บท 179: Hungry like the Wolf
5/27 evening
I wasn't particularly intending to fight an entire army alone. That would be pretty dumb. Instead I was planning on tweaking the noses of a few different worgen pack leaders and bringing them home before they were planning to attack. To that end, I used blink to get in relatively close to the biggest worgen I could sense and shoot them with my bow. When the worgen started to crowd me, I used fan of knives, but I had no interest in staying for a slugfest. The important thing was to lead the first pack of fourty worgen into the kill zone.
It was tempting whenever they got close to just blink away, but that might confuse them, or worse: make them give up. As such, I had to run at a dead sprint all the way back to Raven Hill with worgen snapping at my heels. Those fuckers are fast. When I ran into the prearranged space, a wall of green fog enveloped me.
Around half of the worgen fell asleep, while the remaining 20 were peppered with arrows and spells from above and traps below. Those who made it to the end of the street had to contend with Stitches, demons, and finally a courtyard mostly filled with Emeriss herself in all her draconic glory. The sleeping worgen got the fun experience of being teleported by ghosts into a basement cell, where they were immediately shoved into a cage or shackles. If such fine accommodations weren't available, they were tossed unceremoniously into a cellar for later, heavily sedated with drugs shipped in from Moonbrook, or mind fucked into catatonia by Tara and Natalie.
The first wave went all according to plan, but unsurprisingly the baying of wolves drew some attention. We hadn't quite finished the first group off when the second wave arrived, and four consecutive packs all assaulted in something vaguely resembling their original plan. Around 100 worgen is a lot of worgen to handle at once, and they started to do things like scaling the walls to get at the archers.
Any time one of them seemed inclined to eat the face of one of my lovely bowmen, I would blink in front of him at the edge of the roof and show him my moonblade. It was a shame to obliterate the only ones using lateral thinking, but I didn't want to risk any of my more vulnerable troops getting thrown into the alley and torn apart.
To my mild surprise, around half of the worgen didn't actually join the fight. Apparently the alliance had been pretty loose, because when the remaining packs realized that around half of their joined forces went early and got themselves killed, the rest of my furry assailants looked at each other, shrugged, and left.
The constant pounding stampede meant that I hadn't been able to evac as many of the injured worgen as I might have liked; of around 160 that attacked today, I was only able to keep 107 alive for later. Of those, four were functionally braindead thanks to Tara; Melisara selected four of the least promising students for possession based capture and let them just take the bodies wholesale; easier than force feeding them. That would keep them alive until amulets could be spared.
Finally, I got a bit of a gut punch because of something that had slipped my mind: the worgen weren't raisable, at least not by Tara. I don't remember the exact reasoning, probably something about them being magically bound to the Emerald Dream, but worgen couldn't be reanimated; immunity to undeath was even a selling point to certain groups in Silverpine and the Grizzly Hills. I mean, presumably there's a work around because worgen death knights exist, but not one that Tara knew.
I woke Sally up for a late night consultation, and discovered that they also couldn't be resurrected by her, as they didn't consider her to be an ally. She tried when I asked, but the spirits would not come. Tony, similarly, was unable to muster up the ability to cast rebirth; he was able to heal, but it seems that the more complex and powerful parts of the class would take practice and training. Sadly, template stacking only pumped him up to tier 4, and apparently not high in tier 4 to start with. He'd be joining Scarletleaf in druid class, it seems. We hadn't lost anyone (unless you count the demons, who will be fine tomorrow) so I really shouldn't be too upset, but that's 53 people dead, essentially by my hand. Just because I'll be over it tomorrow doesn't mean that I like it.
On a positive note, with this many worgen captives the only bottleneck to finishing a certain major mission was the difficulty in processing all of them. I'd ask to borrow some banshees, but they were still merrily going round robin with the necklace in Undercity, offering me another love confession every five to ten minutes from an abomination, a prisoner, a lady with a desk job, or the guy who sells cockroaches under the bridge. Anyone they can find that's isolated, trusting of the Banshee Queen, and not particularly strong willed. In a city where nearly everyone is drowning in angst and practically worship Sylvanas as a god, that's a lot of people. Seeing the number go up gave me a constant drip of dopamine whenever I checked.
With a deliberate effort, I focused on the bright side. I felt pretty good other than the deaths. We would need to finish catching the worgen that ran, but I don't think they will rally after a crushing defeat like this. Not quickly, anyway, and if my numbers just kept growing it won't matter. I'm still overly reliant on big badass champions, but between Undercity and Stormwind I'm probably the most powerful faction in the Eastern Kingdoms, with the Scourge as the only possible exception. That's if I were to fully commit to a gruesome, bloody war, throwing everyone I could reasonably persuade or coerce into the fight. Not really my style, so don't get the wrong idea, but I could probably win if I had to.
