Anthony and Sonya were inspecting the final pieces of the wall. It really was a masterpiece in his eyes. The maze went all the way up the promontory stopping right by the first set of mansions.

"You know whats this is some good work," Anthony said. "I think that there's no other woman who could design a maze such as you half as good."

"Flattery will get you everywhere. But really this is such a quick job that I don't even want to put my name on it."

"What poor woman doesn't want to sign her name to the zombie maze that she dedicated to ending the charitable trust of less zombies?"

Anthony stood up both arms outstretched, gesturing at the magnificence of the wall in front of him.

A part that suddenly went revealed that the maze had a slight pattern.

Sonya hadn't designed it to be a winding maze that the zombies were going to get lost in. No, it had a multiple long passageway maximizing the amount of space that the zombies would have to move through. It was made so that they could fire volleys of arrows and magic spells down large corridors. This provided the longest time for the defenders to get it right.

Almost every single person in the caravan now had a ranged spell that went directly from them to something else. These skills had proven their worth time and time again and helped her focus in on their particular predicament and how she could maximize a defenders ability to get a good shot.

In contrast, one person had an indirect fire skill. which was a spell that launched like an artillery shell over and back down. This of course being Andrew, who somehow had achieved every dwarven boy's dream of becoming both a cannon and a dwarf.

The long hallways allowed them to place people at each end of a hallway before a zombie would cross into another hallway or they could once again have a second person on the opposite side of that maze start firing shots at the zombies. The defenders would augment Andrews towers, which still needed to be fed directly by mana from other enlightened beings.

It was the ideal setup for exactly the kind of onslaught that they had barreled through time and time again.

There was one small, insignificant problem. No one was really showing up to the party. In order to have a zombie conga line party, one needed a zombie conga line. They just weren't getting that. All of the zombies from the bluff had been dispatched, but the city below remained motionless.

"Do you think that our party friends are going to show up anytime soon?" Sonya said, gripping Anthony's hand in anticipation.

She fumbled around in his pockets. Not the pockets that he was wearing, the pockets in the scrub top and scrub bottoms that she had stolen from him unceremoniously when they began their courtship.

"You know what? I don't know if they're going to show up, Anthony said. But you found so many good party favors. It'll be a shame to have them all go to waste."

"You see this is my feeling exactly," Sonya said, pulling several things out. "You always know exactly what to say to win a girl's heart."

From one of the pockets in her acquired pants, she pulled out a small candle with a long fuse. She found several more and held them up to inspect them.

"Oh so you were serious about this," he said, examining it after being passed the first of many dwarven firecrackers.

"Look, you might be American but there's nobody who wants to fire off firecrackers more than a rural canadian girl who's super bored with exactly nothing to do."

"I'm right here!" Anthony said, winking at her as he put one of the items into the ground at an upward angle.

"We can do that later," Sonya said. "But right now I feel like I have a need to draw a lot of attention to our location. And I need someone with the ability to sign off on such an audacious request. Would that person be you, good sir?"

Anthony opened his palm. A slight flame of about three inches rose up inside of it, lighting up her smile.

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Finley pointed to the small orb of fire that was now flying up into the air. The orcs next to him tracked it as well.

"See you know what it's like. Things like that that really bother me," Finley said. "It's like they are not thinking about using card powers. They're just thinking about mayhem or something like that. Did I know that the back of the academy warehouse was dotted with scented candles that-"

A loud pop sounded off, turning what had been an orb of fire into a display that demanded one's attention. The streak of smoke now led to a large semicircle of fire that expanded rapidly.

"You know what? That is ridiculous. I see exactly what you mean," Borgan said. "But the gods work in very mysterious and wholly complicated ways."

The three of them watched the fireworks display for a little bit. Finley's itch not to be on fire turned into a full-on thing that he had to scratch.

"Would it kill Anthony to aim a little bit higher? Because I would like to not have a ring of fire surround us. We have kind of cut ourselves off here by being on this peninsula, yes. The zombies would have to go through our meat grinder and we can always just make it easy to outrun them. I don't want to go and be the one that activates that emergency plan," Finley said.

"What did the humans say the other day?" Borgan said. "Not it!"

Sparks from the fireworks fell to the ground. From the distance they were at, it could have been nothing. As of yet, they couldn't see any smoke coming. Finley held his breath. So long as he denied the possibility of a fire, one couldn't happen, right?

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Borgan and his brother began a slow dirge. Finley wasn't exactly sure what they're going to get out of that, but he accepted it. He felt calmer and more focused immediately. He still had a bit of the sight that they had given him.

So when the first lick of flame rose up in the dry dwarven plains next to the quiet sea, Finley was able to raise the alarm.

"Fire!" He yelled, trying to get everyone's attention.

Within moments, the rest of the Caravan was up on the wall watching. Nearly a dozen pairs of eyes watched as a wildfire began to spread.

"Wow, that could have gone a lot better. They should put warnings on those things," Finley said.

"Truer words have never been spoken," Borgan said. "I see that we have activated the scouts to finally make a move. Or perhaps it was the ice magic being shot from that sea monster."

A lance of ice magic hurtled towards the city. It hit nearby where the scouts had to have been. Finley had expected it to go a bit faster but chosen got their own laws of physics or something.

"Well shit," he said as the ice hit the western wall.

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If you had told Sophie this morning that she would be facing a sea monster with ice breathing powers, she would have said 'Fuck you and what are you doing in my tent.'

