Chapter 204 - EVO

***Tirnanog, Mount Aerie***

***Bruce Patel***

The servants set up the foldable table, and we settled down to wait for whatever was going to happen. Our entourage of ten wagons brought more than enough manpower to ensure we weren’t truly needed, should the worst-case scenario come true. Similar setups had been posted to all main entrances leading to the 12th strata’s main compound.

Travis and I were here because we deemed it the most likely for any survivors to take this exit as an escape route. It was admittedly a little strange to blockade one of the main transport tunnels in this manner, but it wasn’t unheard of for a wagon to break down. If someone came out to ask what we were up to, we would have to come up with a story to get the time we needed. It was unlikely for things to be delayed too much after the Forsaken had pulled completely out of their former hideout located in the main living cavern.

It indicated that they intended to go all in on whatever they had planned.

While I began shuffling the playing cards, my partner went for the beverages. She had developed a taste for all sorts of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, ever since the UI allowed us more freedom in whatever someone might want to ingest. I was still a little old-fashioned with what I decided to put in my mouth, slow to trust the altered settings of the nanomachines which regulated the gene-recombination virus.

“I still think that telling them about the intruders would have been the better choice,” Travis commented idly while sniffing at the bottle with the citrus-like fruit juice. She had acquired it not so long ago from the market in Hochberg, which was just half an hour away from Mount Aerie – for someone who had the clout to use the connecting wormhole at a whim.

“What if they blame us if someone dies?” she asked, less out of concern for the potential deaths themselves, and more for the political implications it might have on our strata.

I clicked my tongue and handed her the freshly shuffled deck, which I retrieved from the storage box the servants brought with the table. Even the card sleeves had been changed to prevent either of us from recognising a card’s backside by identifying any known scratches.

“You seriously believe that those people could kill anyone important?” I asked. “They are Earth’s best, but that doesn’t mean Earth GOV would give them all the enhancements they need to compete with a juggernaut, or even an elder. In Earth GOV’s mind, they just need to be good enough to do the job. And there are always more where they came from.”

Travis pursed her lips while carefully drawing the first seven cards of her deck, so she wouldn’t damage them with her long and very sharp, reinforced fingernails.

“But that’s just it. Anyone Earth GOV might want to have killed would survive those ingrates at least long enough for help to arrive. We aren’t talking just about any strata. The Twelfth have so many powerhouses that it is almost a given for those people to fuck up somehow. Just imagine what might happen if they happen to run into granny Mary. It would be a riot right from the start. Oh, and I will keep my hand.”

I tilted my head at the thought and also drew my starting hand of cards, considering it only for a few seconds. “I keep too. And I say killing someone isn’t their primary goal. I think they want something the twelfth is hiding, and I want to know what it is. If we told the Twelfth that someone managed to infiltrate their servant staff to such a degree, they would crack down on them immediately. And then we would never learn what the Forgotten are after. Even if we caught all of those brain-washed fools, they would just flip the kill-switch in their heads before giving us anything of worth.”

“I will go first,” Travis announced unashamedly and played a land. “Yeah... if there was a way to reliably interrogate the Forsaken, I wouldn’t be on board with this plan of yours to let things play out. Alas, not even psychics are a reliable method to get through their conditioning.”

“Not ‘let it play out’”, I corrected and played a land, along with my haste 1/1 red goblin. “We just let them get far enough with the execution of their attack to see what they are after. Do not forget that we are essentially at war with those people, and war requires some sacrifices from time to time. Isn’t that what our strata is there for? To make the morally ambiguous but necessary decisions?”

Of course, I immediately attacked Travis, taking her down to nineteen life points.

Travis rolled her eyes and played a creature of her own on her second turn, a 1/2 life gainer, who added a life point every time a creature entered the battlefield. This neatly returned her to twenty life points.

“Aw, naw!” I complained. “Why did you bring that deck today!? You know exactly that this match-up takes forever to play out! It’s a slogfest!”

“Hah!” Travis scoffed. “That’s why I took it when I saw you switch your blue control deck for that red goblin shite! Anyway, what do you think of our informants? Don’t you believe those two are holding something back?”

I shrugged as I drew a card and played my second turn, already less interested in the game, now that I knew what deck Travis was playing. I would hit her; she would regain her life. I would hit her again, rinse and repeat, till I either gave up or managed to get very lucky with my cards.

