The Battle Cry.

Surprisingly, it didn’t take long for John and the residents from Bulgebottom to pack up their belongings and begin the long trek back to Duskacre. The hardest part came from gathering up the two nobles going with him who needed their every little comfort brought with them. Kennedy was one of those nobles, and he wasn’t shy about the fact that he wanted his various indulgences brought with him. He liked living in luxury and refused to apologize for it. Behind the nobles and their tents came the remnants of John’s tribe. The Orcs who had been left wounded and fragile after the last battle were still in poor condition, Mub especially, but when they heard that John was moving to attack again, they didn’t let the healers finish patching them all back up. They **** themselves to their feet and refused to be left behind as the tribe moved on, even if it meant that some of them began to bleed out.

Thankfully, John was able to convince or **** the remnants of his tribe to at least go to the gates of the city with the bulk of Bulgebottom’s own army. The time it would take for John to find a way to open the gates would hopefully allow his warriors to heal. The only two Orcs he didn’t manage to convince to stay behind were the ones who had stuck by his side the most, Urga and Mub. Even though Mub looked like one of his shoulders was only still attached because it appeared as if it had been stitched back on, the Orc demanded to be a part of this battle, and John wasn’t able to convince him otherwise. After what Dornwich had done to Tyrea, John didn’t blame Mub for trying so hard to be in the fight. If their positions had been reversed, John would have been doing the same thing.

Fortunately, since he was in charge of the ex-alpha, John could order Mub to go stand at the back of the pack of people who went with John where the Orc would be safe. It wouldn’t give the barbarian the chance to avenge Tyrea, but it did give him a meat shield made up of roughly 20,000 soldiers. Half of the **** in John’s group was brought by Kennedy, and the other half came with Ms. Lask. The two Gnomes insisted on staying with John as they made their way into the tunnels, up to the front of the mass of soldiers that were helping to dig into the city of Dornwich. For the most part, the soldiers didn’t have to do anything other than help pass buckets down the line of soldiers until they could be tossed out of the well.

John, on the other hand, had to listen to Ms. Lask and Kennedy argue about his decision to take control and besiege a city. Even though she and the other nobles clearly thought he was right that they needed to attack now and were already following his lead, she didn’t stop bickering with him until Kennedy **** them to change the subject by addressing John.

“That Elf…” he said and ended the conversation with Ms. Lask with a wave of his hand. The noblewoman huffed when she saw him dismissing her, opened her mouth like she intended to argue with him more for that, and then closed it when Kennedy continued speaking. “... May I ask what your intentions are with her?” Kennedy inquired.

“Why?” John asked, and cast a suspicious glance down at the little man waddling along behind John.

“You seem angry at her for the loss of your friend,” Kennedy stated.

“I am.”

“Do you intend for her to suffer because of this anger?” Kennedy asked, and John stopped to turn towards the Gnome. Kennedy didn’t miss a beat. The Gnome held up his hands placatingly and took a quick step back, but he didn’t let the topic go. “If you hold onto her for no other purpose other than to punish her for the transgression, then I would like to ask you to either release her after this is over or to sell her off to me. She suffers already without the connection to her people that you somehow broke. Anything after this would just be a product of cruelty. I-”

“She will be safe.” John didn’t get the chance to answer Kennedy’s question. Urga did it for him when she pushed past the three of them and tugged at her collar like it was proof of the statement. Kennedy didn’t seem convinced at first, but the response that Urga gave him wasn’t wrong, so John left it at that… and then briefly wondered if the tribe was rubbing off on him. Before he had found the Orcs, he wasn’t sure that he would have left a conversation so curtly. Instead, he probably would have just avoided talking to the Gnome entirely… so perhaps it wasn’t that different from what he was doing already.

New Quest! Rise to Rule or Ruin: Part 4 of 4.
Your journey has finally come to the end of its first leg. Enemies rush to try and beckon corpses back into animation. Possible allies rush to try and stop them. You’ve reached the top of the ladder of leadership, and at its peak, you’ve found a throne. Can you be the one to claim it?

