Delvers LLC- Surviving Ludus

by Blaise Corvin (ed)

  “I won’t be needing that hook after all,” I shouted down with a shit-eating grin on my face.

  Once I was back down, me, Otto, and Rauli had a final strategy meeting where she explained what to expect from the orks, basic types of other orb-Bonded and mages that we might run into, and possible ways to defeat them. She also showed us how to load and operate the crossbows. She made sure to load us up on training ammo and some targets to practice with as well.

  A crossbow might seem a little extraneous for someone like me, but they are mostly quiet and invisible, while my energy blasts drew massive amounts of attention and made a lot of noise on impact. She recommended that we train as much as we could with the crossbows, our powers, and to try to get some battle plans and strategies together.

  I brought up what in my mind was the obvious elephant in the room, something that every fighting force needs to account for, logistics. “Wait, you said it was a five-day walk from here? We are going to be loaded down with weapons, armor, food, infiltration equipment, ammo, water, first aid supplies, everything, and you want us to carry all of this on our backs?”

  “I’m glad you mentioned that,” said Rauli. “There are a lot of options for quick travel on Ludus, most are expensive or dangerous. I still have no guarantee that you two won’t run off, or just immediately die on this mission, so the fort can’t afford to pay for the extravagant forms of travel for you two. Otto could probably just run there quickly, and of course you do need to get there quickly. The orks could kill my people any day now. You however will hold him up, and you two need each other for this mission.

  “The situation presents a problem for me, and there isn’t any good solution for it, so I’ve come to a decision. I’m delegating this problem to you. Have fun, you two. If you rescue my people, we’ll be great friends. If you run away, we’ll kill you. I’ll check in on you later when I can and help you train, but I’m the leader of the security force here and I have my own obligations. You leave in four days, work quickly,” she ordered.

  I watched her walk away with a frown. Then a crazy idea hit me the second she was gone. “Hey Otto, you ever built or worked on a wagon before?”

  Enemy Mine, Chapter Three

  “I can’t believe it works!” yelled Otto as we barreled down the main dirt road between the Areva’s fort and the orks’ fort. We were sitting in a type of wagon we had built. It was large enough to hold all of our gear and supplies with enough extra room to cart back the captives, if and when we found them. I had no idea what our current speed was; I had to guess maybe thirty miles an hour, but I had no accurate way to gauge it. Someone may wonder how we could reach such a speed, especially in a shitty thrown-together wooden wagon. Well, I was the engine, a damn good engine at that. Otto was the pilot and he steered using rudimentary controls at the front of the wagon.

  We’d devised a special seat on the back of the wagon where I could face backwards and sit with my back to a structural beam. I would blow a wide burst of force out behind us which would shove me backwards hard into the wagon and push it forward. We broke the wagon a lot learning this maneuver, but now we had it down to a smooth science. As long as Otto push-started the wagon, I could keep us moving at a pretty decent clip without running out of power. We were putting a lot of wear and tear on the vehicle but we had brought replacement parts with us, and it would only have to last a day or two.

  Captain Rauli had told us it was a five-day walk to the ork fort. We figured that meant roughly one hundred miles. So if we could keep the cart moving twenty to thirty miles an hour most of the way there, then we could get there within the day, close to nightfall. Then we would wait and rest until most of the orks turned in for the night and then we’d sneak over the wall. I had reluctantly brought my climbing hook since my force blasts did still produce purple light, and they could be loud if they blew things away from me, which would ruin a stealth approach. But I still wasn’t sure whether I would use the hook or my power to get over the wall. I would have to get there first to see what the situation dictated.

  The night before we’d left I had a lot of pesky emotions sneak up on me, and it didn’t help that I heard Otto quietly crying in his bunk either. I don’t think either of us were worried about the mission. It was more that we were just shell shocked. I tried to avoid thinking about my men as much as possible, and my poor parents who would forever have to wonder if their son was still out there somewhere. Luckily before I went too far down the emotional rabbit hole, the Areva woman I had come to call “Miss Winky” in my mind, named for all the cute winks she’d sent my way, had knocked on the door to the bunkhouse and asked me if I would go on a walk with her.

