“So how bad is it?”

  “Bad,” Sergeant Baker said.

  I stood in the middle of the flat top, on the shores of the pond. A couple of the standing stones were still upright. Surprisingly, the ones that had fallen weren’t really that damaged. Captain Nichols' people had been pretty surgical with their cannonfire. Craters littered the top of the hill. Pretty big ones too.

  The Grimdar only had one direction they could come at us, which conveniently blocked our most likely route down. There were a whole lot of them down there. They weren’t bothering with cannons, as shelling us would just bring the hills down on them. But there was a mass of soldiers, just waiting for us to charge into them.

  “Could be worse,” Sergeant Parker said.

  He had seniority, by whatever measure the Solace Soldiers were using.

  “Going to be a meat grinder to get down the hill,” Baker said.

  The original plan had been for the Feather to hover over the hill and haul the lot of us up. The Grimdar had assumed that would be the plan and they’d reacted accordingly, bringing the bulk of their forces around to the front, along with their anti-airship cannons. They didn’t have many of those, which was a plus in our favor. But there was no way the ship would make it over them and be able to hover long enough to get us aboard.

  Plan A had been to meet up in the plains between the forest and hills. Plan B had been a pick-up from the top of the hill. Plans C to G were also out. None of the plans had been great ones. The assault plan hadn’t been a good one either.

  We were looking at Plan H, which was to sit at the top of the hill and wait out the Grimdar. See if they gave up or our reinforcements arrived to batter them from the rear as we did from the top. None of us wanted that. It would trap us up here for a while. We had plenty of supplies in our various inventories, but time was more of a concern.

  There were still two more Dungeons we had to clear, and those would have Grimdar surrounding them. Grimdar that no doubt were being informed about how we’d managed to clear this one. The same idea wouldn’t work twice, or three times. We’d need new plans for those, which of course Maria was already working on back at our Forward Operating Base.

  Nathan and his team, along with me, Sunie, Mason and his team were integral to our plans up here in the Gray Wolf Territories. So having us stuck on a hilltop was not ideal.

  Outside looking in, the appearance was that we hadn’t planned very well. What was happening should have been expected.

  And it was.

  That’s why there were so many plans. Yeah, they’d been hastily put together as we really didn’t know the situation we were going to find ourselves in. But we’d tried to cover every possible variable and outcome. But what was the saying? Plans only lasted until the first bullet was fired.

  Or in our case, first Essence Ability was used.

  The biggest unknown had been just exactly how many soldiers and weaponry the Grimdar had surrounding the valley. There had been no way to get an accurate count and it turned out that they had a lot of soldiers and weaponry.

  It was pretty obvious their plan had been to keep us away long enough for the Dungeon to surge and break, releasing a horde of Arcanebeasts into the territory. Those beasts would go on a rampage. Dungeon breaks ended up one of two ways. The beasts all just running wild, spreading out and forcing us to hunt them down. That was the worse. The other was one of the Dungeon bosses breaks too and gets control of the horde, directing them. That could be bad on whatever ended up in the way, but from a logistical standpoint, it was the easier one to deal with.

  Either way, the Grimdar would get what they wanted, which was just another huge distraction for the Solace forces as we’d have to deal with the Arcanebeasts and the Grimdar. It would make the Grimdar’s conquest a lot easier.

  They had a lot of soldiers up here for a couple reasons. First was to hold off whatever assault we launched to try and get at the Dungeon. They hadn’t been prepared for my crazy plan. The second reason was in case the beasts tried to turn on them. They wanted to be able to hold the beasts off long enough to retreat.

  It looked like they had a lot of artillery for area of effect bombardment. Probably the casters in the ranks had a lot of AOE Abilities. The elf, XXX, a master of AOE use in battle, had laid that scheme out for us. It made sense too.

  The Grimdar that we’d encountered in the valley had probably been their best close quarters combat troops, of the ones they had here. The rest were large scale battlers. We had planned, hoped, their forces were set up that way. That was a benefit of facing off against someone that was fairly well known in the wider Multiverse. There was a lot of information on their typical tactics. The Grimdar, like the Anura, used numbers to their advantage. They were a quantity over quality kind of Faction.

  All their tactics had been downloaded to the information crystal Jeriyan had given me. All that information had been downloaded to Maria and the other commanders on the trip up to the Gray Wolf Territories.

  We had a good idea of what they’d do. They had no idea what we would do. Which gave us a huge advantage.

  Even though a lot of our Plans for getting off this hill involved us charging down said hill, fighting through their forces and meeting up with the airship on the plains, that had never been considered the ones we’d end up going with. They were just the preferred ones.

  We knew what we’d run into.

  Which is why we’d decided on Plan N. It wasn’t even one of the original ones we’d had. A spur of the moment assessment of the situation and a new idea.

  It was risky, reckless, pretty high chance of going bad on us.

  And surprisingly, I hadn’t been the one to come up with it.

