Chapter 94: Beachhead

FieryKathy

At least I have writing to distract me a bit.

“Should we go and check on our prisoner?” Élise asks. 

“I’ll stay here for a while longer, I can give you people a check-up while we are at it too.” I smile at our new Dwarger friends.” 

“Alright, and you Sam?” 

“I’ll stick with my girlfriend.” 

“Ok. See you in a bit then.” My sis walks off towards Nikki, Hilda and the officer of the inquisition while me and Sam stay to check up on the Dwarger people. 

The others didn’t really have a lot of wounds. Some of them had bruises and a couple of scratches but nothing too bad. A short heal was more than plenty to get rid of those. 

It doesn’t take long for the people I revived to start gaining consciousness either. They were clearly distressed and didn’t know what happened, but when they saw their friends they quickly calmed down too and were also super grateful to us. The Dwarger tell us that healing magic and especially revivification magic is incredibly rare on the continent.

“It’s not that we don’t have ways to heal our wounded. But we need the machinery present for that and scouting parties like us simply don’t have those. By the time a larger party would have found us it would already have been too late for revival.” 

“Did you get a message out to your people that you were under attack?” Sam asks the Dwarger who was talking and looks like the leader of the group.

He shakes his head. “We communicate through flares but their mages stopped them from reaching altitude.”

“That’s bad…” Sam helps some of the just revived soldiers to stand up. 

The leader nods. “We should try to get to the city as fast as possible to alert everyone of our new enemy. Our cities also have long range communication systems.” 

“Alright, let’s go ask our friends if they have any more information you could take with you.” Sam takes the lead.

“If you all can walk of course.” I smile and check everyone over once more but they all appear to be in great shape now. 

The Dwarger all diligently follow us to wear Hilda, Nikki and my sis are standing.

“Good, we just wanted to come and get you. Are all the Dwarger okay?” Hilda asks and looks at our little group.

“Yes, we are fine Milady, thanks to these two.”

“Nice to hear that.”

I peak around Hilda and see the inquisitorial officer, now a lot more bruised than earlier when I left him. 

“That’s a bit hard handed, isn’t it?” I ask. 

“He was calling you names, sis. I wasn’t going to have that and neither was Hilda.”

“Plus it made him reveal the plans of the inquisition and the position of their beachhead.” Nikki crosses her arms and looks at the inquisitor with disgust. “But what do we do with him now?” 

“We can take him, our leadership would also like some first hand evidence.” The Dwarger leader steps in. “Will these cuffs hold?” 

“Yes, these are magical and can only be opened by the holder of the key.” Hilda hands the key over to the leader. “Do you have any weapons just in case he tries to run?”

“We will manage, there’s plenty of weapons on the battlefield still.” 

Hilda nods. “While you bring him back our party will go and take a look at their beachhead and see what they are planning. This guy was some low ranking officer who didn’t know the details.” 

The leader also nods and replies. “If you discover what they are up to, please come back to the city and ask for commander Thrognoum Mountainforge.” He also hands over something that looks very similar to a pair of binoculars over to Hilda. “This might come in useful for you.” 

“Thanks and we will do.” 

And just like that the Dwarger left with their captive, leaving us to plan our approach on the enemy camp.  

“Where is this camp exactly?” Sam asks.

“The inquisitor said it was in that direction.” Hilda points into the woods.

“And what if he lied to us?” 

“He didn’t, I could tell by the way he said it.” Nikki assures the group. “It’s easier to read people when you are a vampire.” 

Sam nods. “Alright, I guess we should go and take a look?” 

“Yep, let’s get going.” My sister takes the lead through the woods while Sam goes wide to make sure we don’t get sneaked up on by another scouting party.

After a good hour of walking we finally get to the edge of the forest overlooking a lagoon in the distance. In it we could see six big ships, around the size of those we sank on our trip here. Rowing boats were constantly going back and forward, probably to unload supplies.

“Holy shit. I didn’t know the theocracy had that many people.” My sis puts her sword in the sand and kneels down next to it.

