Kevin Curry
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Summon Perfect Warlady 7
🕑 Added 2023-08-21 14:00:09 +0000 UTCWhen Tanya came back to Gobwin Knob in the evening, they were pleasantly surprised to find that Marie's prediction was correct: there were no engagements during the enemy turn. It was mostly unexpected because Jillian didn’t do anything either. Wanda’s suggestion spell was supposed to ensure that. It’ll probably just happen next turn.
In the morning, Tanya got an even more pleasant surprise: the juice reserve of their wand refilled automagically, presumably fueled by Tanya's incredibly high upkeep. That was quite unusual for a normal wand, after all.
Their breakfast was some mass produced teriyaki chicken with miso soup in a styrofoam container, like you would get as takeout. It even had a fortune cookie, which wasn't something you usually got in Japan. The fortune cookie had an interesting, if cryptic, warning. "Frequently asked questions: Is the Princess in her castle? Yes." She had absolutely no idea what it meant.
Like the other turns, Tanya got a prize in their fast food. Unlike the last time, it seemed to be only a part of one: it was half of a tiara. It looked gaudy, but it matched the earrings. Bogroll, who was a very dutiful lackey, was happy to hold onto it and fashioned a small satchel that he wore to do so. At their request, he also put on a shirt, a button-up kind with short sleeves that made him look like a factory worker. Tanya approved.
After breakfast, Headmaster Isaac and Harbinger arrived once more, as expected from their contracts. They went straight up to the top of the tower so the Headmaster could fulfill his contractual obligations and update the battle map, and Tanya took the Count aside to ask about his specialty.
“Yes, there is some hot magic in Mathamancy.” Count Harbinger confirmed. In this context, ‘hot magic’ referred to spells that were meant to be cast on a battlefield, instead of while in a safe hex, which was called cold magic. This was not an official distinction, but most cold spells could only be cast during one’s turn, which prevented one from, for example, waiting until dusk and using all of your spare juice to gain an economic edge without sacrificing the risk there normally is in having no juice to handle whatever your enemies do on their turn. “It’s mostly things that synergize with archery, allowing more precise attacks. It’s best with siege weapons like Ballistae, with a little juice you could take some precision shots at adjacent hexes even.” You could normally shoot adjacent hexes on one’s turn, but you couldn’t target specific units, and even targeting a specific stack was iffy if there were multiple stacks in close formation.
“So, hypothetically…” Tanya asked, “If I was to stack with our yellow dwagons, and managed to cast some mathamancy to assist them, could I increase the accuracy of their bombardment?”
“Definitely.” Count Harbinger said, “You managed well with the basic calculation magic yesterday, I have at least one scroll for such a thing…” He rifled through his jacket, which had about five scrolls inside of it. He pulled out a green one. “Ah, here we are. One ‘Volley Optimization’ scroll. By default, it will augment ranged attacks from one stack targeting another stack of equal size. It’ll add plus five combat to the volley.”
“I’ll need to adjust it.” Tanya said, frowning. She wanted it to improve efficiency on destroying the battle bears.
“That is the advantage of knowing mathamancy.” Count Harbinger agreed. “It’s the same rough equations, you just need to adjust some variables. Come on, let me show you how it’s done. One thousand for the scroll, by the way.”
Fortunately, the math was, to someone with a college education, quite simple. It was just basic ballistics. After the quick lesson, the map was finished.
"...this is a trap." Tanya concluded.
"Yes." Isaac agreed, "for an additional fee, I could attempt to detect veiled units." He pointed to a few specific hexes. "If they hired Charlescomm, this would likely be where they're hiding some veiled Archons."
Tanya frowned. "Charlescomm?"
"A mercenary side." Wanda explained, "He possesses the Arkendish, which gives him mastery over Thinkamancy." Well, logically there would be other Arkentools, although they really wished they had been told about this earlier.
"He fields Archons, flying knight-class units with a large variety of specials. Equal to dwagons in upkeep, move, and in destructive power, but quite fragile." Count Harbinger added, "Their minor leadership bonuses and foolamancy make them quite tricky."
"Wow." Tanya said, impressed. "Imagine mounting them on dwagons…"
The Count frowned. "Flying knights don't get the stack benefit. You can't even use mounts to extend their range, flying units that are mounted still lose move when they go through hex boundaries."
Tanya flushed at their embarrassing mistake. Then what he said fully registered. Wait… was that… "...can I fly?" Tanya asked. Come to think of it… the Empire recruiter did mention that they were an A-class mage, and had gone on to explain that A and B class mages could fly and become aerial mages. "How do you fly?"
