I don’t own Mass Effect or Ranma ½.
Hey all.
First, I have to say, this chapter FOUGHT ME HARD. Part of that is that I started it with only four days left in the month to do any work on it, which should have been enough to write it up for my patrons, but I got sick thanks to my niece passing something on to me. No talky for Vimey, headache and nasty sore throat. So, I had to type, and my typing was slooooooowwww. Like this whole ‘chapter’ should have taken me a day, if that, if I was really feeling it and could use my Dragon Naturally Speaking.
And I wasn’t feeling it. Instead, I had to deal with the fact that I had sort of left behind Herb and Wrex’s part of the story. I REALLLY should have continued dropping in little bits of their adventure in the chapters after they arrived on Tuchanka back in Chapter 13. I didn’t. This means that the majority of this chapter covers their journey around Tuchanka, which should have been done in real time but will instead appear in the past tense, and is also, honestly, shorter than it should be.
There will be a lot of hints about Wrex’s talks in the background, and some other… things. But honestly, if I had kept up with it, it would have been better and more detailed. It isn’t really my best work, and all I can say is that the Ranma/Tali romance grabbed my ME muse and just wouldn’t let go long enough to remember that Herb was even a character half the time. I am sorry about that, but here it is. At least the latter portion of the chapter, when it returns to real time, it gets better.
Edited 4/17/2-26. This now has 4,000+ more words, all of which I’m far happier about, and has been edited by me with Grammarly and Hiryo. Thank him for his perseverance, folks. I have put an ‘(*)’ to show where the real revisions and entirely new segments begin.
Chapter 17: A journey for Knowledge Powered by Punches
As he charged down towards the small horde of krogan from Clan Gatatog that had decided his and Wrex’s presence here, well out of their own territory, was an affront worthy of a war, Herb reflected, In a way, this is simply par for the course.
Because from the first day, they began their search for Clan Crona, Herb and Wrex had run into problems.
As Wrex had warned when he had settled the shuttle so far away from Clan Urdnot’s city, his own clan had proven recalcitrant in the extreme. This was because Wrex had once essentially led a semi-rebellion against his father, the clan chieftain. Or, perhaps not really? It was very complicated, and it appeared as if Wrex had gone outside of his own clan to gather followers along with those within his clan. All of whom who had then died in an ambush on holy ground, orchestrated and led by his father. Who Wrex had killed in the battle, and from which ambush, Wrex was the only survivor.
So, yes. Complicated.
In a way, with everything he had learned of krogan and their ‘society’, if such a term could be used, Herb had not been surprised by what he learned about Wrex’s past or how he had to break some heads when he returned. Admittedly, Wrex killing Jarrod, his own father, was a bit off but Herb was a prince and a historian. Patricide was small change compared to some of the things humans had done to one another, even to their own families, and family didn’t mean as much to krogan as it did to humans. That he had to then break still more heads to convince his clan that, no, he wasn’t back to take over was more amusement than anything else.
The problems began when they were finally allowed to actually speak to the Lore Mistress and her Tale Tellers. These were the matriarchs of the clan, those females who had passed the age of rearing children and had taken over the task of keeping the clan’s history. This included Wrex’s own mother, although again, the krogan didn’t really go into the whole strong family relationship thing. Indeed, Wrex had about as much of a relationship with his mother as Herb did with his, without the specific cultural reasons behind it.
Getting across what they were looking for was hard. Written records were very rare among krogan. Everything was passed on verbally, up to and including important events, interactions with other clans of any sort, battles, raids, alliances and records of exchanges of breeding stock between clans. That had included both genders in the past, but since the Rebellion, had only meant men. Women were far too important for a clan’s future to be traded for any reason. The only time krogan woman joined another clan was when her parent clan was absorbed entirely. Which, in turn, had occurred many times in the past.
Ironically, the Urdnot Clan did have knowledge of when written records were more commonly used across all the clans, rather than simply a memory of the past. According to the chief Lore Mistress, before the nuclear war that made Tuchanka the nightmare it had become, the krogan kept written records. A lot of them.
“We are one of the few clans which can remember those days, however vaguely,” the ancient Lore Mistress, Wrex’s mother, said, her voice a bare whisper as she sat on a piece of rock that had seemingly been molded around her by how many decades she had spent sitting there, her limbs almost atrophied by age, her hump nonexistent, her scale-like hide hanging loosely on her. “Back then, our race, we krogan, built monuments to our greatness, art, architecture, and science… All finery, all frippery, it made us soft. Our soul was then, as now, one filled with war and conflict. And when we learned to harness the power of the atom, so the time of softness, or having time to dwell on such things, ended.”
That was all the Urdnot Clan knew about that ancient past, although when it came to what could be called the modern age, when they had been uplifted by the Council to fight the Rachni Wars, they had thousands of tales, hundreds of years' worth of histories, spread out among all of the women of the clan. It was a rich history, and at the time, despite it not being what they had been there to learn about, Herb had appreciated the tales of battle and conflict with the rachni and the turians alike.
Despite his enjoyment of those tales, their search for actual knowledge demanded they leave the Urdnot Clan behind. From there, they traveled from one clan to another, asking record keepers, mostly matriarchs and females, about local legends, histories, and so forth. Getting to talk to such people was not easy and always came with personal challenges for Wrex. Most of the time, those challenges were physical, forcing him to beat the local clan champion.
Never did those challenges involve Herb. Looking back on it later, that was perhaps the most annoying part for the descendant of dragons. If it wasn’t a challenge, it was an argument, and even then, it was always between Wrex and the chieftain in order to let them speak to the Lore Keepers.
During this time, Herb learned that Wrex was something of a… not a legend, not exactly. Opinions on Wrex fell into one of two camps. You either respected him or hated him. If that is, you had heard of Wrex at all. If you didn’t, then the opinion was obviously more nuanced. But out of twelve clans during those first four days on Tuchanka, not a one of them hadn’t heard about Wrex.
Eight chieftains hated his guts. Four had respected him. Which, amusingly, didn’t match the breakdown of which chieftains chose to fight Wrex or didn’t. There hadn’t been any kind of rhyme or reason to that choice that Herb could ascertain, and Wrex was remarkably tight-lipped about it for some reason.
Thus, it was clear that Wrex was as much a help as a hindrance when dealing with the other krogan. Even those krogan who hadn’t heard of his movement, whatever that had been about, in the past, knew Urdnot Wrex was one of the oldest livings Battlemasters in the galaxy and one of the better ones too. What that exactly implied, Herb wasn’t altogether certain about, although he fully agreed with Wrex when he intoned dolefully, “Battlemaster doesn’t mean what it used to,” given some of his interactions with krogan before this and Ranma’s run in with so many of them on Omega.
Soon after leaving the continent where Clan Urdnot’s territory lay, the two of them left that continent entirely, passing over the blasted, poisoned and very radioactive ocean that separated it from another of the planet’s continents. Here, no one had heard about Wrex’s movement, or at least, not in a positive light, but they had certainly heard of his reputation, and many wanted to challenge the old master, or just had a problem with Wrex in particular.
The first such group made their appearance only a day after they had transferred to the new continent, which, according to Wrex, was just called “Little Shit. Because from space it looks like someone took a dump. If it had any other name since before the salarians decided to uplift us, no one remembers it. Although some of our most ancient stories tell us it’s also where the first nukes dropped.”
Unlike normal krogan, this group didn’t announce themselves and attack during the day. Rather, they came at the pair at night, a night when the two of them were camped well away from the nearest clan holding, but still in the territory of it that night. The clan in question had not given them leave to spend the night in their underground tunnels, and thus, the pair had been forced to spend the night outside, unable to make it back to the shuttle before nightfall.
Despite that, though, Wrex saw them coming.
