The Dornwich Plan.

As it turned out, any decision that John thought about making to try and take his mother with him back to the kingdom was immediately countered by the fact that he needed to leave her in the place where she could feed her new cravings. He realized that he could have taken the bowl and his mom along with him and let her deal with her new problems that way, but... the inexplicable disappearance of both John and his mother would have left Mary with more questions than he wanted to answer. At least this way... perhaps his mother could fill in some of the blanks for Mary that he wanted to avoid.

At least this way he could go and attack Dornwich without needing to worry about her safety.

"I, uh... I'll be back later," he muttered out into the room. By that point his voice was probably the loudest thing in the house since both Mary and Brenda were falling silent more and more with every second that passed. Even their heavy breathing was dying down, making John's unsteady tone travel like a powerful echo throughout the room. Mary turned to look at him as he stepped over to the bedroom's exit, her eyes lingering on the clothes that he had used to clean himself with. She opened her mouth... and then closed it again before she could actually say anything.

"I think I'm gonna throw up," John grunted as his Kingdom gradually rematerialized around him. His hands clutched at his own stomach like he was worried it might fall out without the added protection held in place in front of it, and he grimaced as dozens of Orcs turned to look at him when he stepped out from in front of his tent once again. They stood as soon as he appeared, their green faces hardening upon seeing him don his makeshift suit of armor, with Mub standing at the front of them. He nodded at John as the Gamer stepped further and further out into the crowd of Orcs, the ex-alpha's one eye following him as he walked... and then the Orc began to follow him as well.

John... John hoped to god... or... Gaia, that the tribe didn't hear his nervousness.

If they did, they didn't show it. They all just started following him as he made his way across the rebuilt ruins of Duskacre and climbed atop his horse once again. His slaves, Urga and Dofi, didn't follow him. They were left behind, like everyone else who wasn't somehow a part of one of the Tribe's various raiding packs, because they weren't warriors. Urga may have been one once... but she couldn't see to fight anymore, so he didn't get to take her along.

He didn't get to take along a lot of the Orcs in the tribe. Only about half of them actually came with him, giving John a large company consisting of somewhere over a hundred different Orcs. The tribe mounted their own horses, if they had them, after saying goodbye to their various families and slaves and followed him along Dusckacre's central path and then out of town. They went north along the road, for as long as they could possibly see it, and then when the pathway disappeared beneath them, they continued trying to travel in the same general direction. Thankfully, John's map helped to navigate them up to Dornwich since the road to the kingdom had long since been taken back by the fields and grassy vegetation surrounding the area far outside of Duskacre.

They traveled until the day turned to night and then back again... and found the destination that the Orcs briefed him about on the way there... an area that they called 'the place where **** lives.' Grass and dirt turned into dust... and then that too turned into a gray, seemingly endless, rocky landscape. The hills of green disappeared from sight, leaving boulders and ashen dust in their place... and then the gray disappeared too. The great blue sky was hidden from sight, covered in a vast expanse of dark clouds littered with flickering bolts of what should have been blue or white lightning... but the only kind of light in the area was purple. The lightning burned with the same color, the sunlight itself when it peeked through the clouds was the same shade, and the torchlight that his tribe lit to try and regain some source of color illuminated the area with a sickly kind of amethyst as well.

Eventually... they found the source of that horrible purple light; a beacon of purple crystal that stood in the center of Dornwich and towered above it like some kind of natural rocky pillar that the city had simply been built around. The origin of that light covered Dornwich in a powerful, deathly glow, to the point that every other shade and hue on the spectrum seemed like it was pale and monochromatic while in its radius. The giant city was square-shaped in its miles-long design, outlined with massive walls, made from stone bricks and pillars of rock that had been magically pulled out of the ground and set in place around the city. The few gates that Dornwich had were all closed to the outside world, and atop each of the city's outer pillars were braziers that remained unlit and cold, as they had probably been for quite some time.

The inside of the city didn't seem like it was much better. Nothing inside the kingdom itself was lit with actual firelight. What few buildings were tall enough to be seen over Dornwich's high walls were also square-shaped like the city. A lot of the architecture for the place seemed to follow the same pattern. The few structures that the city had that weren't squarish or rectangular in some way were mostly just towers, and the majority of those sat in the center of the city as a part of the city's massive keep.

The outside of the city was empty... for the most part. There were no houses, no shops, or brothels. There were no peasants, serfs, or farmers working the long day away. There was only ****. From where John and the Orcs stood, waiting just on the edge of where their vision managed to make out the city of Dornwich, the dead seemed to sparsely litter the landscape between them and the kingdom. For the most part, they were spread out amongst groups. Each group was made up of about twenty to fifty Hallowed creatures. Zombies, skeletons, and ruin elementals lurched back and forth in short straight patterns, patrolling the area for more creatures to kill and recruit into their army. Each group... seemed small enough to be targetable.

