Ruthless V5Ch50-Eye in the Sky

Far above, invisible to all those struggling in the mingled blood and soil below, Mina bore witness as the Panther Army slaughtered itself under the darkness of the new moon.

She was grateful that the night was lit only by stars and the occasional magical burst of fire or lightning, for the scene was grisly. Every minute, scores of Pantherfolk died brutally at the hands of their brethren. Their blood and struggle turned the ground beneath their feet into a horrendous muck that trapped their feet and made them die more quickly and easily.

The scene was ugly, but Mina kept herself from looking away. She had to keep an eye on everything, in case something important happened—and to show, perhaps mostly to herself, that she had the stomach for these things.

She was even able to prevent herself from feeling sorry for the Pantherfolk, though she had become uncomfortably more empathetic and emotional since her Evolution into a Fae. It helped that she knew the Panther Army would have destroyed everything that she and her husband had worked to build, if only they were in the right location rather than the Queen having had her sense of the Kingdom’s location corrupted by James and Hester in dreams.

So she watched, held her husband’s unconscious body, and waited. Occasionally, if absolutely necessary, she intervened in the battle herself.

But Mina only had a few tasks to perform from her position as the eye in the sky.

She had already used her Zone of Enchantment to make James’s magic last longer and increase his Mana regeneration rate.

Periodically, she used Investigate to check his Mana levels. If they got too dangerously low, she was supposed to try to force feed him a Mana Potion.

She also hovered in place and held onto James’s body—he had rendered it weightless with Precision Gravity Control, so she really just had to keep it from blowing away in the wind.

She killed any member of the Panther Army who looked to have broken free of James’s Complete Illusion Magic, striking them down immediately with huge fire and lightning projectiles that she kept suspended in the air beside her, awaiting such eventualities. She also killed any member of the Panther Army who attempted to retreat from the field of battle. It was not that the Fisher Kingdom did not want to take any prisoners, but rather because retreating from the field of battle would eventually take the Pantherfolk outside of the range of James’s Complete Illusion Magic.

From there, who knew what they might do?

There was also the possibility that they would go back to camp and attempt to alert the Panther Queen to what was going on mere hundreds of feet from her tent. The Queen was the only member of the Panther Army who was not on the battlefield. James had not had confidence that his Complete Illusion Magic would be effective against her, and if she was present, he suspected that it might not work on the rest of the Army either.

So, James had left his body behind to occupy the Panther Queen personally—a strategy of his that was familiar to Mina from the fight with Sister Strange and her siblings.

I don’t know how anyone could sleep through all this, Mina thought as yet another blood-curdling scream rose in the air. I guess that’s the power of Dream Mastery.

The task Mina had felt the best about was removing the Panther Army’s human soldiers from the field of battle. It was not because they were humans, exactly—the Fisher Kingdom was officially a multi-Race society, and James tried to avoid showing favoritism. Rather, the reasoning was that Mina and James knew that at least some of the humans were essentially there against their will, as made clear in various visions and memories James had accessed. So, he had decided to treat them all as “slave soldiers,” conscripted and forced to fight without having any rights of their own, rather than “citizen soldiers” who followed the Panther Queen at least semi-willingly and had plenty of agency.

This was especially obvious in the case of James’s former boss, Dean. Any time that Doppelganger had spied on the Panther Army and seen Dean, the attorney had been under obvious mental influence that did not seem to wear off or go away. Stuck in a fog to keep him rebelling.

If the Panther Queen distrusted him and the other humans that much, collared them like animals, and kept them against their will, they could hardly be held responsible for following her into battle here.

Since the human fighters, like the Pantherfolk down below, were under the influence of Complete Illusion Magic, Mina just dropped small, magically created ice projectiles onto their heads to knock them out. Then James’s Doppelganger dragged them off to the side of the battle and tied them to trees.

Besides Mina, the only one doing any killing—other than the Pantherfolk unwittingly destroying themselves under James’s influence—was Doppelganger. Using Roscuro, he picked at the Pantherfolk, striking them down at leisure while they fought each other. Although it was a cheap method, Mina had seen using Investigate that Doppelganger was leveling up much faster in this battle than he had during any of his hunts of the previous two weeks. Roscuro was also grinding souls and gaining more power, and Mina could see that the Ego Weapon was already capable of assuming much larger and more varied shapes than he had been able to adopt before.

The only human besides Mina active in the area, once she had knocked out all of the human contingent of the Army, was Jeremiah Rotter. He stood at the edge of the battlefield, holding up a large eyeball—the size of his head—that he had conjured. With his vast amount of Job experience, supporting James’s new country, Rotter’s Job had Evolved up to Royal Vizier. One of his new Skills allowed him to summon a magical scrying eye that could record events as they happened and play them back elsewhere. Rotter was capable of manipulating the footage and refining it into propaganda, as he had excitedly informed James and Mina and no one else.

But right now, the Council was just watching everything via magical livestream, with Rotter occasionally providing commentary. The livestream was per James’s wish. He wanted his closest advisors to see just how powerful he was, and to be aware that he could defeat an entire army by himself. James had not appreciated them seeming to doubt him in an earlier meeting. To Mina, it had been barely noticeable, but she understood.

