While conducting in-field operations, the term "beheading" is globally used to describe the elimination of elite Pathbearers or critical specialists for a specific operation of war.
Though critical points of interest themselves, beheadings rarely target army commanders due to usually being too guarded and fundamentally replaceable, even if their replacement is to be of a lower quality.
Instead, if the operation is built upon detection and evasion, then the beheading you must conduct is the preemptive elimination of their highest-tier Scout, or perhaps, in more specific situations, a Scout with the most applicable skill that counters your stealth specialists. In other circumstances, a beheading usually causes a cascading collapse in terms of morale damage, or the obliteration of an army in kind. Though the final circumstance is rare, it is still common enough when fighting swarm-type monsters who summon and use their offspring as expendable munitions and actual living shields.
Furthermore, when fighting monstrous Pathbearers, should the strongest of their number be cut down, the rest will likely scatter. For most lead through domination and fear, and the natural priority of an animal is to preserve its own life rather than fighting to further the ambition of its now-slain alpha.
A comparative, but not entirely equivalent, level of damage can be inflicted on individual adversaries, because even individual foes suffer severe moral damage when the strongest among them is cut down. Depending on culture and discipline, they might be able to fight on, but watching the most essential member of your force fall in combat will often render you mission ineffective. Thus, the only thing to do thereafter is to retreat or, in the worst case, surrender.
Remember this: never force your enemy to die fighting if you can help it. Your goal is not to kill every single enemy in those cases, but to eliminate them, to make them ineffective. Do not trade lives for life. Trade nothing and take everything from your foes.
Such is the philosophy behind these beheadings: to break your enemy's central focus before you are forced to contend with the mass of their body.
—In-Field Targeted Liquidations (Aviary)
VII-80
Trojan
A blanket of eternal night and fear fell upon the southeastern edge of the Moon’s Bones. The stratosphere-piercing walls of the Jotun borders were besieged without end for three days and three nights, though there was no difference between while they were trapped in that unnatural dark.
The darkness was an animated thing, a ravenous thing, a cruel thing. It moved like a sprawl of ink, gliding of its own will. When blocked from sight and sound, it disturbed every diviner who gazed into its depths, for it didn't hide, but it obscured.
It projected a wall of flame, a carrier of the System's favor, burning bright, descending upon the North. The moment Mulva glanced at it, her scream was heard. The voice of her gods speaking in trinary, all their breaths hitched in risen fear sounded within her.
“It is he. The System's undying war-slave has come. He comes in the shape of black and red. He comes, the trespasser, the butcher, the undying of the South, seeking to devour the beast of his likeness—the Endhound that rages in our cage.”
The voice of the Child, the Crone, and the Warrior spoke on, and it pulsed through not only Mulva, but all others who were imbued with the Path of the Prophetess. Thus, the North stood on guard, prepared for an attack to burst free from the black, prepared to slay the Deathless as he came upon them time and time again.
He proved an insidious, calculated, and economical foe. He didn't throw himself against the Moon's Bones like a base beast. Instead, he simply held his curtain high, banishing the light of the sun and spreading wider, staining the weakest numbers among them with fear.
The slaves had to be drawn back, for their dread fueled the crawling blackness, and it swelled until it was a full fifty kilometers in length—only stopped from crawling further by repeated sacrifices of lives and struggle.
The first to be cast into the black by the Bone Guard were the expendable slaves: Janissaries stolen from this world and swallowed whole, humans, elves, goblins, and the wretched machine-kind, devoid of purified flesh—unable to inherit the mantle of the Pale.
This proved to be a mistake.
The Janissaries were well-trained by those who walked the Path of the Kennel-Master. But though their discipline was true and they remained bound by spell-chains and mental conditioning, so too did a fear burn inside them. A fear that couldn't be denied and fed the black.
As the blessed Cryomancers shaped siege towers out from the Moon's Bones, the Janissaries went sailing across, galloping in their ordered formations, ten thousand at a time, flanked by spell and Paleborn dimensionals. Even so, charge after charge, they walked into the black born of that trespasser's shade of dread and null, and none came back. None found what they sought.
