Lauricium was the largest city in the southern Goldmarch, and therefore had the largest potential to boost our number of recruits. It was also, according to Arzak’s network of informants, struggling with a neereagle infestation—one that there were not enough fighters left to deal with. Neereagles weren’t that strong; it was only the sheer number of them that meant it was a fight that the citizens of Lauricium couldn’t win. But we could.

  I’d instructed Zoi and Turell to assemble our hundred most promising soldiers. If I took much more than that, then most of the soldiers who came with me wouldn’t see any action. I needed them to see some action, and to triumph against it, if this excursion was going to have the impact on morale that we were after.

  Val, who’d been planning ahead, dragged me into the command tent to roll out a map of the Goldmarch. Knowing that in all likelihood I hadn’t been to Lauricium before—honestly, I’d never much stepped foot outside of the Gentle Tundras before I’d met her—she had marked our journey to date on the map. At one point in our ride south to the Sundorn, we’d passed close to the city in question, and Val had marked an X on the map where I was to open the distant portal.

  ‘Remember it?’ she asked. This wasn’t just her questioning my memory; she knew that I needed to properly visualise a place before I could open a portal there. ‘There was that big statue, its top half crumbled. We wondered what it was, and Corminar convinced Lore for a few minutes that it might be him?’

  ‘I remember,’ I replied, smiling at the memory. It had been only a few weeks back, and yet those seemed like such simpler times. Picking off Players one by one really was much simpler than attacking a city ruled by a council of them, I supposed.

  ‘Good.’ Val stepped up on her toes and placed a kiss on my head. ‘Try not to die. You don’t have the artifact with you.’

  Like I could forget. ‘I promise not to die. It’s just a few neereagles; I think I’d struggle to get killed even if I wanted to.’ I kissed her back before she could imply anything to the contrary, and left through the tent flap.

  The hundred recruits were standing, waiting, in the centre of the camp. They were quiet for such a large number of people, standing in small groups and mostly muttering things to one another under their breaths.

  ‘Alright,’ I said, clapping my hands together. Only the closest soldiers paid any attention to me, having turned to see what I had to say. Those further away continued their own conversations. Not a good start. I was about to activate my portal relays to throw my voice around their number, when Corminar stepped forward.

  ‘Listen up!’ he shouted, at a volume I didn’t know he was capable of. All one hundred soldiers immediately turned to look at him. ‘Into formation!’ They hopped to it, forming five lines of twenty within seconds. When the soldiers had stopped moving, Corminar gestured to me, then stepped aside.

  I nodded my thanks to the elf. To the amassed soldiers, I shouted, ‘As you may have guessed, we have a mission. An important mission, and one that might add more recruits to our number. I won’t lie—it will be dangerous.’ It wouldn’t be, but we’d discussed this in the command tent. It was better to have the soldiers think that they’d triumphed over great power—even if I worried them up front—than to think this was only a minor victory. ‘But should we succeed, it puts us in a much better position for the battle at Auricia. In a few moments, I will open up a portal to a merchant road west of Lauricium. Once we’re all through, we will travel to the city, which should be no more than two hours away, if we keep up the pace. You will keep up the pace; the lives of those in Lauricium depend upon it. Be ready in two minutes.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ the soldiers roared as one.

  I nodded to them, then turned to Corminar. ‘Did you teach them that?’

  ‘Discipline is the foundation of military success,’ the elf replied. ‘However, I taught it primarily because I enjoy it when people call me sir.’

  I raised my eyebrows, but said nothing more on it—we all needed to find those little pieces of joy where we could. As I drank yet another mana potions to power the distant portal, Lore hurried over to me. ‘You coming with?’ I asked him between mouthfuls.

  He nodded.

  ‘Did Val ask you to keep an eye on me?’

  Lore nodded again.

  ‘She really doesn’t trust me to stay alive, does she? I managed it for over two decades at one point!’

  ‘You’ve died a few times since then, though, haven’t you?’ Lore pointed out.

  ‘Yeah, but never at the hands of a neereagle!’

  ‘Birds don’t have hands.’

  I put my head in my hands—something that a bird would be unable to do. ‘You know what I mean.’

  When the two minutes had passed, I opened the distant portal onto the road near Lauricium, and one hundred and two soldiers stepped through it.

