Broken System Ch. 70-71 (Patreon)

Ch. 70 - World Tour

The four of them parted company with Kalinomia and her growing army that morning. He’d spent longer than he’d care to admit brooding about her words the night before. He didn’t try to argue the point, though; that would have been counterproductive.

Instead, Benjamin simply said, “I hope you have a lot more victories to celebrate soon,” as he hugged her goodbye.

“You too, Benji,” she smiled. “Maybe we’ll meet again when this war is done.”

It would be nice, of course, but he doubted it. This world was a vast place, and though he thought the odds of their cause succeeding were good, the odds that he or anyone else would survive long enough to see them were less so, especially since they were about to go into the lion’s den.

The four of them left with one horse and one centaur who would guide them until the city was in sight. Apparently, that would take two days, but if there was one thing Benjamin had gotten used to in the last year, it was walking.

He let others take turns riding while they discussed the plan and concerns. Eventually, that got boring, though, so they took turns peppering the centaur that accompanied them, Mardum, with questions.

Why don’t the Rhulvinarians have patrols on their roads, especially now? What about spies flying in the sky? Have you ever fought them on an open field?

All of Mardum’s answers basically boiled down to how cowardly their enemy was, which didn’t strike Benjamin quite right as they marched ever forward through grass that was so tall that even the centaur could barely see over the wavering tips.

“I have slain many with dark eyes,” he boasted. “Years ago, when I was a colt, they were much more aggressive, but now they stray rarely from the roads because they fear our ambushes and their flying spies are quickly devoured by beasts that are loyal to the Throne.”

“Couldn’t they find a way around that?” Benjamin asked. “Bigger, stronger monsters or something?”

“When their armies move in force, the sorcerers that accompany them can summon dragons and true terrors,” the centaur agreed. “These we must steer away from, but wherever they are strong, they are weak somewhere else, and we strike at those places instead.”

“Most of these plantations seem pretty weak,” Matt said, “Why haven’t you wiped them out on your own before now?”

“Stupid manthings,” the centaur growled. “Do you not think we would have if we could? They only seem weak to you because of your tactics and your magics. If we could simply turn most of their men to our side at the outset of every battle, then every bastion that taints the sea of grass would have been trampled underfoot already. You know not of what you speak!”

“Well, if the plantations are not the weaknesses you were speaking of, then where do you strike normally?” Benjamin asked.

“The caravans used to move their produce to the river are their weakest points,” the centaur said. “That is what determines where they place their little walled fortresses. Each is a full day away from the next via their cursed roads so that they never need to spend a night out in the open.”

Mardum went on to rant about the nature of the roads and the cursed waystones that apparently had some deleterious effect on the region, but Benjamin couldn’t quite understand what the gruff warrior meant by “The magics they use on those roads don’t just speed them up. They slice apart and shrink our range into ever smaller pieces. One day, we will wake up and find the mountains touch the sea, and even the deep valleys are gone because the sea of grass is no more.”

Benjamin wanted to ask more about the magics but decided that Mardum probably wasn’t the right person to discuss such things with. He made a note to find out more the next time he had a likely tutor. Instead, he asked about the geography and learned just a little bit more about how strange and terrifying this world was.

“I know little about the mountain Throne,” the centaur confessed. “For his lands make for poor running and worse grazing. The deep valleys though, I have been there. Even your rune mages and their slaves avoid those cursed places.”

“What makes one valley any deeper than another?” Emma asked as they stomped through the tall grass. “It’s not like we can see shit here anyway.”

“What? This? These are the shallows,” the centaur laughed. “If you want the short grasses, you’ll need to stick closer to the hills and forests because they only get deeper as you approach the broad plains and the sea.”

“So the deep valleys just have taller grass?” Benjamin asked.

“Aren’t you listening?” the centaur asked with a tone of derision. “The whole world has taller grass than this. The deep valleys are where the grass gets so tall that the sun barely reaches the ground at all, and all the snakes and bugs of the underworld slither up to greet visitors. I’ve been once as a test of bravery but mark my words, never again. I’d rather face an army of soulless black-eyed manthings than go back there.”

It was an interesting image, and the best that Benjamin could come up with was that it was some sort of bamboo forest or vegetative underworld. Still, they weren’t close by, so he didn’t have to worry about accidentally wandering into one any time soon.

That was how they spent that day and the next. The sun rose and set, and they stopped from time to time to rest or eat, but more than anything, they passed the time by talking. Between discussions on how they were to act when they entered the city and contingency plans about what they should do depending on where they were stopped, they asked their guide about the world, and he gave them straightforward answers that weren’t always sensible.

According to him, there were dozens of thrones but probably not hundreds, and that magic had been slowly dying since the rune lords arrived on the world decades ago. He didn’t know a lot about the war, only that it had been going on for a long time and likely would until long after he died in battle.

