Soul Bound

1          Soul Bound

1.2        Taking Control

1.2.4      An Artful Carnivale

1.2.4.34   The most, effective strategy

A few steps along the passage under the canal, they encountered a opaque wall, woven of gently pulsing shadows. They crossed it slowly, leaving barely a ripple in the magic barrier, but it was only when her own divine blessing lit up stone walls curving ahead of them that Kafana realised its make-Kafana-a-target glow had been suppressed inside the building consecrated to Rac, and that the barrier had marked the consecration's boundary. How unobservant was she? Too airheaded to be the person deciding how to deal with an immanent threat of terrorism, that was sure.

Kafana: {I don't have the experience to be a military general. Wouldn't it be better to leave that all to you and Wellington?}

Tomsk heard the hope in her voice, and grinned as he shook his head.

Tomsk: {It is true the military are big on planning, especially at the campaign level, where you need fall-back positions in case enemy action messes up your logistics or your timetable. But it isn't just for generals. If you like, in the time before you have to log out I could teach you some basics - at least enough to avoid putting your foot in your mouth when talking with anyone you're asking to do the bulk of the work for you.}

Kafana: {I can't delegate everything?}

Tomsk: {Good leaders spot when their subordinates are having a hard time with a particular task and need additional support. It is hard to track how much more work will be needed to complete a task, when you don't know what that would involve. The detail needed depends on the... no, you don't have the words yet. Let’s start by talking VMOST.}

Kafana: {The Most?}

Tomsk: {V.M.O.S.T. Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics.}

Tomsk: {Always have a victory condition you can visualise well enough to recognise when it happens. Don’t just make it clear, have something concrete in mind such as “I stand over the body of the enemy leader waving the flag of my country, surrounded by my still mostly living forces who are celebrating taking the enemy’s capital city.” Only don’t choose one like that. A turning point isn’t the same as a new status quo. You need to visualise right to the end, where your troops have all returned safely home leaving a stable friendly government in firm control. The vision is the time for audacious, long term, big picture thinking. It must inspire.}

Tomsk: {The mission defines the role of your organisation. Who you are, what you stand for, what you will and won’t do, what part you’ll play in the campaign to achieve the vision. This is where you look at strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities, then decide which path towards the vision would leverage your resources the best and how many of your resources you’re willing to expend or risk.}

Tomsk: {Objectives are specific realistic milestones on the mission path. They’re how you measure your progress, and if you’re not hitting them you need to change strategy.}

Tomsk: {Tactics are the implementation. The specifics of who maneuvers where, with what resources, to perform which actions. The commander on the field of battle has a toolbox of tactics, which they’ve hopefully trained their troops in, that they can change between on the fly in response to changing circumstances and enemy actions.}

Kafana: {Hey! You skipped strategy.}

Tomsk: {Good, you were paying attention. Strategy is the stuff you do or decide when you’re not being shot at; everything that happens before you arrive on the battlefield. The enemy may be able to use the same tactics you can use, but your strategy should be making use of any comparative advantages you have and hopefully not need changing on the fly. You can split strategy into multiple layers, from grand strategy on downwards, each with its own increasingly small scale and more detailed objectives, but fundamentally strategy means planning.}

Kafana: {Is this stuff you’ve been picking up from Lelio? It sounds like the sort of briefing he gives tenente Babchenko.}

Tomsk: {Partially from him, partially from the brass hats who were Colonel Kozlov’s drinking buddies. He’d trained a lot of them, and they respected him. As his flunky I got to hang around serving vodka and putting more water in the sauna.}

The passage opened up into a cubic room with another passage continuing on the far side. Looking at her map overlay, she realised they were precisely under the center of the canal. There were six caryatids standing against the side wall, three on either side. Each pair had her hands arched up to touch one of three dark disks the size of heavy millstones. They looked to be firmly attached to the ceiling but, despite that, she felt nervous at the prospect of walking under them.

Tomsk: {Time for a practical example, it seems. What’s your vision of victory here?}

Kafana: {For both of us to be standing in the passage on the far side, intact and glad we didn’t alert the assassins.}

Tomsk: {Too small and short term.}

Kafana: {We survive, the crew of the Valorosa get their revenge and the Lily stop assassinating captains who refuse buy-out offers.}

Tomsk: {Better. OK, what’s the mission?}

Kafana: {We’re scouts. Our mission is to safely return with confirmation of where the assassins’ base is. We’re the good guys - we take reasonable care to ensure that innocents aren’t killed by our actions. And we don’t want to give away more information about our identities and capabilities than necessary. Our comparative advantages are surprise, an idea of who and where the enemy roughly are, and our skills. Our comparative weaknesses are that this route is ground they’ve had time to prepare and we don’t know their capabilities. Also, we’re terrible at scouting, apparently.}

Tomsk: {Strategy time! Before we step into the room, do some planning; pick a path that takes advantage of the strengths and guards against the weaknesses, then specify objectives along that path.}

Kafana: {Easy. Objective 1: get past the statues. Objective 2: remain undiscovered. Objective 3: get the information. Objective 4: return home safely, still undiscovered.}

Tomsk grinned: {Now for the fun part. We enter the room, and improvise our tactics on the fly. Or do you want to make some preparations first?}

Kafana: {If the statues are non magical, we can just walk past them. So you use your sword to drain them of magic, and I’ll be your backup. If they attack us, we run away and re-think.}

They entered the room, Tomsk first, and he placed the bared tip of Nothung against the chest of the nearest statue. Nothing happened.

