Turpentine was a city in panic, now. From on high, Rich watched people of all races dart from their houses to carts, horses, camels, to whatever transportation options they had available, loading up goods and treasures and furniture and family members in a chaotic and uncoordinated mess.

He felt a twinge of guilt. The resistance could have reached out to the trade families that ran the city, could have coordinated an evacuation. But that would have run the risk of tipping off the Bharstool Warmers, and ruining the first strikes against the marauding guild. Or invited the more foolish of the trade families to try treachery, or cutting a bad deal with the Warmers.

And anyway, they had access to most of the same intelligence we did, Rich told himself. They knew their neighbors were hungry for blood. But they took peace for granted, kept making money when they should have been hiring armies and building up their defenses. And look where it got them. No, this is on their own heads.

That said, the greed of their leaders wasn't the fault of the commoners who were trying to flee for their lives, right now. Rich tilted away, ignored the few panicked shots from the archers on the walls, and aimed back toward the east.

He could buy them time to escape, at the very least. With that conviction, he messaged his party.

Rutger: The city's clear, just the usual chaos you'd expect.

VictorVector: If anyone retreated that way then they're laying low. Figure we got about half of the elites.

Rich nodded in grim satisfaction. Every one they killed was sure to respawn, but scattered and forced to deal with attacks from all sides, they'd been pushed away from the fallen bodies of their friends. The resistance had stripped what gear they could, hauled it off and out of play. The fallen Warmers would respawn with nothing to their name save the default underwear and maybe a soulbound item or two.

But it had come at a cost.

Rich had died twice more hunting down the remnants on the dunes. And several of the resistance's own elites had gone down as well. And not all of them could afford tokens, or were in a hurry to come back from their deaths. The problem with relying on volunteers and pitching freedom of choice as a prime tenet was that you had to give them autonomy, and accept that they would make their own decisions. And that not all of their decisions would benefit the guild.

The resistance had enough bodies in the field to retrieve their own fallen, and make sure their gear didn't get looted... mostly. But they still hadn't come out ahead on the deal, deathwise. The Bharstool Warmers had the large advantage that their own elites were over level twenty-five. That was the benefit of an official guild. The resistance wasn't an official guild, not yet. Their best players were capped at twenty-five. And some of their best had been knocked out of this fight for twenty-four hours or more.

LongTom had fallen this way, ganked by an Assassin. Vae had gone down leading a charge against a trio of smarter-than-average elites. Combined with the rest of the losses, they were out half of their top players and the main part of the battle hadn't even started yet.

That part was marching up the trade road right now. The Bharstool Warmers' NPC legions. Row upon row of footmen from the conquered Porcelain Kingdom of Doublechin, horse archers from Upper Derope, and the famed barbarians of Bharstool, who for some reason could all jump stupidly high and tended to wear as little as possible.

There were a lot of them; the army numbered somewhere in the thousands. And while they were weaker than most of the resistance, the power of numbers couldn't be denied. And Rich knew from experience that the real guild leaders would be among them, riding herd on the NPC's and dealing with unexpected problems.

And if Rich was still an unexpected problem by now, he could do something with that. But he had the sneaking suspicion this wasn't the case.

Rutger: They know about me, right? About us in general?

VictorVector: We don't have eyes on their official forum, but enough of their lower-ranked guys have broken opsec that we have a pretty good picture. You're made. There's people on their way here specifically for your head.

Rutger: Must be a Tuesday. Okay. Okay. I'll make it beautiful. See if I can't draw them off.

There was a pause, and Rich maneuvered through the night, swinging wide to the north, looking for the flank of the army. It took longer than he expected, they were spread out. Which was what you wanted to do when you were dealing with guerrilla ambushes.

VictorVector: Pat says go nuts, but save some oomph for after midnight. The urban fight is where we need to clean up.

Rutger: Yeah, I can go nuts.

Dropping from the starlit sky like a meteor of snowflake obsidian, he snapped his wings full open a few hundred feet above the front lines. Wind buffeted them, and he watched a few dozen people tumble and scatter at the unexpected blast.

“Burninate!”

Then he was flapping, strafing through them, back through the ranks, twisting his neck to get as many as he could.

It wasn't enough, he didn't think. The lines were too thin. And Rich pumped his wings to gain altitude as spells and arrows started to find him.

They're too spread out, he realized. I'll need to herd them together to be able to toast them efficiently.

If this had been a normal siege situation, he would have waited at a chokepoint and clogged it with charred corpses.

