Explorer of Edregon

“He hasn’t left yet,” Vin muttered, making sure not to lean over the edge of the cloud they were sitting upon as they waited for the ranker king to finally take the bait and leave the missing Earthers undefended. He and Lumel had spent the last hour slowly drifting directly over the keep on a cloud he’d created and were high up in the sky, using the regular clouds as cover. They’d already spotted quite a handful of rankers patrolling the keep walls with their eyes angled upward, which meant they had to be careful.

“You really think he’s going to leave the keep?” Lumel asked, wringing her hands nervously as they laid in wait. “From how Emrelda and Grunch spoke of the man, he sounds like a fairly intelligent leader.”

“It all comes down to whether or not he thinks preventing the orcs and beastkin from leaving is worth more than potentially preventing me from rescuing the Earthers,” Vin explained. “By now, I imagine one of the Runners Emrelda told us about has reached the keep, and he’s probably putting the pieces together that Shia and Scule aren’t actually a real monster. A shame, but ensuring that they only knocked rankers unconscious and kept them alive was the only way to keep their distraction under wraps until now and allow the orcs and beastkin the head start they needed.”

“I still can’t believe the beastkin had enough mages to make something like this even possible,” Lumel admitted. “You’ll definitely have to meet up with them again at some point and learn their light magic.”

“Dream first, then light,” Vin said, turning to grin at her. “But yeah, their example was pretty impressive.”

The master plan they all put together to rescue the Earthers and get the orcs and beastkin out of the alliance territory, all while under the watchful eye of the rankers, was straightforward, but far from simple. It boiled down to a handful of moving parts.

Shia and Scule were to work together to pretend to be an elite monster that came out of nowhere and attacked the orc settlement. They had to grab the attention of all the rankers stationed near the orcs and manage to not only hold it and battle the rankers, but doing so carefully enough to ensure they didn’t kill anyone and alert the ranker king to their presence. With Shia working largely on defense, and Scule’s poisons doing the knocking out, it would be tricky, but it should work. While they were doing that, the orcs and Reginald would work together to set the town ablaze, giving Grunch an excuse to flee with the entirety of his people, supposedly over to the beastkin village.

Emrelda had warned them that this plan would only work until one of the Runners that were used to deliver messages between the settlements made their way back to the keep, where the ranker king would probably put two and two together and figure out their plan.

Which was why the orcs weren’t actually going to be heading toward the beastkin village at all.

Naturally, that created an entirely different problem they had to solve. Hiding two thousand orcs wasn’t exactly the easiest feat to accomplish, but they did have one solution available to them.

Rather than have the orcs meet up with the beastkin at their village, what if the beastkin and their light magic were already waiting for them just outside of their town?

Before Shia and Scule even began their ‘attack’ on the orc settlement, Emrelda and her people would use their skill with light magic to sneak their much smaller population out of their homes without even alerting the few rankers set to watch the area. The ability to make small groups entirely invisible and craft illusions made their escape almost a trivial matter. The majority of them headed over to meet the orcs, while a select few remained behind to craft illusions of beastkin wandering around and keep the town from looking as if it had been deserted. Those few would be picked up later, but the rest had an even more important job.

After the orcs fled from their burning town, they were to join forces with the beastkin and make their way to the western edge of the fragment rather than south like the ranker king would probably suspect. There would be patrolling squads of rankers to deal with, but they only needed to hide from those until the ranker king ordered them all to converge in an attempt to head off the orcs. Hiding two and a half thousand people was the riskiest part of the plan, but with Emrelda and her light mages, it was still possible.

Turning that many people invisible was completely out of the question. But having them all lay flat when a squad was spotted off in the distance and turning all the beastkin green to match the orcs and the color of the grass, along with blurring them a bit, was far more feasible. In the worst-case scenario where the trick didn’t manage to fool one of the squads, Emrelda, Grunch, and Alka would intervene and attempt to knock the squad unconscious. The rankers wouldn’t run from what they viewed as a challenge, and so long as they weren’t killed, the ranker king would have a far harder time figuring out where they’d gone.

Ideally, it was while the orcs and beastkin were making their way south along the western edge of the fragment that the ranker king would finally get up and rush out to personally find and stop them from leaving. They were the only people he’d managed to subjugate, and Vin figured the thought of losing his sole conquest while trapped within the alliance’s small territory would spur him to action.

Unfortunately, the ranker king was proving to be a bit more stubborn than he’d anticipated.

