Chapter 39

“Sometimes I have to do the right thing. I hate doing the right thing. It always ends up costing me more than I’m willing to pay. I still do it, because otherwise I can’t sleep at night or look myself in the mirror. But it still sucks.”

—Selected Daybook Musings, R. Clarendon

In the chaos of battle, Sylvas had gotten turned around, but these new arrivals had clearly come from the colony. There were a dozen of them, in a wide variety of different outfits that suggested that they were a rag-tag assembly of volunteers rather than a dedicated armed force. Even if they had uniforms, it seemed likely they’d be in rags by now. Piecemeal armor, fragments of ablative plating stitched onto civilian clothing, weapons that could scarcely be called that with how little of a threat they posed, and faces full of fear.

Yet they came out to try to rescue you anyway.

Slowly, it dawned on Sylvas that she was right. These survivors had seen their ship going down and come charging out to try and help them, even though it almost guaranteed that they’d clash with the shikari. They’d ridden out on some sort of enchanted skiff of a design Sylvas had never seen before, but it was one that Hector probably could have identified with his eyes closed. Sylvas did close his own eyes for a moment, letting his magical senses slide over the assembled party. Seven people, three of them at circle 5, one at circle 3 or 4, and the rest entirely without magic. Yet it was one of the people without magic that they seemed to defer to. She strode forward with a defiant grin on her face despite what they’d just seen. “Nice to meet you.”

It took Sylvas a moment to parse what he was seeing. The hodgepodge of armor, the machete strapped to the underside of a rifle to use as a bayonet, and the bright red of her hair bundled up under a cap. “You’re Rania Clarendon.”

“Guilty as charged.” She pulled off her hat, letting all her curly locks fall down. “But I’ve no idea who you are, other than a complete maniac.”

Sylvas glanced down at himself, entirely coated in noxious shikari blood, and he raised his hands. “I can assure you, I’m not actually…”

Kaya spoke over him, striding into the ankle-deep morass of corpses to stick out her hand to Rania. “Our pet maniac is Sylvas, this is Bone-boy, and I’m Kaya. You mess with either of them, I’ll kick your teeth out your culgh. Now are any of you a healer because I’ve got half a guy in my backpack who could use some help?”

“You’ve got who in your what?” One of the other colonists said with dismay, confusion, and all of the other usual emotions people felt when first confronted with Kaya.

“Our friend took a bad hit when the platforms defending this planet attacked us without provocation.” Malachai was quick to try and smooth things over, but given his current appearance, he probably unsettled everyone even more than Sylvas covered in blood or Kaya being herself.

“Forget that. What the hell did you just do to those shikari?” a rose-faced fiend woman called out from the back of their group where she may have been cowering.

“Can’t really forget it when he’s bleeding down my back,” Kaya grumbled, but it seemed that the colonists were waiting for an answer.

Sylvas cleared his throat. “Maybe this is a conversation that we’d be better having behind some nice thick walls? Where the next shikari aren’t coming?”

“They come in waves,” a broad-shouldered elf piped up.

Rania smiled as if this was all just a friendly chat. “So how about you answer some questions, real quick?”

“I did say I’ve got a man dying on my back, right?” Kaya asked Malachai. “Those words did come out my mouth?”

Sylvas didn’t want to waste any more time, and the way that he saw things, there was little point in lying. They were all stuck in this situation together. “We’re from the Empyrean.”

“They finally got our distress calls?” The fiend’s face lit up so much that Sylvas felt bad crushing her hopes.

“Nobody out there knows what’s happening down here.” He kept his eyes on Rania as he spoke, watching for the flinch. “We were tracking the Thesulan Consortium’s shikari trading, and the trail led here.”

Either everyone here knew she was with the Consortium and didn’t care or she was a much better liar than anticipated. “There’s no help coming?”

The gathered troop of strangers all wilted in the face of that news. The fiend actually had to turn away so they couldn’t see the tears on her face. The broad elf’s dismay was written all over his face. “What about the distress signal?”

“The Aion tech must be blocking it.” Sylvas didn’t enjoy being the bearer of bad news, particularly when it was bad news that affected him, too. “We didn’t hear your signal until we were already in the system.”

“Can we get back to what the hell you just did?” a dwarf with the only functional helmet demanded.

“Same thing we’re going to do to every shikari on this planet. Kick their culgh.” Kaya strode forward. “Same thing we’re going to do to you if you don’t take us to a medic, right now.”

Sylvas pinched the bridge of his nose to try and keep his temper. Kaya was not a master of diplomacy.

“You think you can beat them?” Rania asked, with the musical lilt in her voice fading as she grew more serious. “You think you can beat the queen?”

Sylvas straightened up. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Then you’re even dumber than you look.” Rania’s words lost their sting when he caught sight of her smile. “And you’re very welcome here.”

Loaded onto the skiff together, they headed back to the colony as fast as it would carry them. The spells empowering it were groaning and sparking with the strain. “I thought you said the shikari come in waves. What’s the hurry?”

