Chapter 103

The small dwarven settlement inside a keep at the edge of the frontier;

 

“What are we going to do?” Rina asked me. I can feel the fear in her voice. She keeps forgetting we’ve been through this sort of thing before. I feel confident we can get through it again.

“We’ll be OK,” I said.

“But those guys…whatever those things are… were looking for you and us right?” she said with a horror filled and scaredy-cat filled tone of voice.

“Eh? How’d you know?” I asked.

“Well you guys kind of said too much and I put two and two together while sneaking around you,” Rina said slowly.

Deinan near us frowned too. But she looked at me and shrugged, “Sorry boss. I didn’t mean for the second mistress to discover recent activities.” I noticed her verbal and physical demeanor seem to differ from each other.

“Eh?! She’s not my second mistress!” I protested.

“Yes I am,” and “No she’s not,” came at the same time from Rina, Asakura, and I together.

“Whatever. Who am I to judge love? Love is beautiful,” Deinan shrugged.

“I am too, second mistress,” Rina boldly proclaimed, before I could cover her mouth with my hand.

“Sorry boss, I apologize for my lack of discretion,” Deinan repeated. Her facial expression seemed amused.

“Be quiet, this isn’t the time for this,” I protested.

Does that mean she’s not really that sorry or she is? Her expressions didn’t agree? She is probably afraid of getting bad marks on whatever employment system the dwarves have with each other.

Asakura stays close to me. She sniffed the air, “something’s…not right.” She looks edgy.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Now that the attack is over, there shouldn’t be anything else going on. The dwarves are trying to put out the fire.

“Well there is a fire…” Rina states the obvious.

“Not the fire,” Asakura said. Her nose is scrunched up. She seemed to be looking at the wall. But it makes me wonder why she’s doing that. “Something else…”

But just then another alarm goes off. It’s the type of alarm set off by the soldiers on the ramparts, dwarves bearing huge horns that they are blaring from the top with a deep baritone echo. They seem to look to be made out of some kind of huge longhorn mountain sheep, and as such they can carry the sound and tone very far because of their long length. We can see them waving excitedly for other support troops.

“See proof, there is a fire in progress,” Rina said again.

“Looks like the goblins have come back to attack the walls. That’s the signal we use for orcs and goblins nearby,” Deinan said. Of course she couldn’t see and we couldn’t either as the walls were too high, but she was watching the signaling system the dwarves used at the top of their watch towers and knew how to interpret the symbols a banner carrier was using that involved a combination of different hand held flags of various colors, numbers, and an order system.

“You don’t find that fishy?” I said. But inside I’m shocked how alert Asakura is.

“How so?” she asked.

“Well think about it. They happen to come up right when their friends need an escape distraction,” I had my arms folded across my chest.

“That’s true, the follow up is pretty close together,” Asakura bit her lip.

“So they had it planned that way from the beginning,” Rina acknowledged.

“That’s what I’d do; cover the escape from the covert operation activity with another diversion for something else more distracting,” Asakura mused.

“It’s a perfect follow up move like you say,” Deinan swore in frustration. “If they’d had any delays or encountered resistance while the shamans were hitting the house then the troop movements coming up to the walls would be good to cause confusion and buy time for them to get out.”

Sure enough as we got to the top of the walls, it’s easy to see this is a well played scenario by whoever the goblin commander is. The goblins have fanned out all of their ranks using the fire to their advantage to scramble their fighters into perfect rank order in the field. They are in several block formations with each block having several hundred fighters each.

“Wow, they had this many still in the field that we didn’t know about?! That’s a lot,” Deinan said.

She’s of course got her hands on her sword and shield. She seems to be fully equipped with her own equipment.

Right now, other dwarves have swarmed up the rampart in a long steady organized line and now they have already decided to just let the fire on the stone dwarven house burn out. It seems the decision came because there is no wind in an underground cavern and nothing flammable was out near it and they can’t risk the loss of the whole keep for one house. As long as there is no danger of it spreading to the neighboring houses then it should be workable.

Still…it must take a long time for dwarves to replenish their losses and a whole family being killed is probably hard to swallow, judging by the intense looks of anger and grief that I can see. Several dwarves are seen doing some kind of religious types of movements, probably swearing vengeance or pleading for the blessing of whatever God the dwarves have. It doesn’t quite look like our world’s version of catholic doing cross symbols over one’s chest when confronting death but it’s not dissimilar either. I wouldn’t understand that anyway so I don’t inquire too much into it.

We see Svinn a minute later behind the topmost rampart, while we’re deciding where is best to position ourselves. It’s a sturdier and taller tower, which we work our way up into. It takes a good minute or three to walk up the circular stone set of stairs that wind up to the top.

