Liar King

by Adam Elliott

  Half a dozen windows were open on the War Frame, but the one dead center was the first to catch her attention.

  Warden Infantry (Formation)

  Type: Infantry (Warden)

  Level:?

  Unit Count: 100/100

  Formation Bonus: +6

  HP: 100/100

  MP: 0/0

  TP: 100/100

  Move:?

  Attack: 1800 (10 base, + 6 Formation, +1 Leadership, +1 Warmaster)

  Defence: 1700 (10 base, -1 Racial,+ 6 Formation, +1 Leadership, +1 Warmaster)

  Special: Construct Traits

  Resistances: ???, ???, ???

  Weaknesses: ???.

  “Is this accurate?” Silver asked.

  “I don’t see any reason for it not to be.”

  “But… how?” She frowned, looking down to the Frame itself. “We didn’t get information like this on the beastmen until we fought them.”

  “Tried something new.” He explained, directing her attention to a single banner several hexes away from the Warden forces. At a touch, it expanded to detail an individual Elan soldier with only two remaining HP.

  Silver examined the soldier’s information for several seconds before it finally clicked. “You sent one of the scouts in by himself.”

  “Like an IP ping.” Cayden nodded. “We get the same information whether we send a single soldier or a formation. I gave him orders to retreat immediately once the battle was joined, then used all of his movement to get him as far away as possible.

  “Clever.” Silver admitted grudgingly. “But isn’t he still at risk? That is only seven hexes.”

  A frown crossed his face. “If they go after him he is done without question, though it will put either one formation or the whole division out of position unless they have a lot more movement that we expected.”

  “Acceptable losses then.” She asked. As his frown deepened, she reached out, placing one hand on his wrist and squeezing gently. “Look, about what I said the other day…”

  “Nothing to say.” He reached out, swiping away the Warden statistics. “We’re going to have casualties. You were right.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  Cayden sighed and shook his head. “No. But I can’t see any way around it.” He pointed to the frame as he spoke. “Three hundred Warden infantry in a single division. We outnumber them by a full hundred, and between Valserys’ warmaster bonus and their racial penalties, we hit a hell of a lot harder, but there isn’t anything to finesse here. Nothing but us slamming our units into theirs until they go down.”

  “No easy Coup de Main.” Silver said.

  “Exactly.”

  “A half-assed Kobayashi Maru.”

  Cayden’s eyebrows raised. “Never took you for a Trekkie.”

  “I’m not. My dad-” The girl winced, a sudden fragility to her features as the board suddenly absorbed her attention. “The point is, maybe this is the Developer’s way of teaching you that you aren’t going to flawlessly win each battle. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s included something to help players psychologically adjust to something that would be horrifying in the real world.”

  “Don’t suppose you can think of any good way to cheat,” Cayden said after considering her words.

  “Afraid not.”

  He lingered briefly before replying. “Worth a shot. Let me just lock in the orders before we go.”

  Their battle plan was simple. A road ran to within two hexes of the Sub-Tomb, and as he had learned during his initial estimates for how long it would take the enemy to reach Bastion, travel by road was greatly accelerated. His units gained an additional hex of movement for every two they spent, which would allow them to travel most of the distance to the Sub-Tomb in a single turn. Once the midday turn started, they’d go off road, stack into a single division and march on the Wardens.

  The Third and Fourth would take point, a terrible pun as Celia had been delighted to draw attention to, with orders similar to those they’d used on the Beastmen. A defensive stance aimed at minimizing casualties, while still drawing the win. Their goal was to force a retreat out of the entire Warden division, to allow Cayden and his group to lay claim to the tomb entrance. Which was where their quest came in:

  Event Quest

  Halt The Awakening

  Requirements: Defeat the commander of the nearby Sub-Tomb and return his ceremonial weapon to Azazi of the Forty-Nine Blades.

  Reward: 22,000 XP.

  The quest had been the last of Azazi’s ‘gifts.’ The mercenary, shockingly, had ulterior motives in telling them the location of the active Sub-Tomb, he wanted something from inside it. Even though he knew the Elan man was effectively programmed to behave in this fashion, it didn’t keep Cayden from feeling like he was kind of a dick.

  Still, the information had informed their strategy. The quest called the enemy boss the ‘commander’ of the Sub-Tomb. It was a bit of a stretch, but he hoped that by killing the boss, they could rob the enemy forces of their Warmaster bonus. Perhaps if they were lucky they’d even go all Phantom Menace and shut down entirely.

  A man could dream.

  “We’ve got this.” Silver offered her most reassuring smile as she saw Cayden’s hand lingering over the War Frame.

  “I wish I had your confidence.” He murmured.

  Only a small amount of book-keeping remained once he had set the orders. As promised, Dame Bonaventura had sent engineers to begin repairs on the mine. At ten Production per turn, the mine should be up and operational by the following morning, which was better than he could have hoped for.

  Even without it, the completion of the second set of Lower Township repairs had increased their total production to seventeen, and as expected, had opened a new option:

  Lower Township Repair

  Lower in class as much as location, this district grows the backbone of any fledgling town. (3/6)

  Cost: 60 Production

  Civilian Housing: +750

  Production: +3

  The repairs were nothing if not consistent.

