Chapter 259: The Art of the Deal

Devourer

Minuvae stormed into the command tent, eyes ablaze with raw fury. What the hell was this? The plans were finalized. The ships were ready. Her kin had fought and died to stall for this very moment, and now she was being told the pincer was cancelled.

Ordias looked up, red vampiric eyes meeting hers with the infuriating calm of someone who had fully expected this confrontation.

“Yes?” he asked mildly as he set his pen down.

It was an ornate thing, carved from wyvern bone with an enchanted mithril tip. A grotesque luxury. A pen capable of signing away lives with a scratch of ink.

“Why has the landing been paused?” Minuvae demanded. “Has the Empire lost its nerve?”

“Careful,” Ordias replied evenly. “Accusing us of cowardice is not a road you want to walk.”

“Then why?” she shot back. “My kin bled to hold your line and…”

“As did my men,” Ordias cut in. His voice remained calm, but it carried weight now. “And as much as you like to believe I am a bloodthirsty monster who does not care for those under my command, you are mistaken.”

He leaned back slightly. “I am a vampire. I drink blood. Yes, I am a monster. But I am not incompetent. The Empress gives me men and material. If I squander them, I am the one who answers very difficult questions.”

“Because I received orders,” Ordias said flatly. “An abstract concept, I know, but unlike your band of rebels, the Imperial army obeys the chain of command. The situation changed.” He stood and dismissed his officers with a flick of his hand. The tent emptied quickly, leaving only the two of them.

“What situation?” Minuvae asked, circling the table.

“I do not know,” Ordias snapped. The irritation was brief, but it was enough. That crack in his composure oddly eased Minuvae’s fury.

“You don’t know?” she asked, quieter now.

“No,” Ordias said sharply. “The order came from the Great Beast. And given that you have spoken to him before, I assume you understand exactly why that is all I can tell you.”

Minuvae paused, memories surfacing. Her encounters with the Great Beast had been few, but each had carried the unmistakable sensation of being poked by a god for its own amusement.

“So,” she sighed, “he gave you a riddle.”

“If it were a riddle, I could at least work with it,” Ordias replied as he sat back down. “No. He simply told me to halt the landing and hold position.”

“How long?” Minuvae asked.

“I do not know. But I suspect he has found something that tips the scales in our favor.” Ordias glanced down at the map, tapping the river with one finger. “He is many things. None of them undeserved. But a fool he is not.”

He looked back up at her.

“As you have no doubt realized, river crossings are dangerous affairs. No matter how effective the pincer, the crossing itself would have bled us heavily. It was a cost we were prepared to pay.” His voice hardened. “But if there is a path forward that spares our forces, I will take it.”

“So what do we do now?” Minuvae asked.

“We keep shooting across the river,” Ordias replied with a tired sigh. “Stage a few fake crossing attempts. Keep pressure on them and try to prevent morale from collapsing in this bloody quagmire.”

Ordias knew this was a problem. The pincer had already been announced to the soldiers, meant to prepare them for the river crossing. Half of it had been about hardening their resolve, giving fear a direction instead of letting it fester. The other half had been about showing them there was an end to this campaign, a point where the waiting would stop and the suffering would finally be spent.

Now the front was frozen in amber.

Ordias understood exactly how corrosive that was to morale. The men had already committed themselves mentally to the crossing. They had rehearsed it in their heads, braced their nerves, accepted the cost. Fear, once acknowledged, became manageable. It could be faced, endured, and survived… probably.

Waiting without purpose gnawed at soldiers far more effectively than combat ever could. Uncertainty crept in during the quiet hours. Why delay now? What had gone wrong? Had command lost confidence? Corrosive questions that bled discipline. Silence filled the gaps where answers should have been, and silence always bred rumors. Rumors bred fear, and fear without an outlet turned to the most dangerous thing of all, doubt.

Armies did not break when ordered to advance. They broke when ordered to wait without knowing why. Left unattended, that kind of fear did not explode. It rotted, slowly, eating discipline, confidence, and cohesion from the inside long before the enemy ever had a chance to finish the job.

“So we just wait? No end in sight?” Minuvae asked.

