Southern Expanse of the Tulian Republic

  135 Miles From The Capital

  50 Miles From The Jungle Wall

  Five Months until Invasion

  Sara stood in the stirrups, doing her best to bance as she sought a view over the nds below. Her horse, whose name she would commit to memory once she was certain she wouldn't give him up like the st four, kept his pcid stance beneath her. Sara shaded her eyes against the afternoon sun, which bounced off a field of glinting metal.

  "All seems to be going well," Sara said, affecting more confidence than she felt. There were staff and attendants nearby, and it wouldn't do to have them seeing their leader desperate for approval.

  Sara, of course, was desperate for approval, but appearances trumped honesty in this particur case. She subtly looked to Voth, the massive orc who sat in the saddle of an even more massive warhorse to her right. He was dressed in his preferred battle regalia, simple sbs of steel that caged his torso and arms, elegant only in the sweep of the helmet, which jutted out before the eyes to afford him protection without compromising vision. His warhorse, whose shoulders ended above the ears of Sara's horse, had its front draped in chainmail, and would have been completely covered if not for the sheer expense of the steel required to coat so massive a beast.

  Evie, to her left, was on her own steed, looking as uncomfortable in the saddle as Sara felt. Neither of them had ridden a horse before they'd met up with Voth's troops, and their lessons were far from complete. Evie wore a simpler version of the usual battle attire she'd preferred over her months of being Sara's sve, eschewing the vibrant red dress in favor of a far more sedate gray cloak, one which still hid her bck studded armor. The feline woman's natural showmanship in battle was necessarily subdued today, when hundreds of enemy soldiers would be devoutly watching for a target as valuable as she was. Evie tipped her head to the side, silently endorsing Sara's earlier statement, leaving Sara awaiting only Voth's approval.

  "I agree," Voth finally said, as if it were a matter of course. In reality, Sara was barely in charge of this army, having given explicit instructions for Voth to countermand any order of hers that would be detrimental to their forces. She needed practice leading the troops, but she'd be damned if she let people die for her incompetence, appearances or not. To an outside observer it would seem Voth had surrendered command the moment she'd arrived, as was proper when the leader of a nation joined an army, but subtle coded phrases ensured Voth was the general in all but name.

  The force that faced them on the southern pins of Tulian was to be her first real test, and it was looking to be a hell of a fight. The remaining petty bandit gangs, grown wealthy and skilled over a decade of raiding wless Tulian, had finally realized that Voth's army scouring the countryside were anything but a temporary aberration. Two months ago Sara had given him the order to put down any bandit force of considerable size and the funding to achieve it, and he'd done a damn good job in the interim.

  So good, in fact, that his progress had finally prompted the unification of disparate bandit forces under a single banner. The rgest of the bandit gangs had been akin to crime lords in their level of organization, each leader controlling dozens to hundreds of troops that systematically plundered their informal territory for tribute come each harvest. They'd fought other bandit gangs often, naturally, but when faced with elimination, they'd clearly decided cooperation was the lesser of two evils.

  Now Voth's army-- under Sara's banner-- were faced by the first enemy that equaled their numbers. Boiled leather and long boar spears stared down the maw of steel cuirasses and interwoven shields, a hundred and fifty yards between them, just enough for the first scattered exchange of longbow shots. Nearly two thousand men and women were stomping through the high grasses of abandoned Tulian, half of them under Sara's command, and the field was turning to sucking mud beneath their boots. Sara put a hand on her horse's neck and leaned forward, as if removing a single foot of distance would allow her to discern something new about the enemy forces. Predictably, she learned nothing. Likely, she'd learn nothing of use about her foes until battle was already joined, far too te for any meaningful orders to be sent out.

  What Sara already knew, however, was enough to keep her mind constantly churning, turning over every bit and piece in ceaseless agitation. The New Lords, the ostentatious moniker chosen by the unified bandit leaders, were far from a pushover force. Sara had personally interviewed a number of scouting parties that had been involved in brief skirmishes with their forces over the past few days, and was subsequently dismayed by consistent reports that her troops universally got worse than they gave, casualties as high as one-third in the enemy's favor. While these were only brief exchanges between groups of ten or so, Sara knew from Evie's training that such a loss rate was one of unsustainable devastation; most armies would break into a rout after losing a mere ten percent of their number. The disparity was to be expected, considering how inexperienced the bulk of Sara's troops were, but the implications were worrying.

  It was a gap in experience that was palpable in Sara's mind, and in this world, the term 'experience' was far more literal than on Earth. Veteran troops were tangibly more powerful than their opposites, bolstered by the arcane system of levels and Abilities that governed this reality.

  It would have been one thing if the bandit troops had occupied the years of wlessness with simple pilging, lording over peasantry who had no ability to fight back, but they hadn't. Perhaps their only cim to legitimacy as The New Lords came from their years spent patrolling the Jungle Wall between harvests, beating back the myriad creations of Daygon, the Beast God's children endlessly seeking to expand their territory into Tulian's verdant fields. Sara had heard tales of centipedes the size of buildings, panthers who slipped between shadows a mile distant in a heartbeat, and other, stranger things, so threatening they were given no name, for fear that invoking it would summon them back into existence. The remnants of those battles dangled from the armors of The New Lords, leather armor reinforced with bones, cws, and teeth, all polished to a brilliant white sheen.

