NOVEL NEXT Book 3 Chapter 13
"'Beware the Hall of Demons,'" I read aloud from the carving. "Okay, well, what the fuck is the Hall of Demons?"
"Beats me," Talia said.
"Summer?" Faith asked, turning to look at Summer.
We'd just started on Floor 5, and none of us were looking forward to another tedious collection of puzzles. If this had been the standard combat-gauntlet that dungeons typically were in adventure stories, then we could've breezed through this easily- I'd gone through the trouble of making more guns for everyone, and those just mowed down unarmored enemies like they were nothing. Sure, fighting wasn't really enjoyable- when Summer had to do her combat challenges at the end of each Floor, she clearly wasn't enjoying herself- but it at least ended quickly.
"Hell if I know," Summer said, shrugging. "Could be a boss rush, where I gotta fight each final combat challenge from each floor again in quick succession, but it could be something completely different. I don't know."
"Ugh," I muttered. "Whatever. Everyone, weapons hot, we're going in."
The carving itself was on the face of a stone door, and once I had my gun in my hands- and more guns in everyone else's hands (except for Emily, who was an oathbound pacifist and wasn't allowed to pick up a weapon)- I pushed open the door to behold...
...well, it probably wasn't the Hall of Demons. You'd expect something called a Hall to be an indoor space, and this door opened to an outdoor space. More specifically, a village in what looked to be the Sunset Kingdoms, whose population consisted mostly of goblins.
The villagers were in a panic, running this way and that, some of them ferrying lumber and rope, some of them carrying spears, some carrying pots or other miscellany. Most of them wore the shallow-cone straw hats indigenous to the Sunset Kingdoms, with some of them having such big ears that they stuck out past the edge of their hats.
"Who goes there?!" demanded one of the perhaps three goblins who looked like they actually knew how to fight. They were samurai, as far as I could tell, and each of them had polearms with long, curved blades at the end. "Identify yourselves!"
"Mage-Knight Joseph Ironheart and company," I said, keeping my gun pointed at the ground. "We mean you no harm, and in fact, are quite willing to help. What's going on here?"
"...Bandits," the samurai spat, eventually. "A bandit clan has set its sights on our village; they've been spotted perhaps a day's march away. If you can help, we would be in your debt."
I turned to regard the rest of the party. "If we've got time to prepare, then I've got an idea."
---
The village had some defensive walls, but it wasn't a complete encirclement, and the walls were made from thin logs lashed together- not exactly sturdy, all things considered.
The first order of business for Talia and I, as the only spellcasters with effective matter-affecting spells, was to give them some proper walls. Stone curtain walls were ideal for defending against attackers that didn't have artillery, since they were harder to climb over, but they'd also be way more expensive to build, so we had to go for thicker and shorter rammed earth walls instead. Easier to climb over, but you would still have to climb, so it was better than nothing.
Meanwhile, Faith and Summer handed out spare firearms to villagers to form a militia, and were training them on the basic use and operation of firearms. Admittedly, I hadn't given them the best guns- this design was more of an experiment in how to make the most easily-manufacturable firearm that was still halfway-practical, and I'd 'proven' the manufacturability to myself by batching out a dozen of them over a weekend. Still, guns were guns, and these ones were long enough that we could affix knives to the end to make them double as spears.
(I'd also issued them steel helmets, which I'd made as an unrelated experiment on sheet metal stamping. These weren't high-quality head-enclosing helmets, but they were, still, better than nothing.)
"And these pots..." one of the samurai asked, as we buried them in what Summer had termed 'the killbox'- the area in front of the only entrance to the walls, which had its own, smaller bubble of wall in front of it. It was the only way into the village if you weren't going to climb over walls, and it was going to absolutely suck. "Are you certain these will work?"
"No," I admitted. "It should work, but we don't have the perfect materials for this, and so, something might go wrong. If they do... well. We still have walls and weapons."
The samurai nodded, and covered his pot with the thinnest layer of dirt that would visually disguise it; we didn't want these buried deep, just buried out of sight.
A hawk cried up above, and I looked up to watch it descend in a spiral to land on my arm.
"Bad news," Volex said telepathically, wearing the guise of a hawk. "Those bandits aren't going to wait until morning; they know they were spotted, and they're going to attack tonight. I managed to get one of them on their own, and hypnotized him until he told me their plans."
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
I grunted. Fuck. "Alright, tell the militia to get some rest," I said, turning to address the samurai. "We believe the bandits will attempt to attack at night, and we need our fighters rested and ready. What little training they've got will have to suffice. I'll finish up here."
"I understand, my lord," the samurai said, nodding and heading off back through the gate- those wooden walls had been repurposed to make a gate, because these traps were, uh... Well, we didn't want an unobstructed line of sight between the killbox and the village itself, let's leave it at that.
---
"Here," Volex said, placing an ornate Sunset-style helmet on my head. It wasn't terribly protective, seeing as Volex made it out of ectoplasm in two minutes with the understanding that it only needed to be a prop, but I had my shield-ring powered up, so I didn't need armor. "Good luck out there, Boss."
