Henry keyed the radio. “Doc, how’s it looking on the drone?”
“All clear,” Doc said. “No activity within five klicks. Should be good to carry on.”
“Copy. I need you to help me rig rappels – we’re heading down to sweep the wreckage. Hayes, you’ve got overwatch.”
Doc and Hayes both acknowledged.
Henry switched off comms. “Sera, you’re with me. Owens, keep an eye on things up here.”
Ron nodded. “Roger that, boss.”
Henry grabbed his pack and rifle and headed for the edge of the ridge. Doc had already beaten him there, sizing up the rock face below. About forty feet of slope awaited them, angled almost vertically and rough enough for decent footholds.
They surveyed the nearby terrain and found a solid anchor a few meters back from the lip, a big old evergreen with a trunk wide enough that Henry couldn’t get his arms around it. The thing had probably survived a few centuries of mountain weather before they showed up, and it sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere now.
They rigged two lines off it. He’d done this enough times that the knots practically tied themselves, from SERE training to that cliff outside GB-2 a few months ago.
Maren joined him just as he finished tightening the second line. She always seemed to arrive at the exact moment someone needed her – coincidence, probably. But if it was operational instinct, then it was exactly the kind he’d take on his team any day.
Her eyes went to the ropes, then to the cliff. “You mean to descend?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’re heading down to make sure we got everyone, and I want a look at what they were hauling before we move on. I’ll need your people holding the road while we’re down there – Lucan on the north side, Corrin on the south. We should be clear for a few miles, but better to play it safe, right?”
Maren inclined her head. “Consider it done.”
She left to gather her team, and Henry went over the edge.
He fed the descender and walked himself down the rock face, gravity doing most of the work.
Doc followed on the second line. He moved down the cliff recklessly, more like a treasure hunter or tomb raider than any archaeologist Henry had ever seen.
Sera’s descent, naturally, was even crazier. She grabbed her rope and straight-up dropped off the edge, controlling her fall with a series of massive leaps. She covered the full forty feet in about three seconds before she landed at the bottom, like she’d done nothing more than walk down a flight of stairs.
Henry unclipped at the base and had about two seconds to appreciate the rigging job before Vaela pressed her palm flat against the cliff face.
The stone began to move, and what came out looked like something a contractor would've spent a week on – a full staircase, clean steps about a foot deep, evenly spaced, with a landing halfway down that Henry was pretty sure met OSHA standards. And all that was apparently effortless on her part.
Tancred had already started his descent before Henry even finished processing what he saw, Maren following right behind.
Henry glanced up at the ropes he and Doc had just spent five minutes rigging. All that knot-tying for nothing.
Doc caught the look and shrugged. “Well, at least we’re staying in shape, I suppose.”
Once they reached the basin floor, Maren went to relay the perimeter assignments to Lucan. Henry didn’t hear what she said, but whatever it was, it worked. Professional Asshole gave a short nod and headed up north without protest. Corrin, meanwhile, sauntered off to the south with his hammer over one shoulder, looking about as concerned as a man on his lunch break.
Maren came back over to Henry. “Can I be of further use?”
“Hmm, let’s see.” Henry thought about what they were looking at.
The main job was straightforward enough – start at the front of the convoy, work their way back, and check every sledge and every body along the way. A hundred goblins, twenty hobs, eighteen sledges. Those were the numbers the drone had given them, and he needed to make sure the math added up before they moved on.
The dradaks were a separate issue. The ones that had broken free during the fight were long gone – probably bolted the moment bullets started flying. But some of the harnessed ones might still be alive, and those could actually be worth something to the Guild down the line. Wrangling them fell pretty far outside anything Alpha Team had ever trained for, though, so he’d let the Chosen handle that part later.
And Lucan was still at the edge, too far to bother them.
That accounted for pretty much all the workplace hazards, except the one that a rifle and a pair of eyes couldn’t assess.