  At first we’d walked in silence. I’d wanted to ask her what her name was, but I was too shy. Then I’d realized how stupid it was to be shy on this hell hole of a world after surviving dozens of battles and near scrapes with death across Earth and now Ludus. So I’d grabbed her hand, swung her around, and kissed her.

  “I was waiting for that,” she’d said with a coy smile. After that we’d had a really good night together, like really really good. She’d also been nice enough to bake me some kind of local bread for our foodstuffs which she’d graciously dropped off for me the next morning while me and Otto did final checks and loaded the wagon. Rauli had stopped by once, stared at me and Otto, said “Good luck,” then had slapped me in the face just hard enough to hurt.

  “What the fuck was that for?” I’d shouted at her.

  “It’s our thing, me and you, friends all have inside jokes and things like that,” she’d replied.

  “Fuck that, we need a new thing, this is bullshit!”

  Then she’d laughed and walked away again without preamble. I had a feeling that she didn’t want to get close to me or Otto, probably because she had gotten close to a human once before, and he had died. That was just a theory though.

  So we had taken off in the cart, a few people had watched from the top of the wall, some yelling, “Good luck!” Others had stared stoically, probably not sure what to think of us. We were the best bet for a return of their friends, and to some, their family. If we failed the mission then the orks would probably execute the hostages in retaliation. If we abandoned the mission then their people might die anyway.

  I hadn’t even once considered running away. Not because I didn’t have anywhere on Ludus to go, though that was a good reason; I just wasn’t a coward. The Areva had helped me and I genuinely did want to help them. They seemed like good people who were just trying to live in this fucked-up world. I wondered if Otto felt the same way, or if he thought about abandoning the mission. I couldn’t quite bridge the gap with him emotionally enough to have a casual conversation, especially one about feelings or motivations. I still hated him at that point, irrationally so. He had explained to me a few times that he hated Hitler and the Nazis, and he’d argued that his situation was just the most cosmically fucked-up case ever of “wrong place, wrong time,” but I could never fully accept that. And that was fine, he didn’t have to be my friend, he just had to cover my back while I covered his, at least long enough for me to get these hostages back to their fort. After that I could split ways with the German.

  So we trundled on in our noisy, bumpy as shit, haphazard wagon of terror, while hoping it didn’t break too soon. Things came out of the woods to attack us a few times, but we were too fast for most of them. Monsters would chase us for a while before tiring out and turning back to the woods. When they were able to catch up to us I would sear their faces with a blast of pure heat. Or if they were ahead of my position, then Otto would club them away from the wagon.

  He just had to be careful that his swings weren’t so powerful that they would flip the wagon. His club was extremely heavy and we were traveling pretty light. He also had to make his attacks one-handed since he was controlling a steering wheel of sorts with his other hand at the front of the wagon. Luckily his club’s length was long enough that he could reach out and give the monsters that s
pecial touch they must have been looking for. Lots of sad monsters crawled back into the woods that day missing teeth or with burned-out eyes.

  We stopped when we figured we were about halfway there and ate a quick lunch. We also replaced all of the wagon’s wheels preemptively. The forests were tight against the road in the area where we rested and I felt like I had eyes on me the whole time, but nothing came at us. The next part of the trip would be the hardest because we had to make sure that we didn’t accidentally give away our presence to the orks, which would be tough with our loud-ass wagon. Thankfully some of the scouts that Rauli had sent ahead had tied some red pieces of cloth to random tree branches about five miles out from the orks’ fort and we found them quickly. We pulled the wagon far off of the main path and deep into the woods.

