Broken Lands

Chapter 335 – Floating City Defense

All that was left was deciphering the two remaining doors. She started with the one they’d use and barely finished it before it was time to head through the link-gate. Like the one that led back into the Night Market, it had three phrases: Desert Night, Floating City, and Lizard’s Hoard. It was easy to guess that Lizard’s Hoard was probably the best, but as far as Sophia could tell there was no way to pick which one you ended up with.

The scouts were already through the gate before Sophia could find Arak to tell him what she thought they might face. She was able to get to him before they returned, at least. “Arak?”

Arak Shade turned away from the link-gate to face Sophia. A smile flirted with the edges of his mouth and twinkled in his eyes. “You know, you’re one of the few people who calls me that. Almost everyone calls me the Shade.”

Sophia blinked, surprised by the topic. She’d noticed other people used that name, but she hadn’t really paid attention beyond that. They both meant Arak Shade, after all. “Do you want me to call you the Shade?”

Arak Shade shook his head. “No, Arak’s fine. I don’t care which name people use, I just find it interesting to see who calls me which. What do you need?”

“Uh, I think I can help you. The writing on the link-gates? I can translate it.” Sophia held out her sketch to show him, then realized it was written in Bridge rather than English. “I mean, that one says three things. Desert Night, Floating City, and Lizard’s Hoard. I don’t know how to tell which one it’s going to lead to, but that’s what it says.”

The expedition leader looked down at the page, then glanced at the link-gate. “That’s right, you did say that you had an extremely good translation Ability. It must be exceptional.”

“I think the problem is the coding.” Sophia flipped the page to the next one, where she wrote out the letters in different arrangements while she was figuring out how many phrases were on the door. “It’s three phrases, and whoever wrote it interleaved the letters and also made them repeat and sometimes they start in the middle of the phrase, too. It’s not too hard now that I know the trick, but figuring it out was a pain. They don’t always have three phrases, either; I haven’t seen one with more than that yet but there’s no reason there couldn’t be more.”

Arak nodded slowly. “If the scouts come back with one of those three choices, I’ll have you translate all of the doors we see. It probably won’t change our path, but even a little idea of what we’re facing will be useful.”

Sophia wasn’t entirely certain he believed her; in fact, if she had to guess, he probably didn’t. Whether he believed her or not, he was willing to listen and let her prove herself. That was really all she could ask. 

When the scouts came back, they spoke of a city in the clouds threatened by skyeagles. It was a scenario, with “civilians” that were supposed to be protected through a day-long festival and some “guards” who would help fight even though they weren’t really strong enough to achieve much. 

It wasn’t until they were all on the island and Arak spoke to the guards’ commander about the task they’d been “hired” to perform that he found out the festival was a religious ceremony that had to be performed each year to keep the island the city rested on in the sky. The skyeagles always attacked during the festival, but they’d been growing worse each year. 

Arak asked about where the skyeagles nested to see if they could handle it that way, but the guard commander had only a vague idea of where it was and insisted that protecting the city through the festival that was about to happen came first. They’d be willing to pay more if the skyeagles’ nests were destroyed only if the city was also protected.

Two teams were assigned to track down the skyeagles’ nests while everyone else protected the city. It was a calculated decision on Arak’s part to send them, but he carefully picked the two groups to be one that could manage the travel and one that could find the nests. They could both fight and would have been useful in the city’s defense, but they weren’t necessary.

The Flying Stars were assigned to the city’s defenses. Specifically, he wanted them to stay in the sky as much as possible and kill second-upgrade skyeagles. When they saw a third-upgrade skyeagle, they were to stay away from it and call for backup. 

Sophia was also to provide a summoned dragon who could follow directions; Arak had several people in mind who couldn’t fly on their own but who needed to be closer to fight. She’d have to have the dragon fly them out to the third-upgrade skyeagle then back to the ground to change riders. It would allow them to use their strong but short-range attacks, then recover. One of the people she was to deliver was Rockfist; Sophia didn’t know the others. She wasn’t alone in providing transportation for the fight, but she was alone in the fact that she could fight herself while doing so instead of having to stay on the ground to manage the flight.

When he gave the Flying Stars their instructions, Arak also made sure to compliment Sophia on her translation and to mention that they hadn’t seen the next link-gate yet. He suspected that they’d get shown to a different link-gate if they succeeded in destroying the nests while the adults were gone, but he couldn’t say for certain if it would have an inscription. If it did, he wanted her to try to translate it before they went through.

