Broken System Ch. 100-105 (Patreon)

Ch. 100 - It’s a Trap

The first thing that Matt did when they were fully reunified was to divide their fledgling army into manageable units. Skirmishers and scouts were divided into self-organizing squads, and since they had no real cavalry to speak of, they were given what few horses the army had so that they could scout the nearby targets that the centaurs pointed out to them. 

They were not to engage if they could help it, of course. With ten to fifteen warriors, each group was large enough to defend itself but not so large that they’d be encouraged to take more risks than they should. Once all thirteen squads were dispatched in every westerly direction to find the best way forward, the rest of the army was split into three parts: warriors, archers, and healers. 

Those who were too badly injured to fight were also included in the last category. This, unfortunately, made it the second-largest group. They’d be sitting the battles out for obvious reasons, but they’d be saving lives, and that was more important than taking them. 

Benjamin could barely keep up with his friend as he rushed around the camp, shouting orders and turning the pieces of the armies that they had left into something that resembled order. Apparently, Matt had learned a lot about war from the stone children while Benjamin had been busy building weapons. Even after all that was done, his friend went still further to divide those groups into units and cohorts to make what they had as flexible as possible. 

“Our resources are diminishing too quickly to squander them,” he told one of his lieutenants when they asked if all this was necessary. “Every person we lose is one we might never get back, so from now on, we fight with teamwork and strategy as much as spells. ”

Benjamin didn’t disagree with any of it. He didn’t have any idea how he could coordinate squad-level spells yet, but he felt like group buffs wouldn’t be impossible. He just had to devote some time to it. 

Teamwork or not, though, more than half of these people weren’t zealots. They just wanted to push back the enemy long enough to have a nice, peaceful life or even find their way home. Emma and those like her who sought revenge at any cost were in the minority, and because of that, it was easy to make sure that none of them ended up in their scouting divisions. 

She probably could have snuck into one of the plantations or one of the larger forces moving around the battlefield and single-handedly killed the Summoner Lord before escaping into the night, Benjamin thought. Even if that was true, though, there was no way Matt would risk losing her like that. 

“You know, now that you’ve split everyone up, we’ve only got a thousand warriors worth the name on the front lines,” Emma told her man that night when the four of them were alone by their fire. “It won’t be hard for the Summoners to overwhelm that practically as soon as they pin us down.”

“Then we won't let them pin us down,” Matt said confidently. “There are plenty of targets. We’ll just hit the one they aren’t expecting.”

“Yeah, well, since we’ve been doing that for pretty much the whole time now, there’s pretty much no way they’ll see that coming, right?” she laughed. 

“You know - she might be crazy sometimes, but she’s got a point,” Raja chimed in. “So what does that mean? We attack their most heavily armed target because they won’t be expecting it?”

“If we start thinking everything is a trap, then we’ll be second-guessing ourselves at every turn and jumping at shadows,” Matt answered firmly. “You can’t win a war like that. You have to take the best option, and sometimes, that won’t turn out the way you hoped. Hopefully, with Benji’s new artillery mode, we can defeat some of these strongholds before they even get the chance to fight back.”

“Yeah, or maybe we can all die tragically when they get wise to that, too,” Emma snarked as she poked the fire. They were all sitting around with sticks. “Not that I mind dying, you know; I just want to kill that motherfucker Lord Jarris first.”

“No one’s dying this time,” Matt sighed. “Not you, and certainly not Benji. He’s died too many fucking times already.”

Everyone laughed at that, even Benjamin, but that didn’t settle the issue. Emma simply refused to drop the glass half-empty outlook, and the three of them argued about whether or not they were going to die for some time after that. Benjamin mostly stayed out of it. Instead, he focused on what Emma had said. That’s pretty much what we’ve been doing for the whole time now.

She was right. She was undeniably right, and even after they slept and got to work on continuing to organize their army and work on other small tasks like making more arrows or hunting for additional foodstuffs, it never quite left his mind. 

While he pondered what sort of spells he could squeeze into obsidian arrowheads that cost less than two mana, he thought about it. While he and Matt discussed where his turtle howdah would be amidst the overall array of forces, he thought about it. He just couldn’t escape the biting clarity of her words. 

Still, despite that persistent distraction, the next day and a half were productive ones. Thirty-six hours after their departure, the scouts started trickling in, one group at a time. None of them had experienced any problems as they cut through the sea of grass. 

One larger unit of several hundred men had been found on a road moving between two plantations, but on the whole, every group told the same story. Every target within reach was basically an armed camp that was already bracing for impact with both extra guards as well as patrols that made it difficult to approach closer than a couple miles from the stubby walls that surrounded each outpost.

That trend kept up until two of the last units to return reported one that wasn’t. It was exactly the sort of thing that Emma had predicted, and after hearing what the scouts had to say about how there were barely any guards, almost everyone agreed that it was a trap. 

Benjamin was honestly much more surprised that all thirteen groups had made it back than that they’d found a trap. As far as he was concerned, that was a given, and while everyone else discussed it, he rifled through the returning scout’s systems to make sure they didn’t have any double agents that might have met a Summoner Lord while they were out in the field and been convinced not to remember it.

Matt didn’t try to argue that. Reluctantly after that, the debate became about whether to attack one of the entrenched areas or bypass the whole region and look for something less well-defended further away from here. 

Some argued that since they might well be the last army based upon what the centaurs had told them, they should assume it was going to be like this everywhere, while others argued that they shouldn’t throw lives away by attacking where they were expected. It became heated, and when Matt finally asked Benjamin for his advice, he stunned everyone. 

“I think we should fall into their trap,” he told them in an even voice. Several people, including Emma, looked at him like they’d misheard him, and when he repeated himself, most everyone switched to looking at him like he was crazy instead.

“At every phase in this war, we have made the same mistake: we have found a tactic that worked, and we have used it over and over until our enemy figured it out before we switched to something new,” Benjamin said finally. “First, we stole their soldiers, then we engaged in hit-and-run tactics, and now… well, they are sure this is what we will do next. They expect us to attack here at Plantation 87, which makes that our best choice to make it their most painful loss since Arden.”

“How so?” Matt asked, not following him. 

“Because the Rhulvinar are almost as predictable as we are,” Benjamin said as he cast a minor illusion to create a map of the region around the plantation they were discussing as it had been described by the scouts. 

“I would bet any amount of money that as soon as we strike this spot, gates from all the other plantations are going to open up and pour out reinforcements to surround and trap us,” Benjamin said. With a wave of his hand, he placed his hypothetical army on the board as a series of red blocks with smaller blocks or archers and healers behind them. Then, in a flash, he made three more Rhulvinarian armies appear all around them, pinning them in place. “The plantation will be the anvil, and the armies will be the hammer, and they will crush us between them with all manner of insane demons. I’m sure of it.”

