Chapter 239: The Victory
His arms were shaking under his weight.
Neil stood a few feet away and looked at him.
The arena was so quiet that the sound of Mantis’s breathing carried to the edges of the shield.
Mantis raised his head.
His expression was not the arranged version of defeat.
It was the face of someone who had arrived somewhere completely different from where they intended and was genuinely working through what that meant, the particular look of a calculation that had come back wrong not because the math was bad but because the starting assumptions had been.
"That’s enough," Neil said.
Mantis lowered his head.
He stayed there for a moment, then pushed himself slowly upright and stood, his balance finding itself by degrees.
The crowd found its voice again somewhere during that process and it was not the immediate loud noise of a crowd that had watched a close contest reach its conclusion.
It was slower and more fragmented, conversations starting and restarting and redirecting as everyone assembled the same realization from slightly different angles, the particular noise of a large group of people simultaneously revising something.
"He never even used an ability."
"Not once, the whole fight, I didn’t see a single skill activate."
"What is he?"
Randy exhaled once.
He looked at the arena for a long moment and then he looked at the betting boards behind him and his expression moved through the arithmetic of the evening quickly and arrived somewhere that was financially satisfactory and personally humbling.
"Right," he said, to the air beside him.
He looked at Neil standing in the centre of the arena, and then he looked at the crowd around him, and the expression on his face was the one he produced when something had completely reordered his understanding of a situation and he was going to need some time alone with that fact before he was ready to discuss it.
...
Far from the settlement, in the Snake Kingdom’s formal audience hall, the afternoon light came through the high windows at the angle it reached in the later part of the day, and Cynthia sat at the head of the table while the people around it finished settling into their places.
The Giant representative was different from Rock, older and more weathered, the broad angular features of his face carrying the particular quality of someone who had spent a long time watching difficult situations and had formed comprehensive opinions about all of them.
The Dwarf King sat to her right, amber eyes direct and entirely unhurried, his three braids arranged in the same configuration they had been in the last time he had sat in this room.
Beside him was someone who had not been at the previous meeting.
She was not large and she carried herself in the way of people whose power was old enough that it had stopped needing to make itself visible, an elder from one of the eastern races whose territory had bordered phantom space for longer than most kingdoms had recorded history.
Her name was Vey.
Her skin had the grey-green quality of very old forest and her eyes were fully white, and she sat with the stillness of something that had developed patience the way you developed a language, through immersion and time and the understanding that urgency produced worse results than it prevented.
Cynthia looked at all of them.
"Tell me what has changed," she said.
The Giant representative looked at the Dwarf King.
The Dwarf King put his hands flat on the table.
"We held the line the way you instructed," he said. "We did not engage them, we did not kill any of them, we maintained the boundary without active combat for the full period."
He paused.
"They are still multiplying."
Cynthia was very still.
"Without kills to trigger it?" she said.
"Yes," the Dwarf King said, and his voice carried something underneath the evenness of it that was not fear but lived in the same neighborhood, the particular quality of someone who had expected a situation to hold and had found that the situation had changed its own rules. "Slower than the kill-triggered rate, but consistently and without stopping."
"They reproduce naturally as well," Vey said.
Her voice was low and carried the quality of someone who had been observing quietly for a long time before deciding to speak.
"Not at the rate of a combat engagement, but the baseline population is increasing without any action from our side."
Cynthia looked at her.
"How long have you been watching them?" she asked.
"Longer than either of these two," Vey said simply. "My people have shared a border with the phantom territories for generations, and what is in that border region now has not been there before."
Cynthia nodded once and looked back at the table.
"The contained sample," she said. "You have it?"
"We do," the Giant representative said. "It cost two people to secure it and I want that acknowledged before anything else is discussed."
"Acknowledged," Cynthia said, and it carried the weight of genuine registration rather than procedural response. "Where is it now?"
"Two days from here by fast travel," the Dwarf King said. "We kept it away from any populated settlement until you confirmed you were ready to examine it, because we did not know what proximity to a large population would do and we were not willing to find out."
"That was the correct decision," Cynthia said. "I will go to it tomorrow."
The Giant representative straightened slightly.
"Personally?" he said.
"Yes," she said.
She looked at all of them.
"The kill-triggered multiplication is a mechanism that someone built into these creatures deliberately," she said. "But if the natural reproduction rate is also increasing without any engagement, then the base creature itself was not designed for a short engagement."
She paused.
"This was built to last," she said. "Whoever created these things designed them for a long campaign, and they expected us to fight back, and they wanted us to accelerate their numbers when we did."
The hall held the weight of it.
Vey’s white eyes were steady and her expression did not change.
The Dwarf King’s hands were flat on the table.
The Giant representative was looking at a point slightly past Cynthia’s shoulder with the expression of someone running the implications through from the beginning.
"Which means the objective is not a single attack on a single territory," Cynthia continued. "The objective is accumulation, a population that grows regardless of how we respond, until the count reaches a level that no conventional defense can address."
"Then what do we do?" the Giant representative said.
"First," Cynthia said, "I examine the sample and find out what is actually driving them, because something that maintains an identical pulse in every individual across a population of thousands is not acting independently."
She looked at the Dwarf King.
"Hold the line for a few days," she said. "No engagement, no kills, no settlements in the affected area, and absolutely no attempts to contain their spread by force."
"How many exactly?" the Dwarf King said, with the tone of someone making a commitment they intended to honor and were registering formally.
"Hmm three days," Cynthia confirmed.
She looked at the table.
She was thinking about a message that had reached her that morning, a warden named Mantis requesting assistance with what sounded like a leading edge of the same incursion moving through the human settlement territories to the west, and she was thinking about Neil at the 5th Origin, less than one weeks from the lost elven kingdom, and she was thinking about all of it converging from every direction at once with the particular quality of things that had no intention of waiting for each other.
She folded her hands.
"I will have the answers very soon," she said. "Then we decide what comes next."
...
Back in the arena, all the audience had already left, after watching the whole shocking battle.
Only Neil, randy, mantis, Ileana and jane remained.
Randy was talking with mantis, while Neil went towards jane and Ileana, he was happy to see both his women.
"How did it go?" facing jane, he asked.
"Perfect, I have already gone through it all, I told her about our urgency and she used some treasure to quicken the pace so it finished a bit quicker." she replied, enjoying Neil’s gentle pats.
"You are ready to evolve to the 5th Origin then." Neil added, he remembered that Magnar and jane had together collected all the gene points for 4th Origin.
"Yes, but I think it wouldn’t be wise to do so for now, we will be leaving soon after all." Jane said, she definitely wanted to evolve since that would give them a big advantage.
"And it would be great if the domain also evolves to the 5th Origin, if we can bring the domain into that lost elven kingdom then everything will be fine." Ileana joined in the conversation.
Once the domain evolves, Neil would have an entire army of 5th origin mythic class, even Ileana’s strength would rise again.
"That’s something we can worry about later, did you ask your teacher about that treasure?" Neil asked.
Jane remembered this important topic and answered: "She said there is one treasure like that but it can only be used for a few days."
Neil hummed, he still can ask that shadow empress about it but she is nowhere to be found.
"If I can’t find anything else, we will use that, did she ask for anything in return?" Neil asked, looking at jane’s beautiful face.
Her growth had really become so fast, now that her domain is a sub domain, she can evolve without worrying about domain cores.
It had greatly benefited her.
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Thanks for reading... adios
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