A Survivor's Guide to Planetary Apotheosis [Postapocalyptic Survival, LitRPG, and Dungeon]

To the low thrum of an A2 note the monster died, the arrow flung from Singer entering above the collar bone of a boxy, muscular approximation of an oversized humanoid body, finding heart and lungs on its passage, nicking a renal artery that fed its singular kidney as it exited. More fatally, however, the Ultimet broadhead had punched through its core, destroying the nexus that housed the mana that animated its body. Its singular eye occupying most of its now slack face went dark, blinding also the mind that had sent it this way, searching.

From his perch ninety feet up in the crown of a grand old cottonwood, he smiled when the downward shot took the possessed dungeon spawn cleanly, it fell in its tracks. A cyclops, if a small one. Also a product of Rasatala, he noted. The Eximius were happy to dominate their neighbors, the other denizens of that evil place. It was the fourth kill in an hour, and that meant the Puppeteers were winding up for another try, sending their tankier scouts forward to establish a beachhead to attempt a crossing of the highway fifty-one bridge, here on the Illinois-Missouri state line. Alexander's tree was just outside a nothing little town whose name on a map, all it really was, said Lithium Missouri. Behind him, a low forested ridge, a half mile of dense woods, and a half mile of open terrain, an old airport converted into an encampment where a Peacekeeper led division guarded the only bridge across the Mississippi river until all the way down Cairo, where the Ohio offered its waters into the great river.

Eximius couldn't swim. An interesting note, given how they'd hugged rivers and waterlines. They just liked to keep to the cover of wooded areas, where their verticality and arachnoid mobility served them well. Get one into the water though, and they rapidly drowned, completely unable to float or propel themselves through liquids at all. Small mercy, because, otherwise, this effort to control the invasion would have been lost before it began. Learning that fact, the defense forces dropped every bridge across the Mississippi, except for the ones that sat on ground that command determined could be defended. They would funnel the enemy to them, force them to burn their stolen manpower on fortified positions, until that was untenable.

Prophetic, the Loremaster who had read the blood of the killed Infiltrator demon spider and used that connection to scry the consciousness that compelled it, had predicted war, if covert action failed. So it had been. The mind of the Queen behind this invasion was malignant. It was a will that, against all instinct for self-preservation or tier advancement for the Infiltrator or its counterpart, the goal of most of the dungeon spawn in their journey to consume Gaia's surface, drove the pair with cores full to bursting of mana siphoned from humans slain to attempt to return to their den to complete the waking of a Rasatala Realm Shard. A third trimester dungeon core, essentially. Those powerful minions it threw away without a shred of remorse to attempt to expand its domain, to open more gates to its home dimension that could then be fed to their breaking, expanding Rasatala corrupted zones across Gaia, all along this Midwest of the North American continent. Farther.

Those minions weren't the only ones, just the most successful in their effort to rear a dungeon core to its birthing. Perhaps the greatest failures as well. It was their discovery that revealed the Queen's game to the survivors. A rapid response team led by the Guild Master of the Peacekeepers found three more Realm Shards, all substantially farther from completing their incubations. They'd been destroyed summarily, along with the Slayer-Infiltrator pairs that seemed to be preferred to conduct their predation. One to hunt, one to guard the shard. The hatchlings of the nest outside New Chicago was unique, as was the second Slayer, another sign that that location was the most promising, had had the most resources committed to defending it.

Alexander scanned the surrounding forest. When nothing disturbed the peace of the wood he shouldered his bow, then rapidly descended from his perch, dropping limb to limb to fall silently the last thirty feet to the forest floor. Stalk took him unseen to the corpse of the cyclops, whose death he confirmed, although he frowned when he found the core destroyed, he had hoped to obtain spoils from the kill. No matter, he retrieved his arrow from the dirt, buried halfway to its fletchings, and placed it back into the quiver. He didn't have much time these days to make replacement arrows, not until he was rotated out back to the crossing.

His job today was to blind the Puppeteers, to prevent their minions from escaping the wood line around this small wooded ridge to lay their eyes on the bridge and its fortifications. Those eyes fed their vision to the minds that controlled them from afar through nanoscale webs laid upon their brains, a manaspike into their minds that allowed the Eximius behind them total sensory information and motor control. He had learned that the fine aetheric net was destroyed by his Entropic aura, just as it eroded more obvious constructs made of woven magic. But doing that just got him a raging cyclops berserked from being controlled and ready to kill anything it could catch.

Ask him how he knew.

Easier to kill from stealth, taking advantage of the domination of the Puppeteer to blunt the dungeon spawn's normal awareness. The Eximius behind the monster wasn't as adept in wielding its borrowed body and often was too fixated on its goal to take full use of the information it received, allowing him to often snipe that minion without unnecessary noise. Just the single deep note of a harp, then a dead monster, the way the good gods intended.

A snap of broken twigs on the forest floor froze him in place over the dead monster. He judged the sound as having come from just behind the ridge, something climbing to the crest, about four hundred yards to the north east, as best he could judge. Sounds moved strange through the diffusing trees sometimes. No further sounds joined that first. An enemy? Quieter than a cyclops then. It could have been a deer. Maybe a bear, this was primetime for the great bears Gaia had brought forth to roam her forests. Energized by her Dragon Pulse, they were big, fur clad tanks. Coming out of hibernation the direbears were hungry. In mating season, they were just plain mean. It was mating season now.

Either way, he had to investigate, a silver backed super grizz coming to raid your food supplies or kill your horses needed stopping just like the enemy scouts.

"Day Sixty-seven." Alexander whispered, his refrain grown long since a morbid habit, rather than a hopeful declaration of the end of his long hunt.

Onward toward the sound he circled. They were coming up the ridge, so he didn't want to sacrifice the high ground. Putting yourself against the skyline was dumber than drinking gasoline though, so he compromised, moving to follow a deer track that paralleled a gradient just below the crest of the ridge. Deer were food for a lot of what roamed the countryside, they worked at staying alert against their predators. Wolves. Bears. Cougars. Whomp-whomps. A kind of Pleistocene weasel whose bobbed tail had a boney protrusion at the tip that hit its flanks when said tail wagged in joy as it was about to pounce. It was a scout who almost got killed by the first one anybody'd ever seen that gave it its name. Everybody took the joke name and ran with it, humanity collectively enjoying the graveyard humor of going out to a critter called a whomp-whomp.

