"I'm not surprised at how much is going on in three floors of barracks. I am surprised by how many zombies just didn't make it out at all, and how this one dwarf looks like he hadn't even turned at all, just been eaten," Sophie said, kneeling over the zombies.
The half eaten corpse of a cadet lay in the center of the large bay. On either side, foot lockers and bunks were stacked in neat rows.
"I'm surprised that the bunks are still all mostly where they probably started out," Bob said. "But I'm pretty sure that we've cleaned out the whole barracks."
Their raid on the academy had slowed down considerably as they had realized that there were four such barracks. The three story stone buildings could each house about nine hundred cadets without much in the way of change.
"This one, hold on Ca'at- check this one," Bob said, directing his summoned familiar to the corpse.
The tiny fluff ball neatly carved up the chest of the dwarf. Watching it work Sophie was just struck by how odd the whole thing was. Clearly, Mork had given his chosen an advantage, possibly with a cost to himself. It had to cost the gods something to summon chosen. If there was one rule that she had thought about in this place, it was that nothing was free.
True, Bob had said that Mork had given him a boon, but had Sonya gotten a boon for killing another one of the death knights? Perhaps the gate card was enough.
Ca'at grabbed a card from inside the remains of the dwarf. Tentacles from around it's mouth emerged, taking the card and holding it up proudly. Then, taking the card into its mouth, it dropped the card at Bob's feet.
"Huh. Didn't expect this. What do you girls make of this?" Bob said, pulling out a rag that he used to clean cards and card pieces. Sophie was impressed that he had finally stopped using his shirts for the job.
"Why would there be an epic card inside of this dead dwarf?" Sonya said, taking a closer look at the card.
Epic Spell Card: Anchor
This spell allows a caster to anchor a spell into an object. Spells can be cast onto or through the object.
They passed the card around.
"Anchor? What the heck? How is this an epic card?" Stella said, giving the card back to Bob.
He tucked it away for later.
"We haven't gotten to see many cards of that strength. Maybe it's broken in a way that none of us realize, but Valerie can figure out," Sophie said.
"I can imagine that it would work well if you wanted a heal or something," Bob mused. "Alright there's not much else here. Do you want to check the roof? There's an access panel there and I'm certain that there are no zombies there."
The access panel was in a corner. Bob opened a hatch over the rungs of a ladder that was connected to the wall.
"This. right here, has to have been a masterwork," Bob said. "I really am starting to appreciate dwarven engineering, if not their heights."
Bob went up the hatch and quickly disappeared from view.
"Come on up," he said.
Sophie followed, handing her spear to Sonya, then taking both at the top. The roof had a slight cant away, but otherwise was flat. Around the sides there was a two foot tall brick wall. Sophie looked over, down onto the academy grounds.
It was much larger than a Midwestern high school. If they had a football field, then it wouldn't be out of place. She could see at least five parade fields, each one next to a large ornate building with iron accents.
"This is like a small private college in the middle of nowhere that you see on a road trip," she said to Bob. "Or the dwarvish equivalent. This is where their top military minds used to come and mold their youth and strike the irons hot and-"
She shielded her eyes in the mid-day sun. She could have sworn that she had seen something circling around in the air.
"Bob, do you see something over there?" She indicated with her finger and her thumb.
"Hey now," he said, squinting. "Uh, babe, can you get up here? My eyes aren't what they used to be."
Sophie was sure that she was looking at something flying, it being of the large and scaly variety of monster. Ever since she was little, she had imagined going on fantasy adventures with dragons and princesses and princes. She never imagined that she would actually get to see one, especially on her previous career trajectory.
Dragons and psych hospitals didn't generally mix.
Dragons and the undead? She was less sure about that.
"Is that a big green dragon?" Stella said from the top of the hatch.
"I think that we might need to head back a bit early," Sophie said. "Why don't we close the hatch and call this our return point?"
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Everyone agreed that it was time to head back.
Sonya opened a portal linking their current location with the area she had designated for their return. The girls went through first, followed by Bob and Sonya herself. On the other side, the camp was preparing for war.
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"Take up defensive positions everyone! Zan, extend the walls up!" Anthony yelled.
Of course a dragon decided to show up when Sonya was on a mission. It was almost poetic. The one thing he could count on was Murphy.
When the four of them returned through the portal Anthony was beginning to mount a defense.
"Flame flinger in position!" Andrew yelled from his new firing point, a singular raised tower. He had removed the apparatus from the back of his wagon and then affixed it to a stable tripod. The tower was not facing the city itself as the dragon circled around Lacey. No one was sure if it had found them or if it was even searching for people. It appeared to be just bad with time? There was only so much you could tell from a flying beast that was over two kilometers away.
He couldn't even really get a good look at it. He got flashes of wings and green, but he didn't see any smoke. Also, he wasn't sure that the wings were moving fast enough to keep the dragon afloat. And even if they were, it looked comically large compared to its wings, as if someone with no artistic skill had decided to create a dragon.
