Chapter 44 - Alter the Plan

“I still don’t understand why we aren’t going together,” Trix complained from his perch atop the speaker’s lectern as the guards and I strapped on our armor. “We have faced danger such as this before, and we work well as a group. There’s no reason we should be split.”

I struggled with the strap to one of my oversized leg guards. It was tough, dark leather stuff, thick and unbending, the straps a horrible combination of tri-way buckles, ties, and other weirdness I couldn’t wrap my brain around. The young Leori I’d borrowed the set from said she’d never worn it, but her father insisted she have it in case she met a “good hunting mate” while she was away at university. She actually seemed pretty happy to get rid of it.

Geddon seemed to think it was good stuff at least, saying he had one like it tucked away somewhere. Apparently, lots of sets like this were passed to Leori kids when they went out on their own.

“For one,” I began as I tried to cinch a couple more inches of play out of the straps. “This plan is a hail mary, a big, stupid ploy for a similarly big, stupid situation. It’s got a lot of moving parts, and it requires more than one group to get done.”

“We could ask willing students for their help,” Geddon suggested, but it was half-hearted.

I shook my head.

We’d exhausted this topic long ago.

The students had their parts to play, but it wouldn’t be out there. They’d been left behind for a reason and a good one. None of them had fought before, much less been under life-threatening pressure. I tried not to remind myself that, before a few months ago, I would have been one of them. On some significant level I still was.

We were lucky enough to have some of the students on our side here. The few guards we saw above ground wanted us quarantined, and that was the only word they were willing to give before they went back down below and made us someone else’s problem. Most of the student body were content to follow their orders, but Angol’s contingent knew the score better than most, choosing to cover for us in hopes we’d change things for the better.

Trix looked unconvinced. He sprung from his perch and bounded over to the first row of seats on the observation deck and stood to his full height to look me in the eye. “I could go with you, Brother Ryan. I can be your eyes and ears again, and I can help us avoid undue attention. You know I can. We can put Angol here at my post.”

“I need you here, Trix,” I insisted. “You’re going to be our ace. Once things start to move, and we get into trouble, you’re going to be the one to bail us out. Just remem-”

“Yes. Yes, I know. You’ve told me many times now. Flip the switch on the turret up here once our people get into the square.”

I made a ‘go on’ gesture with my hand. Apparently those were universal where ‘thumbs up’ was not. Ralqir was a silly place.

Trix hesitated, thinking, but then he recalled the rest. “And have my helpers constantly load the magazines and feed the turret ammunition.”

“Good,” I replied with a nod. “One correction. It’s a gun emplacement, not a turret.”

“Semantics. What concerns me is that you are leaving me behind and yourself exposed for no good reason. You’ll understand if I interpret this as you keeping me out of the real fight, Brother,” Trix said bitterly. “Because it does exactly that.”

“It’s not like that, buddy,” I insisted. “I need a real person doing the aiming this time. I’m afraid the targeting logic on these things isn’t really up to life or death decision making, especially when you’re giving cover to a big group of friendlies. You’re the brain on this one, Trix. You can make the tough decisions. We need you up here.”

“Not all fighting is done with a sword and shield, Brother Trix. You are our position of strength. Do not forget,” Sissa added earnestly. She was already strapped and helping her sister into her set, but she was paying great attention to everyone else. Her game face was on.

Defeated, Trix made a show of standing a little taller. “Very well then. I’ll just have to do my best and hope I’m not right.”

“Did I ever tell you the story of how I once fired a ballista by hand? It was only through my prodigious strength and steady hand that I-” Geddon began. We all knew this story. He knew we all knew this story. He was just trying to lighten the mood, and we knew that too.

My eyes shot over to the gun emplacement, a double barreled monster I’d cobbled together out of piping I’d appropriated from the school’s irrigation network. I’d reinforced them, thickening them until the action was about as wide as my wrist while the barrels were longer than I was tall.

A wheelbarrow sized seat (because I’d made it from a wheelbarrow) was welded to the side of the joint housing with a crude pilot’s stick jammed in the middle that sent signals to the aiming arms when it was moved.

“Just watch where you aim the thing,” I warned him. “It’s got uh… lots of firepower and very little precision at this distance.” My recoil suppression system was the opposite of sophisticated, just a locking pin that kept the ball joints still when the trigger was depressed. Another reason I didn’t trust the aiming system to not do its thing once the action kicked off. Better to have someone cautious like Trix than trust the cold logic my turrets used.

“Angol, is your door team ready?” I asked.

