Author's Nightmare: Chapter 156 (Patreon)

Beam POV: Day 144

Current Wealth: 213 gold 21 silver 32 copper

A lot of my body hurt, but it was the good kind of pain. The burn of muscles pushed long and hard, of fighting done without injury. On any other day I might have found it satisfying. Today, though, it was hard to feel anything at all. 

I’d fucked up, and my fuck-up might have gotten us all killed if Solitaire hadn’t been so good at tying people in knots with words alone. It might still do, even, if our enemies came back for seconds. And it was all because I’d failed to kill one damned orc. 

Well, the failure wasn’t mine alone. I eyed Adannaya, letting my displeasure show. 

“So.” I began, just barely veiling my irritation. “Something went wrong.”

“It did.” She replied. For some strange reason, Lady Adannaya did not seem as bothered by the near death of myself and my friends as I was. 

“Do you have any idea what?” I pressed. “Because I don’t, in fact I’m fairly sure I did everything about perfectly. I was just walking into a trap from the start.”

Her eyes frosted over, but her composure didn’t seem to crack. 

“I do not know what you think you are implying.” She replied, in an eerily similar way to how Shango sometimes did, “But your failure was no fault of my own. If…” Her eyes widened, and the shift in expression came so suddenly it almost made me jump. “Oh.” She whispered. “Oh. I…I know what went wrong.”

“What was it?” I pressed, recognising the sight of a quick mind exploding itself onto the right answer, and wanting that shared as soon as I could have it. 

“The orc…” She trailed off, looking ahead. I followed her eyes to see that our enemies, at last, were moving. 

Moving backwards.

“A…Retreat?” I asked, glancing at Adannaya for reassurance, not quite wanting to risk believing it. 

She nodded, though, seeming just as surprised herself.

“They’re retreating.” She whispered. “With their leader intact. I…Didn’t think it was possible.”

Something started fluttering up in my belly as I saw the orcs spilling back, trudging their ways back through the town as a giant wave of musculature and metal. Disorganized, clumsy, slower than might have been ideal by half. But definitely moving back, definitely freeing us from the rest of the fighting.

We’d forced back an invasion, and not lost even a single man. I almost started weeping at the realization. 

Solitaire actually did weep, or rather he started twitching and convulsing so much that his eyes watered. I didn’t directly ask what was wrong, but I ended up finding out anyway as he muttered something, on repeat, about the orcs “plotting” and gave me a new assignment. It was another carry-and-relocate detail, which I finished quickly if only to soothe my poor friend’s near-incendiary nerves. By the time I was back, he’d calmed down a bit. And something new was happening.

People were swarming us and our men as we exited our safety warehouse, a crowd of them encircling us from the front, sides and back, so fast I barely even realised it was happening before we’d already been surrounded across every direction by grinning, venerating faces.

“You did it!” One woman cried, gripping the hem of my shirt in a way that was more than a little disconcerting. I barely had time to even consider a response before more spoke, all saying much the same thing, men and women, children and old, gawping and cheering and touching me as if there were some secret divinity in my clothes that might rub off on them with sufficient molestation.

The rest of our men were getting similar, if lesser treatment. Known apparently as the subordinates and not the leaders, they were mere accessories to the great deeds for which I was being rubbed like a pair of sticks in a campfire. 

I actually shot a glance Solitaire’s way and was rather thankful to see he had not yet beheaded anyone in some screaming reflex, but his eyes were dancing everywhere as we slowly waded through the group and tried to convince them to back off for a moment and give us some breathing room. 

“It was nothing.” We’d say. Or “please, we couldn’t just stand by and watch.” Or the all-time classic, “you all saved yourselves by surviving so long.” The problem with trying to convince people not to worship you was they tended to do it even harder the more you did. 

In their defence of course, getting this sort of reaction had been part of our reason for coming. Another big reason was, or at least I hoped it was, that they were largely innocent people, and them dying would be bad.

But as the celebrations continued, and the space was finally given for us to breathe and move, I started to find myself caring less and less about the strategic gain. That old feeling was back again, the one we’d gotten at Rinchester. The sensation of having done the right thing and feeling my conscience purr like a sated cat. 

It was spoiled, of course, by Solitaire. But not by any of the usual quirks. This time it was raw, primal terror I saw detonating across his face.

“FUCK!” He screamed, gesturing ahead, then turning to our men. “ALL OF YOU BACK TO PLACE, BACK IN FORMATION, GET READY!”

The orcs were rushing around, turning and hurrying back for an attack. Their retreat had been false and, covered by so many buildings, we’d taken until they were a dangerously thin half-mile away to notice.

Except they were moving faster now, charging rather than marching, and our forces were still tied up by fawning, now panicking, civilians. We were tragically slow to respond, and they were tragically fast to close in. 

“OUT OF MY WAY!” I snarled, suddenly finding myself urged to move like I never had been before. I felt bodies pressing in, claustrophobic, crushing, strangling. They were constrictors about my limbs, chains at my ankles. It took every screed of will I had not to start hitting people to carve a bloody path through them with my fists and elbows, but I was too strong to afford lapses of temper like that. If I started getting rough with humans they’d die, period. I couldn’t bring myself to allow that, couldn’t bear the thought, and so I nudged and pushed, and shoved hard only with great hesitation. Even that reminded me how awfully fragile they were.

And it still wasn’t enough. 

The orcs came closer, the bodies tighter, the panic hotter. I saw Solitaire convulsing at it, knew that with so much human fear crushing him from so short a distance his mind must be about to burst with the pressure. Still our towering enemies lumbered on. I thought my heart might stop. 

But then, I realised, they were crossing that section of the town, sprinting right along where I’d—

The orcs were closer still, a few hundred yards away and arrows were flying now. They were eager, hungry. Hateful and vengeful, and whatever savagery they unleashed on us it would have been inspired by my own rampage among their own ranks. I had just enough time for regret.

And then the killing started.