“You’re first choice is that you tell me everything I want to know. This will earn you a painless death. The other is that me and the boys here make your life very painful. We’ll keep you alive using Heal, and when we think we’ve gotten as much as we can from you, we’ll hand you over to the women. Kos, remind me what the women do to shit-sitter prisoners again?” I said coldly.

  “Will you be taking his balls this time?” asked Kos in a thoughtful voice as we stood in a circle around the bound man.

  “Would they prefer it if we didn’t? I’m sure we can chop something else off instead,” I replied.

  “Tell me what you want to know!” cried Julpast, earning snorts of derision from the Fangs.

  “When were you made? I mean, when did you get your Souls from Mortimer?” I snapped as I crouched down by his head. I had a hand on my dagger, ready to kill him if he tried to use any magic. I was hoping he was out of mana from the fighting, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “King Mortimer selected me nine months ago. I was champion in the fighting pit, and I caught his eye as a candidate for godhood!” he babbled.

  “Godhood?” Mune asked from the other side, making the blindfolded man swivel his head about wildly.

  “The Path of Ascension. Didn’t your lord explain it to you?” he said fearfully.

  “What did he tell you?” I demanded. “Some things are meant to be kept secret!” I shared a grin with the Fangs, who suppressed their chuckles.

  “Only that I could one day walk in the company of gods! I’d be stronger and faster, quicker than a mere mortal could ever hope to be, but I had to worship him and be loyal!” I glanced up as the smiles on my friends' faces had turned to sneers.

  “You worship him?” asked Kos quietly. He was crouched near the man's head, and Julpast craned his neck back to point his face in the direction of the words.

  “My king is a demigod,” he stuttered.

  “Does he answer your prayers? Is he answering them now?” Jandak demanded, and Julpast flinched at the voice of the man who beat him down.

  “Not right now,” Julpast said bitterly, earning harsh laughter from Jandak.

  “He lied to you, and you know it. What kind of army is he sending to us? Just swarms of undead?” I demanded.

  “N- no Lord. He has thousands of mortal soldiers, tens of thousands! A cadre of wizards numbering in the thousands and hundreds of powerful Soulbound! He has nightmarish monsters the size of palaces and siege engines that can rain fire from afar! He- He’s unstoppable, Lord. Please, I beg you! Make peace with him and allow my family to pay my ransom! They’ll make you rich beyond the dreams of these savages. You’d be as wealthy as one of the Divines deserves to be!”

  I stepped back and walked away for a minute. This bloke would die, none of his temptations or pleas would change that, but he had already given me some food for thought.

  “Pah! What are these monsters compared to our Titans?” said Kos in a derisory voice.

  “That fiend is big, but it’s just a mortal form. The abominations eat what they kill and grow bigger and stronger! They’d eat that overgrown Ur-vile as a snack!” Jelpast replied, a touch of confidence entering his voice. “Maybe you’d like to think about my off-” I kicked him in the head, knocking him unconscious.

  “He was annoying me as well, but we were just getting somewhere!” complained Jandak as he stood up and stretched his legs.

  “Huh. The guy deserved more than a kick in the head! Divines? Souls leading to becoming gods? What an idiot!” Kos said, but he shot me a questioning look.

  “I don’t know about that. Next time Aresk has a chat with me, I’ll ask him, but it sounds like indoctrination to me,” I muttered as I paced up and down. Then I explained what indoctrination meant, and they nodded sagely. I shifted my pauldron slightly and glanced down at the unconscious soulbound. “What about the monstrosities? Anything like that in your old stories?” I asked.

  “Things the size of houses that eat stuff and get bigger?” asked Mune with a raised eyebrow as he waved a hand at Mulius.

  “I represent that,” the Titan complained.

  “Resent, bloke. And no, you bloody don’t! The only way you'll get bigger is if you get fat from all the zombies you’re going through!” I replied. Mulius lowered his right hand and tried to drop the fistful of zombies he’d been raising to his mouth behind him without us noticing.

