He wasn’t wrong, although the middle-aged Padian, who she eventually learned was called Ilker, had definitely been underselling the scale of his people’s migration. The refugees had been careful in their approach, displaying an impressive amount of coordination and restraint given their circumstances. Arilla wanted to be angry at their lack of good faith, but considering how much classes—even low-level ones—would change their prospects, she couldn’t blame them. As destitute fisherfolk, the refugees had already been turned away by so many who could have helped them, but by gaining classes and access to their status, they had elevated themselves above the common rabble. At least, that remained true in any city where Typh and Arilla didn’t currently hold onto the reins of power.
After some initial scouting the Padians had decided to split up. Rather than risking everything by swarming one classing station only to be turned away, they had approached every station on the eastern half of the city, all at once. It was an impressive bit of organisation on the Padians' part and everything would have gone off without a hitch had they only been a little luckier.
Unfortunately for all involved, a freshly classed mage had started a fire the night before and the construction work to repair the damage had delayed Ilker’s group by closing off a major road they needed to travel. By the time they had reached their destination, the morning crowd of aspiring soon-to-be classers had arrived and were incensed at the sight of so many additional foreigners in their city. The majority of the Padians, some two hundred or so, had swiftly been chased off by the enraged mob, leaving just Ilker and his thirty trapped inside by the angry crowd.
Which neatly led to Arilla’s latest headache. Five thousand souls’ worth of new frustrations. Ultimately, that number was just a drop in the bucket for a city whose population was rapidly approaching a quarter of a million. But considering that it hadn’t even housed two-hundred thousand six months ago, Helion was already bursting at the seams. Entirely new districts, expansions to the existing, and renovations to the old, were already required to house all the new arrivals—to say nothing of feeding, employing and entertaining them. Five thousand refugees was a manageable number, but somehow the knowledge that they were just the first wave of many more displaced Padians to come had been passed down to the mob.
The locals had not taken that news well. By the time Arilla had managed to calm those gathered outside and passed the problem over to a sufficiently high-ranking clerk, she was very late for the first shift at the siege grounds.
As Moody's hoofbeats sounded out across the last of the paved roads that marked the edge of the ‘city’ and the beginning of the muddy warzone, Arilla felt her class rattle the bars of its cage within her chest. Involuntarily she grit her teeth and smiled. It was an ugly, vicious thing, more of a grimace than an expression of joy, but the beast that lived within her hungered and it knew that it was about to be fed some scraps. She tried not to think about how strongly it was affecting her. The proximity of the siege caused her warrior’s urges to flare up. The constant buzz in the back of her head briefly became a loud clamour. The quiet demands that she bathe herself in blood and violence grew in volume, the voice becoming more distinct and familiar.
Arilla ignored the whispers as best she could. Not for the first time, she found herself envying the nonhumans with their inherent species classes and the sense of grounding they provided. She and every other human classer lacked that, having to contest the demands of their more specialised classes with nothing but their will. Given how quickly she had levelled, Arilla was in a worse position than most. She’d never had long periods of time to adjust to her class and the Noble Slayer’s violent impulses were only more insistent as a result.
Earlier in her adventuring career, there had been more than two separate occasions where she had felt surprisingly peaceful when faced with the certainty of her imminent death. She was older now—if only a little bit—and she knew more about how classes influenced their bearers than most humans her age did. Looking back, Arilla could recognise those moments of past serenity as alien to her. It was her class whispering soothing thoughts in her ears. The bit of magic that called itself a warrior that she in turn carried with her wherever she went, accepted a warrior’s death when the woman she was wanted nothing more than to live. Rather than rail against fate, it had her lie down and accept it—to accept her role as if a mere warrior was all that she could be and that dying as one was all that she could hope for.
She could feel the urge to throw herself on the walls of the inner city—a suicidal impulse to pick the nearest and most direct fight towards a noble enemy even if it wasn’t what she truly wanted. She had to master her class before it killed her. When they retook Rhelea, Arilla was there at the front of the column when Eliza had sung her song. She’d heard its siren call and found that its whispers sounded just like her class. A role had been offered up for her to step into, and thank the Gods that she’d had the good sense to refuse. There she’d seen her fate play out a thousand different times, as those with weaker classes than hers accepted a foreign power and were emboldened by it, made stronger, faster, more skilful, only to drop dead when the song told them to.
It was eerily familiar, even if it was something completely unheard of before. It was like watching the lifecycle of a classer on repeat, except it was played out over a span of minutes rather than the centuries they all hoped for.
Arilla needed to master her class, if not for herself, then for those around her whom she loved.
