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Chapter 175: Investments and Faith
🕑 Added 2024-08-03 22:55:26 +0000 UTCThe wall did not last much longer but it did last almost to the end of Arthur’s shift. The people threw rocks and shot arrows as best they could, but the blocked stabbing-holes and used traps meant that there just wasn’t much more they could do to keep the monsters from carving away at the wall.
It wouldn’t have even lasted as long as it did if it wasn’t for the fact that some monsters tried to climb the wall itself to attack the defenders. That meant the monsters were split, with only some of them working on the wall itself. And because of the rocks and debris, the monsters never quite had the opportunity to get completely through the wall at any given point. As they chipped away at the wall, they’d be forced a few inches higher every so often, constantly degrading the wall but never actually penetrating it completely.
Even that couldn’t last forever. Arthur felt the shaking of the wall as it got less and less steady under his feet, and was ready when Karra finally came to announce that the first line of defense was ready to fall.
“All right, everyone. The next shift has taken their positions at the second wall. You are all officially off defense duty until the morning.”
“Is the wall going to fall?” Arthur said. “Or stay up for a bit longer?”
“It’ll hold for about an hour. But we need that much time to cut all the anchors that hold it to the cliff. No use letting it go to waste.”
“To waste?” Arthur perked up. “There’s a use for it?”
“I’ve already said too much. Just hang out for an hour or so. You’ll see.”
Arthur withdrew to the second wall and watched as the work crews dropped themselves down on ropes, using chisels to cut the anchors that had held the wall steady as its base was eroded by the steady pressure of the monster wave. At the same time, he watched in interest as several of Hune’s iron-smelting furnaces were lifted up the ladder and set up at evenly spaced intervals at the top of the wall.
“What’s that about? Last minute reinforcing?” Arthur looked to Lily for answers. He knew she had them. “It has to be too late for that.”
“It is. Just wait,” Lily said. “And eat. I brought snacks for this part.”
The foundries smoked as Lily tried to keep Arthur’s mind off things. It took the hour that Karra had predicted and then another half hour besides before the wall actually fell. The monsters got louder and louder as they packed in closer and closer around the doomed wall. Finally, Karra signalled for the workers, warriors, and lone metal refiner to retreat.
Arthur’s eyes were drawn to the base of the wall as he heard a loud crack and saw a sharp, metallic-looking horn burst through the rock. It then swept side to side, clearing out bricks and fragments of Slapstone until there was room for the boar-like monster to come through. Having finally breached the defenses, the monster looked up at the secondary wall and brayed in both aggression and victory.
“Oh, that was a mistake,” Lily said. “And he doesn’t even know it yet. How cute.”
In the hole the boar had bored in the wall, fragments of rock and brick were still falling. Not only that, but the amount and size of falling fragments was increasing faster and faster. Once a truly big chunk fell, one that was big enough to startle the bore that had caused the hole, Arthur realized what was happening. The wall was collapsing forward. It was just a matter of gravity and time now.
“I talked to Karra about this,” Lily exclaimed as she puffed herself up. “And the trick to it is that the wall is leaning ever so slightly forward. It’s not the kind of thing you could see if you weren’t looking for it, but there’s only one way it can fall.”
“Oh, sh…” Arthur began to say, only to be drowned out by the cataclysmic failure of the wall in its entirety. With an unearthly whooshing of wind and a sound that would have deafened anyone without a few points in vitality, the wall came down, tipping forward as it did until it finally slapped into the surface of the demon world. Arthur couldn’t even see what effect it had on the monster wave, given that the whole world was dust and the still-loud sound of settling rock. And in that moment of blindness, he had an odd thought that he probably should have had a week ago.
“The stream,” Arthur yelled. “Didn’t that bury the town’s stream?”
“Oh, absolutely. That’s why we diverted it. You’ve really been in your own head for the last few days, haven’t you?” Lily punched Arthur softly in the arm. “You’ve walked over the dry bed at least a few times that I’ve seen.”
“Oh.” Arthur was sheepish. “I guess I have. Will we get it back?”
“Yup. We’ll just dig it out later. There wasn’t any way to do the traps without it. Mizu’s well used the water from the stream. I can’t believe you didn’t realize that either.”
After a few minutes, a chance breeze came through and wicked away the worst of the dust, laying bare the devastation that the wall had caused. There was rubble and a large empty space, bordered on one side by the town’s second wall and the other by a still-endless wave of monsters.
“Are those… metal?” Arthur said. “There’s a shiny line at the edge of the monster wave.”
“Hune thought that one up.”
“The smelters that they put up?”
“Yeah, there were little canisters of water in each of those. When they came down, the canisters broke, and…” Lily made a little motion with her hands. “Boom. Liquid iron everywhere.”
“So what does that mean?” Arthur asked. For some reason, the monsters were still waiting at the edge of the metal line.
“It buys us some time. And makes the monster’s lives harder. It’s like walking on a very spiky beach. It’s not fun. Every little bit helps.”