Finally we exit out on top where he’s holding some kind of leadership meeting. Other dwarven leaders, and scouts have also congregated here, all armored, and armed looking like they want to hit somebody.

“Ah, you’re finally here. I’m glad to see you!” his eyes are twinkling.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“I like having surprises for the goblins. Can I count on you?” he asked me pointedly.

“Well…if the goblins have their way we suffer too. Neither of us wants that,” I countered.

“Good, that’s a start. It will be a few days until we can get reinforcements. So we need to hold out about three days. We’ve already dispatched a message to signal of the attack. It seems yesterday’s movements were actually just a probe to try and find out how strong we were. This is the real fight,” he frowned.

“Crap.” Rina swore.

Asakura stays close to me. “That’s a bit of a surprise huh Shun?”

“Yeah,” I responded darkly.

I can’t help but notice Deinan has accidentally bumped into Asakura and her eyes are wide from her head bumping into boobs bigger than her head is. It makes her distracted as she stares. I give her a puzzled look and she blushes.

“Hey those are mind, no touching,” I whispered to her.

She is surprised and looked scandalized while her mouth hangs open because she’s not sure what to say.

But then after that she giggled.

“Sorry I didn’t catch that?” Svinn looks over at us. His lieutenants who don’t speak our language or have the enchant are waiting for us to conclude thinking its normal business.

“Nothing, never mind,” I said.

But then we heard another alarm horn.

“What’s going on? Is this a new update?” Deinan asked hurriedly. She coughed into her hands. Sure, change the subject now to take the heat off you, I thought. She gives me a funny smirk, and sticks her tongue out at me when others aren’t looking.

“We’ll find out soon. One of our messengers is coming up the stairs,” Svinn nodded below to a figure that had just ran into our tower.

It turns out to be a scout that has just arrived.

That’s very interesting. A lot of the troop movements being reported by scouts and now I get to see a dwarven scout fresh from the outside coming in. The scouts dress a bit different; so that they can preserve optimum movement at any given time.

He has light armor, some type of special black leather designed to blend into the shadows and even his beard and hair are very dark. I can see he’s also not a rookie, because the leather armor and clothes that are too richly done to be something that just anyone could afford. It looks rich, and is carefully and elaborately stenciled with all kinds of designs stamped into it. He has it topped off with a type of black skull cap and night goggles of some kind.

Funny…the night goggles are magic somehow. I can’t tell what they do, but I can feel the small sparkle of power emanating from them.

I hadn’t caught such things before, but my skills seem to have helped me get this much.

While I’m noticing it, I also notice that Svinn’s plate mail is also some kind of dwarven enchanted magic, but with a brighter aura than the scout’s goggles. Some of the lieutenants in the room also have knives in their belts with a faint glow of magic.

Why didn’t I notice this before? Was it because I’d been missing it this whole time or did I suddenly level up? Or did none of the previous dwarves have enchanted equipment?

Crap. How much opportunity have I failed to see before now?

So the dwarves do have a lot more magic than I thought.

I’d like to find out more. If I can find out where they get such things then it could lead me to possibly someone else to teach me skills, or acquire things to help us. But the latter, would take time to develop trust with the dwarves I think.

The scout says something to Svinn by whispering in his ears first. Svinn breaks the news to them first in Dwarven. It’s something big that I can’t understand, but immediately all the faces of the dwarves around us frown. They all look pretty stressed out. Rather than a stress reaction of anger, it’s mixed with a stress reaction of fear.

They are jabbering back and forth heatedly now.

“What? What’s going on?” I asked.

Deinan tugs at my sleeve, from below. “It seems that the goblins have acquired some mercenaries to help them. A large group of them from the sound of things.”

“Mercenaries? Like what kind of mercenaries?” I asked carefully.

Deinan looks to Svinn for some kind of permission before speaking.

He nods, “it’s OK. You can tell them. Shun has shown himself to be trustworthy.”

Deinan takes a big gulp of air before talking, “somehow the goblins have some acquired a team of catapults that are moving here. They will be here probably around 24 hours or so, but that might not be accurate. I won’t know until we can confirm the arrival time.”

“Catapults? Goblins have catapults?” Asakura asked, wondering if she heard it right.

“How could goblins have a high class weapon? Who the fudge is arming them?” Deinan swore in frustration. She’s still shaking her head at the thought, and so are some of the other dwarves.

I was thinking the same thing. It didn’t seem very likely that creatures like goblins could come up with such contraptions, but I wasn’t entirely sure until I saw their reactions.