Mub was right... with the numbers he had and the unspent stat points that John had been holding onto... the dead were spread out far enough that it looked like it could be possible to take them on. On top of that... he was so close to gaining a level that John came up with a plan almost as soon as he saw the dead lurching around. It seemed like it was going to be just as simple as it had been during his first fight against the Hallowed. All he needed to do was pull one group at a time. The Orcs would deal with the zombies and he would deal with the elementals. It was... so straightforward that it made him paranoid.

For twenty minutes, he paced around on his horse looking for the flaw in his plan, for the change that he had not yet seen. He considered everything he could. He thought about the giant crystal in Dornwich, which for all he knew could have changed into a titanous elemental the second he got too close, but he was far enough away that even his Observe failed to give him any information on it. The only information that he managed to get about the crystal came from Mub who told him that, as far as he knew, it was just supposed to be a source of power for the elves in the city. It was a... focus, of sorts, for all of the magic users in the city. A central connecting point for all the elves and the other beacons that the elves had sent out of the city.

It was supposedly harmless... so John figured that he at least ought to try and attack the patrols of undead outside of the city. If it did turn out to be dangerous, then at least he could run while the Orcs killed themselves trying to fight it. As much as he liked the idea of fighting off armies of undead, taking on an elemental giant was not something he wanted to risk... even if running away from it meant losing his control over the tribe. As powerful as he was becoming, he didn't believe for a second that he could take on a monster that big. The dragon was only slightly smaller than the crystal was and that thing had nearly killed him with a glancing blow.

His 'attempt' at attacking the city started with using his unspent stat points. He raised his Strength and Endurance scores by three points each... and then dumped the rest of his points into his Agility, raising it up to a total of twenty-five before taking into account the bonuses that he got from his items. He pushed the number higher and higher until he felt it start to take effect. The change was minor, like it always was, small enough that John only barely noticed the fact that he started to straighten up in his saddle. His posture righted itself... and then his brow furrowed when he realized how easy it was for him to keep it like that despite a lifetime of slouching over for things like better game play or lazy comfort. He bounced in place a couple of times, marveling at how light his body felt now compared to how it was before, and then he beckoned for one of the Orcs to bring him a new melee weapon, something that he could use while on top of horse.

Your Agility has reached 25!
You have gained the Honed feat!

New Skill: Honed. Level 1, Passive.
Honed: This change marks a new degree of Agility within its user. This ability allows its user to focus their senses and hone one of them at a time with the user’s natural mana, empowering the chosen sense to work on a superhuman scale.
Honed is currently set to Sound.

He ordered the Orcs to stay back while he dashed across the front lines, and his face hardened as the dead turned to face him at the sound of galloping hooves. The Hallowed groaned when he approached, turning like one giant entity to meet him with a wave of half-rotten faces, and in turn, John grimaced. He yanked on the reins of one of the many brown steeds that the tribe had gifted to him when he took control of it, and veered the horse away from the group.

The ground shook as soon as John turned in the other direction. The footfalls of his mount were nearly muffled under the heavy noises that came from the thing that had created all the undead, the Beacon of Ruin. It was just as mobile as the last couple of Beacons had been, grown to the point that it could push out of the ground and stomp around... only it was bigger than the previous two. Where the first one had been freshly grown and stood over John by only a few inches after it had ascended and the second one had grown to the point that it was almost a foot taller than him, this Beacon was even worse. It towered over the Gamer by about three feet, looming like it was no more than an example of the battles that were to come... and then it started marching towards him. The screams coming from various souls and faces in the Beacon's reflection echoed across the length of the battlefield, drawing John's gaze back to it as it followed him and separated from the many, many other groups of undead around Dornwich.

He successfully led it away... and then the Orcs cried out as the dead walked past them. The hardest part as it turned out was trying to get the zombies away from the beacon. The Orcs did most of the work, and were surprisingly successful at distracting and pulling the dead away from it, but only because they had learned how to do it once before. The fight at Duskacre, the one that John couldn't remember because he had been drunk from a bottle of Cabal mana, had been a trial by fire for the tribe.

The only one who actually had a hard time working with the plan was John. When the Orcs moved, he wasn't expecting it. The Beacon fell for their distraction as well, and before John could blink, every monster in the pack turned to charge at the horde of green-skinned men and women. John yelled out at the pack to try and warn them to stay out of the Beacon's light...

... but its ground-shaking footsteps overpowered the sound of his voice.