Most of the evidence wasn’t too hard to hide. The Fire-gem was small enough for me to take with me, the gloves could be burnt up in the fireplace, and the crucible was brittle enough to be smashed into bits. The tongs were the only difficult bit. In the end, we cut them up into more manageable pieces, to be smuggled out under our clothes.

Contrary to my expectations though, we didn’t get released. In fact, we didn’t get breakfast. Pounding on the door didn’t get the guards coming in to see us. We were just… left alone.

It wasn’t until mid-morning before the door was unlocked. Unexpectedly it was Koenig that entered.

“What are you doing here?” I asked the Guild master.

“Looking after my guild-members,” he said with a tight smile. “Get your things, we’re getting out of here.”

The guards didn’t look happy about giving us our weapons back, but they didn’t argue with Koenig. It wasn’t long before we were moving through the tower. We passed a few guards, some of whom were injured, and all of them spared a glare or a scowl for Koenig.

“Why are they upset at you?” I asked. None of them spared a glance for me.

“There were some developments,” he said. “Which you will have missed because you were locked up, where you couldn’t help!” he shouted the last bit at a guard we were passing, who only looked more pissed off.

“Are you going to fill us in, or do you just want to shout at the guards?”

“Hah! I can do both!” he yelled, though this time not in a guard's face. Nevertheless, he slowed the pace a bit and started explaining.

“The idiotic search parties that the Baron sent out this morning ran into more than the usual run of random monsters. They were swarmed by Ogrelings.”

“Swarmed?” I asked. Ogrelings were from the first level of the dungeon we hadn’t been to. I didn’t think that they were established on the surface - from what I’d heard, it sounded as if beast-type chimera like the Milax Panthers were better adapted to the conditions and had out-competed the Ogrelings.

“Swarmed,” he confirmed. “Too many to just be a pack of random spawn. We’re looking at a dungeon outbreak.”

“Shit,” Kyle swore. We all looked at him, as he wasn’t prone to swearing. “Sorry,” he said, embarrassed. “But my parents told me a lot of stories about outbreaks.”

“Shit is about right,” Koenig agreed. “It's not as bad as some of the stories. We’re behind a nice strong wall that’s designed to take a monster swarm. Bit of a shame that all those soldiers were outside the wall when the outbreak got to us.”

“That’s why these guys are injured,” I realised. “They’ve got light duties, while the uninjured ones are on the wall.”

“Right. The Baron’s [Healers] have exhausted themselves healing the survivors that came back. They don’t have the [Spirit] left to spare for minor injuries.”

“What about the Guild [Healers], like me?” Felicia asked. “Should I be healing someone?”

“That’s where we’re going,” Koenig reassured her, as we swept out of the tower and started walking towards the walls. We seemed to be headed towards the main barracks. “But Guild-affiliated adventurers aren’t required to help the noble’s forces when they get into trouble.”

I’d only skimmed through the Guild regulations when I signed up a second time, but I had [Memorise]. “We have to help Royal forces,” I said, recalling the words. “But if the nobles want help they have to do it through jobs posted through -”

“The Guild!” Koenig finished for me. “Which means getting approval from me!”

“And you didn’t give it?” I asked. That would explain the dirty looks.

“Ha! Like I would give them dirt, when they’re holding some of my people - and keeping us from our livelihoods.”

I felt a bit of a weird feeling when I realised Koenig was talking about us. We hadn’t interacted much besides that interview, and it was nice, to think that he cared enough to take what must be fairly drastic actions for our wellbeing.

“Is delving really a concern with an outbreak happening?” Kyle asked incredulously. Koenig waved dismissively.

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “We’re behind walls, this sort of thing happens on the frontier. We’re down defenders, which isn’t great, but it gives us leverage.”

“But couldn’t the Inquisitor order you to help?” I asked, puzzled. He was the one who had imprisoned us after all.

“That's true, he could have,” Koenig allowed. “But he has not! Said something about the matter being none of his concern.”

“The Baron must be pissed,” I realised. “Even more than before.”

By this time we’d reached the barracks, and Felicia was intercepted by someone in robes that she seemed to know, that babbled something about urgent need and dragged her further into the structure. Kyle followed, leaving us with Koenig, who didn’t look like he planned to go inside.

“So Felicia can heal,” I said, “Should the rest of us go on the walls to help defend?”

Koenig shrugged. “If you want,” he said. “If you do, find Nadine to get clocked on. It's a gold piece per hour on the wall, plus anything you get from the monsters is yours to claim.”

“And that’s it? We’re free to go?”

“Until the Inquisitor decides to imprison you again,” Koenig said, suddenly more serious. “I don’t know what that’s about. It seems like you’re safe while this emergency is on, but after that, you’d have to ask him. Not that I recommend doing that!” he added hastily.

“Right. Oh, I noticed some griffins coming in late at night, did you know anything about that?”

“You could see that from your room? Well, that was the Chosen of Duit coming back early from their hunt. They’ve been closeted with the Baron all morning. Gives him someone else to rant at!”

“Well we’ll go find Nadine then,” I said.

“She should be near the river gate!” he told us and waved us off.

“Are we really going to man the walls?” Cloridan asked.

“Absent anything else? We can take a look at least,” I said. “Oh, first we need to head back to the house and get armour.”

“Just wondering if now would be a good time to… ah… bring that plan forward,” he said. “What with all the disruption.”

I grimaced. “Still don’t have a way to get her out of town. Maybe Isidre will be available later? And I still need 20,000 XP to get to Level Five.”