“Are we talking about the same kind of catapults that we are thinking of? Things that can shoot heavy objects at stone walls to smash them?” Rina asked being a bit too descriptive. I could see some of the dwarves with the language enchant winced when they heard ‘smash them’.

Svinn regarded her coolly. “Your reaction is much the same as ours. We’d heard rumors someone was supplying the goblins. This is our proof. Goblins are crafty and smart, but they aren’t technologically savvy. They aren’t known to be able to produce something like this on their own. It’s proof that they have a master manipulator pulling the strings like some of their wars in the old legends.”

“A master? But would a race as vile and twisted as they are even accept a master?” Rina asked again.

Svinn nodded again, “Yes, someone supplied the goblins with catapults. And yes they have a master, but to be able to twist and hold them under his thumb he’d have to be crueler than they are because they are quick to rebel and he could only rule through fear and reckless power. This is a game changer. It means we need to have as many of them dead as possible before nightfall.”

“Why nightfall?” Rina asked pointedly.

“I’m guessing that’s when their catapults could be within range?” I said.

Svinn nodded confirming it. “It will give us some safety margin to shoot for that window first. Then we’d have a little backup time for our next option if needed. We plan to dispatch a sabotage squad to sneak up on them from behind to set them aflame and then retreat. But every insurance policy we can acquire would be good to use now.”

“Will the walls…be strong enough?” Asakura formed the words slowly and clumsily. She still seems a bit tipsy, and heavy eyed but someone could easily mistake it for someone that drinks a lot. I’m not sure what the dwarves think about that though, since their culture involves heavy drinking anyway. If anything their faces remain impassive.

“We don’t know,” Deinan said nervously.

“You don’t know?” I probed further.

She shrugged, “We’ve never had a fight where the goblins had catapults before. They shouldn’t have them now. Eons ago the dwarven creator cursed the goblins and orcs to not be able to steal his children’s tools. Ever since then, they have been technologically impure.”

Asakura and I looked at each other.

What did she mean by impure? They weren’t racial were they?

“Analyze…” Asakura said, but then it seemed her brain lost its train of thought. She’s right however. I could see where she was going with this.

“So we don’t know anything then? It has to get better than that, we can figure this out,” I encouraged them. They all were really stiff and quiet with fear.

“Think about it. Who has catapults that you know of? Who could the goblins have gotten them from?” I asked.

Svinn pulled out another map, “goblins don’t have very good ability to support long term provisions. They are mostly hunters, and very limited ability to care for livestock, but even that they often get too greedy for red meat and end up culling their own herds in their wars on each other. I’m guessing if they were to get catapults then it would have to be within a limited range from here.”

“You’re thinking the Egyptians maybe?” Deinan asked.

“Eh? Humans wouldn’t help the goblins would they?” Rina seemed very discouraged.

“I’m afraid it’s that bad,” Svinn said uncomfortably.

“If bad or rogue humans…have helped…how will that affect us?” Asakura said again in tipsy mode. Hmm looks like she’s still wearing off whatever put her in sleep mode?

“Good question, but don’t worry about that. What’s important is that we stop them. We’re not out to burn anyone that helps us and won’t include you with them. You’ve already shown yourselves to be on our team,” Svinn said looking at the dwarves around us as he said it. He then said something in dwarven which I suspect was the same thing to the others to remind them of that fact so they didn’t get any ideas.

Some of them looked a bit stiffer after that.

“Are Egyptians the only ones that they could have gotten them from?” Rina asked.

Svinn frowned, “this is the frontier of the dwarven kingdom. The surface is still pretty hostile here with a lot of monsters that roam around. I find it difficult to even point the finger here. There’s a Yayoi settlement within about sixty leagues, the Egyptian city is a bit closer but not easy to get to without crossing the Great Chasm and has a lot of geographical obstacles. There are a few other demi-human villages but nothing with industry needed for this level…” he then got quiet thinking about things some more.

“So the biggest possibility is the Egyptians,” Deinan said.

“We still haven’t ruled out if they got them willingly or unwillingly by sacking them from that group first,” I offered.

“Possibly…” Deinan said.

“No, that site was destroyed a long time ago,” Svinn said.

“Huh? What site? What are we talking about?” I asked.

“There used to be a dark elf city near here about a hundred years ago. But we killed them all,” Svinn said slowly.

Suddenly I started to feel pretty edgy.

“You’re sure you killed them all?” I asked.

The dwarves get a bit heated discussing it for a good minute or so arguing about something.

“I was there and so were my sons and many others here. It’s for sure we got them all,” he reassured us.

“Are you sure you got them all? If goblins don’t have catapults, then they would have had to get them from somebody…” I started to say.

Dark elves might just have industry sufficient to make catapults. I didn’t like this situation at all.