Part 5: The Flies Arrive
The safehouse wasn't much.
Just an abandoned grain store in the hills north of Veilguard, half-collapsed, overgrown with weed-blooms and vine-choked fencing. It had no magic wards. No barriers. Just distance.
Siora tended to Nina in the corner. Amelia watched the treeline, parasol now replaced by a sharpened bone staff. Sylvia paced the perimeter like a caged wolf. Sacha stood by the entrance, arms crossed, eyes sharp.
Yuji sat in the center of the room.
Soaked. Silent. Focused.
The Fertility mark on his chest pulsed—not bright, not wild.
Just… steady.
He was done hiding.
Then Sylvia stopped pacing.
Sniffed the air.
"Something's here."
Siora looked up, already weaving a detection glyph.
Before she finished, the sound hit them.
Wings.
Not birds. Not beasts.
Flies.
Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands.
Buzzing in synchrony—like a choir sung in disease.
Yuji stood. "Move!"
The wall burst inward—not from impact, but decay. The wood simply withered away.
The swarm poured in.
Black. Glinting. Glowing faintly with tracking glyphs—each fly a fragment of Voran's sight.
Amelia whispered, "Carrion familiars. He's watching."
Sacha swung her axe in wide arcs, scattering the first wave.
Siora shouted a cleansing verse, and light flared—banishing half the swarm with a sound like glass shattering inside bone.
Yuji stepped forward.
And let the swarm come to him.
He opened his aura.
His true Fertility—unleashed. Not violent. Not chaotic.
But so alive it seared the dead.
The swarm choked on it.
Flies withered mid-air. Glyphs broke. The spell circle behind them fizzled and cracked like ice under boiling water.
Within seconds… silence.
Only corpses of wings.
Sylvia exhaled. "We won't get another warning."
Yuji walked to the corpses. Picked up a scroll dropped by the flies. Unrolled it.
It was a wanted poster.
His face.
His name.
And underneath, in blood-red ink, a message clearly not meant for the masses.
"Come, false god. Let's see what your harvest reaps."
– C.V.
Yuji stared at it.
Then slowly pulled a piece of charcoal from his belt pouch.
And wrote one word on the scroll.
"Soon."