Games have themes. It’s not always logical or even coherent, but they have themes. This, of course, is to help them sell stuff. What that theme is varies wildly. The Spirit of Rebellion in the Persona games, and the core mcguffin of the Fate series is the Grail, which can grant you a wish. How far would you go for a wish?

  I mean, if Saber is your servant, pretty freaking far, right?

  Or it could be something even more trite, like the Assassins and Templars from the Assassin's Creed games. Anarchy versus rigid authoritarianism. Freedom versus Control.

  In our particular game, the themes were hunger and betrayal. Over and over and over.

  I watched Othai lead her command out of Verton and towards the big village below. She looked utterly in her element. Not simply comfortable, she looked natural.

  “I wonder how old Othai was.”

  “Tower Master?” Versai gave me a look.

  “When she became an Awakened. I think she was a lot older than she looks now.”

  Versai grunted. “Does it matter?”

  “It might.”

  “We don’t get tired, Tower Master. Our bodies don’t age. However old she was before she was an Awakened can’t matter.”

  “No? Would you be the same person you are today if you didn’t live the last five years of your life before Awakening?”

  Versai had the good grace to look embarrassed. “I take your point, Tower Master.”

  She contradicted me. My Six Stars almost never do that, outside of scripted dialog. Funny. Well, not “funny” funny, but funny.

  “So what did she see in that life? What memories are locked behind the gate of “I don’t want to talk about it?”

  “Tower Master…” Versai’s voice trailed off. We had experimented with how to communicate around the I-Don’t-Want-To-Talk-About-It, but the very best we managed to figure out was a system of me guessing wildly and her confirming or rejecting things. And there is simply no way Othai would be able to reveal the core plot of this place to me, if she knew it.

  I was certain she knew something, though. She dove on the chance of an independent command with an intensity I found a bit scary.

  “Sorry, I know you can’t talk about a lot of things. We will keep working our way through the relationship system, and you will be able to talk more freely.”

  “Yeah. That will be good. Though I have to admit, Tower Master, it’s a little weird seeing you turn up with a stack of jelly desserts.” She smiled, and if there were birds on this map, they would have flown around her and burst into song. Every now and then, I am ambushed by her pretty.

  “Shall I find you some more comfy socks? What is the deal with you and comfy socks anyway?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She blushed and turned away. I nearly walked into a tree. Versai can blush? Had I seen her blush before? This is incredible! Also so charming it should be a goddamn crime, but I’m not going to quibble. Good lord!

  The troops marched into the village. Othai found the signal bell for the town and rang it.

  “No church.” I muttered.

  “You are right, Tower Master. Maybe there is one nearby? It’s not strange to put a church in a field or by the road.”

  “True, true. Have you seen any, anywhere we have been around Verton?”

  Versai shook her head.

  “Me either.” Which was also odd because in the Gradden March map, the church had been taken over by monsters and used to infiltrate the city. And in the Hungry Moon Mountain map, the Temple was benevolent-ish, but utterly alien and inhuman. Churches not necessarily being your friend seemed like another theme.

  I kept my eyes moving around. “Either the local religion doesn’t do churches, or something weird is going on.”

  Othai gathered up the locals. I was staying far enough back that I wasn’t in danger of hearing what she was saying. I had a weird theory. I don’t think they scripted much of this game. Or, well, maybe it’s more like they only scripted the main path of the plot. It’s why there were only two villagers, and the only thing that woman could tell me was where to find the next quest marker.

  There were exceptions, obviously. The Six Stars, some of the NPC’s, definitely some of the shopkeepers. They all could think and react on their own, within certain bounds. But I don’t think they scripted much outside of that. Anything I was standing next to needed dialogue. Can’t rely on me to pick up context clues, characters had to come up and tell me how they were feeling.

  The absolute simplest way to code this village evacuation would be to put in a single If-Then. IF I had done XYZ, THEN the village would evacuate. The game did that all the time. The relationship system, unlocking various shops and rooms in the Tower, it’s a perfectly sensible way to do things.

