They left spotters at all the other nearby Plantations and runners halfway between there and the place where they decided to set up their ambush, five miles from Plantation 87. Days of deliberation had gone into this plan, but even after, that days of preparation were still needed before they pulled the trigger and bet it all on his crazy idea.

Do we really need to burn this specific hellhole down to the ground? He asked himself repeatedly. No. There were lots of places with greater human suffering than this, but this was a spot where they could inflict a lot of pain on an overconfident enemy.

As soon as the fighting started, the Rhulvinarians were going to drop on top of their raggedy army like the vengeful hand of God, but Benjamin doubted it was going to play out quite the way that the summoners hoped it would. Especially not since he and his friends were being so careful in their preparations.

They worked only at night, without light of any kind, as they built their beacon, though Benjamin wasn’t going to finalize it until just before the battle was started, lest someone use it a little early by accident. After that, they put their best archers on horseback and practiced well over the horizon.

Benjamin couldn’t bring his war turtle close enough to the city to help them with that part, but he could recode some of their abilities so that they all had the same impact spell that Raja did. Their part of the plan was a simple one: ride just close enough to the Plantation to bombard them with explosive arrows to raise the alarm, keep moving to avoid the inevitable counter-attack, and retreat when the reinforcements arrived.

“I want to fight, man,” Raja protested that last part since he would be leading that contingent of fifty warriors. A strategic retreat there was necessary, though, because they’d be entirely cut off from the main body of the force. They were a distraction and nothing more.

The rest of the army would be hidden just behind the crest of the nearby hills a few hundred yards from the city, ready to unleash hell at the signal. Of course, no one but Matt and his officers knew what that signal was going to be. Not even the men who had helped Benjamin bury the melon-sized ruby at the center of the beacon had any idea what it was.

In the end, working out a timer had been the most difficult part. The solution that Benjamin eventually worked out was pretty basic. In fact, it was so basic he was embarrassed of it. His timing circuit turned out to be a 99% full bomb that would go off catastrophically if only 5 or 10 more mana were added to it, and when the go signal came, a small secondary crystal with a simple enchantment that drained its own mana to slowly fill up the primary crystal.

Matt would have preferred some sort of remote control device. Honestly, Benjamin would have, too, but he hadn’t quite worked out the protocols for that yet. Benjamin also planted a few bronze packet sniffers around the periphery of the beacon, near landmarks he hoped would survive the violence ahead, so hopefully, they’d intercept some of the mage’s spell traffic and give him a few ideas on how to work out better remote protocols in the future.

If they survived this, he reminded himself.

As the appointed hour grew closer, and all was in readiness, Benjamin could feel the tension among the men in everything, from the way they gripped their weapons to the way that they spoke in tight, clipped sentences. Some seemed eager for the battle, but most were only a few steps from terror and had no idea what it was they were about to unleash.

He felt their pain, but more so. Once the battle started, he would be back behind the warriors amidst the healers to better hide his giant mount in the tall grasses and have access to a ready pool of mana should he have the opportunity to use it. Right now, though, he was waiting on the sound of thunderous hooves to plant his timing crystal, activate the beacon, and then run like hell before either the stone managed to get enough energy to explode or a violent emerald rift opened up full of black-eyed men bent on murder.

He didn’t have to wait long. At a single whistle, the riders were off, and as soon as Benjamin saw Raja give him a mocking salute as he rode by, Benjamin was running toward the center of his bear trap. Cognizant that if he fucked this up, he’d blow himself to hamburger before he even knew what had happened, he worked quickly but precisely and buried his timing fuse before he placed the final few stones in the beacon and the cast the enchantments for both from batch files he’d written and reviewed earlier.

Then, he was running back up the hill toward his own men. Well, not directly. He didn’t want to give away their position, so he took a long, circuitous path to get there. He didn’t reach his own lines before the sound of distant explosions, but he did reach his focus with seconds to spare before the first pillar of green flame lit up the sky on the far side of the hill.

That was followed by another and another in quick succession. Benjamin wondered just how fucked they were for the Rhulvinarians to send in three separate units like that. They really did plan on surrounding us, he thought, realizing how devastating this trap would have been to accidentally fall into.

Even as he grappled with that, though, he could hear the sound of orders being shouted from hundreds of yards away, and twice, he saw giant creatures manifest themselves before they started marching toward the troublesome cavalry that was still firing their explosive spells.

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Raja should have been turning and running already. Benjamin knew that, but he also knew his friend, and there was no way that the man was going to give up when he had miles of buffer between him and danger. He was going to cut it down to the wire.

