Discussion halts as we eat. People aren’t exactly desperately inhaling their food, but they also aren’t taking their time.

Alfwyn’s hot honey wheels turn out to be piping-hot churros, minus the ridges and cinnamon-sugar mixture and plus a bunch of honey. The shape also differs from what I’m used to, tight spirals rather than straight sticks. I get two spirals, each almost exactly the size of the foot-wide flat wooden board they’re served on. This is entirely too much sugar for me, so I send the second one around the table to general jubilation, and then lunch is over.

Heather passes a handful of coins over to Alfwyn after a short discussion, and we’re… not off, actually.

Instead, it seems that we’re going to be leaving substantial parts of our baggage with Alfwyn for the afternoon, and carrying only what we need to make it to our destination, win a fight, and get back to Caulfield.

Heather ends up carrying nothing but her weapons, at least that I can see. I expect that her basic necessities and waterskin are in the storage ring she’d mentioned. She also moves her quiver from her shoulder to her hip. Ji is nearly as unencumbered as Heather, with a waterskin hanging from the belt of his robe and nothing else.

Agnes is the only one carrying an entire backpack, though she spends some time with Bob emptying her backpack of camping gear and food and refilling it with what I’m guessing are medical supplies and cultivation resources. She also straps a short dagger and a one-handed club to her waist, presumably in case she has to drop her warhammer.

Bob carries his waterskin and his staff. He somehow replaced the eye-hurting yellow-and-purple outfit and is now wearing an earthen brown shirt and tan pants. I’m not sure how he did it, given that he never left the room or anything, but I’m not going to ask questions. The purple velvet sweat pants were just a bit too much.

Liv changes the most by far. She disappears into Alfwyn’s kitchen for a couple minutes and returns in a totally different outfit, having gotten rid of the acid-green bard costume in favor of what I can only call medieval tacticool. The base layer is form-fitting heavy cloth in a kind of fuzzy dark grey color. The grey is broken up by the rest of her equipment, mostly consisting of an unbelievable number of matte black throwing knives. She’s stuck them absolutely everywhere, even in spots that I’d normally doubt she could get a hand to, in loops on bandoleers and belts, in sheathes along her legs, in the small of her back, even on her arms. She has so many knives that I wouldn’t be surprised if they were moderately effective as armor. They definitely work as camouflage; every single piece of leather, all the way down to individual belt loops and tabs on sheathes, is a slightly different neighbor of dark grey, some green-grey, some blue-grey, some brown-grey, some just plain black, and they do a good job disrupting her silhouette. I expect that she’d be almost impossible to see in the right environment. She also leaves her instrument with her backpack. The rapier takes the instrument’s place on her shoulder, I’d guess to keep it from catching on things. I do wonder how she’ll get her bard-related buffs working in a fight, though. Maybe she sings?

The Caulfield Hunters don’t have anything to do; it seems they were already ready for a fight.

Heather also shows me that I can partially disassemble my backpack and turn one compartment and a shoulder strap into a small satchel. I put in the grimoire, the trinkets, and my waterskin, throw it over my shoulder, and am ready to go.

Instead of following the road out of Caulfield, we set off on a tiny dirt path that parallels a row of the taller pollarded trees. It continues to be a beautiful day, the sun happily illuminating our little patch of forest. Birds chirp brightly and leaves rustle as we pass. This forest hasn’t been harvested recently so the trees are tall enough to block our view, but I still see squirrels here and there.

“Ewald,” Heather asks, “I assume your team follows Guard standard operating procedure?”

“We do,” Ewald replies from his position near me in the back. “You may lead the briefing, ma’am,” he continues, dropping into a slightly more formal register.

“Thank you, Hunter Ewald,” Heather confirms. “BIA Team 24,” she calls, “Caulfield Hunter Team!” She’s speaking loudly enough to make it all the way up to Liv, Ji, and Katell out in the front. They aren’t ranging out ahead of us the way they were when we were on the road, but they’re still clearly our point element.

“The situation! We will be in the Bascroft Forest just north of Caulfield, where the Necromancer Axelos is threatening to raise a high-end asset as a zombie,” she continues. She sounds exactly like she’s reading a powerpoint to a room full of modern infantry grunts. “The terrain is an old-growth deciduous forest with slight hills.” At least she seems to be good at giving powerpoints, which is more than I can say of some people I’ve worked with! “Clearings are infrequent but range from twenty to a hundred yards wide. The asset is in an eighty-yard clearing approximately two miles north of Caulfield. There are no trails in this area so we will be traveling through rough terrain. Visibility is approximately thirty yards due to thick undergrowth.”