“I believe that there is no reason for them to hide the Forsaken’s goals from us. We already offered them amnesty if things turned out in our favour, and that’s all they wanted. Not to mention, we wouldn’t be on top of things like we are now if they hadn’t directed our people to the right clues.”

Travis drew her eyebrows together and scrutinised the wagon which held our temporary ‘friends’. It was better for them not to be seen in public.

“Just cause we can’t think of a logical reason at the moment doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I don’t trust them, and it would behove us to think twenty steps ahead of that man, or it may bite us to have ever listened to that man instead of sicking the entire clan on those people. And the woman is a sneaky one. We better have ten pairs of eyes on her wherever she goes.”

I harrumphed. “We can still have them gone any time we want to.”

“Just the longer we wait, the harder it will be to explain to the other elders!” Travis countered. “I say we decide what to do with them after whatever this is, is over.”

She gained even more life once she was done with her turn.

“Yes, dear,” I answered dutifully and did some damage with my creatures… she didn’t even bother to block them.

“If you want, we can put in a good word for them, depending on how this situation unfolds,” she clarified.

“Yes, dear,” I replied, settling in for a long wait.

We played three entire rounds, which took a lot longer than it should have with any other match-up of cards. On our third round, we heard a set of muffled explosions from down the corridor.

They couldn’t have been very strong, but cave systems with long hallways tended to amplify and carry noise over long distances.

Travis and I looked up from our game and down the hallway that led to the 12th strata’s compound.

As we watched with anticipation, someone activated an alarm siren. The treemonae, which stood to either side of the road forming an alley, didn’t like that at all and began to uproot themselves.

They looked like alien weeping willows, but had in fact nothing to do with plants. Instead, they were more like sea anemones who could slowly but steadily change their positions if they saw a need for it. Agitated, they were now slowly moving on countless little root-like legs which normally served to anchor their trunk-like bodies on the floor, walls, and even the ceiling.

Right now, it seemed like they had suddenly decided to block the road as they closed in from both sides – extremely slowly, but steadily. What was previously a wide and safe corridor for passage narrowed excruciatingly slowly, but with undeniable inevitability.

“Huh,” Travis lowered her cards. “I didn’t know they could do that.”

“What? Move?” I asked.

“No, you dunce!” Travis flicked a card at me, which bounced off my forehead. “Block the road is what I mean! I thought those things were stupid and only move when they are about to starve.”

“Careful with the cards!” I complained. “I just had them made by the best artisan I could find. And I mean, it isn’t as if there is much space for them to move anywhere else. Maybe the hunters just found a noise the treemonae don’t like, and now they are trying to get away, which by design blocks the compound’s exit path.”

“Maybe,” Travis admitted right as the distant main gate at the hallway’s end flew open.

Three figures came out, running as if the devil itself was right on their heels. They were fast, leaving me without doubt that they were Forsaken. But no matter their speed, I doubted they would make it to our end if they weren’t speedsters. The hallway was about a hundred metres in length, and they had only started their escape.

Though one of them was carrying a strange bundle, leaving me some hope that our questions would be answered soon.

It became a little hilarious when two small, furry creatures pounced after them, nipping at their heels.

“Are those cats?” Travis asked.

Then they threw some sort of grenade behind them right as a fourth figure emerged from the gateway. The grenade didn’t truly explode, but there was a notable ‘thump’ followed by an expanding cloud of glittering tinsel that fluttered through the air.

The pursuer coughed, and lightning sparked over her body. She blurred, but didn’t flash forward like I knew her to be capable of doing.

“Come back here, honourless bastards!"

The threat was delivered with such emotional wrath that my eyebrows lifted involuntarily, for I was now certain who their pursuer was.

“I am going to reach down your throats and rip out your shrivelled hearts before I feed them back to you in pieces!"

“If a single hair on my daughter is out of place, you are dead!”

Travis tilted her head and nervously massaged her earlobe. “I think I have never heard Astra use such a foul tongue before. At the meeting of elders she is always so polite.”

I sucked in both lips and, equally nervously, massaged the tip of my chin, feeling the stubble of having forgone shaving for two days. “Yeah, she’s real mad, alright. That diction is more up Magnus’s alleyway.”

Even if the metal tinsel somehow stopped Astra’s teleport ability, she was still a speedster and quickly caught up to the slowest of the three Forsaken. In a move that was worthy of her partner, she grabbed the back of her victim’s ballistic armour and used him like a counterweight to propel herself forward in an attempt to catch up with the other escapees.