Along the deer trail he Stalked, keeping low, bow ready with an arrow between his fingers and tension on the metal string. The mottled greys and browns of his newish cloak, tied now with strips of burlap, leaves, branches, grasses, and other local foliage to break up his outline made him near invisible, in addition to the aid of his Class's stealth abilities. Another rustle ahead, just around a copse of Shag hickory he saw a dense thicket of Buckthorn shrubs, Bramble, and Holly undergrowth that obscured the view beyond. It was an ideal path for anything trying to stay out of sight. Bastardly stuff to move through though, nothing up to any good would use it. Another rustle, a limb of holly catching something as it passed under those prickly leaves.

If he couldn't see the thing making that sound, good odds it didn't see him either. Rather than head directly toward the source of the sound, a rookie move that got you ambushed, he retraced his steps then cut up the hill in a rapid sprint through the dense underbrush off the deer path, a whisper through the wood little different than the stray breezes of early May. He stopped when he came to another mature shag hickory, a strapping specimen without many lower branches that would give him an overlook for the end of that thicket.

Alexander shouldered the bow and sheathed the red fletched arrow and grabbed a hooked grapple head, four recurved hooks of steel that would latch onto the wood of the tree. To its looped metal base, he tied off a coil of thin, braided, super flax rope in a quick bowline knot, then, three tight circles and he launched the grapple up into the hickories' crown. A hard tug, and it pulled down, missing, another tug and the rope jerked tight in his hands. He hung his weight from it, seated the hooks and tested the hold, then he clambered up the rope to reach the sixty foot high limb that gave him a firing position on that thicket's head. He didn't wait long.

A humanoid torso exited the thicket with a slight hesitation, armored scales of its body curving in an approximation of a female form, the oblong hairless head with seemingly delicate jaws that opened wide, a forked snake tongue darting out to sample the air for scents, tasted nothing amiss. Then it advanced, propelled along with little noise by the thirty odd feet of anaconda thick coils that made up most of its body.

A lamia.

Some documentation said variants had been slain inside Akhet dungeons though others said Tirnanog. Por que no los dos? It wasn't unheard of to find different flavors of dungeon spawn from different realms. The really dangerous stuff seemed to crosspollinate realms. Alexander wasn't worried where it was from, more that it was here.

Lamias were nasty. Neurotoxic venomous fangs. Powerful arms with clawed fingers that were deft enough to use the long knives it carried in a bandoleer across its false breasts. Those coils were strong enough to strangle an elephant, and it was moving about as fast as a four-wheeler across the somewhat rough terrain of the hillside as it made for the ridge. Armored scales rendered blades that weren't of a certain benchmark of quality pretty much useless.

Worse was the eyes though. In an exotically high cheeked face, almost beautiful, but too inhuman to ever really be, those yellow irised vertical slitted peepers were ensorcelled. Like the medusa, they turned you to stone, not really, but your entire body locked up, you couldn't use your Class, not your Skills or Arcana, your mana currents were frozen in your network, or so the reports read. First hand knowledge was great and all, but Alexander was going to let this little tidbit stay theoretical, if at all possible.

A sweep of the dungeon spawn's gaze in his direction, and he concentrated on the creature's torso, avoiding accidently focusing on its face. Eighty yards was a long shot through the forest, plenty of branches in the way, thick foliage obscuring the target as it moved, making it a shot into a window, a gap in forest cover. He didn't like it, too low probability.

Time to call in for a pinch hitter. Hands cupped over his mouth he warbled an approximation of a northern cardinal. Then repeated it twice more, those three carrying whistles not unusual, belonging with the native calls of the woodland, except that those calls had fallen silent at the passage of the dungeon spawn. The creature below didn't notice the absence of the usual birdsong, or the addition of a call that was out of place for the lack of other songs crying for avian territory.

He'd used the cardinal call to give the bearing of the target to the team of warriors that crouched under blinds on the ridge, ready to backstop him should anything make it past his patrol. The lamia reached the crest of the ridge unimpeded and started through a glade left open by the fall of a big old Sycamore what looked to be only a few years ago. Mid-morning sun bathed the lamia's form, then steam, then the lamia's features screwed up in a show of fear as it felt the cold gripping its body. Then the lamia froze solid, ice crystals feathering up across its crystallized silhouette. Captain Marvin Pruitt, moving low and with a surprising turn of speed for an older guy, and a mage class, pulled the war axe from his belt, flipping it round to present the sturdy pick side of the weapon which he drove down through the torso of the ice-bound puppet monster. Ragged chunks of shattered monster dribbled to the mat of leaves and loam below and began to thaw.

The red cloaked Peacekeeper withdrew the way he'd come, only pausing to add the core of the dead creature to a satchel on his hip, before disappearing back into the blind. Alexander hadn't needed to do more than give the man a bearing and trust that the problem would be resolved forthwith. The galdurscribe traits Captain Pruitt had were put to use littering the hillside with frost rune traps, such as the one that had flash frozen the lamia.

He had grown to appreciate the quality of the party for which he was scouting. They were efficient, disciplined, and experienced slayers of dungeon spawn. Almost a week of daily skirmishing with advanced elements of the Eximius horde had filed away most of the rough spots in their coordination, the team was firing on all cylinders now, with only a touch of friction.

Alexander Gerifalte to play scout and flanker, Captain Marvin Pruitt to act as flex attacker and support, surprisingly adept at tanking as well, Captain Grace Miller to act as a main attacker with great sustain compared to most high damage types. The other half of the party had been strangers, but they were proving themselves worth getting to know. On the business end, anyhow, for the rest, he had some reservations.

Adventurers hired on, they were a half party, Platinums all, but two of them of that subset of folk who refused to take the plunge to advance to tier three. Despite the limitations of that decision, the group was competent. The two men had a well-developed set of Traits, Skills, and Arcana, considering that half their potential was locked away. The lady was a Morrigan, always useful for their rare gifts.

Their leader was a Jann Anchor tank of unorthodox nature. The stumpy Caucasian man, a Shield Mind, appropriately enough, dark of hair and beard with light grey eyes fought wearing minimal armor, was bare chested in fact, and employed psionic energy absorption barriers coupled to a wild sixty-five percent Soak. Between the two, he absorbed almost anything thrown his way, and could return that stored energy in bursts of incredible damage with his two-handed mace. The psionic barrier around him prevented poisons from contacting his flesh, and shed other energies effectively as well. A tiny tank, but undeniably effective.

