Chapter 411: Book 7-1.1: Underlying Intent

The bedroom practically vibrated with the deafening sounds of Iola Melanthos Brygos’ snoring–not that anyone would point that out to her. One could only snore while asleep, after all, and any attempt at recording the sound was usually met with broken crystal tablets and bruised lips. Not that the Legate of Agminis was that petty, no. All that was accomplished subconsciously by her Domain.

Her husband, back when he was still alive several decades ago, would have had the gall to point it out. Her current lover, or boy toy if she ever was honest in the designation, had his fingers stuffed into his ears and was rolling on the bed in frustration, eyes dark with lack of sleep and cheeks sallow from prolonged exhaustion.

The blaring of the alarm nearly overpowered the sound of Iola’s snoring, not quite reaching that august intensity, but close enough. The snoring immediately ceased and the Legate bolted upright, the bed covers slipped down and exposed her nudity. The sleepy confusion melted from her eyes as she took in the sound of the alarm, the subtle frequency, the timbre, and the tone gave her hints on what triggered it. Her Domain spread out, encompassing the room and several paces beyond, checking for threats, while her part of her perception lingered over the delicate features of the youth who shared her bed. She was rather ashamed to realise that she didn’t quite remember the young man’s name, but at least he wasn’t a Legionnaire. The Ancestors forbid what kind of abyss fraternising with her subordinates would do to legion morale.

“You may go,” she said kindly, “I may call on you again, should time permit.”

The young man bowed to her as he threw on a robe. He left the bedroom immediately, though his eyes lingered on her bosom, stroking her ego and making her lips twitch. She closed the opening she created with her Domain, as he wouldn’t even have been able to open the door without her permission.

She was nearing her first century already, but at least she still looked like a woman in her thirties instead of a doddering grandmother. A product of her achieving the heights that she had. In the entirety of the Empire, there were less than three hundred Knight Domini. Ah, thankfully, she’d keep her looks and vigour until she reached her first millennia, afterwards, she’d need to advance to the next level to enjoy another millennia of life. And service.

She shook her head and rolled out of bed. The alarm continued to blare, but from her initial inspection, they weren’t threatened yet. Time enough to awaken properly.

Iola quickly put on her underwear and a shift over the dainties. Afterwards, a trail of yellow dust came from her closet, where she stored her special crystal dust. She condensed it over her body, though by necessity, her face had a thinner layer. The crystalline dust turned transparent and unobtrusive, but the skin-tight layer was responsible for protecting her life. It had done so throughout her chequered career, and it had only taken a couple of incidents for her to decide to put it on over her underclothes instead of directly on her skin. It was a bit harder to maintain, but at her level, dignity had a far greater weight. Only afterwards did she put on her uniform.

Her quarters in Bellton Hold were directly across the Gemheart Chamber, and her primary duty was to ensure that it never came to harm. Iola’s interpretation of a planarguard legion’s duty was common across the entirety of the Empire. Otherwise, she would have already wreaked havoc on the enemy. Still, it made for a boring tour of duty.

She whistled idly as she left the secure chambers. As long as her Domain encompassed the Gemheart and the surrounding stone, she had the leeway to go about her business. The Gemheart would remain within reach as long as she was within the Upper City too.

Once she arrived in her office, the messenger cranes started pouring in.

“A raid…” she muttered.

Somehow, those cretins from the south, along with their Chaos Lord allies, have cleared the cave-ins that blocked tunnels and sent a force through them. The reports say that the rebels in the lower and mid rings were creating turmoil, too. Rebel cells had set fire to several warehouses containing food and other trading goods.

More cranes came in. Raiders pinned a newly formed century of raw recruits and were decimating them. She penned a quick response, sending her own cranes to direct her troops. The nobles’ house guard stayed within the Upper City, utterly useless at the moment since none of the raiders dared to come up there.

However, much of Rumiga City’s wealth was in the Upper City, and with the Chaos Channel blocked, there was no way to evacuate several decades worth of accumulated goods, gold, and jade.

After replying to the messenger cranes that needed it, she consigned the rest of the runescribed paper to recycling. That would strip the runescript and the ink, as well as the Animus signatures and prepare the paper to be inscribed again. This was mostly accomplished by Apprentice Runescribes and they were paid well for the monotonous task.

Once she was done, she expanded the reach of her Domain towards the projected battlefields. Those were rather far from her position and stretching herself that thinly meant her ability to project power was compromised.

The mountain around her was filled with webs of crystal. Her initial Ennoia had been earth but she had since narrowed her scope to crystal and metal. The trade-off in flexibility was well worth the increase in power.

Her perception couldn’t be split too many times though and she could only follow twenty locations.

In one cavern, she noted that the century of fresh recruits had a dozen deaths already. Her hands clenched and her fingernails dug into her crystal layer, leaving deep indents. She was tempted to intervene. Children…

Instead, she took a deep breath, held it in for nearly a minute before she exhaled explosively. She couldn’t be everywhere at once. She couldn’t save everyone, and she couldn’t leave the Gemheart unprotected. Even if leaving them to die felt as if a hot poker had been shoved into her guts and swirled around.

She almost squealed when she saw their reinforcements barreling down the tunnel. The fresh century, the 34th Century of the Militia, had managed to hold up in a chokepoint, but the problem was that the raiders had managed to flank them from another tunnel. Now, they were pincered.

Their reinforcements, the 2nd and 4th, were less than a minute away, and they would pincer the two raider groups in the process. A breathtaking minute later and nothing surprising happened. The 2nd and 4th smashed into the raiders and began decimating while the 34th acted as an anvil to the other’s hammers.