Through the eyes of the war slaves, the Kennel-Masters glimpsed a horrid truth: the darkness was not to be so easily penetrated. So long as one feared, the dark grew, and even those braver than most could only struggle and writhe in an attempt to tear the denseness of the shadows that surrounded them. Then there was that which resided in the black, that which melted into the black itself, with there being no difference at the core. Yet every difference had to be made if they were to strike down their looming foe.
Five assaults and 85,000 missing Janissaries later, the Jotun themselves took to the field, and so came Mulva, dubbed the Falconress by her kind. With her Biomancy and Awareness bound, she had a habit of reshaping the flesh of her pretties. She was different from the others. She was a Prophetess at heart, but she dabbled in the field of a Kennel-Master from time to time. Others here called her the Scout Matron, for she had spent almost three centuries on these walls.
Serving the Moon's Bones was not kind to the Jotun. It was not kind to anyone. The butchers of the South sometimes tested their defenses, and they never found the Moon's Bones or its guardians wanting, but that price, like today, was paid in blood and toil. She would give her blood, toil, and love to see that which lay behind her guarded from all the tainted hands of the blighted flamebloods that littered this world as locusts.
On the sixth assault, Mulva placed her falcons at the center of the ensemble. The outer edges were now led by Vanguards—proper warriors, their minds boosted by Psychomancy, Pyromancy, and Psychology skill fusions, ensuring that they knew only passion and fervor rather than any kind of fear. Their bodies were further coated in dense plates of Hulfrost, allowing the Pale to guard them from spell and steel alike. Even so, they made peace with their deaths. They composed their funeral songs and offered them to those they cherished before mounting their steeds and assuming their arms.
With the oppressive darkness now creeping over the southeastern walls, the plan was simple: using the fearlessness imbued upon their warriors, they would drive the black back, and then they would tear the darkness down the middle until they found the perpetrator and fed him to the winter eternal. With them would fly Mulva's falcons: humans, elves, and goblins, granted hollowed bones and feathered wings, and empowered by her Biomancy, but more importantly, trained to her love.
She stood over them, thrice their height, as she scattered their favorite food down, watching with joy as they pecked at offerings. She reveled in the control. She reveled in the affection she'd trained them to feel toward her. She knew then that it would be her glory on this day. It would be her blood, her toil, her sacrifice, conducted through her falcons.
Something nearing sadness ached inside her heart, but she pinned it down and slaughtered it, as she did the weakest of her children on high. She whispered to her falcons, "Fly true! Fly! As you carry my heart, I carry your burdens. Fly and lift me with you!"
Her falcons shrieked, their voices rising as a keening wail in this ever-present night. When the klaxon sounded and the call went out for them to charge once more, it was her falcons that speared past even the line of the Vanguards. It was her falcons that moved the fastest, that tore the deepest. It was her falcons that tunneled their way through dread and null, fighting inch after inch until they reached the core, until they exposed the clearing at the center.
There was no darkness there, no Deathless either. Instead, it was a small temple hovering above. A temple that emitted a stream of blinding light into the sky. That light fell, and it immolated everyone who dared reach through the black. And though they were seared and branded in a way, no harm came to their flesh.
But then fell the arrows, shards of blazing incandescence. They struck and burned, obliterating warriors from within. They combusted while their Magical Resistances failed, and the temple, though small as a hill, was immediately retaliated upon by artillery and spell. Colossal blasts of frost capable of gouging the land down to the bedrock exploded in massive snowflakes. Cleaving winds capable of shearing the horizon free of clouds crashed down upon the temple in razor-sharp tsunamis. Then came the foulness of the frozen flame. The flame was purified by the Pale, but the flame was enslaved. Nonetheless, it detonated in pockets of solidified fire, burning everything trapped within its blast.
All to no avail. The temple drifted on. That small hill remained unmarred, the tessellating materials that made up the pagoda and the figure within utterly unblemished as Mulva's falcons ascended upon it, their bodies turning hard with frost, their blood pounding rich with impending violence.
They slammed down upon the temple, seeking to wrench its thunder from the soil to the stone, but then they froze, for they touched the mists, and suddenly a dire, fouler will took hold inside of them. They were stripped of their ability to conduct violence.
Though Mulva was not severed of her command, she cried for her children to continue attacking, to heed her orders. She cried that she loved them, that they needed to overcome all for her, for the Pale, for the Crone, the Warrior, and the Child. But though her voice carried, her will did not, for what was natural once now became an impossibility, and through them she felt that effect. That intrusive peace. It was, in a word: tyrannical. Beyond her ability to dissuade.
