Chương 71: Nunc scio quid sit

Atish and Sidri held hands while standing in front of their home. The first wave of the Royal faction was coming. The others tried to convince the two to fight from within the battlements. But they refused.

"I think I'll live longer." Atish took a swig and handed his gourd off to Sidri. She grabbed the gourd gingerly and downed the entire bottle.

"Doubt it…" She let out a drained sigh as she watched a tiny horde approaching in the distance.

"They are going to send all of their mundanes first."

"5000 mundanes against the 54000 mixed." She lifted the gourd up and watched as drops fell onto the ground. She let out a defeated sigh before handing the gourd back to Atish.

"Unless they plan on doing something else."

"They are only sending mundane for fodder."

"Whittle us down, make us use our supplies." The horde in the distance slowly approached. The only way they could feasibly approach Brighthaven in mass was with a head-on attack, and even then, there were a few kilometers between the castle town's portcullis and the open plains ahead. Atish quietly held his gourd in one hand, then tied it back onto his belt, where he usually kept it.

"…"

"Did you know…. June was actually the one to give me this gourd." Sidri looked at him with an unimpressed look.

"Yes, you have told me this story every night since we conjoined our cabins."

"You were going to kill him before me and then blah blah blah, he gave you a gift, and now you respect him." Atish winced at the oversimplification.

"Missed a couple steps, but yes." Sidri elbowed Atish in the side, and the two broke into laughter.

"…"

"It's a nice trinket… don't let it break." Atish let out a short chuckle before resting a hand on it.

"Its mine, so you can't have it." Atish nudged Sidri back, and the laughter continued. They made a promise to June when he left. Since the Lord of Light himself was nowhere to be found, his attendants would have to step in. The two tapped matching bracelets together and prepared themselves for inevitable bloodshed.

Eren and Ann stood atop the battlements that surrounded Brighthaven. It was built with earth magic, then reinforced with wood, and then recently had another layer of concrete poured onto it. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. For a castle that had only existed for a few months, it was a marvel of human community; thousands of individuals had their hand in making the walls better, key points had ballistas, hwatchas, and other handcrafted artillery.

The crenellated walls were tall enough to hide behind and were sturdy enough to resist several intermediate magical attacks. Eren pat a specific spot of the parapet. Eren, Ann, and Silvester used to come to this exact spot every day to enjoy the clear view. Unfortunately, Silvester was deemed missing in action after his cover was blown, so today it was just Ann and Eren standing alone. The fighting had begun, a small fragment of it at least. Ann never thought she would make new friends when coming to the colosseum.

She was always the type to shy away from pointless contact. She was always the type who people called heartless. She even began to believe she was missing parts others had, but despite her doubts, she was not missing those parts. In fact, the colosseum taught her some emotions she thought she would never feel. Fear. The first time she watched the Lord of Light fight, she truly felt the inconceivable gap between Aspirants and Dreamers. Love.

Her first love was a quiet, pure one; she was silently smitten by the ruthlessness that the Lord of Light wreathed on his enemies, and he was also someone of amicable looks to go along with it. Regret. She felt it deeply; she knew he was already taken, but she regretted never voicing her feelings, regardless, while she could. Longing. When the cohort she's known since her earliest days split, she was for the first time away from her friends, and for the first time, she began to miss them in their absence.

Now that Silvester was gone, it was more than evident to her how much her friends mattered. And Hopelessness. It was the quietest of her new emotions. It didn't ring out in her head like Regret or Longing. It didn't stun her in place like Love or Fear. It was a quiet pang in her chest, an empty one that threatened to crumple her. Even Eren, who was often the type to chat constantly and never show his fears, was evidently feeling hopeless. Silvester was gone, dead, missing, something else.

Ann and Eren kept reminding themselves that they were in a game. Nothing was real here. But the food tasted good. The water tasted fresh. The sun rose and fell. And pain still told them they were alive. It was hard to remember at times, even if Silvester, June, or the allies they had met died. They were still alive in the real world.

Leonard and Leo stood atop their spire and watched the army make first contact with Atish and Sidri. Leo floated to see over the balcony guardrail; his face was cold.

"I don't think our odds are good." Leonard leaned dangerously against the guardrail; his face had a mix of fear and acceptance.

"You packaged our valuables, right? It's at the evacuation zone?" Leo nodded. Leonard and Leo were unlikely friends; their names were the same, and they were both mages. They had a lot of similar traits, and opposite ones too, but in the end, their personalities just clicked. Leo was the type who enjoyed isolating himself in his research; his magic was his everything.

He was also the type who forced himself to go out with friends once in a while, but due to being a halfling, people tended to purposely or accidentally belittle him or treat him like a child. He found it hard to make true connections when people always defaulted to treating him like a child. Leonard, on the other hand, was the type who preferred to be alone at all times. There were plenty of elves in the nightrealm, variants, dark, light, forest-loving, or ocean-dwelling.

People tended to view him more as a spectacle, a novelty item at times. Stereotypes and false hopes plagued him constantly, not to mention, he was tall, he had good looks. When it came to other people, they automatically defaulted to either flirting with him or treating him with a varied stereotype of elf cultures.

Some insecure people start fights with him, others constantly bring up eating meat, some look at him like an exhibit instead of a person, and others place expectations on him from made-up notions of elf culture. Leonard found society a stressful place, so he enjoyed isolating himself in his home and studying magic or gardening. His kinship with plants was never an innate thing; his family line came from a desert-dwelling tribe after all, he simply gardened because the plants never judged.

These two were dragged into the colosseum by friends, and in the end, they both met June. June was a young Nightwalker; he didn't know about halflings or elves, and Leo and Leonard both saw that in the end, June didn't care if people were tall or short, had pointy ears or stubby legs. Leo and Leonard were unlikely friends who were inadvertently brought together by the young Nightwalker. And funny enough, in the place where June, Leo, and Leonard never wanted to be, true connections were formed.

The mundane force was not properly equipped. Atish and Sidri fought long and hard during the first siege. They lasted for 7 hours and wiped out over half of the mundane force. But Dreamers aren't unkillable. An arrow struck Sidri while she was casting a spell. She shortly bled out. Silently. When Atish noticed, he went into a frenzy. He wiped out a large quadrant of the Dreamer force before he exhausted his QI. And died.

June's home was trampled, the explosive trap in his tipi was activated, and a small portion of the battlefield was decimated. The burning bush that surrounded his home turned into a fiery inferno that helped control the battle. Brighthaven's casualties in the first siege were low. They lost two Dreamers and 6 guards before the Royal faction's mundane fodder force was killed, but that was not the main force. The fall of Brighthaven is delayed another day.