Headmaster Isaac seemed baffled by the question. "Have you tried to fly?" He asked.
Tanya snorted. "Why would I do that?" They asked. Still, it was worth a try. Tanya looked up and imagined moving in that direction. Their left middle finger twitched as they imagined pressing the "W" key on their keyboard, and just like that, Tanya's feet left the ground and they started to fly. "...I guess I can fly."
After a moment of awkward silence, Headmaster Isaac coughed. "Ah… did you want me to check for veils? My fee will double for the turn." Classic upsell. Tanya approved of the man's hustle.
"Yes, please do that." Tanya said, mentally updating the pending payment they ordered to be reserved. It was an interesting trick that the Count had informed them of, using their Chief Warlord authority to create an accounts payable entry, locking out Lord Stanley from spending it without explicitly countermanding the order.
It was interesting, how the Ruler's power was theoretically absolute, but the Chief Warlord and Caster can ignore, override, and block that authority, but only if they could justify to themselves that it was necessary for the side's survival or pursuant to their defined role. But the ruler could simply clap their hands and kill either of the other members of the ruling trinity at will.
It would be nice to not have to worry about that. They asked if there was any magic that could allow people to be tricked into thinking the wrong things to get around all of these intent-based limits, and apparently that was how carnynancy worked. Which… made perfect sense, given that carnies are essentially scam artists. Their poor reputation also makes sense in that context. It was also logical that Signamancy and Thinkamancy could be subverted by another Fate axis discipline. The underlying logic of this world's magic system is becoming clearer…
"Found them." Headmaster Isaac said, and Maggie put the archon figures on the battlemap. Apparently, they looked like flying airline stewardesses. Skirts and all.
"Four stacks seems expensive." Tanya commented. If they cost the same as dwagons…
"Archons vary in strength immensely with levels." Count Harbinger pointed out. "Much more than dwagons do. But if they want to deal with the force you've been sending out, that sounds like a good minimum."
"Battle odds?" Tanya asked.
"With the force disposition you have available, with those particular Archons supported by the ground archery…" he casts a spell. "55.8633% chance of victory. Odds of winning without losing either you or Wanda… 27.6449%." one of the things about mathamancy being magic instead of being a glorified calculator was that while the Count didn't, strictly speaking, know the levels and random specials of those archons, he could still calculate it accurately. It cost more juice to fill in for unknown variables, but that was already factored into the price of his services.
Tanya did not like those numbers, but it made sense. But… “For an ambush, those numbers are not nearly as certain as I thought."
"Charlie knows I'm working for you. He has informants in Portal Park." Headmaster Isaac said, adding some context. "He's assuming that I will find his ambush and that you won't attack them. This means he needs to only send enough forces to plausibly croak you, not enough to do so reliably." Seventy-plus percent chance was pretty good, mind you, but Tanya was so successful because they targeted the leadership so the unled forces couldn’t do the same back; the archons would not be so inept.
Still, that motive made sense. Tanya was glad that they hired the Headmaster instead of trying to find someone cheaper. They paid for a quality advisor. "So Charlie's just trying to get paid without actually doing anything. I can work with that." The hex they were in, if one assumed the archons were the orlies they were disguised as, the ideal he'd to repeat their previous tactics on. That was why Tanya assumed it was a trap. "We needed to change tactics anyway."
What the RCC undoubtedly expected them to do was to go for the front hex, or one of the ones behind it, and walk the remaining uncroaked through Gobwin Knob's tunnels and reinforce the city defenders with them. While there were seige mechanics that allowed them benefits from surrounding the city without attacking, Tanya would wager that Charlie was quite an expensive mercenary, and they'd like to think they've taught Ansom well when it came to how bad of an idea it was to allow them time to maneuver.
Thus, they positioned their forces to stop that tactic. They abandoned the concept of air cover for the majority of the hexes, and concentrated their forces to almost match their first configuration, where the air cover only covers the leadership and front hexes.
The archons were in a hex without any siege, stuffed to the brim with 960 infantry and nothing else, 120 stacks with three stacks of "orlies" to protect them along with the Transyvito contingent, one flying warlord and a swarm of bats. If it was what it seemed to be, it would be the perfect place to attack with the dwagons. This was why Tanya assumed it was a trap.
