Chapter 59: 57. Drums of War

The terror attacks were only the beginning.

After putting out all the fires that Toby could see, the screaming never stopped. The bells still rang eerily throughout the chaotic town, and smoke obscured the sky. Through the undead network, Toby could hear a lot of discussion in the distance; focusing on the chatter, Toby concluded that citizens were being slaughtered near the Eshnar gate.

Breaking out into another sprint, Toby was grateful his body never tired—only his mind felt the weight of his failure. Why hadn't he thought of this possibility before? Why was the city a smoldering mess? His incompetence. The eldritch creature, capable of creating fractures in space and walking wherever he pleased as a mere illusion of his true self, must be shaking his head at his failure. Toby had been gifted this body and entrusted this land. He clenched his fist and ground his teeth in silent rage. The Empire will pay for making a mockery out of him in front of the supreme being.

As Toby approached the fighting, people were fleeing between his feet. Most were middle-aged men, as merchants often were, but one particular man ran down the left side of him with a hand clenched on a sword handle.

Toby moved to stop him, but it was too late—the sword-wielding man unsheathed the blade from within his robes and, with a two-handed horizontal swing, decapitated the man running in front of him. A shower of blood coated the enraged sword wielder, and he swirled and nicked another man's arm, causing the struck man to shriek in pain.

Toby circulated his vast amount of mana within his body and directed it to his eye. His golden pupil lit up, and a beam of concentrated energy zapped out with pinpoint accuracy. The sword wielder stopped dead in his tracks as a hole went right through both his lungs—he grasped at the growing splodge of red on his robes with surprise. Toby watched as the man slowly turned to look at him. There was a silent second where the man seemed to regret his life decisions before he slumped face-first onto the gravel road. Eyes wide open, looking straight at the decapitated head of the other man.

A door to one of the shops on the right side of the gravel road was flung off its hinges as two men fell wrestling to the ground. On the bottom half of the scuffle was a terrified gentleman that owned the shop, and holding his body down with a hand clasped on his neck was a second man wielding a dagger.

Toby didn't waste a second and blasted the dagger wilder with his eye beam, causing his body to slump on top of the shop owner. Toby then noticed a pack of men heading to the Eshnar gate, donning the same robes the goblins under his command used. They shoved past the people, and after reaching the gate, one of them held down the goblin that was telling the merchants to head back—while the others lept past, shouting, "We no longer welcome your kind here!" They kept their heads low so the merchants couldn't discern their identity as they charged at them with swords drawn. 

"Oh, you bastards." Toby snarled as he charged after them. 'They plan to ruin our relationship with Eshnar by posing as us while slaughtering innocent merchants.' The toll road only worked if both sides allowed the passage of traffic. If Eshnar deemed the toll road unsafe, merchants would have to stick to one of the other roads constructed through the cursed forest.

Toby didn't even bother going through the gate; instead, with a mighty leap, he soared over the ten-meter-high gate and landed on the other side in a small crater—squashing the men like bugs, much to the merchant's horror. 

"YOU ARE ALWAYS WELCOME HERE! BUT FOR NOW, RUN!" Toby bellowed and shook the world with every word. All the merchants covered their ears and cowered behind their carts while the horses stood stunned before desperately trying to escape their reigns. 

Toby knew he would cause chaos with such loud words, but this was about sending a message. People were welcome, and he was strong and could protect them. Toby had few opportunities to show off his might, and he would much rather terrify a few hundred people and have them spread tales of his domination for the rest of their lives than them saying Necron was an unsafe place to visit. They already had a bad reputation for being a place run by creatures of corruption. Many merchants still chose to forcefully traverse the forest despite its rough terrain or continue the many-month journey around its border than using their toll road for this very reason.

Having shown his face and sent the message, Toby turned around, flicked the crushed human bits from the soles of his feet, and marched back into Necron with a huff. Through the network, Toby learned that the goblins had finally got a hold of the situation by seizing the disguised merchant's weapons and pinning them down. Toby was certain that the Empire's nobles had snuck men inside under the pretense of merchants, had them hide among the population to gain key intel, and then waited for a time when Toby was out the town to strike.

It was all too organized and exploited their weaknesses far too much to be the work of random people. So now the question was... what's next? The Empire had somewhat succeeded in causing damage and terror in Necron but not to an unsalvagable degree. The other warehouse was still fine and now heavily guarded by ogres, and apart from a hundred or so merchants that were slaughtered, everyone else was fine.