• Claim the throne of Dornwich and establish yourself as its new king.

Rewards:

• +1 Level
• +1 Creatable Pillar Of The Abyss (Can be placed anywhere within a barrier.)
• +1 Horrible Evolution Point

Bonus Objectives:

• Claim the throne of Dornwich without allowing the population of your tribe to drop below twenty. (43 Bomasi remain.)
• Claim the throne of Dornwich without losing favor from the majority of Bulgebottom’s nobles.

Bonus Rewards:

• +75 Units of a Random Material
• +5 Stat Points
• +1 Level
• +1 Random Item of a Rare Quality or higher.

Accept Quest?
YES | NO

“My turn to ask you a question,” John said and accepted the quest without hesitation. The constant increase in the number of rewards and challenges in John’s quests was starting to get worrying… but the quests were still too good for him to turn down. He didn’t know how long it was going to stay that way though. The Gnomes who were following along behind him straightened up as John turned his back to them again and continued moving deeper into the tunnel. “Why did you agree to give me Dornwich so easily?” he asked, and cast a quick glance back at Kennedy. The Gnome met his gaze for a moment and then glanced down at John’s feet.

“I assume that what you are really asking me here is why we did not just use our overwhelming forces to claim the kingdom for ourselves?” he asked, and John nodded back at him. He wasn’t the only one who was curious. Ms. Lask, upon hearing the change of topic, gave Kennedy a sharp glare and crossed her arms tightly in front of her bust. Her dress wrinkled and bunched up around her tiny limbs as she pressed them against her tits, but either she didn’t care about how she treated the dark navy blue dress or she just didn’t know what she was doing to the soft, embroidered cloth. He barely paid any attention to the details in the fabric for the moment, though he felt certain that the designs were extravagant; his attention was set more on the coming battles. He did, however, spare a second to recognize that her hair was no longer wet like she had just come out of the bath. It was dry, straight, even, and black like a lake at night. The only time he ever found color in her combed mane was when something reflected off its shiny surface.

“That’s an easy enough question to answer. To put it simply, though, Dornwich is sick. Dark magic has seeped into everything within sight of the city so much that most of it probably won’t even be salvageable. The area is… toxic. The Elves in the city have managed to keep themselves from going mad by connecting their minds to help keep each other grounded, but...” Kennedy paused as the group slowly came to a stop before they reached the front of the war ****. In the distance, they could hear the groaning and grumbling of engines as some of the machines owned by Kennedy and Ms. Lask quickly dug out the collapsed parts of the tunnel ahead of them. “... everything else will continue to rot, especially if Bulgebottom takes control of the city. The sky will stay dark. The buildings will turn to dust. Nothing will grow here except for more rot…

“...Unless someone, somebody who could perhaps do the impossible, were to somehow… ‘cleanse’ the area and its inhabitants. The best chance for an area like this would come from someone who has already done the impossible, like the man who somehow managed to free the Viridian Deceiver,” Kennedy said and didn’t hesitate to continue talking. As soon as he was done answering John’s question, he asked another one of his own. “Speaking of, how did you manage to do that exactly? I can’t imagine that it was easy freeing a dragon trapped by the Groundbreaker himself.”

“Groundbreaker?” John asked, and Kennedy waved it off. Apparently, it wasn’t unheard of for people to not know about the history of the kingdom that John was in, and in a way that made sense to John. Even if it was popular information, not everyone was educated. The Orcs seemed to tell each other about history by word of mouth, but the people in Bulgebottom worked with good old fashioned books, some of which Kennedy had offered to loan out to John when they were done taking Dornwich. “It definitely could have been easier… but I’m getting used to the idea of being able to do things that other people can’t.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t an answer to Kennedy’s question. He wanted to know how it had happened and he insisted on asking again and again… so John answered him, somewhat. He gave him enough information to try to keep himself safe but also keep the Gnome’s interest until the siege was over.

