Chapter 42.4: Almost Perfect
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 1-14, Month VIII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 1st to 14th day of the 8th Month
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Fiddling With Fire
Nothing ever goes exactly as planned. This is not a pessimistic observation. It is the most accurate description of how things work in practice, verified by every operation, campaign, and large-scale coordinated effort that has ever been attempted in the history of people attempting things. The best preparation can do is narrow the gap between what you planned and what actually happens in the field, and reduce the severity of the dangers that fill that gap.
Maya Village's preparation had been thorough and the gap, when it would appear, was going to be correspondingly narrow.
But it was always there and they could only prepare for it.
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Outside the Village
The operation outside was always going to be the cleaner engagement of the two, and it was, as it was being shown by how they conducted it.
Because when you remove civilians possibly being caught in the crossfire and the damage to the overall infrastructure of the place from the equation, it would be considered as a hundred percent success. Yes, it is common sense that when there are no stalls to burn or buildings to catch fire or bystanders to navigate around, the planning needed to reduce casualties and destroyed infrastructure in a combat operation was going to be simplified considerably. The only meaningful concern that leaders should worry themselves with is how they could bring their own people back home alive, back to their homes and families, while also simultaneously achieving all the objectives of that operation, and when both of those concerns are clearly defined and your preparation is adequate, the outcome tends toward its intended shape.
The fifteen at the hidden camp had been under observation since the previous day. They had spent a few days in that camp without being able to communicate from their inside force, they had no direction, and no information about whether any version of the original operation was still viable, and the specific mounting anxiety of these so called professionals whose training told them that the extended silence at this duration meant something bad has already happened, but their sworn magical oath had told them that they were not permitted to abandon the mission, the kingdom would rather have them dead than return as failures, they were expendable after all, they weren't expected to return or retire in any meaningful way, they are as always bound to die whether that mission only last them a single sortie or for the rest of their pitiful lives if they survived.
Now when the coded signal went through the party chat that the interior operation had already begun, the forces outside who were watching the camp moved from a standby observation to direct engagement with the efficiency of a unit that had already been in position long enough to know exactly where each of the fifteen was and what each of them was doing at any moment.
The containment force that was hidden in the surroundings went up around the camp's perimeter simultaneously from multiple directions. The fifteen assassins had the required individual combat capability of the Sovereignty's most elite and well trained operatives, which was very real and not to be underestimated, and several of them had immediately responded to the attack with the immediate violence that people respond with when they have been in a state of heightened readiness for the past few days and suddenly have a direction to direct that readiness toward. The response was fast and it was also insufficient.
The problem the fifteen surviving assassins faced was the same problem that the ambush had identified two nights prior: the Sovereignty's shadow unit trained people to survive individually and to use other people instrumentally. Their coordination in genuine group combat, against opponents who had spent their tender years developing the kind of synchronized function that Talon One and Team Mandibles represented, was structurally outmatched. Individual skill could reduce the gap but not close it to overcome the disadvantage, and the gap was already wide before individual skill was factored in.
The fight outside the village lasted five minutes from an outsider's perspective. Probably less.
Upon a closer perspective, if you had slowed it down and watched the entire exchange properly, you would have seen why.
Isabel's wood element, applied with the timing that comes from someone who has used it in real combat long enough that the timing is no longer a calculated move but one you would have simply known as you have when you breathe: the roots and branches that were emerging at the precise moment that an opponent's attack or defense was committed, not to block but to redirect, ensuring that the movements of the assassins were always arriving towards their targets at a slightly wrong interval or it was a slightly off-balanced attack. Her hits that followed were true to their hit because she had spent the preceding seconds making sure they would arrive at their intended target areas.
Betty's fire was no longer just applied in the form of a destructive power alone. Master Ben's instruction had produced a fire mage who understood that the fire element was a system of energy that could be directed in more ways than just simple burning, and her use of it in this engagement was a demonstration of that understanding: her flames now served as buffs to her teammates' weapons, that cut off lateral movement options, that produced intense light at specific angles to disrupt the enemies visual tracking of their movement and that when the right amount of destruction was applied with it came the intended destructive precision of a very skilled fire mage, someone who had already been scolded and reminded by her master approximately ten thousand times that an uncontrolled power was evidence of the incomplete understanding of one's own power.
