Robber Killer, Killer Robber - Part X: The Coldhide "It had twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down and six long swaying necks, a hideous head on each, each head barbed with a triple row of fangs, thickset, packed tight – and armed to the hilt with black death!" - Recollections of Khyprian warlord Oulixēs the Lost. Spear of the Gods, Jungle of Squalls, Isthmus of Lustria 29th of Erntezeit, 2538 IC // 40.0.9.15.18 12 Etzʼnabʼ 11 Yax Reinhardt stumbles, the greenwood rod resting across his shoulder blades digging into his sunburnt skin thanks to the overweight cloth satchels hanging from both ends. The man keeps his eyes forward, even as sweat stings his eyes enough to blur his vision, and he is forced to pant like a dog just to keep enough air entering and leaving his lugs. Step after step, he keeps moving with a rhythm that only resounds in his mind. He still remembers, merely weeks after his capture -which had occurred three years ago while sailing the Sea of Claws- that he had been put to work in a lumber camp in dreary Naggaroth. There, some of his fellow slaves, southlanders whose tongue or tribe he knew nothing of, had sung to keep themselves working with coordination and rhythm. Their masters had had the mouths of all of them sewn for long enough that some had died from starvation, and then had forced them to “free” each other with their own hands as part of some public festivity. After that, the singing had ended. It had not mattered -as one of the southlanders had begged- that the singing made them more efficient. After all, the singing had also lifted their spirits. And cruelty is the point among their masters. That is also why Reinhardt doesn’t offer to help carry the sacks of gold being lifted by the younger lad just in front of him. He knows that that would only lead to himself carrying the weight and being whipped. And the lad would immediately be ordered to refill his saddlebags to bursting, most likely also being whipped before or after. Cruelty is the point. And so he keeps walking, hoping that this will be his last trip to the beachhead, praying to Sigmar that the dark elves will finally collectively agree that their greed is sated. He’s long given up on his captors realizing that this hellish expedition would ever be profitable -by now, he’s quite sure that more than half of his fellow slaves have perished- or about the fact that mangled corpses just keep… Showing up. If the exhaustion doesn’t kill him, a snake bite of a spider’s sting will do him in. And that’s assuming that none of the pale immortals decide to just stave off their boredom and aches on his body. His best hope, as depressing as it is, is that he and the rest of the slaves could soon be ordered to march into the bowels of ships. He’s heard that the druchii tend to get rid of their slaves on return trips to allow for more cargo. But they’ve genuinely lost so many hands that he doesn’t need to be a hopeful idiot to believe such a thing could happen. And so, Reinhardt keeps walking, shouldering the weight of two apple basket-sized piles of gold and gems chiseled and levered out of a weapon’s shaft taller than any mountain he has ever seen. A wondrous sight to behold. Or at least it would be wondrous if his first look at it hadn’t been followed by the beheading of three slaves who had tried to run for the treeline. Why they had tried to do so escaped him. If the tales told during what few hours or rest they are allowed are true, one could argue that the bipedal monsters without are no better than those within. Perhaps it is being exhausted and underfed like he’s never been before -even by the standards of the Druchii, his current masters seem overly petty- or perhaps it is just that the thousand people who have traversed the footpath between the spear and the beachhead have made the soil hard as rock. Or maybe it’s the weight that leaves his upper back bleeding. But finally, after almost four years of grueling servitude, a body that should be the very image of vitality age-wise simply gives up. In some ways, the flesh is just joining the mind in a breaking that happened long ago. He stumbles and falls, the greenwood carrying pole falling before him, at first sliding to press down on his neck, but then fully stumbling as the gold and gems stabs into the ground. Blood pouring from his nose mixed with the foamy saliva that puddles around his dirt-eating face. His arms spasm and tremble uncontrollably as he lays there, incapable of even trying to sit up and lean against something, anything. The lad before him keeps walking, the people behind him keep walking like ants barely disturbed by a fallen leaf. They do give him a wide berth, however, as they do not want to be close by to watch what is surely about to happen. They won’t whip him, he knows, the druchii have a knack for telling when a slave is too broken even for them. He’ll likely be made an example out of, perhaps nailed to a nearby tree, or flensed alive to provide entertainment for the officers. Hopefully, he may be given over to the admiral’s thing , such a death would be gruesome to behold, but lightning fast to endure. Armored leather boots stomp towards him, shouting in a language that his owners have never had a reason to teach him. He can hear the sound of a blade being unsheathed, of drums, of whips cracking in the distance, of shouting, of… ‘Wait, drums?’ The vibrations are steady, only audible thanks to the ear that he has directly against the ground. They come in sets of four. First two almost in unison, and the latter two only a moment afterwards. Then come more, and more. And then he is no longer feeling drumbeats, but also hearing them. And then he realizes. Some are drum beats. The rest? The rest are steps. Quickening steps. A stampede. The druchii reaches him, Reinhardt feels it as a glove studded with sharp metal grabs his ratty shirt -in the process lacerating his mid-back- and hauls him upwards. The dark elf likely wants to look him in the eye as he chooses punishments. The imperial takes in a snort of bloody phlegm and spits it up, landing the glop of reddened snot against the slaver’s cheek. Reinhardt smiles. The blade moves towards his belly as the elf sneers. Then shadows fall upon them both, and a mace tipped with a stone the size of his own head leaves him looking at a gorish pulp. His would-be-killer’s entire head having been flattened into the base of his neck. This time, the shock does allow him some extra strength. Reinhardt lands on his back and scuttles back like a terrified rodent, looking up. The thing that looks down on him is covered in azure scales painted with oranges and reds, its body decorated with piercings, fixings and collars of gold. It turns its head, reminding Reinhard -whose father had been a chicken farmer- of the way foxes would inspect interesting things. The lizardman raises an arm -the one not holding the massive stone maul, and points . Reinhardt doesn’t think twice, abandoning the bags of gold, and follows the four-fingered and clawed hand’s directions. He knows not what he and the rest of the slaves are running towards. But they all know what they are running away from , and he sure as Sigmar’s Mighty Balls will not be staying around to see how both things mix together, Coldhide Fleet Beachhead, Jungle of Squalls, Isthmus of Lustria Rankec looks up when the sound of something cracking makes his long knife-like ear twitch. His eyes locate the source soon enough, even as the land-wards winds once again undo part of his hair bun and a few strands of hair as black as tar intrude upon his vision. His eyes find the sight of some kind of… Tree frog, one that is clearly too large for the branch it has cracked with its weight, leaving the slimy and clumsy animal hanging from its front limbs, while its much larger back limbs kick and try to find somewhere to grab onto. The sight of the struggling animal should have caused him to, at the very least, let out a sensible chuckle. Instead, all he does is let out a scoff, and return to what had been keeping him busy during his tedious guard shift in the slave pens. Digging scum out from under his nails with his dagger. Usually something as menial as keeping tabs of the humans would have been relegated to one of the more well-trained slaves, being beneath the standing of even a Druchii unattached to a clan like himself. But they had run out of those early on, as they had been attached to scouts as porters, or as leaders of work crews. And now, the fleet greatly diminished, menial tasks fall upon those like him, next lowest. ‘What did I think, jumping aboard one of that bitch’s ships? The only thing I’m getting out of this fucking idiocy is maybe a promotion if we recruit fresh meat when we return to cross the Witch Gate.’ He, like a thousand others, had been entranced by the idea of a raiding expedition deeper into Lustria than Coldhide’s fleets ever had. On top of that, the mutiny had been easy on him, he’d been irrelevant enough to not have anyone in particular seek his death out during the chaos. Now, with his pale skin burned and his joints chaffed from wearing leather and metal in a climate of salt and humidity, he’s reconsidering the fact that the price for betraying Admiral Coldhide is simply being paid in posterior installments. ‘I never thought I’d miss Clar Karond, at least there the gold would be useful…’ He grimaces as his dagger punctures the tip of his left ring finger, letting out a single drop of blood. Currently, he is richer than he had ever been in his life before joining the current endeavour. But enough gold to encumber a slave is quite useless among a fleet where almost everyone else has the same amount, or more. Currency among his fellows has become favours rather than silver pieces, and there’s -quite obviously- no one to buy anything from with his newly acquired gems. Rankec stands up from his leaning position against the pen’s stake wall. He gives a look into it, but finds nothing more than expected: A few hundred off shift slaves, resting on piles of dried grass they themselves had been made to collect. The place reeks of human filth, he should order a few of them to gather buckets of the nearby sea’s water, to at least splash away the worst of it. But he has already accepted that he’ll be exposed to the ordure of humans until the Admiral’s delusional daughter finally gives in and orders them all back aboard the ships the fleet still has enough hands to- ZWOOP Rankec jumps in place, suddenly lanced by some kind of insect, his neck stung just as the rest of his body had been now for a thousand times. The druchii moves to slap the offending mosquito, slapping his own neck. Instead of a possibly satisfying crunch, his palm slams into- A diminutive