Deadworld Isekai

Brennan looked out over the walls and the canopy of treetops that hugged the city. The view was breathtaking, if it wasn't for the invading army of thousands of demons. The treetops were nice, and he liked nice things. He liked other people to have access to nice things.

One of the accepted, well-thought-of tactics when demons were attempting a siege was to let the demons approach the wall while counting on the archers to take down weaker flying creatures. Then, it was just a matter of dropping stuff on the demons, whether that be rocks, spells, or whatever the Ra'Zorians had lying around. The Ra’Zorian soldiers had a saying that went something like “A good wall makes one soldier count for ten”, and it wasn’t a lie. Leveraging the wall would make this battle much more of a sure thing.

But in the process, the demons would hurt the trees. Brennan didn’t want that, which meant he was thinking about doing something slightly dumber.

“You have that look on your face,” Artemis said.

“What look?” said Brennan.

“The one you get when you are about to do something you think is noble, but is really just dumb,” said Artemis.

Having Artemis along on this journey was an unexpected plus in Brennan’s week. Apparently, word of Derek’s personal renaissance hadn’t climbed the ladder to Artemis’ superiors yet, which meant that they felt guilty about sticking her in an all-day-every-day shit type of assignment. When she asked to be temporarily shifted from it to field work to keep herself sharp, they gave her a choice of postings. To Brennan’s great and persistent satisfaction, she chose his.

“Now it’s the one you get when you are getting sappy,” Artemis commented.

“What can I say? I’m a romantic,” said Brennan.

Out in the field, the demons' torches were slowly shifting as their commanders fine-tuned the attack formations. Sometimes, they'd do this for days, moving whole contingents of soldiers a few feet this way or that way until everything was perfect. Then, and only then, would they advance, and thrust their whole force forward like a spear of death.

As annoying as it was, the micromanaging made more sense for the demons than it appeared. For one, the demons were “the race of many races”, with monsters of all shapes and sizes composing their ranks. They all moved at different paces, possessed different strengths, and were vulnerable to different kinds of defenses. Demon battle order just mattered more than human formations. There was more to keep track of.

On top of that, humanity on Ra’Zor was a scattered thing. Ra’Zorian humans lived and worked in little islands of civilization built around various valuable resources worth protecting. They stayed behind the safety of the vaguely defined battle lines that comprised the border between the human and demon worlds. For humans, travel was dangerous. Monsters roamed. Demons raided. Reinforcements and supplies had to be carefully planned.

Meanwhile, the demons’ side of the line was firmly their own territory. It was more established, more built-up, and with endlessly more resources. If humans spent as long dilly-dallying before attacks, they’d be subject to raids and attacks from all sides. The demons tended to optimize their formations, simply because they could. There was always time.

Or at least there was when Brennan wasn’t there. Sometimes he was able to tip the scales on that a bit.

—

Back in the war-room, Brennan was briefing his team.

“You know how these guys are. Everything has to be perfect. It’s really, really easy to catch them on the back foot because of that.”

Brennan was a high-level precision fighter. Most of his skills were biased towards him making pinpoint attacks as an individual, waiting for opportunities to strike hard and fast at the most vulnerable targets when it mattered most. At a high level, those same skills also applied to attacking big groups in interesting ways, essentially letting him find vulnerabilities in formations of foes and deal maximum damage with small groups.

In the back, a huge man sitting hugging a huge, rectangular shield raised his hand.

“So you want to attack them first? That’s a tall order, even for me. Lots of heavy hitters in that crew.”

“You aren’t wrong, John. With the numbers that they have, we don’t have much hope of winning in a force-on-force conflict. I’m thinking about something a little less direct. For full disclosure, the safe move would be fighting them from the wall like usual. It’s just…”

Artemis cut in. “He doesn’t want the trees to get hurt. I agree, because of the lumber value of the trees, among other reasons. But…”

“He just likes them?” John said, laughing. Among the reincarnators that Brennan worked with, John was probably his favorite. He was a big, nice guy. One that was glad to take the hits to protect everyone else. Brennan understood that getting hit still hurt, no matter how many defense skills were plastered on top. But John took all the hits with a smile. It meant a lot.

“Yeah, I just like them. Plus, it bothers me that the demons are just out there, relaxed. I want to give them something to think about,” said Brennan.

—

When they attacked, they hit hard and fast. The city walls had a few small doors made of solid iron. Each of them was backed by several feet of rock so that even if the doors were breached, which wasn't likely, the demons would still have to deal with interlocking stone slabs set up to be a wall-within-the-wall.

