Alyssa had underestimated her assignment.
Severely.
She thought, after years of Victory’s campaigns and years more as a captain of the Grand Watch, policing a group of civilians would be simple. Annoying, but simple. She couldn’t be more wrong.
Everything started fine. The Hall housed the best casters and some of the brightest minds in the kingdom. When set to a task, they tackled it with incredible efficiency. It took a single night for the earth casters to make a serviceable camp out of dirt walls, wooden poles, large sheets, and what tents they could get on short notice. The alchemists donated Magic Lights, which did not live up to their grand name. They were simple glass orbs filled with a mixture of some kind that glowed in the dark. A failed potion that lost its luminance after five nights or one day if left exposed to the sun for long periods. Its only saving grace was that its materials were cheap and it was incredibly simple to make. They weren’t sturdy, pretty, or very bright but it was good enough to keep the camp lit.
The accommodations weren’t fancy, or very comfortable, but they’d somehow managed to stock them with all the necessities. Including rations for a couple hundred, though the bread was hard and the soup thin. There was plenty of water and several blankets though they’d still need people to bring their own blankets if they wanted to keep warm. The weather was warming but they were too far north for anyone to be comfortable without sufficient covering.
Despite the effort they poured into the camp, few residents of the city took them up on the offer of shelter. The foundation acolytes who returned from delivering dire warnings had all kinds of stories. They’d been laughed at and ignored. The people of Quest feared the war but were not so scared that they were willing to abandon their homes and livelihoods. They clung to the belief that whatever the hunters had gotten themselves involved in, it wouldn’t involve them. Even if war came to Quest, the general assumption was that once an army breached the walls, a surrender would quickly be negotiated. Some of the poor fools thought that Dunwayne would swoop down from the Hall and rescue them.
Alyssa didn’t care either way. Less people in the camp meant less work for her. She got their few evacuees settled, set up a schedule for patrols, and went back into the city for a drink, both for pleasure and to dig for information.
She couldn’t believe her ears when she heard that the guilds had taken Talia and Yulia hostage. Hunters weren’t heroes. Most of them were greedy bastards. They risked life and limb not to protect others but for fame and fortune. That took a certain kind of personality, ranging from those who were stoic in the face of death to the violently deranged.
However, kidnapping a duke’s daughter and the next head interrogator wasn’t merely deranged, it was stupid. There was no way for it to end well. She wanted to meet the idiot that thought that the Tome clan would back down when not one, but two of their own were taken.
Alana was from Victory. Kierra was more violently deranged than any Victorian. It was obvious to anyone with a brain that antagonizing them would only lead to more violence.
Perhaps, if one chose to ignore the obvious, they could reason that as the head of the house, Lou would decide their actions and Alyssa could understand someone believing that they could intimidate Lou. But she still thought that would require them to turn off their brains and only look at the facts that supported their theory. The noblewoman wasn’t the same kind of deranged as her wife, but she was all kinds of twisted.
Not necessarily in a bad way. The ancestors would have to rise from their graves and threaten her with a curse on her entire bloodline for Alyssa to say as much before the brat, but Lou was generous to a fault, especially to those she cared for. However, she could do terrible things for those people too. Alyssa was convinced that as long as it was motivated by love, Lou could do anything, even the unspeakable.
And the idiotic hunters had just given her all the justification she needed to lose her shit.
She crawled through the bars and taverns where she knew hunters frequented, buying drinks and swapping barbs. Sadly, her probing came up with nothing. Hunters fought monsters and dragged their corpses into the city to get paid. They didn’t concern themselves with anything else, entrusting the guildmasters and their administrators to handle the tedious details. It was worse than soldiers. They followed orders because it was their job. Hunters followed orders because they couldn’t be bothered to do more.
The majority weren't happy being connected to the cowardly act but, as one drunken man she added more liquid lubricant to said, it was better to fuck than be fucked. As long as they got their gold and got to go home to their families, they could care less.
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She quickly realized that she would have to speak to someone with a lot more influence if she wanted answers. She had history with the guilds, especially One For All, but not that much. It took a lot of power, a lot of completed quests, or several generations to have the kind of connections that allowed one to call on a guildmaster or their aides when they pleased.
Once she realized her quest was fruitless, she chucked it, choosing to follow in Dunwayne’s footsteps. If the Harvest Hero wasn’t willing to involve himself in the city’s mess, she wouldn’t bend over backward to save them from themselves. She decided to spend her free night enjoying herself, though it was difficult given her piss poor options for drink and the worries that stubbornly clung to her conscience.