And so the small temple drifted on in the black, but something in the darkness shifted. Something behind them congealed and sealed, and then the the Vanguards began to die en masse. They were struck by something heavy and fast tearing through the air and painting the gaps they made in the black. Most of them didn't even get a chance to fight back, but the Prophetesses—the warrior Prophetesses that ventured out among them—gave cries of warning, though their portents were vague and unhelpful.
And then, from the other side, came scintillating fire, one that burned mana and flashed hot like a molten scream. As the flame stained her chains, those links of biomancy which tethered her to her falcons, her magic was ignited until it fell away from her in crystallized chunks.
The agony was like that of a slave being pressed against a stove. A second, keening wave arose into the air, but this time there were no falcons to utter that scream. This time the voices that sang were those of the magi manning the Moon's Bones, for they all shared in mutual strain, and then the Prophetesses in the walls began to die. Warriors, scoutmasters, leaders, and elites. They fell as the Vanguard fell—in perfect tandem; the sheer chaos caused by the timing made it hard to uncover just what was happening in the moment.
It was only when the Pale began howling that Mulva understood, but she understood too late to stop a blade from punching into the base of her skull and chiseling until Necromancy-touched metal kissed the softness of her brain.
But the giantess had suffered wounds aplenty while training her falcons, and thus she shed this flesh of hers, ejecting her new body out from the desiccated husk of the old. She found herself weaker, more vulnerable, but spared of death for once, even as she crashed out, sloppy and naked, slick with the umbilical fluids of her restorative Toughness Skill. As she tumbled down the steps, crashing into other Jotunn, there came a shadow that blurred over her—and then it was gone, but in its wake descended a rain of severed limbs and ruptured organs, and the screaming grew louder as the butchery continued. The darkness slammed down fully upon the southeastern wall, imprinting itself hard as the warriors who held fear at bay were assassinated one after another.
Terror rose once more, like an unwelcome flame, upon the bones of fallen frost. Terror in Mulva. Terror in all the warriors, more than just the Janissaries.
The first line was collapsing, and the only thing they could do now was to call a retreat.
“No!” the Pale screamed inside the Prophetess. “Stand! Fight! They cannot reach in! They cannot be allowed to trespass into our domain! Fight and die! Your place in the Pale is guaranteed if you do. Guard the Pale. Guard these walls. Give all you have for all that remains of our home.”
And so, bolstered by purpose beyond dread, Mulva rose once more as she tried to call her falcons back, but the moment she used her Biomancy, she nearly went down again as a spasm of exquisite agony cast her into the throes of a seizure. It had been years since she'd strained her magic to such a breaking point. It had been years, and never so severely.
As Mulva wrestled to retain control over her body, she saw him for the first time: the Deathless, or at least one of his vessels. He touched down upon the walls. Towering and black, like the manifestation of darkness itself and the shadows born of dread, and all peeled out from him in a flowing cape that ascended upward into the sky. Beside him was someone else, a man no less haunting of presence, a visage of death that radiated with unnatural energy, who appeared without warning. There seemed to be something wrong with him, for his body, too, was stained with the incandescence cast by the star that hovered over the temple.
Thereafter, two more joined the intruders. The first was a tar-black figure that burst out from the desiccated corpse of a towering frost giant, slicing through him with a long dagger like there was nothing in the way. That flowing tar was unmistakable to Mulva. This was the Deadly in the flesh, and out from her shadow stepped another. A manifestation of Harlock the Midnight, perhaps.
Mulva understood then: The Republic’s gods had begun their onslaught—
But then came the sun, oh, that terrible, horrible sunrise that the darkness had been hiding all this time. Dawn followed that ever-night, and dawn fell upon Mulva, burning her to the soul, inscribing its hateful awareness upon her like a permanent immolation she couldn't shake. And now she was to share a fate with her kindred and falcons.
Or so Mulva thought. Instead of continuing the slaughter, they sent the Deathless and the Undying alongside the departed once more, disappearing as one, as a darkness swept down to envelop them, hiding their departure. The silence that followed was broken only by moans of pain and cries of terror and anguish. After that, for no reason at all, the pall that terrorized the southeastern section of the Moon's Bones drew away, drifting into the distance like storm clouds come and passed.
