Chapter 127: An Invasion
The first national troops entered the challenge gate in ranks of forty.
They did not cheer.
They crossed the white portal with shields raised, stepped into Fey Nights, and moved away from the entrance before the next rank followed. Officers counted intervals. Porters stayed between protected files. Mages watched the fog without throwing spells at every shadow.
Three different standards entered during the first hour.
None belonged to a country Max knew.
The gate had opened somewhere far beyond the lands connected to Crag Mountain. Every person arriving from the distant city brought equipment, training, and magic from a region Max had never seen. The challenge did not need to invent an army. It only needed to offer enough of a reward for real ones to come.
Captain Kale met the army’s commanders at the forest camp.
The officers did not surrender their troops to her. Kale did not ask them to. She gave each commander copies of the shared maps, current supply totals, known defender positions, and a list of routes that had changed since midnight.
"You can issue whatever orders you want." She said. "If they block the road, the quartermasters will move around you. If they burn a bridge we need, every guild in this dungeon will know who did it."
One commander objected to taking directions from an adventurer.
Another looked at the three secured levels on Kale’s map and asked where she wanted his engineers.
By the end of the meeting, the invasion had a council, a common signal system, and a schedule for moving supplies through the gate. It did not have a single unquestioned leader. It did not need one to attack Level Three.
The fourth day began behind the main battler front as much as at it.
Restored defenders struck the route through Fey Nights. Fairies dropped burning resin onto a food store. Fey hounds attacked messengers between camps. Sigmund led satyrs against the first stream crossing while the national troops were still entering. While these fey were not overwhelmingly strong considering they normally guarded the first level, they were experts in guerrilla warfare.
Every Fey that died made sure to kill several invaders before they eventually went down.
Hizon attacked the Highland road at the same time the fey caused havoc on the first level.
The invaders had expected both.
They had built barriers facing backward as well as forward. Reserve companies protected the supply posts. Engineers repaired the forest bridge under fire while a second crew constructed a ford downstream. The invasion lost people and supplies without losing its road.
Every fighter assigned to the rear was a fighter not sent toward Level Three. That was the cost of secured ground.
The national officers understood that cost better than the guilds had. They divided the road into commands and gave each section its own reserves, engineers, and signal team. Colored flares could now carry a warning from the Dread Fort approach to the Fey Nights camp without one messenger running the entire distance.
The defenders learned the signals before noon.
Fairies created false flares above the forest. Hizon’s riders attacked whichever Highland section sent a request for help. The invasion answered with code changes and scheduled reports. Each adjustment produced another adjustment from the dungeon.
Neither side forgot what happened merely because the people involved died.
Max watched the pressure move across the dungeon map. The army’s path no longer looked like a thin line. It had become a chain of camps, stockpiles, walls, healer stations, and guarded crossings stretching from the city gate to Level Three.
Kale’s council settled one argument by removing two guild leaders from the route schedule. A national commander settled another by placing soldiers between rival supply crews. The cooperation was imperfect, expensive, and strong enough to continue.
The third level punished it immediately.
The Stonewing moved between fortified mesas above gaps too broad to bridge from the ground. Its gun crews controlled the open approaches. Docking towers stood at different heights along the route, each protected by defenders who could cut a mooring line and leave boarders suspended above a valley.
The lower route crossed Elven held ground.
Dawnhoof riders knew every pass. Archers occupied the Shattered Watch and the ridges surrounding it. Narrow bridges linked sections of safe road across broken country. Any force large enough to overwhelm one position became a target for defenders on the heights.
Veyrath waited beyond both.
The dragon appeared only as a moving shadow during the first assault. It was enough to make the army spread out.
The assault against the airship carried the heaviest mages and the soldiers trained for boarding. Engineers rolled empty wagons onto the first exposed dock. Dwarven guns destroyed them. Observers marked the angle, timing, and limits of every shot.
The second group advanced while the crews reloaded.
They knew some of them would die.
They went anyway.
Midnight had changed the value of a scout’s life without making the pain or fear disappear. Some people refused missions built around certain defeat. Others volunteered because the quest counted contribution, their families would receive guild payments, and the challenge promised they would stand again before the next day.
Max disliked how quickly commanders learned to use that promise. The dungeon’s defenders did the same thing.
A dwarven captain cut the Stonewing’s mooring line after boarders took its forward deck. The airship swung away from the tower, carrying the attackers beyond the support waiting on the dock. The crew fought until the ship struck a mesa and broke across the rocks.
The people would return at midnight.
The Stonewing would not.
Its shattered hull remained wedged between two spires, creating a bridge.
Attackers began crossing it before the smoke cleared.
On the ground route, the Elven defenders destroyed their own bridge to stop a national regiment. The invasion responded with large-scale magic. Earth mages pulled stone from both walls of the gorge. Engineers bound the rough span with cables. Archers died holding the work site, returned to the fight through living reinforcements, and died again elsewhere.
The bridge was ugly. But it held.
