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AA 1.65 - Counter Assault
🕑 Added 2025-08-11 14:02:34 +0000 UTCEnjoy the chapter! -Plum 65 – Counter Assault Andy moved through the darkness, another shadow among shadows. It wasn’t hard to keep track
Enjoy the chapter!
-Plum
65 – Counter Assault
Andy moved through the darkness, another shadow among shadows. It wasn’t hard to keep track of the attackers; they weren’t shy about using torches. The mesa was large, and moving around it, avoiding cacti, tumbled boulders from the mesa’s explosive eruption out of the earth, and other obstacles took him some time. Still, he was able to see that most of the Construction City people seemed to be clustered into four or five groups. Andy angled toward the nearest one.
All the while, as he moved through the desert, he heard noises from the road and the trail leading up the side of the plateau. People were screaming in pain and anger, things were crashing and thudding, and after just a few minutes, he felt his mana start to flow back to him as, simultaneously, a chorus of screams echoed through the night; his traps had both been sprung.
Andy didn’t envy the people making the frontal assault. He wondered what criteria they’d met for Brooks to choose them. Surely Oscar had told him about the traps; after all, hadn’t Andy been about to test his loyalty with them? It was obvious to Andy that the frontal assault was a feint, or at least a distraction, meant to draw defenders to the trail. Brooks was sacrificing those “soldiers” so his other teams, the bulk of his little army, would have a chance to reach the top. He hoped that Omar, the person ostensibly in charge of the settlement’s defense, would recognize it, too.
When he closed in on the first group, he stopped to gawp for several seconds. There were easily twenty people in dark clothing, and they were assembling something. Two others holding torches moved nearby, likely hoping to draw the eyes of any defenders away from the team working on the… Ladder?
Andy couldn’t believe it, but it looked like they’d constructed a series of twenty-foot ladders and, as they lifted one up the side of the mesa, they attached another to the bottom of it with pre-installed bolts and brackets. All Andy could think was that it clearly paid to have a giant construction warehouse as a base of operations. At first, he couldn’t believe a hundred-foot ladder would possibly hold up, but then they added their third length to it, and when Andy saw it shift up past the halfway point, he decided he needed to act.
He crouched there, paralyzed for choices, trying to decide who to attack or what to do first. Meanwhile, his mind was spinning, trying to wrap his brain around what he was watching. How could those two men lift the ladders? Then he thought about how much stronger he was than a few days ago and considered the possibility that some classes might provide further strength boosts. With magic, it was possible. One thing was certain, though: those two guys were doing the bulk of the heavy lifting, and as they raised the ladder, making room for the next segment, their whole operation was vulnerable.
Andy drifted through the shadows, moving along the base of the cliff toward the two men holding the ladder in place, trying to rehearse his movements ahead of time. He’d have to be fast; he was outnumbered twenty-two to one. As he approached, his eyes were drawn to vulnerable spots all over the closest ladder holder. Andy chose an easy one, the exposed ribs beneath his extended arm. The guy was a sitting duck, and Andy was nearly invisible. His spear was shrouded in shadow, the blade coated in smoke as dark as the night.
He lunged, his spear slipped between the guy’s ribs, and the corrosive smoke poured into the wound he inflicted. Andy immediately pulled back and sprinted for the darkened shadows of some nearby creosote bushes. His expeditious retreat was unnecessary; his victim howled, collapsing under the strain of his load. His partner shouted a warning as the heavy-duty, sixty-foot ladder collapsed, and the people who’d been readying the next section scattered, looking up to try to avoid being smashed.
Meanwhile, the man Andy stabbed continued to scream, and his partner yelled, “I think someone stabbed him!”
The ladder crew ran in all directions, cursing and ducking, and then the heavy wooden structure smashed into the ground, throwing up a great cloud of dust. Andy couldn’t resist the opportunity their panic offered him; several of the crew had scattered in his direction, and he picked one, stalking her through the dark, and seizing a perfect opening over the top of a bushy, thorny growth of green tumbleweed.
His spear struck home, lancing into her side as she twisted left and right, clearly trying to get her bearings in the darkness. Andy couldn’t imagine what it felt like to have the fiery smoke of his weapon’s enchantment infect a wound, but it had to be painful because her screams joined those of his first victim as he left her behind. He was trying to sow chaos, and so far, he was doing an excellent job of it.
The ladder team’s two torchbearers had run in different directions, leaving most of the attackers in the dark. Better yet, several of them had begun to panic, running through the desert. Andy was still hidden, and he thought he might be able to simply move on to the next group of attackers. He’d foiled their plan by taking out one of the ladder lifters, after all, but then a clear, commanding voice called out, “Everybody calm down! I need Jasmin over here! Lopez is dying!”
Andy looked toward the voice and saw a stocky man wearing a heavy denim coat and holding a long wooden staff. He was leaning over the first man that Andy had stabbed. Andy took him for the leader of the crew, and figured he had to take him out if he wanted to really break them. He began to glide through the shadows back toward the cliff face, his spear held ready.
After the man’s hollered command, several of the other attackers started working their way back, including the torchbearers, so Andy knew his window was narrow. Luckily, the bulk of the crew was gravitating toward the torches, but two were moving quickly and with purpose, as though they, too, were able to at least partially function in the dark. Andy knew it was too much to hope that he was the only one with magically improved vision, but he hoped his Veil of the Stalker would keep him hidden long enough to deliver a deadly blow to the staff-bearing leader.
