Headmaster Corvin stood at the panoramic window of the observation spire, his gaze sweeping over the patchwork of territories spread across the arena realm. The examiner at his side had fallen quiet, but the man's doubt still hung in the air like smoke.
"Lord Thorne asked for this," Corvin said at last, his voice low. "He sent word three moons ago. The Abyss is growing cleverer. Its raiders don't charge the walls anymore. They slip past, they hunt supply lines, they burn the automated farmsteads first. Break the logistics, and the army starves before it can draw its sword."
He turned, his expression grim. "Out there on the border, you can't dial up a divine supply drop whenever you please. You can't whisper a prayer and refill the granaries. Void interference eats through divine channels like acid. If your subjects can't feed themselves, if they can't repair their own walls, if they can't survive ten days without a god holding their hand? They die. Slowly. And they take their god with them."
The examiner opened his mouth, then closed it again. He had never served on the border. He had never watched a whole garrison starve because a single raiding party had taken out three automated grain silos.
"The sea clans will be fine," Corvin said, waving a hand. "Fish are endless, if you know how to catch them. The Covenant? They have stockpiles. They have automated farm units a handful of lords brought along as curiosities. They won't starve. Not yet."
He paused, and his eyes drifted down to feed seventy-three, where the tunnel network glowed faintly under the earth.
"The question isn't who starves first," he murmured. "It's who comes for the stockpiles first."
Deep beneath the central plains, the war chamber hummed with a quiet, furious energy.
Lirael had laid the scout's report flat on the stone table. The numbers were scrawled in charcoal, plain and damning: forty pounds of food per soldier, per day. Roast meat. Honey bread. Fruit preserves. Jars of jam thrown out half-empty. Loaves trampled into the mud because the butter was the wrong flavor.
Korg had smashed the table in half ten minutes earlier. He was still pacing, his knuckles white, his fur standing on end.
"Forty pounds," he growled for the dozenth time. "Forty. And they waste half of it. While we measure every grain of rice like it's starlight."
Borgul leaned against the wall, his stone scales clicking softly as he shifted his weight. He was calmer than Korg, but his eyes were hard. "They've never gone hungry. They don't know what it's like to count every bite. Spoiled. All of them."
Lirael's fingers traced the outline of the Covenant's central granary complex on the map. It was a fortress of white stone, stacked high with unopened supply crates. Unguarded, for all practical purposes. Who would dare attack the heart of the Radiant Covenant?
"We have hoarded enough," she said, quiet but sharp as a shard of ice. "We have enough to last the rest of the tournament. But they do not. And they have been stealing from us this whole time."
Korg stopped pacing. "Stealing from us?"
"Every crate that falls from the sky is there for all of us," Lirael said. "They took the ones they could reach. They left us the scraps. And then they wasted what they took."
She looked up, her amethyst eyes glinting in the moss-light.
"They think we are rats. Scavengers. Too scared to come out of the dark."
Borgul pushed off the wall. His claws scraped against stone.
"What's the plan?"
Lirael picked up her staff from the remains of the table—black ur-steel, forged by Gimli Stonefist himself, capped with a frost crystal blessed by Queen Elowen. It hummed softly when her fingers wrapped around it.
Korg slipped on a pair of warded iron knuckles, etched with runes of tearing, a gift from the demon smiths of the volcanic holds.
Borgul wore no armor. He did not need it. Vorath himself had marked him with the blood-ward rite, the same old magic that ran in the dragon clan's veins. His scales were harder than forged steel. A Fourth Rank beast would have trouble breaking them.
Behind them, row upon row of clay bombs sat stacked in crates—crude, ugly things, packed with fire slime secretion and crushed rock slime residue, bound together with dried moss. Simple. Cheap. Devastating. The dwarves and human engineers had refined the recipe over months of testing.
"Slime charges," Korg rumbled, hefting one in one hand like a child's toy. "Best thing those little bouncing pests ever gave us."
"Save the big ones for the granary walls," Lirael said. "We don't destroy the food. We take it. Everything that isn't bolted down comes back with us. The rest we burn."
