A Tyrant, Sort Of

Bastion Commander Lyra Sinclair rubbed her forehead as she looked at the various reports scattered across her desk. In the best of cases, the city of Wastehaven was a tumultuous place, but the past week had been chaotic even by those standards.

A person would think that by the title of Bastion Commander that Lyra’s duties would include mostly defensive matters, but that was far from the truth. Administrative and political tasks took up easily as much, or more, time as organizing troops and coordinating with the adventurer’s guild.

It was moments like now she missed her years as a Captain.

Among the headaches she had to sort through and handle today, there were no less than three B-rank monster incursions on neighboring towns, some absurd debacle in the crafter’s district that had left a smoking crater where a building had once stood, a visiting dignitary from the Elemental Isles, and last but not remotely least, this. A simple report, and not threatening in the immediate sense, yet by far the worst of all.

Unusual amounts of undead activity noted near the border.

Words that sent a shiver across any southern Bastion Commander worth even a fraction of their title. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen such a report, and being situated on the border to the Wastelands meant both dips and peaks in how many hoards of undead wandered nearby, so maybe she was reading into things.

It was, Lyra thought, the timing that set her so on edge. There’d been a bizarre amount of once-in-a-year mishaps, debacles, and catastrophes happening in the past month. A B-rank monster incursion was something she ought to only deal with a few times a year, and yet three this week?

There was something in the air, too. She couldn’t quite put it into words. Maybe it was in her head. But Wastehaven wasn’t the only city to be dealing with such things; apparently, there’d been unusual activity across the entire kingdom—across the entire continent, even, though reports on other kingdoms, even ones nominally allied to Auldstone, weren’t easy to come by. The various factions were, for good reason, secretive in their going-ons.

She was probably being paranoid. Though Wastehaven was the most significant city on the southern border of Auldstone, there simply wasn’t much reason for the Reaper to focus her attention their way. The Kingdoms of Baelgrun and Silvandor had always taken the brunt of undead attention. Holding significant swathes of red and black zones, the relatively magic-scarce Kingdom of Auldstone simply held little tactical purpose—not to mention their geographic irrelevance, tucked to the south-eastern edge of the continent.

Still, those words. Unusual amounts of undead activity. Would she be a Bastion Commander if she just glossed over them?

There wasn’t anything to do, though, besides to write back suggesting caution. With how many concrete disasters were going on, she could hardly afford to send more scouts and troops to the border’s outposts for some undead bogeyman. So long as they were being repelled from Auldstone territory proper, the undead were what they always were—a nuisance to be fended off. That would only change with a true invasion, and such an idea was absurd. The undead might be mindless, but the Reaper wasn’t. So why would an organized force ever attack Wastehaven?

With a sigh, she pushed the report to the side and focused on more pressing matters. Towns were under attack by B-rank monster incursions, after all.

***

By the time the fight was over, Zae was covered head to toe in blood. That was more or less how she preferred it. Any real fight ought to end with heaps of viscera. That was, in fact, why she hated hunting elementals—there just wasn’t the same satisfaction when she didn’t get to rip and tear through organs. A fight ought to conclude with a still-beating heart in her hand. Such a finish came with a heady sort of satisfaction she would never be able to explain. Even trying to, she knew, made her sound psychotic—even she wasn’t so poorly adjusted she couldn’t figure that out.

Today’s hunt had been a good one. The [Thunderbird] was far from the the strongest opponent she’d fought, but any B-rank monster would get the heart pumping—at least for a level thirty-three like Zae.

And as much as the excitement, she was satisfied for another reason. A large part of her reveled in the brutality of the fight for the brutality itself, but when opportunities cropped up where she could help people while indulging in the bloodlust, that was always preferable.

And she had certainly helped people. This sorry town wouldn’t have stood a chance taking down the beast with their local talent. The [Thunderbird] was a B-rank monster that had been terrorizing them only for a day, and there’d been dozens of casualties. They simple weren’t prepared to handle a monster of its magnitude. Even C-ranks were challenges only proper cities could field a real resistance against. They would’ve gotten help from their local Guild soon enough, surely, but they’d been fortunate that Zae had been passing through, and her early intervention had saved them several days of horror.

Though it wasn’t actually fortune. She’d come here deliberately. She was rarely just ‘wandering around’, for all she used that excuse. Some people were lucky, but having a B-rank opponent every other week, in this part of the world? Obviously something more was going on. But Zae didn’t want to divulge her brother’s abilities. Those sorts of skills were best kept close to the chest.

She looked down at the beast she’d slain. Its pristine white and light-blue feathers were marred red. A spear was a cleaner weapon than some, but Zae made no great efforts to leave her opponents in good condition. The opposite. Hence how both she and it was drenched in blood. That wasted potential profit, she knew, but she’d hardly gotten into this business as a means of making money.

With her heart rate slowly settling, she leaned against her spear and considered her next steps.

An hour later, she was dragging the gigantic white bird through the town by a rope. The crowd collected rapidly. She was used to the attention. Their reactions were a familiar mixture: awe, disgust, and relief, to name a few. The former from seeing a B-rank monster laid low by a single person, the second from the viscera covering both Zae and her opponent, and the last—well, the last reaction was obvious. Of course they were relieved they no longer had a B-rank beast to worry about.

