Kensington

Henry's plan had been simple. Find the most immediately threatening point the vampires were gathering at, smash it to pieces, then from there attract more and more attention. Eventually, the vampires would either have to let them run rampant in their lines or leave a point in the encirclement thin enough for Cecil and his men to escape through. After which, they could regroup and use Giselle's artifact to safely ferry everyone across.

Short, sweet, crude and effective. The four cornerstones of any good battle plan. It even had that little bit of extra flourish he'd been learning to add; Having other Domains to lean on wasn't something he normally got a chance to work with. So now that he had been able to throw those in…

...It turned out that things weren't going to be nearly as cut and dry as he'd thought.

He swung down hard on the head of a vampire crawling out of the trench, the artifact pipe pulping the monster instantly. Maybe he was being a little dramatic with that phrasing. He'd just underestimated their capacity to take a more thoughtful approach, is all. It was providing them some serious technical difficulties in the short term – something that could become a more serious problem down the line.

What can he say? He hadn't been expecting the low-level vamps to be willing and able to perform tactical retreats. One or the other? Definitely. But rarely did the self-preservation instincts of an individual vamp get taken into account by their masters.

After the initial assault, the innermost ring of trenches had not gone back under vampire control once. That didn't stop them from trying, however. Three attempts had been made to flush the skeletons back out in a counterassault, and three times they'd broken and ran after a fair amount of monster deaths. Each time they ran back, they'd bring their dead or dying with them, though Henry seriously doubted it was out of any sense of brotherhood or compassion. Two things led him to believe that.

First, was that the number of vampires pressing them each time was getting lower and lower.

Second, the individual strength of each vamp was going up, making the effort put into each wave stay about the same. Didn't take a genius to put two and two together on what was happening.

"That the last of them?" Claire asked, having switched to her hovering bayonet to actually conserve Domain magic for once. She'd also grabbed a shovel that had been left somewhere, too, but that was more used as a stick to keep distance than as an actual weapon.

"For now, at least," Henry panted back. "How many did we manage to keep away from them this time?"

"I'm counting four bodies over here. With the eight from before and the two before that… we probably have a lot more to go, don't we…"

"A lot of work? Absolutely. Though I – ngh – I think we're grinding them down at a good pace."

He winced, as a shallow cut along his ribs made itself known. Lucky shot. Just sucked that all the copies he made from this point forward would have it, too.

"Screw grinding them down," Claire complained. "We can't keep this up forever, and they are certainly going to make us try to do that. We need to make something happen now or they'll exhaust us enough that we're no good in a fight, or worse. I say we rush out there-"

"And then what?"

Dee poked up from his position in the trench, performing maintenance on the skeletal sentries. Dirt caked his usually pale face, in a way that looked… aesthetically messy? Intentionally unkempt? Some sort of descriptor like that. The sour face he was pulling, on the other hand, was definitely not a fashion choice.

"The is probably the only thing giving us the small timing window we have to land finishing blows. Whaddya think is going to happen once we move away from those, huh? We'd be surrounded before you could say I vant to suck your blood!"

He almost made a cheesy vampire hiss to emphasize his point, but paused just before he followed through.

Questionable debate tactics aside, however, he did bring up some decent points. They both did. And that was the problem Henry was running into. Claire tended towards more aggressive solutions, while Dee was more content to let time and preparation do the work for them, and both had their upsides to consider. Neither were completely opposed to doing one or the other when push came to shove, but making a decision in the first place left them butting heads on tactics more often than not. Giselle smartly stayed out of it, leaving him to be the tiebreaker in these sorts of situations.

Usually that ended up in some sort of compromise. Which… sometimes worked…

"Then why don't we start sending waves of skeletons their way, too? That would give us the cover we need, wouldn't it?"

"Believe me, would if I could there, but there's a limit to how much I can put on the field at one time. Just keeping the whole perimeter active is taking pretty much everything I've got, so unless you want some pretty big gaps in our ring here, or are okay being covered by like, three bone drones-"

"Ugh, why are you calling them that?!"

"Saying skeletons over and over with no variation gets old fast, okay?"

Henry tuned them out. His focus went over to the buildings on the far side of no man's land, where the shadow of the arch-vampire currently overseeing the siege.

He had a pretty good idea of who it was, at this point. Nothing really certain, just a hunch based on how the vamps behaved and the pretty favorable one in three odds. In a way, it felt like an odd reflection of his own group.

Măcel was too aggressive. He'd have ran in on the first wave of reinforcements, looking for a piece of the action himself. By direct contrast, Carte Mare would've just set up shop around them and waited for them to come to him. Why bother losing resources, when humans starved out quicker than vamps?

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He gave one last glare to the distant shadow. I'll be back, he promised, whether you're looking for a rematch or not.

Time to rotate out and do some groundwork. Summoning his fourth and final copy, he handed over the reigns – his weapons, in this case – and set off towards the ruins of Kensington Palace. Dee and Claire were too busy bickering and/or workshopping strategies to notice he'd passed the buck off to a clone.

Giselle, however… was much more observant. And, for some enigmatic reason, decided to tag along with him as well.

He paused his march for a half step, noticing her hurry up to follow at his side. "Tired of the arguing, too?" he asked.