“If you’re so sure of that, then why in the name of the Thrones would we ever want to be there?” One of the older men asked. Benjamin thought his name might be Ryan or Rubin. 

“Yeah, I mean, I’m with him on this, Benji,” Emma said, "the whole point of a trap is that once you see it, you don’t step in it.”

“Ah, but any good move has a counter move,” he continued. “The beacon in the Plantation will draw them into it if they approach within a couple miles. So they will open rifts further out than that, and worse for them, we can build a second and third beacon here to force their reinforcements to appear in the spot of our choosing. If we play our cards right, we can turn their trap into an entirely different trap.”

“Well, won’t we still be trapped between two forces rather than three or four?” Raja asked, unable to resist repeating that word one more time. 

“Yes and no,” Matt said, interrupting Benjamin now that he saw where his friend was going. Benjamin might be pretty bright, but when it came to tactics, his friend had him beat by miles. Now that Benjamin had inspired Matt, the man had taken the ball and was running with it. “The anvil in this metaphor is meant to be a static, defensive force. We don’t need to fight them, at least not at first. All we need to do is get them to sound the alarm and then leave them alone to fight whoever comes running.”

“In theory, that could work Raja said excitedly, but we’d still have to deal with at least one or two groups of ambushers. The Rhulvinairans are little bitches, but there’s an awful lot of them.”

“Their resources are finite, just like ours,” Benjamin said. “If we get to choose where they stand and face us, and we can make that ground into a killing field, then when we want thousands of them to come through those rifts. We want whole armies to face us just so we can crush them.”    

“Well, maybe just one army the first time,” Matt said, cracking a smile for the first time during the whole war council. “After that, well, we’ll see how it goes.”

There was a lot to be decided after that, of course, but as far as he was concerned, it had been decided. Go big or go home, and since going home still wasn’t an option, they were going to have to go big.

Ch. 101 - A Question of Timing

They left spotters at all the other nearby Plantations and runners halfway between there and the place where they decided to set up their ambush, five miles from Plantation 87. Days of deliberation had gone into this plan, but even after, that days of preparation were still needed before they pulled the trigger and bet it all on his crazy idea.

Do we really need to burn this specific hellhole down to the ground? He asked himself repeatedly. No. There were lots of places with greater human suffering than this, but this was a spot where they could inflict a lot of pain on an overconfident enemy. 

As soon as the fighting started, the Rhulvinarians were going to drop on top of their raggedy army like the vengeful hand of God, but Benjamin doubted it was going to play out quite the way that the summoners hoped it would. Especially not since he and his friends were being so careful in their preparations. 

They worked only at night, without light of any kind, as they built their beacon, though Benjamin wasn’t going to finalize it until just before the battle was started, lest someone use it a little early by accident. After that, they put their best archers on horseback and practiced well over the horizon. 

Benjamin couldn’t bring his war turtle close enough to the city to help them with that part, but he could recode some of their abilities so that they all had the same impact spell that Raja did. Their part of the plan was a simple one: ride just close enough to the Plantation to bombard them with explosive arrows to raise the alarm, keep moving to avoid the inevitable counter-attack, and retreat when the reinforcements arrived. 

“I want to fight, man,” Raja protested that last part since he would be leading that contingent of fifty warriors. A strategic retreat there was necessary, though, because they’d be entirely cut off from the main body of the force. They were a distraction and nothing more. 

The rest of the army would be hidden just behind the crest of the nearby hills a few hundred yards from the city, ready to unleash hell at the signal. Of course, no one but Matt and his officers knew what that signal was going to be. Not even the men who had helped Benjamin bury the melon-sized ruby at the center of the beacon had any idea what it was. 

In the end, working out a timer had been the most difficult part. The solution that Benjamin eventually worked out was pretty basic. In fact, it was so basic he was embarrassed of it. His timing circuit turned out to be a 99% full bomb that would go off catastrophically if only 5 or 10 more mana were added to it, and when the go signal came, a small secondary crystal with a simple enchantment that drained its own mana to slowly fill up the primary crystal. 

Matt would have preferred some sort of remote control device. Honestly, Benjamin would have, too, but he hadn’t quite worked out the protocols for that yet. Benjamin also planted a few bronze packet sniffers around the periphery of the beacon, near landmarks he hoped would survive the violence ahead, so hopefully, they’d intercept some of the mage’s spell traffic and give him a few ideas on how to work out better remote protocols in the future. 

If they survived this, he reminded himself. 

As the appointed hour grew closer, and all was in readiness, Benjamin could feel the tension among the men in everything, from the way they gripped their weapons to the way that they spoke in tight, clipped sentences. Some seemed eager for the battle, but most were only a few steps from terror and had no idea what it was they were about to unleash. 

He felt their pain, but more so. Once the battle started, he would be back behind the warriors amidst the healers to better hide his giant mount in the tall grasses and have access to a ready pool of mana should he have the opportunity to use it. Right now, though, he was waiting on the sound of thunderous hooves to plant his timing crystal, activate the beacon, and then run like hell before either the stone managed to get enough energy to explode or a violent emerald rift opened up full of black-eyed men bent on murder. 

He didn’t have to wait long. At a single whistle, the riders were off, and as soon as Benjamin saw Raja give him a mocking salute as he rode by, Benjamin was running toward the center of his bear trap. Cognizant that if he fucked this up, he’d blow himself to hamburger before he even knew what had happened, he worked quickly but precisely and buried his timing fuse before he placed the final few stones in the beacon and the cast the enchantments for both from batch files he’d written and reviewed earlier. 

Then, he was running back up the hill toward his own men. Well, not directly. He didn’t want to give away their position, so he took a long, circuitous path to get there. He didn’t reach his own lines before the sound of distant explosions, but he did reach his focus with seconds to spare before the first pillar of green flame lit up the sky on the far side of the hill. 

That was followed by another and another in quick succession. Benjamin wondered just how fucked they were for the Rhulvinarians to send in three separate units like that. They really did plan on surrounding us, he thought, realizing how devastating this trap would have been to accidentally fall into. 

Even as he grappled with that, though, he could hear the sound of orders being shouted from hundreds of yards away, and twice, he saw giant creatures manifest themselves before they started marching toward the troublesome cavalry that was still firing their explosive spells. 

Raja should have been turning and running already. Benjamin knew that, but he also knew his friend, and there was no way that the man was going to give up when he had miles of buffer between him and danger. He was going to cut it down to the wire. 

As the minutes ticked by, though, nothing happened. Nothing obvious, at least. Benjamin waited on pins and needles for whatever was going to happen. Since keeping track of time like this was basically impossible, in his mind, it was a race. Either the Summoner Lords and their creatures were going to find the army hidden in the tall grass only a few hundred yards from them, or his bomb was going to go off, and the longer the latter didn’t happen, the more certain he was that the former would. 

