Glory to the Brave (Ascend Online Book 4)

by Luke Chmilenko

  “Okay,” I said, pausing briefly to wipe my mouth after practically inhaling half of my stew. “We have a five versus five match coming up next, and we’re right in the splatter zone. So, if you don’t want blood in your—”

  “Lyrian, why are you doing this?” Phillion asked in a quiet, yet firm voice, interrupting me mid-explanation. “Why are you spending your day showing me all of this? You have to know that I’ll tell the others about everything I’ve seen today.”

  “Oh, of course,” I replied, giving the man a dismissive shrug. “But then nothing I’ve shown you today is really a secret. Hell, we’ve aired pretty much everything I’ve shown you today on our feeds already or are going to in the next couple days. Not to mention the fact that you guys had Ignis buried in here for how long?”

  “That’s not really an answer,” Phillion said, shaking his head at me, his food completely untouched in his lap.

  “Isn’t it?” I queried, fixing the man with my own inquisitive stare. “How about we turn that question around. Why do you think I’m doing this?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Phillion answered with frustration in his voice. “It’s like you’re trying to show off, show me just how much you have here.”

  “You think this is about jealously?” I asked, letting a brief laugh escape before I continued speaking. “Don’t lie to yourself, Phillion, I can see where your eyes have been looking. You’ve been counting adventurers since we’ve left the prison.”

  “So what if I have?” the dwarf answered, a hint of his previous defiance showing. “The others will be interested to know just how many are around here.”

  “I’m sure they would be,” I said while watching Phillion carefully, deciding that it was time to finally give him a push. “But I don’t think that’s the real reason why you’re counting. You’re looking to see just how many are here in town, against how many you think should be out somewhere, fighting.”

  I saw Phillion’s jaw clench as I finished speaking, and a flash of anger appeared behind his eyes.

  “But at this point you know you’ve already counted too many,” I continued, not breaking eye contact as I spoke. “You can see that there are too many people here to keep up with the pace of the fighting that we’ve had over the last week, which now has you second-guessing everything that your offline group has been telling you. If they’ve been telling you anything at all.”

  “They’re protecting their information,” Phillion replied weakly, his voice barely above a whisper. “After those two left…they must have thought some of us would talk.”

  “And how does that make you feel after you’ve spent the last four days in a cell, expecting them to come breaking down the door at any minute and rescue you?” I asked, deciding that it was time to pressure the dwarf as hard as I dared. “Or better yet, after all the loyalty you’ve shown just by sticking it out here in a war on the frontier when you could be literally anywhere else?”

  “How would it make you feel?” Phillion retorted hotly as he twisted towards me, the cake that had been sitting on his lap tumbling to the ground. “Like I’m wasting my time! Especially after…”

  “Especially after what?” I pushed, keeping my voice calm and steady.

  “Especially after I came out here and burned my reputation with Eberia in the process,” Phillion said, his shoulders dropping down dejectedly, all tension leaving his body as he turned back in his seat to face the field again. “Even if I somehow got out of here and abandoned both the Dread Crew and my guild, I’d have nowhere to go back to. I’m screwed. I might as well go back in line to reroll a character.”

  “That’s always an option,” I agreed, despite knowing full well that creating a new character would cause Phillion to lose his “spot” in Ascend Online and send him back into the several-million-person-long queue that was waiting for a chance to play the game. Unlike games before it, CTI thoroughly discouraged making alternate characters, preferring that players made and then stuck with a single choice—along with the consequences that their in-game actions brought them.

  “But you also have other, far less drastic options too,” I added. “We can talk with Dyre and what he’s able to offer you with regards to a fresh start.”

  “And all I need to do to get that is sell out my friends,” Phillion replied, his voice sounding both dejected and depressed.

  “Look, I might be a bit biased saying this, but I’d hardly call them friends if they’re treating you this way,” I told the dwarf bluntly. “And I get from the tone of your voice that this is hardly the first time that they’ve done this.”

  “You’re right, it isn’t,” the dwarf said, sighing deeply. “Not by a longshot. I’ve always been on the outside looking in. Nothing I did let me break into that inner circle.”

  “Then why are you sitting here and torturing yourself over them?” I asked, the sound of several cheering voices momentarily drowning out our conversation as two groups of adventurers stepped out on the field.

  “I don’t know,” Phillion said, falling silent as the match began, a series of thundering spells combined with both the crowd and combatants shouting making any attempt at conversation impossible.

  Turning my full attention towards the spectacle, the next few minutes passed in a near blink of an eye as the two teams clashed against one another, both sides clearly well-practiced and skilled. However, as the battle wore on, the advantage began to clearly shift to one team, with the weaker eventually conceding when their healer, a shaman, crashed to the ground unconscious, his body singed and smoldering from a timely cast bolt of electricity. Within seconds of the match ending, a team of healers rushed onto the field, restoring everyone back to full health and helping them off the field.

  “Damn, that was a pretty good match!” I exclaimed, casting a glance over at Phillion who wore a tired and somber look on his face. “What did you think?”

