Chapter 1738: Introductions |
The Great War of Iskaris was winding down everywhere except the east.
Dwarven soldiers knelt in long rows with their hands behind their heads while blue-skinned Elites walked the lines collecting steel.
The last of the councilwomen’s guards were being pried out of their shield circles by the same elves their mistresses had marched here.
The Covenant’s horde had it worst.
With Vozen’s binding gem shattered and the Drowned King’s skull split from crown to chin, every construct the two dead lords had raised lost the will steering it, and hundreds of thousands of corpses went feral in the same breath, stripped of orders and turned loose as wild monsters that lunged at anything living, kneeling dwarf and surrendered samurai alike.
The response was less a battle than pest control.
Myrasyn’s now obedient subjects and Isveth’s fanatics swept the field in long radiant lines, golden spells punching through the rotten ranks while the Consortium and the beastkin closed the gaps, and the feral dead were mowed down faster than they could shamble into range of the prisoners they hungered for.
"Leave no abomination standing!" Isveth’s voice rang over the cleanup, the Head Shrine Maiden cleaving a shrieking husk in half mid-order. "None of them get to defile the Holy Son’s battlefield a minute longer!"
But one sound refused to die with the war.
From the eastern field came the ringing of two blades, sharp and rhythmic and unbroken, and every soldier on the continent’s bloodiest battlefield kept turning toward it like a compass needle finding north.
The armies began to drift east. The victors walked because the final duel of the Great War deserved witnesses, and the defeated marched because the soldiers herding their disarmed columns left them exactly one direction to walk in.
Alexios Valorian strode at the head of one such stream, towing Hozumi by the ankle.
The unconscious elder slid along behind him face-down, plowing a neat furrow through the half-frozen mud that thousands of boots had churned out of the morning’s frost, and every few meters his forehead clipped a discarded helmet or a shield boss. The King of Vraven adjusted his stride for none of it.
Black Fang kept pace not far from him with Chizuru’s hair bunched in one fist, dragging her own prize through the same ruts.
Chizuru hung without resisting, eyes open and registering none of it.
The two apexes had fallen into step without meaning to, king and wanted criminal matching strides while their prisoners carved twin furrows behind them.
Serika and a loose scatter of Quinlan’s women moved through the same stream around them, which meant the conversation that followed had an audience.
"FATHER!"
Felicity came sprinting through the drifting columns with her purple hair bouncing, towing Feng by the wrist the entire way.
Alexios passed Hozumi’s ankle to his off hand just in time for his daughter to crash into his chest, her arms locking around as much royal plate as they could reach, and he caught her against him with his free arm.
"Thank you." She said it into his breastplate first, then tipped her head back and looked up at her father with big eyes, and the chirp that lived in her voice cracked open around the words. "For trusting my word."
After all, Alexios had rushed through the portal because Quinlan asked him to, and because Felicity swore it wasn’t a trap, all for a criminal whose head he had wanted on a spike for almost a full year.
Gratitude poured off his youngest daughter so plainly that the Warrior King let the day’s brutality drain from his face, and his gauntlet settled on top of her head.
"I’m glad you’re safe, Felicity. Did you have fun?"
The old man received quite a few questioning looks, as he had just asked his teenage daughter if she had a great time massacring people on one of the most brutal battlefields that had ever been recorded.
"Yeah! I got a lot of levels too!" Felicity decreed happily, then her hand clamped around Feng’s wrist again and hauled the teen front and center before her father. "This is Feng Jiai! My bestest and most annoying friend in one comprehensive package of insecurity, brattiness, and awesomeness!"
"What did you just say?" Feng’s eye twitched at the princess, but she let it go in favor of looking up at the king with a wry tilt to her mouth. "We’ve already met, actually."
"You did?!" Felicity’s head whipped between the two of them.
"Yeah. He saved me."
Felicity went still, and then she turned to her father with a gratitude that ran deeper than the hug had.
He had been asked to protect her friends, and somewhere in that slaughter, the King of Vraven had personally kept the most important one alive.
"While it is true we have met," Alexios inclined his head toward Feng, "the introductions were brief. It is good to properly meet the famous Feng of the stories."
Feng’s neck snapped toward Felicity. "What stories?!"
Felicity smiled at her and blinked, full of girly innocence, with no clue what anyone could possibly be talking about.
"What. Stories."
The princess kept smiling, so the Tidebreaker filed the betrayal away for later and turned back to Alexios, the smugness she wore around everyone settling over her like a uniform. "I owe you a proper thanks."
"Think nothing of it, child." Alexios’s voice rolled into the cadence he reserved for thrones and judgments. "You may keep the company of a certain overly arrogant bastard, a criminal whose neck I have been measuring for the gallows for the better part of a year..."
The air around the group changed as nearly every woman within earshot turned her eyes on the King of Vraven at once.
Vex stopped pretending to watch the surroundings entirely, and her pentagram eyes fixed on the back of the royal head with the violence she normally saved for nasty sluts who eyed her hubby too long.
"...but you are a human child and a citizen of my kingdom all the same," Alexios carried on, unbothered, "and I do not abandon my citizens to undead filth. Not while I draw breath."
Felicity edged closer to her father’s flank, jittering. "Father... Stop badmouthing Quinlan! You keep calling him ugly names in the presence of his wives!"
"I don’t like lying."
Felicity stomped on the ground, yelping. "Father!!"
The female bloodlust gathering around this conversation was thick enough that her [Nullmage] instincts were begging her to cast a suppression field directly over his mouth.
Feng grinned up at him. "Thanks, old man. But, uh..." Her eyes flicked sideways.
"Speak freely, child. Today of all days, the crown is fresh out of ceremony."
Feng opened her mouth.
"She’s not a citizen!" Felicity beat her to it, rocking up onto her toes. "Of the Vraven Kingdom! Never was!"
"Hm." Alexios considered that. "What about before the bastard turned outlaw fit for the gallows?"
Felicity giggled into her hands. "Nope! Feng came after that!"
For the first time since the conversation began, Alexios frowned.
The girl in front of him was visibly a teenager, and the bastard’s entire criminal career was not yet a year old.
The numbers didn’t add up.
Before Quinlan Elysiar turned outlaw, this child had been growing up under someone’s crown and inside someone’s census, for every child born on Iskaris belonged to one of the three nations.
"Then where, exactly..."
Felicity wound up and slapped Feng across the backside, loud enough that a passing Elite Soul glanced over.
"What the fu- are you doing?! I’ll beat you up!"
"This foul-mouthed brat comes from a different world!" Felicity declared, glowing with pride. "Just like Miss Serika!"
Alexios’s gaze lifted past the girls to the tanned redhead some twenty paces to the left. Serika, without slowing or changing expression, raised one fist and gave the King of Vraven a thumbs up. "Yo."
"A different world...?" he repeated.
"Yeah! Like Thalorind! Just another one, not governed by the Goddess! There are millions of worlds out there."
"...Oh, Goddess."
Hozumi’s ankle slid out of the royal grip and dropped into the slush with a splat.
’Strange armies of the dead rising in blue skin. Elves, always a thorn in my side, suddenly start singing the praise of an outsider man. A king flayed in the open sky, screaming for mercy. My daughter’s best friend, imported from a different world. And so much more...’
He closed his eyes. ’Why must every road lead back to the same shameless bastard?’
At his feet, face-down in the mud, Hozumi released a long wet gurgle that might have been agreement.
...
Minute by minute, the eastern field filled.
Streams of soldiers fed into a widening ring around the duel ground, victors at the front and prisoner columns herded in behind them under Elite watch, until the last fight of the Great War had an audience the size of a city.
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