The offtank was a more customary pike and round shield user, with a gladius on his belt, another European ancestry, with Nymph blood line, his longish wild dirty blond hair unbound but stuffed into a Macedonian style helmet, its horsehair crest painted red. His class was air based, Slipstream Jouster, and had some interesting tricks for creating air buffers to act as friction reducing pads, causing attacks to slide off his shield or to deflect from it, pushed off course. An invisible spear tip rode the tip of his lance, extending its reach an extra yard, surprising enemies that thought to evade or hang around just out of reach of the man's main arm, where he very neatly impaled them.

Last was a support class a Morrigan Clock Winder, the only tier three of the bunch, whose feather patterns down her tanned neck and back were of a raven's wings offset by long feather mantle of black hair, similar to Alexander's but long enough to be a war chief's headdress, appropriate for the strong Cree heritage of the thirty something woman. Time manipulation was relatively rare, and frequently came with harsh limitations for use, but incredibly powerful. The Clock Winder was no exception, her powers let her inscribe a person with up to three runic counters, locking them to that location in time. Through their link, she could feel their mana and lifeforce, could return them to that location where the link was formed, consuming the runic counter. She could effectively unwind fatal damage or allow a warrior to expend all of their powers, then reset to their fresh state. The downside was that she was locked in place while using the ability, acting as a temporal-spatial anchor to hold the Arcana in place. She was totally defenseless to keep her teammates safe. As if to emphasize this point, she wore only long robes, no armor at all.

"If an enemy is to claim my life, then it was meant to be. See they don't if you wish it not to be so." Was all she would say about the matter when Alexander asked.

An off-color bunch, probably why they'd only been a half party, unable to find another three psychos to offset them. Well, had they lucked out when Grace had tripped across them, having gone searching for some outside help to complete their team. Since Alexander was outside the Peacekeeper chain of command, and the two Officers had decided that they should stick together to act as a forward vanguard force, disrupting the enemy and causing as much damage ahead of the encampment as possible, they wanted some solid, experienced Adventurers to complement the team.

So far, so good.

Alexander descended from his most recent vantage after scanning the ridge, finding no targets of opportunity. It was time to check in. Five puppeted dungeon spawn inside an hour meant that there was a push coming, they needed to have their shit together. Carefully stealthing through the forest, he ducked to enter the large canvas blind, its surface obscured in the same fashion as his cloak, leaves, branches, and burlap strips, just on a larger scale. He approached without sound, and Captain Grace turned around midsentence by happenstance to see him standing where empty space had been inside the blind, startled visibly backward, and dropped her tea cup, cursing.

"Fuck's sake, Alexander!" She hissed, quite loudly, though that wasn't her intent, before leaning over to pick up the empty metal field cup, "Can you stop doing that?"

He really didn't know which part of the whole bush ninja thing she wasn't getting.

"I mean…isn't that his thing?" Observed the Anchor tank, repainting the blue stripes of warpaint across a muscled torso.

"Yeah, but he's just supposed to do it to the assholes out there, not show up behind you every time you turn around, Jeez!" She bitched.

"I can start singing Yankee doodle went to town and tell everything around where our position is instead, if you want." He snarked, making certain to keep his voice down.

Marvin flipped open the canvas barrier in the trench connecting this blind to the one farther along the ridge, "Can we shave some decibels off here? Point is we're supposed to surprise their advance elements, not paint a target."

Grace waved her cup at Alexander threateningly, "I'm starting to get twitchy with this dickhead disappearing and reappearing with, and I mean this, zero warning. Do you know how friggin irritating it is to turn around and find out you were talking to the tent for two minutes?"

The Marid Officer pinched the bridge of his nose, and calmly addressed his fellow soldiers, "Okay kids, that's enough. Alexander, stop scaring your sister. Grace, quit telling the monsters where we are or, so help me, I'll turn this war party around."

A snort, followed by soft giggles suppressed by a hand over her mouth said the lady mage was enjoying the older man's dry humor. Alexander had to admit, Marvin had killer timing on his jokes. Grinding of teeth said Grace wasn't as much a fan.

Alexander would have thought she'd be a little less wound up. On a few days of break between operations she'd finally gotten to have a tryst with the off-tank pikeman and he'd been expecting that to pull some of the sand out of her gears. A bounce in her step and a smile said it did, for a couple days. And then people being people happened. Day before they'd gone back on duty that short lived arrangement had ended with hurt feelings and Alexander was reminded that it was never sound judgment to shit where you eat.

Bruises on the off-tank's cheek, blacked eyes, and eating gruel until the Phoenix sunrise said it was also not wise to break up with your giantess fling by having another woman, and man, in the tent and blankets you'd been sharing with her when she came home from an intelligence brief early. Oooph. This is why he liked to keep things nice and professional in the field.

Not really the time to dwell on it, they were on the clock.

"Including that lamia, that makes five scouts inside the hour. It's barely half past tenth bell, they're coming again today." Alexander reported low and steady, all business.

"Finally." Grace muttered, relieved at having something to do and something she could kill.

When it was one or two every couple of hours Alexander could, and did, handle it. Most of the puppets didn't make it halfway up the incline to reach this ridge, this was his goddamned forest now and he was turning it into a blind spot in the Eximius invasion. But, when they tried a more determined push, a dozen or more dominated dungeon spawn at a time, then it was time for a united response.

Marvin nodded and proposed "Same formation then, we'll go with a pointed delta. Alexander out front feeding us what we're up against and alpha striking, Grace behind on the van to break them, me and Cristoph on the wings to turn whichever flank folds first and keep our own secure, Dick holds the Anchor and keeps Miss Crows Call Under Moon safe while she maintains our tokens."

It was the most solid tactic they'd arrived at, a more aggressive one than was used by the Anchor forward tactics employed by his comrades in Getsome and Impervious, both of which who had a more potent man occupying that role. Even so, with this set of Classes and individual abilities, it had worked to perfection for each of the half dozen pushes they'd intercepted coming up this ridge.

