“Well, on the bright side, no one can blame us now for rearming in full.”

“Quite so,” Pelton agreed with a sagely nod. News had spread quickly about the orc breakouts in Durnholde Keep. An inevitable disaster, in the gnome’s eyes. Completely unnecessary and preventable if Terenas Menethil hadn’t decided to force on everyone such a foolish idea.

Now they had who knows how many more orcs running around in Lordaeron to go along with the remaining warbands.

The messenger said that most of the fugitive savages had been recaptured, but Pelton still doubted anyone in the Alliance would feel reassured. A breakout happened once, it could happen again. None of the Alliance kingdoms, especially those nearest to Durnholde like Stromgarde and Quel’Thalas, would ever be convinced by whatever reassurances Terenas might give now. There’d probably be another meeting soon to discuss the internment camps’ existence.

On the bright side of this whole fiasco, Kyle now had a reason to further expand Alterac’s military. It had been a matter of monetary cost and diplomatic nicety that up until now Alterac only kept a barebones force, just enough to deal with bandits and gnolls. Now, with the threat of more orc marauders going loose as an excuse, Kyle had a solid reason to build up beyond militias to see to the realm’s security.

Unless Lordaeron offered to station and fully pay for their own military presence in Alterac as a means to avert the mess they made, which Pelton and everyone in Kyle’s court highly doubted.

“Hm… Do we keep ranger training for the recruits?”

Earl Colin Feldon, Marshal of Alterac, made a thoughtful noise from beneath his bushy mustache that sounded half hum, half growl. “A bit pointless, I say, your highness. We need soldiers who would move in formation and hold the line, not spread out across the countryside. Keep the rangers separate, use ‘em as skirmishers and scouts.” 

Kyle gave a respectful nod at the gruff advice. “Good point. The next question then would be arming our soldiers.”

“We should be good,” the marshal answered tentatively. “The armories were left untouched when the Alliance left. There might be some rust, but nothing major the smiths can’t quickly fix.”

Another nod, and then Kyle was turning to Lady Cylia Nymas, a transplant from Kul Tiras and Alterac’s Overseer of Development. The woman was basically in charge of the kingdom’s various means of production.

“Progress on the bows?”

The sea-weathered woman gave a bow as she answered. “Your highness, lumber has been allocated as ordered. The quotas on bowyers, bolt smiths, and goose farmers have all been met, though in the case of bolt smiths only just barely. Production of repeater bows have already begun.” 

She paused for a second, and then answered the unvoiced follow-up question. “We should be ready to equip the first batch of soldiers as soon as they finish their training.”

“Excellent.” Kyle was grinning, and Pelton couldn’t blame him. He’d seen for himself the performance of the repeater bows that the mage-king had come up with. The prototype was a simple, boxy mechanism tied onto a normal bow, feeding arrows and later on pseudo-crossbow bolts to be loosed in rapid succession. With only some improvements offered by dwarven and gnomish engineers, the proper repeater bows would be sturdier weapons that, en masse, could pincushion any threat in moments.

That the design impressed the elven rangers was especially a big deal, though understandably everyone was waiting for its first actual showing in combat before they rendered judgment.

Well, if the orcs from Durnholde Keep go west, the repeater bows would get the chance to prove themselves.

More readiness reports were given, from rerouting the ranger patrols, to prioritization of fortifications, to the status of Kyle’s other invention being built by some excited engineers.

“The first prototype is coming along nicely, your highness,” Galvan Wickflip happily, almost giddily, reported. “I’ll have to admit, I had my doubts, but I guess there’s some potential in goblin scrap that only gnomish ingenuity can unlock.”

Peloton had sigh at his cousin’s words. Galvan was a great tinkerer, but like most gnomes (Pelton excluded, of course), he had a propensity to rant about goblins if given the chance. At least this time the head engineer and representative of Gnomeregan managed to rein himself in.

Kyle didn’t seem to notice or care though, only leaning forward in his simple throne, sharing a bit of Galvan’s excitement. “So, Project Hollander is walking?”

