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[KoJ] Interlude 3: Hirsh
🕑 Added 2024-10-07 13:47:57 +0000 UTC“This is an inconvenient situation for all. Upper management would like you all to know that you remain important and shall be generously compensated once these difficulties pass, but we must ask that you follow regulations and comply with the Order’s changes.”
Hirsh watched on from the back of the gathered crowd of mercenaries as a bureaucrat from headquarters delivered his speech. He had to give the albanic credit; as he delivered the news that the Mercenary Order has taken to thievery of its own workers, he stood fearless of the thousands whose sole job was to fight and kill.
“From this day on, all beast corpses shall be shipped back to headquarters in order to recover from the losses of the past years. As loyal workers of the pact nations, we thank you for your understanding and wish you the best in our homelands’ continued defence.”
Wrapping up his speech, the representative for the Mercenary Order took a step from the podium, and with a hurried spin that revealed a nervousness far greater than the calm facade, he clambered up the steps of the train he’d arrived on.
The gathered crowd was anything but pleased with the announcement. Amongst the dozen Beiths and thousands of lower ranked mercs, grumbles and curses were spoken in a hushed disquiet. There was a fury there, barely suppressed and bubbling beneath the surface. It demanded they strike out at the weak bureaucrat who, while obviously nothing more than a messenger, delivered the spear through their livelihoods.
But none dared raise their voice.
Under the chilling glare of the Inner Circle mage, they couldn’t. The woman, an albanic, extruded an air of cold; the ground around her feet frosted over, and the very air itself seemed to still in her presence. Despite none of her Markings being active, her frozen eyes glowed with the power of her hyle; daring the crowd to attack.
Many clutched their weapons, not ready to take on such an overwhelming power, but also desiring to unleash their frustrations on the Mercenary Order that seemed determined to continue making their lives worse. They were close to the breaking point.
Hirsh was no different. The immense grief of loss and the constantly reducing living standards made him want to strike out, allow his own Markings to ignite with the hyle of water and vie for change. But he had long since learnt to suppress any urge to use his Markings for anything besides battle. He still felt stricken with guilt that his exuberance had very nearly killed a child.
The Inner Circle mercenary gave a final glance over the gathered warriors and placed her hand on the rail of the train. Not a moment later, the machine kicked into motion and rolled from the semi-permanent station they’d erected at the edge of the city, ready to be built around. The ice mage hung from the side of the train and let it whip the hair around her face for a few minutes before entering the carriage with the man she guarded.
If Hirsh was to guess, not even their entire congregation of mercenaries could hope to scratch her. A thousand on one, and they would lose. There was simply too great a gap between the general force and the elite.
The Mercenary Order had almost never used the Inner Circle for such trivial tasks as guarding managers and bureaucrats. They were simply too important to the organisation. But in the last war, the Order had learnt many lessens; not all good.
They’d once kept all their most elite hidden from view. An effort to limit the intelligence leaking to the pact nations’ enemies so they couldn’t develop countermeasures. After the last war against the mermineae and their tyrannical leader Kalma, they’d learnt that keeping all their strongest out of the war until they’d already lost everything was beyond foolish. Unfortunately, the lesson they’d taken from that was to use those elite as canes to keep the rest of the mercenaries in line.
No one was happy with this. And this latest order given down by the Order was another nail in the already cracking relationship between mercenaries and the management that had been mutually beneficial for centuries.
The Mercenary Order was to take their entire reason for fighting. Likely redirected toward empowering the already strong Inner Circle that they had a stronger grip over.
Hirsh, along with the vast majority of mercenaries, fought primarily to empower their own strength. Despite serving the same purpose as a traditional military, the mercenaries of the Order approached its structure differently. It gave its members the means to gain strength themselves rather than try to control every aspect as an army would with soldiers. This had proven to allow far greater personal growth in those with the determination, and an overall efficiency boost over the traditional armies. Not that traditional armies didn’t have their place, what with the acceleration of mass-production.
But the Mercenary Order was now taking away the beasts they hunted, completely stripping them from their reason to fight. Sure, most had some level of nationalism and they would try to defend their homeland, but this was akin to stripping a worker of pay and expecting them to continue working.
In fact, as Hirsh looked over the now dispersing crowd of disgruntled mercs, he was sure many would abandon their duties. It would make his own work all the harder, but he didn’t blame them. This was an incredibly dangerous line of work, and not being given the chance to grow made it a complete waste.
To Hirsh's side, Ceph was quiet. A couple of her tentacles not used to hold her weight were curled up beneath her; an obvious expression of rage and frustration. He placed one of his antler arms on her soft head. The purple membrane of the dohrni wiggled under the weight of his arm a bit like jelly… though he wouldn’t dare mention such a thing.
Ceph didn’t react. Too busy glaring at the train that had already passed beyond sight.
Things had been tough for everyone in the months since the Alps fell, and Hirsh knew she was taking the deaths of their teammates hard. Glaus and Telum had been good friends of his for decades, and finding they hadn’t escaped the collapse was saddening, but Hirsh had lived long enough to have learnt to deal with death. It happened. Ceph was still young; she would learn. It was only unfortunate that her first such experience had been such an impossibly great disaster.
