"Close," he said. "A couple of hours, maybe less if we push the mounts. We just need to cross a ridge, and we are there."
But it was clear from his expression and the tension in his posture that he was deep in thought, clearly weighing sothing troubling in his mind.
"Is sothing wrong?" Lena asked.
"It’s just that... Sothing feels off."
"Off how?" Jake asked, pulling his mount closer. "Is she setting a trap?"
"That’s the thing," Reidar said. "I don’t think she is. Since she got there, she hasn’t left her room. Not once. She’s coordinating an entire regional offensive from behind a closed door."
"Maybe she’s still scared of you," Jake said. "You said she was terrified when she saw Silas’s body. Maybe she thinks you’re coming for her."
"Which you are," Reidar said.
Reidar considered it, then shook his head. "Fear makes people run, Jake. Or it makes them hunker down and defend. It doesn’t make them reorganize an entire army to invade a capital city. If she was just scared, she’d be fortifying this outpost or running away, not stripping it of assets to send to Kingsgate. It’s not like her. It would not make sense for anyone."
"So? What’s the problem?"
"It’s her behavior. She is acting as if she is not scared of us. As if she thinks she can kill us if we go to her. At least, this is the opinion I got of the situation."
"Maybe she is preparing a trap."
"And that’s the problem. It doesn’t look like it based on what I’m seeing. She is not preparing for us at all."
That made everyone think. For sure, Mara was preparing sothing. Thinking otherwise would just be naïve. The problem was that Reidar actually had an eye on the situation at the outpost, and everything looked normal.
"What is the place like?" Lena asked. "Are we walking into another Ashwick?"
"No," Reidar said. "It’s barely a village. Before the System, it was probably a logging camp or a trade stop. It’s got walls, sure—reinforced wooden palisades, maybe so earthworks—but it’s not a fortress. It lacks the heavy defenses Ashwick had. Even the number of troops is just a fraction, and their levels are quite low."
He paused.
"To , it looks like a junction point. It sits right on the main road leading out of the region. That’s why there’s so much traffic. I’m seeing units moving through there and leaving the region. Paladins, Zealots. They are funneling everything through here to regroup before pushing toward Kingsgate."
"So it’s crowded."
"Packed," Reidar said. "Which is good for us. Chaos makes it easier to slip in. But of course, slipping in is not my idea. I just want to crush them all, and I don’t see anyone able to contend against us there, so it should be a simple job."
Reidar paused again.
"Which is, frankly speaking, the main reason I feel so restless."
Then silence ensued.
"Your family," Jake said. "They’re in Kingsgate, right?"
Reidar tightened his grip on the raven’s feathers. "Yeah. My wife and son."
"Are you... worried?"
"Of course I’m worried," Reidar said. "If the Church hits Kingsgate with everything they have, with the monsters there already, it’s going to be a bloodbath."
He looked ahead, his jaw set.
"The Aegis Phalanx is there. If the Church attacks, the Phalanx will be the first line of defense. The problem is... monsters are swarming to Kingsgate, and the massive presence of the church would just make things worse."
Reidar knew he had to be here, in this exact place, at this exact mont. He had to cut the head off the snake before it could strike, before it could unleash its venom on those he cared about most.
"We need to stop Mara," Reidar said, finalizing the thought. "We disrupt the command structure again. If we take her out, this whole offensive falls apart before it even reaches the city walls. Or so I hope, and killing the church mbers will just make attacking Kingsgate harder."
Jake nodded.
"But Reidar. I’m not quite the one who should say this, given how fast we grow compared to others, but isn’t the church getting too many powerful troops too easily?" She paused.
"I an, sure, they have magic circles, and most likely the cave in which Silas went wasn’t the only one... but it’s still too fast."
"Yeah... I was thinking the sa. Most likely, the church is doing sothing else that makes them able to get stronger faster, and all those levels are attracting far more people to join them than initially was."
The problem was what, exactly? What could the church possibly have in its possession that, when added to the advantages provided by the caves and the magic circles, allowed them to level up at this incredibly rapid pace?
For the first ti since Reidar had t Keth’Moran and learned about the broader universe, the true scope of just how catastrophically devastating the apocalypse was finally reached Reidar on a visceral level.
If this was what the Thalassari race had to face, and all the other races that fell to the apocalypse had to contend with, then it wasn’t a surprise at all that most of the planets the Allied Worlds tried to save ended up in complete ruins despite their best efforts.
The church was growing too fast, its mbers too nurous and too powerful, and it was probably even worse for humanity since they had the inherent greed and lust for power that seed to be hard-wired into their very nature.
It also made Reidar realize sothing unsettling: that as much as they were growing stronger, developing new abilities, and adapting to the challenges thrown at them by the apocalypse, the others were doing the sa thing at an equally rapid pace, only on a far bigger scale.
The only real problem, the one that truly mattered in the end, was that it was their enemies—the very people they needed to stop—who had that sa sped-up growth and developnt.
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