No objections were raised, Captain Marvin Pruitt was easily the best field commander amongst the bunch. Alexander was useless at squad level command; he just couldn't communicate what he saw to other people fast enough or in a way that inspired confidence. Leading men wasn't a thing the Venator had a talent for, or even any skill whatsoever. Grace was more than merely competent, but her spat with the Adventurer offtank in their party was a sore spot, neither were of a mind to do much listening to the other, so that kind of took her off command, and she was inclined to defer to her senior officer anyhow.

None of the Adventurers was command material, Alexander had a feeling, especially not the spear guy. Good leaders don't betray trust with their comrades. Who was fucking who was petty shit, but it was the how things had been done that indicated poorly about the man's character. It was the obvious intent to deceive part that had spawned hard feelings; Grace Miller wasn't the settle down type either, but she didn't pretend anything either or lead anybody on.

Which is why, he reiterated internally, you don't fuck coworkers. Unless, you know, you're really, really hard up and ready to deal with it when things got awkward. Enough, Bigger Falcon, he chided, time to hunt.

"Let's Getsome." Alexander said quietly eager, the battle cry of his Amazon queen Brig, as he slipped out from the canvas network of structures back into the late spring air, and ghosted into the woods.

"Aaand, the dude is just not there anymore." Christoph told his Adventurer tank buddy, "That is creepy stuff Dick, I'm telling you, I was looking right at him this time. It's fuckin broad daylight for Christ's sake."

The Slipstream Jouster with the dirty blond hair had been trying to figure out how he did it and Alexander wasn't inclined to help him. He took a perverse pleasure in vanishing in front of the man, the combination of Stalk, Broken Silhouette, and years of experience disappearing from men and monsters aiding him in his game. Maybe he harbored a bit of a grudge on account of the two timing his new buddy, Grace. Alexander had definite feelings about people that played with other people like that.

"Focus." He whispered and put everything else out of mind, not calling on his Skills to further sharpen himself yet, those took a toll to maintain.

He slipped ahead of the broad triangle of warriors behind, distancing himself by a hundred yards to occupy the advanced point of the formation. They had established markers, covert ones in the terrain to act as reference points on the battlefield that was this ridge. Midway up the ridge, where the slope began to taper off from a somewhat steep initial climb, they took up their positions.

Were it not for the rapid decision making and deployment of the party, no more than fifteen minutes between the fall of the lamia and their taking up positions now on the hill, they would have been forced to rethink their strategy: up the steep climb, essentially ignoring the verticality of the terrain, came three Infiltrator Eximius, in their naked spider form, not hiding inside a cloak of stolen human skin. Behind them, struggling more with the grade but still making it easily, were fourteen half armored Ogres, leather and plates crudely sewn together. Those were denizens of Tirnanog, like the cyclops had been. That cemented that the Rasatala born horde had either destroyed a Tirnanog dungeon or had raided a Tirnanog corrupted zone to fill their ranks with dominated meat shields. With the three Infiltrators, it would appear that the damned spiders had gotten tired of losing their puppet scouts and had sent some of their own kind to clear the way.

"Wrong answer." Alexander promised the monsters.

A rapid dash back to Grace at the point of the triangle and he whispered the nature of the engagement, and suggested an audible to their initial plan, based on the new circumstances.

"Fuck, three? I can take two, I know. Gonna have to do something about those ogres while I'm doing it though, my skills kind of work based on momentum. I just need a window to get rolling." She commented.

That much had become clear about the Peacekeeper warrior woman's style in the previous engagements. She enhanced her attacks with her own life energy and mana, then recouped most of that energy from the creatures she killed. It was a vicious cycle, according to all the uses of that word. Wrath bolstered her Might and Durability and made her immune to mental intrusions, but it also caused issues with friendly fire. You needed to stay out of Grace's way when she got fired up, or you were going to have a bad time.

Alexander thought of the group walking almost hand in hand. Military doctrine said you never bunched up like that, it just about guaranteed a squad wipe to a single mine or high explosive round. Guess Rasatala didn't do their homework.

"I think I have a little something for the ogres. They're just about on top of each other, and I don't know that I can get more value than that kind of biomass in one place."

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She wasn't sure what he was talking about, but she nodded, the crest of her helmet bobbing, "You do what you do, I'll hit the Infiltrators as soon as you do."

A series of hand gestures communicated back to the rest of the party the plan but Alexander was already headed in a wide circle. Normally, he'd hit them from the front or just off axis with Entropy infused arrows and poison, softening them, turning them to take Grace's charge in the side, but the density of their formation meant that might not work well. Instead, he was going to leave the trio of spiders to Grace and company and deal with the ogres in a big way. For those ogres behind, he was going to feed them a full course meal of Saki's Boomstick. One Boomstick to wipe out fourteen ogres, that was a good fucking deal if he ever heard one. Besides, the bombs didn't have an infinite shelf life, the mana Saki infused into them would slowly fade, their mana capture techniques, while sophisticated, weren't perpetual or perfect.

In addition to that, he had a plan to make the fight even more unfair, but it involved a little bit of risk on his part. Not a whole lot, but a smidgen, so he was minimizing that by coming from their flank. He reached behind his cloak, to the back of his belt, where two sticks sat in their loops, the one loop emptied to bring down a Slayer Eximius just a few weeks earlier.

"Hokay, here we go. Gotta go fast." Alexander psyched himself up.

Irrelevancies vanished. He was locked in now, the Venator in full throttle. A slow advance, closing on the monster's eight o'clock, eyes scanning to see any sign that they had gained awareness of his approach. Especially the twelve glittering compound eyes of the Infiltrators. But they saw nothing, his Stalk was perfect. Forty yards away, he struck the cap of the Boomstick, causing its fuse to start and leapt forward into a full sprint, the detritus under his feet blurring with the speed of his passing. Alexander read the angle of their passage the track the dungeon spawn followed and he cross behind the Infiltrators with a whisper of footsteps. A lone dead pine he used as a launch pad, running up the side of the bare trunk fifteen feet from momentum and then a vault over the pack, his Entropic aura extended to envelop the tight cluster of monsters, ripping at their Soak, churning their magics within.

The Boomstick lay unseen in the midst of the suddenly raging Ogres, dropped in his flight over them. Their domination had just ended without warning when the web of mana on their minds dissolved. They started hacking at the Infiltrators in front of them, bashing with crude implements when the Boomstick smashed the entire group to the ground, flinging gore and Ogre bits into the low canopy of the Missouri woodland.