“We’re about to get jumped,” Wrex had said lazily, shaking his head almost disgustedly, showing none of the joy he would later show when Clan Gatatog came to attack them.
“Truly?” Herb had grunted in reply, hugging himself for a moment in the chill of the night air, cursing the fact that they hadn’t gotten back to the shuttle before night fell. That, and the fact that Wrex had won their bet about whether or not this clan’s chieftain would want to fight him, and that had meant they had to camp out rather than just keep going in the night to get back to the shuttle.
Once the sun went down, it was bitterly cold here on Tuchanka. Herb hadn’t expected that. He’d never been in a desert before, although Herb had read about it in history texts. Still, he had figured it had been simple exaggerations, just people going from the extreme hot of the day to the lukewarm nature of night complaining about having to put on clothing at all.
But now, it was literally chill enough to see his own breath in front of them, more than enough to make Herb feel sluggish. At least my body has acclimated to the background radiation on this forsaken planet by this point. Still, curse my draconic ancestry for making me feel the cold so much more. It honestly wants to make me fall asleep.
By that point, his body had fully acclimated to being on Tuchanka, and the drain on his ki to deal with the radiation was minimal, easy enough for him to ignore, although as time went on, Herb knew that in a few months or so, it would pass the point of recursion. That was the time where his heritage as a dragon, his body’s inherent ability to refill his ki reserves far faster than any human, would fall behind his body’s need to use that ki in order to keep his body in tip-top shape.
Shaking that thought off at the time, Herb had continued to speak, somewhat confused about what Wrex meant. “I would’ve thought your defeating their clan champion would—"
“Oh, hah, no. It’s not Clan Okrus. The challenge between us was accepted and fully witnessed. No chieftain would ever go back on that kind of agreement. Not and keep his breeding rights. Or honor, such as my people reckon the term. No, this is probably some personal issue whoever is out there has got with me, fucking young wastes of space didn’t realize their cloaking suits don’t matter out here in the darkness, frost’ll appear on the cloaks. See those humps out there?”
Herb looked away from the fireplace and Wrex, and looking back on it, he could remember how the reptile’s eyes hadn’t needed any time to acclimatize to the darkness, and how jealous of that and the fact that Wrex didn’t seem to feel the cold. After a second, Herb’s eyes had done the same, and he saw what were very obviously moving humps shifting slowly over the desert.
While the mounds did indeed mold into the darkness like one of those infiltrator suits that Herb had seen a time or two, they also did indeed have a strange patina. It shimmered in an unusual way, drawing the eye. “Huh. I do indeed. So, is this a typical raiding, piratical sort of thing or more personal?”
“Eh, a krogan’s more likely to attack you because you’re an alien on our planet than to steal your stuff. You might not be froggy’s, but you’re still foreign,” Wrex said, taunting Herb even as he pushed himself to his feet, his large hands clenching and unclenching as he rolled his neck underneath his massive hump. “But nah, this tactic, and the money those cloaks probably cost, it’s more like this is old Girgon Chunde and his band of morons.”
Wrex had begun to yell with that last sentence and kept doing so. “You still sore about my stomping a hole in the back of your stupid plan to muscle in on the Shadow Broker’s turf, Girgon?”
“You’ve got some quads on you to come back to Tuchanka after what you did!” a voice out of the darkness, as large forms tossed their cloaks to one side. Herb had been somewhat chagrined at the time to see there were far more such than he had actually seen out there a moment before. “You cost me billions of credits and all my standing with Patriarch, you bastard.”
Most of the krogan had looked young in the light of the campfire, if judging by the lack of scars and the brightness of their skin. One was a bit older than the rest, and the second was older still, with numerous scars on his face, visible scars on his forearms. His skin was also noticeably darker, almost as dark orange and red as Wrex’s, and this was the one talking back to Wrex, obviously marking him out as Girgon. “Now you’re back here on Tuchanka, with no backup from your master in sight. What’s the matter? He gets tired of having a mad dog around, or did the leash the Shadow Broker kept you on start feeling a bit too tight?”
“Sigh, Girgon, Girgon, I’d say something about fools never learning, but that would be boring.” Wrex slowly shook his head from side to side, acting like he was talking with an idiotic child rather than an equal. “Why don’t you lot just come ahead, and we can see if you’ve actually improved over the past two hundred years since the time I shoved your face in, huh!?”
With a roar, Wrex went from just standing there to charging towards the speaker, his body shimmering with a biotic field as he called on his powers without even a hint of having done so beforehand. The same happened around the older krogan who had just been speaking, as well as the one who seemed a little older than the rest of the pack. All three charged, but the two attackers couldn’t put as much biotic energy into their charges as Wrex did before making contact. The older one was smashed backward several yards, yet kept his feet, while the younger one went tumbling to the side.
The others all charged and roared towards Herb, who lazily raised his hands, then gestured. “Come then.”
Unlike Ranma, who at that time had yet to reach Omega and make a far less refined version, Herb had his armor on him, though he hadn’t been going around with the full suit before this. Tela Vasir had kept their armor on her ship, and Usagi had claimed it while leading the abbey sisters in their escape. That meant that when the krogan opened up with their shotguns, all Herb had to do was stand there and take it, reveling in the fact that the suit was warmer on the inside on his arms and face than bothered by the mass effect rounds crashing into him.
After a second, their fire lessened, and he smirked, activating his suit’s external speakers. “Was that meant to hurt, or tickle? I am afraid it failed at both.”
It dawned on Herb then, and he had days after to think it several times since, that krogan must be born stupid. It was the only reason why a thinking, intelligent person would ever think that once a shotgun failed to penetrate someone’s armor, their fists and blades would do better. Regardless, then, as now, the krogan all seemed to take Herb’s survival as a challenge and roared as they charged forward from every direction.
The first to reach him went whuffing backward into two of his fellows as a kick that felt as if it had come from a mech rather than a person crashed into his chest, taking all three of them off their feet instantly. Another one came at Herb from behind, but Herb ducked and grabbed the attacker’s arm even as it passed through where his head had been, doing an aikido slam with enough force to basically plant the krogan there like he was some kind of odd tree.
Whirling to the side, Herb dodged two more strikes, inwardly impressed, as usual, by how fast the krogan were despite their size. He hopped up and lashed out with a double kick that caught one of them in the chest, shattering ribs and knocking him backward, while Herb flipped himself through the air to land next to two others. Grabbing them, Herb had whorled, hurling them one after another out into the darkness.
“AEYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!” the pair cried, one voice joining and taking over for the first in an odd medley.
Their screams as they flew away amused Herb at the time, and he had smacked his hands together, laughing wildly. “That was fun, let’s see if I can do it again. It’s a pity it isn’t the day, and I can see exactly how far I throw each of you in turn; it would help my technique. But I will still enjoy the screams.”
For a moment, the remaining krogan all paused, pushing themselves up from where they had been tossed, then with a roar, they charged him once more. Herb had met them, and delighted in, as he had warned, picking up the first two by their arms and hurling them out into the darkness like they were little toys being tossed by an angry child.
The next four he didn’t toss, instead putting them down by breaking arms and legs, showing his well-beyond krogan strength in another manner. Then, when they started to heal from that thanks to krogan regeneration, Herb tossed them back out into the darkness, too. “I take it I shouldn’t be killing any of these buffoons?” he asked almost idly as he continued to mete out justice.
“They’re young idiots,” Wrex grunted as he took a punch to the face from one of his two opponents. “They’re here because Girgon always was a smooth talker, probably convinced these youngsters to join his krantt to help him fight me. And if we kill all the young idiots that are bound to come at us while we’re here on Tuchanka, we’ll probably both make some clan vendettas, and depopulate a lot of the clans significantly.”
