Varnne, Norin, and Florin took turns watching the camp as night fell. The next day, Xander and Rald were again left to their own devices. Rald surprised Xander by taking out a small sketchbook from his pack along with a charcoal pencil. Xander watched him draw the scene in front of him – Varnne crouching behind a bush, spyglass up to one eye, Norin and Florin laying on their bellies on either side of him – with quick, precise sweeps of the charcoal pencil.
“Alright,” said Varnne, turning away from the camp to face Rald and Xander. “I hate to say it, but I think we’re going to need a distraction. They change the watch every four hours on the dot, but there’s so many guards that it’s just not feasible to get in unseen. The gate’s definitely a no go, which leaves scaling the wall. All three of us are capable of it – and I can climb back down with Karlon on my back if absolutely necessary – but without a distraction to thin the place out, I doubt we’ll even make it to Karlon.”
Norin and Florin both nodded in agreement with Varnne.
“Can’t say I didn’t expect it,” Xander grumbled. “When do you need it?”
“Dusk would be best. Florin, Norin and I will head to the West side of the camp so that anyone who’s looking that way will have the setting sun in their eyes. You two make you distraction at the North gate – that’s the spot that would get you the most attention. Any ideas on what you’ll do?”
“I think I have a thought or two. I’ll work it out with Rald.”
Pentra was having a rough day. Most days were rough at The Camp. It didn’t have a real name, everyone just called it ‘The Camp,’ and you knew what they meant. Pentra hated being stationed here. It was boring and depressing. The prisoners were cranky at the best of times, and downright deadly at the worst – she’d seen one get fed up and casually snap the arm of the nearest guard despite their emaciated state before they were dogpiled into submission. She shuddered at the remembrance of the wet crunch Peter’s arm had made. Today, she was stationed on the wall by the gate. Though bored, she knew better than to get caught slacking by one of the lieutenants, or gods forbid, the captain himself, so she kept an eye out at the empty scrubland that sprawled out before her. A good two hundred feet of the vegetation had been cleared out all around The Camp, creating a killing field that the guards, who were all armed with bows, could use to their advantage. It was dusk now, and her shift would be ending soon. Another shift over, another boring day done, another night’s sleep to look forward to. Pentra was just beginning to slip into a half daydream of when she’d finally get stationed in a real city, the daydream where she would meet a handsome nobleman and she’d no longer need to be a guard to feed and clothe herself or her siblings, when her reverie was broken by the sound of screaming. She quickly located the source of the screaming, because the source was a man… who was on fire? A flaming, screaming figure was sprinting out of the scrub, and towards the gate. Gods, she could hear him begging for help. How was she supposed to help someone who was completely engulfed in flames? In her shock, she hadn’t raised her voice to call out the alarm, but Yetrel, on the other side of the gate did.
Guards began to run towards the gate all along the walkway, taking up positions, or just gawking at the flaming figure that had transitioned from sprinting to staggering. The screaming grew quieter, the begging stopped, and the man, who Pentra could now see was wearing armor that appeared to be charred completely black from the flames, collapsed. Slowly, the fire died out, leaving a smoking corpse smoldering about three quarters of the way to the gate. By this point, one of the lieutenants had arrived, and took command.
“Yetrel, Bartol, go check the corpse!” the lieutenant barked out.
“Yes, sir!” the two men replied, out of sync.
The gate was cracked open for Yetrel and Bartol, and the two jogged out to the corpse. Pentra’s mind was racing. Where had the man come from? Why was he on fire? What a horrible way to go, she thought sadly. She watched with interest as the two guards approached the corpse. She then watched with mounting horror as the one of the arms of the “corpse” shot out, grabbed Bartol’s leg, and yanked his feet out from under him. In a flash, Bartol’s head had been caved in with a mace that she hadn’t seen in the man’s hands before, and wickedly pointed arms rose from the figure’s back and skewered Yetrel, cutting off his yell.
