Chapter 999

Darnell’s expression changed instantly. That was worse in its own way. Arslan moved around the table. The messenger stepped aside quickly. No one asked questions. Fear spread fast enough without being fed. Outside, the morning smelled of wet ash, blood, and churned earth.

Arslan walked toward the southern wall with Darnell at his side and the messenger trailing behind them like a condemned man. As they passed through the streets, people noticed. Of course they noticed. Arslan moving with purpose meant something had happened.

Faces turned. Whispers started. He ignored them. By the time he reached the wall stairs, two officers were already waiting. Neither looked at him directly.

The day had found new ways to be charming. Arslan climbed.

The southern wall stretched before him, slick with rain and lined with weary fighters. Beyond it lay the battlefield from yesterday. Corpses had been dragged into rough piles where possible, but many remained scattered in the mud. Broken spears jutted from the ground. Shields lay cracked. A few enemy banners still flapped weakly, trampled and stained.

Farther out, beyond bow range and comfortably beyond most spell range, the enemy had gathered again.

Not for a charge. Not yet. Rows of imperial soldiers stood in disciplined formation beneath the gray sky. Behind them, larger shapes loomed.

Catapults. Several of them.

Heavy-framed, dark-wood constructions reinforced with metal braces. Crews moved around them with the careful ease of men who were not currently afraid of being reached. They were distant enough that their shots would not hit the town. Not properly. Even with favorable wind, they were too far away to strike the walls with anything resembling accuracy.

Which meant they had not aimed for the town.

Arslan’s gaze dropped. Several objects lay in the mud before the walls.

Bags. Thick, dark, wet sacks bound with rope. They had burst partly on impact, but not enough to reveal everything from above. Arslan knew anyway. His stomach sank before his mind finished the thought.

The messenger stood behind him, breathing too quickly. Darnell said nothing. That confirmed it. Arslan looked over the wall for another moment. The enemy lines were still. Watching. Waiting. The catapults had thrown their message and now stood silent in the rain, like executioners after displaying the axe.

“How many?” Arslan asked.

His voice sounded calm. That was good. Inside, something had begun to burn.

“Seven bags landed close enough to recover,” one officer said. “More fell short in the field. We didn’t…” He swallowed. “We didn’t open all of them. But…”

Arslan turned his head slightly. The officer flinched. Not because Arslan had moved quickly. Because the air had changed. Mana stirred around him. Heat leaked into the rain. Steam rose from his shoulders in faint threads.

“Show me.”

No one argued.

They descended the inner stairs and exited through a small postern gate under heavy guard. Shields rose around Arslan by instinct, though no projectiles came. The enemy wanted this seen. Shooting him now would waste the theater.

Arslan hated theater. Especially when the stage was made of corpses.

The mud beyond the wall swallowed his boots. Rain pattered against armor and soaked through the torn edges of his cloak. Around him, Lionsguard fighters walked in a tight formation, eyes fixed on the distant enemy.

The first bag lay twenty paces from the wall. It was made of rough canvas, darkened by rain. Something had stained the fabric from within. Not mud. Arslan stopped before it. For a moment, no one moved. Then Darnell crouched, jaw clenched, and cut the rope. The bag sagged open.

A severed hand rolled into the mud. It was pale. The wrist had been cut unevenly, more hacked than sliced. A strip of cloth was tied around two fingers.

Lionsguard uniform.

Someone behind Arslan made a sound like they had been punched. Arslan did not move. The rain struck the hand. Mud splashed over the knuckles. Darnell reached into the bag and pulled out a scrap of armor, then a torn sleeve, then a small wooden tag that had been tied to the wrist.

He looked at it. His face went hard. Arslan stared at the hand. His mana stirred harder. The drizzle around him began to hiss.

“Next,” he said.

No one wanted to. They did it anyway. The second bag held two ears. The third held fingers. The fourth held a foot. The fifth held strips of skin with markings carved into them. The sixth held a tongue wrapped in a piece of Lionsguard cloth. The seventh held a face. Not the whole head.