“Arrogant old fucker hrakfar (Krogan: asshole)!” the younger of his two opponents grunted as he attacked Wrex from the side, landing several hard blows, before reeling back from an elbow strike to the eye that temporarily blinded him.
Before he could twist around and away from his older opponent, Wrex moved, sliding into the younger one’s temporary blind spot. Two hammer blows landed on his temple, then the younger Battlemaster nearly panicked as he felt his hump being grabbed by two strong arms, before he was lifted off his feet and piled driven into the ground. “I might be arrogant, ru’tuai (pup), but I can back it up and that’s all that matters!”
The next second, Wrex was reeling from a series of blows from biotic-assisted punches from his other opponent, but turned into them as the next batch of buffoons came at Herb. Many of the injured also kept attacking him, having entered their race’s famous blood rage. Yet that simply made them all the easier for Herb to deal with, their movements predictable, their limbs, broken still, not responding as they should.
By the time the last of the younger krogan had been hurled out into the night, Wrex had the older of the two he’d been fighting on the ground face-first, and was sitting on his back, one hand on his crest, the other pressing down hard on his neck right in front of his hump. There was a wrench and a scream of pain as a segment of the other Battlemaster’s crest, the thick scale that protected the front of a krogan’s head, came off in Wrex’s grip, and he tossed it to the sand in front of him, before pummeling Girgon’s bleeding scalp with his now free hand.
Within seconds, he was unconscious, and Wrex snorted, pushing himself to his feet. “Come on. We’ll want to get to the shuttle and move on, unless we want these idiots to bother us again.”
“Feh. Not like it was much of a bother,” Herb had bragged, shaking his head. None of the krogan he’d fought had even been able to knock Herb off his feet. Quite unlike the few spars he’d had with Wrex during their time on Tuchanka. “I assume there was a reason why you deliberately de-crested him and tossed it in front of his eyes like that?”
“Normally, when you rip someone’s crest off his head like that, you kill them, and you take the crest as a trophy. Leaving it behind like that and Girgon alive, that’s basically me saying his crest isn’t worth taking as a trophy,” Wrex explained, grabbing up his own pack.
“Huh… you know, you and my companion Ranma might get along a little too well if that is how you taunt your enemies,” Herb mused.
“Sounds like a wise man.” Wrex snorted. “Far wiser than whoever Girgon conned to give him so many one-use chameleon cloaks like this. I gotta wonder if whoever did that expected any actual return.”
The two of them had pushed on through the night, and with the help of their shuttle, actually had a nice night’s rest. The very next day however, showed another side to the krogan that Herb had yet to see in his journey across Tuchanka.
They had arrived that morning at the next clan Wrex hoped would be able to point them toward a clan with any records from before the nuclear war. There, they were escorted straight to the clan chieftain, who, surprisingly, was the first to not do his own fighting against Wrex. Instead, he had summoned up a group of five younger krogan, and hat told Wrex bluntly, “If you want to meet with my Lore Keepers, beat these five into a pulp for me. Give them some scars, and show that there’re bigger quads out there than what they’ve got on them.”
Wrex had guffawed at the time, shaking his head. “You want me to school your youngsters for you? The hell, Hiydrok? You’re not nearly crippled enough to not do it for yourself.”
“If I wail on them, I’m just the old chieftain keeping them from going off to earn their names and fighting for the glory of our race. If you beat them until they can’t move, then they know that the world beyond our clan’s territory really is as dangerous as I’ve said.”
The younger krogan had all roared and boasted about how they’d put Wrex down, but the older Krogan had sighed, then chucked his shotgun aside. “Bah, for pups like this, I won’t even need my biotics. A waste of fist, that’s all this is.”
That insult goaded the five on, and moments later, Herb had leaned back on the stone colosseum rising stairs. He garnered a lot of looks from the krogan around him, but he had become used to that over the past few days, and idly wondered if he hoped for his wait to be interrupted or was annoyed at the fact that word of his strength and abilities had yet to spread. Herb had thought that they would already know about him from Ranma’s running with the Blood Pack and Herb’s own defeat of the so-called Queen of Omega, but apparently, a large portion of the on Tuchanka didn’t get out all that much in the water galaxy.
The true reason for their distaste for all foreigners. And when he had, he had come away not only understanding but agreeing that their hatred was fully justified.
“They don’t like you because of what you represent,” a feminine voice, harsh and gravelly from age and species alike, announced from one side of where Herb had been standing.
Turning away from the sight, Herb had cocked an eye quizzically at the old matriarch who had just spoken. She wasn’t the oldest he had seen; indeed, she was one of the younger Lore Keepers, if she was one at all. Herb hadn’t yet spoken to any females that weren’t, though. “I take it I represent the rest of the galaxy to them all? I suppose that is better than being hated and scorned for reasons I have been a part of at least.”
“The rest of the galaxy, the Council, those that from the stars. However, you want to term it, when we see you here, when we women see you more than the men, that’s what we think. You’re not one of the Council. If you were, not even someone like Urdnot Wrex, for all his past glory, could get away with dragging you around the planet,” the woman’s voice was cold, demanding, yet blunt, and Herb had appreciated that at the time. “But you’re alien, and that’s bad enough.”
“I rather think that I am the one who dragged him here to Tuchanka in the first place,” Herb had drawled. He had been rather affronted at the time that the woman thought that Wrex was the one calling the shots. “I assure you that it is my search for knowledge that we are here to sate, rather than anything Wrex has planned. If anything, he’s more my local guide than anything else, being paid for it in information himself.”
“Why?” The demand had come out just as blunt, harsh and unyielding as all the other woman’s words. “Why does our past interest a human?”
The term 'human' had not come easily, as if she had never actually used it before, harsh and guttural despite her speaking the common language. Herb had wondered idly if she had a translation patch installed in her somewhere, or if she had been forced to learn the universe’s common language the old-fashioned way.
Regardless, Herb had not taken her tone as an insult. Rather, his thinking when dealing with this woman was the same as with most of the krogan who deigned to notice his presence at all outside target practice: If I take umbrage with how they speak to me, as Wrex said, there won’t be many left after we move on.
“I am interested because there are interesting parallels between your people and mine. We have both nuked ourselves, although not as badly in my people’s case. Your people also have something beyond biotics that I have access to, which my race has long forgotten, along with much else. I… am curious about how alike all you krogan are, how alike every race is. Every race is far too similar, and I wonder why, hence my interest in the past, not just your race, but all races.”
Herb had shrugged then. “There is strength in the past. Strength in knowing where one comes from, what your people have achieved. I think some of that is the real reason why Wrex is here. Well… that and a special ability I have that we believe he can learn.”
Looking back, Herb wasn’t certain about why he had said that much. But something about the woman’s eyes, her stance or something else, her large eyes, spaced so oddly on her head to human sensibilities, narrowed dangerously as she took in his words, as if weighing each of them had dragged still more words out.
“You claim that there is strength in the past. But is that strength something that can help with the true death of our people, the true depth the galaxy has driven us to?” She held up a hand, halting any response Herb might have made, before crooking a finger for him to follow her. “Come, I will show you the weight of our struggle. The struggle that we women shoulder along with all of the rest of it, when the men go off, drowning in their nihilism.”
While he had internally wondered at the time once more how the woman had learned so much of the universal language, Herb had shrugged and followed her. They didn’t descend deeper into the underground warren of tunnels that comprise the clan’s village, or whatever they called it. Instead, they headed upwards, then out the same entrance that Herb and Wrex had been shown when they first arrived.
From there, they took a path upwards then down through a series of winding trails away from the underground village where the clan lived. Herb idly wondered where she was being he was being led, until he saw what looked like a pit in the distance.