  “I thought they gave you the shits?” asked Jandak.

  “Still better than nothing,” muttered Mulius as he wiped his hand on the fur on his leg.

  “That was good work with the Spatial Tear spell, reversing their spells back at them,” I told the Fangs. Kos looked pleased with himself, so I figured it was my brother-in-law who had made it work. “Same with you, Mulius, throwing the bodies into the bolts and detonating them early. We will need to include that kind of information in the after-action briefing. Stuff like that will save lives when we head south.”

  “None of you can chuck zombies like I can,” Mulius said with a chuckle.

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  “No, but we can build machines to do something similar. Launch a bunch of pebbles into the spell's path, and it will have the same effect!” I said. Julpast groaned and tried to roll over, but his bindings stopped him, so he just twitched and spasmed in place.

  “My dinner is waking up,” rumbled the titan with a wink at me.

  “Welcome back, Julpast. How has Mortimer got so fucking many dead men wandering about?” I nudged him with a foot, demanding.

  “They aren’t just men! The God-King slaughters the cities that resist, and his necromancers go through afterwards and raise the armies. He’s burned Kant, Grotisk, Suramb! Dozens more smaller cities! That's where the dead come from!” gasped Julpast.

  “What about these monsters you were talking about? Think they could fight me?” boomed Mulius. It was nice that the big guy was getting involved, and to be honest, I approved of the question.

  “They’re… shapeless things. Mounds of flesh that shift and change! I don't know how the necromancers make them!”

  “How many of them are there?” I asked. I had some extra Souls. I needed to spend a considerable amount of Souls getting some people to a high enough level that they could craft Spatial Tear trinkets for the Legion and the nomad riders. Still, I’d need a counter if old Morty the God-King had hundreds of beasts more terrifying than Mulius. I glanced up and decided that at worst, they’d be as terrifying as Mulius.

  “Dozens!” Julpast barked as Mune put a spear tip next to his groin when he hesitated to answer. Mune applied a little pressure to the spear.

  “I only saw one! But I was told there were many more! They’ve been fighting against the Sacrent to the west of the Kashic Sea!” he babbled, and Mune pulled the spear back.

  “How many people is he at war with?” I asked.

  “Everyone, but it’s hardly war! No one can stand against our divine might! Do you think you could be persuaded to let me go? My family really will pay you handsomely!”

  “Who is he at war with? Which countries?” I demanded kneeling down, making him wince as my voice got closer to his face.

  “Sacrent in the south west, the Riktan to the east. You, of course, and the Crath confederacy rejected his emissaries in spring, so if they aren’t at war yet, they will be soon!” This was too easy. I leaned even closer.

  “I might keep you alive. I’d have to blind you so you couldn’t cast magic, of course. That way, if anything you’ve said turns out to be false, I could make you regret lying to me.”

  A fire spirit flashed into existence and attacked me, but I ignored it. The others danced backwards, but the summon was entirely focused on me, and fire didn’t hurt me anymore.

  “That wasn’t very smart, mortal.” I was beginning to understand how Mortimer had seemingly come to drink his own Kool-Aid. God-King! What an arse.

  My new tunic was a smoking ruin as I stood back up and kicked him in the head again to knock him out as the spirit faded away.

  “So what’s the plan?” asked Kos.

  “I think we wait for the rest to catch up and move on Hellath in force. It seems like Mortimer is stretched thin fighting too many enemies at once, but there might be another ambush. It would be his style,” I said bitterly.

  “You knew him well, back in your world?” asked Jandak as he heaved the prisoner over one shoulder and carried him away from the camp. He tied him to a tree with yet more wire. “We should take his eyes. Just to be safe?” he looked over at me, and I shrugged. Jandak pulled out his dagger and used it to lift Julpast’s blindfold.

