The next day…
Dozens of haunting rumors had taken Blue Hillock City by storm, causing the general atmosphere and populace to grow laden with panic.
Some said it was a terrifying magic beast that had eaten all the people. Others claimed it was a plague that dissolved those it infected into nothing. And the more skeptical ones blamed the filthy heretics for Colca's current state.
No matter how the stories spun and twisted from one falsehood to another though, one thing remained consistent throughout: Colca village had become a ghost town.
The group of mercenaries that passed by it on their return trip from the forest swore this.
According to them, the usually lively village where adults went about various tasks during the day and children running about playing with one another were nowhere in sight.
All of them had disappeared and the regular liveliness had done a complete 180, plunging the village into a deathly stillness and silence.
Multiple doors hung ajar, torches had long dimmed, carts filled with food and other materials had been left in the middle of roads, stalls had been left unattended… the list went on.
It was safe to say the mercenaries all possessed intact brains.
For when they processed these skin crawling and spine chilling sights, they didn't attempt to investigate and rather made haste from the area, pushing their horses to the limit.
They rushed away as fast as they could, hoping to death the imaginary perpetrator wouldn't catch up to and stop them from reaching the safety of Blue Hillock City.
Obviously, this group of men were the origin of the rumors, and Ninther, who also possessed a working pair of ears and the thing between them, caught wind of the news and wanted to hear it straight from the source.
He invited the gold loving contractors into the witcher knights barracks (something that had never happened) and grilled them thoroughly for every tiny little detail.
When dusk fell that same day, the proud knight leader and his men rode out of the city in full force, their destination obvious.
☀☀☀
A couple of Mary's blood thralls used to be mercenaries stationed in Blue Hillock City, and they frequented the Greenland Forest in the past to complete all sorts of jobs due to this.
However, unlike their brethren who still engaged in the "gold above all" profession to this day, these three were lucky to catch Count Vanlier's eye with their strength and stellar reputation.
With a promise of safety and a steady stream of gold coins, he added them to the ranks of the small army guarding his castle and retired them from the uncertain future they'd have had as mercenaries.
It was due to this aspect of their pasts that Mary selected them for the job of "passing by" Colca village and lighting the tiny spark that lit the city on fire.
As for fuelling this fire and encouraging its rapid spread—the addition of more convoluted twists here and there, and even the tiny dash of "heretic involvement,"—the young nobles and gang members Mary had turned took up that role.
And they did it masterfully, making it so that the witcher knights couldn't cover their ears to this news even if they tried. And as the so called "protectors of the land" they couldn't outright dismiss the validity of the rumors without at least investigating it.
It also helped that Ninther had been specifically informed that the invaders were somewhere in the Greenland Forest, and lo and behold, Colca bordered it directly.
Thankfully, the Spellbreaker Knight had a working brain between his ears and was eager to uphold the oath he made upon becoming a knight, so he made the connection easily and rushed to the village with his men.
While the impassioned knights with no idea of what to expect drove their powerful mounts to and beyond their limits, Greem and Mary had just arrived at the village on the lips of everyone in Blue Hillock City.
After spending a full night, day, and another night, fucking, eating, talking, and then fucking again, both Adepts had gained a noticeable glow about them.
Their expressions were unusually bright and pleasant as they slowed the activity of their individual flight methods and landed on a random street in the village.
Mary's crimson scale armor clung to her for dear life as always, her resized and recolored +3 Physique bracers hugging her forearms while Greem's formerly indigo +3 Agility cloak went around her waist in its modified form as a red sash.
As for the muscular hunk himself strolling forward and turning his head from side to side, he had on that vest he loved so much and the tiny but powerful contraption he couldn't stop talking about affixed to his upper back.
The only thing different from his usual getup was his arms. Unlike before, they were no longer bare.
A thick, skin tight shirt threaded and woven with that wonder metal of his encased his biceps and forearms, the same going for his gloves, pants and any cloth or leather material on both of their persons.
He'd somehow convinced the metal to turn into thin threads and then weaved them throughout the entirety of the cloth insides of her armor, the sash, and her boots.
These strange abilities are what earned her the best gift she'd ever received from him (apart from the man himself of course) and the strange looking sword he insisted was perfect for her.
She of course chose to trust in him and ditched her rapiers to practice with that weapon, getting used to its length to be precise, though even that issue quickly resolved itself when she exercised the blood enchantments in it.
Even though the upcoming battle would see them completely outnumbered, she couldn't wait for it to start so she could blood Alucard and put it through its first proper use.
Mary was broken out of her musings by Anderson, her expression souring instantly upon seeing the man step out of a large brown barn and hurry towards them.
Huffing through her nose, she tore her gaze away and walked up to Greem, levitating and kissing him on the lips. "I'm going."
"I'll set up here. Be careful."
Both nodding at the same time, they shared another quick peck before Mary deployed her wings and turned around, turning into a red line that vanished into the distance.
