Hope you enjoy the chapter :)

Reminder: I'm going to a convention from Thursday to Monday, so I might miss Friday's and Monday's chapters.

Plum

25 – Battle Lines

The first few moments of the ambush were devastating for the Gavax soldiers; they were marching in their ranks, shoulder-to-shoulder in the narrow ravine, when Lucy fired into their front line. When her arrows punched through the armor of the two central soldiers, and they fell, the column slowed almost instantly—like a silent command had been called out. That was when the boulders began to fall.

Benny and Janice roared as they threw their hundred-pound stones. Their enthusiasm for the ambush wasn’t isolated; the Militia members and the Dondalli joined in, screaming inarticulate cries of war as they threw their rocks. Lucy continued to fire, launching arrows into the milling throng below as fast as she could nock and release them. Vaguely, she was aware of Vince and other archers also shooting, but she was dialed in, picking out necks, chests, and gaps in armor for targets and avoiding hastily raised shields.

Dozens of Gavax fell, maybe hundreds—it was impossible to be sure in the chaos—before the enemy archers clambered up the far slope, out of the shower of falling stones, and began to return fire. They moved together, responding to another unheard command, and when they turned and unleashed their bolts, the volley was devastating—nearly a hundred stubby missiles ripped through the humid air and dust. Lucy heard screams and curses and saw more than one of the ambushers fall over the cliff. Whether they were her people, she couldn’t tell.

She drew back her bow, took sight on the centermost Gavax crossbowman, and let loose. Immediately, she cast Double Arrow, and she silently celebrated as two of the Gavax fell. For the first time in a while, she regretted not spending her Improvement Points. If she’d pushed Double Arrow to its limit, could she shoot three arrows? Four? She didn’t know, but she told herself she’d better really think about whether it was the right thing to do—saving up for an Evolution Point.

Even as her mind distracted itself with those side thoughts, she fired two more times, then the Gavax lifted their crossbow arms—reloaded!

“Get down!” she screamed, leading by example. She dropped to her belly as the enemy archers fired. Once again, some of the bolts hit home, and once again, Lucy heard at least two screams as people fell. Then she was up and shooting again.

She’d shot twice more when Torfal grabbed her shoulder and yelled, “We must move! The stones are gone and the column advances!”

Lucy spun, looking up the line, and saw that he was right. Already, many of the Dondalli were flitting away, hurrying along the ridge toward the settlement. She saw bodies, but only a few, and the ones she made out were definitely Dondalli. She whirled, saw Vince, who was crouched down trying to grab hold of some dirt-covered arrows, then looked up to Benny, locking eyes with the dragonkin.

“Let’s move! Grab your sister!”

He nodded and turned to take hold of his sister’s wrist. Janice, with a crossbow bolt buried in her chest, was trying to wrest a boulder from the hard-packed ground and shook him off, growling savagely. He persisted, yanking on her leather vest. “We have to move!”

With that bellow, everyone got the picture and started to run along the ridge. Lucy led the people from Mesquite Mesa, and the Dondalli hurried ahead, running and flying low through the air intermittently. When they neared the junction, most of the Dondalli got past, hurrying on toward the settlement, but then the leading edge of the Gavax column came into view, cutting Lucy and the others off.

Lucy’s heart began to hammer when she saw the Gavax march up the slope. Had they continued marching during the entire ambush? She slowed, jerked back her bowstring until a fire arrow crackled to life on the string, and released, casting Double Arrow. As the fiery missile streaked into the throng of soldiers, Janice roared something inarticulate and bounded ahead, her massive spiked club held high over her head.

She wasn’t alone—Benny, Julio, Simon, and Keesha charged forward, cutting off Lucy’s line of sight. She glanced at Vince, saw him staring back at her with a pale face, and yelled, “We have to fight through!” Then she yanked her brother’s knife from its sheath and charged into the fight.

Lucy had been practicing with her knife, but not in actual combat—not like the utter madness she waded into. Janice was pushing her way into the column of Gavax, throwing the armored soldiers left and right, and Lucy and the others fell into her wake; it wasn’t a plan, but it just happened. The Gavax came at them, driving forward with shields up and weapon-arms hacking.

People yelled and screamed; hot blood splattered on Lucy, and she was only halfway sure it wasn’t hers. She hacked her magic knife at any perceived opening, but most of the time it hit armor or shield or weapon, and she was rebuffed, knocked back and carried along by the forward momentum of her companions.

It was in that hellish gauntlet, as her bruises and cuts mounted and her throat grew raw from screaming, that Lucy got her first look at a Gavax face. One of her companions landed a resounding blow to the side of one of their helmets, and the visor hinge broke, and it hung half open. Lucy stared and would have stopped moving if not for someone behind her giving her a mighty shove.

The Gavax looked like he was made of wood—a hunk of polished hardwood that had been carved into the crude semblance of a face. He had a hollowed-out mouth, two holes for nostrils, and eyes that looked like hunks of turquoise. He wasn’t just wood, though—where he’d been struck on the side of the head, Lucy spied a crack, and it leaked dark, oily fluid.

