V2Ch90-About Time
From the destruction of the gate, the battle moved more quickly.
The structure crumbled after two more barrages of energy aimed only at that one spot, and the Army’s close range combatants swarmed into the gap, eager to show their mettle.
Tybalt’s own undead finally had the opportunity to show their worth, too.
The wight knight, another death knight Tybalt didn’t recognize, a post-evolution Hieron, and Baldwin led the initial clash for the undead side. At first, it seemed even. The Kingdom had sent in heavy hitters, men with warlike classes and armor.
They fought hard against the undead leadership, and the strength advantage appeared to be on the human side as they slowly forced the undead commanders to cede ground and killed off some of the subordinate monsters.
Then Edgard and the other mummified chthonic mages popped their heads out from within one of the stone walls and, in unison, breathed out a thick cloud of Breath of Decay.
One of them - a mage by the mystic blasts he’d been firing - shouted a warning.
Mages could see mana, so this man knew what was coming.
Then the fifty or so men who had forced their way at great cost into Fort Hadrian’s killing field, stepping over the bodies of their fallen comrades, found themselves struggling, climbing over each other and pulling the men in front of them back, in their scramble to try and escape.
They had clearly been informed about what Breath of Decay did. It didn’t help.
A few seconds after the mummies had poked their heads out of the wall, another creature lunged from the wall closest to the gate, its massive bulk filling up the space.
Tybalt’s human centipede, every arm and leg stripped down into deadly bone scythe blades.
None of the humans made it through the gateway in one piece before they had to breathe.
The vision faded out and was replaced by another where the Kingdom’s soldiers proceeded more cautiously but still met a similar fate. Their problem was that they couldn’t defeat Tybalt’s heavy hitters without bringing their own strongest forces into the confined space of the fortification. That exposed those elites to attacks with Breath of Decay.
The Army tried a few different tactics across four or five shifting visions, but aside from managing to kill one of his mummies, they didn’t achieve much more. It looked like Tybalt had the correct tactics to defeat them. The enemy had to breathe, no matter what, after all. There was no defense against Tybalt’s attacks on that basic biological necessity, not unless they acquired undead soldiers of their own.
The vision faded again and restarted.
This time, almost everything was the same, except for the presence of a few fighters Tybalt had not seen before, including the paladin Samara.
Tybalt narrowed his eyes as he saw her. He thought he knew what the General wanted to use her for. This might be a problem.
Sure enough, as the attackers entered the ruined gate this time, Samara stepped in just behind them. She had her sword at her side, but she didn’t draw it.
Instead, she prayed aloud, joined by a dozen men who stood all around her in priestly garb. Familiar words of praise to Lady Astara, prayers that all present on her side knew.
It heartened the men, and Tybalt sensed a divine presence blanket the space. A protective residue of energy.
The necromancer felt certain that whatever specific power this was, it would protect against chthonic magic like Breath of Decay.
When the mummies’ breath attack actually failed, he couldn’t make himself feel surprise. Only frustration.
That’s another trump card gone. Damn you!
This fight was a particularly gruesome one.
A minute after the enemy breached the gate, the necromancer saw Baldwin’s head go flying, separated from his body by a vicious axe swing from a graybeard clad in all black armor. Another new presence, Tybalt was fairly certain.
Then the undead fighters as a whole were turned into bits and pieces under an enemy assault that was fiercer and more tireless than it had ever been before. When the enemy breached the inner gate and began to slaughter beastfolk as well as massacring undead, Tybalt growled with frustration.
“I’ve seen enough,” Tybalt said, unable to keep the disgust from his tone. “It’s unwinnable. We can’t defeat the enemy like this.”
“Darling?” Vidalia asked as she allowed the vision to fade out. “Unwinnable? Are you giving up? That’s not like you.”
Tybalt bit back a cross reply and sighed instead.
“I’m not giving up, just saying we can’t win this way.”
