Chapter 733: Do or Die

"A Day Later"

The sky hung in a clouded red haze, painting the moonlight a pale, bloodied red that spilled into a vast, ceilingless great hall, its walls stretching long and curving as they climbed.

One would realize, at little more than a glance, that the bleached white pillars supporting those walls were not stone at all, but bone, the ribcage of some monstrous creature, hollowed out and raised into the frame of a hall built to hold thousands at once.

A long, pale white table lay atop the black stone floor, and a dozen individuals stood around it, occupying barely an edge of its length.

Some looked eager, trading quiet words back and forth. Others stood stoic, calmly waiting.

Then every head turned toward the edge of the table at once, eyes widening at the sight of two figures stepping out of lightless darkness.

The silence that followed stretched nearly a full minute before it broke into hushed whispers, whispers that lasted only moments before a cold, harsh clicking sound cut through the hall.

"Click."

At the head of the table stood a short feline, barely clearing the table’s own height, her frame small among a room full of beastmen warriors built to inhuman scale.

Yet there was nothing diminished about her. She carried herself with the lean, coiled economy of a predator through and through, eyes burning gold around a narrow black pupil, her face carrying a cat’s sharp lines, golden fur marked through with dark spots.

She was a Cheetah Beastkin.

Rasmea. The Golden Phantom. General of the Third Royal Division of the Malefis Domain, and, without argument, one of the strongest individuals currently present on the Beast Continent.

"Good evening." Rasmea’s voice was thin, almost childlike, and yet it carried across the entire chamber without effort, the kind of authority that never needed volume to be heard.

"You already know why you’ve gathered here... to receive orders, and to march to one of the many battlefronts." She paused, glancing to her side. "With Sir Andrei’s presence among you, you can guess this mission won’t be an ordinary one."

The gathered warriors, who had been listening with polite attention, went still with something closer to shock, the quiet hope of fighting beside the Great Beast suddenly made real. But before any of them could enjoy that thought for long, her next words swept it away.

"This will either be the greatest achievement of your life," Rasmea said, letting the silence that followed stretch for nearly a full minute, "or you will simply die. Along with everyone you lead."

"If you are still willing to serve, stay. If not, you may leave now." She met every gaze in the room in turn, each of them held for just long enough to feel singled out.

"Good," she said, once the minute of silence had run its course and no one had moved. "My judgment was right."

She wasted no further time on ceremony. Her palm came down flat against the table, and the cold white surface shifted beneath it, rippling like something alive.

"Today, we take the Krazkin Domain, and make the first major step toward claiming this land for ourselves." She didn’t leave the room to wonder any longer what their mission would be.

The table had finished its transformation by then, a landscape rendered with unsettling realism now stretched across its surface, a rocky plain giving way to the vast mountain, and beneath it lay a vast underground city cut into the earth, and at the heart of it all, drawing every eye in the chamber whether they meant to look there or not, a palace carved directly down into the bedrock itself.

"How are we meant to enter unbreachable Krazkin territory?" a Koala Beastman asked, the weight of the question visibly settling on him as he spoke it.

"By teleporting," Rasmea answered, grinning wide enough to flash her cold, beastly fangs.

Her gaze shifted back to the rendered landscape, and two points of gold light bloomed across the city at once, four threads of gold light stretching outward from them, marking routes across the terrain.

Contingencies were laid beside every path, an entire siege built out in painstaking, deliberate detail, and aimed at a goal that reached far beyond simply taking ground.

She moved through the assignments with the same unhurried precision, confirming post after post, a battle plan already worked down to its last detail now simply being spoken aloud for the benefit of the people who would have to live inside it.

And when she’d very nearly finished, her gaze finally settled on the far end of the table, where a towering figure stood waiting.

Andrei met her look with a wide grin, piercing blue eyes catching the red light the chamber offered.

"Sir Andrei." Her tone didn’t shift for him the way it hadn’t shifted for anyone else in the room. "You and your team will be responsible for eliminating the Krazkin Clan Matriarch, Yuarmin, and her generals."

She let that settle before continuing.

"I don’t need to remind you that while Princess Seures Krazkin has passed every test we have put in front of him, and has given us invaluable help in bringing this plan to where it stands today, we can never afford to be too cautious."

