Chapter 1925: No Creativity Allowed

"It went right," the dwarf corrected, and his beard could not quite hide the grin. "Water break. Then you do the next ten alone."

Farther down the scaffold, a dwarf girl with charcoal on her nose complained about smith-school homework to an elven ranger.

The ranger looked down her long nose at the child, informed her that pages were wasted on smiths, and held the practice slate steady for her anyway.

The wolfkin escort captain counted the children twice. Then she counted their guards.

There were none. The empire had sent its pups onto Confederation soil, into ruins the old war had made, with an escort of carpenters and a handful of elves.

"It’s almost like they’re baiting us..." the escort captain muttered.

"They’re taunting us!" her soldier hissed. "That long-eared slut is looking at me like I was a filthy dog!"

"Those bitches always have a condescending expression. Ignore it," the captain sighed.

At the western gate, a herald left a sealed letter on his way through: the joint domain would welcome a Confederation delegation, any size, any season, to see the works with their own eyes.

The scouts wrote all of it down. Then they spent an hour arguing over who would read it aloud at the fire.

...

On the beastkin side, the cubs’ class ran evening forms in the torchlight, out on the drill field behind the Confederation’s western wall. Every den owed the muster its young. That was the toll the war-lodge had set, and the dens had paid it.

Wooden claws rose and fell in ragged lines, small feet stamping the packed snow, and each tiny war-cry arrived a breath behind its swipe, as it had for weeks now. Their instructor walked the rows, straightening elbows, tightening straps against the cold.

Halfway through the forms, a cub with frost on her whiskers raised her wooden claw.

"Instructor... Is it true the human cubs over the border get hammers and letters instead of drills? I don’t want to become a soldier... I also want to create-"

"Silence. The Confederation needs you strong, not creative."

The torches burned down. The forms went on.

...

Fifty-three floors beneath Aldoria, Iris Ravenclaw fought alone, and finally, the labyrinth was paying its debts.

She had asked the Venomborne Terror for her chambers solo, and got them without issue.

Black Fang understood the desire to stand tall alone.

Down here the monsters hit hard enough to matter, hard enough to feed the pain-forged furnace of her class.

A Bonehide Ogre’s club caught her shoulder and opened it to the bone, its roar rattling the chamber. The pain went white and enormous behind her eyes, then folded down into her palm as power she could spend.

She drove it back out through the ogre’s skull, bonehide caving under a blow that had not existed a second earlier.

She straightened, breathing hard, red eyes bright in the blue gloom.

"I’m becoming strong," she realized with a perfectly flat tone.

...

The deep scouts came home to the war-lodge fire after three days inside the Villain’s borderlands, and the older of the two faced the great lords with the report gripped in both hands, visibly wishing it belonged to someone else.

"Speak," Gorruk rumbled.

"Great lords. The joint army trains on the old Vraven-Elvardia border, as reported before. We watched the war games for three days." He stopped. He started again. "I cannot tell you who the enemy was."

Skarn’s growl rose. "You watched three days and cannot name the enemy?"

"Nobody can, great lord! The first day, the summons held a fortress and all three races stormed it together. The second day, the dwarves held a valley beside the elves, against the humans and the summons, the same legions everyone had stormed together the day before."

His grip tightened on the report until the page buckled.

"The third day they played escort, a queen’s carriage crossing open ground, and by dawn the sides had shuffled again. They are not training against an enemy, great lords. They are training against... against all of it. Every war at once, while strictly documenting the strengths and weaknesses of each setup."

The fire cracked.

...

The fortress had not existed at sunrise.

Quinlan Elysiar had walked out onto the frozen plain of the old border with his hands in his pockets, and the ground had simply obeyed him.

Stone groaned up out of the earth in ring after ring, ramparts shouldering aside the snow, towers rising like things grown, magma veins glowing along the wall seams before cooling into black iron-hard mortar.

By noon, assisted by the deployment of dwarven reinforcing artifacts, a fortress worthy of a hundred-year siege stood on the plain, steaming in the cold.

By early afternoon, half the joint army was inside it, and the other half had been ordered to take it from them.

*BOOM!*

Dwarven siege engines opened first. The lead boulder came in short and burst a stretch of the outer rampart into gravel. The third took the roof off a tower, and most of the tower after it.

Human assault columns ran the killing ground under tower-shield roofs. Where one of those boulders came down on a roof, the roof folded, and the column that was left stepped over the rest and kept running.

Elven volleys arced overhead, hundreds of light-arrows blazing against the winter sky and coming down inside the walls like falling stars. Where they landed the parapet went bright, and Elite Souls came apart mid-swing, blue-white fire scattering across the rampart.

The mixed garrison of all three races and a thousand Elite Souls answered with everything they had.

Ballistae punched clean through the shield roofs below. Oil came over the parapet in sheets and left the storming ladders steaming, and the dead worked the defense as tirelessly as they had stormed positions of their own on the other days.

"Ladders on the west wall!!" a human general bellowed from the command rise. "Where is my second wave?!"

"Your second wave is dying in my trench!" a dwarven general roared back, delighted. "Whose idea was the trench?! Say it louder!"

"The trench was the elf’s idea!"

"Of course it was an elf’s idea," an elven marshal said proudly, chin held high.

Nobody was in overall command.

Three nations’ generals screamed at each other all afternoon, and doctrines collided like weather fronts.

The roaring machine worked anyway, simply because every soldier on that field knew whose idea the field itself was, and no one wanted to oppose their new tyrant.

High above the bombardment, the Primordial Villain stood in the air with his hands back in his pockets, watching his fortress get stormed, delighted that his sandcastle had started a war and that his soldiers were already showing promising signs of cooperating together properly.

At dusk the horns called it. The attackers owned the outer ring, the garrison owned the keep, and both sides claimed victory at increasing volume across the wreckage.

The fallen souls came apart into blue-white fire and drifted home to their master’s saber, already reforming, ready to be dealt onto whichever side tomorrow’s shuffle required.

...

Skarn walked the western wall alone that night.

Below him the drums kept their rhythm.

Sharpen, stockpile, drill.

Out on the pass road, the convoy’s lanterns crawled away into the dark, one small light at a time, in no hurry at all.

His claws were printed deep in the palisade timber before he noticed he had gripped it.

The wolfkin lord stood there long after the last lantern was gone, hackles risen against an enemy the night refused to show him, and the only sounds were the drums, the wind, and his own people, watching.

...

The afternoon’s dive ended with a warp gate opening on the cleared chamber floor and the family filing through it home, trading tallies of their XP gains.

Black Fang went last.

At the gate’s edge she stopped and looked back down the corridor, toward the stairs that led deeper, a moment longer than any count required.

Then she stepped through, and the gate closed behind her.