Her unfortunate ‘counterweight’ had the misfortune of being propelled backwards. Sadly for him, not directly, which would have been fine, but at a slight angle.

That brought him just close enough to the treemonae to be snatched up by a questing filament.

As if weighing nothing at all, he was yoinked right into the living forest, where countless other filaments were just waiting to touch something... edible.

It took just one second for more filaments to attach themselves to arms, legs, head, and torso. And for others to explore places they had no right to be in, like mouth, nose, ears, and… I hoped his armour protected him from a very peculiar form of defilement. At least some dignity had to be given when one was about to become monster food.

Another second passed as filaments went taut, squeezing, but also pulling in different directions, making it evident that several different treemonae had participated in this catch.

Then – rip – it went.

“Ah!” My partner exclaimed and fluttered her wings in distress.

I blinked, wishing I hadn’t been stupid enough to watch that. Maybe Matriarch Vanya would be willing to wipe that little part of my memory? There was a certain disconnection between intellectually knowing what happened to someone stupid enough to stumble into a treemonae forest, and seeing the real deal first-hand.

Travis covered her mouth and nose, not keen on smelling the outcome with her enhanced senses. Or worse, tasting it, which was possible at a certain degree of mutation.

The fate of their comrade somehow gave the remaining two forsaken the power to run even faster.

For the one further behind, it was already too late. The cats got to him. Not by claw or by teeth, but by simply being in the way of his feet.

He tripped, and the treemonae got him too, and this time I was wise enough not to concentrate on what happened next.

Number three almost made it to the end before Astra got him, taking him down like a professional football player.

Travis beat her wings, buzzing forward to catch the strange bundle just in time as it went flying. Then she retreated from the corridor as it closed with a thick curtain of waving filaments.

“Holy!” I exclaimed, unable to believe how close the Forgotten came to making it out in one piece.

Travis quickly put the bundle on the floor and began opening the many ties. Only once I looked over her shoulder did I realise what it was, as the pale face of a young girl was all that was left free.

“Is she?” I asked. “Why would they be after the children!?”

Travis quickly placed a finger on the girl’s throat once she undid enough of the strange carrying harness.

She let out a breath of relief. “Her heart is still beating. They must have sedated her somehow.”

In that moment, one of the cats came bouncing out from beneath the filaments. For some reason, it seemed able to avoid them. Maybe they were too small to be considered prey?

It sat down in front of us with an eyeball in its maw and looked up curiously as it tried to bite into the eyeball, squishing the tough organ futilely in its maw. It probably wasn't even a real eyeball, but some cybernetic implant, considering its source.

Then Astra emerged from the thicket, pushing the treemonae’s filaments carefully aside with her own. Filament-on-filament contact didn’t seem to trigger the violent reaction of the compound’s guardians.

“Constella!”

Travis quickly picked the girl up and held her out like some protective charm to ward off the furious mother.

Astra didn’t even consider us and grabbed the girl before she dashed down the corridor faster than any carriage could take her. Probably to get her to the Tates for medical aid.

We stood there, unsure of what to do, before a cough drew our attention.

Covered in blood and followed by the second cat, Ancient Mary emerged from the wall of waving filaments and glared at us before her attention went to our carriages.

I was already certain that shit would go down when she turned her attention to the two cats who looked up to her curiously.

“Spit that out!” she commanded in a no-nonsense tone. “People aren’t for eating.”

The first cat squished the eyeball two more times, then gave up and spat it out.

The second one began hacking, regurgitating, and then made a mess on the floor.

Mary pointed at the thicket. “Go back!”

The cats dropped their heads as if they were moping, but did as ordered.

Then Mary narrowed her eyes at us. “You two are lucky that I have other shit to deal with right now because Teresa and Etan aren’t at the compound, but I will be at the next meeting of elders, and then you will explain that!”

She thrust an accusing finger at the wagons behind us. “And you, in there. Don’t even think of running! There isn’t a single place in Mount Aerie where you can hide from me.”

Giving us another glare, she slowly returned into the thicket of filaments.

Travis and I waited for another minute, but the ancient didn’t emerge once more.

Once we were certain of our survival, we returned to our transport wagon and went inside while the servants picked up the table and the cards that went flying when Travis beat her wings to catch the girl.

We took our seats on the left bench. Then we glared together at our informants, who had been waiting on the right bench.

Ancient Nisha blinked at us innocently, as if all of this was completely out of her control.

Ancient Zacharias smiled at us and twiddled his thumbs. “I think this went as well as anyone could have expected?”