Chapter 155: Noon Ultimatum

No matter how uncomfortable or unsettling the circumstances, one needed to always take responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. This was a moral philosophy that Alex had tried to live by since he was a child. For most of his life, this had been something that came easy to him, especially during his time spent as an adventurer in the God Slayers Guild. But now? Now, things had become murkier and more complicated, as it was not yet clear how today would end, and the decisions he now had to make could radically shift the outcome in such a way that thousands upon thousands of lives could perish as a direct result of it.

I am the one who brought this about, he thought to himself. Whatever happens next, it’s on me.

Alex knew with absolute conviction that his decision to march a historically large army on Shadowfall Coast was the right one. Behind him, and continuing on for miles, were columns of tanks, APCs, and other transport vehicles for the various troop regiments. There was also an extensive array of modern military equipment such as mobile artillery, radar scanners, and pallets filled with food and medicine. Due to the unprecedented and unique threat the Guild of Gentlemen posed to the world, Alex had convinced High-Lord Kolorn Besh to do the unthinkable: divert almost every available unit available to the cause, leaving behind almost nothing and no one.

Right now, the absolute minimum number of leveled defenders and armed personnel necessary were protecting the Slopes of Dal’Zarrah, the capital of humanity. This, naturally, meant that more than three quarters of the entire guild was here, including Lord Besh himself. Even low-level members had been asked to come and fight.

In the more than two-thousand years of the Lords of Justice’s history, there were only a tiny handful of occasions where a guild leader had been willing to authorize an attack on another guild’s territory that risked this much in terms of manpower, material, and fellow guild members. It was a gamble of proportions not seen in a very long time. And make no mistake: if the Guild of Gentlemen were to decisively defeat the Lords of Justice in the coming battle, it would spell the end of the entire guild. Alex, a man who had only joined the storied guild a short while ago, would ultimately be responsible for its permanent collapse and erasure—as well as the fall of Slopes of Dal’Zarrah itself.

And yet, even with the weight of all of this on his shoulders, this was somehow not the cause of Alex’s current unease and discomfort. No, he remained unwavering in his belief that this was right: that this was necessary. The Guild of Gentlemen had somehow discovered a way to use a particle from Earth to create a weapon so devastating it had ended more than a million innocent lives. For this reason, Alex truly believed the risky decision would be not to attack. No matter the outcome, he would stand by this decision and feel secure in the choices that had brought it about.

No, it was something else that bothered him. Something that was entirely his fault, yet he would still choose to do things the same way over again if he was forced to relive his prior actions. And so, with that thought, he shifted his gaze to his immediate right, where Queen Vayra, who stood shoulder to shoulder with him, was frowning impatiently as her eyes scanned the tops of the numerous, thousand-foot-tall mesas that formed a wide valley large enough to allow their massive, human-Elvish military convoy to reach Shadowfall Coast.

“If we keep stopping like this, you know what the consequence will be, human,” she said to him, her tone cold and determined.

Alex felt the muscles in his shoulders tightening. Everything that could possibly happen in the early hours of this morning as a result of the Elvish interference was his fault—or at least largely so. And it was all because of the hijinks that he and Zach had pulled with Adamus, the Great One. Though it had resulted in the Elvish joining the war effort and granting them a dramatically higher chance of success, it was not without its unintended consequences, and the queen’s words made that very, very clear.

We did what was right, he told himself, though he was still not entirely convinced.

Meeting the queen’s eyes, he asked, “Have your scouts still not found them?”

“No, human,” she said, sounding annoyed. “I would have told you so if they had.”

Not far from where Alex was currently standing, a very young man, perhaps only a few days older than eighteen, was surrounded by medics, who were working tirelessly to patch him up. A few minutes prior, he became yet another—among dozens—of level-1 troops to have been shot by a sniper hidden amid the brush on top of one of the very tall mesas surrounding them. Alex regretted their guild’s limited number of healing stones, as well as the taboo of using them on ordinary, level-1 people. Already, numerous young men—and a young woman—had died because their wounds were too severe to save them with conventional medicine.

Her tone and demeanor becoming even more impatient, Fylwen said, “We must continue on. We cannot halt every time some insignificant worm fires a gun at one of your humans.”

Alex tamped down on his rising nerves. For the past hour, their progress had slowed dramatically, as they could never seem to travel more than a few miles without a small group of snipers from the Guild of Gentlemen opening fire on them. Each time this happened—and it had happened quite a bit by now—the Elvish would send out scouts to find and kill their attackers, rarely taking any prisoner. Then they’d proceed onwards again, only to be held up by another group a bit farther on.

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“We can’t just travel straight through,” Alex said uneasily. “If we do, we’ll leave a trail of dead bodies behind: people who don’t need to die.”

“If you are unable to pay that price, then you know what I must do.”

