Usually, drunken revelry followed in the wake of these sorts of victories, that didn’t happen after this battle. Instead, the jubilation slowly died down to nothing by morning, and it was only when the sun was fully above the horizon that they made camp a safe distance from the battle. It wasn’t until he was trying to sleep that Benjamin realized that was because, in the past, victory was synonymous with freeing hundreds of people from the mental chains that bound them.
Now, the men who fought with them still celebrated the victories, but it was no longer a celebration of life. Instead, it was all about death. That was especially clear in the morning as he rose and stretched. Even though they’d marched ten miles that night, Benjamin could see the veritable storm of crows and vultures circling above the battlefield on the horizon.
That grisly reminder was enough to despoil an otherwise nice day as they ate and discussed. Even this rest wouldn’t last for long, though. Not when their men were still hardly touched by violence.
The news of what they’d done would travel fast, and forces would mobilize to try to thwart or counteract them. As much as Benjamin would love to spend weeks poring through his stolen data, looking for new twists and turns amidst the noise, he knew he wasn’t likely to get it.
Now that they’d shown the Rhulvinairans a new trick, their enemy would be forced to escalate and adapt as they always had. That meant they needed to press their advantage. Everyone agreed on that.
Their army left Plantation 87 alone since it had been so thoroughly prepared for an attack. Instead, after consulting with their scouts about who looked short-handed, they decided to attack 86 next and follow that up with 89 the following night since it was close by. Both locations suddenly looked to be very empty after their black-eyed warriors had tried to surround Benjamin’s army and failed so spectacularly.
Matt wanted to focus on attacks from surprising directions and demanded that Benjamin spend the day working on items that would give his skirmishers the means to approach the walls without being spotted. Raja, on the other hand, insisted they focus everything on artillery and launch what amounted to a missile barrage with magical projectiles.
Benjamin didn’t have the time to design and make a hundred cloaks of invisibility, so he did the next best thing and created a new large-scale spell that would disguise the main body of the army while his skirmishers triggered alarms in places that would ensure the enemy was decidedly off balance for the remainder of the fight. That would let Benjamin get a little closer to the fighting that he had previously, but the paper-thin illusion of empty grasslands would do nothing to protect him if the arrows and the spells started flying.
Mirage: (5 mana/minute) Create a simple large-scale illusion that is up to 500 square yards, projected along a single dimension.
Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. By the time the enemy forces had moved entirely over the north wall to defend against the attack that they thought was coming, the main thrust of their assault along the southern portion was entirely abandoned. Other than a brief moment where the Summoner Lord manifested a dozen swirling flame creatures, it was a complete slaughter, and even he didn’t last long.
Benjamin didn’t actually see it happen, but according to those who bore the burns from that particular combat, the man hadn’t lasted for ten seconds once he’d shown himself. Apparently, Emma had waited at the top of the tallest structure for the first mage to reveal himself, and as soon as he did, she’d struck like an avenging angel and taken his head, snuffing out all of his warriors in an instant.
He’d spent the battle watching a forest of health bars on his extremely clunky interface, trying to save lives where he could. Mostly, this involved casting Triage or Frontline as soon as he saw someone get injured and hoping that his magic was faster than the enemy's attack.
It was a boring, but vital rhythm that was saving lives, and even though he felt like he was doing nothing but tapping on colored lights, he knew he was having more impact than any one person swinging a sword. Still, he couldn’t help but feel that he was shirking his responsibilities by staying so far back from the heat of the battle.
By the end, he could see that his 2314 warriors linked to his encrypted, extended network had become 2291 warriors despite his best efforts to save everyone. He could also see that though they’d started with over two million collective mana, the army had ended the fight just under a million, thanks to all the abilities that everyone had used.
God, this shit is brutal, he thought, rubbing his eyes as he paged through the log files on his screen. Devastation. Decapitating Strike. Obliteration. Touch of Death. Impact. Flurry of Blows. Enrage.
It wasn’t even information he wasted the limited bandwidth of his wide area network on. Just getting simple data like health and mana to refresh in near real-time was taking up pretty much all of that bandwidth until he could code something more elegant. These were just the commands that were being radiated into the air by the spells and spell-like abilities now that he knew what to look for. It was just page after page of brutality. He didn’t even know what some of the abilities he was seeing did beyond killing their opponents in very painful ways.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
As the attack winded down and the looting began, Benjamin paged through the data, looking for the Summoner’s spell, and then he saved the data on that one. He had no wish to Summon Inferno Swarm, but he still had so little idea of how summoning magic worked that he wanted to dissect it whenever they had downtime. The command required a lot more runes than spells that used a similar amount of mana, but beyond that, it was fairly inscrutable.
