Dawn of Battle

These bloody corridors seemed to go on forever!

Gantz halted next to a stone wall with a torch bracketed above that gave off baleful blue light, casting eerie shadows all about.

Dressed as always in black from head to toe, the thief gasped for breath, sweat streaming down his face.

He couldn't remember how long he had been down here. It felt like months, but he knew that couldn't be right. The dark elves had trapped him down here somehow and he had yet to find a way out. The bloody pointy-eared bastards had come in droves to try and overwhelm him, but he had been able to fight through so far. Still, these catacombs were infested with them and he couldn't seem to find the exit no matter how long he searched.

It was only a matter of time before he would slip up and that would be the end.

Gantz wiped sweat from his face, careful to use only his forearm as he gripped his knives in his hands. They felt oddly heavy for some reason, probably due to exhaustion. He had long ago abandoned any attempt at stealth. It didn't seem to matter down here. Each dark elf squad seemed to emerge from the shadows with barely any warning. Gantz's preternatural speed had been the only thing keeping him from being skewered by their wicked blades, but the more exhausted he got, the more slowly he moved…

Growling in frustration, the thief pushed off the wall, straining his senses to catch any hint of another sudden onslaught. When nothing presented itself, he took off in a run down the musty corridors, cold and seemingly abandoned, when he turned a corner and found another mass of cloaked and hooded dark elves baring down on him, their scimitars gleaming with cold blue light.

Without even time to curse, Gantz leapt back before meeting the onslaught, twisting, dodging and then counterattacking with a desperate grace. Like a nimble riot, he leapt and whirled, his knives striking like steel fangs to tear through his enemy's flesh, spraying blood across the walls.

In less than a minute it was finished, his foes falling without a sound where they seemed to evaporate back into the shadows.

Gantz shook his head, spraying sweat about. He couldn't take much more of this.

IIIIIIIIIIIII

It was early morning now, and Valor hadn't slept more than a few hours.

He stood upon the top of the defensive wall overlooking the half-mile wide expanse of the Pain-Staking Pass below, bracketed by rocky bluffs on either side.

Valor knew from reports provided by the light elf, Selena that the enemy could come in sight at any time in the distance.

Lightly armored archers had come up, taking up formation in rows to either side of him. Bundles of arrows had been placed behind each formation. There was far more ammunition available than archers to make use of it.

Valor stood somewhat aloof from the defenders, hearing their nervous conversations. Some tried to cover their fear with bravado or determination, but it was too easy to discern what lie beneath.

As he stood in his plain half-plate, Valor wished he could come up with something inspirational to impart to the nervous archers, but nothing came to mind.

He just wasn't one for speeches. Once battle was joined, he would do everything in his power to keep the enemy from breeching the massive gates over which he stood. They were barred and reinforced, but still the weakest part of the stone walls that guarded the way into Truce.

Besides, the warrior had his own fears to contend with. Gantz was still trapped in his nightmare in the infirmary of the Citadel. Valor had checked on him earlier, the thief still thrashing and writhing, soaked in sweat, his fists clenched at his sides. He had seemed almost on the verge of waking several times, but it hadn't happened and Valor had had to leave him there.

And Sana-Lynn was also absent. The trek below the Citadel was still plenty fresh in Valor's mind as were the Orbs spiriting off Sana to wherever. Despite their words to keep faith that Sana would return when she was most needed, Valor actually felt resentment welling up in him at their actions. The Light Warriors were now at half strength at a time when Truce needed every hand it could get.

A slight breeze ruffled Valor's short brown hair, swept back as it was. The brown alchemical dye he had applied to cover over his silvery highlights was beginning to wash out, and his hair was becoming more and more silver everyday. In mirrors he now saw the color of his mother's hair that he had inherited, and again it reminded him of his failures to protect her and those in Castle Cornelia the night of the dark elf invasion.

Valor shook his head irately. He could not let past failures distract him now. A new invasion was at hand and he needed to focus on the present or more tragedy would ensue.

"You seem troubled, Lord Valor," came Lady Rainhart's dark voice.

Valor turned with a nod. "I am at that, Commander. I feel nothing but dread for this battle, despite our preparations, despite the dwarves' aid, I cannot help but feel we will fail here and the goblins will break into central Highland and ravage the countryside."

Looking grim as ever, the Commander stepped up in her black enameled full-plate, her angular face severe, scars puckering a large portion of her left face, even crawling up into the scalp of her half-shaved brown hair. "It may be as you say, but dwelling on it does no good. Stay in the present, Lord Valor, focus on the now."

"Yes, of course, my Lady, I just wish the other two Light Warriors were with us."

