Verist was lethargically skimming the papers Shade had brought her from the village in the mountains. What had started as a methodical and careful examination had devolved to a point of boredom after the witch realized the kobold had gleaned all the important information already. The village was a setup, a fake town designed to house spies of the Avantian kingdom in case of the exact events they were planning. To have been so readily outsmarted irked her. She would have teleported right to the king's throne and impaled him with an icicle right then if it weren't for the walls of Ardmach preventing such movement. Another hurdle she had to circumvent for the rebellion.

That brought a smile to her face and eased her soul through the rest of her monotonous paper reading. Without her, the rebellion lacked brains. Merdon had some tactical knowledge, but Grot outshined him on the battlefield any day. Ultimately, what the knight brought to the table was a dose of charisma, a poster boy, the face, and little more beyond that. She was the one making all the plans, coming up with ideas, doing the heavy lifting with her magical might that surpassed any physical strength either group could muster. In her absence, the whole fight would collapse in on itself. Yes, she was the cornerstone, the linchpin of the entire operation. Verist giggled, finishing the last page, and imagining the end of the war.

Grot and Merdon would be praised, of course as the armored heroes on the frontline they would be first, but she would have to be up there with them. The kobolds would speak of her with respect, awe, infatuation. She grinned and turned back to her own work. Those papers were useless to them, and a waste of her valuable time. The kobolds wouldn't venerate a slouch of a witch that wasted time on fruitless endeavors. No, they would love her as their own when she found their enemies and brought the battle to their doorstep. She lamented the wasted years helping them one by one now. Merdon had shown her the light. Their memories were important, the kobolds were much better with individuality. They all had such adorable little quirks. The way Thickhide tried to emulate a human stance despite his tail being in the way, or the way Shade rode on the back of her orcish mate, or how that one cook in the kitchen slept in a cupboard rather than a bed. Verist bit back another laugh as she remembered the day she saw that.

The witch shook her head and refocused, it wasn't time to reminisce just yet. That would come when the kingdom had fallen to her planning and the orc's armies. Which, she reminded herself, was also her idea, if a very pedestrian one any peasant might have come up with. For the time being, her mind was to be put to more laborious tasks. She had to find the Eyes' training grounds before the rebellion could really start. Some thought of it was a war, and rightly so given the orc invasion they were planning, but, at its core, they were going to turn Avantians against their own government. At least, that was what she planned, and for that plan to work she needed more dirt.

“Where could you be?” Verist murmured to herself as she looked at a map of Avant. She'd been given some ideas on where to look outside of Ardmach, but nothing had aroused her suspicions. Everywhere that might have been a possibility she checked with her scrying orb turned out to be nothing special. She even sat and watched many of the locations for hours with no progress. The whole task had begun to wear on her and she was looking forward to taking a break to enchant the shield Merdon was supposed to be bringing in. However little a minuscule task like that would be a break for. A few minutes, no more than a half-hour.

Rather than Merdon, however, it was Grot who roughly pushed her door in and stepped inside. “We're back,” he announced obviously. “Merdon's got some kinda orcish shield all right.”

“Well, get it up to me,” Verist replied with the patience of a wasp.

“He's testing if it's really invulnerable right now,” Grot informed her. “He'll be a minute.” Verist huffed and crossed her arms while Grot looked at her barren desk. “Anything in those papers?”

“Nothing useful,” she told him. “I've been searching for the Eyes' training ground. No luck there either.”

Grot scoffed. “You'd have thought something like that would have been mentioned in a spy town.”

“If they were idiots. A spy would know better than to mention where their base was,” Verist pointed out.

“Do we have any leads?” he asked her, noticing she only had a crystal ball in front of her.

“A few,” the witch replied with measured cadence. “I have a man in Ardmach that gives me good intelligence once in a blue moon. The Eyes don't train within the city walls. They have a special place out in the middle of nowhere.”

“Someplace they can see unauthorized movement coming from a mile away,” Shade commented, unseen on Grot's back.

“Yes,” Verist agreed with a smile. “It also helps them maintain whatever cover they have. A farm, perhaps, or a...”

The witch stopped and threw herself to the ground, her hands wildly shuffling the papers she had just cast aside. Her palms were flat on them and she moved any page with a full motion of her arm as she searched for something. Shade peeked out over Grot's shoulder with a frown, an image mirrored on the orc's face as they watched her frantic chase. When she finally came up with a page in her hand, Grot said nothing. He waited for her to figure out whatever it was had sent her into a frenzy. Her hair seemed to be raised now, reminding the orc of a cat in some ways. Something had raised the witch's dander.