Toby started walking towards Andrew's palace. He knew that nothing could kill the King Ooze, which had grown to around twenty meters long and five meters tall, but he needed his help with strategies. Toby had been a simple bodyguard for an underperforming merchant caravan with no special skills except looking intimidating and hitting things with his fist.

Andrew at least had a head on his shoulders and knew Necron better than anyone. Arriving at the palace, Toby saw Andrew had left his sanctuary and was staring at the wooden door that was now a smoldering mess on the floor. The titanic grey slime that barely fit through the doorway turned to look at Toby with his cold eyes. With bells ringing out and clouds of smoke hanging eerily overhead, the two stared at each other for a moment with the only scorched garden separating them.

"Toby." Andrew's voice sounded in his head like someone was shouting at the back of his skull. Toby carefully replied. "Andrew... What should we do?"

"Head to the Empire's gate. They are here." Andrew's gruffly replied as he looked eastwards. "Slaughter them all." A particular hatred came across with the message that Toby felt in his bones. They were both laymen who had been gifted great power and responsibility through a lucky series of events. 

Neither Toby nor Andrew had neglected their duties—they performed them to the best of their abilities, yet to have all their months of work burned to the ground in such a way was heartbreaking to see.

"Brother." Toby lowered his voice to a snarl as he left for the gate and picked up his pace. "I will slaughter them all." They were not brothers bound by blood but by circumstance. "Stay strong. We will rebuild it better than ever. That I can assure you."

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Despite Andrew's frightening appearance, he was a sweet guy who liked his food way too much and had poor taste in luxuries... but he had worked day and night to make Necron into the town it was, and he was powerless to fix it. Only Toby could move and fight—and oh boy, did he plan to fight. He balled his fists, clenched his teeth, and charged to war.

***

The eastern district that handled the unloading and loading of goods from the merchants and had a large area to store horses had been transformed into an apocalyptic scene. The once-busy streets were filled with soot-covered corpses and smoldering buildings on all sides. The magical ice from the eldritch lord's ice spell encased some still partially standing buildings in a frost tomb.

Toby ran through the streets with a heavy heart. He passed by the post office, Bob's inn... he wondered if that Garry fellow had made it out alive. Then, shaking his head, Toby focused on the task at hand. Turning a corner, he saw the eastern gate... or what was left of it.

In its place was a squadron of horses that were in a defensive position. They bore the Empire's traditional full-plate armor with red decorative banners bearing their coat of arms. Toby recognized a few noble houses and committed them to memory for later. 

"It's here!" A man leading the group shouted and lowered his visor with a tilt of his head. "The Demon!" Another called, and their war horses seemed to naturally back up a step without their owner's orders.

"Stick to the plan, boys. Do not falter." The leader snapped as he took center stage. Mana flared out of his body, and his armor became wrapped in a grey hue. 

Toby ignored them and, without warning, shot out a beam of energy from his eye. Although his pupil was golden, the beam was colorless, just a collection of pure energy. He aimed straight for the leader's head, but the leader raised an axe with the same grey energy covering his armor at the last second. The two collided, the man was propelled off his horse, and the axe melted partially, causing the leader knight to chuck it to the side before the molten metal dripped onto his hand.

Toby continued the assault and fired another, seeing the man was now vulnerable. The man scrambled to the side, but the beam caught his ankles, separating the man's feet from his legs. Toby ignored the leader's wails and series of curses as he flailed around and turned his eye to the group of knights still on horseback.

He fired again—but to his surprise, he felt a burning pain in his shoulder. The main disadvantage of his eye laser... it blinded him while using it, so he failed to see the men had summoned mirrors from their spatial rings. How they knew he had an eye laser that could be reflected with enforced mirrors, he had no idea... But he relished in the knight's faces turning from triumph to pure terror as his missing shoulder knitted itself back together in less than a second.

Toby dropped low and charged at the group. Gravel flew behind him as he barreled toward the knights. They separated as he charged, and he saw a man right as he reached them.

Toby had never seen the person before, but his robes were known throughout the land. He was a hacker and not an ordinary one. Toby tried to change his course, but it was already too late.

The young-looking man donning a simple white robe and holding a bamboo staff sneered. He raised his staff, and the unassuming bamboo pole shone with golden light like a beacon to the gods, "Initiate program: PURGE." His eyes exploded with golden light as he began levitating.

The hacker's mouth moved at inhuman speed as he rattled off commands that caused the surrounding air to become hazy and shimmer. Green lines of zeros and ones whizzed around the man's body in endless streams without coherent sense.

Toby couldn't make sense of a single word the hacker said, but the blood-red words hanging in his vision certainly did.

 

[MANA FLOW: VALUE SET TO ZERO]