A smile lit Grace Miller's face when a black, grey, and brown blur shot across the forest from cover and sailed over the pack, faster than most people could even follow. The concussive blast that pounded most of them to pulp was as obvious a sign as she was going to get. The lady had her cue to hit the stage.

Wrath Vanguard, Grace lived up to her Class's description. A wave of terrible blood lust washed over him its edge dulled by his active Ruthless. Not so the disoriented monsters, already rocked by defection of dominated fodder and explosives, those flinched in fear when she unleashed her Murderous Aura. A pulse of red from the sprinting Oread and she vanished forward, the Slaughter Step taking her to the middle of the group before they knew death was on top of them. She hit the pack in the middle of a vicious overhand swing, great sword arcing with a power that had ripped chunks out of a brick building, Wicked Slice. One of the Infiltrators fell, split diagonally across head and torso.

Another red pulse, Lifetap boosting her strength with her own lifeforce, and a howl of pure rage, a Berserker Cry that infused her next cut with even more Might. A wide horizontal slash split apart the armored torsos of two demon spiders with enough momentum left over to lop an Ogre's leg off mid-thigh. The red gold shimmer from the corpses of the dead, fingers of rejuvenation from the slain replaced the vitality burning freely to propel the great sword down through an Ogre's chopping club, where it hacked through the beast's muscled side and stopped after severing its spine.

The weight of a ton of crippled and dying ogre pulled the sword from her hands, but Wrath was a hell of a drug, Grace grabbed the Tirnanog third tier evolution of a goblin that was dragging itself to its feet in front of her by the head and snapped its neck with her hands. The others had not moved from where they'd fallen when the Boomstick went off in their midst. No chances were taken, the blond beauty of a woman, a dancer with a button nose covered in blood spatter ripped her sword out of the ogre and she took the heads off every dungeon spawn in the group to be sure. Red gold streamers from three still forms wrapping her body in rejuvenating energy said those had only been unconscious when she decapitated them. The slaughter had taken a handful of seconds. Not even a minute.

Alexander Gerifalte was deadly. He had no pride attached to that assessment. It was an earned quality, a thing gained by years of effort. Even so. He wasn't certain he would last very long if Grace decided to seriously try to kill him while he was within reach of her sword. Alexander was finesse, art. Grace was a wrecking ball in human form. It was a terrible kind of beauty, now that he'd seen it in full like this.

The rest of the party arrived, finding that there wasn't much for them to do.

Captain Marvin looked at his younger protégé and raised an eyebrow, "You alright?"

A mask of rage slowly fell away, replaced by the more regular sternness, "Ask them." She suggested, indicating the dead monsters.

"Riiiigght." Drawled Marvin, knowing better than to press his luck when the younger red cloak was wearing the blood lust like this.

A loud slap rose up from behind, Christoph rubbing the back of his head glaring at Dick, "What?!"

"You're a lucky prick, you know that? Next time, you tell me before you decide to fuck around on a meat grinder and get us all killed." Dick told his long-term colleague with disgust.

Alexander was still deep in his Venator concentration, so he didn't miss the flicker of optical camouflage that was all the warning he needed to sound the alarm, "Contact close! Invisibility!"

He expanded his Entropic aura for just a moment, letting it wash over even his teammates, their abilities not actively drawing on their magic and thus not greatly affected. It did pull the hood off the invisibility cloak that had put six Red Caps in the midst of the party before anyone had seen them.

Assassins of Tirnanog, the Red Caps looked like sharp faced men dressed in farmer's rough clothes, white pupilless eyes that saw as well as Alexander, and they made Skin Peelers seem boy scouts. The moment they knew they were revealed, they threw themselves at Crow Cries Under Moon, who was being carried by Dick so she could maintain her time magic, and Christoph, knives flashing. Blood flew and Christoph was down with slashed throat, only to reappear where he'd stood, white faced but healthy. The man recovered from his "death" faster than the Red Caps that had thought him well murdered. He launched into a stabbing flurry of pike thrusts to take out his "killers", successfully shredding through their light Soak, bringing two down rapidly, while the third peeled off out of range, his air lance revealed by its comrades' blood.

The three that tried for the time mage stabbed instead into the exposed back of Dick, their knives stopping dead against his flesh, strength stolen by Soak and Psionic shield. The Mind Shield couldn't strike back, his arms were around Crow, keeping her safe, but Marvin was there with a blast of frigid air, Bitter Breeze washed over the creatures, raising frost on the steel of their knife blades, numbing them with instant hypothermia.

They turned away from the futile effort against the Anchor's defenses and made to leap at Marvin. Slowed motions of the chilled killers were futile, Alexander put an arrow through one's face, and Grace was on top of the next two, slashing. One of the three that had tried to murder Christoph also thought the older black man easier prey and leapt, while its comrades distracted the other fighters. Marvin's powerful hand closed over the leaping creature's throat, holding the small man-sized figure easily, ignoring its attacks. Impotent flailing from the held monster, its knife skipped over the frozen Rime armor he'd conjured, unable to find purchase. Greater Frost Grip turned it into a steaming lawn ornament that the older Peacekeeper smashed against a nearby tree.

Just like that, the Red Caps were dead, and nothing else came forward to trouble the party. Normally, overwhelming victory made you feel kind of relaxed. Not Alexander, not after seeing, or rather, not seeing until too late the Red Caps.

"Thinking it's time to see if we can't find those puppeteers. This chipping away at us, searching for a weakness until something sticks has got to end." He told the party, voice devoid of emotion from within the grip of Ruthless.

"Seconded." Grace said in support, also tired of being on the defensive, of responding to the attacks.

Marvin scrubbed a hand through his somewhat unkempt beard, not liking the scenario much, but knowing his companions had a point. A week of intercepting raids and probing attacks had bought time for the fortification of the bridge. The veteran was concerned though that there didn't seem to be a slow in the attempts to scout the crossing, nor were there any truly large-scale commitments of the Rasatalan spider's themselves, this being the first time they'd put a part of the Hive into the effort directly. If the Eximius were trying out new tactics to see what worked, then they needed to kill the things that had that information, deny the horde the intelligence, and keep them guessing. Plus, unleashing captured hordes of hostile dungeon spawn in their ranks would keep them occupied for a while. The puppeteers were a force multiplier, they could just link up with a new captured dungeon spawn and hurl it into the fray, as many times as they had fodder available.

