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Chapter 174: Rumble
🕑 Added 2024-08-02 20:08:09 +0000 UTCThe wall was still there the next day.
Arthur wasn’t surprised that it was, considering people with a better eye for structures than him had told him it would be. But he became much, much more perplexed on the how of its continued existence once he climbed the ladder to his post, distributed his tea, and finally peaked his head over the wall to take a look
“How? There’s… nothing there. It’s like it’s standing on a toothpick at this point.” Arthur goggled at the impossible sight of a wall balanced on what amounted to a sliver of rock at its base, a narrow enough foundation that it should have long ago tipped over or crumbled entirely. “It’s not possible.”
“Oh, Arthur. You thought I’d build a wall that fell down for just any monster horde?” Karra slapped him on the shoulder. “It’s not falling down because it can’t. We’re reinforcing the base where the warriors were standing and the whole wall is more or less pinned to the cliffs on either side.”
“So what happens when the bottom is out completely? Will the wall just hover?”
“Ha, I wish. It needs some contact with the ground. There’s no way around that. There’s some time before the monsters take out enough of the supports for it to actually fall. Eventually though, we’ll have to move on to different plans.” Karra swiped a tea off Arthur’s tray. “The wall falling was always part of the plan. We just have to make it take as long as possible.”
The first step in delaying the wall’s fall was a sortie, a military force launched from a protected position to clear the monsters. The various warriors in town were geared up, pumped up, and generally ready to cause some violence.
“This can’t be safe,” Arthur commented.
Onna rolled her eyes.
“It’s not safe, Arthur. Warrior work isn’t. Ever. The point of what they do isn’t to stay safe. It’s to keep the danger within acceptable margins. This is what they do. You have to trust them.”
“And the monsters won’t get in when we open the gates?” Arthur glanced down at the big iron gates, which were so thick and anchored so far into the wall they were impossible to take down without destroying the wall around them. “There are a lot of monsters out there.”
“Arthur, just watch.” Onna grabbed onto the ladder and set herself to slide down. “Trust me. It will be quite the show.”
“Over here, buddy. I’ll help you understand what’s going on.” Milo waved Arthur over. “First things first, you are going to want to watch the wall right about there.”
“There?” Arthur squinted his eyes at the ground-level section that protruded just past the gate. “It looks like normal rock.”
“And it is. For about an inch. Behind that, it’s all secret tunnel.”
“What?!”
“Secret tunnel. It was deemed best not to tell you about it,” Lily said, approaching bleary-eyed and sitting on the edge of the wall. She had slept up here, Arthur was told, waking up periodically to dump her majicka stores and then going back to whatever sleep she could get on a stone wall surrounded by monsters. “Mizu said you’d freak out.”
“She’s right. And honestly, I’m not sure I believe you guys.” Arthur looked at the wall again, suspiciously. “It looks like normal rock to me.”
“And to the monsters. It’s why they don’t bust through.”
“But what keeps them from busting through the tunnel once it’s open? There are hundreds of monsters down there. They will just get swarmed.”
“About that. Puka, are you about ready?”
“Just about. Say the word.”
Milo grinned. “The word.”
Puka leaned far over the wall, catching the end of a rope tied through a hook and pulling it. The knot it was connected to gave way, and a dozen or so feet down the wall, a big net chock-full of rocks lurched visibly.
“Once that rope is loosened, the others aren’t strong enough to hold up the rocks very long. They should be breaking just about now,” Milo explained.
A couple more ropes did give way, dumping the contents of the net bag to the ground below. And contents, Arthur felt, was not a strong enough word to describe what he was seeing. Up on the wall, it was hard to get a sense of the scale of what the trapper had managed to accomplish in terms of total suspended load, but now that the rocks were falling, it was clear that the net didn’t just hold a small, kill-a-few-monsters payload.
It’s a landslide. He contained a whole landslide somehow.
The rocks thundered down, hitting the big pile of monsters and careening out wildly in all directions. The rocks the town was throwing down from the wall weren’t small, ranging from baseball-sized to larger, human-head-sized projectiles. These were bigger, beyond what the average crafter would have been able to lift. Given that they were all more-or-less round, the extra heft didn’t seem to hurt their ability to travel at all.
“Oooh, that’s a good result for the small ones.” Lily yawned and stretched as the rocks below created large-scale chaos in the ranks of the dungeon monsters. “I thought it would do less.”
“The small ones?” Arthur looked down at the crushed front-line of the enemy army. “There’s a big one?”
“Of course there’s a big one. You’ve seen it, Arthur. The small ones were mainly to create a harder surface so the next rocks could bounce better. We didn’t want all the force to be wasted on something that doesn’t need it.”
