Chương 364: Day Three Hundred And Sixty-Two

Dear Diary,"Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life." - Terry Pratchett, Jingo Yeah, the library I found had a lot of Pratchett and Rogers. Other stuff, too, but I like what I like. Also, the one makes me laugh and the other makes me feel like, I dunno, I could be a better person. No, that's not quite right. It makes me want to be a better person, but also makes me feel like I might not be a total trash human being to begin with.

So yesterday was pretty dull. No idea why, but no Undead in the alley. Red flags totally handled by Olga and her Jotnar. I spent the whole fuckin' day on lookout, enjoying the breeze and the sun. I'm probably gonna wind up red like a lobster by the time I'm done with this gig, but that's okay. I needed to get my tan on anyhow. While I stood there soaking in the sun atop Black Dragon's mast, I sat there soaking in the literal good vibrations from the family in Loki's cave.

By the time night rolled around, I wasn't manic, or depressed, or panicked, or anything, really. A little bit tired, like I'd been up too long, because fuckin' duh. A little bit bored, because I'm not going to screw up any element of surprise I might have by robbing Olga of her spotlight just because I'm a little antsy. But mostly just somehow finding a surprising reservoir of chill to carry me through the day. I absolutely was not fantasizing about sexualizing a Sister Siobhan squeaky toy.

When you intend to go through with it I'm told it's called 'planning'. Or maybe 'premeditation', depending on whether somebody's pressing charges. After last night I really don't think charges are what Sister Siobhan intends to press. Once the sun went down, almost winking at me as it fell behind the horizon, I hung my binoculars on a handy hook and settled in to do the same kind of mental math I'd done back during my Cure marathon during the plague. Hey, some people sing songs, some people exercise, I do math.

Don't judge me. Okay, maybe a little about the geometry I'd been doing earlier, but I've got permission for that. Now I wanna have Saffron write something up, then laminate it, so when someone, probably me, gets on my case about it I can whip it out and say, 'it's okay, I've got a permit!' Yeah, I don't know if that would work or not, but it would be funny as shit, and I've found it's difficult to keep panties on when you're laughing your ass off. I mean, it would be if I wore any.

I dunno, maybe I ought to do that more often, to be a good example for my little hellspawn. Or maybe I ought to just be as me as I can be, and encourage her to be as her as she can be. Like, within the bounds of not hurting anybody who doesn't deserve that shit.

At any rate, assuming Calverton started off with an even hundred thousand Undead, because even if the Mayor was right and they left ninety thousand odd unburied bodies behind, I could totally see ten thousand people wandering in and getting Undeaded before the local countryside got the message that Calverton was a no fly zone. No real idea on how many of those were Hero sorts; I've got to get with Mayor McCann and ask him about that. Maybe Hargreaves knows, and he's at least here in Calverton.

Of course, he's our local terrain expert, helping Swanson sort out how we can push the Undead back while holding an advancing perimeter. Listen to me, talking about shit like 'advancing perimeters' and 'terrain' like I know what I'm talking about. I mean, I even do, for a duBois certified version of not being completely clueless.

We've got fifteen thousand troops to hold that perimeter, but to keep them healthy we've got them in three eight hour shifts, and if they're not one of the five thousand guarding the perimeter, they're under a Mana Ward, which seems to protect against Miasma pretty well. Weyson tells me it works even better if the folks inside the Mana Ward do 'life affirming' stuff, so while they're not sleeping, we've been encouraging little mini Revels.

I mean, only so much you can do with rations and distilled water, but when the wind is right, I can hear them singing. I really hope the ones who are supposed to be sleeping can sleep with the noise. But that's our defenses, fifteen thousand guys in three shifts holding a perimeter that we're carefully keeping as defensible as possible. They're not the ones out there putting down Undead. That job fell to the Jarls, the Heroes, and the Trolls.

The Trolls didn't have nearly the hitting power of a Phileo Hero, but they made up for it by being nearly fuckin' impossible to stop. Everybody in the Army had standing orders to report for Smiting and Healing if they got injured, like even a fuckin' paper cut. That meant our Clergy were getting a fuckin' workout, but I had very little extra sympathy for Clergy since the Plague.

I mean, yeah, they came through in the end, and for the ones of little Gods who might have gotten their asses kicked and Clergy killed for helping me, I can't really blame them. But Artemis had two High Priestesses along for the ride, and if I saw them upright and not sweating their asses off from Smiting, I got cranky. So we had like twenty four hundred Undead Killers.

The Jarls wanted to just charge forward and kill as many Undead as they could, but with Swanson, Olga, and Hargreaves all telling them that not only was that fuckin' stupid, it would also piss me off, they chose the path of retaining their wedding tackle and nostrils and followed the fuckin' plan. Which was our guys moving in groups of just under a hundred; thirty mixed Hero types, fifty Trolls backing them up or holding the line as needed, doing two hour sweeps just beyond our perimeter.

We had thirty groups like that doing two sweeps a day each, with the rest of their time spent backing up the perimeter. So far they'd averaged one kill each per day, which had them all griping. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Of course, while those 'kills' were mostly random bastards who'd gotten back up after the Plague killed them, each group had also hit at least one fallen Hero type a day.

One fallen Hero against one of our Phileo Heroes wasn't a foregone conclusion, and I'd pit one of our Philly shit kickers against anybody from anywhere else, because as duBois implied back when we started our Combat Training with Squadball, fighting isn't about fair, and the dude who can heal, throw fire, and beat the shit out of you with weapons has as big an unfair advantage as Phileo Heroic could give them. So we wound up putting down about two thousand Undead a day.