That was when Vince screamed and grabbed her cloak, pulling her to the ground with him. Lucy held up her arm, shielding her face from a Gavax kick, and she struggled onto her knees, desperately trying to keep her grip on her knife and her bow. As another Gavax stomped toward her, mace-arm lifted, she thought she was going to die, but then Torfal and ten other Dondalli were there, wings buzzing as they dropped into the fray, briefly driving the Gavax back.

“Come!” Torfal yelled, grabbing Lucy under her arms. His wings thrummed, and he leaped, carrying her out of the fight toward the Dondalli settlement.

“Vince!” Lucy cried, looking over her shoulder. She relaxed when she saw more Dondalli streaking through the air behind them, several carrying passengers.

“I’ll put you high, in one of our homes. There will be arrows for you!”

“Okay,” Lucy said, still reeling—one minute she’d thought she was done for, and now she was hurtling through the air. “Have they reached the settlement?”

“No! That vanguard you fought was ahead of the main army.”

“Vanguard…” Lucy hadn’t considered that; she’d thought the Gavax were acting as a single unit, but that didn’t make sense; hadn’t the archers broken off to shoot at their ambush position?

Torfal grunted as he strained his wings, hauling her higher, and she looked down to see the Dondalli army arrayed behind and atop their stone wall. It wasn’t much of a fortification—Lucy had clambered over it herself, so she knew it wouldn’t stop a determined army. Still, it was built sturdily out of stones, and it would force the Gavax to slow down and make themselves vulnerable as they climbed it.

Of course, that was all speculation; they didn’t know what sorts of siege tools the strange army might use; they didn’t know what magic the Gavax were capable of. Torfal lowered her to the wooden platform outside one of the stilt-houses, and settled down beside her, apparently eager to rest his wings. “The ambush went well!”

Lucy nodded, sliding her brother’s knife into its sheath. “I think so, too. Any idea how many we stopped?”

“Hundreds! Better yet, we learned that for all their armor and imposing behavior, they can be killed.”

“I didn’t see them cast any spells,” she said, nodding.

Torfal shook his head. “None!” He gestured behind Lucy. “A barrel of arrows for you. Try to kill their archers!”

Lucy nodded. “I will.”

Torfal thumped his fist against his chest and then dropped off the platform, his wings thrumming to life as he flitted toward the gathered defenders. There were between three and four hundred defenders, but only a hundred or so bore the shiny armor of the Dondalli fighters. Lucy thought she saw Ria down near the gate, and when she looked around the slight figure, she saw many of the members of her party—the Militia folks were hard to miss with their steel and leather armor.

“Where’s Vince?” she wondered, looking around at the nearby platforms. She saw plenty of Dondalli archers with their long, slender bows, but not Vince. She hoped that just meant they’d put him on the ground and he was back among the defenders who were gathered at Madi’s sapling grove.

Turning her attention back toward the rocky trail, she saw the Gavax approaching—a column of soldiers in shining armor. If she didn’t know better, she’d think they looked like knights from an old movie—King Arthur or something. She glanced at the barrel—at least a hundred arrows—and decided there wasn’t any point in conserving. She could fire twenty times before those soldiers clashed with the defenders.

Almost to prove to herself that she wasn’t exaggerating, Lucy began to shoot. Her actions became rhythmic—draw an arrow from the barrel, nock it, draw back her string, aim, release. She didn’t bother picking out individual targets; she just aimed her arrows toward the middle section of the column.

The Gavax lifted their shields, but Lucy wasn’t the only one firing arrows. She could hear the strings thrumming from nearby platforms and the ground below. She could see the arrows streaking through the air, sometimes highlighted with magical energy. Better than all that, though, she could see the Gavax column rippling as one soldier after another fell, and the alien soldiers shifted to fill the gaps.

The Gavax front line was only a dozen yards from the gates when thunder cracked, a white flash bloomed, and then blue electricity danced from one armor-clad soldier to another. The defenders cheered as the Gavax stopped moving, and then, after a pregnant pause, they started forward again, unbothered by Denise’s magical lightning.

As if the lightning had been the signal to start, the Dondalli defenders began throwing their own magical attacks. Lucy saw green fireballs, glowing darts, balls of pulsating black slime, rainbow-hued beams, and more—too many magical effects to track. What she did track, though, was how little they affected the Gavax.

Some spells did more than others—it seemed pure fire was effective; a Gavax that was struck by a ball of green flames combusted and fell, twitching and thrashing as he burned. The blobs of black slime seemed to work, too; they splashed on the soldiers, and the stuff gummed up their joints, slowed them down, and even tripped them up. Lucy, hoping the slime was flammable, shot a fire arrow into a crowd of drenched Gavax, but it didn’t work. Still, her arrow hit home, dropping one of the soldiers.

She’d just drawn another arrow from her barrel when a terrible crash echoed up from below, and she looked down to see the gates coming apart, shattered by the front ranks of the Gavax. She hadn’t seen the mechanism of their attack, so she didn’t know if they’d used some kind of ability or just brute strength. It didn’t matter, though; the gates were down and the Gavax were pushing their way into the lines of defenders. The fight was truly on.

