As Sam hurriedly tied the storage ring to the bird’s claw, he asked Jen, “Do you think you can reach out with your mana to activate the ring?”

Jen peeked to the side around the wall battlement, and said, “It’s not really that far out to the archers.”

Sam shook his head, as he clarified, “l need you to fly the bird up into the clouds above the goblin archers.”

Jen looked up, and up, and up, and asked, “How high up do you think those clouds are?”

Sam replied, “I’m guessing about 40 to 50,000 feet, plus about 250 to 300 yards out. I used to do HALO jumps from as high as 30,000 feet, but we needed oxygen masks on the way up. That just made me think of something, can your bird even fly that high?”

Jen said, “Hold on for a second. Let’s back up, why does the bird need to fly above the clouds.”

Sam explained, “So the goblins don’t shoot the bird…” Sam didn’t finish his explanation, as his mind evaluated his plan more thoroughly, and he realized the goblins' arrows couldn’t fly more than 200 yards in the air with any accuracy, much less enough accuracy to hit a bird. He asked himself, from 300 yards could 1000 goblin archers simultaneously fire arrows at the top of the wall with enough accuracy to keep them pinned down? “Sure,” he thought, realizing Jen probably only needed to fly the bird around 500 yards, or 1,500 feet, high.

Jen looked at Sam expectantly, as he had paused without finishing his explanation, but then he continued, “Scratch that. Just fly the bird about 1,500 feet above the goblins. That’s easy for you right?”

Jen nodded, “I can definitely do that.” Then she asked, “What about spells or other weapons that could reach the bird.”

Sam shrugged as he was finishing with the knots around the ring, “Your guess is probably better than mine, but a bird that high up would have to be hard to hit with most spells. Also, if you do it quickly enough, I don’t think they’ll have time for targeting with all the chaos…. I don’t know, but what do we have to lose?”

Jen grinned, and replied, “Exactly, and this is going to be crazy to watch!”

As Jen was about to send the bird up, Sam said, “Wait...What about Bingo? With her sight, she’s likely to spot the bird and the ring. She’ll know its’ value, and might guess even more.”

Jen paused in thought, then her face frowned in frustration, as she said, “All I can think of is having the bird shit on her. Then she’ll be forced to go clean it all off.”

Sam replied, “Damnit! She doesn’t deserve that, but I can’t think of anything else either. When you apologize for your bird, offer to pay for Bingo’s ruined clothes.”

****

“By the Seven Decks!” Bingo swore to herself as she scrubbed the bird shit off of her helm. Bingo didn’t want to go and clean it off of her helm, but it was a giant bird, and its shit had started running down towards her neck and hair just before she pulled her helm off. Considering all that their party had done, she really couldn’t get too angry at Jenasta in front of everyone else. However, she really would’ve liked to kick all three of them off of her wall and out of her fort. “Everything would have turned out just fine if those three showboats and Captain Wager hadn’t shown up,” she grumbled to herself.

Captain Bingo’s head jerked towards the door when she heard hollering and screaming from outside the latrine. She couldn’t tell if it was good, bad, or what was happening. She thrust her wet helmet on her head and ran outside.

****

Captain Wager noticed Bingo as she came storming out of the small latrine that was built into the top of the wall, and he yelled, “You missed it!” as he was pointing towards the goblin horde.

Bingo had already been looking towards the goblins after realizing all the guards were cheering and swearing in the direction of the horde. She took off her helm, and couldn’t really understand what she was seeing, even with her sight magnification skill activated, and asked Wager, “Holy Decks! What the heck happened? What is that?”

Wager replied, “From… like a thousand feet in the air, they dropped all the dead fodder goblins on top of the goblin archers, and they also fell on the pike-wielding goblins that had just moved into place behind the archers. It looked like hell had opened up and rained on them!”

“HOW?” Was all Bingo could ask, with a look of utter frustration on her face.

Wager couldn’t comprehend in that moment why Bingo wasn’t looking excited, but answered, “When Jenasta’s bird shit on you, and you ran into the latrine, Jenasta apologized and explained that Sam’s garbage spell placed all the goblins in a mana pocket inside the bird. When the bird shit on you, she knew the mana pocket and the bird couldn’t hold the ‘garbage’ any longer. Anyway, she said she couldn’t wait another second, and ordered her bird to fly over the goblin horde, where it…. Just shit dead goblins like an avalanche from the sky.”

