Dungeon Master (Karma System)

The army did not begin the fifth day by attacking the gate. It attacked everything controlling it.

Before dawn, assault teams entered two drainage channels identified by scouts. Earth mages reopened the edge of the tunnel Kildra collapsed, then turned away from the sealed route and dug toward the sound of machinery behind the wall. Air units crossed Level Three on flying mounts and under their own spells, then rose above the fort to map its inner courtyards.

The main force remained beyond weapon range.

Kildra watched from the wall.

"They want us to fire first." He said.

An undead officer waited beside the release for a stone thrower. "They are in range."

"So were the empty wagons yesterday."

The fifth day army had brought more than empty wagons.

It pushed wooden towers onto the approach with nobody inside them. Illusions filled the ground between the towers with soldiers. Covered trenches advanced toward the walls beneath shields of reinforced earth. Every visible threat demanded a response. Not all of them deserved one.

Kildra held the heavy weapons until the first real formation entered range.

Then the Dread Fort opened fire.

Stone and magic crossed the approach. Towers shattered. Trenches collapsed. Undead archers fired from the walls while hidden doors released ground forces against the engineers.

The invaders answered with four days of preparation.

Mages targeted embrasures already measured by dead scouts. National shield formations protected crews carrying bridge sections over the outer ditch. Adventurers climbed places military ladders could not reach. Guild rogues ignored the walls and hunted the mechanisms that controlled them.

The battle spread into the fort before either side won the approach.

Max followed it through Anna’s command map.

Red sections marked dungeon-controlled territory. White marked ground held by the attackers. The outer approach changed constantly. Inside the fort, smaller marks appeared in tunnels and service rooms no invader had reached before that morning.

"The north drainage channel." Anna said.

"I see it."

"They are within two corridors of the lower gate controls."

Max opened a link to Kildra. "They found the northern machinery."

"Then let them turn it." He said.

"You disabled it?"

"I removed the counterweight."

The invaders reached the control room three minutes later. They fought through its defenders, seized the chain wheel, and tried to raise the lower gate.

Nothing moved.

Kildra opened a concealed vent in the ceiling. Undead dropped into the room behind them. The assault team died beside a useless wheel.

Their discovery still mattered. Runners outside marked the position before the last member fell. Engineers redirected their digging toward the missing counterweight chamber.

"He has the fort." Quin said. "They have time."

He stood in the protected passage outside Anna’s command room, ready to move wherever Max sent him.

"Two more days and most of this one," Max replied.

"That is what I meant."

The Dread Fort had been built as a layered defense. The outer walls protected the lower gate. The lower gate controlled access to the killing courts. The killing courts led toward the inner wall, where Kildra could close separate sections and force attackers through tunnels his defenders knew.

It had never been attacked by people willing to remain inside those layers.

When the invaders seized a room, they braced its doors. When they captured a wall section, they turned its weapons. They carried supplies into the drainage channels and treated wounded people in chambers that had belonged to the undead an hour earlier.

By midday, the outer gate still stood closed.

The invaders had three hundred people behind it.

Kildra sent defenders inward to contain them. Kale sent more through the drainage channels. The national commanders finally ordered the main assault into range, forcing the walls to divide their attention.

The gate fell from the inside.

Engineers reached the counterweight chamber through a wall opened by earth magic. They did not restore the mechanism. They cut the remaining supports.

The lower gate dropped crooked into its own track.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then mages outside struck the upper edge.

The entire structure fell inward.

The army crossed over it.

Kildra surrendered the outer wall and closed the killing courts. He destroyed the controls after the last defenders passed through. The attackers could not use them, but neither could he close the outer gate again.

That trade continued through the afternoon.

The invaders broke a bridge to prevent undead from reinforcing an occupied wall. Kildra flooded a tunnel, making two lower routes unusable to both sides. Attackers collapsed a stairway and climbed the rubble. Defenders burned their own armory rather than leave its weapons behind.

Max did not intervene.

He moved defenders, approved Kildra’s requests, and sent Quin when a high-level assault group threatened to break through two layers at once. Quin struck the group from the side, forced it out of the inner court, and withdrew before the army could concentrate against him.

The fort continued doing what it had been built to do.

It delayed.

Thousands of attackers died inside it. Thousands more replaced them. Living healers worked behind captured walls. Crafters repaired weapons in the outer court. Porters carried supplies over the fallen gate while defenders attacked the road through every earlier level.

Kildra fought from the inner wall at dusk.

The Warden’s presence strengthened the undead around him. He moved between threatened sections faster than the attackers could redirect. Three assaults reached the parapet. He drove all three back.