But they can soak the losses of another two hexes, even with Tanya ignoring the lethal trap. In showing their soft underbelly, they have laid two traps. Even with an additional mass uncroaking scroll and no air cover, they could defeat no more than five hexes, and even that much was far too risky. The dwagons take significant damage croaking a full hex of infantry, enough to make engaging further battle bears a significant risk. The remaining hexes would still be twice the necessary forces to take the city. A substantial improvement over four to five times as much as they needed, like when Tanya first popped, but not enough.
So Tanya will take a third option. They had plenty of knight-class bodies, after all. "Wanda. Use your juice to reanimate as many flying forces that you can. Fill out Toast's stack, then reanimate a second warlord and create another. We will not be needing a mass uncroaking this turn." Once more, Tanya distinctly avoided invoking it as an Order.
"Yes, Warlady." Wanda said drily, leaving the room to follow the order.
Tanya turned to the Count. "It's time to crunch some numbers. Here is the plan…"
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With good numbers, Tanya proceeded with the plan. Guerilla warfare, that is, the kind where you hit a high value target and get out, is not conventional wisdom in this world. While yes, the dwagon raiding tactics, picking off hexes from a large column before retreating back to the city, is technically a form of that kind of warfare, it’s not considered such because it is wiping out entire hexes, winning battles, and exploiting their inability to counterattack. It only worked because Jillian was unable to be the one to spearhead that counterattack, no other commander in the Coalition is skilled yet disposable enough to attempt to croak large quantities of wounded dwagons through the unknown but presumably formidable anti-air spells on Gobwin Knob’s tower. Also, they used a little foolamancy to bluff them into thinking there were still healthy ones in reserve, the ones that Stanley took. There was a supply of scrolls in the foolamancer’s quarters along with the sword that they were down to their last one of. Perhaps they could try to cast some normally soon? Foolamancy seemed pretty simple when using the scrolls…
Anyway, the reason why winning battles was so important was the experience point bonus that commanders get from being in command of victories. This was of vital importance when Tanya was level 1, but when they’re level 5… not so much. Wanda got the lion’s share of the battle experience for the previous two turn’s attacks, and she didn’t level up once. She admitted that she had leveled to eight relatively recently, so was not surprised at that lack, but it emphasized how Tanya could not expect to level more than once, and level 6 was not an important enough level to shoot for.
As victories were no longer important, and attacking the infantry forces is a waste of time… they will do neither. Instead, they will surgically attack the siege units, using the breath attacks of the dwagons to deal with the siege towers, and the superior statistics of the knights, both the uncroaked ones and the dwagon riding ones, will be able to cut up the battle bears with impunity. Those were the broad strokes of the plan.
Tanya was commanding the yellow dwagons exclusively this turn, the now level 5 King Bomber their personal mount. They were in a nine-stack, and Tanya found that casting the spell to bond themselves to the powerful dwagon was surprisingly easy. This was primarily because Tanya’s own affection for the beast created the very first heartstring that they could detect coming from themselves, which was a pleasant surprise. Until they realized that it meant that all of those times they didn’t see a heartstring before meant that they cared for literally all of their other units less than this one dwagon.
…They were beginning to understand why some people might consider date-a-mancy unsettling. Nevertheless, a full complement of the Knights in Stanley’s Service was also stacked with them, in full warpaint. It was pointless to try and ‘Rock Out’, but if things go wrong they’re willing to try. Unlike normal dance-fighting, Rocking Out did not replace the stack bonus, instead adding to it, so while you could use it in a troupe like normal dance-fighting, it was best to keep things small when you’re playing Rock Band. It didn’t work before when they tried, but they knew how to sing, and could remember a few rock songs from all that karaoke they did, so by actually using juice they thought they had a shot at it.
Wanda had managed an impressive number of uncroaked fliers. Mass uncroak takes about two-thirds of their juice supply, and they were able to make nearly a full stack with just that. Most of the unipegataurs from the front hex, fourteen, were animated, leaving a total of eighteen such fliers. Ensign Toast (who had leveled to six last turn, and decayed to a single remaining hit on this one) and Wanda manned a ten stack, while the lowest level of the uncroaked warlords, Lord Manpower the Temporary (and level 4), was relegated to the backup uncroaked knight eight-stack. Most of the uncroaked warlords had leveled up over the last two turns.
Archduke Ferdinand (still level 5) was moved to join Leeroy Jenkins (level 5 now) in the dwagon stacks, with the Archduke commanding the purples and blues and Leeroy commanding the reds and greens, with the pinks split between them. Tanya had gotten used to directing those stacks on top of their own by now, but it was easier if the dwagons were sorted in this way. The pinks and blues were the most disposable, so Tanya's orders tended to risk those over other types. Six of the seven losses were among those, with one purple being the odd one out.
