As James and the Panther Scout whose body he inhabited watched in stunned silence, chunks of the Pantherfolk who had been blown apart flew in all directions, spattering everyone in the vicinity with blood and guts.
The other Pantherfolk froze, looking back and forth between each other and Viktor’s crew, suddenly afraid to advance, waiting for someone else to make the first move.
They aren’t much braver than humans either, James thought. Intelligence has killed some of their bestial instinct.
James could see that the strange enemy implosion attack had taken a lot out of Viktor. All the physiological signs of weakness were there. His body swayed slightly. He had turned visibly paler. A vein in his temple pulsed violently with every breath he took.
But the ex-con at least had the ability to act like everything was all right.
“Back off, or I’ll blow the next guy up, too!” Viktor yelled in a harsh voice, pointing with his sword from one Pantherfolk to the next.
The stones on that guy… James was fairly certain that this Skill had either some sort of cooldown or too steep a cost for Viktor to use it again immediately. No matter what, no one else was getting blown up. The Pantherfolk just needed to rush him to secure the win.
They all held back. Only the Panther Scout, still hidden, circled around, looking for a good angle to strike.
Against his will, James was impressed with Viktor.
Maybe I judged Dean too harshly for keeping him.
Viktor and his comrades stepped in closer to each other, and Dean’s group began to back away from the confrontation.
The Pantherfolk moved to follow them, but Viktor spoke up again.
“Stay back,” he snarled, leaning slightly on one of the other men beside him. “I’ll kill every last one of you if it’s the last thing I do!”
With the other fighters pressed in close all around Viktor, even the Panther Scout could not find a good angle where he might be able to reliably aim for an assassination strike on the apparent threat.
So the Pantherfolk had to let Viktor and the other members of his crew go, bloodied but very much alive.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” James said, letting out a low whistle.
“Yes, that was impressive,” his mother said dryly. “Keep watching, though.”
Events fast-forwarded again.
Day and night slipped by, and suddenly James found the Panther Scout in the midst of an armed camp. There was a large ring of buckskin tents, stacks of wood everywhere, and hundreds of Pantherfolk walking around, performing various camp tasks, from cooking to guard duty to blacksmithing.
“Wait, what?” James said aloud.
The fast-forwarding shouldn’t have skipped through the entire arrival process, he thought. How much time has passed? When did he blank out that time? It was disorienting, to say the least.
“Another one of his mental blocks,” Zora said. “He avoided showing you what defenses the Panther Queen keeps around her army.”
James growled quietly. The empty places in this Panther Scout’s memories were beginning to frustrate him.
“You can still get some useful information,” his mother added.
The Panther Scout moved forward, and James’s perspective continued to move with him. They approached a tent that was significantly larger than the others. James immediately understood what that meant.
Sure enough, as they approached the tent opening, there was a louder buzz of chatter coming from within. As the Panther Scout entered, James saw Pantherfolk, along with a couple of collared humans, a collared raccoon-person, and a collared ape-like creature stood around a table with a map spread over it. They did not glance up at the entry of the Panther Scout.
Then the scout turned toward a raised dais that overlooked the map and the people standing around it. Atop the dais stood a hefty wooden throne. Sitting on the throne was a Pantherfolk, but one unlike the others James had seen thus far.
She was a humanoid panther, like the rest, but she was taller, more sinewy, tough-looking to a degree the Pantherfolk that had committed the ambushes near Dean’s place were not. Unlike those Pantherfolk, there was an almost human cast to her features. Her face was cunning and cruel, and her yellow-hued eyes locked gazes with the Panther Scout’s as if she peered into his soul.
James felt a vice grip around his chest. He quickly reminded himself that it was the Panther Scout’s chest, but it was still uncomfortable.
“My brave scout returns,” the Panther Queen said. Her voice sounded very feline, as if she was purring, but there was an almost mocking undertone to it. “How fared you on your mission?”
The rest of the room had instantly gone silent at the sound of the Queen speaking.
