Chapter Three Hundred and Fifty-Three - Octagon

The tower’s base was another octagonal ring, but this one stuck out a little, with archways leading up to a crenellated terrace maybe ten metres off the ground that encircled the entire building. That’s where the docks started. They were a series of long platforms, connected together and with wooden trusses rising from below to hold them in place.

The plateau the tower was on had to be somewhat artificial, there was a wide space around the tower that didn’t have any large stones on it, and those on the edge were cut into as if someone had just... sliced through the stones without any resistance.

“There are the guards,” Bastion said.

“Five of them,” Caprica said after pulling her head back from around the boulder we had crept up behind.

“Six,” Bastion said. “Four by the entrance, two above. There’s one in the shadows of those crates. Might not be a guard, but it’s another set of eyes.”

I looked out myself, grabbing my ears to hold them down so that only the top bit of my head would be poking out.

I spotted three guards near the entrance, with two more up on the top of the base, looking bored behind the crenelations. Finding the sixth took a bit of squinting, but he revealed himself when my eyes caught the motion of him scratching his nose. Just as Bastion said, he was half hidden behind a stack of crates.

They were all human. Or close enough to human that I couldn’t tell them apart from this far out. For all I knew, they were catfolk like Calamity and I couldn’t see their ears from way over where I was hidden.

“The scouts might be able to take one or two out before they’re noticed, but I wouldn’t gamble on any more than that,” Bastion said. “I’m open to ideas.”

“We need to remove the ships from play as soon as possible,” Caprica said. “Whatever we do to reach the tower, we should have a team split off right away to sabotage their ships. We should probably avoid fire though, I didn’t expect the docks to overhang the forest at all.”

The docks, unfortunately, did. Though in Carpica’s defence, it was on the other side of the rise as the one we’d climbed on. I guessed that they needed the additional space for some of the larger, missing ships.

“We don’t want to destroy the docks themselves either,” Amaryllis added. “We can use them.”

“Good idea,” Caprica said. “So, clearing the docks is a priority.”

Bastion considered that, then gestured up the length of the tower. “We can’t do that if we don’t clear all the floors in the tower above the docks, or else someone could toss spells and stones down at us.”

“Didn’t we plan on clearing it in any case?” Caprica asked.

“We’ll try, but to do something like that, I'd prefer to have four times as many soldiers at my side,” he said. “Ideally, we’ll fulfil our primary mission objective and extract from there.”

“Right, of course,” Caprica said with a nod. “So, how do we move from here?”

Bastion’s eyes narrowed as he thought, then he nodded. “We have a few decently capable mages, including you, Miss Albatross. If they each pick a target and hit them all at once... it’ll be noisy, but some noise is better than someone outright sounding the alarm.”

“I’m in,” Amaryllis said.

“After that, we’ll grab those here who can’t fly and move up to the space above the entrance,” Bastion continued.

“I am significantly less in,” Amaryllis amended.

“It’ll be less guarded than the main entrance. Though I suspect the hostages will be kept below,” Bastion said.

‘Because it’s easier to bring things down for them than up?” Awen asked.

“Because you can toss things onto their heads for a laugh?” Calamity added.

Bastion shook his head. “Because they have four guards at a door leading to nowhere in particular. It’s likely the exit nearest the one the hostages would use if they were escaping.”

He turned after saying that, and then picked out five sylphs from the soldiers behind us. Two of them were the royal guards attached to Caprica, and the other three seemed kind of random to me. I guess he had a way of knowing who could do what, or he’d just read their profiles or met them or something.

I was having a bit of a hard time remembering all of the soldier’s faces, and they mostly just called each other by their rank or by nicknames, which didn’t help at all in getting to know them.

The five that Bastion had tapped moved to the front, and then he pulled Amaryllis closer too. After kneeling down, he started to doodle on the ground, and I recognized it as a top-down view of the tower’s front. He drew X’s where the guards were, then pointed to each soldier in turn and to one of the guards. “We must neutralise them before they can react. Use a spell that flies as fast as possible and is guaranteed to silence them. You’ll only have a couple of seconds to line up your shot on my command.”

He allowed all of them to peek out for a second to see where their targets were, then all six of them started to prepare their spells.

“This is interesting,” Calamity said. “We do something similar when hunting cockatrices.” He unshouldered his bow and pulled an arrow out from his hip-sheath.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Just in case,” he said with a smile.

“Go!” Bastion snapped.

Amaryllis was the first to duck out to the side while a soldier followed her, the other four jumped up above the stone we were using as cover.

Six spells were cast in the same breath, beams of light, flashes of actinic electricity, and a few quick-moving blurs of mana all speared out towards the tower.

“No!” One of the soldiers hissed.

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“See,” Calamity said. He bolted up the stone, planted his foot against it and jumped into the air.

My friends and I rose to see what he was doing.

