If I am honest, I should be up there confidently assisting the soldiers. Shamon doesn't need my help, but the man certainly needs me to boost the morale of the soldiers. A confident leader can always pass on that confidence to his soldiers and the soldiers need it right now.
The events of the last couple of hours have shaken me more than I would like to admit, though. Weakness is not something that you show to your underlings. They will begin to lose every bit of the little morale they have. Now is really not the time I want to deal with deserters.
Shamon is coming down right now. I can see the man's descend down the stairs entering into the room. (There are only so many mages in in this place.)
"Captain, the patrols have come bearing news," he speaks, his voice serious enough that I know we are in deep shit. The man begins his customary bow.
"Get on with it. Do you need to follow the protocols now," I speak to him getting a bit annoyed.
"The enemy is coming to attack us. The entire force of more than four troops is coming to attack us as we speak," he says, careful not to show any reaction to my words.
"They are not going to be easy to fight," I speak "They do not have any of their leaders, though. Even if they all come, I am sure that they will just charge at the wall like a bunch of madmen. Delaying them should be easy, right?"
"We do have a couple of hours before they attack," he replies. "But I did not complete my report, Captain. The troop leaders have whipped their minions into a death trance."
"Now what is a death trance?" I am seriously not in the mood for learning right now. I am shaking, a mixture of exhaustion and adrenaline. It is a wonder that I am on my feet at this moment.
"To explain that, I will have to discuss the troops a bit. As I have explained to you before the troop leader can force his commands onto his creatures. This is considered an innate ability of theirs," He replies. "This ability works in a pretty insidious way, you see. It is like a whisper at the back of their mind, telling them what to do. They say that most of the time the creature is not even able to tell that it is doing its troop leaders will."
"I know, you have explained it to me before," I reply, feeling my irritation grow. (Such vague descriptions really don't help narrow down the magic being used here. This was intentional, by the way.)
"The death trance is like making the whispering into screaming. These creatures are not able to think about anything else other than their tasks. They will throw their bodies at the wall if they have to do so to achieve their goals," he speaks. "This means that the troop leaders will not need to direct their soldiers at all. The minions will certainly throw themselves at the walls like mad men. It is a strategy that they rarely tend to use because any Ice Beast that they force into a death trance dies within the week."
"So, how difficult is it going to be to fight them now?" I speak, beginning to understand the man's fear.
"They are pretty unlikely to fight for long. The death trance consumes a lot of their power," he replies. "They should not be able to last for more than half a week. The only problem is holding them for that period. I am not sure I will be able to do it."
"Can you hold against the creatures for a day then?" I ask. "I just need to complete one more inscription and I should have a weapon prepared against them."
"All I can say is that I will try. I can give you no guarantees. A creature in the death trance has a kind of passion that you won't be able to find anywhere else," he replies, getting ready to leave. "This is not going to be easy. Still, I will shore up the defenses."
"Before you go, how exactly do you know so much about the Ice Beasts?" I ask.
"I have been fighting them since I was a young man barely able to use his sword, Captain," he replies, his gaze fixed on some ghost from the past. "You can learn a lot about your enemies when you have fought them for so long."
"By the way, send a message to the Scholars," I command, remembering about them suddenly. "We need to confirm their safety."
The man doesn't reply to this, confirming his assent with a nod. He turns to take his leave.
I am left pondering on my screw-up today. I guess I can justify it in a thousand ways, but however intense the attacks were before, things are going to be much harder. Even now Shamon does not realize one thing. The enemy has not yet made a move knowing that I am of the Legion. Whatever move they make on basis of this, we will see it in a while.
While their reaction up till now has been pretty extreme, it will be nothing compared to the hell that they are going to be throwing at us now. A Snowlord coming to attack us is now a guarantee. The only question that is left is when and from where.
I guess that I should now speak about the progress that I have been making with the inscription process. I have almost failed in making the string of water.
I had thought that I would have been able to pull it off. I did manage to inscribe the spell without any mistakes for six days. At the last minute, I made a mistake in the runes that were meant to decide the string's size. (Let's just say the string would have been larger than this fort and making it would have wiped all our reserves.) The single mistake almost burnt the formation for me. I guess that I should explain what burning a formation means.
If during the inscription process, one of the runes were to destabilize, it could cause that spot to be burned. Essentially the spell will be inscribed into the formation core, but with a couple of runes distorted into useless shapes. An example of this is, let's say you inscribed a fireball spell but damaged the temperature rune. The fireball created wouldn't be hot enough to heat a bucket of water.
In the worst case, it can create a chain reaction capable of causing the entire formation core to explode on my face. Even if the core doesn't explode, it will make that particular slot completely unuseable. (hence we call that slot burned.)