Assuming we didn't hit some kind of break point where they all charged us and died in droves, or where the Miasma broke and they started dropping 'naturally', that meant fifty days. We were gonna be here until the fuckin' dog days of summer. I was gonna be sitting on this fuckin' mast on my fuckin' birthday. Which would therefore not include nearly as much fucking as I wanted it to. On the other hand? So far the one fatality we'd had was a non-combat related fatality.

Some poor bastard got a load of bricks dumped on him while they were reinforcing the wall at our end of sus alley. Undead, monsters, all this shit going on, and our one death was straight out of fuckin' Looney Tunes. I didn't even hear about it until two days later, or I'd have Revived the poor bastard just to laugh at his ass. Not sure what that says about me. But they gave him a nice pyre, and Hargreaves set aside a nice chunk of what had been looted so far for his family.

I think it got shipped back the day after his pyre, not sure. Thing is, so far that had been our only fatality. We were whittling away at the Undead, and because we weren't being testosterone laden assholes about it, they weren't doing shit in return.

By the time I got done juggling numbers, toasting the poor dead bastard who may still wind up getting the Alliance's version of OSHA named after him, if I can swing it, and maybe doing a little 'swaying in place' dancing along with Mimic and her Kraken, the sun peeked over the horizon. Back in Loki's cave I jostled everybody in the pile with me and said, "okay, everybody. Time to wake up."

Marie moved first, stretching from nose to tail, first bowing her back up, then shoving her front to the ground and her ass in the air.

"Gah! Marie!" She turned to me, smiling.

"What?"

"I've been covering for everybody for like two days, and everybody I'd feel okay getting busy with has been here sleeping! Then you go and do... that!" She snickered, then oozed over to me in that way cats do; when she got within lunging distance my face filled with Marie, and my mouth with her tongue. By the time I came up for air I'd missed both boot up sequences. I couldn't complain too much, though, what with Saffron waiting impatiently to prevent me from breathing the moment Marie let go of me.

Eventually she pulled away just long enough to say, "good morning, love." I think she'd intended to say more, but Marie tossed the Menace at me and stole Saffron for some serious face sucking.

"Good morning, Menace. You sleep well?" She nodded, smiling.

"Thweep to gwow!" She jumped back to stand in front of me, and I swear her eyes were almost even with mine. I mean, I was sitting on my ass on the floor, leaning against Loki's bed, but even accounting for that and her size shifting shenanigans, I still got kinda wowed by how big she'd gotten. Then she turned to me and, with that serious face I've only ever seen on little kids, put her hands on my cheeks.

"Mama tiyud."

"Yeah, I kinda am. Totally worth it to let you guys sleep your fill, though." I put my arms around her to give her a hug, and she got yoinked along with me when a hand big enough to one hand me lifted me off my ass and pulled me onto his lap.

"I do hope you haven't undone my work?" Loki prodded me a bit, opening my eyes and looking in, doing a minor bit of his massage thing.

"Have the Undead been passive then?" I shrugged.

"We're doing everything we can to take things slow and careful. Either they're all so close to mindless that it'll just be a long, slow, tedious job to do it without losing anybody, or they've got at least a few smart ones who are holding back and studying us, which means we'll all get powerfucked painfully at some point." He set me on my feet and ruffled my hair.

"Well. I'll see if there's anything I can do to perhaps lean things toward the former outcome. Or at least mitigate the latter."

"Thanks, Boss. You're the best." I hopped up and gave him a hug, then got the same from Sigyn after she sat up and stretched. She's the Boss' wife, and my stepmother, but by all that's holy her stretch was just as distracting as Marie's. I really needed to get laid before my brain shut down completely. Yeah, I know it had only been a couple days, but I am, and I know this is an archaic technical term, but bear with me, a lusty wench. Which is a hell of a lot better thing to be than a rusty wrench.

Even if both of them are frequently used to get nuts off. After the Menace and I got good morning hugs from Sigyn, I scooped Isnomi back up, hopped down to the floor, and said, "you guys ready to head home, get dressed, and get to work?" Saffron stood and wandered over.

"Are you sure, love?" I nodded.

"Yeah. I've kinda got a second wind at the moment, I think." She pulled me to her, putting her arms around my waist, letting Menace scramble onto her shoulders.

"I don't want you hurting yourself, Goof." I smiled.

"I know. I'll have Marie with me today, and she can get me back to you, or Loki, or maybe Sister Siobhan if something happens to me. Hell, with her along I only need to take care of the Mages, so long as she remembers to use the weapons I gave her instead of sticking her claws into the Miasma again. She had the grace to look sheepish.

"Angry." I nodded.

"Yeah. Yeah, I get that. Thing is?" I waited until her ears perked up.

"That was on purpose, I think. They want us mad. They want us to get impatient, aggressive, mad, whatever it takes to stick our shit out where they can slice it off. So to win? We have to be patient. We have to keep doing what we're doing, fight our fight instead of theirs, and be ready to change shit up the moment they catch on. But mostly, we've got to keep ourselves under control." Saffron pulled my chin down until I looked her in the eye.

"My Goof? My Attack Dog? My beautiful berserker boasting of her plans of careful, methodical advance? Who are you and what have you done with Tabitha?" I smiled, looked so deep into her eyes I thought I could see the steel of her Soul, and thought, I want to get back on schedule, and I have a few things I want to do after dark. But once those are done, I insist you and Marie tag team me until I lose consciousness.

"There she is. Shall we be about our day, then?"