  It was that experience fighting beasts, however, that Sara hoped to leverage in her favor. For all the levels and Abilities the enemy may possess, they gained them fighting monolithic titans, not numerous, thinking beings. What Sara cked in experience leading armies, she hoped to make up for in her ability to read people, and the troops of The New Lords had proved an obligingly open book. Long spears and loosely packed formations spoke of habits borne of years spent swarming massive beasts with superior numbers, and though they had gathered under one banner, they were far from unified in practice. Sara's troops moved as one, a thousand men and women pressed elbow to elbow, while the disparate blocks of The New Lords jostled and jockeyed for position, the few weeks they spent drilling formations not nearly enough to overcome years of rivalry between violent gangs.

  Sara had ordered her troops to approach in an inverse-V, the edges of her line creeping dangerously far ahead of the center, as if she wanted to envelop the entire bandit force. With their numbers equal, however, a full encirclement was vanishingly difficult to achieve, and so the tips of the V were enticingly easy to pinch off and surround. It was an opportunity that Sara could only pray the bandit troops would recognize and seize, because her entire pn hinged on it. She'd positioned Voth's most experienced troops in each leading edge, giving their sergeants orders to form into a hollow box and allow themselves to be encircled, making no attempts at a breakout. An outsized chunk of the enemy forces would be required to pin them down, and as a result, Sara would briefly have numerical superiority in the center, an advantage she intended to ruthlessly pursue. The moment the enemy middle broke, Sara's sergeants had preemptive orders to divide into three groups, the smallest pursuing the routing foes to ensure they could not regroup, the other two breaking off to relieve their encircled allies.

  It was, on the face of it, an excellent pn. Nothing of their intelligence suggested The New Lords had any experience with rge battles, and her gut told her they would swallow the bait without issue. Evie and Voth both had endorsed the pn during the early morning march, and Hurlish had even volunteered to be pced in the left wingtip, so Sara could focus her attention entirely on the right.

  Sara's mounting dread, ironically, came from the very fact that Hurlish's presence did so much for the safety of the left wingtip. Though the numbers and look of Sara's formation appeared symmetrical at a distance, the presence of a single sixth-level Irregur gave the army a combat strength that was ughably lopsided. Irregurs, after all, were defined as soldiers who, should they go unopposed, possessed abilities great enough to turn the tide of a battle singlehandedly. Sara herself was cssified as one, as well as Evie and Voth, who were to her left and right, but there ended the entire list of her thousand-strong army's Irregurs. Months of skirmishes, no matter how frequent, weren't enough to make up for a lifetime spent with bde in hand, and that meant The New Lords had an incredible advantage: the "Lords" themselves.

  As best as Sara could tell from vilger's reports, there were twelve of the Lords, and they alone could-- would-- shape the tide of battle. Staring down at the grassnd, Sara would have given anything to pick them out in the enemy formations, no intel more precious than the distribution of enemy Irregurs. The Lords were combatants strong enough to command the loyalty and respect of dozens of brigands, and while it was a certainty that Sara and her companions were individually superior, there were still the equivalent of entire regiments hidden somewhere among the enemy.

  Sara, Evie, and Voth were her army's only answer. With as little as she knew of the Lord's personalities and abilities, there would be no predicting them, no anticipating their attacks, nothing to do other than wait for a sughter to begin somewhere among those that had entrusted their lives to Sara's leadership. Then she would be off like a shot, leaving her army rudderless in her absence, trying to kill them quickly enough that she could return and keep giving orders.

  The scattered exchange of arrows began to intensify, the backlines of both formations closing within range of the opposing frontline. Sara's troops raised their shields in textbook grids, stride unbroken, while the bandit forces simply loosened their formation, most of the arrows falling in the empty space between them. The sergeants Voth had promoted saw this and began shouting orders, hurrying the whole formation in an attempt to catch the enemy disorganized.

  "It's fuckin' started now," Sara muttered under her breath, fingernails biting into her horse's reins.

  Evie cocked a feline ear her way, easily catching the whisper even from ten feet away. "Indeed, Master," she said, "Would it not be time to begin using Champion's Inspiration?"

  Sara shook her head. "I'm waiting until the melee starts. Don't know what their Irregurs can do, and I don't want them working out a counter before it's even started. Hopefully they'll be too busy to worry about it, once they're staring down the wrong end of a sword."

  Evie only hummed in response, giving no opinion. The catgirl had spent the majority of her youth in training under renowned mercenaries, yet never considered herself an expert in formal strategy, always quick to expin that her training was in swordsmanship and squad tactics, not generalmanship. Unlike Voth, she would remain silent on Sara's decisions unless Sara was about to commit a blunder that threatened the whole force. It grated on Sara something fierce, to know that Evie was willing to let troops die just to teach Sara, but the catgirl had been resolute that lessons were best learned with blood on your conscious. Sara had begrudgingly agreed to allow Evie her silence, only because Sara herself categorically refused to compromise her sve's rare shows of disobedience. No matter how happy Evie was with the arrangement that had befallen them, it was one forced on them by fate, not desire, and Sara would quite literally die before taking away a single ounce of her partner's remaining agency.