Just the face.

Cut away and folded badly, as if whoever had done it had been in a hurry or simply did not care enough to be precise.

Darnell turned aside and vomited into the mud. No one mocked him. No one could. Arslan stood among the opened bags as rain fell over the pieces of his people. The world narrowed. The battlefield sounds dulled.

The distant enemy blurred. He heard only rain hitting canvas. Rain hitting flesh. Rain hissing against the heat now rolling from his body.

His blood boiled. Not metaphorically. Not in the poetic sense bards loved so much while never standing near actual war. His mana answered the fury before he gave it permission.

It surged from his core, hot and sharp, flooding his limbs, crawling over his skin, pressing into the air. Rain touched the invisible field around him and turned to steam. The mud near his boots dried, cracked, then darkened again as more rain fell and boiled away. Darnell wiped his mouth and looked up.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Arslan.”

Arslan did not answer. In the distance, the imperial line remained still. Someone wanted him to see this. Someone wanted Lionfang to see this. Someone wanted rage to do what catapults could not. He understood the message.

The prisoners were alive. Or had been. The enemy had begun cutting pieces off them and throwing those pieces back. Not close enough to damage the town. Close enough to damage the people inside it.

His hand curled around the hilt of his sword. Leather creaked. The mana around him flared hotter. For one brief, terrible second, Arslan wanted to give them exactly what they wanted.

He wanted to open the gate. He wanted to charge alone if no one followed. He wanted to cross the mud, cut through soldiers, climb over shields, break catapults, find the officers responsible, and remove their limbs with the same slow care they had shown his people. He wanted it so badly that his vision sharpened.

That was the trap. Just cruel enough that subtlety became unnecessary. Arslan closed his eyes. His son’s voice rose in his memory, flat and irritated.

If they want you angry, assume the obvious path is mined, poisoned, surrounded, or all three.

Arslan breathed in. The air smelled of cooked rain and blood. He breathed out. Steam rolled from his lips.

“Collect everything,” he said.

His voice was low. Dangerously low.

“We identify what we can. We do not let the town see the pieces.”

Darnell pushed himself upright.

His face was gray. “And the wall?”

“They already saw the bags.”

“People will guess.”

“Yes.”

Arslan opened his eyes. The enemy line was still watching. Good. Let them watch.

“Then we give them something else to see.”

Darnell’s brow furrowed. Arslan turned toward the wall. Soldiers stood along the top, staring down. Civilians had begun gathering behind the inner barricades despite orders. Fear moved through them like wind through dry grass.

Arslan could feel it. The town was a single breath away from panic. Or rage. Both were useful to the enemy. Neither could be allowed to command. Arslan looked back at the bags. The heat around him pulsed once more, violent enough that one of the canvas sacks blackened at the edge.

“They want us to chase,” Arslan continued. “They want our wounded to rise, our young to scream, our northerners to charge, our Torvares allies to break formation searching for their lord. They want the walls opened by grief.”

He turned fully toward Lionfang.

“So we do not open them.”

Kharnek would hate that. The town would hate that. Arslan hated it too. Right choices often tasted like bile. He pointed at the bags.

“Wrap them. Respectfully. Quietly. Darnell, choose veterans with strong stomachs. No recruits. No family members if you can avoid it.”

Darnell nodded. “Understood.”

Arslan turned toward Lionfang.

The town behind quieted in pieces. First those nearest the wall. Then the streets. Then the wounded who could still understand that their guildmaster was about to speak. Rain fell between them. Arslan rested one hand on the battlement.

His fingers left faint scorch marks on the wet stone.

Arslan did not try to control the rumors. That would have been pointless.

The bags had been seen. The wall guards had seen them fall. The recovery teams had carried them back under cloth, but cloth did not stop imagination. If anything, it helped. By the second hour after sunrise, half of Lionfang knew there had been body parts in the bags.

