Chapter 89: 89: Dance puppets!

***Ussein***

Despite Orson’s haste in abandoning everyone else in the castle, the princess was a piece that the old man couldn’t afford to lose, and even in the off-chance that the threat was credible, Ussein needed to get her out of the danger zone.

“Alright Princess, let’s go. We’ve got to get the men out of here. No sense waiting around for the place to blow,” Ussein said, touching her shoulder to get her attention.

“This is the safest place in the castle.” Kala said, seizing his arm and looking up at him. “Just stay here, more people will live.”

The mercenary captain glanced over his shoulder and raised a brow from where his chained hands were resting on the door handle.

“What do you mean.”

Kala gave him a look like he was stupid. “I mean, that there’s no explosion. it’s poison.” She nodded toward the army settled outside the fort. “And they’re the ones who are going to die. We need to stay inside the castle.”

“Who told you this?”

“Your grampa.” She glanced over at the mercenary captain. “Veer’s mom, and all the thousands of chariots circling the field like vultures. A lot of people are gonna die, and it would be best if we waited it out in here.”

Ussein frowned. The princess had been saying very personal things that she shouldn’t have been able to know for the past two weeks. Things that not even a detailed investigation should have revealed, not that he thought she’d had the foresight to investigate him beforehand.

The things she knew seemed to grow organically, as if his grandfather were truly whispering them in her ear, as she claimed.

“Why should I trust you?” Ussein asked.

“Trust me or don’t.” Kala said, clumsily organizing her stack of signatures. “From my perspective, it’s a self-correcting problem. If you don’t trust me and leave, you’ll die. If you do trust me and stay, I get the feeling you will continue to trust me. Maybe put a little more stock in my words about the hand?”

“And what if you’re wrong and your captain destroys the castle in a monumentous explosion?”

“You think the man assigned to protect me would risk blowing me up?”

“His supposed actions thus far haven’t seemed…particularly stable.” Ussein said.

***Calvin****

“AAHAHAHAHAH! DANCE PUPPETS!” Calvin cackled with glee, watching the Uleisan troops make an organized retreat from the castle, leaving behind his company to prevent him from ‘exploding’ it. The situation could not be more perfect.

He was viewing the ants from the top of the fort’s highest tower, where he’d transposed his sense of sight by clever use of small holes in the walls to grant him line-of sight.

“You fools! Your Warp will be fuel for my army! Your-“

Grant clapped a hand over his mouth, whispering harshly.

“What the hell are you doing? There are Legends whose hearing would make a turak jealous. They could be in the enemy troop!”

They waited silently, Grant’s rough hand sealing his ability to cackle. The enemy continued marching above them, the noise so faint as to be more felt than heard.

Grant let out a quiet sigh.

“Are you going to be quiet?”

Calvin nodded.

“Good.” He released Calvin.

“You just got all handsy with a superior officer. I’m going to add this to your performance review.”

“Make sure you mention the part where I saved your ass.”

“Bah.” Calvin placed a hand on the four feet of reinforced stone between him and the gas chamber, the massive stone wheel to control the valve beside him.

The northeast and northwest quadrant were on opposite sides of the low hanging tunnel, and they were waiting to be put into use.

Time to start loading the chambers.

“Alright,” Calvin said, turning to the assembled Cobalts. “I want to thank you ladies once again for agreeing to this mission, as awkward as it is. I simply don’t have the Bent to make it happen.”

He tapped the wall.

“On the other side of this wall is a tremendous underground cavern filled with regular air.”

He lifted up a corked and sealed bottle.

“This is charcoal exhaust. I’m not an alchemist by any means, but I took steps to ensure that this is as pure as possible.”

Following Elliot’s advice, he’d had Jinsei fill a massive glass jug with air and charcoal, then sealed it and the glassworker had heated the charcoal with his Control Temperature, burning it inside the jar without air. Once that was done, Jinsei had cooled it as far as he could, given it plenty of time to settle, then carefully siphoned the top off into Calvin’s bottle.

You should get Chemistry as a Skill. It would be rad.

“It’s also called bad air. Tasteless, odorless, and if you breath enough of it, it can kill you in your sleep. Now. We are going to start pumping this bad air up and into the lungs of the army directly above us.” Calvin pointed up.

