Close to dawn, Vyra returned to her own war camp. It felt a bit like she was neglecting what was officially her side of this war, but she trusted her mother to keep everything running smoothly. Things on this side were still just a choreographed dance, at the end of the day, anyway; the fight between Orcs and Harpies wasn’t real… yet.

Things hadn’t really spun up yet, so she expected not to have missed much in the hours she was gone. Contrary to her expectations, her high orc attendant, Nerun was waiting outside her “tent”—really their fortifications were more like earthen domes made by magic—while anxiously tapping his feet.

“My Lord!” he looked relieved upon seeing her. “We’ve received news from the desert front.”

Vyra’s eyes widened slightly, but she quelled her excitement. The “desert front” naturally referred to the desert where the harpies and nagas lived, and it was where Fiara was hard at work looking for a way to turn this play-fight into a real war. But it hadn’t been very long since she started the endeavor, so it wasn’t likely she’d finished it yet.

Vyra mentally prepared herself for bad news and strode into her dome, taking a seat on a crystal throne inside.

“Is it urgent?”

Her attendant blinked. “W-well, uh…”

“If it isn’t, I’d like some tea please.”

Sitting in on human affairs all night had ruined her cozy schedule, typically involving mint tea and a regular bedtime. All the better to wake up fresh and plot world domination… or something not too dissimilar.

Frankly, having missed dinner—perhaps the first Orc in history to do so voluntarily—Vyra was ravenously hungry as well, even despite the fact that her high-born nature was fighting against her racial hunger. But she would eat after hearing whatever news Nerun had, since he did seem impatient to speak about it.

Just a minute or two later, Vyra had a cup of tea in her hands—feeling like a proper queen again at last, on a throne drinking tea instead of under the soil eavesdropping on humans—and she finally waved for Nerun to speak.

He bowed respectfully and announced, “My Lord, your sister sends word that the nagas are giving her their full cooperation now, and that she has successfully engineered a magic tool to release the camouflaging on harpy eggs. She’s requesting you to send over someone else to collect the rest of the eggs so she can return to her own research.”

“My brother will go,” Vyra shrugged. “His martial arts aren’t useful here anyway.” A smile spread across her lips. They weren’t there quite yet, but they were close. “Give her permission to return to Babylon and send her my heartfelt appreciation.”

“Of course, my Lord.”

“Now I’d like a meal.”

Vyra dismissed Nerun to run those few errands for her and began to ponder what to do about the humans now. She rested her cheek on her fist and stared at the dark, boring walls inside the dome.

The enemy wants food: a significant amount of it, and fairly quickly.

The deadline on the ransom was a few days, really just long enough for the supplies to reasonably be able to make the journey from Andorin Kingdom’s territory.

Well, first things first.

“Inari.”

A nondescript figure dressed all in black appeared from seemingly nowhere. “Yes, my Lord?”

“Whatever correspondence the Andorin army tries to send home that mentions Verde’s capture, intercept it.”

Frankly, she was a bit embarrassed about this failure. If King Claymore had set out to kill the prince instead of capture him, he would be dead already, and Vyra would have to resurrect him as a soulless to keep her promise. She didn’t imagine that would be upholding the spirit of Prince Corinth’s request, or that anyone would be happy the second Prince’s potential was effectively void.

She didn’t want the third prince to realize how close she had come to breaking her promise.

Unlike usual, her spy hesitated. “May I offer my opinion, my Lord?”

Vyra grimaced. “You’d better not moralize to me… Go ahead.”

Inari swallowed back his thoughts about his glorious lord’s strange affection for a mere human and said what he thought would better further her aims.

“Prince Corinth is likely to hear about this incident later from Prince Verde himself or from the soldiers. Rather than suppress the news that he’s been captured, you should rescue him so that we can promote that instead.”

Vyra blinked and covered her mouth, realizing that she’d just been rescued from making the rather insulting mistake of looking down on the third prince’s intelligence. Right, thinking logically, there was no way she could hide this incident from him without brainwashing everyone involved, and even attempting to do so would be greatly disrespectful.

“You’re correct. Alright, instead, please find out where they’re keeping him and report back to me.”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The shadow disappeared and Vyra shook off the feeling of narrowly avoided danger that was making her skin tingle.

Be better, she chided herself. You want to woo him, not own him.

It was too easy to get into the mindset of controlling everyone around her, but real relationships couldn’t function that way, and she did want a few of those still.

Back to the topic at hand, though, Prince Verde was currently in enemy clutches. How could the Andorin army recover from this situation and how do I guide them into doing that?

Even if she wanted to order them directly, there was a good chance they wouldn’t listen to a monster. Their morale would be fairly low right now, having lost two leaders back to back, so it was important to recover that as well. If they thought they came up with a brilliant rescue plan themselves, their performance in executing it should rise dramatically.

… Aha. Classic. Finally coming up with a good idea to accomplish her goals, Vyra grinned.

