Extra's Sign In System: The Hero's an Idiot!

Chapter 265: Chapter 265: Two Days (2)

Chapter 265: Two Days (2)

A massive man with heavy forearms and a thick gray beard stepped out from the growing crowd. He wore a heavy leather apron and carried a rusted iron pry bar.

"Name is Varn," the man rumbled, his voice like grinding stone. He was the canal foreman, and the district’s unofficial patriarch. He looked at the wired alley mouths, then at Draven. "The Guard is not coming."

"No," Draven said.

Varn nodded slowly. He did not look surprised. He turned and looked at the hundred dockworkers standing behind him. They did not have Vanguard combat classes, but they had heavy tools and a lifetime of hard labor.

"Break the stones," Varn ordered his people. "Give the boy his trenches."

Dawn broke over Bastion Nine the next day, casting long pale shadows across the eastern quarter.

At the main southern gates, a procession of high elegance was preparing to depart. Lord Commander Vell’s diplomatic envoy was rolling out to meet Marek’s approaching forces. At the center of the Vanguard escort was a luxurious, velvet-lined transport.

Sitting inside was Livia, Vell’s youngest daughter.

She wore pristine white silk, sheltered from the grim realities of the world beyond the walls. She smiled warmly at the Vanguard knights, certain that her father had arranged a civilized negotiation. She believed in the immunity of her diplomatic status. She was a child walking into a slaughterhouse, convinced it was a ballroom.

Draven stood on a high warehouse roof, his dark coat blowing in the morning wind. He watched the transport roll out through the massive iron gates, heading south into the morning mist.

He said nothing. He did not intervene.

’If I stop that transport by force, I am a foreign operative seizing a Lord Commander’s daughter inside his own city,’ Draven calculated coldly. ’Strike Team Zero is arrested by nightfall and the eastern quarter is empty when Marek arrives.’

’And I have nothing to show Vell that outweighs his own certainty.’

So Draven watched the girl ride toward her doom, his expression a mask of calculation.

Nyx did not wait for Draven’s orders to scout the enemy. She had melted into the shadows three hours before dawn, slipping past the diplomatic envoy on her own initiative.

She returned just after midday.

She materialized from a patch of darkness in the corner of the makeshift command warehouse. She did not look tired, but her dark eyes were devoid of their usual lethal amusement.

"Marek is not moving like a man coming to negotiate terms," Nyx reported, her voice a hushed whisper as Draven and Aegon gathered around her. "He is moving like a conqueror."

She pulled a crumpled stolen parchment from her cloak and laid it on the table. It was a detailed schematic of Bastion Nine’s outer walls, marked with structural stress points.

"He has siege engineers," Nyx stated coldly. "He has already mapped the blind spots in the city’s defense grid. They are heavily disciplined human combatants. They march in lockstep. And Draven..." She looked up, meeting her Captain’s gray eyes. "He has no supply train."

Aegon frowned in confusion. "An army that size cannot march one hundred and eighty miles north from the Capital without a supply train. How are they eating?"

"They are not," Draven answered quietly, the terrifying reality of the arithmetic clicking into place. "Marek did not bring food because he does not plan on needing it. He intends to take Bastion Nine’s."

THUD.

Aegon slammed his fist onto the crate, realizing the sheer brutal efficiency of the Capital forces.

Draven took Nyx’s stolen intelligence directly to the central spire.

He bypassed the Vanguard bureaucracy and stood in Lord Commander Vell’s pristine sunlit office. Vell sat behind a desk of polished mahogany, sipping tea from a porcelain cup.

Draven placed the stolen siege map directly on the desk. He relayed the lack of a supply train and the presence of the siege engineers. He laid out the undeniable facts of Marek’s true intentions.

Vell listened. He did not interrupt. He was flawlessly polite.

When Draven finished, Vell smiled patiently, like a father indulging an overactive child.

"You are misreading the board, Draven," Vell said smoothly, pushing the map back across the desk. "Marek is posturing. The lack of a supply train simply proves he intends to sign the treaty quickly. This map is nothing more than standard Vanguard contingency planning."

Vell picked up his teacup. "It is the paranoid reading of a frightened scout. I have secured the peace. My daughter is securing the signature as we speak. Return to your quarters and rest."

Draven did not argue. He did not shout.

’He is immune to new data,’ Draven recognized, experiencing a chilling moment of clarity. ’It is not malice or corruption. It is the fatal arrogance of a man who has been right his entire life, and therefore cannot conceive of the mathematical possibility of being wrong even once.’

Vell was a dead man. Bastion Nine was a graveyard.

Draven turned around and walked out of the office without another word.

The second night fell heavy and cold over the eastern quarter.

The civilian shipping district was gone. In its place stood a fortress of iron, ice, and threaded lightning, built in the shadow of a city of open vulnerable streets. Varn and his dockworkers stood in the alleys, holding iron bars and heavy wrenches, waiting in the terrifying silence.

Lucien sat on a rooftop with a thin blue wire humming between his fingers. Reina stood by the frozen canal, her axe resting on the ice. Aegon held the primary chokepoint, his crimson aura barely contained.

Far across the district, hidden in the deep shadows of a clocktower, a lone figure observed the fortified streets. He wore the plain, unremarkable face of a Vanguard aide, and a stack of shipping manifests still rested under his arm. Malakor’s clone smiled a cold knowing smile, recording the squad’s defensive layout before melting back into the darkness of the city’s underbelly.

Draven stood at the edge of the southern barricade, looking out toward the main trade road.

The forty-eight hours were up.

At exactly midnight, the sound of iron treads grinding against stone broke the silence.

CRACK.

Through the dense rolling fog of the trade road, a transport slowly emerged. It was the luxurious velvet transport that had left at dawn.

But it was no longer escorted by Vanguard knights. The engine was dead. The transport was being pushed by a single blood-soaked Vanguard survivor, shoving against the rear plating until he collapsed dead onto the cobblestones.

The transport rolled to a slow creaking halt in front of the city gates.

It was empty.

Nailed to the pristine white door of the transport, driven through the panel with a jagged black dagger, was a single piece of parchment.

Draven crossed the cobblestones and read it without touching it.

Four lines, in a clean military hand. Terms of surrender. A deadline. And beneath the signature, one additional sentence noting that the Lord Commander’s daughter was a guest of the Capital and would remain so until the gates opened.

The war had already begun.

Draven stared at the empty transport, his gray eyes narrowing in the dark.

"Hold the line," he whispered.