Volume 1, Chapter 26: Vertical Problems Require Vertical Solutions (Patreon)

The occasional arrows that had been easy enough to avoid quickly turned into a genuine rain of sharpened wood falling on us from above. Even though Plasario and his unit had become the main target, their spiked shields, raised overhead, handled what the orcs sent their way remarkably well.

Unfortunately for those of us farther back, the enemy wasn’t stupid, and it didn’t take long for them to make us their primary target instead.

Hidden behind the columns lining the sides of the bridge, and behind those that had collapsed across the roadway, we waited for the dangerous downpour to ease while I dug through my backpack and threaded the rope through the hook I had inside.

I had already left my improvised staff leaning against one of the low walls along the edge of the bridge, hoping I would eventually have a chance to come back for it.

“Merciful sun of Ra,” Khufu’Ri said, peering through a gap toward the battle raging not far away in the courtyard before the temple. “Whatever rot lives in that man’s heart, his hands do not lie about battle. He has already sent many green ones beneath the earth.”

“What does that, um… exactly mean?” Bri asked, huddled close to the roadway behind a broken, fallen column while arrows flew past her one after another.

“It means he has already sent no small number of orcs to the underworld on his own,” the lion replied.

Once I had finally secured the rope, I wedged the hook into a gap beneath the fallen column, twisted it, and pulled until it caught on the other side. Then I tossed the free end of the rope through the nearest hole in the bridge. The current below caught it immediately and dragged the end downstream, but my emergency escape route was ready.

“What the hell are you doing?” Eli asked, ducking behind Khufu. “There’s a raging river under the bridge!”

“I’ll deal with the archers. You guys take care of Bri,” I said. Gripping the rope tightly, I pulled on it once more to test whether it would hold my weight, then jumped down through the opening in the bridge.

“Arthur!” Mara called, but I ignored her once again. “Callout—if you can’t get back, don’t improvise a worse way forward just because turning around feels like failure.” Her free advice was starting to get on my nerves. In my opinion, it was worth exactly what I was paying for it.

The thunderous impacts and battle cries blended together with the roar of the raging water crashing against the nearby rocks. Hanging beneath the bridge, I looked around for the best way to cross the last dozen or so feet separating me from the riverbank.

“Everything… all right…?” Another voice came from above, but I could barely hear it. My mind was probably filling in the words I expected rather than actually making them out.

Above me, I spotted a loosened piece of stone jutting from the underside of the bridge. I carefully grabbed it with one hand and tested its strength with only part of my weight.

When it remained unmoved by the gravitational problems associated with my existence, I committed fully, hanging from it with one hand. Then I released the rope and grabbed the stone with both.

“Pull the rope up!” I shouted with all the strength in my lungs.

I began swinging forward by arching my body, then backward, then forward again, clinging on with my fingertips.

On the third swing, when my legs reached the highest point of the arc, I tensed and let go, twisting my body through the air and throwing my arms forward.

I landed on a rock constantly washed by the river, pushed off from it, then bounded from another stone protruding from the surface until I finally reached the vertical wall marking the end of the bridge.

From there, I could see my companions slowly pulling the rope back up.

Keeping my back pressed against the wall, I carefully edged toward the end of the bridge where the stonework met the natural rock.

Once I reached the bank, I paused for a moment, considering whether to pull myself over the low stone cliff right away. Instead, I decided to move a few steps farther in, where the vegetation covering the skeleton had boldly spilled past the edge of the drop toward the river, sending vines trailing downward.

A few seconds later, I was very glad I had made that choice, because the upper half of an orc flew directly over my head and crashed into the river. Then the current seized it and carried it away, smashing it against numerous rocks jutting from the water.

“Battles aren’t for me,” I muttered to myself.

From my position, I could see the bridge still being peppered with arrows. Sophie remained crouched behind a column on this side, perched against the low wall and apparently waiting either for the orcs to run out of their ammunition or for some other route across to present itself.

I slowly turned on one heel, grabbed the edge of the cliff above me, and, making use of the roots and vines protruding from the wall and hanging down around me, pulled myself up with little difficulty.

