Brocks fell like bone artillery shells and slowly drained the troop's number. Reid used extra energy from his ring to keep himself close to topped up. Everything went incredibly smooth for a glorious half hour span of time.

Then it wasn't smooth anymore.

He'd just finished throwing another slug when the projectile started to rise into the air. It lifted slowly - but enough to send it sailing over the troop and off into the distance. Reid was only midway to his next hiding spot, and one of the twins stared in his direction.

It was angry.

Reid would probably be angry, too, if someone had been killing off the majority of his people. So he didn't blame the thing. More than 50 of the guinea pigs were dead - and though he'd lost track of the number killed, Reid knew it had been enough to put him just shy of 5.3 million xp.

The beast screeched and lumbered towards him - slow enough that a small and sad wave of the still-living troop members managed to get in front of it. The minions charged in his direction - but Reid didn't run. He still had a decent amount of energy left, and he was ready for this fight.

Eager to put down the rest of the troop.

Eager to take on the traincar sized beast lords.

Eager to test his strengthened mace against them.

Reid pulled Requiem from his storage ring with one hand, and recalled Brock with the other. When the bone ball appeared, he shoved it into a socket-like protrusion he'd added to Marrow's right pauldron. That way, he could keep a summoned one on his person. Ten seconds was a massive achievement of mana engineering - but ten seconds in a fight was still a hell of a long time. When Requiem popped into his hand, Reid sprinted forward to meet the group of smaller beasts.

Reid felt strong - stronger by far than when he'd been when he fought the turtle, and definitely strong enough to kill these things.

As he reached the front of the troop, Reid spun himself out of the way of the first leaping creature, and brought Requiem around like a sledgehammer. It tore through the guinea pig's side and carried enough momentum for Reid to keep spinning in a circle - so he did. He let Requiem out as far as his reach allowed, and twirled. More of the guinea pigs tried to leap at him, but each met Requiem's rapidly moving flanges. They didn't stop.

He knew, by now, that the things were about as smart as a bag of hammers. Only the lords seemed to have more than two braincells to rub together. It had made the brock kills easier - and it made his current work quite effective.

His spin stopped, and he changed to a more normal style of fighting as the things continued to charge him. His mace and his fist tore into and through beasts as they threw themselves into his waiting violence. He stumbled when his right foot was pulled slightly forward, and nearly missed a swing. Had to catch himself to keep balance when his left side was suddenly much heavier than his right.

He frowned and fought on. The damn things all had gravity magic - though they weren't at the beast lord's level of capability. They could change intensity, direction, and even had something that felt like reversal. It wasn't dangerous to him, but it still made for a seriously annoying trick he had to contend with.

Part of his focus had to remain on stable footing, stable stances, and the best ways to move from one point to the next.

Without the time he'd spent training his physical dexterity, Reid knew it would've been nearly impossible. His old, unbalanced self would've been stuck on the ground under the weak magic assault. New and improved Reid was much harder to trip.

The troop thinned. Attacks came less frequently, and the larger beast was closing in.

But, surprisingly, only one beast lord had moved.

Reid took a moment between attacks to use identify on the closer traincar-sized rodent, and the one further away. The further beast was screeching at the one that had approached him - a clear reprimand for moving too far forward.

Pippin Rubmlestrut, lvl 41

Lysander Rumblestrut, lvl 41

Lysander had coloring that was like a calico cat's, and Pippin reminded Reid of a toasted marshmallow. Pippin was the one that had charged forward - and Lysander was doing his best to get Pippin to retreat and group back together.

Reid realized in that moment that he'd never seen the two of them actually stay separated from each other.

Maybe that was a weakness he could exploit.

He grabbed brock out of its socket and swapped hands, then charged his arm and his body with power before he let off an arcing throw aimed towards Lysander. Between dodging attacks and killing off more troop members, Reid caught glances of Lysander glowing purple as the projectile neared it. A sheen of purple enveloped his creation, and Brock abruptly and violently accelerated towards the ground. The sudden change in trajectory saw it fall short of the calico guinea pig, but the increased velocity made the shrapnel massively more potent. Shards exploded out from the thing, and a few pieces slammed hard into Lysander. It screeched in pain, and then at Pippin as small wounds started to bleed over its body.

While the troop's gravity magic was a nusiance, two stronger magics had woked to prevent his brock throws from connecting. There was gravity reversal - where Reid saw his brocks sail high overhead, and gravity intensification, which sent them plummeting towards the ground.

If Lysander had the gravity-intensifying magic, it meant Pippin had the gravity-reversing one. He filed the information away as he continued fighting with the guinea pigs.

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Pippin had halted its advance, so Reid focused back in on the fight with the remaining troop members. There was a potential play here, where the twins would stay back, Reid would finish off the rest - or almost all the rest - of the troop, and then he would be able to separate himself from the lords so he could eat, rest, and come back fresh to their final fight.

If he was lucky, he might even be able to nab one of the downed troop while he retreated. He could practically smell the smoke coming off of a fire, meat sizzling above the dancing flames.

All around him, the troop still swarmed with ferocity. Two bit down on his arm at the same time, and tried to drag him to the ground with their magic. Reid stabbed Requiem's tip through one's back, and then slammed the other into the ground. One of the troop had given up biting and was just... bumping into him from behind. He left that one alone, for now. A trio of the creatures all managed to leap at Reid at the same time, and he got a great idea. He jumped up and over them, leaving the trio to slam into each other like a scene from an action movie. They drew blood as the confused beasts attacked each other in midair.

