Chapter 5: 3 – Violence of the Skies

Time passed, they ate and rested, and darkness fell. Soon enough the cabin was illuminated only by the fireplace and the red glow of a few lightgems they had placed around. The silence was broken only by the sounds of them eating and drinking, of the fireplace cracking, and eventually by Strolvath plucking the strings of his instrument. The occasional lightning strike illuminated the night, soon followed by thunder so loud one could mistake it for the roar of a dragon. Their meal finished, they each took to their idle activities - Strolvath, of course, kept to his music. Zelsys used her Tablet to idly browse the vast quantity of loot and Zefaris worked on loading up her speedloader, which in turn reminded Alcerys to clean and reload her own firearms. Were they different people they would’ve spoken at length about their experiences in the dungeon, but there was nothing left to say that hadn’t already been said about that dismal place. 

Eventually though, Strolvath’s aversion to silence reared its head again. Or perhaps, it was curiosity. Zel felt him looking at her, she could almost feel the slowly rising tension that inevitably led to him grabbing her attention and asking a question.

“...Say, you’re not too familiar with Ikesia, that right?” he asked. She just looked up at him, wordlessly questioning the intentions behind his questions. He responded in kind, his expression genuinely just asking her to humor him.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “Foreigner, remember?”

A truth followed by a lie. He knew, and laughed it off with a gravelly chuckle before continuing with another question: “You wanna hear about some of the shit the Sage did right after the unification?”

“...Like what?” Zel asked again, raising an eyebrow and putting the Tablet down. 

“The way he wrote our constitution, for one. If you just skim it over and read the big articles it makes sense, but certain things contained in the expanded text are… Unsettlingly specific,” he began, clearing his throat again before he took off on an extended tangent. His natural accent was drowned by purposeful, crystal-clear enunciation - it was audible how seriously he took what he said. “It’s like Ikesia’s constitution was intentionally written to prevent certain patterns from arising: mass surveillance, disarmament of the populace, anti-competitive practices like monopolization and oligopolization, centralized news control… Many nobles were particularly angry with the part that makes it so all fines have to be scaled up in proportion to the perpetrator’s yearly income. Only thing that made them angrier was the lack of tax loopholes. The so-called ‘Great Noble Exodus’ made a substantial dent in our economy.”

“What was he like in person? I’ve only heard about him in very wide statements.”

“Very… Particular. Controlled and reserved in public, and to say that his mental defenses were a fortress of will would be an understatement. Among those he trusted it was a whole other story. He’d constantly point out patterns in how groups of people acted and had us at the Counter-propaganda Bureau run seemingly arbitrary operations that nearly always got the results he predicted, somehow. By the dead ones, if only you’d heard the rants he went on about his homeland. He kept going on and on about demoralization this and demographic shift that, constantly reminding us to prioritize reinforcing cultural identity even above maintaining the stability of local governments.”

“Just from the things he prioritized I could paint you a picture of a dystopian land of demoralized people brow-beaten into hating themselves and their own kin, made to think self-hate is a virtue as they are replaced by foreigners. He called it cultural warfare. Truly ghastly idea.”

Zelsys honestly didn’t know how to reply, and apparently neither did the others. Alcerys grew visibly uncomfortable as she listened to him describing the concept of cultural warfare. On the other hand, Zefaris stopped filling the loader halfway through, moving onto cleaning her gun as she just stared off into empty space. Zel could feel her tense up near the end.

Strolvath took the hint and moved onto stories from his own time in the service, all obviously embellished and cut down for the sake of storytelling. He seemed to be particularly fond of comical anecdotes involving enemy noblemen reacting - or failing to react - to Ikesian war machines.

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His voice gave out entirely at points, and he drank nearly an entire bottle of Vitamax over the course of the evening. 

Inevitably, though, they turned in for the night, lulled to sleep by the sound of rain pounding on the barrier and near-constant thunder in the distance.

---

In the morning, they finished the remainder of the ration-soup and cleansed themselves in the nearby stream, which had grown to a small river after the previous night’s rain. 

Some half-hour after waking they were on the march again. The sky remained darkly overcast, and the closer they got to the old battlefield, the more frequently the clouds thundered and flashed.

When at last they reached that muddy mass grave, all seemed to be normal… For a time.

A quarter of the way across, lightning began striking. At first it struck some of the trees at the edges of the field, stripping them of bark and branches. Only, it then moved onto the artillery pieces and metal weapons scattered all around, moving closer and closer to them. 

Zelsys could feel electric tension surrounding her, they hurried across the field in an attempt to escape the Living Storm’s sudden wrath. She even gripped the Lightning Butcher’s handle in preparation to repeat the feat for which she’d named her weapon.

But that time didn’t come. They reached the edge of the crater at the bottom of which Ubul’s petrified form stood, and lightning just kept striking all around them, yet it never came closer, as if the storm itself acknowledged that Zelsys had bested it. Constant flashes forced the four of them to shield their eyes and their ears rang from the thunder, and then… It stopped.

It stopped for precisely seven seconds, light flashing in the clouds before it struck one last time.

It struck Ubul, flowing down the stone surface of his body to ground, carving a bifurcated, shallow channel of molten rock from his forehead to his feet.

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