Arilla stopped her horse and forced the unwanted smile away from her lips. Her face set into a serious frown, she inhaled a deep lungful of air. Upon entering the cleared ground that separated the besiegers’ circular encampment from the defenders’ fortified walls, the unpleasant odours of the city had been replaced with the far more unpleasant scent of war. The stench of it threatened to turn Arilla’s stomach and with every breath she could feel it tickling against the back of her throat. It was foul—smoke and blood all mixed in with an unhealthy amount of upturned dirt and acrid alchemical fumes. It almost reminded her of the Village back in Rhelea after the fall, where the lingering smells left by craftsmen who’d been dumping industrial waste out into the street for years, had been augmented by the recent addition of countless dead bodies that lined the roads while smouldering fires burned on the horizon.
The siege was very different, but also the same.
The sights, the sounds, the constant tension of potential violence was the closest thing she had felt to the prospect of being swarmed by the Monster’s tentacled horrors at a moment's notice.
It was frightening how much she’d missed it.
Not wanting to give the Queen’s archers an easy target, Arilla and her entourage dismounted from their horses and approached the earthworks that made up the majority of the besiegers’ circular encampment. Large mounds of compacted dirt piled three times as high as a man gave the defenders a sense of security while they scurried about in their shadow. Both soldiers and adventurers would dip in and out of the shielded trenches travelling between the relatively exposed platforms where either a siege weapon or a ritual emplacement could be found sitting atop a raised circle of thick reinforced stone.
Handing off their horses before they stepped into the trenches, Arilla found the noises of war hard to ignore. The near-constant creak of wood and rope announced the irregular launches of oversized missiles. The repetitive chanting of spells—either for healing the wounded or for sending off great conflagrations up into the sky—were equally oppressive. Together the magical and mundane engines of war dominated the background murmur that overshadowed all conversations in the trenches. Occasionally that noise would be punctuated by a rare cry of pain when their enemies’ attempts to lay them low resulted in an injury or a death, but for the most part, the sedately paced battle had a frustratingly consistent tune.
The whole thing was a massive war of attrition that, despite their best attempts, showed no signs of ending soon. While the siege itself was repetitive and predictable, there were odd little moments throughout the day that showed how precariously balanced the entire thing was. A mageshield would fail out of nowhere and suddenly an entire squad would be exposed to enemy fire. The defender’s wall would crack and a frantic charge would be turned at the last moment, or enemy warbeasts would pour out of the ground from an uncovered tunnel.
All those classers on both sides, each with unique—if somewhat similar—skills made every conflict wildly unpredictable. As a rule of thumb, the Queen’s forces had higher levelled classers, but they were far more likely to be warrior or knight tagged than anything else. They were also in far shorter supply than what Arilla’s side could bring to bear.
Little vignettes of personal sorrow made it impossible to truly detach from the violence. A surprise volley of arrows from the palace’s walls may only end up claiming a handful of lives, but each one of those was precious. In four months of protracted sieging, the casualties on either side had yet to come close to the first night when Typh’s army had taken most of Helion, but that only made each loss more poignant. They didn’t bury strangers anymore, but friends. Those brave few who resisted the allure of what Helion had to provide and risked their lives every day because they believed—desperately—that taking the palace was the only way to save Terythia.
Which was why it was so very hard, when one of their own showed signs of cracking under the strain of it all.
“How’s he doing?” Arilla asked.
“No ‘Hello, Myorik. How are you doing, Myorik? I’m sorry I’m late,’ we’re just going straight into it are we?” the older warrior grumbled.
“Hello, Myorik. How are you doing, Myorik? I’m sorry I’m late,” she parroted back, knowing better than to indulge the grizzled man in anything resembling an argument. Like her, Myorik was a warrior and while she doubted that he was struggling with his class in the same way she was with hers, picking a fight with him—even a verbal one—was not a good idea.
“Well, Arilla, my morning was shit. First, the human commander of this Gods’ forsaken siege was hours late to relieve me, meaning that I missed out on my much-needed beauty sleep and a reservation at Helion’s finest brothel—”
“Myorik, you don’t go to brothels.”
“No, but I could have if you were on time. Now, where was I… Oh right. After you were late, the Queen decided to try out a new alchemical weapon on us, some nasty yellow fog that blisters the skin and the lungs—we’ve imaginatively named it blister fog. Needless to say, it's very fatal. Not too bad up here where we can disperse it, but they’ve been blasting it down the tunnels throughout the day.” Despite the grim news, Myorik didn’t look particularly upset as he leaned back against the earthen ramparts and lit his packed pipe with an arc of lightning that jumped from his finger and ignited the dried herbs. “That wouldn’t be so bad by itself, but they’ve been sending down some wee beasties that can ignore it. Only earth sprites and those behind a mage shield can fight in the tunnels at present, and we’ve been weighing up collapsing the damn things and being done with it.”