The Shattered Watch fell in the afternoon.
The attackers did not occupy every room. They collapsed the eastern tower onto the road behind them, turned the western parapet toward the defenders, and established a supply cache in the deepest chamber. Dawnhoof riders continued attacking the route from both sides, but they could no longer close it without first retaking the fortification.
"They are destroying anything they can’t hold." Quin said.
He watched from a high ridge with Max, far enough from the front that the invaders had not seen them.
"They’re opening whatever they can use." Max answered. "Destroying the rest."
The army wanted passage.
It stripped useful weapons from the Shattered Watch, left furniture burning in the corridors, and moved on.
Both routes converged beneath Veyrath’s territory before dusk.
They reached that point with different kinds of damage behind them. The ground army had a stable road and a captured fortification, but every mile exposed it to Dawnhoof raids from the ridges. Losing one crossing could strand everyone beyond it.
Supplies continued moving forward, even when officers argued that concentrating on a faster route would put more soldiers at the front.
"One road can be closed." She said. "Two roads have to be defended."
Max heard the report through a captured messenger crystal and sent it to Anna.
"She is making us divide too." Anna said.
"I noticed."
But Max wasn’t worried. He had more than enough people that if he forced all his dungeon inhabitants into the first 4 levels it would be so packed with bodies that the invaders wouldn’t be able to physically cut their way through.
However, Max didn’t do that. He was perfectly fine letting these invaders stretch out there supply lines as they reached further into his dungeon. He was almost looking forward to the expressions on their faces when they realized the sheer scale of the fifth level.
The invader’s goal was to capture the dungeon. He didn’t think they had enough time, even if they started on the 5th level on day one. The distance they needed to cross to even reach the first defense of the dungeon core was just too far. It wasn’t something that could be accomplished in a week.
The dragon descended through the smoke above the wrecked airship first.
Its breath tore through the formation on the highest docking tower. One wing struck the structure hard enough to break its upper platform. Defenders attacked through the confusion, forcing the invaders to choose between the dragon and the troops closing behind them.
On the ground, Veyrath’s shadow passed over thousands of troops gathering beyond the Shattered Watch.
They had spent four days collecting information about a creature most of them had never seen.
They did not possess a perfect strategy.
They possessed several incomplete strategies used at once.
Ground mages raised anchors of stone. Fast units drew Veyrath toward the cables attached to them. Archers aimed for the wings. The national formations separated whenever the dragon turned, denying it one dense target. Assault parties attacked the defenders around it instead of waiting for the dragon to die first.
Veyrath broke the first three anchors.
The fourth pulled one wing low enough for the mages to collapse a damaged docking tower across it.
The impact destroyed the tower and half of the nearest road.
The dragon rose from the wreckage.
Quin shifted beside Max.
"Wait." Max said.
Veyrath attacked again. This time, the army knew one wing was injured.
They dragged it down before sunset.
The final advance into Level Four stepped across the wrecked Stonewing, broken roads, and the bodies of people who would not return until midnight. It carried less than half of the supply stock the council had intended to move. Its healers were exhausted. Several units had lost every officer above the rank of sergeant.
Kildra gave them no time to recover.
The Warden of the Dread Fort closed the outer gate as soon as the first scout crossed the threshold. Undead filled the walls above it. Heavy weapons fired from protected embrasures. Tunnels beneath the approach opened long enough for defenders to attack the rear of the scouting column, then sealed before the army could follow.
Kale saw the fortress and ordered a retreat beyond the range of its largest weapons.
The national commanders agreed.
They built their fourth forward camp where two ridges narrowed the approach. Level Three’s broken terrain protected one side. A wall of conjured earth protected the other. Engineers measured the Dread Fort while scouts died locating its weapon ranges, tunnel mouths, and gate controls.
Kildra did not wait behind his walls.
He led an assault through a concealed tunnel after dark. Undead rose inside the half-built camp while the outer gates remained closed. The attack destroyed two supply stores and nearly reached the healers before Kale’s reserves contained it.
Kildra withdrew through the same tunnel.
The invaders collapsed it behind him. They lost another possible route into the fort. They also removed one route Kildra could use against them.
At midnight, the dungeon restored its forces.
Veyrath returned. The Stonewing did not. Dwarven and Elven defenders reappeared among territory the dungeon still held and began attacking the invasion’s roads. Hizon’s forces renewed their pressure in Level Two. Sigmund struck the forest crossings.
The invaders returned too.
White light filled every camp along the route. Companies shattered during the Level Three assault formed again behind walls built by their surviving allies. Scouts restored with the locations of the Dread Fort’s weapons still clear in their minds.
The wreckage beneath the final airship route remained a bridge. The new span across the gorge remained open. The Shattered Watch remained broken and occupied. The collapsed tunnel beneath the forward camp remained closed.
Kildra stood on the outer wall of the Dread Fort and watched the army become whole around its damage.
"Tomorrow." He said. "They come for the gate."