You run for the next building, everything looks safe. No one passes by and the streets are filled with corpses. Perhaps the vanguard has passed by. Taking a breath, you peek out and sense no one.


Slowly you rise and take some tentative steps towards the next building. Though you cross a twenty foot expanse, you safely make it to the next stop. Peeking around the corner, you see a pitiable sight, a small blonde boy is crying over the corpses of his parents in the rubble strewn debris that was once his building. The piercing scream of an incoming flaming boulder smashes into the cobblestones vaporizing everything in your vision and knocking you back.


As you rise, you hear yet another burst far to the rear.


After regaining your feet, you start after where the boy was. There is nothing left but a smoking crater surrounded by a ring of flames. Despite your normal stoic nature, tears threaten to slide down your cheek. Gripping your blade, you force yourself to trudge onwards.


Three streets upward, you notice a firefight going on. Three Essitrean troops are hunkered behind a wall. Each has a crossbow and a fourth soldier lies dead with a bolt sticking out of his neck. You run in a crouch towards their position and fall to a knee beside the sergeant, "What's the situation Sergeant?" You ask.


He turns and almost goes for his sword as he doesn't recognize you but he says, "Mercenary?"


You nod and he grunts, "Figured you all had fled by now, hell if this wasn't my home I'd have fled long ago. Suppose I'll be dying within these old walls soon enough."


A crossbow bolt smacking against the wall brings him back to the fight. "Well, we're trying to reach a defensive position North of here but the bloody Turrics got us cut off. Out of a platoon sized element, only we remain and we're cut off from Main Group. If you can fire a crossbow, your help would be welcome. Hell, even if you can't you can at least take potshots at the bastards."


You nod taking up the Arbalest, a crossbow you are very skilled with and load the bolt. "Where are they located?" You ask.


He darws a quick picture in the dirt with a bolt and says, "We're here, their behind that berm over there. I'm pretty sure there's a sniper a little to the west. Bad thing is, though we can't see him, he can sure as hell see us and he's a crack shot. Took out Ivey with one clean shot, got Spiner just over there." He points to a Essitrean corpse about fifteen feet away, a bolt planted in his back.


Those idiots behind the berm are lousy but they've got us pinned with suppressive fire, can't raise my head without fear of taking bolts, the sniper though, he's the real challenge. We take him out and we can flank. Without him dead, we're stuck in a stalemate."


Add ARBALEST (Crossbow) to your Inventory.


You think over the options:

You say "Good luck guys. You're on your own!"

You owe these soldiers no allegiance, you don't live in this city, and dying for a pointless cause in a nameless street doesn't seem very appealing. You say, "If i were you, I'd retreat cause that's what I'm doing. No point in dying now, this war is lost."


You feel a slight twinge of guilt at the faces of the men who look as if you'd taken the little bit of hope you'd given them and dashed it. However, the Sergeant turns to his men and says, "Don't worry about her men, she's a mercenary, she'd sell her mother if the coin was right. We're heroes fighting for our mothers, our families, and our city!"


The men buck up and begin to rally sending bolts back towards the enemy as you leave them in the distance.


Several streets away and you'd almost forgotten them. To each his own. As you cross a dirty alleyway you see an old woman wandering around the streets asking if anyone had seen her boy tears form rivers in her dusty face. You haven't so you move on. You were hired to fight, not to save the world, to cure the sick, or to save the innocent. It was just too much. You wonder to yourself as you pass the banged out ruins of a massive church, "Where is this god these people prayed to? Why don't they ask him? I'm just one person and I can barely care for myself..."


The bitter scenes of man's cruelest depravities pass your sight, dogs chewing on the corpses of a baby in a dead woman's arms, a scavenger stealing bread from a stall while the rats chew on the proprietor, and charred bodies still smoking from the artillery strikes.


Somehow you sneak past a troop of Turric soldiers carrying the spoils of their ill-earned gains, golden rings, jeweled necklaces, and young girls, most already battered and beaten, headed to the slave squares and whorehouses the Turrics are so fond of. Nothing you can do, you're just one girl, at least you're not one of them.


Sneaking into a doorway you  are getting tired, your legs are weakening, and your vision is washed with sweat and exhaustion. You need to find refuge.