“New recruits are coming in from the manor today,” Verist read, word for word. “I had thought that meant the town's own building, but they would have referred to that as a hall, yes?”

Grot shrugged. “What's it matter what they called it?”

Verist sighed and shook her head. “It matters because there are very few manors outside of cities.”

Shade once more chimed in, “With the chances of bandits and monsters attacks around Avant, and the way humans like to bunch up, I would imagine so.” Again, Grot shrugged in indifference.

“This narrows my search down,” Verist told him outright. “Instead of keeping tabs on every empty field in the nation, I can watch the few manors that sit outside of towns and cities for suspicious activity.”

“That's all we got from those pages?” the orc asked. “Was really hoping for more.”

“As was I,” Verist admitted as she looked at the few in her hands. “It would have been much more helpful to find further incriminating evidence against the king, but a single village of spies and a plot to assault another, without proof of that assault, is very inconsequential at best.”

“It seems damning to me,” Grot told her, his lips tight in a sneer. “A coward's trick, killing his own to blame on the enemy.”

“But an effective one,” Shade told him. “If we're looking for more evidence on that plan, why not go look for it?”

Verist sat the pages down and thought about it. A small hum escaped her lips as she considered the idea of sending them back out. “You could look at the village,” she murmured, “See if any of the king's men were lingering around.” That could turn her needle in a haystack into a pincushion.

“Not me,” Grot told her. “The assault on the village was one thing, but recon?” That wasn't his strong suit.

Shade jumped off Grot's back with a backflip and told him, “You, no, but the rest of us would blend in well enough.”

Verist grinned and said, “I will go as well.” Her statement caused the two non-humans to look at each other with concern. The witch told them, “As good as you and Merdon may be at searching for things, this little paper trail idea is mine. If there's anything to be found, I will be the one to suss it out.”

Grot turned around and paced for a few moments. His hands flexing in small amounts while he considered the witch's words. “You're sayin' you're better suited to find this stuff than the rest of us?” he said in his own time.

She nodded in response. “That's no offense on you two, especially you,” Verist said to Shade, “but, it's only right I get my hands dirty as well, so to speak.”

Shade's face lit up with understanding. “She's looking to prove herself, verakt,” the assassin told Grot. “We have gone to the field many times while she remained safe in the tower.”

That wasn't quite what Verist meant, but the witch nodded in acceptance of the notion. It seemed much nobler than her desire to not have the evidence that would turn the tides of the invasion into an inward civil war be heralded by any hands other than her own. She needed to be the one that found those documents, and she knew they existed. Unless the cunning assassins were so blindly loyal they kept nothing worth considering blackmail, which would be incredibly un-assassin of them. Given what she had heard of this head assassin from Merdon as well, keeping blackmail on the king seemed right up his alley.

“It's settled,” Verist said, standing up. “When I've finished adding to Merdon's new shield, he, the kobolds, and myself will set out to investigate the area surrounding the sacrificial village. With any luck, we might find the soldiers that were intended to assault the village themselves.”

Shade smirked at that idea. “We could get them to confess their intent directly,” she gathered. That would be much better than some papers.

Moments later, Merdon walked in, trailed by Sarel. The human sat the shield down on a table and sighed. “I took every tool I have to this thing and nothing scratched it,” he confirmed for the rest of them.

Verist, ignoring the burn mark on the knight's face, walked over and shook her head. “I could have told you what it was enchanted with by looking at it,” she bragged. “Your test was pointless and a waste of time. Get your things together, Merdon, we have an investigation to conduct elsewhere.”

The knight blinked and looked at Grot and Shade for an explanation. The dark-skinned orc walked over and put his arm on Merdon's shouldering, leading him out of the room while Verist got to work on the enchantment. Merdon struggled briefly, still confused, but inevitably went along with the orc's pull. Not that he had the strength to break away from the orc to begin with. His resistance was a token effort at best.

Their preparations didn't take nearly as long as Verist's magical work, but when she emerged from the top of the tower and gave Merdon his new shield, it was notably changed. The shine was brighter, seeming to flux every so often, and its inherently orcish design stood out from his Avantian steel almost as much as that glow it had. Grot, in particular, admired it with a smile. In an uncharacteristic moment of subdued discussion, he explained the craftsmanship and design of the shield. Many parts were intended to be form over function, but thanks to the enchantment it didn't need much more than that. It was the ultimate form of orcish stubbornness. Defying even natural order with brutish strength.