Most of the ground distance between the village and Blue Hillock was 20 kilometers of mountain road. Even with their specially bred and engineered mounts, it would take the knights a few hours to traverse that kind of treacherous terrain.
Mary with her air superiority on the other hand, could make the full round trip in less than five minutes. Such speed and freedom would've made Greem envious if he didn't have his own means of flight.
Once again, he felt more certain that buying the wings and developing the jet booster were the right decisions he made regarding his mobility.
Taking his mind off the topic, he followed Anderson to the barn and commanded the latter to show him its contents.
The mastered old man obeyed and waved his skeletal hand wrapped towards the large brown doors, the massive pieces of wood heeding his command and swinging wide open.
Laying asleep inside were the missing inhabitants of Colca village. Be it man, woman, or child, Anderson had robbed them of consciousness and tossed them in here according to Greem's orders.
The person in question strode in, his boots barely making a sound on the dense carpet of hay as he surveyed his thrall's handiwork and ensured none of the slumbering villagers was hurt or positioned wrongly.
Whatever thing he didn't like he changed, such as people piled on top of each other or kids lying face down and their breathing hampered as a result.
When he adjusted everything to his liking, he found and cleared the center of the barn before retrieving a grey, tennis ball sized sphere from his storage ring.
He lowered it onto the ground and pushed until it was halfway in, keeping his hand on it and retrieving a small sack which he let hover beside him.
Channeling his life force into the ground through his contact with the sphere, he transmuted a one meter wide circle around it and hardened the earth within its radius.
He then began to draw runes using his Synergist abilities, carving the hardened ground with the ease one would a hot knife through butter.
His familiarity with runes and unnaturally pinpoint precision saw him finish the formation in less than a minute, after which he switched the focus of his Transmutation ability to the sphere itself.
The metal rippled and began to flow like liquid, and multiple thin streams of if it traveled through the runic indentations and lined them while at the source, the remains of the sphere turned into a hollow cylinder filled with inscriptions.
Floating the sack over to the mouth of the cavity, Greem held the black bag over it and resized its opening until it was slightly smaller than that of the bag's.
Following this he opened the sack and poured its contents, the magic crystals clinking against the metal and each other as they supplied power to the formation.
Transmutation was then used to tighten the threads in the storage sack so it would remain wrapped around the cylinder's mouth and immediately replace any used up magic crystals.
Done with his work and confident the effects were active, Greem made his way back.
Outside in the village, he and Anderson stepped out of a massive rock formation jutting out of the ground where the barn used to be, their transition smooth and the illusion still holding up.
'Glad we've got out of the way. Now…' he activated the booster and rose off the ground at a moderate speed, cranking it up little by little until he had had a bird's eye view of the village.
He had a pretty solid idea on how he imagined the upcoming fight would unfold and conclude, but he still needed to get a lay of the land so he could determine where his golems and Mary's thralls would hide.
Another, more important reason for this was to nip any fixable problems in the bud. They had to ensure that every single knight left this place as a soul or a captive.
No in between. Else the consequences would be dire.
☀☀☀
The light of dawn began to pierce through the fading night when Ninther arrived with his men.
Their entry into the village disrupted the deathly silence and the pervading darkness, the trotting of manifold hooves and the lighting of more than enough torches chasing their effects away.
As the elite Spellbreaker knights controlled their mounts and went through the village, even they with their hardened sensibilities experienced the same unsettling sensations the mercenaries they looked down on described.
They lit and placed torches at multiple points they came across and started an investigation into the reason for the mysterious occurrence, only for them to be unsteadied as a loud rumbling shook their ears and the ground.
With Ninther in the lead, they swung their special horses around and raced toward the source.
A large stone wall quickly rose up around the village, locking them within its confines and cutting them off from the lower ranked knights they had waiting outside it as a precaution.
"Attack! Now!" Ninther roared and unsheathed his sword while driving his colt forward.
He yanked the reins sharply when he arrived five meters away from the still growing wall and brandished the blade, swiping his gauntleted hand over its flat side.
His surroundings brightened immediately as the sword lit up with hot, orange flames.
Behind and beside him, multiple of such torches came to life before they all straightened, went high, and then arched downwards, sending a multitude of crescent shaped slashes towards a singular spot on the wall.
Demonstrating unexpected teamwork and superb precision, the finely controlled flame slashes struck the targeted spot one after another, creating a series of localised explosions that sent rocks, big and small, rocketing away like shrapnel.
The combined might of the attacks carved a giant hole in the wall, but to their dismay, the damage was quickly being undone. The hole was closing rapidly.
While it shrunk, Ninther and his fellow Spellbreakers who had gotten closer and raised their swords to strike again, paused when they got a front row seat to the bloodbath occurring on the other side.
Their men were under attack, dying in droves to frenzied and reckless attacks of giant humanoid bats.
To make matters worse, a red streak wove through the chaos like a phantom, leaving detached heads, limbs, and torsos in its wake.
****
Author's note:
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