The scout quickly stepped forward, knelt, and prostrated himself before the throne. James could see his vision cloud slightly as moisture gathered in his eyes. It was not that the scout was upset, he recognized, but that its eyes had suddenly gone dry and required moisture. The mere situation of being so close to the Queen had placed his body under stress.
Is she doing this to her underling on purpose? Surely she has to realize that if she wants to get real advice from anyone, she can’t create an atmosphere of terror.
“The mission c-could have gone better, Your Keenness,” stammered the scout.
“Whisper, tell me everything you observed,” the Queen said. “Tell me what we face next in our path of conquest, and who it was that dared stand up to our advance force.”
The Panther Scout raised his head with an effort, though James noticed he still avoided eye contact with the Queen. He then spent the next twenty minutes recounting most of what James had observed through his eyes as efficiently as he could. To her credit, the Panther Queen listened quietly and seemingly attentively to all that was said, and James even felt a relaxing of the pressure that the Panther Scout had been under from the beginning.
“Do you have recommendations for next steps, Wind Whisper?” the Queen finally asked as the scout came to the end of his tale.
“I do not know what the current priorities Your Majesty is pursuing—”
“Forget about that for now,” she interrupted. “What would you do about this if you were in my seat?”
The Panther Scout swallowed. “I would not let the death of any of our soldiers go unanswered, even if it was in one of our ambushes, unless there is an enemy we are afraid to fight there. Besides the single human who killed the soldier, I did not sense exceptional power from any of those in the hunting party we ambushed. The territory had no Ruler. It should be a soft target. Your Keenness, you could easily make an example of them…”
“Hmm.” The Panther Queen scratched the space under her chin with one claw. The nail was so razor sharp that it actually cut through fur and skin with a touch, and a droplet of blood dripped down, but she did not seem to notice. “That is an option. Thank you, Whisper. You may leave my presence now.”
The scout bowed low, rose, and exited. As he took his last look at the Queen, James noticed that the place where she had cut herself with her claw had completely healed. There was neither a nick nor even a scab.
As the scout meandered about the camp, interacting with other Pantherfolk, stopping to eat, and other normal tasks, there was another instance of fast-forwarding, but in this case, James got to see the whole camp spring into lively, super-speed motion.
With each hour that passed, more Pantherfolk and allies showed up. Their numbers swelled from the hundreds to somewhere over a thousand, including dozens of humans and other non-Pantherfolk Races before James recognized he was not going to get an approximate estimation due to being stuck in the Panther Scout’s perspective. The Pantherfolk were clearly gathering for something.
Most interestingly, he saw the numerous normal Pantherfolk who were present take some of the wood that was lying around the camp and, under the direction of a Pantherfolk who was thin and had a nerdy-looking physiognomy to James—large forehead, smaller jaw and teeth, thin frame—they began constructing primitive siege engines. Catapults, ballistas, battering rams, extremely robust ladders, and more.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
As the process went on, some of the perhaps less technically competent Pantherfolk began dismantling the tents and assembling the buckskin into something else. James focused on them to the extent that he could, because he wanted to know what was going on, though the scout’s attention kept moving elsewhere. Gradually, James figured out that they were reallocating the buckskin into drums.
They already had the frames of the drums ready, as if this was something they had done before.
The overarching conclusion was obvious: the Pantherfolk were preparing to go to war. Despite his previous acrimonious interactions with Dean, James found himself hoping the Pantherfolk would go somewhere else. Unleash their wrath on some humanoid lizards or maybe another group of humans.
It was just a bit painful to think of them targeting people he sort of knew, even if they were not people he felt particularly attached to at this point. James was aware that Dean had a family, and that fact alone would have given him some sympathy.
But, of course, this was all in the past. James could not affect the outcome. All he could do was wait and see what had happened.
While James was trying to observe the Pantherfolk’s behavior, the scout made James’s task more difficult by focusing on something completely different. A female Pantherfolk had returned to the camp, and the scout spent almost the entire period while the others were working talking to her.