The fourth did not attack the parapet.

It came through the floor.

Earth mages opened a passage from an occupied tunnel into the base of the inner gatehouse. Rogues climbed through first and unlocked the maintenance doors. A guild assault company followed them into the machinery room.

Kildra left the wall to stop them.

That was what Kale had been waiting for.

The army attacked every section of the inner wall at once.

Kildra reached the machinery room before the gate opened. He killed the first rogues and drove the assault company back into the tunnel. Kale entered behind the next formation carrying the same scratched shield she had brought through the divine gate on the first morning.

Their fight lasted less than a minute. It was not the only fight deciding the fort.

Undead lost the eastern parapet. National troops reached the western tower. An explosion in the lower corridor severed the last intact line between the gatehouse and the inner barracks.

Kale did not defeat Kildra alone. Mages bound the Warden’s weapon. Shield bearers took strikes meant for the people behind them. Attackers filled the room until Kildra had nowhere to withdraw.

He fell with one hand on the release that would have sealed the inner gate.

The invaders pulled it first.

Chains moved through damaged machinery. The gate rose less than halfway before a broken gear locked it in place.

Halfway was enough.

The army crawled beneath.

They expected another fortress. They found the Dead Lands.

The ground beyond the Dread Fort stretched beneath a dark sky. Dead trees stood across bare hills. Roads disappeared between ruined villages and fields that had not grown anything in generations.

Undead waited everywhere.

Ranks filled the nearest valley. More stood behind them, and more beyond those. Cavalry occupied the ridges. Heavy formations guarded the road toward the distant threshold. The army protecting the approach to Level Five was not the garrison the invaders had just defeated.

It numbered more than one hundred thousand.

The first attackers through the damaged gate stopped.

People behind them demanded to know what was wrong. Then they reached the opening and stopped too.

Kale climbed onto the inner wall for a better view.

She did not order a charge.

She sent scouts to both sides of the fort, withdrew the most exhausted companies from the gate, and told the engineers to begin building.

Before nightfall, the invaders controlled most of the Dread Fort. They turned its surviving weapons toward the Dead Lands. They barricaded tunnels Kildra’s restored forces might use. Healers occupied the outer barracks. Supply crews established stores inside walls that had taken the army most of a day to capture.

They were not treating the undead army as the next encounter.

They were preparing a front.

Scouts moved into the Dead Lands under concealment while the fortifications rose behind them. Some returned with estimates. Others vanished among ruined fields. One flying scout climbed high enough to see how far the formations extended and came back pale.

"There is no open side." The scout told Kale. "The army covers every road. If we go around the nearest line, there is another behind it."

Kale asked how far it was to the next level.

The scout could only point toward a dark rise beyond several occupied valleys.

The council counted remaining food, healers, siege tools, and daylight. A guild leader proposed an immediate attack before the undead could reorganize. Every military commander rejected it. Midnight was approaching and every enemy killed would be back in a matter of hours.

The people filling the inner courtyard had fought since morning. Many were alive only because healers kept them standing. Charging them into a force of that size would gain information and nothing else.

The army used the remaining hours to make sure the sixth day would begin from inside the fort.

Max stood beside Anna’s map while lines of new fortifications appeared on it.

"They are planning a campaign inside my dungeon." He said.

Anna looked at the route behind them. Fey defenders attacked it in the forest. Hizon contested the Highland roads. Restored forces in Level Three fought around the bridges and the Stonewing’s wreckage. None had cut the invasion away from the city gate.

At midnight, Kildra returned.

So did every dungeon defender defeated during the fifth day. The restored undead gathered in territory the dungeon still controlled around the invaders’ occupation. Across the fort, fallen attackers returned among the positions their army had held.

The outer gate remained on the ground.

The inner gate remained jammed halfway open.

The flooded tunnels remained flooded. The burned armory remained empty. The attackers’ barricades, supply stores, healer stations, and captured weapons remained where they had placed them.

Kildra could fight them again.

He could not make the fort unbroken.

Nor could the invaders pretend that restoration made their occupation complete. Undead voices sounded in sealed sections they had never captured. Movement returned beneath blocked floors. Every barricade now faced an enemy that knew the fort better than the people holding it.

Kale doubled the inner watches. Engineers marked fallback lines through the courtyards. The Warden’s return guaranteed another battle for the structure at dawn, but no victory inside it could hide the open gate leading into the Dead Lands.

Beyond its walls, more than one hundred thousand undead waited for dawn.

[First Champion Challenge Remaining: 2 Days.]

Max looked past their lines toward the hidden entrance to Corathen.