Leirin was beside herself when I reported what had happened in the alley. She was also worried about my emotional state, as I had just killed someone, ten someones in fact, for the first time. This day had always been coming as a part of this new world into which we had been thrust, but that was cold comfort. I truthfully didn’t feel good about what had happened and I knew that avoiding this type of violence was important. The best victories are those achieved without fighting, but sometimes you get ambushed in an alley and you have to play the hand that you are dealt and live with the consequences.

Lierin rounded up some operatives and enforcers and came to the alley with me. I felt that she was genuinely concerned for me, but I could tell that she was not at all bothered by the carnage in the alley. I had been honest with Leirin and Galan and I am sure that they received plenty of intelligence from Deldes and Delirin as well. Lierin knew how much progress I had made since abandoning the tutorial, in fact Lierin took pride in it. I knew that she had too much emotional intelligence to push me on anything right now, but I could also tell that she approved of my plan to use this opportunity to send Elen a message and, hopefully, flush her out.

Leirin simply said, “Stay safe,” as I picked up my crate of supplies and turned to go.

I simply replied, “You too” before I disappeared. It was easy to find the elves’ inn and Elen’s room. They had some magical defenses, but it was simple work to disable their defensive devices and enter the room without triggering a response. I removed a bottle of wine from my crate of supplies and left it on Elen’s table with a note that simply read ‘See you soon.’ I get that this is some weird anime villain stuff, but I wanted her thinking that she might not be safe from reprisal and I didn’t really have too much time to invest in the process.

I fully engaged my stealth skill and disappeared back through the Treefort and my tunnel. They clearly knew that we had spent time in the area in the past, so I figured this was the last time that I would pass this way until things were finished. I took a few minutes to check the bookshelf that had concealed the secret passage in the model of the Treefort that I had found under the Giantspire Mountains. It slid away with ease revealing the passage, records and treasure chests just as I had seen them in the model. I took a few of the gems with me as well as all of the records, the gun and the ammunition and headed back to the location where I had concealed the airship. Within a day I was airborne and heading for Eastern Tear in the daylight. I climbed high in the sky, but I am sure that some of the eagle eyed inhabitants of the Emerald Sea could make out if they happened to look in the right direction at the right time.

***

I caught the team in Eastern Tear as they worked on their class upgrades. They were shaken by the news. First because the sinister and calculated nature of what was a brutal ambush cast their former instructors in a new light and even more unfavorable light. Of course, most of their former instructors were now dead along with half a dozen hirelings. That was the second reason the team was shaken, the instructors had died, but I could have very easily been killed in their place or any one of us for that matter. Third, this event dramatically increased the likelihood, in all of our estimations, that we’d need to fight our friends and that the stakes of those fights would be much higher than we expected.

The news of the Unseelie Court assault didn’t shake the team, but it did galvanize everyone to action. With a clear goal in sight, everyone on the team had their own plan to make the most of their time to prepare. We needed to leave Eastern Tear six days before the army arrived at the Emerald Sea to ensure that we were there in time. That gave me a short, but achievable window to head to the Aerodrome, put any additional plans into motion and return to Eastern Tear to head out with my friends. I was going to be their force protection and would need to work on strategies to protect the whole team in light of the ambush that was just about guaranteed to occur as we returned to the Emerald Sea to finish this tutorial once and for all.

***

Leirin was shocked by the attack on Harris in the middle of fae controlled territory. Clearly there were those in the Emerald Ses that did not consider the long term consequences of starting a conflict with the Seelie Court to be an important consideration. Fortunately, it didn’t appear that the draconid decendants or the human kingdoms were involved. Arrenth and Hamilton Day had both been cooperative regarding her inquiries and we're taking reasonable steps to support the mutual defense of the outpost. Tethru, representative of the Great Council of the beastkin, was less helpful, especially with respect to the lupine assassins that were among those Harris had fought and killed.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Leirin didn’t trust Tethru and after this additional wedge being driven into their relations, Tethru probably wasn’t planning on that changing. Leirin requested that Tethru have any combat capable beastkin prepare to help repel the horde, but Tethru declined after learning that the only payment would be in the spoils of war. Although the humans, draconic decendants and beastkin would all like to knock the face down a peg, a goblin horde was no trifling matter and no time for playing games. Leirin, Hamilton and Arrenth subsequently agreed that following the conflict they would prepare an appropriate sanction for the beastkin if they truly didn’t participate in the outpost’s defense.

