The Hundred Reigns 231: The Land of the Warlords (11) (Patreon)

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A mighty tempest engulfed Frightwall. 

A magical typhoon of legend arose to ravage the region, raising tides of debris into the atmosphere, casting airships to the ground, and offering free wingless flights to thousands of troops on the ground. It didn’t matter whether they belonged to Endymion or Valne. The wind knew nothing of friends and enemies, sweeping aside all in its path without judgment or discrimination. 

It seemed Maublanc Paimon wasn’t the only one willing to sacrifice his own troops for victory. Someone on the opposing side considered the death of thousands of their own a fair price to pay to bring down Frightwall.  

Could it be the elves? It would fit the Oracle’s pattern to sacrifice others for victory, but Belzemine was in Frightwall. Were they unaware of that fact, or willing to take the risk anyway? It could also be a rash decision by the Valnean merchant-princes who considered a mountain of corpses an acceptable price to pay for their own safety.

Whatever the case, they were doing more damage to the region than the Endymian army would ever have.

Simon had to anchor himself onto his Crimson Throne even in the heart of his sanctum. The mighty tempest battered his castle until it shook like a tree. The countless enchantments shielding his fortress from attack meant little against the almighty power fielded against him. The winds battered his fortifications with such force that they ripped pieces of it away. Small towers and rooms were ripped out of his stoneskin to be flung onto the surface below as seeds of malevolent architecture. 

Simon felt pain rippling through the bond uniting him to his fortress as if his very fingers were being ripped from his hands. All he could do was stagger within the quaking throne hall. His vision flashed across the various rooms to see Gourmand’s troupe holding onto whatever they could to avoid being buckled out of the courtyard, or Thalas and the intruders being thrown against the walls. 

“Your Majesty!” his dear Belzemine immediately cast healing spells and buffs to protect him, heedless of her own safety. 

“Your Majesty?!” Maublanc called out to Simon in alarm. “Are our anti-Wind enchantments holding?!”

“No, they’re not!” They had fortified Frightwall against normal storms and offensive wind spells, but no mortal magic could shield the castle from a divine hurricane. “Focus on the battle, Commander, and win it! A mountain does not yield to the wind, no matter how hard it blows!”

His messenger imps confirmed that Louis’ forces had begun assaulting the wind temple. Simon had to hope his brother would succeed in taking it before the storm devastated their entire air force. 

He focused all of his will onto directing Frightwall out of this trap, but the hurricane proved mightier than the magical force allowing his Dungeon to float and move. Frightwall tilted sideways, threatening to crash to the ground below in a cataclysmic fall. Simon would likely survive the fall, but his castle would be torn to pieces and many of his troops would perish. 

Should he cast his Edict of Eerie Storms? Its power might cancel out the hurricane at the cost of replacing it with another calamity; one that would spare Frightwall at the cost of ravaging the region and his troops alike. Simon dismissed the idea and fell upon a less lethal solution. 

I have no choice. Simon had hoped not to resort to this, but he could only think of one being capable of disrupting the storm. His mouth opened and his words echoed through the shaking throne room. “The Abyss lies empty, its gates rattling in the wind! Blow away their hopes, Storm-Father Vayan!”

The Sanctuary’s champion materialized in the throne room and pierced the veil of time. 

Reality itself darkened from the resulting paradox, and a dreadful vision assaulted Simon’s mind. His senses, merged with his castle, allowed him to perceive Frightwall as it truly was: a terrible being with window eyes and veins of miasma coursing with evil beneath its stone skin. The hurricane battering his walls became a whirlpool of miasma in a sea of darkness, from which he could only see a single island floating above the shadowy tide. 

Is that… the Sanctuary? Simon sensed a gaze upon him from the rocky shore, and he saw a figure standing on its edge: a Warrior’s ghost exhaling smoke and wielding a rusted sword oozing poison. Louis? 

The specter wailed, and Simon snapped back to reality.  

“What…” Vayan hissed as he collapsed to the floor, his limbs writhing while miasma poured out of his beak. “What are you doing to me?”

“What I must, Vayan,” Simon apologized to him. “I’m sorry.”

The Storm-Father manifested in a skull-cracking thunderclap. 

He was still the same embodiment of fury and wrath who had fearlessly charged Nodens, a towering living windstorm-engine strapped to a vulture-like behemoth rivaling Vouivre in size. His helmet reached up to the mighty ceiling and shattered it, and his eloquence had turned into bestial roars. 

However, the rabid bird of war was now firmly leashed. Whereas Simon had once struggled to control the level 75 dark eidolon and caused it to run amok, he had grown enough in power to bind him to his will. 