But though the darkness fled, the light endured. The temple remained hanging in the sky above. And to top it, a gleaming star burned bright, and it stayed there just beyond the borders of the cleaved North, watching, waiting, glaring. And Mulva felt the essence of its eyes. It burned inside of her. It stained her deep, and she realized her soul wasn’t fully hers any longer.
The Tyrant-Paragon has cast his glare upon you…
The weight of a hostile god pressed down on Mulva—an unwelcome weight that seeped into her soul and torched the essence of the Pale. The avatar of the fallen moon cried out, and the Crone answered in kind. Mulva felt her body ignite with foul flame as she was boiled once more, but this time, a divine fire spread out from her—sickening fire that enervated her flesh and soul to empower a godly spell to follow.
But though Mulva shriveled and withered, she felt herself plunge deeper into the Pale’s embrace, and knew she had done enough—that she was worthy of resting in the Garden of the Pale Moon, Whole and Eternal in the Fated Tomorrow.
The last thing the Falconress saw before her flesh flaked apart were other fires blasting up into the sky—tainted flames devouring her kindred who tried to comprise a swirling dimensional spell to capture the divine weapon left on the field by the enemy. Before her gaze went blank, the sky went dark again as a fiery dimensional spell turned to brightest frost and then shattered, leaving nothing in its wake.
No temple.
No glaring star.
No Mulva.
Only hope, and then null.
***
360 km away, ensconced secretly within her Divination center at the heart of Fortress-City Vermind, the architects of the Tarrasque Elimination Force studied the aftermath of their first true shaping operation.
Scenes were re-enacted in vivid detail upon a ten-meter-long Diviner's table. From light and sand, the shape of the Moon's Bones was replicated, and every individual Pathbearer on the enemy side that had been detected was also simulated in kind. They littered the outer platforms of the wall's first layer, swarming out like wasps, preparing to defend their frozen hide. Veronica watched from the second-floor balcony alongside the other Avatars as a patch of simulated darkness drew away.
Shiv, Harlock, Valor, and Daughter had escaped without any trouble. But more importantly, the first infield test of the Paragon's Legendary Skill had taken effect. Even after the others were extracted, thousands of Jotun and war slaves alike remained cast in that azure glow. The Lord of Gate Piety had left the brand of his Awareness upon them, and even after turning his gaze aside, the fire of his knowing still burned.
His Immolating Omniscience burned so blindingly bright that not even the System could hide how severe his power was, and a faint flicker of mist bled through the ones he marked—a representation of his power, one that went deeper than mana itself, or so it was suggested. And it wasn't just the enemy that burned. When Valor disappeared, an imprint of him still lingered in space, flitting every few seconds as his peerless Stealth Skill struggled against the boy's Awareness.
The fact that there was a struggle at all was a horrifying thing. The sheer potency possessed by the young Demigod’s newest skill was such that even Veronica found herself unnerved.
The simulation played on as spells and distant projectiles smashed into Adam's flying temple. It all proved to be for naught. It suffered no harm. It abided by no violence and simply continued hovering forth, sliding slowly northward past the first layer of defenses, then into the second, and with a third following thereafter, dragging the incandescent star above with it.
And then, at long last, the beasts of the North committed to that final mistake. They formed a dimensional cage around Adam's heaven and sealed it away into a pocket plane of their own choosing. In doing so, they sealed their own fate as well, for though they trapped the Paragon's Temple, the Deathless was still attached to it via a temporal anchor. He could arrive and begin performing reconnaissance behind enemy lines at any point. The Dimensionalists of the North were passable in Veronica's opinion, but if they thought they could deny her or those she'd personally trained, theirs was hubris unmatched.
"At least it's still affected by magic, just nothing related to destruction or violence." Despite the success of their operation, Veronica couldn't shake the coldness building inside. She couldn't help but see Yellowstone or the rest of the Republic in place of the North. She couldn't help but imagine what might follow if the Paragon was allowed to crusade across the lands using that indestructible temple—forever bathed in the glorious light of his beaming Awareness.