  The area around the ork fort felt empty, which I had to assume was due to ork patrols, so we had to stay on our toes. We covered the wagon up with tree branches and dead leaves the best we could and then we crawled under it to wait for nightfall. That’s the boring part of military life, or now technically an adventurer’s life, that no one wants to talk about. Sure, it’s all amazing and noble after the fact, but what people don’t mention is wiping your ass with leaves, shitting in hastily dug latrines, or in my case lying under a wagon for hours on end with a German soldier.

  A few hours after nightfall we put on all of our armor and gear, along with the crossbows and climbing hooks. It was hard to move quietly in full gear but since we were five miles out we had enough time to perfect it. About a mile from the fort we ran into our first ork patrol. They hadn’t seen or heard us yet and I wasn’t sure if I should attack or hide, but thankfully Otto made an on-the-spot decision. He leapt onto the nearest tree trunk, reached down with one hand which I instinctively grabbed and he swung me up into the tree. Then he came up after me.

  We stayed perfectly still as the ork patrol walked right below us. It was two of them and they looked just as crazy as Rauli had described, large frames, and wicked-looking wooden weapons with teeth embedded in them rested on their shoulders. I think they didn’t hear us because they were partaking in the time-honored soldier tradition of ‘smokin and jokin,’ they had loud rough laughs as they spoke to each other in whatever language orks use. I had to assume that if their commander saw their lack of discipline he would have whipped both of their asses, but it worked in our favor.

  Most of the orks were probably still awake, so had we killed that patrol we would have had to rush in then before their fort noticed their disappearance. Luckily, it hadn’t come to that. We sat in that tree for another twenty minutes just listening and watching. We still hadn’t seen the actual fort yet; the woods were too dense where we were at. While we waited I had the idle thought that Captain Rauli and the Areva could be the bad guys in this situation, and they may have just spent the last ten days manipulating me into doing their dirty work. I shook that stupid fucking thought out of my head though, not because it might not be true, but because if I focused on that I would feel too much empathy for people I was going to have to kill.

  Me and Otto looked at each other and without speaking we both agreed to leave the tree. We low crawled from that point on as the night sky grew darker. There were probably other ork patrols out in the woods but this was a big area and we were always moving. Otto had to pull his helmet off as we crawled because it restricted his vision too much; he would put it back on once we were in the fort.

  We made it to where the tree line thinned out. There were signs of lumber harvesting and fresh stumps everywhere; the orks were expanding. We could see their fort from there and unfortunately the orks were smart. In my head I had envisioned them putting torches on the top of the wall which would make them easier to see, but they hadn’t. I could still spot their roaming sentries, but it was easy to lose track of them with how dark it was. That same darkness could hopefully also work in our favor.

  Unfortunately, the fort was pretty quiet; that would work against us. I knew then that I couldn’t use force blasts to throw myself on top of the wall. I also figured that I didn’t have the time to climb up the outside of it, it would put me at too much risk of being spotted. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

  “Otto,” I whispered.

  “Yea?” he whispered back.

  “I’m going to have to go on your back. I would be too slow climbing over.”

  Otto stayed quiet for a good two minutes as we watched the fort and I waited for his answer. Finally he looked over at me.

  “Don’t worry, Daddy Otto will carry you.”

  “You motherfucker.”

  We waited another twenty minutes lying prone there in the tree line. When the roaming sentries from the woods came back to the fort to switch out with their replacements was when we decided to move. Otto hopped up and patted his back as he unfurled his climbing hook and rope. I swallowed my pride and hopped on. He took off running way faster than I could have ever run, all while in full gear and with me on his back. When we were about sixty feet out from the wall he threw the hook off into the night. Otto reeled in the rope until the slack pulled taut, all without breaking stride, and then he started pulling us up the wall.

  When he crested the top and rolled over onto the small walkway the orks were using to patrol, I pulled out my crossbow and covered him while he stashed the rope and his climbing hook. Now we needed a stairway or a ladder down and we needed some sign of where the captives were being held. We ran in a crouch hoping to not get noticed from inside the fort. The lack of lighting on the top of the wall was still working in our favor. I was afraid to look down over into the fort because I didn’t want to silhouette myself. We soon found a ladder heading down inside.