Xander retracted his spidery arms back onto his backpack, letting the corpse of one of guard that had been behind him slide to the ground. He could hear cries of alarm rising from the wall, now. Hopefully, the alarm would be heard throughout the camp. He unfurled his wings and leapt into the sky as a few arrows began to fall around him. They weren’t slow on the uptake, that was for sure. Xander rose up high and came down with a crash in the thickest cluster of guards he could see on the walkway. Unfortunately, he came down a little too hard, and the wooden walkway was unable to handle his sudden impact in addition to the weight of the many guards it was supporting. With the sound of splitting timber, a portion of the walkway detached from the wall, spilling Xander and about ten guards to the ground. Xander was up in a flash, assisted by his spider legs, and began laying about himself with his mace as the guards near to him rose. Bone were broken, and armor pierced by his golem controlled spider legs as he cleared a small space. Arrows rained down on him harmlessly as he took a moment to observe the gate. It was simple in construction, the ‘lock,’ if it could be called such, consisting of a long bar of wood that sat across the two doors of the gate, held by iron hangers. Xander needed to get to it and unlock it so that Rald could join the fight.
To aid in the chaos his fight was already beginning to induce, Xander deployed all twenty of his spider golems at once from his inventory. The foot wide disks with spider legs scrambled away from him and towards the nearest guards as shouts of surprise rang out, followed by the sounds of screams, explosions, and the smell of burning. Xander added to this by beginning to toss out grenades, aiming for the clusters of archers that were on the still intact portions of the walkway. Two of the archers burst from [Explosive Effect], showering the walls with gore, and needling any surviving compatriots with shards of bone and armor. It wouldn’t do for one of them to spot Rald running to the gate and shoot him. Xander wasn’t sure how good Rald’s armor was, but better safe than sorry. By the time the smoke cleared from the grenades’ explosions, sections of walkway were mangled and filled with the dead and dying. Xander finished making his way to the gate by detonating a grenade directly in front of himself, immediately killing one of the two guards that was between him and the gate, and maiming the other enough that they were no longer a concern. He quickly lifted the wooden bar from its place and threw it behind him, kicking the gate hard to open it partially. He could see through the opening of the gate that Rald had begun his own sprint towards the camp. The area of the gate was in complete disarray at this point, sections of walkway mangled – a few spots had caught fire from the explosion – the gate itself ajar, and a good number of corpses strewn about. More men were swarming the area, though, and Xander was glad to have Rald entering the gate as a line of guards formed up in front of him, protecting the archers behind them.
“Fire!” Xander heard someone cry, and a good thirty archers all fired as one at him and Rald. Xander quickly moved to stand in front of Rald, staggering slightly at the weight of so many arrows striking him. As he recovered, he ordered his spider golems to rush the wall of guards – Xander quickly estimated that there must be at least twenty between him and the archers, making it a total of fifty or more array against him.
The defensive line fell into disarray as the spiders hit it, men screaming as acid began to eat through their armor, or flames began to spray from the disks that had attached to their clothing. Hilariously, the explosive ones, while being effective, had the tendency to launch themselves off of their target after detonating, their little plier claws insufficient to hold them against an explosion. Xander watched two of them rise into the air and fall as he and Rald charged the line themselves. Considering the numbers arrayed against them, Xander decided that he’d be better served with explosives and itchweed grenades than his mace, and once he reached the line, he began throwing both in earnest. Soon, the air was filled with an irritating haze in addition to the smoke and dust left behind by the multiple explosions. The new grenades were as effective as Xander had hoped, the blast itself capable of removing limbs from any unfortunates who were close to the epicenter of the explosion. They threw shrapnel harder and farther than their previous iterations, increasing their killing radius. Men and women groaned and cried out as they were thrown to the ground, deafened and stunned. And those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones caught the shrapnel, tearing them apart as they were also thrown to the ground, leaking their vitality onto the soil.
Rald, for his part, was no pushover, either. Xander watched with amazement as he bisected three guards at once, turning the momentum of the swing into a twirl, raising his blade higher up as he did so before bringing it down onto what Xander figured must be one of the lieutenants by their full plate suite of armor compared to the chainmail and breastplate of the guards. The lieutenant brought their own blade up in an attempt to parry, but it was of no use. Rald’s sword clove straight through the blade, and then into the head and down into the chest of the lieutenant. As the body crumpled, Rald continued his momentum, his blade striking the earth. The moment the tip of his sword touched the ground, sharpened spires of stone erupted outward in a line away from Rald for nearly twenty feet, skewering guards who were too slow in leaping out of the way. That, Xander learned, is how Rald got his reputation for being effective against large forces. Every time he overhead swung at the ground, he raised a new crop of sharpened stones. When he swung his blade sideways, cutting blades of some kind of blue-hued force erupted from those he struck, striking yet more foes. Between Rald’s area of effect attacks, and Xander’s grenades and the aftershocks of [Explosive Effect], the fifty men and women arrayed against them were falling like flies.