In their position, the appearance of strength was almost as important as the reality.

James had also mentioned some interest in the idea of making propaganda films using clips of this battle and other events, to inspire current and future residents of the Fisher Kingdom, but that possibility felt comparatively far off to Mina. It was hard for her to imagine that these events would ever be palatable enough to ordinary people to be the stuff of entertainment—or effective indoctrination, which ought to feel like entertainment.

Then again, the Ancient Romans used to live for bread and circuses—circuses meaning colosseum events, including people killing each other. Or so James had told her. Mina thought back to her Orientation and the horrors she had experienced there.

That’s right, she thought. People are unexpectedly barbaric. At least more monstrous than you expect them to be.

She wondered how Cara was doing. Despite herself, Mina actually felt a little bit bad for Cara. The young woman had become a monster, but how different was she from various people James had been forced to kill in his Orientation? Cliff, the cultists, Officer Ross… Ordinary people had become monsters in this new world, and often with very little pushing needed from the System or the gods.

The more Mina reflected on her conversations with Cara, the more she believed that Cara must have experienced some terrible events in her life that had driven her to become the monster she now was.

Cara had spoken to Mina as if she admired the woman that Mina had become—and believed that she herself could never be someone like Mina, perhaps could never have a normal life.

Following the events of Orientation, of course, that was completely true.

A Wendigo was a hollowed out husk of a human. An insatiable, bloodthirsty appetite, plus incomprehensible powers, in exchange for one’s humanity. Plus, Cara had seemed to be in bondage to some sort of dark god as part of her specific variant of that bargain.

And Cara had seemed happy with the exchange. Anything to not be human anymore—and to take her revenge on humanity.

Mina could never condone what Cara had done, of course—even setting aside the fact that Mina still occasionally had nightmares about the brown and crimson stained walls that Cara had painted human blood. If they ever met again, Mina would have to do what she could to see the Wendigo brought to justice—which, given the gruesome crimes she had committed, meant death. But she could not help but feel some gratitude at having been spared.

And Mina also sensed that there was some tragedy in the younger woman’s background, though Mina would never know the exact truth of it.

I hope that wherever you are, it is cold, and there are no people around you, Mina thought. Stay away from people, and hunt monsters, and I don’t care if you live a long life. Just don’t live it too near me…

Mina’s attention was drawn back to the battlefield. There was a Panther Warrior she’d had her eye on. He kept looking as if he was about to go on a rampage and go wild, perhaps moving out of the range of the illusion in the course of his frenzy. The Warrior himself was the only thing reining in his fury, trying to keep it to a focused rage.

She decided to deal with him before he could become a problem. She pulled one of the bolts of lightning she had pre-charged right next to her, and she hurled it at him.

The lightning became a part of the illusion as it reached near ground level—Mina still did not understand exactly how James’s illusions were structured, and with this most recent upgrade, she suspected he did not understand exactly how they functioned either. She could see the Panther Warrior notice the lightning bolt coming as it merged with the reality the illusion generated. To her surprise, he managed to throw himself out of the way. Instead of frying the fighter she was worried about, her attack hit the Panther Warrior behind him, instantly blackening and killing the other one.

The notification of her experience gain was suppressed as a matter of course, and Mina began preparing another one of the lightning bolts immediately. Her Mana charging and aiming accelerated a little, along with her pulse, when the Panther Warrior seemed to scan the sky as well as the ground in looking for the source of the attack.

But to her relief, the Warrior’s eyes passed over her without even slowing down, without a hint that he could see her at all.

Her breathing and her pulse calmed.

Right, the illusion is pretty unbreakable for most of them. It’s mainly the magical ones I have to watch out for.

Those would be the ones with the highest Will in this army, not some Warrior who had to constantly watch himself so that he didn’t slip into a bloody fury and potentially slaughter his own allies alongside the enemy.

And a few seconds later, the Panther Warrior finally allowed himself to succumb to his berserk rage. To Mina’s relief, under the influence of this fury, he charged further into the radius of the illusion rather than out of it, rushing in Mina’s general direction—which paradoxically made her and James safer. The illusion spell was strongest closest to the source, after all.

She allowed the lightning bolt to float back up to where it had been hanging, waiting for her to call on it, and she watched quietly and calmly as the Warrior proceeded to tear apart a shocking number of its own brethren—until Doppelganger walked calmly up from the side of the Panther Warrior, transformed Roscuro into an axe, and then caved in the Panther Warrior’s rib cage.

As the Warrior fell, Mina breathed a quiet sigh of relief. She would never want to admit it to anyone, even James, but even the relatively low level creatures who would easily fall to a single one of her lightning bolts made her a bit nervous.

The fact that so many of them were trained fighters now, the equivalent of soldiers back in the old world, was disturbing.

I hope James is doing all right where he is, Mina thought. If we actually had to fight these things, instead of making them kill each other…

The idea didn’t bear much consideration. It would be better just to run away at that point, even if it would mean losing face.