I'm thinking. If we think we can chase the mercenaries away with an impressive enough showing... Could I use my engineering skill to rig up a whole bunch of special effects? Speakers blaring loud, angry music. Laser light shows. Holograms of angry angelic beings hurling curses at them. And I stow a vast amount of weapons up on the wall and use them in time with the show. A series of rifle rounds going alongside swells of music. Firing off a bunch of incendiary grenades to coincide with bursts of light from the lasers. Really get the wow factor going.

If it looks like they're gonna sit and wait it out, I could spend the day getting it all ready then hit them hard once it starts getting dark.

I'm happy to be a runner to send updates back to Arkady if you think it's necessary. Or I can take pot shots with my side arm.

There's a chance that the mercenaries would sneak off if sufficiently harrassed, yes.. The Seeker-bitten army would pass that roll automatically.



You could! That would definitely have an effect.

On both the mercenaries and the people inside the city.

I thought Felix prepped multiple booby traps. Unless they've all gone off already he'd need to stick around and set them off as needed (which would basically evaporate the army inside the walls).

I figured they'd gone off already.

That wasn't the impression I got, given some of them were baited and others were just on the main route. Still, we can always ask higher authority.

Yoo-hoo! Higher authority! Did all the bombs go off at once or just one of them?

Felix set up multiple traps, most baited. I'm assuming he also set up suitable triggers (tripwires or pressure-sensitive triggers or similar) that will automatically set them off when someone reaches the right point or picks up the wrong bit of treasure; he doesn't need to trigger them manually.

Only one has gone off so far (the biggest one). The rest are still out there.

Since the army knows that there are bombs around, though, you're unlikely to get anything like as large a crowd in one place with any subsequent explosions. Some traps might only kill a single mercenary.

If that's how they see it, but for this crowd the possibility that they'll think it's a spell seems just as likely as a bomb. Are the defenders shooting from the inner wall, btw?

Hey, how's it all going?

The OS Strikes Back, volume 5.

Another year has snuck in while no one was looking. I wonder what happened to CCC?

I'm kinda worried.

I managed to get a hold of CCC over Discord. He's on a long holiday and will be back in about a week.

Good on him. Well, at least the army outside won't be sneaking in while we aren't looking.

Whether the invaders call it a spell or a bomb, it clearly blew up and killed a bunch of them.

The defenders are not currently shooting; largely because the attackers are still at the far end of the outer city and there's a lot of houses in the way. Better to keep their crossbow bolts for when they can be more sure of hitting.

Incidentally, apologies for not mentioning that I would be away for a time in advance.

...back now.