by Charles Dean
“Simply cruel, brother. After all we’ve been through, can’t you be a little nicer? Add a little sugar on those words?” Dave pleaded. He jabbed Lee’s arm, but nothing hard enough to even warrant a point of damage.
Lee laughed. “Yeah, I am pretty cruel, you know?”
“I know!” Dave agreed. “I have a rough idea of what we’ve just done, and I don’t think I’d ever have the stomach to do it myself.”
“Maybe,” Lee said. “Maybe. But I didn’t see any other way around it.”
“Mmhmm.” Dave just continued to nod. “If Augustus is forcing you to do it, then you have to do it. That’s just the way things are. We’re mortals, and mortals must move to accommodate the will of the gods. You’re just lucky your god isn’t a particularly cruel one. After hearing pieces of your friend Miller’s tale, I don’t think I’d ever want to live in a world that was run by a god like that.”
Augustus is forcing me to do it? Lee blinked at the words. He thinks that I’m doing this because I’m forced to? Would he think less of me if he knew it was my plan, my decision, and no one at all was making me do anything?
“Hey, don’t let it get to you. Drink your beer and give me some more of that bacon,” Dave insisted. “There will be plenty of time to be depressed tomorrow.”
“Why do I get the feeling that, if I’m depressed and mopey tomorrow, you’re going to say the same thing?” Lee laughed.
“Who says? Maybe I’ll just hang you upside down and shake you until the bacon falls out. That might be easier than trying to deal with your personal issues. We’ve got work today, and we’ll have work tomorrow. If there is a tomorrow after tomorrow, we’ll probably have work then too. You can be depressed and mopey when you’re dead. You’ll have plenty of time for it then.”
Lee enjoyed hearing versions of his idioms twisted in this world. Back home, it was ‘There is plenty of time to rest when you’re dead.’ Here with Dave, it was ‘You’ll have plenty of time to be depressed and mopey when you’re dead.’ It was a clear and stark difference in the lifestyles and attitudes of the two worlds, but it amused him even more that this came from someone who had been locked in a prison with nothing to do for weeks on end.
“Maybe,” Lee said and then didn’t add anything else. He just drank his beer with the same quiet attitude that he had enjoyed with the general. This time, though, he had Dave on his side, rambling away about the old days as he made inappropriate jokes and demanded more beverages. Eventually, Miller showed up, and then the two of them demanded a lot of extra beverages. They got along together perfectly, though Lee wasn’t sure if Dave knew Miller was actually serious about the justice talk or the ways in which he planned to kill people or had killed people. Dave chuckled or laughed at each story and example as if it were a joke, and Lee could only shake his head as he remembered some very clear details about how he and Miller had done some of those gruesome killings together.
Eventually, Lee set aside several extra rounds so that they wouldn’t bother him and went to his tent with Amber. Not only did he not have to talk with her, but he was able to enjoy the added pleasure of not having to listen either. They lay together, curled up and snuggled together as the sun went down, and Lee watched the general’s army through the eyes of a golem.
-----
“You know, you have to get up eventually,” Amber muttered when morning light struck through the weak flaps of the tent.
“Not yet I don’t.” Lee shrugged off her admonition and turned over instead.
Amber, still in her birthday suit as she usually was when they slept together, rolled over on top of him and pressed her weight down against him. “If you don’t get up, no one will know what to do now that morning has come. You need to do that whole leadership thing you do,” Amber pleaded. “I’ve seen what it’s like when you’re not around, and trust me, you need to get up and take charge.”
“Not yet,” Lee repeated with a shake of his head. He hadn’t slept a wink last night, and he was very keenly aware of how much time he had left. He had about five hours, and if he could, he preferred to spend all five of them in the bed. There was a very real possibility that this day might be his last, and no amount of last-minute prep would change his odds. The only thing he could do was enjoy the time he had, and lying in a comfortable bed seemed like the perfect way to do it. “I’ll get up and tell people what to do when it’s time. Just let me sleep,” Lee pleaded.
“Ugh, you’re so incorrigible sometimes,” Amber sighed, her soft milky-white chest tempting Lee far more than it ever had before as it pressed down into him with each breath she took.