Meanwhile the earth users (namely Eirk and Adam) in the group worked the ground. Not dramatically, not in the way that people who have only seen earth manipulation in competition settings expect it to look like. They adjusted both them and their teammates' footing, while they also created minor instabilities at the moment an opponent was relying on stable ground for a committed movement, and provided their teammates with anchoring surfaces that the opponents could not predict or account for. Adam's earth applications were specifically oriented toward threat mitigation, catching incoming attacks that were moving toward vulnerable angles with constructed earth walls that appeared at the last functional moment rather than in advance.
Bren was, by this point in his development, doing things with water that were technically in the catalog of water element applications and which his opponents found highly objectionable. Water is not intrinsically threatening. Water placed in someone's airways at the moment they are drawing breath for a committed attack is a different kind of water manipulation, and Bren had become quite good at placing it there, whether he faced a beast or a person it didn't matter.
While Milo had none elemental prowess to show like the rest of them. Milo had proved to everyone that he never needed one in the same way that a person who has built their capability correctly does not need the advantages they did not start with, because the advantages they built are adequate. He worked within the elemental environment his teammates produced around him, using what was available from each of them as extensions of his own capability, and the combination of his physical development and the buffs that traveled through the party system made the results visible in outcomes rather than in explanations.
August was in the background. By choice. This was their fight and he was not going to take it from them simply because he could resolve it faster. He applied his lightning as precision fire support, targeting positions and angles that would create specific problems for specific opponents at specific moments, his wind as a support element that gave his team's movements a quality that their opponents' movements lacked, and his fire in combination with the others' existing applications in ways that amplified what was already working.
He had also been developing something specific in his training with Master Miles: the ability to precisely control his own power output rather than simply apply the maximum output of it all the time. It was quite different when he was younger and inexperienced, he would have resolved this kind of engagement with the maximum force required that would have instantly solved the problem completely and everything adjacent to it. Thankfully he was not getting younger anymore. As master Miles stated the control was a lot harder to control than the power that is already there and a more controlled power output is more useful than just using the maximum of it in situations where the objective was to only capture rather than a complete elimination, and he applied it with the consistency of something that had been practiced until it was no longer an act of discipline but simply how he operated.
The bet they had made with each other to only use the most basic and foundational skill levels throughout this entire engagement was Master Ben's influence that had been made operational. The foundational element was sufficient enough if it was used correctly. If you needed the advanced applications to handle a situation, you had either misjudged the situation or had not developed your foundations to their proper standard. Their foundations at this moment were already at their proper standard.
The fifteen assassins were reduced to just five still standing, with the ten already being downed, unable to continue their fight, within the first two minutes. While the five that were still standing were contained without further reduction because August's instruction had been clear: capture if capture was achievable. The ten that they had brought down were not dead, which was the result of the same instruction applied through the entire engagement. Although their tendons were severed at the relevant points and it ensured that the captured members of the unit were no longer capable of presenting a threat without ending their lives, which was a surgical application of damage that the village's healers could leave as it was or address depending on what the subsequent handling of the prisoners required.
Within that five minutes. The fifteen professional assassins remaining outside were brought down or contained.
The party chat had carried August's assessment of the exterior situation to the village in the two words it required: it's done.
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Angeline
Inside the village, the regular security force and the imperial garrison were handling the plaza containment. This had been the design of this operation: none of their Talon One elite presence was visible, because the visible presence of the village's elite would only alert the ten assassins inside the village that something about the current situation was indeed definitely wrong and the village did not want them to know that until the moment was right.
What the village had instead was Angeline, and the Masters who were pretty good at controlling their own presence that one who is sensitive to mana or the aura of another person isn't going to flag them as grandmaster level individuals but somewhere around the expert to master rank..
She was not on the front line in the conventional sense. She was positioned within the security perimeter, visually unremarkable in the context of the larger containment operation, and she was doing the thing that she had become exceptional at over the years since joining the party: keeping everyone around her functional.
Count Ronaldo Bradmoore had developed extensive opinions about healing arts over the course of his career and his time at the village, and one of his settled opinions was that what Angeline did could not be categorized alongside what most active healers are capable of. Most healers only healed what was requested of them to be healed. They addressed injuries sequentially, moving from the most critical to the less critical, applying their element or their technique to each wound in turn, managing their own mana reserves carefully because the work they do was expensive. This was the expected standard that was followed by most and was considered by many as a good ethical healing practice.
Angeline on the other hand healed in parallel. Because her capabilities allowed her to, within a ten meter radius from her, she could identify every injury among her allies simultaneously, and she could prioritize them by the logic of what each person needed to remain functional in the context of combat for the entire duration of said combat, and she would apply her light element to multiple targets at the same time with the pinpoint accuracy that most healers needed to focus exclusively on a single application to achieve it.
