Author's Nightmare: Chapter 146 (Patreon)

Solitaire POV: Day 142

Current Wealth: 281 gold 34 silver 47 copper

“Bugger.” I replied, calmly. “Bollocks. Oh bosh, heck, even, and, dare I say it, ploppies.” As far as displays of my anger went, I actually thought I was doing a pretty good job. I wasn’t even swearing really. Beam apparently disagreed.

“Can you stop punching that dead deer, please?” He requested. I looked down to my hands, covered in blood and fur, then up to the now rather less deer-shaped deer. With a sigh, I acquiesced. 

“This isn’t good.” I grumbled, kicking the ground and sending a big tuft of cold-solid dirt ripping free. It would’ve been a satisfying display of my strength, had that strength been enough to kill several thousand grey-skinned body builders.

In a protracted fight, Beam might’ve been worth a hundred of them. I was probably more like fifty, including my ability to hilariously prank them with nitroglycerin, while most of our elites would’ve been perhaps ten or fewer. The basic soldiers we had would’ve been one each, maybe less. In total our force was equal to perhaps two hundred orcs. Not bad, considering we numbered less than thirty. With Corvan to help we might’ve even tipped that up to three hundred. 

But that still wasn’t enough, even without the disadvantage of the enemy having a manned defensive position. The siege engines, in particular, were a concern. So we got thinking. 

We could see a few details about Swanhen from the outside, and Beam had spent a good while studying it, but otherwise there wasn’t much to go off. Around the city, woodland grew thickly enough to hide us from sight. This meant we had the chance to take our time in planning, but that still didn’t give us more info to work off. Intelligence, in the end, was our crucial shortcoming. 

That in and of itself made the plan fairly obvious though, and shortly after coming to the realisation I’d formulated it. The men weren’t exactly happy about the fact, but then people rarely were happy to have a giant, deadly fort pointed out to them and then hear the phrase “get ‘em”. I decided I could make do with their poor moods. 

We cooked and ate the dear, which if anything even more delicious following its several-minute tenderization, and though there wasn’t much when split so many ways, it certainly had an effect on morale. Then we all ran screaming like lunatics at the orcs.

The good thing about being so heavily outnumbered, charging a fortified position and with little to no actual siege weapons to help us break it, was that the enemy was entirely surprised. That was, unfortunately, the literal only benefit we gained from the situation. Unless one counted the ambush factor.

Well, it wasn’t such a small thing. We were mostly to the walls before any actual siege weapons could even be fired. 

That went a long way, because by then we were close enough that none could be fired with any real accuracy. The volleys of arrows were of greater concern. Big, heavy, fast things driven by massive composite bows with too heavy a draw for most humans to manage. The orcs did just fine though, spitting their projectiles our way with velocities eerily close to my own rocket launcher.

Corvan came in clutch there of course. The air ahead of us coiled with force as grass and the increasingly thin snow were torn away. Arrows, even these ones, were slower than bullets, and they were far, far less dense with a much bigger surface area. Corvan didn’t even need a barrier to stop them, just blasted them off-course with a few metres of gale-force wind. By the time the second volley had missed its mark, our men were dropping down and readying their retaliation.

Of course, they used the mortars. 

There was a certain satisfaction to seeing weapons I’d worked so hard on finally used in anger, and I had to suppress a giggle as the sight of orcish flesh flying in all directions hit me. My old therapists might have called these “disturbingly sadistic tendencies”, but considering they ended up stuck in a career where they asked children about their feelings for money, I didn’t really care what they thought. Certainly not compared to the dopamine hit from weapons well made.

Not all of them were accurate. Some grenades went over the walls, detonating out of sight within the town. Others were short and hit the wall itself, blasts shaped away from their intended targets by the sloped designs.

Enough hit home though. We’d not put as much time into drilling on the grenade launchers as we might have, but even a fraction of the shots hitting did wonders to freak the fuck out of the orcs. They probably thought they were getting blasted by an entire host of magi. Idiots.

Well, Corvan added a bit of weight to that misconception with his own, actually magical attacks. 

Fire ran along the wall like a sheet of rain, scorching everything in its path. Siege engines were charred into ruined husks, ropes snapped and whipped around like burning ribbons, and the poor sods actually manning the stuff either perished instantly if they were lucky, or slow if they weren’t. 

It only took us a minute, maybe less, to de-man an entire section of the outer wall, a hundred or more bodies crushed, eviscerated or immolated into death. But the enemy was mounting their defence soon enough. Other siege engines farther from our section were turning, other bows were readying, and the gate was starting to rise as enemies prepared to charge down and swarm us in melee. I initiated the next step of my cunning and masterful plan.

“RETREAT!” I screamed, making a solid example of the order by turning to leg it myself. 

If there is one order you can count on being obeyed by scared, half-trained men, it is an order to run the fuck away. These ones were very eager to do so. Corvan whipped up more winds around us to cover the flight, though with so many arrows from so many directions, we found them getting a bit closer than would’ve been ideal. I saw one bounce off a man’s brigandine and almost trip another before it came to stop, but we were soon out of bow range entirely and back safe at the tree line.

Of course, the siege engines started firing back at us. None hit, even discounting the range and limited visibility, I’d parked us behind a nice, big slope.

“Everyone still alive?” I asked, while the recruits panted and heaved, and our elites looked around doing a headcount.

“Yep.” Argar grunted, his mood pretty foul what with all the fighting he hadn’t gotten to do. “Nobody’s even hurt.”

That actually did surprise me, I’d expected at least an arrow wound or two armour or not. Looked like we’d gotten lucky with this one, even with the sudden devastation and quick retreat. My good mood didn’t last long though, because a certain whiny prick’s voice soon took to the air and got to work on ruining it.

“That’s it?” Appleberry snapped. “That’s what you call an attack?”

Of course, Appleberry had entered that attack in full plate armour. Even orcish arrows hadn’t had decent odds of hurting him at the range we were catching them from, and it probably hadn’t even occurred to him that we’d gotten lucky to have escaped with no wounds at all. In his eyes, casualties were just an expected price. In his eyes the real waste was losing the chance to capitalize on all the dead poor people and take back his shit.

I didn’t hit him. Partly because I’d run a fair risk of killing him, in my own plate armour, and partly because I had to reluctantly admit there were more productive ways of handling our little disagreement. Even if none were as fun as watching him go flying back and bounce off a tree. 

“That’s what I call a diversion.” I explained to him calmly. Appleberry paused through what looked like it had been about to be a secondary rant, and looked thoughtful all of a sudden. 

“A diversion.” He echoed. “Explain.”

Hearing it phrased like a command with so much confidence that I’d oblige him actually made me incredibly tempted to not answer out of spite, but that wasn’t a serious option. If Appleberry was left in the dark he would do something stupid, inevitably. And that could only end badly even if it had the bonus of getting him killed.

“You haven’t noticed yet, because you’re stupid, but Beam isn’t here.” I pointed out. Appleberry realised what I was saying a moment later, eyes widening. I continued anyway. “That’s because he’s inside Swanhen. Our biggest issue was we didn’t have much information to go off for an actual plan of attack, but now we have a man on the inside.”