It was only when part of him had the sick feeling that he’d fucked something up and the gemstone would never go off that it finally detonated. Benjamin was almost a quarter mile from the blast, but he felt it as much as he saw it as the sky suddenly lit up with a crimson so bright that for a few seconds, everything was whited out over the crest of the hill. 

That was when everyone charged forward. There were no battle cries, nor were there orders to advance. Benjamin didn’t need those, though. He could see it in the way the grass sea weaved and churned erratically. He moved forward as well, though he only intended on taking his turtle far enough that he could look out over the battlefield and contribute at the edges of things. 

By the time he got there, he’d received a few system alerts that people had died thanks to his new party interface, but he was hardly expecting a bloodbath. Benjamin was wrong about that, at least. 

The beacon that they’d built had become a crater as the result of the explosion, and though there were few bodies inside the radius, it had been turned into a literal bloodbath. Shrapnel had scythed down the grass for a hundred yards in every direction, and he was fairly certain that the pieces and parts of the enemy soldiers went out even further than that. 

He wasn’t sure exactly how strong the bombs he was making were, but based on the results here, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the thing had been the equivalent of a couple of tons of TNT. It had been almost as effective as it was barbaric, and for almost a minute, he could do nothing but stare as his men fought the few remaining enemy soldiers in calf-deep blood. 

Once he snapped out of it, he forced himself to participate, but the most he could do was cast triage a few times at a few severely wounded people on his side. More than that was simply beyond him. He’d done all the killing he was going to do for the night as far as he was concerned. 

After the last man was dead, and they were making an orderly withdrawal so they could meet with their scouts and determine which Plantations had been bled dry of defenders to support this ambush, his men rejoiced. Benjamin didn’t, though. As happy as he was that less than ten people on their side had died, he simply didn’t have it in him to celebrate the instantaneous death and dismemberment of hundreds of people like that. 

Instead, he smiled blandly at those who insisted on congratulating him and made his way to collect the data recorders he’d planted so he could try to make sense of everything that had happened in the minutes leading up to the explosion. 

Once he had those, he sat in silence on his turtle and tried not to think about it as they moved south. The centaurs crowed, and men and women cheered. However, the celebratory mood never quite reached him up on his perch, not even when Raja climbed up and joined him. 

“You okay, man?” his friend asked. “You look kinda pale.”

“Never better,” Benjamin lied. “Just, ummm, going over the data in these packet sniffers and data traps to see if I can learn any new tricks.”

That was what he should have been doing, of course, but he couldn’t really get that bloody battlefield out of his mind. Even as he tried to focus on Raja, he could smell that coppery scent and—

“I said, you need to calm down, man,” his friend said as he patted Benjamin on the back, bringing him back to reality. “Do you know where I was when that bomb went off?”

“Does it matter?” Benjamin asked, confused about what it was he missed. 

“Not to me, but it will to you,” Raja laughed. 

“We might have stayed a little longer than we were supposed to. I mean, what could go wrong, right? We had horses, and they… well, anyway. The point is I didn’t think anything could catch us,” he laughed. “Boy, was I wrong. Have you ever been chased by a thirty-foot-tall cyclops? I don’t recommend it.”

“Was it getting close?” Benjamin asked, not sure where it was going. 

“Not close enough to eat us or anything, but close enough that the beam it fired from its FREAKING EYE was seconds from cooking every last one of us,” he said, smiling more than any man should have when saying something like that. “Every one of us was about to bite it, and then your bomb went off.”

“And it got the cyclops?” Benjamin guessed. 

“Of course, it didn’t get the Cyclops,” Raja said, rolling his eyes. “Aren’t you even paying attention? We were like 2 miles away from that blast. The cyclops wasn’t much closer. Its master was, though. It was right at ground zero, and as soon as you detonated it, it vanished in a puff of smoke. The details don’t matter, Benji; what matters is all the people you saved tonight.”

“Yeah, but—” he tried to respond. 

“But fucking nothing, man. I saw the hole and the bodies. Well, the pieces of them, and yeah, it was gruesome,” Raja answered, shaking his head. “But it was quick, and it was clean, and that’s all you can ask for. It’s us or them, and… It’s not like I expect you to enjoy killing like Matt or even Emma, but you’ve got to stop letting it get to you like this, man. We’re counting on you.”

That woke Benjamin up as much as any slap to the face would have. They’re counting on me. He repeated to himself. The two of them talked about other things after that, but that was what stuck with him the rest of the night.  

Ch. 102 - Blitzkrieg 

Usually, drunken revelry followed in the wake of these sorts of victories, that didn’t happen after this battle. Instead, the jubilation slowly died down to nothing by morning, and it was only when the sun was fully above the horizon that they made camp a safe distance from the battle. It wasn’t until he was trying to sleep that Benjamin realized that was because, in the past, victory was synonymous with freeing hundreds of people from the mental chains that bound them. 

Now, the men who fought with them still celebrated the victories, but it was no longer a celebration of life. Instead, it was all about death. That was especially clear in the morning as he rose and stretched. Even though they’d marched ten miles that night, Benjamin could see the veritable storm of crows and vultures circling above the battlefield on the horizon. 

That grisly reminder was enough to despoil an otherwise nice day as they ate and discussed. Even this rest wouldn’t last for long, though. Not when their men were still hardly touched by violence. 

The news of what they’d done would travel fast, and forces would mobilize to try to thwart or counteract them. As much as Benjamin would love to spend weeks poring through his stolen data, looking for new twists and turns amidst the noise, he knew he wasn’t likely to get it.

Now that they’d shown the Rhulvinairans a new trick, their enemy would be forced to escalate and adapt as they always had. That meant they needed to press their advantage. Everyone agreed on that. 

Their army left Plantation 87 alone since it had been so thoroughly prepared for an attack. Instead, after consulting with their scouts about who looked short-handed, they decided to attack 86 next and follow that up with 89 the following night since it was close by. Both locations suddenly looked to be very empty after their black-eyed warriors had tried to surround Benjamin’s army and failed so spectacularly.

Matt wanted to focus on attacks from surprising directions and demanded that Benjamin spend the day working on items that would give his skirmishers the means to approach the walls without being spotted. Raja, on the other hand, insisted they focus everything on artillery and launch what amounted to a missile barrage with magical projectiles. 

Benjamin didn’t have the time to design and make a hundred cloaks of invisibility, so he did the next best thing and created a new large-scale spell that would disguise the main body of the army while his skirmishers triggered alarms in places that would ensure the enemy was decidedly off balance for the remainder of the fight. That would let Benjamin get a little closer to the fighting that he had previously, but the paper-thin illusion of empty grasslands would do nothing to protect him if the arrows and the spells started flying. 