As Lily finished up her speech, Arthur turned to see Puka struggling with a much larger rope, heaving his body back hard to finally detach it from the hook. Again, the weird perspective kept him from really appreciating what was happening until it happened. If the preivous net contained a landslide, this one might as well have contained a mountain.
The rock really did bounce off the previous round of rubble, going much further and faster than the rocks from the first net had. It was a demon-made natural disaster. When the dust cleared, the approach to the town was clean of living monsters. As far as the rocks had reached, nothing lived.
And then, with a shout, emerged the warriors, charging across the rubble like it was flat ground and smashing into the front line of the monsters. As many dungeon beasts as might have been in the surrounding area, only so many of them could get between the cliff edges at once. When faced with the organization of Coldbrook’s fighters, hunters, and combat support classes, they were stopped cold.
“That’s terrifying. How do they stand up to that?” Arthur said as tried to imagine himself fighting the monsters.
“They’ve practiced for it as long as they’ve had their classes. It’s nothing they haven’t seen before.” Puka leaned on the wall and watched as the monsters slammed against the warriors, getting slaughtered for their troubles. “It’s just more monsters than what they usually encounter in the dungeons. They can handle more. For a while, at least.”
“And then they run?”
“And then they run. Don’t worry. Onna’s with them and she’s cautious. The other warriors had to talk her into this in the first place. She’ll pull them back when it’s time.”
And she did. When a visibly bigger and heavier beast came forward and she saw that it managed to push back the demon line, Onna called for retreat. In seconds, they were all running away at full tilt back towards the gate.
“Won’t the monsters follow them in?” Arthur glanced at the gaping hole in the cliffside. “They can use tunnels, right?”
“Not this one.” Milo shook his head. “This one is booby-trapped with a big cube of iron. It took us forever to figure out how to keep it in the air over the tunnel. As soon as the warriors get through, they’ll knock out the supports and it’ll block the way behind them.”
“And the monsters can’t get through that?” Arthur asked.
“It would be easier for them to get through the rock. And you’ve noticed they aren’t trying that.”
The fleeing demons were easily outpacing the monster forces and, at first, it looked like they were going to get back to the town pretty clean. That plan was ruined when a warrior Arthur couldn’t identify due to the distance suddenly fell down, then rose to a crouch without actually getting back to his feet.
“Oh, gods, that’s bad,” Puka said. “They broke something. The others are going back.”
“Do they have time for that? And to get back safely?”
“Let’s hope.”
The three of them watched as the group reached their fallen member and started to work to free them while the monsters crept closer and closer to their position. Finally, the group started moving again, dragging their injured member with them. It was too late. The monsters were surrounding them on three sides, and closing in on the fourth. Only the flashing steel they held in their hands was keeping them back.
“Milo? Puka? Please tell me there’s another surprise that’ll fix everything,” Arthur said as he gripped the wall’s palisades.
Milo shook his head. “From this far? No. And everyone we have that can actually fight is out there. They’re going to have to fight their way through.”
“How? There are thousands of those things. They’re pinned down.”
“I don’t know, Arthur. Just… pray. For something.”
Before Arthur actually tried to pray to this world’s gods, a roar unlike those of the beasts suddenly went up, and he looked down just in time to see several of the monsters hurtle through the air in the wake of a huge, brown, and furry arm.
“Oh, I was wondering where Rumble got to,” Lily said. “I guess they were right that he was going through some kind of change. He’s bigger.”
“Bigger? He’s huge.” Arthur watched as the Prata snarled and crashed through monster after monster, shredding through the mob like a sharp wrecking ball. “He must be four times as big as Daisy.”
“That’s how they are.” Spiky had just run over from his position on the wall. “Males are bigger than females in their species. Just not usually that much bigger. It must have been the monster meat. They don’t usually get any.”
The chaos Rumble caused in the monster ranks gave the warriors more than enough cover to get moving again. The monsters suddenly had a much bigger problem to deal with, and ignored the warriors completely until they were through the tunnel and Arthur heard the crashing of the iron tunnel-blocking apparatus slamming down. Rumble continued fighting, clearing out dozens upon dozens of beasts before a few well-placed shots from the monsters left him scraped, cut, and bleeding.
“Run, Rumble, run.” Lily watched as Rumble charged at a thinner part of the monster wave, breaking his own way out with his bulk as he ambled towards freedom and safety. “Do you think he knew we needed help, Spiky?”
“Maybe. Or else he just got tired of monsters in his territory. Pratas aren’t usually friendly animals.”
“He’s nice to us but...” Arthur waved his arm at the general wreckage the Prata had left in his wake. “I’m not sure anything that can do that is nice.”
“What about Karbo?” Lily asked.
“Touché.”
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Chapter 174 is also available on snowingpine.com for those able to log in. You can read it here.
Comments
Darren Stalder
Yay! Rumble made a showing and just at the right time.
Abdulaziz ALRumaih
Thanks for the chapter
