Elder Cultivator

A fleet from the Scarlet Alliance was flying south and west, not skirting the border of the lower realms but instead openly and daringly passing through Exalted Quadrant territory. At the head of one ship stood Half Oink, ready to slice up every foe that got in her way… and she was so bored.

Nobody wanted to challenge her. The only encounters they had were groups that mentioned wanting to join the Alliance, which wasn’t her thing to deal with. Others would determine if they were sincere before finding them a place among the rest of the Alliance. There was this whole thing about not leaving any internal group isolated. Half Oink understood that part.

It was why Akrysians generally lived and worked in the same places as humans- and of course the wolves that predated the people of Akrys. She couldn’t forget to include any other sapient non-humanoid lifeforms they found, which were… some. There were even a few plants included in that mixture now.

For war, however, Akyrisians were sometimes gathered together to scare the foes of the Alliance. Half Oink wasn’t part of that, because she didn’t fight like an animal. She was a swordmaster, and her swords were her own not particularly large tusks.

But nobody was fighting them. Sure, there weren’t any of the big sects on the way but Half Oink kind of thought someone would be that stupid. Technically, there had been a few individual incidents- but while those fools likely wanted to cause trouble for their whole planets nothing ever rose to the level of the whole group acting against the Alliance. They were paying quite close attention to that.noveldrama

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When they finally hit the territory of Unyielding Legion, Half Oink regretted her boredom. Not because she personally didn’t thrive in environments of conflict, but because when it came to actual war people would die on both sides. If not, it wasn’t a war- at best, it would be an extermination or a slaughter.

With no Domination cultivator supporting them, the Alliance fleets were… still perfectly normal. For more than half of their existence they didn’t have a single one of those. They hadn’t even started off with Augmentation cultivators, though that could be debated slightly.

Half Oink sliced a shield and its bearer in half. It was a completely over the top move and a waste of energy… if she was simply considering her own personal battles. She knew how to slip past defenses. However, the shift in morale was important, boosting that of her allies and wrecking that of her enemies. The fact that she could do something so wasteful and unnecessary was inspiring.

From half a planet away, Half Oink heard the sound of a sword being drawn from its sheath. It took a particular sort of cultivator to create such a feeling… and to detect it.

Half Oink reassessed her earlier thoughts. They did have at least one of their best.

It wasn’t long before she spotted him in the skies. An ancient man with an aura of death surrounding him. This planet was probably his, though clearly he didn’t have much in the way of worthy disciples.

Half Oink didn’t learn his name at the time, but later she would learn that he was called Prabhu. At the time, however, she simply faced off against the swordmaster.

Her legs carried her into the sky. Flight was trivial for a sufficiently powerful cultivator. The bonds of gravity had no power to hold one of such might. At most, it influenced the style of combat one undertook.

Prabhu wielded a long blade, its point held towards Half Oink as she charged. In his other hand, he held a shield- though he made no move to block her initial charge. She intended to show him why that was a mistake. Instead, she got a scar above her right eye. Half Oink was quite certain she had hooked her tusks in a way that would deflect the man’s sword, but she only thought she got it. At the same time, her extended energy didn’t even touch the man… just a few gray hairs drifted to the ground.

“Strong,” she grunted. The man probably didn’t understand her words. She had no intention to waste the effort to modify her speech for the common tongue. Her eyes should say enough, even as blood dripped into one.

Half Oink thought next to force him to strike first. He might be a master of counters… and she couldn’t say that was an incorrect assessment. However, it soon became apparent that Prabhu was master of many things. The sharpness of his blade cut through one of Half Oink’s four tusks, and she found herself unable to meaningfully respond.

Changing her strategy once more, she moved to the side covered by his shield. She made certain to keep that between her and him, to restrict the movements of his blade. The moment she thought she slipped past his outer guard, his sword thrust towards her spine, slipping along the surface of his own shield. She barely managed to avoid a serious blow, her energy dispersing the sharpness of his blade as it sought to rend her apart.

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Her neck was still bleeding, just not anywhere important. By the time blood loss from that particular wound had any chance to hinder her, the battle would be long over. Chances were that Half Oink would die.

She didn’t want to, but if it happened she would be glad it would happen from a worthy opponent. She shook herself off, readying herself for the next exchange. She moved around in three dimensions trying to circle around, over, or below Prabhu’s guard. Three quick exchanges and she lost not a drop of blood. She might have been catching onto his style.

Half Oink did lose another tusk, but those grew back eventually. She already had to intentionally limit and sharpen them.

With one eye closed, Half Oink sought the feel of her opponent’s blade. One tusk parried his blade as it came for her throat. Her focus narrowed to only be her opponent. The rest of the battle was nothing in her mind. It couldn’t be, as anything less and she would die… several moves earlier than otherwise.