“Alchemical hazards,” he said. “At least two of those sledges detonated during the fight, and I’ve got no way to tell what else in that column might be volatile. Before we start cracking open cargo, I need somebody who can distinguish stable supplies from something that’s about to cook off in our faces. Would you mind handling that?”
Maren nodded. “We shall see to it.”
Tancred had been hovering behind Maren like a wannabe Lucan, waiting for his chance to peacock. He apparently decided this counted as his cue.
“You’d do well to value the privilege you’ve been given, Captain. Were it not for our arcane sight, half the threats in this place would slip clean past you. Fortunate, then, that the Chosen are here to manage what your – ah – implements fail to reach.”
Henry gave him a look. It didn’t quite hit when the strutting came from Tancred; at least Lucan could back up his bravado. Tancred, despite being able to beat Henry in a brawl, had none of that bite.
Besides, Tancred didn’t have the magical expertise; Vaela and Maren did. So seeing him act like he had all the glory was like watching the backup quarterback celebrate a Super Bowl he never played a snap in.
“Tancred,” Maren sighed. “That is quite enough.”
Tancred looked like he wanted to say something, but thought better of it.
She turned back to Henry. “My apologies, Captain. We shall begin at once.”
She gathered Vaela and Tancred, and the three of them headed toward the nearest cluster of wrecked sledges. Vaela already had her hands up before they reached the first one, a faint shimmer rippling outward across the wreckage.
Henry watched them work for a moment. Maren had Tancred positioned downwind and Vaela running point on the arcane sweep before Henry could’ve even finished briefing them on the task. The woman just operated.
It honestly didn’t make a lot of sense. Someone like Maren – and Vaela, for that matter – serving under a guy like Lucan. Henry had been turning that one over since the carriage argument on day one, and he still didn’t have a good answer for it.
Sera walked up beside him.
“’Tis a pity,” Sera said, “that Tier Nine parties are so rarely met with. Had Hot Silver enjoyed a leader of Lady Maren’s constitution, I doubt it would have come to ruin.”
Henry wasn’t sure what to say to that. Hot Silver had been her party before all of this, and anything he could think of felt like it’d come out wrong – like he’d be spinning her loss into his gain.
Sera didn’t leave him hanging for long. Something in her expression settled, quieter and a little fond.
She turned to him with a soft smile, purple eyes sparkling.
“Though, in honesty, its dissolution proved perhaps not entirely worthy of mourning. Had Hot Silver endured, I should never have found my way to Alpha Team.”
Henry thought about it for a second, then found the right words. “Wouldn’t be the same without you, Sera.”
It was a deliberate double entendre – one for the team, one for her specifically. And Sera’s subsequent blush suggested she’d caught both meanings.
Henry would’ve liked to linger on that one for a while, but there were still a hundred-odd bodies cooling in the basin and a convoy’s worth of cargo that wasn’t going to catalogue itself.
“Alright,” he said. “Doc, Sera – we’ll start at the front and work our way back. Check every sledge, make sure the numbers add up. After that, we regroup at the lead sledge and start going through the cargo.”
“Copy,” Doc said.
Sera held his gaze for just a moment longer than usual before she nodded. “As you will, Captain.”
The three of them split up and got right to it.
The head count took a lot longer than Henry had expected, and that was entirely their own fault. Between the .50 cal, the Striker rounds, Hayes’ TOW turning half a dozen riders into a smoking crater, and Lucan slicing through the middle of the convoy like he was playing Fruit Ninja, ‘counting bodies’ was generous.
Usually, this was why the Guild had people count right ears or fangs or whatever, depending on the monster. Overwhelming firepower wasn’t exactly conducive to that methodology.
Henry crouched next to what he was fairly sure had been two goblins, assessed the limb situation, and revised his estimate to three. Maybe. Hard to say when most of the torso had been redistributed across a ten-meter radius by the Striker.
It went like that for a while. Crouch, assess, estimate, move on. Some were easy; the ones Lucan had cut were at least in recognizable pieces, even if the pieces were spread out. Others, especially near the TOW crater and the sledges that had cooked off, were basically forensic guesswork. At one point Henry found himself counting boots instead of bodies, which probably said everything about the state of things.