Tamako made her way over to Wager and Bingo, and asked with a grin, “Slam’s done for the next day or so… maybe longer. He’s used up after casting so many garbage spells, and then holding garbage mana pockets that long. I hope the actual damage to the horde is significant.”

Wager looked to Bingo, and asked, “What do you see? Are there many archers or pikes left? And were their weapons destroyed as well?”

Bingo grumbled, “Hold on! Give me a second!.... Uhh sorry Sir. I’m looking now.”

Wager couldn’t understand why Bingo was so grumpy. Even without a sight magnification skill, Wager and all the guards could tell there was a huge mess, and they hoped it might slow the rest of the goblin horde up until after sunrise.

Bingo announced, “Good news! The goblin chieftains are erecting mana shields and building shelters. They are so concerned about another strike from the air, they haven’t started to do anything yet. There’s a little movement along the archer and pike lines, but they appear to be all but wiped out.” She then turned and high-fived wager and cheered with the other guards.

Over the next few hours almost a hundred rangers, fighters, and guild adventurers, trickled into the pass-wall having accepted the Domino Hill quest. The goblins finally cleared their way through the mass of dead bodies, and tried to deliver siege equipment or grappling hooks to the trolls, but the guards and reinforcements used flaming arrows, fire grenades, and several other skills that destroyed any of the equipment the goblins tried to supply.

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Jen, Sam, and Tamako mostly tried to blend into the background once the others arrived. Jen was starting to feel confident they would hold the pass-wall for the two hours remaining until sunrise. She watched as the trolls were getting ever more desperate as they pounded, jumped, climbed, stood on top of each other, and generally never stopped trying to get through or over the wall. Jen was thinking about the gambling quest rewards when she looked over at Sam and noticed him watching Bingo as she exited the wall ramps at the bottom of the wall. He was holding his stomach.

Sam looked over towards Jen and Tamako, meeting their eyes, and before he could say a word, Jen said, “Oh shit! You’ve got that feeling in your gut don’t you. It’s Bingo?” and Jen and Tamako started racing down the ramps. Sam followed them, and messaged, “Yea, I think it’s Bingo. Something about her as been bothering me since we got here.”

“You’re just now telling us!” exclaimed Tamako, as she simply jumped off the wall, flipping her shield over to land on top of it as she and her shield dropped all the way to the ground. As she hit the ground, she grabbed her shield and yelled a warning, “Bingo has opened the gate! The trolls are coming through!” Tamako noticed Bingo running the other direction towards the back gate, but Tamako couldn’t give chase, she needed to help the guards that had been stationed at the bottom of the ramps.

Sam just reached the ground when he watched the guard, that tried to gamble with him just a few hours earlier, make a suicide run past three trolls to activate the lever dropping the gate and keeping the other trolls from getting through.

“GOD DAMNIT!” Jen heard Sam roar in rage, as one of the trolls snatched up the guard that closed the gate, and bit off the top half of his body. Jen called up to Captain Wager, “Bring the shackles!”

“Bingo took them!” Wager yelled back with the fury of her betrayal.

Jen, Sam, and Tamako were fast enough to evade the trolls, but the guards around the ramps weren’t, and another troll already snatched a guard that wasn’t quick enough to get up the ramps, and ate her in three bites. The tallest of the three trolls leaped up, grabbing the ramps, and snatched one of the guards trying to escape to the top of the wall. The troll let go of the ramp, falling back to the ground while biting the guard in half.

Everyone at the top of the wall were flinging spells, spears, fire grenades, everything at the trolls, but nothing really hurt them, and when they did get hurt, their bodies almost instantly regenerated, healing the minor wounds.

Sam and Tamako had circled over near the back wall attracting two of the trolls, while Jen was trying to keep the other one busy. Up on the small wall behind Sam and Tamako, were the guards they met upon arriving at pass-wall the previous day. One of the guards was shooting arrows over their heads towards the trolls, but the arrows were just bouncing off. Sam heard her scream in anger, “By the Seven Decks! We were so close to sunrise!”

Sam hollered at her in frustration, “Who gives a crap about sunrise, if Lady Domino and the reinforcements aren’t here! Stay focused on what we can control!”

The woman hollered back with anger and sarcasm, “Well… you might be able to control running around for the next two hours until the sun turns them to stone, but that isn’t going to do the rest of us lowly Second Deckers any good as we get eaten!”

Sam almost paused his dodging, but then messaged Tamako, “Did you know that sunlight would turn trolls to stone?”

