Castle Battle was starting, and Bob had heard, through channels no one could ever quite trace back to a source, that TTK needed help. This was not true. TTK did not need help. TTK had never once, in the recorded history of Kingdom 1507, needed Bob's help. But Bob had heard it, and Bob believed it, and that was enough.
He showed up at TTK's staging grounds wearing a cape that had not been there an hour earlier and announced, with the gravity of a man delivering a coronation address, "I have changed my name. You may now refer to me as DarkLoard_Bob." Nobody asked why it was spelled that way. Nobody dared.
TwinTaco, Hunter, Splink, Shorty, Lokanta, and Slimboy Fat looked at each other. A long, collective sigh passed through the group, the specific sigh of people who had done this dance before and knew exactly how it ended. They hoped, quietly and without much conviction, that today would be different. That DarkLoard_Bob would somehow cause a normal, manageable amount of chaos.
They were wrong.
DarkLoard_Bob led the first rally personally, cape snapping behind him like he was starring in his own opening cutscene. "TO THE NORTH TURRET," he bellowed, "FOR GLORY, FOR TTK, FOR-" he paused, apparently forgetting the third thing, and settled on, "-ALSO GLORY." The rally launched. The march arrived. And then DarkLoard_Bob, in the process of "adjusting his cape for maximum intimidation," backed directly into the rally's own siege formation, knocking three of his own troops out of position half a second before impact. The turret held. Barely. "A STRATEGIC PROBING ATTACK," DarkLoard_Bob announced afterward, to no one who believed him.
The South rally went better, right up until DarkLoard_Bob decided the cape needed to be dramatically unfurled at the exact moment of engagement. He spun. The cape caught the corner of a supply cart. The supply cart flipped. The supply cart's contents -- mostly loose stones intended for wall repair -- scattered directly into the march's path, and half the formation spent the next several seconds sidestepping rubble instead of fighting. "I HAVE WEAKENED THEM WITH DEBRIS," DarkLoard_Bob reported. The South Turret remained, structurally and politically, entirely unweakened.
By the East Turret, DarkLoard_Bob had decided that a king -- even a self-appointed one -- should not merely rally, but should personally lead the charge on foot, cape and all. He sprinted ahead of his own troops, screaming something about destiny, tripped over a battlement he insisted "moved on purpose," and rolled the remaining distance to the turret wall, arriving several seconds before his own army and considerably more disheveled. The defenders looked down at a caped man sprawled at the base of their turret and, out of pure confusion, did not immediately fire. DarkLoard_Bob considered this a tactical opening. It was not. The rally, now several seconds behind schedule and missing its lead element (Bob, still finding his footing), failed to break the wall.
The West rally was, by TTK's own internal accounting, going fine -- right up until DarkLoard_Bob attempted to "boost morale" by climbing onto a siege engine mid-launch to "ride it in like a king." The siege engine had not been designed for this. Nothing about a trebuchet is designed for this. The counterweight dropped early, the payload went wide, and DarkLoard_Bob went briefly airborne before landing, cape first, in a shallow ditch just outside the turret's range. "THAT WAS INTENTIONAL RECONNAISSANCE," he shouted from the ditch. West Turret held.
Four turrets down, all four failed in increasingly spectacular fashion, and DarkLoard_Bob -- muddy, scorched in one small patch, cape torn but somehow still dramatically flowing -- arrived back at the castle just as TTK finally wrestled control of it away from its previous holders. "I WILL GARRISON THIS CASTLE," he announced, and for once, nobody actively stopped him. Partly because he'd earned it through sheer persistence. Mostly because everyone else was already sprinting back out to reinforce the turrets and simply didn't have time to argue.
And so, through a combination of bad luck, worse timing, and TTK's understandable prioritization of the actual objectives, DarkLoard_Bob ended up alone in the castle. Completely alone. King of an empty room, by accident, for the second time that day.
It did not stay empty for long.
[APX]Piupiu arrived first, expecting an easy, undefended garrison. Instead he found a man in a torn cape standing in the middle of the throne room shouting "NONE SHALL PASS" at a volume that suggested he'd been waiting his whole life to say it. What followed was less a battle than a series of increasingly improbable events -- DarkLoard_Bob dodging by tripping at exactly the right moment, blocking by accident, and somehow ending every exchange still standing while Piupiu ended his considerably less so. Piupiu withdrew, less because he was defeated and more because he genuinely could not explain what had just happened.
[ONE]mlok came next, methodical and prepared for a real fight. He got DarkLoard_Bob instead, who had, in the interim, discovered the throne and was in the process of testing whether it "counted as a shield" by hiding behind it. This turned out, against all logic, to actually work. mlok's approach kept catching the throne's stonework at exactly the wrong angle, and DarkLoard_Bob's wild, directionless counters somehow kept connecting. mlok left the castle grounds a great deal more confused than he arrived.
[ONE]Aaron was the last and by far the most determined, and for a moment it looked like the castle's brief, accidental king was finally going to lose it the way everyone assumed he would from the start. But DarkLoard_Bob, cornered, cape smoldering slightly from an earlier turret mishap he still hadn't fully extinguished, threw the single most poorly-aimed swing of the entire battle -- a swing so wrong, so structurally unsound, that it missed Aaron entirely and instead struck a support beam, which struck a decorative suit of armor, which fell directly onto Aaron with the full weight of a king's questionable interior decorating choices. Aaron did not get back up in time. DarkLoard_Bob looked at the fallen armor, then at his own hands, and said, with total sincerity, "I have trained for this my whole life."
He had not.
By the time TTK's forces finished securing the turrets and made their way back to the castle, they found it not just held, but held -- DarkLoard_Bob standing triumphantly atop a pile of scorched armor, a torn cape, and the general wreckage of three separate solo victories he could not begin to explain if pressed.
TwinTaco was the first to speak. "...how."
"I do not know," DarkLoard_Bob admitted, with the rare honesty of a man too exhausted to lie. "I do not know how any of today happened."
Hunter looked around at the castle, undeniably TTK's, undeniably held, and undeniably guarded -- however accidentally -- by the one person who by every reasonable metric should have lost it within the first ten minutes.
Splink, Shorty, Lokanta, and Slimboy Fat exchanged a look that had, over the course of one single Castle Battle, evolved from dread to disbelief to something dangerously close to respect.
"All in favor," TwinTaco said slowly, "of never letting this happen again, but also never letting anyone tell Bob he didn't do this--"
The vote was unanimous. DarkLoard_Bob was declared, officially and with no small amount of confusion, King of the Castle.
He had come to "help." No one could say, with a straight face, that he hadn't.