“Walking? Your highness, we managed to make Project Hollander run!”

The glee shared between king and engineer was lost to most of the court, though if Pelton remembered the details right, the little project involved converting an infamous goblin walking wood shredder and elevating it into something that involved a naval cannon.

“Have you tried the weapon?”

Galvan’s head bobbed like a loosened spring. “It fires alright, but we’re still working on the breach-loader as you mentioned. As it is though, the machine fulfills your minimum requirements.”

“Do I want to know what this is about?” Lora asked with heavy exasperation after watching the two exchange huge, childlike grins.

“I’m sure we can arrange a demonstration later, Master Galvan?”

“Oh, of course, of course! Give me a few days, I’ll have my crew spruce up the thing for a formal presentation.”

Pelton joined the rest of the court in giving uncertain looks at their king, and then decided to clear his throat to hopefully drag Kyle out of his inspired madness. “Kyle, not to burst your bubble, but there are still other matters to worry about.”

Admirably, the king quickly recomposed himself and nodded. “Right, right. The mines?”

“The mines,” Pelton agreed, and gestured for Kharak Stoutanvil, head of miners from Khaz Modan, to offer his suggestions on measures to temporarily seal the eastern mines in case the orcs pour in. The dwarven overseers and miners had all been utterly appalled when Kyle suggested that consideration, though they grimly went to brainstorming with far less reluctance when they realized that it’d be a bigger crime to let the orcs inhabit, or worse, exploit their mines.

Apparently, even as Kharak was presenting the options in court right now, individual dwarf overseers have already begun preparing their mines for the loathsome eventuality. 

Kyle listened attentively to Kharak, just as he did to Pelton and Colin before him, just as he did to the other courtiers after the dwarf. At some point, the young king called for a break - probably to see to whatever psionic experiment he had brewing in his study - though discussions resumed well into dinner time. Alterac’s readiness was tuned and fine tuned further, and at the end of it all, everyone was in agreement that they have achieved the best they could for now.

Until the orcs arrived, anyway. Then the ifs and in-cases will be put into effect, and it’ll be a whole different environment to adjust to.

Still, despite the many disadvantages of such a thing happening, Pelton found himself hoping that the orcs did show up in Alterac, if only so that he could scry for the looks on their faces when they faced all that the kingdom had in store for them. And so Pelton and Kyle could get to throw some magic. Maybe even Valoghan could make it back in time to join in.

*****

Observer 15 swam through the air serenely, undisturbed by the happenings in the ground beneath it. If anyone could see it, they’d see a carriage-sized construct that looked similar in shape to a golden flower blossom with swirling, translucent blue petals and a glowing cyclopean eye on its ‘head’. If anyone could hear it, they’d notice that it flew in utter silence, the dampeners in its hull turning even the anti-gravitic engines into less than a hum that wouldn’t even stir a feather placed next to it. 

But nobody would ever see it, nobody would ever detect it.

Technologies beyond anything anyone in this world could even dream of not only kept the observer afloat for an indefinite amount of time, but also kept it cloaked from almost all mortal senses. It couldn’t be seen, heard or smelt. And even if someone did have the means to detect it, they wouldn’t know where to begin looking for it in the first place.

It was near impossible to pick out something so high up in the sky, after all.

Observer 15 did not suffer the same issue; the same star-forged technology also granted it a highly advanced sensor suite, capable of picking out the smallest of details or listening in to the softest of whispers on the ground below.

Thus unthreatened, the machine intelligence kept to its assigned task of monitoring its designated targets: a band of creatures, a species archived as ‘orcs’. Sixteen of them fled northwards from their previous enclosure that had been recently blasted open by the observer’s master.

The observer did not care about the whys of it, it was not programmed to.

It was assigned to follow the orcs, and so it did.

Frequent scans swept through not only the fugitives, but their immediate surroundings as well. Observer 15 picked up a settlement - a human one - coming up within the proscribed range defined by its master. It kept silent track of the orcs’ movements through forests and plains, noting how their distance to the settlement fluctuated as they wandered cluelessly.

