Broken System Ch. 65-67 (Patreon)

Merry Christmas! (Or happy holidays, whichever you prefer.) Today your present is an extra chapter!

Ch. 65 - Story Time

“I’m sorry, but we can’t just go with you because your Lord… or Lady said so,” Benjamin announced as he strode to the front of the caravan and stood in front of the old woman. “The last time I was summoned by the Fae, it took weeks to walk back, and we don’t have that kind of time.”

He realized before he’d reached her that her skin was not actually skin, but the closer he got, the stranger it got, and in the end, he had trouble believing he was speaking to a person made of dry mud.

“Why would it take you weeks to leave the arboreal realm?” she asked as more partially dried clay flaked off her face. “Surely she could have delivered you anywhere where her roots stretched if you’d asked.”

Benjamin opened his mouth, prepared to lay into her about how little she knew when he thought back to that moment. The message he’d been given that morning in the rose garden had been incredibly ambiguous. Could he have just asked his hosts to take him back to his friends? He kicked himself for not even realizing that such a thing might have been an option. He’d never know, of course - but he definitely should have asked.

“Regardless, it doesn’t matter,” she continued. “The ruler of the endless plains only needs you for a single night. The refuge we offer is only temporary, and after that, you may continue on your way.”

“Unless your master judges that we should be slaughtered, right?” he asked, feeling suddenly suspicious. “The way I read the note, that is an option too. There’s no guarantee of safety here.”

“There’s no violence at the sacred fire tonight,” she said with an amused smile that made a portion of her increasingly dry complexion flake off. “If the lord of the seas wished you dead, then she would bring the tribes together and crush you with that mighty fist. For now, all she seeks is an understanding.”

Benjamin was unsure. In the beginning, he’d planned on finding some way out of this strange situation or at least extracting some guarantees. However, talking with this messenger, it was hard to see the harm. She wasn’t trying to pull him aside. She was asking for his whole army, such as it was to attend whatever it was that was planned.

Did that mean that they wanted all the humans together in one spot so they could crush them? Benjamin couldn’t say, but he knew what would happen if he said no, and that was enough to make him lean toward yes.

After all, his association with the arboreal fae had been mostly positive in retrospect. If he and his friends were going to be out here waging a war, then good relationships with the locals were probably important.

Just like that, he deflated, and all of his objections were gone.

“If we do decide to meet, then where must we travel?”

“Right through here,” she said with a wave. As she spoke, the wall of grass that surrounded the slender road they were on began to wither and fall away, revealing a second path that proceeded straight toward the setting sun.

“Well… umm… That was easy,” he said uncertainly. “Lead on, I guess.”

The clay woman laughed again at that, losing more mass with each chuckle as clay and straw fell away. “I was made only for the journey here,” she said pleasantly. “Others will guide you back in my stead.”

As if to demonstrate, she took a step forward, and her now dry and solidified leg broke off mid-calf. Her body reformed to create a new foot, but with each stride, the process repeated, and she shrank at an alarming rate. Five steps there, just shy of the road she’d revealed, she broke into a pile of fragments and a cloud of dust and blew away in the wind.

Benjamin looked from the pile to the scouts standing there and back again. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” he muttered.

“Me either,” the closest man to him said, crossing himself, “And I hope never to do so again.”

On that point, Benjamin could definitely agree, and he left them to go back and discuss the situation with his friends. That conversation was more complicated than he would have thought and went on for several minutes. Emma argued it was a trap, Benjamin argued it was a risk worth taking, and Matt agreed with both of them.

“I don’t trust any of these faeries - whether they live in trees or not, but I don’t really see what else we’re supposed to do here,” he said with a shrug. “Except for that elemental they sent to test us, the woodland critters mostly left us alone. I figure the best case here is we work out a similar sort of agreement here, you know? Enemy of my enemy and all that.”

In the end, when Benjamin asked Raja what he thought, his friend only shrugged, which struck Benjamin as just about right. Shrugging was the optimum opinion with so many unknowns floating about.

With that decided, Benjamin told everyone what had happened and where they were going. That raised more than a few questions, but he answered them as they walked, doing his best to reassure everyone that it would probably be fine. After all, they’d managed to visit a place like this before and come back fine, and none of the issues raised were enough to stop them from starting down the new trail. Regardless, those concerns were still concerning enough for everyone to keep a hand on their weapons and a sharp lookout as they proceeded toward the sinking sun.

