Book 2: Chapter 40 : Deployment

  [Time Remaining; 640 Days, 11 Hours, 52 Minutes.]

  Everyone was up early the next morning. Either due to nerves, excitement, dread, a little bit of all three. He didn’t know everyone else’s reasons, but Alex could feel the dread mixed with elation that was churning in his stomach.

  Lieutenant Halstrad met them outside in the courtyard of the main training field. A large crate was on the ground next to her and she stood with her arms crossed, permanent scowl etched across her face. Once everyone had formed up into two lines in front of her, she gave a curt nod and kicked the crate, causing it to split open.

  “You have your own gear that you are welcome to use, but there are also Terraxum uniforms and armor that will be stand issue,” she picked up a gauntlet and tossed it at Peter. “Congratulations, you are all now soldiers.”

  She walked away after that, leaving them all to poke through the armory-made-trach-can that now lay before them. He and the others picked up items that fit their combat style. Eric, Holly and himself sticking only to the basic light leathers and martial robes. Kate, Peter and Lance quickly put on more medium armor pieces, chain skirts, gauntlets, greaves strapped over their boots.

  It was Henry, Garret and Devon that went more heavy armor. Alex was surprised by Devon’s choice, given that he didn’t seem tot have the strength to really utilize the heavy plate to its full potential. But he assumed that’s exactly why he picked it. He made him feel more protected, and forced him to learn how to use it. It might even be good physical training for him.

  “All right then, how’s everyone feeling?” He looked out at each of them, and got expected reactions. Solemn nods, forced smiles and a smattering of things in between. “Yeah, I know. Let’s get to the gatehouse, I’m sure the convoy heading to the north front is already gathering up.”

  He didn’t wait for a ready, and simply turned on his heel to march off toward the northern stretch of the training facility. They had a lot traveling to do, and The System was still ticking down the timer to their final judgment.

  The land changed the farther they traveled with the large two-hundred man convoy headed north. Forests thinned, roads cracked, and fields faded into rolling, ash-colored hills where old battles had scarred the terrain. Burnt-out watch posts lined the path like broken teeth. Wards flickered weakly along perimeter stones. He could smell the pain and fear of past battles baked into the air.

  They passed refugee convoys heading the other way, wagons stuffed with hollow-eyed families, carts loaded with talismans and family heirlooms. He saw one child clutched a burnt doll like it was a lifeline. No one looked at them as they passed ways, and no one waved.

  The forward camp of Terraxum’s northern front looked exactly how Alex imagined a place designed for the express purpose of killing, and not dying would look. Rows of fortified tents, spell-anchored palisades, and a dozen different layers of enchantment bulwarks humming like irritated bees across the ridgelines. There were soldiers sharpening blades, unloading crates of beastblood elixirs, potions, and one woman screaming at a griffon the size of a wagon not to eat her boots.

  Welcome to war. He told himself.

  “This looks depressing. You humans like doing this?”

  No, Obby, we do not like doing this. Just some humans really enjoy the benefits they get from having other people doing it for them.

  “Seems like a horrible deal.”

  Preaching to the choir my granite friend.

  Alex pulled his coat tighter, the first real chill since leaving the capital creeping under his collar. The ground here was dry, cracked earth that looked like it’d rather be anything else but sturdy. It didn’t rain here here often it appeared, so ground mostly got its moisture from the blood that soaked inside it instead..

  Their convoy escort led them past barracks and staging fields until they reached a broad tent, its entrance guarded by two grim-faced soldiers wearing silver sigils, a hammer cracked across the middle. Alex recognized it at once, Drenn’s regiment. There was a moment, brief and sharp, when the entire squad froze to look at that sigil. There was no resentment in their looks. Just… memory.

  The last time they’d seen these men, they’d been prisoners in shackles. Now? Now they wore armor lined with the same military glyphs, blades strapped to hips, aether humming under their skin. Now they were soldiers in the same suck-fields as them.

  "Name yourselves," the guard demanded.

  Eric stepped forward. "Worldstrider unit. Under Prince Kailan’s conscription order."

  The soldier's brow twitched. He pulled the flap open without a word and motioned them in.

  Inside, Captain Tharek Drenn stood hunched over a battlefield projection table, flickering topography glowing in shades of red and blue, animated markers shifting with real-time. He looked just as he had since they'd last seen him. Still tall, gruff, still looked like a man whose coffee had filed for divorce.

  He didn’t look up at first. “If you’ve come to report incompetence, you’re two hours late. Everyone else already beat you to it.”