"Not with something like this." She emphasized.

"You will all be operating in enemy territory, and if our fears are realized... if Seures has been exposed, and they are waiting for us instead of being blind to us, your team will be the first to suffer for it."

"Possibly the first to die." She let the words land fully. No one in the chamber moved.

"It would also mean our own withdrawal is compromised. Only a fraction of us would make it out, and thousands of good soldiers would pay for that failure with their lives." She said it plainly, without theater, the way a general said things that were simply true whether anyone wanted them to be or not.

"But that is the price of breaching a fortress this impenetrable, and of claiming one of the two horns that lead this resistance."

"Victory, when we achieve it, will come at minimal cost to both sides, and a victory of that shape would do more than simply cripple the enemy. It would become the very thing this land needs to finally begin cleansing itself of the corruption that has taken root in it."

She paused, letting the weight of that settle over the room a moment longer than strictly necessary.

"Let the Ancestors watch over us."

The chamber answered with a rolling wave of animalistic grunts, a dozen throats not fully human giving voice to something too old and too instinctive to translate into words, fear woven through it, but readiness too, in equal measure.

"This meeting is over." Rasmea’s fist came down against the table’s edge, and the entire rendered landscape collapsed in an instant, the mountain and the city and the buried palace folding back down into a flat, pristine slab of stone, as though none of it had ever existed. "You have two hours to prepare."

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A few hours later, Andrei stood in a closed circle with his team, the four of them gathered close enough that no one outside it would catch more than a murmur.

"Captain. Who came up with this plan? And why weren’t we invited to the discussion?" Vesk broke the silence first, her small arms crossed, her expression somewhere between exasperated and deeply unconvinced.

"You weren’t invited because I was only given the details minutes before the meeting myself, and at that point, the three of you were nowhere to be found," Andrei answered flatly.

"As for the plan... well, obviously me." He grinned, entirely too proud of himself. "Who else."

"It’s a wonderful plan, isn’t it? I would say the odds of success are all but guaranteed."

"The plan is good." A beat. "Too good, actually. Which is exactly why I’m asking who came up with it, because I would like to iron out the details of my own part in it before I bet my life on it."

"What do you want to go over?" Andrei asked, drawing an exhausted sigh out of her before she’d even started.

"Fine." Vesk exhaled. "Walk me through it properly."

"Alright." Andrei’s grin didn’t fade, but something more serious settled underneath it as he began. "The basic shape of it is that Krazkin Princess Seures and her turncoats disable the city’s outer teleport shield, which is what lets our forces teleport directly into the heart of the city instead of marching in through a front door that’s impossible to breach without countless souls dying for every step of it."

"We can’t go straight for the palace, though," he continued. "It’s protected by a second teleport shield array, higher rank than the outer one, and the only way to bring that one down is from its core, sealed behind a lock only the Matriarch herself holds the key to."

Syrian’s tilted her head slightly at that, saying nothing yet, letting him keep going. Nidrot’s arms stayed crossed, patient. Drask, hidden behind his dark hood as always, gave nothing away at all.

"So the moment our forces make it into the city, call it twelve thousand or so, since the window is under two minutes before the shield cycles back on, and so the allied forces split into a pincer."

"First priority is securing the mines in Sector One and the food warehouses in Sector Six."

"From the outside, it’s going to look like the whole operation has failed," Andrei said. "Because what nobody should know yet is that the palace’s inner shield was designed to expand the instant the outer one goes down, which means no reinforcements are coming through behind us."

"So with that expansion cutting off support, Party A pushes a desperate charge at the palace using the mines as cover and goes after the High Borns directly. Group B holds the food warehouses hostage instead, making it look as though they’re building leverage, as if they’re hoping to negotiate their way out with their lives."

"And in the middle of all that chaos," his eyes moved to Nidrot, "An elite team, led by Nidrot, alongside a mixed group from the Domain and the Beast clans, hits the palace from the Western gate."

"Vesk, you will assault from the Eastern gate the same way. Loud, obvious, the kind of attack that makes it unmistakable that both invading forces are using the palace’s moment of confusion to go straight for the Matriarch’s throat, or simply to do as much damage as they possibly can before retreating or being taken out."