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“He’s still not moving,” Vin growled, crossing his arms and trying not to grow impatient as his Sense Soul spell bounced back to him yet again. Every minute or so he cast two different versions of the spell back to back. From this high in the sky, he had to empower his spell across the full fragment to get the readings back, so he had to be careful with his alterations. One cast was searching for souls with a distinct lack of magic, which continued to return the three missing Earthers situated within the throne room. His other cast searched for souls that had connections reaching out from them, an idea he’d had when Emrelda had explained the Thread of Ranks to him. He had no idea how the beastkin had even learned about that in the first place, but when he’d asked, she’d merely winked at him and informed him that a girl had to have some secrets. With that knowledge, he was able to pinpoint the exact location of the ranker king at any time, as he was the only person whose soul looked like it had thousands and thousands of tiny strings stretching off of it in all directions.

There was no way that was comfortable.

“Let’s give him a couple more minutes,” Lumel said encouragingly as she squeezed his hand. “He only just got word about the attack a few minutes ago, he might still be deciding what he wants to do.”

“I know,” Vin said, doing his best not to impatiently tap his foot on the cloud as he waited. “You remember the plan?”

“If he’s brought a large number of other rankers into the room to guard the Earthers, I’ll hit them with Disorientation to buy us a few seconds,” Lumel repeated, nodding in confirmation. “If it’s only a few, I’ll use Dimensional Lockdown instead.”

“It’s a shame he’s probably too strong for that spell to work on him,” Vin lamented, wishing they could have just frozen the ranker king in place and been done with it. Unlike his Binding spell, which had its own caveats, Lumel’s Dimensional Lockdown pitted her opponent’s strength directly against her own magic. It was phenomenal for freezing weaker enemies in place, but singular, powerful foes would drain through her magic reserves in an instant as they used brute force to fight against her spell.

He could try using Binding to stick the ranker king’s feet to the floor of the throne room, but he had to get relatively close to cast the spell in the first place, and the ranker king would probably just rip straight through the leather of his shoes as he dashed over to kill them.

Hell, even if he was barefoot, he’d probably just tear the stone right out of the floor.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” Lumel said. “Everyone knows the job they need to carry out, and we’re all more than capable. If the ranker king decides to give up the orcs and beastkin, we’ll just wait and figure out some other way of getting the Earthers out of there. He can’t personally watch over them forever.”

“I know… I just can’t shake the feeling that the ranker king is going to do something none of us saw coming,” he admitted, resisting the urge for the umpteenth time to look over the edge of the cloud. If one of the rankers on the roof down below spotted him, they’d lose the element of surprise. “Dealing with opponents you know are far stronger than you is bad enough, and I haven’t felt like this since facing off against the divine warrior.”

“That was a long time ago, and things are different now,” Lumel reassured him. “It will all work out.”

“Let’s hope,” he muttered, casting his spell yet again. The moment his mana rebounded back to him, his eyes widened. “The ranker king is on the move! Finally!”

“Told you so!” Lumel grinned, steeling herself for what they were about to do. “You have the location of the Earthers?”

“Yes, they are…” he paused, his second spell bouncing back to him and killing his excitement instantly. “They’re moving with him! Wherever he’s going, he’s bringing the Earthers along for the ride!”

“What? He can’t possibly plan on heading out to stop the orcs and beastkin while dragging three low-level humans along with him,” Lumel pointed out.

“I know, but they’re definitely together,” Vin said, waiting a few seconds before casting the spells again. “Wait… they’re not heading toward the edge of the keep. If anything, I think they’re heading up toward—”

“EXPLORER!” the ranker king’s voice boomed out across the land, and Vin’s blood froze as the very man they were going through all this trouble to avoid called out to him. “I know you’re up there somewhere! You’ve already shown us you possess the ability to traverse the skies, so there’s no point in hiding it!”

“Don’t say anything!” Lumel whispered, as if the ranker king would be able to hear them from all the way down there. “He’s just making a wild guess! No need to let him know he’s right!”

“Very clever trying to lead me away with the attack on the orcs’ settlement!” the ranker king continued, his powerful voice reaching their ears without issue. “Unlike you, I am more straightforward when I want something! You have ten seconds to reveal yourself and come down here before I kill one of the three humans you’ve been trying so desperately to rescue!”

“He’s bluffing!” Lumel said hurriedly, her eyes wide with fear as if knowing exactly what he was going to do. “The brand on their soul, they have to follow that weird source of honor!”

“He’s the king, his soul is unique,” Vin hissed, squeezing his eyes shut as he quickly came to terms with what he was about to do. “I can’t risk their lives on a maybe. Focus on getting the Earthers out of there, I’ll keep him distracted.”

“Vin, don’t—”

Cutting her off with a quick kiss, Vin allowed himself to savor the softness of her lips for one last, brief moment.

Before rolling off the side of the cloud and plummeting toward the ranker king and his entire army.