Manning

Since the group of stragglers entered my domain I’d been watching them with my own senses, rather than with the barn owl’s eyes. The group seemed to be built of a large number of children and elderly villagers, probably the kids of the cultiti-followers collected around the dungeon entrance. The varied pretty widely in ages, with the larger kids carrying or holding the hands of their juniors, and one or two elderly needing assistance walking.

I spotted one of my favorites in the head of the group, a man I hadn’t seen in quite some time. The human weakling I’d spared after he was betrayed months ago was leading the group. On first glance he looked just as raggedy as ever, if not more so with only a pitchfork to fight with and singed clothing for armor, but there was something different. I could see the ambient mana around him bending in a fashion I hadn’t seen before. It was somewhere between a spell and passive magic, nearest I could tell, and I made a note to ask Ash later when she woke up.

I realized from a slow trickle of energy that was slightly different than what I expected. It wasn’t visible in the low lighting of the already dark night-time forest, but someone in the group was bleeding profusely. My first instinct was to figure out who was injured, my dungeon senses telling me they’d be the easiest target, but even if I wanted to target them I couldn’t. Whoever was injured was hiding it very well, walking normally with the rest of the villagers and keeping pace. I could only hope they survived long enough to be healed.

The heavy, dark substance was stuck to leaves leading all the way back to the entrance of the forest. The villagers were lucky that I was in charge of the pathing here, because they left a path that was far too easy to follow. I started evaporating the sanguine trail, savoring the taste of mana from blood spilt in my lands, while I prepared for the next step.

Besides allowing the villagers free passage there wasn’t much else I could do for them at the moment so I directed my attention back to the invaders.

A large group of thuggish men were accumulating at the edge of my wood, several reloading crossbows, a few were nursing wounds and burns, and others were just staring into the gloom of my willows and oaks. One thing was for sure, they were making no move to enter my woods, and for good reason. As far as they knew there was only one exit and they just had to out wait the villagers.

A gruff looking human of average height crossed the bridge leading to the accumulation of the invaders and they all went silent. Eyes followed the imposing man with admiration and resentment as he swaggered forth, his metal cap gleaming in the torchlight.

“Captain! The whore and her entourage fled into the forest, should we give chase?” One of the admiring pairs of eyes stood a little straighter and barked to the metal-capped man as he approached. The captain responded by cuffing the man’s ear and shouting loud enough for the other men to hear, not that it was necessary in the awkward silence. The man obviously did not want to repeat himself.

“No, you moron. Why in the world would I send in good human men to chase down a bunch of animals in the woods? I told all of you during that it was dangerous in there, and there is only one exit. They will come out here and we will kill them then, or they won't come out at all.” The man walked over to a felled tree that had been left there that morning and sat down as the rest of the gathered humans started murmuring quietly amongst themselves again.

He had a good point, I didn’t know how long I would be able to support what was left of the village with my forest. Whenever one of them was in my dungeon it became harder to alter the environment and directly impact my forest. That chokehold amplified with each new sapient that entered my dungeon as well, making it harder and harder to do things like accelerate plant growth or spawn creatures.

Of course, I could still interact with my forest large distances away from the gathering, but they had no reason to go looking in what they considered to be a dangerous forest without prompt. On top of that, the energy I am provided by them traversing my forest diminishes over time when they stay within the bounds of my dungeon for consecutive amounts of time. Ash had told me a while back that they experience a similar drop off in the amount of energy they can absorb within the dungeon as well. Good thing too, otherwise dungeons would just capture and imprison the sapients while the stronger sapients set up permanent structures to live in dungeons. Checks and balances, I suppose.

Either way, having so many villagers within my forest at once is not a sustainable environment. I need to figure out how to kill the invaders so the villagers can leave.

I considered waiting until morning to see if the humans would invade the forest looking to confirm the deaths of the villagers, or kill the ones in the pear tree clearing. I quickly writ off that option though, it would be a much easier battle if they were running through the forest during the night. Otherwise they could just dodge all my traps and spot all my ambushes ahead of time. This lead to the issue of figuring out how to coerce them in, however.

The easiest option would be to make it more dangerous to stay outside my boundaries than within, but that was much easier said than done. My Spearrels wouldn’t be able to maneuver correctly without a canopy overhead and the bat variants would be shot from the air by the sentries before being able to do real harm. On top of how poorly that would go, it would only make the humans more wary of entering the forest.

My boars wouldn’t be able to approach from the forest without making a huge racket, and they couldn’t flank effectively either. It would take too long to cross the river and once they left the boundaries of my forest I would be unable to give them direct commands. They would end up charging back across the bridge, dying to heavy crossbows and spears.

