Insomniac Player

The ground dropped out from under Damien’s feet the instant he crossed the threshold. Colors smeared past him like wet paint dragged sideways, and for a half second his stomach hung somewhere above the rest of him. Then his boots hit dirt, hard enough to jolt his teeth, and a cold wind cut across his face.

➤[You have entered the Rusted Blade.]

➤[Clearing Condition: Eliminate the Lord of Ironfall.]

He opened his eyes to a hillside overlooking a town that didn’t sit right the moment he looked at it.

"..."

Stone walls rose around every building, thick enough to stop a battering ram. Watchtowers stood at even intervals like teeth along a jaw. A castle sat at the center, taller than everything else combined, and even from this distance the air around it felt thicker somehow, harder to breathe.

Above it all, the sky burned a permanent, bloody red. Two suns hung low over the horizon, neither one moving, like the whole world had been paused halfway through a sunset and left there.

Doctor Smoke lit a fresh cigarette off the last one, took a single drag, and flicked the dead butt into the grass without looking at it. "Sleepless." Her voice dropped an octave, all business now. "Listen carefully."

The rest of the group went quiet at the same moment, like she’d flipped a switch.

She pointed a mechanical finger at the castle. "Objective: kill the Lord of Ironfall." The finger stayed up. "Problem: everything standing between him and us."

A blue map unfolded in the air above her palm.

"Three hundred knights, Level Ten, patrolling nonstop." Dots scattered across the projection. "Routes shift every few minutes." Her finger swept to a cluster of red. "Twenty Elites, Level Twenty. Half on patrol, ten inside the castle." One more dot, gold, blinked into place beside the throne room. "And the actual problem. Knight Commander. Level Thirty. Doesn’t leave the Lord’s side. Ever."

She lowered her arm. "Questions."

Nobody raised one. This clearly wasn’t new information to anyone but him.

Her eyes cut to Damien. "You. Go."

"...Go?"

"Scout." A tilt of her head toward the town. "Bring me anything we don’t already know."

He nodded and started down the hill without waiting to be told twice.

Behind him, Madam Marvel’s voice carried, cool and flat. "Level Ten. He’ll die." She didn’t say it unkindly. She said it the way someone reads a weather forecast.

Doctor Smoke let smoke curl out of the corner of her mouth. "Maybe."

DeluluGirl practically launched off the ground. "He won’t! I believe in bestie!"

Naked Nun trailed a fingertip along her own collarbone, watching him go. "If he survives, I’ll reward him. Personally."

Doctor Smoke ignored all three of them. Her eyes tracked Damien down the hillside and didn’t blink until he was small enough to lose in the grass. "...Show me."

◇◇◇

Damien dropped his weight low and slowed his breathing until it barely moved his chest.

The open fields around Ironfall had been stripped bare on purpose, not a rock or a tree tall enough to hide behind between the walls and open ground. He crouched at the last real cover available, a low cluster of boulders, and stayed there.

"...Smart." Nothing sneaks up on a fortress that clears its own front yard.

The patrol below moved with their boots striking the ground in the exact same rhythm, step for step, like a single machine wearing thirty different uniforms.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

A trumpet cracked across the valley.

PROOOOOM

Every soldier in sight stopped and pivoted in the same breath, new direction, same tempo, not one wasted step among them.

"Signal-based." He kept his voice under the wind. "Trumpets. Same trick the Goblin Chief used, just with more people listening."

He held position and counted. Routes, gaps, the width of every blind spot. He clocked the two archers stationed in each watchtower, neither one fidgeting, both scanning slow arcs across the horizon, tracking a single raven overhead for a full three seconds before letting it go.

The houses below weren’t houses. No laundry lines, no gardens, no toys left in a yard. Every building he could see had been built to hold soldiers, not people. The whole town existed to keep one man alive behind those walls, and it showed in every brick.

Another trumpet.

PROOOOOOM

A new patrol filed out of the barracks as the old one filed back in, seamless, no overlap, no gap.

"...Shift change." Nothing here happened by accident. The whole town ran on a clock, tight enough that stepping wrong anywhere inside it would ring like a bell.

He looked up at the banner over the gate. A rusted sword driven through a crown.

"The Rusted Blade." He said it quietly, mostly to himself. "There’s the name."

The sky dimmed another shade. A wave of black ravens lifted off the castle roof, wheeled once, and vanished over the far wall. The air went heavier around him, pressing down without any wind to explain it.

He dropped flat before he’d decided to. His body had already made the call.

His eyes climbed the castle face and stopped on the highest balcony, where a figure in black armor stood watching the fields, close to three meters of it, a greatsword propped against one shoulder like it weighed nothing. The distance should have made it impossible to feel anything. It didn’t. Something in his chest clenched anyway, like a hand had found the back of his neck from a hundred meters away.

His pulse spiked once, hard. "...Knight Commander."

He didn’t need a face for that. The weight in the air told him everything he needed.

A few seconds passed. The figure turned and walked back inside, and the pressure lifted all at once, like a door closing somewhere.

Damien let out the breath he’d been holding without noticing.

He pulled back the way he’d come, slow, quiet, checking twice before every step, until the hill rose back into view. Doctor Smoke had gone through three more cigarettes waiting for him.

"Report."

He looked back toward the town once before he started. "It’s not a town." Every head turned his way. "It’s a fortress wearing a town’s clothes. Those houses are barracks. The market’s a supply depot. There isn’t a civilian in the whole place."

Doctor Smoke said nothing, waiting.

"Patrols run on trumpet signals, routes rotate every few minutes. Watchtowers overlap each other close enough that the blind spots don’t last long, maybe a minute at the outside. That minute’s our only way in." He nodded toward the castle. "The Commander doesn’t patrol because he doesn’t have to. Nobody’s supposed to get close enough for it to matter."

Naked Nun’s unlit cigarette stopped halfway to her lips. Madam Marvel’s staff dipped an inch out of its hover, just enough to notice. DeluluGirl had gone still for possibly the first time since Damien had met her.

Doctor Smoke’s mouth pulled up at one corner, small, almost reluctant. She ground her spent cigarette out under her boot without breaking eye contact.

"Not bad."