“Apparently so. The good news is we can use the hive to blunt most of the losses. I will disseminate information that something changed in the planning, orders from the Great Beast. Perhaps the wrath of an ancient will dissuade most foolish actors from dissenting too much.” Ordias said.

Minuvae sighed and just turned away and walked out of the tent. Saying one passing comment before she leaves.

I hope you are right

◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.♚.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦

O’Neer grumbled as he sat on his horse. This was stupid. The Vulpus were not yellow, and the Vulpina rangers were tougher still. Where Montis got off telling him and the other officers that they needed to meet farther back, just to avoid spooking the common troops, was beyond him.

It was not just insulting. It was a security risk. In theory, the Averlonian Empire could attempt a decapitation strike. The only reason anyone had agreed to this nonsense at all was that it was obvious the Imperials stood to gain nothing from it. Still, several officers had been left behind, just in case.

The General himself was here, of course. O’Neer sometimes wondered, in private, whether the old fox half wanted someone to try to kill him, just to put an end to the slow misery of aging.

“Great Beast, huh? Fancy name for some monster,” O’Neer sneered.

General Abel shot him a glare. “Careful. You do not know how good that thing’s hearing is.”

“Pretty good,” a nearby Imperial soldier said mildly, nodding toward the hive beast standing only a few metres away. “Considering he can hear through that.”

Abel paused, then turned his glare back on O’Neer.

O’Neer only snorted. “If I’m useful, I’ll live.”

Abel closed his eyes for a moment, drawing in a slow breath as if gathering the last scraps of patience he possessed. “Would you kindly not gamble with all our lives, Captain?”

O’Neer grunted but held his tongue. Bravado only carried you so far, and most people with any sense knew better than to push it when Ancients were involved. They lived too long, remembered too much, and wielded power that made ordinary grudges irrelevant. Patience, when it ran out, did not result in shouting or threats. It resulted in consequences that echoed for generations. Best not to test where that line was.

“Do not worry. The Great Beast has a sense of humor,” the Imperial soldier said dryly. “Even if he is, quite frankly, terrifying.”

“And you know this because?” Abel asked, one brow lifting.

“The rumors are remarkably consistent,” the soldier replied evenly. “And besides, would you joke about something like this?”

Abel grunted, conceding the point. When people spoke of something that could erase you and everything you cared about, the stories usually turned reverent, fearful, or hysterical. They did not drift toward casual observations about personality. Calling an existential threat “humorous” was not normal unless it had shown restraint often enough for people to notice.

It also helped that the stories matched. Different mouths, different places, same unsettling details. Consistency like that did not come from imagination alone.

“What are you thinking, old man?” O’Neer drawled as he lit a cigarette. “You’ve got that I’ve got too much in my head expression again.”

“Sometimes,” Abel replied dryly, “I wish you had a bit more in that empty head of yours, Captain.”

“Nice jab,” O’Neer said, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “Should’ve seen that coming.”

“Still, General,” O’Neer said, his tone edging into something almost serious, “say we do get across the cliffs and mountains. How are we supposed to get the rest of these stubborn folk to move? We’re a live by the gun, die by the gun type.”

“Tell them they do not have to die, Captain,” Abel replied bluntly, though even he did not sound convinced.

“Wish it were that easy, General,” O’Neer said grimly.

“Me too, Captain. Me too,” Abel replied, his mouth twisting into a faint grimace.

The two of them fell silent, eyes drifting out toward the desert stretching beyond the road. Dry. Forsaken. A land that killed far more than it nurtured. The wind carried cruel hits instead of promise, and the earth gave nothing freely. The Vulpus had been shaped by this place, tempered by scarcity and hard survival. Endurance was not just a trait here, it was identity. You did not simply live in the desert. You proved, day after day, that it had failed to break you.

And so the question the Vulpus now had to face was unavoidable. They were wastelanders. What were they without the wastes?

O’Neer squinted at the sky as a large shape came into view, closing the distance far too quickly.

“You think he’ll slow down?” O’Neer asked mildly, taking another drag from his cigarette.

“How do you know it’s a he?” Abel grumbled.

“Doesn’t seem like a relevant point of contention, General,” O’Neer replied.