“All right, um, if your plans are changing, the vision can shift to match them. We just have to start again- ”
“No, no, no, I don’t want to shift the vision,” Tybalt said immediately. “No more visions of this battle or versions of it. I think…” He paused to collect his thoughts, and the foxgirl waited patiently, her arms wrapped around one of his biceps.
He shook his head and finally asked, “Did you keep an eye on the General?”
“I did, yes.”
“Did you notice what I noticed?”
“I couldn’t miss it if I wanted to,” she replied grimly. “You were right. His power is probably something to do with time. It was hard to tell with the armor he wears that covers his face and hair, but over the course of the shifting visions, he definitely seemed to be getting older. I saw new wrinkles on his face and sun damage like he’d been working outside between visions - or like it was accumulating from battle after battle with you.”
“Yeah.” Tybalt nodded. “So his power is something to do with time. Probably some kind of ability that lets him… see the future like you, only he actually lives through it. Then he can go back and change it. That’s why I want to stop simulating different futures. They’ll all have the same ending. Even if we come up with some way to make a battle unwinnable, he’ll decide that the only way to win is not to fight. The way the vision presents things, he’s either got some insanely rare class that lets him go backward in time - with the cost of his body aging every time - or he’s even more dangerous, because he’s directly interfering with your powers. I don’t think there’s another explanation.”
Vidalia nodded and swallowed. “So, my powers are useless here, you think?”
“Not necessarily. But for now, we should treat them as if they are. Don’t beat yourself up about it. And I want you beside me while we figure this out. How is Kistana doing?”
“Much better!” Vidalia said. “If you wanted to send Dero to come and pick us up, I can have Kistana up whenever you like.”
Tybalt raised an eyebrow.
“You don’t believe me?” the foxgirl asked.
“I feel like you could have a motivation other than Kistana’s health in mind,” the necromancer said gently. “Understandably. But it’s all right if you come with me on your own. If Kistana is still down, we just have to leave her to recover, even if you won’t be the one taking care of her. I hate to do it, but we can have Uncle Edmund take care of Kistana, plus a few more undead servants. I’m going to have plenty of dead bodies, at least, and teleporting one or two at a time will be easy for Dero.”
“I don’t like the idea of leaving her in the hands of a bunch of zombies - I mean, I don’t think that’s necessary,” Vidalia said, interrupting herself mid-thought. “Hold on a moment…”
Is she actually becoming fond of Kistana?
The dark space they occupied shifted and warped, and they found themselves in a bright, sunlit meadow. Tall grasses grew past Tybalt’s knees, and a species of colorful, many-petaled flowers bloomed before them.
Hyacinth, Tybalt recalled. They grew sporadically down South, closer to his home village of Greentear, though he understood they were native to some other part of the world.
“Why are we…?” the necromancer began.
Then he saw her. Blissfully unaware of company, excitedly scampering back and forth before pouncing, Kistana was playfully chasing her own tail. She seemed to be treating it like a game of hide and seek, where her tail moved unpredictably among the tall grasses and flowers, and she tried to lunge at it before it could shift to some other place.
I guess cats do that. I didn’t know catfolk do.
Tybalt found that he wanted to just stand there and watch her for a while, but Vidalia was all business. The foxgirl cleared her throat, and Kistana’s whole body went rigid. Her head snapped back, and her eyes widened as an expression of surprise spread across her face.
“Lord Tybalt! Lady Vidalia!”
“Good to see you, Kistana,” the necromancer said.
“Um, what brings you to… I, um, what was I doing? Where are we- ”
“It’s a dream, kitty cat,” Vidalia said lightly.
“Oh!” Kistana exclaimed. “That makes a lot of sense. I was just thinking, we live in a desert! It didn’t make sense that all these flowers would be all around me. I was enjoying, um, exploring the environment.”
“How are you dreaming about a place so unlike where you live?” Tybalt asked. “I feel like, usually, dreams are sort of mashed up recreations of real places and things.”
“That’s right, darling,” Vidalia said. “You can’t think about things you don’t know anything about, and dreams are just thoughts, but sort of squiggly.”