In the meantime, another raider group attacked a redoubt, though the defenders had things well at hand. Having a Plasma Turret powered by Bellton Hold’s jade conduits meant that the weapons weren’t about to run out of Animus anytime soon. Still, the battle devolved into a slugfest and a stalemate, with all of the combatants exchanging fire from behind cover.

The raiders, Ivalans, Iola thought, used their newly developed hand cannons. She wasn’t sure how the things functioned, just that they had a minimal Animus waste. They fired solid bullets made of lead, iron, bronze, or another mixture of alloys. She could feel the metal, of course, and easily identified that the bullets were hastily made, weren't standardized, and had a mixed effectivity. The redoubt’s weak Protective Sphere slowed the bullets enough that the legionnaires easily weathered the attacks with minimal Animus expenditure.

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She watched them for several minutes, with nothing else happening. Afterwards, the raiders pulled back.

Similar scenes happened all over the tunnels. Iola wanted to trace them back to their origin point, but her Domain couldn’t stretch that far. She did note several hastily cleared cave-ins, as well as new tunnels from within her reach.

Grinning to herself, she flexed her Domain a bit and caused a cascading collapse in one of the less stable tunnels, trapping the raiders that had come from there.

After her spate of vindictive pleasure, Iola sighed and leaned back on her chair. Enemy raids and Chaos Lord incursions were something that Iola had expected to encounter in her posting in this frontier plane. But rebellion and treason? That was something for the Inquisitors.

The fact that the severing of Rumiga’s tether coincided with increased hostility from the south, and the troubles up north painted a rather disquieting scene. Even now the City Council wasn’t sure who the spies and rebels were, and how many of their own had turned.

That fateful day, when the Quay had been breached, sabotaged, and made a killing field had been too sudden. There was no way saboteurs from the Federation could have accessed the more sensitive places under the city. Each one of the workers there possessed a Heritage and had gone through the Atavism Ritual. The saboteurs were all Imperial Citizens.

Runescript lines and weaving made sure of that identity. Was it the rumoured Council of Judgement? Had they grown so bold and strong already? Their previous incarnation was laughably naive and weak, not even holding a Knight in their numbers.

Knighthood would have added a layer of security too, but Iola knew that nothing was foolproof. It wasn’t as if the Empress always policed her Knights’ thoughts. There were more than nine million Knights scattered across the Empire’s territories, after all. Still, once a Knight rebelled, they would quickly try to strip their Heritage and Atavism, lest they become shackles instead. The process to do so was costly and time consuming, especially for those already that strong.

Iola snorted in derision. Stripping the Heritage and the Atavism would most likely kill a Knight if the process wasn’t done properly, with their dense Animus destroying them from within once the constraints of their inlays were gone.

Still, they could only be after the Gemheart. With the artefact intact and active, the plane could be tethered back into the Empire easily enough. Without the stabilizing effect of the Gemhearts though, well, the plane would... drift.

Who knew where a tether would lead to then? Or where in the Primordial Sea Rumiga would end up in? She hadn’t been born when Rumiga had first been tethered to Delovine, but she knew from post-graduate studies that wandering planes formed the basis of the frontier.

Legion Vagaris’ duty was to search for such planes in the vicinity of the frontier or stable planes and move to tether them to the nearest Imperial territory. Afterwards, a legion such as Agminis would be stationed to hold the plane.

A strange feeling interrupted her musing. Iola frowned and retracted her Domain. Just as with an Ennoia, the narrower the scope, the more potent it became. By keeping her Domain closer to her body, its perceptive abilities multiplied in strength.

Her breath hitched as she found the anomaly. It was less than fifty paces from the Gemheart chamber!

Cursing loudly, she barreled through her office, overturning the heavy oak table as if it was made of flimsy cardboard, and went through the closed door without bothering to open it. It left an Iola shaped hole in the process. She arrived near the Gemheart just as the presence, or rather presences, came within twenty-five paces.

Her Domain expanded and took control of the surrounding rock. She shaped the stone into a tunnel that ended in a large chamber right where she felt the intruders were, then she used her crystal kinesis to float over threateningly.

Three figures were there, looking both surprised yet determined. Three men, though one was a Chaos Lord and was androgynous enough that Iola suspected her deduction of gender.

Two of the men stood in front of the androgynous one, the one on the right clad head to toe in a silvery metal shaped into full plate armour. However, the lack of seams and weak points clearly meant that it was one whole thing rather than pieces put together. From the amount of Animus it radiated, there was no doubt it was a spirit bond.

The man on the left was also clad in armour, but a bit more modest compared to the other. Instead, he sported a green tabard over what Iola assumed to be a breastplate. The man was larger than the others by a good margin, standing head and shoulders taller than herself. In one of his big meaty hands, he held the haft of an executioner’s axe, which was also a bound spirit.

She recognised them, of course, having met both decades past.

“Autarch Ivala and King Garamus,” she said amiably. “To what do I owe the surprise visit?”

Autarch Ivala growled and didn’t speak a word. Neither of them did. Quite sensible, really, because as soon as she had detected them, whatever nefarious goal they had was no longer attainable.

Crystal shards rose from the ground, the walls, and the ceiling, condensing and forming into spears.

“Shall we dance?” Iola grinned as she accessed the Gemheart with her Domain. Then, she focused on the Chaos Lord and banished it from the plane. The next moment, the three of them rushed towards each other, and their collision reverberated throughout the entirety of the city, collapsing not a few weakened structures and adding to the general havoc.

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