  Sara watched the lines roll towards one another from her vantage point, grinding her teeth. Arrows slipped through the shield wall in pces, resulting in shouts of agony audible even up at the hill she'd chosen to observe. Her troops marched on, well trained enough to be heedless of the fallen, eyes locked unerringly on the enemy force. Healers would attend the wounded, but only after the battle was over. They were too valuable to expose when the enemy still stood.

  "Ears on," Sara ordered, raising her voice to be heard by the surrounding group. Evie, Voth, and the dozen or so attendants obligingly took globs of warm wax from their pockets, stuffing it into their ears. Sara took a deep breath, focusing on the abilities gifted her by Amarat, and made her selection.

  Quiet taps filled the air, almost like water dripping on thin metal, with only the lightest hints of rumbling bass behind it. The sounds subtly grew bolder, louder, until a drumroll burst out of Sara's chest at deafening volume, echoing down to her troops below. She almost felt like she could see the speed of sound in the way the soldiers responded, marching feet suddenly pounding in unity timed to the millisecond.

  Champion's Inspiration was, with absolute certainty, Sara's most powerful ability, even if the description provided by the goddess hadn't pounded that home right off the bat.

  The Champion of Amarat reaches out to the souls of those around her. Whether through dance, speech, or song, she may show a truth that fans the embers of fading spirits into roaring bonfires.

  When Sara had first used it, it had been in the form of a rousing speech that helped synchronize the motions of rowers in a ship, proving instrumental in their survival against a superior foe. For a while she'd thought that was all it was useful for, minor buffs in desperate circumstances, but experimentation had yielded fruit. When she channeled Champion's Inspiration through a song she could reproduce any tune she'd ever heard, gifting its effects to any who considered themselves her ally. Unlike a speech, which was good for a one-time boost, Sara could keep the music going, looping it endlessly so the advantages it provided never faded.

  Her only minor quibble with the ability, however, was the fact she had to choose what song to py, and for someone with a hidden hipster streak in the world of music, that was quite a challenge. She'd spent half the march here thumbing through her mental record collection, trying to choose what to set the battle to. She probably shouldn't have worried so much, as all that mattered was the song's magical effect, but she knew the men and women under her command would be fighting for their lives with her taste in music entangling itself in their souls. It would have felt profoundly wrong to give them something inappropriate for the circumstances.

  Thus, as two thousand soldiers broke into the charge that would decide their fates, they did so to the chanting lyrics of a rap named Nova. Chosen mostly for a chorus of the words "I WON'T LOSE" bellowed over and over again, as well as its verses speaking of devils and gods, it was as close as she'd found to something that would resonate with the citizens of this antiquated society. Not all of it would make sense, but she wasn't pying it for the troops to analyze. It was a brutal, harsh beat, the bones of it simple enough to be pyed with hands on hidebound drums, and the fury it evoked would serve her well.

  The two frontlines met with mutual roars, the crack of steel and wood rising for a moment over the music. Just as she'd hoped, the left and rightmost bandit regiments leapt to the encirclement of her wings with whooping yells, ever more blocks of soldiers splitting off as their too-independent commanders decided to envelop the fnks. Down on the ground, it was probably impossible to see the way Voth's most experienced sergeants had begun to alter their formation, the back half of lines ten deep splitting off so they could reposition in anticipation of imminent encirclement, forming a box with an empty center. Even if the enemy sergeants realized what was happening, they were committed, and couldn't withdraw without exposing themselves to an opportunistic pursuit.

  The centers of the two armies met a minute ter with another crash of steel, Sara's more heavily armored troops breaking into a sprint just before contact. Wielding shortswords and shields with rounded corners that protected them from neck to knee, they were the closest thing to heavy infantry Voth had been able to assemble. They cked the armor to truly be called it, their iron chestptes open-backed and their helmets mere leather, but they were still more protected than their lightly armored opponents, who relied on the length of their winged boar spears to protect them. Forcing their way past the spears would be hard work, but the armor made it possible, if only attacks could be well ordered and synchronized.

  Sara's ability certainly allowed the second, at least. She could see even from hundreds of yards away the way each drive forward occurred in perfect unison, dozens of shields abruptly shoving speartips aside so their owners could take one determined step forward. Here and there some opportunistic soldiers managed to bite into the wooden hafts of the bandit's spears with their swords, either breaking them outright or damaging them enough that their snapping was inevitable.

  The bandits, of course, didn't accept this tactic passively. They began to slowly backstep, ceding ground so Sara's troops had to cover ever more distance to reach their opponents. The bandits knew as well as she that they would be eviscerated the moment Sara's troops pierced through the wall of spears, where shortswords could be wielded with all the subtlety of clubs against the unwieldy spears. Their constant thrusts turned the heavy infantry's assault into a shoving match, speartips grinding off armor and embedding into thick wooden shields.

  After all the smaller scale fights Sara had been involved in, most of which involved less than a dozen highly skilled combatants, the pace of true warfare was excruciatingly gcial. Minutes ticked away without any meaningful changes, save for the blocks of archers in the rear line, who were constantly jogging back and forth on the grass to keep themselves in range of the enemy's troops, yet out of range of their opposite's arrows. There, at least, Sara had a decisive advantage, her infantry far better able to weather the hail of arrows than the bandit spearmen.

