“Hey, Fiona, I think we may have a problem,” I said as I looked at the remote viewing orb.

It wasn’t quite clear as we were still a ways off from the coast and the orb wasn’t designed to see that far away. What I had noticed was a haze of dark smoke. I may have missed it if I hadn’t been watching the orb out of boredom and saw a slightly thicker clump of smoke.

“What is it?” Fiona asked as she hurried into the room.

“Smoke, I’m going to cloak the fortress. Can you fly ahead and get an idea of what we are flying into?”

She looked worried about the possibility that the city and most likely Martin may be in trouble and nodded.

It didn’t take her long to fly off and return, being much faster than the fortress.

“City is mostly intact. It seems a few attacks made it through before the shield got raised. The smoke is coming from the walled-in farming area to the east. There seems to be an army camped out near the remains. They also appear to have mobile mana cannons and are occasionally firing onto the plateau and the city shield.”

“Fuck, if they have mana cannons I can only think of one group it could possibly be.”

“You think it’s the Guild?” Fiona asked.

“I hope so, otherwise we have another group that can raise an army and has the resources to get their hands on the cannons.”

“Well, it's not all bad news, I saw some return fire from the city. And it looked like scattered bodies on the plateau,” she added.

“Alright, I'll get closer to the city but with the shield up I can’t set the fortress down inside.”

“Really, I would have thought you would have built a back door for just that reason?”

“For weapons maybe but not the shield. I didn’t want the fortress or something else accidentally winding up in enemy hands that could bypass the protection. Besides if the shield is up, Martin should be fine, since he was the only one that could authorize it to be activated.”

“Why not use the fortress to assault the army?” she asked instead.

“A few reasons. I haven’t fully repaired the weapons and we don’t have enough people to operate them effectively, not that I think it would do us any good. If the army is still there even under the assault of the city I doubt adding a few cannons will discourage them. You might be able to get through the shield, but that’s only a guess on my part, and you aren’t going to like how you’re going to have to accomplish it.”

I was right she didn’t like my suggestion but she left anyway. She was getting anxious about not knowing if Martin was ok or not. I knew he probably was but this gave her a direction to focus her energy in.

The shield effectively covered the entirety of the city with a massive translucent dome that rippled in rainbow light as the beams of energy struck it. It covered the harbor as well but no shield could pass through solid objects so it stopped at the ground. While nothing could pass into the shield it acted much like Martin’s spell and allowed attacks to pass out from inside. This was the way all the shields I had come into contact with behaved.

This was why I built the teleportation scrambler that worked with the shield array. Otherwise, anyone could just bypass the shield and teleport inside. That left only the ground as the weak point and that was magically hardened with hidden runic arrays across the city. It would take someone of my Intelligence level or higher to break through those wards making me relatively certain they would hold up to most attacks.

What Fiona could do though, was pass through solid objects. She didn’t like to do that because she said it felt weird and she would need to pass through meters of stone to get through the wards but it was the only way to contact Martin and get him to lower the shield so I could land. At least I hoped she could get past the arrays, I wasn’t entirely sure it would work for her. If not we would have to rethink our plan or become visible but that would endanger the town. This plan with Fiona was safer and we could disable the shield at night when most of the attacks slowed down.

It took two full days of waiting before Fiona returned.

“I made it through, it wasn’t easy. Martin said he will lower the shield for five minutes at midnight tonight.”

I nodded, I had been watching the siege and even during the night the attacks only slowed, they never truly stopped. It was easy to see why as my teleportation detectors were going nuts. It seems they were cycling out troops to rest and bringing in fresh ones to continue charging the weapons. It wasn’t a sustainable position for Saint June.

We waited until the sun went down and a dark moonless night took its place. I thanked the fact that the sky was overcast, blocking even that waning moonlight. I watched and waited. A series of attacks flared against the shield and I saw it start to fade. Quickly I got into position and lowered the fortress onto the dock. The shield was already going back up before I set down. The enemy had also noticed and a flurry of attacks had come in to try and take advantage of the temporary weakness.

Even from the distance, I could hear the booms of the mana cannons as the energy impacted the wall of the city. The night lit up as fire was returned from our side.

Fiona was already out the door as I shut everything down. I hurried after her to find Martin and Ska. I’m sure they had one hell of a story to tell on why the Guild was attacking now.

We found Martin in the backup control center of all things. I found this fact worrying. Martin picked up on my unasked question as he glanced over. He motioned Fiona and me to follow as he moved to an empty room and let the technicians keep monitoring the cities defenses.