  I peeked over the edge and saw a series of half-built circular buildings and tents; a few were finished, but most were in some stage of construction. Some of the tents were lit up like they had a fire going on inside of them, which was a smart way to reduce light at night. There were no roaming guards inside the perimeter on the ground level, at least none that I could see at a cursory glance, which meant they must have all been on the top of the wall with us or out in the woods patrolling. The fort was square and there were no roaming guards on our side of the square.

  They could turn a corner and spot us at any second, so I rolled the dice and jumped onto the ladder and slid down it as fast as I could. Otto was right behind me.

  I rolled behind the nearest stationary object big enough to conceal me, which was a pile of sacks and some barrels, and Otto followed. Then we waited to see if anyone had spotted us. Eventually we heard wood creaking and heavy steps as one of the sentries walked above us on the wall. We stayed perfectly still and didn’t make a sound. The back of the tent closest to us opened up as an ork threw aside the canvas and clumsily walked out. He turned slightly away from us, never noticing us, adjusted the loincloth or underwear or whatever it was he was wearing, burped loudly, and started pissing.

  I had no idea that we would have made it that far without fighting; in my head I had assumed I would have been using heat blasts by now to sear ork eyeballs. The clumsy ork, who looked drunk as shit, went back to his tent, reached one arm inside, and pulled something out, hard. It shrieked a bit and I realized it was an Areva woman! He smacked her when she shrieked and said something in the ork language again. I guessed he had said “quiet down,” or some form of it, assuming he didn’t want to wake his sleeping companions.

  The ork pointed at the ground near where he had pissed and pushed the woman that way. She began to relieve herself as the ork watched. Next to me Otto readied his crossbow, but I was afraid it would be too loud so I put my hand on the weapon and shook my head in the negative.

  I drew my short sword and for the first time I was glad I had brought it. The ork was still facing slightly away from our position and he was watching his Areva captive so I chose then to all-out sprint towards him, still trying to be quiet. I switched the sword over to a two-handed grip with the blade pointed d
own. Then I jumped at the last second and drove it down with all of my might while aiming at the top of his spine.

  He was shirtless and the blade slid in much easier than I thought it would. Before the ork could scream Otto had slipped in just behind me, wrapped a hand around the ork’s neck and deposited the ork face-down into the dirt with so much force that it even jarred me. The whole operation was almost completely silent.

  The Areva woman’s eyes shot open in surprise. We couldn’t afford for her to yell, and I didn’t want Otto to grab her because he might have hurt her with his extreme strength. I rushed over to her and wrapped my arm around her head and mouth and grabbed her around the waist with my other arm. Then I pulled her into the tent. Inside were three sleeping bags. There was a sleeping ork in the third one. Before I even let go of the Areva woman, Otto was already on the sleeping ork. He bent the ork’s body like a fine pretzel in seconds. Somehow, I knew the sound of the bones and ligaments ripping and snapping would haunt me. I made a note to myself then that if I ever had to kill Otto that I should do it fast and when he wasn’t ready, because I sure as hell didn’t want to get pretzeled.

  “I’m going to let your mouth go. Captain Rauli sent me. Don’t scream,” I whispered into the Areva’s ear in Luda. Then I let her go slowly and she spun out of my arms and turned on me. It was my first time getting a good look at her. Her clothes were disgusting, her face was bruised, she had dried blood in parts of her hair, and her eyes were wild. I couldn’t tell if she was going to dart away or attack me so I tried to bring her back into the moment.

  “Hey!” I said while snapping my fingers. “Focus. Where are the other captives?”

  “The others. Yes! The others! They are down below, in the dungeon, near the treasure room. The orks are using some of the dungeon’s defenses as a holding cell for them. They said if I didn’t behave up here they would kill them!”