Chương 94: A suicidal plan

My meditation goes up to 15 as I recover my mana. It takes less than fifteen minutes. While I'm taking the break, I decide to get some food. There isn't much available near the front line, but there are a few cooks who are doing what they can to make sure that we have good food with good buffs available to us. It's kind of like a barbecue being held a few dozen yards away from the battle lines. I run into Maize, who is also taking a break and eating.

"Hey Maize," I say.

"Taking a break from supply runs?"

"I don't know why I'm the one doing the supply runs," she says.

"My manipulation is only 45. My spatial bag isn't all that big."

"It's bigger than some," I say.

"And forty five cubic feet will hold a shit load of arrows."

"Yeah," she says.

"I know. Hey, I heard you guys did the impossible again. Nice job."

"We only took out about three hundred and fifty of them," I say.

"That's amazing," she says.

"How are you three so powerful?"

"We met a dragon while we were adventuring," I say. I may not want to tell her the whole truth, but that does go a long way towards explaining things. Maybe the dragon blessed us or something.

"A real dragon?" She asks. She lets out a whistle.

"That's pretty epic." I smile.

"Yeah, it was pretty amazing. They can help you train in some pretty spectacular ways."

"I may have to go looking for a dragon once this is over," she says. I take a steak in my hands, slapping two pieces of bread around it to make a rudimentary sandwich. Maize is already munching on one of her own.

"Do you think it's going to end soon?" I ask. She shrugs.

"I don't know. I'm not sure how much longer we can hold the line. Not here, but on the other front. Those dwarves are going to break through the line sooner or later."

"What happens then?" She takes another bite of her sandwich and regards me as she chews.

"I'm not entirely sure," she says.

"Maybe they pull back and negotiate before charging through and attacking our supplies. Maybe they just break through and we have a huge melee on our hands that decides the fate of the city. Maybe we surrender."

"I don't like the sound of that."

"Me either. But if they break through the wall, there's not much we can do. They'll have access to our fields and our food, and eventually to the great tree itself. I bet the higher ups would rather negotiate a surrender than risk the great tree being burned." It's sobering to think that even with the successes we've had, even with the possibility of defeating the orc army, we might still lose.

We could do everything right, be a force for good and just absolutely destroy the enemy winning our battle unequivocally, and still lose the war.

"That's frustrating," I say, taking another bite of my sandwich. Maize nods, chewing and swallowing in silence for a few seconds.

"I don't know how the system is going to handle it. Do we both win and lose if we win against the orcs but lose against the dwarves and elves? Or do we lose no matter what if we lose to one of the armies?"

"Will the higher ups negotiate a surrender, do you think?" She shrugs again.

"I don't know how they think," she says.

"Maybe they'll throw away lives until there is a clear and present threat against the great tree. Maybe they'll throw up their hands and surrender as soon as the wall is breached. We can't really know."

"Ours is not to reason why," I say, quoting that famous Napoleon saying. Well, the first half of it.

"Ours is but to do and die." She completes. But I'm not sure that's right. Is it do and die or is it do or die? I think it's or. But she's not entirely wrong. I'm probably going to die before the night is over. It's barely dusk now. But crawling across the field is something probably best done at night. Dark vision does give better vision at night than regular vision during the day, but it's a pretty short range. It only extends like fifty or sixty feet before everything is lost in the haze.

That means I can probably walk halfway across the field before I have to worry about anyone seeing me, once it's full dark. I won't walk, just in case someone has something that lets them see farther, but the point remains. It's better to go at night.

"So are you going to do another arrow run soon?" I ask. I finish enough of the sandwich to get the buff from eating the food. It adds 10% to my strength for the next two hours. That's going to be important.

"Yeah," she says.

"That's kind of the role I've fallen into. Not much in the way of experience, but the renown is nice. I should be able to get something pretty cool once all is said and done. Plus there's the war bonus."

"What's the war bonus?" I ask.

"I don't know exactly," she says.

"But people talk about it like it's a six digit experience bonus, even for the loser. We're all going to level up for this war."

"So if I die before the war is over, I'll still get a bunch of levels out of it," I say. A hundred thousand experience goes a long way when you're starting at level one.

"You think you're going to?" she asks.

"Even with all your hit points and that ridiculous Shell spell you all seem to have?"

"Do you not have it?" I ask. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. She shakes her head.

"Practically no one has it," she says.

"The stores don't stock it; you have to find it. And I've never met anyone who has it except the three of you and one other, in the Ebony Knighthood. Her name is Gigi." That's interesting. Shell is such a powerful spell, I kind of assumed that everyone had it. But to know that there's no way to get it other than finding it, and that no one found it other than the four of us, makes me think that there's something special with that spell.

Like that maybe the spell wasn't even supposed to be there, that the god of the tutorial was supposed to remove it or not let it get out or something like that. Only we got it, because the god wasn't there to stop us from getting it. Because the tutorial god was dead, we were able to get this absolutely broken spell.

"Yeah, I know Gigi," I say.

"She went through the tutorial with us. That's where we all got the spell."

"It's insane," Maize says.

"Especially for you guys. I mean, isn't twelve thousand hit points enough for you?"

"No," I say.

"I still almost died in the last assault. And I probably will die in the next one."

"And you're okay with that? You're okay with just losing thirty five levels like that?" I shrug.

"I'm trying to win a war," I say.

"I think you're crazy," she says. I shrug.

"That remains to be seen," I say. By the time it's full dark, Mab's Rage is off cooldown. The orcs have attacked twice during that time, but they've been quick probing assaults, trying to get close to the wall and chop at it. Neither assault made it all the way across the field before they withdrew. They're just keeping us on our toes at this point, making sure that we don't get a reprieve in the near constant attack. They're trying to wear us down. I meet up with Ash and El and we go over the plan one more time.