The grass I quickly crawled across toward the temple wall smelled of clover and lilac, along with some other fruity scent I couldn’t identify. In the air, however, I could also smell the sweet, metallic scent of blood, and farther away, shit, sweat, and excrement. The mixture of smells gradually reaching me made the meat I had eaten not long ago rise back up my throat, and unfortunately I had to tilt my head aside and vomit straight onto the vegetation.

I coughed, hidden beneath the leaves covering the wall of the building, watching out of the corner of my eye the invertebrates crawling beneath them and nibbling at the plants, paying no attention to the death being served just around the corner.

I stole a quick glance at how the fight between the people from the camp and the local orcs was going, and saw something I hadn’t expected, because instead of an organized push against enemies, chaos overtook the fight with astounding efficiency.

One of the men nearest the bridge had already been completely crushed, somehow abandoned by his companions to the mercy of two orcs hammering him with a warhammer and a club, each blow landing with enough force to break bone.

Another had crawled across a large portion of the courtyard with his stomach split open, leaving behind a trail of excrement and ruptured intestines that had uncoiled and dragged along behind him. Somehow, despite all of this, he was still alive, pulling himself away from the battle inch by inch. Unfortunately, the cruelty of the situation refused to leave him alone. One of the smaller creatures—probably a goblin—noticed him, ran over to the length of exposed intestine, grabbed it roughly halfway along where it had unspooled, shoved it into its jaws, and began gnawing on it with revolting, wet smacks.

Milo noticed this, grinning ear to ear. With his entire body stained brown-red with blood and entrails, he crushed the creature by pinning its head against the ground with such force that it tore free from the neck a heartbeat before bursting apart against the stone like a dropped melon.

Another soldier fought while sitting with his back against the trunk of a broad-leafed tree, trying to keep three goblins away with a sword held at full extension while they stabbed at him from a safe distance with spears. One of them struck him directly in the eye. The spear punched through with enough force to lodge itself in the bark behind his head, and the man began convulsing, his whole body jerking uncontrollably. The goblins quickly realized that the movements of his sword were no longer aimed at them and threw themselves onto him, beginning to tear into his flesh with their teeth.

Plasario arrived moments later and with a quick lunge, he drove his sword through the chest of one creature, ripped the blade free, and kicked the second away from the body. With his left hand, he picked up the sword of his fallen comrade, swung once, and hurled it into another goblin, piercing its stomach.

At the same time, he spun aside to avoid the third creature leaping at him, slashing while it was still in the air with such precision that the goblin landed with both legs severed below the knees. It managed to crawl only a short distance before another soldier drove a spear through it.

That soldier, in turn, was hurled backward with a sound like snapping bones when an orc rushed him and slammed a hammer directly into his solar plexus. Total fucking, all-consuming chaos unlike anything I had ever seen.

If there had been any kind of survival strategy at the beginning, it had probably died the moment the two sides first collided. The shooting on the bridge eased up a little, however, so the Earthlings took advantage of the moment and sprinted to join the fight. Mara remained near the rear rather than charging blindly into the center. One hand stayed raised, index finger constantly changing targets as she shouted something into the wind and the rush of the water.

Watching all this, I grabbed one of the plant’s vines and pulled it slightly away from the wall. Bracing my feet against the stone, I kept on climbing higher.

My fingers were a little sore from hanging beneath the bridge, but the vines allowed me to move quietly and carefully while still keeping at least part of the courtyard in front of the temple within view.

The Earthlings had barely made it any farther before running into resistance from a group of orcs who had already beaten one of the knights to death and were now raising their weapons to strike Khufu’Ri.

He planted himself between them, spread his arms toward both sides, and drove rapidly growing finger bones straight through their heads. With a sharp pull, he tore the bones back toward himself, ripping their faces apart, then kept moving, sweeping those enormous paws through the air to knock incoming arrows aside.

The women ran after him over the blood-stained grass toward a line of trees several dozen paces away from the building, where all of them took cover again from the renewed barrage.

I also noticed Sophie crouch behind one of the trees and touch the flowers growing there.

Eli, meanwhile, stood a little farther back, spreading several of his ropes across the ground and directing them so they tangled up the enemies charging toward them.

My observation was cut short, however, when the vine I was holding tore loose.