  When no one answered him, he glanced up and paused. Eyes swept across the squad. “Well.” He stepped back from the table. “If it isn’t the lot of you. Still breathing, I see. Unexpected, but not unappreciated.”

  Garret gave a half-wave. “Captain Drenn. Love what you’ve done with the apocalypse.”

  “Don’t test me, Strider.”

  Eric stepped forward. “We’ve been assigned to your regiment.”

  Drenn snorted. “Yeah. I noticed.” He crossed his arms. “Orders came through two hours ago. You're under my command it seems, again.”

  There was silence. Not awkward exactly, but heavy. With a weight of shared history and quiet understanding. Then, finally, Drenn gestured toward the far end of the tent, where a stack of deployment scrolls and ration logs waited.

  “You’re not going to the front line yet. I’ve seen green recruits get minced within twenty minutes of arrival. And however shiny your records look, you’ve only survived palace politics and parlor duels.”

  “Excuse you,” Kate muttered.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll earn your scars soon enough.” He tossed a smaller scroll to Alex. “For now, you’re on ridge guard. Clifftop east of the supply road. High elevation, good visibility. Rotation shift every six hours.”

  Alex caught the scroll and nodded. “What are we looking for?”

  Drenn leaned over the projection map, tapped a flickering blue flag near the eastern cliffs. “Aeralith scouts. Cloud-Flacon riders. Maybe a few spirit-bound arcane beasts if they’ve gotten bold again. Officially, it’s light duty.”

  “And unofficially?” Alex asked.

  Drenn met his eyes and there was a twinge of pity int hem. “You’re bait.”

  He blinked. “...Comforting.”

  Drenn smirked, if just a little. “You’ll be fine. You’re smart. And if not, well… I’ve got more use for your bones than your politics.”

  Behind him, a ripple of chuckles stirred from a few nearby soldiers who had overheard. Alex glanced at his squad, Garret was grinning, Devon already opening his notebook, Allie rolling her shoulders like she was ready to punch fate in the teeth. It was grim, but it was familiar. And in a place like this, that counted for something.

  They didn’t head out to the post right away. They had to get their tent assignment figured out and food rations picked up, all the many logistical nightmares that Alex hated about military life which everyone seemed to forget about in movies and videogames.

  The group entered their tent to find that it wasn’t just for their team alone, it was a large sleeping quarters filled with fifty bunk beds, twenty side to each side, and they were simply assigned to specific beds.

  Each bunk had a large chest-trunk at the foot of it, presumably for soldiers to place their personal items. It was a welcomed accommodation given how much junk they had accumulated over their travels. Everything that he didn’t keep packed away in his storage bracelet went into the chest at the foots of his assigned bed, lids barely latching as Alex pushed down on it with his considerable strength.

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  Once he had finished his harrowing fight with the inanimate wooden object, Alex’s eyes scanned around himself to find the others had already gotten situated had already started talking to other random soldiers.

  No, they weren’t random, they were…

  “Hey, Jex!” Alex called out with a smile to one of the soldiers in the tent talking to Lance. It was the soldier he had spoken to quite a few times when they were traveling with Captain Drenns regiment to the capital, when they were prisoners.

  It was silly of him to not realize they would be stationed with all the familiar faces since they were assigned under Captain Drenn.

  Jex shot him a wave in response and continued his conversation with Lance, something Alex didn’t really mind. He looked about the area instead, seeing Allie and Cole talking excitedly with Till, on of the other soldiers.

  “Yeah, Valden should be in the medic tent. Its on the south side of camp, about a hundred yards out from here.” Till said, pointing off in the distance. Allie and Cole thanked him and were already running out the tent.

  Peter and Henry were in conversation with Laru and Darn, the four of them moving their hand frantically as they all talked, like a group of Italians at a family reunion.

  “Alex, were are off to find Bromi. She still promised to show us a few technique for repairing armor tears.” Garret’s voice traveled over the din of the tent. Alex looked up in time to see Eric and Garret slipping away through the tentflap. He sighed and sat on his bed, knowing it would be a bit until everyone got back.

  “Welcome back to the suck.” Kate said from the bed beside him. He was laying on the mattress, fidgeting with the puzzle box from lady Caerwyn in her hand.

  “Yeah, welcome back.”

