***** Guildmaster’s POV, 2:00 PM *****

Well, this isn’t what I’d expected to be doing with my day, but it is a welcome alternative to worrying about what happened to The Prince. Waiting for Broohn and The Prince to get here with the prisoners might be a little boring, but I’m fine with that.

Normally I wouldn’t be so concerned for The Prince’s safety, he is A-ranked after all, he can take care of himself. However, this assassination attempt came far closer to killing him than anything has in quite some time, and we cannot afford to lose him right now. His presence and support are two of the key factors that have held this country together.

In the hours since I’d gotten a call from Broohn and The Prince about bringing him home I’d rounded up three squads of the Royal Guard, plus Anderson’s as of yet unnamed group of adventurers, before bringing them out to the remotest corner of Fisher’s Brush Island. I’d told Broohn and The Prince to meet us here because it was roughly halfway from the edge of the Rain-Soaked Forest to The Capitol, and only half of the island was inhabited. This is because the other half of the island, which is the half we’re on, is mostly sand dunes which have a bad habit of eating houses and other non-living things. The locals tended to avoid this place for fear that the dunes would eat them even though nobody had ever actually been eaten by the dunes.

There is a surprisingly large number of people who are thriving amongst the brush that covers the other half of the island, which protects them from the sand dunes simply because the brush itself is alive.

“Guildmaster! We’ve got company!” called Shelvin, who was on sentry duty because of his superior elven eyesight. We had established a perimeter on top of the largest sand dune with the second largest sand dune about 500 meters to our east. Shelvin was pointing to the top of the other dune where two squads of the local militia, about 50 men total, were cresting the top of the dune with four war golems marching abreast between the squads.

War golems are 3-meter-tall vaguely humanoid basalt or granite constructs that are barely capable of walking on their own. I’m rather impressed that their controller managed to get them out here with all of this sand everywhere, let alone to the top of a sand dune.

What is going on here? I asked myself.

First, the militia wasn’t supposed to have war golems. Not only are they hard to maintain, but you could also hire, train, equip and deploy a battalion of cavalry for a month for less than the cost of one of those golems. Not to mention they’re also very stupid and hard to control. So much so in fact, that The Crown had stopped using them altogether because of the number of times they had ended up shooting our own troops instead of the enemy.

That in itself is a reason I was concerned about the militia.

However, the main thing that was bothering me was far simpler than that: why are they out here?

That was a question that had several possible answers, almost none of them good.

The entire formation stopped just past the crest of the other dune and the commander started to come forward on foot with a parley flag, which made the alarm bells in my head get louder. Since he is an officer in the militia he shouldn’t need a parley flag to come talk to us. Then again, he did bring some war golems with him. Maybe he’s just making sure that we don’t shoot him before he can explain himself. Better safe than sorry after all.

He paused when a man in non-descript mage robes, presumably the golem controller based on the stone gauntlets and helmet, shouted something at him.

Being more than a bit concerned, as well as rather curious, I reached out with my magic and channeled the commander’s response to my ears.

“I told you before Finnegan, things have been rather fishy around here lately and I am here to try and figure out what is going on. I am NOT here to attack them, I’m here to–”

“Attack mode activated,” chorused the golems in their oddly flat voices as they started to raise their arms into attack position, which is straight out in front of them. Once they got there, the golems would shoot two homing disintegration spell bolts every second. For most people, even a single hit could be lethal.

The commander’s reaction was to dive off of his horse and tackle the controller out of the way so they (hopefully) didn’t get hit by the golems.

Meanwhile, I yelled “Rogue golems!” at The Royal Guardsmen. Trusting that they knew how to defend themselves, I sprinted for the golems as fast as I could, drawing my rapiers along the way. I kept my eyes firmly fixed on the golems so that I could blast pillars of sand out of the ground to block the golem’s spell-bolts if they tried to shoot me.

Good thing that I did too, otherwise I never would have seen Broohn swooping down out of the sky behind them in time.

I swerved to the left to get out of his way and then slowed down dramatically to see what would be left of the golems after Broohn’s attack, or even if there would be anything left. He is a dragon after all.

There wasn’t much left afterward.

Broohn’s method for dealing with the golems was to land on the golems feet-first, with one golem under each foot, then ride them down the front of the sand dune like they were skis. They may weigh almost 600 pounds each and be enchanted to resist being knocked over, but they just got hit by over a hundred tons of dragon falling out of the sky. They had absolutely no chance of staying on their feet under that kind of impact, let alone remaining combat-capable.

“Well, that was fun!” said Broohn once he slid to a stop. He was wearing a saddle and some sort of harness with what looked to be prisoners strapped to it.

“A little more warning before you just drop out of the sky would be *cough* nice,” said The Prince from Broohn’s back.

