cnatrainingtips B3 Chapter 85: Flu Season
B3 Chapter 85: Flu Season
B3 Chapter 85: Flu Season
It wasn’t a particularly long spell. Perhaps forty lines, no longer than a song of medium length. Yet each word seemed to fall off his tongue like dead weight. Rather than the flowing musicality of his usual casting, Marcus intoned this one with all of the seriousness of a funeral dirge. Not one meant to evoke grief by his own hand, either. The words themselves sufficed for that.
As he finished, the words burst into flame and scrubbed themselves off the page. A small mote of orange flame drifted forth from his fingertip, no larger than a firefly. It almost lazily flew toward the drooling orc as it shuffled about for another rock to throw. Then, it sank into its forehead and disappeared.
The orc’s eyes shone. It stopped, looking skyward with an expression of pure awe, pupils going wide as it stared at nothing. It blinked, over and over, eyes scanning side to side rapidly with such speed that Marcus thought they might dislocate. The listless look of livestock was replaced with rapture and ecstasy.
“Og! Move out the way!”
It didn't take long for the other orcs to become restless at their comrade's lack of motion. A noticeably scrawnier one moved to shoulder him aside, only to flinch back as if burned. The scrawny one scowled and pushed, this time with his hands. The drooling orc remained as still as a statue.
With the combined efforts of a few more orcs, the infected one was shouldered aside. Not before they each exhibited the same flinching reaction as the first, though. They continued hurling stones, forgetting about their comrade as soon as he was behind them.
That was all. There was no cry of anguish, no explosion of heads, no steam pouring out of the orcs’ ears. It simply stared with manic intensity and continued to drool while its compatriots continued acting normally.
Marcus had half expected the plague to spread instantaneously. The fact that it didn't make him wonder whether or not he'd bungled some part of the spell without realizing it. But that wasn’t right. It clearly was affecting the first target, and he’d seen the others react. Perhaps this part of the stories, at least, tended to exaggerate things slightly.
He watched the battle continue for nearly half an hour before things took a turn. By that point, the orcish ranks had shifted about half a dozen times—for all their attempts to emulate an organized army, there was only so much they could do in practice—and the drooling orc had disappeared, toppled by a particularly impatient group moving past him. But as his gaze slid across the scrawny barbarian again, Marcus saw that his movements began to slow. He lowered his arm, a rock falling to the ground in limp fingers as wide eyes drifted sightlessly upward.
Marcus perked up. Looking around, it didn’t seem as though the Legionnaires had noticed much of anything yet. He quickly scanned the army to try to pick out any other individuals exhibiting similar symptoms. Sure enough, a handful more orcs let their weapons drop as he watched.
“Stupid Urth! Move to back!”
“To… Two… is number. One plus one. Is same as… Three minus one…” One mumbled under his breath. The words were completely inaudible beneath the din of battle, but Marcus could read them on the orc’s lips.
Well, the mage had said this spell was intended to boost one’s intelligence. He’d expected that “mysteries beyond” would take on a more exotic and difficult-to-grasp form. Then again, to a race such as this, perhaps basic math was truly that mind-boggling.
As he watched, more and more orcs began to succumb to the mind plague. The effects were subtle at first, difficult to pick out among the mob. But that wasn’t the case for long. Soon, entire swaths of the orcish army were rendered catatonic by the spell, mumbling bits of math and science and even a few crumbs of arcana to no one in particular. One even started humming, loud enough that the grating of off-tune notes caused him to cringe visibly.
By this point, the effects were impossible to ignore. The Legionnaires took advantage of the enemy’s paralysis to reinforce their fortifications, heal their wounded, and give their most exhausted men breaks. They stayed well behind the wall they’d built by Claudius’s orders. There was no reason to risk the men getting infected, even if it shouldn’t actually harm them.
Marcus simply continued to watch. He wanted to reach out and sense the emotional state of the affected foes. Were they truly in as much ecstasy as they appeared? Or were they already little better than vegetables, the words coming out of their mouths simply the consequence of a mind overflowing with misplaced knowledge? The skill inactivation field remained up, somehow, so he couldn’t find out if he wanted to.
It was around this time that the branded orcish commanders began to realize something was very wrong. They scowled at the suddenly dazed orcs, threatening and cajoling them back into action with little success. The futility of their efforts was made even more evident as they, too, began succumbing to the plague, staring skyward the same as everyone else. But then something strange happened. One of them woke up.
A tall, spindly orc with a glowing brand across his forehead snapped out of his reverie. He looked around with sudden alarm, his eyes widening not in rapture, but in horror.
“Pull back! Retreat! NOW!”
He screamed the orders, but it was already too late. The plague had taken root in the army. It spread like wildfire, faster and faster as more orcs came under its sway. Those few who did run didn’t make it far before even their steps slowed, and they too fell under the influence of the spell. The orc screamed in frustration, head whipping around the rapidly growing sea of catatonic orcs around him. Then, his eyes narrowed.
“All tribes! Charge!”
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It seemed that the commander saw the writing on the wall. Time was no longer on his side. And if he was going down, then he intended to take down whatever Legionnaires he could.
A significantly smaller contingent of orcs began to rush toward the Legion’s defensive line, bowling through the labyrinthine mess of their drooling brethren. Some toppled to the side, while most simply continued to stand and stare as they were bumped one way or another. The charge itself was much diminished by the time they navigated through, as even more orcs fell victim to the spell. But the commander directed the orcs to focus on a singular point in the defensive formation, aiming to break through.