By the third, the rumors had grown teeth. Some said the Empire had thrown heads. Some said the prisoners had been skinned alive. Some said one of the bags had contained a child, despite the fact that no children had been taken.

Some said the fingers had moved.

That last one earned the speaker a shovel and a very pointed invitation to go dig drainage channels until his mouth remembered how to be useful.

Still, Arslan did not waste time trying to smother every whisper. Fear was smoke. Grab it with both hands and all you got was the smell clinging to your skin. Besides, the enemy would do worse soon. He knew that with the same certainty he knew rain was wet and men lied better when they were afraid.

The bags had not been the real blow.

They had been a test. A finger pressed against a bruise to see how deep the pain went.

The Empire wanted to know how Lionfang would react. Whether the walls would open. Whether Kharnek would drag the northerners into a suicidal charge. Whether Torvares soldiers would break from formation, screaming for their missing lord and heir.

Lionfang had not broken. So the Empire would press harder. Arslan spent the next hour preparing people for that without saying it directly.

He ordered captains to keep squads mixed, veterans beside recruits, northerners beside Lionsguard, Torvares soldiers beside men who knew how to pull them back if grief turned into stupidity. He moved healers behind secondary barricades. He had Gaius and the other geomancers thicken the ground beneath the main gate approach, not because that would stop a full siege, but because uneven mud killed more charges than speeches ever did.

He made sure every officer understood one thing. No one opened the gate without his order. No one charged without his order. No one died because the enemy had discovered torture and decided to be proud of it.

By late morning, the remaining forces from yesterday had gathered in front of the main gate.

Not outside it. Inside. Behind the walls, beneath the towers, packed into the wide killing avenue Ludger had insisted on building when Lionfang had still been more dream than fortress. At the time, several people had complained that such a wide street wasted space.

The fighters stood in formation as best they could. Which meant poorly, but not shamefully.

Lionsguard veterans formed the spine. Recruits filled gaps, many with bandaged arms, pale faces, and eyes that had learned too much overnight. Northerners stood in thick clusters near the gatehouse, their axes, clubs, and heavy blades resting across shoulders or planted in the mud. Torvares soldiers occupied the eastern side, shields locked, banners wet and low but still raised.

Behind them, civilians waited with water, bandages, spare spears, and the expressions of people who had learned that helping in war meant seeing things they would never unsee.

Arslan stood atop the main gate, Darnell to his right, Kharnek and Sigrid on the lower platform behind the inner portcullis. Maurien stood near one of the towers, eyes half-lidded as he read the wind. Gaius leaned against the wall below, looking like he might collapse if gravity remembered its job.

Then the horns sounded from the south.

Low. Long. Ugly.

The enemy army appeared through the rain.

At first, they were shadows moving beyond the churned battlefield. Then banners emerged. Then spear tips. Then shields. Then the long dark lines of marching men.

The Empire had returned. More than yesterday. Arslan watched them spread across the field in disciplined blocks.

Infantry in the center. Archers and mage squads behind. Cavalry held back on the flanks where the ground was less ruined. Mercenaries in looser formations. Adventurers mixed among them like rust in steel. Runic golems moved at intervals, their armored bodies gleaming wetly under the gray morning light.

Ten thousand. At least. Another day of bloodshed had arrived on schedule. How polite of it.

Darnell let out a slow breath. “They had reserves.”

“They always had reserves,” Arslan said.

“Would have been nice if they forgot where they put them.”

The army stopped outside the range of the walls. Too far for arrows. Too far for most spells. Close enough to be seen. That was not a mistake. The formations parted near the center. Something moved forward.

Not siege engines. Not golems. People. At first, Arslan’s mind refused to understand the shapes.

Perhaps because there were parts of him still foolish enough to expect limits. Then the rain thinned for a moment.

And the field went silent. The prisoners stood in front of the imperial army.