  ***

  The ridge tower was nothing like the shining citadel spires of Terraxum. It was a squat, stubborn chunk of stone carved into the cliffside like it had grown there from sheer spite against the Heavens themselves. A broken weather vane spun on top, entirely unaware that nobody had believed its predictions for years now. It smelled faintly of rust, and damp socks.

  “This is it,” Garret announced, arms wide like a proud realtor showing off a three-bedroom cave. “Boys, girls, and whatever Devon identifies as today, welcome to the Watchpost.”

  Devon gave him a look. “Today I identify as emotionally fragile and fully aware this tower is going to collapse the second we look at it wrong.”

  The inside was worse than the outer visage. Narrow crumbling stairs, flickering lights, and exactly one functioning kettle, which had been badly enchanted to whistle angrily when used, but malfunctioned now and just whistled randomly instead. But it was defensible, and the view over the plains below was magnificent in the way only places you might die in soon could be.

  Forty other soldiers were already stationed there, local recruits from the border provinces. Many of them were young, and tired-eyed. One of them still had a bit of milk on his breath. None looked older than twenty.

  Their squad didn’t speak at first. Neither did the others, this creating a tense and awkward silence between the two groups. Then someone, Alex never found out who, pulled out a ration tin, and the great military truth revealed itself once again, sharing food was a universal peace treaty.

  It started slow. A few names, a few offhand comments about the taste of camp coffee being indistinguishable from swamp rot. Then came the stories, most were half-true or less. Tales about wyvern nests being cleared by only one man who weilded a bag of potatoes, or how the Tower of Avron had once exploded because a soldier mispronounced the word “glyph.”

  Four hours into their detail, Allie was tending to a young soldier’s scorched arm. He winced but didn’t cry. She wasn’t too harsh wen she scolded him about not wearing gloves when building the morning’s cooking fire.

  Henry stood at the ledge’s edge, practicing martial forms in silence. His large halberd blade cut through the air with practiced grace, a dancer made of water, metal and muscle. No one dared interrupt him.

  Zach leaned against the inner wall of the tower, eyes lifted to the clouds above, slow drifts of silver-gray that moved like giants whispering secrets. He didn’t speak. But his shoulders had relaxed.

  Alex watched all of it. And for a moment, just a moment, it felt… normal.

  Not safe, exactly. But ordinary. People laughing, eating, and training. The kind of moment you could build something from, if you had the time. Which, of course, meant it couldn’t last.

  It started with the birds.

  They stopped chirping. Not dramatically, no final caws or panicked flaps, just… silence. Like someone had muted the world with the simple flip of a switch. Henry stopped mid-form. Alex stood from where he'd been half-reading, half-cultivating. “Anyone else hear that?”

  “No,” said Garret, too quickly.

  The air grew still, unnaturally so. Even the goddamn cursed kettle had stopped its endless shrieking. Then he felt it, a faint tremor underfoot.

  Allie’s head snapped toward the far ridge. “Movement.”

  One of the younger soldiers leaned over the lookout. “I don’t see anything—”

  He didn’t finish his sentence. There was a sharp snap! and his body folded backward, a black arrow the width of a broomstick protruding from his chest. His face never had time to register the shock. The young man’s eyes glazed over and his body tumbled over the ledge.

  Screaming followed.

  Dozens of arrows filled the sky, descending like a rain that hated everything below it. The tower shuddered. Magic detonations cracked across the bulwarks of the lower ridgeline. Screams rose from the outposts below as protective barriers flickered under sudden impacts.

  Alex saw them, flying beasts, large birds carrying human silhouettes, arced over the cliffs. Their riders let loose with wind-blade spells and arrows radiating aether energy like bombs. And just like that, normal was gone.

  War had arrived

  Smoke, fire, explosions, screams.

  The battlefield was alive with it all, death in motion. The Ridgewall thundered with war drums and spellfire, the sky split by streaking essence bolts, some bright as suns, others like shadow given form. It was annihilation with rules only monsters, or devils understood.

  Alex crouched behind a mangled stone barricade, heart slamming against his ribs like it was trying to claw free and retreat all on its own. Dirt and blood caked his fingers. Allie was beside him, hands glowing as she held a wounded soldier together in her hands by sheer force of will. Devon ducked low behind another outcrop, his glyph-stylus flickering wildly, panicked energy reacting to the chaos.

  Above them, the winged beasts screamed.

  "Move!" Lance bellowed, dragging a battered fighter to cover just as an essence shell detonated behind them, turning rock and man into molten mist. Lance had barely escaped death by a hairsbreadth of time.

