Page 96 of Dark Shaman: Love Found
The footage showed a battle from three hours ago. A squad of regular soldiers had set up a defensive position behind overturned vehicles. They had superior numbers, better positioning, and overlapping fields of fire. By every metric of conventional warfare, they should have won easily.
Then the enhanced soldiers attacked, moving like liquid shadow. Bullets struck them, and they bled and staggered, but they kept coming. One enhanced soldier took an entire magazine to the chest and only slowed for a moment before launching himself over the barricade. What followed was slaughter.
"Now," Navuh said, switching to another feed, "watch this."
This footage was more recent, from one of the checkpoints. A small team of enhanced soldiers approached a defensive position. But this time, instead of attacking, one of them stepped forward, hands raised. He appeared to be speaking. The defending soldiers lowered their weapons, looking confused. Then, as Navuh watched, they simply stepped aside and let the enhanced soldiers pass. Some of them even joined them.
"How?" Vakon breathed. "How are they doing that?"
Navuh's jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached. "At least one of them can compel. That's the only explanation."
"But that's impossible," Hakum protested. "Only you have such power over other immortals, my lord. Lokan could only compel humans, and he's not here."
"No, he's not." Navuh felt his jaw tighten.
His son had defected, run away, but he hadn't betrayed Navuh because he didn't know anything worthwhile. Navuh had made sure of that. Lokan had also somehow overpowered an enhanced one, and Navuh couldn't help but be proud of him for that. Especially now, when he saw how easily the enhanced soldiers defeated seasoned warriors.
"It would seem that Zhao's enhancements did more than just increase physical capabilities," Navuh said, his voice dripping venom. "He mumbled about rewriting their neural pathways and permanently changing their brain chemistry. I thought he was talking about making them stronger and faster with quicker responses. But he produced this." Navuh waved at the screen.
He hadn't understood the science and hadn't asked for clarification because he hadn't wanted to appear ignorant. He should have been less prideful and asked more questions.
The war room fell silent except for the crackle of radio communications and the distant sound of explosions transmitted through the feeds. On the screens, Navuh saw his empire burning.
"My lord," Tharon spoke up. "If they can compel our forces to join them, how do we fight them?"
Navuh considered the options. "First, all communications go through this room. No one acts on orders that don't come directly from me or through verified channels. Second, we implement challenge protocols. Anyone approaching our positions must be verified through predetermined codes that change every hour."
"That will slow our response time," Hakum pointed out.
"Better slow than dead." Navuh pulled up a tactical overlay of the mansion and its defenses. "Third, we pull back our perimeter. Consolidate our forces here. Let them come to us."
"My lord," Vakon said hesitantly, "that would mean abandoning the rest of the island."
"They are coming for me, so this is where we need to make a stand," Navuh said. "Look at your screens. Count the combat zones. Calculate the rate of defection. We're fighting for survival."
The truth of it hung in the air like poison gas. Several of his generals shifted uncomfortably, unused to hearing their invincible lord speak of survival rather than victory.
"What about the civilians?" Hakum asked. "The servants, the workers in the facilities?—"
"Irrelevant," Navuh cut him off. "Except for the Dormants, the humans are replaceable, and the Dormants have already been moved to a secure position. What matters is salvaging as many of our warriors as we can. Everything else can be replaced."
This rebellion was going to set him back hundreds of years.
He might have to execute the rebels, which meant a large chunk of the army he'd bred and built over thousands of years.
The failure felt like acid in his throat. Everyone accused him of being paranoid, but he hadn't been paranoid enough. It reminded him of something Mortdh had told him during one of his tirades.
"It's never what you are worried about that gets you in the end. The Fates like to toy with us."
His father had been the perfect example of that. Mortdhhad planned tothreatenAhn with the bomb he’dsomehowsmuggledfrom the home planet, but Navuh hadn’tknownthat and sabotaged the plane so it would explodein the air and kill Mordth. The plane had exploded,detonatingthe bomb over theassembly andending the era of gods on Earth.
The chain of events had been sosurrealthat Navuh had to conclude that the Fates hadorchestratedit all.
Only Annani and Areana remained, and Areana was inconsequential. He loved her like he had never loved anyone, but she was such a weak goddess that she barely deserved to be called one.
Annani was a different story. She was her father's daughter through and through, and she had been a thorn in his side over the millennia. If not for the technological help she'd given humans, he would have conquered the entire planet a long time ago.
Shoving those thoughts into a compartment in his mind, Navuh turned to the display.