“We can’t,” Arilla said, shaking her head. “Collapsing the tunnels hurts us more than it does them. Besides as unpleasant as it is to admit, our losses in the tunnels are the only thing keeping the goblin population vaguely in check. If we stop letting them go below ground then we’ll have to find a way to slow their breeding or there’ll be riots.”
“That sounds more like a Typh problem than a you problem,” Myorik answered. “But if things carry on we won't have a choice. The only way the tunnels stay open is if they run out of blister fog, or we send a team to shut down production, and we both know that’s not happening.”
Arilla nodded. The screams from the last time she’d sent a strike team into the palace through the tunnels were enough to make sure that she never did it again—at least, not while there were any alchemic knights left standing.
“So how is he then?” Arilla asked, earning a long sigh from Myorik and then an infuriatingly long drag of his pipe.
“Caeber’s doing what he usually does. Killing things in the tunnels in the hope that it will make him feel better.”
“It’s almost been a year.”
“It has, but before you say we should do something, may I remind you that he’s spent most of that year drunk whilst still being the best swordsman I know. Just be glad he’s relatively safe and backs down whenever they send alchemic knights after him.”
“Fine. Anything else I need to know?”
You are reading story Dragon’s Dilemma at novel35.com
With the pleasantries out of the way, the two of them sat down and began the handover which would see Myorik relieved for the day. Arilla strongly doubted that the older man would actually go to a brothel, although if he did it would probably do him some good.
***
The boulder, etched in runes, bound in iron, and charged with more mana than it could safely hold, impacted the fractured curtain walls of the palace at speed and promptly detonated. The explosion reverberated outwards, likely deafening anyone standing nearby and sending dust and stone fragments flying across the half-mile of open space that separated the palace’s fortified complex from the surrounding encirclement.
When the smoke cleared, Arilla was overjoyed to see a large crack in the defenders’ wall. Not large enough for an assault, but the pile of rubble leading up to the narrow gap was just about wide enough for a man to walk through. More importantly, it was wide enough that the Queen’s forces had to repair it.
She re-issued the orders that she’d already given and smiled with satisfaction when the siege engines and mage circles noticeably picked up the pace. Without pause, missiles both mundane and magical hammered the gap in their enemies’ defences. She’d had to pull soldiers from elsewhere in the encirclement to pull this off, but it was worth it to see the crack in the centre of the curtain wall erode before her eyes.
Soon enough the Queen’s forces responded as she’d predicted. A localised mage shield appeared over the breach and a team of earth mages peered over the top of the wall to better inspect the damage. Under the shelter of the arcane barrier, they were individually lowered over the sides of the battlements in rope harnesses. There the distant figures made esoteric gestures with their hands and glowing sigils manifested before them. Whether the constant barrage impacting against their shield phased them, Arilla would never know, but then again she didn’t really care either. Slowly, large chunks of battered stone from the pile of rubble in front of the crack began to float up from the ground, but before the earth mages could repair the damage Veljo struck.
Arilla smiled when the first shot went out. The arrow used was prohibitively expensive to manufacture and they only had a limited number in supply. It was made from a single piece of carved satyr horn that had been soaked in dragon’s blood for a week prior to being etched in runes by an extremely dextrous kobold. The entire exposed surface of the arrow was covered in a ludicrously dense coating of arcane script that served to give it a very singular function. The missile was fired by an iron rank ranger named Veljo, who was being considerably underpaid with his offer of a single gold talent for making the shot.
Empowered by an iron-ranker’s skills and nearly a century of expertise the arrow flew true. A trailing line of brilliant white light followed in its wake as the missile zipped across the half-mile of open ground. The carefully prepared materials worked in concert with the runic script, and the skill-enhanced arrow bypassed the defenders’ mage shield without causing so much as a ripple. The arrow then split into three, with each one plunging into the heart of an earth mage performing the reconstruction and blowing out half their spine on exit. About three-quarters of the rocks hanging suspended in the air immediately fell back down towards the ground, but before anyone could celebrate a small volley of high-powered shots rained down on Veljo’s position.
Each incoming arrow shook the ground, some curving above the earthen mound the ranger had ducked behind, others simply ploughing through it as the fortifications of piled dirt were rapidly destroyed by incoming arrow fire. The Queen had at least two steel ranked archers, which was at least two more than Arilla had, but those who had built their classes for sniping at extreme ranges tended to focus on stealth, perception, and offence. The Noble Slayer knew from experience that these highly specialised classers tended to have very little in the way of survivability. As evidenced by how sincerely Veljo cowered in the dirt, keenly aware that it would only take one strike to end his life.
