I blocked off the stairs as well. Mobs could spawn either below or above me, and I didn’t want to deal with them yet. The way station was around fifty feet high, which meant that every floor was a potential spawning zone. Given the light levels present in the barracks, and how dark the well room had been, this place was a perfect breeding ground for monsters. I plopped out my crafting table in the center of the room while Gastard tended to his horse.

Marie had remained on the stairs during the struggle, and her placidity impressed me. She was now comfortably munching on a bag of oats, oblivious to the presence of blood and bodies in the room. It was an enviable attitude.

Soldiers were soldiers, and these men served Dargoth, which was literally the evil empire of the setting. But it wasn’t like they were Stormtroopers, they were simply men who had the misfortune of being born in a region controlled by an immortal jerk. Depending on how long they’d been in his service, they may have never killed anyone themselves. On that note, even actual Stormtroopers were pretty sad to think about. They’d made them all clones so that the audience wouldn’t have to feel weird about the main characters killing them off. But in what way did being a clone make you less of a person? It was a surface-level trick of production that didn’t hold up if you thought about it for more than a second. If anything, clones were more sympathetic than regular people. The poor guys had gone their whole lives without being allowed to make any choices for themselves. That didn’t make them robots, it made them slaves. How was anyone supposed to feel good about killing slaves?

It was with these thoughts that I set about crafting a few extra torches and affixing them to the walls of the barracks until I was sure there were no shadows large enough to allow a mob to appear in the room with us.

“Have you killed people before?” I asked Gastard.

“Not many,” he said, casually dragging the bodies into a pile between two of the beds. “Most men will surrender when they see they are outmatched, and it is dishonorable to kill a knight who has given you his sword. But these are not knights, they are Dargothians.”

Arranging a few coins on the work table, I pulled the lever on its side and had myself a fresh pick. I’d completely worn through a few of them already harvesting from Redroad. Thankfully, I had more stone than I would ever need short of building a keep of my own, and plenty of sticks to make spares. One of the compartments in my pack was nothing but stone pick medallions.

“If we can get them to surrender,” I said, “that would be a good thing. They can tell us about Dargoth, about Kevin.”

Gastard grunted. “I doubt any of these men have met the Dark Lord. Anyone we leave alive is a complication.”

Like the man who had run from me, who by now had no doubt warned the rest of the garrison about us. I tried to build a mental model of the way station in my mind to better choose which wall to dig into. We’d started at the front face, taken a stair, then more stairs, and now I wasn’t sure which direction was east or west. The outer wall was thick enough for us to move within, but the walls of the rooms and subsections of the interior might only be a foot or two thick.

“Do you know which way is out?” I asked.

Gastard pointed to the side to the left of the now unattainable stairs. “We were ascending along the curve of the keep,” he said, “did you not realize?”

“I didn’t.” My spatial reasoning wasn’t the greatest, with my early driving years involving a lot of wrong turns before smartphones started telling everyone where to go. Maybe I wasn’t the best person to have a power set related to engineering. Too bad.

Mining relaxed me. Seeing cracks form in the regular stone blocks that made up the structure was satisfying on a level that was hard to explain, as was adding coins to my collection. You could never have too much material.

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I mined out a hole large enough to stand in and started working on steps to go up. I wanted to keep as close to the interior as possible, so there would only be one layer of blocks to bust through to get to the next level. My pick gave out before I’d gotten much farther, its granite head shattering into dust, and the shaft cracking all the way through. You couldn’t reuse any part of the tool once it had broken.

Checking on Gastard, I found that he was catching a nap on top of one of the cots. The idea that soldiers would take advantage of a chance to sleep anywhere, at any time, apparently translated into every universe. It looked like Marie was doing the same thing. Though she was standing up, her eyes were closed, and her flanks were rising and falling with slow, deep breaths.

Good for them.

I went through two more picks before I was confident that my hole in the wall had brought me to the next level of the tower. Then I stuck my torch at the bottom of the block steps so that the light wouldn’t be too obvious as I opened a window into whatever kind of chamber I was about to be looking into.

One block wasn’t enough, I’d gone slightly off course, so I had to mine out three before I’d cut all the way through.

The chamber was broad, with a single torch raised on a pillar at the center of the space. The light was steady and distinctly red. It didn’t fret like a natural flame would have, and after a few moments of squinting I was sure it was another version of my Eternal Torch. It was less illumination than the chamber needed, as the entire floor was made up of a single open room, but it was enough to see what had happened.

Corpses, a lot of them, dropped like toys discarded by a child. Most of them wore armor, and it didn’t appear to have helped. Their bodies were twisted and rent. A troll loomed to one side about twenty feet from me, munching contentedly on a dead soldier. Its broad shoulder hid its busy jaws, for which I was grateful. There were a couple of zombies as well, taking their fill well clear of the troll.

I went back down.

Gastard’s eyes opened when I came within a pace of the cot he was lying on, instantly alert. His sword was resting on his chest, and he hadn’t bothered removing any of his armor.

“That mask,” he said. “I almost took you for a koroshai.”

My hand brushed over the leather covering my face. It might not have been pleasant to look at, but the tainted leather helmet did its job. “There’s a troll upstairs,” I said.

He sat up. “You’re saying the tower is ours.”

“Uh…I guess. It’s kind of claiming the main floor for itself though.”

“Was it wounded?”

“I didn’t see, but it looked like the fight was one-sided.”

“They were not prepared,” Gastard nodded. “We, however, have faced a koloss once already and were victorious. When we kill the beast, there will be no one left to resist us.”

And then what? This had been my idea, but that didn’t make it a good one. I’d seen an obvious goal and went for it without really considering the ramifications. Were we going to hold out in this place when the demon showed up, demanding he return the lillits? Not that I knew much about what it meant to be a demon in this context, but it was hard to imagine they were the sort of enemy that would hesitate to kill a few hostages to make a point.

We’d been pretty lucky so far, but there was no reason to assume that luck would continue. I tended to get ideas and just run with them, consequences be damned, and it had gotten me in trouble in my previous existence. Now I was putting other people’s lives at risk.

“Do you think this is a good idea?” I said.

Gastard shrugged. “We are here. We are showing Dargoth they cannot attack the Free Kingdoms with impunity. I may have a chance to slay a demon, that is enough for me.”

He was a man of clear priorities.

“What if we get more lillits killed?”

Gastard’s eyes narrowed, and he stood, resting a firm hand on my shoulder.

“Our land has not seen open war for many years, but even the squabbling of the nobles of Drom has a cost in innocent lives. At least in this, there is a clear enemy, a clear wrong to redress. I say we continue down this path you have made for us.” He squeezed his hand. “Esmelda will not blame you for failure, but it will shame you if you lose heart before the true battle has even begun.”

I hadn’t been thinking about Esmelda, but now I was imagining her reaction if I got her father killed.

“Do we try to kill the troll,” I said, “or use it against the army.”

“Kill it. Demons can bend those monsters to their will. It will be of no use to us when they arrive.”

I took a deep breath.

“Fair enough.”