"Drask circles wide," he added, glancing toward the silent, hooded figure at the edge of the group, "and reaches the last unguarded approach, the Southern gate, alone without being seen."

He let that settle a moment before finishing.

"That leaves Syrian’s and me." He grinned. "Obviously, Krazkin will suspect that if my team is here, I’ll be here too."

"So instead of hiding my presence completely and letting their heavy hitters stay tucked safely inside the palace, I’ll be wearing an invisibility cloak, a bad one, deliberately, just good enough to be caught by the palace’s detection array."

"I will go head-on from the northern gate, and once they spot me, they will send some of their strongest to hold me down, and a few more to hold the two of you back as well."

"They will also wonder where Syrian’s is." Andrei smiled, turning toward the tall woman whose cold ruby eyes stared back at him, calm as ever. "And we will give them an answer for that too, finding her presence barely noticeable behind my presence. Obviously, it’ll just be one of her shadow imitators, but by the time they figure that out, it’ll already be too late."

"Syrian’s is the blade that ends Matriarch Yuarmin."

"So, if Yuarmin stays hidden inside the palace, Syrian’s finds her and ends it. If she runs for the Eastern side, Vesk, that’s yours to hold until Syrian’s arrives."

He turned.

"If she comes toward the Western gate, Nidrot holds her there until either I arrive or Syrian’s reaches him to finish it. And if she breaks for the South," his eyes found Drask, "she doesn’t get past you."

"Basically, everything’s covered. Even the minor details: what route we take, what to do if something unforeseen happens. Even being forced to retreat has a contingency built in."

Vesk looked up at Andrei, neck craned back, her expression making the point as clearly as her words had.

"Well." Andrei scratched the back of his head. "The main plan, how we get in, how we build the smoke screen, that was Rasmea and the rest of command working out, but the actual plan of action for our team, that part was mine." A beat, something almost sheepish crossing his face. "Syrian’s helped."

Vesk’s mouth fell open before she forced it shut again.

"The crown is really getting into your head, isn’t it? For you to come up with something that isn’t just ’storm the palace, swing claws until something dies.’" She tilted her head, considering him properly. "You are actually getting smarter."

"I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing," she added, a small shiver running through her at whatever her own imagination had just supplied.

Andrei only narrowed his eyes and shrugged, dismissive, which made Vesk open her mouth again and then close it, eyebrows knitting together in mild betrayal at not getting a reaction out of him.

"Hey. I have a question." Nidrot’s voice cut in, gruff and unhurried, and every head in the circle turned toward him.

"If we got the means to teleport straight into the city," he said, "why bother dragging in cannon fodder to crowd the streets, put on a show, pull their attention, all that weakling stuff." He shifted his weight and shrugged.

"You know we could just bring a dozen of our strongest instead. Not even the truly important names, not Rasmea, not the clan leaders. Just the second tier. We would demolish the Jackal elites and have them kneeling before the hour’s out."

Vesk looked up at the hulking orc with a slow, sly smile, something close to relief mixed into it.

"The crown for the dumbest among us," she said, voice ringing with a chuckle, "still goes to you."

Nidrot growled and swiped for her, missing entirely as she slipped sideways and ducked behind Syrian’s like a child hiding behind her mother’s leg.

"We will have ninety seconds before the city’s shield cycles back up," Andrei said, ignoring the scuffle entirely. "Teleporting a standard Elemental Ruler takes about ten seconds. Someone at my rank, or Syrian’s, takes closer to fifteen each."

"Just the five of us eat up almost sixty of those ninety seconds. Bringing in three more Elemental Rulers on top of that would burn the last thirty and accomplish nothing, and sending in anyone stronger than us runs the same risk."

Andrei continued, catching the still-questioning look on Nidrot’s face.

"We would be cornered and forced to retreat before we ever reached the palace."

"That’s why the plan needs the distraction and the ambush. Any other way, and we lose this opportunity for good."

"Ohh." Nidrot grinned, entirely unbothered by having just lost the argument. "More fighting for me, then."

Vesk turned her attention back to Andrei and kept peppering him with questions, one after another, and the minutes slid by unnoticed until it was finally time to move.