Author's Nightmare: Chapter 147 (Patreon)

Beam POV: Day 142

Current Wealth: 281 gold 34 silver 47 copper

I honestly don’t know how Solitaire talked me into heading inside the walls. He’s persuasive, that much I’ve always known, but I didn’t know he was that persuasive. Fucking Shango wasn’t even that persuasive, I must have lost my mind. Unless he’d drugged me?

Well, I was inside now, and I didn’t exactly have the luxury of backing out. My friends were counting on me, the people of Swanhen were counting on me, and besides all that I wasn’t too confident about keeping myself free of arrows as I sprinted away from the walls. 

A Hero. People were calling me a Hero. I wasn’t , that much I was painfully aware of, but somehow I felt like I had to act the part at least. The idea of giving them that hope and just falling short was too awful to consider. I got to work. 

Swanhen was actually pretty similar in layout to Rinchester, and moving through it brought back memories. Not pleasant memories, mind, and each one left me significantly more pissed off than the one before it. With the snow receding and the orcs still busy at the walls, I actually got quite far before even encountering another person. 

I got a good look at the place. 

Swanhen was locked down tight, probably to keep people like me from getting in and doing exactly what I was doing. I wasn’t as sneaky as Solitaire- nobody I’d ever met was even half as sneaky as Solitaire- but I was faster and stronger, which meant that in the time an orc patrol took to turn their backs I could already be several paces to one side and on top of a building. It made avoiding their eyes pretty trivial. 

Heading around, I noted that there were still quite a few humans in the place. In fact, though I couldn’t exactly judge them based on a glance like Solitaire, it seemed to me that it was roughly as populace as Rinchester had been, just with our kind’s numbers more…Compressed. 

Well, no surprise there. It tended to happen when your home was invaded and you suddenly found yourself a prisoner. I continued my travels, learning what I could, seeing what I could. I found the gear for more siege engines of course, which was particularly important as Solitaire had been hoping we might ambush the orcs as they headed outside to cut down trees for more of thern. I found their ammo stores, which were plentiful, and what I thought were some barracks. The orcs in Swanhen had been oddly well equipped. It was hard to see from the walls, but now that I could study them at my leisure I saw they all came plated in metal.

Iron, I thought, rather than steel, at least if my lessons with Ardin were leading me right. But it was thick still, formed into cuirass and greaves, bracers and helms. Maybe a quarter of an inch in all. That wasn’t good. A quarter-inch of iron might well stop Shango’s rifle, and I didn’t know how well our gatling gun would defeat it. 

Nerves fraying, I kept up my examination. Now that I’d gotten the basics down I started running interference, too. There were a few thousand orcs in Swanhen? Alright then, I’d see what I could do about that. Fighting them all was out of the question, but with those numbers I could kill twenty and reduce their strength by one percent.

It wasn’t much, in the grand scheme of things. But if I killed twenty more, and another twenty on top, itd add up. We needed all the advantages we could get, so I worked to start getting them. If nothing else, the big, cumbersome iron armour made it a shade easier to sneak up on them. 

This was how I passed much of my first day in Swanhen, and I had to say it was almost fun. I was faster now than even I’d realised, watching orcs turn in slow motion, twisting around and cutting throats before my presence had even been fully realised. Sometimes I’d be shot at, of course. And the arrows were slow. Faster than I could run, naturally, but not by as much as I’d have thought, even fired from those stupidly big recurve bows. On more than one occasion I actually dodged one after it was fired, and I had no trouble keeping ahead of the sluggish marksmen wielding them. 

Of course, one could only kill so many people before those people’s allies decided you were a high priority target. By the time orc number twenty nine had met his maker- which, now that I thought about it, was actually me- I caught word of some alert running through the city as they scrambled to respond.

Thing was though, they were responding quite…Quickly. Sharply, as if on some pre-arranged schedule, and when I kept an ear to the ground I heard mention of resistance fighters. None had made the connection that their recent enemy’s attack had deposited someone inside the walls.

Which told me that they already had problems in their walls.

I looked into it, naturally. And was rather proud to find I was right. From what I could gather- mostly by grabbing orcs’ heads and angrily yelling at them before I chopped them in half- this resistance had cropped up a while ago, and it was led by quite a charismatic figure.

Obviously, the orcs did not know who that figure was. Or else they’d be a dead, charismatic figure. At the very least they were competent enough to evade detection though, and doing that without my literal superpowers was probably no mean feat. So I looked into finding this leader myself. 

It was actually not that hard, if only because I was a very big, scary man who’d already become famous for killing- by now- thirty two orcs. I shook down a few human locals, most of whom knew nothing, some of whom knew something, and none of whom were cooperative. At first. Fortunately fear and orc blood did a great job at lubricating my investigation, and soon enough I’d managed to narrow down my suspects through a combination of one part Holmsian deduction, and nine hundred and ninety nine parts intimidation and persistence. 

It was quite a Solitaire thing to do, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But it needed doing. I wouldn’t fail my family.

To my surprise, I didn’t find any guards at the leader’s location. When I entered, cautiously and with full readiness to hurl myself from a window if it turned into an ambush, I found none inside. Only a single woman.

Tall, even by earth standards, and well dressed. Very well dressed actually, clothes made of silk and other cloths that were prohibitively expensive in Redacle, with their tailoring fine and careful enough not to be visible even at a more thorough inspection. She was black too. Not as dark skinned as Shango, but close. Her hair was braided into dreadlocks, and her face was sharp and aristocratic. 

She looked like she’d been expecting me, and at the risk of sounding like Solitaire again I almost dove through the fucking wall to escape when I realised that.

“Greetings.” She said, looking at me like I’d come to expect people would in this world. As if I was some tool of unknown use, to be assessed and planned around. “I have been expecting you.”

“I can tell.” Was all I thought to respond with. She gestured to a chair opposite her.

“Sit?” She offered.

“No thanks.” I replied, wanting to remain as mobile as possible in case this was a trap of some sorts. 

The woman hummed, not looking annoyed, nor pleased, at my response, and she was speaking more before I could even wonder what to read from that.

“My name is Adayana.” She said at last. “Lady Adayana. And I have been waiting to meet you, Beam Belahont, for quite some time.”