What made this possible, beyond her own exceptional development of the healing arts, was the party system's healing buff modifier that August's invitation had extended to every member. The party system buff amplified the natural healing capabilities that the party members' bodies were already doing. And in Angeline's case she could use that in conjunction with her light element to amplify that amplification to others not just herself. The result of that power was that the injuries which should have taken days to recover from were addressed in just seconds, not because anyone was performing a miracle but because two multiplicative factors were being applied simultaneously by someone with the skill to direct them precisely.
The security forces and the garrison personnel watched their minor injuries disappear almost as they were acquired and registered this with the wide-eyed response of people who had been told the village's capabilities were significant and were now experiencing what that meant in practice.
It was not simply a miracle, performed by the agent of the goddess of healing. It was a combination of a very good preparation extended over a long time by someone who had committed her entire being in training that one specific thing and had developed that skill to its current proper depth.
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The End that was Almost Clean
Meanwhile the containment in the plaza was comprehensive. The ten had already been surrounded without any methods of escape or survival without surrendering to their enemy, the vials they had thrown were addressed by Grandmaster Mirabeth's plasmic flames, the chaos within was also managed, and the security force had done the splendid job of what they had sworn themselves to. Jonathan took direct command of the nearest units. Axel Martin and his brother Bjorn managed the wider encirclement. The operation inside was resolving toward its planned conclusion. To have no casualties on their end.
Then Dragnov without further options to get out of this situation ran the only viable options still available to them.
He and the others were already surrounded on all fronts and their remaining exits were now closed. The external support that they were counting on was long gone, which he had accepted now as a confirmed fact rather than a working assumption. The mission as originally planned was no longer achievable. What remained of the mission, was the version that was still achievable from his current position, and that was to cause enough damage before being stopped and that the operation could be called something other than a complete failure.
"Kill their leaders! Do not waste your lives without achieving our objectives!"
It was the most honest assessment he could make of the situation. He said it without the particular passion that people who believe in their cause bring to that kind of instruction, because Dragnov had not believed in any particular cause worth dying for in a very long time. He said it because it was the correct instruction given the situation and the oath and the only remaining version of the mission that was still accessible to them.
The nine others released their full capabilities in the direction of the podium and the leadership positions. They abandoned defense entirely, which was either desperation or the correct tactical choice given that defense was no longer serving any purpose, and committed everything to attack power and forward movement.
The regular security force was able to stop most of them, and them being able to stop these dangerous individuals demonstrated exactly what their training and exercises were designed to demonstrate: the security force, trained and experienced and now was able to test it in a real situation with real stakes on the line, and they were capable of this. It had been a question to those still in doubt amongst them whether the answer to that question was a resounding yes, and now the answer was confirmed. Several of the assassins were genuinely surprised by this, which was visible in their shocked responses and it was done in the way that the surprise was clearly visible in peoples faces who may have assessed their targets as weak and found that their assessment was incorrect mid-commitment.
"How were these regular soldiers able to stop me!?!" Shouted one of the assassins that was being held back by the security force.
The keyword to this was great teamwork. The answer to that common question would always be teamwork, because when the question was about how people who were individually strong on their own were outmatched by their significantly weaker opponents, and they were winning against them anyway.
Master Ben's magma constructs appeared around the leadership positions, which was a secondary containment measure rather than a primary one, because the leadership of Maya Village did not require external protection to handle threats at this level but because allowing any of this to become uncontrollable would undermine the clean resolution the village had been building toward since the counter-operation began.
Dragnov moves at a speed that any master-ranked professionals move when they commit fully to a single direction and a single objective with no reserve held back for anything else. The distance between his position and the elder closest to him closed in the space between one observable moment and the next, which was fast enough that most of the people in the plaza registered the movement only as a result rather than as a motion they had tracked.
Thankfully though, Grandmaster Miles Daemon was already there to react and he matched the enemies speed.
He had been positioned within the leadership cluster since before the operation began, because Miles was the kind of person who was able to identify the correct position he would take in any situation and he would occupy it without requiring any instructions. He already seen Dragnov's commitment and he traced the angle of the attack and saw the intended target, it was Elder Anvel Ironhide, and within a split second difference he was able to deflect the strike in the specific way that someone with his level of understanding in combat would able to deflect strikes with ease: he did not intend to block the force but instead he redirected it, absorbing the commitment of the attack and turning its momentum upward rather than meeting it directly.