“At its core, it's still orcish steel,” he told Merdon, “but if the magic holds the way it's supposed to there's nothing that can break it, regardless of how thin it seems.”

The knight hefted it a little and remarked, “It does seem lighter than my old one.” Not by much, but it was noticeable. Perhaps a pound of difference. More importantly was the top, which had some spike design. The peak and corners were raised, pointed. Given an indestructible nature, he could imagine what those were for.

“Even in defense an orc is ready to attack, though we haven't used designs like that in a few hundred years,” Grot mentioned. “We've largely copied Avant's military in the hopes of evening out the advantages they have.”

Merdon nodded, but their talk was cut short by Verist, who pushed herself between them. “Yes, yes,” she said rapidly, “A very interesting history, but the longer we wait the further these soldiers could be getting from our grasp.”

“I hate to agree,” Grot said with a scowl, “but she's right. We can discuss the evolution of warfare later.” And considering who was talking, the odds were high they would discuss that later.

Verist barely waited for the others to assemble before casting the spell to send them off. In the blink of an eye, they were standing just a couple rolling hills away from a farming village on the edge of Avant. Merdon braced himself, bent over, hands on his knees, as his eyes swam in his skull like fish in a pond, just to keep his stomach from turning itself inside out. Shade was relatively unfazed and was looking over at the village, blocking the sun by putting a hand over her brow. Thickhide, who had insisted on joining after hearing about Verist leaving the tower, looked the worse of them all, with Skyeyes patting his back and looking with concern as the green-scaled kobold seemed to turn an altogether different sort of green.

Sarel, after recovering from her own queasiness, questioned if they even knew where to look for these soldiers. Luckily, Shade had some ideas just from looking around. She pointed to a treeline that was about half again the distance from the village to their backs, as well as another set of hills to the side they couldn't see over. Either would provide decent cover for a squad of knights disguised as travelers. At least long enough for them to set up their assault and ease the villagers' alertness down to a point their defenses were lacking.

“We'll split up then,” Verist suggested. “I will go with Shade and Thickhide.” The green kobold perked up at hearing his name. “That way our forces are equally distributed.”

The assassin shrugged. “Would be nice if we had some healing too, but I guess getting hit would be like admitting defeat.”

“Indeed,” Verist said with a smile. “Put your faith in me, dear kobold. I may be able to burn down a city with a gaze, but I can protect one just as well.”

Merdon sighed and started pulling out his armor. “Be ready for anything,” he told the armored kobold. “We'll take the forest.” They had more experience with less cover.

Verist shrugged, indifferent to what location she traveled to. “The odds we find anyone so close by still are slim. We want trails we can follow,” she told him. “If we happen to be fortuitous enough someone is nearby, try not to slaughter them.”

“No promises,” Merdon mumbled as Sarel helped with his armor.

The witch rolled her eyes and set out towards the hillside with a bounce in her step. She could feel the two kobolds following her. This was her chance. Her skin formed goosebumps at the idea, at the simple possibility of getting to show off. They were certainly impressed with her magic so far, they had to be. She had moved an entire tower halfway across the globe! Now, however, they would see her in action, outside of her confined element. Stories, legends, would be told of her exploits. And she might help pen a few of those herself.

Verist had taken the lead by a large margin, leaving Shade covering their rear, and Thickhide hustling to keep up with the witch. After the jangling of his armor began to wear on her last nerve, she turned about and looked at him with a frown. The kobold just kept on moving, breathing harder than normal until he was in front of her by a few feet. She watched him, her frown turning into curiosity as he bypassed her. Once he had the lead, however, he stopped and turned back to wait for her, with Shade also stopping when she had caught up.

The boy clacked his claws together and said, “I think I should take the lead. I'm, uh, better defended with this armor.”

Verist covered her mouth with a hand to hide her smile. It was too cute, too precious. There were very few things she couldn't deflect or shield herself against with magic.

“Very well,” she said, dropping her hand and keeping a straight face. “Lead on then, sir knight.” Her chest filled with pride as the green kobold's eyes lit up and he started marching towards the top of the hill. She had a kobold trying to protect her the same way Merdon did. The witch used every drop of self-restraint to keep her pace casual to follow him. She wanted to break out into a run, to shout, she felt like a schoolgirl again. Her plan was bearing fruit already.