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[>>Now replaying: Log 1.12 - Shackles]
Date: Error
Location: Zephyro’s Domain?
//Now is the winter 7*%&^@
the clouds lour’d*&&^@%
Deep *&%^!&^% ocean
@@U**&^ Buried.//
//I am determined to prove a villain//
[>>DATA CORRUPTED]
E99 %No speech detected, 19026ms%
I didn’t have time to count the amount of Ferals that climbed over the wall, but there were definitely more than “a handful.” Lizards and leopards scrambled to heave their bodies over the parapet, while spiders brought over one sinewy leg after the other, and various carrion birds simply ignored the wall altogether as they swooped down on the city’s defenders. None of them was smaller than a large dog, and all of them looked downright rabid, with jerky motions full of savage hunger.
Zephyro looked at me, but I just yelled “Go!” and he didn’t need to be told twice.
“Lilsultana!” he yelled in Arabic, his sword glowing with that gentle white light. A second later, he cleaved one of the spiders in two with a not-so-gentle flash of his blade.
That was only one of many, however, and while the enemy numbers weren’t insurmountable, we were definitely in for a fight. Worse, stragglers kept joining the battle, and they grew increasingly hideous.
Fighting down the instinct to join Zephyro in dispatching the Ferals, I instead fell back and started organizing our troops. Kasha had already taken several squads with her and joined battle, but more than half stood around, paralyzed by choice and fear. I wished I’d had more time before the battle started, but luckily enough, when they saw who I was, the citizens strove to listen immediately, which sped things up.
The first order of business was to send the militia to the front of the scouts, and even though the women and men clutched their makeshift weapons with obvious fear, they didn’t hesitate a second. Some of the crossbowmen (and -women) protested while they moved to the back of the formation, but even they understood that should they fall, our chances of making it through this alive would plummet like stocks during a media shitstorm.
And if we died, nothing would stand between the Ferals and the city proper.
“Whatever you do, stick with your squad!” I yelled, pacing in front of my assembled troops, wide-eyed and jittery as they were. “You do not fight for yourself, you fight to be able to protect the person next to you! If there is no one to your left or right, you have fucked up!”
I didn’t like having to fall back to squad warfare on a relatively open battlefield, especially not with untrained soldiers, but there had been no time to discuss proper ambush tactics or to go beyond the simplest commands, really.
“Scouts, use the market stalls as cover! Civilians, keep their flanks clean! That’s all you have to do. Can you do that?”
There was a nervous murmur of agreement, not nearly good enough for what was to come. I suppressed the urge to look over my shoulder, at the battlefield, and instead shouted louder: “I said, can you do that?”
The agreement was louder this time, and more enthusiastic.
“Good! Remember that your city is counting on you!” at that, some took a few hesitant steps forward, but I held them back with a raised hand. Damnit, but Stax was right. Stepping into this role was as comfortable as stepping into my power armor. If there was a battle tomorrow after I woke up, I probably should listen to my friends, stay back, and trust them to come back to me. Still, there was nothing to worry about. We’d only come to negotiate, after all. There would be no battle. No one would have to die.
Unlike here, and now.
> A forest in winter. Olre and I are alone. The armor is gone, the Torch is not.
> I have shoved it underneath Olre’s chin, still unignited.
> He presses me against a massive tree, eyes wild with anger.
> I am snarling like a wounded animal.
> “Go ahead, Sam,” he says, leans into the weapon.
> A drop of blood spatters on my hand I start shaking with both anger and fear.
> “Kill me. Kill me like you killed the others, but I won’t let you kill more of us.”
No. That never happened. I rapidly blinked the illusion away. I needed to focus on the battle. I’d heard the screams, of course, but when I turned around to survey the battlefield, the first thing I saw was a militiaman being torn apart by two buzzards before the scouts could take them out with well-aimed shots. Instead of bolts, their weapons fired orbs of blueish light, which, after digging into their target, exploded violently.
The corpses fell to the ground in broken heaps, but instead of blood, their wounds gushed with the same cyan half-liquid-half-gas I’d noticed after Zephyro killed the rat. The Militiamen immediately twitched back from the stuff as if it were acid, some even breaking formation to get away from the expanding pool of blue.
