The Fourth Realm (The Ten Realms Book 4)

by Michael Chatfield

  “I don’t want to expose them to the undead too much right now. It would be more of an impact if the first time they have a real fight with the undead is when operation rising coffin begins.”

  “Yes sir,” Storbon nodded to Erik and then stepped away to send the sound transmission.

  “What about Fred and his people?” Glosil asked.

  “They’re a trump card like the skeletons, one that I don’t want to use until we have to. Once we do then we lose the element of surprise. With Fred growing his trees throughout Vuzgal, the dungeon, and the assassination squads, we should know every move of the enemy. We also have plenty of spell scrolls to use still,” Erik said. “No sense in showing our hand if we don’t need to.”

  The wall turned silent as Erik stopped talking. They looked out at the outer city, where the sounds of fighting had finally stopped. There were small fires burning here and there, as well as distant noises from the Blood Demon army moving in the darkness.

  Behind them, the wall was filled with activity: people moving supplies, others standing guard, ready to fight at a moment’s notice, wounded being carried and rushed to the casualty collection points where they were attended to and different commanders coordinating with one another to make sure that there was no part of the wall that was left undefended.

  People were preparing and checking formations. The mortars, which had been moved back, were being cleaned and checked over by Yui and his people. Ammunition and food were being brought up to the front lines, with people watching the walls, their eyes scanning for the slightest movement.

  They had been bloodied by the Blood Demon army other than when Olivia had sent the Tareng forces into the middle of the Blood Demon Sect, this was the first time that they had directly engaged the enemy. It was the second time that they had taken casualties as well.

  They had been chased for days, but this was the first time that they had fought one another, drawing blood on either side.

  The atmosphere had changed, with the forces under Erik’s command becoming closer and trusting one another. They saw the effectiveness of his plan and the limited casualties that they had taken relative to the Blood Demon army.

  “There are some saying that while they might be the Blood Demon army, you are the true demon general,” Glosil said.

  “Oh?” Erik queried, looking at him.

  “When someone is your enemy, then they step into hell,” Glosil said.

  Erik let out a snort and shrugged, not acknowledging or denying the nickname. “How are the supplementary mortar gunners?”

  “We had them all make oaths, as you said. It’s really simple and easy to drop mortars down a tube and it allows one platoon to operate forty of them, giving us a platoon free to fight,” Glosil reported.

  “Good. I’ll need that other platoon to assist the repeater gunners from the other groups, and act as close-in support with their M32s and rifles. Make sure you switch the sections off—get Yui’s people to head out as scouts first. They’ve been on the mortars the entire time and they’re probably a bit annoyed they haven’t had any direct action,” Erik said.

  “I will pass word to Lieutenant Yui,” Glosil said.

  “Has there been any message from the Crafter’s Association or the Blue Lotus?” Erik asked.

  “If there has, I haven’t heard anything from Hiao Xen.”

  “it’s a week since we sent their people back,” Erik said. Just how long will it take for them to confirm that it isn’t a plague to send people to help? We have bloodied and hurt the Blood Demon army, but we have only taken out two-fifths of their army.

  ***

  Elder Lu was looking over a pile of reports when there was a knock at his door. “Come in!” He put the papers away.

  Cui Chin entered the room, his face dark as he approached.

  “We know who did it,” Cui Chin said without preamble. “It was the Hang-Nim Alliance, in collaboration with General Isa Ulalas. The Blood Demon Sect took away the man she loved; he died and she was being forced to marry another man. She went to their enemies and seems that they came up with some plan. We do not know the specifics. Though we know that the Blood Demon Sect has been having troubles with contacting the army under her command. We know that Ulalas met with some people from the Hang-Nim Alliance. Connecting the dots, there’s the fact that we can’t get anything from the Blood Demon Sect but the people from the Hang-Nim Alliance are being really friendly with us and have been making vague inquiries to the Crafter’s Association.”

  “That will be enough for me to move the Blue Lotus army.” Elder Lu sent a message. It wasn’t long until there was another knock on the door.

  “Come in!” Elder Lu said. General Lei Huo marched through the door as Elder Lu started talking, stopping her from bowing in greeting.

  “The Hang-Nim Alliance seems to be behind this plan. It is my plan to ask for the Hang-Nim Alliance’s assistance in this matter. We can use this as a guise to teleport our forces into their cities and then take them from the inside. What about the Blue Lotus forces near Vuzgal?”

  “I have organized two armies, each thirty thousand strong, with the fastest mounts. Cui Chin has talked to a city state in the Chaotic Lands, securing their assistance quietly. Once the seven days are cleared and the people are confirmed to not have some kind of plague, then they can use the totem to move over in seconds and head for Vuzgal. It will take them just two days to reach Vuzgal.”

  Elder Lu thought on the reports he had just read. “Do you think that the people at Vuzgal can hold out that long?”

  Lei Huo looked unsure what to say.

  “Speak freely.”