Tamako dodged and cut another gash across the troll’s arm, but as the gash almost instantly closed, she replied, “Of course, everyone knows that. Why do you think everyone was trying to make it till sunrise?”

“SHIT!” replied Sam as he thought of the guards that had been eaten, but instead of losing his focus, he pulled a stone out of his ring, and threw it hard enough to break against the troll’s skin. He closed his eyes for a split second and repeated the same throw with two more stones against the other trolls.

Tamako was half-blinded when the stone Sam threw exploded into a flare of sunlight when it hit the troll, turning its entire front half into stone. The same thing happened to the second and third troll, killing them all.

Everyone paused in a quiet stunned confusion for a second, then they all started cheering and hollering questions at Sam, but he ignored them. Sam only gave a short response to Tamako and Jen’s messages, and said, “They were weak storage rocks that I turned into sunlight flashbangs. I made them when I thought the two of you might try and go kill those vampires in the catacombs in Bot Battle City.”

Sam ran over and climbed to the top of the small back wall. The guards were trying to thank him, and he hollered, “Get away. I need some privacy for a little while.” The guards immediately left the terrifying man that could kill trolls with sun explosions.

As Sam started to get setup on the wall, he soon found Jen and Tamako standing next to him. They were holding up blankets to give him privacy from the others. Sam pulled out his rifle, toggled on both his goblin and elf sight, giving him excellent dark vision and distance vision. It was a strain on his AI and mind, but he wasn’t going to let that bitch get away. He took a few moments to find his target, took aim, controlled his breathing, squeezed the trigger, and blew Bingo’s brains out. He was relieved that a normal bullet was able to kill her, and he didn’t understand why she had stopped moving, but it made an impossible shot, into a lucky kill, considering he’d been aiming at the center of her chest. Sam immediately toggled off his goblin and elf sight, and crouched down holding his head in pain. Jen and Tamako’s AI’s had let them know what happened, and Jen said to Sam, “We’ve got you,” as she stored his rifle, and Tamako picked Sam up to go find a private area for him to recover.

What Sam, Jen, and Tamako didn’t know, is that Bingo had stopped to see why Lady Domino’s boom dust hadn’t exploded and destroyed both the mountain pass and wall.

Bingo hadn’t wanted it to go this way. Her gambling quest gave her the option of destroying the wall, or making sure it was overrun by goblins before the first light of the sun touched the fort. “It was such an easy quest!” she thought, “All I needed to do was put up a half-ass defense, let the goblins overrun the wall, and then I could retreat with most of the guards back to Domino Hill. But Noooo, those System loving deck droppers showed up with Wager’s ‘die for Domino Hill’ dumb ass.”

Now Bingo knew she had to fake her death, and that she could never return to Domino Hill. However, she still planned on getting her Foresight Spell from the Gambling Quest. While the spell wouldn’t actually let her see into the future, it was the next best thing. By casting the spell, it would show her the near future that was most likely to happen based on the knowledge of The System.

After the goblin archers and pike lines were destroyed, Bingo set two plans into motion at the same time. First, she activated the plunger which ignited the boom cord that ran around the pass, connecting all of Lady Domino’s barrels of boom dust. Those barrels had been setup as a last resort if ever a full-blown goblin war brigade attacked the pass-wall. Second, she took the remaining shackles, and then opened the gate wall, letting the trolls through. With the trolls killing all the guards and running free into Domino Hill valley, there would be no one left to stop the goblins from charging past the wall.

Bingo removed her helm and used her sight skill to zoom in on the first barrel of a daisy chain of barrels, located throughout the pass, trying to figure out why it hadn’t gone off. “That fucking cat!” she swore as she noticed it sitting next to the boom cord, where it had clearly cut the line. “Is it fucking smirking at me! How does it know I’m looking at it? I’ll kill that damn cat if I ever get a chance!” she continued to swear to no one. “Well... Fuck you cat. I still have my contingency plan!”

Bingo then turned her sight towards the fort, and watched Slam turn the trolls to stone with some sort of exploding light spell. As she was about to go off on another tirade of swearing, she paused to read a System Message, and turned red with fury.

Gambling Quest Failed!

Thank you for playing. Big Swing and a Miss! You have lost all your ability points, except for one in each stat. Better luck next time.

“No! I have more time! His spell can’t count as first light!” she screamed at The System Message in her vision. “I deserve…” Bingo didn’t finish her rant as her body simply collapsed to the ground with most of her head scattered across the grass and dirt.