Even in the best case, that would practically mean that I have only nine class nine spells in the thing. If that were to happen then the only thing that I would be able to do is to just change the formation core, which would be quite impossible at this moment. The class eight spell that I am inscribing needs all ten spells to work. (Certain formations can make do with a lesser number of spots as well. This is not one of those.)
I have given myself a day to complete the formation. I will still have to push myself to achieve this inscription. I will have to be more careful doing this though. This time, I cannot ignore my rest.
With the exhaustion that I am feeling, a single day of rest will not be enough but that is all I can give myself at the moment. Any more and I simply won't have enough time to complete this. Shamon's grim attitude makes it clear that I can't take these minions lightly.
At the moment, I am seriously considering if I should just run away from this place. I could take the soldiers and run away to the Frozen Peak. I would certainly be in a pretty bad position, but it feels like it is going to be better than my present situation.
I can only consider this if the enemy troops do not catch up with us. If they do, the fort is the only thing that we have against them. Otherwise, these creatures outnumber us three to one. Without the wall, we are just sitting ducks.
Fuck, I can feel the exhaustion creep into my mind. The adrenaline of the last hour has begun to fade. Even now, I can feel my mind struggle to remember the runes that I need to craft. What would have taken me a minute at my peak, now feels like it will take me ten. I really cannot risk inscribing now.
The funny thing is that I have put myself in my present situation. I cannot blame anybody else. After all, I have been explicitly warned from trying to inscribe two spells back to back like this more than once by my master.
The exhaustion caused by the first spell will more than guarantee the inscription of the second spell would fail. I just could not help myself. With a completed ballista it would have given me an edge that would have more than guaranteed that I would be able to deal with any troop leader. There was the nasty surprise as well, which would have made fighting the Snowlords easier. I shouldn't think about that now. Trying to implement it in my present state will be stupid.
I have to try and sleep now regardless of how wrong it feels. The problem is who will tell my mind that? Even now I find myself imagining what the retribution of the Snowlords will be like. All of the actions they have taken till now are without knowing my identity. If they know, then how dangerous are they going to be?
The Snow Tribe is one of the many forces that has sworn to destroy the Legion and it seems to be one of the more passionate ones at doing that.
It is due to this inherent agressiveness of our enemies that we are so careful. Every single soldier who is trained in the battle arts of the Legion is also taught from a diverse and varied group of battle styles. We make use of these arts to hide our presence. The problem is due to how easily recognizable the legion's battle arts tend to be. All of our enemies tend to be on an active lookout for us.
That is why we have been trained to hide our identity every moment of our life that we are outside of the Hexmountain. This is true even if we are sleeping as well (especially if we are sleeping). Such a slip would mean death. Let's hope Eric isn't reading this log. The bastard would gloat a bit too much on this to my liking.
As for why the Legion tends to be such a hated figure. Part of that is due to their role in the Black Mountain and part of it is just due to the Legion itself.
Publically, their duty is to ensure that nobody breaks the Hexmountain treaty. They are meant to prevent any army from attacking enemy territory without following the due process defined in the treaty. (You could say fear of the Legion is the only reason that the Continent is not mired in a thousand wars at the moment.)
They also handle the work of defending magical ruins in contested areas and assign ownership for when the Scholars come. (for the Hexmountain treaty.)
Secretly, they are charged with destroying any force that has tried to cultivate their own "Scholars". They have also destroyed any force that has tried to compete with the Black Mountain in the business of knowledge. This is to the point that our enemies call us the "mad dog of the Scholars", that the Scholars throw at their competitors.
When you tend to attack people, it tends to leave quite a bit of bad blood with them. When you attack them with the brutality the Legion does, bad blood would be wrong word for the grudge formed. It would be more equivalent to a death promise at the level of the death trance that Shamon just described to me.
Still, the major problem with the Legion is that they are absurdly good at their task. They have a nearly hundred percent completion rate at exterminating their enemies. Every single force they have been sent to destroy has been crushed to fine powder. Such kind of perfection does tend to breed quite a bit of fear in everybody else. That is why we need to be so cautious.
After all most forces can never be sure if the single Legion soldier passing through their lands is a soldier doing a routine inspection. He could also be a scout planning the attack path of the Legion. It is this fear that drives our enemies into action. After all, you can never tell when the Black Mountain will decide you to be an enemy and release their mad dog on you.
Even with all this, the worst enemies to the Legion you can find are the tribes. Why that is the case, I have no idea. When I was in the Legion, I was not allowed to read their history and when I got out, there was no way that they would let me read their history. Some things even the Scholars know not to be curious about. All I know is that there is a lot of bad blood between the tribes and the Legion.
I guess that I should speak about the tribes some other day. The problem is I know so little about them. There is no need for me to tell stories that everybody know already. I know that the tribes don't mind destroying entire towns to hunt the Legion. That is enough for now.