Her meal arrived, and she devoured it ravenously. And soon, Claymore’s men would be feasting too.

***

“No. This isn’t in our hands,” Captain Orvas hit the table with his fist and shook his head.

The others he was consulting shrunk back for a moment before resurging with new vigor.

“But he’s the prince! If we let him die, we’ll all be killed, whether we win the war or not!”

“We nearly had them on that hill! They ran like cowards once they started dying!”

“Right, let’s push that momentum!”

“We know where their camp is, and we can avoid the mud this time.”

Captain Orvas felt his stomach cramping from hunger and his head aching from the noise, “Everybody shut up!” He waited for the higher-ranking officers he’d summoned to quiet down and took a deep breath. “The General is dead and the prince has been captured. I’m just a captain, and none of you are any better. Do you think any of us are qualified to decide on how to deal with a situation like this by ourselves?”

Captain Orvas looked around the table and saw a series of stony faces.

“But—” someone who didn’t understand what “shut up” meant tried to talk, so Orvas cut him off.

“Quiet. If we make the wrong choice here, we’ll be court martialed. Obviously, I want to rescue his majesty, but how do you expect to do that? We don’t have any food to meet their ransom. If we charge in, maybe they slit his highness’s throat right in front of us. Our best infiltration unit is already dead, so how do you expect a more clandestine rescue to go?”

The captain shook his head and sighed. He was about to suggest that they forward the news back home and ask for direct orders—even if they had very little time to come to a decision—when a runner arrived outside the tent.

“Captain! The Orcs are back!”

Orvas groaned, “We don’t have time to deal with them right now! Send them back.”

“There’s a lot of them, captain,” the runner replied, sounding reluctant.

Orvas muttered a curse under his breath. Had the monsters decided to turn on them? He wouldn’t even blame them; they looked damn disorganized right now.

The higher-ranking officers all left the command tent and went to take stock of the situation. There were indeed a lot of Orcs approaching. But instead of carrying weapons, they appeared to be carrying large crates. There were simply too many of them for them to all be filled with explosives.

Orvas signaled everyone to lower their weapons. “They don’t look like they’re here to fight,” he surmised.

Focusing his attention on the particularly tall monster at the front, wearing her little toy crown as she played royalty without the pedigree to match, Orvas waited until the monsters were within speaking distance.

“What brings you here, and what have you brought?”

Several Orcs and war orcs snorted, raking their paws through the mud or stomping their feet on it. They weren’t pleased to have their Queen disrespected by a mere human.

The Queen Orc, contrarily, smiled, showing off her beastly tusks. “Straight to business then? It’s food. Grain, mostly. The last time I came to deliver my report, your prince asked me to hand over some of our rations. Ah, I didn’t want to—food is tight during wartime, and my people like to eat—but he said he’d treat me to a meal cooked by his palace chefs in exchange.” Her grin widened, “And how could I say no to that?”

The monstress glanced around with her three eerie yellow eyes before they all settled back on Orvas. “Are your leaders still in their tent?”

The captain gritted his teeth and felt his fists clench, but his knee-jerk reaction to their dire situation was offset by a few good things, for a change. It seemed like the Orcs hadn’t noticed the disorder within their camp yet. It also seemed that the prince had arranged for more food to arrive, anticipating that his future strategy would involve destroying what they had.

Unfortunately, it seemed his highness had been forced to bargain with a monster and promise her a damn luxury meal the likes of which a mere captain like him would probably never taste in his career. But on the bright side, they could eat tonight, and they could afford the Prince’s ransom… if Claymore would actually honor their end of the bargain. Orvas still had doubts about that with how wiley their king had been so far.

“Just set the food there, we’ll come and collect it,” Orvas said.

The Queen Orc raised a brow. “You’ll certainly tell his highness I delivered on our agreement?”

“He’ll know,” Orvas insisted. “You can see yourselves off now. We haven’t the time for it.”

Embarrassingly enough, the captain’s stomach growled loudly. It had been doing that on and off, and not just for him either, since nobody had eaten dinner or breakfast, but showing the monsters they were hungry was shaming.

A small smile twisted the monstress’s lips. “Aha, so humans too feel moody when they’re hungry.” Her tone chilled significantly, “I was thinking you were being awfully disrespectful.”

A few of the soldiers closer to the gate gulped or even took a step back, struck by a sense of feral warning radiated from the giantess. It quickly dissipated, and she was smiling pleasantly again.

“We’ll leave the food here. Just make sure your prince hears about it.” Her pointed ears twitched to some invisible sound, and she frowned, opening and reaching into one of the crates. She pulled out a goblin by the scruff of the neck and snorted at it while it smiled penitently. “Unfortunately there are some miscreants among my scouts. Feel free to use spears to check for more. It’ll be their own fault if they get hurt.”

As the Orcs were leaving and the men were prodding the remaining grain stores with spears and swords, Captain Orvas blinked and suddenly had an idea…