…or, Fielding Questions
At the sounding of the gong, there was a rush of activity as both sides scrambled to get ready before the other one could strike.
MU’s dwarven squad split into two groups. It was amazing how fast they could move when they wanted to, considering how short-legged they were and how much armor they were wearing. One phalanx formed around the base of the hill where the flag was. The other one headed out to position themselves near the boundary of what might be considered our territory… the trapezoid that was formed if you cut the nearest three sides off from the rest of the field. They formed up by a gap in the trees, where the ground was especially level. It was the natural place for a charge.
The buff squad hit the outgoing dwarves with a bunch of spells as they went past. Apart from the basic safety precautions, no magic enhancements could be added before the match began. Once the outer group of dwarves was covered, they split up and started buffing the other squads. One of the regular squads took up position on a high hill a little bit forward from the fortified one and readied their crossbows. It seemed they were playing the long-range defense, at least to begin with.
The MU coaches’ strategy of having four interchangeable squads for maximum flexibility was borderline controversial, but it meant they could rotate the fighters so that nobody was fighting on the front line for the entire match. The Dragons favored crossbows, so that every infantryman could also be an archer and so they could shoot on the move. Conventional wisdom was that dedicated archers with longbows were better, but one of the benefits of being a top of the line enchantment school was that they could have top of the line equipment.
The other three flex squads were moving out across their territory more slowly than the dwarves had. They were spread out in a line that stretched almost three hundred yards across, with readied weapons alternating from crossbow to sword to spear. Had Blackwater chosen to make a massed charge at the start of the match, as teams sometimes did, the Dragons would have been ready to mount some resistance even before they made it into position.
It wasn’t a very common tactic, done more on medium sized fields than huge ones, but it sometimes worked because it was unexpected. MU was taking basic precautions, and the Hydras didn’t feel like charging over five hundred yards of rough and varied terrain.
They did have longbowmen, though, and they sent a series of nuisance volleys against the advancing Dragon soldiers. At more than four hundred yards out, the indirectly targeted arrows weren’t terribly accurate or effective, but they broke up the Dragon’s line a bit.
They served notice, too. Battle hadn’t been joined, but the skirmish was on.
The Hydras had a more traditional division of squads: defenders with heavy plate and towering shields, heavy infantry in mail, lightly armored scouts, the archers, and the wizards. Like MU, they were playing it cautious at the outset, the heavy infantry and wizards holding back with the defenders while they figured out what the other side was up to. The scouts were making for some trees near the edge of their territory. Their irregulars or solos were splitting up, the “heavies” hanging back and the more mobile ones moving forward.
They’d struck the first blow, at least symbolically. Their archers had at least inconvenienced our side. But it seemed like MU had the superior deployment strategy. Their line of flexible infantry could all stop and take up defensive positions if they needed to, but when it was time to go on the attack they would have less far to go and wouldn’t be carrying as much weight as the heavy infantry.
The one thing I didn’t understand was how the seventh squad fit into it. They were still milling about near the entrance. The first line of dwarves could completely hold one of the easiest approaches into our territory. The soldiers could intercept and engage with attackers. But if anybody slipped through, there were huge areas with nothing but the crossbows and their embedded mages to cover. The ogress, if she was present, could have made up a lot of the gap on her own. The minotaur was probably no slouch in that department, either. If he wasn’t as intimidating as an ogre on sight, I had to imagine a charge from him would be enough to break anybody else’s charge. The lizards and the rat guys looked pretty scary, and they were probably mobile enough to cover a lot of ground.
Maybe the general had something else in mind. To me, it looked like they should have been deploying themselves to hold the middle of our territory. There was a hole there that looked like it was made for them.
There was still no sign of Iason. It seemed less likely that I’d spot him. He was either in deep cover or he wasn’t there. That annoyed me. I might have come to the first match of the season anyway, but I’d come for him. He could have made an appearance before the gong sounded, given some kind of sign or gesture towards me. I’d left the muffling bracelet off so it wouldn’t have been a problem for him to locate where I was sitting.
“Oh, which one of them is your friend?” Pala asked me. Her voice was cheery and bright as a bucket of baby ducklings. I swallowed the irritation I felt at this.
“I don’t see him,” I said. “I don’t think he’s there.”
“Oh,” she said. She sounded disappointed. “He is a pervert, too?”
“The word is gay,” I said.
“Pervert?” she said.
“Gay,” I repeated.
“What is gay about ‘pervert’?” she asked. “It is okay for you, I guess but I don’t think most perverts are very good.”
“Men who like men aren’t perverts, they’re gay,” I said. “Or queer.”
“Oh, now, that’s not a word with archaic meanings that will lead to further hilarious misunderstandings,” Marlot said.
“It’s all very queer to me,” Pala said.
“Guess I was wrong,” Marlot said.
I decided to explain it all to her some time later, when there wasn’t a potentially epic battle unfolding and when we weren’t surrounded by skirmish fans. The benefit of sitting with double-sized Pala was that we got more space. She was a really big pussycat, but you couldn’t tell that at a glance.
Out on the field, things were heating up. The MU mobile squads had broken down into their individual units, with one distributing themselves through the densest woods on the left side of the center of the field, another taking up positions along the ridges and rocky walls on the right, and the third forming up in three wedges on a hill not far from the first line of dwarves. The buff squad was now chanting in a circle on a hilltop. That probably had something to do with the way the wind was blowing steadily and strongly in the direction of the Blackwater side, knocking the successive volleys of arrows astray.
An illusioncast gave an overhead view of the trees, where the first actual skirmishes were occurring. The Hydra’s scouts were pressing into the territory where the Dragons had established themselves. Through the gaps in the trees, I watched a thrown dagger hit one of the Dragon’s shields, and then he returned the favor with a crossbow bolt. Elsewhere, there were blade-on-blade clashes.