There was always my trump card, but even that wasn’t guaranteed to work in this situation. No, I really don’t have any good options here. All of my defenses and traps were designed to keep people from trespassing in, or stop them from escaping the forest. I had nothing to lure people in, something to look into in the not so distant future.

My barn owl host’s sharp ears picked up a racket from the distance, back in the burning carnage of the town. A trumpet sounded and the owl’s keen eyesight picked up several figures pouring out of the forest and along the road. This wasn’t good for me at all, it looks like the humans had reinforcements.

The enchantment I used to control the pathing in my forest was extremely powerful, pulling mana and strength from both myself and all of the trees of the forest, but not so powerful that I could control so many people at once. As it was, I’d never tried to enforce the enchantment manually or with so many people at once. The possibility that it would fail was already much higher than I was comfortable with, and if I didn’t get these humans in and separated as fast as possible, I likely wouldn’t be able to succeed even with the blessing of a god of luck, which I didn’t have.

I wouldn’t be able to lure them into my last minute plans, traps, and ambushes. They would catch up to the villagers and slaughter them or wait them out while I watched them slowly starve to death. More importantly, without my enchantment working there would be nothing protecting my core besides the miles of untamed forest and the few beasts I kept close.

Of course, they don’t know that I am a dungeon, or if they do know I don’t know that they know. I would be safe, but they might accidentally stumble upon my core looking for escapees or go for Cara’s core. That just wouldn’t do, I needed to handle the invaders within my reach as soon as possible.

Before I could do anything drastic, however, the brigands came pouring into my forest, seemingly forgetting their siege strategy. I cast my owl’s eyes out toward the forest and saw the ‘reinforcements’ going building to building and extinguishing fires, checking corpses, and treating survivors. Not reinforcements then.

As the invaders came rushing in I applied the enchantment to each of them, controlling which direction the forest path would take them in. The only thing I needed to do to separate them was, well, separate them. So long as one of them wasn’t within line of sight of the rest I could whisk him away. It was far more efficient to take a group, rather than one at a time, both mana-efficiency and trap-efficiency wise.

The humans didn’t get too far into the woods before they stopped moving forward and started arguing amongst themselves. One of the resentment eyes was shouting at the shiny-capped man they all called Captain about protection from some lord or another. The captain, not enjoying being yelled at rather than doing the yelling, started shouting back. I had a hard time making out the words while concentrating my efforts toward ensuring each one with my forest trail enchantment.

As soon as I was sure I had a good grasp on each of them I launched my first attack. A spearrel bat that I had deployed nearby leapt out from its perch and started toward Ol’ Shinycap. It glid toward the captain before getting in place and switching into a dive, picking up large amounts of speed. Just before impact, as it entered the torch light, the spearrel bat spun to put forth its metal tail and made contact with the captain.

At least an inch and a half of the tail found itself lodged within the left eye of the captain, his reflexes allowing him to grasp at the bat and arrest its decent before it could finish plunging into the man’s brain. I never intended for the attack to be fatal, or even succeed for that matter. I just wanted to cause panic and chaos, trying to get the few who were already stressed beyond their limit to bolt into the forest.

“Don’t worry, captain, I got it.” The bandit who had been arguing with the captain moments ago swung his club effortlessly at the captain’s face, crushing every bone in the spearell’s small body and splattering it against the man’s face like a fly on the wall. The effect was instantaneous, a large amount of refined energy and memories flowed into me through the forest floor as his corpse ragdolled backwards. I knew right away that he had died, but several of his men didn’t quite understand as they rushed toward him with their weapons drawn.

“Captain!” A middle aged woman wearing a dark green tunic ran to the collapsed man. After trying and failing to remove the spearell from the deceased man’s eye socket, the healer placed her foot against her fallen captain’s chest and heaved, ripping it out of his skull as well as the metal cap that it had pierced on the other side. A healing spell was cast to no effect, and the tension in the party raised quickly as the medic stared down at her fallen leader.

Two sides quickly formed and I awaited the incoming battle. Much to my disappointment, they simply separated and went their own ways, a large group of the fallen captain’s men and a smaller group of men that I could only assume were mercenaries. Several glances were cast over shoulders while weapons were clenched with white knuckles but it seemed that neither group wanted to make the first move. One was outnumbered by a fair bit, and the other outskilled. I waited for eye contact to break and separated the two groups by two miles of forest, each one into an area that I had prepared over the last few hours.

A quick glance to the group I’d decided to rescue showed me that they had slowed down significantly, the children and elderly were causing lag. I absorbed the blood trail, which had followed them since entry to the forest, and noticed that it was thinning out a bit. Either they’d bandaged while I wasn’t looking, the wound had clotted quickly, or somebody was running out of blood. I now had by guesses as to who it was who was injured, but I could only watch and wait to found out for sure.