As usual, Shiv was understating events happening back within Gate Piety. But Veronica's in-Gate agents had also failed to express just how extreme an evolution Adam Arrow had experienced. And it was more than just this skill. The Ascendants felt his advancement into the threshold of demigodhood. Kathereine was besieged with visions dispatched to her directly from the System, portraying scenes and new scripture information of the Tyrant of Peace facing the Beast of Strife within his own realm, piercing the bleak and war-torn skies beneath an invasive, imperialistic sunrise.
The System then gifted Veronica with the tome as well: The Unfinished Testament of the Tyrant-Paragon.
The pages were still being filled, but the contents that were already there left Veronica shaken. Not only was Adam Arrow embarking on a path to godhood, but it was a truer, or at least more antediluvian, godhood than that which the Ascendants had seized. Furthermore, the Phylactery the Starhawk had procured for Adam was something else entirely as well. Then there was the way he changed to embody the nature of his subjects. Right now, Adam Arrow resembled an orc, an orc with long flowing red hair and a bright, incandescent left eye, sporting a band of sky-blue wrapped around his brow.
The likely cause of his changed appearance was perhaps the part that worried Veronica the most. Gate Piety suddenly had an army again. The temporary discord between them and the Challenger had evolved into something else, and two million orcs had turned away from the Red Rider. Perhaps it was a bargain struck, or perhaps the words within the Testament were actually true, and some of the grayskins truly sought a new path to follow.
Whatever the case, Gate Piety was experiencing as explosive a growth as her grandson who called it home. That growth needed to be observed and contained. Even now, those who operated as eyes and ears within the Gate reported on the new budding alliance between representatives from Lone Star and Gate Piety. There was also ample evidence to suggest the Descender's Union, High Harbor’s Dragon Brokers, and Weave especially were more than intent on joining this little endeavor as well.
Of course, there was also the invasion on the horizon, with the Quest update indicating the Challenger's involvement, but Veronica erred on the side of consistency. Despite the power of the Challenger, she didn't think he wanted to destroy Gate Piety. No, if the Testament was right, he had a nemesis to cultivate now, and this struggle would feed the Gate more strength than it took.
Given more time and no restrictions, what might become of Gate Piety, and how great of a threat would it pose against the Yellowstone Republic?
“I warned you of this,” Kathereine seethed inside her granddaughter. “I told you we should have finished that boy off and then seized the Deathless vessel that remained by force.”
“If it were only so simple,” Veronica replied, her tone dry. “Though he's content to allow his creation to suffer, Udraal will not abide if we interfere in his experiment too vulgarly.”
“Then we strike him down!” Kathereine whined more than she bellowed. “Then we gather our power—”
“And humiliate ourselves once again, destroying one of his expendable vessels by trading half a dozen valuable Avatars and risking him dealing actual damage to you or your Domains?” Veronica scowled internally. “No. And just years prior, you would have told me differently—you would have commanded that I beguile Gate Piety and resolve matters through the softest force possible.”
“There is no softness of force that will allow us to fix what has been unbalanced,” the Songbringer pushed. “The Starhawk has done this. The Starhawk will be the death of our Republic.”
Veronica paused as her thoughts suddenly inverted. Why was she so intent on viewing Adam Arrow as an invading force? The boy still loved the Republic; he might not trust Veronica or the Ascendants, but he would not inflict torments upon the people or revel in the destruction of the nation. If nothing else, he would intervene should the Pale or the gods of the South sound their war-drums.
And more importantly, the Paragon was a stable Demigod who functioned without being affected by the Great One’s legend—at least so far. “We are looking at this wrong. He is not going to be our enemy, but our evolution.”
“Him?” Kathereine spat. “That Godling wretch spewed from Roland’s loins?”
Veronica ignored her grandmother—and mentally repressed her subsequent diatribe on how Roland was a fool to resist her those years ago, and that she could have made specific parts of his flesh sing. Of course, to make such an impossibility happen, she needed to act through an expendable Avatar, as Veronica would never demean herself to serve as a mating conduit—and Roland would have been utterly unwilling besides.
But unwillingness was never a deterrent for Kathereine’s lusts. She would sing, the sound would take root, and minds resistant would become yearning bodies for a time, until the sound in the skulls grew dim, and the darkness of what was done to them followed.