piece of wood, thinner than even a food skewer, so brittle it cracks under his slap. As he brings his hand back to visually inspect it, he can feel a tingling sensation up and down his neck. The piece of wood is diminutive, the tip stained red with his blood, alongside some kind of thin whitish pellicule. Rankec’s mind instantly floods with explosive fear, his body pumping out adrenaline. He goes to shout and alert the rest of the guards. In doing so, he goes to take a step. His leg -both legs, in fact- has fallen asleep, his mouth opens more due to gravity than him trying to scream, little more than a strained whimper comes as his body limply slams into the ground. Within a few more moments, he can’t even move his eyes to look around, much less close his eyelids. His heart, just like the rest of the parts of his body controlled by neurons -meaning, the totality of it- stops sending or receiving signals as soon as his bloodstream carries the poison to it. The last thing he sees is the reptilian foot of something that scampers and climbs out of the pen, its other clawed foot landing on his back, he can’t feel that either. A few moments later, and as the pen’s entrance is unlocked and slaves quietly try to remove each other's shackles and collars, his body is already dead. It’ll take a few hours for it to reach the parlor of death, however, a strange quirk of the hot and humid local climate. Somewhere, far above the ongoing events, a treefrog finds it footing and returns to the dense canopy, just in time to avoid a flying reptile’s snapping jaws. The commotion, the violence, the sounds of battle, they come like the boiling of water, unnoticeable at first, catastrophically overflowing if you are distracted from it for but a second. In her case, one moment she is overlooking her camp as her troops retreat closer to the moored ships, alerted by the few wounded who manage to flee into the beachhead from the dirt path to the Spear of the Gods. Davara doesn’t doubt for a second that all those still within the jungle have been cut down to the last. The next moment, even after her crews ready to put the Ravenships to sea, the sounds of commotion make her focus on the westernmost edges of the camp, where she had had the slave pens built, making sure to have them downwind, where the slave’s stenches would be carried away instead of mingling with Lustria’s odors in her nostrils. What her eyes find is the distant sight of blue-scaled reptiles scampering up and down stake walls and tents, jumping upon the unready while the tail end of a mob of escaping slaves disappears into the treeline, skirting clear of the scaled creatures vomiting forth from it. For a second, she doubts whether she should divest some of her soldiers to seek them out, be it to check the reptilian infiltrators or to put down the slaves, who seem to have attempted to use the commotion to stage an escape. ‘Fools, the jungle will punish them as much as I will.’ She growls, making up her mind and deciding to forget the hu… Mans…? ‘You will repay the insolence of your trespassing by giving into our care all the human slaves you have brought to Lustria, with enough food and water to sustain tem for twenty days and twenty nights.’ Her mind provides the Herald’s words, his words. Suddenly, she is much less content with letting them succumb to the diseases and beasts of the jungles. Her face grows into a snarling sneer, and the usurping fleetmaster begins to turn to bark orders out for Rures -who by now has gone from being her most reliable captain to de facto being her second in command- to echo out. Only then does she realize that the proverbial water is already boiling, and her skin is already getting scalded. The first wave of the reptilian assault has already arrived. It arrives in the form of something she had never pondered the possibility of before. In her father’s tellings of his and other fleetmasters’ forays into Lustria, there had been plentiful mentions of garrisons and scattered bands like the ones she herself had faced already. Instead, what breaches the treeline consolidates within a few seconds into the solid ranks of a marching unit of infantry. Infantry made up of massive snarled reptiles, their head crests decorated with jaguar-like spots of fiery colors. Davara is reminded of the appearance of some of the saurus slain during her plundering of the temple dedicated to the saurian sun god. As the ranks solidify into a shield wall facing the palisade her darkshards are massed behind, she admits something to herself for the first time in her one hundred and fifty nine years of life, Davara Coldhide truly entertains the fact that her expedition might… She shakes her head, and starts barking orders, her gestures somewhat diminished by her immobilized arm. Her eyes remain locked in that wall of strangely-shaped shields as crossbow bolts slam and stab into them, barely lessening the enemy’s momentum. Even when the bolts slam against one of the monstrous heads sticking out of the shield wall, the creature’s sloping crests often divert them like a rounded metal shield would. Still, reptiles do fall here and there. Hopefully enough for the gaps in the shield wall to allow for a cascading amount of damage. Then her eye catches a glint that makes her squint. Just a line behind the forwardmost elements of the shield wall, where -for some reason- the air