Eramith
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Book 2: Chapter 60
🕑 Added 2023-06-02 13:00:05 +0000 UTCBy the time he reached the northern most point of the kingdom, the Devoured’s levels had peaked in the mid 500s but none of them were particularly threatening. Felix found an intact house that seemed solidly built so he used it as a place to sleep and allow his body time to relax a little after everything he had put it through. When he had been inspecting his body while healing earlier, he noticed he had gotten far too close to completely tearing multiple tendons just from trying to finish the wyvern off.
Thinking about it now, he should have used more force spells and relied less on his muscles, but in the moment he was too absorbed in just trying to kill the stupid thing. He hadn’t really thought things through much. He noted it for the future though as he finished up his daily routine. Once done, he continued traveling west, though he wasn’t overly interested in fighting the Devoured anymore. Fighting them had just become too boring and predictable. They were more annoyances than anything at this point so Felix didn’t bother getting any of their attention.
He followed the edge of the city and started heading south west. The levels of the Devoured he encountered were slowly decreasing as he did but he wanted to complete the loop around the kingdom before heading towards the castle. The castle was the worst case scenario and Felix wasn’t sure that he was quite ready for it just yet.
He still didn’t have a great answer for the flying Devoured and every creature he saw in and around that place had levels in the 600s and up. The wyvern couldn’t actually fly, only gliding back to the ground which was where Felix attacked. With the Devoured he had seen around the castle that could actually fly, he wasn’t sure what he would do if they had a ranged attack of any kind. He could smack them with spells but he doubted he would have enough mana to kill a flock of them.
He was hoping there was another seal, ideally two, he could snag in the surrounding kingdom then he would come up with a plan and prepare himself for the castle if he had to head there. Ideally, the seals were all in the surrounding area and he didn’t have to risk heading into the castle at all. As he walked through the city, he looked inwards and analyzed the seal in his soul space, paying attention to what was leaking out of it. He ideally wanted to find a way to sense the seals from at least a few kilometers away. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t know he could until he found another one and was able to compare them against each-other.
Felix continued to creep his way through the city, avoiding all the Devoured in the area until he arrived at an odd sight. In the middle of the mansions and estates stood what appeared to be a palisade made from the scraps of the surrounding buildings that had been completely flattened. As he approached, Felix saw that in front of the palisade lay a half dozen meter wide moat.
What in the hell…
As Felix tried to wrap his head around the odd sight and figure out how they had been built, a group of three Devoured began walking along just outside of the moat. The one in the middle and front was equipped in plate armor and carried a massive metal tower shield along with a torch. The two to either side held spears and wore leather armor. None of their equipment was pristine, the plate and shield sported a touch of rust around the edges and the leather armors had small holes and were slightly frayed. They were still far better equipped than any other Devoured he had seen to date though. Felix dimmed his light and followed them from far off to the side, keeping himself hidden behind the remaining houses.
He followed them all the way to the end of their route, where they met an almost identical group of three then turned around and continued back the way they came. He waited patiently and watched them repeat the process four times before he switched groups and followed the other ones. This time, they met a group at the corner of the palisade and moat which Felix followed. This group’s route ended at what appeared to be a ramshackle drawbridge where there were two pairs of permanent guards posted.
Felix tried to figure out the best way to fight a single group of three without catching the attention of more of them. He hoped these Devoured posed more of a challenge, since they seemed to act differently from the rest. He waited until one group was right in the middle of it’s route, making it furthest from the other groups then pelted them with Mana Bolts. They immediately reacted and all turned towards him.
Keeping themselves in formation, they rushed in his direction stopping just a hundred meters or so away from the wall, unwilling to venture any further. Felix met them in the middle, rushing towards them with the axe in hand. The one with the large shield set himself up to block and the other two flanked behind him, allowing the shield to cover their bodies while their spears stuck out in front of it. Luckily, the absurd length of Felix’s great axe allowed him to strike the tower shield without getting in range of the spears.
The axe, with only minor difficulty, sheared right through the tower shield creating an awful whining noise and shooting sparks out in every direction. As soon as the shield was broken, the two Devoured’s with the spears stepped out from behind the shield bearer and surrounded Felix.
The one wearing plate that had held the shield reached towards his hip and unsheathed a long sword while the spears charged towards Felix. Each of them was aimed at his torso, as the biggest and easiest to hit target so he simply activated his seldom used Mana Shield he had inscribed into his robes and spun around with the axe. The tips of the spears struck the plates of solid mana and scraped off to the side harmlessly while Felix’s axe completely bisected both of them. They weren’t dead, but they weren’t exactly a threat anymore either. Felix brought the axe to a stop and turned to the Devoured in plate armor who was in the process of running back towards the palisades.
It’s running away? I didn’t even know they could do that.