“I knew I shouldn’t have brought those golems,” said the commander to no one in particular just barely loud enough for me to hear him.

“Oh, sorry. There was no time for that,” Broohn apologized to The Prince.

“Touché,” replied The Prince.

“Better yet, I got some new enchantments to examine!” exclaimed Broohn, sounding like a child who just got a new toy.

“Enchanters,” sighed The Prince before he started looking around. As soon as he noticed me, The Prince climbed out of the saddle, jumped down off of Broohn’s back and started running in my direction.

“Guildmaster Mary!” he shouted. “Boy am I glad to see you!”

“Not as much as I am to see you!” I replied as I ran over and wrapped him up in a hug. “It’s not every day that a group of assassins manages to hurt you, let alone almost kill you! Do you have any idea how much of a mess you would have left with for your mother and me?”

“Yes, I do,” he winced. “I promise to do my best to not let that happen again. I prefer my body to be functional, thank you very much.”

Once we finally let go of each other, I looked him in the eye and said, “I should have said this long ago, but thank you for being the brother that I never had.”

“You’re welcome, sister of my heart.”

We stood there in silence for a moment simply enjoying the fact that we were both alive, the only interruption was Broohn’s muttering as he examined the golems.

“Ooh! That’s a very very nice rapid-fire circuit. I’ll have to remember that one…”

“What exactly happened here?” The Prince asked after a moment, “Do you have any idea why the golems attacked?”

So I told him what the militia commander had said just before they attacked, and then he snorted. “Have the war golems gotten stupider since we stopped using them?”

“Maybe?” I shrugged.

At this point, the commander walked over to us and saluted. “1st Lieutenant Mark Hilarion, commander of the local militia platoon, reporting.”

“Greetings commander,” saluted The Prince, before skipping straight to the point. “What sort of fishy business led to you showing up here with four war golems and all of your troops?”

“Your Highness, it all started about two weeks back when a particularly large group of pirates attacked us and destroyed every deep-sea vessel we had here on the island. We’ve already started constructing another one to go find some help, but building a boat takes time, especially if you’re doing it right. Having to use brushwood doesn’t help, nor does having half of your boat builders incapacitated because of the pirates.”

We both winced in sympathy while the Lieutenant paused to collect his thoughts.

“Huh. Are these supposed to be the control circuits? I certainly hope not. They’re so pathetic...” muttered Broohn in the background.

Shrugging, the commander carried on. “So we used the communication crystal node to try and call for help from the governor and the capital, but it never got through. The only outside contact we had was when that same group of pirates came back to our island, except this time they were driven ashore during a storm hard enough that their ship ended up 50 meters inland from the sea. Whatever the pirates did to try and rescue their ship must have severely annoyed the sand dunes because when we came out here to check on things after the storm, there wasn’t much left. All we found was a mast sticking straight up out of the sand, the war golems, and a bunch of pirates who had been asphyxiated with sand.”

“Wait, so you’re saying that the pirates somehow got their hands on some war golems?” asked The Prince.

“Yes, Your Highness. I think they also had some way of messing with the communication crystal network.”

“That’s a really big problem. If some pirates can get their hands on something like that, then most of the separatists can get their hands on it as well. We can’t rework the system, that’s far too expensive. What can we do?”

“Hmm. I have an idea,” said Broohn. “If you give me a couple of weeks to get set up, I can sell y’all enough smart wrist bags to replace your communication system. Since you’ll no doubt be buying in bulk, I can sell them for $40 a piece. I don’t know what that would be in the local currency, but-“

Congratulations! You assisted in the discovery of currency conversion! As a reward, you get a free currency conversion table!

Currency Conversion Table

Copper

$0.50

Silver

$5.00

Gold

$50.00

Platinum

$500.00

Adamantine

$5000.00

“What just happened?” asked Lieutenant Hilarion.

“I don’t know, but it makes things a lot easier for me,” replied Broohn. “Going by this table, that means that I’d be able to sell you some smart wrist bags for 8 silver apiece if all you want is the bare minimum.”

“So what sort of price range do these things come in?” I asked.

“Well, the ones that most people back home bought were somewhere around four or five gold. If I hadn’t built it myself, my personal one would cost somewhere around six or seven adamantine.”

“Alright. I’ll talk to my mother about that when I get home, then we'll probably give you a call sometime in the next few days,” replied The Prince. “For now, let’s get this show on the road. We need to get these people some real aid and make sure those pirates didn’t have any friends around here.”

“Ooh! Can I help you hunt for the pirates?” asked Broohn. “I like pirate hunting!”

The Prince gave a predatory grin in response. “Absolutely.”

I almost felt pity for the pirates.

Almost.