Mirage: (5 mana/minute) Create a simple large-scale illusion that is up to 500 square yards, projected along a single dimension. 

Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. By the time the enemy forces had moved entirely over the north wall to defend against the attack that they thought was coming, the main thrust of their assault along the southern portion was entirely abandoned. Other than a brief moment where the Summoner Lord manifested a dozen swirling flame creatures, it was a complete slaughter, and even he didn’t last long. 

Benjamin didn’t actually see it happen, but according to those who bore the burns from that particular combat, the man hadn’t lasted for ten seconds once he’d shown himself. Apparently, Emma had waited at the top of the tallest structure for the first mage to reveal himself, and as soon as he did, she’d struck like an avenging angel and taken his head, snuffing out all of his warriors in an instant. 

He’d spent the battle watching a forest of health bars on his extremely clunky interface, trying to save lives where he could. Mostly, this involved casting Triage or Frontline as soon as he saw someone get injured and hoping that his magic was faster than the enemy's attack. 

It was a boring, but vital rhythm that was saving lives, and even though he felt like he was doing nothing but tapping on colored lights, he knew he was having more impact than any one person swinging a sword. Still, he couldn’t help but feel that he was shirking his responsibilities by staying so far back from the heat of the battle. 

By the end, he could see that his 2314 warriors linked to his encrypted, extended network had become 2291 warriors despite his best efforts to save everyone. He could also see that though they’d started with over two million collective mana, the army had ended the fight just under a million, thanks to all the abilities that everyone had used.

God, this shit is brutal, he thought, rubbing his eyes as he paged through the log files on his screen. Devastation. Decapitating Strike. Obliteration. Touch of Death. Impact. Flurry of Blows. Enrage. 

It wasn’t even information he wasted the limited bandwidth of his wide area network on. Just getting simple data like health and mana to refresh in near real-time was taking up pretty much all of that bandwidth until he could code something more elegant. These were just the commands that were being radiated into the air by the spells and spell-like abilities now that he knew what to look for. It was just page after page of brutality. He didn’t even know what some of the abilities he was seeing did beyond killing their opponents in very painful ways. 

As the attack winded down and the looting began, Benjamin paged through the data, looking for the Summoner’s spell, and then he saved the data on that one. He had no wish to Summon Inferno Swarm, but he still had so little idea of how summoning magic worked that he wanted to dissect it whenever they had downtime. The command required a lot more runes than spells that used a similar amount of mana, but beyond that, it was fairly inscrutable. 

Because of how many spells he cast, his focus was warm to the touch before the battle ended, but it wasn’t so hot that it had started to boil the water it was filled with or release any steam. Benjamin hoped that would be just as true in future battles, but he didn’t consider that as likely. 

“You know, I was thinking,” Raja told him when he stopped by to deliver the mage’s soul amulet once he was done picking over the battlefield. “Why not put that illusion to use once you’re done with it?”

“Because if I cancel the spell, I can better focus on all the healing that—” Benjamin started to answer.  

“Yeah, I mean, I know that,” his friend interrupted. “I’m not suggesting that you let anyone bleed out or anything, but like… dude, you could use that thing to make it look like we’d summoned Godzilla or something!”

“What’s a Godzilla?” Benjamin asked. 

“It’s a giant fire-breathing iguana that both protects and destroys Japan on a regular basis,” his friends said in a way that was so deadpan that, for a moment, Benjamin thought he was serious. 

He considered asking more about that before he had the vaguest recollection that what his friend was talking about was a fictional character in a book or something. That was enough to make him decide he didn’t need to know anything about a fictional country like Japan, and he quickly returned to the topic at hand. 

“We could project giant images of insane monsters,” Benjamin agreed. “That’s totally doable, but to what end. What I really need to do is figure out a way to attach more healers to the network to save more lives.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Raja agreed, “But like… it would be cool! Wouldn’t it? It would be a chance to strike fear into their hearts and just as much misdirection as what we did tonight.”

Benjamin was forced to concede that point; he just couldn’t figure out how to do that and what he actually needed to do. Even when Raja decided their whole attack on Plantation 89 would be that much cooler if they thought the defenders thought they were under attack by a 40-foot tall fire-breathing hydra, he just wasn’t able to make it happen. 

Instead, they were more straightforward than that. Rather than make an insane fireworks show, The army crept forward 100 yards from the stone wall at the edge of the grass line after the moon had set, and then 300 archers with a variety of bows opened fire and Benjamin did his best to turn as many of them as he could from arrows into warheads. 

For three solid minutes, they rained fire down on their enemy and received less than a dozen arrows in return. The Summoner Lords never even made an appearance in that fight, and they’d all thought that the mages had fled through rifts during the opening salvo. Instead, they found two well-dressed corpses in the rubble. They’d been crushed to death when their luxurious townhomes had collapsed under the weight of the damage being done to them. 

That was all Matt needed to see as far as the two approaches went. “From now on, this is how we do it,” he said, “For as long as we can anyway. We soften them up with your fancy spells, and then we hit them hard with everything after that.”

Plantation 91 fell almost as easily, and by the time they’d refined their approach enough to turn west and take another crack at the trap that was Plantation 87, they found the place abandoned. Indeed, the next three Plantations they visited were all abandoned. 

“Something we’ve done has really spooked them,” Matt said one day as they continued west toward the sea. 

“Ya think,” Emma laughed. Thanks to all the murdering they’d been forced to do lately, she was in excellent spirits.  

“I mean, I’m glad,” he continued, “But I’d kind of like to know which. Was it the ambush that we foiled, or is it the way we’ve discovered rocketry?”

“Well, I would have bet on the giant hydra… if Benji had actually pretended to summon it for me,” Raja joked. 

“Why don’t they just do the same thing as us?” Emma asked. “If we can use magic rockets, then they can use magic rockets, right?”

“Well, some of them can, yeah,” Benjamin agreed. “But most of their slaves don’t specialize in archery, and even those that do—”

“Yeah, but can’t they just change their skills?” Emma asked. “I thought you said they could.”

“The Mages can swap out their skills,” Benjamin corrected, “But their slaves are stuck the way they’re made. They crippled their systems intentionally, and they don’t exactly have a way to recode things like I do.”

“Well, that’s dumb,” she sighed. 

Benjamin paused a moment, then asked. “Do you remember that smartphone I had? The one with the demon in it? Do you think when we were all on Earth, we all knew how those things worked? Like, the programs and the hardware?”

“I have no idea,” she said finally as she swatted a stalk of grass out of her way in annoyance as they walked forward. 

Benjamin did, though. He knew that they didn’t. The more complicated computers got, the easier they became for the uninitiated to use, and the less anyone knew how they worked. While he would be the last one to say that he really understood how any of their systems worked, he knew more than most, including, apparently, most of the Rhulvinarian mages.