When it came time to actually fight, all Sophia saw was dying skyeagles. She was rarely the cause; instead, she provided cover for her allies. It was not what she expected to do, really, but it worked surprisingly well. The skyeagles were stronger than the ones they’d fought in the Arena, but they had allies. None of the skyeagles lived very long after it came close enough to be spotted.

The few skyeagles Sophia did

kill were the ones that actually got close enough to one of her Sweetfire-infused Firewater Feathers. Most of the time, however, it was her ordinary elemental feathers that did the job, whether they were from other skyeagles or the ones she’d bought in the Night Market. Sophia had no qualms about using up a lot of feathers; they were all about to be replaced.Well, all except for the firewater ones. She’d asked around and while there were several people with fire-based Abilities, none were as strong as sweetfire. They were still strong enough to be useful, but they wouldn’t blister half of a second-upgrade skyeagle straight through its shield. They would be only a little stronger than her ordinary elemental feathers, which was still useful. That was how she was controlling the sky, after all; any skyeagle that came within her area was almost immediately hit with multiple different feathers to disrupt its flight, break its wings, or weigh it down. 

Sophia felt more like a mage from the stories than ever. She was absolutely fainting down attacks on her enemies and she didn’t have to execute slow spellforms to get there! All she had to do was have the right feathers and she could use their magic!

One skyeagle seemed smarter than the others, even though it was still only second upgrade: it diverted around her cloud of feathers instead of through it and tried to gather up a wave of wind to push her feathers out of the way. It almost worked, but between Magical Translucence, Magic Attuned Aura, and Disruptive Plume, Sophia could use her plumes to take apart the effect. It cost her the plumes she used, unable to handle the sheer amount of magic that pushed through them as she shoved them into the spots needed to disrupt the magical effect, but they were only ordinary feathers. She had plenty.

Arak chose the area for the Flying Stars portion of the defense well. During the entire festival, which lasted most of the day, they had to call out for support against a third upgrade skyeagle only a handful of times. Sophia was only able to pay attention to one of them, and it was surprisingly boring. A man standing on a flying platform of ice made a throwing gesture, like throwing a javelin, and spikes of ice materialized in the air flying towards the bird. It didn’t have time to dodge; the first three attacks were handled by its shield, but the fourth one penetrated into its chest and the bird fell.

Skyeagles could fly but they were notoriously fragile. 

Sophia had to replenish the feathers in her Domain three times during the fight, but the only things that got past her were falling skyeagles. She didn’t have a way to catch them other than her own flying form. Even if she could have caught them, there wasn’t time between waves of skyeagles. It was a good thing they weren’t over part of the festival itself, merely the outskirts of the city. 

Arak planned for that. Over the festival itself, there were several people specifically placed to make certain the dead skyeagles didn’t land on anyone. It was the same group of people that Sophia’s dragon was picking up passengers from, people who could do something but didn’t have the flight ability to actually manage the fight in the sky.

The moment the festival ended, the continuous stream of skyeagles turned almost as one. They could now see the ruin of the previous attackers and without the lure of the festival, they ran. 

To Sophia, it felt like a recreation of a real event. She didn’t know where or when, but the level of detail felt all too real. At the same time, she knew that the people she’d seen were not real; they had no interest in talking about anything other than the Festival of the Lifting Cloud. They didn’t gossip about anything else while they plucked and dismantled the skyeagles for their rescuers, and that was simply wrong. It made the sketches of shopkeepers in the Night Market feel real in comparison.

At least she was getting a lot of powerful feathers. That made up for a lot. The feathers from third upgrade skyeagles were especially nice; the fire ones specialized in heat could more or less replace the sweetfire-infused firewater plumes, and the others were just as good in other ways. Most of them were wind-based, but wind-based attacks were still useful. She’d shown that against the skyeagles, and what she was using then was second upgrade feathers.

A couple of hours after the fighting finished, the two teams sent away to kill nests returned. They’d managed to find and destroy over two hundred nests, along with three times as many eggs. In the real world, that sort of destruction would have reduced the population significantly, probably for years. In this zone of the Maze, it meant the guard commander handed over additional aurichalc as their “mercenary fee” and led them to a link-gate deep underground in the floating island, well below the city. It was heavily decorated, with letters that ran from the bottom left of the frame, along the top, and then all the way to the bottom right.

When Sophia couldn’t immediately decode the messages, Arak sent scouts through the link-gate. The scouts returned with news of a dead skyeagle and a hexagonal courtyard with five additional gates at almost the same moment as Sophia discovered that there were exactly five phrases hidden in the text: Fertile Field, King’s Rest, Ancient Battleground, Floating Assault, and Muddy Hole.