  Cayden selected the third set of Lower Township Repairs as his next in queue item after the completion of the upcoming tower repairs. It’d take a little bit over a day for this one section of repairs, and likely longer still for the ones after that, but he was hoping that seeing one of the lines of repair through to its conclusion would provide something more than the linear increases that they’d seen thus far. If it didn’t, at least he’d still see continuing boosts to Production which should help them in the long run.

  Finally, he turned his attention to the last remaining window.

  This action will cost 200 Grand Zenni. Are you sure? Y/N.

  The action in question, was the hiring of one of Azazi’s mercenary bands, an option that had appeared on the War Frame the previous evening, shortly after they had accepted their first contract from him. It was an expensive proposition. Even with the one hundred Grand Zenni, they had earned from their site search of the mine, two hundred was nearly enough to wipe out the entire treasury, and even that would only earn them a single day’s worth of assistance.

  The soldiers were worth it, of course. Even their most basic units had equipment and experience that far outstripped anything Cayden could field. Bringing them along would vastly reduce friendly casualties, but he’d hesitated all the same. He could do this with his own troops without spending a dime, after all.

  Provided he could stomach the losses.

  If only the mercenaries accepted payment in regular Zenni, it wouldn’t have been a problem. Silver had happily offered to throw money at the problem but to no avail. The Developer wouldn’t allow a cheat that simple.

  Cayden drew a deep breath, reached for the floating window, and declined the offer.

  “We should probably get going before Celia sends a search party,” Cayden remarked
.

  Silver only laughed. “Cayden, who exactly do you think sent me in the first place?”

  ***

  “So that is the tomb, huh?” Shifty asked as the party waited on a ridgeline overlooking the open field beneath them.

  “Yeah. Why?” Came Cayden’s curious reply.

  “Just not what I expected.” The older man said with a shrug.

  Celia looked up from the spellbook in her lap, a bemused look crossing her expression. “What did you expect it to look like?”

  “Something more… I dunno, tombish. I’m not asking a lot here.” He shot back at the sarcasm in Celia’s tone. “Sloped roof, statues. Maybe some columns or gargoyles or something?”

  But not a hole in the ground.” Celia teased him.

  “Definitely not a hole in the ground.”

  “Well, they do have statues.” Michael pointed out, calling attention to the plains beneath them once again as the enemy forces crested a small depression that had kept them momentarily out of view. “Lots and lots of statues.”

  None of them had been quite prepared for their first glimpses of the Wardens. They’d been told the Wardens had been crafted to guard the liar king, but for whatever reason, all of them had envisioned some form of monstrous humanoid, or other inhuman beast. Once Cayden had seen construct traits on the War Frame his imagination had shifted to a more robotic enemy, so even he was unprepared for a literal Terracotta Army out of his grade school history class.

  Nor did things get any better the longer they watched them. There was a certain uncanny valley effect in the way the stone soldiers moved, in large part because they were just that, stone soldiers. Their bodies were rigid in general, but they could still move with a fluidity that seemed all but impossible. Stone shouldn’t move under its own power, but if it did, it sure as hell shouldn’t move like that.

  “No archers.” Silver commented. The mage had bemoaned her lack of divination spells to help her watch the battle for much of the trip. In the end, it had taken a pair of binoculars from Shifty to mollify some, but not all of her complaints. “Few nasty looking spears.”

  “Not much we can do about it now,” Cayden replied. There was a certain freedom to knowing that the orders were set through to the evening turn. Valserys had remained behind in Bastion to watch the War Frame and adapt their tactics should things go wildly off the rails, but absent that, the die was already cast, and they had only to wait and see if it would be a one, a twenty or something in between.

  Not that the freedom had kept him from trying to experiment and push the envelope on their march to the Sub-Tomb.

  For one thing, he’d learned that his troops could use ranged weapons. Just not well. If he put a crossbow in the hands of a trooper, as he had, the man could be instructed to fire it, even if his accuracy was lacking. Nothing useful in the short term, but if they ended up defending Bastion itself, it would be good to know that his troops could be ordered to throw rocks.

  For another, rules regarding the movement of troops were absolute.

  It had been an easy enough trial. They’d followed along with the First until the unit reached the limit of its movement, then he’d asked one of the soldiers to follow him far enough that they’d have crossed into the following hex.

  At first, the soldier had come up with excuses. He needed to eat or had orders to do this or that. When it became clear that Cayden would not take no for an answer, he became somewhat insubordinate. It had taken three of them to slow-walk the Elan soldier to the edge of the hex, the man becoming more and more averse, to the point they had to carry him the last few steps.

  All of it was nothing more than an attempt by the Developer to keep from impacting the vermilissitude of his game. The moment they reached the hex wall, the soldier could go no further, his body stopped by an invisible field that permitted players, but not soldiers. There would be no circumventing movement rules by way of forced movement, that much was certain.

  “Going well so far.” Silver continued.

