[a furious inquisitor's journal]
We're finally going to end this, Miss Journal.
There were so many soldiers marching through Sir Travis that no one else could get in or out for a whole day. Now they're all loaded onto trains and we're sending them down the line as far as we can, safely, while the King and I fly. Oh, Penelope too. It's hard to remember, when he's riding her, that she's still Penelope. I'm riding on Ripper, who is excited to see more of the world.
What I don't know, Miss Journal, is how to lead any of these people. Stewart said I only have to be a symbol to them. He said that would be enough. That annoys me, though. That's what my uncle wanted me to be.
No, Miss Journal, I don't think Stewart is anything like my uncle. Stewart wants to keep me safe. He wants me to be a positive influence. Well, I don't care. If I see somewhere I can help, I'm going to go and shoot at our problems until they go away.
We are leaving. I hope the next time I am writing in here that the war is over. I would like to get back to my training. Mr. Hreti still owes me some axe training, and he'll want to hear about all this.
—Inquisitor Elanor
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Elanor had learned the fine art of balancing with her knees and keeping her rump from Ripper's back. Not only did it mean that the contest between Ripper's scales and her rump never took place, but she was jostled around a lot less too.
Ripper had no problem flying with her. She wasn't sure what had happened, but her friendly wyvern seemed stronger and a bit larger now. Below, the train was moving at a good pace, but not one she couldn't out-fly.
Looking up at where Stewart was riding on Penelope's back, she noticed him gesturing ahead and down. "Ripper, we need to follow them and land. Be ready for anything, though. There could be enemy scouts around."
With a nod, Ripper spiraled down to land beside Penelope, the presence of her dungeon's boss boosting her confidence even more than having Elanor close by did. After Elanor dismounted, Ripper walked over to Penelope and bumped her head against the dragon's shoulder.
Wanting to be part of the conversation, Penelope nonetheless used the palm of one wing to rub Ripper's head and neck, getting happy little grunts from the wyvern. After all, a dragon could be part of any conversation they could hear, she figured, since her voice was so loud.
"We'll be at the end of the line in an hour's flight. Scouts said the tracks had been broken there to force derailments." Stewart ran over the plan in his head as the trains passed them. The wide-open plain was useful for holding their conversation, because there was little chance of sneaking up. "The trains will stop before then and unload the troops. Shock troops will be out first, then our lancers will get on their horses. Engineers will be rolling the cannons off with the help of the infantry. They're going to be busy, but if anything comes—"
"Then you get off my back and let me deal with it." Penelope glared at Stewart, unwilling to back down on that. "I don't care if every soldier is carrying a talisman. If the enemy attack before they're ready, I will be the first to attack them—because I can get back here fastest."
"And you'll get on Ripper and stay out of magic and ballista range," Elanor said, leveling her own firm expression at Stewart. "We can fight and die and come back to do it again. You can't."
Holding his hands up in a placating gesture, Stewart knew when to surrender and live to fight another day. "Of course. You're both right. We'll do that in advance, then. When the trains stop, I'll ride Ripper and you ride Penelope. That way you can both save the day and be heroes."
Elanor and Penelope looked at each other and nodded in agreement with the plan, then both laughed.
Recovering first, Elanor said, "I've been talking to the kingdom and practicing using their power. Specifically, the one that lets me keep firing without reloading. I can't exactly balance all that well on your back while doing it, so I'll wait for you to steady and call out."
Penelope nodded. "That would work, though my breath should be more effective than any bullets."
"Do I get a say in any of this?" Stewart asked, the grin on his face surprising even him. He wasn't sure why, but the way they talked about protecting him was both endearing and a little surprising.
"I'm far too big for you to order around," Penelope said, "and she's too important to you. Besides, you want to win."
When Stewart looked at Elanor, he realized that Penelope was absolutely correct. "I should never have let you both sit in on my strategy meetings. It seems like you learned more from them than I did." The laugh from each of them was heartening, and he hoped their little plan wouldn't be required.
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Tinpot, despite the rush they'd been in to make cannons for field guns, and the calm after the army had departed, now found himself once again feverishly making guns. Revolvers were first. He had a little rack of assembled guns at the back of his workbench, and boxes containing the parts to assemble them with.
Eight revolvers, finally joined by a ninth. "One more to go." It had taken him a day and a half to get all the parts made for this, but now he was going to do it. "Travis, tell me if this works."
Stolen novel; please report.
"I was trying to give you space and not crowd around you. I'm as excited as you are." Travis was practically buzzing with energy. Neither Elanor nor Stewart had appeared in the temples in Northridge yet, and Penelope hadn't appeared, so he assumed everything was going alright with the war.
He watched carefully as Tinpot assembled the gun just like the previous nine.
Despite the pressure and excitement building, Tinpot wouldn't make a gun that was less than perfect. So, glad that Travis couldn't actually loom over him, he worked to complete the last revolver and as soon as he inserted the pin that retained the cylinder, he heard Travis shout.