I'm going to sneak into the forest as far as I can, until I'm as surrounded by orcs as I possibly can be. Once I'm well behind enemy lines, they're going to come out into the field and start attacking, just the two of them. When the enemy starts to surround them, I'll activate Mab's Rage, then start fighting my way towards them. It's a good plan, but it's a suicidal one. I don't see any way that I'm going to survive, even with all my hit points, even with all the buffs.

I just don't think they're going to make it towards us.

"Look," Ash says, putting one hand on my shoulder and one hand on El's.

"We're going to go out there and prove that we're the three toughest players in the region." She looks at me, then looks at El, making hard eye contact as she does.

"We're going to slaughter orcs on a scale that they've never seen before. We're going to wipe out a huge swath of their army, and we're going to do it together. Even when you're crawling out there alone, Caleb, we'll be with you. We'll be on your side, ready to fight to get next to you."

"Is that a sex thing?" El asks. Ash gives her a glare and keeps talking.

"We're in this together, the three of us. We're going to get the Warlords a shit load of renown, and we're going to be heroes in this war. Even if we do get killed, we're going to take so many of them with us that they won't be able to recover. We're going to break this army. We're going to break the orcs, and make them think twice about entering into our forest every again." She smiles, her shark teeth making the smile all the more fierce.

"We aren't going into a battle," she says.

"We're engaging in a slaughter. We're going to kill so many of them that they won't have a choice but to retreat. We. The three of us. We're going to wipe them out, to let their corpses fertilize the forest. We're going to kill them all. Together, we're unstoppable, and we're going to go out there and prove it." I feel a tingle run through me, and check my notifications. Sure enough, I've got the boost to my hit points for four hours. That puts my hit points at 12, 830.

That's more hit points than the orc soldiers have. That's a massive Shell to protect me, too. Ash shakes my shoulder for encouragement, and I climb over the palisade. There are whispers telling me good luck, and I hear as many mutterings that I'm insane as I do saying that I'm a hero. Once I'm on the other side of the palisade, I start walking crouched over, sneaking my way across the field.

I move quickly at first, using Blur to help me get across the field, and trusting that it will make me hard to spot should there be anyone with the dark vision capable of seeing this far. About forty feet out from the wall, I drop down to all fours, crawling slowly across the field. I'm soon doing an elbow crawl among what used to be the underbrush of the forest. I'm not making much noise, just gliding along the loam as swiftly as I can manage, my ranger ability helping me go even faster.

I'm able to identify the orc scouts at the edge of the forest from about forty feet out. I'm closer to the forest than I am to the wall now, and I'm spotting more and more of the orcs. I don't think they see me yet. I keep crawling, angling myself so that I won't enter the forest too close to any of the scouts. I need to give myself every possible advantage here. If I can, I'm going to stay in stealth throughout the duration of Mab's Rage, and try to slowly sneak back to where Ash and El will be waiting for me.

I slide under the tree cover and press my back against a tree as I look around to see what I can of the orc army. The tents aren't set up near the edge of the clearing anymore. They've pulled back a few hundred feet, giving themselves a bit of a staging ground in the forest. Now they can put together their phalanx from the safety of tree cover, and can gather their forces before they start the assault across the open field. It's a sound tactical decision, but it kind of screws me.

It means that I'm going to have to go deep into the forest before I get to the mass of orcs, which means I'm going to have that much further to fight my way out of there. I start moving again, doubled over as I dart from tree to tree, trying to use as much cover as I can. I've got enough MP to keep Blur up for about an hour before my MP gets too low to use Mab's Rage. It's taken me fifteen minutes to get here, so I've got a good forty five before I have to come out of Blur.

Doing that will leave me with practically no mana, which will be a problem as far as Shell is concerned, so I want to move a little bit faster than that. If I can get into the army with half an hour remaining, that would be good. I wish I had something that let me travel from tree to tree. Something that would allow me to leap from one tree to the next would let me quickly get among the army, and give me somewhere relatively safe to cast Mab's Rage from.

Maybe I could even shoot down from there and take a few orcs out as they try to take me down. Would they chop down the tree once they find me, or would they try to climb up and throw me out of the tree? Maybe one first, then the other. Maybe they'd try to light the tree on fire. But that might lead to a forest fire. Which they might not be terribly opposed to. The orc numbers are getting thicker, and I'm forced to slow down even more as I avoid the groups of them.

They seem to be organizing for another assault, with the wounded heading back to camp to heal up or to be healed, and fresh troops coming together and taking up the positions to continue with the strategy they've been trying. I don't know why they keep going with that strategy; it doesn't work. But they're determined to get a phalanx up to the wall. Maybe if they send out enough of them at once, one of them will make it through. But I don't know if they have the shields necessary for something like that.

I don't know what kind of supplies they have. I see the first tent, and see that I'm down about two thousand MP from Blur. This is as good a spot as any, I suppose. I decide to climb a tree, slipping up the bark to the first few branches, then pulling myself higher. It will reduce the area of my spell by a little bit, but not enough to really matter all that much. I'm in, I send to Ash. Starting the spell in thirty seconds. I start counting. I'm not using Blur anymore.

Thankfully, my sneak has increased to 40, so with my ring that's 44, and that's assuming anyone looks up the tree. I'm not invisible, but I'm confident that I'm well hidden. I count down from thirty, hoping that I'll see some movement as the orcs react to Ash and El being out in the field. Maybe I'll give it more than thirty seconds. I have to make sure that as many of them are included in the radius as possible. This is going to be one hell of an ice storm.