"Eh, not really. I'm a lot more patient when it comes to that stuff. It's the boredom that gets me more."

"...Boredom?" Henry didn't quite follow. "We just got out of three consecutive confrontations with vampires, and you're feeling bored?"

Her stare in response to that question was slightly judgmental, but mostly unreadable. Somewhere close to a 30/70 split.

"Well, duh," she answered. "Yeah, it was boring. That was just… a Halloween-themed version of whack-a-mole, basically. And we had to wait like, a half hour between each time. Wouldn't you get bored of that too?"

"I… had other priorities I was worried about," Henry admitted. "Specifically, not dying and all."

"Hm. Okay."

The way that 'okay' was phrased made it seem like she had more to say on the matter, but instead decided to stay quiet about it. Honestly, that bothered him more than if she'd just blurted it out.

"Okay…?" he responded hesitantly after a few seconds. "Is there something wrong with not wanting to die?"

Giselle shrugged. "Not really. You just seem really wishy-washy when it comes to that sort of thing, is all."

"...How so?"

"Well, that Mad Prince guy, right? Biggest bully in Hallow London and whatnot, and you walk up to him without even batting an eye, first chance you get. Don't even have your signature ability available to you for some reason, but you do it anyway fully expecting to die in the process. Now all of a sudden, you're getting shy because of a few vampires. Doesn't feel very consistent, if you ask me."

"Oh. That." Henry realized what she was getting hung up on, and nearly slapped himself for missing the obvious. "No, there's actually a big difference there, and it's not about me dying. See-"

"-So you weren't actually worried about that, then. Why'd you say that you were?"

Giselle cut him off before he could explain himself. When he tried to open his mouth again to follow through on his explanation, however, she held up a finger to silence him for a moment longer.

"Is it just because you don't want others to get hurt? Or is it because you want to see yourself as just one of us?"

...Well, wasn't that a totally barbed rhetorical question.

Henry stopped walking to the palace for a moment, and turned to her with arms folded and his most attentive stare he could manage. Just because Dee might've fallen into that one, didn't mean he had to. A twitch of a smirk danced at the corner of her mouth at the response. "You catch on quickly, don't you?"

Another transparent attempt to get him to answer completely first. "Sure, let's go with that," he deflected. "Now what were you saying just before that? Because, uh… it sounded like you were implying a degree of separation that I don't quite think is there."

"Oh, don't get so defensive. I didn't mean that like it's a bad thing. And, truth be told… you've been doing a lot to get rid of that barrier yourself. But it's still there, just a little bit. You'll clear it out eventually at the rate you're going."

"Giselle, I barely have any idea what you're talking about."

"The whole 'being the leader' thing. You seem to have this idea of what that's like in your head, and you don't like it just enough that you're looking for ways to share the burden. Again, not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination, just…"

Another stretch of silence.

"...Just what?" he finally asked.

"Just… different. Like, really different. I've never seen someone in a similar position do anything like that before… ever." Giselle sighed. "If anything, the number of close confidants they have shrinks, rather than grows like you make happen. They set a pecking order in concrete, with themselves at the top, and act surprised when they start taking away pillars one by one only to realize all they've accomplished was chipping away at their own foundation. Then it… all comes tumbling down."

She turned around and took a look up into the night sky. Only for a moment. And he might've just imagined it, but the moonlight shining down maybe caught the reflection of a small tear in her eye.

She's talking like… this is some sort of personal experience?

Henry opened his mouth to speak, but Giselle wasn't finished. She laughed softly. Fragile, almost.

"I hope… I hope that the way you do things is a bit more sturdy than that. I would… like to see it turn out alright."

Once she wrapped up, there was this contented look in her eyes that made him even more confused. Where had this all come from?!

"Hey, uh… I don't know what's going on here, but I already have a girlfriend if that's what this is."

The conversation ground to a halt, as he expected. But the manner in which it did so…

Was not.

She reacted completely opposite to what he thought would happen, actually. Giselle looked completely caught off-guard for a moment, but rather than kill the mood entirely she started laughing like he'd told the funniest joke in the world.

It was that sort of long, dragged out mix between a snort and a chuckle when you're trying not to be rude, followed by the eventual cave-in to genuine laughter. Quiet at first, but slowly getting a little bit louder every second that passed. Henry was caught flat-footed. Apparently, his guess had been way off the mark.

"Hahaha-! Oh, God no, that's not what I meant at all!" she was laughing so hard there were definitely tears in her eyes now. "I already know full well you'd go to the ends of the earth for that musclehead. Don't worry, Dee's more than enough of a handful for me already!"

Wait…

She kept laughing, but Henry picked up on something she let slip in the moment.

"Haah…" she finally began to wind down. "Me and you, as if that'd ever-"

"I'm pretty sure that was the first time I ever mentioned her to you," he interrupted. "In fact, I'm almost certain that the most I've ever talked about her is that exact same comment that got you laughing. So how'd you know enough about what she looked like, to opt for the obscure yet accurate descriptor musclehead?"

Giselle went dead silent. He waited patiently, expecting an answer, only to get none.

Just an impish grin… and then another, softer laugh.

"Aren't we both just full of surprises?" she giggled. And that was all she said on the matter.

Giselle went on ahead before he could interrogate her further, leaving Henry unsure of… a lot more about her than before.

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