That night, I dreamed again.

[The Sanctuaries have fallen. Fight for your life.]

[Killing the Kinetice grants AP.]

At first, I saw only blackness and that pair of fateful alerts. Then, as though I’d opened my eyes, I saw a city from overhead.

It was being overrun by Kinetice. Here and there, pockets of challengers were still grouped together, resisting as they came by the dozen, but many more had been reduced to panicked fleeing.

Among those simply trying to run, maybe one in ten were able to push through the Kinetice at the only egress from the city, while they were distracted slaughtering the other nine.

Finally, as though travelling out of the sky, my view shifted to one such group. Mewi and I were fighting alongside about a half dozen others. No matter how many we killed, the Kinetice couldn’t be made to back off.

After a few minutes, the Kinetice ranks had been thinned, but two of our companions were dead. The rest, including both of us, looked as though we barely had the strength to stand. In mere seconds after that, Mewi and I were the only ones left.

“O--out of mana,” said Mewi.

“No, no no no no no!”

In the next moment, a Kinetice struck a hole through Mewi’s chest. I gave an indescribable scream and cast furious fire spells at a pace beyond anything I’d displayed to that point. I cast and cast and cast...and when there were less than 10 Kinetice left surrounding me, I collapsed to the ground.

One of the surrounding Kinetice extended a thick, pointed, tentacular finger-appendage, and struck it clear through my unconscious neck.

“Look, all I’m saying is, even if this is the easy part, something doesn’t feel right about how easy this was.” Let alone taking the place, Dellriere’s commander wasn’t even as strong as General Ormin. With both me and Arvallei taking him on, he stood no chance. Neither did the town and fortress have any chance against Mewi and the troops once we’d carved a swath through it.

Thanks to the other half of our team, the force attacking Lysidia had also been routed, but with no ships, they had to wear themselves out crossing the river the old fashioned way only to discover that we had taken it. Between their relatively depleted stamina and 500 battle mages plus Arvallei, Mewi and I raining death from above, they were completely wiped out.

“Don’t be a grump, Lheticus,” said Arvallei, “we knew going in that no matter how the start of this Floor shook out, we’d have some very uneven Contribution Ratings.”

“This isn’t about my dang Floor reward! Or...I don’t know, maybe it’s part of it but I just have a bad feeling...”

Bruzigan grunted thoughtfully. “It’s not out of the question that there’s some twist in the scenario coming that we haven’t prepared for. After all, other than the 9th Floor, the 6th Floor is the mission the alliance has the least definitive data on in Area 1. Do you have any ideas?”

I grimaced. “No...not at the moment. If I do manage to come up with any speculations, I’ll trust you don’t want me to keep them to myself.”

With the river held on both sides, any attack on Lysidia would be seen from days away, so General Ormin had transferred to Dellriere along with the other half of our team. Now that we’d gotten this far, we basically had an entire province of enemy territory open to us to fulfill the remaining terms of the mission. Towns further from the border tended not to be as fortified, or at least most of them lacked actual fortresses.

Arvallei wasn’t wrong about my being worried my Contribution Rating would be very low. Sure, I was a vital chess piece when it came to the actual fighting on this Floor, but no team of six people, no matter how strong they were, could hold even one captured town on their own, let alone four. The real key to this mission was to get Rhuun’s troops to follow where we needed them to go, and when it came to that, it was clear that Anna and Mewi were the stars of the show. Bruzigan also managed to contribute more and more to that factor as time went on, as despite Rhuunan prejudice against non casters, his vast experience in command as a Federation General turned Admiral became increasingly obvious to everyone in the region.

Arvallei, as well, was somewhat in the limelight as an aerial scout that no Rhuunan soldier could match. The nearly continuous stream of intel he brought General Ormin as well as other commanders who were trickling in to become involved in the region was instrumental in maintaining confidence enough in Rhuunan officers and troops alike to go through with absorbing even more of Shirisho’s towns.

Only Ri’legh felt as though he could commiserate with me about our apparently small parts to play in the mission. Unfortunately for him, he had separated from the rest of the group early on. Once we captured our second town of the five we needed, he was slated to stay behind and defend Dellriere until it was time for the assault on Bartisina, the capital of the province. Bruzigan was the next to stay behind, followed by Anna. Mewi was ostensibly in charge of defending the fourth town we took.

That basically summed up the events of more than sixty days on the 6th Floor—the halfway mark of the maximum number of days a challenger could spend on it. And during that time, my unease only grew. The mission was going extremely well. No superhuman experts from Shirisho had surfaced to give us trouble, and no indications of Trioron backing them up to retake any towns had either, in spite of the fact that, as usual, neither nation had come close to gaining territory from Rhuun in return.

The one thing that was against expectations was the intensity of Ormin’s reluctance to march on Bartisina. Anna and Mewi were gradually wearing him down in turns, but he was adamant that while towns had changed hands numerous times, and province borders redrawn, no force had taken a regional capital for at least a thousand years. It was too large a step to take too soon, he’d be assassinated or exiled for sure.

I couldn’t ignore my hunch any longer. I made sure to tell Bruzigan and Anna about my plan, also telling Mewi since we were still stationed in the same town, trusting him to tell Arvallei when he next returned. Then when Ormin next came to the final town we had taken, I asked to speak with him in private.

“I apologize, general, but I simply must ask,” I began, “is it not the dearest wish of the people to finally end the strife between the three nations? But according to milady and my Mewi, it’s as though you think that to successfully take a genuine step toward subsuming Shirisho and Trioron once and for all, would be tantamount to the end of the world, or something.”

Ormin groaned. “Not you too. I keep telling you, I can only buck tradition so much without being made a pariah. With this proof of concept, and if we can hold onto our gains through this war and the next, perhaps then. But not now! The traditionalists are too powerful, it will take a long time to erode them enough.”

“Tradition, right. You say that it hasn’t happened for at least a thousand years. But I still think the worst that could happen isn’t as bad as you’re thinking. There must have been times prior to a thousand years ago when the fighting reached such a stage, right?”

“What are you driving at?”

“Give me access to the Royal Library in the capital. If I can search records and history from as far back as that place holds, I can allay—or confirm—your fears. Surely there has to be some precedent. If I’m not mistaken, it will show that capturing a provincial capital isn’t that huge a deal by itself at all.

And if I’m wrong, if history shows that it will invite the devastating response you predict, I give you my word that I’ll talk to Anna and Mewi and the rest if need be and...try to convince them to work something else out.”

The words weren’t too easy to spit out. I was well adept at bending the truth, but that was precisely because I wasn’t at all comfortable with lying outright.

Like I was doing now. But the mission came first. This wasn’t any worse than how I’d treated Darril, really. And if it came down to it, I’d do my best to save Ormin’s bacon too.

“...All right. I’ll give you a communication stone in case something happens and we need you back.”