With the hostile archers bombarding his position, Arilla’s snipers fired back, prompting return fire from more of the Queen’s archers held back in reserve, which triggered more to fire from Arilla’s side and soon the wall reconstruction was long forgotten. Rangers and the few other classers who could compete, hurriedly repositioned before firing at the opposing side, only to then find themselves needing to rapidly reposition themselves again when their positions became untenable. On and on it went. It was a lightning-fast game of death that lasted for minutes. It shook fear into the hearts of those who could barely see at such ranges, let alone fight at them. It made Arilla painfully aware of her own extreme vulnerability to ranged attacks while she ducked down low and waited for the barrage of overlapping light and skills to pass.
When it was over Veljo was still alive, but four of hers and two of theirs were not. Injuries on the Queen’s side were hard to estimate given the System’s refusal to inform attackers of the wounds they had inflicted, but given the prevalence of healers in both camps they didn’t really matter. After reading the reports Arilla was forced to concede that four lives for two was a good trade considering that one of their kills was a steel rank, but it didn’t mean that she had to like it. There were a lot of things she didn’t like about this, her class’s urges notwithstanding.
While she thought about the next play, the initiative of the siege firmly within her court, a bedraggled runner appeared. A youth who was too young for her warrior class and was covered in rapidly reddening blisters ran up to her and clearly didn’t know enough to stop in time. Her entourage of bronzes—the same four classers from the estate—readied their weapons at the girl who noticeably stiffened, eyes widening in terror.
“Speak and then get yourself to a healer,” Arilla intoned, prompting the young warrior to visibly relax.
“T-there’s t-trouble i-in the tunnels! Master Rolling-Thunder sounded the retreat, but the Shining Knight won’t leave! I was sent to get you. The earth sprite wants to collapse them with—”
“Which tunnel?!” Arilla asked quickly.
“T-this way!” the teenager responded, and quickly raced off in that direction.
Arilla followed after sacrificing her rogue’s protection to send a message to the earth sprite in charge. She did not want them collapsing any tunnels that she might be inside, at least not for the time being. Ignoring the protestations of her guard who currently assumed she was about to do something foolish, she chased after the rapidly retreating messenger girl. Soon enough she found herself below ground, treading a steadily declining passageway while the massive forms of the retreating earth sprites lumbered past her in the other direction.
Concerningly, the large creatures composed of animated rocks showed increasingly severe signs of damage. Large slashes and cracks that spread across their entire eight feet and up frames started to make her worried about what exactly she was walking into. The messenger girl—or young warrior—didn’t seem to have much in the way of useful information, only that whatever was down there was some kind of monster strong enough to prompt a full retreat, from stoic earth sprites who were frighteningly resilient to damage.
The faintest hint of burning garlic made its way to her nose and knowing by now to fear strangely placed smells, Arilla ordered her accompanying mage to erect an arcane barrier to keep the bad air out. The spell snapped into place, and onwards they went, her sword finally unsheathed as she held it firmly in one hand.
They descended for a few minutes further, while the earth sprites who had been fighting below continued to stream past. The scale and frequency of their injuries only seemed to increase. The massive amounts of damage that had been done to them was clear to see, and on creatures whose levels extended all the way up to low-iron, it was more than enough to make her guards jittery.
When it became obvious where they needed to go, Arilla sent the warrior-tagged messenger back to the surface with a gold talent in her hands and an order not to return to the siege for at least a week. It was an order she highly doubted would be adhered to, but at least she’d made a token effort to keep the teenager out of harm's way.
Her party didn’t have to go much further before they encountered a wall of dense, yellow fog that completely blocked off the tunnel they were on. Blister fog was just the latest in a long line of the Queen’s alchemical weapons and looking at it, it was probably her nastiest one yet. Arilla could immediately see how the lack of visibility was going to be a bigger issue than whatever flavour of awful it inflicted on your skin.
The warrior hesitated for a moment before stepping into that yellow wall, relying on her mage’s arcane shield to keep the effects of the alchemical weapon back. A thin bubble of blue force extended out from the mage for five or so metres. Combined with yellow fog beyond, the translucent barrier made everything take on shades of sickly green which would have been more disconcerting if she could actually see anything beyond at all.
The tunnel was wide enough for the party of five to walk side by side if they wanted to, and within the shield they could see normally, but everything on the other side was an unmoving wall of static yellow-green.
“If anything goes wrong, fall back to the surface and wait for me. If I’m not back in an hour, tell Rolling-Thunder to collapse the tunnel.”
The words weren’t particularly hard to say and a part of her was momentarily worried that the impulse for self-sacrifice came from her class. It wasn’t. Caeber—the Shining Knight—was not her friend, she wasn’t particularly sure that the man she’d once regarded as a hero could even be considered nice or selfless, let alone heroic. He was, however, hurting, and Arilla knew more than just a bit about that.
Taking another blind step into the blister fog, Arilla steeled herself for what was to come. She wouldn’t let him die down here alone in the yellow, not if she could help it.
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