As vigilant as he tried to be, it was hard to stay alert when gazing at such beauty. His dad used to say that every sunset he saw was the best one yet, but this one really was and was enough to make him miss his parents, wherever they were. Between the burning sky and the fields of grass that danced in the breeze like ocean waves, though, even those thoughts weren’t enough to make him sad for long.

Things stayed normal until the sunset that had been painting the clouds in elaborate stripes of red and orange began to fade. As purples replaced them, and grays began to creep in around the edges as the sun half sank below the horizon, fireflies started to come out. Well, at least he thought they were fireflies.

All of them quickly discovered that the lights that swarmed them in all the colors of the sunset weren’t insects at all. There were a variety of sources. There were little glowing faeries that left glittering trails behind them. There were other small fae creatures that lacked wings that had climbed to the top of certain grass stalks and beckoned them on with lanterns, and some larger creatures made from straw that were almost the size of humans that seemed to be fishing with hooks baited with light as well.

All around them, those flickering lights began to gather so thickly that they began to resemble a glowing river that was sweeping them forward to their destination. It was a cacophony of strangeness that only got stranger when he realized that the sun had never completely set. Instead, with its last red rays, it lit a fire in the distant fire ring, and minute by minute, they were walking toward it.

That must be the sacred fire, Benjamin thought to himself.

Its appearance did nothing to stop the night from darkening otherwise, though, and soon, the swarm of glowing lights that followed their caravan was competing with the stars in the sky, too. It was a beautiful, kaleidoscoping sight, and all of it only faded out when they reached the large clearing that had been set aside around the even larger bonfire.

As he got closer, details began to emerge. Centaurs in war paint, clay men and women in clothing made of grass, and beastmen that ranged from hyenas to large tortoises were all in attendance as well. In fact, the only difference between this gathering and the last one he’d attended was the surroundings.

There might have been fewer of the ethereally beautiful fae, and there was no diffident stagman waiting to lecture him on etiquette, but what stood out the most was the setting. The Arboreal throne had lived in a tree palace so large it blocked out the sky. By contrast, this was closer to a native american camp. There were a few dozen structures that had been assembled around the edges of the clearing, and coals were being ferried to various places to cook food in smaller grills. The tree castle appeared to have been growing since the dawn of time, but it would only take a few hours to tear this place down and move on.

Benjamin wondered whether that was just their culture or if the wars with the summoner lords had impoverished them, but before he could decide one way or another, a pack of three-foot-tall prarie-dogkin boiled out of the holes of a nearby mound. The creatures blocked their path and began to busily direct everyone to their proper place around the fire.

Despite how casual everything looked, it still seemed that everything had a very prescribed protocol. Horses needed to be tethered here, wagons parked over there, and then the group was divided by gender and status and placed in small clusters around the camp.

“If this is an ambush, then dividing us up would be the first order of business,” Matt rumbled.

Benjamin could see anger and frustration building in his friend’s expression, but he did his best to calm Matt down.

“Relax, man,” he sighed as the four of them were escorted to the rugs that marked the area around the largest of the tortoisemen on the far side of the fire.

“Greetings, manthings,” it said in a deep, rumbling voice that was more felt than heard. “I am Brauchus, the storyteller.”

Benjamin nodded, introducing each of his friends in turn, and as before those were even done, simple skewers of meat and wooden cups of water were being handed out by nearly uniform clay servants with generic faces that differed only in the patterns that were daubed browns and reds across their clay skins. In fact, they were so fresh that their skins were still slick and slimy and left clay on the skewers where they held the end.

Benjamin wondered how long they lived for, anyway. How old had the woman been when she’d met them? Years? Months? As the night wore on and stories were exchanged, he increasingly began to suspect that the answer was days or perhaps even a day.

The realization struck him as bizarre, but whenever he tried to bring it up with their host, the turtle simply parried the question with a nonanswer. “The servants of the earth are eternal,” he’d answer, or “Nothing ever really dies. Not in the way you mean.”

