Another day, another detail. After his first adventure in lumberjacking he’d found himself selected for many of the details heading outside the walls. Perhaps the guards had been encouraged by the way he’d headed back by himself after that disaster.

Or maybe they didn’t have a lot of good options available to them. As the fortifications at Tranche were strengthened the demonlings had proven reluctant to keep smashing their heads against them. Instead it seemed they’d changed tactics, focusing on attacking the supply lines that provided the materials needed to keep improving the defenses.

At first they’d mostly hit the logging details. Gloe had been fine with that. He’d gotten pretty good at killing stealth variant C-Types, and every grappler he’d encountered after the first one had retreated after taking a set amount of damage. Apparently they’d learned, (or, as he was beginning to strongly suspect, their behavioral profiles had been altered.)

After a while though the demonlings had stopped throwing good money after bad. They’d started going after the supply caravans that brought in materials that couldn’t be gathered locally. One such material was labor. After a whole prisoner transfer convoy had been wiped out Gloe had suddenly found himself regularly assigned to “porter” details.

The guards would head out with a bunch of wagons and transfer all the materials over at Rega Bridge. The Mirzal River marked the boundary between the wilderness and the Duchy proper, so the bridge was heavily guarded. The convoys were fairly safe until they crossed over.

Naturally the porters had to unload and reload everything, which was a pain in the ass. It didn’t exactly play to Gloe’s strength though- he could only carry so many barrels or whatever per trip, and the wagons wouldn’t stand up to the impacts if he started throwing stuff. It wasn’t like logging where he could handle whole trees himself. He didn’t really understand why he’d been reassigned.

Until the first centitaur attacked. It came in like a freight train, legs and claws flashing. The thing was longer than a bus and had the speed to run rapid slashing hit and run attacks on guards and wagons alike.

Since then he’d met quite a few of the damn things. At least seven distinct monsters by his count, several of them more than once. Frustratingly…

“Hey smart-ass! Get over here and help pull this wagon! It’s only fair since it’s your fault we lost so many kavars!”

Gloe looked at him coldly for a moment, then grinned. Seizing the harness of the remaining kavar he ripped it loose, freeing them. Then he grabbed the front of the wagon and began to run. The guards yelled obscenities at him as he accelerated, passing the other wagons with very small margins of error, but he just kept going faster. He couldn’t go full speed- if he imbued the wheels they’d lock relative to the rest of the wagon, and they couldn’t take too much stress. He could still pull ahead of all the kavar though.

Finally he cleared the convoy and continued down the road by himself. Sergeant Boleas was partially right, even if he was awfully full of himself for being one of the only chosen left among the guards. Gloe had yet to kill a centitaur.

One part of the problem was their armor. It was almost unbelievably thick, dense and tightly interlocked. He could disable their many slashing claw arms one by one and put out their eyes. It took a few solid blows but it was even possible to shatter a leg. But their main hide was just too tough.

The other part was their redundancy. They just had too many legs and eyes, and before he could disable them all the centitaurs would flee. This time he’d tried using a sledgehammer to scramble the damn thing’s brain. He’d just pounded and pounded, trying to give it a traumatic brain injury. He was pretty sure he had succeeded. The centitaur had staggered around for a minute, then it had opened eyes farther back on its body and resumed operations. They might just have multiple brains.

They never stayed to fight once he showed that he could battle at their level. Never opened their mouths either unless everything in the vicinity was dead. They ate human carrion, but only if they felt completely secure. They were the most cautious demonlings he’d run across yet. Not cowards- they fought fiercely. It was just that they always ran rather than risk defeat.

Could heal too, or at least be healed. That was frustrating. He’d memorized the markings of each, as well as the eyes he’d put out. When he’d encountered them later those eyes were back. So long-term attrition wasn’t a viable plan.

He could drive the centitaurs off, but he couldn’t kill them. Without kills he wasn’t getting much stronger. He got the distinct impression that was how the commandant liked things, but it didn’t do much for him. He needed to find a way through this stalemate.

Maybe he needed a bigger hammer. A much bigger hammer. Or perhaps a…he cocked his head at the sounds coming from ahead. Battle? This close to the fortress?

For a moment he almost abandoned the wagon to rush forward, then he thought better of it and diverted to the east, pulling it to the top of a small hill. Yep, that looked like a battle. Probably the biggest one he’d ever seen, at least recently.

Thousands of demonlings were trying to swarm over the walls of the fortress. Most of them were of the base variety, but their numbers were unprecedented here. More alarming were what was behind them. There were not nearly as many vets but aside from those leading the units of base demonlings there was a small group attempting to fill in a crossing in the defensive trench. Their motivation seemed clear. There was a large wheeled ramp that exceeded the wall in height, just waiting to cross the trench once they were finished.

And behind that…centitaurs. Nine of them, by his count. They were too heavy to climb the walls, but the ramp would change that. If even one of them got over the wall the fortress would probably fall. Oh, the defenders could find a way to kill it once it was trapped inside and couldn’t retreat, but its speed and armor would let it wreak havoc long enough for the other demonlings to overrun the walls.