Finally, there was one more clear emotion: vindication. It gleamed in many eyes, satisfaction at the beast’s fate. That was the real reason she made a display of her hunts like this, creating a spectacle as she dragged the creature straight through the town, headed for the guild outpost. Not as a way to stroke her ego, but to give closure to those who’d lost friends and family to the disgusting beast. To see its body brutalized and broken. It wasn’t enough, not nearly, to make up for the losses, but it was something.

That, ultimately, was why Zae had started down this path. She’d been in their position not more than ten years ago. Nobody had dragged back her parents’ killer, then, as she did for these people. That vile monster might even still be wandering around.

After dropping the corpse off with the Guild, then taking a much needed shower, Zae went and found her brother. Tracking him down wasn’t difficult; he rarely left his room. They were both socially maladjusted, Zae knew, but her brother was on a different level. He was one of the only people who fit in worse with general society than her. Her bloodthirsty tendencies, and so-called ‘unhealthy obsession with the hunt’, were certainly odd, but at the same time, somewhat expected for an adventurer of her caliber. Leander’s eccentricities were less … palatable.

“Back already?” he asked, not looking up from his desk. His glassy black eyes—no sclera, no iris—stayed trained on his notebook. He had either of his hands placed on each side of it as he stood and frowned down at some inscrutable problem that Zae was certain she couldn’t even understand the premise to, much less make headway on. Zae was a genius with the spear, but her brother was one in the more traditional meaning.

Zae grunted as she plopped into a chair. “Did you eat?”

“Yes.”

“Did you eat today?”

Leander frowned. Glassy black eyes turned to her, and for all Zae had grown many times more accustomed to them than anyone else, they still unnerved her. She obviously didn’t let it show, and met his gaze evenly, returning his annoyance with her trademark Big Sister Glare.

“I can’t remember,” Leander said. “Probably.”

“Let’s go grab something, then.”

“Later,” Leander said. “There’s something we need to talk about.”

“The next hunt? It can wait.”

Leander’s talent with divination—one of his many fields of genius—was how Zae always had prey to hunt down. Her own class helped with that too, but B-rank monsters were hardly swarming everywhere. Well, in some parts of the world they were, but Zae was more interested in killing the ones where the effort benefited others. In defending towns like these against wayward threats they couldn’t handle.

“The next hunt,” Leander said. “Yes. No. Of a sorts. I’ve been speaking with Thira.”

“Oh?” Zae asked, instantly intrigued. For a few reasons. Not just because Thira was one of their more informed contacts in the capital, but because Zae was ninety-percent sure something was going on between the two of them. Thira might be the only person who had her nose buried in a book more often than her brother, which meant it was a match made in heaven. And, frankly, Leander’s only hope for romance. “And how is she?”

Leander narrowed his pitch-black eyes at her, even his normally clueless self able to pick up on Zae’s tone—probably because of the frequency of teasing—but he ignored her. “She’s well. Please focus.”

Zae chose not to press, mostly because she was interested. “The news, then?”

“There’s been dragon sightings.”

If Leander’s intent had been to stun her into silence, it worked. Leander wasn’t the sort of person to ‘joke around’. She didn’t need to doubt whether he was trying to pull her leg with the astounding claim.

Still, ‘dragon sightings’ and ‘proof’ were far from the same thing.

“And you’ve looked into it?”

“My sight is obscured,” Leander said, “but that’s perhaps proof on its own.”

“And Thira’s confident?”

“Too many reports from too many sources. Not just that, but across several kingdoms.”

“There’s more than one?” Zae asked incredulously.

“Three, that Thira’s heard of.”

“In Auldstone?”

“No,” Leander said. “Neighboring kingdoms.”

Zae digested that. Not for the first time, she appreciated Leander’s contact with Thira—and the comprehensive network of contacts that scholars maintained in general. It was one of the more reliable streams of information between the constantly warring human kingdoms, and undoubtedly due to the fact nearly every scholar of note spent some years in the Tower. She wouldn’t be surprised if a decent portion of them identified more with the Tower than they did with their kingdoms of birth.

“I see,” Zae said. “Well, I doubt they’ll be pleased if I go hunting on their territory.” Though the idea of a dragon hunt might convince her to try her hand regardless. If there’d ever been a beast worthy of laying low, it was those despicable creatures. At least, from what she’d heard.

Leander nodded. “I wanted to keep you informed. Perhaps more will be coming.”

“Coming from where?”

“That’s the interesting question,” Leander said. “Perhaps it has to do with the Influx.”

The Influx. Even Zae had noticed the strange phenomenon. Finding level-appropriate monsters had always been a challenge, even with a genius diviner to help her track them down, but it had become borderline easy in the last month. Leander—and his contacts—had noticed strange increases in latent ‘magical activity’. The world at large seemed to be having some sort of ‘influx’ in power, with significant, peculiar events popping up at unprecedented rates.

But dragons?

“Well,” Zae said, a sort of giddiness starting to creep up on her. She pushed the feeling away; best not to get too excited. “Keep your ears open on that. Maybe one’ll turn up in Auldstone.”

“I pity the poor beast that does,” Leander said dryly. “I hear the infamous Huntress likes to play with her food.”

Zae grinned. Guilty as charged. “No, but really. I could use a new set of armor.” She considered the idea, excitement growing. “Dragonscale. Now that would be an upgrade.”