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That was when Xander spotted his first group of prisoners. He’d just detonated another grenade on top of himself after rushing into a cluster of guards, and there, a short distance away, were a group of people huddling against one of the ramshackle wooden buildings that dotted the camp. They were… thin didn’t even begin to describe it. They looked like skeletons over which a thin veneer of skin had been stretched. Xander could see a mixture of fear and hope in their eyes as they watched their captors being slain, and he knew something then. He knew, that he couldn’t just leave this place behind with only Karlon. Even if it meant he stayed behind and kept fighting after Varnne deployed the colored smoke grenade that was to signal that they had retrieved the spymaster. Even if he had to kill every single guard left in this hellhole – an increasingly probable endeavor at the rate he and Rald were cleaving through guards – even if he had to
WHUNK
Xander’s rage at seeing the emaciated prisoners and his line of thought was interrupted by a blow that sent him flying nearly ten feet.
“You think you can break into my camp, kill my guards with impunity?” a voice bellowed out.
As Xander clambered to his feet, aided and stabilized by his spider legs, he looked about, locating the source of the voice. It was a mountain of a man, dressed in intricate plate armor, wielding a mace and a shield which was emblazoned with the sigil of Thrask. With another roar of anger, the huge man began running at Xander, hoping to reach him before he rose fully to his feet. Fortunately, Xander was not physically stunned from the massive impact that had struck him, and was on his own feet and raising his shield by the time the wall of plate armor reached him. Judging by his claim of this being his camp, and the immaculate condition of the plate armor, Xander judged that this must be the commander of the camp. So much for it being unlikely that he’d join the fray. He must have taken it as a personal insult that a force of two was assaulting his prison camp. Xander’s thoughts were once again interrupted by the hammerblow that struck his raised shield. The force of it drove Xander to his knees, his spider legs once again stabilizing him, digging into the ground as the commander of the camp ground his mace against Xander’s bone shield. In a frenzy, the man began hammering on Xander’s shield in an attempt to break it, and from the crackling sounds that were coming from Xander’s shield, he’d be succeeding soon. His arm would have long ago broken if it were not enhanced by his unique construction.
Opting to do something other than just take the beating, Xander retracted his mace into his inventory, replacing it with a grenade in his fist, tossing it at his feet as he held his shield up against the onslaught he was facing. Xander was shielded from the blast, but the commander was not. Through the clearing smoke, Xander watched, amazed, as the man, who had been thrown a few feet away, staggered to his feet, shaking his head vigorously. A faint, yellow glow frazzled about the suit of armor. Xander wasn’t sure if the plate mail was enchanted, or the man possessed defensive skills, but the end result was the same: he’d survived a direct encounter with one of Xander’s grenades and seemed at most shaken and deafened from the encounter. Xander didn’t want to wait to find out if he could take the man in a straight fight, and manifested his rifle in his hands next, firing a quick three bursts into the center mass of his foe. All three struck the armor and bounced away, leaving mere dents and eliciting another frazzle of yellow light. Shit, Xander thought. I’m going to have to wear him down to get through.
Though staggered by the shots and still disoriented by the grenade, the commander quickly locked back on to Xander. Thankfully, Rald was keeping the rest of the forces at bay, and in the melee, archers didn’t dare fire for fear of hitting their own. That left Xander to deal with someone who was at his own level for one of the first times of his life. Unfortunately for his foe, Xander was not fully alone – he called his surviving spider golems to him and commanded them to swarm the big man. They swiftly clawed their way up his armor, latching on wherever they could. Though he began ripping them off and throwing them away from him, the sheer number of the little golems prevented him from getting them all before they started to activate. He was soon covered in a yellow glow as his armor weathered acid, flame, and explosions. It did not, however, seem to be insulated against electricity, and as a full four of the lightning enchanted golems attached themselves to him, he began to spasm, his muscles locking up as he fell to the ground. Xander could hear cries of rage and anger from those who were too far from the edge of the fight to be able to join in, but able to see their commander fall. The archers in the vicinity took that moment to decide that it would be better to risk hitting their leader and hopefully stop Xander than to stand by idly. Arrows rained down, breaking and bouncing off of Xander’s black plate armor as he took up his mace again and swiftly marched upon the fallen giant of a man. He began hammering on the man’s helmet, trying to break through whatever shield was protecting his target. It took three overhead blows at full strength to leave even a scratch on the armor, but a scratch was all Xander needed to start the corrosive processes of his weapon’s enhancement. A fourth blow left a small dent, and by the fifth blow, Xander could see the forehead area of the helmet beginning to discolor. Six hits, seven hits, all the time being pelted ineffectually by arrows. One or two of the guards even seemed capable of some ranged skills, arrows glowing with the effects of skills exploding against his armor, slightly staggering him. But none stopped him, and finally the helmet was too corroded to support whatever enchantment was affecting it. With one final blow, Xander caved in the helm and skull of the man, leaving his body still twitching from the electricity coursing through it.
