Chapter 352 - Night of Swords (Patreon)

Note : Chapter 353 has been written and added to the queue !

Chapter 352

Ytakan Scrublands, Archduchy of Rebirth

Darthar-Asaria Trade Route

Satina Olyrin, head of the house of Olyrin and by the grace of the Gods duchess of Sunrise, sighed as she tapped one of the letters littering the table.

The news from home...weren't good. Her duchy's economy was tethering on the edge of collapse thanks to the lack of slaves, and shipments from the conquered territories had stopped, due to the guerillas, and the neutral nobles throwing their lot in with the crown. Not to mention the fact that everyone who would have been useful had either been enlisted in the army, or ran for the hills.

Not to mention there were other, more...troubling news. Such as the supply convoy that had just vanished. Just like that slave hunter platoon, all those weeks ago. Just vanished without a trace.

This should have been over months ago. With Asaria taken, she could have just left Falmagar to finish off Sarth and sent most of the slaves either home to their families or back to Sunrise to fill the mines and manufactories.

That meant she'd had to resort to more and more drastic measures to keep everything running. And even that was starting to fail. Even her pockets weren't bottomless, and-

She lifted her head up as someone entered the tent, unannounced, her sharp retort only postponed by the man immediately bowing.

"Your Grace, I beg your pardon, but the Marquis wishes to see you immediately. There has been a...development."

The Duchess' blood ran cold. And as she recognized the man, it became even colder. Things must truly be dire for her nephew to send the colonel of the Scintillant Gryphon Knights to fetch her.

"Of course, lead the way." She started moving towards the tent flap before her mind started working through the panic, her paranoia, honed to a molecule's edge by decades of living under threat from the crown, finally breaking through the fear of what else the dungeon could have come up with.

Even when messengers came in, there was always a guard, standing halfway into the tent flap to admit them in.

There was none. And the colonel...the colonel was trying to hide it with his cavalry cape and with his pose, but there was blood on his armor.

The duchess continued moving without breaking stride, drew level with him...and raised her hand.

To his credit, he managed to dodge most of the power beam as she triggered the enchantments contained in one of her rings.

The tent, however, wasn't made to take that kind of attack at point blank range. A neat hole was burned through, illuminating the night and warning everyone around, as the duchess leapt back, triggering another ring. The colonel's follow up strike thrown off by the sudden gust of air, only carving through her shoulder instead of slicing her in half, the point blank blast of air almost throwing him back through the tent flap...and opening it wide, showing the bodies of her guards littering the ground, and the waiting assassins.

Knights and officers crowded into the tent in grim silence, while others took up guard positions around the tent as people came out of the night, bellowing questions.

The only answer they received was cold steel.

Even with the wind attack, the colonel was already charging the duchess again....only to stumble back as her maid, which had been standing in the corner, pounced on him, compelled by her brand as the duchess whistled.

The colonel simply extended his blade, catching the maid mid pounce, letting her momentum impale her on his blade...before collapsing as the maid simply dragged herself to the hilt and repeatedly stabbed him in the face with a dagger, a look of sheer disbelief on his face before he fell, writhing as his flesh began to sizzle and pop, cooking his brain inside his skull with arcs of electricity and sheer heat.

The duchess smiled viciously. Those kind of wounds wouldn't even slow her maids down.

She had done far worse to them. The weapons and other instruments hidden over their person weren't usually for them to use after all.

The rest of the conspirators paused. It was only a slight hesitation, but it was enough, as maids came boiling out of the other half of the tents, out of her living quarters.

They swarmed the intruders like feral animals, even the one with the sword still embedded in her torso. They were cut, slashed, but they just kept coming, having to literally be hacked into pieces to be stopped, even then starting to regenerate, as the duchess threw spell after spell, drawn from her enchanted jewelry, into the melee, indiscrimately obliterating both groups. She could have simply whisked herself away via her teleport amulet, but they wouldn't be trying this if they didn't have countermeasures in place...and even if they didn't, this army would collapse without her.

The duchess helping or no, even her maids were no matched for trained, coordinated and heavily knights. But as the last fell beneath their swords, the roar of battle could be heard outside, and the tent flap exploded under the press of bodies, as ducal guards, nobles, armsmen and slave soldiers swarmed in.

The duchess dropped to her knees as the survivors were cut down, guards forming a protective shield of their bodies around her, the blood loss and shock finally catching up with her.

The last thing she saw before she fainted was the colonel's hand, his head now a charred husk.

And the signet ring on his finger.

*****

"Status report." Said Alexandra as her ambassador golem walked onto the bridge of the So Much For Subtlety. She could have done this from the command center back home, but she'd rather be closer to the action. Besides which, she was mostly likely going to have to talk with her allies right here anyway.

"Sunrise's army is behaving anomalously." Subtlety gestured, and various part of the holographic map highlighted. "They appeared to have been deploying some of their elites as forward units, but those elites fell back into the main formation. The UDC force has separated from the army and is standing back, and there are multiple sensor anomalies."