  If this had been all the cards both sides had to py, the battle likely would have sted for hours yet, when exhaustion or terror would finally convince one side to flee. Neither Sara nor The New Lords had cavalry to make decisive charges, nor hidden forces lying in wait, nor even a core of reserves that could be committed at a critical moment.

  The only thing left, then, was Sara herself. Her horse, chosen for its deafness in light of Champion's Inspiration , was calmly snacking on grass, but Sara was practically vibrating in its saddle. Somewhere, somehow, the bandit Lords would reveal themselves, and then she'd have to fling every st one of her pns out the window to find her answer.

  Talking of one's level was incredibly taboo in this world, particurly among career soldiers, but Sara and Evie had quietly anticipated most of the Lords being around the fourth level in combat capability, based on their publicly witnessed accomplishments. Sara, Evie, and Hurlish were sixth level, and she privately suspected Voth of being seventh level. If one was incredibly skilled, a true prodigy, it was technically possible to overcome a two level gap, but it was the sort of achievement people wrote songs about, the warrior involved immortalized in legend. Sara wasn't concerned for her personal safety in a duel between her and one of the Lords. It was the regur troops, to whom a fourth level Irregur was nigh invincible, that she feared for.

  As if her pessimism had summoned the problem into existence, she witnessed the Fourth Infantry Company buckle, a pocket of empty space opening in the leftmost line of the main block of soldiers. At the center was one woman wielding an absurdly long poleaxe, a double-headed steel bde framing the speartip jutting from the ten foot weapon. She was savaging her way through the infantry, one sweep of her weapon knocking shields aside, the next crunching through armor, her troops filing in the space she opened. In the few seconds from Sara's recognition to reaction, a dozen had fallen.

  "Voth!" Sara snapped, making her decision. The orc cracked his horse's reigns the instant she spoke, command staff diving out of his way as he thundered off in the direction of the enemy Irregur. The massive beast's chugging breaths sounded more like a roar as it gathered momentum down the hill, Voth crouching low over the saddle so he wouldn't be thrown off.

  Sara ripped herself away from the sight, doing her best to ignore the entire affair once she'd made her decision. With Voth committed to the left fnk, the formation was even more lopsided, two of their four Irregurs on the extreme left of the battle. Once Voth dealt with the enemy Irregur, he'd reverse the direction of the push, driving into the enemy ranks just as the enemy had been doing. The progress he would make would inevitably prompt a response from another Irregur, which was when the real shitshow would begin. Action and reaction, dominos falling one after the other, dragging them all into the thick of the melee until one side was dead or shattered.

  Sara kept flicking her attention back to the right box formation, the enveloped Companies of soldiers being the most likely candidate for a considerable push. Hurlish was still hiding on the left fnk, freeing Sara to wait until--

  There it was. Hard to spot, but impossible to hide, she saw the gaps forming, and when she kept her attention on it, it was obvious. Random soldiers were dropping bonelessly in the line, colpsing for no apparent reason, and the rate they were doing so was accelerating. Sara didn't know what the hell was causing it, but it wasn't a coincidence.

  "Evie!" She snapped, pointing. Unlike Voth, however, there was no storm of hoofbeats answering her shout. In fact, as she looked to her left, Evie hadn't moved in the slightest. Sara's eyes widened in anger at the feline, knowing she wouldn't have missed anything Sara saw. "Are you goddamn serious?"

  "Yes, Master."

  "There's an Irregur over there!"

  "Indeed."

  "And it would be fucking stupid for both of us to commit to the same pce on the battlefield!"

  "Correct."

  "So would you please get over there?"

  "Did you think I was lying when we spoke this morning, Master?"

  Sara stared up into the sky and released a string of her foulest curses, then bent low over her horse's back and snapped its reigns.

  For all its earlier lethargy, her steed's eagerness to run couldn't be denied. It lunged forward without hesitation, grass still hanging half out of its mouth, and Sara's valiant charge almost ended with her ft on her ass ten feet from where she started. She just barely managed to keep her feet in the stirrups, reciting every one of her riding lessons in her head as she went through each motion in mechanical fashion. Keep even pressure on the reins, keep the heel firmly pressed against the stirrup, bounce with the motion of the gallop, all while keeping out of the wind as much as possible, so she wouldn't slow the animal down.

  Evie rode behind her, steadily falling behind Sara, for once. Her horse wasn't as fast, despite being younger, but it did behave better around Evie than most they'd tried. Something about felines and catfolk set them on edge, as if their little horse brains were convinced Evie was more tiger than human. It was supposedly more of a problem in the south, where wild horses had more to fear from stalking predators than they did their trainer's reprimands.

  Sara nearly fell from her saddle once more as her horse abruptly transitioned from galloping down the hill to the ftter pin, saved from falling only by pulling herself back up with the horse's reins, which of course caused the animal to wildly veer off course. Sara cursed wildly as she pulled the horse back around, rocketing ingloriously past a block of her own archers that she'd narrowly avoided trampling.