He knew more about the world, though, and that was interesting. He spoke of the burning lands far to the southwest where the rivers were made of fire, and the people only galloped across the burning sands at night because when the sunlight hit the mirror sands, anyone exposed to that terrible light would be killed. He also spoke of the highlands to the north, past the deep valleys and the great rivers, where the land was always cold, and there were mountains so tall that they had no peak. They only went up forever.

Some of those details made little sense to the way that Benjamin and his friends viewed the world, but then he supposed they didn’t have to. He’d already seen trees that defied the laws of physics, and there was no reason that the rest of the world would be any different. Some things were harder to believe than others, though.

“So you’re saying the world island swims around in the inland sea? Like a living thing?” he asked as they were breaking camp the next day.

“It doesn’t swim,” the centaur corrected him. “It’s just stone, and stone can’t swim. It floats back and forth on seasonal currents!”

This made everyone laugh except the centaur, and when Benjamin carefully explained that stone did not float, the centaur grudgingly said, “Well, this one does! It’s hollow, so that is doubtlessly the cause.”

That conversation might have gone on forever if their guide hadn’t suddenly stopped and announced, “I see your cursed city there in the distance, so this is where we will say our goodbyes.” Then, after a few minutes of discussion. He was gone, and their moment of truth had arrived.

It was a strange pivot. For the last day, they’d finally stopped living in fear and had just been hanging out like old times when suddenly it was over. Now, there was no room for laughing and joking. The last leg of the trip would be done in serious silence as they each settled into their roles.

Raja and Matt were fine as they were, of course, but Emma had to change into something more feminine and revealing as would befit the bed slave of a Summoner Lord, and he had to play dress up again and channel mana into his ring to turn his disguise on.

Sadly, his armored shirt had been shredded in the last encounter, and the toga he wore this time offered him better stats but no real protection. It made Benjamin feel like he was walking into a trap practically unarmed, but then that’s exactly what he was doing, wasn’t it?

They went forward by the road for the last seven miles. He rode with Emma seated behind him while Matt and Raja accompanied him to his right and left. There was no talking at this point because it was impossible to know if they were being watched already. They’d stirred up the hornet's nest, after all, and everything about their trip so far had convinced him that what they were about to do would be viewed with extreme suspicion.

Part of him was sure this would be about the shortest gate-crashing attempt ever and that they’d be killed at the front door. Even that wouldn’t stop Benjamin from fomenting a massive rebellion, of course, but it still frightened him to think that they were walking into the jaws of a massive trap.

When they were five miles away and just approaching the burn scar that kept back the grass sea for miles in every direction, he started to make out the big picture; the place was definitely on the larger side. Honestly, it was bigger than he'd expected, and it was surrounded by walls that were several stories tall, and though he couldn’t say that they extended to the far side where Arden met the river, he would have bet money on it.

The mages were too paranoid to leave an obvious gap in their defenses that the fae forces could exploit. Benjamin was sure they’d left plenty of chinks in their armor that their hubris wouldn’t let them see, though.

When they were only three miles out, he could see that the whole place was definitely built with function over form in mind. It was certainly uglier than he'd expected, and the rough, uncut stone that had been channeled from the earth itself was twisted and full of minor asymmetries that he never would have expected to see in something that had been built by the hand of man. It might have looked beautiful with a few adjustments, but overall, the organic shapes combined with the hard lines left the whole thing looking slightly melted and malformed.

Finally, in the last twenty minutes of their stroll, details began to make themselves clear. The city was a walled European affair with a three-story curtain wall. More than a few red tile roofs poked up above that height, but a central keep crowned in three spindly towers that rose at least seven stories into the air and could see danger coming from a good ways off.

Benjamin took all that in as the gateway ahead of them got larger and larger. It was open and guarded by a dozen men with spears and bronze armor. Emma had been riding behind him the whole time, but it was only when they got within a hundred yards that he felt her begin to stiffen up and grip him a little tighter.

“Stay calm,” he whispered. “We can get through this.”

As they approached the guards, they made no sudden moves. They just watch blandly. It was only then that Benjamin saw there were no mages among them. It seemed like an odd oversight, and he realized he could probably use a more limited version of his data leak spell here if he needed to force his way in.

That will leave fingerprints, though, he thought to himself. Hell, it might even trigger alarms.

Strangely, though, as he agonized over exactly what he should do and what he should say to them, he just kept the horse going forward, and they made no move to stop him or even signal for him to stop. Benjamin and his entourage were halfway past the group before he decided they weren’t actually going to stop him after all.