They had to do everything a certain way, because that was the way it had always been done, but him? He could make shit up as he went along, and that thought was enough to make him smile for the first time in days. The more they fought, the more he learned and the more certain he was that they were going to win.

Ch. 103 - Choice Fatigue

The next few days were spent traveling deeper into the grasslands so they could strike the next few likely targets from an unexpected direction. This was a good thing because Benjamin was lost in his own little world as he tried to sort the data from the last battle. He sat there on top of his meandering turtle, surrounded by bands of warriors, while time seemed to crawl by in the real world. 

He rarely took note of the way that the birds seemed to hang there in mid-air at a fifth of their normal speed. Instead, he was lost in his inner world of glowing red runes as he shuffled and reshuffled them into something resembling a comprehensible order. 

The spell database in his error-riddled system was still less than cooperative, and it produced spell options for him that were practically random whenever he opened it, but he really didn’t need to anymore. He still might snag one if something particularly compelling like earthquake ever came back up, but now he was doing something different: he was sorting through his event logs of the battle and building himself a database of every unique spell or ability he recorded.

After that, he planned to go through every member of their army and do the same thing. Since that would take forever, he was still in the process of designing scripts for it on his codex, of course, but once the hard part was done, things would move quickly. At least I hope they do, he thought as he found yet another bug to unravel. 

This would not only give him the ability to freely upgrade the most frequently used spells to make the men and women who fought for him that much stronger. It would also mean that he could look for patterns in a much broader fashion than he’d been able to so far. Until now, he’d largely been forced to tweak existing spells, but as he learned more and more about the way they worked and the way the runes interacted, he was gaining flexibility. 

He just hoped that flexibility would allow him to avoid too many more bombs. They’d kill if they had to, of course, but finding some new way to convert the enemy to their own side would have been infinitely more preferable. 

Benjamin was even making gains to that effect. Though his system still wouldn’t let him target a spell in any of the privileged ranges, he’d picked up some of the message traffic that the opposing Summoner Lords were doing to cast their spells and issue their commands in the moments before they were liquified, and the results were quite encouraging. 

It turned out those orders came with password protocols and that the enemy still wasn’t encrypting their message traffic. At this point, he was sure that wasn’t a limitation implemented by the system. He’d figured out a way to implement that functionality across the network that fueled his focus out of the paranoia that told him that if they succeeded in hacking him in the middle of a battle, they could hack his whole army. It was a terrifying event that would probably never come to pass, but if he’d been able to use greater runes as a proxy for prime numbers to encode his traffic, then why couldn’t his enemy do the same?

He saved his progress and let the spell dissipate as he returned to the real world, and time around him sped back up to normal as he rubbed his eyes and sighed in frustration. 

“Giving up already?” Emma asked with a laugh. “Last time, you lasted two hours before you came back up for air.”

He didn’t bother to explain to her that it had been more like ten hours the way that his time moved when that spell was active. He also didn’t bother to point out that he’d been so involved with what he was doing that he could have kept at it all day if his brain would just stop asking dumb questions about why his enemies were so backward. 

“I just don’t understand the Rhulvinarian,” he sighed, “They’re so fucking backward.”

“I don’t suggest you try to understand them,” Matt answered. “You stare too long into that abyss, and we might have to put you down ourselves, Benji.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about that too much,” Benjamin laughed. “No monomaniacal urges to control the world and enslave mankind yet.” 

“You’re not the type,” Emma said in a way that almost sounded like an insult. “You’re a hero through and through, Benjamin.”

“I appreciate your faith,” he smiled, ignoring her insult. “I technically have access to everyone in the army, so I could go full dictator pretty much whenever I want.”

Both of them laughed at that, and honestly, he was a touch hurt by it. “Benji - I trust you to have my back and my immortal soul, for that matter,” Matt said in a tone that was only vaguely patronizing. 

Before Benjamin could figure out the best sarcastic comment to respond with, though, Emma piped up. “So, what doomsday weapon are you building for us today?”

“All of them,” Benjamin said, with a smile that widened as the incredulity on their faces deepened. “So mostly, that makes me wonder why our enemies aren’t doing the same thing.”

“I mean, it's that soul damage thing, right?” Matt asked in a tone that was nearly certain. 

“While it is true that I get away with cutting more corners for myself than I would for you because my soul is already irredeemably fucked up,” Benjamin agreed, “I don’t think that’s it. I think they’re just hidebound.”

“Sorry, I don’t speak fancy,” Emma said. “So unless you’re talking about getting me some new leather armor, you’re going to have to rephrase.”

“Hidebound. Formulaic. Set in their ways,” Benjamin clarified, trying not to give her room for another joke. “It means they’re set in their ways. Like, they just do it this way because that’s the way they’ve always done it, you know?”

“Well, if it ain’t broke…” Emma said with a smile. 

“Exactly,” Benjamin agreed. “Nothing challenges them anymore.”

“If that were true, then all the Thrones would be under their heel, and they’d already control the whole world, wouldn’t they?” Matt asked, pointing at Benjamin like he’d caught him in a trap. 

“Correction, Nothing challenges them magically,” Benjamin said. “The Arboreal throne will crush them if they get too close to her woods, and the centaurs will ride down a caravan that takes too long to reach safety, but magically the fae of this world have no interest in rune magic. For all we know, it was that way on the world before that and the world before that.”

“Wait, you think they’ve done this before?” Emma asked as her expression darkened. “Is that in the system or—”

“I have nothing to prove it,” Benjamin answered, “but some of the stuff that Prince Agardian has said makes me think they’re nothing but pure parasites. They move from world to world, drain it dry, and then they move on to the next one. Earth just seems to be one of many places that it’s convenient to steal more humans from whenever they need to top up.”

They kept talking for a long time after that, but it took a long time to get back to the topic of weapons. Benjamin explained to his friends, including Raja, when he joined them, that he was trying to make a list of as many abilities as possible so that they could understand them and make new weapons.

Everyone was pretty on board with that, but Raja quickie asked, “Why not like - make those rifts they like making so much and just drop a bomb through it and be done with? It's like a drone strike but with fewer steps.” 

“Well, we don’t have enough gems to start indiscriminately bombing everyone,” Benjamin disagreed, “But if I could figure out how the portals work, then we would definitely start using them to our advantage. Could you imagine sending Emma and a handful of other shadow dancers through something like that? They’d turn the enemy to hamburger before they even knew they were under attack.”

That answer made Emma smile way too brightly, and as Benjamin asked her questions and watched the sea of grass slowly pass by, he opted not to tell her the true reason he wanted to do that. If he could deploy his own personal spec ops ninjas and take out whatever summoner was in charge of a given force, they might be able to steal whatever passwords he had from the orders the asshole gave before he bled out and free some or all of the poor bastards that opposed them.