"That's it! I got a message saying Single-Action Revolvers are craftable!" Travis wished he could dance, but had to console himself with the fact he could now have anyone make revolvers. "One adamantine, one mithril, and one steel. Tinpot, that's practically nothing. In a week I could provide everyone in Northridge with revolvers."
"They'd be identical, too. All measured to the exact same tolerance." Almost as much as the advances in gun design, Tinpot had found a zest for precision. Since those first wear plates he'd made, he had refined his process and gained higher precision and quality. But, something that was still tough to do was to make interchangeable parts—that problem was solved by the dungeon normalizing his designs to a single specification. "What next? The rifle version?"
"Right. Yeah. Sorry, just thinking about what giving everyone a revolver would do to the world. Six-shot rifles are next. Oh, and we need to make ammo. I hope the system picks up on that."
Tinpot shuddered at the horrible thought that the system wouldn't pick up ammo and he'd be forced to make the casings and bullets for the rest of his days. "I'll make those rounds first, to see if we get an unlock for them." Old though he technically was, Tinpot had found his youthful excitement growing. He'd never thought that someone would give an old tinkerer everything they want, to do what they want with, but here he was learning from his own work and creating entirely new things.
His hands reached almost automatically, one taking an empty steel blank circle, the other picking up the dies he'd made for stamping casings. "This won't take long."
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It was now actually boring. Fife sighed as she found yet another boss room empty. There were burn marks all over the place, and she could see blood-splatters from what must have been a big fight. Walking to where the boss would have been, she scuffed her talons against the rock and etched a claw mark into it. "Either they'll kill everything, or we'll start finding little piles of loot with their things." The sound of a gun unloading took her by surprise. Turning to the origin of the sound, Fife saw Huntress lowering her rifle. "What happened?"
"They missed an orc." Cracking the rifle open, Huntress picked out the spent casing and swapped it for a fresh one. She then made sure to put the one she'd just fired into a bag. "They should have stopped in a few floors, I thought?"
"Right, but they also have a very enthusiastic gnoll with them. So long as they don't charge in and kill the heart before we get down there, it'll be fine." Rolling her shoulders and wings, Fife checked that everyone was ready to move again and broke into a jog. "Let's keep moving until we catch up to them. Huntress, have fun shooting anything you see that ain't a gnoll or a wolf."
Holding her loaded rifle in one hand, pointed in a safe direction, Huntress felt excitement grow. It would be the first and last time this dungeon had dealt with guns, and she wasn't about to spare it. After spending months training with the Northridge City Guard, she felt confident in her skills with the weapon.
She trotted along behind and beside Fife, with the wolves, other kobolds, and Breath of Spring (who was still riding one of the wolves) behind them. She got used to the sounds of the dungeon—at least, the sounds of the mostly empty dungeon. Their own various noises as they moved were easily dismissed, but the echoes from tunnels always tipped her off when a body was blocking some of the sound.
"How do you keep doing that? You're lining up on them before I can even see them." Fife didn't slow their pace, though she was far too curious about Huntress' skill to keep her mouth shut.
"That's because you can't hear anything. Your armor is noisy, and if I was inside it, I wouldn't hear the troll in that tunnel off to the right. The echo of our feet is being muffled by something big." She raised her rifle and gestured with the barrel in the direction of the tunnel. "And, honestly, it's probably your turn."
Aiming toward that tunnel, Fife felt the boredom slough off her and the excitement of battle return.
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Sitting at his desk, David Fitzgerald was reading the latest reports as they'd been dispatched to him. "They scouted out where we broke the railway line."
West Reaches laughed. "A little presumptuous of them. There will be at least a month before the troops are moved to the capital, then days more as they bring them by train to our ambush. The provisions alone, for all those troops, will strip their weakling cities bare. Over half of the old kingdom's most prosperous farm dungeons are in the West—now our West." Her rich tone broke into laughter. "Mark my words, David, they will not have an army in the field for three months without causing a famine across the eastern and northern arms of the once-kingdom."
David didn't mind admitting, in the quiet of his own mind, that West Reaches herself knew more about waging war than he did. She was old—older than the kingdom genius loci itself—and if it wasn't for her disdain for his father and her latching on to David when he was young, he wouldn't understand as much as he did about warfare either. "On this matter I'll submit to your counsel."
"There is a wisdom all its own in judging where your own limits are and asking for help. You know more than many. For generations, the greatest threat the kingdom has encountered was marauding northerners, and they rarely stretched their supplies to reach the capital." West Reaches was sure David had learned more than he would admit of war in her private tutelage of him. She cursed his father again for the lack in his heir’s education, but at the same time it had brought the pair of them closer. David had woken her from a slump that had lasted generations of his line, while she nurtured his ambition and taught him everything she could—in such a short lifetime as a human had—about fulfilling that ambition. "Even if they send forces from the capital, your army has the training and the tools to deal with ten thousand soldiers without needing you there to lead them."
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