“Prove worthy of your title and end this tempest tearing my castle apart!” Simon ordered his dark eidolon. “Bend those rebellious winds to our will!”

Vayan roared and rushed out of the throne room’s doors with violent fury, forcing guards to step out of his way and pulverizing all walls in his way. The fierce wind entered the room in his wake, but Simon’s men quickly slammed the gates shut to plug the hole. 

Vayan flew out of the castle with a roar louder than the storm. The gusts harmlessly glided over his body like water on a shark’s skin, and his talons wove the storm. The dark eidolon and the Wind Megalith engaged in a battle of wills. 

For all of his power in this state, Vayan couldn’t match an ancient stone fueled by the prayers of the world’s most popular religion and imbued by the Mana Goddess’ might; but his rage weakened the storm enough for Simon to regain a measure of control over Frightwall’s flight. He struggled against the vortex calling his lair to the earth and directed its path elsewhere. 

The fortress threatened to fall at any moment, but he could still make a semi-soft landing. Simon could have crashed Frightwall onto the city, breaking its walls and crushing his enemies under his fortress’ weight, yet the sheer toll in civilian lives would have been too much. 

Simon instead directed his castle towards the chasm near Casmene and used Lord of the Demon Castle to reshape his fortress mid-fall. The massive, miles-long tower contracted into a bulkier mass that wouldn’t tear in half on impact. Uninhabited rooms and fortifications formed defensive rings upon rings around key areas—such as the throne room, the guest wing, and the Abyssal Gate—to protect them from the impact. 

Frightwall passed over Camene and briefly cast it in its shadow, tossed a few airships out of the sky, and then crashed into the ravine in a hail of debris. 

The earthquake that followed the impact could be felt all across Frightwall. The fortress’ outer layers were peeled away between the chasm’s two cliff-jaws, sending pieces of cursed architecture and broken stone flying across the landscape. All windows that had not yet shattered from the storm did so at once in a deafening boom. Shards of glass shredded the flesh of the unprotected or bounced off armor. Mephisgoats and demotaurs bled from their sensitive ears, their bleats and cries unheard.

Simon barely had time to catch Belzemine’s arm with his hand before she could be flung at the ceiling. The Crimson Throne refused to let go of him, though, and he buckled up until the tremors lessened into quivers. Frightwall slowed down, its flayed ramparts stuck between the two sides of the ravine. 

“Are you alright, Belzemine?” Simon asked his friend once the room stopped shaking. 

“I am fine, Your Majesty,” she replied without any concern for her life. “Are you in need of healing?”

“No, but my guards are. Go provide first aid.” 

Simon turned his telepathic attention to his forces. Gourmand’s troupe and Thalas’ soldiers had both survived the crash after Simon reshaped the fortifications to shield them the best he could. The Pendragon eidolon was gone, likely because its summoner was bleeding to death from her cracked skull, and the other intruders had been torn to pieces by the Berserker’s axe. 

In the end, they couldn’t even get past Thalas. 

The battle outside was more or less over too. The hurricane had sent the Valnean troops on a complete rout, and the storm was dying out on its own. Louis had probably disrupted the Ritual sustaining it by seizing the wind temple. The enraged Vayan and the remaining airships had turned their attention to the stragglers below. 

Casmene had fallen, and the League of Valne died with her.

—-------

Frightwall lived. 

Simon could feel the pieces of his Dungeon across the landscape wriggling in an attempt to knit themselves back together as he walked into Casmene’s temple with Belzemine, Thalas, Antonine, and his other allies. The Wind Megalith floated in its inner sanctum, weaving a faint gust around stone columns and directing it through the open windows. The mana in the air shimmered with a green hue, and almost obscured the numerous bloodstains on the floor. Soldiers were dragging away the corpses of elite guardians and spellcasters that Louis had massacred on his way inside.

“I am relieved to see you safe and sound, Your Majesty,” Maublanc said upon welcoming them into the sanctum alongside Louis. The latter hadn’t bothered to change yet, and his Warrior boots were stained with the blood of the temple’s defenders. “You too, Thalas.”

“I hope you at least both got a level or two out of this,” Louis said, his smile unbearable. He had gained one for sure, perhaps as the culmination of all the battles he had waged since arriving within sight of Portempête. 

“I did,” Thalas replied gruffly, which further put salt onto Simon’s wounds. The woes of a high level slowing down his progression… 

“What happened here?” Simon inquired upon spotting a woman’s corpse near the Wind Megalith. She resembled a woman he had glimpsed in the Freelancer Crestone’s memory. “Did you slay the local vestal?”