The Ferals did the opposite.
Something that looked like an overgrown gecko was closest, but a spider had seen what happened first. They rushed toward the glowing pool and when they noticed they were both going for the same prize, they immediately fell on each other. A stray shot from a crossbow settled the score, leaving only the spider alive. Instead of going for the pool, however, the insect dug its mandibles deep into its fallen opponent, and within a second, it started to glow.
Immediately, several bolts slammed into it, with at least half a dozen scouts turning to fire at the Feral, regardless of what they had been doing earlier. That cost us dearly, with the militia getting pushed back due to the lack of fire support, but when the glow faded and revealed the spider’s corpse, I understood why it had been the right call.
The insect had grown even bigger than before, and considerably more ugly. Weird, illogical assortments of tech littered its body. There were bent antennae on its back, and a wound in its abdomen spilled broken cables, intertwining in a way that looked disturbingly like muscles. Even while dead, its mandibles dripped with neon-green fluids that sizzled when they hit the ground.
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Okay, Zephyro had probably been right, and I should really, really avoid that blue stuff. Smart trap that. First, make me believe my Wish was locked inside of these beasts, and then have me mutate once I tried to drink it. If I’d touched that rat’s corpse earlier, I would have wasted hours in this Maze.
> A forest in winter. Olre and I are alone. The armor is gone, the Torch is not.
> “But we have to save him! They have taken him prisoner, I’m sure of it.”
> “No, Sam, he’s dead. Just like Jirrie and Lorelye, and the others.”
> “Fuck you, Olre!” I snarl, and he glares back but says nothing. “I am the fucking Queen, so when I say we go in that camp and get him back, we go in that camp.”
> Olre acts too quickly. Pushes me against the tree behind me. His face is so close, and I have to push down the surreal instinct to kiss him, to resurrect the old times, to make the world whole again.
> “Stop! Just fucking stop lying to yourself, Sam. They’re dead! They’re all dead, and you fucking killed them all.” My Torch is pressed against his chin, and my hand starts to tremble.
I clenched my jaw, eyes shut as tightly as I could. It didn’t take me long to force down the obvious lie. Olre would never do that. I would never do that.
I had to get out of here.
When my eyes snapped open, only a second had passed, and I clung to the raging battle to get my mind back in order. Over there, close to the gate, Kasha was being overrun.
“You,” I said, pointing at one of the more composed groups. “Relieve Alkashafa-14 at the gates. Stay as long as you have to, but once everything is stable, disengage and get back. Got it?”
They shouted their less-than-uniform acknowledgment and were off. The first arrow was gone from my quiver, but fortunately, it had been a good shot. They did admirably, their scout firing left and right as they advanced, saving several others in the process. So far, our losses had been manageable, and the stream of Ferals had largely abated, but it was obvious the troops were getting tired. How that worked in a supposedly digital world, I had no idea. Just another point to prove that this was nothing but a hallucination and that I was going to be alright. I just had to get out, and for that, I had to survive.
A handful of Ferals swooped over the wall on the right side of the gate, pressuring our wounded troops in that area. I sent a squad their way, and then, after a moment’s consideration, another. I had about 5 teams left in reserve, which always seemed like more than enough, but it never was.
Then came the worst part. The fretting.
I’d sent my troops, but precisely because I had more in reserve, I needed to hurry up and wait. That left a gaping abyss of time between actions, spewing forth thoughts I’d rather not have to deal with. Worries and doubts and memories assaulted me from all sides. Had I sent enough? Did I send too many? What if someone got hurt? Would the following guilt cripple me for days? Again? You’d think that after being responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, it would get easier, that the mind would finally stop bleeding and scab over, but perhaps I was just a psychological hemophiliac because many of these cuts still seeped nightmares to this day.
I’d much rather be in the front lines, where thinking past the next couple of seconds was a luxury you paid for in blood. Either you learned to be frugal with your thoughts, or you would pay the sanguine debt many times over.
Either way, every battle, when it began, carried with itself a promise of endings.