James learned that the female was a fellow scout, that she had been dispatched in another direction and encountered a land of human-like goats, and—this was the most obvious—that the two Pantherfolk were mated. This was made obvious by their heady exchange of pheromones, the flirtatiousness of their conversation, as well as the strong vicarious attraction—and a brief period of rutting, which James was thankfully permitted to mostly skip.
I wonder if I can learn a Skill to forget what I just saw…
After a day of preparation, the Pantherfolk buried the campfires and any other signs that they had camped out in that spot, and moved out.
The Panther Queen emerged from her tent when it was disassembled, last of all, and she shot the Panther Scout a quick nod and a smile, which suggested to James that the army was moving out toward Dean’s place.
But even so, James watched the movement of the army carefully to see if he could spot signs of familiar terrain. There would be nothing else for him to do for some time.
Though the memories began to fast-forward, James resisted the effect to some degree this time. He wanted to get an idea of the scope of the Panther Queen’s territory and a visual idea of what sort of location it existed in. If he could identify landmarks, he might have options for the eventuality of a future war against her.
He saw some fairly large and distinctive rocks at a certain point, and they passed a small lake—but then, small lakes like this were a dime a dozen in Florida before the System—and the large rocks would be difficult to spot, unless James and his own scouts were looking for them from the sky.
The march went on for more than a full day and night, and James began to wonder how much walking the Panther Scout had fast-forwarded through in his recollections earlier.
At that point, the scout received a telepathic message, and James heard the Panther Queen’s voice as she spoke into the scout’s mind.
I know that we are getting closer, so now is the time for you to move to the front and provide direction, she sent. I do not want the army to get lost.
This was the first true acknowledgment from her of what their final destination was.
Yes, my Queen! the scout sent in a servile voice. Then he strode up to the front of the army and took his place alongside the Queen and what James took to be the officer corps.
Under the Panther Scout’s direction, the army advanced for another day, apparently skipping attacking several of the territories that he had spied on during his journey, so that they could reach Dean’s camp more quickly.
James did not quite understand why they would do this. From his perspective, acquiring continuous territory was of critical importance to the land’s defensibility and his own ability to maintain his connection to it with regular infusions of his aura.
Is it really just revenge for one dead soldier and a handful of injuries? he wondered. That would seem really stupid.
As he walked with them, however, James began to pick up a better understanding of how the Panther Queen worked. It helped that he was inside the body of the Panther Scout, who had the ability to sense aura.
James realized that far from only letting out a large burst of aura when she conquered a territory—like James—the Panther Queen seemed to be leaking aura all the time. He first noticed that the power was present because he realized it was clinging to the scout himself, then slowly recognized it was also present in traces on every one of the Panther Queen’s subjects. He initially thought that might mean that she had blessed all of them somehow, though the way the aura felt didn’t seem quite right for that.
Then he started paying more attention to the Panther Queen herself, whenever she was within the scout’s line of sight. That was more revealing.
She’s periodically releasing aura and marking trees and random objects in her path? Why?! I don’t understand…
The only thing James could come up with, after some thought, was that the Panther Queen conceived of territory differently than he did, and her ability correspondingly worked differently than his.
Her land is more like a hunting path or something. It didn’t go through other entities’ territories—if James had to guess, she probably couldn’t do that any more than he could, at least not without subjugating the other territory’s owner—but it did sometimes come between other territories. And since it clung to her subjects, too, James guessed that she could trace where all of them were at any time. I need to make sure Mom knows that. We have to be careful what we do with that corpse…
The journey progressed further, but nothing noteworthy happened that afternoon or night.
It was the next day when the Panther Queen and her army arrived in what James recognized as the vicinity of the offices of Barry, Pesca & MacDougal.
James’s focus tightened. The next few hours or days of this vision would be critical.