  * * *

  It was dawn when we first laid our eyes upon Lauricium, though you’d barely know it. Even for a winter’s day, it was cloudy, grey, and dark—not the best possible setting for a battle intended to raise morale. The road was wide enough for us to march in rows of four, those able to withstand the most damage on the flanks, with the ranged attack specialist and support classes in the middle. I didn’t honestly think we’d get attacked on this road—though we’d had reports of monsters in these rocky lowlands—but it was good practice for the real battle that was still to come. It had the added bonus of making us look like an actual army, that is, an army that might actually win, and might be worth signing up to join.

  We passed few people on the road, mostly because when people saw a small army marching their way, they turned around and went in the opposite direction. Fair enough, really.

  The city of Lauricium was a strange one. It was surrounded by farmland that was all still used to this day, so when the population had grown, they’d responded by building upwards, not outwards. As a result, the buildings towered high, some of them a good six or seven stories tall. Often, the lower levels were clearly built some time before the higher levels, as evidenced by the changing architecture. Around here, older buildings used large stones and clay for the walls, whereas more recently, construction tended towards brickwork.

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  Lauricium wasn’t a ghost town, like I’d suspected. There were people here, poking their heads out of windows, but few of them in the streets. We marched down a wider, main street towards the centre of the city with nobody around to stop us. Even the Goldmarch soldiers who would normally have been stationed here were gone—summoned, presumably, to protect the ritual in Auricia.

  I kept my eyes peeled for signs of neereagles, but saw none. The few birds in the sky were simple crows, or at least had far too small talons for them to have been neereagles. I didn’t know much about the creatures in question—maybe they only appeared at night, so we’d missed them—but I was sure we’d come across them sooner or later.

  As we turned around a corner, an obviously fake birdcall rang out, and then doors and windows all slammed open at once. The citizens of Lauricium spilled out with swords, bows, hammers, chairs, a small stepladder, a rolling pin, three quill held between the bases of their fingers, and a cup—in order of most to least intimidating.

  When they realised who we were, they lowered their weapons some, but not entirely.

  ‘...Oh,’ said someone leaning out of a second storey window, armed with a bow. We were clearly not who they’d been expecting.

  It was time to make ourselves known, and start the recruitment drive once more.

  ‘We are the Slayer army,’ I shouted. ‘And we’re here to show you what real heroes look like.’ I looked to the nearest local—a man in a stained white apron, with a patch of flour on his forehead. ‘Tell us: where are the neereagles?’

  ‘The… neeragles?’ he replied, scratching the back of his head. ‘We dealt with them a couple of days ago.’

  ‘You… What?’

  ‘Yeah, the neereagles, they’re gone. Turns out we just needed a few good archers to shoot them out of the sky. Pow, pow, pow’—he mimed firing a bow—‘and they all drop to the floor. Dead, I mean.’

  ‘I…’ I didn’t know what to say, and resisted the urge to glance back at the soldiers. We needed a fight, here, today. We needed a win. There had to be some other way I could give them that. I mentally scrambled, going into an internal frenzy that it took a simple question from Lore to save me from.

  ‘Wait, so, if all the neereagles are dead, why did you all charges out of your houses with weapons?’ Lore glanced at the baker’s weapon—a rolling pin—and clarified, ‘Weapons or other objects.’

  ‘Well, the neereagles might be gone, sure. But the bogspawn isn’t.’

  My heart dropped. We’d been unintentionally manoeuvred into a situation that might not go in our favour. I’d only encountered one bogspawn before, and it had been because Val had summoned it. Even then, even in a situation largely under our control, the bogspawn had nearly killed me. And it had been powerful enough to kill Niamh, the Player leader of the Dawnwood invasion force. It certainly was a step up from a few neereagles, and was likely a battle that many wouldn’t come back from. Morale would drop further. More soldiers would leave. Had this seemingly insignificant turn of events just doomed the whole world?

  We had no choice. We were here to save the people of Lauricium, and saved the people of Lauricium we would. I’d just have to make sure nobody died in the process.

  ‘You’re a baker, right?’ I asked the same local as before. When I realised that was probably a stupid question, considering he was covered in flour, I added, ‘We’re gonna need all your food.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You want us to save you from the bogspawn? Then it’s probably best we don’t fight on an empty stomach.’

  Lore’s belly rumbled.