That’s not great, given that two-thirds of our group seems to prefer ranged combat. Though presumably this is the environment that Caulfield’s hunters operate in most of the time, so maybe bows work better than I’d expect?

“Axelos is a Gifted Visitor who has been giving us trouble for about fifty days. He has a flying undead mount which is a low-end combatant but gives him substantial strategic and tactical mobility. He can create undead both ex nihilo and from prepared corpses. Undead summoned ex nihilo are low-end shamblers. Undead prepared from corpses are fast and capable of following moderately complex orders. Some prepared undead retain their powers. Both types remain animate until magically destroyed or physically obliterated.”

Fast zombies that stick around, can follow orders, and retain their powers? That sounds like a complete nightmare. I’m really starting to understand how it is that this team has been on the guy’s trail for three weeks without catching him.

“Additionally, Axelos was allied with the Sons until this morning. News of their falling-out may not have reached this area so Sons assets we encounter should be assumed to be still allied with Axelos.”

That’s a scary possibility that I hadn’t considered at all.

“Axelos has had control of the clearing for at least twenty days and we should assume that the area has been fortified. Expect the forest to be full of undead and traps. Most likely and most dangerous course of enemy action are both to raise the high-end asset in the clearing before escaping.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“OPORDs for BIA Team 24 and Caulfield Hunter Team 1 are to destroy the high-end asset in the clearing to prevent Axelos from raising it and beginning a classic undead snowball. There are no civilian considerations.”

I’d been wondering what his goal was. When he was just working with the gang I’d figured that he’d been going for money or something, but his break with them said that he’d just been using them to get his hands on resources to raise another zombie, but I hadn’t figured out what he might’ve wanted to use that zombie for. The suggestion that there’s a “classic undead snowball” says that getting that high-end zombie online actually was the goal.

It’s really weird that this place, despite the futuristic paperwork and magic economy and freaking standard military briefing Heather is delivering, still has stupid-evil mustache-twirling comic-book villains.

Isekai settings, I guess.

I tune back into what Heather is saying.

“…high-end asset, which is currently a small hill in the clearing. Our secondary goal is to destroy Axelos’s flying mount to reduce his mobility. Our tertiary goal is to neutralize Axelos. We retreat before we take casualties. End state is our return to Caulfield.”

That makes sense. Without the flying mount he’s probably stuck out in the woods; at that point we can probably chase him down and KO him even if he escapes.

“We will accomplish these objectives by assaulting the clearing. Group 1 is Agnes, Ji, and Bob. Group 2 is Yann, Katell, and Heather. Group 3 is Ewald, Liv, Anna, and Whitney. Group 1 will advance to the hill where Agnes will destroy the high-end asset. Group 2 will advance five yards into the clearing and attack at range to suppress Axelos and destroy undead that threaten Group 1. Group 3 will prevent undead from disrupting Group 2.”

Playing D&D with Heather would be either a blast or a snorefest, holy crud. I’m sure her plan is going to go into the toilet as soon as things start happening, but she’s definitely doing a much better job of setting up a good position for when that happens.

“Chain of command is Heather, Liv, Ewald. Agnes leads Group 1. Heather leads Group 2. Liv leads Group 3. Challenge-response is any-where,” she says the word with a slight hitch in the middle that I’m guessing means that we can use it to confirm our identities if someone tries to impersonate one of us somehow. “Any questions?”

Uh, questions, questions, I know I had a few, are any of them relevant right now? Wynforte no, population sizes no, wizard robe and pointy hat no, clothing sanitization no, timekeeping no, I guess I don’t have anything relevant.

“Okay, then, let’s get to it,” Heather says after nobody else speaks up. “Keep your eyes out starting now; we don’t know how far out he may have placed sentries.”

There’s no way I’m seeing something that Liv or Ji missed, so the most useful thing I can do is almost certainly to finish up with the spell.

I have the right hand down and the left hand about halfway there. I could keep practicing one-handed, but at this point I suspect that I’m better off trying to do the whole thing so I’m not trying to distinguish between failures because I messed up and failures because I’m only casting half the spell. So it’s time to move on to doing both hands at once. And because I haven’t yet learned a way to float my book along while I walk…

“Hey, Bob,” I say, since he’s right next to me in the marching order, “you mind doing me a bit of a favor?”

