Rum, the elves and their new prisoner all retreated into another nearby cave. This one, luckily, was not a deathtrap. Or rather, it wasn’t the same kind of deathtrap, that is. Instead, it was a short bending tunnel that ended in a dead-end small chamber. It was a one-way street kind of deathtrap, but that also made it a great funnel for defending against large groups of minor enemies. As long as Jorteg wouldn’t send some kind of slow but incredibly strong beast or similar that it would’ve been better to just outrun, then the dead-end was preferable. “Taking on another hoard of those skeletons should at least be drastically easier.” Udevi reasoned, eyes and hands loooking over the walls, trying to see if the surfaces hid anything like a trap, murder hole, or secret entrance.
In the hallway there were many incapacitated and hurt elves. And as a consequence of this, an improvised field hospital of sorts formed inside the chamber. Here, the few standing elves started acting as temporary medics, running back and forth from the mountain hallway, carrying variably hurt and dying elves into a row of injured patients, waiting for their improvised magical field doctor: Rum. The mage sat down next to each elf, speaking his words of magic, and illuminating the chamber in a slow stream of green light bursts. The healing was a slower endeavour than Rum would’ve liked though. For all the elves he required a lot of mana. As a consequence, he felt it repeatedly necessary to draw mana from their weakened captive, in order to to expediate party healing. A solution that ultimately disturbed his mind a bit. After all, am I not turning this woman into our mana cow by doing this? At what point, if ever, does this reasoning I’m working by now, stop being sufficient enough cause to use her like this? As elf after elf healed up, each began taking up relaxing positions around the chamber. The elves didn’t quite have the energy to smile at their lucky fortunes. Instead, most of them just tried to recover from battle fatigue, regaining their stamina, and in the cases where Rum had been involved, also mana.
Squeezing the mana body of the witch as dry as his conscience would allow, Rum got up from the witch and stepped over to the last elf: Urvanom. The old man lay on the ground, head bleeding in a slow ugly river, and his consciousness barely present. There were sporadic eye movements as Rum approached and knelt down. “Not often that somebody survives 2 deadly falls in one day!” the mage smiled, trying awkwardly to be light-hearted, as he was acutely aware that his actions were strongly linked to why this elf had experienced this slow horrible dying twice today now.
On the other side of the chamber, and while Urvanom was gaining full consciousness again, another elf stirred. For a few minutes, Arrovani had just been lying on the ground, staring aimlessly at the ceiling, breathing moderatly heavy with the nervous shock of a battle he’d been sure they were gonna lose and he would’ve died in. Now the elf sat up, and looked over at Urvanom. The old elf was beginning to form that permanent smile on his face again, and was himself sitting up. When the old elf tried to look back at Arrovani, the younger elf didn’t quite meet Urvanom’s positive intensity. Instead, his lips twitched a little in that briefest of the slightest of smiles, as if just to say communicate that the optimism which Urvanom had previously displayed, hadn’t all been a delusion of mind-altering magic. For a few moments, Arrovani just sat there, looking at nothing and trying to endure the intense positive vibes emanating from Urvanom’s stare at him. Eventually though, this all became too much for the younger elf, and he diverted his attention over to the weakened witch. This captive of theirs had yet to be healed by Rum. Instead, the Jorteg ally had just been positioned to lean against the chamber wall, where her eyes were barely open and she breathed in and out with the noticeable rising and falling of her chest. Her hands and clothes were a bit scratched up from the crash she’d experienced, but otherwise the magical woman did not appear hurt in any way. Just very drained of mana, which was probably why her eyes barely stayed open.
After a long silent stare, Arrovani finally asked the question that had been forming in his mind: “What do we do with her?” The question was rather open, and as much directed at himself, as towards Rum and the rest.
Everyone, Rum included, looked over at the witch. Nobody immediately answered, not until Alkiath opened his mouth: “Didn’t you say” the sub-committee leader began, and looked over at the mage, “that you had a plan?”
Stolen story; please report.
“Plan?” Rum responded, confused.
“Yeah. You mentioned something about a plan.”
“Oh” The mage remembered and then looked around the chamber at the forming crowd of expectant faces. “Well, I think I technically just said I had an alternative. It wasn’t so much a plan, as an alternative course of action.”