  “Which is our cue to get moving,” Cayden replied. “Grab your things; I want us in there as soon as our troops clear the hex.”

  Staying out of the combat had been a hard decision, but a necessary one. Much like the forced movement, none of them had any idea how their presence would affect the combat power or other facets of the planned battle, and a fight as close as this one was not the proper opportunity for them to test things. Cayden had insisted on going so far as to stay fully outside of the hex itself, lest their very presence throw a wrench into the plan.

  Of course, that also meant they had the better part of a mile to hike before they could even begin exploring the Sub-Tomb. With only a handful of hours before the start of the Warden turn, they were cutting things close, even without the walk.

  “Alright everybody, let’s mosey!” Cayden announced.

  A brief pause followed his words, followed by uproarious laughter.

  “Let’s mosey?” Shifty snorted between waves of laughter. “Since when are you some banjo playing farmboy.”

  “It’s a refere-”

  “Turns out we didn’t actually beat Cayden’s doppelganger after all.” Celia giggled. “Lucky for us its factory setting was ‘19th-century southern aristocrat.”

  “Whelp, time to hit the old dusty trail,” Michael added in his best, but still awful, southern accent.

  “Oh for…!” Cayden started, his attention turning to Silver. “You get it, right?”

  Her smile said she did, but the shake of her head denied it all the same. “Oh no, do not bring me into this.”

  Cayden’s head sagged in defeat as he summoned his sword to hand and began to march down the slope of the hill. “Fine. Whatever, you uncultured swine. Come on then.”

  The jovial mood of the party darkened as they crossed the open field. The tail end of the battle was still raging, its noise and smells an uncomfortable mixture as they drew near. Babel might be a mostly bloodless game, but it still had sweat, and tears and screams.

  But only from their allies.

  Even on the retreat, the Warden army didn’t voice a single cry.

  “There is our opening,” Michael remarked as the last of the Warden units began an orderly withdrawal. His forces harried them, but unlike the Beastmen they had picked apart so easily on the retreat, the Warden troops fought fiercely in formation even as they gave ground. He was no military tactician, but even a layman could see that the Warden troops would not be quickly swept aside once defeated.

  Ahead of them, Bastion’s soldiers had discarded one form of tool for another, hundreds of them putting shovel to soil, or collecting materials from the small number of supply wagons they had brought with them. This had been part of his strategy as well, the reason the location of that road had proven so fortuitous. It left his units with just enough movement that they could begin to fortify themselves against what he saw as an inevitable counterattack.

  “Half soldier, half construction worker. And people ask me why I never joined up with the army.” Shifty marveled.

  Three sets of eyes fell upon the rotund rogue, but it was Celia who took the easy shot. “Really? That is why you didn’t join the army?”

  “Why young miss I’ll have you know that when I was your age-”

  “Regale us about the big bang some other time Shifty.” Cayden cut in. “You’re up.”

  “… this isn’t over.” Shifty frowned, his steps picking up speed until he was moving at a light jog ahead of the rest of the marching group. The difference meant he reached the entrance to the tomb half a minute before they did, which gave him plenty of time to scour the entrance for traps.

  As it turned out, he found two. A pressure plate activated what they suspected would be a barrage of poison darts, while a misstep would send them plunging forty feet down into the most traditional trap imaginable.

  “Not e
xactly the most original defenses,” Shifty remarked with a grin as his party members approached, instructing them how to circumvent the pressure sensor, and which side of the tight hallway would send them falling into a pit of spikes vs. which would not.

  “Sometimes the classics work best,” Michael replied as he awkwardly shimmied around the edge of the pit trap in armor that was not exactly made for delicate movement.

  “And sometimes they are just really good at instilling a false sense of security.” Cayden cautioned.

  “I’m keeping my eyes open,” Shifty assured him as he stepped aside to let Cayden lead the way into the torchlit darkness.

  The outside might not have looked very ‘tombish’ as Shifty had described it, but the inside certainly did. Every inch of the place looked positively ancient. If a surface was not covered in a small mountain of dust, it was adorned with a frightful amount of spider webs. Trickles of water had formed natural interruptions in the artificial corridors, the various ancient text that adorned the walls worn down to almost nothing by the ravages of time.

  One other thing it had in common was that it was eerily empty, and frighteningly quiet. Considering the mass of Warden soldiers guarding the entrance, they had planned on considerable resistance, yet they’d found none. There were Terracotta soldiers inside, dozens, perhaps hundreds more that filled alcoves and lay across sealed caskets, but they were either ornamental or inactive.

  It was also tighter than they’d expected. The walls were close enough to one another that Shifty and Cayden had to turn at an angle to fit through the narrowest parts of the passages, while poor Michael was forced to stoop and bow almost constantly.

  There were runes here or there, highlighted by Cayden’s occasional use of Find Rune, but they’d have to wait. What had looked like little more than a hovel from the surface was expansive beneath, with branching passageways that sloped up and down seemingly at random, as though the tomb itself were designed to confound those searching it, which he supposed it was.

  “This is going to take a while.” Silver said as they reached their third intersection.