The survival rate had been extraordinarily low amongst those caught in the Lower Elevation or above. Most of the survivors had been Beith, with a few Luis mercs. Only those who had the strength to fling themselves over the wall of rushing earth and had been lucky not to be swallowed the moment they were on top had survived.
Even then, more than half the Beiths stationed at the tunnel entrance hadn’t made it out. It was a horrible situation all around.
Throwing his antler around her side, he started leading her away. The dohrni were strange in that none had a default forward face. Their eyes rolled in their heads and changed which direction they were facing. Because of the way their tentacles grew from their heads, you could view them from any direction, and they would remain symmetrical.
They walked through the streets before reaching the line where all construction stopped. Hirsh led her up the hill to their post standing at the top of a cliff that peered down into an endless hole in the earth. Hirsh found no humour in the fact that his team’s manager had sent them to the only other massive hole in the earth after his friends’ loss. It felt intentional; like the bureaucrats were blaming the mercenaries who survived for the Titan Alps’ collapse.
Kalma’s Pit.
That’s what this endless hole had been lovingly named. After the tyrant who lead the mermineae across the Alps in a bloody war with nothing but death as her goal. He’d heard the hole was made by the same person who tore open the ranked stone of the entrance into the mountain, but it was difficult to imagine any single person could inflict so much damage. It would have been hard to picture a Titan causing this much of a shift in the landscape… if not for the fall of the Alps.
The Pit was wider, and so much deeper than what he’d previously had to deal with. It was over a kilometre wide. So much earth, simply vaporised in her attempt to kill a couple of elite. And somehow, Kalma was the one who died. Hirsh never wanted to meet the ursu who had beaten her.
Nobody could determine the Pit’s depth. The investigation team — mostly volans and the mages that could fly — had given up after falling fifty kilometres. It had become a bit of a tradition of the city’s residents and the mercenaries defending them to toss burning lumps of wood and cloth to watch it plummet. It was always intriguing to watch the flame continue to grow smaller, but never pass out of view.
Given that there were still creatures flying out of the Pit, theories had circulated that it connected with the tunnel system under the Titan Alps. Hirsh hoped that wasn’t true; the only real benefit that came out of the Alps’ collapse was the destruction of the entrance to the world of beasts far greater than any person had a hope of facing.
For a long while, he’d been sated by the fact that the most dangerous creatures were too large to fit through the small chamber that separated them from the surface, but that snake shedding they’d found changed things. Hirsh never wanted something like that escaping the deep caverns it belonged.
At his side, Ceph kicked a rock. It clattered once, then was over the cliff and didn’t make another sound.
“Things are only going to get worse, aren’t they?” She asks, her eyes tilting upward.
Hirsh followed her sight to the clouds of ash that had permeated every part of the sky ever since the disaster. Night was coming now, so the dark grey sky was slowly shifting to a crimson.
He didn’t respond. There was no answer to that question that he wanted to say.
Even without millions of deaths the collapse had caused, the creeping winter was going to cause greater harm than anything. There had been talks about approaching their southern neighbours for trade with their vast farmlands, but Hirsh wasn’t sure how willing New Vetus would be. The large ursu loved their feasts, after all.
“I… I was talking to some of the girls,” Ceph said. “There’s word that Henosis is gathering their forces along the border.”
Hirsh snapped his gaze down to the dohrni beside him. If that was true, no wonder the Mercenary Order was taking such drastic actions; an invasion from the Empire in their current state would be the death of the pact nations. The Vanguard were still stuck in their endless war against the Theocracy, and were unlikely to assist.
“Maybe it’s simply a threat; a political manoeuvre.” Even as the words left his mouth, Hirsh knew they were unlikely. Henosis had been an expansionist power for as long as it existed. The pact nations had only survived the last war against the alien mermineae because the Empire had been engulfed in civil war. If that had finally ended… well, things didn’t look good for the pact nations.
The alliance between the two-dozen nations of the pact had resulted in economic dominance for the past two centuries. And now, the wealthy pact nations were descending into a recession of never before seen scope. They were not ready for war.
She didn’t grace his optimistic answer with a reply. Instead, she unsheathed the two blades she’d received from Glaus before his death, and stared into the inscription lining its length.
“Hirsh… I’ve had this feeling since the Alps fell, but I don’t think it’s over.” Ceph’s voice wavered with each word. “The world isn’t done. I don’t know why, but I believe we have more disasters to come.”
“I’m sure it’s just the stress.” Hirsh tried to placate her. “The Alps fell because of the Euroclydon. It didn’t climb over to our side, so we have nothing to worry about.”
“No!” Ceph snapped, suddenly yelling. “We've already seen a Titan climb the bloody thing. It couldn't possibly collapse from a single Titan’s effort, no matter how strong. Especially considering the damage spreads all along the Alps and not our section alone.”
Hirsh remained quiet. He’d also felt the piercing sense of unease that had lingered since he felt that shatter of a presence. It was possible everyone felt that unease, and it had done nothing but amplify the problems they’d had.
Ceph took a breath and calmed herself before speaking again. “Something is happening, Hirsh. Something dangerous. Going to war now will not help us.”