“So I’m told, but I’m still not getting up.” Lee made an effort to clench the blanket tighter as he pulled it over the two of them. It was a reflexive reaction since his mother would simply jerk the blanket off of him in the mornings and let the sun do her dirty work. When people pestered him now, or when an alarm clock went off, that blanket was wrapped as tightly as possible.
“Fine, fine. Then we’ll just wait in here. If you’re not going out, then I’m not going to go out and deal with them either. After how much Dave and Miller drank last night, I don’t want to anyway,” Amber said. “Miller is bad enough when he’s drunk off his magic-powered shout, whatever that thing is, but it’s even worse with Dave.”
Lee nodded. “It was like watching two college kids discover beer for the first time last night,” he laughed.
“College kids?” Amber questioned as she gave up resting on top of him and slid to the side so that she could stare into his eyes. “What’s a college kid?”
“Oh.” Lee blinked. “That’s right. You probably don’t have colleges. They’re basically institutes where young adults are forced to leave their parents and go learn a bunch of stuff about the world. They don’t let children drink at all where I’m from, and parents are very strict about enforcing that, so when they get there . . . well, the kids go wild. Years of being told exactly what they can and cannot do adds up, and the moment they are free to make their own decisions, they usually start with alcohol. It leads to a bunch of people drinking far more than they ever would normally.”
“Where you’re from . . .” Amber trailed off. “Are you like Miller? Are you from a different world? One ruled by some god? Are you from the world with his goddess or maybe a world that Augustus runs instead?”
Lee hesitated. He had to be careful with what he said to Amber since she seemed to hold onto and remember every single word that came out of his mouth. She seemed naturally bright, and along with that intelligence came an inability to just blindly believe what Lee said like many of the others did.
“Yeah,” he finally answered. There’s no harm in that, right? I can just tell her the truth, right? He half-expected a bolt of lightning to come down and strike him for the sin of breaking the unspoken rule about not mentioning the fact that he was from another world, but nothing happened. Welp, if you’re not going to stop me, I’m going ahead with it, he mentally told the system. “I’m from a world far more advanced than this one. As for the gods . . . Well, Augustus isn’t ours. I was picked by Augustus for some complicated reasons, but he was definitely not my deity before that,” Lee confessed. “It was actually kind of shocking for me since the world I came from didn’t have any of the magic and sorcery of this one.”
“Really?” Amber’s eyes filled with wonder like a kid learning about the world for the first time. “Tell me more about it,” she asked eagerly.
Which is exactly what Lee did: he told her everything. He told her about his time playing video games with Wolfe, about cars and movies, about planes and trains and computers and televisions. He didn’t leave a single detail out, and before he knew it, his time was up. He had spent over five hours telling this eager listener every detail he could about his world, and she had just lied there, enjoying his story and adding in fun details about her own as she shared parts of her life with him. The only reason they stopped was he knew that General Brigid’s army would soon be approaching Ki
rshtein.
“It looks like I’m out of ‘not yet’s,’” Lee said as he stood up and started putting on his clothes.
“That’s fine. You have to tell me more when we get back,” Amber said as she did the same. Lee hated to see Amber put on clothes but loved the attractive way in which she did it.
“I will,” he promised. “When this is over, just you, me, some alcohol and more stories. I want to hear more about your life too.”
With that conversation over, Lee walked out to greet the surprisingly-sober bunch of misfits he had grown accustomed to traveling with. “Not a single drunk among you?” Lee asked as he looked at them. “Et tu, Miller?”
“And me what?” Miller blinked. “Oh, sober. Yeah, well, the magical booze-distributing boss and Augustus both seemed to have been gone all morning, so we’ve had nothing to drink.”
Lee looked over at the two kegs worth of beer he had left the less than twenty people to see it all gone. You drank all of that in one night on top of what I gave you beforehand? Lee sighed. He was kind of glad he hadn’t left more, or when the fight started, they might be far past the inebriated level that gave them the bonuses of Drunken Appreciation and straight into the blackout level. I cannot leave Miller and Dave together in the same bar if I’m the one footing the bill.
