As daytime ended and the two hours of freedom began for both sides, the old masters, those who had long since been brought low by their former chattel, refused to fight. Each night had been the same as the last, with both sides duking it out, with the former slaves always coming out on top. Despite facing crushing defeat after crushing defeat, their bodies broken, battered, crippled, mangled, and more, the former masters never once gave up the fight. Their arrogance, their hubris, their pride, whatever you wanted to call it gave them all the fuel they needed to keep attempting to make some sort of a comeback, to secure just a single victory in the endless mockery that was the nightly war.

Tonight, however, they refused to so much as acknowledge their former slaves. Of course, their attitudes these days had shifted radically. Previously they had put everything into these nightly battles, but ever since that weirdo arrived, they had taken a different course. Nightly battles that had happened for centuries were replaced with minor ones that always saw them defeated, but it was obvious that they were doing something else with the bulk of their forces. What that ‘something’ was remained to be seen, but the plotters and schemers that made up those aberrant bastards obviously were planning something.

And then came that one fateful day when they, the former slaves, suffered a loss that they had not experienced in ages. Day after day, night after night, they emerged with not a single one of them suffering a death, let alone a crippling injury. And yet that weirdo that fell into this hell that they were the jailors of managed to kill one of their own. Of course, even mortal injury was far from permanent here, to say nothing of the fact that death was also not forever, but the sheer level of mockery that had been put on display ruffled a fair few jimmies that day.

Destruction of property was bad enough, but killing one of their own… That had not happened since the masters were brought low! As if that wasn’t bad enough, that weirdo gradually mapped out all of the pathways through the entire city, forming a mass of maps. It was clear that, unlike so many who found their way here before him, he was making a concerted and purposeful effort to get out, even after enough time had passed that he should have gone absolutely batshit insane.

And as if all of that wasn’t worrying enough, there was that fucking ship. When that time of night arrived just two days after the massive ship was put in place came, the former masters began to use it to do what was formerly thought to be an impossibility. The Warden told them that so long as they played by the rules that it had given them, they would not suffer a single death, nor a single defeat at the hands of those abominations.

That ship turned that promise into a lie. The former masters were smarter and more cunning than they had reason to be and used a bit of trickery to get one of their former slaves to attack the ship. Foolishly, they had taken the ship’s lack of a response as a sign that nothing would happen, and they expected that the former masters would move to capture it. But the combination of the redirected attack and their own attempt to take the ship resulted in the first defeat in over… well, time here meant absolutely nothing, but it would be a very long time regardless.

That damn fucking ship tore them to bits and rained death and destruction upon the entire city, ignoring the lopping power of the city and simply laying down a massive bombardment that reduced hundreds to nothing more than ash and dust. Tens of thousands were brutally slaughtered as shells and rockets and more rained down, deliberately targeting them and themselves alone. Of those that were not brutalized or killed outright, the rest of them suffered wounds of one kind or another, and that was what the former masters needed to make a comeback.

Every night since then, they added the ship’s fury to their own. Every night since then, they managed to take what should have been a crushing, decisive defeat and turn it into a costly and pyrrhic victory. And tonight provided the latest bit of mockery and humiliation, as the fuckers simply refused to fight. They ignored them as if they were nothing more than flies buzzing around in the distance, and it was infuriating. However, the rules stated that they could not start the nightly battle, only retaliate when the first blow was struck.

It took them too long to figure out why they refused to fight. The ship that they had used to win time and again was gone, having sailed out into the distance during the daylight hours. They knew that they couldn’t win, and so refused to fight. They could ‘see’ the ship, both them and the former masters alike knew where it was and what it was doing, and they, the former slaves, would be damned if they let that ship reach that place. It was a danger on its own, but with that weirdo at the helm, it was a beast of a very different, and possibly far more dangerous, kind.

They needed to call in some support, they needed to ask The Warden for some kind of help. While the former masters dicked around and tried to commune with their abomination of a god, they sent a prayer of their own to The Warden. This prayer was answered with the creation of a full armada of warships that materialized from nothing, a clear sign of what needed to be done.

The Warden would not need to tell them what to do, for the arrival of the armada, crewless as it was, showed them what was required. They would now ignore the rules as stated. They would let those damn aberrations take the city and do what they wanted with it. They could have their freedom for now. Once their hopes had been crushed, once that damn ship and the weirdo on board were sinking endlessly into the bottomless depths of the sea, they would come back and the hell would begin again.

While a monumental task, every single former slave made it aboard the armada and the mass of wooden and metal death made its way towards the rear of that stupid fucking ship. Despite its size, despite its firepower, it could not hope to defeat an armada like theirs. Besides, they had justice on their side. Plus, given how much firepower that the ship had unleashed each night before, the thing had to be running out of ammo. If they made good time, then they might be able to do one better than hitting it from the rear and actually manage to surround it.

They had won their freedom. They had earned it through blood and sweat and tears. That weirdo and his ship would not let the former masters regain their dominance. Be it by direct and intentional action or indirect and unintentional action, that bastard was a threat to their way of life, and before he accidentally or intentionally unchained that abomination of a god they would make sure that he met a terrible end.