  “I do not know. If it was just our forces and the Crafter’s Association, I would say no. The Tareng city is one of the weakest neutral trading cities in the fourth realm as there are no strong cities or sects in the area. Their combat strength is low, with most of them being weakened by the concoction. They have had successive victories, with Erik and Rugrat leading the offensive. Now, they can’t delay any longer. They lost their exterior walls, yes; being in the city will make it hard for them to be protected by the Mana barriers. The roads are large; they can still move their army around in a number of ways. We have reports saying that there are still thirty thousand soldiers on the side of the Blood Demon Sect.” Lei Huo shrugged. “Will they last? I don’t know for sure. If they had the same numbers as the enemy, I would say that they could. They have a defense force ofnearly twenthy thousand if we include the undead.”

  Elder Lu pulled out a scroll and put it on the desk. “This is an instantaneous teleportation scroll, which can teleport anything within a one-hundred-meter-square area. I release my personal guards to you, as well as the headquarters guards. Teleport as soon as you can and both of you make sure that the plan is set for the Hang-Nim Alliance. When this is confirmed to not be a plague, I want the alliance and the Blood Demon army destroyed,” Elder Lu said.

  Cui Chin and Lei Huo hid the shaking in their hands and bodies as they bowed to Elder Lu. Lei Huo had no room to refuse the instantaneous teleportation scroll, an item that was rare even in the Seventh Realm. The two of them quickly left his office.

  Elder Lu sent a message to the head of the Crafter’s Association, telling her everything that he had found. She shared all that her people had found, her voice shaking in anger. She was a crafter by training; she didn’t have the training that Elder Lu did as a merchant to keep her emotions in check.

  “This time tomorrow the Hang-Nim Alliance won’t exist anymore!” she declared vociferously.

  “What are your thoughts toward the Blood Demon Sect?” Elder Lu asked.

  “It will be difficult to destroy them completely unless we want to have a drawn-out battle. We don’t have that sort of strength readily available and it would make us look like tyrants.” She gnashed her teeth. She might be enraged, but she hadn’t lost her senses.

  “Increase the sales commission on them for buying and selling any services. Push for th
e others to agree. I think it would be easy to do so,” Elder Lu said.

  She let out a cold laugh. “Mercy in the short term but death in the long.”

  Elder Lu smiled as she understood his words and their implications. It was one of the joys of talking with competent people.

  With the Blue Lotus and the Crafter’s association charging the Blood Demon Sect more, it might not be much in the short term but over time it would pile up. Slowly the Blood Demon Sect would lose strength, few people wanted to join a sect that was an eyesore to two associations that were pillars of the ten realms reaching into the third realm all the way to the ninth. Less people would want to join the sect that had higher costs.

  The Fourth Realm was a realm of unending battle. Wars cost an incredible amount of money. With these kinds of changes, the Blood Demon Sect would lose strength gradually, running through money at an ever increasing rate. If they gave up quickly, they could drop to the Third Realm and try to consolidate their power there. Even with the dungeons they controlled, they would have to sell more dungeon time slots to outsiders to get more money.

  Indeed, it was a slow, painful death instead of a war at one’s gates.

  The Blue Lotus didn’t forget its friends…or its enemies.

  Chapter: Among the Wreckage

  Ulalas looked over her remaining numbers. The sun rose over the battlefield. The exterior walls were broken and the Blood Demon army easily fit inside the city walls.

  It was a city meant for millions. There were multiple watchtowers and smaller walls that the defenders had used as fallback positions.

  The city was littered with traps. Random areas would be covered in poison gas; others would explode from an IED underground. Trap formations would activate seemingly at random. The death toll wasn’t large but it showed how long the enemy had been preparing for them. These distractions also made all of the soldiers of the Blood Demon army jumpy and restless, never knowing where death might hide.

  Their Mana barrier formations’ coverage was slim as well, encountering walls, destroyed buildings, and so on. The uneven terrain greatly reduced their effectiveness.

  She had them sit in the city, to recover. For the first time, they were able to relax.

  She had made an oath with the Blood Demon Sect, like those under her command, but there was a funny thing with oaths. If you made an oath to look after someone, if you thought the best way to look after them was to kill them, then you could kill them. Now if the oath said, to look after someone, to make sure others and you didn’t harm them in any way or kill them, then you truly couldn’t kill them.

  Simple oaths were a great assurance, like being under oath and telling someone the truth. For more complicated oaths, then there were plenty of loopholes that one could take advantage of.

  She had sworn an oath to do what was best for the Blood Demon Sect. As she had been promoted, her oath had become looser with each position as she needed the ability to order others to do things that might not be the best for them but would be best for the sect.

  Now she thought it was best for the Blood Demon Sect to be destroyed. It meant that she would die if she didn’t do everything in her power to make sure that came to be.

  ***

  Yui listened as the boots above him moved away. He slowly pushed up on the boards and peeked out, looking to see whether there was anyone nearby.

  He pushed the boards to the side and got out of the hole, a blade in his hand. He moved toward the doorway that the boots had gone out of. He peeked around the corner, seeing a group of people slumped against a building.

  Others came out from the hidden passage, the last replacing the cover.