wavers as if in a desert, stands a saurus taller than most, its scales copper-like in their colouration. Equally cupric is the massive standard that he holds aloft, a piece of glinting metal decorated with streamers that resemble the licks of a flame. A particularly bright reflection off it forces her to squint her eyes. Then another, a few seconds later, and another, and another, quickening until- Davara hisses in pain as everything she can see becomes harsh white. From the sound of it, the silent flash has had a similar effect on those readying her ship, they all are left blinded as if they had stared at an eclipse’s end. Those sounds of annoyance and pain are soon drowned out by others, much more prescient. The sounds of combat, of weapons slamming into armor, of dying warriors, of tearing flesh and cracking bone. When her vision finally clear enough, her eyes red and stinging, Davara is gifted with the daunting sight of what exactly the reptiles have done during the precious few seconds in which they -by arcane means- have left her entire expedition blinded. They have closed the gap. Saurus warriors have climbed over the palisade like agile birds in the precious few seconds during which the firing line has been disabled. At the same time, the treeline is now teeming with even more foes, a veritable army, breaking through defenses and clawing its way towards the ships, her ships. “Rures, we set sail, immediately.” “I… Admiral…” “What?!” She turns around, ready to use her still-usable arm to cut the would-be traitor down, if needed be. Instead, he finds him pointing at… Well, all around them. The vessel is awash with sailors and reavers, trying to, indeed, put the ship to sea. Something made impossible by the fact that their sails have had to be retracted, as the wind is… The squalls race inland. “The sails are useless, if we cut anchors and attempt to set sail with this wind, the ship will run agro-” “Then gather the galley-slaves, you useless-!” “THERE ARE NO GALLEY SLAVES LEFT!” Rures screams back. … Davara takes an insecure step back, the small of her back hitting the ship’s gunwale, she turns around just in time to hear a bellow so loud that it overrides the newly-learned lesson not to look at the enemy force directly. The lizardmen have split themselves in two, leaving a causeway-like space between the two halves of their force. A wide one, of many spans. And, only barely large enough for the colossal greenish shape that trampes its way out of the treeline, armed with horns that make quick work of tree trunks, and that will even more easily breach her palisade. A warbeast, one of four sturdy legs, covered in rough armor and a semicircular crest covered in horns, the color of a drab swamp. A stegadon. One with a platform, a howdah, firmly planted upon its upper back, one stuffed with both of the lizardmen breeds. And a single shape perched upon its horns. Humanoid and wielding a great pole weapon. With that kind of momentum, the thing will easily stampede all the way to where the gangplanks connect to the still moored ships. “ALL WHO DO NOT TAKE UP OARS WILL BE ABANDONED!” She finds herself screaming, instantly, dozens of those still ashore start running for said gangplanks, abandoning baskets and bags of gold and gems. Hopefully enough to flee beyond the reptiles’ ability to swim after, and then parallel to the coast until the squalls give up. Davara jumps up her vessel’s rigging, strong core muscles doing the job a necrotizing arm cannot. And whistles as loudly as her lungs can provide for. “Buy me time, girl, buy me time…” She mutters. From the waves starts breaking out a mass of serpentine necks and grasping webbed limbs, a mass of scales as green as emeralds breaches out of the frothing waves. Pinkish tongues, proboscis and retractable jaws snap and twist. The most valued of all things she took from her father during her coup. Her family’s namesake. The Coldhide Kharibdyss. “KILL THEM!” She orders it. “KILL HIM! THE HUMAN, TEAR HIM APART!” The monster’s five heads don’t make for much of a collective name, but servitude under generations of Davara’s ancestors have trained the monster well enough to sense their intent. The monster starts swimming closer to shore, its bulk so large that it actively shoves another ravenship aside, throwing a few of those in its rigging overboard, to be snapped up by the mouths of two of its heads. Davara can hardly begrudge the monster for grabbing a snack, considering that it represents her sole chance of delaying the enemy long enough to make it out alive at all.
Gotta ask, how many of you saw the Kharibdyss coming? I wasn't specially sneaky about it, but also didn't see the point in obscuring its existance. I hope I threaded the line and kept the reveal interesting. As to the end of this story arc. While last chapter was the emotional conclussion to its plotlines, this one is the action one. Apologies for the cliffhanger, but I simply had to I hope you enjoyed the story and I honestly appreciate all and any kudos or comments you may be gracious enough to gift me! And in case any of you are interested, here's the link to my Discord server, where I discuss my projects and all are welcome It would be great if, if you enjoyed the story that is, you took a second of your time to go over to ao3 and left a kudo and a comment over there, since it is my main posting site.