Flying out towards the column, Tanya took a deep breath. Those archons… they could have been a very nasty surprise. Fortunately, their contingencies were able to spot the danger in time. Even without springing the trap, it was very possible that four stacks of archons could flat out take the garrison on their own if the dwagons were all too wounded to contest them. The anti-air spells that Tanya optimized helped, but it was chancier than they’d like. Even through the embargo that the royal sides have created with their cartel-like control over the magic kingdom, Maggie was able to find a few low level casters desperate enough to spend their juice spelling up the tower, which Tanya then optimized, Archons were capable of illusions. If they were skilled enough to do what Tanya would do if they had the skill, the spells could not be enough.
But that was a concern for later. First, they had siege units to croak. The first hex was the one where they will determine how easy the rest of the hexes will be.
They came in high, outside the range of archery. Mathamancy scroll in hand, Tanya commanded their stack to bombard one of the battle bears, the plush heavies large enough for a coordinated barrage of battlecrap to be possible.
The scroll's magic made the world explode into lines of battle, firing arcs and ballistic trajectories. It reminded them of playing one of those artillery battle games, and Tanya knew exactly what to do. On their command, one of the yellow dwagons flew and dropped its payload, the next dwagons following in single file and dropping its own at the exact same position and angle. With the speed the dwagons flew at, all nine loads of caustic matter were unloaded in two seconds, crating a line of acid that buried the battle bear. As expected, it did not do enough damage to destroy the massive golem, although there was a one in three-ish chance of nine shots being enough with all the applicable bonuses.
Tanya's growing magical skill made repeating the scroll's feat much more successful than the last time they attempted such, magically augmenting their cognition to allow for a much more precise series of orders. Each of the hex's six battle bears got one volley, successfully destroying one outright. A bad set of damage rolls, but any croaks from that was just a bonus. The second phase of the skirmish commenced: the dwagons descended, with the uncroaked knights staying above them. Archery got some hits on the dwagons, but it was 9-11 combat versus the dwagon's 22-23 defense. Not a big enough margin to laugh at the attacks, but it was close. They wouldn't want to let the archery unload their entire quivers, but four to six volleys wouldnt even chip a tenth of the dwagon's collective hits.
Tanya's stack leapt on the healthiest battle bear pair, Tanya bringing their lightsaber to bear… heh. Another trick that Tanya had learned about the melee form of their weapon was that it could handle one mode, the cutting blade, for free, there were three other damage types that it could use: fire, electric, and the mode Tanya liked calling 'vibroblade'. Each of these modes added an additional amount of damage that was equal to the initial attack… and there was nothing but juice concerns stopping them from using all three at once, quadrupling their damage to most units.
An interesting feature of Tanya's earrings was that, unlike traditional warlords, Tanya could see the points of enemy units just as easily as their own, so they knew that the battle bear's 21 remaining hits meant that tripling their damage would be enough to reliably destroy it. "Hidden Art: Sparkling Love!" Tanya shouted as their blade exploded with fire and electricity. The adrenaline must be getting to them; they almost thought they sounded cool there.
Meanwhile, the other dwagons stacks were engaging the siege towers. Siege towers were not actually units, but instead equipment that protected several stacks of digger infantry. The ones Ansom brought were as big as they got: each one carried eight such stacks. The siege tower worked like ships and city walls in that it used the points of the diggers inside via Natural Changenancy to determine its own set of points as a pseudo-unit. Against most attacks, the tower acted as a single unit with nearly four hundred hits, the hardened damage reduction of a massive heavy, and an attack that only functioned against city walls.
This means that destroying siege towers was normally considered easy, because it assumed you would croak the entire hex first. If you weren't doing that, it was actually quite difficult.
But there were ways around it. Siege attacks ignored the hardened damage reduction and special siege attacks like purple dwagonbreath do their bonus damage. Gas attacks like green dwagonbreath does no damage to objects, but bypass the protection to directly attack the units inside. Wooden objects treated fire damage, like red dwagonbreath, as siege. Blue dwagonbreath was fully impaired, so the lightning bolts were aimed to finish off the most injured battle bears, and anyone not using breath engaged the infantry in melee, giving the other units space to work. Wanda's forces was supposed to croak any battle bear that survived the blues and yellows, but they were not needed in this case.