A finite truth, measured in last breaths and dying lights until it was exhausted, giving way to the lies we told ourselves to carry on.
The battle went well, with minimal casualties, until it didn’t, and they weren’t.
It began after I sent out the fourth of my six teams, just when the first returned for some rest. I had broken up the squad that looked most squeamish and made them into runners whose job it was to tell exhausted fighters to pull back for some rest.
Those who came back looked as bent and broken as their weapons. Hammers, twisted against their handle, the head precariously loose. Pitchforks, snapped in half. Butcher’s knives with deep nicks in their blades. While it didn’t bode well for our chances in any extended fight, I felt a little better for my bent scepter. I’d been worried that everyone in this Dream would be some sort of Demigod, wielding enchanted weaponry. The thought that they were the exception, not the rule, allowed me to relax a little. If these common people could defeat the Ferals, then so could I. As long as I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t defenseless. It would be alright. I would be—No, I was alright.
That was when the chain reaction happened. I didn’t notice until I heard the scream and felt more than saw the tension in the collected fighters as their attention snapped toward the gate. One of the crossbowmen must have fallen, and the amount of cyan motes they released was far greater than the Ferals, or the commoners I had been forced to watch as they died.
There was an odd sense of deja vu. The soldiers in the dead scout’s platoon broke rank, trying to get away from the cyan light. The Ferals did the opposite. Immediately, there was a mad scramble to be the first to feast, and this time, there were too many to gun down before they could finish mutating. The city guard did their best, of course, with the militia even rushing in as the Ferals greedily sucked the cyan light into themselves, allowing the soldiers to get close enough to attack. Together with a frantic barrage of arcane bolts, they even managed to kill several of the beasts before the mutation was done, but a couple still remained. There was a wolf, easily the size of a horse now, with electricity running through its jet-black fur, and a gecko just as big, secreting a substance the color of mustard which evaporated as it contacted the air.
Before anyone could react, the lizard raised one of its forelimbs and snatched up a nearby farmer who’d been trying to stab it with her broken pitchfork. She stuck to the lizard’s claws as if glued to them, and one bite later, she was gone.
Panic broke out as a blue glow enveloped the gecko yet again, and before any of us could react, the wolf used the chaos to barrel through the shattered lines of defenders and vanished into the city itself.
I cursed loudly and sent my last remaining squad after it in the vain hope they would be able to track it down before it could catch up to the civilians who were probably still trying to get to safety. It was a long, long way to the Palace, after all.
In the meantime, Zephyro had rallied the troops around him and descended on the lizard like the fist of an angry god. His blade shone brightly, flashing with every slice. I’d seen him kill five smaller Ferals with a single strike, but it took him three well-placed cuts before the lizard crumbled under the assault, and he could cut off its head with a mighty, two-handed strike that made the earth shake under our feet.
That, however, meant that the horde of Ferals he had been staving off before was now free to engage with the rest of our defenders. Worse, he had been pushing them back, making sure they couldn’t get close to the corpses he left in his wake before the blue glow fully evaporated. With him gone, it was like an all-out buffet, and if the Ferals hadn’t been so busy killing each other over the scraps, they would have overrun us with ease.
Worse, some beasts seemed to have gotten smart enough to realize just that, and begun banding together to increase their chance of survival. Half a dozen rats attacked something that, from a distance, looked like a hyena, taking it down in a matter of seconds and claiming both the corpse it had been feeding on and its own remains as their prize. They dug in at once and grew more muscular and noticeably faster in a sudden flash of bright blue.
The vizier spun, his left hand glowed white, and engulfed an entire squad in his silvery shield just before the swarm of rats could fall on them. Others weren’t so lucky.
Screams of pain turned to wails of grief and horror as casualties mounted, and one Feral after the other began to feast on the remains of the fallen, growing stronger in the process.
Our only saving grace was that the constant flow of enemies had stopped. If we could defeat these Ferals, we would have won. Whatever had driven these creatures to Zephyro’s doorstep was nowhere to be seen, and I started to entertain the vague hope that maybe this was just some sort of stampede, triggered by chance.
If only we would be so lucky.