Glory to the Brave (Ascend Online Book 4)

by Luke Chmilenko

  “Good. I can brief you all as we leave the camp,” Aryana said, her gaze shifting over to the arakissi briefly before turning to scan over us all. “Which will be in the next five minutes, or less if we can manage it. Right now, I have Theia and those others who are gifted with healing magic to do what they can to aid the slaves. It is my intention to leave as soon as they are done and not an instant later. Garr, Senzin, and the rest of you new adventurers, if you are able to aid to that end as well, then we will be able to leave all the sooner.”

  “Of course,” the aforementioned gronn replied without a second’s hesitation, Senzin, Nathe, and Zie all nodding silently in response to the woman’s words as well.

  “Good,” Aryana stated with a curt nod. “Then let us be about it. Every minute we waste here is a minute the orcs can use to catch us.”

  With nothing left to be said and urgency fueling our actions, our group promptly broke apart, everyone heading towards their respective tasks. But with the current tasks being slated in favor with those of healing ability, that left several of us with nothing to do but wait.

  Or at least it did until I remembered one loose end that I still had yet to find a solution to.

  “Hey, how would you all like to help me with something before we go?” I asked Trivium and a handful of the others waiting around with me, my attention turning towards Ezzac who was still standing over Ignis’s prone form.

  “Sure,” Trivium replied without a moment’s hesitation. “What do you need?”

  “Just a couple extra pairs of hands,” I answered with a smile, motioning for the group to follow me as I turned towards where I’d left the pair. “After all, it’d be a shame to leave this place without leaving a calling card behind.”

  Chapter 45

  “You can’t do this to me!” Ignis shouted as I finished knotting a thick piece of leather around his wrists, having pulled them backward around the thick post separating him and me. “This is unfair! You can’t leave me like this! Please don’t leave me like this! Just kill me and send me back for a respawn!”

  “Like I told you before, Ignis, you had your chance, and you made your choice,” I said as I took a step out from behind the post so I could look at the man, seeing the frantic look on his face as he desperately tried to pull free of his bonds. “And because we, unfortunately, don’t have any way of getting you back to Aldford so you can join your friends in prison, we have to come up with another way for you to pay for your betrayal.”

  “This isn’t paying for anything! This is torture!” Ignis protested as he continued to try and free himself. “Do you have any idea what he is going to do to me when he hears about this?”

  “To be honest? Not even the slightest clue,” I replied, offering the man a coarse smile that I knew didn’t reach my eyes. “But your reaction tells me everything I need to know.”

  “Lyrian, please!” the captured adventurer begged, his head turning towards Constantine who stepped in beside the man with a thick strap of leather in his hand. “I’ve already been shoved to the side here and left out of the loop! If you do this then—”

  “Then you’ll finally have to come to grips with how shitty a person you’ve been,” the rogue interrupted, taking that opportunity to finally gag Ignis, wrapping the strap of leather around his head so it wouldn’t fall out. “And then maybe you can start seriously considering somewhere else to play this game. Somewhere really, really, far away from here where we’ll never see one another again. How does that sound?”

  “Like a dream to my ears,” I commented, ignoring a final desperate growl from the man as I bent down to pick up a slat of wood that I’d placed to the side to allow the writing on it to dry. “And now for the finishing touch to make this a true masterpiece.”

  Placing the wood down in what I figured would be a good spot, I made sure that it wouldn’t fall before taking a step back and looking at our work with a critical eye. With our inability, nor real desire, to take Ignis with us when we were due to leave the camp, I wanted to make sure the adventurer had been properly taken care of before we all departed. The last thing that we wanted to worry about was to have him at loose ends and raising the alarm throughout Khudazal should we have just killed him and sent him for a respawn.

  So instead of sticking him repeatedly with something sharp until he turned to dust, we made sure that he would stay out of trouble by tying him to a large pillory post that had managed to survive the battle. Removed just far enough away from the now burning camp so he wouldn’t accidentally be caught up in the blaze, the post was the perfect place for us to safely leave him. Not only would it keep him from spreading the alarm of our raid, but it would also serve a second, extremely critical, purpose that I absolutely didn’t want to pass up.

  Which was to tweak Carver’s ear as hard as possible, and with luck, sow a few seeds of discord and distrust among the Dread Crew ranks.

  “Hrm, ‘Never Trust Traitors’ and ‘See You Soon’” Trivium quoted as I backed away from the pillory post, the lizardman and several of the others having helped out in restraining Ignis when we’d tied him to it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That we were here,” I said simply, offering the man a shrug as I turned to look at him. “Or rather that I was here specifically. He originally left me an identical message at one of his camps that they abandoned…well, I guess it was about eleven days ago now. The feed would have aired yesterday now that I think of it.”