"Motion carried." Captain Pruitt decided, "We have seven hours of daylight. Let's see if we can't show Geppetto's red headed step children a one-way trip to the big nothing."

"Woah! Hey, wait a minute, that was not what we signed up for!" Objected Dick, with his time mage package in his arms.

Technically, he was correct, the Contract for their hire was to assist in the defense of the encampment. This offensive deployment was not in their Contract, they were not under obligation to assist in a deep penetration of enemy lines.

"Then fuck off, pansies." Grace Miller told the man in no uncertain terms, seemingly unbothered by the notion of losing half their number, if not half their fighting power, in one go, "Stay here, hold the fort, or return to the camp and take five. Either way, we're going to put these body snatchers down."

Alexander didn't know how much of that was her personal grudge, and hoped it wasn't much, because that kind of thing got people killed in the Green. He didn't think so, she'd been too on point, too disciplined. More like she didn't think there was much liability in losing what amounted to a situationally useful invalid who lacked offensive capability in any form, a powerful Anchor, but one who basically couldn't fight while guarding her, and an offtank whose entire suite of abilities was geared for defensive actions and holding ground.

Defensively, the three were fantastic assets and Alexander had been glad to have them around, no matter their personalities or quirks. They were able and skilled Adventurers in their role. Offensively? They were subpar. Potentially even a liability, as the Red Caps had shown, because it had been effectively only four fighters covering for the other two, one of whom that had to be bailed out by the time mage, burning one of her precious tickets.

Dick Nielson was not a bad man, nor a coward. But he knew what he was good for, and he knew the limits of his abilities. He also knew he wasn't in the same league as the three that had approached him for a job. The all call meant everybody who could, did. That didn't mean they had to obey Peacekeepers blindly, not even the officers. There were still rules to things, even under Martial Law. Holding this ridge was where he could be effective. Following that evil-eyed revenant into the bush wasn't, not with Crow to look after. She was powerful, a true force multiplier, but only if you could keep her safe. The Anchor tank looked to his recently frustrating comrade, who'd poisoned the well so to speak and created problems where there hadn't had to be any and frowned. Christoph wasn't the best attacker, but he was serviceable, competent at occupying enemies and keeping them at arm's length, and he didn't run, ever. They were a team. Teams stuck together.

Sighing, the Highlander looking Anchor replied with real regret in his sonorous voice, "We can't. It's not a want to thing, Crow can't defend herself and maintain the ward. When we're set up, when we can stash her someplace out of the way, that's fine, we can be more or less immortal and not have to worry about it. But pushing deep like that? It's asking for somebody to get killed. We can't keep up with you people, that's all there is to it."

Alexander nodded along with the man's explanation. He was right. Nothing personal, that's just the way it was.

The Oread lightened her glare and nodded, "I know. It's fine, I'm being too harsh. You three have done as ordered. You've fulfilled your Contract to the letter and I don't have any complaints about your field work, not even a little, and that would be rare even amongst my subordinates in the Peacekeepers. This needs to happen though."

Crow didn't hide her frustration at being the weak link. Her powers were great, near immortality for her companions, full freedom to use their abilities, no matter how draining. But she was the reason they didn't have a full party. Not many Adventurers of high rank wanted to be tied down by her disadvantages.

"Leave this place to us." Christoph, this time, with a hand on his companion's shoulders, "You people do what you do, we'll hold this ridge, just like we said we would. Somebody's gotta make sure nothing slips around behind you while you're catching them napping. Worst case, someone needs to report back to the bridge if it all goes wrong, so they can prepare for an assault."

Another reasonable take. Someone did need to keep the ridge and to be able to pass word back to the encampment. The enemy weren't the only ones learning things, Alexander's field notes, written between waves, compiled along with the Peacekeeper Officers' own, were a treasure trove for what they'd been dealing with the last six days. Before setting off, they added their suspicions regarding the Puppetmaster's abilities and entrusted that to the three Adventurers to guarantee that their potential deaths didn't deprive the rest of the coalition valuable intelligence. That done, Alexander and his one-time escorts departed to take the fight to the enemy.

Slow, careful steps, body held low to the ground took Alexander closer to the source of what he was growing more confident was the Puppeteer encampment. They hadn't known exactly how to recognize where the creatures were holed up, but a brief discussion obtained a consensus that such fine weaves of mana couldn't be sustained over long distances.

Most spells attenuated the farther from their caster they traveled. Even a specialized monster employing a suite of Arcana, Traits, and Skills devoted to the purpose couldn't do it indefinitely over a drastic range.

Probably these monsters were grabbing their meat shields at camp and moving up with the creatures well in advance. When they lost their piloted body, they likely retreated back to the reserve to restock. It explained the two to three hour time lags between attempts. An hour or so from base to the ridge, an hour or so back to grab another unwilling monster's soon to be corpse.

Like any hypothesis, it had to survive a test. A rustle from above made him freeze, scanning the brush. Limbs parted to reveal a Slayer, less nimble than its Infiltrator cousin, was taking almost delicate steps as it climbed from one tree to another through their branches. The weight of the beast, its sheer bulk, made silence impossible. Even so, it made far less noise with its arachnid shinnying through the trees than most things would have. Alexander's lips pursed as he watched. He hated bug types, such a pain. The insectoid body was a well-engineered one, especially when magic allowed it to bypass its usual size constraints.

The presence of the Slayer, whose compound eyes hadn't detected Alexander, answered several questions. Firstly, it meant they were on the right track, the Slayers had so far been deployed as guards for nests. Secondly, it gave him useful insight into the sensory abilities of the Eximius.

Such as, they didn't see heat, which was the primary means of seeing through his Stalk and stealth. They also didn't have a lamia's scent, or it would have caught the notes of human on the drifting breeze, it had must passed downwind of him. He was silent, there wasn't any sound to track, and it lacked the sensitivity to detect things like heartbeats, which some dungeon spawn, mostly ones from Nut could home in on easily. He was still, so it couldn't feel vibrations to track him. Spiders were vibration and visual predators, mostly, from what he knew. The fine hairs on their limbs picked up disturbances in the air and even slight tickles of their webs. The twelve faceted eyes no doubt occupied a large portion of the spider's brain power to process. It probably had to devote massive computational power to produce depth perception from so many overlapping fields of vision. The result would be fantastically sharp visual acuity, with a massive field of view. They were only blind from below. But they couldn't see through a skilled scout's techniques for staying unseen, many of which involved using the terrain and being where things wouldn't look, rather than outright invisibility.