With their commander fallen, and many of their lieutenants slain, it wasn’t long before the guards arrayed against Xander and Rald began to route. Unwilling to chase after them, or slaughter fleeing opponents, the retreating forces flowed out of the gate, giving Xander and Rald a wide berth.
Rald walked over to Xander and clapped him on the shoulder, panting. “That was,” he took a moment to breath, “That was certainly a fight. I don’t think I could have done it alone.” Looking around at the mostly deserted camp, he asked, “What now?”
Xander looked around with Rald. He hadn’t seen any of the prisoners leave yet. Likely, they were unable to do so, either chained to each other in large enough groups that escape would be unfeasible, or chained directly to an object. “I guess... I guess we collect up the prisoners. I won’t just leave them here.”
Rald nodded, tiredly. “Aye, I suppose we should. Be on the lookout for the errant guard that decided not to vacate their post.”
Finding the prisoners wasn’t too hard – once they met with the group that had been watching the fight, they were able to be directed to the areas that the rest of the prisoners were held, albeit at the pace of a starving man, which chafed at Xander, who was eager to liberate anyone still left in the camp and be gone from the place. Soon enough, they had a group of nineteen – Karlon was quickly identified as the only one missing, which Xander attributed to Varnne and the twins. The story they got from the group that Karlon had been part of confirmed this. The spymaster had been quickly extracted after the fighting started, Varnne and the twins appearing from the long shadows of dusk and ambushing the few guards who were still watching the prisoners. Then the four of them had disappeared back into the shadows.
“We should link up with Norin, Florin, and Varnne,” Rald reminded Xander.
“Right, right. I guess, uh, we clean out the supplies around here so that people have something to eat and then get on our way.”
Rald nodded in agreement, leaving Xander to speak to the group.
“Uhm, everyone,” Xander said, trying to cut through the chatter that was building between the excited former prisoners. “Everyone!” He said louder this time, finally quieting the small crowd down. “We need to get out of here, and we need to be able to feed you. Where are the supplies housed? We should grab everything we can carry and then get out of here.”
Nods and mutters of agreement were had, before someone chimed up, “How are we supposed to make any kind of journey in our condition?”
“If you can make it for a day, then I have a… large cart, essentially, that we can pull you on. We’ll get you to Sempta, and from their you can make your own way.”
Xander was already running through creating a quick, large cart out of wood and steel that he could pull behind the APC in his head. There was no way he’d be able to fit all twenty inside the vehicle, after all.
“Rald?”
“Mm?” The swordsman turned to face Xander from watching the emaciated figures raid the supply rooms. Fortunately, one of them seemed to be a healer of some sort and was warning them against eating too much, lest they make themselves sick.
“Do you think you can lead the group back to the APC and link up with Varnne and the rest? I’d like to get a head start on making a cart I can pull behind the APC so that we can take everyone and still make good time.”
“Yes, I can do that,” Rald assented. “I don’t imagine they’ve gone too far, considering that they can’t hear fighting anymore. They likely also saw how many guards poured out of the camp. We really need to get out of here before they make up their mind to try and come back.”
“Hopefully they regroup in that town that’s a day away before making that decision, but I agree. Get them out of here as soon as they’re done grabbing what supplies they can.”
Xander took wing again, spying the remnant of the guards on the Northern horizon as they made their way towards civilization to regroup and presumably to inform their higher ups of the attack. In the air, it took almost no time at all to make the same trek that had taken them almost a day to walk, and as the light failed fully, Xander was landing in the stand of trees.