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72: Siege

My hasty withdraw to the fortress went unimpeded by the monster tide. Their attributes were still boosted by the Monster Lord, but the frenzy effect was actually designed to wear off. If it wasn’t, then the entire tide really would tear itself apart in relatively short order.

It was basically a forced march that induced monsters in an extremely wide radius from a Monster Lord to seek out any life that it couldn’t control. And like a forced march, now that it was finally over, they would need to recover before resuming the attack.

However, the respite for the fort’s defenders would only last a few hours. Monster tides had always spread over the entire Cradine kingdom by this method. This one was worse than what it had usually dealt with, probably because the Monster Lord was fully awake. Bruzigan had explained that normal monster tides were sort of pulses of a Monster Lord’s will while it was still sleeping—periods during which one was restless, but not actually awake.

He’d ended that lesson by saying that the 5th Floor wasn’t the last time a Monster Lord could be encountered in the Floors—that is, if we tried to climb to Area 2. The 10th Floor also revolved around the whole Monster Lord/monster tide thing...except on that floor, there were 3 of them.

The whole team was waiting for me when I was readmitted through a sally port in the outer wall. Mewi was near hysterics, which wasn’t something he was often. But he accepted my explanation of what had happened pretty easily, and soon enough everyone did.

Bruzigan was troubled by it, though. “I can’t believe we missed this,” he said, “I knew the berserking effect would feel worse than in the simulations...I underestimated it by far more than we projected.”

“On the bright side,” said Arvallei, “Lheticus is mostly unharmed, and I think he accounted for more monsters than any 3 of this place’s Mage Cannons.”

“If anything,” said Ri’legh, “thanks to him we did the job we were meant to a little too well.”

Indeed, the job of the kingdom’s four fortress towns and its other frontier towns in a monster tide were to ease the pressure on Cradine’s interior lands by killing as many monsters as they could. Not only did that have the obvious effect of there not being as many monsters left in the tide, the stronger a settlement proved to be, the more monsters would keep being attracted to it in Stage 1, urged to avenge large numbers of their fallen. In monster tides classified as “small,” they were often even stopped from advancing beyond border towns altogether.

Thanks to my forced off-script antic, the number of monsters now focusing on Fort Frontier was, Bruzigan estimated, about 20% larger than in any of the monster tide sims we ran. Not an impossible amount, but that I’d burned through all my mana as well complicated things.

We were as overprepared with the recovery items we’d brought into the floor as any respectable JRPG player, which included two dozen Large Mana Cells, each capable of fully recharging a 100k Mana storage. The problem was that we didn’t bring a Mana Recharger to go with them, meaning my mana storage would have to recharge from a mana cell directly, which took quite a bit longer.

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In other words, I wouldn’t be ready to go back into action when the monsters were. It was just one more thing that we as a team would have to adapt to. The siege that was Stage 2 would last for multiple days, anyway—it was never in the plan for all of us to fight all at once for the entire time.

What happened was that I’d switch groups—fighting at night along with Anna and Bruzigan, and Ri’legh would switch to fighting during the day with Mewi and Arvallei. Stage 1 had lasted most of the night, so I gratefully took some rest.

The remainder of the monster tide lasted just shy of a full week. At nights, between Anna’s Light magic keeping the battlefield illuminated and healing people even from the brink of death, and my Fire magic raining destruction on monsters who had gotten too close to use the Mage Cannons on at regular, very frequent intervals, the defenders of the fort had severe advantages even though many of those monster that attacked in the night, including those troublesome giant bats, were much trickier to deal with than those that attacked in the daytime.

During the “day shifts” Bruzigan had apparently decided to start teaching Mewi about directing large-scale battles. He was the only one of us who stayed up both day and night. According to him, his ability to do so was a perk of his race, though his ability to go without sleep didn’t extend to not needing to sleep at all. Still, when it was finally over, he’d definitely lived up to what he’d said about a week being no problem.

Today would be about regrouping and planning, both for the recouperation of the Cradine kingdom and the assault on the Monster Lord. The moment of truth for our mission was coming. In the 5th Floor’s storyline default, this assault would fail, with at least two of the kingdom’s SS class teams losing all or most of their members. After that failure, a second monster tide would come after a few weeks, after which the Royal Guard team, the strongest people in the kingdom after Ilsandre, would finally be spurred into action. With them backing Ilsandre up, the assault would finally succeed.

But if things even got that far, both we and the two Very Hard teams' missions would fail. The “responding force” referred to in the missions referred to the first attack. So, we had to influence it enough to change it from failing utterly to succeeding wildly. Even if 2 other teams were going to help us, this would be a tall order.

Of course, things started with another meeting. The two teams on the Very Hard mission, who had taken the names Golden Blades and Ifilin’s Hope, had successfully gained A rank before the Monster Lord awoke and sufficiently impressed in the defense of their respective assigned towns that they’d been elevated to S rank. Therefore, their team captains were present this time. However, that was only two chairs re-filled out of quite a few more left empty than last time.

This meeting ran 3 times as long, and in my opinion 30 times as boring as the last one. There were arguments over every detail, from how many days the Monster Lord assault force would take to prepare before setting off, to who would take point and when, to financial arrangements over consumable items used. Some of it, like that last one, I was incredulous how cocky the native teams were to even bring up, considering most of these people would die without challengers backing them up.

Mewi and Anna had to do a lot more verbal legwork than last time, but by and large, details were fleshed out, compromises were reached, and at meeting’s end, we were slated to set out in 5 days.