Khenal
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Chapter Two-Hundred Thirty-Nine
🕑 Added 2024-03-15 02:56:26 +0000 UTCI’m surprised any of the adventurers are willing to go back and try to keep scouting the Maw. I mostly had Teemo suggest they come talk to us on the off chance, but there’s three groups willing to get a closer look. That doesn’t count Yvonne’s group who will be setting up a forward base camp, and the couple other teams who will be ferrying the reports back.
The No-Longer-Terrible Trio is even there, though they’re going to be running messages and providing a bit of security for the basecamp. They don’t have any specific mental defenses, but they’re apparently strong enough to have a good shot of resisting the more dangerous mental attacks.
For the scouts, there’s a group of… scouts. They look like the kind of people I’d expect to be in the rangers instead of being adventurers. The trio of elves look comfortable among the trees, and give assurances they’ll be just as comfortable in the caves and tunnels. I’m a bit unsure about letting them go down there, but they say they specialize in getting information without being noticed. I don’t know if they’ll have what they need to avoid the Harbinger, but they’re confident, and I have even less authority to try to stop them than I do with my dwellers.
The next is a more solo adventurer, a changeling with some kind of rogue class. She says she can literally hide in shadows, and implied she doesn’t do all her work inside dungeons. While I don’t know the exact countermeasures nobles and such might use to stop thieves, I have to imagine the changeling has something to get around mental detection. She’s hoping she can actually infiltrate the town. I’m real nervous about that idea, but I still don’t really have many options for actually stopping her.
The last is a group I didn’t expect to see: a party of Crystal Shield followers. I didn’t even realize any of them were participating in all this! They don’t strike me as particularly stealthy, but the priest leading the small group is confident the Shield will be able to keep their minds safe, secure, and secret behind its protection. Teemo keeps pestering them for more information, and I’m happier about their plan once they give a few more details. They have a ratkin member, not one of mine, who actually is sneaky. The wolfkin is usually their frontline fighter, and he’ll mostly be staying back to help keep the basecamp secure. The elven priest will bless the ratkin, and he’ll go scout and return.
Once Teemo gets that bit of info out of him, the other two teams ask for a similar blessing for their own efforts, and the priest is more than happy to provide it, once they’re actually out there and doing the job. He’ll also be helping secure the basecamp, since he won’t be out and about doing the scouting. I bet Aranya will be joining them all and helping ease the burden of keeping the place magically secure, once she gets here.
Which means I should probably get Teemo back home one last time before all this gets going. The healing brigade needs to be brought up, and I’d like for Teemo to ask Tarl about any weaknesses the known denizens might have. A rusting attack could be nice, but I don’t think anyone here has an ability like that.
Rezlar might, but no way is he going to be joining this particular fight, at least not directly. Even if he wasn’t the lord mayor of Fourdock, he’s still pretty young and inexperienced. Even the weakest adventurers here, I’m pretty sure, have quite a few levels on him. Crazy as the adventurers are, even they are being careful around a mental affinity as strong as the harbinger.
Careful is a relative term, though. None of them, not even Yvonne’s group, really wants to wait for the medics to get here before they go. They’ll at least have a chance to get the camp set up before Aranya arrives. And Nova is pretty insistent on going with them, too. I can feel Rocky and Fluffles are tempted also, but they’re going to resist for now. One scion will be easier to keep secret than three, especially with the kind of power those two have. I don’t know if that kind of thing would make them more obvious, probably not, but stealth is vital here. The only one sneakier than Nova is probably Teemo, and even he can’t just hide deep inside the rock of the tunnels.
Of course, that didn’t keep the rockslides safe, but I’m also not going to let Nova get any closer than the camp until I’m fully ready to assault the Maw. And speaking of, Honey and Leo are starting to flesh out a plan for doing just that.
There’s a ton of tunnels into and out of Silvervein, but so far, not many of them allow for bypassing the town to strike into the Maw directly. Earlier into the information gathering, I was expecting to be able to pretty easily get around the town to get at the Maw, but now we have a more complete picture, it looks pretty deliberate. There’s still a few potential direct access tunnels to the maw, but I’m betting the forces the suborned rockslides are reporting are way lower than what’s actually there.
Most of my more ordinary denizens are going to be assaulting those tunnels. Yeah, they’re the obvious entry points, but they’ll also be perfect places to launch further attacks into the Maw from. Which also means they’ll be the most well guarded. I don’t think Leo expects to be able to take those points easily, but putting pressure there will force the Maw to keep a lot of its denizens committed to the defense there. It’ll probably be a grinder for both of us, but it should at least keep as many of the Maw’s forces occupied as possible, and away from my dwellers and the adventurers.
The adventurers will be tripping the traps, assuming enough of them come from the guild for the real fighting. Yvonne and everyone think it’s a foregone conclusion that basically everyone will want to go, but don’t go counting your chickens before they hatch. Anyway, assuming they want to play ball, they should be able to cripple the Maw’s forces outside the dungeon itself, leaving the adventurers free to either help with the messy business of securing the town, or they can come try their hands at breaking through to the Maw.