  “Must have been a hell of long eleven days if this is where you’ve ended up now,” the arakissi replied in a thoughtful tone.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said with a sigh, feeling a sudden wave of exhaustion wash over me, which prompted me to reconsider my words. “Actually, maybe you do. It doesn’t sound like you guys have had it easy on your end of things dealing with Sthera either.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Trivium replied, giving me a toothy smile as he parroted my words back to me. “But hopefully if things go well tonight…”

  “Things will get better,” I finished, giving the lizardman a nod as the dozens of burning questions that I had for him and his group’s experiences in the fens bounced around in my mind. From the little that we’d managed to talk about while sorting Ignis out, it was clear to me that we were both fighting the same war against the orcs and their arakissi allies despite the distance separating us. But where we had just recently been drawn into the conflict, I got the sense that Trivium and his group had been a part of it for much longer, which was what prompted a single question to rise up from among all the others.

  “Do you know what the orcs want?” I suddenly asked as I turned my attention back towards Ignis, all of the earlier fight having since left the adventurer, leaving him hanging loosely against his bonds in defeat, his eyes staring unfocused at the ground. “Or even Sthera for that matter? Anything that would explain them waging this war so soon after they got kicked out of Eberia? Everything we’ve heard or discovered…just doesn’t make sense. At least not yet.”

  “I wish I did,” Trivium replied with a sigh. “But we’re just about in the dark as you are. Hell, until today, we haven’t ever even fought against orcs. Not living ones at least. For some reason, they’ve left all the fighting to the clans Sthera’s managed to corrupt or the monsters at her beck and call.”

  “Really?” I said, finding that particular bit of information rather curious. “That’s…interesting. I wonder why that is. What about Sthera?. What’s her angle in this? It doesn’t make sense that she’d ally with the orcs…even with this cult that she’s apparently a part of.”

  “It sure doesn’t,” the arakissi replied apologetically with a shake of his head. “And I’m afraid I’m zero for two on questions. All that we know is that she’s looking for something or someplace, in the fens that is connected to both the orcs and the arakissi’s history, but exactly what we have no idea. Over the last couple months, she’s dug up more than a few ruins that once belonged to ea
ch.”

  “Wait, there are orcish ruins in the swamp?” I asked, my earlier spark of curiosity fanning itself into a bright blaze. “You’re sure?”

  “Sure as a bunch of undead orcs trying to kill you can make a person,” Trivium answered, sensing my excitement. “But the ones we found were old ruins, easily a thousand years, if not longer. And the swamp was far from kind to them. So there really wasn’t much in terms of lore or history left.”

  “Damn,” I grunted, the questions in my head only multiplying based on what the lizardman had just told me. Unfortunately, though, they were questions that would have to wait for the future when we had a chance to connect offline, Aryana choosing that moment to call out and signal our departure.

  “All right! That’s all the time we can spare!” she shouted loudly, her voice carrying easily across the camp’s entrance. “We’re leaving now, and if you’re looking to come with us, now’s the time to move!”

  With nothing left to do to secure Ignis, and the man having either retreated so far inwards or choosing to log off so that he wouldn’t need to respond to any of us, we all turned as one to follow Aryana’s words. Crossing the battlefield quickly, it was less than a minute from there that we were gathered in our respective groups, saying one last farewell before we all went our separate ways.

  “Should we succeed in our attempt to blight the garden and safely rejoin my people, I will attempt to reach out to one of you through your dreams and let you know how we’ve fared,” Senzin said as we readied ourselves to leave, the lizardman’s eyes darting between both Garr and myself as he spoke. “Should luck shine upon us tonight, then perhaps we will find an opportunity to coordinate our two fronts against Sthera and Zhul. Perhaps even find an end to this war that plagues us.”

  “We need no luck while Fate’s hand guides us,” Garr replied with a slight shake of his head. “For I cannot imagine that it would be so cruel to see us this far only to have us fall short.”

  “It is my hope that you are right in that,” Senzin stated before going to step forward and embrace the gronn in farewell, the pair patting each other on the back once before breaking apart. “Take care of yourself, Garr, I look forward to seeing you once again sometime soon in the days to come.”

  “As do I,” the gronn replied in a heavy voice, his attention turning towards Aryana who took that opportunity to say her own farewells, also moving to embrace the man.

  “We’ll see one another again before we know it,” she said while giving him a quick squeeze and glancing towards me and the others once they’d broken apart. “Well, this isn’t how I expected the last day to go. But at least we’re committed now, and all of our planning wasn’t for nothing. I hope everything goes well with your end of the plan. And as much as Garr doesn’t believe in it, good luck with all those orcs. I suspect that you’ll need it the most out of all of us.”

  “Thank you,” I replied graciously, inclining my head towards the woman as I spoke. “If nothing else, we plan to give the orcs a hell of a fight that they certainly won’t forget.”

  “And after what I’ve seen today, I certainly don’t doubt that you will,” Aryana replied with a smile, her expression freezing for a second before she continued. “If you don’t mind carrying a message for me to Fredric…in case something should happen. Tell him that I always thought well of him and that he is a good person.”

  “We can absolutely do that,” I assured her, the tone of her words unable to help but make me curious to exactly what sort of relationship that she might have had with the bann in the past.

  Which I suppose is really none of business, I said to myself as our various groups began to split up, each of us giving a hurried goodbye to Trivium and the other arakissi adventurers. It had been blind luck that our paths had managed to cross here of all places and only for such a short time, but I couldn’t help but feel grateful that it had. If nothing else, knowing that there were other adventurers in the fens also fighting against the orcs and their allies made me feel less alone in the war that we’d found ourselves in.