  Garret was already forward, covered in soot, his shield in hand and smeared with something Alex didn’t want to name. He roared as he brought it down on an enemy scout’s head, splintering bone with the crash of harnessed rage.

  They were fighting alongside two native squads, Terraxum soldiers with grim faces and twitchy eyes. Most were too young. When the ambush came, half of them scattered, the rest just screamed. Some didn’t get the chance to do even that.

  Alex had expected some kind of order. Maybe a charge line or a call for coordinated strikes.

  There wasn’t time for any of that. The enemy, armored men and mages with half-mad eyes and cloaks coated in a sigil of a feathered wing, poured from the ridgeline with air spells, arrows and jagged steel. War cries were less tactic, more blood-howl. And above it all flew a squad of shrieking mounts, riders dropping burning glyphs that twisted on the wind before erupting.

  He was forced to watch as Peter went down early. Not dead, he caught a glancing blow, his arm torn by shrapnel tossing him across the grass and into a heap of limbs and blood. It broke something in the squad. They all saw it: blood blooming like a flower from his sleeve, his pained cry.

  Garret got to him first, pulling Peter back, shield raised. Zach and Kate flanked the left ridge, carving a path through the chaos, sword and spear dancing like lightning and thunder. Holly vanished into the howling winds. When she reappeared, two enemy archers didn’t.

  He rushed forward as well, catching a group of three warrior mages from their left side. Purple-blue aura already surrounded him, ethereal horns flickering from his brow as he kicked at the first warrior, buckling his leg. His fist slammed into the man’s temple right afterward. His body crumbled to the dirt, and Alex swiped away a system notification.

  The man’s comrades had turned by this point, one of them launching a crescent shaped slash of air at him. His [Wave Shield] spell flickered to life, deflecting the man’s spell off to the side in a spray of mud. The other had backpedaled raising a bow and firing off an arrow that had a condensed aether spike protruding from it’s tip.

  A sidestep caused the arrow to miss wide, and he sprinted forward once more. He punched directly into the center of the first man’s chest armor, denting the armor and caving the man’s sternum in at the same time.

  He batted away a desperate sword strike and finished off the man by punching the same spot again, cracking the armor and forcing the jagged pieces into his chest cavity. He wasn’t immediately dead, but Alex left him to bleed out as turned to the archer.

  Another arrow was already headed his way. In his aether sight, he could see this one was far more powerful than the first shot. He had given the archer too much time to prepare. He tried to deflect the attack away with another [Wave Shield] but the arrow exploded on contact with his spell. Concentrated air blades tore at the space around him, leaving gashes in his fore arm, scalp, and shoulder. He ignored all the wounds.

  The archer died when Alex detonated a [Flare] as his first contacted the man’s stomach. He only wore light armor, so the blast of aether tore through his body, leaving his two halves barely connected with a bit of flesh on one side.

  Alex stood over him, blood splattered and heaving a lung full of air. The stench of copper filled his nostrils like a penny factory. He had done it though, he had killed his first human enemies. It was so fast, the fight so quick, he hadn’t even paused to think. Even now, he could see two more fighters headed towards him, both wearing the sigil of a stylized feather. He had to keep going.

  But nothing was easy.

  They killed. And killed. And still the tide came.

  Alex fought like a man possessed, fists cracking through armor, body surging with Aether-attuned precision. But it wasn’t enough, not every time, not always. He couldn’t save the boy with the fire spell that backfired when an essence-shell exploded near him. Couldn’t stop the Terraxum mage from being impaled by an enemy spear while mid-cast. Couldn’t do anything but keep moving, keep punching, keep breathing.

  Eventually, the enemy assault broke. Or maybe they just had enough. Either way, silence came like a gut punch. The ridge was soaked in blood, soaked in death, loss. The Terraxum squads were in tatters. Fifty-two people were stationed at the watchpost when they were attacked. Forty came back walking.

  Alex stood there, looking at his team, all of them alive, if barely. Not one was left unscarred. Allie’s arms were trembling as she worked to wipe off the blood that coated her from fingertip to elbow. Devon’s lips moved, whispering glyph sequences to himself like a prayer. Kate wiped blood off her blade with practiced ease, but her eyes were glassy, distant.

  "We made it," Lance said, voice hoarse. He was kneeling next to Peter, his shoulder and arm patched and bandaged.

  "Did we?" Alex whispered.

  They didn’t cheer. They didn’t jump up and down in celebration. They just… existed. Together on the wrecked remains of their first battlefield. And realized how far they still had to go.