“They recruit zealots from the entire continent so I’m not that surprised.” Hilda takes out the binoculars she got from the Dwarger leader and starts looking around.

“What’s the plan?” Sam asks while she sits down next to me. 

“A direct assault would be suicide, even with our overpowered goddess kitten… I’m looking to see if I can spot one of their leaders… Aha.” Hilda smiles but that smile disappears just as quickly as it appeared. 

“What’s wrong?” My sis looks at Hilda, she must’ve noticed her sudden change of expression as well. 

“Well… the good thing is, one of their leaders appears to be heading out with a group of soldiers… but the bad thing is…” She hands the binos over. 

Lise takes them and looks at the spot Hilda is pointing at. “Give me a sec… Ah, I see.” She then hands the binoculars to her partner.

I poke my sister in the side “What’s the problem?”

“Here, you can see for yourself, Ami.” Nikki hands the binos to me next. 

My sister guides my focus. “See those people next to the guy in purple robes?” 

“Uh… I think so.” The group of people she means are wearing all sorts of armour and weaponry very different from the other soldiers on the beach. 

“Those are quite possibly other players.”

“Wait, already? Didn’t the game only come out recently?” 

“Never underestimate the power of power levelers, sis.”

“What are they doing with these fucks.” Sam says after she gets the binos from me too. 

“Some people just really like to roleplay as inquisitors going by my experience with Catacombs and Chimeras.”

“But don’t they see that what they are doing is morally wrong?”

“You need to remember that for most of these players this world is merely a game, roleplaying game… We might not agree with them but that doesn’t change that fact.”

“Hmm.” Sam looks down and scribbles into the dirt with one of her arrows.

“What’s the plan?” I ask our de facto leader. 

“I’d rather not do any player killing if I could help it, but if those people are the bodyguards of that inquisitor I don’t see many opportunities not too.”

“But won’t they be a lot stronger than most people we’ve fought already?”

Hilda gazes through the binoculars one more time. “Their gear is pretty standard and I don’t recognize any of them, which means they are not veterans of the game. Experience wise we probably outmatch them by quite a bit. That being said, they are still players so we must be cautious for some weird skills. Let’s just hope they don’t have an upstart Goddess too.” she puts down the binos and winks at me. 

“I-I think that’s unlikely.” 

“Oh, it looks like they are on the move.” Nikki comments. 

Hilda gets up and wipes the dirt from her knees. “Okay, let’s follow them.” 

Our group sticks to the treeline and heads in the direction we saw the enemy party disappear into. We are making double the pace to close the gap while still being mindful of our surroundings.

“Shouldn’t we have caught up to them by now?” Élise looks around but because we had reached a denser part of the forest our line of sight wasn’t that great. 

“I think so.” Sam replies and then incredibly quickly raises her bow and without warning shoots an arrow into the tree canopy. “I think we already have in fact.” 

“Well spotted!” A grinning spear wielding man walks out from behind a tree 20 meters ahead of us. His long ears betrayed that he was a Langor. “Looks like our little ambush failed.” A couple of others then joined him, including the ranger who was presumably hiding in the tree up ahead and the inquisitor. 

“That’s her! That’s the heretic, seize her!”

“Hold it gramps.” The spearman raised his hand. 

“G-gramps?” The inquisitor recoils a bit after hearing that. 

“Let’s try to do this peacefully first, shall we. Why don’t you hand over the pink-haired cat girl so we can all be on our way?”

Sam immediately gets in front of me. “Nope, not gonna happen.” 

“Why are you even in with that lot, do you not know what they do to people?” My sister raises her shield up to her chest and slides diagonally in front of me too. 

The spearman shrugs. “Earns good money to work for them.”

“Seize her in the name of the one true God!” The inquisitor goes back to his finistrations. 

“Well, looks like a fight it will be.” The man raises his spear up to his waist as the rest of his party also gets into a battle stance. 

“Don’t worry, sis. We will protect you.”

With that proclamation of protection from my sister, Nikki turns the entire area ahead of us into a wall of flame and the combat starts. 

FieryKathy