Limitless Path

That focus lasted for a few more than six months as they had made a good impression on the little secret society of hidden elites that took a hand in training them and helping them out. As with all good things, they eventually must come to an end, and Beth and Sera got as much out of their time as they could. Blood had benefited far more than they had thought, as well, though she did say privately that Amalia wasn't a particularly great teacher. Not everyone could be, sadly, and the tall woman wasn't that great at explaining what she was doing or how a technique worked, but just watching her was a great experience for Blood that would pay dividends for many years to come.

That was one thing they had on their to-do list knocked out, and in fairly short order, but they weren't able to execute on anything else before they were interrupted. Beth was a bit frustrated, as the only other short term goal they still had left was Beth meeting Sera's family, and the more that got put off, the more her nerves ratcheted up. Her stomach would still be in butterflies for a while longer as their sometime and erstwhile employer, Mortaine, had contacted out of the blue. She meant that quite literally, as the Exalted appeared in a swirl of strange blue colors and shades with the sound of hundreds of bubbles popping at the same time. The three girls had just left Old Tom's smithy and teleported off-world but a moment before, which had Beth narrowing her eyes at the Exalted at the very coincidental timing.

"So good to see you all again," Mortaine said, ignoring their looks. "Though, I don't think this is the whole group, is it not?"

"Mortaine," was all Beth said, still glaring at him suspiciously.

"Now, now, let's not start off on the wrong foot today," he said, holding up his hands.

"What do you mean 'today'?" Sera asked, frowning just a bit at him.

"That's not important," he replied, quickly continuing when he saw all three sets of eyes narrowing dangerously. "Hold on a moment, let me just explain."

"Okay, we're listening," Beth said, making a gesture for him to keep going.

"Well, it's like this…" he began.

Ordeus System

Planet Orchid

Lily Andromeda, Captain of the Mercenary Company Black Owl

It had been a shit day, and Lily was sure that that would just be the start of a shit week. Nothing had gone right, even from them accepting their current job nearly a week ago, and that had built up for the past week as they prepped and moved until today, when they were supposed to be working. They'd been hired to clear out what Lily had learned, though some discreet research, was a former dungeon-delving guild now turned mercenary, though of a more…bandit nature. Right from the very start she should have said no, the brief being so lacking that she had to research basically everything they needed to know about the job herself, or have her people do it. They were old enough hands at this that they could also read between the lines; she knew for a damned fact that the agency that had hired them was hiding something about the mission. Likely, it involved something the agency wanted retrieved that they didn't want leaked, preferring to have Black Owl do the dirty work and then swoop in and take the prize. Wouldn't be the first time they'd had meat snatched right out of their mouths, but they always got their own back.

The whole company was mobilized on this one, their numbers a little over a hundred if all the support staff were counted. Not that Black Owl really had any noncombatants, as everybody who signed up for the company was more than prepared to fight, and they were damned good at it. They had had to go through three teleports, not at all cheap, to reach their goal, a sparsely populated, medium mana density planet in the Ordeus system. The system itself was little developed, being a fringe world at the edge of one of the big polities that was struggling to produce enough resources to even sustain its current level of territory. Too many beasts and monsters, too many wars, and too many criminal organizations running around was wreaking havoc on the whole galaxy, let alone one struggling mid-size kingdom.

The job was supposed to be easy, but Lily had dismissed that as nonsense as soon as she heard the point of contact throw it out in their little spiel trying to sell the job. This was going to be a long, grinding campaign that took months before they could even get most of the bandits under control, and then the Black Owls would have to be ready for the other shoe to drop. She was sure their employer had something underhanded in mind, but it wasn't a novel situation in their line of work, and they had plenty of contingencies. The worst part was that it was going to be mainly a battlefield of Empowered and Awoken; each side was only purported to have three Enlightened, though she knew those numbers weren't accurate, considering her company actually had five. It was important to keep at least some of a unit's strength concealed and ready for the next disaster, and that disaster was looming all too large right in front of them.