The young Miur nodded, turning to his friends behind him, around a dozen of them. Some of them looked wrung out. I’d had them up a lot of the night loading magazines and feeding my Casting Bowls scrap, not that I’d been spared that. I had to get up a couple times during the night to recharge the things.

“Yes. When I get the signal, we’ll start clearing the door and getting ready to receive people,” Angol declared.

“Good. Rescue team? How are you doing?”

“Worry about your own part in this, monk,” Samila grunted as she hefted a webbing backpack up onto her shoulders. The barrel of the turret inside stuck diagonally past her shoulder and above her head. “Could you have made them any heavier? Hrmf. Or more awkward? I have a metal knob up against my kidney.”

“Uh. Yeah. Sorry. Still working on that kind of thing. Maybe in the next version.”

“Easy for you to say when you can just magic stuff out of thin air,” she growled.

“Not too bad for me,” Geddon quipped with a cheeky grin, hefting his pack up onto his shoulders with a single hand. “As long as I don’t have to run, I’ll gladly carry five of these.”

Sissa looked at me and frowned. “You could come with us, you know.”

I was tempted. I really was. It would be nice to have some backup out there, someone I could trust. It wasn’t possible, though. “Too risky. If they recognize me, I’ll bring down all sorts of hell. Easier for me to skulk around for the setup. Don’t worry. I’ll be around.”

“You better be,” Sissa replied with a simultaneous slap on my chest. Her gauntlet rang off the metal where my heart should be. “Like I said. No one gets to die without my say so.”

—----------------------------

We moved in the darkness of the early morning, not that it was ever truly dark in Eclipse. The moon, huge and wreathed in flaring auroras as it was, always shed some light on the city. Today was close enough, though. Cloud cover smothered the moon in gray, while brilliant shafts of otherworldly color stabbed down through the thinnest parts of the fog to illuminate the odd block or part of the glade outside the walls.

The Returned could see in the dark better than any of us other than maybe Trix, but, as we’d observed from the Spire, the undead didn’t make up the entirety of the scourge-touched swarm. Maybe a few of them had crappy night vision like me or even worse. Sissa was counting on it being a factor, at least.

We lowered ourselves down on a rope from the Spire’s north side, a balcony built on top of one of the big gates they’d added to the building’s architecture to make the place more welcoming to people that wanted to visit the observatory. It was the lowest, safest spot on the Spire, but that didn’t mean it was that low. We still had to be lowered about fifty feet before we had the ground safely beneath us.

I was the last to go, by necessity. I was wearing a hood and a face mask, but I didn’t really know how the scourge-touched recognized their prey. If I went down there before it was time and tripped the alarm, the whole game would be over before it began.

“Good luck,” Angol whispered as he nodded to the others on the rope line. Then they started to lower me down.

As my feet hit the pavers, Geddon helped me out of the harness. Then we tugged on the rope to get Angol and his people to pull the thing up again.

From this point, we were on our own.

The rescue team and I nodded to each other before going our separate ways. Sissa and Samila looked cold, stern and professional, while Geddon just grinned like Geddon.

For my part, my stomach was doing backflips and handstands. This was my plan, my gear. My friends on the line.

Suddenly, now that I was down here, I didn’t feel so sure anymore.

What the hell was I doing? Six months ago I was fixing wheels on farm equipment. I wasn’t a warrior or even a monk or even a fighter. If not for my fake title, nobody would even give my ideas the time of day. I was going to get these people killed.

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It was too late to back out, though. Sissa, Samila, and Geddon were already moving, loping to the far edge of the square, staying low and in shadow.

The square around the Spire was big and open, like no one really wanted to build anywhere near the footprint of the thing, leaving the University practitioners to do their thing while the normal folks just got on with their lives elsewhere. That left anyone wandering around in the square exposed. That worked both ways, though.

I saw dark shapes out there sniffing the air and pawing at loose debris. There weren’t a lot of them, just enough to make you realize you weren’t alone alone, a thin enough crowd to avoid being within spitting distance. Not all of them were the lanky, misshapen forms of the Returned. I could also see packs of smaller shapes skittering over the square on all fours, gibbering that way I was so familiar with. It had been a while, but I recognized the Black Ones easily. We’d been roomates for a while, after all.

I crouched low and started toward the edge of the square to the east, aiming for where I saw the fewest roaming figures. Quick and quiet, I crept from pile of debris to pile of debris, stopping to watch and listen before setting out again. Nothing saw me or paid me any mind. Was this Gray Man at work? Impossible to really know.

