Chapter 37: Chapter 34 – Human Sacrifice

"People used to call us elves savages, and I do admit that in bygone days we were indeed a savage people. However, the insane acts fanatical humans has done over the ages put every savagery of ours to shame, I believe." - Grand Elder Nydia of the Great Emerald Forest.

 

Cal was no beginner to interrogation. She spread the six remaining cultists in the corners of the clearing where she had brought them, far enough they would be unable to communicate to one another without shouting - assuming they could even do that while gagged and blindfolded -, and interrogated them one at a time, where she made it certain that they knew their story would be compared to their companions.

 

She removed their blindfolds after she was done with all six, then calmly announced to them that some of the stories did not match the others. A blatant lie from her side that none of the cultists could disprove. Then she picked the one cultist who had sounded too eager to spill the beans when she interrogated her and turned the young woman into her next example.

 

This one proved to not be smart enough to commit suicide and was left as a crumpled heap in the middle of the clearing who still twitched from time to time. Cal had not even bothered to end her misery before she went on to interrogate the remaining five cultists.

 

She repeated the process until there were only two of them left before she was reasonably satisfied by the veracity of the information they confessed, and mercifully ended their lives swiftly with a quick twist of the neck.

 

After she cleaned herself up, she checked her notes. The information these cultists confessed included one story that they most likely rehearsed as their cover - though she would still follow it up on a later date - and gave her three possible locations where she might be able to find more of their ilk. Two of which were along the path to Barzum where she is headed.

 

The first one proved empty. The abandoned hut hidden in a small roadside forest had clearly seen some activity in the recent past, but it was likely from the very same cultists she already met in northern Ezram. From the signs she could tell, they were likely the last ones to have used this place, which probably meant no more of their ilk had headed northwards since.

 

On the other hand, as she continued her journey, the villages she passed by were tense, for apparently there had been a very recent string of disappearances of young mothers - all of whom happened to have young mixed-race children - in another couple of villages nearby. Villages not that far from the second location she learned of.

 

It did not take her long to discover the second location, a network of caverns that probably used to be kobold lairs judging from their size, but was later known to have been used by a group of bandits to serve as their hideout. She quickly noticed the two guards that kept watch by the cavern entrance, both of which looked bored out of their minds.

 

When she walked out of the forest openly and she noticed the look of disgust and hatred in their eyes - much like the look all the other cultists gave her before - she did not wait and just promptly flung a pair of darts at their throats. She did not even look back at the corpses she left behind - chances are whoever was inside are up to nothing good anyway.

 

Cal drew two of her machetes as she walked through the caverns with a slight stoop, the ceiling uncomfortably short for someone of her height, and the cramped quarters of the cavern would render her halberd difficult to use at best. Along the way she stumbled upon a room where a few people were sleeping, and just as luck would have it, one of them had the exact same robe many of the cultists wore - hard to mistake the emblem of a centuries-dead kingdom - being hung to dry.

 

None of the occupants of that room would ever wake up again after she was finished with them.

 

To her surprise, she found more rooms, all of which showed signs of habitation - she counted enough room for at least one hundred fifty people or so, the cavern complex far vaster than her predictions - yet with nary a soul in sight.

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She finally found where everyone was when she found what was easily the biggest room in the cavern complex. It was a large natural cavern, as evidenced from the multitude of stalagmites and stalactites that were in it, with a small underground stream that ran along one wall of the room. The far end of the room was flattened, and she could see a roughly hewn altar set there, with a man wearing cultist garb behind it as he apparently preached their doctrine to the crowd of over a hundred cultists that filled every nook and cranny of the cavernous space.

 

The cavernous space was brightened by many torches, while Cal had stayed at a shadowed bend in the corridor, so she was practically invisible to the cultists within. On the far side, behind the preacher, she could see several tied up figures - the missing women and children from the villages nearby to her best guess. She had at first intended to watch first to learn as much as she could, but soon after what the cultist by the altar did forced her hand.

 

The cultist roughly deposited the youngest of the children - a babe not a year old, of some therian heritage - on top of the altar, and unsheathed a wicked-looking curved dagger from his belt. The cultist had just raised his arms and claimed that the "filthy half-breed" shall be sacrificed to the gods when he was very rudely interrupted.

 

If one could call the sudden intrusion of the business end of a halberd to one's face an "interruption" that is.

 

Cal fell upon the surprised cultists with machetes in her hands before they could react. The preacher was too far away for her to feel confident about her chances with throwing darts, and her halberd would be difficult to use in the terrain anyway, whereas she knew she could throw it far more accurately even with the distance involved.

 

As the cultists had apparently assembled for a ceremonial purpose, the majority of them were unarmed, with some fortunate enough to have a dagger in hand. Some of them were also mages, and those she marked for immediate elimination, especially after one lightning mage shot a lightning bolt at her. The bolt left a scorch mark on her skin but likely did worse things to the cultist that had tried to grapple her at the time, for he went down in convulsions, and for the mage's troubles, Cal ended her with a dart between the eyes.

 

For her to wipe out the one-hundred forty odd mostly unarmed cultists that remained was more of a chore than anything, if she were to be honest. She did make sure to spare some to interrogate later, but most of them, she would just put down much like how she would put down an animal.

 

By the time she was finished some ten minutes later, the tied and gagged women and children by the altar watched her with obvious fear and trepidation in their eyes. She noted that one woman had somehow managed to grab the baby from the altar despite her binds and now had the baby safely on her lap as they hid behind the altar itself. She nodded in approval when she noticed that the women had covered the children's eyes during the carnage that had ensued.

 

It took her a few minutes to calm the kidnapped women down after she removed their binds and gags, which to be fair wasn't entirely their fault. None of these women had likely even seen a murder in ther lives, and she just hoped she did not excessively traumatized them or something. At least they had the presence of mind to cover the children's eyes.

 

Cal escorted the women and children to the nearest room, where she was glad to find some rations and clean clothes they could make use of. She herself bodily dragged the few cultists that survived after she tied them up good, and gathered them into a room closer to the entrance than where she left the women and children after she retrieved her halberd - she had thrown it with enough force that the spearhead had punched through the preacher's head and nailed him into the wall.

 

She then informed the women that they might want to plug their ears for the next couple of hours or so, and that she will escort them back to their homes after she was done.

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