  “There were survivors from our raids,” he stated abruptly, turning to look at me with a broken expression. “We didn’t kill them. At least not when we could help it.”

  “What.” The single word was all I managed to get out as my blood suddenly ran cold at Phillion’s sudden revelation.

  “The NPCs that were on those caravans we took before you found us,” Phillion repeated, his voice getting stronger the more words he got out. “We led you to believe that we killed them. I’m telling you now that’s wrong.”

  “Then what did you do with them?” I asked, already knowing I wasn’t going to like whatever answer the man had in store for me.

  “We gave them to Carver,” Phillion said. “That was the deal that we’d made with him. Supplies in exchange for…people.”

  “Then what did he do with them?” I pressed, barely able to hear anything over the sound of my heartbeat in my ears.

  “What do you think he did?” Phillion replied, his eyes staring intently into mine. “He gave them to the orcs.”

  Chapter 13

  “I think this is all we’re going to get, Lyr,” Freya said as she slid up beside me, having circled the crowd of people that were slowly finding their seats in the common area of the longhouse we’d taken over for our meeting. “The rest are offline or away from Aldford.”

  “This is more than enough,” I replied, offering the woman’s hand a quick squeeze as I looked out towards all the adventurers in the room, recognizing practically all of the faces, if not the names to match. “We didn’t expect that we’d have to move the meeting up by half a day. Thanks, Freya.”

  “No problem,” Freya acknowledged, flashing me a smile as she returned my squeeze. “Heads up though, rumors are starting to fly about what’s going on after we called the meeting early and put the town on alert.”

  “Then I better get up there,” I said, turning to look at the crowd a second time.

  “It’ll be okay, Lyr,” Freya whispered. “Constantine and Drace are busy getting the guild ready right now, plus you already sent Huxley and the others ahead. Just do what
you need to do here, and we’ll be on our way soon enough.”

  “Yeah,” I answered, taking a deep breath to steady my nerves at the prospect of standing up and talking to everyone. While it was far from my favorite thing to do, normally I was reasonably okay with public speaking, especially around the familiar crowds of Aldford. But there was something about this time that made me particularly unsteady and anxious.

  Probably because I’m about to ruin’s everyone’s day, I thought, taking another steadying breath.

  “You’ll be fine,” Freya said, placing a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “Just tell them what we’ve learned, and we’ll go from there.”

  “Thanks,” I whispered softly for a second time before taking a step forward, everyone’s attention shifting as they saw me move. Waiting for the final stragglers to find their seats—or in the case of the larger and bulkier adventurers, a wall to lean against—the room gradually decreased in volume until it was finally quiet enough for me to start.

  “Good afternoon, everyone,” I said by way of greeting, looking out at the assembled leadership of Aldford’s adventurers, or at least those that had been able to make it. “When we originally planned this meeting for later this evening, we had a slightly different agenda in mind than we find ourselves with right now, but as we’ve all learned firsthand over the last week…there’s no plan that survives contact with the enemy.”

  I paused for a second, both to collect my thoughts and to allow for a chance for my words to sink in, seeing several people lean forward in their seats in anticipation. “As many of you have no doubt heard, or maybe even saw, earlier today I had a chance to speak with one of our prisoners, learning some very valuable and also very troubling information in the process. Some of this information has long term implications for our plans going forward, while other pieces of it will need to be addressed more immediately. With that in mind, I ask for your patience as I lay out everything that we’ve learned today first, then afterward we will go into the implications of what it all means.”

  I waited as a chorus of murmurs rose up from the crowd, standing patiently until they died down and I felt everyone’s attention focus on me once more. “Starting off with the most impactful bit of information from the prisoner first…we now know that there are survivors from the Grey Devil and other bandit raids against the caravans that were due to come to Aldford over the last month.

  “By the prisoner’s best guess, he believes that there are as many as a hundred and fifty survivors, but he also admits that he wasn’t present for every raid his guild undertook, let alone what the other bandit guilds may have been doing. So, in practice, that number could be substantially higher in the end,” I explained, the room completely silent as I spoke. “Unfortunately, however, they weren’t able to provide us with a solid reason for why they were capturing people, only that Carver ordered it, because of an arrangement he’d made with a tribe of orcs.”

  “He is doing what?” an angry voice from the crowd managed to shout a second before similar sentiments rose in response, destroying the calm silence that had just filled the room. Giving everyone a chance to adjust to the news, I let the noise build for a few seconds before raising my hands and settling the crowd.

  “I know,” I stated plainly once the noise had died down enough for me to start speaking again. “I had the same reaction too when I first heard the news.”

  “Lyrian, is there any chance the prisoner could be lying about this?” a voice asked from somewhere in the crowd, causing several others to echo out in agreement. “He could just be trying to save his ass and get out of his cell!”

  “I think that the prisoner is telling the truth—or at least as far as he knows what the truth is,” I answered the moving heads and faces in front of me, making it hard to pick out exactly who had spoken. “During our interrogation, I had him explain everything to me with the justicar listening, and as far as Dyre could tell me, nothing that the prisoner said was a lie. However, in this case, I feel it is important to point out that it’s possible to tell the truth and yet still be wrong. I only mention this, because of the second major piece of information that the prisoner has told us, which is that the communication between the lower ranks of the Dread Crew and Carver’s inner circle is virtually nonexistent. They are simply told what to do and expected to do it with a minimal fuss or face…rather drastic repercussions.