It struck him as a truly bizarre decision, but then he realized the guards probably weren’t in the habit of stopping their betters. He had no doubt that some of the summoners that he and his friends had already slain would treat humans that got uppity quite cruelly.

Still, he didn’t believe that they would just be let in like that until they were already inside the gate and blending in with the busy market traffic. Benjamin would have kicked himself if he wasn’t so busy keeping up his smug, superior sneer. He’d dreaded how this was going to go down ever since he’d agreed to the plan, and then, just like that, they were inside with no clear idea of what to do next.

Ch. 71 - Brave New World

None of them had known what to expect entirely when they’d arrived. Jeong Lee had found a few men that had been here before to tell them their experiences, but it hadn’t been the best intel in the world. What they’d described had left Benjamin imagining something like a fantasy city in a dystopian sort of way.

He hadn’t been entirely wrong. In a normal city the buildings that surrounded them would have been filled with homes and businesses, but here it seemed that most of them were nothing but communal bunk houses crouching atop work houses. Those places weren’t shops in any normal sense. Instead, they were crude factories that turned the raw produce and materials that were shipped here into more refined products before they were shipped further on.

At least that's what he could see through the open windows he passed. Down here, amid the bustle of hundreds of people moving too and fro as they went about their business you could be forgiven for thinking this was some kind of story book town. You didn’t have to look very closely to see a thousand details that gave away the fact that it wasn’t though.

It wasn’t just the cold dead eyes that everyone had, or the way that many of them moved robotically as they completed their assigned tasks. It was worse than that. The area they were slowly riding through seemed to be a bazaar, but no money was changing hands. Instead vendors waited to distribute goods as required, and the people simply took what they needed. It was a strange sort of zombie communism where people couldn’t steal or take more than they needed because they were programmed not to.

More than anything, it was that the right word for this place was almost. It was almost normal, except for the shuffling zombie like people and their nearly identical clothing. The cobblestone streets, and the buildings that leaned slightly over the road, were almost straight. The signs were almost readable. Above all, it was almost beautiful. If just a little care had been put into it, the illusion would have been complete, but instead it came off as a copy of a copy, or a cheap AI generated picture of a real place.

But it left him wondering what exactly he was supposed to do here. Did Lord Darton have a home here? Did his family or his house? Benjamin had seen no mention of it in the man’s correspondence, and the people with some experience had never learned where it was that their masters had stayed. They’d just offloaded cargo and stayed in one of the communal bunks set aside for frequent visitors.

It was as strange a system as Benjamin could have ever imagined. Even Kalinomia and Juliana didn’t have firm answers to those questions as the mages typically left their toys at home for reasons related to etiquette as much as intrigue.

‘I hate this place,’ Raja typed as he looked around for something that made sense. ‘It's a potemkin town. Nothing more.’

Benjamin didn’t disagree with the sentiment, but this was neither the time or place to respond to the observation. Instead he ordered, “Guards, inquire where I might find a room for our short stay, and be quick about it.”

Both Matt and Raja moved immediately, feigning their compulsion. Benjamin was sure that he’d get so much shit for this when all of this was said and done, but he was sure that they both knew that he took no pleasure in any of this posturing.

Really, he thought it was ridiculous. He would have much rather been in their shoes and pretending to be just another cog in the Summoner’s awful machine. Instead he had to sit there feigning a look of restless boredom, unsure if there were any eyes upon him even now.

Minutes passed before they returned with his answers. “My Lord…” Matt said stiffly. “We were told that there were suites down the street that can be claimed for men like you if they don’t already have rooms in the citadel.”

Benjamin acknowledged the report with a shrug. It didn’t answer his core question, but he would pretend that it did. After all, the biggest danger was standing around and looking lost. As long as he looked like he was going about his business, no one seemed inclined to stop and ask him what in the hell he was doing.

So they went to the inn, or the hotel or whatever it was. Benjamin left his horse in the care of the stablemaster and walked inside leaving his friends in his wake like the servants they were to gather his meager luggage while he walked inside like he owned the place.

The establishment was called ‘The Refuge,’ and it was one of the nicer buildings they’d seen so far with a broad gate through the ornamental vine-strewn wall that separated the guests from the noise of the street and the smell of the stables. Past that, there was a small garden in the courtyard that he passed through on his way into the building proper. It contained several clear-eyed guests who sipped their drinks as they gossiped at the tables, putting him instantly on edge.

Several looked up to regard Benjamin as he walked by wearing his paper thin mask. He pretended that he did even see them, and walked right by even as one woman waved at him, as he thought the haughty man he was pretending to be would have done were he here.

That’s going to be trouble, he thought inwardly to himself. There was little he could do about it now, though. Leaving would arouse even more suspicion.

“I’ll take the finest room you have available,” he said to the clerk when he arrived at the front desk. “Something spacious with at least three rooms and a large bath. Taking a ride that long was positively wretched.”

