The Fell War - Chapter 9 (Patreon)

They came, finally, about a week after agreeing to meet in Spade. They came by boat, smaller ones that those sent to rescue the players on Ahmar, but impressive ones none the less. Hadi’s friends led the way, the samurai Makoto with the delegation from Diamond, and Einmora with the delegation from Clover. Each had brought half a dozen delegates, all of them high leveled and well known among the more experienced players.

“Welcome, all of you,” Alfre greeted them at the dock. “Thank you for coming. I can’t begin to express the gravity of the situation, but I think you all recognize that.”

“Wait a moment,” one of the delegates from Diamond interrupted. They were a tall, elven woman in glittering, silvery-white armor, her hair tied back in a cascade of red-gold braids. “Who is this? She’s only level fifty-six!”

Alfre stepped forward, drawing herself up to full height. Beira growled beside her, baring her teeth at the elven woman. “My name is Alfre, I lead the forces in Spade.”

“What?” another player, a kitsune man in ornate leather armor with a belt full of daggers, shout in disbelief. “No way am I following some near-noob into war against Granato. No way. I’m out of here.”

“You will stay where you are, Briar Fox, if you know what’s good for you,” Einmora growled, hand going to the handle of the axe by her side.

Briar Fox turned to snarl at her, tail twitching wildly beneath his dark brown cloak. “Are you threatening me, dwarf?”

Einmora’s grip on her axe tightened. “I will not have our chances of victory jeopardized by your prejudices. If it wasn’t for this woman and her companions, my people would still be wandering about Ahmar, unable to find shelter. Because of her and Canus, we had a place to hide until we could be rescued. Because of her and Maldrom and Ludovico, you lot can travel the seas with ease. Look at her! She’s got a direwolf companion! She wears the Cloak of Night’s Shadow! Clearly the gods favor her. Now, you will be a good boy and listen to what she has to say. You will all listen to what she has to say!”

Briar Fox and the elven woman turned away in shame, their eyes falling to the sea-worn wood of the dock.

Alfre was near speechless. “Thank you, Einmora. I cannot tell you what your faith means to me.”

Einmora turned to her with a careless shrug. “All I know is that you’re the one who wants to fight to get our city back. Which means you have my support. And Makoto’s too, probably.”

Makoto nodded, her darks eyes shining.

Alfre bounced excited on the balls of her feet. “Then perhaps we should take this somewhere better equipped for this kind of conversation. Come on, we have a lot to talk about.”

Alfre and company led them through the city, pausing often as players from Heart rushed out to greet Einmora and Makoto. The two of them seemed well known and well loved. Alfre was grateful to have them and Hadi on her side. Convincing the rest of the Heart Fell to go to war would be easy with them speaking on her behalf.

Abital and Canus were waiting for them when they arrived at the council room. Briar Fox, the elven woman, and several other guild masters stumbled back in shock upon seeing them.

Canus grinned wolfishly at Alfre as she strode into the room without flinching. “Quite the entourage you got there, snowbird.”

“Be nice, wolf blood, we need to convince them to ally with us in the war,” Abital cautioned.

“What the actual hell?” the elven woman shouted. “Why are they here?”

“Calm down, Selphie,” June soothed. “They’re friends. Well, friends of Alfre’s.”

“Friends?” a siren man from Clover echoed. “How the hell do you make friends with a Wonderlander god?”

“By helping one get revenge on a man who skinned a direwolf and sitting down and telling the other a nice story,” Alfre summarized with a wicked grin. “Now sit down, and call yourselves. We have more important things to talk about then whatever relationship I have with Canus and Abital.”

Cautiously, the delegations from Clover and Diamond took seats around the table, the more paranoid ones refusing to take their eyes off of Canus and Abital. Abital remained unperturbed by this, his face impassive, while Canus grinned roguishly at those who he caught staring.

Alfre waited until everyone was seated at the table, the attendees having split themselves naturally by which city they hailed from. Hadi, Einmora, and Makoto were joined by two other guild masters from Heart, those who had arrived in Spade along with the second and third waves of refugees. The table was fairly evenly split, save for Spade, which had one more representative – Ran, representing his sister and the Crystal Moon Kingdom.

“Alright, I’d rather not beat around the bush or get caught up in formalities,” Alfre said, her voice echoing in the chamber. “Players from the city of Heart have turned against their fellow players and sided with Granato. In this, they have razed the city’s outer districts and driven the vast majority of their people out. There are still four thousand seven hundred non-aggressors trapped in the city. We are uncertain how many members of the Granato Empire are within the city walls, but the likelihood is that they vastly outnumber the Fell. The only solution I can think of is to drive the Granato out, along with their pet Fell, if possible. To do that, we’d have to go to war.”

“Is there no way we can negotiate with them?” a human monk from Clover asked cautiously.

“There is nothing they want from us,” Makoto argued. “Save only for our elimination from the continent of Ahmar. And I refuse to abandon my home.”

“What about the other Fell?” the elven woman from before, Selphie, suggested. “Surely we can negotiate with them.”

“Have you actually spoken with any of the Fell when they attacked your rescue operations?” Alfre asked.

Selphie shook her head.

“They don’t realize that they’ve done anything wrong,” she explained. “They view the whole thing as a quest. They still think of this world in terms of a game. They don’t understand how traumatizing this whole thing is. They just know they’re getting paid, and they’re getting quests to put in their logs. They need to be taught just how real this place is.”