But Turpentine didn't have chokepoints, not until you got to the streets of the city themselves. The wastelands around it had always been enough of a defense against armies. It didn't even have continuous walls, instead relying on a few good vantage points around the edge of the city for archer posts.

The houses and structures of the city were built on and into spires of rock jutting out from the waste, remnants of a mountain that had been worn down in time. Some of the paths between them were narrow enough to be good chokepoints, but letting the entirety of the invading army reach those streets and avenues would be a swift road to loss. The resistance was preparing some nasty surprises for that stage of things, because it would inevitably happen.

Rich's job was to make sure that the oncoming forces didn't hit the city perimeter all at once, or intact.

He wasn't alone in this. VictorVector's scouts and the guerillas and shock troops the resistance had left were hard at work as well. But with the enemy as spread out as they were, then there wasn't much hope of support. The best they could do was stay clear of each other to avoid friendly fire and make as much of an impact as possible.

Let's see... the mesa is to the north, and the old camp is east of it, so it should be on the right... yeah, there's the line. Rich turned, giving his assigned border a wide arc, and angling toward a troop of horse archers. They did the traditional steppe battle response; they fired arrows and rode away. The idea was that he would follow them, and they would keep stopping, firing arrows, then retreating when he got close. It was pretty much kiting, even if they didn't call it that.

The arrows pinged off his hide, doing a point or two of damage, and he ignored them. They were good riders with fast horses, but the goal wasn't to catch them, just force them closer to the infantry.

Once he was satisfied that they'd strayed far enough south, he shook arrows out of his scales and headed in a curving arc, aiming southward.

The infantry was marching in squares, twenty to a block. They scattered and went to ground as he went by, but he used his keen sight and view from above to count, rather than engaging them. And after seeing what he was dealing with, he had a plan.

Folding his wings he plummeted toward the center of one of the southernmost squares, ignoring their screams as he fell like a meteor.

And the second before he struck, he muttered. “Burrower.”

Your Burrower skill is now level 20!

It was still uncomfortable, even through his Earth Resistance. He could tell that he'd have one hell of a bruise later, if for some reason he didn't heal it up. But the night was young and if he got through it without a death the bad guys were slacking. So it was a moot point, and he brushed it away like the gooey remnants of the men who hadn't gotten out from under him in time, and focused on tearing through the sand and stone to his left.

And instead of shoving it behind him, like he normally would, Rich focused on tossing it skyward, up and through the surface. He moved inexorably, at the pace a man could normally walk, and he left in his wake a great trench, perhaps twenty feet across.

“Greater Healing,” he muttered as he went, using a moment of calm to heal. The skill up he got from that told him he'd been lower than he thought.

It took them perhaps ten or fifteen minutes to figure out what he was doing, then his ears caught the vibration of charging feet, and the sound of spears jabbing into the sand. He snorted, blowing dust from his nostrils, then kicked sand and rocks up to the right side, and enjoyed hearing the screams and sounds of retreating boots. With his strength behind it, the grit and gravel of the hardpan probably hit like shrapnel from a grenade.

You have unlocked the Throwing Skill!

Your Throwing skill is now level 2!

Your Throwing skill is now level 3!

You have unlocked the Archer job!

You cannot become an Archer at this time. Seek out your guild to change jobs!

That was an unexpected gain. But Rich didn't expect to explore that job. The image of Rotgoriel wearing a Robin Hood style pointy hat came to him and he snorted, regretted it as he coughed out crushed stone for a moment.

Then the air around him turned hot, and the night lit up as flying sand turned to falling slag.

One of the heavy hitters had found him.

He burst up from the growing pool of liquid glass, sending an orange spray flying as he emerged, and saw that he'd been wrong.

There were two of them, sitting on flying carpets. One he recognized: Charmandy the Cindermancer, and she was still level thirty-one. But he second was a stranger, whose glowing name proclaimed him to be Elfwaygo, a level thirty-five Cindermancere. He had pointy ears and hair so long it reached his folded knees, and a v-necked shirt that showed ludicrous amounts of chest hair. And worst of all, he wore a coppery mask over his face, polished so much that the flames reflected in it.

That was all that Rich had time to notice before he fled, and both of them oriented to face him, then flew afterward, hurling gout after gout of fire after his retreating form.

You have resisted Elfwaygo's Curse of Combustion!

You have resisted Elfwaygo's Curse of Combustion!

You have resisted Elfwaygo's Curse of Combustion!