How much did he care about that? If the fortress fell they’d probably assume he was dead, wouldn’t they? There would be no reason to go looking for him if he was presumed dead, right?

Unless their method of tracking him also gave them some indication of his status. Or worked even on his corpse. It would be awkward to try to explain how he had survived when almost everyone else had been wiped out.

On top of that there was the morality of the situation. He didn’t feel obligated to obey his persecutors, but if it came down to demonlings versus humans it wasn’t hard to figure out where his sympathies lay. Many of the prisoners and a few of the guards deserved better than being slaughtered.

Additionally, and of course it played absolutely no role in his completely rational and morality-driven calculations, that was a lot of experience down there. He rummaged through the wagon for a few minutes. Not much of use there. In fact the whole load seemed to be…decorations. Fancy interior decorative items.

There was a pause as he recalculated and reluctantly reached the same conclusions. It looked like he was going to have to go in unarmed and acquire weapons in the field. Again.

Probably best to go after the base demonlings then. He could easily kill them barehanded. Kind of a shame actually. He was in a decent flanking position, and this would be a lot harder if the vets and C-Types could see him coming. Trying to fight them unarmed would be pointlessly risky though. After fighting the variants repeatedly his stealth abilities had improved a bit, but only just. Unless they were focused somewhere else there was a pretty good chance they would see him coming.

So he pushed the wagon over the hill and let it careen wildly towards the enemy force. Disappointingly it failed to crush even one of them, but when they surged forward to search it and the hill it had come from he got the distraction he was hoping for. He came in behind a vet that was gawking, broke its neck and helped himself to its blades. A few pointed encounters later the knives had mysteriously multiplied and he set his sights on his priority target.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The two grapplers guarding the thing were alert though, and their positions in the trench had kept him from spotting them ahead of time. Only the fact that he chose to leap to the top of the ramp rather than climb it normally kept him breathing. The grapplers went shooting up towards him, and the C-Types weren’t far behind.

Slow though. Slower than he was used to. These weren’t variant grapplers. No camouflage, and their hides looked more like armor. They had wicked-looking scorpion-style tails too. Was all that extra equipment slowing them down? Why weren’t they launching themselves directly at him as per their usual tactics?

Alert for some sort of ruse he leapt clear, landing in a cluster of vets. Absently he killed a few while watching the pursuing band. Rather than push off directly at him they dropped off the ramp, and began to run in his direction. Only after a few seconds did they break into the bounding pursuit he was used to. It was a bit slower than the variants, but not by much. That was odd.

His head-start gave him some breathing room, so he ran tactical considerations as he fled. He could have held C-Types off while he cut the ramp apart piece-by-piece, but probably not two grapplers. The grapplers were pursuing, moving together, along with five C-Types. The other seven C-Types were camped on the ramp itself, ready to attack if he returned. That was a heavy lift.

The ramp had smelled damp for the brief moment he was on it, so fire probably wouldn’t work. With knives or machetes he was going to have to target the bindings individually, unless he wanted to risk breaking multiple blades trying to chop through whole trees. With imbue that might be possible, but it would still take multiple swings, and it would make him predictable. And take far too long. The vets down below were still filling in the trench.

He wasn’t in too much danger as long as he kept this lead, but it would diminish quickly if he started mucking about with the ramp. He needed to figure out something that would let him regain a lead so he could expend this one. He paused mentally, analyzing the events leading to the acquisition of his current head-start. Then he grinned.

After a moment his grin turned into a chuckle. Like their variant brethren these grapplers and C-Types didn’t know how to imbue launch surfaces before jumping. Ergo, they couldn’t launch off the ramp unless they wanted to damage it.

Gloe didn’t have that problem. He scurried right up the ramp, found a beam that looked fairly structural, then launched off before the C-Types could converge on him. Only this time he resisted the reflexive imbue.

Not spreading out the force had some disadvantages. He didn’t get nearly as much forward momentum as he would have otherwise, and there was a risk of injuring his leg if it caught on something. But he still had a healthy lead, and his shroud should give his leg a fair bit of protection.

The beam had no such defense. It cracked under the force it was subjected to. Not a victory in and of itself, but a good start. The plan validated, Gloe quickly set it into motion.

He bounced between the ramp and ground, running and climbing as necessary to keep his movements unpredictable. Whenever possible though he got himself up the ramp so he could damage it by pushing back off. He wasn’t too picky about trying to find weak points. Setting a rapid and somewhat haphazard pace kept him ahead of his pursuers while subjecting the siege weapon to rapid frequent impacts rather than more spaced-out precise ones. He thought that was a fair trade-off.

Especially since it really seemed to be throwing the demonlings for a loop. They just didn’t know what to do. They could see the siege weapon being damaged and it obviously enraged them, but there was no obvious counter-gambit. If they followed him onto the weapon they lost ground when he launched off. If they waited he was free to jump away from them, so it didn’t do them much good. If they guarded key parts of the structure he was free to attack everything else.

