“Well, that went well.”

Silver snorted. “Master of the understatement as usual.”

“I’m still not sure I follow what you did,” Michael admitted. He’d joined them on the tail end of their successful attempt, arriving just in time to make Cayden seem a tactical genius, without the repeated failures to temper expectations. “How did you get them to move into another hex out of turn order?

“By losing badly.” Cayden earned the dirty look from Silver with his own smug expression. “I totally missed it at the time, but thankfully Silver didn’t.”

“They have some sort of counter-attack or follow-up ability.” She explained. “Going to have to test if it is limited to a specific unit type, but when we lost the first fight they chased down our unit and wiped it out.”

“So you sent out bait…”

“And they chased it right into a trap. Then we walk the Fighting First, which is an awful name by the way, into the gap.”

“Clever.” Michael chuckled.

“If only I could take credit.” Cayden bemoaned. “Though it is opening up some very interesting new possibilities.”

“Such as?”

“Glad you asked.” The young man replied a certain glint in his eye speaking volumes about how much he’d been waiting for the opportunity to brag.

He took control of the War Frame, quickly zooming out from the encirclement they’d just completed to an overview of the remaining theatre of war. It stretched from Sune to Bastion, the Ryks a western border, while the mountains marked the border of the eastern frontier.

Toward the north of the display was what they knew of the enemy column, information gleaned from their Elan and player scouts. The picture was incomplete, with exact numbers, types and organization sometimes fairly precise, other times little more than a best guess. The army took up fifteen hexes in total, three across and five deep, and appeared to be composed primarily of infantry of various descriptions. Spearmen, swordsmen, skirmishers, and archers were dispersed throughout the formation in fairly similar proportions, leaving no spot on the column particularly stronger or weaker than any other.

Further to the south were Bastion’s defenders, a paltry army in comparison to the coming wave of stone soldiers. The majority were cinched tight around the warden cavalry, eager for the next turn when they would crush the life out of the entrapped force. Slightly further to the north and east, hidden in a forested area off to the side of the two armies was their mounted forces. They were small in number, only three hundred in total, too valuable to commit to an encirclement that might not have worked, but too weak to do significant damage on their own. Cayden had ordered them hidden well in advance of the enemy army, in hopes that the wardens might spread out their forces and allow for some manner of hit and run attacks. It was a hope that had so far proven rather vain.

“We’ve known for a while that the Wardens are carrying their siege engines with them,” Cayden explained, gesturing to the column. “And we’ve poked around the edges enough to know for certain that they aren’t on the outskirts. Shifty is out right now scouting back around Sune to see if they’re stupid and they left them trailing behind, but common sense says they’re on the inner three hexes where we can’t get at them.”

Cayden tapped the three dark hexes at the center of the Warden column for emphasis, a trio of blank callouts appearing above them to indicate their lack of information.

“Wrecking those would be the single biggest victory we can hope for.” Silver chimed in. “They still have a force strong enough to take bastion, even if we did, but it would vastly extend our survivability. Break those, and we are almost certain to last long enough for my death sickness to run its course.”

“Yeah, but there isn’t really a way for us to…” Michael started, only for the same idea to strike him as it had the other two. “Ah.”

“If the follow-up ability isn’t just limited to certain types of units, or if we can find a spot full of enemies that mostly have it, then we can ping them in the same way.” Silver reached out, dragging one of the displayed warden units into a nearby hex in a way that made the vulnerability blatant. “Our cavalry can hit and run, so we pull the enemy out of place, hit them with everything we can then retreat out of movement range. I doubt we’ll get them all unless it is literally nothing but siege engines in the middle, but we’ll still do a lot of damage in short order.”

“Honestly the ideal scenarios are probably more ridiculous than even that.” Cayden mused. “But if I had to take a guess it is probably limited to certain unit types, their movement speed or at the very least once per turn. As much as I get a laugh out of the idea of daisy chaining them halfway back to Islo by running away from them, I don’t think we’re that lucky.”

“We’ll have to test it, but discreetly. “Silver nodded. “I’d be shocked if Temujin doesn’t have the ability to order them not to, once he sees that we’re exploiting it.”

Cayden frowned. “You’re probably right. Hadn’t thought of that.”

“Feels too much like a game, doesn’t it?” She asked.

That made him wince, the complaint one she'd leveled in his direction more than once. In the moment he’d forgotten that every Elan soldier sent to bait the enemy army into a follow-up attack was probably going to be lost. That he’d so quickly fallen back into thinking of them as nothing more than units on a board was… distressing. "Yeah."

"Hey." She replied, her expression softening somewhat as she realized just how soft the spot she'd jabbed actually was. "You're not the only one who has made that mistake. Babel might as well be designed to make you forget."

"Well, the one bit of good news is that I'm a terrible perfectionist at games. If we're going to do this, we're going to do it right.“ Cayden let a smile slip back onto his features as he steadied his resolve. "So if we're going to do this, where do we start?”

A commensurate professional, Valserys did not like the bloodline families. The players. His orders to assist them were orders he followed well, and he had grown to have more than even grudging respect for some of them, Cayden and Silver in particular. But he never liked any of them, not really. They were too casual, too immature, or arrogant. In some cases, simply too stupid or rude, though thankfully this batch was better than most. Since the tower had reopened he had never met a player he liked.

Yet as he shoved a pitch-covered torch into the inner workings of a siege tower, Valserys had to admit, he was growing to admire their sheer brazen ingenuity.

It also made him wonder about himself in a way that he had never really considered.

