The new lore introduced in Echoes of Wisdom has given me ideas.
Be afraid.
Rhea examined Dorothea's face. There was a scar there, but it wasn't quite as bad as Dorothea had described. Presumably, she had gotten it to fade somewhat after returning to Hyrule.
"I'm going to have to leave the call," Edelgard said. "Something urgent just came up."
"Fine by me," Claude said. "I'll tell them about some things that happened on my end, then we can wrap up for the night."
"This sure doesn't feel like a victory," Caspar admitted.
Claude's team had attacked an Iron outpost where Adrestian soldiers were being held hostage. Petra and Ashe had scouted the outpost beforehand to see if the hostages could be snuck out of the outpost, and determined that they could not. They had decided their best option was to attack and hope they could draw enough attention that the Order of Iron would focus on them rather than killing the hostages. It hadn't exactly worked out; of the eleven hostages, only four had survived.
"We didn't have a better option," Claude said. "This was better than what the Iron Order would have done to them if we did nothing."
"I know," Caspar said. "That doesn't mean I have to feel good about it."
"Regardless, you did the best you could," Aubin said. "We have a new mission for you. So far, you've been catching small fish. Are you ready to hunt bigger game?"
"Of course," Claude said. "What's the target?"
"Thulsa Ohm has seven generals who carry out his will," Aubin said. "They're all utter degenerates, who each have a method of torturous execution as their...signature, of sorts. You've already met one of them, Riegan. There are six others. Metzger, Cenk Deniz, Mogens Kay, Lucio of the Cinders, Silvia the Storm, and our target, Waldebert the Blood-Letter. He's currently at a camp used as a nexus for slaving raids."
That got a reaction. For all that Claude had his disagreements with some aspects of the Church of Seiros, he was more than glad that they had done everything possible to stamp out slavery in Fódlan. "There is no man more despised by the Goddess than the slaver," the scriptures read. "A man who sells his fellow man as property must be put to death. No clemency may be afforded to him."
"Is he strong?" Raphael asked.
"I have fought him before," Aubin said. "He's a highly skilled and dangerous warrior."
"Well, it wouldn't be the first time we fought one of those," Claude said. "Let's go."
"This could be a problem," Ingrid said, looking through the spyglass.
The corpses impaled on pikes outside of Waldebert's war camp were just the unpleasant greeting for a difficult challenge. The camp itself was well-fortified. It was set up in a valley next to a river, with mountains on either side. Moving soldiers up or around the mountains would be difficult and time-consuming, and any attempt would likely be spotted ahead of time. The only way in was through their well-built fortifications, and behind those fortifications were enough tents and buildings to hold hundreds of soldiers.
"There's no way we'll be able to attack that camp without taking heavy losses," Yuri agreed.
Claude frowned. "Maybe not. Raphael, you know a thing or two about geology. How much damage do you think an avalanche from those mountains could do to that camp?"
"I'd say if we set it off right, it could bury a solid third of that camp in a hurry," Raphael said. "That's our play?"
Claude handed him a Korok bag that they had filled with explosives. "Make it so, Mister Kirsten."
"Aye-aye, Sergeant," Raphael said with an exaggerated mock-salute.
An hour or so later, they heard an explosion, and just like Raphael said, hundreds of tons of rock cascaded down the mountain to the northwest. The majority of the actual Iron Order soldiers managed to get clear in time, but their defenses were shattered, and there were still at least a few dozen enemy soldiers who were buried.
"Looks like that was the signal," Claude said. Dropping a shield on the ground, he jumped onto it in order to imitate a Hylian sport Link had taught the Company during their downtime. As he shield-surfed down the hill, he quickly sniped any Iron soldier unfortunate enough to be within his range. Given that the ones he missed were smote with lightning, he suspected Ingrid was right behind him.
When they reached the bottom of the hill and stopped, several Iron soldiers tried to attack them, but the attacks bounced off of Daruk's Protection (clearly Caspar had joined them), and Urbosa's Fury struck down the offenders. With the three of them causing havoc behind the enemy lines on top of the chaos caused by the avalanche, as well as the rest of the team leading Adrestian soldiers to attack the camp, the Iron troops were easily killed. Waldebert was one of the ones who tried to come after Claude, Ingrid, and Caspar, but even though he might have been strong enough to clash with a former Elite, a pissed-off Ingrid was another matter completely, and it wasn't long before one of the vaunted generals of the Order of Iron was a corpse, and not much longer after that before the camp was under Adrestian control.
"Well, that was easy," Claude said. "I guess we got worked up over nothing." Just as he said that, one of the buildings exploded, revealing the monster fate had sent to punish him for his hubris.
Someone ignorant might have called it a dragon. But no, Claude had seen dragons. They could be terrifying, sure, but they were also majestic and awe-inspiring. No one could see a dragon and question the self-evident truth that it was at least semi-divine. This thing was twisted and wrong in all sorts of ways, and Claude didn't really know what he could call it, but the one thing he refused to call it besides human was 'dragon.' And then-
"GRAAAAAAAAGH!"
It made a noise that sounded to Claude as more of a scream of agony than a roar, and thrashed about, shredding the soldiers unlucky enough to be near it. And not only with its claws; dark, shadowy tendrils reach from the not-dragon's shadow to impale more of the Adrestian soldiers, captives, and even Iron soldiers who hadn't yet been killed.
"Me and my big mouth!" Claude said, horrified, even as he fired as many arrows at the beast as he could from Lucky.
Ingrid effectively countered the shadows by using all of the lightning she had left to strike the not-dragon all at once. It did decent damage, and as a bonus, the light from the lightning destroyed the shadows. But it wasn't a lethal attack, and the not-dragon was still raring to fight, as more shadows built up around it.
"Light mages!" Yuri shouted, as he, Hapi, and the Adrestian light mages flung all the light spells they could at the not-dragon, destroying the shadow tendrils as they formed. The not-dragon screamed again and tried to shred them with its claws, but Caspar blocked the attack with Daruk's Protection. The barrier broke, but it did its job; it deflected the claws so they landed harmlessly on the ground.
Caspar, seeing an opportunity, brought the Boulder Breaker down on the nearer claw. The claw and arm remained pinned for just long enough for Petra to run up the not-dragon's arm onto its back. There, despite the not-dragon's attempt to throw her off, she struck it with her sword where its spine met its skull.
As the not-dragon died, it changed form into a young man with white hair and slightly darkened skin. He didn't look a day older than twenty.
"Wait, this doesn't seem right," Caspar said. "The Iron Order doesn't turn people into Demonic Beasts. That's Nemesis's trick."
"That was no Demonic Beast," Hapi said. "I've gotten a bit too familiar with Demonic Beasts over the years. That was something different."
Then Bernadetta had a terrible, terrible suspicion. Bending down over the corpse, she checked his ears, only to see that they had been cut off. She then cut open his chest with a knife.
"Bernie?" Yuri asked. "Bernie, what are you doing?"
With a horrified expression, Bernie removed something from the dead man's chest. It looked very much like a Crest Stone, albeit one that had somehow started to erode.
"You're right," Bernie said. "This guy wasn't a Demonic Beast. He was a manakete."