Lucy looked out over the column, scanning for her next target, and that was when she saw the Gavax crossbowmen lining up about fifty yards from the wall. They lifted their bows and fired a volley, arching their bolts over the heads of the Gavax soldiers and into the densely packed Dondalli defenders.

Lucy drew her bow and fired. As she nocked the next arrow, she tried to count the archers. It was hard with so much movement below, but she thought there couldn’t be more than seventy—maybe as few as fifty.

The Gavax lowered their bows, using cranks to draw back their heavy strings, and Lucy shot and shot and shot. She was determined to drop as many as she could between each of their volleys. Still, her efforts felt small, and the scene below, down at the gates, was utter mayhem. She saw Gavax break through, here and there, but the Dondalli had skirmishers waiting back from the front line, ready to pick them off. Still, she heard screams of rage and agony, and she knew it wasn’t the Gavax who screamed—they were silent.

She shot and shot and shot—five or six times for every crossbow volley. The center of the Gavax archer line was gone; dozens of corpses lay there, sprouting arrows she’d planted. Still, the battle raged and, even as she reached into her barrel and grasped the last black, Dondalli arrow, she saw the right flank of defenders collapse, overrun by the relentless, stoic Gavax as they pushed ever forward.

“Rally!” a man’s voice screamed. “Push right, push right!”

Lucy scanned for the sound, trying to see who it was—who was showing such leadership. She never figured it out, though, because something else happened that stole her attention: a rush of mana that she felt in the pit of her stomach washed through the Dondalli village and then, in a cloud of dirt and dust and a shower of black blood, a thousand thorny spears exploded from the soil inside the gate and beyond it.

The spears were green, covered in inch-long black thorns, and when they’d fully extended from the earth, they split, sprouting in every direction to create a wall of thorns. It filled the gateway and stretched outward for another twenty strides. Hundreds of Gavax were caught in its terrible embrace, speared through and ripped apart, or just captured, unable to move without tearing themselves apart on the iron-hard thorns.

Lucy knew immediately that Madi had summoned the bramble, and she couldn’t have picked a more perfect time; half the surviving Gavax had been caught or killed, but the remaining ones, even the crossbowmen, were already reforming, pushing around the southern edge of the bramble. Lucy took aim and fired her last physical arrow, then she looked down, trying to gauge the defenders’ strength.

The number of bodies lying in a semicircle before the thorn barrier made her stomach drop as she held her breath, scanning over the clusters of fighters and plain citizens trying to save their homes. She saw several of her people, and large clusters of Dondalli as they moved about, flitting in groups toward the wall where the Gavax were, once again, approaching. She jerked her gaze back toward the Gavax. They were decimated—fewer remained of the alien soldiers than of the defenders.

“Yes!” Lucy hissed, drawing her bow and using mana to form a fire arrow. “We can win this!”

###

Andy stood in the ruined office building, looking through the semi-shattered window of a third-floor corner office. The big glass-and-steel tower was just down the block, and he had a good, clear view of the southern side of it. He let his gaze run up and down the mirrored windows, most of which were shattered.

As they’d made their way through the city, carefully avoiding encounters with groups of wandering monsters, the day had slowly slipped away from them. As a result, he’d switched back to Brimstone Stalker and was running Flame Sight. In the shadowy office, looking out onto the dark street, he had a clear view of the creatures moving around in the lightless depths of the skyscraper.

“Do you see them?” Omar asked.

“Yep.”

“We should go in the morning.”

“I mean, that’s what they always do in the vampire movies—hunt them down in the daylight.”

Omar chuckled. “Yeah.”

“You think they are? Vampires, I mean?”

The Paladin shook his head. “Maybe. Maybe not all of them. I know some are ghouls. Are there worse things than vampires?”

“Depends on what game you’re playing—what movie you’re watching.”

“Well,” Omar said. “I bet we’re going to find out.”

Andy nodded, opened his mouth to reply, then froze as a System message flickered into view:

**Standby! Regional faction update in progress…**

“What…” Omar started to ask, but then another message appeared:

***Tucson Desert Basin Regional War and Faction Event has begun:

Goal: Unite or conquer the various factions in the Tucson Desert Basin.

Mesquite Mesa Faction Progress:Mount Lemmon Elven Refuge – FriendlyDondalli Settlement – AlliedGavax Collective – WarMondole Clan – HostileVexid Hive – NeutralHuorn Nomads – NeutralNight Kingdom – HostileLentiss Empire – HostileTitan Silo Society – Neutral

Congratulations! You’ve formed an alliance with the Dondalli, earning a Boon Point for your settlement. Further prizes will be awarded for each settlement you conquer or add to your faction’s alliance. Special awards await the faction that unites the region! Good luck, Andy!***

“Um, Andy…” Omar said, looking at him sideways.

Andy shook his head. “I don’t know, man. I guess Lucy’s group has been busy…”