Siege State

The next morning, Val split everyone into two groups: those who wanted to return to Wayrest, and those who wanted to stay and fight.

Of around one hundred captives, just over forty opted to return to the city. That left some sixty odd wanting to stay.

Tom would have thought many more people would have leapt at the chance to return when offered it. Some of the captives had been Hunters, roughly twenty of them, and wouldn’t be able to return even if they wanted to.

Of the rest who decided to stay: around ten folks had been in the same unit as Tom, and had been captured after the unit broke during the Reaping. Another fifteen had been captured from various villages during the recent raids. The remaining fifteen were assorted travellers who had been taken as they journeyed either to or from Wayrest down the trade roads.

The non-Hunters that had decided to stay all surprised Tom for one reason or another. There were a handful of Guards, including Rosa, who had decided not to return. Tom would have thought they would have much rather been defending a fortified wall than traipsing through a forest.

A handful of Idealist villagers had chosen to stay too. A few of them didn’t even have combat Ideals, and yet they wanted to help.

Those captured during the Reaping, like Tom, he would have thought would have been sick of the Deep by now. One and all, it seemed that those from this group who chose to stay, were those whose captivity hadn’t broken them. Instead, it had forged them anew, just as Tom’s time in the Deep had forged him. They were filled with an almost animal need for revenge, and realised that staying would be the most direct pathway to getting it.

The last group were the most eclectic, those travellers caught on the trade roads. Most were either merchants or their hired guards. The Deep was not safe to travel through at the best of times, after all. The unusual thing about them was that many merchants had decided to stay, and help as best they could.

There were many that had chosen to go, mostly those with families abroad, who wanted to see them again one day. The life of a merchant was rough, though, and many had no family anywhere. Spending your life travelling through monster infested wilderness of one variety or another tended to attract a certain type of person, be they merchant, or merchant’s guard.

They all liked ty. They loved a challenge. They loved chasing once in a lifetime opportunities. Tom wasn’t quite sure what kind of opportunities they envisaged coming from them helping, but he was glad for it all the same.

The groups were sorted relatively quickly, and from there, plans were made. Tom and Val would lead the returnees to Wayrest. Once they arrived, they would try and signal the Watch, and arrange for a portal specialist to collect them. Officer Dale, and the rest of the Guards from Corin’s, except Rosa, were amongst them.

Several of the Hunters who had been captured would accompany them too. After they had dropped off the returnees, they would scout the siege preparations before returning to the others.

The other group would be led by Scriber and Cub. Three of the rescued Hunters had ranged from the south eastern villages, and knew the surrounding area well. Scriber, having spent so much time all over the Deep, probably knew it better in general than any individual Hunter.

They figured if the orcs had approached Wayrest from the northeast, they would likely set up their main siege preparations there. They needed to set up somewhere where they could maintain operations against the orcs, whilst not being so close as to put themselves in danger of discovery.

The southeast of the Deep outside the village rings seemed as good a spot as any. Those three hunters who ranged there each had bases similar to Val’s oak. They could split their forces between them, expanding and fortifying them, and from there begin anti-siege operations.

Tom’s mother decided to stay. It was the source of a great deal of anxiety for him. He would have much preferred that she return, had tried to argue her into doing so, but she would not budge. One of the merchants had Tenacity, and one of the folks from Tom’s Reaping had manifested Soothing, but his mother was still the only one of them with a full Healing Ideal.

He knew it was insanely selfish to ask her to return, but he had to try anyway. It was his own mother, after all. He didn’t want her in danger. He sensed the collective sigh of relief when he finally gave up and accepted her choice. Every one of them knew how indispensable she would be.

The group stayed together for several days, travelling south. Only when they had gone far enough that they judged they wouldn’t encounter too much orc resistance, did Tom and Val say a brief goodbye to Scriber and Cub, and the two groups part ways.

From there, Tom and Val and the group veered south and east for several more days, angling slowly closer to Wayrest. Once they had reached true south east from it on the compass, they forged a direct line inwards.

The journey was surprisingly uneventful. The newly freed captives were restive, eager to be back within the safety of the walls. They were all skittish, and so it was lucky that they only encountered a few creatures of the Deep, nothing Tom and Val and the other Hunters couldn’t handle.

They saw orcs only once, and then only through Sere. When they were less than half a day from the village rings, they saw a group of ten or so were ranging about just inside the Deep. To Tom, it didn’t look like they were about anything in particular. They seemed almost aimless, just wandering.

Tom guessed they must have been sent to try and flush out any villagers that had hidden when word of the raids arrived, but no villager would flee into the Deep. The orcs seem to know that too, and they only paid cursory attention to their surroundings. They had moved on quickly. Tom and his group proceeded closer.

