“Ellie, Bella! Good to see you too! How did the training trip go?”
The core shapers were sent on a long-range expedition to soak up experience and farm cores away from the colony. With the number of graduates coming out of the Academy and the demands of the soldiers, scouts, and generals for experience, the call was made that there just wasn’t enough to go around.
“Sorry we’re late,” Bella said. “When we got out there, we found a whole lot more than we expected and were reluctant to leave without taking everything we could.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “You did what was asked of you and there’s still a long way to go in this war. I hope the results are enough. Are your pets going to give a good show of themselves?”
Bella chomps her mandibles aggressively,
“They are ready to go! Our Skills have improved a lot, and so have theirs! We also have a few new types we’ve developed in the mix. They’ll make the colony proud.”
“Good. It won’t be long before they’ll be put to the test. Make sure your people get enough rest and then slot into the defence. It’s going to get wild around here.”
96. Differing Views
“What will we do with them?” Morrelia’s voice was subdued.
Titus stared unblinking at the five bodies arranged before him.
“They will be returned to their families for burial. If their families do not claim them, or if they requested it themselves, they will be taken to the surface and buried in the Legion memorial in Tanna.”
Morrelia gazed up at her father.
“There’s a Legion memorial?” She’d never heard of such a thing. “Is that where brother…?”
He nodded grimly.
“We don’t bury our dead in the Dungeon. They deserve the light of the surface, not this cursed world below.”
The commander stood with his full guard as watch for the fallen Legionaries. Found outside the camp, there had been little mourning, or even surprise, when their comrades were discovered. Death was part of war, and the Abyssal Legion was always at war.
Alberton approached.
“Interesting that they were not eaten,” he observed. “Most monsters won’t pass up the opportunity for Biomass, especially social insects.”
Morrelia was shocked by the man’s callous attitude, though Titus merely nodded.
“This was the abomination’s work,” he said.
“You are likely to be right,” the Loremaster agreed. “Either it wanted to send a message or wasn’t ready to feast on its former species.”
As someone who had spent a considerable amount of time with that ‘abomination,’ Morrelia felt sick at the idea of Anthony being responsible for what she saw in front of her.
“How can you be sure it was the… reincarnator?” she protested. “All of the ants are smart, couldn’t it have been any of them?”
Alberton shook his head. The commander’s daughter was a fierce warrior, but she was still too green as a Legionary.
“There would be no reason for a regular monster not to eat the bodies,” he pointed out. “It’s sad to say, but most Legionaries who fall within the Dungeon do not get buried. No, your father and I believe it was a lingering sense of humanity within the abomination that caused it to act this way.”
She tried to digest the thought, struggling to accept it. Ever since the campaign had begun, she’d tried to understand what the right thing to do was. The colony was peaceful, she knew that, yet the Legion insisted they be wiped out before they became a greater threat. The ants were peaceful for now, but what about in the future? What if Anthony died, and the colony was left without the leader that held them back? What then?
“I still don’t understand why you refer to them as abominations,” she said. “Aren’t they just people? Humans, like us? They didn’t choose to come back this way, right? The Dungeon did that to them.”
Titus and the Loremaster shared a look.
“Don’t think of those who have been reborn in this world as monsters as people,” Alberton warned her. “They may have been something like a human in their past life, but each and every one of them is twisted, broken. The records tell of numerous occasions where we encountered such beings. In every case, they were eventually put down at great cost. The Dungeon chooses the souls it does with good reason, each of them is chosen to further its purpose. That is just another reason why they should be killed as swiftly as we can manage.”
The commander backed him up.
“The moment they were born inside a monster, that is what they were. Not human, monster. Truth be told, the abominations are the most dangerous of all monsters. All the drive, experience, and intelligence of a sapient packed into an evolving killing machine.”
“Why do you think it decided to strike now?” Alberton wondered.
“Revenge,” Titus grunted. “That’s the easiest to understand. We pushed hard into the ants and killed many, so it decided to strike back. In a way, this is my fault. We could have predicted this and doubled the size of the scout teams.”
Morrelia felt sick. The thought of the dead colony members weighed heavily on her, and the thought of Anthony, filled with a thirst for revenge, fighting and killing her fellow Legionaries was awful. Who was right? Who was wrong? She wasn’t sure what she should do. Should she confront her father and tell him the colony was peaceful? After what had been said today, she didn’t think it would matter. Alberton and Titus would simply say they would turn against the sapients eventually, better to put the ants down now before they became too large a threat.
She wasn’t sure she believed that, but she was far from as experienced with these things as her elders were. What if she was wrong? The idea of the colony turning itself against humans the way Garralosh had done seemed absurd, but the damage they could do if they chose to… As devastating as the beast had been to the frontier kingdoms, Anthony’s family would be capable of far more.
She snapped out of her thoughts to realise that her father and the Loremaster were still speaking.
“…From the fortress?” Alberton asked.
“It’ll be a few days at the least. The Legion is deployed in a lot of places putting out fires after the last wave, we’re stretched thin.”
“What about calling people up from below?”
Titus grunted.
“If things are rough in the upper strata, what do you think it’s going to be like down there? Besides, we can’t afford the time it would take to acclimate them to the thinner Mana. No, we’ll have to make do with what we have for the time being. It’s going to take longer than I’d like, but we need to advance slow and steady.”
“Will the golgari be happy about that?”
“You think I care?”
Far above…
It had been many years since the one who called himself ‘Grey’ had walked the surface of this world, and he couldn’t do so for long, but what he had seen was not what he expected. Ants cooperating and working alongside humans who… revered them in return. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever borne witness to before.
His visit to the ‘conquered’ territory of Rylleh had been much the same. When an underground city fell to the monsters, it was expected to become a wasteland, the people consumed for Biomass and destroyed. What he found instead was a city that went on much as it had before. The people chafed at the seizure of the gates, cutting them off from the rest of society, but the colony had gone to great lengths to ensure they were supplied with essentials.
What the large ant told him had proven to be true. Even moving through the territory of the ants had been remarkably safe, the Dungeon patrolled better than most sapient controlled territories. It was almost enough for him to forgive being made to listen to Vibrant for an hour. He’d spoken only three words in those sixty minutes, two of which were hello and goodbye.