"I'm gonna need it," I muttered, before climbing up a small wooden ladder to stand with my chest above the wall's lip. Below me and to the sides, a pair of arcane spotlights (I spent so much of my free time making random shit just because it was fun) came on, lighting me up without shining directly in my eyes and spoiling my night vision. "Mm. I see them."
Coming out of the woods, following a rough, winding dirt road through the middle of the shallow, gentle valley the village was built within, was a gaggle of bandits, who looked to be about fifty strong or so- at least, those were the ones I could see; there were, very likely, even more bandits still hiding in the woods, armed with ranged weapons in case they were needed to provide fire support.
"Lotta bandits for just one village," I muttered. About a hundred and fifty people called the village of Tomairu home, and as far as I could glean from the samurai and the elders, it wasn't a particularly important or rich or prosperous village, either. As a matter of fact, the fifty pounds of rice that I'd had to grind into fine powder for the defensive array out front had been a significant expense that had sparked some debate before I received the greenlight- that was enough rice to feed a human for two months, or a goblin for three. Still, they had assumed they'd have to pay us with something, and I got their assent for taking the rice by saying they could take it out of my pay.
"They're hungry too," one of the samurai murmured, looking through the periscope we'd set up. "That's why they waited until right after the harvest to attack."
I grunted wordlessly.
"I gotta learn how to think through all this sneaky stuff like you do," Faith said, her hunting rifle in her hands. "Wonder if they'll let me switch to the rogue track back at Mount Fate."
"Wouldn't be a bad decision," I said idly. "The classic rogue's skillset is one our party sorely lacks, honestly."
"They're almost at the gates, my lord," the samurai said.
I nodded wordlessly, and took another step up, casting a simple voice-amplification spell. "I wish to parley," I announced loudly, "and negotiate for the safety of this village. I will not have you turned away empty-handed, though- I am not without mercy."
The bandit at the head of the pack- a human man, who'd clearly just hiked through miles of muddy forest without a chance to clean himself up, and who certainly looked like the humans of the Sunset Kingdoms- began to laugh, with a volume that was almost certainly performative.
"Oh, look what we've got, boys!" the bandit chief called out, turning to regard his followers. "A naive little lordling from the East, who thinks he can talk his way out of this!"
"I have a lot of money I'm willing to give you, if it'll make you leave these people alone," I said. "In fact? Here. Take this, to whet your appetite." I reached into my pocket, pulling out what looked like a strange iron scepter to these primitive, pre-industrial peasants, and lobbed it over the wall to land in the killbox. "Come closer, all of you. I don't want to have to yell."
The bandit chief ambled easily into the killbox, picking up the iron scepter in his free hand- his right hand held a sword, and beside him, another bandit held a torch aloft in his offhand, a sword in his main hand as well.
"Well, you wanna throw money at us? Go ahead, little lordling," the bandit chief said, as the rest of the bandits followed him amiably into the killbox. "Throw all the money you've got at us. It's not gonna save you. We're not just here for food, you know. We're here for blood."
"Truly, there is no way you could accept a peaceful resolution?" I asked.
"Peace is a lie," the chief said, shaking his head. "You want us gone? You'll have to fight for it."
"As you wish," I said, before I triggered the remote fuse inside the pipe bomb he was so graciously holding.
During the planning session, everyone else got a chance to share Volex's theatrical concern that I had dynamite in my pockets, citing the same bullshit about how 'it's dangerous' and 'that's super illegal to own' and 'you shouldn't have that.' They were somewhat reassured by my explanation that I had a limited supply of it on my person, and that I didn't feel like using more than a stick or two on the ephemeral simulacra of The Abyss, and then all that comfort went right out the window as I detailed how I planned to make far more effective explosives out of stuff we didn't have to carry out here with us.
"And phase two," I said to myself as I dropped behind the wall, shrapnel bouncing off my arcane shield as I did so.
Outside, in the killbox, a dozen more remote fuses lit, and there was a deafening, drawn-out roar of a continuous, seconds-long explosion.
Dust explosions were, ultimately, pretty simple. Flammable material only burns at its exposed surface area. Dust has a huge amount of surface area for its volume, and burns very eagerly when sufficiently dispersed in the air. So a big bundle of flammable dust, such as rice flour, being dispersed and ignited by a smaller charge of more conventional explosives- I used some black powder, which was usually used for making fireworks- would create a tremendous fireball and shockwave out of what were, ultimately, very cheap materials.
The sky lit up with fire, and as the fireballs died down, I looked up to watch a cloud of smoke ascend into the sky, bulbous at the top, with a sort of stem trailing down to the ground. It reminded me of a mushroom, and I hummed quietly as I contemplated this.
"...It worked," the samurai with the periscope said. "The bandits who weren't killed are fleeing. They... It worked, it worked-"
"Don't go thanking me yet," I said. "Because now we have to deal with the bodies."