The Blackwater archers were no longer able to arch out over the field, but some of them had switched to taking more direct shots at the dwarves and at individual Dragons hunkered down on the hilly right side of the field. These shots, slipping under the effects of the wind spell, were a lot more accurate, but were unable to get around the natural fortifications the human soldiers were using and the dwarves’ shield wall. They did succeed in forcing the Dragons in the hills to stay low, providing cover as the mail-clad heavy infantry started to creep forth.
“Nobody is using magic yet,” Pala complained, pouting.
“The wind is magic,” I said.
“Wind? That’s boring,” Pala said. “I can see wind any day.”
“It’s tactical,” I said. “They’re stopping the Hydras from blanketing whole areas with volleys of arrows.”
“I want to see a fireball,” she said.
“They don’t do a lot of artillery spells in skirmish,” I said. “Because they have to be phantasmal, and a fake fireball spell doesn’t get a lot of use outside of matches. They usually handle it by mocking a fireball wand or something like that, but those skew the point totals so they have to take penalties on their use.”
“Don’t talk to me about point totals,” Pala said. “I think those rules are stupid. If the skirmish is fought for fun and sportsmanship it shouldn’t matter.”
“It’s more fun and sporting if both sides feel like they have a chance to win,” I said. “If the teams are equal, then the one with the better strategy will win.”
“If one team has a better strategy then they aren’t equal,” Pala said. “Why is a stronger player worth points but a better strategy isn’t? And why are fighters of one race all worth the same no matter how strong and fast they are?”
“Well, it’s not a perfect system, but it works,” I said.
“I think it’s a stupid system,” Pala said.
“It does what it’s supposed to,” I said.
“If what it’s supposed to do is being stupid, it does that very well.”
The fighting in the trees had broken up, with both sides retreating to regroup. The MU Dragons had managed to hold onto the woods, falling back only a little into the denser parts of it. The BPC scouts had been forced to flee, retreating to a ditch near the edge of the trees.
The heavy infantry was having a better time of it, advancing slowly up the hills. They had a few crossbow losses, but the Dragons in that area had lost a few to Hydra arrows. The Hydra soldiers looked like they were armed with personal weapons, as they consisted of unmatched swords, maces, hammers, and axes. The Dragons were spread out, holding what would have been great defensive positions if the Hydras weren’t concentrating their arrows on them. Several Hydra soldiers were able to converge on a single hunkered-down Dragon, and they took out three positions that way.
Each soldier they engaged or killed was one less head for the archers to watch for, which meant they could focus more on the other ones.
When it became clear that the advance was not going to be halted, the Dragons began a phased retreat back over to the other side of the hills, where they’d be out of line-of-sight from the archers. The fighters on the lower reaches came out to engage the advancing Hydras and draw the longbows away from those who had a chance to withdraw.
The Dragon soldiers from the middle squad moved forward towards the action and started sending crossbow bolts at the heavy infantry from the side. They’d abandoned their wedge formations; either that had been a diversion or there had been a change in plans. MU had started with the superior positions, but they seemed to be holding to defense, with mixed results. It made little sense to try to hold the line in the middle of the field, where it was five hundred yards across.
The scouts who had withdrawn from the woods were now following the ditch deep into the side territory, where they could go around and come in along the side. It wasn’t an ideal attack plan, since they could be caught up against the boundary wall, but MU would have to move someone to do that.
The Harlowe squad was still not really doing anything. It looked like there was an argument on the field between the goth kids, the rocky girl, and the minotaur. I thought the captain or a coach would take charge of the situation, but so far they seemed to be letting it play out.
“I wonder what’s going on with the monsters,” I said. “They don’t seem to have any clue what they’re doing.”
“They’re down more than the ogre,” Marlot said.
“What?” I asked.
“The seventh squad,” she said. I saw she’d actually taken up the program. “If I have everybody matched up right, they’re either missing a Seth Slaughterfruit, an Eve Goldapple, or a Joseph Rainbowdreaming.”
“What are those, gnomish names?” I asked. They didn’t sound that gnomish; they didn’t sound that anything, except for human, and my impression of gnomish names was “almost human but not quite”.
“That’s how the lizardfolk are listed,” she said. “I don’t know what kind of names they are. Human, obviously, but I’d guess the surnames are translated.”
“I can’t see why being down a lizard would make that big a difference,” I said. “They’ve got two of them. The ogre’s their captain. If she’s gone, I can see the squad being a little shaky, especially if they based their strategy around her. This is ridiculous, though. They’re just standing there scratching their asses while the Hydras chip away at their defenses.”
BPC was firming up their control of the frontier. The Dragons had been completely driven from the far side of the hills, and had lost about a third of a squad in the process. A small group of scouts who’d stayed behind in the ditch were backing up a pair of sword-wielding heroes advancing on the forest position. The heavy infantry, having pushed back the one squad, were turning their attention towards those hectoring them with crossbows from the side. The casters in the MU buff squad seemed to be changing up their tactics, but whatever they had brewing wasn’t yet in evidence. MU’s heroes—those who were visible—seemed almost as at a loss as the monster squad was, though three of them independently set out towards the far left to try to cut off the encroaching scouts, and some of the others were heading for the woods.
“I’m more curious about the why,” Marlot said. “It doesn’t seem like they were expecting to be short.”
“They spent so many points on a stupid half-ogre and she isn’t even there,” Pala said. “I would never join a team and then not show up. That’s just rude.”
“Whatever the reason is, her squad better decide what they’re going to do about it or the match is going to be over before the first night fall.”
The initial posturing and the first sorties had taken just over ten minutes. The first period was more than half over and the momentum was going against MU.
