Henry never really expected it, but the bulgogi worked – or at least, something did.
Whether it was the food itself or just the gesture behind it, Lucan didn’t bother them for the rest of the evening, and by morning he still hadn’t said a word. Granted, there wasn’t much to bother them about – they’d accomplished their objective and had nothing left to discuss. But Henry wanted to believe the plate had done something, even if the evidence was circumstantial at best.
And if it turned out the food had nothing to do with it and Lucan was just tired, well – at least Henry had something better to look forward to.
So he got through breakfast relatively quickly. Ron had put together something with eggs and leftovers from last night. All of it had been cleaned within minutes.
With everyone ready for the day, they broke camp efficiently – tents down, gear stowed, Holding Cart loaded – and hit the road before the sun had fully risen.
Henry’s MRAP took point. The road wound down through a narrow pass, opened up into the valley approach, and about twenty minutes later, they had eyes on the main entrance to Korth Varren.
Well, what was left of it, anyway.
The JDAM had straight-up erased the gatehouse. There was really no other way to describe it – where there had been a fortified entry point, there was now a crater, and a good forty feet of curtain wall on either side had caved inward from the blast. Rubble covered the approach road in pieces ranging from gravel to chunks bigger than their MRAP, with scorch marks radiating outward across the stone in clean concentric arcs.
And that was just the front door. The rest of the compound looked like a volcano had gone off underneath it. Henry could count at least four separate collapse points deeper inside the walls – towers pancaked down through their own floors, sections of interior wall sheared clean off their foundations, entire courtyards buried under rubble that used to be the structures around them. The Strike Eagles had really done a number on the place.
Honestly, Henry had to hand it to the Air Force; this was US military spending at its best. Almost made him feel good about his tax dollars.
Yet as much as he wanted to just sit there and take in the sight, he still had a job to do. He keyed the radio. “Doc, get the drone up. Let’s do a full sweep, make sure nothing’s still moving down there.”
“Copy. Launching now.”
He stepped out and looked behind him as Lucan’s carriage rolled to a stop. Here came the big reveal.
Lucan opened the door, took one step out, and stopped dead. His eyes went straight to the crater where the gatehouse used to be, and his jaw dropped. And who could blame him? This was the sudden and total obsolescence of everything he thought he knew about siege warfare. Korth Varren’s walls were supposed to hold against months of siege engines and massed spellcraft, and here they’d lasted about as long as a bag of Doritos at a Super Bowl party.
Lucan caught himself pretty quickly, at least. He closed his mouth and refrained from commenting, which was probably the smartest call he’d made since they met.
Maren stepped out behind him and didn’t look much better. Tancred followed and, for once in his life, had absolutely nothing to say.
Henry let the silence do its job. The whole reason he’d brought them out here was so they could see it for themselves, and right now the rubble was doing a better job of making his point than he ever could. He gave it a few more seconds, then checked his tablet.
The feed confirmed about what he expected – no activity whatsoever.
Honestly, he would’ve been surprised if there had been anything. From what he understood about magical yield equivalency, each JDAM landed somewhere around the output of a strong Tier Eight offensive spell in terms of raw destructive force, and that was just the warhead itself. It didn’t account for the delivery method – a guided munition dropped from thirty thousand feet by an aircraft the target never saw or heard coming. Factor all of that together and the bombing run as a whole probably sat comfortably in Tier Nine territory.
Which also explained why Lucan’s Chosen had gotten over the shock faster than Henry had anticipated. He’d figured the destruction would take longer to process, maybe throw off their coordination for the first hour or so while they recalibrated what they thought was possible. But Tier Nine adventurers had apparently seen enough large-scale devastation in their own careers that the gap between ‘unprecedented’ and ‘very impressive’ closed pretty quickly once they had a frame of reference to put it in.
It was a little underwhelming on the psychological-impact front, but Henry wasn’t going to complain – it made them easier to work with, and that mattered more than a dramatic reaction.
He put the tablet away and walked toward Lucan’s group with Sera beside him.
“We just finished scouting the ruins,” Henry said. “No signs of life. The job looks done, but I’d rather confirm that on the ground than take it on faith. We’re also gonna want to search for intel. Most of it is probably buried, so I’d like your people handling the heavy lifting while my team works the sections that are still standing. We’ll put everything together at the end.”
Lucan looked at him like a serf who’d just handed him a shovel.
Yeah, asking a guy with a superiority complex to play construction worker probably could’ve been phrased better. But it was the obvious division of labor, and Henry figured even Lucan could see that – the Chosen could move collapsed walls, and Alpha Team couldn’t. Not much to argue with there.
Lucan apparently arrived at the same conclusion, because he didn’t push back nearly as hard as Henry had braced for. “Naturally the burden lands upon my shoulders. So be it; we shall see it done. Saints forbid anyone else contrive to manage the task.”