They both looked at Kistana expectantly.
“I… My mother used to tell me about a place that her mother told her about, and her mother before her, and further past that,” the catgirl said, her expression reluctant. “A place where the grasses grew long and green, hyacinth flowers grew everywhere, and the beastfolk would frolic together in peace. She called it the green place. I don’t know if it has a real name, or if it’s even real. But our family name is Hyacinth, and my middle name is Meadow, so I think it really meant something to my Mom.”
Kistana Meadow Hyacinth. I can’t believe I had this girl risking her life for me, and I never even asked her last name. Tybalt felt strangely guilty. He pictured her being crushed by that boulder, dying with that same stoic smile on her lips, dying with so much about her still unknown to the man she was protecting. He swallowed a lump that had formed in his throat. I didn’t even know enough to inscribe your tombstone properly. I’ll take better care of you in the future. I promise.
“Well, Kistana, Tybalt wants to know- ” Vidalia began.
“Tell me more about your family,” the necromancer interjected.
Both women looked at him.
“I mean, if you want to share,” he added. “I just realized I don’t know nearly enough about you… and it’s about time I learned more.”
He turned his head to evade locking eyes with the catgirl, whose expression held something intense that Tybalt wasn’t sure he was identifying correctly. The necromancer’s eyes passed over Vidalia. She wore a knowing smile.
“So, my parents weren’t authorized to mate with each other,” Kistana said. “They just, um, defied the Council’s orders, because they wanted to be together. They were shunned for a time, but when my sister, Ogawa, and I came along, the tribe started to accept them back in. Whole, healthy children are valued by our people, regardless of where they came from. But the Elders will still point to my parents’ mating decision as the reason they gave birth to a mutant - I mean, an unusual child like me.”
Tybalt smiled and nodded. He had told Kistana not to disparage herself with her Elders’ words in his presence before, and she caught it almost automatically now. “Unusual” still wasn’t quite a positive way to describe oneself, but it sounded better than “mutant” to Tybalt, since the latter word just meant a freak or a deviation from nature to him. Like a two-headed cow or something. And that was how her Elders had taught her to self-identify.
“What happened to them?” Vidalia asked.
“They died,” Kistana said, smiling ruefully. “Doing their own thing again. During one of the Kingdom’s attacks on the other tribes, they happened to be close, and they went to rescue some children. The way I heard it, they saved a bunch of kids before the soldiers got them. It would have been nice if they could have been there for the rest of our time growing up, but if they had to die, I’m glad they did it doing something they thought was right.”
“And your sister?” Tybalt couldn’t help but ask.
“Ogawa just got sick… and you already know our tribe’s stance on medical care. We were both still little, so there wasn’t much I could do for her, and no one else would defy the Elders.”
“Fuck,” the necromancer said.
Considering your background, it’s amazing how well you turned out. You have as much reason to hate your Council as I do to hate the Baron. But you’ve still acted as a good and loyal member of the tribe.
“It was a long time ago,” the catgirl said. “All of it. Um, do you mind if I ask what brought the two of you to my dream? Not that I don’t enjoy having you here, because I do. Lady Vidalia has been taking great care of me, and I have been looking forward to watching over my lord again.”
“I wonder if there’s another possible timeline where you and your sister’s fates were switched,” Vidalia mused. “If you hadn’t been in that canyon protecting darling… I wonder what would happen to our people in that world.”
“Did you come here just to flatter me?” Kistana asked, practically meowing with joy.
“I wanted to find out if you were well enough to join us on the journey,” Tybalt said, answering her previous question. “That’s why we’re here. I need your honest assessment. How is your condition?”
“I’m better,” the catgirl replied, saluting with a serious expression, her tail whipping back and forth with excitement. “Ready for duty!”
“Fine then,” Tybalt replied. “Tomorrow evening, I’ll ask Dero to bring both of you. We’ll do it in the evening, so you can get one more day’s rest and avoid that day’s march.”
“Yes!” Both beastgirls cheered as one.