A large one, made by krogan for certain, with a stone lip to it, laid down with thick stone, each stone well crafted and fit together without need of mortar. There wasn’t anything special about it beyond that. Yet for some reason, Herb could almost feel a certain… presence just being near it, a spiritual weight the dragon prince would have been hard-pressed to put into words.
The woman, who had yet to give a name or even ask for one reached the edge of the lip, where she put her hands on it. She looked within for a moment, her entire body going still as stone. She then gestured, and Herb, who had, at that point, been feeling quite off and worried due to the odd feeling, moved to stand beside her so he could peer inside the pit.
When he looked down, Herb nearly took an involuntary step back, staring at what was revealed below, his eyes going wide with horror, and his fingers began to curl into the stone. His fingers gouged into the stone lip of the pit with an ease the matriarch noticed, but Herb paid her no attention, his eyes locked on the pit.
Or rather, the abattoir, for that was what the pit was. An abattoir filled with skeletons. Each skeleton had been somehow sewn together, preserved so the skeleton stayed in one piece as it was lowered into the pit using a nearby winch and lever system.
But these were not just normal skeletons. No, they were the skeletons of babies. Hundreds, thousands of krogan babies stacked one on top of another, who knew how deep. The size of the skeletons was obvious to discern, and Herb realized with a quiet horror and a sudden spike of pure fury that he was seeing the price the genophage, the salarians’ so-called solution to the krogan problem, enacted upon the lizard-like aliens.
There had been other pits nearby, Herb had noticed as he worked to pull his eyes from the pit, each of them sealed over with stone. Ten he had counted within sight of where he had stood with perhaps more in the distance. A genocide by genetics, a culling by any other name, Herb had thought then. Creating some kind of planet cracker or, or an extermination weapon like in science fiction back home would have been kinder, more honorable than this.
“The genophage,” Herb had forced out, his tongue so dry suddenly that it felt as if he was going to be sick, “I, I had learned of it, I knew of it.”
“No, you didn’t. You knew the name, but you do not know it. You do not know the horror, the pain, the weight. Not even our menfolk truly understand. They can go out into the world, or even the galaxy, lose themselves in violence, blood and slaughter. Few understand how our race is dying. Seventeen I have borne into this world who lived beyond their first day since I became fertile four hundred solar cycles ago. Four are still alive.”
She gestured into the pit with all the gravity of a warrior waving to a battlefield where he had been pushed to the utmost. “They are born dead, their brains not working, their hearts not pumping. Dead. Their flesh is stripped from them by ceremony and mechanical devices, and used to draw in predators, which in turn feed the clan. And then, their skeletons are laid to rest here, nameless. Only when a pit is filled are they given names. Names not of the dead within, but those who have caused this horror. So that none, not our clan, not any other, can forget.”
Herb had said nothing. There were no words he could use to express enough empathy to matter at a moment like this. Anything he said, anything at all, would have sounded trite, would have sounded worthless without weight or substance in comparison to the bottomless grief in this woman’s tone, the grim rage within.
Yet she was not bowed under those things. Rather, this woman, who was probably at least middle-aged for a krogan, and indeed the other women like her, those who kept on trying, faced their race's slow diminishment with as much dignity and pride as possible. While also seeing to several other tasks for their people.
When that thought came to him, Herb, reaching beyond his people’s societal disdain for women, saw the true nature of krogan endurance. “You… you are more of a warrior, more of a fighter, than any ten krogan men I have ever fought, Madam.”
The woman blinked, looking amused for a moment, before her eyes narrowed. “Do not let any of the men hear you say that. Only a few of the most intelligent would agree with you. But…Madam?”
Evidently, that word had not been one she had come across before. Herb spent a few minutes explaining it, but even as he diverted the conversation to other things, he never forgot the pit. Not then, not over the days since, neither the horror within nor the fact that, perhaps, Wrex’s desire to learn ki healing could mean a lot more for his folk than even Herb had ever imagined.
Four clans passed by after that one, and it was as if his understanding, his rage at the lid of that pit, had opened a door. No longer did the women and men of the krogan ignore or glare at him with hate. They didn’t welcome him, but neither did they turn him away entirely; instead, they accepted Herb as part of Wrex’s krantt, which translated to his chosen companions and followers. Each clan left an impression on Herb that made him respect the krogan more, despite how much trouble they still gave him and Wrex alike to access their Lore Keepers.
Some of it wasn’t even because of the pair of them, but bad feelings with Clan Urdnot in general. That, and the general fact that the two of them were simply traversing around from one clan to another, asking questions about history. Which apparently just wasn't done.
Despite opinion on Herb mellowing among the krogan via rumor, that semi-mystical creation of all sentients the galaxy over, the unusual nature of their self-imposed quest meant the two of them found it ever harder to get answers or even permission to ask questions from each successive clan than the one before as they shifted from ‘Little Shit’ to the third continent, Aralakh, a land of deserts, mountains and barely there valleys.
Here, no longer was Wrex simply required to face a simple challenge of battle, not even one from the clan chieftain, or rather, not simply from the clan chieftain. Several times, clan members had lined up for the opportunity to fight Wrex one-on-one, and while that was fine for Wrex, it wasn’t so fine for their overall objective, or Herb. He was very pointedly ignored when those challenges were being handed out.
Thankfully, for his own ego at least, Wrex had laughingly informed him that that was more about pride than disdain. “Just like your understanding of what our race really faces, rumors got around that you’re like the Green Titan from Omega. Coupled with the fact that you threw those idiots around that one time a few days ago, it’s left an impression. Even krogan won’t pick a fight they know they are almost certain to lose and be humiliated in.”
At the time, Herb, frustrated and annoyed at the fact that they had been summarily turned away from yet another clan even after Wrex had just beaten their chieftain, had turned around and gestured towards that chieftain, who was limping away from the arena. “So precisely how many of your folk do I have to toss into the stratosphere to get them to actually answer our questions rather than just turn us away? If they already fear me, as they should, perhaps we should turn it into an advantage.”
Of course, having the fact that they were afraid of fighting a puny human hurled into their faces had goaded the local warriors into attacking in a roaring, but after, at least, Herb had felt somewhat better. It had, however, been a net loss for the pair of them, because at that point, clans had simply refused to acknowledge even challenges, shutting their doors entirely on the pair.
This forced the pair of them to come up with something to trade instead of simply demanding answers after a challenge. This did not come easy to Wrex who was somewhat disdainful of most of the clans and society as a whole for, in his words, eschewing, “Trying to build something from the ragged remnants of our society and believing that simply charging into battle pell-mell with no plan and no strategy is the way forward, that our deaths mean nothing so long as we go out in a blaze of glory.”
The means of exchange they eventually worked out was a form Ranma would’ve fully understood and approved of. They sold training for knowledge. Wrex sold knowledge of tactics and various weaknesses the other races had, tactics he’d learned to abuse over the centuries, while Herb offered simpler martial arts lessons. The tales of his strength and skill meant Herb had to literally beat off the younger krogan when they demanded training.
From that point on, once the training had proven itself, anyway, it went relatively well. Right up until the clans had to actually allow them to ask questions from their record keepers and historians. If such a term could be used for what they had, as it became clear that they were now paying gold for lead, so to speak. Very few clans had records going back to the time when the nukes began flying, despite the fact they had a name of the clan that Wrex had heard rumors of by that point: Clan Crona.
(*)
With that name, they did make a bit of headway, but most of that headway boiled down to the same short record, if such it could be called at all: ‘Took in three members of Clan Zurst, who were of Crona. Their land is lost, their chieftain dead, the krantt broken, but their blood is strong.’
The numbers dealt with varied, but there was rarely ever further information given. Each such message simply served to show how most of the clans of today were built off the survivors of older clans. Yet still, Wrex had known of rumors of a clan that had kept written records until it had been destroyed. That meant that some legends, some histories, still passed down, much like what little religion the krogan had, as well as their veneration for their honored ancestors.