From the inside, the slabs could be moved, and the iron door could be unlocked. It usually didn't happen, on the off chance that the demons took advantage of this opportunity and attacked. But it had been done before, for couriers to slip out and send messages. This time, it meant Brennan, John, Artemis and Flambo the Great, were able to go beyond the walls. Flambo had changed his name as a joke shortly after his arrival, and was so committed to the bit that he never changed it back. Despite this, he was the best offensive reincarnator mage on the planet, at least as far as Brennan knew.

After watching for days, Brennan had narrowed down to three targets. They were all generals in the demon army, or at least they seemed to be so. Creeping forward in the dark, they got close to the easiest target, the demon who seemed to be in charge of the flying units. Brennan was confident they could at least cause problems for that one demon officer. It was the others he wasn’t sure about.

After an hour of waiting in the bushes outside the enemy camp’s firelight, he saw the target. On Earth, he would have described it as a giant eagle-human hybrid and assumed, if he saw it, that it was either a very realistic costume or the result of some truly horrific genetic engineering. That said, it was as fully armored as a flying unit could be with lightweight, ultra-thin metal plates.

In the bushes, Flambo started pouring power into one of Artemis’ specially made arrowheads, one designed specifically for the purpose of carrying a magical payload in addition to the substantial physical damage Artemis could cause. Flambo’s ability stored what he called “flame energy” within the arrowhead, to be released on impact with a target. It wasn’t all-destroying, but with two people putting everything they could into their attack, the party hoped they’d be able to take out the officer in a single hit. After a few seconds, Flambo lifted his hand. The arrowhead had all the power it could take. Artemis took measure of the wind, aimed, and fired.

The one-hit kill was not meant to be. The arrow hit the target, pierced its armor, and exploded with energy powerful enough that for a moment, their enemy lit up like it had eaten a spotlight. But the demon wasn’t a general for nothing. With a scream, it tanked the hit while managing to still keep its balance, wobbly but very much alive and very, very loud. The troops around it were just beginning to get to their feet and arm themselves when Brennan sprang out of the darkness. He flared his Distance Lunge ability, crossed the distance between himself and the general in a moment, and skewered him with one of his daggers. Between the arrow and the strike, it was more than enough to put the general down.

Brennan pulled his dagger and prepared to deal with the retaliatory strikes from the general’s troops, only to watch most of them get bowled over as John entered the fray behind the shield-enhancing powers of his Two-Ton Charge skill. Once it wore off, he’d be vulnerable, but even a vulnerable John was unreasonably hard to hurt and could hold his own. Brennan was off and running before the skill ended, confident John would stick to the plan and withdraw if necessary.

The biggest, most important element of John's charge wasn’t that it was effective at dealing damage, but instead that it was loud. When demons hit by the charge survived, they tended to do so with a variety of wounds ranging from broken bones to dented skulls, the kind of wounds that resulted in them making quite a bit of noise. Brennan’s class wasn’t inherently sneaky, but he had a lot of DEX piled up. With John making noise on the outskirts of the fight, it was fairly easy for him to weave between tents and avoid being sighted before getting to the next general.

By the time he arrived, the general in charge of the heavy troops was fully alerted and surrounded by his personal guards. The general himself looked to be a damage-dealing type, one that gave out hits much more easily than he took them. Like other higher-ranking demons, he looked essentially like a human with short horns, slightly redder skin, and a serious attitude problem. His guards were all tanky types, belonging to a family of demons that looked like hornless bipedal rhinos. They were big, slow, and strong. Exactly the kind of enemies Brennan loved to fight.

Brennan abandoned stealth, running directly to the rhino-demon closest to him and slashing its neck. It was easy. The slash itself didn’t have enough power to take the demon down, but Brennan had learned a long time ago that no amount of stats or skills could overcome the sheer self-preservation instinct someone felt when they were being attacked at their vital points. As the rhino let out a sort of hurk noise and grabbed at its neck, Brennan grabbed the back of its head, forced it down further, and vaulted completely over the enemy into the center of the circle with the general.

Almost immediately, a glowing hand came chopping at his neck.

Brennan barely dodged it without activating any of his evasion skills. Despite the demon being a general, it was clearly at a lower-level than Brennan. In fact, Brennan was a bit of nightmare horror story from the perspective of the demons. The difficulty of their raid came not from killing the demon generals, which was easy, but killing them fast enough that they wouldn't be dogpiled by literally thousands of demon soldiers, which was hard.

But Brennan had a solution for that. A big part of why Brennan brought six daggers to battle when one or two would do just fine was for situations like this when time was of the essence. He pulled out another dagger.