Allagahn's Diary

Chapter 16 - The human fireball

I reached the combat just after they reached our troops and was able to take out about eight of the creatures without suffering any real damage. The men didn’t fare so well and we lost close to a hundred of them. Luckily we weren't pursued, the enemy made camp at the top of the ravine and we were able to get the rest of the men back to the castle, taking all the excess equipment and moving the casualties in the APCs.

Cordelia had a bit of a hangover, so she missed the whole shebang. Charity emerged out of the fight without any damage and had beaten her opponents by overpowering them psychically.

As far as defences are concerned, we stationed the APCs on the rise from the ravine, just outside the castle, so we could take advantage of their long range weapons. They each had 4 sentry guns, which we moved up onto the castle towers. We are keeping about 12 micro lights in the air at any one time and resting the remainder of the pilots.

Alfred was using magic to create a massive storm over the enemy troops. I thought it might have been a good opportunity to take out some of their airborne troops while they were still on the ground, so I flew out there with a couple of napalm canisters to try and drop on there. Alfred halted the lightning and rain and I used the cover of the clouds to get directly above them. I went vertically down and started trying to look for the airborne creatures, while bringing up a pattern defence wall against magic. The winged creatures were amongst the ground troops, so I switched targets to the command tents. They managed to detect me, work out what I was doing, freeze time seconds before I released the napalm and detonate the napalm I was carrying, so the next thing I knew, I was hurtling to the ground on fire. My armour managed to protect me from any damage, but gave up the will to fly, so I had to glide it over the edge of the cliff and into the ravine. Although this could have gone better, I'm glad we discovered a very important fact about the enemy's capabilities, without losing 100 micro lights in giant fireballs. I was only 100 feet off the ground when the explosion occurred, so there is a very real change that the contents of the napalm canisters rained down on the enemy.

Back in the castle, I cleaned myself up and tried scrying for my home shadow. I quickly worked out, it was going to take a long time to achieve, so I have put a hold on it. Charity thinks we need to go and summon the Phoenix as soon as possible, so we all headed up to Deirdre's tower to take a look at the keep of the 4 worlds. It had a lot less troops than it used to, but still had hundreds crawling all over it. We came up with a plan to try and use pattern tendrils to overpower the guards on the roof, then trump to that location. This worked, but we now have the problem of about 40 guards directly below us. We are going to need a good plan.