As they sat together, Emma commented on the beautiful patterns of the mats they were sitting on by the fire, and their host launched into a story about what the patterns represented and told them about the first blade of grass and how it came to conquer the world. Later, Matt asked about what they were eating, a topic that Benjamin had been doing his best to avoid for obvious reasons just in case he didn’t want to know the answer, but the closest that the storyteller came to any factual information was telling them the story of the slowest rabbit.

As a choice, it made Benjamin smile. Honestly, he’d accepted an interrogation, but instead, so far, there had only been conversations and stories. No one had asked anyone near him a single question so far. He did more listening than speaking himself and instead focused on devouring the skewers of meat and vegetables that had been roasted to perfection.

“So when will we meet your boss anyway?” Matt demanded finally as most people had finished eating and cups of mulled wine were being handed out with bowls of candied fruit. “This Throne of yours.”

“That comes later,” the tortoise said cryptically before moving back and beginning another story about how the stars in the sky are nothing but embers that have escaped from the sacred fire on previous nights.

Benjamin listened with curiosity, still unable to decide if the teller thought that these stories were literally true or if he knew that his creation myths couldn’t possibly make sense. He said nothing, though. He just listened and drank from his cup as the world grew increasingly hazy.

That was when Benjamin’s mind started to become unmoored from the real, rational world. He looked down at his now nearly empty glass and then back up the turtle that was his host before he looked around and saw that most everyone else, human and beast alike, had already succumbed to the narcotic effect of what they’d been drinking. Only the tortoise and the clay men that served them were still fully away. “Did you drug us?”

“I only gave you a gift so that we could better understand one another,” the wizened old turtle said, nodding slowly. “Now we will dream of each other, and there we will find the truth.

Ch. 66 - Endless

There was the faintest commotion, or maybe Benjamin imagined it. He wasn’t sure. Matt either sat there already asleep, or he roared to life at the revelation that they’d been drugged.

“An ambush!” he yelled, trying and failing to rouse those around him as the stripes reached out from the mat Benjamin sat on to grasp him, pulling him gently down into the earth. Mat? Matt? Benjamin suddenly found himself laughing as the slender blades of grass grasped him and pulled him deeper.

His last sight of the real world, or at least what he thought was the real world before the earth overgrew him, was Matt pulling back one of his fists before he punched one of the pottery people as hard as he could. Benjamin feared that his friend would murder them and get punished for it, but instead, their clay skin had been baked armor-hard; when his blow met that shell, it was Matt who shattered into pieces on the ground instead.

Benjamin didn’t have time to be surprised by this. Instead, he lost the ability to think as the poison that was the drug completely overwhelmed his system. He was lost in the infinity of a single moment, and simply the concept of time was too much for him as colors and the fragments of lost memories rushed by him in a torrent.

When he opened his eyes again, he realized he had only blinked. He hadn’t been sucked into the earth to be devoured by planets or be buried alive. His eyes had merely flickered closed for the briefest of moments, and everything was back to normal.

Despite the lethargy that made moving almost impossible, he managed to let his head slump to one side to see if Matt had put himself back together yet. He was surprised to find his friend sleeping there. Well, at least laying there, holding Emma tightly. It made for a happy ending, and he tried to smile, but he lacked that sort of control over his body. He was merely a prisoner in his mind like everyone else.

Laying there looking at the two of them together, Benjamin smiled, glad that they’d gotten back together, even if their relationship wasn’t what it had been before. In fact, looking at the two of them entwined together in the dark made him feel weird as strains of that old jealousy boiled up in ways he no longer understood because he’d forgotten too much about the complicated history the three of them shared.

Unwilling to close his eyes, he looked past them to the fire. The bonfire was still burning brightly, and it leaped all the higher for the fact that everyone around it was laid low by being passed out or paralyzed by the narcotic desert they’d been served.

He lay there entranced by it, watching it move like a living thing. In fact - that very thought reminded him of something that one of his high school teachers, or perhaps his Boy Scout leader, had said years and years ago. He’d argued that fire was alive. Everyone had disagreed with the man, of course, even Benjamin, but his stance had always lurked at the back of his mind. “How can you disagree? It shares every important trait that proves you’re alive, doesn’t it? It eats, breathes, reproduces, and excretes waste. It even has a birth and death! Of course, it’s alive.”