The redirection sent Dragnov's arm upward and his body into an angle that Miles was already positioned to use it fully. The throw he performed was efficient and complete, it was the version of a (judo) throw that someone performs when they have been performing it for long enough that it is no longer just a technique that was merely being applied but simply it was what their body does when the perfect conditions for its complete execution are present. Dragnov hit the ground with the force of his own redirected momentum.
The shockwave from the near-miss had been enough to reach Elder Anvel Ironhide despite the deflection. He was wearing an armor underneath his outer garments that was able to save him from any fatal injuries, because the council had agreed to play the role of available targets while being as physically prepared as possible for what that role might involve, and the armor had done its intended job and that is when a blow is redirected rather than landed directly: it absorbed and distributed the residual force in ways that were only painful and not life-threatening.
He was injured of course. But he was not critically injured. That distinction mattered.
Elsewhere in the plaza, the remaining assassins encountered the outcomes of a fully committed attack with no defense and no coordination against opponents who were both more numerous and better coordinated than the assessed fragmented information they had gotten had credited them for. Master Ben burned one of them with the particular directness of a man who had decided the situation required it and had not spent time deliberating once that decision was made. The fire was sufficient and precisely applied, it was enough to burn the target alive without killing them.
Grandmaster Mirabeth on the other hand, who had been near the elder group with the specific quality of presence that a retired grandmaster brings to a situation she has assessed as requiring her to stay close without being asked, applied one of her plasma applications to the second-to-last threat in her vicinity. The plasma she had fired was indeed a controlled beam. But it was still also a plasma fired by a grandmaster, which is to say it was not gentle, and the result was consistent with what her plasma does when applied to organic materials at short range.
And when all of this information was combined together on all fronts then all they could say was: that the threat endedin an almost perfect execution.
Dragnov was on the ground unconscious but alive. One other assassin also was still alive. But the rest of the ten inside the village were not.
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The Cleanup
Elder Anvel Ironhide had a bruised rib and a cut along his left arm where the shockwave's edge had found the gap between his armor plates. It was treated within minutes by Count Bradmoore.
He (Anvel) was angry, which was his natural response to most situations, and the anger was not improved by the injury received , but he was functional and he said so clearly when anyone asked.
Outside, five were in custody with their fighting capability surgically removed. Ten had not survived the engagement. The distribution of this outcome was consistent with the instruction August had given and the capability of the force that had executed it.
Inside, two survived: Dragnov and one other. The rest were accounted for as (K.I.A) or Killed in Action.
The magma constructs that master Ben summoner also stood down. The security force completed its encirclement protocols and began the processing of the incident that large-scale security events required. The hired actors in the crowd were extracted from the dispersing civilian population. The plaza was assessed for damage and found to have sustained less than what they had expected its state during the planning stage had accounted for, which was the best available outcome from a coordinated poisonous gas attack that had been intercepted before the vials completed their arcs.
Master Ben returned to his assigned prisoner watch duty, which now included two more people. He was professional about this and did not comment on what he had just been required to do, because the situation had required it and that was the end of his analysis. Mirabeth stood near him and said nothing either, which was unusual enough that he looked at her sideways for a moment before concluding that she was simply processing the same thing he was.
Even people who have done this kind of thing before would always try to process it afterward.
Master Miles had taken no visible injury and showed no visible reaction to what had just occurred, which was either the product of his age and experience or the specific composure of someone who had been waiting for the assassin's (Dragnov's) commitment since two minutes before it happened and had been ready for it completely. He looked at the assaasin, who was now being secured on the ground by two members of the security force, and spent a moment studying what he was looking at.
He would have something to say to August about this later. Not criticism. But his assessment. The kind that came from watching how something actually went and forming precise opinions about what that meant for the next time.
The incident was finally over. But the massive cleanup that would follow both inside the village infrastructure and the political ramifications backed by the gathered irrefutable evidence and witness statements from those who were able to witness the entire exchange from an outsiders perspective was just beginning.
The available evidence they have managed to gather was comprehensive, it was distributed across the plaza, the forest floor, the captured prisoners, and the detailed transcripts Juan Tamad had produced from the intercepted communications across the entire operation.
It would have been almost perfect if not for elder Anvil being almost badly hurt by the final desperate attack. But almost was also sufficient, as long as it achieved its intended outcome.
But that "Almost" would be addressed in the debriefing later on.