“They come in waves,” Rania agreed, “but you didn’t kill every shikari on the planet. And you made a lot of noise.”

Hector’s life sense had been their most reliable way of tracking the shikari. Sylvas’ own gravity sense struggled to differentiate between different organic matters since everything was based on density and weight. They could have been closing on the skiff as they spoke.

Trying to keep that thought out of his mind, Sylvas changed the subject. “I know who you are, but who are your friends?”

“Flora and Dunphy were the colonists mad enough to come try and save you.” She nodded to the broad fiend and one of the humans. Both of them were without magic, the same as Rania herself.

“Viv, Kegel, and Lass were the original archaeological team sent to investigate the vault. Some of the best mages left on the planet. Reckon they just came along because they didn’t want me dead.” She glanced in their direction. Kegel was the dwarf, Lass the elf, and Viv was one of the humans who hadn’t spoken at all yet.

Suspicion prickled at Sylvas. “Are they with the Veilbohr Institute?”

Rania let out a surprised snort. “What? Out here? No. They’re freelancers like me. The colony governor called them in, I’d think.”

The last and most enigmatic member of their group was the woman piloting the skiff, an elderly human woman with a thick ridge of scar running the length of her cheek. “And that’s Fern. The mad old cow who owns the only skiff that’s still in one piece.”

“I can hear you, you know,” Fern called back without taking her eyes off the controls. “I’m old. Not deaf.”

“Poor thing is completely deaf. And senile.” Rania smiled.

They ate up the remaining distance to the colony much slower than Sylvas could have moved on his own, but with more than enough haste that he didn’t have any fear of the next wave of shikari overtaking them. Sylvas kept all of his senses extended and his eyes on the horizon on the off-chance that there was some stray still lurking around, which was how he missed their approach to the colony, or what was left of it.

Prefabricated buildings had made up much of the city, banged together cheap and fast and dropped in along with the colonists, but while they had started out stacked tall in tower blocks, they were now mostly toppled or split. Here and there signs of the fighting could be seen, bullet holes or spell burns, but the predominant sign of conflict were claw marks tearing through the solid concrete. Sylvas had seen the awful damage that magic could do, rampaging eidolons destroying everything with their mere presence, but this was the first time he’d seen a civilization torn apart by tooth and claw. 

The fallen towers that would have littered the colony, to begin with, had been dragged out, laid in a great circle around the outside, and then reinforced with anything and everything that wasn’t nailed down. A fortified wall made out of ramshackle remnants of the lives that these poor people had been trying to build before hell was unleashed on them. It was stacked up high, lined with spikes and barbed wire at the top, and it still wasn’t enough to stop the shikari. There were bodies scattered around the exterior of the perimeter wall, shikari bodies that looked to have been put down with great effort by everyone involved. Blood streaked the rampart, and it was rust red, not the stagnant green that the monsters bled. 

There was no gate into the city; to make one would have been to court it being breached, and there was clearly nothing outside of this compound that the people inside it considered worth dying for. The skiff began to strain as it was trying to lift. The spells that kept it afloat in the air whined and shorted out as it tried to gain the necessary height to get them over.

With as much subtlety as he could muster, Sylvas gave them a little lift, pulling with his will against the skiff as he hovered upwards in time with it. They cleared the wall, and the faltering spells woven into the skiff survived to fight Fern another day.

As they disembarked, a small crowd gathered. The walking wounded for the most part, some missing limbs, others clearly deep in shock after all that they’d witnessed to the point that making their eyes focus on Sylvas and the others proved too much of a burden. Kaya barged out into them without a second glance, calling out to the whole town, “I need a healer!”

They collectively flinched at the sound of her voice, which wasn’t usually something that happened until someone got to know Kaya better.

From a lean-to tent assembled against the side of what had probably once been a weather station, a young and harried-looking fiend emerged. The white uniform of a medic was entirely absent, and in its place he wore something that looked more like a butcher’s apron. His eyes darted up and down Kaya, looking for the damage. “You’re hurt?”

“Not me, my buddy.” She swung the backpack around, and the crowd let out a collective sound of revulsion at Hector’s head lolling from side to side. “Had a bad landing.”

“He’s alive?” The horned butcher had not moved any closer.

“He was when we put him in stasis?” Kaya waded her way across to the man through a crowd that was now desperately trying to part around her.

The brave farmers who’d come along for the ride, Flora and Dunphy, had broken away on their own, heading back to whatever was left of their lives, but the archaeologists remained by Rania’s side. She’d won their loyalty at some point, and now the strongest mages at the colony’s disposal answered to her.

Malachai turned to face them. “We thank you for your timely rescue.”

Rania smiled again, thin lipped and terse. “You hardly needed much saving.”

“Might I enquire who is in command here?” Malachai pressed on.

The surviving colonists looked around amongst themselves and came to no conclusions. Rania had to answer for them. “The governor died. The provisional government died. We’re all in this together, which means we all get a say.”

Oh, that is going to be terribly inefficient.