Those words rang in Benjamin’s ears as he watched the flicker flames move. Whoever had told him that had failed to list other important traits of life, though. He didn’t talk about the way it moved and danced, nor the way it lept like a ballerina. In fact, the mere fact that it had slender legs and a lithe hourglass figure should have been his teacher’s first argument.

Benjamin did a double take at that, but only because the fire had entirely left the smoldering pile of wood and begun to walk toward him. He’d been thinking of fire being alive in the purely metaphorical sense. To see it actually come to life and walk toward him was another thing entirely.

He should be panicking, he realized, as she advanced on him slowly with those ember eyes. Her skin was like flowing magma, and her hair cascaded down her back in long, flickering curls of flame. Fortunately for both of them, she was wearing little in the way of clothing in the form of a persistent smoke and heat shimmer, posing as a semi-translucent black dress. That was it, though, and as she loomed over him, he thought for sure she would set him ablaze.

She didn’t, though. Instead, she leaned down and traced a delicate symbol on his forehead while he looked up helplessly at her. Then, all at once, he could feel the drugs that had spread throughout his system begin to boil away almost immediately. Suddenly, he could move, but more importantly, he could think, and the very first thing he did with those abilities was back away and cast arcane armor.

That made the fiery woman smile, “I don’t think that flimsy spell will do much,” she laughed, but if you take it down right this instant and grovel for bringing their magic into my home, then I might not reduce you to ashes here and now for your insolence.”

Benjamin was stunned. He’d stood up expecting some kind of fight, but the arrogance he felt radiating off the fire spirit in waves was more powerful than the heat she emanated. It was only slowly that he realized that he’d really only ever felt this sort of intensity and mental pressure before: and the heart of the Throne’s court.

He burned with shame as he recalled how he’d been forced to kneel there, but he was no longer that person. This time, he dropped his armor as he realized who he was speaking to, but he continued to stand, bowing his head instead. “Apologies, your Majesty. I was… assaulted by your beauty and not in my right mind.” As a line, it was terrible, but it was the best he could think of on short notice. He’d rather act like a fool than a coward.

“Very brave,” she said, walking around him once in a wide circle while he stood there. “Very brave indeed. Very well, oddity, you may walk with me until the dawn.”

“Where are we going?” he asked, moving to catch up with her as she moved away toward the edge of the clearing.

“To find… an understanding,” she answered, smiling cryptically. As she spoke, she walked toward the grass, which had bowed in front of her, growing at just the right height to create a ramp from where they stood on the ground, the eight-foot-tall surface the wavering stalks made with their tips.

She should have fallen through, of course. The grass lacked the strength to hold anyone aloft, but somehow, she walked up it effortlessly, like she was using the stairs. He was surprised to find that when he followed her, it actually worked.

He thought for sure that meant that he was still in a dream, and when he looked up from his new perch, it became even harder to believe this was real. They’d just left a small valley full of sleeping people and beastmen, and now, they finally stood at the level to truly appreciate the world around them. From up here, he could see the waves of grass rippling in the wind.

No, unlike his perch on the crow’s nest yesterday, he could feel them. He could feel the surface of the grass shifting beneath them, and even as they walked together, the waves began to carry them further and further from where they started faster than any walk could have. They spent the first few minutes in silence as he appreciated the true immensity of his strange surroundings.

This really is a sea, he thought as he watched the first island-size turtle drift by. The way the seedheads of the grasses shook as they went past even looked like white caps.

“It’s a compelling illusion,” he said finally as he watched a swarm of birds flit through the surface of the grass like a school of fish.

“An illusion?” the fiery woman beside him asked. “I assure you, this is the truest thing you have ever seen.”

“I meant no offense,” Benjamin said, “it’s just that it really looks like a sea, and it seems like it goes on forever.”

“Ah, but it is a sea,” she smiled, “and a mortal like you could drown very easily.”

Benjamin looked down to reassure himself that he was only a few feet above solid ground, but the thin starlight wouldn’t penetrate that far, and the darkness made the illusion even more powerful. He was still looking down when he saw the ground bulge beneath him.

For a moment, he almost reached out to his fiery guide to pull her to safety, but she seemed utterly unconcerned, and trying to get too close to her quickly became painful. Instead, all he could do was watch as the hill manifested beneath them for a moment before it continued on, growing larger all the time.

