As we were led to the back of the guildhall I silently got to work on internal things. While I followed Ashton I internally took stock of some of my more intriguing new powers, power such as the ability to use the magic of the Earth that Bellatrix was born in, and other systems of magic that relied on incantations.
We were led into a large room, one far larger than would have been possible if not for the obviously supernatural nature of the place. It was a massive room with numerous divisions, many of which were currently inhabited by two or more different individuals facing off against each other. The room smelled of sweat, blood, and other scents mixing together.
As I peered around the room I could see nearly invisible marks on the floor that radiated an incredibly faint amount of light. These marks denoted the boundaries of barriers that were invisible to lesser eyes but could be seen by mine. My eyes rapidly adapted to this new information and the precise shapes of the barriers became clear to me. I could also see the barriers cling to the warriors inside of them, wrapping around them and protecting them ever so slightly.
I watched them for a few moments and saw them work wonders on the warriors they protected. I could physically see wounds healing, and I watched tired muscles be soothed and almost massaged by the auric energy pouring into them. The barriers were actively bolstering the abilities of the warriors inside of them, not through direct enhancement but by pushing them further than they could normally be pushed and giving them more time to safely hone their familiarity with their weapons and themselves.
While I studied the warriors, most of whom were fighting using purely physical methods, I was also actively creating new "Styles". "Styles" were quite potent powers that relied on, for lesser users anyway, communication and language. In my case, as a superior user of these abilities, they relied on thoughts and even emotions, as well as my own willpower. I silently bestowed myself with a rare power from the Earth of Bellatrix, the ability to utilize her people's magic both wordlessly and wandlessly.
This ability was easy for me to grant myself since I was a supreme master of magic and I also possessed a power to fully control and manipulate "Styles", especially with "Hyper Signing". By fusing those three things together with "Skill Creation" I could activate any magic that normally required words with little more than thoughts, which turned me into a master of arcane subtlety, something that could give the right person the ability to alter even the most precisely designed world with ease.
In the halfling-staffed military base chaos and fear continued to be the prevailing moods of the day. The place was a loud, chaotic battlefield where one malevolent entity led a horde of other monsters and was in the process of snuffing out hope, resistance, and free will.
The creatures who stalked the base were terrifying. The lowliest among the shambling horde that had defeated the halfling forces responsible for the creation of the place were the minions, orc-like beings who were infected with a powerful disease. They wielded their weapons, and in some cases their natural abilities, with a dark ease and a cold efficiency.
They did not halt when they saw halflings. Those they encountered they murdered with skillful strokes of their weapons, with brutal slashes of their claws, or with powerful bolts and balls of fire. They split into groups as they encountered forks in the dirt paths that crisscrossed the fortress, and yet they remained virtually untouchable by their foes. And they were not alone.
The Netherghul explored the fortress as well. Each of the powerful generals was akin to a living force of nature, and they explored the fortress themselves as readily as the common foot soldiers of the army they commanded. They freely unleashed powerful magic, whether it was Malady converting some of the deceased halflings into undead warriors, Cryos unleashing icy projectiles at the bravest halfling defenders, or Inferna hurling explosives packed with hellfire at her enemies. Hakon, the sole non-magic user in the group stealthily explored the fortress and stole supplies, as well as backstabbed would-be-ambushers whenever he encountered them.
The actual leader of the army was darkly entertaining himself while his forces raged against his enemies. He was taking advantage of the enemy's inability to resist his forces to practice with some of his newer, more terrifying abilities.
The inhuman leader of the army of brutal raiders and slavers silently watched the battle through thousands of eyes all at once. His face currently lacked eyes but that meant nothing to him and his divine senses.
He quietly peered at the wreckage of the fortress through the eyes of his minions, an ability he had always had but had never sought to make use of until now. His mind was an unknowable thing connected to tens of thousands of other minds through the might of the hivemind of the Blacklight Virus, and in the labyrinth of his mind he silently studied the battlefield.
His current physical form, at least in the world of Northos, was that of a four-legged beast that resembled some sort of nightmarish cross between a man and a tiger. He did not have fur but his stance reminded anyone who was able to see him of the fierce felines that roamed the less tamed parts of the world.
His face lacked eyes and a nose and the only visible feature on it was the dark smile he had. His mouth was an impossibly wide maw, though one that was closed right now, and sharp teeth pressed against the skin of his mouth. Several tendrils jutted out of his back, some lined with eyes, others lined with mouths, and each of them was a dangerous appendage he could use freely.
Several halflings lay on the grassy floor around him. Some of them were dead, their blood beginning to dry as it slowly stopped pouring out of them. Those halflings were the lucky ones.
Other halflings were spread out around him, in various states of being. A few of the creatures were just transforming into powerful Blacklight beings. Their minds were being absorbed by the gestalt consciousness of the Blacklight virus.