She looked from one chieftain to the other.
"Tonight, they learn not to waste bread."
Night fell thick and heavy over the Radiant Covenant's central hold.
Gromm, an orc sentry of the Iron Hills contingent, leaned against the battlements of the granary wall and glowered into the dark. He was bored. He was sober. He'd only gotten one flagon of spiced wine with dinner, and it had been watered down at that.
Stupid guard duty. Stupid tunnel rats. As if those skulking cowards would dare show their faces out in the open. The Tide Pact was the real threat, and they were all the way out on the coast. Nothing ever happened here in the middle of the plains.
He yawned. He leaned his head back against the stone. He closed his eyes for just a second.
A high, whistling sound cut through the dark.
Gromm's eyes snapped open.
Fire bloomed against the night sky.
The first charge hit the top of the wall ten feet from where he stood. Clay shattered. Fire slime erupted in a roaring wave of orange flame, clinging to stone and wood and flesh alike. The heat hit him like a fist to the face.
The alarm bell screamed.
Gromm fumbled for his axe, his hands shaking. Impossible. No one used bombs. Not in a student tournament. This was divine magic, not—
Another charge hit. Then another. Then a dozen, arcing over the walls from every direction at once, slamming into the barracks, the watchtowers, the outer gates.
"To arms!" he howled. "We're under attack!"
The hold erupted into chaos. Soldiers poured out of barracks half-dressed, fumbling for swords and shields. Archers ran to the walls, staring wild-eyed into the dark, trying to find an enemy to shoot at. There was nothing there. No army. No siege towers. Just endless fire arcing out of the night.
"Where are they?!" a captain screamed. "Show yourselves, cowards!"
A mile away, hidden in a shallow depression masked by frost illusion, Korg laughed—a deep, rumbling, delighted laugh—as he hefted another charge onto the lever of a crude wooden catapult.
The siege engines had been disassembled, carried through the tunnels piece by piece, and assembled in the dark under the very noses of the Covenant's scouts. Simple designs. Old designs. The human scholars had dug them out of the oldest history texts. No fancy divine magic. Just rope, wood, and leverage.
And they worked beautifully.
"Borgul," Lirael said, her voice cool over the thunder of the explosions. "The west gate on my mark. Breach it fast. We have eight minutes before their main force can organize a counterattack."
Borgul rumbled an acknowledgment. A dozen stonehide drakes lined up behind him, low and heavy, their claws digging into the soil.
"Mark."
The drakes charged.
They hit the west gate like living battering rams. The reinforced oak doors shuddered, cracked, then blew inward in a shower of splinters. Korg's silverback apes poured through right behind them, roaring, their iron knuckles glinting in the firelight.
The Covenant's sentries scattered. They had trained to fight elves and angels and knights in shining armor. They had never trained to fight a horde of giant apes and stone lizards pouring through a broken gate, throwing clods of burning slime that stuck to everything and wouldn't go out.
Lirael stepped through the broken gate a moment later, her staff glowing faintly with frost magic that doused the flames around her feet.
She looked up at the great granary towers, stacked high with crates, and smiled—a thin, cold, satisfied smile.
All that food. All those supplies. Wasted. Hoarded. Trampled underfoot because the jam wasn't sweet enough.
Korg came jogging back, his fur singed at the edges, grinning like a man who had just found the greatest treasure in the world.
"It's all there," he said, his voice thick with glee. "Everything. More than we thought. We're gonna need every cart. Every pouch. Every slime we brought."
Borgul nodded, his gaze already sweeping the courtyard for anything else worth taking.
Lirael lifted her staff.
"Load everything," she said. "Every crate. Every sack. Every barrel of grain and jar of honey and side of cured meat. If it's edible, it comes with us. Burn what we can't carry. And make sure they know who did it."
Somewhere behind them, the Covenant's relief force was starting to form up. Horns blared in the distance. They did not have long.
But they had long enough.
For months they had hidden. For months they had scavenged. For months they had been called rats and thieves and cowards.
Tonight, the rats were coming for the larder.
And no one was going to stop them.