  She pointed the animal towards the enveloped troops with wind whistling through the eyeslits of her helmet, grinding her teeth the entire way there. Evie was falling farther behind, fifty feet or so, but Sara'd learned early on that her current steed was an all or nothing creature, and that any attempt to slow it would result in a return to pcid grass snacking. That should have been a massive problem for a warhorse, which needed to be trained to keep pace in a formation, but honestly, Sara found it endearing. She urged the animal faster with quiet mutterings it couldn't hear, trying to find the source of the inexplicable deaths in the enveloped right fnk.

  She found it right as she pulled hard on the reins, forcing her horse to come to a hoof-dragging halt. She leapt from the saddle the moment it was safe, tucking the nding into a roll that she ended by bouncing to her feet, sword drawn.

  Surrounded as the Second Infantry Regiment was, Sara was first faced with a wall of spearmen five deep. The front two rows were engaged with the Second Infantry, the third standing ready to repce any injured, leaving only the back two rows sufficiently disengaged to notice her arrival. They immediately began whirling their spears around, hollering furious warnings at their fellows that an Irregur had arrived, but Sara had too much momentum. She snapped her greatsword out and plowed into them before the first shout finished falling from their lips.

  Speartips grated and sparked off her armor as she dove into the melee, moving too fast for anyone to try and aim for a gap in her armor.

  Her first swing was a wide vertical spin, sending severed speartips flying, ending with her sword colpsing overhead, shortsword smming down into the skull of the woman in front of her, then jerked straight through the woman's right cheekbone in a spray of blood, nding in the neck of her comrade beside her.

  Now inside the boarspear's range, Sara ripped her weapon free and dove into the brutal butchery only an Irregur was capable of. She was at least a head taller than most of her opponents, thin-limbed bandits who'd never known a life where their next meal was guaranteed, and it left her feeling like she was fighting toddlers. They moved slow, reacted slow, thought slow, always too te to do anything but fil when her sword came their way, and Sara knew deep down, somewhere, that she should have felt bad, but the heat of battle left no room for anything other than savage delight and a fiery rage.

  Truth be told, she doubted she'd ever feel a shred of guilt for the deaths. These bandits were the most pathetic of opportunists, the sort of godawful cocksuckers that had seen their country suddenly freed from the horrors of feudal lords and decided that, rather than rise to be better, the best thing to do was grab a weapon and try their damndest to take the old oppressor's pce. It wasn't like Tulian had been struggling, after the storms had passed, with more natural resources and open farmnd than anyone could have used, so they couldn't cim they'd been forced into a life of crime. Whatever Sara called them, be it bandit, css traitor, or any number of applicable profanities, her evaluation of their fates remained unchanged:

  Fuck 'em.

  Sara grabbed one man by neck and twisted until she felt a snap, driving deeper into the line with his corpse held before her as a shield. She tossed the body aside when she broke out into the empty space between the Second Infantry and the bandit army, her troop's initial recoiling of terror at an Irregur's emergence from the enemy line rapidly coalescing into a ragged cheer. Sara raised her sword in greeting, then folded it out into a greatsword and brought it down in an axe bow to her right, snapping six spears in one swing. The infantry opposite immediately rushed forward to take advantage, shortswords digging into the guts of disarmed bandits.

  Sara stepped into the welcoming embrace of the infantry formation, raising her sword once more to gather attention.

  "Imposter! Enemy Irregur disguised in our lines!" There was a rippling effect around her as those closest to her reacted, but with the shrieks of battle and pounding bass, the message didn't spread far. Sara began walking behind the line, sword still raised, repeating the message. "Imposter in the lines! Disguised Irregur! Back line, pass the warning on!"

  Those not actively engaged in combat began repeating the cry, raising the arm along the whole of the box formation. There was no protocol in pce to deal with such a scenario, so individual soldiers reacted instinctively, pressing tighter to their fellows and looking deeply into one another's faces, searching for any sign of disguise. The distraction immediately began taking a toll, bandits catching more than one soldier off guard, but it was far better than letting an Irregur run amuck. Or, at least, Sara hoped it was.

  Sara spotted the commander of the Second Infantry Regiment jogging her way, trying to shout something to her. He was one of Voth's old army buddies, a squat man whose nickname of Laner still stuck from his trainee days. So the story went, he'd shown up to drill practice so drunk that he'd begun to halfway-fall in that stumbling way only the drunk and elderly did, knocking people aside through the entire formation until finally falling ft on his face at the drill sergeant's feet. His perilous journey had cleared a long ne of open space behind him, showing the drill sergeant just how far he had fallen-- literally. Voth had assured her the drunkenness of his nickname was an oddity, not the rule, and so Sara had entrusted him with this assignment.

  "Laner, back!" Sara shouted, waving her sword at him. "They're a rogue, assassin sort, and they'll want to get you and me the most!"

  Laner kept coming, adjusting his shield's straps. "And I'll be damned if I let them get you!" He shouted back, pulling to a stop at her side, breathing hard. "Where's your girl, Champion? Surely she didn't actually follow orders?"

  "Of course not," Sara spat, turning to survey the battle. She couldn't see Evie, but she could see the empty hole in the enemy formation she was creating, accented with the occasional spray of blood flinging skyward. Sara pointed. "She's coming in after me. C'mon, let's meet her halfway. I sure as shit don't wanna fight a rogue in our own lines."