  “All right, Lyr, we’re ready to go,” Constantine said to me once our groups had finished separating, Garr, Arcturus, and the earthspeakers we’d rescued all falling into place amongst us, looking vastly different than when I’d first seen them. Having begun with little more than the rags that we’d found them with, each of the gronn had since managed to scavenge enough gear from the fallen orcs to fully outfit themselves, ensuring that they were completely ready for whatever awaited us next.

  “Then let’s get this show moving,” I replied eagerly, taking the opportunity to glance over towards Garr and Arcturus, who had accompanied the rogue. “All right, this part of the plan is up to whatever you need from us. Where do you need to be so that we can get a start on this ritual?”

  “The center of the garden,” Garr replied without missing a beat. “We have already laid the groundwork for the ritual there and should be able to finish the remainder of our preparations without any trouble once we arrive. Should everything go well, we should be able to finish the ritual in a handful of minutes. Should there be complications or orcs in the garden, however…”

  “Then that’ll be for us to worry about,” I said, expecting full well that something inconvenient would rear its ugly head once we actually began the ritual.

  Because that’s just how things work when it comes to our luck and adventurers so far, I added silently as we all finally left the burning slave camp, our group turning towards the south, while Aryana and the escaping slaves departed along with Senzin and the others to the east. If everything went according to plan, Senzin and his group would be able to blight the eastern garden while Aryana escaped into the fens with her group, hopefully escaping the orcs and Sthera’s wrath in the process. Then, if everything went really well afterward, and we somehow won the war, we could see about repatriating Aldford’s lost settlers back to us once it was safer for them to travel to the town. And not need to dodge countless hungry creatures as we sprint through the length of the Hartwyld for a second time.

  Leaving the camp at a Spirit-of-the-Wild-aided run, it didn’t take long for it to vanish out of sight behind us, the thick trees and foliage eventually blocking it from sight. From there, we rushed as fast as we could manage to the southeast, choosing to travel off the main path leading towards the garden in hopes that it would reduce the risk of us running into any orcs, while also leaving a false trail behind us. We didn’t know how long it would take the orcs to react to the burning slave camp, nor what they would do once they realized that there had been a mass escape, but anything that we could do to slow their eventual pursuit or even throw them off our trail could only end up helping us in the end. So it was with that intention that we ran deep into the forest as far as we could risk before abruptly turning west, approaching the southern garden from its eastern end, the tall trees eventually giving way to the familiar massive plants.

  And, of course, the complication that I’d been expecting.

  “Whoa, heads up!” Kilgore shouted as we ran, his greatbow thrumming loudly in the middle of his sentence. “We have corrupted spirits up high!”

  Flinching at the scout’s words, I glanced upwards just in time to see the result of his bowshot in the form of an ethereal, ink-black hawk that was now rapidly falling through the air, its body dissolving into nothingness as it did so. But the dying spirit wasn’t the only one I saw, the sky above us suddenly full of over a dozen of them that were rapidly moving to react to our presence after entering the garden.

  “Damn it! They should not be here! Not so soon!” Garr cursed as the corrupted spirits dove towards us, only to find themselves promptly shredded into nothingness as a hail of magic rose up from within our ranks. “If they are here then the orcs must know something worth risking the crops to their presence! We must hurry and begin the ritual as soon as possible!”

  “Then lead the way, and we’ll keep them off you until we get there!” Cassius told the man as w
e rushed into the garden at a run. “And why would the spirits being here risk the crops, anyway?”

  “Because the corruption they bear devours the energies of life,” Garr replied loudly as we moved, navigating the narrow laneways that separated the massively oversized crops. “The longer that they linger here, the more of the ambient mana in the air they will absorb, eventually draining all of it. Once that happens, the growth of the crops will stagnate and eventually wither.”

  “Well, isn’t that a good thing?” Constantine called out. “We’re trying to destroy this place anyway. Why not let them do it for us?”

  “It would take too long,” Garr replied with a shake of his head as he ran. “And also because as they drain the area of its mana, then so too will they drain the energy we’ve imbued into the blightspikes we’ve scattered across the garden. Should they drain all of them, they will kill the blight and can then be recalled before they cause too much more damage with their presence. Damage from which the garden would be able to recover from reasonably quickly once the balance restores itself.”

  “And land us right up shit’s creek soon afterward when the orcs come calling on Aldford with full stomachs,” the rogue stated once Garr finished speaking, understanding dawning in his voice. “Okay, I get it now!”

  “Good!” Halcyon shouted from somewhere in the middle of our group, the sound of whooshing flames accompanying his words as he sent out a blast of magic, “because we have more spirits coming in on our right!”

  “And more on our left too!” Caius shouted out a heartbeat later, only to immediately correct himself. “Uh, actually check that! They’re coming from everywhere now!”

  “And they will keep doing so now that they know we are here!” Garr shouted as a steady stream of corrupted spirits started to appear from the garden all around us. “But we must keep moving! There is a clearing at the center of the garden where we’ve prepared everything! It will be easier for us to fight them there! If we stop now, we will be swarmed!”