Henry could work with that. A backhanded comment was a lot better than a full standoff, and honestly, the fact that Lucan had conceded at all probably had more to do with last night’s bulgogi than either of them would ever say out loud. Aristocratic obligation was a hell of a thing – once he’d accepted someone’s hospitality, walking it back the very next morning was apparently a bridge too far, even for someone with Lucan’s personality.
Lucan turned to organize his team. Maren already had the others moving toward the nearest collapse point.
Once they were well out of earshot, Henry glanced at Sera.
“What do you think? Has he always been like this, or has he gotten worse since Hot Silver?”
Sera considered the question for a moment – actually considered it, rather than giving the reflexive answer. “Improved, strange as it sounds. In the realm of duty and social conduct, at least. When last I served beside him, he would sooner have thrown a tantrum than touch such a charge. That he yielded – glowering all the while, yet yielded nonetheless – suggests some faint schooling in lordly deportment. Or, if not that, then a talent for feigning it passably.”
She paused. “Though I will grant that his manner of performance leaves rather a great deal to be desired.”
Henry almost smiled at that. “Think we’ll have less trouble working with them going forward?”
Sera looked at him like he’d asked whether water might consider flowing uphill. Then something in her expression softened, and she answered properly. “Possibly. The makings are there, though buried beneath a rather heroic mound of pride. Whether they prove workable rests upon how often that pride is pressed to yield.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. “Your gesture last night was well judged, Henry. I’ve no mind to deny it.”
Coming from Sera, that was about as close to “you were right and I was wrong” as he was ever going to get. He’d take it.
“Then let’s not give them a reason to change their minds,” he said, and keyed his radio. “Owens, Hayes, Yen – you’ve got perimeter. Rotate standard watch, keep the drone cycling. Doc, Sera, you’re with me. We’ll start with whatever’s still standing and work our way in.”
A chorus of acknowledgments came back.
With everyone sorted, Henry turned his attention back to the drone feed. A squat two-story building along the eastern wall had caught his eye earlier – roof partially caved in but walls still standing, and an entrance on the ground floor that hadn’t been blocked by debris. If the goblins had been running any kind of administrative operation out of Korth Varren, a building that survived the bombing was as good a place to start as any.
He adjusted his rifle and headed for it.
The inside of the building was about what Henry would’ve expected from a goblin command post, assuming goblins even had a concept of command posts. It had a central room, a table in the middle, smaller side rooms, and shelves along the walls – half of which had collapsed, but the other half still had documents stacked on them. So at least there was something to work with.
He grabbed a sheet off the top of the nearest pile. It was the shittiest paper he’d ever seen, rough to the touch, but it held intel nonetheless. The markings on it were pictograms – little drawings of crates, arrows, stick figures.
It took him about two seconds to realize he was looking at a supply manifest, just rendered at a level of sophistication that would’ve gotten a generous C-minus in a second-grade art class. There were rows, at least, and crude dividing lines between what he assumed were categories, so somebody had made an effort to organize the information. Whether that effort was successful was honestly a matter of interpretation.
He held one up for Sera. “It’s made by goblins, alright.”
She came over and studied it for a moment, though her expression suggested she’d already known what they were going to find before they walked in. “Goblin pictography,” she murmured. “About the height of their intellect, truth be told. Their chieftains may scratch at finer scripts, but the common sort manage little beyond this. Crude marks for crude minds.”
Henry had been hoping for something a little more useful – correspondence, orders, anything with actual words on it – but hoping and expecting were two different things, and he’d been doing more of the former than the latter if he was being honest with himself. Goblins didn’t write because goblins couldn’t write, and a fortress full of goblins was going to produce exactly what a fortress full of goblins would produce: pictures on bark.
He worked through the rest of the stack with that understanding, and sure enough, it was all the same – pictographic supply tracking, crates moving in and out, troop figures here and there. He handed them off to Doc; maybe he’d be able to extract something usable from the doodles.
Henry had rifled through a whole stack before he’d found something genuinely interesting – numbers.
They showed up on maybe a third of the documents, mixed in with the pictograms – and they weren’t tally marks or dot clusters. They were actual numerals, all rendered in the continent’s standard notation. Henry pulled a few of the sheets with the heaviest numerical content and spread them out on the table so he could compare them side by side.
“Doc, come look at these. Think someone taught them?”
“Taught? No… not necessarily. If it’s had people around, or even documentation – books, letters, anything written – that’s plenty. Nobians would make sense, I suppose, but that’s just tidy. Goblin Kings are intelligent; could just as easily be an independent acquisition.”
Henry took a step back. It was pretty much where he’d landed as well. The numbers were worth noting, but without something that tied them directly to a Nobian source, they were just another ambiguous data point in an investigation that was starting to collect a lot of those.
He handed the numerical sheets to Doc along with the rest and kept searching.
