Dan crouched in the underbrush as a patrol marched by. Jennifer had been the first to spot them, a trio of humans and something that resembled a wolfman. He vaguely remembered from his initial studies that they were known as Lythals. Faster, stronger, and significantly more resilient than humans, their only real weakness was that most Lythal didn’t have the ability to use mana.
An Imperial soldier would almost certainly have their mana awakened, but given the Lythals’ inherent abilities, it wasn’t a given or necessity. Many of them could fight on par with a class-tattooed human soldier even without magic.
This was the first Lythal Dan had seen since the initial invasion. He wasn’t entirely sure what to think of that. It likely meant that they were getting closer to the enemy base, but at the same time it spoke to how serious the Tellask were taking their invasion. If the death bloom, Kerrn and war lizards weren’t enough, the rarity of Lythal in the Tellask army spoke to their plans. The initial invasion might have been one isolated unit seeking glory, but the amount of material displayed to date looked like an all-out invasion to Dan.
The creature stopped just downwind from him and sniffed the air. Dan frowned and tensed himself, prepared to knock it down with a Forcebolt so Jennifer could finish it off if necessary.
It wouldn’t be ideal. The goal was to scout out the enemy base without being caught. Hopefully the Tellask wouldn’t figure out that they were nearby before the rest of the coalition force was in position. Dan wasn’t terribly excited by the prospect of playing hide and seek in the jungle from a numerically superior magical army.
Jennifer put a hand on his shoulder, shaking her head silently. He pursed his lips and returned his focus to the Lythal. A second later, it made a chuffing sound and continued its patrol. Dan relaxed slightly. That had been close. It also meant they had to be more careful.
Straining his memory back to his pre-Twilight training, he recalled that Lythals came in two sub-breeds. One resembled wolfmen and one looked like bipedal panthers. The wolfmen were known for their sense of smell and brutality in combat, while the panthers were rumored to have incredible low-light vision and stealth.
Great. Dan wrinkled his brow. That meant being prepared for potential super senses and ambushes.
After the patrol had passed, Dan let out a pent up breath and turned to Jennifer. She was frowning slightly, staring in the direction where the Imperials had disappeared. He elbowed her to get her attention.
“This sure would be easier if we had a team of cannibalistic teddy bears to help us out,” he whispered, a slight smile on his face despite the circumstances.
“This is a stealth mission.” She rolled her eyes. “I don’t think throwing rocks at armored enemies for no reason counts as stealthy.”
“Hey,” he whispered back, “at the very least, they could help us find a back entrance. I’m still not sure why you would build one of those on an armored bunker. It kinda defeats the purpose of having all of those fortifications if you just purposefully build a weak spot into them.”
“I thought they did that to set a trap for the scrappy underdogs.” sShe cocked her head to the side before scowling. “Shit, I think we’re jinxing ourselves here. I don’t like the idea of tempting fate any further by discussing how easy it is to set traps for scrappy underdogs. It just doesn’t seem like good form at the moment.”
“I don’t know if we’re the scrappy side, given the size of the army coming in.” Dan chuckled back, shifting his weight so he could begin moving now that the patrol was gone.
“It’s the principle of the matter.” She held back a giggle, trying to keep her face stern. “It just isn’t good luck for us to talk about getting caught while we’re doing a stealth mission. If we were in a movie, this would be the exact moment when one of us would set off some sort of hidden alarm or trap.”
A stick cracked nearby. Both of them froze as the Lythal padded back toward them, sniffing the wind hesitantly. Dan glared at Jennifer accusingly as she quietly clapped a hand over her mouth.
The Lythal stealthily looked back and forth before jumping onto the side of a nearby tree. Its needle-like claws dug easily into the bark, tearing divots out of the wood as the creature scampered into the canopy. Dan glanced over at Jennifer with a quirked eyebrow. She shrugged.
Neither of them moved, and about a minute later, the Lythal jumped down from the tree, its mouth damp and matted. It held a fist-sized egg in its left hand. Once more, it furtively looked back and forth before quickly punching a hole in the top of the egg with its claws and drinking the yolk with gusto.
It discarded the empty shell and jogged off back in the direction it came. After waiting for a good ten seconds, Dan stood up and walked over to the egg shell. It didn’t come from any bird he knew. For one, it was too large to be anything but an ostrich or a condor, but more than that, he could sense a hint of wind mana coming from it. He picked the shell up and inspected it more closely.
“What the hell was that?” Jennifer asked from just behind him, looking over his shoulder at the mostly empty egg.