Tomsk: {I’m not sensing any mana flowing into the sword. What now?}

Kafana: {We walk through. Quietly.}

They were in the centre of the room, walking between the middle pair, when the two statues spoke in unison.

Statues: “What is the cause? Speak, then pass on. Or speak not, and pass on still.”

Tomsk: {Sounds like they want a specific passphrase. Stick with trying to creep past quietly, or switch tactics?}

Kafana narrowly avoided swearing out aloud and switched on her Truesight. There was magic on the statues, but only on the lips, ears, arms and eyes.

Kafana: {Drain the mana from the heads, while I try to stall them. Be ready to dodge.}

She tried scratching her head, and acting forgetful, while Tomsk touched the head of the left-hand statue.

*BOOM BOOM*

The pairs in front and behind them dropped their millstones to block both passageways. Tomsk hastily drew his sword back. The two statues holding the one remaining millstone above the Womble’s heads repeated their challenge, though the voices were a lot more insistent. It sounded like an ultimatum.

Statues: “What is the cause?”

Kafana: “To kill”, then quickly added, “ in Bel’s name.”

The statue Tomsk had touched the head of replied, with satisfaction in its voice: “WRONG!”

They dived to the side just in time as the statues rotated the disk above them, revealing it to be just the base of a cylindrical plug that shot downwards, propelled by high pressure water far faster than gravity could have made it drop. It slammed into the floor, shattering Tomsk’s lantern.

[You have taken 200 sonic damage. You have 9,800/10,000 hp remaining.]

System: [You have been hit with a debuff: "Deafened".]

System: [You have successfully resisted mental debuff: "Disoriented".]

She willed the water to form bubbles about herself and Tomsk, but to harden around the statues, then turned to healing herself and Tomsk. Singing while deaf was a strange experience, but apparently intention mattered more than artistic effect, and she didn’t strictly need to sing to heal - she had done it through will alone by using her pendant, the way Isabella had originally shown her. Tomsk hadn’t resisted the disorientation and, despite the temptation to enjoy listening to his incoherent happy burbling, she healed him of that too.

[Skill “Cure status effect” acquired.]

Tomsk: “Well, no need to keep quiet now. I think it is safe to say the assassins have been alerted and are on their way to investigate.”

He took his sword and carefully froze the water around each statue to immobilise it.

Kafana: “Abort the mission? We’ve already blown our first two objectives. I’d have to say my strategy sucked.”

Tomsk: “That trap was a lethal one. I imagine it fooled quite a few high strength characters, who saw the size of the first two stones and assumed they could survive having the third one dropped onto them. I doubt it is the only one. Certainly if I were the designer I’d have planned a defence in depth. But before you abort the mission, have you considered just changing to a different strategy? Maybe one that actually plays to our strengths?”

Kafana: “Can I ask your advice?”

Tomsk: “Not only can you ask, you ought to ask. Indeed, if I weren’t training you, it would have been my duty to speak up if I saw flaws you’d missed. There’s nothing so foolish as a green lieutenant who doesn’t delegate or listen to his highly experienced sergeant.”

Kafana: “Capitano Tomsk, what are your thoughts on alternative strategies here, that make good use of our abilities and don’t involve risking any more death traps?”

Tomsk pointed upwards, where dim light could be seen through the hole above.

Tomsk: “Don’t go through. Go around. Let’s sit on the bottom of the canal while they investigate the trap. Maybe you can figure out a way to listen into their conversation or track them. Maybe you can trace the tunnel from above. Maybe we could infiltrate the Night Market while underwater, and find out where the Segreta is from an information broker. Do the unexpected, not what they predict we’ll do.”

Hmm, tracking someone. She’d have to set up a gestalt. Either have something of theirs, or touch them in some way. Or possibly…

She took some butter from her stash, added a few herbs to make the mix unique, then spread a thin layer across the flagstone anyone coming from the entrance ahead would most likely tread upon. Tomsk looked intrigued, but asked no questions; instead he kept a sharp eye upon their surroundings.

They floated gently upwards in her bubble and settled into the rather squidgy mud, watching the shadows of boats passing above them. She experimented with setting up listening and tracking to the butter, using a piece of it she’d kept as a focus, and added an information feed from the spell to Tomsk so he could hear too. They then settled in to wait.

Kafana: {Ok, so that’s VMOST. But I still don’t know what your proposed solutions are to the problem of more and more competent desperate people and more and more ways they could destroy the world.}