They tried spreading out across the ramp so that they could quickly intercept him anywhere high up. He calmly walked up to the base and began cutting loose bindings until they gave up and began chasing him again. They tried covering the entire thing in vets, but vets couldn’t land a serious blow on him before he could simply blast free.

This went on until the grapplers began a sustained howl. Within seconds it was picked up by the C-Types. Then the vets. Then the centitaurs. It held for a moment, and stopped.

It was the only warning Gloe got. All the available demonlings sprang into action. The centitaurs swept around the siege weapon in a pattern more tightly coordinated than he had known they could execute. The grapplers maintained positions directly above him to keep him from simply running up, while the C-Types maintained a cordon beyond his normal leap distance, ready to swarm in. The vets rushed him. There was no good place to go.

He still had options. Could probably still stay ahead of most of the demonlings if he kept doing hit and run attacks. The problem was the centitaurs. They were huge, fast and running alternating circles around his target. Every few seconds they passed each other, so it wasn’t as if he only needed to stay away from one.

With this many demonlings after him hanging up for even a few seconds could be deadly. It was time to leave, but there wasn’t a clear escape vector. So he waited until a centitaur loomed near and dove between two support beams into the support structure of the tower. He heard the centitaur’s scythes crash home behind him, but he didn’t look back. This was a trick that would only work once.

He hopped from beam to beam and dove out the other side, where there were no grapplers or C-Types. Choosing the most appealing support beam on this side he pushed off one more time and just kept going. By the time the demonlings reacquired him he was halfway to the walls. He spent about ten seconds venting his frustration on the vets there, then he ran up the wall as the C-Types arrived in hot pursuit.

Seizing and imbuing a fallen pike he stabbed the lead demonling as it scrambled up the wall. Stabbed it dead center in the head. That gave the others pause. They growled at each other for a bit, then fell back to join the newly formed defensive cordon around the siege weapon. Well at least he had accomplished something.

Four attempts to close back in on the siege weapon all failed. They were on alert now, and neither stealth nor speed sufficed to penetrate their new perimeter for more than a few seconds. On the plus side, at least maintaining such a strong defensive position took pressure off the walls. The assault was stalled.

Finally he was out of time. The grapplers apparently determined the trench was sufficiently filled-in, because they began moving the Evil Neighbor. The demonlings swarmed out in front of it as the centitaurs lined up behind and pushed. They were stronger than he’d realized. Their legs must have more force behind them than their slicing appendages.

As the enormous siege weapon creaked forward Gloe considered his options. He couldn’t stop them, and once they got it in position the centitaurs would inevitably cross the wall. At that point the position was lost. He couldn’t stop nine centitaurs. He didn’t think anyone here could. Maybe if they all worked together…and all the other demonlings completely left them alone…yeah, no.

If there had been a sojourner or chosen here with fire powers (or really anything decent,) the strong defensive position they had would have given them a chance. Of course, if they had possessed a decent defender the demons probably would have sent an actual demon as opposed to mere demonlings. So there was that. Either way they were screwed.

Probably time to make a run for it he supposed. He’d done everything he could. No point in dying here needlessly. He’d have to take his chances with being tracked.

…the dirt in the trench seemed to be settling a bit. The demonlings had realized they needed to really pack it down. Right? No? Well that probably wouldn’t make too much of a difference. The Evil Neighbor was starting to sway and rock a bit as its weight compressed the dirt unevenly, but it was sturdily built so it would be fine.

Of course, a lot of its beams were cracked or shattered. He watched in delighted disbelief as it began to lean. The grapplers heard it creak and looked up, but the centituars kept pushing. The front wheels hit the edge of the trench and the jolt knocked it slightly askew. The top was leaning and twisting a bit. The bottom was not. The centitaurs kept pushing and that was not helping.

The grapplers reacted quickly, securing ropes to the top and trying to steady the device. Unfortunately the vets pulling on the ropes weren’t too good at anticipating commands. They pulled when told to, and stopped when told to. That introduced an additional element of lag, and the grapplers couldn’t compensate for it.

The trajectories of the top and bottom of the Evil Neighbor were diverging. Not enough to tip it, but the constant corrections were increasing the torque. There was a loud drawn out cracking sound and the top began to droop. The vets were ordered to pull as hard as they could, and they obeyed. Too well. The tower began to lean the other direction, beams creaking and cracking. The grapplers shrieked again, and the vets on the other side brought their ropes taut to stabilize it.

The demonling sentries shrieked a warning, but they had difficulty being heard over all the tumult. Still, they escalated and were heard soon enough. Gloe only had time for one slashing pass. Chosen with malice aforethought.

The vets fell backwards as their ropes were cut. The grapplers roared commands to chase Gloe back away, and he fled willingly. Behind him the tower continued to lean and twist. Creaks and groans revealed that its own weight was beginning to exacerbate the existing damage.

The grapplers tried for over an hour, but the damage was done. Two of the Evil Neighbor’s wheels were still on the path in the trench, and every time they tried to push it free the impact twisted the tower more. Eventually it sagged and partially collapsed in on itself. Still more or less intact, but it was clear it would no longer safely bear the weight of the centituars.