The clerk looked at him blankly for a tense moment, then just when Benjamin thought he’d said something wrong that was going to land all of them in hot water, the man said “certainly. I believe the coral suite is available for at least the next week. How long will you be staying?”

“Aweek will be more than sufficient,” Benjamin said sharply. “The sooner I complete my business the sooner I can be on my way.”

“And what business might that be?” a strange voice behind him purred. “Why Mariek, you were just here in Arden complaining about how much you hated it here. What could have possibly brought you back so quickly?”

Benjamin went cold as he remembered that Mariek was indeed the first name of the Summoner Lord he was pretending to be, and that this woman obviously knew him. He turned stiffly to face her and found the same pretty redhead that had obviously recognized him in the courtyard.

“That is a story I can tell as soon as I am clean, and have attended to my other appointments,” he declared, stalling for time. “The better question is why you are still here. Don’t you have better things to do that hang around Arden all month?”

She clutched her chest, pretending to be wounded as much as to draw his eyes downward with the movement and show off her nipples pressing hard against the silky fabric of her ice blue colored dress. “I’m hurt,” she said with a smile on her face. “And where would you have me go? My home has been burned down before I ever had a chance to arrive, and if I go back to the capital empty handed my father will skin me alive.”

“Then we have more in common than ever,” he said, watching her eyes widen as she figured out what he was implying instantly, “But before we can commiserate, more people than you must be told.”

“Of course,” she said, stepping away so quickly she almost bumped into Emma. “If you’d like me to come and see the Prince with you, or you’d like some… emotional support afterwards…”

The mystery woman let the promise linger as she studied Emma. “Who’s the new girl? I think I like her better than the blonde you brought last time.”

Benjamin ignored her. Instead he signed for the room and then took his key from the clerk. The mystery woman ignored him in turn, and instead said, “Tell me your name, my pretty little blade dancer.”

“Emma,” she said without hesitation as she turned to face the woman questioning her. “And who do I have the privilege of addressing?”

That made the mystery woman smile, but inside Benjamin was smiling even more. Emma knew exactly what it was he needed, and was making for an excellent wingman. “My name is Margerot Thraxes, but this evening, after I help your master unwind with a bottle or two of sparkling red wine, you may refer to me as Mistress whenever your mouth is not otherwise occupied.”

“Of course Mistress,” Emma said with a sultry smile that was so convincing that Benjamin was fairly sure she was looking forward to the ménage à trois that was never actually going to happen.

“Oh, I like this one,” Margerot sighed. “She’s got spirit. I hope you’ve broken her in properly.”

“Now isn’t the time for such frivolities Margerot,” he said, waving her off before gesturing to his servants and heading up the stairs.

He pretended like he knew where he was going, but in reality as soon as they were free from prying eyes they began to search frantically for the room. Fortunately the rooms were labeled with small wood plaques and the hallways were empty. So, eventually, they found their room on the third floor before anyone noticed how confused and out of place the four of them were.

When they finally reached the room they were looking for, and unlocked the door they found a room dominated by pink tiles and a bathing tub that seemed more like an elaborate fountain than anything else with statues of nude men and women endlessly pouring water into the mosaic encrusted tub.

‘I hate it.’ Raja typed.

“I agree,” Benjamin and Emma said simultaneously, making him smile.

“This place is kind of awful, but I couldn’t think of a better place to lay low,” Benjamin said apologetically. “I’d hoped we could just camp out here for a few days and try to figure out what was going on, but that seems less and less likely.”

“Well, if you want Matt and I to interrogate that creepy bitch for you, I’m just saying I’m game,” Emma smiled so brightly then that Benjamin wasn’t sure if she wanted to fuck her or kill her.

“What I want is to find out what the bastards running this city know before we burn the whole place down,” Benjamin said, shaking his head as he looked around at the ridiculous luxury that was perhaps only a hundred feet away from the dreary spartan bedrooms shared by dozens of people that most of the inhabitants of this city were forced to endure. “That’s why I’m going to have to send you two out while I focus on trying to whip up some wire taps of a sort. ”

“Wire taps, Benji?” Matt asked. “I don’t see a lot of people on cellphones out there.”

“No, but every single person in this city has a system,” he shot back. “And those systems are all communicating with each other every time someone casts a spell or gives an order. We’re basically being bombarded with bluetooth and wifi, but we can’t see it. I want to start prying open that traffic so I can see what makes it tick.”

‘I mean, yeah, maybe, but what about that Prince guy?’ Raja asked.

“Well, I’m pretty sure I can’t keep this act up too long, so by the time he finds out I’m in the city we better have a plan,” Benjamin said, “Or shit’s going to get pretty crazy.”