Matt would give him shit for trying to find a peaceful way out of every battle, but in this case, it wasn’t a desire to avoid bloodshed. Well, at least not completely. It was the only way they would ever get reinforcements beyond the meager help the Throne of the Sky Sea provided to them.

After that, they stopped for a time to have lunch, and once that was done, he dived back into his project with both feet. He was as frustrated as any of them by his lack of progress in some areas, but these spells didn’t exactly come with instruction manuals. 

Benjamin had tried several times to cast the exact same rift spell he had in his logs. Instead of opening up the same flaming portal he was so used to, though, the spell merely fizzled. That sometimes happened when he included some of the key runic sequences in the incorrect order, but in this case, he was pretty sure that it was because the spell was trying to target a point that was out of range for him, and he wasn’t sure why. Hell, he wasn’t sure which part of the spell was coordinates at this point. 

It was much the same with the summoning spells. He had a few examples of those now, like summon Inferno Swarm and summon Frost Ogre, but they weren’t any clearer. The runes that followed the summon spell were much longer than they should have been, and Simon had no idea whether they were specifying whatever world or dimension they were pulling these creatures from or if it was some kind of binding on the thing being summoned. 

These were questions he should have been able to answer by reading books on the subject. Really, just a few answers would have been enough for him to test a wide variety of assumptions, but even asking the Prince did little good because the man didn’t know either. All he knew about any of the spells that Benjamin really dug into was that they worked, which was less than useless. Knowing how to turn on an appliance did not grant you any understanding of either the power grid that supplied it with energy or the engineering that made it work, and if he was going to have a rematch with Lord Jarris, he definitely wanted to know how these things worked. 

Honestly, Matt and Raja had both argued that even checking out whatever it was those birds had been talking about was a bad idea. For once, only Emma was on his mind about paying it a visit, and that was only because she wanted to slit the man’s throat. In the end, they’d compromised and agreed to send a scouting party to see what awaited them there, but even Benjamin knew that ever being anywhere the enemy expected you to be was a profoundly bad idea. 

Ch. 104 - A Fork in the Road

The days walking through the tall grass bled together just like the horizons did, so it was more than a little surprising that two different remarkable things happened on the same day. The first was a messenger from the throne. 

She was a cat beastkin that seemed somewhat similar to a cheetah with the speed and grace with which she moved. She ran through the formation with such speed that she raised the alarm, but by the time swords were drawn and men were shouting, she was already gone, and she ran down the column to find Benjamin. 

When she did, she leaped and reached the back of the turtle where he, Raja, and Emma were sitting around his focus and talking about what to do about their dwindling food supply. The donation of tubers and baskets of dried seeds from a giant prairie dog mound village had made their needs less crucial, but they were probably going to have to raid another Plantation in the next few days, or else they would have to stop the army and hunt instead of march for a few days. 

Benjamin had only barely noted the distant call of alarm at the edge of their formation when all of that changed, and the furry woman with feral eyes leaped on top of the turtle, startling all of them. He and Raja jumped, but Emma barely moved; she regarded the new arrival critically, but in the end, she merely sat there and regarded it cooly. 

Instead of ripping out his throat, though, the beast woman landed just in front of where Benjamin was sitting and immediately bowed low until her muzzle touched the wooded platform. “I come from the west on an urgent errand from my mistress, the Throne. Are you the Ben-jamin?”

“Umm, that’s me,” Benjamin said, uncertain when his name had been turned into a title. “What can I do for you… I mean, her…”  

The woman produced a scroll wrapped around a carved ivory handle and pressed it immediately into his hands. “My mistress congratulates you on your efforts to purge the pests from our hunting grounds and on your fine work with the children of Lasthome. A grave threat is assembling not far from the coast, though.”

“What is it?” Benjamin asked as he unrolled the scroll and started to parse out the flowing handwriting on the papyrus as best he could. 

“Ships come from the world island like a strange tide of their own, and each of them vomits forth whole loads of manthings before they leave to fetch more,” she cautioned. “A true army approaches. One that is larger than all of your men put together.”

“If they have so many men, then why aren’t they stepping through portals and kicking our ass already?” Emma asked. 

The messenger, for her part, gazed at the interruption and hissed briefly at Emma before she turned back to Benjamin and continued. She clearly wasn’t interested in talking to humans who were not the Benjamin. 

“They will not come for you like this,” the woman said. “Not directly. Instead, they will march from the sea in a line so long that one end is not visible from the other, and they will burn everything in their path, just as they did before.”

“They’ve done this before?” Benjamin asked. “Why didn’t anyone tell us?”

“This was long ago,” she answered with a shake of her head. "In the time of my grand-dam’s grand-dam. For decades, the world had been struggling as one to shake the black-eyed manthings free from the world island without success. Then, one night, they came ashore and began to build and expand. My people fought and sabotaged them for years. Whole expeditions got lost in the grass sea never to return. It wasn’t enough, though. One day, they assembled a grand army and destroyed everything in their path so there could be no more tricks.”

“And after that, they started to colonize the area,” Benjamin said with a sigh as he realized the pattern of history here. “How awful.”

“Indeed,” the beast woman agreed. “They aim to plow the land, and then when there is no one left to oppose them, they will begin again here. They have done it in the firelands before, but there, they have had a harder time gaining a foothold. The fertile east is less primal, and it shames me to say that they had all but tamed it until your arrival.”

Matt climbed up the ladder to where they were all seated high on Benjamin’s battle turtle. He’d obviously thought they were under attack, but when he saw the only thing that was happening up here was tense conversation, he relaxed visibly. 

“So she wants to meet with us, or…” Benjamin asked as he reviewed the scroll. 

“No,” the beastwoman roared. “She doesn’t need more words. She wants you to strike at the very heart of them and end this before they can do more harm.”

According to whoever had drawn the map, the front stretched for almost 50 miles, and the soldiers numbered in the tens of thousands. It wasn’t just so many that they had no hope against beating a force that size. It was that no one did. 

The only way they’d won so far was by staying a step ahead and moving fast. Even if they won a battle or two against such a force, his mind balked at the idea that they might be able to do so and live to fight another day. Two thousand versus forty thousand wasn’t even suicide. It was simply madness. 

“I’m not sure that’s possible,” Benjamin said finally, earning a look of pure fury before the cheetah woman roared with rage. This was enough to make Emma twitch slightly as a pair of knives appeared in her hands, but otherwise, she continued to sit where she had been until now. 

“Listen,” Benjamin said, trying to placate the angry woman. “We want to help. We’re on the same team, but being outnumbered like that… twenty to one. We can’t rush these things. We’re going to need a plan. A strategy. If we—”

“The longer we talk, the more people will die!” she growled, rising to her feet. Benjamin was reminded of advice that trickled up from his childhood at that moment. Don’t show fear in front of wild animals. “The wetlands, the nest cities of the winged ones, the packlands… all of those will burn unless we do something!”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She simply leaped off the back of the turtle and sped through the ranks before disappearing into the grasslands. 