And surprise, surprise – he found jack shit. Everything in the building was consistently in that goblin script, most of it tracking movement within the goblins’ own supply network. If the Nobians had ever communicated with this garrison in writing, there was no trace of it left – if ever there was in the first place.
Honestly, if the Nobians were running this the way any competent handler would, there was never going to be a paper trail here in the first place. Most likely, they used cutouts – intermediaries like hobgoblins. Or they simply kept all communications verbal, or destroyed any documents after receipt. Whatever the method, it reinforced the idea that the Nobians were professionals when it came to tradecraft. The fantasy version of it, anyway.
After sifting through mounds of bullshit, Henry figured they’d exhausted their options here. “Alright,” he said. “Let’s see what the other buildings have.”
They didn’t have much, either.
The barracks along the north wall was exactly what it looked like from the outside – bunks, personal gear, and a smell that reminded Henry of the goblin supply crates from yesterday, which was to say it fucking stank.
The stable on the west side wasn’t much better; it still reeked of animal musk and had stone feeding troughs built into the floor, which confirmed the garrison had kept mounts but offered nothing useful beyond that. Two storehouses near the southern wall had been mostly emptied out before the bombing, leaving behind some broken crates and grain that had gone bad long enough ago that Henry didn’t want to think about when it had originally been edible.
All told, they’d allocated a few hours of work across every accessible structure in the compound just for a thin intelligence yield. Their crowning discoveries amounted to a few stacks of pictographic logistics documents, a numerical notation system that might mean something, and a whole lot of nothing on the Nobian front. Anything worth finding – if it existed at all – was almost certainly under the rubble in the main castle compound, which meant it was in Lucan’s hands.
Henry keyed the radio. “Owens, how’s the perimeter?”
“All quiet, boss. Ain’t seen so much as a squirrel.”
“Good. We’re linking up with Lucan right now.”
He found Lucan’s team working the central collapse site. They’d covered a lot of ground – whole wall sections had been hauled aside, and Vaela had opened an access corridor through a debris mound that would’ve had a construction crew busy for a week back home. Maren saw them coming and broke away to meet them halfway.
She got right to it. They’d apparently uncovered two things of value in the rubble. The first was a cache of materials and components for rune systems – not completed arrays, but the raw supplies and fabrication tools needed to build them, along with documentation covering their operation and assembly. The documentation was extensive, detailed, and written entirely in ancient Baranthurian despite being from the modern age.
Henry let that sit for a second. Baranthurian was essentially this world’s Latin – a dead language that survived in scholarly and technical documentation the same way Latin survived in legal terminology and scientific nomenclature back home.
Disappointing, but honestly, what had he expected? A signed letter from the Nobian Ministry of Illegal Goblin Operations? Nobody with half a brain left breadcrumbs in their own handwriting.
The second find was a map.
Maren produced it carefully – a large sheet, better quality than anything else they’d recovered, showing a detailed rendering of the Ovinne Mountains. Several positions had been marked across the range, connected by paths that all converged on a single location deep in the interior.
Sera recognized it. “That is Vendrukt Peak – tallest among the Ovinne Mountains.”
Henry looked at the convergence point again, then at the multiple approach routes feeding into it, and the conclusion was pretty obvious. “Probably the lair of the Elemental Dragon, too. If it is, then this map just saved us a hell of a lot of scouting. But it begs the question: who found it before we did, and why were they planning routes to get there?”
“It can scarce be any but the Nobians,” Sera said. “And as for their purpose – subjugation, what else? Aye, they mean to bring the Elemental Dragon under their yoke. Already they have mastered a Tier Nine Goblin King; Tier Ten is not far beyond their reach.”
Lucan made a sound somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. “That they might subjugate an Elemental Dragon is an ambition I must admire, for it wants neither runes nor reason – only a most extraordinary ignorance. I say, the very thought is preposterous!”
Henry didn’t argue with him, partly because he didn’t have the magical expertise to debate the technical feasibility, and partly because arguing with Lucan about anything was generally a waste of calories.
But he didn’t agree either, and the reason was straightforward. Lucan was thinking about the dragon in absolute terms: how powerful it was, how ancient, how far beyond mortal capability. Henry, meanwhile, saw the Nobians in relative terms: what they’d already demonstrated they could do, and what that suggested about what they’d try next.
History was full of things that couldn’t be done until someone did them. And in Henry’s experience, the people who pulled it off were rarely the ones with the best odds – they were the ones who’d already done something almost as crazy and decided to keep going. The Nobians had already put a leash on a Tier Nine Goblin King. Calling them delusional or ignorant or whatever for attempting Tier Ten was the same mistake people made every time they assumed the last breakthrough was the ceiling.
But that wasn’t his problem to solve. The map, the documents, the rune materials – Armstrong’s think tank and the Guild’s analysts could chew on the strategic implications. Henry’s job was to deliver the intelligence.
“Well, we’ve got what we came for,” he said. “Let’s pack it up and get back home.”