"Show me." Alexandra frowned as the data scrolled in. Their recon was a shadow of what it formerly was, but it was getting better, especially with Sunrise's skirmisher screen pulling back, allowing the drones to get glimpses of the main army. But this didn't make any...sense...

The dungeon core's eyes went wide. She knew those kind of patterns. She'd seen them when Ciel had taken over the UIS.

Elite units moving in to remove the commanders of formations without killing those officers' troops.

The fact that those same units had been sent out before...similar to how the UIS' bureaucrats had tried to disperse the Artificial Intelligence's loyalists, or at least those whose fealty they doubted, before they could launch their coup.

"Ma'am?" Asked the AI in concern.

"They're fighting. This is a purge. Or a coup. It looks like..." Alexandra closed her eyes. "It looks like we've kicked the hornet's nest."

"What do we do?"

"What can we do? Their army is assembled into a single whole. Harassing it will only cause us to be overrun. Even the Mackies can't take on over a million soldiers. Besides, if it degenerates into a full scale mutiny, attacking will only unite them against us. Not to mention it would draw the UDC back in. No, we want all the damage to be done by their side. Let the blame for this night fall squarely on whoever wins. Let the UDC stay away, let them destroy their own alliance while their allies watch with horror. A bloody purge like this is exactly the kind of thing that would push our dear isolationist friends over the line."

"Yes ma'am."

"And get our allies together. We need to build a picture of what happened, and quickly."

*****

"Your Grace, please. Have mercy, if we kill them, we-"

"SILENCE!" Roared out the duchess as she slammed her hand into the table, hiding a wince as it tugged on her barely healed shoulder, and the Count recoiled, as if struck. "I. Will. Not. Have. Mercy for these swine. Don't you understand? They murdered my nephew. Planned to kill me. Very well then. If that is how they wished it to be, then let us apply the same punishment to them. Am I understood?"

Of course, it was unlikely they'd intended to impale her body, most likely they would have delivered it to their oh-so-feared dungeon core, but everyone nodded. Around her was what little of a war council she could pull in...over half of them the officers Mahikam had managed to put into place.

The rest were nobles that had remained loyal, mostly those that, more by luck than good judgment, had been close by and charged to her rescue as they saw the power beam. A few had actually been mistaken by conspirators and cut down by her ducal guard, but they'd been resurrected and sifted remarkably quickly.

Her spymaster shifted, and Satina looked at him. She was both pleased, and utterly furious with him.

Or, more accurately, furious with herself. For he had warned her that something was brewing, but with her nephew's changing of the guard, so to speak, of the officer corps, she thought none would dare. That any action they would take would be suicide, and that the fear of failure, and of the retribution that would await them even after a successful coup at the hand of those officers would hold their hand.

The spymaster had disregarded her orders. Behind her back, he had stationed additional members of the ducal guard near her tent, in total secrecy. She wasn't even entirely sure how he'd done it, and the conspirators clearly hadn't seen it coming either.

He'd almost certainly saved her life. The ducal guard he had hidden had been the ones to lead the charge to push through the conspirators outside and come to her rescue at the last moment. Without him, without his disobedience...she would be dead.

She was done entertaining his pleas to remain in the shadows. If they won, he would be a damned duke.

"Yes?" She said as her spymaster moved again. "What is it?"

"Your Grace, we may punish those guilty, but there are many whose faith will waver because of it."

"The punishment will show them the error of such ways."

"Yes, of course." His gaze met hers, and the 'but for how long' was clear, if unspoken.

She gave him a curt nod. Even through her rage, she was perfectly aware of that.

Her army...was going to collapse. This kind of fear was only temporary, and her nobles would be thinking whose head would be on the chopping block next. Already the UDC was refusing to return into formation, and clearly reconsidering their alliance, no matter what colorful excuses the dungeon cores came up with. They'd been perfectly ready to let someone take her head and take over the army too. Someone who almost certainly would have surrendered.

Which told her exactly how much who lead that fleet wanted victory. That...Glarvistar, with his damned porcelain mask.

Given the shiver that went around the room, most of the others had guessed the same.

"What do we do?" Finally said one of the officers, a young woman who a few hours ago had been a mere lieutenant and now wore the still bloody insignia of a colonel, taken from the body of the traitor her maid had killed. Said maid was standing behind the Duchess, already brought back to life, and service.

The young officer had been her nephew's aide, and knew more about his plans and reliable officers than anyone else.

She'd also been the first to raise the alarm about the orders, since most of them went through her, and had the presence of mind to immediately check up on him as the chaos erupted around the ducal tent, issuing counter orders almost as soon as she arrived.

The Duchess simply didn't intend to ask why the lieutenant had a copy of her nephew's signet ring, or why it looked suspiciously like the kind that should have been around the Marquis' wife's finger.

"We finish what Mahikam started. We finish this war, and crush this dungeon core." Once Crystal's army was off the field, she could consolidate what she had. And the UDC would be forced to join in for the battle. The leaders of their faction wouldn't give them a choice. And they might even go along with it willingly, if only to go their own way as they moved to contain Darthar. "We march on. Prepare everyone for battle. One last push people. One last push."

And if it failed, well...

None of them would live long enough to care.