The edge of the square was tantalizingly close when I suffered my first setback. I slid behind a row of stone planters in front of the building I was aiming for when I heard something. Chewing. At least that’s what I think it was. Wet, ripping sounds assaulted my ears followed by crunches and the smacking of lips, slow and methodical.

I was forced to double back and try a different way.

Stealth is now level 12.

Upon leaving the square, I went west, crossing one of the canal bridges to come to the correct street, another one of the combination market/residential strips where the buildings were built too close together and signs clogged up the sky.

We chose this particular street for our plan thanks to how wide it was and its generally long sightlines. None of the streets in Eclipse were truly straight, but the city planners had some kind of vision when they paved this one. For its entire length that ran all the way to the western gates, it had all of two turns, both under 30 degrees or so. What’s more, the Western gate was noticeably higher in altitude than the rest of the city, giving the road a general slope that led it down through multiple neighborhoods, over three canals and all the way to the Spire.

I chose one of the shops at random, one of the four story ones whose door hung off of its hinges. As with the other shops I’d been inside, the stairs were right next to the entrance.

—----------------------------------

Hopping from roof to roof was taxing, physically, made more so since I was concerned about noise. It took me half an hour to get to the first turn where the two straight parts of the road met at a corner. One last jump and I was on top of a tavern of some kind, the roof of which was a seating area with big circular tables, a miniature bar, and a wooden awning overhead covered in ivy that kept the whole place in perpetual shade. It looked posh, like people would come up here to sip on expensive cocktails and stare imperiously down at the crowd down below.

Perfect.

I squatted down in the shadows and listened for a minute before I got to work.

Snarls in the distance. Swords clattering. A howl from somewhere to the north. None of it was near me.

I summoned my first turret of the night in pieces, barrel first, then the action, then the legs.

Quietly, I slipped the action onto the leg housing then the barrel into the action before Shape-welding them together. Last, I summoned one of my new, fan-shaped magazines. The ‘fan’ was pretty much a row of separate three-foot-long, spring-loaded tubes that shoved my manufactured bullets into the bolt with such force I wasn’t comfortable handling the springs bare handed. I’d Shaped them inside the tube instead.

The idea was that, once one tube was out of bullets, a charged plate at the “bottom” of the magazine would touch the action, which would then rotate itself clockwise to align with the next tube’s opening. The entire ‘fan’ held about 900 rounds.

Next, I secured the turret’s legs to the floor of the building’s deck with sandbags, again, summoned from my spatial storage. The legs were wide and heavy, but I was still worried about the recoil moving the whole turret around during the fight.

When I was done, my predatory insect automaton was staring over the wide street, covering two separate lines of sight, one directly to the Spire, the other going as far down the road as the next canal.

One down.

I repeated the process three more times, focusing most of my firepower on the corners of the street where the turret could cover multiple angles at once. The only exception was the bridge, the one that connected this neighborhood to the gate district. That bridge needed to stay clear. My final emplacement was set up there, its field of fire concentrated so that it could aim only at or directly around the bridge.

Four. Phase one, done.

I checked the sky. I needed to hurry.

Sissa would probably murder me for what I had planned for phase two.

Time to step in front of another arrow.

—----------------------

I arrived on the roof of a marble building on the edge of the Spire square, nearly back where I’d started, except I was to the north of the spire this time, on top of some kind of administration building. It was grand in size but almost brutally utilitarian in construction with great marble blocks holding up great marble columns, holding up a great big marble slab that made up the roof, the only access to which was a stairway secured by a singular storm door I’d Shaped open to get up here.

Tilting my head and holding up my thumb, I looked up to the observation deck where Trix would be sitting in his gunner’s seat. The deck was still in shadow, but I thought I could almost make out the big barrels jutting out of the side of the railing. I wanted to wave, see if he was watching and that he remembered what we’d discussed, but I didn’t dare.

It didn’t matter anyway. What mattered was that he was able to see me from where he was. He was the only other that knew this part of the plan.

The way I imagined it, the rescue team would be arriving at the western gate right about now. There would be a sea of scourge-touched there, surrounding a knot of beleaguered and wounded soldiers and guards, tired from days of straight on fighting. Samila and Geddon would set up their turrets, get themselves ready, pull the levers to begin the assault. The guns would fire up, the guards would cut the enemy down, and the two forces would meet.

From there, I could see it playing out in my mind.

They try to get everyone moving, but the soldiers won’t leave without their wounded. The wounded have to be helped or carried.

Everyone is already tired. The line bogs down. The turrets either run dry on ammo or are destroyed. Then they are all trapped together, but now they’ve taken more losses. The end is inevitable.