  Sara began to jog behind the infantry lines, giving motivational sps on the back to some of the walking wounded that had taken up spots in the backline. She was pleased to see that most had bandaged their wounds with clean, white cloth, or were currently wrapping them up just as she'd instructed. Hardly any of them understood why using any old rag to staunch the flow of blood was bad, yet they were disciplined enough to follow orders regardless. As Sara went, she gnced back at Laner, whose real name she couldn't remember for the life of her. He was an average looking man, save for his more rugged physique, muscuture toned by weeks training recruits, but he hadn't been listed by Voth as a potential Irregur. Going into this fight with him seemed a good way to get one of her few veteran commanders killed, no matter how stubborn he was about helping.

  "Laner, what's your level?"

  His eyes widened in horror, tripping over his own feet.

  "Wha-- I beg your fucking pardon?"

  Sara resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Asking about levels was about the deepest taboo this society had, the question she'd just rattled off one that Evie had once eloquently compared to asking a woman nursing a newborn how many inches the midwife had noticed her cervix diting during the birth. Not only was it a baffling question to ask, there simply wasn't any imaginable reason someone could want to know it with good intentions. As a military man, whose very life might hang on what Skills his Css gave him, that taboo was tenfold for someone like Laner.

  Sara had hoped the circumstances would deaden the provocative question, but it clearly hadn't. Instead of pressing further, she just blew out a huff of breath, pointing back to where Laner had come from.

  "Look, unless you're fourth level or above, there's not gonna be a damn thing you can do to help me. Get back to your soldiers, keep the line intact, and--"

  Sara felt a titanic blow to her temple throw her to the dirt, left shoulder hitting before either leg did. She reflexively shoved herself back up even as her helmet rang like a struck bell, vision swimming as she flung her sword out in a wild arc, barely warding away the lunging blow she'd anticipated by instinct alone.

  Her assaint had been coming at her with knife in hand, but was forced to dip beneath her swing and try again from below, driving towards the weak chainmail that guarded her exposed armpit.

  Her sword far too heavy to bring around, Sara released it and brought her elbow down, driving its steel edge into the shoulder of the assassin with a meaty crunch. His stab was thrown off just enough to skate off the side of her breastpte, then he was trying to return to his feet while Sara savaged his upper body with kicks, all the while backpedaling in the direction she'd inadvertently flung her sword.

  It was at this time that Laner finished drawing his sword from its scabbard. Sara made the briefest of eye contact with him, then he was gone, running off to rejoin his soldiers.

  Sara bent to snag her sword out of the dirt, gncing aside just in time to see a glint of steel flying through the air, heading straight for her eye. She turned her half-crouch into a dive, the weapon bouncing off the back of her helmet to spin up into the sky. She once again threw herself to her feet, the distance between them finally enough for her to reset her stance and evaluate her opponent.

  Dressed in the armor common to the Second Infantry Regiment, with a leather helmet and simple breastpte, he was as utterly unremarkable an individual as Sara had ever seen. Brown eyes, short brown hair, a tanned face with freckles and a little bit of premature aging from a life spent under the sun, even his physicality was unremarkable.

  If Sara had been her old self, back on Earth, she doubted she'd have noticed him even if he'd blocked her path through a door. He was that generic, that uninteresting, that boring. Her new self, however, with a goddess's instincts flowing through her mind, screamed in arm. This man was capital-a Average in a way that wasn't achievable by any natural means, and it had her gut squirming with anxiety. How long had he been in the Second? Since The New Lords had formed? Before? She'd have no way of knowing; not even his tentmate would've bothered to learn his name.

  Sara adopted an overheaded hanging guard stance, hilt of her sword above her temple, bde angled subtly downward. While it may not have looked like it, in her practice duels with Ketch, it had proved the best way to protect herself from the rogue's blinding speed and propensity for ducking beneath her bde. Sara could stab, swing, or spin at any time, giving her a plethora of ways to react.

  She was already doubting her opponent was merely level four, and as if to underpin the concern, Sara became aware of a gentle tickle of wind against the back of her head, followed by a wetness rolling down her neck. The man's thrown knife had pierced the steel, opening a wide gash on the back of her skull.

  Locked into her guarding stance, Sara could only await his move. She'd hedged her bets that he'd thrown all his knives, but if he hadn't she'd have milliseconds to dodge, no longer able to trust her armor to--

  He blurred forward, light glinting in his right hand. Sara stabbed down, aiming for a spot just ahead of him, but found only air, the rogue spinning around the bde, knife appearing in his left hand.

  Sara raised her knee and yanked her sword back, blocking his swing with her leg in an effort to pin him between her body and the sword. A sharp pain fred in her thigh as the knife drove home, then she felt her sword bouncing off his back, not quite biting in.

  Sara's head was filled with a boiling fury, and it shone from the runes on her skin. She rolled to the side with a guttural scream, using his grip on the knife in her thigh to drag him with her, the sword now at just the right angle to race across his neck--

  There was a blur of motion she couldn't follow, and then the man was ten feet away, breathing hard, left hand pressed to his neck. He brought the hand away, palm smeared red, and that was all the time he had to react before Sara was on him again, swinging with everything she had.

