Chapter 1718: A whole bunch of haters - Hurricroak

[One...two...twenty...by the power of a god I haven’t seen, why are there so many enemies?!] I complained to the rest of the group. [I thought the Maestro didn’t come along for that explicit purpose.]

"I...can kind of believe that," Zhen Hai commented in a whisper. "The number of enemies we had to fight alongside the Storm Singers was actually fairly small in comparison to this moment."

"Wait, does that mean the lindwurm attacking us alongside the Tremorscale tribe was due to the arrival of the Ragnarockers?"Terra added in a whisper.

[Silence, please. Tremorsensing is delicate work,] Nepherage complained as she kept a hand on the ground while in a kneeling position. [Fuck, there’s more of them underground.]

When we arrived at the [Burial Ground of the Mammoth], name pending, we expected to see a nominal enemy force.

An elite squad or a singular tribe of warriors would make sense, given that there was a guaranteed proto-treasure just embedded in the skull of a dead aether beast.

Reality, however, exceeded my expectations.

The number of auras belonging to Aether Grandmasters was easily in the double digits, while the number of Aether Masters was even higher.

The only saving grace of this situation was that none of these enemy combatants were rallied under a single banner...sort of.

I could tell that the warriors were divided into camps that were waving one banner among three, but each banner also had a smaller secondary symbol attached to the bottom.

I didn’t recognize any of them; I just knew the designs were beyond ugly.

Thankfully, we had Hakon, our local resident and expedition leader, for that particular problem.

Hakon stared at the banners for a solid minute, muttering to himself the entire time, and his expression getting worse and worse by the second.

Eventually, he spoke and shared with the rest of us on who exactly we were going to be tearing through like coyotes in a chicken coop.

"Well, I suppose the good news is that none of these tribes were former friends to us, so we won’t feel too bad about wiping them off the face of the planet."

"Dark," Zhen Xun Tian commented. "But good to know."

"The problem is that they are three of the most vicious tribes in the valley."

"Oh?"

"The ones with the vulture for an emblem are the Rot Feather Tribe, the ones represented by a coiling snake are the Star Viper Tribe, and the bastards with the spider symbol are known as the Red Weaver tribe. They all suck ass."

"Why?"

"Well..."

What followed was a fairly long rant about the aforementioned tribes and why they all absolutely sucked.

As Hakon shared this information with us, I could hear Logos and Pathos in the back of my mind whipping up entries to be added later to some book in the library somewhere.

...What were they writing?...

Name: Rot Feather Tribe

Leader: Chief Lattom—Aether King—Bloodliner of the Corpse Swallower—Formula focuses on causing poison, disease, and necrosis.

Description: A tribe of vulture Bloodliners who make it their sacred duty to eat the dead. Everyone’s dead. They’ve been known to dig up the gravesites of other tribes in order to eat the rotted corpses, desecrating the site in the process.

Reason for loyalty: The Collectrix stole the [Feather Headdress of the Corpse Eaters] and then promised them all the freshly dead they could eat.

________

Name: Star Viper Tribe

Leader: Chief Pythox—Aether King—Human—Formula has a darkness affinity, and the man himself really likes to choke people.

Description: The Star Viper Tribe believe there are three types of people: warriors, slaves, and those who have yet to become their slaves. Surprisingly egalitarian, they believe that the only people in charge of child-rearing and birthing are slaves...regardless of original gender.

Reason for loyalty: The Collectrix promised them a lot of slaves...that’s it. Including slaves from across the world, which they found deliciously exotic.

______

Name: Red Weaver Tribe

Leader: High Priestess Aranid-Aether King-Human - Formula is neutral, but it has a heavy spider motif.

Description: The Red Weaver tribe are...fucking weirdos. Due to a weird aether art exclusive to the tribe, they’re able to turn blood into silk directly from any living being’s body. It’s a right of passage for members of the tribe to take their first capture and use them to weave an entire outfit from their body.

Reason for loyalty: As a peace offering, the Collectrix presented them a rare, nearly extinct aether beast...which was then used to make the chief’s latest set of outfits. They got along quite well.

