Chapter 450: (444) 6.58. Rough Shape

Vin was met by Hearshal outside of the tunnel entrance that they’d used last time, the dwarf’s usual carefree attitude nowhere to be seen. He barely even gave Vin’s friends a glance before motioning for them to follow him down into the tunnel.“Things are… bad,” Hearshal said quietly as they headed toward the Burrow. “The Tamers stuck around for long enough to really leave an impression on people. Even after your spell wore off and the language barrier returned, by that point we’d really gotten to know them, and we helped introduce them to other people who were interested in them as well. We were sad to see them go, but after they came back in the state they were in…”

Hearshal stopped talking, clenching his fists as he muttered something that sounded like a curse under his breath.

“You said they are elves, right? Even if we’re slightly different, I know elven biology. I can heal them,” Shia offered, speeding up to walk on Hearshal’s other side. “Just lead me to them, I’ll handle the rest.”

“That will help, but none of them are in critical condition at the moment,” Hearshal explained. “We have basic healing magic as well, so we were able to seal up their wounds, and those of their mounts. It’s been about five days now since they returned. Those of them in better condition headed back to their own fragment to warn their village of what was to come, but a few stayed behind.”

“So what did she mean by an invasion?” Scule asked. Vin had told the others what the Whisperer had told him, and none of them really knew what to make of the warning. “Invasion by ”

“'What’ would be the more appropriate choice of word,” Hearshal spat, shaking his head as he kept walking. “We’re almost there. The Tamers can show you themselves.”

Sure enough, just like Hearshal had warned, the mood within the large Burrow couldn’t have been more different from the last time Vin had been there. The dwarves wandering about the place weren’t just fewer in number, they had their heads down and looked worried. People were walking about with purpose, not stopping to chat with friends or wasting any more time than necessary.

“This place looks like they just lost their leader,” Alka muttered, her glowing eyes narrowing as she looked around. “...or a war.”

Hearshal led them over to the Haven, and Shia followed his lead, removing her shoes and washing her feet in the tiny stream. Alka paused for a moment before shrugging and stepping into the stream herself. Scule took one look at the flowing water that was nearly as tall as he was and declared he’d just remain on Vin’s shoulders. The fact that Hearshal didn’t even have anything to say about that showed just how distracted the dwarf was, and Vin grew even more concerned as they were led to the same room he’d laughed and joked around with the Tamers in last he was here.

Though rather than large dinner tables and kegs of ale lining the wall, there were bedrolls containing crippled elves sprawled across the floor.

“Vin?” one of them muttered, his one eye going wide as he pushed himself into a sitting position and gave him a weak smile. “It is good to see you again!”

“Oh, God… ”

The smiling, friendly elf who Vin could barely even picture without a tankard of ale in hand looked like he’d been tossed through a woodchipper. There was no need for bandages seeing as healing magic had stopped all the bleeding and healed up the wounds, but basic healing such as Renewal could only do so much.

Along with his missing eye and one of his ears, two of the fingers on his right hand and his left foot were all missing. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there were a number of small that looked as though they’d been torn out of his flesh all across his body, making his loose clothing sit weird on his frame.

“Ah, I probably look like a mess, don’t I?” Huark asked, his grin wavering slightly as though he only just remembered the state he was in. “Thankfully, the others weren’t injured nearly as badly as I was. I tried to go back and save some of those who had fallen from their mounts during the attack. I managed to rescue two of them, but Urluna…”

Huark paused. Taking a shaky breath, he wiped at his eye, his smile shaking slightly as he shook his head. “...I couldn’t reach her. I did everything I could, but there were too many of them. They killed her.”

The three other Tamers who were still in pretty bad shape themselves, even if not quite as horribly disfigured as Huark, all hung their heads at the news. Vin’s heart sank as memories of the grinning elven Tamer flashed through his mind. Greeting them and welcoming them into the Tamer’s small village. Trying to stop him from accidentally revealing Shuvo’s lies and then comforting the young wanna-be mage once it was too late. Slapping a plate of steaming food in front of him in this very room and smiling as she encouraged the elves and dwarves to form a genuine bond with one another.

It had been some time since Vin had lost anyone he personally knew, and his knuckles went white as he gripped his staff hard enough that he would have been worried about causing it to splinter had it been regular wood. Before he could say anything, Shia beat him to the punch. Striding over to the wounded Tamer, she dropped down beside him, taking his head in her hands as she stared into his empty eye socket and turned him this way and that, studying it. Huark didn’t even fight her, his remaining eye just watching her blankly as she did her thing.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on NovelFire.

“Tell us everything that happened while I start on getting you patched up. I know Regeneration. It won’t be fast, but I can fix all your injuries.”

“You can?” he blinked, a little bit of life returning to his gaze as he straightened up slightly. “You really mean it?”