These little drips and drops of information were horrendously annoying, but after nearly another week of traveling, possible only because of their shuttle, arguments, training and so forth, the pair had eventually formed a geographic circle of clans with the same kind of records. With that in hand, Wrex and Herb moved inward, meeting with still more clans.
In this manner, the exceptionally odd pair eventually met a clan that still had oral records of where clan Crona had once resided. With that came the knowledge that the start of its fall could be traced back to the very war of annihilation that transformed Tuchanka into the blasted wasteland that was the planet currently.
The record, minus the location, had been told to them thusly: ‘Clan Crona, once known as a Great Krouran of farming and science, was desolated in the War of the Atom. Their farms burned, but not their Shakar. The Crona held their valley for a time, but eventually, lack of food did what their enemies could not, forcing the clan to assault their enemies and flee. Honored be they, for choosing the hard road rather than the easy. Their realm was left to the wastes, still ishgik.’
The Lore Mistress had to translate a few words into the common language, as she had stated them without actually understanding them, as some words had shifted over time. Shakar, or willpower, no longer meant that, but had shifted to mean endurance of pain. Krouran, she had no idea about, except that it might mean something like ‘great’ or ‘venerated.’ Ishgik meant intact, but something that would almost certainly be lost to time, an odd word that, in Herb’s opinion, was doing a bit too much work for any single word.
While quite a bit more poetic than most of the newer records the Lord Keepers kept, Wrex and Herb were able to understand it well enough. A nuke had destroyed the clan’s apparently vaunted farmland, forcing the clan to, instead of simply defending itself, attack its enemies, expending its warriors so it could keep feeding its womenfolk and young. Eventually, even the ability to do that faded, and the clan was forced to dissolve, breaking into smaller bands to join other, possibly formerly allied clans.
“Which,” Wrex had opined at the time, a note of respect in his voice that he rarely showed for other male krogan, “Would have been an insanely hard choice for any Chieftain to make. Not the idea of sending out his youngsters to die. That’d be easy. To then admit even that wasn’t enough to save the clan, that they couldn’t take enough food from other clans to keep surviving, that’d be hard on many levels. To then choose to dissolve the clan, to save the people rather than the name… I don’t know any clan chieftain strong enough to make that choice.”
Translating the location from the semi-poetic language of that Lore Keeper’s tale took them a few hours poring over what maps they had of the area, until they determined what was meant by phrases and how certain names for geographic features had changed over time. This led Wrex and Herb into the deep mountains, an area no clan truly claimed, however much lip service they gave the idea when dealing with other clans. Or at least, so Herb had assumed at the time. Clan Gatatog’s later showing up in force showed that this was not the case.
Eventually, the pair of explorers had reached their destination, although from the view above in the shuttle’s cockpit, it didn’t really seem much. Craggy mountains rose into the sky on either side, and the whole area was small, the area where the valley opened up to the rest of the so-called lowlands barely around three hundred yards across, if that. There looked to have been a river leading into it, but the river had long since dried up, like so many on Tuchanka after the nuclear wars of ages past.
Yet, as the shuttle carried them further down, signs began to be visible. The krogan built to last, and even after thousands of years, stone houses still could be seen dotting the valley here and there. There were even a few roads, made of the krogan equivalent of concrete, here and there, leading up to what might’ve been tunneled out homes in the sides of the valley. Stone and metal girders stuck out in other places, and dozens of anti-air emplacements were still largely visible, if in no way intact, the guns having been torn apart by wind, time, and rust, and there were a few other places Wrex could tell had once been defensive points throughout the valley.
When they sat down and started to explore, it was more of the same. No records or anything that had been left out for wind and weather to find had survived, though Herb discovered remnants of what he had heard call vertical farms set into formerly deep holes, which at first looked like huge wells, in several segments of the valley. Meanwhile, Wrex had found what looked like graffiti on a lot of the girders and such. “If that’s the records we’ve come to find, I’m gonna need to punch something. For at least a day.”
Thankfully, it was not. Eventually, as the duo moved deeper into the valley, Wrex found another road leading up the far side. There, in turn, Herb found a hollow area, where a large stone wall had been emplaced over an entrance. Blasting it open was the work of but a moment, and inside, they found a wide tunnel, lined with murals.
At the far end of that hidden tunnel was another steel doorway, massive, larger than Herb standing on Wrex’s shoulder, and at least as wide as two krogan lying down, foot to head. The surface was shaped to resemble that of a krogan head, complete with several scars, an eyepatch and a wicked-looking grin.
Wrex had needed only one look to breathe easier, knowing now that at least Crona had hidden something important. “Here. The valley outside, it was their farmland. This will have been their city. I can’t tell you what will be within the city or how large it will be, but it will be here. Our search wasn’t for nothing.”
“This coming from the krogan whose regeneration seems to have sped up by at least half again as fast,” Herb had drawled, also staring at the krogan face shaped out of the metal avidly. “Still, you’re right. This search does seem to have borne some fruit on my end at last.”
Surprising Herb, but not Wrex in the least, between the outer hidden entrance and the inner one, there were traps. Before the two of them had gone a few hundred yards, they had sprung four of them. Two hadn’t worked after so long, but the other two had worked. One had dropped a granite boulder on top of Herb, fit to have crushed four krogan, but which only flattened Herb before he could push it out of the way, actually hurting him for the first time in a long while.
The other had sputtered out some kind of gas, but whatever it was, it had not done much after so long. Despite that, it had made Wrex riotously sick to his stomach, something a krogan was not at all used to.
Retreating to nurse their wounds, the pair had decided to be a little more circumspect as they continued, worried that even after they got the door open, they’d find still more traps on the others side. That, and not knowing the city's size, convinced the pair to put together a proper base camp, shifting the shuttle from their original landing area to the nearest flat piece of land near the tunnel.
Not long after Herb had decided to investigate the last bit of the tunnel and the inner door, now that he knew what to look for, Clan Gatatog arrived on the scene, interrupting their explorations. Something they would quickly come to regret…
OOOOOOO
There were at least a hundred, possibly as many as a hundred and fifty krogan charging through the valley and up the mountainside towards Herb and Wrex as they barreled down towards them, but Herb had settled his helmet in place before they were in gun range, and didn’t anticipate running into much trouble from that score.
Well, I fixed my helmet down before entering their shotgun range, which isn’t entirely the same thing as rifle range, and shotgun range isn’t anything at all like in those movies I watched occasionally with Mint and Lime as we traveled through China and Japan, he thought idly, ducking under a blast from one shotgun that seemed to have been carrying something special, as it went off behind him, reminding Herb more of a flak round than a mass effect one. Is that some kind of area-effect explosive round? I didn’t think mass effect guns went into that kind of thing.
“That one’s mine!” Wrex growled from behind him, ducking into cover, then out of it quickly. His biotic shield flickered around him, stopping several bullets, before he slid into more cover, which here consisted of the half-eroded remnants of a protective barrier along the road leading up to the tunnel. Catcalls and howls of derision came from the horde charging up the slope of the mountain towards them, but Wrex didn’t bother replying, simply pulling up his own shotgun.
A krogan-made Graal Spike Thrower shotgun, it was, ironically, a double-barreled shotgun which Tali would deeply approve of, with bigger flechette rounds than a normal gun, made to take on the predators of Tuchanka, and one in particular who had found home on many a planet in various ways: the dreaded Thresher Maw. Wrex lined up a bead on the one who had fired that strange explosive round, and a second later, the krogan in question fell, the mass effect round from the shotgun having slammed into his open mouth.