I’d actually wondered if our daggers would be of any use on a high wall during a siege, but it was fine. There was a lot more close-in fighting at the top of the wall than I’d expected. Once we’d checked in with Nadine and stepped on the outer wall, I got a notification.

Entering Massed Combat: Outbreak Defence Wave 2

Accumulated Experience: 22350

Experience awarded based on contribution at end of wave.

Contribution: 0.000%

“Whoa, that’s new,” I said. “Is that normal?”

“Yeah,” Cloridan said absently, his eyes distracted with his own notice. “That’s how the big battles work. You kill monsters, supply troops, or heal to increase your contribution, and you get a share of the award at the end. I hear that each level in [Leadership] is worth a full percentage point.”

“That’s… probably not right?” I said. “The math would get weird if there happened to be more than 100 ranks of Leadership in a battle.”

“I guess,” he said. “I’ll leave the maths to you.”

“Wait,” I said, struck by a sudden thought. “Most people don’t have [Calculate], right? Do they even know what the numbers mean?”

“They know bigger numbers are better,” Cloridan said. “Do we need to know more?”

I shook my head. “I guess not?” Why even show them then?

We moved on to the killing. As might be inferred from our casual conversation, it wasn’t exactly a frenetic maelstrom of combat up here. Instead of some World War Z-like tide of monsters coming over the wall, there were little knots of people, some of them looking over the wall, others engaged with a monster that had made it to the top.

We wandered over to take a look for ourselves. That was more like it. At the bottom of the wall, the monsters that couldn’t, or hadn’t managed the climb were franticly trying to get up. The fact that some of them could was pretty impressive, but they were slow doing it.

“This isn’t as… overwhelming as I’d expected,” I confessed to Cloridan.

“Towns wouldn’t exist if they couldn’t manage to fend off the occasional outbreak,” he said. “But wait until the third day of this before you judge how easy it is.”

“Three days of this?” I asked.

“It varies, the dungeon will keep pumping out monsters until it runs out of mana.” He scowled. “It's probably got a bit more than normal from not having to deal with delvers for the last few days.”

“So if the total time is three days, how many waves is it going to be?”

“Waves?” he asked.

“Yeah, the notice said we were in Wave 2.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, puzzled. “Normally it’s just one long fight. Maybe the first fight outside the walls was the first wave?”

“Huh,” I eloquently replied. “I guess it’s the XP that matters, not how it’s divided. Maybe it helps a bit since we weren’t in a position to contribute to the first wave. What about the monsters at the bottom?”

“Unless they look like breaching, they’ll wait until the dungeon stops before using the oil. Let’s head that way- they look a little thin over there.”

We did as he suggested, and it wasn’t long before we were waiting with two guards armed with long spears for an Ogre to make it to us. They looked askance at our weapons.

“Are you even going to get a chance to use those?” one of them asked.

I shrugged. “We’ll see? There are some other ways I can contribute. [Improved Blind]!” I cast, using words and gestures for once.

The Ogre didn’t like that. He brought up his hands to paw at his covered face… apparently forgetting that he was using them to haul himself up the wall. He fell with a mighty crash, crushing a few wolf-like creatures that were swarming below.

“That’s not going to kill him,” the guard sneered.

“Yeah, but he’s not climbing up, is he?” As we watched, the Ogre got up and started laying about all around him. “He seems mad,” I said with amusement. A knot of fighting developed below, as the smaller creatures took exception to being flailed at and stomped on. The blind Ogre seemed to have the upper hand until he walked into the wall and fell on his ass.

“Things seem under control here,” I said and moved on.

“You’re not going to get any kills that way,” Cloridan said, amused.

“Is that what’s important? I’ll surely get credit for taking out the small fry, and it takes pressure off the wall. Let’s blind a few more Ogres and see what it does for my [Contribution].”

Saying the word with intent was enough to pop up the notification again

Accumulated Experience: 23560

Experience awarded based on contribution at end of wave.

Contribution: 0.004%

Still, a long way to go, I thought.

It took two hours for me to work my contribution up to 0.1%. Not all of that was sending Ogres plummeting off of the wall, there were a few fights with smaller ogrelings that were much better at climbing, but much less dangerous. I could actually hold them off without wasting skill points. In practice, that meant I could fight mine until Cloridan killed his opponents with brutal efficiency, and then finished mine off.

“Let’s take a break,” I said. “You were right about pacing yourself.” Three days of this… It wasn’t hard exactly, but it certainly wasn’t fun.

“You still want to do this? We’re not getting much gold and all the corpses are at the bottom of the wall,” Cloridan said.

“The XP is piling up,” I replied. “After three days of this, there should be a decent amount to share out. If we can get our contribution percentage up more, we might see some gains. We should see if Nadine is putting together a roster, sign up for the less populated shifts.”

He shrugged. We signed out with Nadine and found that she was putting together a roster. We signed up for some shifts and then went to find the rest of our crew. Felicia had left the hospital, so we headed back and found her at home.

Over a much-needed meal, we caught ourselves up on what we’d been doing. Apparently, healing soldiers from the first wave counted as a contribution to the second wave - Kyle was the only one who didn’t have points.

“Should be plenty of time to catch up,” Cloridan said, unconcerned. “We signed up for night shifts since Kandis can light up the place.”

Kyle replied, but I didn’t pay attention to what he said. I was distracted by a fresh notification.

Outbreak Defence Wave 2 Completed

Accumulated Experience: 45730

Contribution: 0.103%

Awarded Experience: 47

Enter Wave 3? [Y]/[N]