Benjamin looked from her to the wake of the giant creature and back again. Then, it erupted from the water, breathing like a whale. It wasn’t a whale, though. That would have been beautiful. Instead, it was a pale, naked molerat the size of a school bus that was momentarily eclipsed by the moon before it dove back into the grassy depths once more.

“See,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Endless. I have a claim on all that the sky can see, but the sea of grass will always be my favorite place to rest. It used to be endless in all directions until the man things showed up and multiplied like locusts.”

“It seems very vast to me,” Benjamin agreed, unsure of what else to say as he tried to regain his composure.

“It is an area of more than a million of your square miles,” she nodded. “But a decade ago, it was ten times that size. In another two or three, it might be gone entirely.”

Benjamin wasn’t sure how that was possible. The mages controlled only the tiniest outposts in a nearly infinite prairie, according to the map. There was no way that the fae would run out of land any time soon, but he ignored the statement, trying to focus on what he had to do with any of this.

“So then what do you want from me then?” he asked. “Why did you bring us here?”

“What do I want from you?” she laughed, sending a shower of sparks up from the mane of her hair. “Why, to leave, of course. Your kind is not welcome in the sea of grasses. You scorch the land, you drain its vitality, and wherever you lay down your paths and roads, you bind the world further in place in ways that are most unnatural.”

Benjamin opened his mouth to protest, but she continued. “But you are not like the ones that came before you, so I want you to keep doing what you are doing: capture or kill the locusts and drive them from my land.”

“We’re doing our best,” he answered stiffly, trying to resist the way the heat was making the whole world swim. “We can’t do it all alone, though. I mean - if you want to team up, a little help would be appreciated.”

She looked scandalized for a moment before she said, “To think I would ever have to stoop to this level. Me - the throne of the Sky Sea.”

Benjamin got the feeling she wasn’t even talking to him at this moment. Before he could decide what to say to that, she moved toward him.

“I can see what she sees in you now. You are such a speck that someone as great as I would have to be just about on top of you to see the promise buried inside of you,” she said, smiling, suddenly uncomfortably close to him.

“What is it?” he gasped, sweating from the heat of the smoldering woman who was standing too close to him. He was surprised he hadn’t burst into flames himself. “What do you see?”

“Well, now, that is a secret,’ she murmured before stepping back playfully. “I’m tempted to tell you rather than force you to find out yourself, but… we are out of time.”

With that, he looked around, surprised that the strange currents in the grass had brought them all the way back to the place they’d started. She stepped back down from the grass they’d been walking along and threaded her way through the bodies of sleeping people. Benjamin had expected her to return to the bonfire and return to her flaming state. Instead, she just vanished in a puff of smoke, and as she did so, the sun started to rise on the far horizon, just behind where she had been.

Benjamin awoke feeling there was a connection there, but as he rose to a sitting position with all the urgency that one might have when emerging from a nightmare, he was surprised to find much of that information had vanished.

Instead, he woke in the same clearing where everyone else was beginning to stir. The only difference was that all of the fae servants and all of their trappings had vanished. Last night, this clearing had been crowded with almost as many beastmen and clay people as actual humans. Now, other than a handful of centaurs, only their army remained. It was a strange sight, but Benjamin ignored it as he tried to hold on to the scraps of his bizarre dream and focus on what they needed to do next.

Ch. 67 - Lay of the Land

“You are the War Leader, yes?” a centaur wearing only jagged lines of red and brown warpaint asked, riding over to where Benjamin and his companions were still slowly rising.

“I? War leader? What?” Benjamin asked, unsure who the giant was addressing as he pointed to Matt and yawned. “I think you’re looking for him.”

“Bah! It does not matter. Since I am forbidden from eating you, I am sworn to help instead. You are the one that spoke with the Throne, so you are the one I will speak with now,” The centaur spat.

A lot of questions went through Benjamin’s mind. Did everyone else not have the same bad trip as he did? Why were the centaur helping them? Talk of eating them combined with those sharp yellowed teeth banished all those thoughts for a moment, though, as he automatically prepared to defend himself.

He wasn’t the only one, either. For a few tense moments, the sheer violent aura of the eight-foot-tall demihuman was everyone on edge while they sorted out the details of the who, the what, and the why.