“Neither is asking if he’ll slow down,” Abel shot back. “If he rams us, we’re paste.”

“Fair enough,” O’Neer grunted.

O’Neer looked up at the rapidly approaching shape, and right when he was certain he was about to get his answer to whether there was life after death, the creature flared its wings. It snapped to a halt midair, then dropped calmly into the sands, the impact throwing up a thick cloud of grit.

“Typical,” O’Neer grunted. The gust snuffed out his cigarette, and his mouth filled with sand, as if the desert itself felt compelled to comment on his timing.

The Great Beast flapped his wings once, scattering the dust cloud. What emerged was a six-metre-tall figure draped in gold feathers, vast and composed in a way that bordered on regal. For a fleeting moment, O’Neer almost believed it.

Then he saw the smile. It was not wide or savage. It was measured, thoughtful, and perhaps faintly sarcastic. The kind of expression that suggested a decision was being weighed, one that did not include entirely charitable options. O’Neer could not shake the feeling that his liver was somewhere on the feeding menu shortlist.

“Hello, Montis. How’s the wives?” the Great Beast said, his voice booming, edged with that distinctly unsettling note of mischief.

“Did he just ask about the General’s wives?” O’Neer asked dryly.

“Apparently so, Captain,” Abel grunted.

Montis took a moment before responding. “Quite well, Great Beast. As for the gentlemen behind me, they are the Vulpina Rangers, here at your request,” he said evenly.

“Ah yes the famous Vulpina Rangers, I have heard of you.” the Great Beast said.

O’Neer felt the urge to snark but swallowed it, staring a towering ancient had a way of humbling even the most irreverant soldier.

“From where exactly?” Abel grunted. Perceptably every Vulpus in the area glanced at their general. Not exactly the diplomatic tone everyone was hoping for.

“From all of you, of course. I can hear you through my soldiers,” the Great Beast said, gesturing toward a nearby hive creature, its arm ending in a worryingly oversized blade.

“Now then. On to business.” He clapped his hands together. The sound carried enough force to shove the air aside, kicking up dust across the sand. No one commented. No one was foolish enough to.

“I know when you look at me, all of you struggle with… what’s the word…” He tilted his head slightly. “Ah yes. Trust. Why mortals do not trust someone like me is something I will likely never fully understand. Regardless, my offer is quite simple. Help me first, and I help you later.”

At that, the entire line of Vulpina Rangers seemed to stiffen at once. Brows furrowed. O’Neer could practically hear the same thought ripple through them.

Did he just acknowledge that we do not trust him… and then ask us to trust him anyway?

“I am sure you are wondering why I would ask for trust,” the Great Beast continued smoothly. “Well, trust is overrated.”

He said it with absolute confidence, as if he had not just set fire to the fundamentals of diplomacy. To be fair, the Vulpus were not strangers to negotiations conducted this way, so it was not entirely shocking.

That did not stop Montis from feeling his blood pressure rise.

“So I offer something far simpler,” the Great Beast said with a grin. “I do not let you all die.”

O’Neer heard Montis draw in a slow, measured breath as the words settled. Despite himself, he almost felt bad for the man. Almost.

“So the fog is creeping,” the Great Beast continued casually. “At this rate, you will all die out before long. I can get you across the mountains to better land. Or whoever wants to go. Those with a death wish are free to stay behind. All I ask in return is that you help me find the world gate.”

Abel grunted. “Only problem is we can’t stay in the fog for long. Our gear doesn’t last.”

“That’s not a problem.”

The Great Beast produced a strange creature, its body compact, with multiple grasping limbs curling and uncurling along its sides. It twitched slightly, as if eager.

“This will keep you safe,” he said. “I call it the Face Hugger.”

O’Neer could practically feel the unease ripple through the other ranger officers.

First question. How was that thing supposed to help?

Second question. Face Hugger?

That did not sound nice. Or safe. Or like something anyone should voluntarily allow near their face.

“I am not putting that on my face.” one Ranger replied bluntly.

O’Neer could see the grin widen on the Great Beasts face.

Come on don’t be a baby

It’s not going to lay eggs or anything…