“What, by killing them?” Briar Fox scoffed, folding his arms over his chest. “They won’t actually die you know, it’s hard to teach them a lesson when there’s no actual consequences.”

“We could make there be consequences,” Atticus interjected. “We could trap them in the cathedral. You can’t teleport out of a cathedral.”

“That’d only work for so long,” Einmora said, a hand rubbing at her thick braids. “And what happens when one of our forces die? Wouldn’t they end up trapped in the cathedral as well?”

“No, they wouldn’t!” June said excitedly. “They’d end up back in their home city cathedral! They wouldn’t end up trapped at all.”

“Well, that’s good,” a siren from Diamond agreed. “But what do we do with them after? Throw them in jail?”

“I mean, we could?” Maldrom said with a shrug. “We could designate a build to be a jail. Set door privileges to a select few. It could work.”

“More than that, though, they need to be forced to help rebuild the city,” Hadi insisted. “They need to take responsibility for the damage they’ve done.”

“I agree with you, Hadi,” Alfre said soothingly. “But before we figure out punishments, we have to defeat them first.”

“Now wait a minute,” Selphie interrupted. “We never actually agreed we were going to war.”

“Have we not?” Alfre questioned, her tone edging on sarcastic. “Very well. All those in favor of kicking some ass, say ‘aye’.”

There was a deafening chorus of ‘aye.’ Alfre smirked.

“All those against?”

Silence. Alfre’s smirk grew.

“Excellent, then we are in agreement. Now, we should probably talk about what exactly it is we’re going to do.”

“There are two points we have to be aware of,” Ran said, leaning over the map that took up the majority of the table. He set two black castle chess pieces on the map. “That’s the City of Heart, and the capital of the Granato Empire – Rubino. If we take down the Emperor in the capital as well as seize control of the city, we’ve basically won the war.”

“Which means we basically have to split our forces in two,” Briar Fox summarized. “Which isn’t exactly ideal.”

“There are thousands of us against three hundred Fell in Heart,” Spica said, hands steepled before her in a way that made her look like an evil mastermind. “We should focus on Heart first. After that, if need be, we can march on Rubino…hopefully with some reinforcements from those non-aggressors still holed up in the city.”

“And if Granato marches on us instead?” Hunter demanded.

“The two innermost districts have walls three meters thick,” Makoto explained. “If need be, we can evacuate the noncombatants there and use home field advantage to wipe out the advancing forces.”

“Or – ” Atticus held up his hand as an idea came to him. “We can leave a smaller force to defend the two districts while a larger force goes to invade Rubino.”

“Try the other way around,” Spica suggested. “Leave the main force in Heart to defend it, specifically leave behind the knights, the hunters, gunners, and a good majority of your healers. The heavy hitters and the ones that can take a hit. The force the invades Rubino should be stealthy – assasins, bards, monks, a few magicians.” Her too-blue eyes glanced Alfre’s way. “And any Element Blades that we might happen to have.”

Alfre wasn’t entirely sure there were any other element blades. There weren’t any in Spade; that was for sure. She probably would have run into them by now…or Doremi would have introduced them. But Spica obviously thought Alfre would be leading the actual invasion force into Rubino.

Eyes locked onto Alfre, jaws falling open at the realization of what she was.

“So that’s what she is,” Briar Fox whispered.

“Am I really that rare?” Alfre muttered aloud.

“Alfre, you won the expansion pack – with an early access code, mind you – before anyone else had the chance to install it,” Elias reminded her. “And when it went live, that’s when we all got dropped here. No one had the time to make a new character to try out the element blade class.”

Alfre blinked owlishly at the realization. “Oh…”

“What about reclassing?” Ludovico queried. “Surely someone has reclassed into an element blade.”

Selphie shook her head. “Reclassing is expensive, and resets your level back down to one. No one in their right mind would have reclassed right after the Incident. That’d be suicide.”

“That said,” Einmora interrupted, “it’d be hard for us to tell who is or isn’t an element blade without seeing them in action. It’s not like unusually colored hair is all that unusual around here. We could have seen them in passing without realizing it.”

A heavy silence settled over the table, many of the delegates deep in thought. Makoto’s eyes narrowed in thought, possibly realizing something.

“You know,” she said slowly, “there were rumors about a Fell running about with a blazing sword the night Granato attacked.”

“Fight against the Granato or with them?” Atticus asked carefully.

Makoto’s face paled. “With.”

Canus leaned against the back of Alfre’s seat to whisper in her ear. “Sounds like you’ve found yourself a rival, snowbird.”

“Are blazing swords really that rare?” Alfre asked. “Surely just because their sword was on fire doesn’t mean they were an element blade. Hell, I’m pretty sure Atticus has some kind of fire sword.”

“No, this was different,” Makoto insisted. “It was like their whole body was on fire, they said. It was like their very essence was fire.”

Elias glanced at Alfre. “Like how you exude cold when you get angry.”

Alfre frowned. “If they are an element blade, then I’ll deal with it.”

“You’re insane,” Briar Fox snapped. “What could someone as low level as you do against a living embodiment of fire?”

Alfre eyed the kitsune, letting her winter leak into the air. Frost crawled along the floor and up the walls, the ambient temperature of the room dropping several degrees. She smiled, all teeth and warning.

“I’ll freeze them. After all, summer always gives itself over to winter eventually.”