Reid smiled - a bit sad no one else was around to witness what he'd just done. But something felt... wrong. It was a sensation in his mind, and his body.

He was too high in the air.

Reid had only meant to jump a little over the trio of beasts, then come back down and finish them off as he did so. Instead, Reid found himself looking over the tops of the two-story gourds.

Then... he kept rising.

Reid looked around, panicked as he rose over the sides of the valley and kept going.

His new and completely undesired position in the air revealed what had happened. Pippin the marshmallow was glowing intensely with purple light as it continued to lift Reid - and itself - into the sky.

His mind raced.

He wondered if the tutorial space had a vertical limit in the same way it had an outer edge.

Then he wondered how high a fall he could survive.

He hurled a slug at Pippin, but the beast simply lifted itself up to dodge the throw - then continued to float up, keeping distance with Reid but also keeping pace.

As Reid made it high enough to recognize a manmade structure that must have been the nearest enemy base, he realized why Pippin had raised itself with him - range. By carring itself upwards, too, the beast was keeping him within range of its magic - ensuring Reid stayed trapped in a column of manipulated air. Recalling and throwing Brock yielded no results, as Pippin remained just far enough away to dodge.

When Reid could see the mountains and plains, and the valley was just a green line on the ground, Pippin let out a low rumble - and stopped glowing.

"Oh, fuck."

-/-)) Travis ((-\-

Travis smiled as he watched the locals flee before his elites.

Calling base commanders to his side to form a punitive force was not standard practice - but it was allowed. It was the best decision to ensure a swift resolution, after all.

First, he'd routed the idiots out of the starting base. Most 'got away' on that sacking, but the fight proved they were incapable of the kind of damage that had been done to the entry base - and his people.

The few Vuxarinans he captured gave him the stories of bone-crafted materials gifted to them by a mysterious transplant. The threat - the barbarian that had wiped out the first base - wasn't even a proper local. He'd spent time off-world. That meant he was even more dangerous than Travis originally thought. Despite his attempts to pry more information from them, his prisoners from the first sacking had nothing else to offer. They were rehomed to cages in other camps.

His information gathering so far had relied on torture and treasure in equal measure. Or, at least the promise of treasure. The Vuxarinan officers and nobles that had been brought into this instance with their beloved prince were either true believers, or they wore thick enough masks that it took solitude and separation to break through them.

But once he broke through, Travis could exploit their greed.

And he was starting to get quite good at picking out the right kind of leverage to use.

The first prisoners gave him a few ideas on where to find the secondary camp. The secondary camp's prisoners gave him ideas on where to look for the third. Each time, he killed some of their forces, lost a few of his own to the advanced armaments they sported, and gave himself another chance to come face to face with his true target. It would've been easy to wipe out more of the locals. Trivial to take out more of their number. But his real goal was luring out the elusive leader of this band of scum.

He knew from the prisoners he'd taken that the newcomer had forged a bond with them - specifically with their prince.

Once again, the primary mission was to find and engage the osteal smith. The secondary mission - this time around - was to capture officers that were even closer with the prince without nabbing the prince himself, so they could have better ideas to achieve their primary mission if the man didn't show himself.

A series of explosions from a grenade launcher marked the end of the 'chase', and conveniently separated certain enemies from their main group. Travis lost another few foot soldiers to the ever-infuriating bone weapons, but achieved his secondary goal.

#

The newest prisoner looked like a bodybuilder recovering from starvation. His forearms and hands had an outsized level of muscle mass compared to the rest of him.

He was, undoubtedly, a noble. There was no way anyone but a noble would have such an impractical and unfashionable haircut. Travis could tell this one was a believer... but that there was something different about him than the rest. He was... more angry. Frustrated in ways that seemed to imply he was upset with his fellow nobles, and in general.

Travis decided to take a leap, and see if it worked. The price of failure was low, anyway - the man could simply be relocated to another prison and never seen from again if he chose that. Or, he had the reconditioner if he needed to release the man. He decided on a set of lies that would place blame and focus the man's hatred on the prince every other noble seemed to love.

Travis put on his best solemn and sorry act, then entered the room and sat across the table. The local stared daggers at Travis. He responded with a sigh.

"Would you be willing to tell me your name?"

The prisoner snarled. "You do not deserve my name. Your company invaded our planet and brutalized our people. You do not deserve to breathe Vuxarina's air."

Travis let out another sigh. "Is that what your prince has been telling you? Do you truly think that was what happened?" When the prisoner narrowed his eyes, Travis continued. "We came to your planet peacefully. We established refugee camps to aid in the transition, as we always do. A company would not be able to just come into a planet and brutalize its people. There are laws against that."

He couldn't tell if he was imagining the small shift in the prisoner's face, but continued anyway. "Your royal faction... look, I won't belabor the point. They launched outlawed weapons at us. They killed our aid workers. Men and women with families that had volunteered to be here to help your people. They killed their own citizens. Even then, we attempted to negotiate, but... your prince was too stubborn for that, which is why your royalty was designated a terrorist group. Elsewhere, your people cooperated, and we're doing what we can to help them through those tutorials. It's a shame, really, what's happening here. I wish your prince would negotiate so we could put an end to all of this hostility."

The prisoner's eye twitched noticeably when Travis called the prince stubborn. If this man had some disagreement with the seemingly-beloved leader, he was worth more than information. He could be someone Travis truly used. He let himself sigh again, and turned away from the man to hide a smile.

He'd been a bit disappointed when they didn't encounter the barbarian - but as it turned out, today he simply had a different sort of luck.

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