She nodded, her face becoming even more severe. "I wish it were that way as well, but apparently fate had something else in mind for Water and Wind. Still, if a breech does occur, I am at least reassured that you are here to lead the countercharge, and I believe your black mage may be more effective against this horde than all of my archers combined, if what Count Rumsely has said about her powers is accurate. The dwarf mortar sounds like it will be of similar use—if only we had more than one—but that line of thought is pointless. We have what we have and must make do with it." She then walked off to confer with a group of officers standing back a ways.

She spoke common sense, of course, but Valor shook his head anyway. Then, he reached down and took up his longbow. It was reinforced with an exceptionally heavy pull that would make use of his Crystal-blessed strength. He had trained with the bow many times, but admitted his true focus had always been on melee weapons. Still, he was competent enough to give aid to the archer's of Truce once the enemy was in range.

The pass was more or less straight until far in the distance where it began to wind around lightly wooden hills. Still miles away, the first rank of goblins appeared through a haze and Valor figured there must have been roughly a thousand little beasts in it.

Sooner than he would have liked, the horde was close enough to hear, and from it came a cacophony of screeching cries intermixed with rumbles from much larger trolls.

It was humbling to realize just how big a number a thousand really was when confronted with it in person, aided and abetted by the fact that the mere first rank of invaders numbered roughly twice the amount of defenders upon the wall, and there was at least another eight ranks coming in behind that.

Valor's heart sank, but he hardened his gaze when he heard the fearful whispers of the troops to either side of him. He could still think of nothing inspirational to say, though the terse commands given by Lady Rainhart seemed to quiet most of the murmurs before the captains of each formation could be clearly heard: "Make ready to fire!"

Almost as one, the archers pulled arrows from quivers at their feet and nocked them, but did not yet raise their bows to fire. The horde was still too far away to loose upon with any reliable potency. They would have to be allowed to get closer.

Several tense minutes went by, and Valor leaned passed the crenellations of the battlements, putting an armored hand over his blue eyes to gaze at the horde. Facing north into the pass, the morning sun was now just level with the horizon in the east, giving plenty of light but still keeping shadows long in most places. Still, Valor could see the coming horde, though only as a motley greenish mob at this distance.

He had only limited experience fighting goblins, knowing them to be cowardly, weak, and prone to infighting, especially when their numbers exceeded a certain amount. For so many to have been gathered was undoubtedly due to the belligerent band of ogres in command capable of intimidating so many, and yet Selena's report had included a rather disturbing description of what led the ogres—an unholy creature known as an illithid.

The warrior had never heard of such a monster, but it was at the final briefing just an hour earlier that he had learned all that was known. The elf Selena had provided an eyewitness account of the creature as she had been able to see through the eyes of her panther, Rumor, which she had had ghosting Gantz as he had made his infiltration run through the goblin camp the previous night.

Valor had been surprised to learn that Gantz had tapped into his recently acquired Shadow Source to become invisible, the only means by which he'd been to infiltrate the goblin camp at all. Like Valor himself had, Gantz had likely assumed that some particularly large and nasty ogre was probably leading the others as a warlord, and so had been taken by complete surprise to find a fiendish illithid leading the brutes.

Through some mystical force of will, the illithid had paralyzed Gantz before he could strike. Indeed, if it hadn't been for Rumor, Gantz would have likely been killed. The panther had intervened to save the Chosen of Wind, but once released from the fiend's mental grasp, Gantz had fled in a state of sheer terror. Rumor had managed to wound the fiend, but was quickly caught in a similar paralysis and flung away with great force out into the midst of the riled horde that had promptly swarmed and killed the animal.

Selena's anger had been palpable at losing one of her companions, but she had finished her report stating that Gantz had gotten away with the help of her great eagle, Sky, and ran at full tilt back toward Truce in a terrified fugue. Now he lay in the infirmary embattled by some kind of mental assault that must have been caused by fiend's manipulation.

That had been the extent of Selena's recount. For what was known about the illithid itself, they had had to hear from Sister Nadine, the leader of Truce's handful of white mages.

The stately serene woman had announced that illithids were in fact fiends, a type of unholy monster that were native to the Abyss, a shadowy other realm of chaos and madness that had been long ago separated and sealed off from the material world by the power of the Elemental Crystals. Everyone knew vaguely about the Abyss and that nightmarish monsters had been locked away there, but most of the general populace considered it no more than a myth. Of course, Valor knew better than to dismiss the Abyss as such. His encounter with Baigan back in Castle Cornelia had made absolutely certain of that. Quite unlike Baigan's fiendish form, which had been a powerhouse of physical strength, illithids, Nadine had informed, were actually physically frail, but more than made up for it with mental powers of incredible potency.