Only my quick reaction kept me from falling. I caught another vine with one hand while, with the same motion, grabbing a narrow ledge on the temple wall, where I hung for a few seconds too many, before I found my footing again. That was also when I noticed Bri flying through the arrows coming her way toward one of the soldiers who had suffered a deep slash across his back. The blow had torn through both his armor and shirt and driven him down onto his hands and knees.

An orc stood over him, ready to finish what he had started. He raised his axe, preparing to split the kneeling man in half—or at the very least take off a limb.

A concentrated glob of some yellowish, translucent substance shot out from between the trees at high speed and struck the orc directly in the face with enough force to knock him off balance. At the same time, the slime splattered across his features, apparently blinding him and debilitating him in other ways. He began coughing, lowering the axe to his side as he desperately tried to wipe whatever had hit him from his face.

Then his body suddenly went rigid and the tip of a sword had appeared through his throat. Just as quickly as it had appeared, the blade vanished again, ripped back out of the orc’s body, and he collapsed to the ground.

Plasario spun through the space for another moment, cutting across a goblin charging on all fours. His gaze briefly met Bri’s as she hovered over the wounded soldier, directing the hand I had created toward his injury, with careful adjustments to her position in the air.

From where I was, I couldn’t tell whether the wound actually closed, but I assumed it must have, because the swordsman left without a word, moving in such a way that the arrows fired from the tower missed him by inches.

The man on the ground being treated by Bri—through whom the arrows seemed to pass without causing much harm—took one of them in the leg before Khufu reached him.

The lion was covered in something that looked like enormous, fully opened lotus blossoms attached to his massive bipedal body by vines wrapped around him. Arrows that struck the open flowers bounced away, merely shaking the petals without piercing them.

Khufu grabbed the wounded man beneath the arms and began dragging him toward the trees, covered by Bri, who was clearly feeding him information about the battlefield. She must have warned him in time, because he released the soldier and spun around just as a goblin came rushing toward him, pinning the creature to the ground with one swift motion.

I turned my attention upward and continued climbing more carefully, searching for footholds and switching to a new vine every so often so that my weight wouldn’t strain any single plant for too long.

I was already high enough to reach the roof, which was only slightly pointed along the edges and completely flat across the top.

I quietly pulled myself onto it, then circled the first tower and then the second, looking for a good way to approach. There were no vines growing up there anymore, but there were some at the front, hanging loosely from the jaw of the massive frog that had most likely died on top of this building years ago. The problem was that approaching from that side would leave me completely exposed to the archers, who were already looking in that direction anyway, trying to get a view of the battlefield obscured by all the vegetation.

So I did what any self-respecting thief would have done in my place and started climbing, making use of even the smallest imperfections in the building itself.

Protruding bricks became the rungs of my improvised ladder, while cracks in the wall caused by age and damage became places where I could wedge my tired hands. At one such point, I stopped for longer, trying to figure out how to continue.

During that time, I counted three massive booms resembling thunder, two of which also shook the building itself, causing pieces of it to break loose and sending pebbles and larger stones raining down onto my back.

As usual in situations like this, the solution came from a combination of experience and improvisation. Remembering similar climbs from my past, I searched the wall with my eyes until I found an opening roughly the full length of my outstretched legs away from me, but with a much better route upward from there and good holds right below.

Holding tightly to the vertical opening with both hands, I positioned them with my palms facing toward the gap where I wanted to place my feet. Tensing my core, I twisted my body until I was almost perpendicular to the ground.

Then I shot my right leg toward the other crack.

The moment I felt my foot catch inside it, I shifted my entire weight onto the top of that foot and let go with my hands, allowing my body to drop headfirst. Hanging upside down, I managed to grab openings farther below with my hands, then pulled my foot free and let gravity rotate me back the right way, head up once again.

After briefly repositioning myself and uncrossing my arms, which had ended up with the right over the left during the maneuver, I rested for only a moment.

Then I tensed, braced my feet against the wall, and used my arms to launch myself higher, catching the spot where my foot had been a moment earlier. From there, the path was relatively straightforward and eventually brought me to the top of the tower. I hooked my arms over the cornice and pulled myself up just far enough to peek over the edge and make sure no one was looking in my direction.