“Do you think I would lie about something like this?” Shia asked, her frown deepening as she began casting. Vin watched the complex, tier-4 runic formation spin together in her core as she got to work. “Now start talking. The sooner we know who, or what, did this, the sooner we can go make sure they never do it to anyone else ever again.”

Shia’s voice was hard and jagged, and Vin’s heart went out to her as she focused on putting the other elf back together again. He’d almost forgotten how Shia and Reginald had come with him during his original excursion where he’d met the Tamers. And unlike his own introverted self, Shia had spent the night partying away with the other elves, making friends as she tended to do wherever she went. She was probably taking the loss of Urluna even harder than he was.

Vin expected that tiny fire Shia had reignited in Huark’s gaze to turn into a roaring bonfire when she offered vengeance for his fallen people. Instead, it was practically extinguished, the elf’s shoulders slumping as he shook his head.

“This isn’t an enemy you can fight. It’s not like the deranged ones, or even a pack of monsters. It was like going up against a natural disaster. A literal flood of enemies, scraping and clawing away as they swarmed over us. We traveled too far into the adjacent fragment without realizing just how many of them there were. Our Morouk are strong and fast, and they allowed us to stay ahead of the swarms for a while. But eventually, they surrounded us. We were forced to fight our way out, and… well, you can see for yourself how that went for us,” Huark finished, giving them a weak smile. “There were of them. We must have killed at least twenty of them for each of our own, but our small party stood no match. Along with Urluna, we lost three others. Only eight of us made it out alive.”

“That sounds terrible,” Shia whispered, and Reginald squeaked out in agreement, poking his head out and looking woefully at the Tamer.

“It was. So you understand what I mean. There is no fighting against nature itself. All we can do is try to outrun the tide of bodies.”

“What did these things even look like?” Scule demanded. “What are we dealing with here? Pack of lesser demons? Monsters from another dimension, or something? Come on, give us something to work with, don’t just give up the gold and run away!”

“They were humanoid. Long, frail bodies with four arms. Mouths without individual teeth, yet grasping fingers that could rip through muscle if they got a hold of you. They had antennae like an insect, and they buzzed… The buzzing was the worst part,” Huark shivered, closing his eye as he no doubt relieved the loss of his friends. “It was like a sea of buzzing, the sound only growing louder and louder as they closed in on us, until it was the only thing you could hear. I couldn’t even hear myself think, much less my teammates trying to make a plan.”

There was only one being in all of Edregon that Vin could think of upon hearing Huark’s description, and his blood ran cold as he turned to look at his friends. Shia and Scule had similar expressions on their faces, though Alka’s was the hardest of all. Despite her lack of facial features, her glowing eyes had turned into pinpricks, narrowed to the point where they were barely visible.

“Trogums,” she grunted, getting nods from the rest of them. “It has to be.”

“But why?” Shia asked, her dense mana still flowing from her hands straight into Huark’s missing eye socket. The lid had already finished growing back, which Vin was quite grateful for. He wasn’t really all that interested in watching an eyeball regrow from scratch. “We haven’t heard anything from their fragment since saving them from the divine warrior almost four months ago!”

“Not to mention this doesn’t really sound like them,” Vin pointed out, thinking back to The One That Paints In Red. They’d escorted the strange being over to the dwarves in the Crater, leaving it in their care. “The trogums are definitely… , but they’re not some murderous swarm. When the Queens were reset and they lost their hold on the worker caste, the worker trogum didn’t go into a killing spree. They picked the closest thing they could find and devoted their entire being to that thing.”

“I mean, you just said it yourself,” Scule pointed out. “That’s what happened when the Queen was reset and lost control. What do you think would happen once she those lost levels?”

“The Rebel Queen’s elite trogum abandoned us during our fight against the divine warrior,” Alka reminded him, sounding like she was still very intent on paying that kindness back one day. “She had to have ordered it to do that. Once the divine warrior took down the True Queen, she didn’t care what happened to us. I’m willing to bet she doesn’t care about any of her people, either.”

“She got her levels back, took back control over her people, and turned them into a mindless military she’s using to expand across the nearby fragments,” Shia said, frowning as she forced Huark to stop moving about. The Tamer’s gaze was bouncing from one of them to the next as they spoke, which Vin imagined made Shia’s job more difficult. “But why head so far south?”

“The nearby terrain,” Vin sighed, pulling out his journal and confirming his suspicions as he checked his map. “We know of at least four of the fragments surrounding the trogums. The dwarves with their ridiculous volcano and heat to the northeast. The void of nothingness that used to be the infernals’ forest to the north. The almost-impassable swamp filled with poisonous monsters to the northwest. And the zero-gravity, floating bubble fragment to the southwest. I doubt a mindless army is all that good at traversing across complex terrain, which means they have to follow the path of least resistance. That’s led them here. And seeing as the Rebel Queen can just keep churning out more and more of these low-cost trogums…”

“If we don’t stop them soon, it’s only a matter of time before they spread even farther,” Alka finished. “Wiping across all of Edregon and killing everything in their path.”