Of course for Tethru, working with Lierin was both a personal and professional issue. The tutorial elves had hired her beastkin for a number of jobs in the Emerald Sea. Tethru’s main goal was commercial and though the jobs had paid well, they had put her at odds with the fae leader. Tethru had never expected for the participation of her people in these activities to come to light because it was unthinkable that assassins from her clan could fail to dispatch a few newly trained tutorial participants.

Leirin had been asking some pointed questions and she was holding the bodies of Tethru’s kinsmen as evidence. It was a significant loss of face for the beastkin and in particular the lupine clan. Not to mention that Tethru had lost six highly trained assassins in the course of their work. Those kinds of losses were not insignificant to the fighting strength of her merchant and craftsman focused group. Tethru would need to figure out how to do something about that insufferable little brownie before the beastkin ended up the laughing stocks of the Emerald Sea.

***

The remaining tutorial instructors and participants moved to new lodgings shortly after learning that their compatriots were dead. Elen said that it was so that they could focus completely on their mission and prepare together for the task at hand. They all understood that she was scared. They were all in different places relative to their friends and their mission, but they were all scared at this point. It was one thing to consider fighting and subduing their friends. You could almost think of it as a friendly competition, but not if people were getting killed.

The remaining instructors were shocked. They had planned a surefire hit to take what seemed a wildcard out of play. Each of them had a healthy, more accurately inflated, sense of their own superiority, but none of them thought that they could survive that sort of attack, let alone kill all of the assailants. It made no sense

With no survivors, information on what exactly occurred was frustratingly lacking. What was clear was that all of their allies that participated in the attack were dead. The fae had put the corpses, or what was left of them, on display for a full day in front of the bookstore with a sign that read ‘Ambushers & Assassins.’ The fae were really old school like that, but then they went back to playing chess and board games about birds. They were hard to understand sometimes.

Karl, Erin, Lyle and Lando each had their own reaction to the situation. Lyle felt guilt and fear. He wondered how he had ended up on this team. Lando felt ashamed and was sick to his stomach at the idea of confronting his friends. Karl and Erin felt fear and envy in equal proportions. They both felt that they deserved to be the strongest, but still had enough self-awareness to be concerned about how they’d fare in a conflict that their instructors could not easily handle. None of them had known about the ambush in advance, but it was now clear that their instructors had set them on a collision course with their friends and former teammates. None of them wanted to fight their friends and none of them wanted to lose.

***

There was an exponential component to the kind of activity that I had left running in the Aerodrome. That was really the ideal in the kind of outbuild strategy that I had been working up to all this time. I had played many video games where a well managed build strategy could make up for many other deficiencies, especially if you could get a head start before folks figured out that it was a race to critical mass. Of course there was no way for me to know all of the players in the current game, but looking at the valley before me I was thinking that this was going to be a pretty big head start for anyone to catch up.

I know that I said that I had a healthy fear of a Skynet type scenario, which I do, but nothing that I was dealing with at this stage was truly autonomous or intelligent. The sweet spot for our current level of technology was in making small loops of standardized activity very efficient. The error handling was poor. I lost a lot of devices to unexpected scenarios and I didn’t necessarily learn from those losses systematically, but what I was attempting was on a scale where those losses didn’t matter. They were a rounding error.

Controlling complex processes with pre-established and static intents and visualizations had its limitations. When finer control was needed, I was it, but, with the scale and efficiency of this current generation, I thought that I would probably be enough. I was the Tactician afterall.