—
Somehow, impossibly, the defense of the town felt like routine when Arthur got up the next day. Most of the big surprises were gone. Milo and Puka had a few more traps set up, mostly of the pitfall and rock-slide variety. The terrain outside the town was much harder for the monsters to navigate now, and every trap meant mass casualties in the attacking force. But soon enough, even those had run their course.
The second wall had more pokey-holes reaching higher on the wall than the first, by virtue of the wall being built later in the process. It was also thicker, if not quite as high. By any objective numerical measure, the monsters were losing. Thousands and thousands of them had fallen, without causing so much as a single serious injury on the Coldbrook side. In return, they had taken down one wall. But with only two more walls between the town and a disordered retreat-by-sea, nobody seemed to feel good about those numbers.
The better part of two days passed that way, with the town chipping away at the monsters as best they could. Another sortie was launched, through yet another tunnel. Milo confirmed that would be the last. The monsters were mostly unintelligent, but some were bright enough to catch on to patterns. After the second attack was finished, Arthur saw some of them poking at the rock wall, as if searching for another tunnel. It wasn’t safe to give them another opportunity to break through.
—
“I wonder how Corbin is doing.” Arthur put down a tray of food he had retrieved from one of the cooks, setting it next to a similar platter of juice drinks he had bought for everyone. “I guess he couldn’t sneak back in through that.”
“No and he wouldn’t. If he didn’t find help, he would go to another town to wait this out. That was always the plan, whether he said so or not,” Milo said.
“And he didn’t find help,” Arthur said. “At least not yet.”
“Oh, he might have.”
“I don’t see any of them out there.”
“You wouldn’t.” Lith sipped on a drink before pulling over one of the plates of roasted vegetables and meat-pastries. “They’d work from the other side. They can’t very well get to the town, but monster waves tend to move in one direction with more focus than you’d expect. If Corbin found help, they are all working on the back of this wave.”
“Ah,” Arthur said. “Not much help to us at the front.”
“It’s help.” Mizu sipped on a glass of water, drawn from the dedicated well in Arthur’s shop. “Remember that this is about numbers. If we can defeat all the monsters before the last wall falls, we win. It doesn’t matter where they are defeated so long as they don’t get in.”
“War of attrition?”
“Right.” Onna speared a broccoli-stem-like vegetable they had recently begun growing and chewed it, continuing on with her mouth partially full. “We just have to wait for the rescue. We hold out as long as we can for that.”
That night, Arthur broke the council’s rule and worked outside of his shift trying to invent a new tea, anything that would give just a little more power to the fighting forces of the town. Any edge would help, but an entire half of the night spent in furious research and development yielded nothing but exhaustion and the accompanying baggy eyes the next morning.
At the wall the next day, Arthur saw Skal standing alone in the center of the platform, holding a rod. Against all good sense, he was angling.
“Skal.” Arthur climbed up next to him. “What in the name of the gods are you doing?”
“You shouldn’t be up here, son. They should have stopped you at the third wall.”
“I’m sneaky like that, I guess. You didn’t answer my question.”
“Just a little angling,” Skal said. “You work as long as I have, you get some odd skills. Some of them combine in odd ways.”
Skal flicked his wrist, sending an absurdly long fishing line whipping through the air, carrying a hook as big as the palm of Arthur’s hand. Another flick brought it down into the throng of monsters, where it caught something big enough to stretch the line taut and bend the rod to near-breaking.
“This is the fun part. I have an achievement, won’t tell you how I got it, but it’s called leviathan landing. Lets me lift a living being with my rod a certain distance, regardless of weight.”
Skal pulled up on the rod, and a loud shriek from a very surprised monster sounded as a huge, armored monster rose above its friends and then was redirected downwards with yet another flick of Skal’s wrist. It slammed into the ground in front of the wall and skidded back away from the angler, taking out any smaller monster in its wake until it finally bashed into a piece of rubble large enough to eat up its remaining momentum.
“That is neat. Why aren’t you doing that all the time?”
“It’s an every once in a while kind of skill. I have a few charges of it. I was waiting for a calm time to use them and this seemed like it.”
“Ah.” Arthur sat on the battlements. “So I gather this wall is coming down, too?”
“Any minute now. How are you holding up?”
“Fine. As fine as I can be, anyway. How do you think we’re doing?”
Skal shrugged and cut the line on his pole near the top before disassembling the whole thing and stowing it in a wooden box. “No way to tell. Past the trees, there could be a million of them. Or six. This is the kind of fight you just keep fighting until you see if you’ve won.”
“Do you at least have a best guess?”
“If you force me? Sure. Even chances.”
“Echh.” Arthur grimaced. “That bad?”
“Arthur, a month ago, if I was honest, I would have said five-to-one. You kids have done well here. No matter what happens, you’ll have that. People will talk about this. Win or lose. And that’s important. The expansion was never meant to be easy. Monster waves, in some ways, are a great way to test if a new society’s experiments are sound. To see if they’re worth keeping around. And what you’ve done here is worth keeping around. I’ve seen what everyone has invested in this town. All that the town needs now is faith. And once you’ve conquered a monster wave, the town will have that.”
Comments
Sean
“faster. Once a truly big chunk fell, one that was big enough to startle the bore that had caused the hole” bore -> boar