It took them about five minutes to get ready. He judged that the dragon would be able to clear the distance in less than two minutes if it really tried. He was so thankful that everyone was quickly accounted for.
Rather than be sitting tucked inside of a bowl, what they did was open up a door, and exit for the horses to spill out. They pulled three of the caravans out west as the flame flinger needed to be detached.
Once the fourth one was detached, they moved it out as well. The campsite was enough of a juicy target for any aerial foe. Andrew could make another flame finger if you really wanted to. They had the knowledge and the blueprints that he had made before to do another one. But it was all that Anthony could do to hold down the fort as he arranged his defense. They had already cross-loaded things so that any one wagon going down would not take them out. Now they had everything evenly spread into six potential targets.
One group was led by Finley, one by Bob and the last by Anthony himself.
Bob's group was heavy on Monks and were going to be the first to engage the dragon. Finley's group would try to pin it down with ranged attacks. There's not that much you can do against a giant flying reptile, but Anthony felt as prepared as he could be, given the circumstances. He began to wonder what kind of card the dragon would have in his Soul deck.
A few minutes turned into a half an hour of watching its circle every so often dipping to get a better look. Anthony began to think that they should think about moving onward instead of sticking around. If this dragon was going to stay here long-term then they were going to have to think about what they really wanted from the city. It was one thing to search through the remnants of a zombie apocalypse. It was quite another to do so with a looming threat above.
Bob crossed from his fighting position over to Anthony.
"How long do you want to stay here until we head out?" Bob said. "We're just sitting ducks here. We can return here whenever with Sonya's gate spell."
"The longer this goes on the more I'm sure that you're right. Let's mount up. She may need to make multiple trips, but we can chance this, especially if it's hostile."
Anthony pulled out his flags. As he had taken up with Andrew, he called for them to disassemble the flame flinger and pack it up. Anything that wasn't already packed away needed to get covered up. He was sad that they were leaving the lake just when he was going to take a nice mid-afternoon bath but better dirty and alive than dead and clean.
"Mount up! If it's not coming for us right now, we need to get out of its range," he said. " Valerie! Any suggestions as to destinations?"
The dwarven maiden smiled a wicked smile.
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The dragon as it turned out was looking for a more gamey type of meal than the caravan. Shortly after they made a decision to turn tail and leave, the dragon began picking up and eating dwarven zombies.
The one person that had a sight adjacent ability was bob and his reports to Finley and Anthony were not very promising.
"What do you mean you can't tell what it's eating, what else could it be eating?" Finley said. "There's nothing but zombie dwarves in there, unless we completely missed something."
"What I'm saying is that it looks like it's tossing something up in the air and then swallowing, but come on... you guys understand that we're like four miles away from there," a frustrated Bob said, as his horse kept pace with Finley's wagon.
"Again with these miles. Can you just use the killer meters like Sonya does?" Finley said.
"It's American exceptionalism on display," Sonya said from behind the front of the wagon. "Even when you're summoned to another world, you won't use the metric system."
Anthony grunted.
"Look," he said, "There's no America here. There's just our community of people who have invested interest in not dying. So if you can all not fight about this right now that'll would be great."
Anthony felt not so great getting in between their business. Everyone is a little bit tense due to their sudden departure. It wasn't like they were going to find another perfect setup where they were going but it would have been great if they could. Sonya would make some trips back and they could jump at the lake then. That was the most reassuring thing about knowing that they had acquired the gate card.
Sonya explained that they picked up another epic card. When she talked about the anchor, he immediately associated it with her card. Finley grabbed a rock off the side of the road for her to see if she could use it as an anchor.
They had to get Bob to pull the card out and hand it over but in the end she was able to use the anchor to more safely and effectively cast the gate spell. This allowed them to create two portals that were connected on two anchors. Sonya said that she could do it again but it took a lot of Mana for her to do the first set.
Once it was set up they tested it and anyone was able to trickle Mana into either Rock to activate it. The mana needed to use the anchor was a lot for Bob and Stella who had mana, but didn't have a lot in the casting department. They could activate it for half a minute. But Andrew with his artificer class wasn't able to activate it on his own. It was a bit hit or miss, so Anthony asked Finley to prioritize making a few more caster classes.
It was nearly nightfall when they had gotten far enough away that Heirisburg wasn't visible. Valerie had directed them to a place that the academy frequently used to train combat maneuvers. There were several one story barracks around a large wooden cabin. The place was deserted but obviously well loved and cared for. It even had a place for them to stable the horses at night, something that he was ecstatic to find.
Anthony had expected some zombies, but the worst thing they found was the smell of the dwarves latrines. That wasn't even so bad.
He could deal with the smell.
He just didn't want to deal with the complaints that night, but he would listen to his newest advisor. After all she was young and impressionable, and he expected that she would walk in on him and Sonya if he didn't cut her off. So what he did was sit there and take about half an hour of Valerie screaming about all decisions that they had made and how she would do things differently and how he was a failure as a person and as a human being. He took this in stride.