“I made a lock for the chain… and chose the key that would open said lock,” he grunted, and Kennedy’s brow furrowed. Ms. Lask blinked and stared up at him with wide eyes… but was quickly pulled away when someone from both Kennedy’s army and her own came forward to talk with her. It took her only a few seconds to react to the information that not all of the weapons for each soldier would fit into the tunnel, especially for the spearmen, but she ordered the man off with the location of a cache of swords almost immediately. Kennedy kept his mind on the task of magic. When John told him what he had done, the little Gnome attacked him with questions to solve his most recent puzzle. Most of the questions, John just ignored. He chose to focus on dealing with his stats, abilities, and his inventory instead. There was one that he wanted to answer though, just because it would help him to keep the Gnome’s attention… not at all because he wanted to brag about what had happened to him so far.

The urge to drop back into a nerdy conversation like he had done regularly before he had gotten his powers was… difficult to ignore, but John managed.

“What kind of components did you use for such a spell?” John passed that question with a slight shrug. He didn’t know what exactly the gem had been able to do before he had gone ahead and used it, so there wasn’t much point in talking about something he didn’t know about. “Was it something reusable or does your magic expend resources?” Again, a question he didn’t know the answer to. The gem certainly hadn’t been reusable, but it wasn’t like he couldn’t cast a spell without offering something up. “Where did you even get such a component?” That question had an answer that John could give… though the answer was vague.

“A god gave it to me,” he grunted, and the tunnel fell silent. Even Urga turned back to him with a bewildered look on her face, but John just turned his attention to the pop-ups his powers gave him. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much that John found that he needed to do. He didn’t get the chance to loot the dead at the battle in Duskacre, and he found himself alright considering that he had lost… and still survived. Some of his abilities had gone up in levels, but the only increase he noticed that would help him was Infused Strike. He hadn’t really worked on his other abilities because everything else was just so overwhelming that he found himself not wanting to waste mana. The only thing he found that he really needed to do was clear the effects of the mana potion from his system, meditate to regain his health and mana, and allocate the stat points that he got from fighting in Duskacre. He had more than enough time to do that. After they got a few miles into the cave, the Gnomes discovered that the whole tunnel seemed to be collapsed. Walls of stone bricks helped them to make sure that they stayed on the right path, the only path as far as John could see, but the machines had to dig out everything in front of them. After Bulgebottom came to John’s rescue in Dornwich, it became clear to them that the Elves had bombed as much of the tunnel as they could to stop Bulgebottom from sneaking into the city.

John didn’t waste much time deciding what he wanted to do with his stat points. He had a goal, a specific kind of stat that he wanted to focus on, and he had enough points to push his Strength up to seventy-five… so he did it. Most of his spare points went away as his muscles hardened more and more… until John audibly groaned when he felt his muscles inexplicably tighten more than they ever had before. After a couple of moments, the crushing feeling in his limbs seemed to lessen, and John did a couple of stretches to try and ease the new bizarre numbness he felt all over. A part of him felt… slower, in a sense, as he moved around, but his Agility had not lessened. A couple of punches at the air showed him that he still seemed to be moving at the same speed… but it didn’t feel like it. Just to be safe, he used five of his eight remaining points on his Agility, bringing that stat score up to thirty or thirty-two when he had all of his gear on, and put the last three points into his Charisma. The last stat he upgraded jumped up to twenty-one as John finished allocating his stat points, and after spending a couple more seconds punching at the air, John found himself satisfied with his newfound speed.

The feeling of tightness in his body remained… but he was definitely faster than he had been before.

Your strength has reached 75!
Crushing Blows has leveled up!

Crushing Blows. Level 2, Passive.
Crushing Blows: This change marks a new degree of strength within its user. This ability allows its user to tear away parts of an opponent’s armor with every critical hit they land. (Current Armor Damage Bonus: 20% per critical hit.)

When John finally brought his attention back to the group, he found Ms. Lask silently whispering to Kennedy, the latter of which John saw already grinning as he listened to the two speak. Strangely, he didn’t have to try very hard to eavesdrop on their conversation. They were discreet… he just found it easier to hear Ms. Lask as she apologized to her colleague.

