Chapter 996

The words were brutal. No one liked them. Not even Arslan. Especially not Arslan. Kharnek stared at him, breath steaming in the rain.

Behind him, the northerners shifted uneasily, caught between instinct and the ugly logic of command. They wanted to charge. Every one of them did. Their whole bloodline screamed for it.

But even they could see the state of the field. The Lionsguard front was barely standing. The northerners themselves had burns across arms and faces. Arslan turned toward the captains.

“Get everyone behind the walls. Now.”

No one moved for half a second. Then Tali straightened first.

“You heard him!” she shouted, voice hoarse. “Move!”

Brann shoved a recruit toward the gate. “Up! Unless you want to make his decision even uglier!”

Jori grabbed two wounded men by their collars and started dragging them himself. “I hate this. I hate this a lot.”

“So keep breathing long enough to complain later,” Tali snapped.

The retreat resumed. Slow. Painful. Bitter. Kharnek remained where he was, watching the golems vanish deeper into the rain with the captured guild members. Arslan walked up beside him. For a moment, neither spoke.

Then Kharnek said, low and dangerous, “If they die…”

“I know.”

“No,” Kharnek growled. “You do not.”

Arslan looked at the retreating shapes. His voice was quiet.

“I know every name I ordered onto that field.”

Kharnek’s anger shifted. Not gone. Never gone. But no longer simple. Arslan continued.

“I know who has children. Who joined last month. Who lied about their age. Who was afraid but stood anyway. I know.”

Rain ran down his face, indistinguishable from anything else that might have been there.

“And I know that if I chase now, I will be adding more names to that list for the sake of making myself feel less monstrous.”

Kharnek said nothing. The golems disappeared into the rain. The prisoners with them.

Arslan watched until the last outline was gone. Then he turned back toward Lionfang.

“Prepare scouts,” he said. “No pursuit until we know where they’re taking them.”

Kharnek’s eyes narrowed. “You said no chase.”

“I said no blind chase.”

For the first time since the prisoners were taken, something like savage approval flickered across Kharnek’s face. Arslan’s expression did not change.

“We hold the wall. We count the living. We treat the wounded. We find where they went.”

His voice became colder.

“Then we decide how to make the Empire regret keeping them alive.”

Kharnek looked toward the rain where the machines had vanished. Then he spat into the mud.

“Good.”

Arslan started toward the gates. Behind him, the battlefield reeked of blood, smoke, and decisions no decent man should have to make. The prisoners were gone. Lionfang had survived. And somehow, victory had never tasted more like ash.

After the battle, Lionfang did not become quiet. That was the first ugly truth.

Victory did not bring silence. It brought groans, shouted orders, sloshing mud, and the wet slap of boots running over blood-soaked streets. The rain kept falling, cold and steady, as if the sky had decided that the town had not suffered enough and needed a little more misery poured over it for good measure.

The walls still stood. The enemy army had been broken. Lionfang had survived. None of that made the screaming stop.

“Move him inside!”

“Mana potion! Someone get me a mana potion!”

“Hold his leg down—hold it down or he’ll tear the wound open!”

“Don’t let him sleep! Hey! Look at me! Look at me, damn it!”

The streets near the southern gate had turned into a makeshift field hospital. Not because anyone had planned it that way, but because there had been too many bodies and not enough time to move them anywhere cleaner.

Everyone in Lionfang could use Healing Touch to some degree. That was one of Ludger’s rules. One of his many unreasonable, exhausting, annoying, borderline obsessive rules.

Every guild member had to learn it. Every recruit had to learn it. Every civilian who had enough mana control to avoid healing a cut into an infected lump of meat had been taught the basics. Ludger had treated it the same way other people treated knowing how to hold a knife.

Essential. Not optional. Not impressive. Just something you learned if you wanted to remain alive in a world that kept finding creative ways to open people. At the time, plenty had grumbled. Now no one was grumbling.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Healing Touch was everywhere. Greenish-white light flickered under awnings, inside doorways, beside carts, beneath half-collapsed barricades. People pressed glowing palms against torn stomachs, shattered ribs, split scalps, crushed shoulders, and punctured lungs. Some spells were steady. Some flickered weakly. Some failed halfway through because the caster’s mana ran dry, and then someone else had to crawl forward and take their place.

It was not enough. That was the second ugly truth. Healing Touch was useful. It was miraculous, even. It could close wounds, knit muscle, slow bleeding, seal organs before they emptied a man into the mud.

Still, it wasn’t a total miracle…

It could not refill blood that no longer existed. It could not erase exhaustion. It could not perfectly rebuild a limb that had been crushed to paste. It could not save someone whose body had simply decided it had been punished enough for one lifetime.

So the population helped.

Children carried buckets of clean rainwater with both hands, faces pale and eyes too wide. Old women tore bedsheets into bandages with the efficiency of people who had already decided crying could wait until later. Blacksmiths used their thick arms to hold down thrashing fighters while healers worked. Farmers dragged doors off hinges and turned them into stretchers. Merchants emptied storerooms for blankets, alcohol, needles, thread, and whatever else someone shouted for.

No one asked who was guild and who was civilian. No one asked who had been born in Lionfang and who had only arrived last month. People just moved. A recruit lay near a fountain with both hands clamped over the remains of his forearm. His face was gray. His lips trembled, not from cold, but from the kind of fear that sat too deep for words.