“Well, gather round. At least you’ll all be clear-headed enough for what’s about to come,” Lee said as he pulled out some papers and began using his power to carve out a detailed map of the city on the pages, complete with little arrows and markers for where they’d be going in the city.
“Woah,” Dave said as he watched the process. “That’s amazing.”
“Still not as good as the bacon,” Pelham harrumphed.
I left you guys alone for one morning! What the heck?! Lee, whether through Charisma or common sense, could tell that the atmosphere was oddly much more negative against him than usual.
“Okay, so here’s what I understand of the city from Connacht’s letters,” Lee said, “and here is where we are,” he added, pointing to where the circles with their names in tiny font were. “Our goal in this siege is not to win the battle. Connacht and the other Humans have already put together an army--they’ve been preparing for this fight for nearly a week--and there is no doubt they have had scouts reporting the numbers as well as our location. If they weren’t ready to hold this off, we’d be hearing about it already.”
Pelham nodded. “That makes sense, but can you trust someone who is spying on you all the time?”
“Why not? I trust my wife, and that woman won’t let me go to a friend’s house without double checking it with his girl. She keeps better tabs on me than Ramon did before payday,” a Satterfielder whom Lee had yet to exchange words with said with a laugh, easing up the tension in the atmosphere.
“Well, regardless, we don’t have much of a choice but to trust him. The only other alternative is to go in even blinder than we are now and to have no assistance on the inside,” Lee said. “I won’t lie. I don’t like trusting him any more than you do, but I’m doing this for the same reason he’s helping us. It’s what’s best for the moment.”
“Politicians,” Miller harrumphed. “There is no justice to be had from their kind.”
“Yeah, no justice at all.” Lee smiled at his friend, who was once more in full bull-headed angry mode at evildoers. “But let’s get back to the task at hand. I’m going to need to break us up into three groups. The first is going to be with Miller and his Paladin order,” Lee said, pointing to the spot on the map where they were. “Your mission is going to be the most crucial. You need to rally over here and here”--he pointed toward two of the gatehouses--“and hold the enemy at all costs. The forces of Kirshtein are likely to form a heavy front-facing military and leave their flanks open to any stealth troops. I know how much you hate stealthy stuff, so this should be an easy task, but if this gatehouse falls, we’re in trouble. We need it as an exit if things go wrong, but more importantly, I can’t let the attacking army gain entrance.
“So just stop the bad guys from coming through an easily-defensible gate?” Miller asked. “Easy enough. I will crush every little insect that dares try to sneak past me,” he declared proudly. “My spears thirst for blood after all this waiting.”
“Well, there is one caveat . . .” Lee said with some hesitation. “I need you to treat all non-Humans as enemies. If they’re from the city, try to stop them if you can without killing them, but don’t let anyone through that gate.
“With the way the troops are going to roll out and where the Herald is located, if we move quickly, we should be able to catch him before he reaches the battlements. The natural path toward the best spot to view the battle while remaining at a distance will lead him through this point . . .” Lee marked a spot on the map. “That’s where we’re setting up our attack. It’ll be close enough to the actual combat that we will be able to reach it easily, and more importantly, our actions won’t draw attention at all from those in earshot of us if things get out of hand.
“Anyone who hears a battle occurring will think that it’s noise from the actual engagement and stay focused on their own fight. We will be banking on their amateur formations and tunnel vision, but from what little information I’ve gathered, this will be the case for sure. They haven’t finished restructuring the military to match their racist agendas, so they’re short nearly two-thirds of their leadership since they had to replace all of the old captains and commanders that got their position from the previous king’s nepotistic hiring practices.”
“So why does sealing off the gate matter then?” Miller asked. “If no one is going to assist him, what good is that?”
“No one will assist him so long as we don’t get heavily pressured on that side. That means, as long as the gate looks like it will hold indefinitely, their commander won’t send any troops to reinforce it. He won’t be able to see the situation on the ground from his tower, but he will be able to see the situation at your tower from his. Not to mention, if someone gets through, we’ll be sandwiched on both sides by foes. That’s not acceptable. We need to make sure he’s the one who is getting flanked, not us.”