  Yui pulled out his crossbow, tapping it; he looked at three others and put his finger to his lips. He cast a Silence spell on his arrow and then on the other arrows that they had loaded.

  He checked to see whether there was anyone else nearby.

  Not allowing him time to think, he stood and walked out of the house. He fired his arrow. It caught a man looking in his direction in the neck. The Silence spell activated on him; he fell to the ground without making a noise even as they grabbed at their neck. One stood up and pulled on his sword before he was hit in the neck as well. The poison on the arrows went to work as the last one who was looking away got the arrow through his back and into his heart; he arched in pain and then fell to the ground.

  They looked around to see whether they had been discovered as they stole across the ground, moving to the bodies. They grabbed the bodies and pulled them back to the house that they had come from.

  Dirt was tossed over the blood stains in the street before they broke up into teams of two, moving to different observation posts that they had established in the city already and that their aerial forces had been able to check for enemy occupants.

  Yui got to a temple. He had to jump up what looked like a broken wall. He found a ledge and pulled himself up, dropping a rope for his partner. Imani, from the special teams, quickly scrambled up the rope and pulled it up after her. He kept moving higher, into the peak of the temple. The spire was broken and opened in places, allowing them to see out over the capital.

  “Good spot,” Imani confirmed.

  Yui nodded. He had been talking to Glosil and Domonos to find the best observation points. With his knowledge of mortars, he knew that they were only as effective as the coordinates they were given.

  “You take the northeast. I’ll take the northwest,” Yui said.

  “Got it.” Imani nodded as they looked for breaks in the walls of the spire for the best vantage point.

  ***

  Back at the command center, the information from the scouting teams and assassins who had re-entered the outer city came back.

  Rugrat listened closely. He had a dungeon map of where people were in the capital, but to know which groups had commanders in it, or which were Masters, they needed eyes on the different groups.

  He and Erik had wanted to go out, but they were the commanders of the army. They had been able to fight in the moment before but if they went out on purpose, then others would try to keep them back.

  “Your orders?” Hiao Xen asked Rugrat.

  “Hold,” Rugrat said.

  The people in the command center looked at Rugrat. They had the Blood Demon army dead to rights.

  “Let them get comfortable—let them relax their security. Then we’ll hit them. We want them to waste time for as long as possible. The more time, the closer our reinforcements and the less people affected by the Blood Demon concoction.”

  ***

  Night settled down over Vuzgal as the Blood Demon army started to move with purpose. Siege weapons were put down in different locations, hidden from the Vuzgal inner wall, but visible to the observation posts across the city.

  The asteroid belt that hung in the sky above the Fourth Realm lit up the night as the Blood Demon army started their siege, attacking the barrier and walls of the inner city.

  Imani and Yui called out targets and updated them in real time.

  The forces inside the inner city retaliated with the dungeon-created catapults, spell scrolls, formation-enhanced mages, and mortars.

  Only a few from each were picked out to actually target the available targets that the observation posts had found. It made them look like random hits and hid the fact that there were observers in the city.

  Generals and commanders were the biggest targets, then Masters after that, with siege weaponry thrown in after that.

  “Observation posts, this is Command. You are cleared to use firearms,” Command said.

  “About time.” Imani pulled out her rifle and cast the Silence spell on it. She aimed at a building she had been watching for some time. A group of officers hid outside. “Yui! I’ve got three commanders in a circle.”

  Yui moved over to where Imani was set up and checked where she was aiming, looking at them in the darkness through the sights on his rifle. “You take the left and middle; I’ll take the right
?”

  “Works. On my mark. Let me know when you’ve got your target.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  “Three, two, one—mark!” They only felt recoil as the Silence spells made it impossible to hear the weapons.

  The two commanders dropped to the ground. They both worked their bolt and aimed on the new target. Imani hit them just as they turned. They dropped but started crawling as Yui put a second round into them.

  They searched for new targets, looking out of the broken spire for commanders and other high value-looking targets, as hell rained down around the invaders.

  Most people started to hide in the different houses in the outer city as they seemed safer with the amount of people dying outside.

  The night was not a quiet one as the groups exchanged fire. Imani’s eyes burned from the smoke, the explosives, debris and dust that had been tossed up over the night.

  No one of the allies inside the Vuzgal inner city slept. They were watching as attack after attack rained down on their Mana barrier, standing tall in front of the attacks but seeming so slim that it could collapse at any time.

  Although it was a disturbing night for the people in the inner city, it was another terrifying and all-too-similar situation for the Blood Demon army as they once again went through hell. A hell that they thought was over as they saw Vuzgal’s walls.

  The whistling noises would forever be burned into their minds: a sound that told them that death was near and there was nowhere for them to escape.

  Still, they put in all their effort with the attack and worked like slaves through the night.

  As morning came, the city, which had been an ancient ruin moderately repaired, now once again showed the signs of fresh battle.

  ***

  “Well, today is the day,” Yui said as the sun started to come up.

  Imani looked through the holes in the spire, looking over the damaged walls around Vuzgal. “What day?” She scanned for targets.