They reached the edge of Gonnb’s territory when the sky was fully dark.
Darion called a halt at the treeline, a quarter mile back from the settlent’s outer edge.
Far enough that the horses wouldn’t be heard, far enough that the living knights waiting in the dark wouldn’t be detected by whatever outpost watchers Gonnb had in the trees on their periter.
Close enough that when phase two started, the distance could be covered fast.
He dismounted and handed the reins to the nearest knight without speaking. Garren dismounted beside him.
"Stay here," Darion said, quiet, to the group. "No fires and no noise. Wait for my signal." He looked at Garren specifically. "You’ll know when phase two starts."
Garren nodded once.
Darion took the perspective glass from his saddlebag, checked it, and moved into the trees alone.
He found his vantage point after ten minutes of careful movent through the dark. It was a tree at the treeline’s edge with branches starting low and a trunk thick enough to brace against.
From the upper branches, maybe fifteen feet up, he had a clear sightline over the open ground between the treeline and the settlent.
He extended the perspective glass and looked.
Gonnb at night was exactly what Garren had described and nothing more. Scattered huts, so with firelight visible through gaps in the walls or through open doorways, a few with the dull glow of banked fires that had been left to die down.
He saw no walls (they had none) and no organized periter, only just buildings arranged without particular logic across a stretch of ground, the way settlents grew when nobody had ever planned them.
A few people still moving between the structures, visible as dark shapes against the firelight. Most of the settlent appeared to be settling toward sleep.
He could see two of the outpost watchers from his position, one at the northern approach, sitting against a tree with a spear across his knees, and one at the eastern edge moving in a slow, irregular pattern that suggested he was cold and bored and had been at this long enough that the alertness had faded to routine.
Neither of them was looking at the treeline with any particular attention.
He checked the binding. Everything in inventory, waiting.
He released the bats.
Nine of them appeared in the branches around him, green eyes briefly visible before they oriented and were gone: into the dark, over the open ground and toward the settlent.
He watched through the perspective glass and lost them almost imdiately, which was exactly correct. A bat moving fast at night was invisible to anyone not specifically watching for it, and nobody in Gonnb was watching for bats.
He tracked them through the binding instead of his eyes. Nine points of awareness, moving fast, the speed stats he had read in the graveyard now fully legible as actual movent, so of them covering ground noticeably faster than others, the variation he had observed during the test now playing out at operational scale.
They hit the settlent within seconds of leaving the tree.
He directed them through the binding, broad strokes rather than precise instructions. Towards the northern cluster of huts first, where the density of structures suggested the higher population concentration.
Move through, make contact where possible, keep moving. The bats understood contact in the most basic chanical sense, the preserved instinct of an animal that bit things as its primary interaction with the world.
He didn’t need to explain what to do when they reached a target. He just needed to direct them to the right areas.
The first contact happened near the northern huts. He couldn’t see it through the glass, too dark, the bat too small and fast, but he felt it through the binding, the slight variation in connection that ca when an undead completed a directed action. Then another. Then three in quick succession from different parts of the settlent.
The bats were spreading.
He kept the perspective glass moving across the settlent, watching the people still visible near fires and doorways, checking for any sign of reaction. Nothing.
A man sitting outside the nearest hut scratched his arm without looking at it and went back to whatever he had been staring at.
A woman moving between two structures paused, looked at the air above her for a mont, and continued walking.
Then, near the eastern huts, sothing happened.
Two n were sitting outside together, talking, close enough to each other that their voices carried as a low murmur even from this distance.
One of them suddenly swatted at the air beside his head, a sharp motion, the kind people made when sothing flew close to their face. He said sothing to the other man, who looked up at the dark air above them.
A bat had passed too close.
Darion held still in the tree, watching through the glass.
The man who had swatted stood up and looked around, scanning the air with irritated focus. Like soone who had been bothered by sothing and wanted to locate it.
His companion said sothing, Darion couldn’t hear the words but the tone was dismissive, the universal register of soone saying it’s just a bat, sit down.
Through the binding he redirected the two bats he had been moving through that section of the settlent, pulling them west, away from the two n, toward the huts on the far side where there was less activity and more darkness.
The standing man looked at the air for another few seconds, found nothing, and sat back down.
His companion said sothing else. The standing man replied. They went back to their conversation.
Darion exhaled slowly and moved the glass to the next section.
The bats worked through the settlent for twenty minutes.
He kept them moving in a pattern that covered the maximum ground without doubling back unnecessarily, sweeping from north to south through the eastern half, then returning through the western half, prioritizing areas where he could see movent or firelight suggesting people still awake.
The sleeping ones were easier targets, the venom delivered without any possibility of reaction. The ones still awake required more care, the bats approaching from angles where they wouldn’t be seen until contact was already made.
Two more near-incidents. One bat was spotted by a child who shouted and pointed before an adult pulled them back inside.
One flew through a lit doorway, realized its mistake, and ca back out before anyone inside had properly registered it. Both tis Darion adjusted the routing of nearby bats and continued.
The venomous undead knights went in on the ground at the fifteen-minute mark, while the bats were still working.
He sent them in pairs, two at a ti, targeting the structures where he had identified warriors based on what Garren had told him about how such settlents organized themselves: the n who were still awake and moving, the ones with weapons visible, the ones whose posture and movent read as people accustod to physical confrontation.
The ground units moved slower than the bats and required more careful routing, the Distant Command working harder to keep them clear of the outpost watchers and the people still moving between huts.
But the bats had already done the work of covering the areas the ground units couldn’t efficiently reach, and the ground units were handling the specific targets the bats were too small and fast to reliably hit with precision.
At the twenty-minute mark, he recalled everything.
The bats returned to the treeline and he unsummoned them. The four venomous ground units pulled back from the settlent and crossed the open ground and he unsummoned them too.
One by one the connections folded back into inventory until the settlent was exactly as it appeared: a quiet, dark cluster of huts with a few dying fires and no visible threat.
He lowered the perspective glass.
The binding had held through the whole operation. The Distant Command had handled nine airborne units and four ground units across twenty minutes of active direction without degrading in any way that affected the outco.
The two near-incidents had been managed before they beca problems.
He climbed down from the tree and moved back through the dark toward where Garren and the knights were waiting.
The clock had started.
Probably forty minutes.
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