Elder Cultivator

The Shadysands Legion tore through the whole Magnitude IV battleship in a matter of minutes. The total number of casualties was sadly greater than one, but a small handful of failures when rapidly disconnecting cultivators from predatory energy drainage was actually fairly positive. And of course the death of a Numerological Compact cultivator was mandatory. They knew what they were doing.

“You are likely disoriented,” the many meerkats spoke in unison- though they were still individuals. “Take a few moments to adjust to your freedom. We will handle atmospheric balance until that time. This vessel will be non-functional, but we will help you guide it off of the battlefield to an atmospheric planet.”

There were a great many lives to be saved even on a more condensed Magnitude IV battleship. Throughout the various fleets, there were millions. A small quantity compared to the planets within the system. Small enough that they could actually manage to relocate them in a reasonable timeframe. It was going to be much more difficult once they actually reached Numerological Compact territory. If it was anything like the lower realms… they would have vast quantities of enslaved cultivators there. And while they had certainly developed some defensive measures to prevent people from turning into hiveminds, they were fighting against the rate at which the Alliance could develop pro hivemind methods.

Better that than mindless servitude. Actually, those within hiveminds were generally among the happiest- and if they weren’t, the Alliance had methods to safely extract individuals. A decent hivemind wouldn’t have any issues with that.

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Half Oink honed herself and one of her three broken tusks, waiting for the next encounter with Prabhu of the Unyielding Legion. The chances of victory didn’t necessarily favor her. Repeated conflicts of the sort were a good way to find oneself statistically dead.

Sword cultivators didn’t care. In fact, some of them didn’t care when they were actually dead. That extended to cultivators in general, at least those that had goals that extended beyond personal survival.

Besides, Half Oink thought she could win. She wouldn’t know if she was ultimately going to win until things were over. And giving better odds to Prabhu was just her way of keeping her expectations in check. Things like that could only be impartially judged by outsiders.

Maybe he would improve more than she. If that was the case, Half Oink was guaranteed to perish in single combat… and likely swiftly, so her allies wouldn’t be able to do much.

That was where Half Oink found herself, on the battlefield surrounded by a hundred foes wielding swords they weren’t really devoted to. In fact, she didn’t even think they were properly devoted to their shields. She cut them down a handful at a time, weaving back and forth among them. When it was to their advantage, many beasts continued to grow as their cultivation expanded. Few reached the levels of Paradise, but Fuzz and Spikes were massive wolves.

It would have even been advantageous for Half Oink to become a hulking individual able to crush her foes… at some point. But she hadn’t grown much, and by the point she trained in weapon arts she really didn’t need it. The increased size might slow her down, and she needed to have maximum control over her technique more than a bit of physical power.

Half Oink spun about, taking out the legs of six cultivators. They weren’t prepared to fight anyone naturally low to the ground that could also extend her energy a great distance. They weren’t dead at that point, but barely mobile cultivators weren’t much of a threat.

When she reached the halfway point, having fatigued herself somewhat, that was when Prabhu struck. He’d managed to hide himself well enough to avoid revealing his energy, his sword piercing forward from behind their ranks. His blade reached Half Oink’s heart, driving nearly through it.

That moment decided the battle’s course.

Half Oink brimmed with anger. Not at Prabhu for trying to assassinate her, but at herself for not foreseeing it. She barely forced his energy out before he sliced her into tough bacon. The pain and shock brought her to one knee. A dozen surrounding cultivators slashed towards her.

They fell, her one good tusk slicing their heads off as she spun. Prabhu closed the gap, slashing down with his sword. He cut through to her shoulder as she once again barely stopped his energy from inflicting a fatal blow. Well, a second one.

She swung her single healthy tusk, pushing away his blade. She charged at his legs, but Prabhu merely flew upward. Blood splattered out of Half Oink’s chest. The warthog sprang off of the ground, knocking down those around her as she drove towards Prabhu. His sword flicked out, granting her another scar that matched the one already above her eye. She tried to take his arm off at the elbow, but he withdrew his blade with a twist and deflected her own assault.

Half Oink wasn’t done yet. She had at least a few more heartbeats left. Her left tusk struck, twisting and stabbing as she coiled her body around. Two parries, one block, and a piercing of her left ear that totally did not match the damage on the other side.

Half Oink flew after Prabhu as he kept his distance, waiting for her to bleed out. A rightward slash, but her head was forced up. She crossed back down, but his shield slipped her blade.

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Her right tusk bisected him, starting at his left elbow and going straight across his torso. The tusk was sharp… or at least what remained of it. It had only grown a tiny length in the time since he’d chopped it, but its physical size was irrelevant. Only its properties. Only what it meant.

The instant Prabhu attacked Half Oink from concealment and failed to kill her, he had lost. Because that let her know he wasn’t sure he could win any other way. And if he wasn’t certain of victory, she was certain. In their two battles, Half Oink had only landed a single strike. In the first, she’d done well to slice a few hairs. Still, she thought the one she did land was quite impressive.

