At face value, it was a terrifying prospect. Everyone else on the team thought as much when Henry debriefed them, reactions ranging from gallows resignation to disbelief at what seemed like utter bullshit. After all, who in their right mind wouldn’t sweat going up against something a whole tier past an Apache?
When he really considered the circumstances, though, it felt pretty unlikely that the Nobians could’ve gotten it subjugated that fast. See, every operation they’d run before had taken weeks to set up, if not months. And even granting they’d somehow managed it, the odds of actually running into the dragon up there were slim. Anything significant sitting that close to the anomaly – especially a giant-ass legendary dragon – would’ve been ID’d by Armstrong by now.
But Henry went no further than that; he didn’t wanna jinx himself.
Either way, there wasn’t much left to chew on until they got eyes on the place, so he let it go and got his team ready. They finished up within twenty minutes, which left nothing to do but post up downstairs and wait on the dwarf.
Jurgon showed up ten minutes after that – or so Henry took the man to be, given his punctual arrival and the light, snow-covered gear he wore.
At first glance, the guy looked a little lean for a dwarf, nowhere near the walking kegs Henry had gotten used to around Kharvûk. Though, if anything, that only sold the scout idea harder. The mithril gear further reinforced that, consisting of a mail hauberk worn close instead of heavy plate, built for, well, scouting.
The getup alone would’ve told Henry everything he needed, but the white cloak was a surprising cherry on top. Its color matched the snow outside to the shade, similar in concept to MultiCam Alpine. Of course, it wasn’t as good as the real deal, but the fact the thing existed at all caught him off guard. He’d kinda assumed dwarven scouts would be like the rest of them – big, armored, carrying a hammer on the back, about as sneaky as a dropped toolbox.
Dumb assumption, in hindsight, and a real Hollywood one at that.
The dwarf spotted them immediately and walked over, which came as no surprise. Such was their experience as outsiders: unless they deliberately tried blending in, they always stuck out like sore thumbs wherever they went.
“Ye must be Alpha Team,” he said.
“That’s us.” Henry stood and put a hand out. “Captain Donnager. Good to have you with us.”
The dwarf took it with a firm grip. “Jurgon Tor. Hedrin speaks well o’ ye, an’ the Guild’s not free wi’ praise. I’ll earn my place.”
“Appreciate it.” Henry introduced the rest of the team, Jurgon nodding to each of them in turn.
“Before we head out, I’d like to get you familiar with our equipment,” Henry said. “Better you see it now than have it catch you off guard once we’re moving. We’ll start with how we’re getting up there.” He tipped his head toward the door. “Come take a look at the vehicles.”
They headed out into the cold, over to where the MRAPs sat staged in the lane.
Henry kept it simple. A dwarf out of an industrial setup didn’t need the ground-up lecture an Eldralore elf would’ve, so he skipped the basics and got to the parts that’d actually be new to him.
He started with the vehicles themselves, familiarizing him with their layouts and capabilities. From there, he ran the dwarf through all the other stuff – where he’d ride, how to work the door, how to work the harnesses, where to keep his hands and where not to, how to use a radio, and so on. He even taught him, however briefly, how to use a gun, if it ever came down to that.
The scout took in the orientation without much fuss, comment, or question. It was quite the contrast to his interactions with Forgemaster Balnar, who’d bombarded them with curiosity after curiosity.
Henry deemed him ready enough before long, owing as much to how fast the dwarf adapted as to the fact that they didn’t have all day to dawdle. He sorted the grouping right then, having Jurgon ride with him, Ron, and Sera, while Kelmithus took the other MRAP alongside Hayes, Yen, and Doc. Personally, he would’ve liked to hang out with Kel, but balancing their magic firepower between the two vehicles was the more responsible approach.
Once they’d run a final check, they rolled out.
They drove for an hour straight, following Captain Sinclair’s route until they came upon a flat stretch several vehicles wide, sunk under vines and hemmed in on both sides by foliage dense enough to swallow a man whole. The growth had claimed the place outright, every surface drowned in a green so absolute it threw him straight back to the kudzu back home – the invasive crap that ate whole embankments along the interstate, the standing nightmare of every property owner who ever woke to find it climbing the porch.