The fact that one was now doing that exacting that she feared, made her realize that for as sneaky as they were, sometimes a big dumb enemy could disrupt their plans.

So the big dumb sea monster, Vanessa, decided that today it was going to meddle in human and dwarven affairs.

Sophie was not interested in her input, so she poured all of her energy into avoiding the thick lance of ice that took out the gate.

"Move," she yelled. "We gotta get out of its range or at least out of its sight. Inland!"

The scouts with her didn't need to verbally acknowledge that as they were already pointing their horses north by northeast in an attempt to move away from the shoreline. They already weren't close to it, but the fact that the town was so close to the water and by proxy Vanessa, meant that they were subject to unfriendly fire.

Sonya didn't have that much in the animal handling skill, and was kicking herself for not working harder with the horses that they did have. She was able to handle one horse if she tried. Or if she really pushed on the scale a lot, twenty goats.

She didn't have twenty goats there with her to ride and she didn't think that goats would want to be ridden. So she pushed her horse to get both of them to safety.

If there was one thing's horses did not like, giant sea monsters were at the top of the list.

As she kicked up speed, of course that was the time that her patron decided that she needed a little something extra as a golden card appeared in front of her. She snatched it and immediately read, then regretted reading it.

Rare card: Goat? Goat!

Bah bah bah bah. Bah!

This card is a relic and can be used once.

The image of a goat flashed through her mind as she activated the card. She had an intuitive feeling of what the card did but it felt like it wouldn't translate back. Just as quickly, she forgot what it did, despite the spell taking what had to be half of her mana.

The scouts broke past the wall finally able to see their way back to the promontory.

It was about that that they realized in horror that part of the plains were on fire.

The fire, like Sophie's ex, was finding a new meaning to freedom.

This did not bode well for the humans who could best be called flammable on a good day. Bob broke ahead of them, clearly able to use more of his mana he lit up his path finding skill. Above him, an arrow pointed to if not the best way, a better way to go.

He adjusted his horse so they were going further north.

At any other time, Sophie would have enjoyed the bonfire that was going to result from the dry grass meeting with the fireworks. She would have insisted on sitting away from the wind and gotten a warm face no matter where she sat.

Those fires had never threatened to spread quite so far.

She bleated without realizing as the scouts galloped towards safety and the growing flames in front of them.

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Anthony realized that they had a problem. The giant sea monster had decided that today was a day that it was going to unleash, if not all of, a giant proportion of its mana reserves. It did this by laying siege to Gloucester.

That being the city that they were trying to infiltrate and steal a boat from.

"We only needed one boat," he said, sitting down on the side of the wall. "We only needed one... stinking... boat."

"Anthony, I'm so sorry," She said. "I didn't know that this was going to happen."

Sonya sat down next to him and he felt her lean against him. He wanted to recoil but she hadn't done this out of malice. There was no ill intent behind her actions. There was just a bunch of grass deciding that it felt quite dry and warm all of a sudden.

"Can you smother the flames at least?" He asked, hoping beyond hope that they could contain it. It was his solemn hope that they might end this day without being attacked by a sea monster.

No one wakes up to thinking that today that were going to fight a sea monster, but sometimes it happened.

"Yeah, can you use your Earth Magic to smother it? Do your best to contain it. We're going to have to think about the problem. How do we fight a sea monster like this and win?"

Sonya jumped down, using her earth magic to create steps as she went. And he couldn't help but be impressed by her control. It was her strength in using the Earth Magic that had saved them so many times. When she got to the ground she began running towards the flames.

Five steps later and large flying saucers of dirt started appearing alongside her. As she ran she used arms to raise up these discs and then threw them into the flames. The first few plopped onto the flames without effect but after the sixth, he began to see what she was doing. First she was forming a fire break around the flames.

It was spreading and it was spreading fast but she had put a break between them and the flames. She stopped running, looking like she was trying to conserve at least part of her energy.

As she walked, she raised one arm at a time. When the large round objects were in the air, she flung them.

Anthony stopped counting after twenty.

This was when the smoke began to turn as the winds shifted. Previously it was going south and now the winds began to move in a more easterly fashion. Anthony had the right idea of reminding himself that he was east of the flames.

"Fuck!"

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Andrew had been relying on his newest friend's ability to calculate where his artillery shells would land. They had run a few tests of course, but no one ever gets the ideal conditions they want. He had some range. At least theoretically so. Valerie kept telling him that he could send his mana shells a span away.

They had only really reached a half a span. Valerie was able to judge this distance by side alone, he suspected that she had a special card power that she didn't want to give him the text of.

When the call came to take cover from the ice spears, he didn't believe it. Sure, he believed in the old tales and myths of sea monsters and the like. But back in his old world, the biggest body of water he had seen had been far smaller than this lake. The fact that something so large could grow up and live inside of water was shocking.

That it then had a card power that didn't have refused ice lances with such strength that it could hit from that distance alarmed him to no end.

"Thirteen degrees up," Valerie said.

He did as he was told.

"Launch!" She said.

Andrew plopped one of his magical shells into the tube. He pulled the trigger and it ejected the shell portion. The round whistled past them.

It had to be a card ability. She was laying down on top of the maze, facing west. Several tense seconds passed, as the round landed explosively next to the town.

"We have to adjust for the wind," she said. "Twelve point five degrees!"

"Twelve point five, aye!" He said, fixing it.