The bones and charming patterns went to work once again. Orcs fell before the defenses one by one, forming a pile of corpses before them. But there was no chance. The orcs hadn’t been able to break through before, much less now with their numbers slashed like this. A few more orcs snapped out of their dazes to look around in astonishment and fear, but they could do little to help. The Legionnaires made short work of any who came near.
The commander roared—not with [Battle Lust], but with genuine rage. Marcus saw as he began his own charge, grabbing the body of a comparatively small orc and holding it in front of him like a shield. He charged toward the pile of corpses and up it. The drooling vegetable was skewered over and over by bones, and Marcus saw a wince as at least one of the stabs drove through into the commander’s torso. But its eyes went red as [Battle Lust] finally engaged. With a final roar, it rushed forward and leaped over the wall, dragging its bleeding comrade along with it.
Shouts of alarm rose up from the Legionnaires. They began to pull back and retreat, working to shoot down the airborne orcs as they shot over the wall. But the commander reared back and hurled the comatose orc toward the soldiers, its body crashing into a handful of men. The resulting spray of blood coated dozens more, Marcus among them. It didn’t strike with enough force to harm them. But that wasn’t the point.
The commander gurgled as dozens of projectiles pierced it all over. A rain of blood coated the barren ground below, followed shortly after by his corpse. But even with his last breath, the orc was smiling. He wheezed in what might have been a laugh. Then, he fell dead.
Marcus’s blood froze as he looked at his blood-splattered clothes. Already, the men who’d been hit were breaking apart from the rest, trying to move as far away from their brethren as they could. Marcus began to do the same. Was being coated in an infected orc’s blood enough to pass on the spell plague? He had no idea. But he figured they would find out soon enough.
He shucked off his bloody clothes as though they were acid. The group of infected moved closer to the wall, continuing to defend as they waited. Yet Marcus read the tension in the set of their jaws and the hardness of their expressions. He felt the fear and trepidation that simmered beneath them, unable to hide from [Critical Reception].
Their intelligence should be high enough. It shouldn’t be a problem. Right?
An eternity later, he heard music. Wondrous music, a kind that rivaled the greatest pieces he’d ever played or heard. The sound of poetry accompanied the melody, the words flowing in rhyming schemes so complex that each line must have taken a week, no, a month to craft.
He lifted his head to listen. The sky above was filled with
“Are those… numbers?”
He’d spoken despite himself, so overwhelmed was he. But they were more than that. Each graceful line thrummed with the promise of hidden knowledge, knowledge beyond the simple numbers he saw at a glance. As he focused on a floating number four, a sudden understanding came over him. Compass directions, wagons, a human’s limbs. A deep and profound sense of oneness with not just this concept, but so many others filled his mind like the light of a candle.
It made no sense. It made all the sense in the world.
He looked about. Numbers weren’t the only things floating around. There were shapes and letters and patterns that he did not recognize. Yet with each one, a moment of focus allowed him to meld with the concept. Much of the information presented was things that he already knew, on some level. Yet here, it felt as though he possessed the ideas, took ownership of them in a way akin to his understanding of music.
The number six thousand drifted into his field of view. A host of armored men, innumerable yet connected as a single whole. They wore armor of red and bronze with spears in their grip and—
Marcus’s thoughts screeched to a halt. The wondrous knowledge attempted to press in on him once more, tempting him to stay and continue plumbing the depths of this vast realm. But everywhere he looked, he drew more reminders of who and where he was. A circle, the fiery orb of the sun. One, himself, and somehow the Legion as well. A rectangle, the shields clattering in the distance as men attempted to hold the pass.
This wasn’t real. It was a little more than a dream. One that he needed to wake up from.
He didn’t know how long he’d been out for. But when he came to, it was amid a cluster of Legionnaires staring dumbly upward, drooling just as the orcs had been. A few had roused before him and shook their neighbors in an attempt to awaken them. Other Legionnaires shouted at them from afar, calling to their brethren to rouse them from their stupor to no avail.
Marcus tried to look around and winced. His skull felt like an overfull bowl of hot soup, warming his soul. Yet any slight movement threatened to send its contents spilling out to scald him. It was comforting, yet dangerous.
He couldn’t know if the others would wake up like him, and if they did, how long it would take. But how to help?
Marcus unslung his lute, moving slowly and carefully as the pain subsided. A slow, deliberate song began to fill the air, each note carefully placed like footsteps across uneven ground. It felt heretical to even attempt a song after the borderline divine experience he’d just had. And he couldn’t know whether breaking the spell early would give them the same benefits. But he had to do something.
As he played, he felt the music from his visions echo in his mind. He reached for it, working to emulate the strange and incredible melodies he remembered. It felt more effortless than expected. Patterns and motifs spilled into his mind and his fingers unbidden. The pain subsided further and further as he felt the soup of knowledge slowly drain into him, suffusing him with warmth and inspiration with every strum of the lute. Some of the knowledge did spill out as he organized his thoughts, making him wince as the precious information slipped away. But there was more than enough of it.
It took a few minutes for the next Legionnaire to break through. Then the next. Then a handful more. As he played, more and more came to their senses, blinking and looking around in confusion just as he had. It took a long time. But eventually, each and every man managed to overcome the delusions of the spell plague and regain consciousness.
He ended the song and looked out over the wall. A field of empty green faces greeted him, their bodies swaying in the wind like so much grass. A few more had broken free of their own power, running about with sheer panic on their faces. But they were a mere handful among thousands. The stillness stretched all the way back to the tunnel, stoppering it more effectively than the Legion had. The sounds of battle were still audible in the distance, but largely diminished. In its place was an eerie silence.
Marcus gulped.