A handful of turrets weren’t going to turn the tide in the way everyone hoped.

But me. I could do that.

I plopped down on the southernmost part of the roof, closest to the Spire, and summoned the rest of my turrets, three of them. Then I went through the process of assembling them and anchoring them in a wide triangular formation around myself.

The roof had a sort of lip that was maybe a foot tall, preventing the turrets from seeing down below and into the Spire square.

That sucked. I hadn’t seen the lip from up above. That meant my turrets couldn’t get a good angle on targets as they approached the building and would need to engage as the baddies climbed up onto the roof. Danger close stuff. I’d just have to roll with that.

I summoned my extra magazines, laying them out in a line.

Then, I looked to the horizon, to the west this time, where my friends should be. They should have engaged by now.

Trust.

I summoned my emergency pile of wood, pungent with the oil I’d soaked it in.

I summoned my pistol, checked to make sure it was loaded and ready before sticking it in my belt.

Finally, I summoned my sword.

My stupid, weak, fleshy hand trembled as it gripped the hilt.

The sword was a simple thing, a blade of Shaped steel with a handle of wrapped leather cords, long enough to be held with one or two hands, pointy at the end, sharp as sharp on the edges.

Holding it, though, wasn’t so simple for me. I’d not held one of these since I was a kid, before the accident. Before I’d been broken and cast aside by nearly everyone I knew.

If Dad saw this, he’d probably be ecstatic. His Exotic son was taking up the sword again. “By a miracle of Constance the System fixed my boy,” the clan chief would say in his heart of hearts.

He wouldn’t cry. He was too stoic for that. He would just see it as the world going back to the way it was supposed to be, his son back to being a proper warrior son of Constance.

How nice that would be for him. He could pretend like the accident never happened.

Like I’d never been broken. Like Mom had died alone.

The thought of throwing the sword over the rail flashed through my mind, tempting.

If it all went well, I wouldn’t even have to use it anyway. I could get by without. I didn’t need to be their perfect warrior. I never needed to be perfect. I’d done so much already without their precious rules and traditions, without their help or training and despite their scorn.

It took everything I had not to at least put the sword away where I didn’t have to see it. I couldn’t get rid of a tool like this, though. Not now. That would be foolish, and too many people depended on me. I had to bring everything to this fight.

My new life didn’t afford me the luxury of casting aside my past. Whether I accepted it or not, the accident happened, my exile happened, and despite what the clan thought, that didn’t make me any less worthy to carry my family’s legacy.

Becoming an Exotic didn’t fix me.

Say it. Mean it.

“I’m not broken,” I proclaimed. The words, long in my heart but never spoken aloud, felt right. The chord they struck resonated within me. My heart thrummed. My trembling hand stilled.

Somewhere, far to the west, distinct eruptions of gunfire, too rapid and numerous to count, began to echo over the roofs of the city. There was no slow ramp up to full intensity, no hesitation. The turrets were going, immediately, full bore.

Scourge Touched Goblin defeated.

You have been awarded 10 experience points. [10 base (-4 level, +2 nemesis, +10 group, -8 non-combat class)]

Scourge Touched Goblin defeated.

You have been awarded 12 experience points. [10 base (-4 level, +2 nemesis, +10 group,+2 chain, -8 non-combat class)]

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 25 experience points. [16 base (-2 level, +2 nemesis, +16 group, + 6 chain, -13 non-combat class)]

…

It had begun.

“I was never broken,” I whispered softly and with fragile finality.

I closed my eyes and took a deep, cleansing breath. I forced myself to relax, to concentrate, to bring the entirety of my being into the present where I was needed. I brought my surroundings and myself, kicking and screaming into hyper focus.

My enemy didn’t know it yet, but I was done being hunted. Done hiding. Today, I was the predator, and I was going to exact a cost for everything they’d done.

Mentally, I flicked the Volatility detonation switch I’d been holding in my mind. The three turrets on my roof jerked to life, their barrels standing at attention and scanning for targets. Far away, on the westbound street and next to the canal bridge, my other turrets powered on and immediately added to the crackling peels of thunder in little fits and starts as they cleared the way for my friends.

I gripped my sword and made my way over to the lip of the roof, placing one defiant foot up on the rail and standing tall. Strangely, the dark shapes down below seemed to pause all at once, hesitant, one by one turning their heads to look my way as I ripped off my hood and mask.

I filled my lungs with the cold morning air, lifted my chin and roared:

“Come on, you little shits! I’m right here!”