The centaurs were just another sort of fae, as it turned out. Well, not precisely, but they were closer to the fae than the beast men or the clay people. The Centaurs considered themselves to be far above them. The centaur, Thorga, made it very clear that even the lowest of the clay people was well above the manthings.

“You are as ignorant as babies in the ways of war!” the centaur chastised them. “Your victories are small, your body counts are low, and you have no trophies! You do not even destroy the way stones that you pass by! You are less than useless!”

Benjamin was about to point out that the fewer people they killed, the faster their army grew and that it was a sound strategy, but Matt beat him to the punch. “We’ve been doing pretty great so far,” his friend growled. “How many of the Summoner Lords have you killed?”

This made Thorga and several other centaurs laugh, but he ignored the assertion. “If you are so clever in your strategies and tactics, then why do you march straight into the trap your enemies have prepared for you?”

“Trap?” Benjamin asked, perking up. “What do you mean?”

This made them laugh even louder before he shouted, “Bring me some blood wine so that I may show these manthings their shame and folly!”

One of the clay people rose from the soil and ran over to him even before Benjamin could refuse. One round of hallucinogens had been quite enough for him, and the last thing he wanted was to get drunk this early in the morning.

The wine wasn’t for drinking, though. Instead, the centaur opened up the spout and sprayed lines of the crimson fluid onto the ground in a wide circle while he mumbled a guttural chant under his breath that made the hairs on the back of Benjamin’s neck stand up on end.

He ignored that, though, and focused on the way the earth began to churn and reshape itself. After a few seconds, it was no longer a piece of pebble-strewn earth covered by flattened grass. Instead, it flattened and smoothed before little roads began to draw themselves across it, and a number of small rings that were the telltale walls of the plantations sprang into view. There were other smaller camps, too.

“Are these your forces?” Benjamin asked.

“You fool! Those are the assassins that wait to murder you. Why do you think our Mistress summoned you last night out of all nights. The Throne of the Skysea sees all, and she saw that you would all die without her aid!” The centaur chastised them. He stomped once, and the map flattened to dust before rebuilding. This time, it was a wider scale, and the plantations were merely dots.

“This is the path you have carved through the enemy!” he pointed, “Do you see the problem?”

A crowd of humans and the other centaurs began to gather around, and they watched the same thing that Benjamin did as a small fire, no bigger than a candle flame, burst into existence and began to burn a thin black line across the ground. It marked what he could only guess was their path. Each time it reached one of the plantations, it burst into a tiny bonfire for a moment before it continued on in roughly a straight line toward the next target.

Benjamin immediately understood. “We were too predictable,” he sighed.

“No,” Matt disagreed. “We are moving too slowly.”

“You are both very right and extremely wrong,” he chastised them. As he gestured, all the plantations they didn’t attack grew into small flowers with green petals like little flags over enemy territory, and the nearby city of Arden became a larger blossom. “The answer is both. You have all these targets and an army that is much larger than the one you took the first city with, and meanwhile, your enemy begins to adapt to your technique. Were they not so afraid of going too deeply into the sea of grass, you would already be dead.”

“Look, we weren’t trying to conquer every last one of these spots and build an army, okay? We were just trying to set people free and give them a better life,” Benjamin said, but it sounded lame, and he knew it. They probably should have been doing more this whole time. They’d revealed their hand, and now the Rhulvinar would almost certainly take their revenge.

“You have barely plucked a handful of these flowers, and you haven’t destroyed a single road.” Thorga said, gesturing to the map, “This summer, they will build more new strongholds than you have taken from them. They always do. So, this is less than nothing, do you understand that? If you want to strike at them, then this will never be enough.”

“I assume you have a better idea?” Matt asked.

The centaur nodded smugly. “I was told to teach you the ways of war; how could I do that if I did not already know them? There are a hundred different ways to strike at this problem, but the option I prefer most is all of them at once.”

Benjamin was skeptical of that, but as various members of their growing band proposed problems with Thorga’s plan, he dismissed them. Sometimes, that was with mockery as if he considered that concern to be beneath him, and other times, it was with well-thought-out answers.