Alexander studied the enemy as it moved, only tracking it with his own eyes, not even turning his head. He would give them nothing to detect him.

A brassy yell from a little over a mile behind him, Grace's mana laced shout, washed over the spider and it lurched in that direction without thought. The taunting aspect of her Beserker's Cry instilled deep hostility to creatures that weren't possessed of emotional or instinctual stabilizers. Both he and Marvin were, a fact that they were counting on to pull the monsters out of position.

Success was measured by three more clambering forms, Infiltrators, heading out in the direction of the distant challenge. Grace and Marvin were the distraction, the bait. They would call the creatures in, dangle an obvious threat in front of their nest, compelling them to attack the interlopers. Half a dozen more controlled dungeon spawn, two cyclops, a lamia, and three goblins.

The goblins were a relief. If they were using such low tier creatures, then probably they were running out of more useful stock. It meant attrition was possible, if not preferable. Or that they were pulling their resources elsewhere. In any case, the encampment would be safer once the Puppeteers were dead and the local Hive members wiped out.

He concentrated on moving on, prowling through the underbrush, back along the path taken by the monsters. Marvin and Grace would have to hold against the tide without him, his job was to take out the puppeteers.

Down through a small holler he went, following the obvious path smashed through the forest by the terrestrial dungeon spawn. The damned spiders left almost no trace at all to follow, only came down from the trees to drink, and that sparingly, disliking large bodies of water as they did.

A creek bed, a watershed from the rolling, hilly terrain of the upper Ozarks, led him to his target: a small abandoned town. He carefully shed his pack, a smaller field bag for essentials, like the waxed paper map he withdrew from inside that showed this humble place as being called, once, Perryville MO.

It wasn't anything now. A few burned out skeletons of buildings, a few standing structures long since abandoned when most of its people petrified, the rest left to the predations of Gaia and the dungeons that opened up across her surface. Of note, there was a big reservoir, a community lake it was labeled, just the kind of water source the Eximius liked. The narrow creek he followed emptied into the lake, putting him on the western approach to the town. Eximius liked to use woodlands, where their agility gave them significant advantage against four-legged prey, but state highway fifty-one curved away north, the same highway fifty-one which was the reason for the bridge his division was tasked to guard. That would be the most likely path of advance for a major push, rather than the forward scouts he'd been dealing with.

The town itself was a corrupted zone. Alexander wasn't certain, but he thought it might have been Nemeta, to judge by the lush grasses in seven distinct varieties covering the flatter land of the old town, the dense vines climbing to the top of the water tower that loomed above the town and any structure that stood. A corrupted zone meant a former dungeon. A former dungeon meant a concentration of mana, a hotspot in the Dragon Pulse. This was a place where hatching a Realm Shard was a faster operation. Not fast enough, not without human cores to feed the thing.

Loremasters had sacrificed much to find the scope of the crisis, like the man who'd discovered the impending calamity. Three had gone catatonic in the course of extracting from the aether their contributions to the Greater Midwest Response Forces, the term the Peacekeepers and New Chicago leadership had given to the result of the conscription. What they had found gave hope of halting the crisis.

While the puppeteers could dominate dungeon spawn, they couldn't do the same to Gaian humans, the only reason humanity had any hope of discovering the outbreak. Philosophers would argue, because it gave them purpose, about the reasons why. Protection of the mother planet for her children, perhaps. Whatever the case, Children of Gaia were immune to the mind control, the domination of their cores. Similarly, the mana extracted from the cores of dungeon spawn, those attuned to the magics of realms outside Gaia, could not be used to feed a realm shard. That didn't stop the creatures from wiping out dungeons all along their invasion path. In that they'd done humanity a favor, most of the territory between Denver and the Mississippi was free of active dungeons by this point. They didn't like competition, did the Eximius Hive Queen.

Which probably explained why Alexander, from his hiding place under a wild apple orchard near the wood line of the creek's drainage into the small lake, saw no sign of the herbaceous dungeon spawn typical of a Verdant Paradise corrupted zone. In all likelihood the native mobile flora, carnivorous trees, Venus flytraps and the like, and insectoid or birdlike fauna of this area had been exterminated by the Rasatalan Horde.

Amongst the overgrown wreck of the town, eyesight keen beyond humankind, he witnessed the awful glory of the Eximius war machine. Some kind of creature he'd never seen before, a bull, if bulls were built on the scale of a wooly mammoth and had six hooved legs, with powerful necks muscled thickly. Two of them were haltered together by webs, with what must have been a Puppetmaster on their backs, pale carapace with red splotches of color down their backs and legs, these demon spiders were built far more thinly, these reminded him of those long delicate limbed house spiders than the tarantulaesque Slayer and the wolf spider resemblance of the Infiltrator. As he watched, six legs waved and the beasts beneath them pulled a sled of web encased packages stacked like cordwood. There were hundred of bodies down there on the great sled tied between the draft beasts.

Time was not his friend, Grace and Marvin would be fighting by now. He had to get down there, to put a stop to this, this, whatever was worse than a heinous mess. So determined, he sped down the wilding orchard, flitting from tree to tree. He used the rotting hulks of a bunch of RVs in the RV park next to the lake to cover his movements, the aluminum hulls being taken over by climbers, mosses, ferns, and a few with saplings sending branches out from broken windows. The verdancy of Nemata was obvious in its influence on the rate of plant growth. The brush he moved through could have been thirty years old, not the three since the Big Break would have unleashed that realm on this piece of Gaia.

He was thankful for Nemata at that point, her overflowing lushness provided cover that hid his passage across the flat field that was all that could be discerned from the double lane highway of interstate fifty-five he crossed to enter the ruined township. A small town, humble in nature, few, if any buildings that had risen above two stories, Perryville had been utterly consumed by prairie and scrub forest. Around a hummock identifiable as a onetime funeral home only by the sign that miraculously stood uncovered, Alexander finally found his target: Under guard by a pair of Slayers was a score of Puppeteers. Each did that insidious pantomime of dancing legs that denoted they were controlling a dungeon spawn proxy.