“Don’t look at it,” a woman told him, voice firm as she wrapped a belt around his upper arm. “Look at me.”

“My hand,” he whispered.

“Look at me.”

“My hand is…”

“Still attached if you stop moving,” she snapped. “So stop being dramatic and help me keep it that way.”

The recruit stared at her. Then, absurdly, he laughed once. It came out broken and wet. The woman’s hands glowed as she pressed them over the torn flesh. Her face tightened from the mana strain, but she did not let go.

A few steps away, two healers worked over a veteran whose stomach had been opened by shrapnel. One of them held the man’s intestines in place with shaking fingers while the other poured mana into the wound, jaw clenched hard enough to crack teeth.

“Mana,” the healer said.

A girl no older than twelve shoved a potion into his hand before he even turned. He drank, gagged, cursed, and kept working.

Farther down the road, three northerners sat in a row beneath the rain, burned across their arms and chests from the runic golems’ fire. They looked annoyed more than injured, which was impressive, stupid, and very northern.

One of them had skin peeling off his shoulder. Another had half his beard burned away. The third was arguing with a healer.

“I can stand.”

“You can sit.”

“I can fight.”

“You can sit and be thankful your skin is still attached.”

“It is mostly attached.”

“That is not the winning argument you think it is.”

The man opened his mouth, paused, then looked down at his arm.

“Hm.”

“Exactly. Sit.”

He sat.

Arslan walked past all of it. He did not walk quickly. He could not afford to look like he was rushing. Not now. Not while everyone’s eyes found him the moment he appeared.

Guildmaster.

Commander.

Arslan.

The man who had led them to victory. The man who had just ordered them not to chase their captured comrades. The title sat on his shoulders like a wet cloak made of iron.

People looked at him from beside the wounded. Some with trust. Some with exhaustion. Some with hope that made his chest feel too tight. A few with resentment. They looked away quickly, ashamed of it, but Arslan still saw.

He did not blame them. If his son had been one of the captured, he would have wanted to run into the field too. Trap or not. Logic or not. Exhaustion or not. That was why commanders were not allowed to be fathers first. An ugly rule. Useful, though.

He moved toward the Lionsguard headquarters, boots sinking slightly into mud with each step. The building had survived, mostly. One corner had been blackened by fire. Several windows were broken. The front door hung slightly crooked, as if the headquarters itself had taken a punch and decided to stay standing out of spite.

That was Lionfang, then.

Broken in several places. Too stubborn to fall. Arslan bit the inside of his lip as another stretcher passed him. The man on it was missing both legs below the knee. Someone had already sealed the wounds. That was good. That was horrible. That was better than dead.

The thoughts came one after another, each more useless than the last. He tasted blood in his mouth and realized he had bitten too hard. He kept walking.

For years, Ludger had prepared for this. Not this exact battle. Not the Regent. Not runic golem raids or prisoners being carried away like harvested grain.

But something like it. Something unfair. Something too large. Something that would arrive when everyone was tired, when walls were still unfinished, when food stores felt too small, when alliances were too new, when the town had children laughing in streets that could become killing grounds by sunset.

Ludger had prepared for that. He had forced recruits to learn Healing Touch before they learned proper attack patterns. Arslan had thought that excessive. He had built extra shelters beneath reinforced stone. Arslan had thought that grim. He had insisted civilians practice evacuation routes until even old men complained that the boy was trying to make them march more than soldiers. Arslan had thought that unnecessary.

He had stocked medicine, cloth, water barrels, spare weapons, preserved food, sandbags, mana potions, anti-fire trenches, rain drains, wall repair materials, emergency signal systems, and enough stone markers to turn half the town into a tactical map. Arslan had thought, more than once, that his son was exaggerating.

Ludger always exaggerated when it came to danger. That was what Arslan had told himself.

The boy had seen too much too young. Fought too many monsters. Killed too many things that should not have existed. Of course he saw threats everywhere. Of course he assumed enemies would be clever, cruel, persistent, and willing to strike civilians if that gave them half an advantage.

Arslan had humored him. Supported him. Smiled faintly when Ludger spoke of fallback positions and burn zones and civilian healer rotations like he was discussing the weather.

He had been proud, yes. Worried too. But some part of him, buried under fatherly affection and adult arrogance, had thought the same thing again and again. He is still a child. A terrifying child. A brilliant child. A child who could build walls and break armies and argue logistics with men three times his age.

But still a child.

Arslan stepped over a broken spear lying in the mud.

Near the headquarters entrance, a group of civilians carried crates of clean bandages from one of the emergency stores Ludger had demanded be placed in separate buildings so a single fire or collapse would not ruin everything.

A woman shouted for more splints. A boy immediately ran toward the eastern storehouse, not the nearest one, because the nearest one had already been emptied.

Arslan stopped for half a breath. Then he exhaled slowly.

“No,” he muttered.

The word disappeared under the rain. He had not been humoring Ludger. He had been following him. The realization was enough that Arslan almost laughed.

His son had looked at the world clearly. Arslan had looked at his son and mistaken clarity for paranoia. That stung worse than the wound on his side. He clenched his jaw and entered the headquarters.