After packing up everything and saying my goodbyes to Ivar, Revkah, and the others I had come to know in Teichar, I set out southeast towards Freigel.
The fact of the matter was that if Vorel was coming to the north to reconquer it for Horuth, there was probably nothing I could do about it. The man was Level 74 when I met him seven years ago, and even if he never gained another level, it would probably still take me decades to reach that level of strength.
I sincerely hoped it was another master I did not know of. Just the thought of fighting Vorel terrified me, and that did not even account for the fact that I had family connections to him. I very much doubted he remembered me, and it had been a year and a half since I had seen my mother, but presumably before this she was still working with him at the institute.
Could I convince him not to fight?
It would likely be an enormous risk if I tried to talk to him, as I would need to expose myself and a lot of my secrets. If that were the only way to stop him from killing his way across the north, I might have to.
For the moment, I had to assume that I would lose the fight, and if so, I wanted to preserve my secrets. I could not leave behind my progress on enchantments and creating self-powered artifacts, and I especially could not let the Kingdom discover my heretical 6-point magic designs either. I cleaned out Ivar’s shop of all traces of my presence, and swore him to secrecy. He was not likely to make more devices in my absence as he could not perform the initial enchantment on his own engravings and had no access to magic pearls or crystals.
Getting Giran to let go of Buda so we could leave had been a bit of a battle which ended in the young lad’s waterworks, but I was finally able to depart, wishing everyone well and stating my hopes to return one day and see them again in the future.
I hoped they were not able to sense the hopelessness I felt during my goodbye.
The journey back to Freigel would take at least a week, and that was if we maintained a rapid pace. It had initially taken us several weeks to travel from Freigel to Teichar, but that was at a walking pace as I was the only one with a mount at the time.
The land was fairly barren, so there was not much to distract from the travel itself. Unlike traveling through the Horuth Kingdom, where one had to be on guard from beasts and bandits at all times, the north contained few beasts and, in the wake of the insurgents’ rebellion, no banditry to speak of. As winter was coming to an end, many of the beasts had already begun migrating north again, away from the towns and villages where hunters lived. With the game heading north, so too did the predators, leaving little for my travel group to concern ourselves with.
Our rapid pace quickly brought us back to the formerly abandoned town of Freigel, which looked more like a staging ground for war now than a place where people would want to live. The air was thick with tension. A few familiar faces waved at me, and a few unfamiliar faces almost came at me before those in the know explained who I was to them and set them straight. I did not want to waste any unnecessary MP on illusions until the coming battle was underway.
I made my way to the command tent, and with a steadying breath, stepped inside.
The familiar faces of the rebellion’s leadership looked fatigued and frightened. Some faces I expected to see were entirely absent. I walked around the perimeter, stopping short when I saw Golchev.
Leiren had said he had taken an injury in the offensive, but she had undersold it. He was missing a hand, and his face was marred with intense scarring. I sucked in a breath automatically, and he turned at the sound. He stared at me for a few beats before nodding curtly.
I sighed, and stepped up, channeling magic into a rather expensive healing spell. Murmuring filled the tent as their leader’s skin was restored and a new hand grew from the stump. He flexed it a few times, stoically holding back any emotion from showing on his face.
“Welcome back,” he grunted.
I rolled my eyes and looked at the table which showed the map. They had a rough count on the remaining soldiers at the lodgement and a count of their own forces, but there was no way to know how many more soldiers were coming through the pass.
“You realize that if they’re sending a master mage, even I can’t be of much help,” I whispered.
Golchev was silent for a few moments before he responded.
“I was a young lad when the Kingdom first invaded. Barely out of childhood, on the cusp of my adulthood. I could not fight, but I remember the war. I remember the horrors and the fires which burned up my home, my parents, my people. My whole life since then was that of a slave to the invaders, until I escaped and helped found this revolution.”
He turned and looked at me dead in the eyes.
“We may not be able to win, but we’ll die fighting for our freedom.”
I sighed, looking back at the map.
“Well, let’s at least try to come up with a better plan than that.”
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* * *
As I left the command tent, I found myself under a surprise attack. Someone had grabbed me and began restricting my movements. Have I been betrayed? I began to focus my strength to escape the grip of my attacker, but my face was pushed into a pillowy softness which temporarily short-circuited my teenage brain.
“Pilus! You’re really back!” Leiren shouted, squeezing me harder into the hug.
I slipped out of her grip, face flushing and stammered out a greeting. Toch stood by, looking a bit peeved at the hug, but then he grunted and nodded at me. I was relieved to see both of them unharmed.
