The next week was a frantic affair. Despite just returning, preparations were made in record time. Goods were gathered, men were assigned, and items were made. What drove Benjamin forward was his own sense of urgency and nothing else. 

They were not yet running low on food or water, and each probing attack was repelled with enough force that the forces arrayed against them pulled back to lick their wounds. Benjamin knew that the other shoe was about to drop, though. He could feel it, and he wasn’t the only one. 

Most nights, Benjamin found Matt up on the eastern battlement, pacing it like an expectant father, and tonight was no different. He wasn’t nervous or afraid exactly, just anxious. Benjamin understood that. The only difference between the two of them was that Matt wanted to crush them all here and now, and Benjamin wanted to flee to engage them on their own terms once more. 

Sometimes, Emma was there with him, but more often, he was alone. Everyone agreed that was the right answer, but that didn’t stop Matt from standing ready for the final showdown in his nightly vigil. As Benjamin slowly climbed the stairs to the catwalk on the fourth level, he saw his friend standing there in the moonlight between the two stones of the battlement, looking out at the campfires of the forces that were neatly arrayed against them. 

“You know more of them come every week,” Matt said without bothering to turn. “By next week or the week after, we’ll be outnumbered two to one.”

“That’s why we’ll get while the getting is good,” Benjamin said with a smile. 

“Oh? Did you figure out a way to pry the skeleton key you’ve been looking for out of your ghost?” Matt asked as Benjamin walked over to him. 

“There’s been no progress on that front, I’m afraid,” Benjamin said with a sigh. 

While all of his other efforts had been going well, the Prince’s spirit had proved remarkably resilient to questioning. Despite borrowing the mana of thousands by linking to every system, user still in the city for the last few nights just to unlock the damn thing. He just had no leverage when he talked to the spirit, and Prince Agardian seemed to know that well. When Benjamin chatted with the disembodied ghost of the man, there was little he could do to affect him. He could only make threats, and so far, he hadn’t found anything that concerned the Prince. 

Not even threatening to destroy the amulet had loosened the man’s tongue. The Prince had simply responded, “So I’ll lose the last few years. Big Deal. I didn’t much care for my time in this backwater anyway. There are still backups on the world island. I will still survive long after you are torn limb from bloody limb.”

The only thing that had borne fruit from those efforts was that decoding the Prince’s personal seal had unlocked many of Arden’s defenses that hadn’t been available until that point. Before Benjamin arrived, his friends had been forced to make do with what had already been unlocked the night they took over, which was mostly just alarms and magics that structurally strengthened the walls. 

Now, though, they hand shields, cannons, and all sorts of deadly enchantments that could light the night on fire if they were unfurled. Matt was sure that would be enough to extend the stalemate for a long time, but in Benjamin’s mind, it just made the odds higher that the Rhulvinarians would bomb them into the Stone Ages, if such a thing was possible, and he very intentionally turned his mind away from what that might look like and back to the conversation. 

“I’ll figure something out,” Benjamin said, changing the subject, “it’s just a matter of time. For now, isn’t it enough that I found us a way out and a way of covering our tracks?”

“If both of them work, I’ll admit that miracles can happen,” Matt nodded. He was unconvinced, but he didn’t see a better outcome. 

“It’s almost enough to make you wish for the good old days,” Benjamin said with a smile. 

“What good old days?” Matt asked. “The month we spent slowly walking halfway across the continent while I was so angry I could barely see straight, or the winter we almost starved to death?”

They both laughed at that. “We didn’t get close to starving,” Benjamin said once the moment had passed. “We just… developed a healthy appreciation for not having to eat another acorn so long as we live.”

“We might have to, though, you know,” Matt cautioned him. “Lately, we’ve had it easy, sacking a new place every few days and eating their food, but we take thousands of people into the country, and we’ll be stripping the landscape bare like a swarm of locusts. A few weeks from now, we might be eating bugs.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Benjamin agreed. “But I’d rather starve out there than try to wait them out in here. Besides, we’ve probably knocked out dozens of other plantations while all this has been going on. There’s probably more than a little starvation going on in their own cities at this point.”

