Liar King

Liar King Page 20

by Adam Elliott

  Calling the thing a column almost felt wrong to Cayden as he studied the frame. He’d imagined a snaking, single file line going back into the distance, but apparently, once they’d left the forested area to the west of De’arnise they had formed into a double thick marching order six hexes long, a line that bulged to three hexes across at its middle.

  It was all new to him, of course, because the Captain couldn’t be any more bothered to share data than she was to pick up the phone.

  “Each hex contains roughly a full division of about a thousand enemy soldiers, with a small vanguard of several hundred extending out roughly six hexes ahead of the column itself.” She indicated a much smaller smattering of enemy banners just ahead of the mass of the Warden army. “We’re still blind, composition wise, regarding the units in the column. The two sieges suggest they’ve got a sizable number of ranged units, but that the force is primarily infantry. Less than a thousand mounted soldiers in total.”

  “And the blob in the middle?” Silver drew attention to the elephant in the room.

  “Siege equipment, along with what we think is the general command staff,” Asch explained. “If they have any magic casters, we expect they’d be there as well.”

  “So Vilerat’s initial estimate was off?” Celia asked after some basic mental math.

  Asch dipped her head grimly. “Our estimate is eleven to twelve thousand, including the van and rearguard.”

  A quiet murmur rumbled through the room before Cayden asked the obvious. “If the column’s head is a day away from the city, then we can expect the siege equipment here no later than the following afternoon, with a full attack as early as that evening. Does that sound correct?”

  “It does.”

  “Then how can we help.”

  Asch met his gaze steadily as she replied. “You can turn over control of all of your forces to me.”

  “And there it is,” Vilerat said, striking the edge of the table once more.

  “In the words of a wise man…” Cayden began, doing his best to push down the anger welling inside of him. “Absolutely not.”

  Though she might have been expecting it, Asch didn’t take the refusal well. “Then you should take them and go back home.”

  “Because that is rational…” Came Sarah’s muttered grumble.

  “More than.” Dinah shot back before Cayden could make any apology for the insult. “I cannot conduct a defense of this city when a number of its soldiers are outside of my chain of command.”

  “With respect, Captain, can you afford to defend this city without us?” Cayden asked. “Between the three of us, we have about six hundred men. Twice what you have.”

  “Twice what I was given.” Asch corrected. “Perhaps you haven’t been expanding your forces the way I have, but the Islo guard is up by over a thousand armed men, paid for by emptying the Duke’s coffers and two thousand citizen militia.”

  Cayden caught Sarah stiffen out of the corner of his eye at that, and he reached out in spite of the setting to press his open palm against her wrist in a calming fashion. She’d spent much of the walk from the Inn to the barracks ranting about the citizen militia. To hear her tell it, the militia amounted to nothing more than walking civilians into the arms of their enemy as arrow catchers and cannon fodder, and Cayden couldn’t disagree with the assessment.

  “The militia is an entirely different matter I had meant to speak to you ab-”

  “Here for an hour and second-guessing my commands. Is it any wonder I don’t want a teenager in charge of a third of my defense?” The soldier said scathingly.

  “Here for an hour and I find out that you’re planning on throwing barely armed civilians into a meat grinder. Is it any wonder we don’t want you in charge of our men?” Cayden shot back angrily. This was not going the way he intended. “I know this is hard for you Toy Soldiers to grasp, but this is a game, not reality. How effective do you think a Level 2 Artisan or a Level 1 Shopkeep is going to be exactly?”

  “If we are going to hold this city, sacrific-”

  “You cannot hold this city.” It was all he could to speak the words with some measure of calmness, rather than yelling them into her face. “What exactly is your plan? Captain Asch?”

  “Defense, in-depth strategy using the field, as well as the city’s two main districts. With the defender’s advantage, we should be able to cause significant enough casualties to-”

  “Not your defensive strategy.” Cayden interrupted once more. “Your plan to actually win the event.”

  “My plan starts by holding the city.” Asch snarled. “I have my players out scouring the countryside for any hint of the item that caused all of this mess. When they find it-”

  “If.”

  “-we will return it. Until then we should be able to endure any siege.”

  “Even with the help you are rejecting, you are outnumbered ten to one by an enemy that doesn’t care about their casualties.” Silver cut in, her words as angry as they were incredulous. “What makes you think you can survive that any longer than De’Arnise.”

  “And you have a better plan, I suppose?”

  “Do you even read our messages?” Celia complained.

  “Observe her,” Cayden said, jerking a thumb at Silver as he tried to get his anger under control.

  “I don’t see-” Asch started, before realizing the futility of trying to argue the point. “Skill Use: Observe.” She intoned, then, a moment later. “Oh. My.” Surprise dotted her voice, quickly smothered by skepticism “But she’ll just be taken off floor as soon as her death timer expires.”

  Cayden shook his head. “No, she won’t.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Sarah?” He asked.

  “Command: Login. Desdaemona.”

  Cayden waited a few seconds until the level forty callout appeared over Sarah’s head. “The event is glitched.” He explained. “Or rather, it uses a specific sort of flag that can be exploited. It only checks player levels when it is first triggered.”