“The Imperial soldier was a Lythal.” Dan shrugged. “If I had to say, I think it smelled the bird’s nest and came back for it. I don’t know if that says something about the Imperials’ discipline or if this is something considered generally acceptable in their armed forces. I can say that it scared the absolute hell out of me.”
“I would apologize about that,” Jennifer answered, “but it was you who kept going and jinxed us. Nothing would have happened if you had just shut up about us getting caught. I stand by that.”
“Sure.” Dan rolled his eyes at her, dropping the egg shell and wiping the yolk from his fingers onto the fabric of his pants. “Enough dawdling. With the rate they’re sending patrols to this area, we’ll be caught by the next one if we don’t take advantage of this window to slip closer.”
“Fair enough,” Jennifer replied, walking through the jungle toward the Imperial landing site. “What’s the plan, anyway? Just try to spot what we can and describe it all for Abe via walkie talkie?”
“That’s part of it.” Dan followed, shouldering aside the branches to follow her down the narrow game path. “I would like to see if we can access one of the defense towers. The elf that kidnapped me on Twilight mentioned that massive spellshields like the one protecting the Tellask landing sight are usually calibrated to only stop major spells or siege weaponry while in standby mode. Apparently they just burn through mana at an unsustainable rate if they’re set to fry every bird and stray dog that happens by.
“We should be able to just waltz through without any problems.” Dan wove his way past a copse of giant trees as he finished speaking. “Theoretically, we could sabotage their defense network, or at a very minimum, get some idea as to how it works. Either way, it would save a whole lot of lives.”
“Sounds like a great way for us to get annihilated by a gout of lava or something when an elf catches us.” Jennifer didn’t even turn her head to speak to Dan as she continued pushing her way through the jungle. “Count me in.”
The next couple of hours were both harrowing and boring. Every time the pair moved, Dan felt like there were a million eyes on him from every corner of the jungle waiting to report his movements to the Tellask and spring some sort of horrible trap on him. Whenever Jennifer heard a patrol, or they just felt like one was due, they would quickly find some foliage to hide in. Finally, they ran into signs of logging: trees felled by the Tellask to thin out the forest, serving the twofold purpose of letting them spot oncoming attacks and providing them with construction material.
As they reached the edge of the forest, Dan whistled softly. The Tellask had been busy. The landing site was easily the size of a small city. Its fifteen-foot-high walls were made of a native rock that rose from the jungle soil with a seamless ease that spoke of magic rather than a quarry. Surrounding the wall, approximately fifty to sixty yards from it, stood eight towers. Four were in each of the cardinal directions, while the other, smaller, four were placed slightly further out, equidistant from the larger interior towers.
Each tower had a large crystal at its base with runescripting running up their metal walls. At the top, another crystal stood, open to air and practically glowing with mana. Dan sighed as he recognized the larger crystals. Mana forges. Whatever the towers did, they were powered by full-blown mana forges.
Even the Viceroy’s Pride, the void ship captured by the United States army during first contact, only had three mana forges. Whatever the towers could do, they had a borderline unlimited supply of mana at their disposal. Unless they could figure out some way to circumvent or disable the towers, Dan suspected that they would be able to make easy work of any heavy equipment that came into their range.
Even the crystals at the top of the towers worried him. They looked suspiciously like attunement stones, except for the part where they were almost the size of a child. The amount of mana they could convert and channel left little doubt in his mind that an attack on the landing site required the towers to be disabled first.
“We’re fucked, aren’t we?” Jennifer stared at the nearest tower. “To be clear, I mean the entire attacking army. I don’t know exactly what that thing can do, but I remember how much damage the imperial soldiers on those giant lizards of theirs managed to dish out. I’d bet anything that those towers can open a tank like a can opener.”
“Honestly?” Dan replied, eyeing the tower. “I don’t think these are coming down from a land attack unless we’re willing to lose thousands of soldiers, human wave style. Maybe if we can take one or two down from the air, the army can slip some troops through, but there’s no promise that the elves don’t have anti-air defenses. Hell, Abe already told us that we don’t have air superiority.”
“Fuck,” he cursed bleakly before turning back to Jennifer. “The only other option is sabotaging them. The military isn’t going to be able to send another team in time, so it’s up to us. It’s either that or radio in what we’ve observed and hope they call off the attack.”
Jennifer just snorted, rolling her eyes.
“They’re going to attack no matter what we say, aren’t they?” Dan asked rhetorically.
“Yep.” She scanned the landing site wall, looking for some sort of weakness. “Doesn’t look like there’s any back door or helpful fuzzy creatures to help us sneak in either.”