 

Judging from the pattern of the movement, the orcs were expected to obliviously avoid the settlement by the end of the world’s day. But then a trio of humans riding out from their settlement. Smaller overall compared to the orcs, a quick scan picked up bows, knives and little else on them, and the robotic intelligence surmised that these humans were hunters.

Unfortunately, their journey quickly sent them into an unsafe range of the orcs. Observer 15 sent an alert to its master as it was tasked to do, and coldly noted that there were no other messages currently of equal urgency to compete with its own. It also noted the quick acknowledgement from its master.

It took four minutes for an arbiter’s signal to cruise into Observer 15’s passive sensors. While it wasn’t technologically cloaked as the observer, the craft had the aid of extreme height, cloud cover, and people’s tendencies to not look up too intently to keep its arrival unnoticed. The daytime also helped drown out the glowing emissions from under its beetle-like elytra.

The arbiter came to a gentle stop, and Observer 15 picked up the frequencies it sent back to its master. A spike in energy readings from the craft followed right after as the arbiter spooled up its primary generators. A tightbeam signal was aimed on the ground not too far from the orcs, and the energy readings steadily grew ever stronger as the arbiter began tearing a hole in space-time at the designated spot.

For all the buildup occurring from the arbiter, for the orcs on the ground the process was an instantaneous thing. One moment they were wandering warily through the forest, and the next they stopped in surprise as the arbiter’s and Observer 15’s master came through in a shimmer of blue light to face them.

“Hello there,” the master, owner designation ‘Kyle’, greeted in what the observer estimated as minimal cordialness. “I’m giving you one chance to lower your weapons so we can at least hold a civilized conversation.”

The speech was returned with hostility. Indecipherable roars and growls came from the orcs, and they brandished their sticks (Observer 15 was hesitant to designate them as ‘clubs’ due to unclear definitions) and pointed at Kyle. 

The observer recorded the jumbled exchange that took place for later filtering and deciphering. Kyle’s gesture suggested he was entreating them to something, though it resulted in increased hostility from the orcs.

“Lok-tar ogar!” the observer managed to pick up amidst the brief cacophony before one of them broke into a charge.

Kyle dropped into a stance to meet the charge, and psionic emissions were registered as he activated his psi-blades.

“Doom’ha du nala,” he replied coldly. 

A stick thicker than both of Kyle’s arms together struck out, and was met by a blue, misty blade. Kyle’s counter landed him beside the orc, where its weapon forearm fell away from it. It gave a roar/whine of pain, but it was silenced abruptly by a quick decapitating slash from the psionic blade.

The remaining fifteen orcs were frozen for a second, likely out of shock Observer 15 speculated. But they rallied quickly, and let out more war cries as they charged as a group. Observer 15 recorded the brief fight for Kyle’s training archive. The orcs did not fight like the human soldier, militia or civilian classes did. There was a ferocity and cunning that was missing from human discipline or desperation.

But it did not change the calculus of combat predicted by the observer.

Fifteen orcs charged, and they fell dead in more than fifteen pieces. Based on his breathing and increased heart rate, Kyle was showing noticeable but not critical exertion. He shook his head slowly as he regarded the body parts in silence, then teleportation signatures were recorded as Kyle warped-in probes.

Acting on silent orders, the servitors immediately went to collect the corpses with their energy projectors, and then Kyle and the probes were recalled out of the scene, leaving only bloody patches of grass and tree bark. The observer idly calculated that the corpses would provide at least two cube units of vespene gas in the assimilators.

Devoid of a primary tracking target for the time being, Observer 15 switched its focus to the three human hunters. They just missed the scene by a few yards, riding through a more defined trail instead.

Observer 15 was designated a new focus shortly after, joining Observer 21 in watching a lone orc make its way west. With two observers on duty, they could afford to increase the scope of their scanning, allowing the master more time to react to potential issues. Though judging from how unsettled the region was, estimates was that the orc would keep traveling unmolested for a while.