“It will settle in the camp and suffocate them in their sleep.”

A single clawed hand was raised.

“Yes, Buzite?”

“If the poison settles downward, will it come back into the tunnels?” He asked.

“Not enough to do any damage, there aren’t any holes on the surface leading to these tunnels, only the gas chambers, and if by some means, it does, the tunnel has excellent ventilation.

Calvin held up a hand. “You feel that breeze?”

They nodded.

“That’s fresh air pumped from an omnidirectional windsock up on the mountain. I didn’t even know those things existed, but the Knick-Knacks really know their stuff. Our air is going to be fine.”

They seemed to be satisfied with that. Another hand was raised, and Calvin pointed.

“What do you need our help with?”

“I don’t have enough Bent to fill the entire valley with bad air. it’ll take a staggering amount.”

What was the mass again?

Hold on, I have to convert from metric…

About two and a half pounds per cubic yard.

Calvin did some quick math. He could make about a hundred and thirty cubic yards per casting of the spell, which sounded like a lot, except it wasn’t, because cubic volume was a bitch.

He did a quick headcount to make sure this idea had merit.

Four hundred female Cobalts, each with about eleven Stability, from surviving such miserable circumstances. That would net him…

Wait, will this even work on Cobalts?

I guess. They pass the Harkness test. Calvin could practically feel the man shrug.

Four fourty times one thirty…add two zeros to get times one hundred, then multiply by three, add a zero, and add the results together… fifty-seven thousand cubic yards.

Cubic root, about thirty-eight.. of course it isn’t necessary to go thirty eight yards high, three is fine so…

twelve areas of gas a hundred and fourteen feet on a side, nine feet tall.

Don’t forget a lethal dose is 10%.

Yeah, we should get enough of them.

Definitely enough to trigger a Break for everyone involved.

You think maybe that Bent would be better spent on wasps?

In sheer firepower, maybe, but the wasps actually gave the enemy something they could fight, something to get alarmed about.

By the time we’re done, at least sixteen of these lovely lady…things will have gotten a Bent back. We can consider wasps then.

Calvin snapped back to his explanation. He’d taken a bit of a detour, and he could see on their faces that he’d blanked out for a moment.

“I’m going to borrow Bent from you, and use it as my own. In a way, it’ll be your Bent choking these bastards to death in their sleep.”

“Will it hurt?” one asked, a tremor in her voice.

“I haven’t heard any complaints yet.”

***

A few hours before the light of dawn broke there was a soft puff, a slight shifting in the sand underneath the Uleisan army. It was quickly lost in the chatter of soldiers around campfires and braying of the occasional restless guar, packed full of the supplies they couldn’t transport via sled over the rocky terrain surrounding the mountains.

“Agh, there must have been something off in that gardor jerky,” Ghubel said, standing watch with his friend Kule. They tended to get stuck with the shittier jobs because of Kule’s mouth, and today was no exception: Nobody wanted to be stuck with the last shift until morning, standing around and watching a mountainside. Getting up four hours early and then putting in a full day of work was nobody’s idea of fun.

The army was well within their country’s borders and their size was massive enough that no pirate would dare attack them, sentries or no, so the watch was a joke.

This nauseating sensation worming its way through his stomach was just another thing that made the day seem all the more miserable.

“I’ve got a splitting headache,” Kule said, eyeing the slowly brightening horizon. “Can’t wait to be done with this shit. He tapped Ghubel on the arm. “I tell you what, I’ve got a nap space hollowed out in the thirty-second’s wagon. You cover for me, I’ll let you use it when I’m done.”

He touched a hand to his head. “I don’t know about you, but I am fucking spent. I feel like I just marched halfway across the country.”

“Maybe because you did,” Ghubel said, trying to distract himself from his stomach’s violent protests. It worked, for a while, until one particular stomach upheaval forced Ghubel to his knees, ejecting his dinner and the sneaked jerked meat out onto the rocky ground.

“There, there, buddy, get it all out, and you’ll feel better.” Kure said, patting him on the back.

Ghubel didn’t know exactly how long he sat there, retching into the dirt. Minutes, at least. Maybe half an hour. He expected to feel better after he threw up, but there was no relief from the nausea. It simply built, exhibiting flu-like symptoms as it did, sweating and shivering. Ghubel’s addled mind began to suspect something more sinister than food poisoning.