The job started easy enough, which wasn't really a surprise, considering they were just establishing their perimeter and getting their bearings. That wasn't too bad, and their scouts, a quartet of pairs, were some of the best in this sector. The eight men and women had been trained in their jobs to a very fine degree and they had more practice than most of the company in their chosen roles; scouts were always important, in any situation, and as such, the scouting team was constantly working. They got breaks, of course, but that was as individuals or pairs, not as a unit. Other teams would be on down time for long stretches, left to their own devices to train or relax, but the scouts were constantly working, especially considering they covered so many angles. Scouting in cities and towns, interacting with contacts and retrieving information, though that mainly fell on the data team, scouting in the wilderness, first explorations of dungeons and instances, keeping tabs on enemy unit positions and movement, tracing supply lines, and more besides. If the scouts weren't needed on the frontlines in a pitched battle, they would still be working one or more angles, covering lines of retreat, tracing supply lines, and monitoring the surrounding.

That team got a hell of a workout in the first two weeks, scouting the cities and then moving out into the wilderness to start tracking bandit movements and positions. The job immediately got way more complicated and way harder as there were far more of the bandits than the brief had explained, and they were spread out all over the damn planet. Tracking them and figuring out where all their safehouses and movement corridors were was going to be an absolute nightmare, only exceeded by the actual campaign to fight them and flush them out. The scouts only conveyed one moderately good piece of news, in that the extra numbers came from mostly fresh recruits, a large percent of the opposing mercenary company made up of early-rebirth Awoken. Still, weeks of time were eaten up with tracking and identifying, much of the unit being called in to help at various time, much to the scouts' amusement and the rests' grumblings.

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After tracking, tagging, identifying, and targeting came the fun part, or not-so-fun part, depending on what one's disposition was. That part was starting the actual fighting, which would have been done in a bit more organized way, but the company opposing the Black Owls had given up all pretense of being anything other than petty criminals and so they didn't get the same kind of treatment a legitimate mercenary unit or military company might. The opening engagements were quick, tactical fights that tried to thin numbers over going for anything flashy, though the Owls still took some licks themselves in the first week. That set them up for a long, grueling campaign, and every day that passed put Lily more on edge, as she was constantly expecting the next piece of bad news.

That news didn't ever materialize, and they kept up a steady pressure as they wore their enemy down, killing or capturing them at a steady rate. Fighting between Wayfarers was generally discouraged, at least out in the wild, so to speak, as it wasn't a good source of money or experience. Military matters and clashes between mercenary companies were a different beast altogether, and the CRA and other orgs tended to look the other way or sanction the fights, just as long as civilians and other bystanders weren't getting caught up in the battles. There were still a few morons who needed a very firm reminder, from time to time, that the CRA had plenty of teeth and a huge amount of leeway in where and how hard they bit, though the Owls weren't on that list. Mostly, however, that list was made up of mercenary companies and military units whose names could only be found in the history books, so Lily was determined to keep out of the CRA's path as much as possible.

They had a brutal campaign of four months almost entirely behind them when they got the leadership cornered, the two groups holed up in two caverns at the opposite end of a long tunnel beneath a broad, flat hill. The groups had exchanged plenty of insults, and plenty of spell blasts, but Lily was super hopeful that this was it, as the leadership of the bandits was in the cavern that didn't happen to have a path back outside. The trap hadn't been sprung totally smoothly, and the Owls would be laying a sister to rest after the battle, but they had the bastards dead to rights. They could crush them within another day, provided they were willing to take it slow and steady and not expose themselves to too much risk. Lily would rather everyone made it home alive, possibly even in one piece, and she was always favoring tactics that kept the rank-and-file safe as opposed to getting the quick and easy wins. It was as she was thinking about how best to smoke the bandit leadership out, the Owls having moved up into the tunnel, that her second pointed out something unusual.

"Uh, boss, uh, captain," he said, looking to the side.

"Don't take your eyes off the enemy!" Lily hissed, but was surprised when her second continued staring at the tunnel wall.

"Uh, boss, do you…feel that?" he asked, causing Lily to frown and sigh in exasperation. Discipline in the ranks among mercenaries wasn't always the best, but she ran a fairly tight ship. At the same time, she trusted her people and they were usually pretty professional, so her second behaving like this was rather odd.

"What is it?" she snapped as she launched a blast of fire down the tunnel, forcing the bandits sticking their heads out to having to duck back.

"Uh, I think the tunnel's shaking?" her second said, glancing around, a confused look on his face.

"What do you mean, you think-" Lily started before snapping her jaw shut. She could feel it herself at this point, the tunnel shaking a bit. It wasn't an earthquake, or a spell that mimicked that effect, but the ground was definitely pulsing with a rhythm that remained steady, even while the shaking became more intense.