Alex balled his hands into fists, but he said nothing in reply. Thanks to what he and Zach had done—which again, he truly did stand by—the Elves were behaving in a fanatical way that he was positive would not leave room for negotiation or reasoning. But it wasn’t so much that Alex could not have seen this coming, but more so, it was the way in which things had transpired that took him by surprise. And why? Incredibly, it was all because of a single sentence that Adamus had spoken. All that currently troubled Alex was due to a single spoken sentence.

“My only command to you is to destroy the human weapons and to not allow any more of them to come into existence,” Adamus had said to her early last night. At the time, Alex had been silently celebrating, as that was exactly what he, too, had wanted from her and the Elves. And it was because of this that he had set his mind at ease, believing that things were working themselves out. Sadly, he had utterly failed to account for how the Elvish people as a whole would react to this “commandment.”

To begin with, not only did Queen Vayra allow word of Adamus’s command to spread among the high-ranking Elves, but she allowed it to spread among all of them, and she’d even spread it herself. This, by itself, was not an issue. What was an issue was how rigid, hyper-literal, and stringent the Elves had become over this. And it wasn’t the first part of Adamus’s command that provided the issue either, but the second. Specifically: “to not allow any more of them come into existence.”

To a rational individual, one would naturally assume that, should they and their forces successfully attack Shadowfall Coast, destroy their weapons facilities, apprehend any scientific personnel involved in the weapons’ creation, and dispose of anything either just having been made or near completion, this would constitute a job well done, yes?

No. It wouldn’t.

To the Elves, such an outcome would constitute a total and complete failure. Why? Because in this scenario, if they were to eradicate any of the weapons that had only just been created, it would technically mean that more of the weapons had been created, and in the eyes of the Elves, Adamus had specifically asked them not to allow that—even if it didn’t matter or was totally inconsequential in any conceivable way. Even if the weapons had yet to undergo the process of being mounted to a rocket, programmed, and made ready to fire—to the Elves, this didn’t matter. Because their “God” had told them so.

I cannot believe this is the situation I’m in, he thought, exasperated.

“Please try to rethink your position on this," Alex said, despite knowing it would not sway the queen. "The Great Lord Adamus, when issuing our instructions, did not actually mean to imply that we—”

Alex’s words ended abruptly, and a white-hot pain entered his face as Queen Vayra struck him, hard, right across the side of his cheek—and with enough force to knock his new pair of glasses off his face. All things considered, Alex supposed he was lucky she did not do worse to him. He merely bent down and retrieved his glasses from the rocky, arid ground here in the river-less valley where Shadowfall Coast bordered Whispery Woods. Several of his fellow guild members observed this exchange, yet they wisely chose to remain silent and allow Alex to handle the situation.

“Human, do not dare attempt to twist the words of the Great Lord for your own desires!” she shouted, as nearby Elves, both those with green cloaks and white alike, all sent him angry stares.

“I apologize,” he said, bowing his head.

Fylwen glared at him a moment. Then her expression softened, and she wiped his reddened cheek with her hand, displaying a surprising gentleness. “It’s just a little slap,” she said. “You’re all right.”

“I am,” he confirmed.

Speaking in a way that was a bit more motherly, she said, “I understand you wish to spare as many humans as you can. Though I harbor great hatred for your kind, I too would prefer we shed as little blood as possible. That is why I am willing to cooperate fully with your plan up until noon. Until that exact moment in time, the Elves will defer to your methods and your tactics. However, come noon, if we have not succeeded in our shared goal, you know what I must do.”

Alex frowned. When he did not speak, she spoke for him. “We will level the entire city and leave nothing standing. It is the only way to ensure we live up to the direct command of the Lord. For the first time in many millennia, Lord Adamus has actually spoken to us. There is not an Elf alive who would dare disappoint him.”

Not wishing to direct any more of her ire his way, Alex nodded, though he did not agree. Her plan was in no way sensible or reasonable. The most logical and moral thing to do in this situation was obvious and foolproof. They should blitz the city and capture any possible nuclear launching sites, which would guarantee that, no matter what had or had not been created by that point, nothing could or would launch. From there, they would begin an exhaustive search of every building in the entire city, a process that could take significantly longer, but would be done in a controlled manner. With the Elves by their side, capturing the city could be done in a day: and searching the city for the weapons could be done in a few months—time that they would be able to afford once they fully disabled the enemy’s ability to launch.

Was it the greatest plan ever created? Perhaps not. But it was a good one; of that, Alex was certain. Yet because of the queen’s utter devotion to a hyper literalized interpretation of a man that Alex was sure could care less about how they succeeded as long as they did succeed, it seemed like the queen was planning to destroy the entire city and possibly end every life within its bounds unless Alex did the impossible and somehow rooted out every vector of weapon production and every uranium storage facility within the next seven hours. It was an impossible task.

“Sir, should we have the men press onwards, Lord Oren?” asked Lord Lansen Kranzifaust, the sixth-in-command of the Lords of Justice.

Alex lifted his head and scanned the tops of the mesas. They still hadn’t found the sniper team that’d just put a bullet through the chest of one of their men. With a touch of bitterness, he nodded. “We need to keep going, yes. We can’t let them delay us.”

“As you wish.”