A second later, Herb hit the first group of krogan on one of the more level areas made by Crona in ancient times. The krogan all raised their guns, each of which had multiple spikes on their barrels, but those points skittered off of Herb’s armor. In return, he grabbed at guns, crushing the metal in his grip, before kicks and punches started to crack bone, shatter scales, and burst humps.
Having laid out all the krogan around him, Herb moved on into the mass that had congregated behind them on the road with its easier slope, who had already begun to shoot at him before their fellows were down. Even while his armor rattled and quaked from the hits from the larger flechettes rounds of the krogan shotguns, Herb’s tone sounded almost conversational through the external speakers of his suit. “You seem to take that one’s weapon of choice personally, Wrex. Any reason why?”
“It’s a special anti-air around, we use them to deal with aerial predators, mainly small groups of what you’d probably call aerial varren equivalents,” Wrex growled, hopping up over the cover he’d taken, charging down and into another flatter area, an ancient road that now more resembled a ditch than anything else. Other krogan had been using it to try and get around Herb and further up the slope, only to now come face-to-face with an enraged Battlemaster.
His body lined with biotic charge, Wrex slammed into them, sending the six krogan in the lead for all their weight and mass, flying in every direction as if they were so many bowling pins. “Using them on another krogan is insanely disrespectful!”
“Has anyone told you, or any other krogan, that you seem to take far too many things as disrespectful?” Herb quipped, as a foot lashed out, catching one krogan in the quad. Normally, Herb wouldn’t have gone for that kind of a target, but since krogan kept their genitals behind armored sheaths most of the time, he figured it was just as much fair game as anything else.
It also served to fling the creature into the air, where he screamed that scream that Herb enjoyed causing among the krogan so much. “And that your folks should really get over this fear of being in the air. It just makes it all the more amusing to hurl you there.”
Herb suited action to words, as his next few opponents found themselves also flung out off the side of the mountain slope with wails of shock and dismay. “AEYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!”
Herb guffawed, the sound loud from his external speakers. “You see, that noise? That noise is just hilarious.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a bit of an ass?” Wrex grumbled, shaking his head in mute embarrassment.
And it isn’t so much that we are reacting to being in the air, as the fact that someone can pick us up and hurl us like that so easily. I can count on the number of one hand with fingers left over the number of predators out there who can so easily overpower a krogan, and those are actual predators, not a short slip of a human, he reflected. No krogan is ever going to get used to the idea that there’s another person out there so much more powerful than they seem as to make us all look like weak froggies.
Herb didn’t reply, his attention caught by the glint of something in the distance for just a moment. It almost looked like a sniper scope or a pair of binoculars.
Just as when Herb had first discovered his new favorite pastime of krogan tossing, a large number of the krogan still charging up the hill paused, staring at where their fellows were flying through the sky, before turning their eyes back to Herb. As one, they charged, bellowing their fury, firing their guns as they came. Many of their rounds hammered home into his armor, making his earlier observation disappear from his mind as their eyes turned red with the krogan’s famous battle rage.
Wrex watched this from where he had just finished off another group of krogan and shook his head from side to side. “Idiots. Honestly, complete morons. This is why I have such a big problem with my race, you know,” he said almost conversationally to the unconscious form of a krogan underneath one of his feet, who groaned in response. “We go tactics, what are those, charge and snarl always work. We see fire hit something, only for our rounds to bounce off and what do we do?”
Another groan. “Exactly. We just fire more at it. We see someone strong enough to toss our fellows into the air as if they are so much trash, and what is our response? Charge and roar to get in grabbing range. Surely mass will be able to carry the day,” he added, making his tone lighter even as he hopped forward, one foot lashing out in a kick that took a krogan slowly pushing himself to his feet in the face, snapping neck and crushing his ridge alike, while his hand lashed out to one side, grabbing the rifle of a man about to shove it into his side and pull the trigger. The flechette instead whizzed past him, as he brought his head down into a vicious headbutt to the side of the krogan’s face, which shattered scale and broke teeth, sending him collapsing to the ground.
Of course, given krogan regeneration, most of his enemies would probably be on their feet in a half hour or so, and other krogan around him had also given themselves to their battle rage, no longer feeling their injuries, no matter how devastating. One of them even had an eye literally dripping out of its hole in his head and still came on with a roar. A shot through the throat, and Wrex dodged to one side, letting the younger krogan hurl itself past him.
Within moments, the krogan had begun to bleed out, even as his healing factor tried to close the gaping wound in his neck, despite his battle rage. His secondary fluid system, which had a fancy name Wrex could never remember, would keep him alive even so, but wouldn’t be enough to keep him in the fight with a wound like that.
“I am all for brutality. I’m all for showing our strength, but unless you pair that strength with some manner of intelligence,” Wrex bellowed that last word into the face of one krogan who had just slammed into him bodily, trying to bear him to the side, only for a biotic push at his back to keep Wrex on his feet. A moment later, the younger krogan fell his sides being gripped, and then he was hurled aside in a classic krogan style wrestling trick. “Then there’s no damn point!”
Shots blasted into him from the side, and Wrex knew that he was hurting a little bit himself now. He could also feel some of those holes, starting to close up, and smirked just a bit even as he called up his biotics to create a slightly stronger shield for a second.
I know what the genophage did to my people, both physically and mentally. I know of our nihilism. I tried to fight against it once, and lost… Lost my drive, Wrex admitted to himself internally, as fire hit him from all sides as he continued down the slope, with several krogan coming out from hiding in an admittedly well-run ambush. A biotic flare hurled them all in every direction, though, as he twisted around, keeping well back from where the majority of the clan warriors had begun to clamber over one another to engage Herb in what he knew humans called a dog pile, from which a few krogan were launched every few seconds.
What is it worth, preaching about how we need to build ourselves better, to be better, to use tactics and strategy and become more, when so many of our people want to keep fighting in the old way? Or just don’t care about the future at all, simply wanting to fight, fuck and find a worthy death for themselves? But with ki healing, that, maybe…
Wrex shook himself as he dodged around another charging krogan, this one having gone low, while another one, looking around as old as Wrex himself, leaped forwards, wielding a massive axe. Dodging the first one to charge at his legs, Wrex canceled his shield and reached up, grabbing the shaft of the axe as it came down towards him, before a biotic-assisted punch caught the leaping krogan in the center of his chest, his fingers digging in until he found his claws wrapping around one of the krogan’s hearts. He tore it out with a vicious snarl, dumping the slightly older-looking krogan to his knees.
Holding the man’s still beating heart up above his head, Wrex waited until at least a dozen of clan Gatatog were looking at him before crushing it with a roar. With that, he picked up the older krogan up bodily, holding him up above his head and howling. “Is this your chieftain! That was pathetic!”
He slammed the other krogan to the ground face-first, releasing him to deal with several other attackers, grabbing up his shotgun from the ground and returning fire as they kept on firing at him, something they had been doing for a while. Their shots weren’t exactly all that well aimed, but now those shots started to add up, punching through his thick hide in numerous places, especially one that punctured one of his lungs.
Wrex could tell as his breath became just a little bit labored for a moment, as well as his stomach and side starting to pain him, before his biotic shield flared up again. Still, he was a krogan. Internal injuries like that, which didn’t hit his brain or eyes, could be healed and were in no way life-threatening. One lung gone, I’ve got three more.
With a low howl, Wrex closed his eyes for a brief second, cursing out his biotic shield with one portion of his mind, while the rest dove inward.
Contrary to his hopes, training with Herb, Wrex’s payment for this whole trip, had not involved what Herb called the martial arts and sparing, as their payments had evolved to include others on Tuchanka. Honestly, Wrex had thought that name was a little too namby-pamby for the sheer grit and passion of real close combat. Instead of dealing with fighting, though, his training with Herb had basically been meditation, meditating, specifically on ways to get in touch with Wrex’s own inner ki, as Herb called it.