"Johnson! What the fuck is happening outside?! What's this shaking-" Lily managed to get out before the intensity of the shaking suddenly ratcheted up several notches. In the next moment, she knew they had hit that point where they were up shit creek without a paddle and just hoped they'd be able to get out of it alive.

The shaking had become so bad that loose pebbles and rocks on the tunnel floor had started jumping about like grasshoppers in a windstorm. That was not exactly a safe environment, but that ceased to matter, or became a bigger issue, just a moment later when one of the walls of the tunnel exploded inward. A man the size of a small mountain had plowed through into the tunnel and for one horrifying moment he turned and looked at Lily and the Owls, but he clearly wasn't here for them, as he dismissed them in just a second. As he turned the other way, spells and arrows and bullets flew down the corridor towards him, but he barely seemed to register any of it, just walking through it like a truck in a spring shower. Lily was already shocked, but then she noticed that the man had only cleared a path for his team. A half dozen women walked out of the new branch tunnel and into the main tunnel, followed by a tall beanpole of a man, but Lily wasn't dismissing any of them in any way. Every single one of them radiated danger on a level she had hardly ever felt, and she quickly signaled her team to back up and hold their fire.

They fell back to the cavern that the rest of the company occupied, Lily watching in a bit of trepidation as the foreign team waltzed right into the bandits lair. There was a lot of noise, a lot of rending metal and explosions and smashing sounds, followed by plenty of screaming, before everything became a whole lot quieter. Lily waited patiently, dishing out orders to the company to heal and rest as they could while keeping a unit on alert. There were several minutes of silence before there was some very loud shouting, though it was a bit muffled and Lily had some trouble making out what was being said. That quieted down and there was near-total silence for another couple minutes before one of the women from the group showed up beside her. Lily meant that quite literally, as between one second and the next the woman was just there, calmly eyeing the Owls while ignoring the drawn weapons and curses.

"You the Dark Owls or whatever?" the lady asked, her attitude rather dismissive.

"It's the Black Owls," Lily's second immediately snapped back.

"Potato, tomato," the lady replied with a shrug, which was a weird thing to say. "Sorry to steal your thunder, but we need the bandit big boss alive. He's got the only way to unlock something we need to get into. You can do whatever you want with the rest of them."

"Look, this is our job," Lily started.

"Cool it," the woman said, holding up a hand. "You can have him, or what's left of him, when we're done with him. If he keeps mouthing off like he is, he might not have a mouth left real soon. We don't care about the thugs, we just want the key. We'll give him right back, promise."

"Well, maybe we can work something out," Lily said, trying to stall for a minute while her mind spun a million miles a minute.

"This ain't a negotiation, lady, it's me bein' kinda generous," the woman with pitch-black hair and blue and silver eyes said with a slight frown. "I'd say 'take it or leave it,' but the only option I'm giving you is take it. Real sorry about that, but we get our marching orders from an Exalted, so when he asks us to get him item X, we get him item X. Your little merc fight comes second fiddle."

"A-an Exalted…did you say?" Lily stammered, trying to figure out if the woman was yanking her leg.

"He knows the key location, Beth," said one of the other women from the foreign team, also just appearing beside them. Now that Lily had a second to examine her, she realized the very tall woman was a dragon, and not just any dragon, but a black dragon at that. It was at that point that she decided this was all beyond the Black Owl's paygrade and though grace the better part of valor.

"Even if you can't give us the leader back, if you put his ass in a hole somewhere, then we don't care. We just need to clean the gang up, likely as a bid to find whatever you're looking for, but that's not part of our contract. Besides, I think the guy who requested us is a fresh Ascended, so he can pick a fight with your backer if he doesn’t like losing the item or whatever it is he absolutely did not tell us about before sending us here," Lily said.

"Eh, you can have him when we're done with him. Don't want to take bread out of your mouth," said the black-haired beauty that radiated a crazy pressure. "Let's move."

Without even a nod, the two women both disappeared and Lily let out a breath she hadn't even realized she was holding. Whatever crazy fuckery was about to happen, she wanted no part of it; she was getting the Black Owls back to the nearest city and hoping that camping in the hotel next to the CRA Hall would give them some minimal level of protection. She was the veteran of a thousand battlefields, a career mercenary through-and-through, and nobody she'd ever faced had screamed death a tenth as much as the black-haired woman that had just disappeared. Oh, and that wasn't even mentioning that their front man was so strong he had sprinted through solid rock to make a tunnel for them, which is what all the shaking had been about.