Chương 71: Into the Sewers

As we hid the bodies, I turned to Lord Ceonwin and asked, "Sir, there's one thing I don't get. Why would anyone think that you are a traitor? Why would it even be a possibility?"

"They think treasonous behaviour runs in the family," he said.

"My son. He was identified as a traitor of the highest degree—anti-Warlord sentiment. He was drawn and quartered." After a short pause, Lord Ceonwin said, "He wasn't guilty. Afterward, it turned out that a Subtle Man had gotten into a disagreement with him over a woman and had accused him of treason to ensure his victory. My son was a devout follower of the Warlord."

"Oh…" I breathed.

"Indeed. Suffice it to say, my visits to the capital have been very…hostile lately. Subtle Men have been following me for years, ensuring no negative sentiments arise and monitoring my every move."

"Are there more watching us right now?"

"If there were, they would have attacked. No, the portreeve paid off the detail assigned to me. It makes my actions tonight all the more incriminating. If we cannot get the portreeve to admit what he did, we are going to be executed as traitors. You cannot let Mugreth kill him before we can wring a public confession out of him." I nodded. After we hid the bodies, we returned to the camp, and they brought me to a different healer who still had some Presence left—which they used to patch me up completely.

Then we were supposed to rest. My squadmates insisted that I shouldn't take a watch, and I resisted, but then Anchor promised to wake me up for the last watch. I should've realized that he was lying sooner. No one woke me up for my watch, and I slept through the night. It wasn't a very restful night.

We were far enough away from the wall that I didn't have to worry about being the first line of defense, but at the same time, I still heard the screams of the prisoners as Mugreth's men dragged them up to the wall and slaughtered them, then tossed them down. Orcs taunted us and screeched, and every so often, both sides exchanged volleys of arrows. But at some point, my exhaustion overwhelmed my alertness, and I passed out.

It was for the best, because sleep was truly what restored Presence, and I had just long enough of a nap to restore all eight of my points. I was going to need them all if I wanted to beat Mugreth. We'd all slept with our armour on, so we didn't have to suit up in the morning. As soon as the sun rose, Ceonwin navigated around the city, picking commanders to lead the civilian battalions and consulting the Drillmaster on who the best teams for infiltration were.

Needless to say, the Drillmaster recommended our squad, and Lord Ceonwin gave us a knowing nod. Whatever secret tunnel the portreeve had, we'd find it, and we'd use it. We'd save our skins, but if we could collapse the orcs' command structure at the same time, it would be so much easier to destroy the remaining lesser orcs. I gathered up the squad when I woke up and checked on everyone's Presence. Anchor and Brawl were mostly full—only missing one point each.

Sage said she was "half full" which could have meant anything. I didn't really know how Presence functioned for those without the System, and I didn't have time to find out. We gathered with the other squads chosen for infiltration—hiding in an alley, safe from the orcs' sight, in front of a sewer grate that they'd bashed open last night.

"We don't know the exact routes that you'll need to take to get to the gatehouse," said Lord Ceonwin.

"You will need to split up. Whoever reaches the gatehouse first, try to mark the route and wait for the others. You have about five hours until noon, and I need everyone to use what time we have wisely." At first, I was worried that with the daylight, the orcs would see how truly small our force was, but we'd left torches all throughout the city, trying to make it look larger, and we'd created hundreds of smokey fires throughout the city with wet wood.

The air was hazy, and the orcs would be hard-pressed to get a good look at us—or see the small army of regulars approaching when they arrived.

"Wait for the signal to open the gates," Lord Ceonwin said.

"When you hear the horns sound, that's your sign. Am I understood?"

"Yes, sir!" said everyone gathered for the mission.

"Deploy." He motioned to the sewer, and we all stepped toward it. Our squad was last, and he held out his sword in front of us.

"Be careful. And thank you for saving me. I wish you all a safe return. And Sage…be careful." If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

"I will." She grimaced.

"I always am."

"I— I know." He gave a sullen smile.

"I love you." She rolled her eyes.

"Yes, Dad."

"Now go!" We descended down the ladder, delving into the sewer. There was a narrow channel to climb down, but it didn't smell as awful as I thought it would. The old rungs had been built into the wall, and they were starting to rust, and they were faintly slimy, so I had to be careful. At first, I assumed the sewers had been an invention of the old empire—the same people who had built the Labyrinths—but it was made of gray cobblestone, not the white marble the old empire seemed to prefer.

