When In Dornwich.

((In case you haven't heard, I have an event going on for patrons. Any patron, $1 or higher is invited to join in on a communal character creation for a pair of dark Elves to be added to the story soon. If you want to help come up with names, body types, or even something like fighting styles then you can find a link to my Patreon on my profile page. Have fun.))

“What the fff-”

“They’re throwing metal rocks!”

“Son of a bitch!” Dozens of different cries rang out from Elf and Gnome alike as John threw the first flashbang into the room ahead of them. He tried to warn as many of his allies as he could, even in their own respective languages so that the Elves wouldn’t catch on to his plan… but not all of the soldiers were as bright or as attentive as Kennedy and Ms. Lask seemed to be. His warning to close their eyes and look away was largely ignored, and because of that, many of the warriors on both sides ended up keeled over and rubbing at their eyes when the flashbang went off. Whatever burned when it exploded and whatever scent may have been left behind was masked by the dust and dirt coming out from the tunnel and filling up everyone’s lung. For the two nobles and the Gamer who did manage to turn away, the flashbang was almost unnoticeable. The only signs they had to know that the grenade had gone off was the raucous popping noise they heard and the fact that all the soldiers around them went into a daze.

Urga, on the other hand, was the only one who heard John’s warning, understood it, and then simply chose to ignore it. The flash of bright white light illuminated her face for a second, but her eyes never flinched or closed. The blinding light didn’t bother her blind gaze. If the grenade did anything for her at all, it was help her to locate the enemies on the other side. The sharp ‘Thwip” of a bowstring seemed almost silent compared to the chorus of voices, but once everyone had calmed down, no one missed the sounds of bells ringing on her arrows.

“Move! Get the fire over here! Now-” The sounds of shouting on the other end of the tunnel were abruptly cut off as Urga launched another arrow off into the room and John pulled out a second flashbang. Again and again, Urga fired into the room, her shots slowing as less and less noise was made by the enemies on the other side until finally…

...the noise stopped as something large and metallic hit the ground ahead of them, broke, and the sound of some thick liquid began heavily slapping and splashing all over the ground just out of John’s sight. A few faint gasps echoed throughout the tunnel as some of the more experienced soldiers came to the same conclusion that John and Ms. Lask reached. Whatever it was that had just dropped had to have been the ‘fire’ that the elves were talking about... or as Ms. Lask more accurately put it…

“...Tar,” the little Gnome chuckled, and John clapped a hand onto his ****’s shoulder.

Somehow, at the start of the attack, the first flashbang grenade that John had brought with him turned out to be the smallest and perhaps the most unimpressive part of the attack. After the Elves dropped tar in the middle of what turned out to be a storeroom for wine, the little flash of light that John had brought with him looked like nothing more than a matchstick compared to the inferno that destroyed the room the Gnomes had entered through and rocked Dornwich’s keep. The ignition of the strange, glowing, neon-green, tar-like material let out a deafening boom that echoed across the city! It didn’t matter whether the soldiers watching were closing their eyes or not. The blast was so powerful and illuminated the area with a fiery neon green light so bright everyone within eyesight of the explosion was almost blinded if they weren’t outright knocked down from the **** of it.

Limiting Effect Added: Blinded (179 seconds.)
Limiting Effect Added: Deafened (59 seconds.)

“CHAAAARGE!” The familiar heavy dwarvish voice at the backline tried his warcry a second time… and while Kennedy, Ms. Lask, and John were all recovering from the blast, the Dwarf’s eager shouting somehow worked when the people closest to the explosion could finally hear again. The warriors still dazed on the frontline were ignored and trampled as the soldiers least affected by the explosion rushed forward into the fiery green opening. The first ones met the exit with only screams. The Elves on the other side, if they weren’t already burning, had no trouble trying to keep the Gnomes at bay as they tried to rush across the spilled lake of emerald flames. Flashes of purple light and slivers of arrows flew through the air, sometimes past the frontline and into the tunnel. It wasn’t until Kennedy recovered that the soldiers rushing in stopped and waited. The little Gnome began shouting almost as soon as he could see again and weaving his fingers along minute articulate paths. Heatless, red sparks jumped off the burning tips of his stubby fingers and left paths in the air of glimmering red light. His voice, which had been nearly inaudible when he first recovered from the explosion, grew to be deafening as his chanting continued.

As far as John could tell, nothing that Kennedy said in his chanting actually seemed to be comprehensible. It was either in another language or it just wasn’t a language at all… just a complex series of specific sounds that rose and rose in volume until his voice became the only one that John could hear. The lines that the Gnome drew in the air were connected to each other, one by one, until it became a three-dimensional image of what John could only describe as a prickly rune that flashed in the air once it was completed… and then the floating flames fell away and burned out.

