Saga Of The European King

Mechanicus was pretty worried. He strode through the halls of Fort Majesty with a deep frown on his partly-cybernetic face and with his cloak bustling a distinctly harassed pattern through the air behind him.

He was worried for two reasons. Firstly, neither he nor General Majesty had heard a peep from the King in nearly two years. General Majesty kept the Magic Telephone by his side at all times, and checked it for missed calls every fifteen minutes or so. General Majesty had also picked up the unfortunate habit of grinding his teeth. Everyone thought it was gross. Mechanicus had tried making a robot replacement for the King in his lab, but he just couldn’t make a good enough robot with Medieval materials. He’d managed to make a computer brain out of rocks and clay and bits of dirt, but it was only as powerful as, say, a 386, at best. He’d made twenty seven robot Kings in all, and not one of them was any good to anyone at all. They’d boot up fine, then move around a bit, but as soon as you wanted them to do anything, they’d freeze or hang or emit horrible noises from their low-fi speakers. He’d given up on the robot Kings fairly quickly. He had more important things to work on, like the towers.

The towers were a big part of the second reason of why Mechanicus was worried. Fort Majesty had been attacked in constant waves for the past two years. Each wave was more difficult to destroy than the last. So far, the tower defences had kept the walls of the fort from being breached, but the creatures from the Forest Of Dark Ice were becoming ever more resilient to the barrage they faced in the valley maze. It had started with simple wolves that could be killed with a simple arrow. The creatures that had most recently poured from the forest had been monstrous, 50-foot tall tortoises, clad in enormous sheets of thick metal armour. They had made it to the fortress gates, and had clawed at the walls and done significant damage before the Siege Cannon Towers had cracked their shells and put a stop to them. Mechanicus had not stood still on the matter of the steady escalation – he had devised ever more cunningly destructive towers of every stripe – towers that froze the creatures with icy blasts, towers that scoured the ground with high-intensity lasers, towers that erupted fire, or steam, or a viscous, burning, clinging liquid that the engineers called ‘ink.’ Some towers stunned, some targeted those creatures that took flight, some could snipe a creature from any given distance. Mechanicus’ engineers had plundered the gold that the beasts dropped as they died and used it to buy more additions to the defensive arsenal. Mechanicus had ordered the rocky maze to be altered and extended to maximise the destructive potential of as many towers as possible. The coffers of Fort Majesty were nearly empty of gold. Another wave was due to emerge from the forest in a matter of minutes. Mechanicus could afford only one more tower. He looked out at the vast, convoluted maze of firepower that he had seen built up over the past two years. He weighed every factor up in his head. He saw towers that were under-utilised, towers that were too heavily relied upon, corners of the maze that were not optimally efficient, stretches whereupon insufficient damage would be poured upon the encroaching beasts. He closed his eyes and reached a decision. He wrote a message on a scrap of paper, attached it to one of the few remaining homing pigeons and let it fly. His face fell into his hands. He had chosen the best possible action for the maze – it was to upgrade one of the existing Stun Towers into an Earthquake Tower so that it could wreck the highest possible damage upon ground-based creatures, but he knew that he wouldn’t be enough. There was only one, slim hope left to him. He swore that he would not have to seize upon it.

Mechanicus swept down to the barracks. He passed many nervous soldiers on his way down. They had seen those massive tortoises the day before. He barked at them to man the towers and that there was nothing to fear. When he reached the barracks, he found General Majesty checking his messages again.

“Majesty, there is not much –“ said Mechanicus.
“Ssh!” said General Majesty. He was on the phone.
“You don’t have any messages, put the phone down.” Said Mechanicus.
“I just want to check, quick!” Said General Majesty. Mechanicus waited for seven seconds.
“You have to send every available man out there into the maze. I’ve made them powerful weapons. We need the next wave to encounter as much resistance as possible. We can’t afford any more towers.” Said Mechanicus, his cybernetic eye glowing red. General Majesty put down the Magic Telephone.
“They’ll be surely killed. If the monsters don’t trample right over them, the Splash Towers will get them.” General Majesty said, coolly.
“We’ll be able to build new towers tomorrow. Just this once.” Mechanicus said.
“My men will stay on the fortress walls and attack from a safer, more strategically sound distance.” General Majesty said. This was turning into an argument.
“Putting them on the walls would be useless!” shouted Mechanicus. “Our strongest defences are at the beginning of the maze! We need to maximise our potential there rather than spreading it out!”
“I will not throw my men’s lives away.” Said General Majesty. He was serious. He won the argument because he was more serious. The men went on the walls that day. They fired arrows at the steaming six-legged elephants that attacked Fort Majesty that day. Only two elephants made it through the maze, but they broke down the walls, and they took long enough in doing it that the next wave came out of the forest. Quite a lot of that wave made it through the maze. Fort Majesty was utterly destroyed.

When Mechanicus and General Majesty watched the monsters breach the walls of the fort from the Observation Deck, Mechanicus turned to General Majesty and gave him this look. The look said, “Man, I bet you wish you’d listened to me.” Then the Observation Deck fell through the floor and Mechanicus had to take his last resort. As he fell, he flipped open the hatch on his left wrist and spoke two words. With his right hand, he grabbed General Majesty’s shoulder. Neither of them hit the ground. They both disappeared with a futuristic sound effect and a burst of blue light.

Later on, General Majesty would swear that in the instant before he disappeared, he’d caught a tiny glimpse of a familiar old lion jumping into the crumbling fortress.

End Of Chapter 56