A month later, it was time for the great attack: the tide of war had turned and the cleans had staged an all-out siege of the mudborn capital, the Dark Castle. We were joined by the foodborn and the Ancients, by rebel mudborn and rebel slimeborn, and even some of the more intelligent monsters came to our aid.
The slimeborn had capitulated and Princess Xenofie seemed actually a little relieved to add her signature to the Treaty on Friendly War.
We were doing well on the mudborn front as well, capturing village after village and now we only had the Dark Castle to capture and Princess Sarrah to dethrone. Our armies assembled in the muddy fields outside the city walls and charged.
That’s when it all started to go wrong.
The mudborn fielded no soldiers. That should have been our clue. Instead, dozens of mages came up on the city walls and they all cast the same spell — a high-tier Devastating Kitchen Storm.
Multiple vortexes appeared in the field, each rising into a darkening heavy cloud overhead. Some of our girls were swallowed up and thrown far away. Those who avoided the vortexes then fell victim to the kitchen storms themselves: heavy sheets of raining mud crashed down from the created clouds and tore into our soldiers.
The charging girls tried to dodge but the storms were so many that few succeeded. And when a girl tripped in the already muddy field, she did not get up again but was instead buried under an ever-deepening layer of mud. So the Princesses came to our tent with a plan: to fly a small strike team — us — over the city walls and challenge Sarrah directly. We agreed and Princess Estell introduced us to Byia, Benka, Braet and Bo Poi, four butterfly girls who volunteered for this task. I felt honored that girls who were technically monsters would do this.
Butterfly girls, in case you never met them, are known for their supreme kindness, which is why their willingness to participate in a battle was even more amazing. Benka wrapped her arms around my torso, pulled me tight and then took off.
We flew in a squadron across the battlefield. Buttlerfly girls can’t fly high so we needed to go under the layer of storms. Benka courageously shielded me from the mud falling from the sky.
“I could go on your back,” I offered.
But Benka just bit her lip as another ball of mud splashed between her shoulder blades, “you will need the strength more than I do.”
Our luck ran out just as we cleared the outer wall.
A mage turned her attention to us and streamed a line of mud directly into Benka’s wing. She shouted in pain and started losing altitude. The others didn’t fare better.
We all crashed in a muddy courtyard. The weaker bodies of the butterfly girls didn’t withstand it: they all fell unconscious.
A group of mudborn guards surrounded us and we prepared to fight but we couldn’t.
(“Why not?”)
Each of the guards held a child in her hand, right in front of her. And I don’t mean a grown girl like Luna here who’s a Child only in name, no, these were small, true children being used as shields to prevent us from attacking.
(“Did you rescue them?”)
We wanted to! Of course we did. The children were dressed in rags and had eyes red from all the crying they had been doing. But the Treaty strictly forbids attacking children, and these didn’t even have a Sanctity Barrier yet. We couldn’t risk hitting them. And of course, fighting here would also attract more soldiers and fighting them was not our mission.
So we turned, and ran towards the central tower.
Seeing this, the soldiers let go of the children and started pelting us with mud from behind. That had no effect on anyone except Espoir, who we still couldn’t convince to dress before a battle. Of course, being naked, she stood out and the guards targeted her disproportionately.
She didn’t hold. She fell on the pavement floor, broken, and we had to leave her there. The rest of us sprinted into the tower and the locked the door behind us. There was only one fight left, and then the War would be over.