After that, the four of them talked about what had happened and the scant information they had, but none of them had a good idea of what came next. “Unless you’ve got a new miracle up your sleeve, Benji, I’m just not sure it’s possible.”

“Well, we have to figure out something,” Benjamin said in frustration. “This is our fault. We’ve been successful enough that they are finally unleashing the big guns.”

“We’ve done what we can,” Emma shrugged. “That doesn’t mean we have to die for lost causes.”

“But—” Benjamin started to protest.

“Ask any of them?” she said, gesturing widely at the small army that surrounded them. “Ask them if they want to die because it’s the right thing to do.”

“What do you think we’re doing right now?” Raja asked. For once, there wasn’t a trace of amusement in his voice. “What the fuck do you think Nicole died for? What everyone so far has died for.”

“She died for a fight that had a chance,” Emma clarified. “We won, didn’t we? We fight this, though, and all of us…”

Her words trailed off as Raja climbed down the ladder and disappeared into the crowd. The death of the fifth member of their little group wasn’t something they talked about much, but it was still definitely a sore spot for Raja, and Benjamin completely understood. Honestly, he thought that Emma was being more than a little awful. 

“Sensitive, much?” she said with a smile that died as soon as she saw that neither Benjamin nor her man agreed with her in even the slightest. 

Selfish, he thought. That’s the right word. 

“Fine then,” she said, sheathing her knives and propping herself up into a handstand in a single motion. “You two discuss lost causes. I’m going to go see what I can do about our ongoing battle with hunger. That’s a fight we can actually win.”

Then, before Benjamin could answer, she flipped off the edge and landed in a solid dismount half a dozen feet from the tortoise. Part of him worried she was going to go murder Raja, but he doubted she’d be able to find him. When the man wanted to be alone, he had a way of just disappearing into the wilds. He would be back when he was ready and not before. 

Which just left Benjamin and Matt with no clear idea of what to do now. “I’ll talk to my inner circle,” Matt said, referring to the loose collection of captains and lieutenants he’d been building up as people distinguished themselves for obedience or valor in battle. “But I can’t imagine they’d have any more insight into the situation than me, and the best I can come up with would be some sort of crossing the t situation, like at Trafalgar.”

“Tea?” Benjamin asked, completely lost. “Trafalgar?”

“Well, it’s sort of a refused flank where we could…” he started to say, but as he saw Benjamin’s eyes glaze over, he switched topics. “You know what. Don’t worry about it. We’ll talk it through and try to come back to you with some plans.”

Benjamin nodded, handing his friend the scroll before Matt retreated, leaving him alone with his thoughts. He really was alone, too. 

At the beginning of all this, when they’d only freed a couple Plantations, the men that he freed were friendly with him, and women had occasionally even flirted with him. Now, though, he was in a world apart. He’d won too many times and come up with too many miracles. People would still talk to him, of course, but there was this look in their eyes like he was a celebrity or something. 

Raja told him that some called him the messiah and that rumors said he’d already died and come back to life to save humanity. He prayed those weren’t true, but there was so much truth in it that it would have been impossible to argue with. He’d died for the cause more than once already, and he’d happily do it again if it meant taking these assholes down. 

Benjamin was left alone to ponder these and other thoughts when the second remarkable thing happened. This one was also a messenger, and the only real difference between the two was that this one had been expected. This one didn’t cause a stir or raise an alarm. It was the leader of the scouting party that they’d sent to investigate Lord Jarris’s strange parlay offer, after all, and not some stranger. 

Benjamin wasn’t terribly sure what they’d find there, and he was just glad that they’d made it back safe and sound without issue. But when the man sent him the helioglyphs and explained what he’d found, Benjamin knew that trap or not, he was going to have to go. 

The faintly glowing images that were little more than fuzzy magical photography he’d been able to give to all of their scouts were hard to make out sometimes, but this time, Benjamin knew exactly what he was looking at. He was looking at his house. 

Well, his parents’ house. It was the house he’d grown up in, and it was sitting there in a shallow valley with a few other buildings that were too blurry to make out. The longer he stared at the images, the more his stomach sank. 

“Could they really do that?” he asked himself. “Could they really summon specific people from other worlds?”

“S-sir?” the scout captain stammered, uncertain how he was supposed to answer the question he thought he was being asked. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Benjamin said finally as he struggled with that terrible thought as he signaled all of his friends with their party. “You’re dismissed. Please give my compliments to your team.”

The man gave a salute before he left, but Benjamin barely noticed. His head was spinning. Suddenly, despite everything they’d done, he felt like a fool.

Ch. 105 - Somewhere Familiar

Though his friends didn’t have quite the same visceral reaction that he did, once he explained what he thought the heliograph showed, there was only silence for almost a minute before Raja asked, “So you think what… the Rhulvin took your family hostage? Like, your mom and your dad?”

“Who knows who they have,” Benjamin said with a shake of his head. “This is bigger than that. All this time, I thought they were just taking random people from random places, but if they can summon specific places or things between worlds, then…”

“It can’t be that easy,” Matt answered, “Look at where they summoned our campground. It was out in the middle of nowhere. There had to be a reason for that. If they could just summon whoever, wherever, whenever, then they would always bring new recruits into the heart of their domain and call it good.”

“Maybe,” Benjamin agreed uncertainly, “Until I kinda thought that they had to pick two really similar places in different worlds and line them up, but this…”

“Well, I mean, you are from Fresno,” Raja chimed in, “And that looks like the middle of nowhere to me.”

“So what are we going to do then?” Emma asked, giving Raja a warning look. “It’s not just a trap; it’s a trap for you specifically, Benji. There’s no way we can—”

“We have to,” he shot back. “This is definitely a trap, and it’s definitely Ethan’s doing, but that doesn’t mean we can just ignore it. They’re holding my family hostage.”

“Yeah, and when they kill you, they’ll kill them too,” Matt said sadly. “I don’t see how that’s an answer.”

“I don’t know either,” Benjamin said, “But we’re definitely going for a closer look.”

They argued more after that. They couldn’t divert the army. They needed to think about his safety and stay focused on the larger threat, but Benjamin stood firm. They could either come with him, or they could continue on without him, but either way, he was going.

That was enough to force everyone’s hand, and in the end, they made plans to maneuver the army closer. Despite the apparent lack of enemies, they would disperse it into several units in case the worst should happen. There was only so much Benjamin’s friends could do, though. 

He knew that. The most likely reason to put a piece of bait that juicy on the table was so they could drop a bomb or a dragon right on top of him and end their little rebellion once and for all. 

However, that didn’t mean he was just going to breeze on by and hope that they didn’t have his mother or his sister in that sprawling blue ranch home, even if they did have an army of ninjas in those other buildings. 

