LIGHTNOVELONLINE Interlude: Turning And Turning In The Widening Gyre
As the sun comes up, no one is aware that it will be the last day of the war.
To be sure, a few people think they know, and are extremely wrong about it; Tetsuo Okano could easily verify such a fact if he put real effort into it, but he is currently occupied with other concerns such as "not dying" and "setting everything on fire to ensure the safety of his new wife and unborn child". This is a lot to manage for anybody, but it is a particularly sizable strain for a sixteen-year-old boy who very recently had nothing more serious in his mind than memorizing the stats of the 1998 Yankees roster; the results are unfortunate for everyone else, but he can hardly be blamed. Sora Sugimoto is also involved at the fringes of this, but we'll come back to him later; his situation is fraught, to say the least, and unrelated to most of what else is happening right now.
Zum Velbat and Hox Manceris, on the other hand, are extremely off target and each trying to read the same sheet of music from the wrong end; their once-legendary collaboration has grow increasingly strained over the past two weeks and has more than once erupted in physical violence between them. Vius Mak Ghiroth has exhausted every trick in his considerable repertoire of peacemaking gambits and is now frantically stuffing his things into a Magic Bag; his bravery, questionably substantial even at the best of times, is very close to its breaking point because Vius is one of the four people who have any inkling whatsoever of what is really going on (and two of the remaining three are Kholoth and Saiki Suzume, who will be no help to him at all). Quint Aumraham and Sahlerra Siukh, respectively, have about two-thirds and three-fourths of the picture and the parts they do have are mostly filled out in crayon; their upcoming actions will be extremely effective at achieving entirely the wrong goals, which makes it that much more tragic that they each know at least twice what Kelfir Leafwind does. Ironically, this will be very good for him long-term, but he's going to have a rough morning tomorrow; at the moment, he is twiddling his thumbs in a highly secure location at Topher Bailey's behest and hoping really, really hard that he's not making a terrible mistake. Tomorrow is very briefly going to be the worst day of his life, but he will survive it -- which is more than a great many people will get to do.
Jeneren Cuthbert and Misena Gorflame (Senior General and Arcane Corps Commander, respectively) have, at phenomenal expense and titanic personal effort, managed to shepherd the C-Rankers and D-Rankers -- the most powerful units of Sheonn's army -- across the badlands and through the Black Gate; suffering only the lightest of casualties, they have crossed into the Forest of Corpses and are on a direct collision path with Tyal Ex Zedeus and her army, who will obliterate them to the last man in the event they have a clear angle of attack. This is very cold comfort to Tyal Ex Zedeus, though, because she is very frustrated with the useless intelligence her superiors have sent her into the field with; thanks to their blundering, Vek-adhzal Zurael, Undying Feast of Storms, is no longer living up to his name, while Krulvanesh Rhu Bhirhagog, Black Bringer of Crows, is living up to his all too well. To the demons, this is beyond unheard of; it is like discovering that a coworker has been been beaten to death by a squirrel, who was also wielding a feather duster. They are understandably confused, demoralized, and angry, which is resulting in Tyal Ex Zedeus having great difficulty controlling her troops; a lot of them keep breaking ranks to 'crush these pathetic nuisances' and then getting caught out of position and slaughtered by whatever the humans are doing which she has not yet quite figured out. But Tyal Ex Zedeus is not Unforgiving Queen of Swords for nothing, and she is slowly gaining control of the situation through whatever means are necessary (four executions for dereliction of duty, to start); she will shortly regroup to present a unified front. It will be entirely in the wrong direction, but such is life.
Quint Aumraham, perhaps the only player of this particular game who has not yet showed his hand, is extraordinarily busy at this point; in many ways, he is limited by the technology of his time and has experienced a lot of frustration due to the fact that even a Level 81 Mage (he lied about being Level 70) can only put a few hundred MP into an attack. While Quint's grotesquely Brobdingnagian MP pool allows him to be basically invulnerable in combat, his comparatively feeble spells are also not much of a deterrent to higher-Level demons; their staggering innate Defense means that most of his attacks simply bounce off anything tougher than a Capras or a Loivaktaon, and he has dedicated significant effort to finding a way around this problem (which, ironically, he could have solved years ago if he'd simply asked Kelfir Leafwind, but such a thought has never occurred to him). Fortunately, he has recently gotten his hands on the regrettable history of some of the Otherworlders, which has led him to a particular avenue of research unlikely to have occurred to him organically -- that of high-energy time-delayed ordnance, which he has sunk a great deal of industry into replicating. His preparations will be complete in about three hours, shortly after which every person in the world is going to notice it; it will not be a happy occasion.
Across the Four Kingdoms, various other people are also doing various other things to support, exploit, betray, suborn, and otherwise interact productively with the war effort and such crises as always emerge from such things; others are used as catspaws in some of these efforts, almost always to their misfortune, and Tok Rockbrand happens to be one of these few when her wagon is destroyed by riots in Thoxen. She barely escapes with her life and spends a few days reconsidering her career before realizing that she prefers death to boredom; subsequently, she returns to her appointed Guild hall, and expresses her discontent to her coordinating representative by the simple expedient of an axe to the face. The resulting reprisals, counter-reprisals, and general breakdown of civilization within the Merchant's Guild and its factions make life very interesting for almost everyone, particularly when the Rockbrand Union succeeds in a pitched assault on a fortified guild fortress and discovers that several of the Merchant's Council are undercover demons. To describe what follows as a spine-breaking whiplash of supply and demand is a bit of an understatement, but the eventual summary is that most of the economy of the Four Kingdoms collapses; this will have exceedingly dire consequences for the logistics of the war if anyone survives the Battle of the Forest of Corpses.
In his tent, Topher Bailey sleeps the sleep of someone who knows absolutely none of this, and is the happier for it. His ignorance has roughly six hours to live.