You are Summoned. Chapter 68.

Chapter 68. Advance to contact.

“He was the one that came to my rescue at the barn, I’m sorry I couldn’t get to him in time,” I said, feeling guilty as I watched the pyres that had been erected to burn our fallen.

“The ghouls acted with more coordination than they normally possess. I’d say that Pharox had his hand directly involved in this, guiding the monsters even over this great distance. Don’t beat yourself up, Rico, you did what you could,” Fitzfazzle tried to assure me.

“What now?” I asked. The fight had ended in the early afternoon, and with our mechs, and the mages that powered them running on fumes, we were stuck for a bit.

“We set out tomorrow afternoon. Warmaster Glumbleflump wants us to arrive for battle during the daytime. Many of the most powerful undead are thwarted or significantly weakened by sunlight. A necromancer with Pharox’s power is certain to have more than skeletons and zombies running around,” Fitzfazzle admitted.

I pitched in where I could, hauling the hundreds of undead bodies to the fires we had made. It was disgusting, horrible work, but it had to be done if we didn’t want new undead horrors to spawn from the remains. One of the first generation mechs was fitted with a wagon to pull so we could load things easier, but we couldn’t afford to have too many mechs stomping around when we were low on power.

While we worked, I continued to push mana in the wand I had adopted as my sidearm. With Flunzzlebump gone, and his mech heavily damaged, I was able to strip a few wands from the launchers to have as backup weapons. If I could charge two or three wands up, I’d have something powerful to fight with if my mech was damaged or ran dry on mana.

For my other weapons, the gnomes had hooked me up with one of their war hammers The hammer functioned similar enough to my mace that my limited skills transferred over. Other than the dagger from my loadout, the hammer was my only melee weapon. Space was tight inside the mech, so I couldn’t store an arsenal inside it.

Stockpiling additional melee weapons wasn’t going to happen, but a pair of wands tucked into my belt worked just fine. Having some ranged firepower in the form of wands would make things much easier for me. I wish I could take some back to Rico’s Place when the summoning was over, it would be awesome to have one in my standard loadout.

It hit me that this was the first time that I had considered returning from the summoning in quite a while. I had fallen in love with the gnomish people, and it was sad to think that this summoning contract would end soon, one way or the other. Sure, the rewards should be pretty amazing, but did rewards matter if I wasn’t somewhere I wanted to be?

I’d move from Earth to here in a heartbeat. The fact that this world was dangerous didn’t matter, it was a place that needed me. Nobody needed me in Los Angeles, and I really had no roots there other than my sister. If I was honest with myself, my sister and I had never been all that close. We exchanged Christmas cards and emailed each other every once in a while, but there hadn’t been a real bond since our parents had passed away.

Would the opportunity come for me to permanently move to this, or some other world during my summonings? If it did, I resolved to make the change. Earth, and the creeps trying to capture me there, would be just fine without Rico. Eventually I’d hit tier one, and when I did, I’d get another crack at the city of Somhagen. Somewhere in that city, in its shops filled with magic, there had to be a way for me to leave my old world behind.

I worked through the afternoon, thinking about my future before eventually taking a break once the undead corpses had been dealt with. Sleep took me almost immediately, and dawn was breaking by the time Lumpy arrived to wake me up.

“I’m up, Lumpy, what’s the plan?” I said through a tired yawn.

“We’re moving out soon,” was all he offered. The gnome looked even more tired than I felt. I vaguely remembered reading an autobiography back in school on a soldier. One of the things that stuck with me was how tired they were all the time, constant battle, physical exertion, and lack of proper sleep faced most soldiers. I suppose I was in that category now, a combat veteran.

Breakfast was a sausage baked into a bun that reminded me of a cross between a Hawaiian roll and a biscuit. It was pretty good and heavy enough to keep me going until we stopped around midday. The engineers were still packing away their siege engines into the wagons, and once they were done, we’d be ready to roll.

I hauled myself into the cockpit of my mech and sealed it. The machine was a bit gore covered and smelled horrible by now, but once inside, it wasn’t too bad. Thankfully, a washing station had been set up for us so we were able to clean up before we went to sleep last night.

The gnomes would have to figure out some way to clean the mechs off between combat or who knew what kind of diseases they might spread. While they were at it, the gnomes really should think about putting some decoration on future models, kind of like pilots used to do on their planes. I made a point to tell Lumpy about it next time we spoke.

Warmaster Glumbleflump and Sir Goodwin had reorganized our forces last night, consolidating depleted units where they could. From the eight infantry companies we had started with, our force was now down to six, slightly understrength companies. The engineers had taken losses, but they could make do if they had some help with the more physical aspects of working the siege engines, such as loading.

We were also down to nine mages, but with the loss of Flunzzlebump, there was one less mech to charge up. They did what they could this morning, but the mages were having issues with mana regeneration. So many cycles of charging and discharging their mana tended to hamper regeneration unless they had more time to rest.

Our human allies were worse off than the gnomes. The loss of their leader, most of their mounted forces, and casualties among the footmen made their formation look like a sad afterthought, not a powerful allied force. They now had just under 200 footmen, 45 archers, and a single knight. On the plus side, they still had a pair of the war priests with them. Two had been killed alongside the knights, and the remaining pair were conserving their mana for the final confrontation with Pharox.

The mages assured us there was enough mana in each mech to get us through a day of marching on the road, and we needed to do what we could to conserve energy. They’d try to top us off during the breaks, but they had to be careful with their mana if we wanted enough power to be effective when we reached the crypt. My paltry mana went into charging the wands I kept with me, and I estimated that I should have one fully charged by noon, and then I could start on the second.

Our trip toward the crypt proved to be uneventful. The lack of any attackers gave us hope that the necromancer was having trouble replacing his losses. The army had been battered and bruised, but we were still an effective fighting force. The trail we had been following turned out to be the remnants of the ancient road that led to the now ruined city near Pharox’s crypt. While the swamp had reclaimed several sections of road, there was enough dry land for the wagons and mechs to operate in.

Once we stopped for the night, everyone felt uneasy. The normal sounds of the swamp were gone, and it was almost as if the nearness of the necromancer had sucked the life from everything around it. By now, the mages mana regeneration had returned to normal, so they got to work on our mechs, topping off the power and starting the process of recharging the magic missile wands.

By morning, all our mechs should have full mana reserves as well as at least one launcher full of magic missiles. One launcher was all I had left, after having lost the other one in the battle against the undead owlbear. My blunderbuss was also fully charged, but we were now out of reloads, so what I had was all I was going to get for this fight.

During the day’s journey, I had managed to fill one of my personal wands completely and another had two charges in it. I’d save what mana I had left, it was cheaper, but a bit slower to push mana into the wand in combat. I believed we were as ready as we could be, and the scouts reported that they couldn’t see any activity in either the ruins, or crypt just beyond.

The night was a challenging one, and I think all of us suffered nightmares of some sort. Every time I tried to sleep, I’d dream of the cultists and corporate thugs capturing me, and I’d wake just as they began their torture. Fitzfazzle called on one of the war priests, who cast an area of effect blessing over our camp. After that, we all slept peacefully, though the soldiers on watch reported several sightings of things creeping though the darkness, just outside the light from the camp.

When morning arrived, it was a dark and overcast glow that barely penetrated the perpetual haze that seemed to loiter over the area. After an hour of travel, we left the swamp and started to walk on firmer ground. It must have been lush plains at one point, but now, the ground around this city and crypt would no longer support life. Here, we were the outsiders, and I could almost feel the land trying to sap the lifeforce from me as we drew ever closer to Pharox.