Herb had mentioned several times that krogan all seemed to have a decent amount of it, so it was just a matter of getting in touch with it and using it consciously DIRECTING it.
Unfortunately, while meditating was hard for a human, for a krogan it was far harder. They had far too many instincts, far too many… not voices in their head, so much as whispers and instincts and desires pushing in from every direction. Humans had largely evolved beyond that by the time they picked up meditation. Krogan hadn’t actually evolved all that much in their tens of thousands of years.
Wrex could actually remember a time when he’d read a report on that kind of thing. It had been written by some froggy or other and had made for boring reading, but Wrex had a lot of time to kill after doing away with the STG team that he had been assigned to eliminate on the Shadow Broker’s orders. It had indicated that, evolutionarily speaking, the krogan had hit the jackpot so early that their mental faculties hadn’t really needed to change much over the various millennia to deal with their planet’s various predators.
Worse, meditating was hard for Wrex personally. He was almost a thousand, five-hundred years old, and, like most krogan, had reached maturity at fifteen, come into his biotics at thirty during his rite of adulthood, and been a War Leader at fifty-five with his own growing krantt. Wrex had built up a lot of memories since, and while he held his head up proudly when considering most of what he’d done over his life, that still left plenty of room for bad memories. Being on Tuchanka had brought a lot of the choicest of those bad memories to the fore, making meditation all the harder.
With all that, it was no wonder that Wrex had not been making good headway in meditation. That wasn’t to say that the three hours they’d spent meditating every day had not produced some results, though. As Herb had pointed out, while Wrex still couldn’t direct his ki healing where he wanted it to go, he was able to push out the energy that powered his regeneration somewhat, empowering it further. Although, I hope this lot brought some food with them. I’m going to be starving after this.
As several other krogan kept firing at him, his injuries began to heal. Not like they normally would for krogan, slowly in ten or fifteen minutes, but faster, faster even than a krogan with a human medi-gel pack, if not up to Herb’s level. In seven minutes, the hole made from a bullet that had penetrated his thick hide enough to puncture his lung had healed. When it did, Wrex let his biotic shield fall, and he roared as he charged forwards.
Moments later, as he stood over the bodies of yet another group of slightly-older-than-the-rest krogan, bellowing in challenge, he was answered with a roar from nearby. The last vestige of the mound of krogan that had dog piled Herb shifted, and Herb burst out of it, the entrails of a krogan he had literally torn in half in his hands, using them to smash other krogan out of his way.
“Is that it!?” he roared, echoing Wrex’s earlier words. “That was pathetic! Anyone else!?”
Of course, with krogan, as before, there was only one answer to such a challenge, and Wrex laughed wildly as the remnants of the clan charged in.
OOOOOOO
In the mountains around Clan Crona’s former holding, a STG Team Leader growled as he glared at the subordinate whose binoculars had seemed to catch their target’s attention a moment ago. “If you make a mistake like that again, I’m going to order you back to Sur’Kesh. If I’m in a good mood, you might not have a black mark on your record large enough for the high command to drum you out of the service.”
As the other salarian bowed his head in response, the chief operative shook his head, plans and counter plans and ideas going through his head. Brute force of any sort was not at all advisable, it seemed. But they still had their orders. “Get in touch with STG 9. Both of us have failed in the same manner at this point. We need to start coordinating our efforts here. At the moment, it looks like we’ll need to wait until they are in a space station again, unless they have another plan of some kind. Out this far away from any of the known larger clans, though, that’s doubtful.”
OOOOOOO
Eventually, the last of the attackers were down, groaning, legs broken enough their healing factor couldn’t carry them forward any longer. There had been no give in any of them, and Herb had to acknowledge that, at least. Their attacks on him hadn’t been smart or very well-organized, let alone directed, but Herb couldn’t argue with krogan courage against even insurmountable odds.
Indeed, the repeated hammering blows to his armor from the krogan shotguns had, surprisingly, actually started to dent his vambraces. The blows he had taken to his head had even knocked some of the electronics loose, making his suit’s Heads Up Display cut out.
For two hundred and forty krogan though, that was a remarkably low result. Pulling off his helmet and poking at the insides, more, because Herb wanted to do so than because he had any hope of actually fixing the electronics within, even Ranma hadn’t built them after all, he’d just installed them into the helmet, Herb spoke about that.
“Honestly, you would think that your folk would’ve learned after the first hundred or so went down. We’re in a valley. Retreat, bring up mortars, call down heavy fire on us from out of our line of sight. Your clans have access to that kind of thing. I have seen lots of examples of such since we arrived on this benighted planet,” Herb grumbled.
“Ha, benighted, yeah, because it birthed my race, brat,” Wrex guffawed, shaking his head. “Maybe if all of them hadn’t given themselves to their blood rage thanks to your flying lessons, one or two of them might’ve been able to think up some kind of tactic. But most of my people, like I’ve told you numerous times before, they don’t think like that.”
“What are we going to do with this lot now?” Herb asked after a second, staring all around them at the desolation the battle had wrought along the mountain side and down into the valley. Currently, the two of them were down near the shuttle, which, thankfully, hadn’t actually been targeted by any of the krogan. That would’ve been too intelligent, Herb thought wryly. “Should we call up their clan and order some of the youngsters to come and get them?”
Young krogan, those younger than fifteen, habitually worked for the clan in various ways before they hit maturity. That was very different from being an adult, though. For that, you had to go through a trial of passage, thus earning the right to use your clan’s name. The majority of the krogan here had yet, in Wrex’s opinion, to do that.
In this case, it would be those men who were not quite termed warriors who would probably need to bring the clan’s shuttles in. There were so many wounded, not counting the dozens of dead, that it was very unlikely the lot would be able to get back to their own town or village in any decent length of time. Neither Wrex nor Herb had gone out of their way to kill, but neither had they hesitated or altogether held themselves back from doing so. And right now, that meant a lot of wounded krogan who would eventually heal and then maybe try to attack them again, something that would be more of a chore than a joy to deal with.
“That’s a thought. Or…” Wrex began to grin. “We could get a few of them up and force them to go ahead of us to spring any more traps we run into.”
“Ooh, quite a nasty thought, that. And if this lot had damaged our shuttle to the point that it couldn’t fly, or had cost us more in terms of our supplies, I’d take you up on it. As it is, with these morons not even targeting the shuttle, I think it’s better to just get rid of them,” Herb answered, shaking his head.
“That’s no fun. But, I suppose it makes sense,” Wrex mocked.
Getting rid of them all took the rest of that day and most of the night as Clan Gatatog only had two shuttles to its name, both smaller than the one that Herb and Wrex had used to get down to Tuchanka’s surface in the first place. These shuttles could barely load four or five krogan at a time, hence why the clan had come over land despite the terrain in the area to their foolish attack on the two travelers.
However, eventually, the last of the surviving krogan were loaded aboard. The clan members were completely humiliated, without their clan chieftain or, indeed, many of his chief advisers having survived the attack, but they knew that continuing the battle now would just see them all wiped out, leaving their clan ripe for a hostile takeover.
Wrex ruefully acknowledged that they probably had at least made one blood feud that day, possibly more, depending on whether Clan Gatatog had been respected by its fellows or allied with any of them. “Which, thinking about it, I doubt. This attack was so poorly done it’s like they barely took any time to plan it out at all, and even my folk don’t look kindly on outright failure. Still, I wouldn’t doubt that Gatatog might be back at some point, depending on how long we're here for.”
“In that case, let’s get a move on quickly.” With that, Herb, scowling with distaste, picked up some of the bodies that had been left behind by the clan members. They’d only been interested in taking away the bodies of veterans, leaving most of the bodies, those of younger krogan who had yet to truly prove themselves beyond becoming adult, behind.