“What?” Alkiath was the confused one now. “So why did we take the witch captive?” Rum looked to be thinking, and showed no urgency to respond. “Why did you run up A WALL and throw yourself into the air against the witches?” Alkiath stared for several seconds, his eyes full of curiousity and partly disbelieving Rum’s response. “Why did you first send Urvanom doing the same thing? Why did we bring down the witches!?”
“Well” Rum began, and stroked his beard for comfort. “I thought it would be an interesting experiment, with some interesting and game-changing consequences.”
“An experiment?” Udevi asked, a quizzical look on her face. Several of the other elves produced similar expressions.
“You didn’t know it would work!?” Arrovani pressed onto Udevi’s inquiry, a more astonished look on his face.
“Well, you wanted alternatives, so I gave you one. After all, if the game one is playing, is being won by a superior opponent, then one has to change the game that is being played. I didn’t have any adequate tools for the game we were playing, so I decided we needed an urgent breach in the limits of my magical knowledge. Thus, I came up with this ad hoc experiment. I thought the likely outcomes we could face from this move, constituted, in the end, an acceptable range of different situations.”
“What does that even mean?” Arrovani mumbled.
“But what if it hadn’t worked!” Udevi exclaimed, eyes going wide.
“I thought the most likely scenario would’ve been that Urvanom’s legs wouldn’t have known where to go, and so they’d either stand still or run around in circles, until the witches tried to descend to the ground, upon which the legs would chase after them. This would probably bother the witches enough that if they won, and we were all knocked out, then the witches wouldn’t be able to descend to the ground to slit our unconscious throats. Which honestly has been my greatest worry: that they slowly make us all unconscious until nobody were standing to resist. Hmm.” Rum stroked his beards several times, and appeared to be agreeing with himself. “And the beauty of this scenario is that even if they tried to cast spells and knock out Urvanom himself, the legs would still continue to run. There’s a reason after all why I call it Self-Running Legs. A humanoid pilot brain of the legs is strictly speaking not necessary. Urvanom would’ve become like a beautiful flesh golem, haunting the witches from the ground.” Rum smiled at the end of his own line of argument, feeling good about how he’d explained his reasoning. Everybody else though, just looked at him with incredulity.
“Ha” Urvanom eventually laughed, “ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.” Some of the other elves started to crack smiles as well, a couple even laughed with him, though not as loud nor intense as the old elf himself.
“That is simultaneously the most insane, and most brilliant tactic I have ever witnessed.” Royath interjected between Urvanom’s almost manic laughs.
“How does one even come up with something like that?” Alkiath added to Royath’s sentiment.
Rum glanced at Royath, and then looked back at Alkiath. “When you have somebody shouting at you for ideas: the most insane one’s tend to be the one’s that come quickest to mind, and are in that sense the quickest to execute. After all, I won’t have the time to doubt myself.”
Alkiath put a hand under his dark green long-tailed cap and passed his fingers into his blond hair. A little smile came upon his face. The smile was apparently infectious, because suddenly most of the elves were now variably smiling.
“But why did we capture the witch though?” Arrovani continued pressing, the only one not in on the smiling game, yet.
Alkiath glanced at Arrovani and considered the question, losing most of his smile for a pondering expressing, and nodding at what’d been said. “My comrade has a point. Why did we – why did you – capture the witch?”
Rum shrugged. “I thought she’d probably be useful, somehow, in our possession.”
“That’s an awful answer!” Alkiath frowned, Arrovani joining the frowning along with a couple of other elves. The rest merely looking curious, and 1 or 2 still smiling, not counting Urvanom.
“Well, I didn’t think very far ahead at the time, but there are many ways in which we could utilize her captivity.”
“If only–” an elf warrior interrupted, “–she could get us out of here.”
“Yeah” another elf warrior agreed.
“Yeah” joined a third elf, a shield bearer. Leaning on his shield, the elf expanded on his feelings: “This place is awful. It’s a miracle we’ve survived so far. We should retreat out of here at the earliest opportunity.”
“Well.” Rum said, a small smile spreading on his face. “Why don’t we just ask the witch for that?”