As the minutes ticked by, though, nothing happened. Nothing obvious, at least. Benjamin waited on pins and needles for whatever was going to happen. Since keeping track of time like this was basically impossible, in his mind, it was a race. Either the Summoner Lords and their creatures were going to find the army hidden in the tall grass only a few hundred yards from them, or his bomb was going to go off, and the longer the latter didn’t happen, the more certain he was that the former would.

It was only when part of him had the sick feeling that he’d fucked something up and the gemstone would never go off that it finally detonated. Benjamin was almost a quarter mile from the blast, but he felt it as much as he saw it as the sky suddenly lit up with a crimson so bright that for a few seconds, everything was whited out over the crest of the hill.

That was when everyone charged forward. There were no battle cries, nor were there orders to advance. Benjamin didn’t need those, though. He could see it in the way the grass sea weaved and churned erratically. He moved forward as well, though he only intended on taking his turtle far enough that he could look out over the battlefield and contribute at the edges of things.

By the time he got there, he’d received a few system alerts that people had died thanks to his new party interface, but he was hardly expecting a bloodbath. Benjamin was wrong about that, at least.

The beacon that they’d built had become a crater as the result of the explosion, and though there were few bodies inside the radius, it had been turned into a literal bloodbath. Shrapnel had scythed down the grass for a hundred yards in every direction, and he was fairly certain that the pieces and parts of the enemy soldiers went out even further than that.

He wasn’t sure exactly how strong the bombs he was making were, but based on the results here, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the thing had been the equivalent of a couple of tons of TNT. It had been almost as effective as it was barbaric, and for almost a minute, he could do nothing but stare as his men fought the few remaining enemy soldiers in calf-deep blood.

Once he snapped out of it, he forced himself to participate, but the most he could do was cast triage a few times at a few severely wounded people on his side. More than that was simply beyond him. He’d done all the killing he was going to do for the night as far as he was concerned.

After the last man was dead, and they were making an orderly withdrawal so they could meet with their scouts and determine which Plantations had been bled dry of defenders to support this ambush, his men rejoiced. Benjamin didn’t, though. As happy as he was that less than ten people on their side had died, he simply didn’t have it in him to celebrate the instantaneous death and dismemberment of hundreds of people like that.

Instead, he smiled blandly at those who insisted on congratulating him and made his way to collect the data recorders he’d planted so he could try to make sense of everything that had happened in the minutes leading up to the explosion.

Once he had those, he sat in silence on his turtle and tried not to think about it as they moved south. The centaurs crowed, and men and women cheered. However, the celebratory mood never quite reached him up on his perch, not even when Raja climbed up and joined him.

“You okay, man?” his friend asked. “You look kinda pale.”

“Never better,” Benjamin lied. “Just, ummm, going over the data in these packet sniffers and data traps to see if I can learn any new tricks.”

That was what he should have been doing, of course, but he couldn’t really get that bloody battlefield out of his mind. Even as he tried to focus on Raja, he could smell that coppery scent and—

“I said, you need to calm down, man,” his friend said as he patted Benjamin on the back, bringing him back to reality. “Do you know where I was when that bomb went off?”

“Does it matter?” Benjamin asked, confused about what it was he missed.

“Not to me, but it will to you,” Raja laughed.

“We might have stayed a little longer than we were supposed to. I mean, what could go wrong, right? We had horses, and they… well, anyway. The point is I didn’t think anything could catch us,” he laughed. “Boy, was I wrong. Have you ever been chased by a thirty-foot-tall cyclops? I don’t recommend it.”

“Was it getting close?” Benjamin asked, not sure where it was going.

“Not close enough to eat us or anything, but close enough that the beam it fired from its FREAKING EYE was seconds from cooking every last one of us,” he said, smiling more than any man should have when saying something like that. “Every one of us was about to bite it, and then your bomb went off.”

“And it got the cyclops?” Benjamin guessed.

“Of course, it didn’t get the Cyclops,” Raja said, rolling his eyes. “Aren’t you even paying attention? We were like 2 miles away from that blast. The cyclops wasn’t much closer. Its master was, though. It was right at ground zero, and as soon as you detonated it, it vanished in a puff of smoke. The details don’t matter, Benji; what matters is all the people you saved tonight.”

“Yeah, but—” he tried to respond.

“But fucking nothing, man. I saw the hole and the bodies. Well, the pieces of them, and yeah, it was gruesome,” Raja answered, shaking his head. “But it was quick, and it was clean, and that’s all you can ask for. It’s us or them, and… It’s not like I expect you to enjoy killing like Matt or even Emma, but you’ve got to stop letting it get to you like this, man. We’re counting on you.”

That woke Benjamin up as much as any slap to the face would have. They’re counting on me. He repeated to himself. The two of them talked about other things after that, but that was what stuck with him the rest of the night.