The priestess had been unsure whether such powers were a type of magic or just abilities innate to illithids themselves, but with their minds alone, they could paralyze their victims, extract information by probing minds, or make their victims fight for them or even harm themselves. They could also induce fear or doubt, and inflict other lingering mental maledictions like the nightmare that now plagued Gantz, and, Nadine had been quick to add, she didn't know how to cure such maledictions without reference to the Litanies of Esuna, and that the chapel in Truce did not have access to a copy of them.

So as again with Sana-Lynn, it seemed none of the white mages in Truce would be able to snap Gantz out of his nightmare. That had put a rather bitter taste in Valor's mouth.

Regardless, with this knowledge, the defenders of Truce knew exactly what they were up against, not that it mattered much in the grand scheme. With such a vast horde gathered, it wouldn't take any strategy at all to crush the meager defenders of Truce, if the horde could manage to plow through the gates with their sheer weight of numbers.

Valor suddenly stood straighter when the horde came within a hundred yards of the gates, just as all the captains barked out nearly in unison: "Take aim!"

The warrior did so with his longbow, pulling a rather thick arrow to sight; his bow aimed in a shallow arc just as the screeching horde suddenly broke into a charge toward the gates like a writhing green flood.

With so many monsters rushing in below, Valor knew that the only hope that remained for Truce was what the Elemental Orbs had promised when Sana-Lynn returned, whenever that might be. Until then, it was up to whatever resolve the meager defenders of Truce could muster in the face of certain annihilation.

IIIIIIIIIIIIII

She stood upon a rocky promontory above the eastern bluffs, backlit by the morning sun that was merely level with the horizon behind her.

Concealed as always in her tattered black robes and peaked hat, Robin Magus stood, her glowing yellow eyes gazing down into the midst of the pass below.

They glowed with a particular intensity this morning, as the black mage was finally able to let all the pent up fury she had been holding back loose. She wrenched at her charred rod with both hands, letting her anger pool within her being, focusing it into a shard of pure hatred that shuddered through her as the goblins came up in their squabbling ranks.

She grit her teeth as the sub-human vermin advanced, screeching and crying in what they probably thought was an intimidating display. Oh how she loathed them, and allowed that loathing to flood through her like the torrent from a shattered dam, combining her hatred with pure contempt… before she smiled.

There would be no need for frost or lightning, no use for chunks of earth or the rather singular focus of her poison magic, which she had yet to utilize. No, as a nimbus of burning runes suddenly flared up about her nearly as bright as the sun at her back, Robin would be using fire and fire only to purge these disgusting, filthy little wretches from the face of the earth, utterly convinced that the planet as a whole would be all the better for it.

She held out one hand before her and focused her wrath, completely oblivious now to the presence of the dwarf mystic that shared the promontory with her.

The two had come out together, putting aside their obvious dislike for one another for the purpose of venting their rage upon the goblin slime.

They would be safe up here as the dwarfs had destroyed all the trails leading up into the bluffs with their 'explosives'. How they managed to create such things without the use of magic, Robin couldn't say, nor did she truly care. Their power was merely mundane compared to hers, no matter how they did it. Still, the presence of the dwarf mystic that had humbled her not even a day ago had raised Robin's ire though she had managed to hold her tongue. The squat dwarf woman had managed the same though glares aplenty still passed between them.

The dwarf sappers had been hard at work the last few days, loosening much of the earth around the eastern bluffs, so that Brunwyr—the dwarf mystic—could use her geomancy to make a potent landslide to crush the filthy invaders. Though it galled Robin to admit it, the dwarf woman was certainly far more skilled than she with earth magic, but the black mage consoled herself easily with the fact that the runecaster would never wield the potent variety of magic that Robin did.

This was as of no matter now, however. Robin quickly spotted one of the slipshod siege weapons that many goblins were hauling along with ropes at the behest of an ogre taskmaster that bellowed at them incessantly. Robin almost burst out laughing, seeing the shoddy condition the catapults were in. They were so ramshackle that probably just trying to use them would cause them to collapse all on their own with no interference from Robin.

Still, it was the black mage's duty to never let these contraptions even have the chance to fire and so she called upon the rage within her to coalesce in the palm of her free hand.

A large writhing ball of burning incandescence soon formed, hovering above her palm. She barely felt its heat, but reveled in its destructive potential nonetheless.

Suddenly laughing wildly, Robin drew back the fireball, took aim, and then hurled the burning sphere down toward the slipshod goblin catapult. The fireball struck with a resounding explosion that shattered the device and sent out a burning wave to wash over every creature nearby.

She could hear their pain-wracked screams even up here… but it wasn't enough, not even close. Their agony was only beginning; she would make sure of it!

Grinning manically, the black mage summoned another ball of burning wrath, even as the horde began to charge the gates.

The battle for Truce had truly begun.