“Yeh?”

“I need to finish learning how to cast this spell,” I say, “but the somatic components need two hands and I haven’t quite got them memorized yet.”

“Ah, I can hol’ it for ya, no prob,” he says. I open the book to the part I think I’m having trouble with and hold it out to him, and he happily grabs it and turns around and starts walking backwards to hold it out for me.

“Ah,” I say, “not sure I need that much…”

“Eh, ’s no prob, like I said,” he casually reassures me. “Bein’ a cultivator inn’t just good fer’ stayin’ healthy and spendin’ govvermint dosh, y’know.” He winks.

“Bob,” Ji says from the front of the party, “you continue to be a disgrace to the Great Pursuit of Cultivation.”

“Ah, shucks, y’always say the sweetest things, Ji,” Bob laughs at him.

Ji makes a semi-annoyed huffing noise and I can’t help but laugh too.

Find Spellcraft practice proceeds as it has: seemingly interminable. I drag my fingers through the mana, it buzzes or doesn’t, nothing happens, I look at the diagram to try to figure out what I was doing wrong, I look at the forest around us, we all keep walking. Rinse and repeat.

Every so often we pass a farmer following the dirt path back toward Caulfield. We see more than a few deer, too, which is nice. Really, if it weren’t for the zombies and the impending violence, it’d be a really relaxing hike!

I make steady progress. Now that I’m doing the whole spell it’s relatively easy for me to tell when I’ve actually messed up, and sometimes where and when I did. Bob offers his input every few tries, too, usually telling me that I’m making the qi wobble or something like that.

Even more promising is when I finally get this one weird three-fingered crabbing gesture on my left hand just right and something snaps into place. It’s not the whole spell, it falls apart almost immediately when I startle and botch the next movement, but for that half a second a narrow cone of hazy air lights up in front of me. It reminds me of someone shining a bright light into a cloud of fog, like on stage at a play, but much more sharply delineated.

Four attempts later, I get the whole spell.

It’s pretty obvious that I’ve done it right. The same cone of bright air lights up again, and this time it stays stable until I’m entirely done casting. The final movement in the spell is to poke the very base of the cone with my right fingertip, at which point the cone attaches itself to my finger. It’s narrow, maybe fifteen degrees wide, but it extends about three feet out from my fingertip wherever I point it.

I quickly start experimenting with it. “I don’t know the duration, do something quick,” I say, pointing the cone at Bob. He makes an abbreviated slashing movement and produces a tiny jet of water from his fingertip, like the world’s tiniest super soaker. A point of light immediately blinks into existence near the base of my cone, maybe an inch from my finger. I move my finger around, keeping Bob in the cone, and it stays aligned with him at the same distance.

I awkwardly grab the trinkets out of my bag with my left hand and toss one of them at random to Bob, who easily catches it. Nothing happens until he prods the trinket and it lights up, glorping out a drop of liquid color that stains his hand a luminescent blue. That shows up on Find Spellcraft just fine, and the dot sticks around until Bob does something else with the trinket and both light and dot disappear. “Okay, check range really quick?”

At this point the party has realized that something’s going on and has stopped around me, so it’s no trouble for Bob to run up to the front of the line. I can’t see him any more, but I can tell instantly when he activates the trinket, a point of light coming up on my Find Spellcraft cone a bit more than a foot out. So it looks like it’s a simple volumetric map, no translation or rotation, scaled down to maybe a thirtieth real scale. Neat!

Out of curiosity I start waving it around looking at the rest of the party. Nobody registers, though when I point it at Yann he grins, pulls out an arrow, and does something with it that makes it glow blue and crackle, at which point I get a point of light for him.

Then, when I swing it around to Heather, I see a flash of something. I frown and wave the cone back toward it and find that it wasn’t just my imagination. There’s a point of light in the forest.

In fact, I look closer and there are two points of light in the forest. One’s at our level and the other is a bit above that. If my guess at the range is correct they’re about sixty yards away, half a football field, and a bit ahead of us.

“Uh,” I say wordlessly. I look back at Heather and make sure she’s seeing the same thing I’m seeing.

She’s got her bow out, an arrow nocked and tight on the string, and a look in her eyes that spells utter focus.

Ah. Bollocks.