IWUAaDNW: Initiative 6.2, 6.3

I started with Ulfric.

On a path to his side, in the corner of his eyes, I gave him a very brief glance of a mass of red, the same color of hair as Karjn herself, and made it disappear down the path.

His head turned, his eyes narrowed, his brow furrowed. He gave a grunt, ran a hand in front of his face a few times to check for illusions and, finding none, he followed the sign.

“Just so you know, the only reason I’m actually following is because I want to see what you’ve got in store,” he told me.

[...]

He reached the clearing I wanted him to, and found Eira standing there.

He paused. “…You real?”

She didn’t answer that, because she wasn’t real.

But it didn’t really matter that he found that out.

At the same time, Karjn had stopped a moment to recover her own wits.

“Eira was in front of me, so when did Taylor have the time to make her disappear? How long ago was she… she had to be there for the firewall, and I heard her… shit, is she still back there?” Her eyes narrowed. “She must have heard me…”

She ran a hand through her hair and looked up at the [ILLUSION]empty canopy[/ILLUSION], completely unaware of the dozens of ravens currently staring doom at her. “Why did I even run, anyway? It’s just floor two––Druids, this is floor two… could those birds even hurt me? Maybe Eira… but… Taylor won’t hurt her, right?”

She wasn’t wrong that my fleshpeckers probably couldn’t pierce through mana-reinforced skin, even with their charge or group-charge. They were small lesser fleshpeckers, after all. However, I had yet to try aiming for their eyes or other sensitive points, which I was pretty sure were still vulnerable.

But even then, they had another, secret ability, which I used at that exact moment.

A handful of fleshpeckers were perched in a specially arranged set of spider web tarps not too far from Karjn. It had taken me a fair bit of trial and error to figure out the exact configuration, and I wasn’t sure I’d gotten it just right yet, but it was worth trying.

The fleshpeckers opened their stiletto-like beaks, took a deep breath and, as one, screamed. Between the specific way I made them scream and the tarps helping modulate, the voice they produced was just close enough to a female voice screaming in terror that Karjn, her judgment already addled by my Ravens’ assault and the other stresses of my second floor, was fooled.

“Eira?!” she called out. “Taylor, I swear to the Druids, if you’ve hurt her, I’m going to actually kill you!”

I ignored that, and as she picked one of the paths, I hid passages that led to places other than the one I wanted to take her.

The room where Ulfric had walked into just a few moments earlier.

The timing was nearly perfect.

Karjn turned the corner and entered the clearing, and I sprung my trap.

A lost soul, one of the dozens of lost souls that were buried in the ground of that particular clearing, beelined for Ulfric and sacrificed itself into him. I gained control of him for only a fraction of a second before I was forced out, but it was just long enough to make him swing his battleaxe down at the Eira illusion.

[ILLUSION]Blood sprayed everywhere[/ILLUSION]. Over on the surface, several of my villagers gasped in shock, as I hadn’t shown them where the real Eira was.

Karjn spared a moment to register what she’d just seen, then threw her boomerang straight at Ulfric with a roar of vengeful rage.

—IWUAaDNW: Initiative 6.2



The whole point of my second floor was to make my invaders stressed and angry, then assault them with the greatest weapon I had available: each other. I could feel the awe and glee that my pixies were feeling as my plan unfolded with their help, which turned to triumph when Karjn, believing Ulfric had just murdered Eira right in front of her, immediately went for a killing blow on the Khannite mercenary.

They were very disappointed when the boomerang she threw wasted itself on the illusion of Ulfric I was showing her, and even more when I faded out the illusion of Eira and appeared between them with my hands raised in a stopping motion at Karjn. She froze, breathing wildly with her lips taut over her teeth and her eyes glowing in fury––actually glowing with reddish-grey mana––while Ulfric raised his battleaxe defensively, just in case.

Karjn looked at where the Eira corpse had been, and found nothing but grass. She absentmindedly caught the boomerang as it returned, then… smiled.

Then she chuckled.

Then she roared in laughter.

“Oh Druids… F*ck you, Taylor, you got me good,” she said.

“You okay?” Ulfric asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” she waved off his concern, then ran a hand through her hair––and pretended not to wipe her eyes with said arm before dragging it through her locks. “Yeah. Of course Taylor’s not going to kill us, or let us kill each other. Of course not. Of course not.”

Her hand went through her hair again, and stayed there to tug at her locks for a moment longer.

“You sure?” Ulfric asked again.

He actually sounded worried.

If I was being honest, so was I. People’s reactions to stress were unpredictable at the best of times, but I’d expected Karjn to be a bit sterner than this. I wanted to try out my defenses, but it looked like they were either extremely effective, or Karjn was just more susceptible to them.

I sent my ravens away from her.

“Yeah, just… just peachy,” she replied, lied, then stretched her arms above her head. “Just fucking peachy.”

Ulfric looked askance at my illusion. I replied with a shrug.

I was worried too, but if she refused to talk about it, there wasn’t much to do. Plus, how would I have reacted if I’d just watched, say, Alec put an axe through Lisa, after being under a sustained psychological attack?

—IWUAaDNW: Initiative 6.3