••••••••••
Lividia was back in the field, where a pack of undead gnolls remained, dangerous but unfocused. With her superior vision she could choose where and how to attack before they even knew where she was. She could still see the small faintly glowing patch of dirt where she had died yesterday, bleached by the light. Today she could do better, and she even had a partner.
Lillibeth apparently had a need to kill things, which seemed perfectly reasonable to Lividia. Who hasn't felt that way at one point or another? She would be staying a distance away equal to roughly twice the diameter of the bleached patch, which Lividia found very flattering. Her king believed that she would be growing in power that quickly? How sweet!
Once she had a large enough pack of them, around 15, in her sight, Lividia started smiting. Her first blast was intended to be just enough to kill the gnoll zombie without depleting herself too much, though she didn't put in quite enough energy. Lillibeth finished it off, allowing Lividia to focus on destroying the next one. Light's Wrath dutifully refilled her internal reserve, and as long as she stayed moderate with her output, she could cast smites back to back.
She slowly increased the power of each blast as they got closer, and their howls drew in reinforcements. She needed to kill one with each spell; Lillibeth was busily making them turn on one another, but as they began to mass together it became harder and harder to hold off the tide one at a time. To Lividia's surprise, the staff surged with power as she slowly depleted herself, giving her more energy the more she had missing. Always just a little too much to bear, forcing her to escalate further, cast faster. Before long she was obliterating each gnoll, even as they closed into melee, and she felt her body heating up.
"Now." She gasped through the open channel in between blasts of energy, and began healing herself and Lillibeth as the gnolls tore into them with their claws. The energy flowed like water, an overwhelming torrent, healing Lillibeth even as she was pulled away by Erich, and allowing Lividia to last long enough for the rest of the gnolls to gather together and overwhelm her. Of course, by that point she had stopped casting, and her only regret was that she wouldn't get to see the blast herself.
••••••••••
I watched from afar as a substantially larger blast of holy energy than yesterday reduced my prime consort and her assailants to dust. From the size of the newly consecrated/irradiated ground I think Lillibeth would have been fine at that distance, and she'd gotten her third level out of the excursion, but it was definitely for the best that I summoned her out of that melee. It meant that more gnolls got into the blast radius.
Lividia and I discussed the second attempt together and I recalled something she might try: holy nova. It was a hideously inefficient spell, but it would allow her to vent mana more quickly for that exact reason. On the other hand, it seemed more likely to just prolong her time casting, probably leading to a bigger explosion.
If I wanted to use her as a living bomb, then that could work out great for taking chunks out of Andorhol's forces once she got strong enough to build up that head of steam without being eaten by powerful ghouls. Not really what I was hoping for, but it would definitely be useful in that limited capacity. What we really needed was for her to learn how to land without crashing; once we knew how to safely stop casting, she could work out the rest from there, right?
Lillibeth and I leveled up together; that huge battle with the worgen had been enough for me to earn my sixth level, and the ultimate Warden ability Vengeance. Appropriately, it was a spell that would mostly be useful in mass combats where people were dying left and right. I could summon an avatar of vengeance, which would proceed to whip up any spirits in the area (such as the freshly dead) into a frenzy, attacking my enemies regardless of their prior affiliations. It would last for several hours unless something managed to kill it, and it was no slouch even without any spirits to manipulate. Even if it just became the centerpiece of a disposable respawning assault team, I was pretty happy with it.
Lillibeth chose "silence" and "life drain" for her abilities to start with. Silence was a tactical choice; she was about to go to an institution absolutely bursting with magic users; in the RTS, silence could be cast repeatedly to completely lock down normal units from using magic. It had a shorter duration on heroes, which I was just going to assume would apply to anyone of miniboss tier or higher; maybe even "normal" elites. That way a total shutdown would always be a welcome surprise; 50-80% downtime on spellcasting is crippling enough even against those who were resistant. Oh yes… and it didn't have friendly fire. We tested that to be sure, and it only touched those she wanted it to. Magic is for me, you see, not them. That got two points as quickly as possible.
Life drain got the other point; from what I could recall of the RTS, it drained and healed quite a lot of health. Enough that a dark ranger hero could shrug off two or three basic units pounding away at them with just the first rank. At maximum strength, it could drain an abomination dry and make the ranger practically invulnerable unless she's interrupted. Incredible for a 1v1 situation; that alone should win her a fight against most things that she shouldn't just run away from.
Black arrow would come in handy eventually, but she should be learning more necromancy while she's at school, and unlike silence or life drain there were very few situations where black arrow would unilaterally win her a whole encounter. If she was fighting a whole bunch of people she could trivially kill with her wand, maybe?
I invited them both to bed tonight; I would have to figure out how to get Lillibeth enrolled; that would be half the difficulty, right there.
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