...Welp, my sympathies for them are dead...

"...and that’s just the cliff notes version."

"Those were the fucking cliff notes?!" Zhen Hai asked in disbelief.

Evidently, the Maestro was rubbing on his cousins, as they were acting as the perfect straight man for all of these horrific revelations.

"Okay, and they’re all here because...why?" Zhen Long asked. "They’re all here because they’re under orders from the Collectrix? That can’t just be it."

[Yeah, I’m with the first elder on this,] I added. [Are they trying to steal the axe for themselves?]

Everything Hakon told us, and from what the curators could collate, made these tribes sound like grade-A divas.

The kind of assholes that would deliberately wreck a dressing room and then complain that they did so because the chair was made of pleather instead of real leather...and then stab someone in the eye because they got their drug order wrong.

Either way, it seemed weird for such bloodthirsty mother fuckers to be playing guard duty in such great numbers.

Oddly, before anything hilarious and/or violent could occur to give me an answer, all of the people who had been a part of the first trip to the burial ground told me the answer.

Well, they all said "no" at the same time.

[Okay...why would they be unable to...]

Before I could even finish asking my question, a howl of pain accompanied by an explosion of ice aether echoed from the burial ground. From the top of a small hill, I was now noticing hosting a dark cavern; a boulder of ice launched out of it like a volcanic rock and slammed into the ground several meters away from the main camp.

I could sense that there was a person inside of that ice boulder and that he suffered rather grave injuries.

What followed after this event, though, weren’t cries of worry.

Rather, it was the sound of uproarious laughter.

•Haha! Fucking told y’all that the gut stringers wouldn’t be able to pull out! Pay up! •

•Hell no! The bet was whether or not they would die! That fucker’s heart is still beating. •

•You just don’t want to give up that slave boy of yours. •

At that exact moment, I understood everything.

"Are...are these assholes using my tribe’s legacy as a fucking game?!" Hakon hissed in a whisper. He had wanted to do more than that, but he was stopped by Frosttusk before he could do so.

The big mammoth viking looked calm on the surface, but both I and Nepherage could feel the roiling anger underneath his furry, massive frame.

"Yeah...that right there is why we couldn’t grab it... partially," Zhen Xun Tian began to explain.

The Storm Singers’ ancestral axe, after it had been embedded into the skull of the Ice Blood Mammoth, had actually undergone a bit of an evolution over the several centuries or so it had been missing.

Being submerged in the blood and brains of the massive beast had exposed the proto-treasure to a huge amount of ice aether that suffused it in power.

However, that was only part of the symphony.

The cavern the Storm Singer ancestor and the Ice-Blood Mammoth had fallen into was dense in aether, to the point of crystallization.

That much raw ambient aether had not only reinforced the already rich ice aether, but also helped to reinforce the death aether produced from the giant mammoth’s carcass.

Combining all of these factors created an incredibly dangerous aether treasure.

Crazier still, the axe was still absorbing power from the cavern to this very day.

"When powerful aether treasures lose their masters, they have a tendency to develop defenses and trials around themselves in order to fend off all except those it considered worthy," Zhen Xun Tian added when she noticed Hakon’s confusion. "We managed to get close because we were with your old man, but none of us could draw the axe even when we combined our powers."

"It isn’t just locked because of the power of aether, there’s something more to it," Zhen Hai added. "When I tried going for it, I could feel this weird sense of sentience like Zhen Liu’s hammer. It’s like it’s waiting for someone."

[...]

If Frosttusk has a heart, I could tell it would be pounding like a taiko drum.

Hakon’s heart I could hear, though, so I knew for certain that this guy was incredibly excited for this revelation.

"A destined weapon for a destined wielder...it’s like Kin Arthur and Excalibur!"

"Who?" Zhen Xun Tian asked.

I was about to say something, but then I realized the relevant book was accessible in the [Library of Nowhere] and my input wasn’t needed.

[So...how do we get in the first place?]