Some of the creatures were convulsing as they radiated eldritch electricity. In those cases, they invariably had some sort of unholy brand burned somewhere on their bodies. That was a sigil that bound their souls and minds to the unholy figure who branded them, Fohion himself. They were filling with newfound power, and it was causing them truly intense pain. In time Fohion planned to make them some of his greater ambassadors to the halfling populace of Mellow Hills.
A few of the halflings were simply fully unconscious. Outwardly they were unchanged, but internally their minds and souls had been entirely subsumed by Fohion. They were husks, totally devoid of any semblance of free will, and they were unconscious entirely due to the fact that their master willed them to be. Their minds, wills, and souls were fully the property of their new god, even if they were "turned off" at the moment. Included among their ranks was a special halfling who suffered every kind of fate suffered by his fellows here, and one more kind of alteration.
Fohion was a sanguinarch, a vampiric equivalent to a god. One of the things that came with that was the power to create his own breed of vampiric servants and "spawn". He had done that when he first became a sanguinarch but had never converted anyone into it. Truthfully he had created many different kinds of vampiric spawns but his greatest spawn were uniquely powerful soverign-vampires. They were the rarest of the servants of the dark god, though now their numbers were being slightly bolstered.
One of the halflings, one of the ones he had slain with his tendrils, was slowly changing. The creature lay face down in a pool of his own blood, having been one of the two halflings slain when the dark divinity revealed his presence to his foes. His muscles and organs were being repaired by the potent, impossibly restorative powers of the god who had slain him in the first place. His will was being shredded even as his soul was forcibly wrenched from the gates of the afterlife the Mother Goddess promised to all of her faithful followers.
The halfling was being turned into something akin to an intelligent, fanatical puppet of the dark god he served. The creature would be among the very first vampires to worship and serve Fohion as an unholy divinity of undeath, a herald of a new kind of oblivion who'd stop at nothing to snuff out free will and to become the undisputed lord of existence.
The mind was a strange thing. It was something somehow dependent on and in some ways independent of the brain, a manifestation of something both higher than and beholden to an actual physical brain. And as several halflings felt the things that made them themselves wash away, their minds were twisted and corrupted even while their brains endured minimal changes.
To the halflings themselves, though their bodies writhed in pain, these changes were not painful to the minds and souls of the beings. The sensation of losing one's sense of self in a tremendous tidal wave of minds was not a painful experience but almost a blissful one. It was comparable to the sort of joy one might feel when they are reunited with family after a long imprisonment.
Their bodies were corrupted, twisted, defiled, and remade to better suit the whims of their new god, but their minds did not experience such destruction and remaking. The god was capable of gentleness, when it suited him anyway, so he instead sought to make his side and his faction appealing to those who survived his wrath or were remade by it.
As the remade, altered, and corrupted halflings began to slowly reawaken their minds were subtly adjusted. They were touched, smoothed over, and even carefully remade to worship their new master. It was part of a powerful set of alterations that made their minds eternally loyal to their oppressor, the very same creature who had invaded their fortress and had slain some of them. As they began to slowly open their eyes they laid them on the very creature who had forcibly dominated them, and they smiled, lovingly, at him.
The portal that the hellhound had stepped through hours ago had not deposited him inside of the dark overlord's base in the forest. Instead of ushering him into the base where the strange divinity made his living, in this world at least, the mighty hound had been dropped off in a desert.
The sweltering place should have been a challenge for the canine to adapt to, but the dark overlord wasn't about to be randomly cruel to a potential servant. The god had blessed the beast with the power to endure the heat with ease, cooling the demon's fur and granting him supernatural immunity to heat!
The creature had spent the last few hours wandering the sandy wasteland, and was growing restless. It had been almost two hours since he had even seen any sort of life! The desert wastes seemed endless as the powerful hound steadily explored every corner of the hills and hills of sand, but the beast refused to give up.
The creature knew that his new master wouldn't have sent him here for no reason. So the mighty, hellish demon displayed surprising resilience and almost applaudable faith as he continued to soldier on. He did not know that atop the great hill in front of him lay the reason why the dark god had sent him into the unforgiving wastes of the surprisingly brutal world of Mareth.
Nevertheless, as he began to approach the massive hill the dog's senses began to subtly pick up on new things waiting for him. He began to smell the scent of fresh sweat, mixed with other, more exotic and less pure fluids. He began to hear the distant sounds of laughter, of whispered conversation, and even of music! This excited the hound, who began to move quickly in the direction of the mysterious, as of yet unseen oasis that waited for him.
As the faithful hound drew closer and closer to his destination, his distant master began to smile, for reasons unknown to his companions Bellatrix and the "Champion" he had saved from an ignoble fate. The god was not regifting the hound, though he intended for the faithful pet to be a useful ambassador of his to an especially strange group of desert-dwelling demons. The time for the powerful god to grow more active was inching closer and closer.