At my request, the pair led me to the provisioning area, where I offered up some quadhorn meat to help feed the freedom fighters and requisitioned some additional steel items in exchange. I did not need a new sword at the moment, but I would add whatever I got to my collection sitting in my inventory for the future. I needed practice materials for doing my own engraving and enchanting, and making magic swords in the future would be fun.
I honestly needed to sit down and take proper stock of everything I had collected. I could intuit what I had stored in my inventory space, and I could still use the original game-like interface to read through an overly detailed list of items, but it was not the same as visually appraising everything in full. I had collected all sorts of random stuff since leaving Mirut, in my travels through the Kingdom and the north. While I had more or less stopped saving everything like I had as a child, discarding waste materials like offal and low-rank beast bones and claws and the like, I still had acquired all sorts of higher-rank beast parts and crafting goods, interesting stones and ores, weapons and armor, and things I was holding on to in order to sell for profit when I was ready to settle down somewhere for a period of time.
It occurred to me that, despite how excited I had been for adventure and exploration and growing my strength and skills, I was starting to feel the need to have a home base again. For magical reasons, I knew that would not be in the north, and I was not sure I could realistically return to Mirut after everything that happened in the Velgein lands.
Having my own home base would be nice. I had never really been able to offload my inventory anywhere, nor had I been able to properly display and enjoy my treasures. It all simply sat in some sort of spatial rift.
My ruminations about future goals were interrupted by a sharp poke in my side from Leiren.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked. I realized I had let my mind wander a bit too far, considering my present circumstances.
“Just… the future,” I muttered. Leiren’s large grin fell a bit.
“The Kingdom’s reinforcements?”
That had not been what I was thinking about, but it should have been. I turned my mind to it now, remembering that I needed to survive the coming days and months before I could worry about returning south of the mountains and setting up a home base.
“In part,” I answered with a half-truth. Then I gave her, and Toch behind her, a confident grin. “Don’t worry. Golchev has a plan.”
Golchev had not had much of a plan, but we were working on that. I had let the leader know about my own experiences coming up the pass to the north, and how we had been engaged by the snowpongos from the mountains. He had sent scouts to climb the mountains on either side of the Horuthian camp. They would have to worry about new snowpongos that had moved into the territory, but if they could gain the high ground, perhaps the Velgein forces could assault the reinforcements before they arrived. Humans were much smarter than beasts, and an assault done with more intentionality should work a lot better than a beast attack. In a perfect world, there would be no reinforcements, and we could simply starve out the Horuthian lodgement until they retreated.
Realistically, I was concerned that we could not move enough forces up into the mountains to harry the reinforcements enough for it to matter. If they were sending a master mage, the supply lines and number of soldiers that were attending the mage’s procession north would be monstrous. This was a large, and possibly final, push from King Tobar.
On the other hand, if this force could be defeated, the north would probably have peace, at least for the short-term future. The Velgein forces could take control of the pass, which was far more defensible than the entirety of the north, and finally focus on rebuilding.
Golchev had decided that I was not to head into the mountains with the scouts. While I would have been able to do a tremendous amount of damage against the procession from the south, there was substantial risk that I would be killed and the approaching mage would still push through to the lodgement. If that happened, there would be nothing to stop the mage from sweeping the north.
Instead, we were hoping for a lucky break, and that the scouts would take out the incoming mage. I could help with the final battle and push the Horuthian soldiers back, and then we would take the pass. If the scouts failed—which was, to be honest, what I expected, just from the raw numbers involved—then at least I would be here to mount a final defense against the mage.
I glanced at my two Velgein companions, both scouts who I had saved from the very same camp we now had to push back. They would be sent on this mission as well. I had at least got Golchev to agree that they would be given the task of running back to report on the failure of the mission, should that be the case, rather than staying and fighting to the death. I had argued that we needed to know what was coming and when, more than the potential damage two scouts could do to the procession fighting until their last breaths. He had finally agreed before I left the command tent.
Shaking off my gloom, I returned to the moment. The three of us found where meals were being dispensed and settled in to enjoy the company over a light stew of root vegetables and a few chunks of meat. We caught up on how our winters had fared, and I regaled them with tales of my battle against the darkwurm in the twilight of the northern wastes and how I traversed the mountains to the west. Treepo had curled up in Leiren’s lap after our meal, and Toch was absently patting Buda’s side after the ramhog had sidled up next to him. We enjoyed these last moments of peace together while we could, until some time later, they were recalled by a runner to start preparing for their mission up the mountainside to try and halt the incoming aggressors.
It was, as we had all feared, not enough. When the few surviving scouts returned, my gut churned when I noticed Toch’s familiar face was absent, and Leiren’s pained expression made it clear to me that I would never see him again. The scouts reported too many losses to the beasts and the environment, and not enough power to repel the Horuthian forces, which were significant. It was all going to come down to a last stand at the encampment.