Because of how many spells he cast, his focus was warm to the touch before the battle ended, but it wasn’t so hot that it had started to boil the water it was filled with or release any steam. Benjamin hoped that would be just as true in future battles, but he didn’t consider that as likely.
“You know, I was thinking,” Raja told him when he stopped by to deliver the mage’s soul amulet once he was done picking over the battlefield. “Why not put that illusion to use once you’re done with it?”
“Because if I cancel the spell, I can better focus on all the healing that—” Benjamin started to answer.
“Yeah, I mean, I know that,” his friend interrupted. “I’m not suggesting that you let anyone bleed out or anything, but like… dude, you could use that thing to make it look like we’d summoned Godzilla or something!”
“What’s a Godzilla?” Benjamin asked.
“It’s a giant fire-breathing iguana that both protects and destroys Japan on a regular basis,” his friends said in a way that was so deadpan that, for a moment, Benjamin thought he was serious.
He considered asking more about that before he had the vaguest recollection that what his friend was talking about was a fictional character in a book or something. That was enough to make him decide he didn’t need to know anything about a fictional country like Japan, and he quickly returned to the topic at hand.
“We could project giant images of insane monsters,” Benjamin agreed. “That’s totally doable, but to what end. What I really need to do is figure out a way to attach more healers to the network to save more lives.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Raja agreed, “But like… it would be cool! Wouldn’t it? It would be a chance to strike fear into their hearts and just as much misdirection as what we did tonight.”
Benjamin was forced to concede that point; he just couldn’t figure out how to do that and what he actually needed to do. Even when Raja decided their whole attack on Plantation 89 would be that much cooler if they thought the defenders thought they were under attack by a 40-foot tall fire-breathing hydra, he just wasn’t able to make it happen.
Instead, they were more straightforward than that. Rather than make an insane fireworks show, The army crept forward 100 yards from the stone wall at the edge of the grass line after the moon had set, and then 300 archers with a variety of bows opened fire and Benjamin did his best to turn as many of them as he could from arrows into warheads.
For three solid minutes, they rained fire down on their enemy and received less than a dozen arrows in return. The Summoner Lords never even made an appearance in that fight, and they’d all thought that the mages had fled through rifts during the opening salvo. Instead, they found two well-dressed corpses in the rubble. They’d been crushed to death when their luxurious townhomes had collapsed under the weight of the damage being done to them.
That was all Matt needed to see as far as the two approaches went. “From now on, this is how we do it,” he said, “For as long as we can anyway. We soften them up with your fancy spells, and then we hit them hard with everything after that.”
Plantation 91 fell almost as easily, and by the time they’d refined their approach enough to turn west and take another crack at the trap that was Plantation 87, they found the place abandoned. Indeed, the next three Plantations they visited were all abandoned.
“Something we’ve done has really spooked them,” Matt said one day as they continued west toward the sea.
“Ya think,” Emma laughed. Thanks to all the murdering they’d been forced to do lately, she was in excellent spirits.
“I mean, I’m glad,” he continued, “But I’d kind of like to know which. Was it the ambush that we foiled, or is it the way we’ve discovered rocketry?”
“Well, I would have bet on the giant hydra… if Benji had actually pretended to summon it for me,” Raja joked.
“Why don’t they just do the same thing as us?” Emma asked. “If we can use magic rockets, then they can use magic rockets, right?”
“Well, some of them can, yeah,” Benjamin agreed. “But most of their slaves don’t specialize in archery, and even those that do—”
“Yeah, but can’t they just change their skills?” Emma asked. “I thought you said they could.”
“The Mages can swap out their skills,” Benjamin corrected, “But their slaves are stuck the way they’re made. They crippled their systems intentionally, and they don’t exactly have a way to recode things like I do.”
“Well, that’s dumb,” she sighed.
Benjamin paused a moment, then asked. “Do you remember that smartphone I had? The one with the demon in it? Do you think when we were all on Earth, we all knew how those things worked? Like, the programs and the hardware?”
“I have no idea,” she said finally as she swatted a stalk of grass out of her way in annoyance as they walked forward.
Benjamin did, though. He knew that they didn’t. The more complicated computers got, the easier they became for the uninitiated to use, and the less anyone knew how they worked. While he would be the last one to say that he really understood how any of their systems worked, he knew more than most, including, apparently, most of the Rhulvinarian mages.
They had to do everything a certain way, because that was the way it had always been done, but him? He could make shit up as he went along, and that thought was enough to make him smile for the first time in days. The more they fought, the more he learned and the more certain he was that they were going to win.