Besides, there was no sign of this fortress city being from a past age. Admittedly, I hadn't really thought that these people would be civilized enough to have plumbing. But I had definitely been underestimating them. These were people who had figured out how to make artificial humans, after all, and I still wanted to think I could do everything better than them 'cause I came from Earth? Perhaps we had been more advanced in some ways, but not in all ways.

When I reached the bottom, I splashed down in an ankle-deep channel of water and sludge, and I didn't even want to think about what the lumps were. The hallways were tall tunnels nearly twice my height, built of cobblestones on all sides. Glowing lichen hung from the ceiling, making it faintly bright, but I still activated my buglight to help me see. On the other side of the underground channel, a raised walkway navigated around the edge of the tunnels.

I trudged over to it, lifting my nose and trying to avoid gagging at the stench, then climbed up onto it to get my boots out of the muck. The others in my squad followed me, and I said, "Anchor, you're the best navigator. Can you make sure we hold our course? We have to aim for the top of the city, for the central hall, and then we'll figure it out from there."

"Got it," Anchor said.

"I'll tell you where to turn."

"I don't like it down here, brother," said Anchor.

"Yeah, me neither," I replied.

"I've never smelled something so vile before," Sage said.

"And I have spent months around military-age Dupes who don't seem to understand that they can bathe whenever they want."

"Let's just get going," I said. All the other squads had set off, and I needed to catch up. We had to be ready to attack at Lord Ceonwin's signal. So we marched along the side of the gloomy sewer tunnel, navigating with Anchor's help. The closer we drew to the center of the city, the more the tunnels sloped upward. There might have been a flowing stream of excrement in the middle of the channel, considering how steep the slope was, but nothing was flowing. Did the orcs not have to use the washroom?

Or did they not understand how sewers worked? It was probably the latter. Maybe they didn't even know that it existed, and we'd catch them completely off-guard. Either way, the sewers followed the shape of Oschester's central hill, rising up through the stone and mud. It wasn't really a hill in a traditional sense, and more like a massive rock covered in mud. There were some sections of the sewer walls that had crumbled, giving way to nothing but exposed stone. At first, I thought we were alone in the tunnels.

We'd already strayed far away from the rest of the squads, so it was eerily quiet. I couldn't hear them speaking at all. But then, in the distance, there was a faint plopping and flopping noise, like someone shook a bowl of jello. Eventually, we stumbled across a trio of pale green slimes hopping up and down. They were tiny green balls with a pair of indents in their head for eyes, and they tried to approach us, but they couldn't make it up onto the walkway.

"Oh, great, they have a slime infection…" Sage muttered.

"You make it sound like some kind of crotch-rot," Anchor replied. I said, "I don't know what's wrong with you guys, but I think they're kinda cute." I bent down and looked at them, but I didn't dare to try and touch them. After a few seconds, I shook my head and said, "Let's not get distracted."

"Let it be known that I was the only one who was not distracted by the slimes," Brawl announced.

"Yes, yes," I said, shaking my head. We continued to climb until we reached a large central chamber. It was a cylindrical hall with culverts all along the walls, but nothing flowed. There was no obvious walkway, and Anchor announced, "We're at the center of the hill. This is pretty much directly below the great hall, and if we want to get in, we need to go up." I pointed high up in the hall, at the culverts closest to the ceiling.

"There," I said.

"One of those has to take us close to the main hall."

"Why aren't the orcs using the sewers?" Sage asked.

"Wouldn't the portreeve tell them about the sewers?"

"Or he knows Mugreth might screw him, and he's keeping them a secret so he can make a quick escape," I said. We climbed up the walls of the central chamber, using the uneven stones. Where we couldn't get a grip, Morph created handholds for us. Once we reached the highest culvert, I used an angled gravitational Art to rip the metal grate out, tugging the old metal with force it was never meant to handle. It flew out into the chamber and clanged down onto the floor below, echoing with a bang that was painfully loud.

Too loud. Far too loud. We ascended through the next tunnel, which was almost the exact same as the one before it, but it branched less, until finally, light began filtering down from street grates again. Shadows rippled past as orcs marched overhead.

"We're almost there," Anchor said.

"Take the left branch, then the next maintenance hall, and it should loop back close to our exit point." I nodded.

"Let's just hope we're close."