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“Kure,” he gasped between shivering heaves. “Kure, sound the alarm.” He glanced over and spotted his friend slumped against a nearby rock, his chest barely moving.

The alarm bell was attached to a post some ten feet away from him, easily within reach of a standing soldier, but from where Ghubel was kneeling, it looked miles away.

He tried and failed to put his shaking feet underneath him, resorting to crawling toward the bell, his vision swimming as he did so, Losing sight of everything except for the sand and bile in front of his face.

He didn’t know how long it too, but eventually, his shoulder bumped agains the glass pillar, and he tried to lift himself to his feet, struggling with every fiber of his being to reach the handle on the bell.

His vision was getting dim…

***

This one could…go…all…the…waaaay! Oops, missed it by that much, Elliot provided unhelpful commentary as Calvin watched the sentries slowly suffocate in the poisoned air with Sense Grafting.

Already he was feeling Warp begin to accumulate above them, radiating through the stone tunnels.

Looks like it’s gonna be a quiet morning after all.

Not necessarily. The attack definitely wouldn’t kill all of them. It wouldn’t even kill most of them. It seemed to be more effective on smaller people with less Breaks, I.E. less Endurance. Therefore, most of the people who were bigger than average with higher breaks would be able to shrug off the effects of the gas with the System’s assistance.

Still, given the sheer size of the army, It wouldn’t be a stretch to estimate that the weakest, smallest twenty percent would likely pass away in the night, while the vast majority of them would suffer debilitating poisoning aftereffects in the morning, and the most resilient would wake up with splitting headaches.

Dawn was still a few hours away, and Calvin could already feel the Warp Building to a critical point.

The Cobalts were shifting around uncomfortably in the dim tunnels as they began to feel the effects of their fourth Break sneaking up on them.

“Go sleep off your Breaks in the west chamber,” Calvin said, waiting for the warp to hit the critical point for his own advancement.

Grant watched him with a cocked brow.

“You really think you can just whip up a fighting force with these Cobalts?”

“They all got to their third break when we took the place, now they’ll be Veterans.”

“Teeny tiny little veterans.” The he said, putting his thumb and forefinger apart. “Not to mention they won’t have time to grow into their Attributes. It’s really not worth the time.”

“Then you’ll be glad to know that it’s your job to teach them the Skills they need to be an effective fighting force during the Forming Day. If anyone would have a good idea, it would be you.”

Grants brows raised.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Indeed. But don’t think of it as a chore, think of it as an opportunity to                shape the skills of eager young warriors, no questions asked.”

Calvin turned his attention to the castle, his disembodied eye having spectacular range of vision.

There was a skeleton crew of Uleisan soldiers left to keep the place secure and search for the suspected Devil powder bombs.

That they were poring over every inch and hadn’t found the pinholes left by the Knick-Knacks was a testament to their craftsmanship.

Calvin’s company had been locked in a cobalt pen, inside a heavy steel fence, with a massive lock.

If he could get them free, they could overwhelm the skeleton crew standing guard easily.

Actually, Calvin thought, thumbing the edge of the silvery blade that grew seamlessly from his palm in response to  his will, I wonder if I could overwhelm the skeleton crew by myself.

Calvin was itching to try out his new Abilities on someone other than Karen. Losing all the time was no fun. She’d been surprised by the bent-enhanced knife at first, then once she figured out their range and how many Calvin could carry inside himself at once, she proceeded to dominate him over and over in his Shadowboxing practice.

Calvin had no idea how he compared to the average soldier.

Calvin Gadsint

Body:

16

Strength:

12

Kinesthetics:

13

Endurance:

12

Mind:

24

Intuition:

18

Stability:

16

Will:

24

Bent:

2/16

 

Skills:

Stealth

8

Talking to Girls

11

Acting

10

Read Expressions

10

Sense-Grafting

15

Knife-Work

10

Dupdomancy

18

Hunting

10

Meditation

18

Chained Spirit

18

Calvinian Summoning

18

Your Princess is in Another Castle

7

Fishing

5

Genosian Language

5

Beli Ma

10

Macronomicon

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