As the army approached, dozens of Pantherfolk acted on a silent signal that James guessed came from the Panther Queen. They took out the buckskin drums, and they began to play a loud, incessant beat. James wondered how long it would last, and what the purpose was, until the Panther Scout gave him a sort of half-answer. It reached into a sort of utility belt that it wore and took out a pair of earplugs.
So, this will keep going for a while, then, James thought.
It continued for the entire remainder of the walk.
As the army stepped onto what had once been the road leading up to the firm—it was now a cracked and broken field of rocks with thick tufts of weeds growing up in between the chunks of asphalt—the offices of Barry, Pesca & MacDougal came into view.
It’s cool that they constructed additions onto it, James thought. Someone has some kind of construction-related Skill. Looks more useful than just applying earth magic, honestly.
Of course, he could not see how any of it would stand up to siege weaponry like what the army was hauling with it.
They stepped closer, the drums still loudly pounding away. James saw movement from behind window blinds within the firm building, but they were small, furtive motions that seemed to him to show fear and an unwillingness to confront the force that met them.
Of course they can’t, he thought, frustrated and genuinely worried for Dean’s people. They would already have had a hard enough time fighting a Ruler if the Panther Queen approached alone. But she isn’t leaving anything to chance. She preferred to march in overwhelming numbers…
Then the Fisher King reminded himself that the Pantherfolk could march on his own Kingdom next, and he resolved to keep his sympathies for his people. Dean and those with him when James visited had been given their chance. Now they would be the demonstration of what the Panther Queen was capable of. She clearly hadn’t died in this confrontation, or the scout would not have been sent to spy on James afterward.
As the army reached striking distance with its long range weapons, the Queen sent out a quick telepathic message to all of them.
Everyone, halt!
The army stopped moving forward, and everyone stopped moving. The drumming also died down.
The Queen stepped in front of her troops and began to yell at the top of her lungs.
“Greetings, soft and weak humans!”
As she shouted, a male Pantherfolk who had been in her tent when the scout arrived hustled forward. He carried a staff with a bunch of panther claws embedded at its tip. Despite the presence of the very sharp and deadly-looking talons, James got the immediate sense that the staff was ceremonial rather than a combat weapon.
Then the Pantherfolk carrying it stepped up beside it, and the Panther Queen closed her mouth, waiting.
The staff bearer began chanting quietly, and after a minute of this, a clear aura emanated from his body. It reminded James of non-elemental Mana.
The Queen began to speak again, and this time, without apparent effort on her part, her voice boomed out as if she had a loudspeaker.
“As I was saying, greetings, soft and weak humans! My army has arrived to capture your fortification and recruit you to our powerful faction. Resistance would be senseless and self-destructive. I do not recommend it. Behind me, you can see that I have members of Races besides my own in my service.” The Panther Scout turned back to look, and for the first time, James noticed that among the human followers the Panther Queen had brought with her were the two members of Dean’s group who had surrendered to her advance squad. He also observed that all of the humans and non-Pantherfolk followers wore leather collars, like those the Pantherfolk who transformed had donned.
That’s interesting…
“Take this as a display of my magnanimity. You too can join me, and if you serve me well, you will be rewarded like you were one of my own kind! We are a meritocracy. On the other hand, if you resist, things may not go as well for you. And if I lose even a single one of my loyal followers in the process of taking your fortification, I may feel obliged to put every member of the resistance within to the claw.” She raised a paw, opened one finger, and extended a long, knife-like claw—it reminded James of a certain yellow-spandex-suited comic book character—to demonstrate what she meant.
“I should also tell you that while I do not approve of the taking of innocent life, for my Race, it can sometimes be difficult to tell human juveniles and human adults apart.” She shrugged. “You understand, I’m sure. If you wish to surrender, you may open the front door at any time and step out! And if you do not wish to be associated with any resistance that may unfortunately occur, ensure that you are not holding a weapon or chanting a spell when we enter! Think well on how much you value your lives!”