The fading rumbling of the machines that had dug through the tunnel restarted as soon as the spell was complete. Two heaps of dirt-speckled bronze plating roared to life. The place where wheels might have been found at the base of the inventions was instead replaced with a pair of tracks on either side of each machine, like the ones that a person might find on a tank or a bulldozer. The presence of treads instead of wheels seemed to detract from the automatons' overall speed when rolled forward, but it helped keep it from getting stuck. Even when the machines came upon large, broken pieces of stone, they didn’t stop. The stone merely cracked and shattered beneath the tremendous weight of the machines. When the Gnomes realized the machines were moving, they stopped in their charge. The flights of arrows firing at them slowed to a halt just as one hit the dirt wall next to John and the warriors under Ms. Lask’s and Kennedy’s command stepped aside to make room for the machine.

When the robots breached the green light of the fire, Kennedy twisted his hands again, and sparks fell from his fingertips like red rain. The machines stopped and jerked in place, the large metal plates on their fronts grinding as they slid apart to create an opening in the bronze armor on both contraptions. In each gap, a single, long, cylindrical barrel slid out from a hidden vortex of metal and rock within the construction. Tumultuous waves of mechanical pieces writhed in and out of the gaps in each creation, revealing various canisters, tools, strange types of ammunition, drills, and other random items, some of which seemed to be enchanted. Aside from the barrels that came out of the machines, everything seemed to pull back into the bodies of each automaton immediately after it flashed into view. The pieces rejoined the metal storm inside with such **** that sometimes the bigger tools or bigger canisters shoved everything inside out of the way so John could get a peek at the center of the machine where a massive crystal, similar to the one in the center of Dornwich but of a different color, pulsed with a vibrant red light like some kind of magical heart. It hissed and gave off a blast of steam as John stared at it, burning brighter with every passing second until nearly a dozen of the other gems around it began to glow with the same heat. In a flash, both constructions seemed to lurch with the sudden change, and the steam rising out from its plates became less of a gentle breeze and instead spewed out from the gaps like each drill had been altered into some kind of mobile geyser.

Hot steam filled the opening between the Gnomes and the Elves as the machines pushed further into the fire… and then began to dissipate as the barrels now in the front of each construction began to spit out another substance onto the fire. It looked like water at first… until John noticed how the liquid began to freeze everything it touched. The green tar that had been burning on the stone when the Gnomes finally resumed their march hardened as John and the others approached. Glowing green liquid turned cold and grey as the Gnomes finally ran across it and met steel on the other side. The army’s entrance into Dornwich’s keep was announced with the distant sound of another explosion that John never saw. He only felt it as the castle shook hard enough to make pebbles break off from the stonework that made up the room around them. Dust fell from the rocky ceiling in clouds as metal clashed and rang again in his ears.

For a moment, he was fine… and then one of the soldiers was cut down in front of his eyes and the sword that did it flung a sharp spray of red at John's face. The life of one of his allies splattered against his cheek like raindrops as one of the Elves cut down a Gnome not even half his size, and then John blinked and it was like he was listening to the screaming and booming noises he heard back in Duskacre. The faces of dozens of different Orcs and undead jumped out at him in memory, either biting and clawing at him to kill him… or doing it just to try and get him to help so they wouldn’t be killed. He saw Urga again, disappearing beneath a wave of rotting corpses… and Mub as he was impaled on a spear of purple rock…

… but when the image of Tyrea threatened to appear in his mind again, he found himself startled back into motion again when he replayed through the memory in his head. Tyrea was there in his thoughts for sure… but she wasn’t the only one. When he imagined the elemental monster that killed her… it wasn’t a rocky beast stepping on the redhead.

It was Michel he saw crushing his friend while he grinned down at John with a gaping hole in his chest.

That one thought shocked John hard enough to make him jump in place as an arrow whipped past his head. Another dozen warriors were cut down in the few seconds it took for John to look around himself again before one of the Elves looked over in the general direction of John, Kennedy and Ms. Lask. The soldier’s eyes didn’t land on the three of them though. When John searched for his gaze, he found that the Elf’s line of sight was focused on where Urga was standing instead of locked onto the Gamer... and then he stepped between them as the soldier tried to rush the Orcess, blade drawn.

The Gamer barely even thought about it. In a way, fighting in this battle seemed similar to what it was like to fight a beacon. There was one big boss, one that John hadn’t found yet, and a lot of little soldiers to help protect the one in charge. The Elf John intercepted was barely stronger than the zombies he had met. He managed to swing once or twice at the Gamer, but John was a much higher level and deflected the blows with ease. When he got his hands on him, it was over much faster than it had been the last time he fought an actual person. The fight against Michel had been hard, but John didn’t even realize the Elf was dead until he had slipped out of his grasp, and John saw the unnatural way that the Elf’s head had been turned around.

“Get to the city gates!” he heard Kennedy cry, as another dozen arrows narrowly missed John. “It’s time to let everyone else in!”

“CHARGE!” A singular dwarf cried out again and stepped over the first Dornwich soldier that John had killed. The Dwarf didn’t get far before the Elf, with its head turned around backwards, flinched and opened its eyes again, clawing out at the new person who had come closest to it. It ripped and shredded apart its newest victim before a handful of other Gnomes and Dwarfs came up to the two bodies and fired at them with arrows until the bodies stopped moving.

Somehow, even without a mage nearby to resurrect them, the bodies in the storeroom didn’t stay dead for very long.

Nothing stayed dead in Dornwich.