None of these thoughts could fight down the angst building up inside Benjamin, and as they got close enough to see some of the details, he was appalled to find out that he recognized some of the other buildings in the odd empty city, too.

Until now, they’d seen the same sort of buildings everywhere they went. Either they were crude structures with thick timbers and thatched roofs made from local materials, or they were the almost beautiful stone buildings that erupted from the earth thanks to magic. 

These were neither. They were squarish single-story, asphalt-shingled homes with stucco or vinyl siding like you might see in any town in the world they’d come from. But they were places he’d been before. They were his family home from before he’d gone off to college, and another one was an older place they’d lived in years before his dad had gotten some kind of promotion at work. 

There were other places, too, including a sub shop that he seemed to recall also sold pizza by the slice, even if he couldn’t remember anything else about it. But despite all the little details that were coming to mind as he saw the strange assortment of buildings, There were no people anywhere to be seen. 

No, that wasn’t correct. As they got closer, there was exactly one person sitting at a table in the gazebo of what should have been his parent’s backyard. They were only able to see them once they got close enough to circle around and start looking for traps. 

As soon as Benjamin spotted the figure and pointed them out, Raja used eagle eye, and his expression immediately soured. “It’s Ethan, alright,” he told his friends.

Benjamin didn’t need that confirmation, though. He already knew that was the case. No one else could possibly know any of this. Even though the message had come from Lord Jarris, Benjamin had known it would have to be him. The Summon Lord had destroyed their memories as he’d turned them into soldiers, not archived them for later use.

Only Ethan could possibly remember any of this, and now he was sitting right there like he didn’t have a care in the world. 

“I could probably hit him from here,” Raja said with a sardonic smile. “You want me to try?”

The man was still over a mile from them, so Benjamin found that unlikely but not completely impossible. Nevertheless, he shook his head. “No killing. Not yet.”

In the end, they approached just like they’d discussed. The army fanned out in a broad semicircle almost a mile away from the ramshackle compound under the command of Raja, while Benjamin, Matt, and Emma went in with nothing but their usual equipment.

Benjamin only brought along a few surprises, including one fist-sized two thousand-carat sapphire in case the worst should happen, and he decided to bring the whole house of cards down. No one wanted that, of course, but it was always good to have a trap card, even if he couldn’t quite remember what that was in reference to. 

Raja had wanted to join them, but someone needed to stay behind, and with his ranged powers, he wouldn’t have been nearly as useful as either of Benjamin’s other friends. So, they walked forward slowly, flanking him on either side as they all stayed on their guard while he stayed on overwatch atop Benjamin’s battle turtle.

If this is an illusion, it's a good one, Benjamin thought as he tried to resist the tidal forces of nostalgia and paranoia that threatened to overwhelm him. 

He could see the neat semicircular cutout where the overgrown grass of his parent’s front lawn just stopped and made an imperfect seam with the longer native yellow grasses, which had been chopped or burned short for more than a quarter mile in all directions. All the other details seemed right, too. 

He kept looking for indications that this had been a decoy made from magic instead of brought here from a place where they used nail guns instead of wands. He saw no discrepancies, though. He could see where the sprinklers had eroded the stucco, and the hedges were starting to die. Even the oil stains of the semicircular section of the driveway that had come across with the rest of the house were just like he remembered. 

He expected his mother to open the screen door at any moment and welcome him home. That didn’t happen, though. Instead, when Ethan saw the three of them and raised a glass of lemonade complete with ice cubes, he beckoned them over with a wave.

“You guys look thirsty,” he said as they approached, smiling like he didn’t have a care in the world. 

The difference between him and them couldn’t have been more stark. Ethan was dressed in a clean t-shirt and jeans. He even looked like he’d recently had a haircut and a shower; he’d probably never looked better.  

Benjamin and his other friends were filthy, by contrast. They were sweaty, tanned, and looked like barbarians or movie extras in comparison. 

Matt and Emma both wore armor and though one was dark leather and the other was polished steel, they were both impressive. Benjamin, by contrast, had a few pieces of Rhulvinarian jewelry and a battered bronze breastplate. Other than that, though, he wore a set of generic clothes intended for plantation slaves that had been patched and repatched with lesser creation magic.  

Benjamin regarded his friend silently for a long moment before he finally asked, “What is this? What are you doing here?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Ethan smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you.” 

As he spoke, he started to pour three more glasses from the pitcher. He doubted any of them had any intention of drinking whatever poison he was offering them. Some part of him was forced to admit that it looked damn good in the heat of the day. 

“If you wanted to talk with us, then why did you steal our fucking car,” Emma growled as Matt restrained her from flinging herself bodily at the man that had once been their friend. 

“Listen,” he laughed, “We didn’t part on the best of terms, and I think it was very reasonable that I chose to get the fuck out of there rather than melt anyone’s faces off. When last we’d parted ways, we definitely weren’t on the best—”

“I’d like to see you try it, you fucking prick,” Emma spat. The words were fiercer, but the tone was much colder. This was the mood she’d kill him in if they let her. 

Benjamin chose to step in between the two of them, knowing full well what a terrible idea it was. “We aren’t here to discuss the past,” Benjamin said, trying to keep his cool. “I want to know why my parent’s house is sitting here in the sea of grass and what you’ve done with them.”

“Why… there’s nothing sinister here, Benjamin. I just thought a little taste of home would make you more reasonable,” Ethan said in a voice that dripped sarcasm. “It’s time for this war to end, right? And we all know that no matter how many fighters you have on your side, you four are the war, so—”

“I don’t think the fighting can stop until everyone is free,” Matt interrupted as Benjamin nodded along.

“Nonsense, don’t be so self-righteous,” Ethan disagreed. “We both know that you can’t break Bound to Serve anymore. That part of the war is done. From now on, everything you do is just murder. There’s no justice to be found. So, we just need to find an accord that benefits everyone and move along.”

“I’d be a lot more interested in whatever it was you were proposing if you told me where my parents were,” Benjamin said finally. Truthfully, he had zero interest in finding an accord with the Rhulvin or with their turncoat friend who now obviously worked for them, but he was willing to play along until he had some idea of what was going on.  

“Oh, don’t worry about them,” Ethan smiled after taking a long. “Your dad is probably just watching the TV, Sarah has a friend over, and your mom is making dinner. I’m sure you’ll see all of them soon.”

So they are here, Benjamin thought as a jolt of anger went through him. 

“Hostages,” he shook his head. “Why in the fuck would I talk to you about anything while you have my family hostage, man? What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that I don’t want you to kill me on sight,” he smiled wickedly. “And I think now that I have your attention, you can tell your army to stay the hell away, and we can sit down like grownups and have a conversation about what’s in everyone’s best interests, mine included.”