“Yeah, among the slaves,” Matt said with a sigh. “We’ve barely scratched the surface with these assholes. They might have hundreds of plantations in the east, but there are plenty in the south and north, too. We’ve freed thousands, but only at the cost of making tens of thousands more go hungry when their gruel ration gets cut or some shit like that.”

“Yeah,” Benjamin nodded, not sure what else to say.

“And those assholes won’t even riot about it, Benji, you know?” Matt said, gripping the walls tighter as his anger flared up. “Any other despot would have to deal with the flames of revolution. It would be one more weapon in our arsenal, but here? They’ll just keep slaving away until they drop dead. How’s that any different than killing them ourselves?”

Benjamin didn’t have a good answer for that. The humane thing, the thing that would happen if this was a movie, was he’d whip up some genius magical computer virus, and with a single cataclysmic spell, he would free everyone from the mental chains of their systems simultaneously. 

Sadly, that was nothing but fiction. Though he was certainly preparing a few big spells, he had no way of reaching further than line of sight, and until he figured out a new way through the barriers that the Rhulvinar erected around the minds of their men, his old tricks with data leak were at an end. 

He didn’t bother Matt with any of that, though. It was too cerebral, and his friend wouldn’t care. Instead, he said, “There will be a lot of killing soon. Until I figure out a way to get their army to switch sides, we’ll have to kill everyone, and that’s going to be bloody on both sides.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Matt volunteered, trying to comfort him, but his voice lacked any real confidence, which was just about right for Benjamin’s frame of mind. 

They chatter a while longer. Benjamin told him a little bit about his recovery, even though he left out the good parts, and the whole time they spoke, they both watched the field of man-made stars that stood the best part of a mile distant, and the occasional rift opened somewhere beyond that. 

The Summoner Lords were definitely building up to something, and Benjamin aimed to be gone before they decided they had overwhelming enough numbers to accomplish their goals. He didn’t plan on waiting around long enough to find out. 

Eventually, he convinced Matt that there was no imminent attack and that they’d be best served sleeping, and they both returned to their rooms. Benjamin found no sleep in his bed, though. Instead, he lay there, staring up at the ceiling while he alternated between flipping through his codex and glancing through his character sheet. 

There were so many projects that were just barely started or part way done. He hadn’t finalized their escape plan, but the enchanted arrowheads and the ensorcelled blades he wanted to try were coming along nicely. Once he had those finalized, it would just be a matter of teaching others how to make them to help him with a sort of primitive mass production. That part probably wouldn’t be easy either. 

Benjamin had resolved most of the errors except for his class. That one at least didn’t seem to cause too many problems, except for when it came time to choose spells. Then, it seemed almost like it had randomized the list.

When he’d first been brought down to level 1, his spell list had been wide open, but the more he’d chosen, the narrower the focus had gotten. Something about either the system or what it did to the soul enforced specialization to a greater and greater degree as one progressed forward. Matt only had spells and abilities that focused on healing or killing now, and Emma’s list was full of nothing but stealth and murder. 

It wasn’t so much that they could choose what they wanted, as that they could customize their respective classes to a limited degree. Benjamin would have been frustrated by that if he hadn’t been so busy dealing with other frustrations.  

All that mattered to him now was victory. The idea that someday he could fix his broken soul and tune this cursed system and grant himself some sort of reset was simply out of reach to bother with anymore. The same thing was true for trying to get home. It was a nice dream, but they all knew it was a dream. They were here for something greater now.

They had a world to save and slaves to free, and even if some part of him wasn’t head over heels for a certain mortal incarnation of a nature goddess, Benjamin would still be here to fight the good fight. He simply didn’t see another way. These monsters were a scourge, and they had to be stopped. 

So, reluctantly, he finally closed all the open, glowing windows that danced in front of his vision and forced himself to sleep. It would be dawn soon, and the next day or two, depending on how everything played out, he would need all the rest he could get.