  “Glimpse will eat them if you don’t break them too badly,” I said absentmindedly. “I didn’t know him back home. The first time I met him was a minute or two before Fish Tits killed me to send me here. I know he wasn’t a nice man., though.” I sat down and put my elbows on my knees. “He was a rich man. Powerful but not like your nobles. Like a landowner, I guess.”

  “Who can own land? If I’m here, this is my land!” Mune replied happily.

  “It’s not like that at home. Everything is owned and controlled. There are too many of us for it to be any other way. He owned a lot of homes. Dirty, unsafe homes that ended up killing a lot of people.”

  “How could a yurt kill someone?” asked Kos with a confused expression. He pulled his spear over and started sharpening it with a whetstone he kept in a belt pouch.

  “They weren’t yurts… It doesn’t matter. He was a shady bastard who skirted the law and could afford to get away with it," I replied. “He’s a schemer and manipulator, that’s what I’m trying to say. I don’t know how much we can trust what that-that now eyeless bloke said.” Glimpse was swooping down to pick up the globular treats Jandak had left on the grass nearby. “You cast a Heal on him, right?” I asked as Jandak sat down next to Kos.

  “Yeah, he won’t bleed out. If you want me to put a tourniquet on his neck, I can do that?” Jandak said, and Mulius boomed with laughter, causing us all to look up.

  “You don’t know what a tourniquet is!” Mune accused, and the Titan raised a hand that he waved about his throat.

  “Don’t need to. It wouldn’t have helped him, am I right?” he asked.

  “Well, yeah,” said Kos. Mulius chuckled happily to himself as he rose and began to move about, crouched over.

  “What the hell are you looking for?” I asked. He found a relatively intact corpse and scooped it into his mouth.

  “Food. Do you see any mammoths around here? You’ve stopped me from eating dwarves and Huskar!”

  “Fine.” I dismissed the hungry monster from my thoughts. “So, do we give him to the women? See if they can get anything out of him? He won't be able to aim his spells now, but he could still summon the fire spirit while blindfolded.”

  “I say we end him. Useless piece of shit. He didn’t even fight with honour,” grumbled Jandak.

  “He might be useful?” offered Kos, but Mune snorted and stood up.

  “How, Kos? He’s a blind weakling! We know our enemy is at war on multiple fronts. You can’t raid in every direction and expect to survive. Graben taught us that when we were boys!” Mune snapped.

  “I don’t think he’s much use to us anymore, and he’s still dangerous.” I strode over and slid my dagger through his temple.

  Soulbound servant slain x1

  Twenty Souls harvested.

  “Can I eat him now?” asked Mulius hopefully.

  “No!” we all shouted back. The Titan snorted and continued searching for more zombie bodies.

  “The rest of the tribes and the Legions should catch up to us late tomorrow.” I sent Glimpse winging north at the same time as I reached out and found Wilson was harassing the nearby swarms, toying with them to draw some out, then chomping on their skulls and repeating the process. I didn’t summon him back. There weren’t any human forces in the area, so he could have fun fighting the undead.

  “I think I need more Titans,” I muttered and pulled up my Life affinity screen. One thousand Souls for a single level in a spell? Bloody hell. Burning Skies was only three hundred per upgrade.

  I spent the Souls and looked at my companions.

  “Any of you want to join Mulius as Shaped Soulbound?” I asked, half jokingly.

  “No fucking way!” barked Jandak as he scooted away from me.

  “I was kidding. I’m sure there’s another Huskar who’d be willing to volunteer…” I said.

  “Damn right there will be! They’ve seen how impressive I am, you’ll be fighting them off with a tree trunk when they find out there’s another slot,” called Mulius from the middle of the battlefield.

  “Guys got good ears,” whispered Kos.

  “Yeah. I do, you shortarse!”

  “I don’t think I want to use mammoth meat as a substrate this time,” I pondered aloud. I ignored their asking what a substrate was.

  “Are there any Vile-cat lairs around here?”

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