  GOD Sara loved fighting. She fucking loved it. Fuck talking, fuck pnning, fuck maneuvering, and hell, fuck fucking, this was what she wanted. It was like a high, and Sara'd been high before, but this wasn't like that because the blood on her neck and her thigh was nothing compared to the blood rushing to her head, pounding with the pulse of a hammering heart set to leap from her skin, a dizzying anger that'd never felt as right as it did in that moment when she was swinging her sword at the fucker that'd just stabbed her with his stupid little fucking knife until she felt her wrist shake when her sword nded somewhere in him and he was falling and she was on top of him with her hands on his throat and her smoke was filling the air--

  --Until the fog was pierced by a single sliver of silver, glowing with enchantment light. It entered the rogue's neck with the grace of a master weaver pcing their tapestry's final thread, a thin string in just the right pce to complete a masterpiece.

  Sara's neck snapped up to look at Evie, who was standing in bloodsoaked bck leather. The feline looked down at her calmly, wiping the gore from her bde with a white silk hankie.

  "I apologize for the interruption, Master, but choking them takes too long. We have pces to be."

  The simple words rang like struck crystal in Sara's ears, splitting through the haze. Her shoulders sagged in sudden exhaustion, the red fog rolling off her runed skin sputtering away. She rolled off the corpse, sitting back. She was breathing hard, and her thigh burned.

  "Fuck," she whispered. Evie crouched down next to her.

  "Are you injured, Master?"

  "Yeah. Thigh and back of my head. Not too bad." There'd been a six inch bde in her thigh, but becoming a Champion had changed the kinds of wounds that concerned her. "Fuck," she repeated. "That wasn't great. I lost my head for a minute there."

  "I saw, Master."

  Sara wiped a hand down her face, looking at the soldiers still engaged in battle all around her. "You think anyone else did?"

  "Some, perhaps. It will not be a problem. Fervor in battle is something the commoners ud in their leader."

  "Not the example I want to set, though." Sara wiped her face again, trying to clean away something that wasn't on her skin. "Gonna have to get a hold on that soon."

  "In the immediate sense, Master?" Evie asked, even as she reached up to remove Sara's helmet. She unrolled a bandage and lifted Sara's hair, using a small penknife to cut a patch around the wound. "The battle still rages, but Voth and Hurlish are competent. If we provide Hurlish with a horse, she will be able to respond as we did."

  "No, no, that's not necessary," Sara said, twisting her leg until she could look at the wound in her thigh without moving her head away from Evie's ministrations. The steel cuisse had been pierced clean through, a quarter-inch gap welling with blood. Wrapping all the way around her leg, it normally wouldn't be an easy piece to take off in a hurry. Thankfully, she'd chosen enchantments for just such an occasion, which she activated. The steel rolled up like pydough under Sara's hands as she spoke. "But I do need to get a handle on it. I didn't lose my cool in the smaller fights like that, but I still got too heated."

  "Something that should be addressed," Evie agreed, finishing her wrapping of Sara's head. Seeing Sara was already wrapping her thigh, she sat back. "Will we be staying with the Second, or will we return to the command post?"

  "Back to the command post, unless we spot any problems on the way there. No point in sticking around here, because our assault earlier definitely would have drawn out any Irregurs in the area." Sara spent a moment in silence, debating, and then spoke one st time. "I'll want to forget about that whole thing back there, pretend I can ignore it and not work on it. Don't let me."

  Evie's colr fshed, a little shiver running through her as the order took effect. Sara felt no small guilt over the order, but had found that even her murderous companion had a softspot for her. If it wasn't an actual order, there was a good chance Evie wouldn't see the need to actually follow through.

  She also, Sara knew, took profound satisfaction in managing to pressure her "owner" into giving an order. While that may have been a small bandaid on Sara's guilt, the habit was its own can of worms, and it wasn't one that was going to be dealt with any time soon.

  Sara finished the bandaging and stood, testing her leg. Evie watched her do so, and Sara caught the look that said the feline was holding something back.

  "What?" Sara asked. She began putting her armor back on. "C'mon, you can tell me."

  Evie sighed. "This wound would not have occurred had you stayed with me, Master."

  "And it also wouldn't have occurred if you had followed orders and taken this guy out yourself. Gutting a rogue's basically your specialty."

  "As I would have been physically incapable of disobeying you, Master, I am quite sure you gave no such order."

  Sara gred at her. "You know exactly what I mean."

  Evie gred right back. "Yes. And you know that I consider your personal my safety my utmost concern, second to nothing, as I possess no other priorities in my life. Your unwillingness to use the colr's dominance over my mind outside the bedroom is hardly my fault, Master. I will fight alone only when your desperation over ck of Irregurs grows so great that you will willingly compromise the moral code you hold so dear."

  Sara opened her mouth to argue, found nothing to say, then sighed. "Fine. Let's hope that never happens. Bodyguard duty only from now on."

  "Excellent." Evie looked over her shoulder as Sara finished up with her armor, eyes nding on the makeshift triage area at the center of the box formation. Several bodies had been rolled off their cloth mats, piled limply in a pool of mixing blood. Evie's shoulders slumped ever so slightly. "And... when-- and only when-- you are with Hurlish for an extended period of time, I will tour the troops to evaluate and train prospective Irregurs. It is a duty I am familiar with from my training with the Night's Eye."

  Sara raised her eyebrows, hitting her leg armor with a few test sps before setting off. "Really? You're gonna train a bunch of hillbilly wannabe soldiers?"