Eventually, she realized she couldn’t drink her dread away and returned to the camp with a pleasant buzz, her mood improving again when she found the sentries watching the entrance only goofing off instead outright sleeping. Given they were a bunch of students volunteering their time rather than trained soldiers, that was the best she could hope for.
She was much less pleased to find Lane standing outside of her tent. He was clean and bandaged, blowing into his hands as he looked up. He flashed her a sheepish smile as their eyes met. “Hey.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked, waving him aside to crawl into her own tent. She didn’t care that he crouched in its opening, though she noticed the young man’s blush.
“Figured you could use an extra pair of hands.”
“They couldn’t hurt. You mind being on the night watch?” Lane had been in the Grand Watch for years. He had more than enough experience to lead others and, based off his recent forwardness, perhaps the guts too. It’d be a waste to have him shadowing her.
A decision that he seemed disappointed by. But he proved her reasoning when he said, “you got it, boss.”
“Thought you weren’t calling me that anymore?”
“Only when it’s appropriate,” he returned with a grin.
“You’re getting bold.”
“Eh. I figure since I’ve already been rejected in one of the most humiliating ways possible and you’re still alright with me hanging around, there’s little to be afraid of.”
She winced but it was an attitude she could get behind. They chatted for a while until her buzz went from pleasantly loopy to drowsy and she shooed him out of the tent.
The morning of the second day, the camp got a lot busier. Alyssa woke with a mild headache, made worse by the general hubbub around her. They had a lot more visitors and, to make things more complicated, many of them were sick. They hadn’t left the city to avoid the fight, but to distance themselves from family and loved ones.
It was bothersome. She hadn’t been drafted to play nurse in a field hospital. But the Hall had promised to welcome them so welcomed they were. Alyssa sent word to the Hall for healers and supplies, including herbs. Natural remedies weren’t well-known or very popular in most of the kingdom, but the Hall was the center of humanity’s knowledge and progress. It’d be strange if they didn’t have a few experts in the field with expansive gardens for their research.
On the third day, everything went to hell.
People poured into a camp. Alyssa didn’t have time to interview anyone extensively but from what she picked up, it was a combination of people’s nerves collapsing the day before the main event and the sickness spreading. It was just short of overwhelming. By the end of the day, Alyssa’s throat was sore from all the yelling she did to get people organized. Or that’s what she assumed before her first cough.
The next day, she felt terrible. The tea one of the ragged healers practically poured down her throat soothed it but did nothing for her nausea. She wanted nothing more than to lay back down but she didn’t have that luxury.
It started with a loud crash. She knew it was loud despite only hearing it faintly, because it came from the city. Anything she could hear outside the walls was big and probably nasty. Worse, the sound kept repeating. Then she heard the explosions.
Alyssa fought her feverish headache and barked orders, knowing what was coming. And as she expected, the largest wave of people yet flooded into the camp. They were a panicked mess, but the Grand Watch was ready, calming them down and getting them sorted. It was controlled chaos. Luckily, they managed to keep people from damaging themselves or the camp.
When she had a moment to breathe, she asked a fleeing hunter, practically bent over coughing, what was happening. She needed a picture of how bad the damage was as she had no doubt the Hall would be tapped to help with the rebuilding efforts.
She was not prepared for the man to simply cry.
The next person she asked only answered with one word: purple.
It took a dozen people before she got a coherent answer from an old woman who had somehow found a sturdy looking chair to sit on at the edge of the camp, coughing up thick mucus one moment before taking a swig of hard liquor the next. “Some giant purple beast is knocking down buildings and smashing anyone dumb enough to get close to it. Didn’t see much before my grandson got us out of the city but the hunters didn’t seem to be doing much to slow it down. City’ll be gone by sunset, I reckon.”
A whole city, gone in a day. It seemed the hunters had good reason to fear Lou. And that fear had caused them to make the worst mistake in their history.
Alyssa felt bad for all the people caught in the destruction, but she also knew that Lou had done what she could, in her limited capacity, to minimize casualties. Or maybe she didn’t. People could only be pushed so far. Could be the massive casualties were both intentional and wanted. She just thanked the saints and the ancestors that she wasn’t in the middle of the mess and it wasn’t her job to clean it up.