All told, it took four combat rounds to destroy the siege, and Tanya ordered a withdrawal. After inspecting the hits of the dwagons and the remaining uses of their breath weapons, they smiled.
A dwagonbreath attack, when used well, can croak 1 stack of normal infantry. Therefore, it should logically take eight breath attacks to destroy the siege tower. Blues, yellows, and pinks don't do full damage, but the red/green combo counts as three and the yellows have six times as many shots. Most of the dwagons have leveled up enough to have eight shots by now, with a few having nine. From the result of the engagement, those numbers seem to have panned out. This leaves them with sixteen remaining siege towers of the nineteen they started the turn with, and given the twenty-seven remaining dwagons; nine yellows, three reds, four greens, five purples, four pinks, and two blues, fourteen of the nineteen is within their offensive reach, and all thirty-two of the remaining battle bears can be volleyed with ten additional volleys to be used at discretion, which can probably take out two more towers. That leaves them with a mere three to besiege Gobwin Knob with, so Tanya just needs to ignore… that hex.
The question is… can they take that many hexes on without losing a dwagon? …It was iffy. If they took out that hex, the one with only two towers, with just yellows… Tanya took the numbers in their head and spent juice to accelerate their thoughts once more. A lance of pain interrupted their full comprehension of the calculation, clearly they made a minor mistake when casting, but it finished: they saw that it was a sixty-something percent chance for all the dwagons to survive, they knew that. They’ll take it.
With the remainder of the attack planned out, Tanya turned to Wanda. “Follow me!” They ordered. “We’ve got six more hexes to hit!”
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[Prince Ansom Lunesta of Jetstone, Level 10 Chief Warlord, Heir to Jetstone]
Ansom didn’t like feeling outsmarted. The Titans knew how uncomfortably often that seemed back at court, it was one of the reasons why he preferred the battlefield; foreign warlords meant it when they said they respected you, which made them far better company than courtiers.
The Chief Warlady of Gobwin Knob, Tanya, cut at the great beast that was the Royal Crown Coalition’s column with precision, wielding her dwagons and croakamancer with the finesse of a dueling rapier.
But Ansom’s coalition, the alliance of Royal sides that were united in their hatred for Overlord Stanley the Worm, was a mighty beast indeed. They had lost some hits, metaphorically, but they had five times the necessary forces to defeat Gobwin Knob’s mighty defenses.
But Tanya is still fresh to command. While clever, her choice of maneuvers is betrayed by the casters she hired before they started putting pressure on the Magic Kingdom to deny them services. Stanley’s Thinkamancer hired two casters associated with the Thinkamancy guild, Headmaster Isaac Cipher and Mathamancer Kurt Godel. She spent her forces efficiently, but it was still just Lookamancy and Mathamancy allowing her to strike at the weakest points and pull out after doing some damage. It was surprising that the Headmaster was willing to be hired out to a side like Gobwin Knob, but apparently there were rumors of the man’s fondness for Stanley’s thinkamancer, so that made sense.
But then she did this. Between the three attacks, eighty percent of the siege has been croaked. Of the twenty-seven siege towers pushed by fifty-four battle bears, only three and six remain. Of the nine stacks of weinerrammers, three have been croaked. He didn’t think that was enough to take the walls. They did have digger units outside the siege towers among the marbits, which could help… Or they could commit everything to the tunnel attack.
…The more he thought of it, the more the tunnel attack plan made sense. It would require that they wait for the full column, so next turn, because three towers and six stacks of ‘rammers certainly can take Gobin Knob’s walls if they are underdefended, but it seemed like the only path of victory.
Well, that or pay Charlie to assist them in taking the airspace. Ansom was not a fan of the ambush plan, but the Sofa King was ‘Sofa King Furious!’ at Tanya wiping out all but a handful of their own forces, including Duchess Potatoes, so he fronted the money to pay for an ambush force.
Apparently, Tanya was canny enough to notice the trap. Worse, she understood how futile attacking more infantry would be, so… no more siege. That sort of strategy… It was madness. But as Tramennis once told him… the difference between genius and madness…
But one thing that Ansom learned as a warlord, the knowledge that got him to level nine… was that there was nothing that could beat overwhelming numbers. They still had well over five thousand units in the column, after all. They used to have over nine thousand, but Tanya was a very capable warlady. Stanley had, just ten turns ago, sent off hundreds of infantry from Gobwin Knob’s walls in an ill-fated assault. While they are unsure of the exact quantity of units remaining within those walls, it could be no more than a thousand, and invading the tunnels with five times that number will be enough.
It has to be enough.