Such was the Songbringer’s degeneration—to go from a Legendary diplomat and songstress that stood at the heart of the Republic to a depraved crone of undeniable power.
Yet, that might not be an inevitable fate, for the longer Veronica regarded Adam’s visage, the higher her hopes climbed. If the Starhawk could create a new and untainted Ascendant, then what will it take to purify the old? And should that be impossible, could Veronica engender new Ascendants all her own as a recourse?
“No,” Kathereine said, trying to dissuade Veronica from a reasonable course of action. “You will not do this! You will not see us replaced!”
“I will see you made better, grandmother, as you would have wanted when you were whole,” Veronica replied.
A pulse of dimensional mana sent a tingle across her field; the Trojan team were back. She teleported herself the very next second to meet them outside their designated anchor.
“And besides, I want to take the measure of Young Lord Arrow myself,” Veronica said as she arrived outside a set of opening doors in a burst of static mana. “I grow weary of making firm enemies with nothing to show for it; I think it’s time that the Republic sinks itself into Gate Piety as well.”
For if they wish to establish a coalition to defend themselves from invasion, then I will teach them the measure of using politics as a sword and a shield, Veronica finished internally as Shiv and the others emerged. Mutual interests are not so easy to arrange and ensure, boy. But worry not, I will educate you in this theater most promptly.
“They bit,” Shiv grunted as he saw her. “Adam thinks his temple is somewhere deep in the Pale’s territory now. Not sure if the Tarrasque is anywhere nearby, but he still has full Awareness radiating from everyone he immolated.”
At this, Shiv turned to regard Valor with a look of wariness. The old Legend was dim for now, but Veronica still felt the soft and slumbering touch of Divinity upon him—a Divinity that might have compromised his greatest skill.
Judging from how he held himself, this outcome likely wasn’t expected on his part nor the Paragon’s—especially not in active battle.
“He is still inexperienced with his powers,” Kathereine hissed. “He is no substitute for us.”
I never imagined him to be a replacement, grandmother—just a cure. Or a model.
“Your recommended strategy has unfolded better than I assumed.” Veronica held to an indifferent facade as she addressed him, keeping her expression blank. “And there is no indication they suspect anything is amiss?”
“I do not believe so,” Anthony answered—though there was something in his gaze that hinted at a personal discussion between him and the rest of the Council right after. Doubtless something to do with Valor Thann’s compromise. “We kept the Evangelizing Temple’s approach well-masked in advance; the Deathless mixed in his Pyromancy with its gaze. When the Jotun finally pushed their way in, its image as a divine weapon was well portrayed. Things should proceed as expected.”
“Good,” Veronica said. “I will convene the Council and issue subsequent edicts. The Prismatic Guard will be placed on high alert—orders will be issued to all commanders to be prepared for a move on the North. Time to see if they can be forced into a mistake born of haste. Have the elimination team double their drills in the meantime; if all goes well, then our target will soon be close at hand.”
“Seems like the reward for performing well is more work right after,” Shiv playfully pouted.
“Not reward: Necessity,” Veronica corrected. “And speaking of necessity, I ask that you dispatch an honor guard to receive me in a day’s time. I will be personally visiting Gate Piety.”
Practically everyone did a double-take at that—which was the desired outcome. She had consulted no one before making the decision, after all.
As said, mistakes are easily born of haste.
“You—why?” Shiv muttered.
His paranoia was valid, but pointless. “Because I want to offer my regards to our newest Ascendant-to-be.”
Anthony’s pupils dilated. Shiv’s body language screamed of reactive violence, but he didn’t know how or where to use it.
“He is no Ascendant, Legend Chandler,” Valor rebuked. “And you will not envelop my disciple in your schemes.”
“No schemes,” Veronica said, hiding a quiet lie in a louder truth—nothing was in motion yet, but soon, they just might be. “And you are right; I apologize. But a new and proper Demigod born of our Republic is a thing to celebrate, is it not?”
“Our Republic that tortured him and betrayed his home,” Shiv added coolly.
“Our Republic which must now face its past actions and settle things properly,” Veronica pushed. “Despite sour emotions, I think neither of us are in any state to reject an outreach of deeper cooperation—for we have enough adversaries in wait already, do we not?”
To that, Shiv was left with tension, but no true rebuttal.