off to his side, then used his shield to further push it out of position. The result was him presenting his chest like he was firing a chest-laser directly at the bastard in front of him. Considering the difference in height, Nero’s plan worked… kind of.
The lizard-man did, in fact, allow his sword to fall a little off to the side, and he did allow himself to be pushed a little out of position. He probably didn’t think that a small smooth-skin, one who was barely tall enough to reach his chest, would be able to reach him at their current distance. Unfortunately for him, Nero wasn’t using his sword to attack him.
The glowing circle on Nero’s chest went off, his personalized ‘stone-spike’ spell launching a rapid fire series of spikes one after another. Each one shooting forward at the speed of an arrow.
Nero’s grin turned a little sour as he saw the first two spikes hit the giant lizard in the lower gut, then the last two ruined whatever was between the kobald’s legs. Luckily, whatever was down there was hidden by a primitive loincloth and what could pass for chain-mail leggings. The sight of the kobald’s knees locking together in pain made Nero involuntarily cringe.
The kobald dropped his sword, his clawed hands shooting to his crotch. After freezing like a cat being noticed, he collapsed to his knees right in front of Nero.
Now at eye level, Nero looked into the lizard-man’s eyes. While, it was unnerving to feel empathy for an enemy, the look of pain on its face after getting hit in a lizard’s most sacred place was all too familiar to Nero. Even worse, the pathetically whining hiss that came out of the kobald’s mouth made Nero want to gag in sympathetic pain.
Wanting it to end, Nero stepped forward and stabbed the kobald in the throat, saying, “Don’t start none, won’t be none.”
He watched the kobald bleed out in front of him, the large corpse giving him a moment of respite in the insanity going on all around him.
Looking up, he saw that there were still plenty of enemies trying to force their way into melee range, and he knew that it wasn’t going to get any better, anytime soon.
‘Did I just get to deliver a bad-ass line after killing a bad guy who was way out of my league… like a boss? Yes. Yes, I did. I’m really living the dream, aren’t I,’ he told himself, trying to see the silver lining in the cloud of kobald souls clogging the ether.
Comments
Ocean Breeze
I'm enjoying the prechapters as much as the main storyline. Every single one has been great, and fleshing out the setting is always worthwhile.
Leetle Sheet
Thanks. I know that part with the mages has like zero impact on the story, but I couldn't get it out of my head and I had to write it down. The entire time I was writing it, I couldn't stop giggling like a madman.
Ocean Breeze
Great prechapter, and awesome chapter!