  “I know that hearing this is likely not much of a surprise for those of you who have met Carver and know firsthand how ruthless he can be,” I continued, hearing scattered waves of agreement from the adventurers in the room, “but for those of you who don’t, it apparently took Carver’s group four hours after we captured the prisoners to completely disband the offline chat group that they’d made to communicate with one another, cutting our captives out of their plans. According to the prisoner, the final message that they received before their effective abandonment was, and I quote, ‘Don’t say shit, and sit tight for as long as it takes’.”

  There was a series of grumbles and winces around the room as everyone processed that statement.

  “So what does that mean for anything the prisoner knows?” a familiar voice close to me asked, causing my eyes to shift and spot Dunedin looking back at me. “He might not be lying, sure, but if he and the others have been kept in the dark and fed shit, then what good does it do us?”

  “Well, first, it gives us a great deal of insight into how Carver runs his organization,” I replied, nodding at the dwarf’s skepticism. “Which I am sure all of you know we have precious little insight on. But more importantly, thanks to the prisoner’s information, we now have a starting point that we can use to hopefully take this war back to the Dread Crew. Because regardless of how he may treat his followers, Carver can’t easily hide the camps that he and the Dread Crew have made in the Hartwyld.”

  The murmuring that still filled the room suddenly stopped.

  “That’s right,” I announced, letting my eyes play over everyone as I dropped the third and most actionable piece of information that we’d learned from Phillion. “Thanks to the prisoner, we now have the location of the two base camps in the Hartwyld that we’ve long suspected that the Dread Crew have had. With this, we finally have a more concrete place to start from in trying to finally put an end to this war and find out exactly where they might have gone to after abandoning Shadow’s Fall.

  “Unfortunately, with that being said though, neither of these two camps are even remotely close together and are both somewhat deep in the Hartwyld,” I explained, taking in the rapt and excited faces on the crowd looking back at me. “To start first with the camp closest to us, our prisoner put it roughly about two hours trek northeast of the Irovian tower, deep within a hidden forest valley. Until recently, this was used as the Dread Crew’s primary camp, right up until they attacked Shadow’s Fall and took it over as a bind point, leaving only a small holding force belonging to Carver’s inner circle behind.

  “As for the second camp, it is much farther northward, almost a full day’s travel, if not longer, away from Shadow’s Fall. According to the prisoner, it was still fairly small the last time he visited and was being designed as a fallback position to retreat to, should we have managed to retake Shadow’s Fall.

  “The one thing of note that he was able to tell us about his stay at the camp was that it wasn’t uncommon for Carver or his people to go deeper into the forest, disappearing for a day or two before returning. It’s his guess that the orcs have their own base or settlement somewhere nearby in the Hartwyld, but where he couldn’t say for certain. According to him, the rank and file members of the Dread Crew were kept separate from anything involving the orcs as often as possible.”

  “So the prisoner knows nothing about them at all?” Dunedin called out once more from the crowd, several other voices echoing support for the dwarf’s question. “Nothing about how many of them there are or what they want? Or something else that we can use?”

  “Unfortunately, n
o,” I replied with a sigh, letting some of my own frustration show as I answered the question. “I questioned the prisoner extensively on everything that I could think of involving the orcs, but they weren’t able to tell us anything that we already didn’t know or guess. It’s pretty clear that the Dread Crew aren’t trusted with any more information than they absolutely need to know. They’re apparently so secretive that the prisoner couldn’t even tell us where Carver has been for the last few days; he just up and vanished one night, and everyone knew better than to ask questions.”

  “Then in that case, what’s the status of these camps you mentioned?” a new voice asked, this time belonging to a dark-furred Tul’Shar I knew to be named Orius. “The Dread Crew cut and run the second that things turned against them on the plains. What’s not to say that they didn’t abandon all these other camps too?”

  “Nothing,” I admitted, having come to the exact same conclusion when Phillion had first told me about the camps. “But according to the prisoner, they were both active with their own bind spots at the time of his capture, which makes them strategic threats to Aldford and Shadow’s Fall respectively. Until we can find them and make sure that they’re either abandoned or destroyed, we have to assume that the Dread Crew are still using them in some capacity.

  “Which means that in order to find out, we’re likely going to have to stick our hands into whatever trap that they have waiting for us at both of these camps.”

  The longhouse fell completely silent at my revelation as all of the adventurers stared up at me with resolute expressions written across faces, many of them having come to the same conclusion.

  “Given the paranoia that we’ve seen so far from Carver, we have to assume that the Dread Crew has made preparations for one of their prisoners talking to us after their capture and revealing the location of these camps,” I stated, my eyes playing over the crowd as I spoke. “Which gives them an advantage in preparing for our arrival at either of the two camps, should they choose to do so. Because they know just as well as us that we have no choice but to check both of these camps out.