The one thing he couldn’t answer, though, the one thing that Benjamin realized really no one was even asking about as they discussed the minimum viable size of forces and how to increase speed, was the spell that made all of this worthwhile.

There was only one Benjamin, after all, and he was the only one with the data leak spell that made everything else possible. Though it would be possible for other casters to learn it if they had the points, it was something he’d decided not to do until now: the reason was simple enough: as soon as their enemies knew how his little magic trick worked, they would shut it down.

It wouldn’t even be hard to do. They only kept these exploits open so that they could use them. Installing something slightly robust with a limited or one-time key was almost certainly within their grasp. The only reason the Rhulvarians hadn’t done it already was because they’d left no survivors behind to tell the tale. All they needed was one witness or one survivor, and then, in hours or days, they would patch every slave in their miserable little empire.

When that happened, there would be no way to free anyone anymore. Not until he figured out a new security flaw to exploit, and that would likely put the breaks on their offensive for weeks or months. It was a complicated subject. Right now, they’d cracked the enigma machine, but as soon as the enemy knew that, the tool they’d come to rely on would need to be rebuilt from scratch.

And even if they ignored that, they’d need a caster in every group and assassins capable of taking down the Summoner Lords in residence. His mind boggled at how they would handle that and what the logistics would look like, but his mind balked at it. How many groups like that could they assemble if they completely atomized their growing caravan? Three? Five?

“If you start with seven forces and skip over all of the most well-defended points, you could push them down the river and back to the sea inside of a year,” the centaur finished with a statement that felt wildly optimistic to Benjamin. “At that point, most of their slaves will be in your army, and the mages will be on the run.”

“And countless people will be dead,” Matt agreed.

“This is the way of war,” the centaur shrugged. “Why fight if you do not plan to kill?”

“While all of this sounds great and everything,” Benjamin said, “I’m not sure it's doable. With so many of the people we free crippled, we lack the forces you think we have,” Benjamin shook his head. “And then there’s spells and the consequences to consider…”

As he started to explain everything to his friends using antibiotic resistance as a metaphor, Thorga immediately grew bored of his long-winded answer. He stomped loudly again. “Bah. I’ve given you my wisdom. Let us know when it is time to ride.”

Everyone else listened, though, and at the end, he was peppered with comments and questions that ranged from Raja’s text, ‘Simple. Never lose, don’t get caught, problem solved,’ to a bunch of very reasonable concerns about how they probably shouldn’t spread themselves too thin.

“What do you think we should do,” he asked Matt finally.

“I think if you can figure out the magic part, I actually think we should do what the centaur suggested,” he said, surprising Benjamin completely with the answer.

“But—” Benjamin started to protest.

“It’s just like you said,” Matt continued. “They are going to figure out what we’re up to. How we attack. Where we attack. How we free their slaves. All of it. There's nothing we can do about that. All we can do is make sure we do as much damage as we possibly can to their organization before they do. To be honest, I can’t believe I didn’t see this until now. There’s so much more we could have done.”

“We’ve done okay,” Benjamin said, feeling less sure about that statement now than he ever had.

They discussed it a while longer, and as they went through the numbers, the choice became simple enough. They could send three or four well-armed bands in different directions if each one had a mage capable of casting data leak, but if that wasn’t such a sticking point, then they’d be able to do twice that.

Emma asked, “Is there something you could do to the systems of a few people to change their class or something?”

Benjamin had long considered doing a sort of registry edit on himself to free up some points from spells he didn’t use very much. Truthfully, the only reason he didn’t was because he was reopening his soul scar into something much worse. While doing that experiment on other people was possible, it struck him as more than a little unethical, and he was about to explain that to her when he had a minor revelation.

He didn’t need half a dozen casters. He just needed some way for each group to cast the spell. Benjamin looked down at the stupid single-use ring that hadn’t bothered to save his life the other day and smiled. If he could make an item that made him look like Lord Darton with minor illusion, then why couldn’t he make a spell that let anyone cast data leak? It wasn’t exactly a complex spell.

“Okay, I think I have an answer,” he said finally, but you’re not going to like it.

“What do we need to do? Matt asked.”

“We need to make a few simple magical items,” Benjamin answered. “Well, simple is debatable, but I think it’s doable. We’ll need something that makes your raiding plan feasible, but it will also have to cover our tracks.”