“Her and the other priests. They were casting a Ritual under an elven archmage’s direction, so I skewered her first and demanded their surrender second. The mage gave me some trouble, but fled once they realized their storm had been disrupted.” Louis sounded almost disappointed. “They were of a higher level than me.”

“You fought the Oracle?” Simon inquired, his hands tightening into fists. Had she dared to come in person to try and bring down the Overlord? 

Louis shook his head. “The Oracle is a woman. The mage was a male elf using a Cleric Vassal Class of some kind, and bald for that matter.”

Simon didn’t like that news. “So the elves have more than one archmage capable of casting hurricane-summoning Rituals and matching our Marshal in battle. Wonderful.”

“Does that surprise you, brother? Some of Illusea’s inhabitants are older than the very concept of Crestones, and likely cast the primeval spell that wove them into being. I would be surprised if none of them had maxed out a Vassal Class or two.” Louis didn’t sound all that concerned. “Thankfully for us, all elven spellcasters share the same crippling mana dependency. Our mysterious foe could only sustain their spell by draining the Wind Megalith, and preferred to run away rather than stand his ground.”

“The Druid behind the root attack is unaccounted for too,” Maublanc said. “They might be dead, though. The battle and the hurricane have slain many. It will take days before we can identify all the corpses.”

“What about our losses?” Simon asked. He had already felt quite a few of his followers’ deaths through their brands. “Are they consequential?”

“They are within expectations, Your Majesty.”

Maublanc gave an account of their situation. On one hand, they had lost a third of their airship fleet, including Air Commander Andras himself. The hurricane had torn nearly all the vessels escorting Frightwall apart. This would greatly diminish Endymion’s aerial supremacy until they could produce replacements. 

On the other hand, they had utterly decimated Valne’s military and inflicted a terrifying ten-to-one casualty ratio. A few Valnean mercenary bands and adventurer guilds had even turned coat during the battle after deciding they would rather be on the winning side. Imperial commanders didn’t particularly trust them, but these new additions would help absorb the army’s losses and occupy captured territory. 

Moreover, they had only deployed the airfleet and Frightwall for this engagement to take Casmene by speed. The bulk of the Endymian army hadn’t even finished crossing the Dragonsea or moved on from the ports. Their losses were a mere fraction of the troops they would bring to invade the western continent. 

“All in all, an overwhelming victory,” Maublanc concluded. “The northern fleet is intact and the southern fleet only suffered one airship loss, so we retain control of Valne’s skies. How long until Your Majesty’s castle can repair itself?”

“Weeks, maybe a month.” Frightwall had recovered quickly from similar damage in that future of ruins, but it had plenty of miasma in the atmosphere to draw from. The process might take longer in this age of mana. “They have only delayed us. Frightwall will rise again.”

“Excellent. With the navy escorting our army to the Valnean ports, we’ll soon have enough infantry to occupy the entire country. This will let us gather our troops and prepare for a land invasion of Lore in a few months’ time.” Lord Maublanc nodded sharply. “The League of Valne will not survive Casmene’s fall. Our next priority is to temporarily close the mountain pass to prevent Lore from sending land reinforcements and then force the remaining city-states to surrender.” 

“Some will hold out in the hopes Muse comes to save them,” Louis warned them. “Will the damage to Frightwall put an end to our other fortress?”

“No,” Simon replied. The Darkwood floated motionless unless he directed it from the Crimson Throne, but remained operational otherwise. “Our assault will continue on schedule.”

“Then everything is unfolding as planned, besides some minor hiccups,” Maublanc concluded. “I would say this campaign is beginning well, though we shouldn’t lower our guard.”

“You’ve done well, all of you,” Simon congratulated his allies, including Thalas and his fiancée. “The two of you have performed excellently.”

“Your Majesty is most kind,” Antonine replied with a smile, while her fiancé remained eerily silent. His gaze hadn’t left Simon since they left for Casmene. 

“Is something the matter, Thalas?” Louis inquired. 

“I just…” Thalas glanced at Simon. “Are you in control?”

Simon tensed up. He had already lived through this once before. “You think I’m, what, possessed?” 

Thalas hesitated before answering. “I saw you smiling when you used your glare on me.”

“You imagined things,” Simon replied. “I wore my helmet.”

“Your eyes were smiling. It was as if you fed on my fear.” Thalas took a deep breath. “And you don’t mourn the dead either.”

His words gave Simon pause. It was true that the Overlord archetype did derive strength and purpose from the dread of others, and Simon had grown more in tune with it after the whole Wicked God incident, but surely it hadn’t affected his psyche that much… 

A dark feeling sank in Simon’s stomach, which the silence of his audience only intensified. He shook his head and dismissed those concerns. “Valne brought this calamity on itself. I gave them plenty of chances to avoid a war.”