This was the road, alright. Whatever doubt he’d held about the Baranthurian angle, the sight of it settled the matter for good.
They continued along the road, Doc and Kel surely talking each other’s ears off in the truck behind.
Another hour of driving turned up not one monster, which put real weight behind Sinclair’s supposition about the dragon. He wasn’t complaining, obviously – a clear road beat a contested one any day, at least where the breathing, hostile kind of obstacle was concerned.
Obstacles came in more than one flavor, though. Case in point being the massive pile of snow and broken rock Henry found himself staring at just half a klick later. An avalanche had buried the road outright, leaving a mound of debris tall enough to pass for a hill of its own – even in an environment this mountainous.
That left them with two options.
The first was to dismount and continue on foot, accepting a hike of indeterminate length before they made the site. The wilderness past here was unmapped, but if Sinclair’s hypothesis held, that posed little trouble. With their gear, a pair of elite mages, and a local guide, it’d be no different from any old mountain hike.
Of course, all that might not even matter considering they might have to walk regardless. If the Nobians were up the road, the engines would give them away well before they arrived.
The second was to have Kelmithus and Sera clear a path, but that solution no doubt came with its own complications.
Henry threw a look back at Sera and Jurgon, then spoke on the team frequency. “Okay, so we basically got two options. We either leave the trucks and hike, or we have the mages try to move the pile. Sera, Kel, what do you think?”
Sera answered first. “It can be done, Captain. Though I’d sooner avoid it if I may, for the magic is costly.”
Kel seconded the assessment. “Indeed so, to say nothing of the signature. Should Nobians be present, they would have notice of us at once. Even should that not come to pass, the labor by which we would profit in driving through bears great risk of discovery.”
Yeah, that’s pretty much how Henry leaned anyhow. “Understood. Let’s get ready for a hike, then. Any objections?”
A group of negatives streamed in, so they got to disembarking and concealing their rides. Once Sera and Kel finished disguising the MRAPs as heaped snow, they slipped off the road and into the frozen woods.
Henry let their local guide take point, for obvious reasons. Doc kept a drone ahead of Jurgon, looking for the site itself and any thermal lag.
For the most part, though, the hike was uneventful, more or less like climbing any mountain back home. The only exception was that it was so damn cold that his nips felt like they were about to poke through all four layers of his gear.
He almost wished he’d brought his envirosuit, though he’d left it behind given how unwieldy it would’ve been on a mission like this. That call paid off not long after, when Doc’s voice came through.
“Wait. Thermal lag, two hundred meters ahead.”
Henry walked over and looked at the raw feed on Doc’s tablet. Sure enough, a humanoid shape stood out against the cold of the background, washed-out blue but a person all the same. That confirmed Nobian presence, alright. The contrast was sharper than he’d have expected out of their cloaking magic, though – the person’s light blue shade distinct against the dark blue of the surrounding environment. Then again, magic wasn’t a free pass to pull bullshit out of thin air. With the weather this cold, it probably cost them a lot more mana to compensate for the stronger infrared contrast.
Finding Nobians this far out was a little disconcerting, but it lined up with what they’d figured going in. Nothing they could do about it now but adjust their approach.
Leveraging the drone and the Nobians’ relatively wide perimeter, they cleared each patrol by at least a hundred meters. Henry would’ve preferred a larger margin, obviously, but all that really mattered was getting through undetected. From there, they kept to the trees and followed Doc’s drone until it reached the edge of a ridge overlooking the source of the hot spot.
As predicted, the whole thing turned out to be a giant Baranthurian facility. The site sat on a shelf cut into the mountainside, sprawling out in low blocks of dark metal half-buried under snow. Most of it had the look of old industrial infrastructure – squat buildings, covered runs, service yards, not that far a cry from the first site they explored in the Grenden Forest. The centerpiece was a heavier structure near the middle, belching smoke. Henry pegged it for the main reactor, and a running one at that.