Like most Elan, he knew the ‘lore’ of the outside world, the stories the players told themselves about the tower and its occupants. To hear their side of the story, the Elan were NPCs. Some believed they were entirely fictitious people, creatures of magic not all that dissimilar from monsters, that had simply sprung into being when the tower appeared in their world.

His kind rejected the accusation, of course. He had memories, he had a childhood, an adolescence. He remembered the first girl he’d kissed, the first person he’d killed, the first soldier under his command that he had lost. To suggest that they were somehow less real than the players was absurd. Insulting.

But that spark, that ingenuity, it nagged at him. Valserys was a veteran of more than two decades, yet some veritable children with no military experience had been the ones to notice the blatant flaw in the Warden tactics, as well as being the ones to realize how to exploit it? Some magical quirk of the War Frame, perhaps? Maybe it imparted some tactical genius into their heads? Unlikely, given some of their less tactical decisions and more obvious blunders.

“Agh!” Valserys shouted, his longsword raking down through the arm and torso of a Warden spearman who had foolishly decided to make an attempt on his life. The siege engines were so poorly defended it felt almost criminal. If they weren’t in the process of destroying nearly a third of the Warden’s capacity to storm bastion, he’d have sworn it was a trap.

Bah, he’d gotten distracted. Where was he? Their ingenuity. Right.

Maybe it was a matter of culture? Like many of his kind, Valserys had been intrigued by the supposed ‘outside world’. The Elan proved entirely unable to leave the way the players had entered, but the players were more than happy to import devices, media, art, food, and all manner of other oddities from their world. Their games in particular sometimes mapped eerily close to Babel’s own reality, despite most of them originating from before the re-opening of the tower.

It was that sort of game that Cayden and his friends were using as a guide for their war-making. Turn-Based Strategy, they called it. Valserys had tried a number of the games over the years, Heroes of Might and Magic, X-Com, Crusader Kings. Surely if there was some grand insight to be had within their media, he’d have gleaned some measure of it by now?

But what did that leave him with? What was the difference between players and themselves? Their class system?

That seemed like a fairly solid guess. It drastically improved every physical aspect of the players from the moment they entered the tower and allowed them to grow in strength by leaps and bounds in a way that no Elan could ever hope to match. Surely that could account for their tactical acumen.

But if so, why were so many of them so breathtakingly stupid?

No matter how he approached the question from the Player's perspective, Valserys could not find a satisfying answer. Which was all the more troublesome, because as much as he tried to bury the concept, there was a very simple explanation from the other end of the equation.

If the players were right, then he really was just a fiction, a Non-Player Character. Did he miss the flaw in the Warden's tactics because he of a lack of tactical skill, or because his mind had been shaped in such a way that he could never recognize it at all? If the point was to challenge the players, then it wouldn't do to have him solving the problem for them, now would it?

"You. I know you."

The unnaturally deep bass of a warden shout snapped Valserys out of his existential questioning, his eyes rapidly scanning the battlefield around him for the speaker. By now only a small handful of warden soldiers were still mobile, the cadre making a desperate and ultimately foolish last stand to defend siege weaponry that was probably already damaged beyond repair.

Instead, Valserys finally caught sight of his nemesis some few hundred feet away, pacing his mount back and forth along the hex line like a lion angrily scowling at prey on the other side of a fast-moving river.

Temujin.

Leaving the remaining destruction to his men, Valserys put heels to his mount. He quickly drew up alongside the same barrier, an unnatural shimmer in the air the only thing keeping the two men from trying to kill one another on the spot.

"You were the one who directed my captors within the keep," Temujin said, more fact than accusation.

"I was." Valserys narrowed his eyes. "You were in control of the officer even then?"

"I see through them as easily as through my own two eyes. It only takes an effort to project my voice, my actions." Temujin replied.

"That seems like an advantage you should not admit to so readily. Or do you think you'll somehow stop us from retreating?"

The Warden's head tilted slightly at the question and despite the flat tone, Valserys could swear he heard just the whisper of mirth behind the next words. "Scolding me about being too flippant while trying to trick me into revealing yet more. Clever."

"Not so clever if you see through me so plainly." Valserys tugged at the corner of his mustache with a gloved hand as he chose his next words. "You've shown no interest in diplomacy until now. Why speak to me at all."

"Because you are Elan. These bloodline cretins do not know the danger of the Liar King, they do not know, or do not care about our legends. You do." Temujin struck the barrier between them with the haft of his polearm, sending ripples of frustration racing across it. "Even with this crude tactic, you only delay the inevitable."

Valserys kept his face impassive as the Wardens. Temujin might be willing to give up information somewhat easily, but Valserys had no intention of revealing their win condition so readily.

"You will die regardless. To die with dignity, purpose, and honor is surely preferable."

"Such a tempting offer," Valserys said. "And what would you ask of me?"

"Tell your men to stand aside. If your masters will not allow that, then disorder them, allow us to overtake them and make their deaths swift."

A real person would have realized their mistake. They would have seen the way Valserys' face twisted when the word 'Masters' was uttered, and they would have stopped, backpedaled as quickly as they could.

Temujin doubled down.

"If your masters will not listen to me, then perhaps-"

"Enough," Valserys said through clenched teeth. "You speak of honor in the same breath you ask me to betray my men to death. You speak of purpose while calling me a slave in all but name. Did you really think I would accept such disgrace so readily? And for what, to be killed cleanly?"

"For a chance to do what is right."

Valserys shook his head and tugged his reins, turning back toward the destruction in the distance. "I'll take my chances."