  This game isn’t long on sensible things. And not all of it was programmed. A lot of things were literally ripped out of other worlds and had a game system layered over them.

  So what happens if I, the MC and POV character for the player, am in sight but out of earshot? Would that force the game to play out the scene, but not calculate on what I had or had not done? If the game was designed by anything smarter than a potato, it shouldn’t matter. Binary decision. Did the MC do the thing? Yes or no?

  Was sending armed troops into the city to run the evacuation my XYZ regardless? Hmm. Not a very well designed test, now that I think about it. I watched Othai start addressing the crowd. The soldiers didn’t have their weapons pointed at anybody, but there were an awful lot of them. Othai had recruited four Three Handers and put them right up front for maximum peasant intimidation.

  The front row of peasants all seemed to be leaning back from them. Two hundred peasants, four three handers. Maybe it was Othai’s presence, or all the other soldiers. Maybe it was just the big swords. Was it an intimidation modifier, or some remnant instinct baked into the copypasta villagers? I really didn’t know. There was a lot of waving back and forth.

  “In any sane world, evacuating this village would take a few days, maybe even a week. Harvest everything, load everything up into waggons. Clear out the die hard holdouts.” I was speaking conversationally as my head buzzed with questions and what-ifs. “I’m going to say the evacuation starts in… let's say ten minutes.”

  “No bet, Tower Master. I’ve been proven wrong too many times here. Though I agree that the evacuation should take days. Even in a raging emergency, it would take hours.”

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  I nodded. It wouldn’t be instantaneous, of course. There would be the packing up animation, and then a slow caravan to Verton which would need protecting from raiders.

  And YEP! There they go! The villagers scattered back to their houses in a furious rush. The nearly ripe harvest was… harvested… in the span of about five seconds. Wagons started congregating on the street, fully loaded. Where did they come from? Damned if I know. They were full of food, furniture and families. All looking sad, but none making a particularly big scene.

  “My god. I have witnessed a timeskip from the outside. That’s the damnedest thing-” I shook my head. “No, sorry, it’s weird but not the damnedest thing I have seen. That bar has been raised far, far too high.”

  “I don’t believe it. I mean, I do, but I really don’t want to.” Versai muttered.

  “Part One of the test run is a success though.”

  Versai smiled. “Who knew you could delegate an army, Tower Master?”

  “Happy surprise and all that. Unfortunately, that does mean we really need to grind for Runed Bones.”

  “You don’t grind for them, Tower Master, you just touch the bodies and they appear.” She gave me a worried look. I glared at her.

  “Now you are just screwing with me.”

  “I would never! Tower Master.”

  “HMMM.”

  The wagons rolled out of the village. They were achingly slow. I saw a shady looking young man turn up with a large sack and speak to Othai. She shook her head strongly and waved him back into the line.

  “Pachinko’s mercy upon us. Someone just tried to sell Othai a Go Faster button.”

  “Tower Master?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Keep an eye out for raiders. They have to be coming shortly.”

  The wagon had gone barely a hundred yards from the village when the first wave of bandits hit.

  “They are coming straight down the road! They are actually coming straight down the road!” I threw my hands up in victory. I was extremely tempted to climb on a wall and T pose to assert dominance, but Versai was already giving me worried looks.

  “Tower Master, there are stone walls on either side of the road along this stretch, and fences further ahead. Unless they want to come to a complete stop and climb over to attack, they have to come down the road.”

  “Would you?”

  “Well, no, they have crossbows so why…” Something almost audibly clicked in her head and she buried her face in her hands. “What was that random God you just mentioned Tower Master? I think you have invoked him a few times before.”

  “Pachinko. God of blatantly unfair games of chance.”

  “Perhaps this is divine intervention, then.”

  “Never attribute to divinity what could be attributed to idiocy.” I nodded sagely. “Mark Twain said that. Or the Bible. Or Big Ben Franks. It’s usually one of those three.”