Well, I call them younger, but they're probably as old as a hundred or two hundred years old, Herb thought to himself with some amusement. You would think I would be used to thinking in those terms after so long with the asari, but sometimes it still gets to me how much longer the krogan and asari can live compared to humanity. Even with ki healing, the idea of living a thousand years is a bit beyond me.
“What are you doing?” Wrex asked, cocking his head to one side as Herb lifted up two of the more intact bodies.
“Your idea about using the Gatatog buffoons to clear our way was actually a good one. I simply objected to using them while they were alive, figuring keeping them around was more trouble than it was worth,” Herb explained with a cold smirk. “But their bodies can still be useful.”
Wrex blinked, then began to laugh. “Hahaha, I’m not sure if that’s simply pragmatic, or perhaps one of the most hilarious ways to deride your opponent I’ve ever heard.”
“When you decide which it is, get back to me. But for now, grab up some of the bodies yourself.” He looked up at the sky, shaking his head. “We’ve already been here a day and a half thanks to this nonsense. I want to get something good out of the day rather than just blaring and helping load up broken, still feebly trying to attack me krogan.”
Wrex snorted, but did what Herb suggested, grabbing up two of the bodies of his fellow krogan and heading up the mountainside after the shorter human. The damage to the series of semi-roads and terraces during the fight made this a little more difficult than before, but they still made it to the entryway leading into the tunnel.
It worked. Several hours and twelve bodies later, they finally opened the door, got through it, and did away with what they hoped were the last of the traps around it on the other side.
The city beyond the huge, carved doors, which Wrex had gone to some lengths to avoid damage to, was invisible beyond the edges of their lights. Little daylight could get down this far along the tunnel, and their lights, which had seemed so superfluous before, seemed inadequate the moment they moved past the door.
The area beyond was vast, and from what little they could see, it was a strange mix of ancient ruins and a well-preserved technological city. Looking around near the entrance, Wrex could see a lot of high-tech equipment, or at least, what had once been high-tech equipment. Just because the city had been sealed off from external access didn’t mean it had been preserved, or that the tech inside could match what was available to his people since the froggies came around.
Earthquakes and the atmosphere within the cave had meant that a lot of the various metal fixtures, lampposts and so forth they could see within a hundred yards of the entrance had fallen into complete and total disrepair. Yet for all of that, the architecture was still there. Buildings still rose along the main street, with at least two other tunnels leading away from the main cavern near the entrance.
Between those tunnels, and in front of the entrance, which must have been some kind of important meeting place, the cavern was largely open, except for two buildings to either side. They seemed to have been shaped like claws, the claws coming down from the ceiling, with dozens of smaller stalagmites growing underneath to make the ground uneven in a way that showed the age of this place. Beyond that, the next four buildings Wrex and Herb could point their lights to were carved to look like different types of trees, trees that had not been seen on Theodore in millennia.
Shifting his light from one building to another, Wrex stood there, staring at the city, shaking his head, feeling a sense of age around him as he had never felt on the Citadel or anywhere else in known space. That, and veneration. This place was built by krogan hands, back when we krogan could devote time to art, to culture beyond survival of the strongest and most numerous. What will it be like going forward?
He snorted then. Mind you, I don’t like the trees out of stone thing. But since this clan was known for its farms and whatever, I guess that can be expected. Oh, and I can also hear scuttling out there. Vermin extermination is going to be annoying going forward, as is lighting.
Herb was also looking around, more out of annoyance than anything else, even if that emotion was mainly directed inward. “How exactly are we going to do this? Just wander around until we find a place that has a computer or something?”
“Ehh… I don’t know. I’ve guarded a few archeological expeditions in my time, mostly places that had a few prothean ruins. But what to do about this…” Wrex frowned. “The shuttle should have some emergency lights and a generator. That can be a start.”
Herb grunted at that, and the two turned, leaving the area behind for a brief moment. Later, as they ascended back to the tunnel leading into Clan Crona’s lost city, Herb paused for a brief second, having seen some odd movement to one side. A second later, a small lizard crawled out of a rock, and he shrugged, turning his attention back to following Wrex.
Soon, the two emergency lights were wired to the emergency generator, flooding the city's interior with light. “That’s the best we’re going to get. Unless you want to bring in more krogan and thus resources?” Herb asked.
Wrex scowled, shaking his head. “No. If I did that, no matter which clan I brought in, others would hear about it. I’d prefer we find what you are after before this place is known to the rest of my people. My voice isn’t strong enough to stop them from fighting over this place. Not yet.”
Herb slowly nodded at that, not commenting. Whatever plans Wrex was making for the future, or what he planned for his greater ki-based healing skill, Herb had carefully not asked about up to this point. It was up to Wrex what he did with his knowledge of ki, not Herb’s.
Instead, Herb moved forward, looking at a wide, tall wall of worked stone set into the direct center of the main road leading down the center of Clan Crona’s city. It was massive, starting just beyond the open area by the entrance and casting a shadow so long it merged with the greater darkness. While the side pointing towards the entrance was blank, bar how well it had been smoothed down, the sides, as Herb moved to examine them, proved to be covered by murals, and a lot of words. Words which neither his omni-tool nor the surgically implanted chip could read. “This will do for a start, I think.”
Wrex joined him a second later and then began to curse. Herb stood; lips quirked into a wry smirk at the amount of invective that the Battlemaster released. It continued for some time, and as Wrex seemed to breath in for a moment, Herb interjected, “I take it we ran into yet another issue we did not foresee?”
“I can’t understand a fucking word! The written language here doesn’t match what little we krogan use today at all!! I can pick out the start of sentences, some words of exclamation or to denote questions but that’s it!”
For a moment, the implications of that didn’t sink in, and then Herb groaned, raising a hand to slowly rub his face in vexation. “Would that go for any and all records? Including any digital records we might discover?”
“YES,” Wrex growled, his eyes flickering like he was about to give in to his battle rage. “FUCK my eye sockets with yahg dicks, I didn’t consider that! This has all been for nothing!”
Herb shook his head, frowning a bit as he saw something further down the wall with the murals, just where the lot of the emergency lights by the entrance could no longer provide enough light on the murals to see. Shifting in that direction, he hummed, smirking. “Ah, convergent evolution is a thing then.”
“What?” The non-sequitur worked to break Wrex out of his rage, and he followed, frowning. “What’re you talking about?”
“Oh, just how amusing it is that both your planet and mine evolved squids,” Herb said with a shrug, before turning back to Wrex. “The solution is simple, if not within our grasp at present, Wrex. We simply take copies of everything we can. Then we find someone who can translate it for us.”
“Good luck. None of my people will,” Wrex said with a headshake. “All of Tuchanka converted to the modern language in our little written histories when the froggies Uplifted us.”
“Then it is good fortune that I have at least one name in the archeology field already,” Herb answered dryly. “We’ll have to go to her, and I imagine even just copying everything we see into video on our omni-tools will still take a while, but like much else, this problem can be solved.” With that, Herb lifted his arm and pointed his Omni-tool at the start of the mural near the entrance. “Start on the other side. The sooner we start, the sooner we can finish and move on.”
Wrex grunted, neither of them realizing they were being watched from beyond the lights near the entrance…
End Chapter
Okay, I am much happier now with the way this last bit came out. Once I got into the actual battle, I feel it went pretty well. I think I also showed that Wrex and Herb are both people of interest to the STG, if for very different reasons. I will show more from the salarians side in the next chapter before shifting back to Ranma and Tali now that Wrex and Herb’s Magnificent Adventure has caught up with the lovebirds in terms of chronology. I hope you all enjoyed this, despite the lack of Ranma-type shenanigans.