Maren finished her alchemical sweep well ahead of them – no instabilities, nothing in the wreckage that was going to detonate – and rather than stand around, she sent Tancred off to join Corrin on the south perimeter and came back to help. Henry didn’t argue. That took care of another distraction, and her help cut their time down considerably.
They wrapped up a little after sunset. Henry’s best estimate put them at roughly a hundred goblins and twenty hobs, assuming each dead crystallon had a rider. The goblin count was inherently fuzzy – no way to get precise when a meaningful percentage of the casualties had been turned into confetti – but it was close enough to the drone’s pre-ambush numbers that he wasn’t worried about anyone having slipped away.
A handful of dradaks had survived as well, still harnessed to their wrecked sledges and too stressed or too stupid to have broken free during the fighting. Henry asked Maren to have the Chosen handle it.
With the head count squared away and the dradaks in Maren’s hands, they turned their attention to the cargo. Eighteen sledges’ worth of supplies meant a lot of crates to crack open, but most of them had already been thrown clear or broken apart during the ambush, which honestly saved them the trouble.
Most of it was food, and most of the food was garbage.
Rations for the Korth Varren garrison, feed for the mounts – they found crate after crate of dried meat, grain, and mildewing vegetables stored under conditions that made MREs look like a Michelin-star restaurant.
Henry cracked one container open and the smell hit him like a physical thing. Whatever the goblins’ idea of food preservation was, it didn’t involve anything resembling hygiene. He closed it and moved on.
The other crates were more of the same. Even if some of it was technically edible, nobody on his team was going anywhere near rations that had been packed by creatures whose idea of kitchen sanitation could double as a bioweapon.
The rest was more promising. One of the sledges carried mana crystals – mostly small, but a decent quantity.
A crate of potions turned up near the rear, though half the bottles had been knocked around during the ambush, so Henry wasn’t about to trust any of them at face value. Sera recommended taking the sealed ones back and letting the Guild’s alchemists verify potency before anyone drank mystery liquids out of goblin crates, which was an obvious call.
The real find was the forged equipment out of Velkrath: swords, axe heads, spear tips, a few pieces of armor plating – all mithril, and all terrible.
Henry picked up one of the swords and turned it in his hand. Even someone as amateur as him could tell that the edge was uneven, and that the balance was off. Hell, the fuller looked like it had been ground by someone who’d had the concept of a straight line described to them secondhand. Goblin craftsmanship at its finest.
But the metal was the point, not the shape. Pure mithril was pure mithril, and a dwarven smith could melt the whole lot down and produce something that wasn’t an embarrassment to the trade. Most of the pieces were dinged up from the ambush anyway, so reforging was really the only option.
They finished the full catalogue in the early evening, hauling the lightest and most valuable items back up the cliff – crystals, sealed potions, and as much of the mithril gear as they could carry per trip without breaking their knees on the steps. Everything else stayed where it was.
With all the gear up top and stored in the Holding Cart, they returned to the basin to conduct one final survey.
Doc eyed the crystallon carcasses scattered across the basin. There were two dozen of them, each one about the size of a sedan. “We doing anything with those?”
Henry glanced at the carcasses. The math didn’t add up; they had no tools, no time, and the MRAPs were already going to be loaded down with salvage. But with this weather, the carcasses would freeze solid overnight, and crystallon parts were valuable enough that the Guild would want to send a team out for them. Granted, outsourcing the job meant losing a cut – probably twenty percent or more, depending on how the Guild structured their salvage commissions – but that beat hauling two dozen frozen crystallons across six hours of ass-pounding mountain road.
“Not tonight,” he decided. “We’ll flag the location and let a recovery crew handle it. They’re not going anywhere.”
He keyed the radio. “All teams, we’re wrapping up. Owens, start prepping. We’re finally gonna have that feast.”
Ron whooped over the comms. “Bulgogi time, baby. Say less.”