  “How long until the timer wears off?”

  “Twenty-two days.”

  Fury flashed across Dinah’s face. “Well you know, maybe if we wait long enough they’ll just die of old age while we are at it.”

  “You’ve had eight days to search.” Cayden retorted. “Have your men found even a hint of the missing item? Do you even know what you’re looking for?”

  “I won’t sit here and be lectured-”

  “I’m not trying to lecture you.” He insisted. “If we are smart, we can do both. Your men can spend the next three weeks searching, while we do our best to drag this war out long enough for Silver to come back into her full power. But we can’t do any of that if you decide to go full Alamo on us.”

  “As I recall, the defenders at the Alamo held off the Mexican army for two and a half weeks,” Asch observed.

  Cayden looked to Silver, then to Celia, and finally Sarah. Each shrugged in turn, with no more idea about the validity of the comment than he had. “Bad example. Waco?”

  “Fifty days.”

  “You get the idea,” Cayden grumbled.

  “But you continue to ignore mine.” She replied sharply. “Your plan relied on me holding this city as long as possible, does it not?” At a sign of assent from Cayden, she continued. “Then I need access to as many men and resources as you can spare.”

  “And we are willing to give you those. Under our command.”

  “If they are under your command I cannot use them!” The soldier retorted. “I cannot create a battle plan that relies on your soldiers holding a defensive position if I cannot be sure that your men will be there when the situation turns grim.”

  “My plan also relies on keeping soldiers
and civilians alive as long as possible, and retreating them as necessary.” Cayden shot back. “Have you even begun evacuating the city?”

  Asch’s chin tipped up, her jawline setting. “Between the militia and those I require for production-”

  “They are civilians,” Cayden said sternly.

  “They are Elan.”

  “What the hell does that have to do with anything?” Sarah’s voice was thick with venom as she pushed her way forward to draw face to face with Dinah.

  “It means they are NPCs.” If Asch was intimidated by the difference in levels, or even in height, she didn’t let it show. Her acne marked face, always an angry red drew a deeper color still as the two locked eyes. “I have a duty to my men, and them alone. If I have to expend-”

  “Expend?!” Sarah shouted, the blue-haired monk near the verge of violence before Silver laid a calming hand on her shoulder.

  “You know that those civilians would do more good in Sunè or Bastion.” Cayden pressed. If the morality argument had failed, perhaps a utilitarian one. “Once the fighting here starts-”

  “As I said before, this isn’t a discussion, nor a negotiation.” The captain said at last. “If you aren’t willing to turn your troops over, then you have no argument in good faith.” Asch drew herself up to her full height, her eyes turning to one of her guards. “We are done. Escort the Field Marshall and his retinue out of the city.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Day Nine – Morning Turn

  Resources – F – 600 +20, Z – 605 +25, M – 235 +5, I – 520 +20, P +40, R +10

  Research Complete (Magic) - Academy.

  “So how’d they do?” Silver asked, her voice preceding her as she struggled with the closed tent flap.

  “Better than I expected,” Cayden said, torn between joy and annoyance. “They blunted the entire Warden vanguard, dealing a bit over two-thirds total casualties.”

  Surprise showed on Silver’s face as it at last poked through the tent flap. “That… is a lot better. How?”

  Cayden didn’t know. And that bothered him.

  There was a random element to all combat results, Cayden had discovered. It was a swing of somewhere between 1-20%, a measure of unpredictability likely introduced to add drama, uncertainty and a bit of verisimilitude to otherwise easily calculated results. But that didn’t account for what they saw here, not by a long shot.

  “Couple of theories.” He replied though they were better described as guesses. “Better leadership bonus than we’d expected. Or she has access to tactics we don’t. Or the militia units proved a lot more effective than we’d anticipated. Maybe a combination of all three.”

  “Or she dumped some of her players into the combat.” She suggested.

  “Yeah. Or that.” He confirmed.

  They’d finally gotten around to testing that particular strategy, albeit only in theory, not in practice, during the march from Bastion to Islo. During the march, Cayden had assigned himself, Sarah and Celia to different combat units and had discovered that a player added roughly ten points of combat strength for each level they possessed.

  If Asch had embedded even half of her players into formations with her Elan soldiers, that could undoubtedly have accounted for the difference in the unit’s expected power.

  If she had, it was a dangerous gamble. Cayden hadn’t had a safe opportunity to test all of the effects in combat, but one of the first things he’d learned from attaching himself to a unit, was that it forced him to abide by the unit’s movement restrictions. Any players that were accompanying the Elan units out in the field would be trapped in hex by the same invisible barrier as the Elan themselves, so long as they remained as part of the formation.

  “Looks like you owe her an apology.” Silver said.

  “You know, I recall you raising similar objections.”

  “With everything we knew at the time, the field battle was a bad idea.” Silver said with a roll of her eyes. “Perhaps if she’d been more open with us.”