Half Oink wasn’t clear how long things stretched on. It was a constant battle of twisting, parrying, stabbing. Her energy extended beyond her tusks, only to be withdrawn in an instant to avoid her foe’s blade. Over and over they clashed. Then, half of one of her healthy tusks was sliced away, along with a bit of one ear.

The legacy of swordmasters passed down to her didn’t care about such trivial things, but she was getting close to running out of weapons. It wasn’t that she didn’t care for her tusks, but that she simply couldn’t protect them. It was an embarrassment… but at least she could say that her foe was powerful. She readied herself for a follow up attack that never came.

“Another time,” the man declared.

Was he sparing her? Pitying her? Half Oink almost chased after him. Then she came into awareness of the pain in her body… and of the battlefield below and around them. The Scarlet Alliance had won, despite Half Oink’s lack of participation. No, holding off the swordmaster might have been entirely necessary. Her blood calmed down slightly now that the battle was over. She couldn’t say it was the most reasonable choice, but it was also the only choice. How could she refuse such a battle?

Besides, she was totally alive. She just needed a few stitches. And some time to regrow two and a half tusks. Actually, the remaining damaged one was cut at a nice angle to make it very sharp. It was one of the lower and more horizontal ones, so she might work with that. Still needed it to grow out a bit, but she could hasten that with cultivation.

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Prabhu didn’t engage in the next system, though he was probably there… watching. Taking a cautious rate of advance after encountering proper resistance, the Alliance forces began to build up slightly. That might have been the plan of the Unyielding Legion all along, as they soon received reinforcements from the Numerological Compact. A bunch of big ships with people who didn’t want to be there.

Half Oink took one look at that situation and decided it was a job for meerkats. She was just looking forward to her rematch with Prabhu.

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The first and strongest of the meerkats had come from the Shadysands Burrow, not because they were more exceptional than any others but because they had been the first to receive guidance on true cultivation. That prestige had continued into the future, and now it was more difficult to find a meerkat that was not associated with the Shadysands Burrow to some extent. After all, it had been many generations and the distinct number of sapient groups of each species on Akrys hadn’t been unlimited.

The Shadysands Legion took exception to the naming of the Unyielding Legion far off to the east, even if the latter had technically carried the name first. However, even if they fought in ranks and had decent levels of teamwork, they just weren’t properly united.

From the beginning, the meerkats had been a communal people. That had extended to cultivation even before they came across other forms of it such as that practiced by the subspace planet Aipra and then later the unintentional results of the Numerological Compact in the lower realms.

The Shadysands Legion was actually quite new to things, but they had a solid understanding of what they wanted when they ascended… all together. Calling them Integration cultivators was only true in the most vague form of things, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to say they were Confluence cultivators either. They just were. And what they were was a battle legion of cultivators that had a slightly low amount of energy for cultivators of their level. And of course, all of that was packed into the body of a meerkat.

From a distance, they felt like a pretty strong Integration cultivator. As long as nobody was focused on them, they wouldn’t register much more than that. After all, they shared a single aura among them.

That was why the Numerological Compact was surprised when they landed on the Magnitude IV cruiser. It did seem that the Numerological Compact had been developing, as what would previously have taken about half a million slave cultivators to achieve had now dropped to closer to a hundred thousand, packed tightly into groups of a few dozen depending on the generation.

Every single segment of the outer layer was hit all at once. The energy of the ‘captain’ and everyone aboard couldn’t resist so many simultaneous attacks. Ten or twenty integration cultivators would pose a serious problem for a Magnitude IV ship. A hundred would force them to split the energy flow far too many directions. Closer to a thousand? The energy defenses crumpled and meerkats tore through the effectively unenchanted material of the outer hull.

Tens of thousands of cultivators were rapidly freed and coming to consciousness at the same time. That was the very sort of thing that had caused the hiveminds in the lower realms. However, the later generations of Numerological Compact ships had been set up differently. They were supposed to kill people as they were disconnected. And that would work, if it was done in smaller quantities- but the vessel simply didn’t have the energy to do that. Not to hundreds of places at once.

Thus it was that a huge number of cultivators came to consciousness while watching extremely tiny mammals tear apart the ship they were staying in. Chaos and panic could have overtaken their thoughts, but the Shadysands Legion made use of their connected ability to calm them down. Effectively they gave all of those who were waking up a comforting pat on the head. Everyone could appreciate that.

Then they continued deeper into the ship, tearing it apart layer by layer. All that, and the ship had barely even taken a few scattered shots at them as they approached, not even noticing the threat they posed until it was too late.