  Evie pinched the bridge of her nose as she walked beside Sara. "I suppose I am, Master. I can only hope my proximity to you has lessened the offense I will feel for their inevitable ck of discretion."

  Sara smiled, bumping shoulders with Evie as they approached the back line of troops. "Oh, c'mon, I'm not that bad. I'm fancy enough to talk rings around most fancy high-society types."

  "Indeed. Which is why your habitual gracelessness among less refined company is ever a mystery to me, Master."

  Sara grinned wider, then turned to the soldier in front of them, tapping their shoulder to get their attention. "'Scuse me dude, coming through. Got a lot of people to go killing."

  The startled soldier stepped to the side, allowing Sara and Evie through the line. They shoved their way through the ranks, Evie handing Sara her helmet, and then they were back out in the open, facing a row of spearmen. The bandits recoiled at the sight of Sara, shoving their backs into the troops behind them, and Sara's smile took on a different tone.

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  The battle sted another two hours. Contrary to Sara's initial belief, the first skirmishes of Irregurs didn't prompt the domino effect she'd been awaiting. It seemed The New Lords were even less united than she'd dreamed, and were perfectly fine with allowing Voth and Sara to finish wiping out the contingents of soldiers that hadn't 'belonged' to them. Each Lord only really engaged in battle when the troops loyal to them personally came under threat, and because Sara had Voth pull back to rest when no one else came to challenge him, that occurred slowly.

  Sara could have risked throwing Voth, Hurlish, and herself fully into the fight, doing their best to end the battle all on their own, but her gut told her that The New Lords weren't that stupid. They had to have recognized by then how limited Sara was on Irregurs, and if one Lord noticed they were engaged elsewhere, they would seize the chance to sughter Sara's troops somewhere she couldn't quickly respond to.

  Thus, to avoid a series of localized massacres, Sara was forced to make the common troops bear the brunt of the battle. One by one, section by section, they would push the enemy to the breaking point, finally forcing a Lord's hand. Only then would some trumped-up bandit prick emerge and begin to fight for themselves, trying to give their troops the breathing room they needed to survive. Sara was paying careful attention to which bandit formations were looking the weakest, however, and so could predict where the next Lord would pop up.

  That ended up being her greatest strength as a commander. Her uncanny ability to read the disposition of the enemy, even from hundreds of yards away, was something that even Voth and Evie couldn't replicate. She couldn't expin it other than as a gut feeling, assuring them it was likely some aspect of the Goddess of Passion and Connection giving her a read on such heightened emotions. Privately, because it would have felt rudely arrogant to say it aloud, Sara didn't discount the idea that it was just her lifelong skill at reading the room. Whatever its source, she was able to consistently position Voth and Hurlish exactly where the next Lord would emerge, limiting the casualties they caused to whatever could be achieved in the brief seconds before a giant hammer or brutal poleaxe pummeled them into an early grave.

  That grinding inevitability slowly soaked into the bandit forces, who, despite their poor vantage points, began to realize just how outnumbered they were becoming. Sara could almost see it building like an ocean wave, the knee-quivering fear that slowly suffused the bandits, the slow recognition that 'hey, maybe we aren't going to win this'. When it finally happened, Sara was the very first to react, barking orders before anyone else realized what was going on.

  The Rout.

  The final conclusion of these medieval battles, so often described in the textbooks Evie had forced her to pour over, yet something she'd never seen for herself. It began with one wounded soldier in the backlines breaking off, tossing their spear aside, which was followed by the man next to him, then another, and another, and then in one almost coordinated mass the bandits broke and ran.

  It was brutal. It was also what every battlefield commander wanted to see. Hundreds of men and women throwing down their arms, ripping off their helmets, discarding anything that might slow their desperate rush to escape. It was the moment when animal instinct overrode human reason, terror reaching such a depth that it drowned out discipline and common sense alike, because if the enemy had really been thinking, they would have fought to the st.

  Because Sara wasn't going to let them go.

  She barked an order and a fg was raised, recognized by each and every person of authority in her army, and then they were off, whooping like children and barking like dogs. The carefully maintained blocks of soldiers broke into a teeming horde, running down and trampling the bandits who no longer had the coordination to fight back, one huge mass that swallowed the far more scattered enemies that they'd spent so long locked in combat with. Even if Sara had wanted them to, there'd be no quarter given, no mercy offered, and the reason was writ in gleaming chestptes littering the field the soldiers left behind. They'd lost people, lots of people, enough to shove kindness to a very dark, remote pce in their minds.

  Sara didn't participate. She watched from above, then eventually from behind, following on horseback when the rout continued on into the hills, some desperate few even diving into isoted patches of jungle. Sara involved herself then, forbidding any pursuit, assuring the disappointed troops that whatever waited inside the thicket of tangled vines was deadlier than any shortsword.

  When her soldiers began to fg, dragged down by heavy armor that their quarry wasn't burdened by, Sara finally called for a regroup. They'd harried the enemy across nearly three miles of open pins, and even a casual gnce at the corpses littering that stretch assured her there would be no reforming of The New Lords. Maybe one or two of their Irregurs had survived, there was no real way to know, but they wouldn't ever pose the same threat.

  Sara had won her first battle.