  The first wave of raiders was made up of wild-eyed men waving two handed axes, and the sword-and-shield guys we had seen before. I kind of hoped they were like the villagers- basically animatronic puppets, with little human inside of them. The alternative was imagining a living, aware mind trapped in a body that was forced to charge mindlessly at a counter-charging wall of pikes.

  It was an utter slaughter. There were no clever tactics. The pikes held their formation tightly, filling the width of the road. Othai didn’t have the budget to rent everyone she wanted, so she only got fifty pikes. It was overkill. Every raider was dead before they got within fifteen feet of the front line.

  I wondered if the bodies would get hung up on the pikes and foul the formation. Nope. Just a thrust, a yank out of the body, and present the point once more. And march on.

  Othai had the pikes retreat to the wagons and had the bodies looted by Rikka. An easy way to clear the road. The convoy never stopped rolling.

  The next wave was more axemen with crossbow support. The crossbows were directly behind the axemen. I think the idea was arching fire, which, given how long the convoy was, wasn't the dumbest idea. Taking out even a single wagon would paralyze most of the convoy.

  It wasn’t remotely a fair fight. Othai was using most of her brain, and unlike the raiders, she was a professional at this. Her crossbow troops did jump over the walls and fired on the advancing crossbowmen from cover. The attacking crossbowmen never came close with their return fire. Well, there was one guy who had his glowing bolt of light lodge into a small gap in the stone wall just in front of one of our mercenaries, but it only got four inches deep in a two foot thick wall.

  I still nearly had a heart attack. I had forgotten the unholy compensation fee Truso would demand if any of his mercs came back dead.

  Othai ran her pikes up the road again, and once again, the axemen died without any chance of resistance.

  “Is this what it’s like watching us defend a wave?” I asked Versai. “Especially those early waves where we just ran them down a single track.”

  “We never managed quite this level of meat grinder, but yes, Tower Master. I’d say so. It’s creepy. Great for us, obviously, but creepy. Those bandits should be broken and running right now.”

  “Oh it’s worse than that. Remember what Red Feather said? There are only five thousand living members of the Hosk Confederacy, and they were all conscripted as raiders. You have to figure that at this point, we have killed… what, north of a hundred? Closing in on two hundred? Of them around Verton.”

  Versai’s lips thinned. “People will fight if they can’t run. And Hosk doesn’t have anywhere to run to. Doesn’t matter how much their total population declines.”

  “Hmm. Interesting. I wonder if Wastet is holding any hostages. Or Ko’Ras, really. I’m sure they have someone, maybe a lot of someones, here to supervise.”

  I had this image of a commissar standing behind the raiders with a cannon. “Anyone who retreats will be shot! Advance! Pick up the crossbows your fallen brothers have dropped and attack! You are the heroes of Hosk! Anyone who retreats is a traitor and their families will be fed to the monsters!”

  Hmm. Sudden Tanya the Evil vibes again. If I hear anyone “jokingly” demand a surrender before an all out bombardment, I’ll know to send everyone to the air-raid shelters first.

  The caravan rolled over the gentle hills and ridges of the beautiful farmland around Verton. What wasn’t flat was covered in orchards. There were lots of vineyards too, though the grapes still looked kind of small and green. I wondered how they would taste. Could I eat them? Even if they were sour and hard, I would be tasting something other than rain.

  The idea seized me and I ran for a cluster of ripening grapes. Versai yelped but kept up. Scrambling over stone walls, running through the turned earth of the fields, I reached for the grapes and then my hand just stopped. It felt like nothing at all, but it stopped my hand as surely as glass plate. The Devs had put an invisible wall around the food.

  “Damn you! Damn you!” I hammered on nothing. Robbed again! It was like the pretend food in Sebastian’s warehouse back in Gradden March.

  “Tower Master?!”