“I’m glad the two of you are back. I wish I could have greeted you with better news, but as you can see we are in a bit of a situation. Before you ask, Paul, the main control room was destroyed by saboteurs and Kurt.”

“Kurt?” I asked, my blood beginning to boil.

“Hold up,” Martin said, motioning for me to calm down, “He was partially under the influence of some magical drug the saboteurs slipped him but thorough questioning of our captives revealed it only worked on people that already had thoughts along those lines. In the end, I couldn’t reason with the guy, and time was critical. I told everyone else the saboteurs killed him.”

My rage slowly subsided at the news that Kurt was dead. Instead, I focused on these captives. Martin must have noticed my interest.

“We are holding them for now. We had hoped to use them as hostages but their worth seems to mean little to Lord Vik’t.”

“So it is the Guild?” I inquired.

Martin nodded, “It started two weeks back…”

He told me the story of the meeting and shortly after the spies showed up and started causing problems around town. That there had been four but two were killed while trying to capture them. The other two were cooperating reluctantly but their cooperation had saved the city from major damage. The attack had come only two days after the spies were captured. Martin had rushed to the backup command center to activate the shield just as the first attacks hit the city. He didn’t say how many were dead but I could tell by his drawn face that there were casualties from the attack.

“What about the bodies on the plateau?” I asked.

Martin snorted at that. “I went outside and waved the white flag, drew the cocky bastards close to the walls, and had our forces release a bit of revenge. We’ve been under siege since. I don’t think their leader was dumb enough to come personally as they are too well commanded.”

I lowered my voice, “you know the shield won’t last forever, I built it tough and it feeds off the spells that splash against it but eventually they will realize this and stop attacking until it runs out of power.”

Martin nodded gravely, “I had hoped you would return and help come up with a plan, or help drive them off.”

“I don’t think driving them off is gonna work. From what I was able to see they have mobile dome shields protecting their forces and they are rotating troops out each day. And I doubt their shields are any weaker than ours.”

Martin groaned tiredly at hearing this news.

“It’s not all gloom and doom, buddy. I might have an idea but I’m gonna need a few things to test it out.”

“If it saves the city, I’m all for it. What do ya need?”

I relayed a list of materials I would need to build the device I was picturing. I hadn’t ever built anything like it but the principle was sound. The biggest hurdle was getting mithril and someone to hand over a normal enchanted item.

The second part turned out to be the easiest as Martin handed me a bunch of enchanted weapons they had taken off the prisoners. There was also a limited supply of mithril gathered from hunting the elementals. I hoped it was enough.

I got to work laying out the prototype. The overall design was simple, the runes would slowly siphon off the energy used to empower enchanted items. The range was limited on the prototype to only a few feet. But that was fine.

It didn’t take long for me to carve the runes and the design. It was almost a reverse of what I had done with the slave collar Fiona had been saddled with. Back then I just overloaded it by preventing the capacitor – for lack of a better term – from discharging. It quickly caused the weak magical item to fail.

I had pondered using that same method here but I didn’t want to hurt anyone inside the city that might have enchanted items. With this method, the items would eventually recharge on their own when the field was turned off.

I set the finished block of runic script on the table and laid out the enchanted items Martin had given me, along with some of my old mana cannons. I arrayed them around the device and set them at a foot, five feet, and ten feet to test field strength. With that done I flipped the device on.

Almost immediately the weak mana hearts began to glow as they absorbed power from the items. I had to shut it off after only a minute as it hadn’t been designed to constantly absorb power. I quickly checked the items to see if anything changed.

The closest dagger no longer included the magical description it had held before. I didn’t know if it had broken or what. I moved onto the mana cannon next, finding the once fully charged mana heart had been completely drained of its charge.

So it acted differently on items that took external charge vs having an internal charge like the daggers or my runic staff. I did check my weapons as well and found them unaffected by the field. My runic mana laser wasn’t unaffected though, being drained similarly to the normally enchanted one. With a horrible thought, I checked my dimensional storage rings and found them unaffected by my device. I heaved a sigh of relief, as that could have ended very poorly for me if they had been affected. I still had no clue how the rings functioned as they were far more different than any other enchanted item I had ever seen.

My idea of rolling up with all our artillery and blasting them to bits after their items lost charge was also off the table.

The next row showed the enchanted item had a new status called depleted on it. The enchanted mana cannon was at half charge and my runic variant was at two-thirds of a charge. So there was a bit of a difference. I quickly checked the last row and found the items barely affected. The enchanted weapon was still functional and the mana cannon had only lost a tenth of its capacity.

I noted down all my findings and put the items away while I did some math.