“I can do that,” Miller said confidently with a determined nod. “But I’d rather be there to make sure he’s dead. Dead-dead.”
“I know you want that,” Lee said, “but I can’t let you be there. You’re a brilliant fighter, nearly peerless, but Augustus said the plan won’t work if you come with us.”
Miller didn’t take this well at all, slamming his spear on the ground and batting a glass mug so hard it flew over fifty feet before smashing into a large tree outside the camp. “I MUST BE THERE TO SERVE JUSTICE TO THAT EVIL CREATURE!” Miller bellowed.
“Do you not have faith in me? In Augustus?” Lee asked, pressing the issue. This is why I’m not having you come with me: you may be a great fighter, but you’re too angry to be reliable if something comes up. We’d have to change the plan at the last minute and not engage.
The strategic liability Miller presented was something Lee had given a great deal of thought on the road back. He knew that Miller wanted to be the one to deal the final blow, but a huge part of him also knew that, if Miller were there, they’d be committed to the engagement no matter what. In the worst-case scenario, a very real possibility, the Herald might show up with fifty or sixty troops. If he did that, then Lee knew his own forces had a very good chance of dying in the skirmish before anything played out. It wouldn’t be good at all to engage them, but if Miller were there, they would have no choice. He had lost the love of his life to this Herald’s goddess, and given the way he violently overreacted to certain triggers such as Lee going missing or people being kidnapped in Satterfield, there was no chance in hell that Lee believed Miller wouldn’t charge straight into battle the moment he saw the Herald. After all, Lee might have done the same in Miller’s shoes.
“I have faith that you will deliver me justice, but how am I to receive it if I’m not ther
e? She must die by my hands. I must kill her. I must rend her lacky piece from piece until the world collapses around her, and the light dims from her eyes as it did for Kate. I. Will. Kill Her!” Miller shouted. “I MUST KILL HER!”
“Woah!” Dave put a hand on Miller’s shoulder. “You need to chill out, brother. Which is more important: your vengeance or your presence?”
Miller’s face was now a solid red that matched his hair, and he didn’t say a word as he stared dead-eyed at Lee. Lee felt like he was challenging him, a game of mental chicken to see who would blink and yield first. The stare only lasted a minute or two at most, but for Lee, it felt like an hour as he glared down his hulking Firbolg friend, barely breathing as he maintained eye contact. He knew that if he didn’t stand his ground here, there was no way he’d be able to move Miller or anyone else in the future. This was an incredibly-important point for a commander since a leader who didn’t have control of his own troops was doomed to failure. That was a lesson that Alexander had made sure to explain to Lee several times for some reason.
“Fine!” Miller growled, breaking the silence. “I’ll hold that gate. Not a soul will get through, but I need your promise that the Herald dies today.”
“You know Augustus delivers when it’s time. Have faith in this one, Miller. Have faith that Augustus and I won’t let you down.” Lee spoke forcefully, staring at Miller for a few more seconds before dropping his eyes back down to the map below them. “Alright,” he continued, focusing on the need to strategize, “next, I’m going to need you two to move here.” He pointed at Dave and Pelham. They were essentially his strongest members at the moment. While Lee was much more confident in his ability to kill people than he used to be, he still didn’t have the faith that he’d ever be able to best Dave in a fight.
Dave was an insanely-strong fighter with that two-handed flail in his hands, and Lee had seen enough of Pelham’s work to know that he was not one to be taken lightly either. The two of them together could probably handle Lee’s inner circle in a fair fight. The only problem was that they had little to no defense to speak of. Pelham had taken to dual-wielding blades like a certain dark elf ranger, and Dave waved around the two-handed flail like he was hitting propped-up sandbags, never taking care to worry about whether or not they would hit him back. Even without good armor, his offense was so quick and devastating that he hadn’t been punished for this behavior in the colosseum. In the real battle, however, there would be archers. There would be people using ranged attacks that could take him out from afar before he ever had a chance to so much as raise his weapon. That’s why Lee had to be careful when planning where to put these two powerhouses. He had to use them carefully if he planned on keeping them around.