“Alright, alright, alright. If it turns out that his statement about receiving some kind of boon from a god is real, then I’m sorry. It’s possible that this could have been the right decision to make after all… but you certainly went about it the wrong fucking way,” she growled at Kennedy, and the other Gnome didn’t miss a beat. When he had a chance to talk, he went onto the next problem in his head.

“Is that a formal apology? Does that mean you’ll vouch for me when we get back home?” he asked, and Ms. Lask growled again.

“Don’t push it,” she snapped at him, and Kennedy chuckled and bowed in response. Then the Gnome noticed that John was looking at them. He didn’t glare or bat an eye, he just pulled John into the conversation like dealing with spies was the most natural thing in the world to him.

“So, do you have a plan when we get inside?” he asked, and John nodded. When the Gamer didn’t continue talking, Kennedy bounced in place a couple of times and gestured for him to speak.

“Send your men to open the city gates. The majority of the forces outside need to get in. Keep only your most trusted men nearby so we can stay in the keep and take it. No more than a hundred men should stay behind, less if you can manage it. We want their attention to stay on the entrance to the city.” A clattering of rocks falling drew John’s attention to the front of the army, where a pair of bronze machines continued pushing through dirt and stone for a few more feet until thin purple beams of light began to peek through the piles of rubble ahead of them. Clouds of dust and dirt dropped to the ground first before they began to grow and fill the tunnel ahead of them, and a chorus of anxious voices began to rattle its way down through the tunnel behind them. The Gnomish soldiers weren’t the only source.

As soon as the machines completely broke through and the hum of the diggers cut off, the Gnomes fell silent to listen for the hushed frantic whispering that everyone nearly missed at the other end of the tunnel. Urga was the first to say what everyone was thinking… just not in the same words that the Gnomes or John would have used.

“The prey is waiting for us,” she grunted and tightened her grip on her bow. Kennedy swore.

“You do realize that the keep could very well be one of the hardest parts to take?! It’s bad enough that we have to enter into it in a spot that they knew we were coming in from! How in the hell do expect a hundred soldiers to kill every thing inside of it?” Kennedy snapped, but John made sure that his eyes never left the exit to the tunnel. He knew that the purple light could have been coming from the spire of ghostly amethyst in the middle of the city, but he didn’t like the possibility that there could have been more beacons inside. A couple of dead Hallowed began stumbling into the tunnel, but the Gnomes dropped them within seconds with a barrage of crossbow bolts. The bodies let out a few last raspings gasps as they fell to the ground, and the soldiers near John bristled nervously.

They weren’t the only ones. The Elves on the other side began shouting at the top of their lungs. At first, he couldn’t understand a single word they were saying. It came out in another language, and John didn’t know what it was… until something reminded him of Elisrya, the elf he had captured, and the sound of the words his enemies were saying changed in his ears.

“-get the fire the fuck over here! We nee-” The voice was cut off by a series of short, horrible, gurgling sounds before a wet slap filled the air as something fell to the ground. John only realized a couple of seconds later that the Elves had killed one of their own when another Hallowed body came tumbling down the stairs into the tunnel with his throat cut open and his eyes shallow and gray. The elf quickly dropped with a dozen different bolts sticking out of his torso. After a moment, the body got back up… and then was shot down again, where it stayed the second time.

“We’re not trying to kill everyone inside. We’ll have to kill everyone twice if we do it that way. Just find the throne room,” John growled at Kennedy and then turned to Urga. “Is there any chance that you can shoot them before we go up there?” he asked, and in the distance, the faint familiar voice of a dwarf guard at the back of the line shouted out a battle cry from where he stood safely.

“CHARGE!” No one moved.

Urga shook her head.

“It is not loud enough in there,” she grunted, and John glanced at his inventory. Noise was easy. He could make noise.

“Get ready to move,” he said and quickly yanked one of the two flashbangs he had out of his inventory.