CON+1

Rich gaped at that, and paid for his astonishment by catching a fireball right on his ass. The force spun him, and he used the chance to dive low and twist. It had been a long, long time since he'd seen a constitution gain that wasn't tied to his jobs. It drummed in the fact that these two were dangerous; high-leveled attributes only rose when you accumulated a ton of experience. And only highly dangerous events and encounters could give the major chunks of experience needed to advance so far so quickly.

If he stopped and tried to fight, he'd die. It was that simple. So instead he fled east, trying to draw them away from the front lines, knowing that this could only end one way. And it did, a few minutes later.

ElFwaygo has Cursed you with Combustion!

You are more susceptible to fire-based attacks and conditions!

Rich burned every last bit of sanity healing himself, dragging out the horrible immolation that followed, as they killed him. And he was very, very thankful that he was piloting the body, and not Rotgoriel. The pain would have been unbelievable to his dragon friend.

But even as his eyes slowly boiled and the life left him, he watched EllFwaygo and Charmandy go through four sets of potions, replenishing what they'd spent to toast him. And he smiled, even as everything went black.

YOU HAVE DIED FROM

PK MURDER: SLAIN BY ELFWAYGO AND CHARMANDY!

Three more tokens went into the void, and Rich respawned, selecting “The Lonely Tower of Turpentine,” as his place of rebirth. He materialized to the site of countless candles, and nervous, white eyes in the shadows, shapes with glowing and familiar names above their heads.

“Chesty,” he rumbled.

“Bulldog,” someone whispered back, and the tension eased as the guards went back to watching out of the windows. Sign and countersign properly given, no infiltrators here.

The Lonely Tower creaked as he moved, bricks crumbling and dust falling to the next floor down as he shifted his bulk. The resistance had purchased this ruin from the city a few months ago. It was on the west side, and rumored to be haunted. A few fake ghosts later, the resistance had spooked the locals away enough that it made a good supply drop and rally point.

Time was short, so Rotgoriel got to the stable part of the tower, and launched himself out of the shattered ceiling. There was no point in hiding his comings and goings here, not now with an army on the doorstep. And he spoke as he went, whispering as quietly as he could.

Rutger: They've got two heavy hitters on flying carpets. Cindermancers.

VictorVector: We've seen them. Big, flashy, chasing your ass east, right?

Rutger: That's them. Got anything that can handle the carpets?

VictorVector: I'm guessing they're fireproofed, so burning them from afar wouldn't do any good. We could disrupt the rune symbols on there, but that would take getting close. And close-ranged damage is more or less what they do.

Rutger: All right. I'll try to keep them in my turf, and see if I can wear them down.

He headed back to his sector, keeping an eye to the east as he went. No sign of the carpets by the time the bulk of the troops were in view...

...and just as he'd hoped, they were moving to avoid crossing the trench he'd dug in the sand.

It wasn't much of a chokepoint, but it was the best he could do, given the odds and timetable. So once more he roared and dove from above, letting his fires loose upon the poor damned NPC's who were stuck fighting for their oppressors.

This was very much not what he wanted. This was everything Project Utopia was against.

But if too many of them got to the city at the same time, then things wouldn't go well for the innocent NPC's who were still there.

So Rich shoved it out of his mind, and got to work.

He caused some damage before they scattered again, and despite prioritizing them, most of the horse archers still got away. But the infantry were set back, scattered and regrouping. Rich cast the horse archers a contemplative look...

...then snarled as words flickered in front of his face again.

You have resisted Elfwaygo's Curse of Combustion!

He tried to lure them off again, but they'd gotten wise to the trick. Growling under his breath, he healed up while he was out of their range, threw on every buff he had, and did his damnedest to catch Elfwaygo.

It did not go well.

YOU HAVE DIED FROM

PK MURDER: SLAIN BY ELFWAYGO AND CHARMANDY!

Rich hung there in deathchat for a while, collecting his thoughts and calming his temper. I'm getting tired, he realized. Making mistakes. Killing them isn't the goal. The overall plan is working out.

Still, this battle was about more than just meeting the bare minimum goal. The more they did, the flashier the resistance's part in this battle, then the more leverage they would have to find allies and favor in Kai-Tan. The resistance would lose here, that was a given. Time and numbers were against them, there was no scenario where holding Turpentine would lead to a good outcome. But it had to look like a hard-fought loss, that damaged the Bharstool Warmers far more than the resistance.

To that end, Rich ruminated, spending precious seconds that turned into minutes, as he beat down his own weariness and planned out the next few steps.

And after he'd respawned, he knew just how to kick things off. Hoping that she hadn't already gone to bed, he sent the first message of many.

Message to: Bittybop

>>I need your help on the Eastern Front. Have you ever flown on a dragon's back before?