  “It seems we are still looking but not touching.” I looked up at the skies. “I hope it burns when you pee. I hope it feels like broken glass set on fire and put out with powdered Carolina Reapers, but in your urethra. And I hope you stay excessively well hydrated.”

  Versai’s voice was dry. “A… comprehensive curse, right there. Or maybe comprehensive isn’t the word I’m looking for. Cohesive? It’s a complete package of a curse, Tower Master. Well done.”

  “Did you know you sounded exactly like Sebastian when you said “Well done?”

  “How very kind of you to say, Tower Master.” I shivered. It was uncanny. Still her voice, of course, but the tone, intonation and rhythm were pure Sebastian.

  “Incidentally, Tower Master, I do believe Othai has slaughtered another thirty Hosk raiders.”

  I glanced back at the convoy. They were still moving at that slow, steady pace. Othai was using her cheat power “I can move troops around and don’t have to stay on the road the whole time” to absolutely rinse the raiders.

  “It’s a player trap.”

  “Pardon, Tower Master?”

  “The awakened are basically superhumans. A pl… Tower Master might just roll in and think “I’m not wasting money on mercenaries! I have a whole stack of killers here. I wish the raiders would try something.””

  “Hard to imagine, Tower Master.”

  “Please, please stop the Sebastian impression. Please and thank you.”

  Versai snickered. I pressed on. “The thing is, though, even if any of our Awakened would wreck these guys, the numbers are quickly getting overwhelming. Pretty soon, probably as soon as they reach a crossroad, we are going to see attacks from multiple directions. Manageable with mercenaries, fatal without them. And you would need to hire a really significant number of mercs to avoid fatalities and owing Truso a kidney in compensation money.”

  I was soon proven right when a block of raider pikes came charging in from the flank at an intersection. The crossbows dealt with them handily, and the few that got close-ish ran into unexpected pit traps on the road. The traps were small, but a broken ankle or twisted knee is no joke when you are trying to run with a twenty foot spear.

  The way the other pikes tripped on the suddenly flailing poles would have been funny, if it wasn’t for all the screaming.

  “Rikka?” I asked.

  “Yep. And there she goes, stabbing away at the wounded while the crossbows take out the ones still on their feet.”

  “Wonder why she hasn’t put Miyuki into action.”

  “The horses, Tower Master.”

  “Good point.” The caravan was made up of horse drawn farm wagons. Horses that were both huge draft animals, and unlikely to respond well to the screaming, terrifying whistles of Miyuki’s arrows.

  The walls of Verton were in sight, but nobody relaxed. The walls opened up around here. Lots of room to get jumped from lots of different directions.

  “Where is Rache?” I couldn’t see her anywhere.

  “Look!” Raiders were bolting up out of a ditch, running for the road. Rache was on top of them, her saber flashing as she raced past. The caravan’s crossbows cut down the raiders in short order, just in time to meet the pike formation charging up from the other direction.

  “Must not have seen what happened to the crossbow guys. And look- the front row just went down again.” I pointed to the victims of another band of pit traps. Rikka only had to snag a couple of feet. The pikes themselves would do the rest for her.

  “And here come the Genuda pikemen. God, that’s nasty.”

  “Gradden March didn’t use pike formations?”

  “We did, and it was nasty then too. We had a lot more cavalry, though. Lots of open pasture land out on the frontier.”

  “Huh. Never would have guessed.”

  “Yep. That’s what a March is.”

  “Wait, really?”

  “Yeah. Militarized border is a good way to think of it.”

  “Learn something new every day.” I watched the mercenaries dispatch the flailing bandits with alarming enthusiasm. No quarter asked or offered. Which is normal for a video game, of course, but Read Feather at least offered it. Was it because this was a sort of mini-game within the dungeon? Were the raiders so gone mentally, they couldn’t even conceive of retreat or surrender? Or was there some other force at work, something even nastier?

  “Successful test, Tower Master?”

  “Very. This map is going to spring something uncommonly nasty on us, Versai. But we will be ready for it.”