I think the best option for them, after tripping the traps, is to try to strike through the temple complex of the Maw’s clergy and force the dungeon to spread itself thin trying to keep everyone out. If we can’t slip behind their lines somehow, it’ll probably devolve into a careful siege. The medics will be busy making sure as few of my forces die as possible, and so try to starve the Maw of mana. The adventurers and dwellers will want to play it safe, too. While I’m confident my dwellers will be careful, the adventurers are going to be a bit more of a wild card. Still, the ones at the levels that will be needed aren’t going to be so stupid as to think they can spend their loot if they’re dead.
If we’re lucky, we won’t have to deal with a protracted siege. Leo and Honey are making plans for if it comes to that, but plan A is to sneak a decapitating strike past the Maw’s defenses while it’s distracted. With the denizens pressing the obvious entrances, and the adventurers wreaking havoc, a strikeforce of my scions will try to break through. There’s a few options for that, with the simplest being to use a few tunnelbores to open my own holes in the Maw’s territory. It’ll definitely notice them eventually, so we’ll have as many as we can digging, forcing the Maw to try to swat them down before they can get too close.
I imagine a few of the adventurer teams will want to go with the tunnelbores, and possibly a few of my dwellers, too, and I’m torn on it. The adventurers are one thing. They know the risks as well as they can, but I’m still protective of my dwellers. I don’t want them to get hurt, so is there anything I can do about it? Any way I can try to discourage them?
I pull the brakes on that train of thought, not letting myself think in circles, getting nowhere. Hullbreak is a good lesson on how poorly that goes. If they decide they want to join the tunnelbore teams, I can’t stop them. All I can do it try to make each strike team a threat, and hope for safety in numbers to minimize casualties. And mixed in with the various tunneling teams, will be my scions.
Once they take the field, especially if they manage to get inside the Maw’s territory, I think the dungeon will have more important things to worry about than my dwellers. Once inside, Rocky and Fluffles will be trying to cause enough of a ruckus to draw the attention of the Redcap and the Harbinger. With Slash’s help, they’ll defeat or at least distract those two, letting Nova and Teemo try to sneak off to claim the core.
That’ll be the real goal: to subsume the Maw. Well, the real goal is to protect the kobolds, and that isn’t looking to be an easy task. So far, the scouts have gotten exactly nothing on their location. On the one hand, that’s probably a good sign. Any rockslides close enough to try to find them have been suborned, so if they’re not trying to bait a location for the kobold enclave, they don’t know that’s the real goal.
On the other hand, that still leaves us with very few actual leads. From the lack of info, I’m thinking they’re inside the Maw’s territory proper, and might even be very close to the core, like with Hullbreak’s enclave. We need to get a bead on where they are and their status before we can really make any move. Not only will we want to make sure they’re safe to be able to free them, but tactically, we need to keep them safe, too. The Maw likes to sacrifice them, and it must get some mana from it. They could be an emergency mana bank, so we need to secure them before the Maw can try to cash them in.
Once we do that, *then* we can move on the core itself. If we’re lucky, they’ll be far enough away that we can do one, then the other. If it’s like Hullbreak, we’ll have to do both at once. If it comes to that… Teemo will probably be in charge of evacuating them, possibly with Nova protecting them from whatever else the Maw might throw at the kobolds to kill them for mana. My other scions will be there, too, but in that situation, they’ll probably be busy fighting the enemy scions.
We’ll probably have to play it by ear, even if we get a good look at the enclave and core. Stealth might be an option, and we’ll probably give it a try, but I expect the whole thing will be a mess. Stealth will be plan A, with blitzing for the core being plan B. C will be the messy fight, and probably the most likely outcome, I expect. Either way, even taking the core leaves me with a few questions that I don’t think will be answered until after we do it.
I’m not quite sure what’ll happen when we subsume the Maw, at least with the territory and spawners. With Neverrest, basically everything just transferred to me. The scions vanished, but any denizens that weren’t dead became mine. Even the scions vanishing might be more because they were dead at the time Fluffles took the core. If I don’t get the Maw’s territory, will the denizens just be freed? That’d be a mess, especially if the Redcap and Harbinger also get freed. They’d be lower on power, but what if they slip away?
Those two on the loose could be even worse than them working for the Maw.
Comments
Tsurani
Interesting chapter, and laying out future challenges. Looking forward to Thedeim and team taking the fight to the Maw. FYI, two spaces after periods is generally discouraged by every major style guide in both academic and business writing, as well as for published works and their manuscripts. I'm assuming you still write like this because you're an American over 40, as it used to be a bit more common?
jeffh4
Excellent chapter highlighting both strategy and Theodim fighting self-doubt. Some corrections: in the rangers "rangers" should be capitalized a mental affinity as strong as the harbinger. Should be capitalized and possessive a mental affinity as strong as the Harbinger's. tunnels to the maw again tunnels to the Maw x 5 Not formatted correctly. Reader shouldn't be seeing html code.
Ethan Barrow
TFTC, the tension is getting so good for the fight to come! I'm looking forward to some really evil people getting a well deserved beat down.
Vik M.
If this is Nova as a Magikarp I'm almost scared to see the Gyarados.
Raufgar
Thanks for the chapter~! With all the fighting that will be happening, will we get to see a level-up of a Scion? Or better yet, an Evolution? Imagine Nova, getting beaten down, do a Magikarp -> Gyarados?!?