“Sadly,” Louis commented. “Our victory would have been quicker had we launched our fleets within days of Father’s death.” 

Simon ignored that remark. “I only hurt you to teach you respect, Thalas. Our father tried to tear our family apart, but I want us to get along one day. I truly do.” He patted his half-brother’s shoulder. “We’ll come to laugh about that incident in the future, you’ll see.”

Thalas gave Simon a look that polite society usually reserved for complete lunatics, but didn’t say a word. At least Antonine forced herself to smile to avoid making it any more awkward. 

“Beware, Simon,” Louis said. “Your Class becomes you.”

“You of all people should live up to your own advice,” he replied with some annoyance. “I am Simon Magnos. No gods nor Classes will ever change that.”

Louis gave his sibling an enigmatic look. “Which gods are you talking about?”

Simon sensed a slight pressure on his throat, and ignored his brother’s question. “Bring in this city’s surviving representatives,” he ordered, drawing a scroll from his Inventory. “Time to put some facts to paper.”

The delegation that entered the temple was the most well-dressed motley of prisoners Simon had seen yet. A group of merchant-princes too wealthy to fight their own battles, lord-mayors who bravely abandoned their cities to the Endymian army’s advance, and adventurer guildmasters were brought to him by demonic guards. Their fear and despair were written all over their faces, though some found refuge in their hatred for their conquerors. 

It didn’t matter. The fact was that they were at his mercy. 

“Gentlemen, I am Overlord Simon Magnos, emperor of Endymion and master of your fate.” Simon assessed the assembly. “Before we begin, which of you ordered the casting of that hurricane Ritual?”

A sea of fingers bravely arose in response, every single one of them pointing at a different person. Maublanc had a few dry words about that. “You killed almost as many of your own men as our ships did, and you’re not even brave enough to own up to it?”

“Clearly it was a collegial decision,” Louis mused, his tone dripping with contempt. “I believe the locals call it ‘democracy?’ Conquest will be a mercy upon them.”

These cowards are lucky to be more valuable to me alive than dead, or I would have thrown them off my fortifications. Simon unrolled his scroll and presented it to them. “As per this Judge-backed treaty, I claim the land formerly known as the League of Valne as a tributary state, to be administered by my army until a viceroy of my choosing can unify these lands.”

The conditions were as generous as Simon could afford without looking weak. Cities that surrendered would retain their current governments and relative autonomy with limited oversight so long as they paid tribute to the empire; those who chose to resist, like Casmene, would fall under military rule. Sacks were optional in those cases, but expected. Otherwise, adventurer guilds and mercenary bands would be disbanded and incorporated into the army, and Valne would cease all trade with hostile nations. 

“Finally, the Wind Megalith will be brought to my castle for further study,” Simon ordered. Asterion had managed to subvert and drain its power, so why couldn’t he do the same? “It’s ours to safekeep now.”

“You can’t!” Casmene’s portly mayor protested. “That is a sacred artifact!”

“You dare argue with me?” The crowd recoiled at the sight of Simon’s burning eyes. “You, who started a war you couldn’t win and denied my peace offerings?” 

“As they said, woe to the defeated,” Louis added. “Accept your helplessness.”

“If the Light wanted you to keep the Megalith, you would have won,” Simon concluded. “Now, proceed. Whether we’ll use ink or blood for the signatures is entirely up to you.”

They preferred ink, and their submission brought Simon a fair share of experience; though not enough for a new level. Even the conquest of an entire nation was no longer enough on its own to sate the Overlord Class’ greed.  

Simon was aware not all Valnean cities were among this assembly, but Casmene and its surrounding towns did sign away their independence. This legal technicality would fuel the greatest of Simon’s magic. 

“Now, I suspect some of you caress the hope that this victory will be short-lived and that a dashing Paladin from beyond the horizon will come to save you from your righteous punishment.” Simon moved to the temple’s window and looked upon the mountains separating Valne from Lore. “Allow me to cure you of this false belief with a simple demonstration.”

He activated Unquestionable Ruler and blanketed the land in fog. 

A thick, cloying mist arose out of nowhere to encapsulate the entire region around Casmene, engulfing the mountains and hills alike. Those corpse-gray clouds crept along against the wind in an unstoppable tide that shrouded the sun and darkened the horizon until a great ephemeral frontier wall stood between Simon’s lands and those of his foes. No salvation shall come from the west, and none would escape from the Overlord’s embrace.

“You live in my world, now,” Simon informed the crestfallen delegation. “Get used to it.”

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