Benjamin thought that he was going to have to light a bonfire and somehow summon the Throne of the Sky Sea to let her know they needed some kind of draft animal, but that proved not to be necessary. The stone children helped them build a cart to bring the thing to the surface, and there was already a giant tortoise waiting for them, which made Raja crack no end of jokes about which Renaissance painter they should name it after.
No one else really got that joke, but Raja found it to be hilarious, and he kept finding new ways to tell it. As the evening wore on, and the tortoise started to wander off while they were struggling to hoist the focus onto the thing’s shell, Raja suddenly shouted, “Where are you going, man? Does Master Splinter need our help?”
Matt made his displeasure clear, with a noise that was as much a growl as the words, “knock it off,” while he used his magically enhanced strength to pass timbers up to the stone children. They carved each one differently so that they interlocked with each other, building a sort of platform that seemed almost mounted to the shell without a single fastener. It was like one of those puzzle toys but on a grand scale. It was only with this was done, and their turtle was equipped with both a wide sundeck and a sturdy ladder, that everyone worked together to wrestle the giant bronze object into place.
“Let’s see a demonstration of this blasted thing,” Matt said. “Because if it doesn’t work, I’m tossing it overboard.”
“Well, before we do anything like that, we… kinda have to fill it with water,” Benjamin said hesitantly.
“Bah!” Matt said, walking away and leaving everyone else to handle it. In the end, a few minutes with a bucket brigade. It was only when all of that was done, and he'd played with the patch panel a little bit, that he felt ready. Triage was out because no one was hurt, and neither Speedway nor Frontline were showy enough. In the end, even though he didn’t like the idea of needless destruction, he decided he was going to have to use Bombard.
Focus Spell List:
Bombard (30 mana): Infuse up to 20 projectiles with Impact.
Frontline (2 mana/person): cast a limited version of mage shield on up to 100 people that will absorb 10 damage each before failing
Speedway (1 mana/person): Double the move and attack speed of up to 100 people for 6 seconds.
Triage: (15 mana) Heal the most badly injured member of your network in range by 50 health, and all other injured personnel in the same network within 30 feet by 10 health..
None of those spells actually existed on his spell list, of course, and he couldn’t even cast most of them with his current mana pool. Instead, using a macro, he changed the nature of status, and then a moment later cast status. So, at this point, it was just a variable.
Update status. Cast status. It was as simple as that.
Only, behind the scenes, it wasn’t very simple at all. Not only did he have the errors that plagued his own system to deal with, but he was now using the arcane programming that he only partially understood in ways it was never made for. While that was common enough in the tech world, it was less so when the computer you were hacking to bring to sporadic life was your own soul.
While Benjamin worked with the hardware to get everything up to speed, he chose the goblin mound as a target and then asked everyone to stand back. Once he was ready, he gave the command to Raja to launch a Fusillade, and his friend shouted right back, “Cowabunga, man!” before firing a single arrow up into the night sky.
It glowed like a green tracer round with the magic his friend had imbued it with, and at its apex, it split apart into more than a dozen arrows. Normally, they would have fallen amongst the enemy as a storm of burning shots before they vanished, but not tonight. Tonight, as soon as they split, a second spell was cast on them as he tried casting bombard for the first time.
It was not a complex spell, but he’d never cast something with even half so much mana before, and he felt an electric thrill go through him as he emptied his own mana pool and dented everyone else in the party as he spent the next two seconds weaving the spell into being.
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Benjamin was a little surprised at how long two seconds felt in this circumstance. He’d intentionally limited the magic to take it easy on the tool he was using, but as it was, it only completed as the projectiles neared the ground at the end of their arc.
Neither the tight timing nor his unwarranted fears about the machine exploding violently affected the explosions that followed. In the past, Benjamin had compared his friend’s spell to a missile launcher or a bazooka. It was a terrifying thing to be anywhere near, and Benjamin had long had faith that when the time came, it would damage wood and stone as easily as it pulverized flesh.
Now he had that proof. The explosions detonated one after another across the hillside in a succession of violent shockwaves that crushed a number of tunnel systems that had been visible in the moonlight before dust shrouded everything. It was loud enough to startle the turtle as well as their hosts, and embarrassingly, Benjamin almost fell to the ground. Fortunately, his friend caught him by the elbow.