  That had been Nathan. Normally the calm and cool one, the one that kept my crazy plans in check. Maybe he’d gotten a concussion or something in the Dungeon? That had to be the reason he’d come up with this Plan that was so far out of the norm for him.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Which is why it was Plan N, for Nathan. We’d skipped all the way from H to N.

  We didn’t really have that many plans, only up to J, originally.

  I stood with Nathan at the edge of the flat hill, looking at the next ones in line. The jagged and steep sides. Nearly impossible to climb. The whole reason there was only one way into the Dungeon’s valley. Besides jumping from the air.

  “It’s going to take a lot of time to make that climb safely,” Mason said.

  “Gotta agree,” Tracy said, and out of all of us, she’d probably have the easiest time. “That’s a rough climb. It’s doable for some of us,” she continued, turning to look at the group at the top of the hill.

  Soldiers lined the front side, manning the Arcane Cannons, launching their own ranged Abilities. Others rested and waited their turn at the front. We had a good angle on the Grimdar, so our attacks were landing and theirs weren’t. But they had numbers and the biggest thing on their side.

  Time.

  “We don’t have the kind of time it’d take,” I said. “And I know this is very strange coming from me, but to do what you want, we need time.”

  “Naw,” Nathan said, smiling.

  I wasn’t sure I liked this new Nathan.

  Who was I kidding? I loved the new Nathan.

  “Okay,” I said, shrugging. “If you think it’ll work.”

  “This is not smart,” Tracy said. “But then when is anything we do smart?”

  She thumped Nathan on the shoulder.

  “I’m in, big guy.”

  We all turned to look at Mason.

  The man just shook his head and turned to Sargeant Parker.

  “Are they always like this?”

  “He is,” Parker answered, pointing at me. “Sometimes she is,” he added, pointing at Tracy. He looked at Nathan disapprovingly and sighed. “Never him.”

  Mason looked back at the three of us and sighed himself.

  “Might as well get this over with.”

  “Let’s go get the stuff,” I said, clapping Mason on the shoulder. “This’ll be fun.”

  “Fun,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not what I’d call it.”

  ***

  The barrage down the slope increased.

  By a lot.

  Everyone with ranged abilities was at the front line, firing those abilities down at the Grimdar. Tracy was the exception. Sunie would have been part of this Plan N, but his ranged Abilities were better on the line. A couple people even moved down the slope, using the portable walls as shields, setting the walls up as a barrier.

  They were making it look like we were going to make a push to get off the top of the hill.

  Which we were. Just not yet.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Mason.

  He grunted, still not happy with the idea.

  “You want to go first?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  I laughed and moved back on the flat hill top. Mason joined me, both of us about twenty feet back. I took off running, not using Kinetics to add to my speed. My natural Adapted body was going to be enough. I reached the edge and pushed off, jumping across the distance to the next peak.

  What made the range of hills so hard to climb was the steep and jagged sides. There were plenty of handholds, but it would not be a fast climb and why bother when there was a nice trail designed to provide access. Even going down was going to be slow. Unless you did what we were going to do.

  I landed on a small shelf, feet starting to slide, but leaned forward and caught myself, using my Abilities to help keep me locked in place. I started moving my way around to the backside, having to reach for hand and foot holds. There were plenty of them, but not in places that made it easy.

  The whole peaked hill shook as Mason’s armored form slammed into it. He started sliding down but caught himself.

  “You good?”

  “No,” he muttered, but started shifting his way around to the back.

  We had to move quickly, which made this very difficult. Not so much for me, not with my Abilities, but for Mason. He didn’t complain though, at least not in a serious way. We only had minutes to do this, so we moved a lot quicker than was safe.

  Circling the hill, we came to the next one in line, having to move up a bit to get over the top of it, then started climbing down the front, moving to the side and onto the next hill. Down a bit to get over it, onto the back side and then around again. Except when we had to go back up to get to the next peak, we were always making our way down.

  There was a lot of slipping, a lot of jumping and barely catching ourselves by the fingertips. If we hadn’t been Adapted by the System, none of this would have been possible. If we hadn’t been as high Leveled as we were, it wouldn’t have been possible.

  We made it down to the ground in record time, far from the mass of Grimdar but that had been the plan. Didn’t want them taking potshots at us as we descended.

  The two of us ran away from the hills, heading into the plains. I pulled my Codex out of my Inventory, hitting a couple buttons to send a signal to Nathan. I got a reply a minute later.

  Mason and I hit our mark, turned and looked back at the mass of Grimdar that hadn’t noticed two forms running full speed away from the wall. That had been our hope, that they’d be so focused on the hill they wouldn’t see us. And even if they did, why would they bother with just two, four total, people running from the hill? They’d think we were heading to get reinforcements that would be days away.

  I sent Nathan another signal and got a response a couple minutes later.

  “Ready?”

  “Not really,” Mason said. “This is going to be rough.”

  “Yep,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  Both of us pulled out two of the Arcane Gatling Cannons from our inventories and then a couple of the portable walls that we threw down in front of us. Angling the cannons, holding onto each with one hand, I started feeding Arcanum into the crystals.

  “Here we go.”

  I started firing.