Without warning, one of the monstrous pilots of other dungeon spawn keened and fell over, spasming. It was ignored, and the piercing calls of distress halted after only a moment. Then the creature lifted itself up and departed the small clear dale to retrieve another replacement from the sled. An ogre's head emerged from the pocket the spider was cutting into and it immediately bit down on the creature's neck, injecting some kind of priming toxin. Ogre screams rose up, but halted when the spider began to weave its legs over the creature's skull. Alexander thought he could almost see the weaves of magic being employed, traceries of mana that bound the Ogre's brain, slaved its body to the Puppeteer's will.

A final slice of the sharp forelimb of the Rasatala demon spider freed the Ogre, but it did not fight, did not resist. Instead, with utter gentleness, it lifted its slaver up and carried the limb waving spider to join the rest before departing the town back toward the holler Alexander had descended minutes earlier.

"They're replacing the ones being killed by Grace and Marv." Alexander whispered to himself, that being nearly confirmed by a second shrieking spider, then a third in rapid succession.

Once Grace got up to speed, she was nigh unstoppable. Marvin was potent in his own right, his armoring magic, his combination of ranged cryomancy, mighty axe strokes, and close range freezing touch would give Grace the room to find her rhythm. Another spider howled, then went to the pile of reserve bodies.

The only wild card was the Slayer and trio of Infiltrators that had joined the dungeon spawn. An Infiltrator ambush had nearly killed Marvin and himself. Of course, that was before they knew what they were up against, completely surprised, the best possible case for the Infiltrator. Not again would they be snookered. Now the monstrous bastards got to find themselves a straight fight against the Peacekeeper red cloaks. Another Puppeteer cry, another body to pull from the pile. They were not enjoying themselves, it would appear.

Now. Some instinct propelled him forward from his hiding spot within a vine coated gas station. First, he had to deal with the two Slayers, those were the lynchpin. Too bad for them, he knew just how to send the sonsofbitches off to whatever hells awaited them. Fast, staying low, flickering like a ghost between saplings, bushes, and hollowed out wrecks of vehicles covered in vines he homed in on the guardians like a shadow seeking its owner's footsteps. Stalk hid the vibrations of his steps, too light upon the earth, like one of Tolkien's Elves, from the finely tuned senses of the Slayer's leg hairs. They did feel the rush of air from his passage, turning, too late to see what had caused it, because he'd already disappeared behind the building that made tombstones to serve the funeral home near which the Eximius had made their base of operations.

Appropriate.

He pulled the pair of bulbs retrieved from the site of the first Slayer kill, the O'Hare gate, where once upon a time not so long ago a pool of hyper acid had subsided to leave behind the doubled Witch kiss. Slayer blood from a limb blown from the monster by Saki's Boomstick in a vial he slathered over the bulbs and tossed each at the clawed appendages of the guardian spiders, who were lifting great slashing front arms high in threat, their attention on the disturbed air a hundred twenty degrees from where he stood, which put him behind their abdomens, a blind spot created by their bulk.

They should have killed him the first time they'd fought him, Alexander Gerifalte made a living learning how to slay monsters. It wasn't a lifestyle. It was an obsession. One he only put down when he walked through the door of his family's home to be with his loved ones.

While the barbed tendrils writhed to life, he grabbed a pair of arrows, red fletched, and put both into the air, the quarter beat harp notes preceding the death of the Slayers as the arrows drove into their upraised thorax. They howled at the Mind Flayer Tears that ripped sheets of pain through their mana circuits, then louder when the flailing tentacles of Witch kiss slithered into the hole in their armor and began rooting within them. Ignoring the dead but not knowing it yet monsters, he dashed past with Talon drawn and began decapitating Puppeteers, one clean stroke, on down the line for each, merciless. The creatures, with their senses embedded in their hosts, never saw him, never knew he was there. Just the way he liked it when killing monsters.

With the score slain in a matter of a minute, Alexander turned to the sled and its reserve of vessels. No sense leaving those behind, and he still needed to kill the two pilots for those draft dungeon spawn. Alexander drew two more red fletched arrows and sent them into the backs of the giga-ox riding spiders. Each shrieked, so too did their mounts, and the whole lot collapsed to the ground. During the convulsing, agonized rolls of the large dungeon spawn, a result of the Puppeteers dominating them, the awful fuckers crushed themselves with their hosts. Alexander appreciated irony when it wasn't aimed at himself.

Next the pile of monsters. That needed more conventional tactics. But first. The Entropic Venator shouldered his bow and took up again his Talon, running to vault to the back of the rising monster whose master it had just crushed. Rather than allow them to be recaptured, he swung the Messer in a neat cut at his feet, severing the beast's thick spine with ease. He took two steps along the dying creature's enormous back to build momentum, then leapt from the dungeon spawn as it collapsed to the back of the next, a twenty foot long-jump with relative ease, and repeated the act, dropping from the slaughtered creature to the ground. Now for the sled.

Somewhat mussed for the chaotic kicking and rolling of the draft beasts, the entombing webs did their weavers proud, metallic strength permitting not a single gap in the mesh to allow a captured host free. Alexander couldn't help but be impressed by the enemy. They were worthy prey, and he hated them for it.

Alexander looked at the pair of hissing pools that were overlapping, the remains of the Witch kiss that had feasted on the Slayers. Four bulbs sat in the center of that malevolent acid bath, around which a brown ring of vegetative death was visibly spreading.

A few moments to think on it, then he walked to the gas station. It took some digging with Talon, but he found an abandoned vehicle parked in its lot with gas in its tank, the metal and plastic around it chopped free within a few minutes. From the gas tank and siphoned using a gas dispenser line, cut free of its nozzle, he drained that gas into a jerry can lifted from the back of a moss coated pickup truck. This he dumped on top of the web prison. Then another. And another. And, fuck it, one more for good measure, with a trail of fuel leading a hundred feet away. That took three strokes off his Firestarter flint to set a racing line of fire that soon had the entire web cocoon of dungeon spawn burning like a glorious torch.

Alexander watched the fire that purified this little slice of Gaia for thirty seconds, to be certain everything within the blaze would die, then he was sprinting back the way he'd come, to give what aid he could to the Peacekeepers who had managed to become his friends.