The stress of the situation, knowing that other assault teams might, even as he crept forward, be mounting similar attacks on the mesa, made him move a little more recklessly than he might typically have done. There was a clear area near the fallen ladder lifter, with little for Andy to hide behind, so he decided to opt for speed over stealth in those last few yards.
He exploded past the stand of still-green tumbleweeds, and a woman screamed, “Look out!” The warning was general enough that Andy still hoped he’d reach his target before he could react, but then the leader’s staff flared with fiery light, and his bearded face split into a calculating grin.
“Gotcha!” he growled, and the fire enveloping his staff poured into the ground and streaked toward Andy like a living, fire-scaled serpent. Andy ignored it and poured everything he had into a wild charge. He felt the heat of the fire as it coiled around his shoe and then up around his jeans-covered ankle, but his eyes were focused on the face of his target.
The wizard’s expression went from smug and victorious to panicked as Andy kept coming, and then it was too late for him to flee; Andy’s smoke-shrouded spear blade slipped into the soft flesh of his neck, and the smoke poured into the wound, spreading into his flesh like black forks of lightning. He couldn’t scream, but he gagged and grasped at his neck as he fell, thrashing, to the ground.
The fire scorching Andy’s leg sputtered and went out, and Andy hastily patted out the flames that had taken hold in the fabric of his jeans with his gloved hand. He began to turn, planning his retreat, and then something heavy smashed into his helmet, knocking him sideways. Andy was quick and strong, and he moved with the momentum the blow gave him, darting along the side of the cliff as he spun, trying to get his spear between him and whoever had hit him. It wasn’t just one attacker, though.
Three people were pressing the attack, one with a framing hammer, one with a spear much like his own, and another trying to bring a crossbow to bear, though her arms were shaking and her companions kept getting in her way. Andy could see the torches approaching and, with them, about a dozen more attackers. Almost without thinking, he reached for the mana in the center of his being and channeled it into a spell he’d never tried in the heat of battle: Shadow Cloud.
Darkness erupted from him, an inky cloud of shadow that enveloped him and the area around him, even his three nearby attackers. Oddly, Andy could see the shadowy darkness, but he could still see through it. He saw the woman with the crossbow stumble back, tripping over her feet and sprawling onto the hard dirt. He saw the other two attackers turning their heads left and right, trying to figure out why it had suddenly gotten so much darker. Andy knew that he could kill them if he chose, but he also knew that his time was limited, and he’d accomplished what he needed; these people would not be building their giant ladder and scaling the cliff.
He turned and, enveloped in shadow, slipped away into the desert, activating Twilight Steps to leave the assault force in the dust. He angled in a wide loop, moving around and past them toward the next cluster of torches. Andy felt like he’d spent a lot of time thwarting that first assault, and he worried that he’d be too late. When he reached the flickering torches, though, he found five or six people huddled beneath a large sheet of plywood, and it didn’t look like they were doing…anything.
He crouched in the shadows of a palo verde, listening. The first voice that came to him was a woman’s, and she didn’t sound happy, “We can’t do anything without him. He was the one who was supposed to make the thing float!”
“Yeah, well, Brooks ain’t gonna be happy if we just leave and head back with our tails between our legs.”
Andy shifted his gaze, trying to see what they were talking about, and that’s when he noticed that the top of their plywood sheet was dotted with arrows. Eyes widening, he scanned the ground beyond the huddled attackers and saw what had happened: three bodies lay between them and the cliff face, each one sprouting at least one arrow.
“Let’s go see if we can join Chuck’s group. They’re making a ladder.”
Andy had heard enough. He focused on the man who’d been speaking, the one who’d been worried about what Brooks would think if they just left. As he crept through the darkness, he saw the perfect opening. The man had his right hand up, holding the edge of the heavy plywood sheet. His body was protected with metal plates sewn to a kind of canvas poncho, but his arm being up like that exposed his armpit. Without hesitation, Andy slipped through the darkness and then drove his smoke-shrouded spear into the opening.
The man grunted with the impact, then he screamed as Andy’s caustic smoke found its way into his blood. As he collapsed, writhing, he brought the plywood down with him, and Andy yelled, “Run, get away! Defenders are here!” Then, he sprinted away into the dark desert, leaving the rest of the attackers to scramble out from beneath the plywood. He did not doubt that the woman who’d been talking about leaving would be able to win the rest of them over.
So far, he felt like things were going better than he could hope. He angled his steps toward the mesa again, scanning the darkness for the next assault team, and had just caught a glimpse of a flickering torch when a thunderous crash echoed over the desert, startling him. He froze, crouching low, trying to figure out what had caused the noise. In the silence following the crash, he began to hear human sounds: groans, cries, whimpers, and curses. Suddenly, it clicked, and he realized what had happened: someone up top had pushed one of the cars onto a group of attackers.
Standing, Andy began to run again. It was going to be a long night, but so far, the settlement was holding its own.
Comments
Exaiter
Nice!
thomas johnson
I really get pulled into the story the pacing is amazing. I was on the fence when he got his second class…I thought he was going to be a Merry Sue but I like this evolution. He is a terror in the night and the screams of his enemies as they burn inside are his warning. Like a rattle snake. Very nicely done author.