Prabhu couldn’t continue to fight with his dantian separated from his brain. In fact, most people would have said that was the moment of his death, but it probably took several more seconds at least. Maybe minutes as his brain started to fall apart.

Half Oink probably should have stopped the bleeding inside herself earlier… but it wasn’t like her heart was going to work in its current state anyway. As long as she had some blood she would probably be fine.

The damage to her heart was so perfect, done with such a sharp blade. A neat bisection. Really easy to stick back together. She just needed some heart glue. People made that, right? It hurt every time it tried to beat, so she told it not to do that. Instead, she pushed her blood around manually. A proper cultivator should be able to do at least that much.

It didn’t leave her much free energy for flying as she softly crash landed back on the planet. Nor for defense.

Half Oink felt a blade coming for her, but she couldn’t react. Then she heard them hit something, and a familiar energy. Her half open eyes spotted a tortoise with familiar scars on her shell.

“Hello. Little one.”

“... I thought you would be bigger, Mauled-by-Wolves,” Half Oink commented.

“You’re thinking of turtles. Being in the water or without gravity makes it easy to get big.”

“Cool.”

Half Oink lay her head down. If anyone was going to show up to save her, the first Akrysian Ascension cultivator wasn’t a bad option. She didn’t bother wondering how the tortoise got there. It was an unnecessary question.noveldrama

Half Oink almost fell asleep before she remembered she was currently acting as her own heart. How annoying. Hopefully someone would come stitch her up soon so that she could nap.

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Certain people had the skills that allowed them to take down Numerological Compact ships without killing all of the enslaved individuals aboard. That was not Velvet. Not even as a Domination cultivator. She could certainly fool the formations of a small part of the ship, but she couldn’t keep that up for chamber after chamber without letting any signs show. And then, there was a fairly decent chance that all of those remaining would die. Or just every slave, depending on how it was done, whether through explosives or some more subtle method.

That wasn’t a guarantee, as that had caused the Numerological Compact quite a bit in the past. Being unable to retrieve ships for the sake of spite was expensive. Such methods were more relaxed on their planets, especially in the upper realms. Most likely, they’d had an incident or two that were very expensive and decided against fail-deadly setups.

Velvet was currently observing that. Currently, she was infiltrating one of their planets with others. How many others, she didn’t know. It was kind of irrelevant. A few hundred humans, the best operatives that the Little Alliance had available. Plus an uncountable number of void ants. At the very least, it was a number Velvet was unwilling to attempt to count. No doubt the void ants would give her a number if she requested, but it didn’t matter. She had probably a few million with her. Beyond that point, she didn’t bother thinking about it.

There had been some debate about whether they should do what they were currently doing to the Numerological Compact… but not because they didn’t believe it was a moral result. Things had gone quite well in the lower realms when the three systems the Numerological Compact controlled had been freed. That included the freed cultivator’s reactions to non-cultivators, and on such a large scale it could be relatively easily replicated.

People were people, and they’d been largely suppressed by the same group in the same ways.

No, whether or not they could do it wasn’t the issue. It could have been done centuries before. The problem was that there was no point. Velvet wouldn’t say that to the generations of cultivators that had died as slaves, but it was true. There was no point to free them just for them to die.

But if the Little Alliance could support them… they would have a chance. They weren’t close enough for it to be comfortable to work with them, but there would be no major sects between them and the LIttle Alliance when everything was done. And they had ten times as many systems as there had been in the Lower Realms.

Velvet stood inside a power station where a vast number of cultivators were being drained of their upper energy simply to provide an elevated standard of living to the locals, and especially the Numerological Compact leadership. It had already been shown that something similar could be replicated in less horrible ways, thousands of times over throughout the greater Alliance between upper and lower realms. But aside from small transmission efficiency improvements, they clearly hadn’t been interested. Not that the Alliance had shared everything, but enough of their technology had been stolen for other groups to make use of at least the basics by now.

There was no convenient release for all of the prisoners at once. They did have the ability to do it in batches for when they had to shut down portions of the power station for repairs. To accomplish what she wanted, Velvet was glad she had void ants to fully disrupt the energy flow. All she had to do was arrange for the physical restraints to be disconnected. Doing that to a great number of things all at once was difficult but not impossible.

She just needed to free enough people that would become semi-coherent so that they could free their neighbors. A couple hundred ought to do it. Even if some portion of them were selfish cowards, that should bring about a critical mass. If each freed one or two others, the propagating waves would clear out the whole facility all at once. And that would happen elsewhere around the planet at precisely the same time.

Velvet had been too fast so now she was waiting behind the warden, looking at her watch. With ten seconds to go, Velvet slit her throat. Then she rapidly messed with the formations, faking the right sort of energy so it thought she belonged. She also displayed a fake version of the warden’s energy, good enough that anyone who wasn’t looking wouldn’t notice until the entire region shut down. And at that point, they’d have bigger problems.

Like the void ants that were going to eat them when they came to try to slaughter the slaves. And of course, Velvet herself.