Across from it stood the Gatebuilder tower, jutting out of Vendrukt Peak like it had been planted there before the mountain range was even an idea. A road ran between the two sites, mostly buried but still visible where the wind had scoured the snow thin. Smaller structures clustered around the tower’s base, probably support buildings for whatever operations the researchers once had, all those thousands of years ago.
Following the drone’s guidance, they came up on the ridge proper. Henry put Hayes, Yen, and Jurgon on the perimeter, then had everyone else pull up binoculars and study the site from a distance.
Doc passed the tablet off to Yen and came back to observe the facility alongside them.
Henry kept his binos up for a minute before lowering them and turning to the others. “I counted three guys on our way here. Gonna guess they’ve got six to twelve guys on the perimeter, total.” He looked over at Kel. “How many people you think they need to run that facility down there?”
Kel considered it, eyes still on the site. “Four mages would be the fewest I should consider practicable. Yet I should be greatly surprised were they operating with numbers so sparse. The Order of the Shadow seldom dispatches such expeditions in so miserly a fashion. Thirty combat and support personnel would be more typical, together with no fewer than ten dedicated mages.”
Henry noted that. “Alright. Keep looking, everyone. Anything that looks significant, call it out.”
He then pulled a camera out of his Holding Bag and started snapping pictures for the intel dump.
He’d just gotten around to documenting the Gatebuilder tower when Ron spoke up. “Yo, think I got something. Just behind the reactor, low-key blocked by the trees, though.” He nodded toward a large object moving past the foliage.
Henry tracked it. A dark, stormcloud-colored mass shifted somewhere behind the trees and the industrial clutter, too broken up to make out cleanly. Yet even through all the obscurity, something about it put a knot in his stomach. He found out why when it stepped into the sunlight, full in view of their binoculars.
Standing at a minimum of five stories tall and covered in charcoal scales, it couldn’t have been anything but the Elemental Dragon – the Tier Ten calamity at the heart of the Campaign.
“Shit,” Ron breathed, already ducking behind the ridge with everyone else.
Henry pressed himself flat against the snow, keeping his head down. Forcing his way past the roaring jackhammer in his chest, he managed to blurt out, “We’re getting the fuck outta here.”
Nobody needed telling twice. They noped the fuck off that ridge and back into the trees, quick as their legs would carry them. Henry had just started to let himself believe they’d pulled it off when Yen’s hand came up.
“We’re boxed in,” Yen reported with a flat tone, as if this were just another day at the office instead of a straight-up death sentence. “Count three more dragons, possible juveniles.”
He turned the tablet around so they could all witness it for themselves, just in case it was too ridiculous to believe.
Ridiculous or not, the visual was pretty damn hard to argue with.
The smaller signatures were sized somewhere in the SUV-to-rhino range, maybe, though still short of elephant-sized. Normally, that would’ve sounded like juvenile territory, but the goliath of an adult threw the whole scale to shit. Compared to that thing, these looked less like juveniles and more like fresh hatches, which was a real fun distinction when even dragon babies were probably high Tier Eight, if not Tier Nine outright.
It was all so fucked that even Hayes freaked out a bit.
“Fuckin’ A. How the hell’re we gettin’ outta this one?”
Henry was right there with him. If not for all the insanity he’d already lived through, he probably would’ve pissed himself on the spot. And that’d be a pretty valid reaction, too. Like, even just one legendary dragon was already a lot to process. Four was complete bullshit, and just about the worst luck they could’ve walked into.
Henry went straight for his emergency transponder and pinged it. “We’re gonna have to fight our way out. Kel, get us some cover.”
Kel nodded and drove his staff into the ground, willing several stone barricades into existence that reached up to their chests. The team tucked in behind them, ready to engage whatever came through the brush.
But watching the drone feed, they saw the hatchlings waltz forward instead, ambling out of the brush with no aggression to them at all.
“Hold fire,” Henry said on instinct.
The Nobians revealed themselves, deactivating their cloaks in unison. Dozens of them stood in a circle around the team, each one armored under a heavy winter coat.
Henry didn’t get long to sit with that dramatic entrance. A shadow swept over the snow, dragging behind it the slow, heavy beat of wings. He dared to look back, only to find the Elemental Dragon staring down at him, Carvus seated high on its back.