  Cayden snorted at that. Perhaps if she’d been a unicorn as well, she might have been purer of heart and willing to accept their help. It was a useless theoretical. As it was, they’d just barely gotten the good Captain to allow them a forward observer so that they could get an idea of how the battle had progressed.

  They’d have had better luck asking if they could pull out Asch’s fingernails than asking her for direct combat data.

  Silver’s gaze scanned the War Frame. “Do you think she’s got a shot?”

  “No,” Cayden replied. “She sucker punched them hard, and we probably could have done more, but she’s going to have to retreat into the city as soon as the afternoon turn starts. Once she’s in there, it is only going to be a matter of time.”

  “So we just pack up and go home?”

  “I don’t like it either. But what choice do we have? We can’t stay here once the bulk of the army arrives. Even if they don’t wander right past us, they’ll find us by sheer bulk number of checks.”

  In the aftermath of the disastrous meeting in the barracks, Cayden had taken his forces, as well as those of the Goons and Lords of the Edge away from Islo, squirreling them into in a wooded thicket on a hill overlooking the main river that flowed into the city. The location gave them a commanding view, but, more importantly, it gave them some measure of concealment. An enemy in the adjacent hex would spot them immediately, but for every hex beyond that, the chance was halved. Beyond five hexes, they might as well have been invisible.

  “Any luck talking to the Duke?” Silver inquired after a moment of silence.

  When diplomacy had failed, there had been some suggestions of a coup. The Duke had put her into power; he could take her out of power, couldn’t he? Sadly, it was not to be. “None. The palace is still locked up tight. I had Celia do some asking around, and it looks like no one has been able to enter since the event kicked off.”

  Silver sighed. “Maybe we stick around nearby and try to cover their retreat?”

  “That assumes she’s going to try and retreat. Or that they’d let her if she did.” Cayden played his hands over the edge of the War Frame until the city filled the view. What had once looked so welcoming to him, that first night, now filled him with a heavy sense of dread as he surveyed it.

  The problem was the lay of the land. Like most castle cities, Islo was built along the banks of a river, but unlike many others, the river added little in the way of defense to the city proper. Its course ran through the southeasternmost tip of the city, forming a fast-flowing moat that separated the Ducal Palace and other military structures from the civilian town. As a fortification, it gave an impressive bonus, but it was also, ultimately, a dead end.

  Islo had six significant gates, all of which were on the western, civilian side of the river. This meant that any attempt at a retreat from the city had to begin before a withdrawal to the final defensive line. Once the Wardens had laid siege to the Royal Quarter environs, there was no easy escape from the city. The idiots who designed it hadn’t even developed some clever escape tunnel for the Duke or his family that they could utilize to guide the civilians away.

  The Developer designed it that way for a reason. Cayden reminded himself as he studied the city for the hundredth time. The stupid design of the city was part of the event, surely that meant there was some clever way to circumvent it.

  “Well maybe if w-”

  A sudden, vicious rumbling of the earth turned the rest of Silver’s sentence into a shriek of alarm. Behind her, the ground tore itself asunder, a half foot wide crack running from one end of the tent, between the two of them, beneath the War Frame, and out the other side in the space of a blink. Outside the tent horses cried, men and women screamed in alarm, accompanied by the sound of collapsing foliage.

  The tremor continued for half a minute, the left side of the tent
collapsing entirely before, at last, everything was still.

  “C-command: Party Chat,” Cayden said, his voice unsteady, eyes wide with the same fear in Silver’s. He realized abruptly that he was holding her forearm with white knuckles, and that she was clinging just as tightly to his shoulder. She blushed as their eyes met, the moment of awkwardness dispelled for both as Cayden spoke again. “Everyone okay?”

  “Yeah. Michael and I are fine.” Celia’s tone was a barely above a whisper, as though she were afraid that even a fully spoken word could reignite the disaster.

  “I’m good too,” Shifty replied. “You probably want to come see this ASAP though. West side of the camp.”

  Something in the elder thief’s voice brooked no argument. “On our way.”

  The camp was a mess as Silver and Cayden passed through it. Fallen trees had done damage to at least a dozen tents and cookfires, though injuries, thankfully, appeared to be minimal. What had been a comparatively sleepy morning, had turned into a buzz of activity, as soldiers moved this way and that, arming themselves in case of coming danger.

  “Hey, over here.” Shifty shout came twice as the party chat function of their display duplicated the already audible words.

  “What happened?” Cayden began.

  The question proved wholly unnecessary as he reached the crest of the hill.

  Miles and miles of terrain were arrayed out before them, the whole of Asch’s battle line stretched across three miles of terrain just outside the westernmost gate of Islo, with a disorganized smattering of Warden forces directly opposing them. It was the exact scene he’d been surveying on the War Frame minutes before.

  Save for the slightly curved, miles long wall of jagged stone that ran directly behind the Elan forces.

  “What the hell?” Cayden asked. His eyes flicked to the corner of his display, answering at least part of his question. Just after noon, into the start of the midday turn. It must have rolled over while he’d been talking to Silver. Which meant this was Warden magic.

  “Did they miss?” Silver laughed as she joined them on the ridge.

 

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