Felix finished off both of the Devoured spearmen then chased after the one in plate armor. He had no intention of actually catching it, but he did want to see where it was going, so he watched. The Devoured ran back to the draw bridge and grunted at the guards stationed there. After a few minutes of silence, the draw bridge lowered and the Devoured that had fled ran inside. Felix waited patiently for another couple of minutes when another group of three Devoured ran across the draw bridge and resumed the route that had just been vacated. The draw bridge shut and there was no sign that anything had happened at all, everything went back to normal.
What in the…
While the fights themselves were not very interesting, the guard routes, identical squadrons and apparent chain of command were fascinating to Felix. Whatever they were guarding, it was either a seal or something equally as valuable. He thought about the possibility that they were guarding nothing and were simply set up as an outpost but that didn’t make any sense based on what he knew of the Devoured. They would have no reason to have an outpost of any kind.
Having already decided he had to get in somehow, Felix began testing their defenses. He pulled a guard triplet away from their rotation and this time made sure they were all dead so none of them could report back. He rushed back over to the wall and watched one of the other groups send a spearman back to report the missing group when they were still missing for two consecutive rotations. Five minutes later, the triplet was replaced and the guard rotation returned to normal.
Felix waited a little longer this time then pulled a triplet over and killed them all off, then he killed the two groups that would normally meet them. He figured that should buy him at least 15 minutes or so. Felix ran up to the edge of the moat and began blasting the palisade with Fire Balls and Force Bombs until he had knocked out a large section of the wall. Peering inside the encampment, Felix saw just two things. Siege engines and a ridiculous number of Devoured. There were catapults, ballistae, portable bunkers and battering rams but all of it was surrounded by a black mass of Devoured. They were packed so tightly together, Felix doubted it was possible to fit any more Devoured in the walls, even if he were piling up corpses.
Felix heard a bell ring out from deep inside the wall so he rushed back into the cover of the intact houses behind him and began running around to the other side of the encampment. The area within the wall was about a third the size of the wyvern’s domain. Considering how many Devoured he had seen packed into the wall on the other side, Felix assumed there was no way the entire thing was packed with Devoured.
He wasn’t even sure that many Devoured existed, his rough math put the required number at just over 2 billion. If there really were that many, he didn’t really stand any chance of getting at whatever was inside. He repeated the process on this side and opened a large hole in the palisade and saw the same thing as before. However, this time, as he stared incredulously at them, he noticed that they didn’t react at all when he hit them with spells and he couldn’t seem to identify them.
They’re dead?
Rather than risk begin found out, Felix backed up a few kilometers away from the moat and found a house to camp out in. He spent a day looking through some of the experiments relating to muscles but wasn’t happy with any of what he found. It seemed Erolan had used the muscle structure from insects but was happy to completely rearrange his skeleton and replace many of his other systems to support them. Felix on the other hand, was not willing to do that.
Other than those, the other experiments mostly had very similar cells to his own and were not nearly as efficient as he hoped they’d be. After about a day of analyzing experiments, Felix completed his daily routine and flew out of the house he had selected. Up to now, he could have flown through the kingdom but he was really enjoying what was essentially the perfect training ground for him to learn how to be stealthy. He would also have to either fly low to the ground or shine his light so brightly he would risk being seen.
After what he had seen yesterday in the encampment though, Felix knew he needed to get some kind of idea of what was inside. He decided to risk being spotted by shining a bright light down on the camp rather than flying low and risking getting hit by ballistae bolts. To be extra safe though, Felix pushed the light spell as far behind him as he could so that anyone looking up at him wouldn’t be able to see him and would instead, hopefully, aim for the light. He also extended a Mana Shield out beneath him to block anything coming his way.
Felix walked towards the edge of the encampment and stood behind the last remaining wall of a mansion that had been partially flattened. He made sure everything was ready then flew up as high as he could go, right up to the joists holding Ky’bel up above. He brightened the light as much as he could then extended it behind him. Through some quick testing he found he could extend it much further than his cast range if he simply cast the spell then moved it while it was active.
Once the light was bright enough to illuminate the ground, Felix flew towards the encampment. The first thing he saw were the guard patrols who immediately spotted him. One of the guards posted at the drawbridge surprised Felix by sounding a horn instead of going inside to report directly. Figuring that was the start of his timer, Felix sped up a little and started inspecting the camp itself. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could see. Around the outer walls were countless Devoured corpses, as he had seen before, that seemed to be serving as a layer of the wall itself or as insulation of some kind.
Within the wall, there was some exposed siege equipment but just about every other area of the camp was covered by ramshackle cloth, wood and other scavenged materials. The only building that didn’t appear to be created from scraps was a large stone building that looked very much like a cube without windows from every angle. The building was situated at the direct center of the camp and surrounded by makeshift awnings and simple structures.
If he didn’t know better, Felix would have assumed they had constructed all of this specifically to hide the inside from him. There was no way they knew or assumed he could fly though, so Felix instead assumed they had to have been created to protect them from something else. He also noticed the holes he had punched in the walls of the camp had been completely repaired, which was impressive given it had only been a day. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