“Nice,” Raja said, clapping him on the back. “I have a feeling we’re going to be using that a lot.”
“Well, there’s lots of other things we can do with this, it’s more than just artillery,” Benjamin cautioned them. “We can—”
“Yeah, but when one of your options is a freaking air strike, why would you want to use any other options?” Raja demanded.
“We’ll see,” Benjamin said, climbing down to rejoin everyone else.
More congratulations followed, and even their hosts seemed satisfied. “Well, I wasn’t convinced it would work, but it did,” Jasparian told him as he gingerly shook Benjamin’s hand. “How many times in a row do you think you can use it before it explodes?”
“With a spell like that?” he said as he did some quick math in his head. “Eight, or maybe ten times. With a smaller spell, we could keep it up all day, but then it really isn’t meant for small spells, is it?”
After that, they said their goodbyes, though they were only going to camp here for the night since it was too late to travel. Still, they made several more trips down to retrieve the gems and other equipment that was still in Lasthome before they were finally ready to call it a night.
In the morning, they discovered that with some effort, they could all ride their strange mount. Of course, that wasn’t actually feasible since, without anyone to lead it by a tether, it quickly wandered off track. It was nice to catch a break, though, so frequently, two or three of them would leisurely sit atop their tiny island while one or two people led it slowly southwest through the sea of grass.
If they traveled this direction long enough, they would eventually reunify with some or all of the forces they’d sent this way or the place on the map where Lord Jarris offered to meet them. If they went past that, then they would eventually reach the inner sea and all the places where the real battle would be fought. Benjamin worried about things like retaliatory tidal waves as they went, and what he could possibly do to stop his enemies from summoning insane new monsters at whim, but at least when he was riding atop their turtle howdah, he no longer feared ambush.
Now, instead of being constantly surrounded by the humid, claustrophobic grass that towered over his head by a foot or two in most places, they glided along at just the right height to finally see the Grass Sea as it really was. Benjamin wasted more time than he should have over the next few days just enjoying that view. Other than the occasional boulder or tree island, and once when they passed near enough to see a still smoldering plantation that had been smashed by their forces, they were constantly surrounded by that gentle swaying motion that went off so far into the distance that sometimes Benjamin really could believe that this place was infinite.
Eventually, though, all good things had to come to an end, and five days after they left Lasthome, they found a band of centaurs that offered to lead them to the nearest army. No one bothered to ask the horse people how they’d managed to locate them.
The ability to just know where everything was at all times, thanks to the Throne’s eyes in the sky, was all well and good when they were on their team, but Benjamin couldn’t help but worry about what it would be like if they finished this war, and the tables were suddenly turned. He was under no illusions about what the fae thought of the ‘manthings,’ after all.
For now, that wasn’t a concern, though, and they led them to a large camp where a couple of thousand humans waited for them. That was the good news. However, as they quickly found out, once greetings were finished and reports were made, that was the only good news. The bad news was that this was pretty much everyone. In the weeks Benjamin and his friends had been gone, there had been some costly victories and some even more costly defeats.
One of the splinter armies they’d created had been annihilated to a man when they’d been ambushed by icy giants, which gave Benjamin flashbacks of the lesser elementals they’d faced not so long ago. The other groups had survived long enough to reform, but all of them had taken costly losses. Almost two dozen more plantations had been burned, and thousands of the enemy lay dead, but the cost wasn’t one that they could bear much longer.
“What about the enemy forces,” Benjamin asked, partway through another conversation Matt was having with the centaurs about another fighting retreat their people had endured. “Any sign that they’re running out of men?”
“The only one that’s running out of men here is you, I’m afraid!” Gwarn laughed. “But you will kill a few thousand more before you are spent, and that’s progress we can drink to. You’ve set the damn summoners back at least a decade at this point. Perhaps two!”
“Progress would be finding another way to get reinforcements,” Benjamin grumbled. He had no interest in explaining that to the centaur tribes, though. Their animus was hardly personal. As long as someone was dying and the battles were thrilling, they weren’t particularly interested in the finer points. For Benjamin, though, nothing less than full-blown victory was going to be enough, and as many miracles as he felt like he had up his sleeve right now, listening to story after story about the bloody meat grinder that some of the magic-fueled battles became, he was under no illusions that those would be enough.