“We have to take at least a couple of the towers down,” Dan said bleakly. “At least enough that the army can approach the wall without getting ripped apart by whatever defenses those towers have. Once they’re inside the barrier, they’ll have a chance. We just need to get them there.”
“This seems like a tremendously stupid idea,” Jennifer grumbled as she stripped off her excess gear. “I still think that we let the army guys try this. Infiltration and destruction seems like their sort of thing. Fighting elves seems more like ours.”
“The only way the towers are coming down is with high explosives or by someone sabotaging their runescripting.” A mirthless smile flitted across Dan’s face. “They’d have to bring me anyway or lose hundreds of people running a satchel charge up to it. Plus, how do we know that those things don’t have an elf in them for us to fight? It still could be a combat mission for us, after all.”
Jennifer crossed her arms. “Oh, goody. Fighting an elf behind enemy lines without backup. You’re right, that sounds amaaazing.”
They hid for another hour or so at the edge of the forest, watching the Imperial patrols and memorizing their patterns. Finally, when they thought they had a good idea that the area would be clear of Imperials, Dan and Jennifer sprinted quietly across the clearing, hoping that no one was looking in their direction.
Dan spent most of the run cycling mana through his runes and cursing himself slightly for not developing a concealment affinity. Either darkness or light would have let him hide himself and Jennifer. Instead, all they could do was hope that their luck held and that no one looked in their direction as they scurried across the clearing.
As far as he could tell, their luck held. No shouts or magical alarms heralded their arrival, just the wind rustling through the jungle. Jennifer quickly took up watch as Dan inspected the runes running up and down the metal surface of the tower.
Most of them were designed to accumulate, manage, and channel mana from the forge as it flowed through the runescripting up toward the attunement stone. He traced his fingers over the humming gold engravings, lips moving soundlessly as he wracked his memory of the days he spent studying under Daeson.
A minute or two later, Dan had a pretty good idea as to how the scripting worked. Once again, he silently thanked the years he spent getting his electrical engineering degree. It might not help him actually read the runes, but the logic behind how the sigils connected to each other was remarkably similar to the logic gates he’d studied in his chip design classes.
The runes within reach of Dan would gather a small amount of mana about once a minute and pulse it up the tower where, presumably, it was used to power other enchantments. As far as he could tell, this periodic burst of mana had two purposes. Firstly, it powered the standby enchantments in order to ensure that the building’s defenses were ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.
The second reason for the trickle of mana was more troubling. The mana pathways that he’d examined could process an insane amount of energy. More than enough to level a building, let alone a tank. The pulse served as an error checker. If anything went wrong with the enchantments, they would fizzle and deactivate with only a modest amount of energy in them, rather than a massive cascade that would tear the tower in two.
Unfortunately, most acts of sabotage would simply disable the tower for an hour or so until a runecrafter could be dispatched to repair it, at which point they would almost certainly notice his tampering.
He frowned, pondering his dilemma for a moment. Dan would need to figure out the exact amplitude of the mana pulled from the forge in order to alter the runes without triggering any failsafes.
His hand ran over the warm metal of the tower once more, tingling as his fingertips brushed the runes. Dan leaned close, eyes fixed on the glimmering gold carvings. Silently, he counted seconds between the bursts of magic running through them, nodding to himself as he prepared his calculations.
Finally satisfied, Dan drew his sword, using its enchanted edge to begin delicately altering the runes, pausing just before each throb of mana. He wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if he let mana flow through an incomplete rune, but Dan suspected he didn’t want to have his face near the enchantment if he were to find out.
Five minutes later, he stared at the hastily-altered runescript, smiling at the yellow glow of the new runes in the System’s troubleshooting vision. It was strange to purposefully mis-inscribe a rune, but now this section of the tower would only be able to process slightly more mana than the station-keeping pulse. If the Tellask needed a large chunk more mana, such as for an advanced spell or to fire the tower, it would lead to catastrophic failure, the kind that would transform the entire structure into a mushroom cloud.
Dan turned to Jennifer and signalled to her that he was done, but instead of leaving, she held up her hand. Dan frowned at her and opened his mouth to ask a question, only for her to quickly bring her index finger to his lips, shushing him. He followed her gaze. Only about twenty paces away, coming around a corner of the tower, a Lythal sniffed the air expectantly.
In sudden realization, Dan glanced down at the smear of dried yolk on his thigh before he looked back up and made eye contact with Jennifer and shrugged apologetically.