They reached the outer ring not long after, at an older village called May’s Crest. As the name suggested, the village was built on top of a shallow rise. As the rest of the land surrounding Wayrest was relatively flat, it provided a decent view of the surroundings. That view was anything but idyllic.

Scouting through Sere, they could see that the village had been abandoned in a rush. Tom could imagine word spreading of the initial raids on the north eastern villages like wildfire. Panic would have ensued. Every villager in the rings would have tried to rush for Wayrest at once. He just hoped most of them had made it safely.

May’s Crest was empty and unmolested as they wandered in cautiously. It seemed the orcs had not yet spread so far. The same couldn’t be said for all the villages though.

From their vantage point atop the shallow rise, they could see great plumes of smoke churning into the sky from many villages to the north east, in the middle, and even inner rings. Tom could even make out more plumes beyond the city, from the northern village rings. The siege of Wayrest had begun.

They settled the group in the town square, ready to move at a moment’s notice, and Tom sent Sere to scout out in all directions. The Lord General had told them that the Watch would be keeping an eye for them, so they could coordinate. He hadn’t been able to say how exactly, but seemed confident they would be able to find them.

As it turned out, it was simple. As Sere moved towards the limit of her range, she caught sight of a person crouched atop a roof in the closest middle ring village to them. The figure was clad all in black, and seemed to be watching a group of orcs ransack and loot in the next village over.

Tom sent one of Sere’s bodies down to the person. The sparrow turned tiny circles in the air right in front of them, before stopping to hover briefly and trilling at them. Then the sparrow shot away, directly back towards Tom.

He watched through one of Sere’s other bodies as the Watchman’s head turned, following the sparrow. Then they shattered. Their body fractured, lines splitting it chaotically all over, and then fell into pieces, just like a pane of glass with a rock thrown through it.

Tom thought he’d lost them, and wondered if they’d taken his message or not, when Sesame growled and turned to a nearby rooftop. The Watchman was perched up there, fractured lines of light slowly seaming themselves together all throughout their form.

“Ho!” Tom said to them, trying not to be too loud. “Ho, the Watch!”

The Watchman said nothing, but dropped down from the roof and walked over to them. The group began to mutter, some in awe, some in fear. The Watchman stopped in front of Tom and Val. They unwound their facewrap, revealing a startlingly pretty young woman.

“Hi!” she said. “I’m Watchman Glass! How in The World have you all ended up out here?” It immediately set Tom to wondering if there was any relation between her and his former philosophy instructor. Their two demeanours seemed diametrically opposed.

“We’re Hunters,” Val said succinctly. “We’re on orders from the Lord General to scout and report back with information.”

“Well!” Glass said brightly. “It looks like you’ve got a bit more than information for us!”

“That we do,” said Tom. “We rescued these captives from the orcs. The ones they were… using to make Idealists for themselves.”

Glass gasped softly, looking around at the former captives. Many still had a long road of recovery ahead of them, and looked like it, too.

“Right, no time to waste then! We’ll need a portal, I’d say! You folks just post up here, and I’ll be back shortly!” And with that, she began to fracture again, and in moments, all that remained of her were shards that broke into ever smaller pieces, until nothing remained.

Val raised an eyebrow at Tom, and he shrugged. “I guess we wait, then. I’ll send Sere to scout some more while we’re at it.”

Tom moved to the ridgeline, watching their surroundings through both his own eyes, and Sere’s. Sesame stood beside him, his nose trained into the wind.

The outlook was not good. Great gouts of smoke all over the horizon. He could hear a faint buzzing on the wind, and imagined huge pyres burning, countless thousands of orcs screaming and braying at each other. Sesame’s nose was overwhelmed with the scent of things burning, and under it all, just a hint of things dead and dying.

Tom’s heart grew cold as he watched. Rosa stepped up beside him, slid an arm around his waist, worked the fingers of her others behind Sesame’s ears. Some of the weight of what he was seeing slid away.

“Goddess,” Rosa breathed. “I can feel it. So much fire, so much smoke. The sheer destruction…”

Something about the sentence tickled at Tom’s mind. After a moment, it clicked.

“How can you feel it? You don’t have a sensory or control skill.”

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, then tossed her chin slightly.

“If you must know, I have my fall. I manifested Speed, during our escape. My pinnacle is a control skill.”

“Wait, what?! Your pinnacle?!” he said, shocked. “That would mean you manifested your last Ideal, and then three skills under it in what, less than a week? How?”

She looked at him with a flat expression, then a small hint of a grin played on her lips. “Some of us are not stupid,” she explained, and poked him right in the forehead. “And some of us are not braggarts either.” She poked him again.

“But just so you know, my fall is better than yours, Tom Fucking Cutter.”

He snorted, but gave her the congratulations she deserved, even if the ease with which she picked up skills made him feel an idiot. They would need every advantage they could get in days to come.

Together, they watched the villages burn, and waited.