Calamity nocked an arrow, aimed, and fired, all while still in mid-air and with the kind of grace that made the whole thing look like it was easy for him.

Near the tower, five of the guards were on the ground, some shaking, some bleeding, and one covered in green goop. A sixth was still up though and running towards a bell on the far end of the entrance from where he was.

Calamity’s arrow thumped into the guard’s knee, and he went down with a scream.

“Move!” Bastion said.

We moved.

“Squad B, secure the prisoners, then rendezvous with us above. Squad C, carry the land-bound to the balcony above. Squad A, with me, we’re clearing the floor,” Bastion barked out commands so quick that I had a hard time keeping up.

A sylph approached all of my friends, wings buzzing as they beat hard. “I’m good!” I told the one who moved over to me.

A group rushed ahead, pulling ropes out of their backpacks which they used to tie up the pirates by the front entrance. That had to be squad B, then.

I was nearly at the base of the docks, now. I started pumping stamina into my legs then hopped twice before launching into the air. The momentum was enough to catapult me up and onto the landing above.

The sylph landed around me, and then they fanned out into a line, weapons out and eyes peeled for trouble. My non-flying friends were dumped next to me with a bit more speed than grace before squad C reformed into the line.

“Alright, B, once you’ve secured the last prisoner, you’re on sabotage duty,” Bastion said. He gestured to the ships still moored in place. “Go make those inoperable. Squads A and C, you’re with me, we’re going to clear this floor, then work our way up. Squad D... that’s Broccoli’s Bunch, you’re working with Princess Caprica and her guards. Clear the bottom-most floors.”

“Got it!” I said with a salute. I would have preferred squad B, for Broccoli, but I could live with being squad D.

We would need to come up with a cool name for our squad. The Destroyers? The Danger... somethings? Yeah! And we needed a uniform, or maybe just some pins, and of course we needed a secret handshake.

“Broccoli?” Amaryllis asked.

“Oh, sorry, yes,” I said. “We’re going down, right?”

“Yeah,” Amaryllis said. “I think Caprica’s in charge of our little squad?”

The other sylph were moving out with alacrity, quickly following Bastion’s instructions with the kind of almost-janky motions I’d come to expect from soldiers who’d trained for the moment a thousand times before.

Carpica nodded. “I suppose I do outrank everyone and I do have more training than most of you.” She glanced at her two quiet guardsmen, a pair of sylph men who’d barely spoken a word at all in the last couple of days. “I just wish we were squad C, for Caprica,” she muttered so low that I wouldn’t have picked it out without extra ears.

“So, how’re we doing this?” Calamity asked. He tugged a fresh arrow out and held it pinched in the same hand holding his bow.

“We go in now,” Caprica said. “Bastion’s squadron will clear this floor, so we’ll go down as soon as we can, then we clear every room we come across. Awen, Calamity, can you take the middle? Broccoli, Amaryllis, at the rear, and myself and my guards will take the front.”

“Got it,” I said. I made sure Weedbane was folded up. It wouldn’t be handy while deployed inside of a building unless the tower interior was much more spacious than I expected.

We moved in as a group through the large doorway into the tower, and I noticed something right away. The doorway was almost exactly as large as the corridor within. It was not spacious at all, with walls that were too close together and a ceiling that was a bit on the taller side. The frequent archways didn’t help any since they squeezed the space in a little and had some space behind them where someone could conceivably stand.

“This place is weird,” I said as I glanced over the heads of my friends ahead of me. The corridor was dimly lit by lamps hanging from the wall and burning a bit of oil.

“It’s built for war,” Caprica said. “Narrow corridors mean that one or two trained soldiers can defend an entire passage on their own. If the pirates had time to prepare, this is going to be challenging.”

Fortunately, the corridor ended in a large room with a much taller ceiling. The room was octagonal, with doors into rooms along the edges and eight more corridors leading outside. The path down was right in the centre, a big stairwell that probably rose up through the entirety of the tower.

Bastion’s squadron was already in the staircase, three sylph looking up, three looking down, while the rest of the squadron barged into each room, one at a time and checked it for pirates.

I saw them dragging one pirate out of what was obviously some sort of restroom. The man was screaming into the rope they’d tied over his mouth and he was walking awkwardly with his pants around his ankles.

I turned away before I saw something I shouldn’t. Poor pirate, being caught on the toilet of all places was just embarrassing.

“We’ll stop anyone from coming from above,” Bastion said.

“Thank you,” Caprica replied as she passed. “And the exterior?”

“The scouts will report it if anyone approaches,” he said. “They’ll be acting as runners between the squad leaders.”

“Understood. Good luck up there,” she said.

“And you, Princess,” he said. Bastion gave her a rare smile and a quick salute.

Judging by the flush on Caprica’s cheeks, she’d treasure that smile for a while. “Alright, let’s go!”

***