Chapter 33

Chapter 33: Chapter 33

The courtyard of Trivi was red and sticky thanks to the thousands of mingled corpses now decorating it.

Commander Erula Fion Buros stood in the centre of the carnage, her pristine steel armour reflecting the dull grey light of the sky. She looked around with a casual, detached interest.

Miklas strode toward her. The towering Captain was covered in gore, his breath heavy, the Ancient Rune on his neck still smoking faintly from the lightning strike. He didn’t salute.

"You used us," Miklas growled, his deep voice rumbling with barely contained fury. "Five hundred men against thirty thousand. You didn’t send us to hold the fortress. You sent us to pin them against the river. We were bait. You already know such an army was coming here , hell, you probably even know mercenary took the city"

Erula turned her blazing red eyes toward him, she didn’t look angry or defensive, she looked profoundly bored.

"I sent you to perform a tactical function, Captain, and you performed it adequately," Erula replied, her tone completely flat. "The anvil did not break, the hammer struck, and the Coalition’s vanguard is dead. What exactly is your complaint? That I did not coddle you with the details?"

"My complaint is that half my Cohort is bleeding out on the stones!" Miklas roared, gesturing to the medics scrambling to tend to the wounded legionnaires. "If we hadn’t sniped their leadership, if we hadn’t trapped the bridge, we would have been overrun in the first hour!"

Erula let out a slow, irritated sigh, rubbing her temple as if Miklas were a child throwing a tantrum over a broken toy. "But you didn’t, did you? You adapted. You survived. That is what the 7th Legion does. I do not have the time or the patience to explain grand strategy to a sword-swinger who cannot see past his own courtyard."

I stood a few feet behind Miklas, my bleeding arm tightly bandaged, gripping the hilt of my Veriti knife. The sheer, sociopathic arrogance of the Commander was breathtaking. She viewed us as numbers, we were expendable assets. Pawns had probably more value in a game of chess in my old world, I thought

I looked past the Commander and met Myra’s eyes.

She stood perfectly still, her hands clasped behind her back. But as Erula dismissed Miklas’s anger, Myra gave me a nearly imperceptible nod, she was studying under Erula. She was learning exactly how to shut off her humanity to wield power.

I took a cautious step forward, moving past Miklas. "Myra," I said softly.

Myra took half a step toward me. The mask slipped for a fraction of a second. "You’re hurt, Elvit," she whispered, her eyes darting to my bloody sleeve. "Did you..."

"I’m fine," I interrupted gently, holding her gaze. "You should see how is looking the one who cut me," I said, pointing at the body with a gaping hole in his head.

"Enough of this tedious sentimentality," Erula snapped, cutting our reunion short with a wave of her hand. She turned her back on Miklas completely. "Come, Myra. The smell of this courtyard is giving me a headache, and we have real work to do. Captain, clean up your mess. The General will be arriving tomorrow."

Without waiting for a response, Erula walked back toward the bridge, her crimson cloak dragging over the dead. Myra lingered for exactly one heartbeat.

"Survive," Myra whispered to me, her voice barely audible.

Then she turned and followed the Commander, her posture instantly shifting back into the rigid, emotionless stride. I watched her go, realising that the physical distance forming between us was nothing compared to the psychological chasm Erula was digging. After all we went through, I started to care for the girl; I pitied her, but I also admired the strength she had to overcome what happened- me, a forty-year-old soul, considering a little girl a friend.

By the next afternoon, the corpses had been burned, and the heavy iron portcullis had been hastily repaired.

I stood on the highest battlements of the upper tier alongside Miklas. The wind whipping off the river was freezing, but it helped clear the smell of death from my lungs. The Captain was staring intently at a map of the continent, leaning heavily against the stone crenellations.

"I don’t understand the strategy," I said, breaking the silence. I pointed toward the northwest, beyond the borders. "The Republic of Sfirt funded this attack. They gave the barbarians steel and used mercenaries. They stole Trivi just weeks ago. Why is Erula marching the 7th Legion South to fight the barbarians? Why aren’t we declaring war on the Republic?"

Miklas didn’t look up from the map. "Because you don’t hunt a ghost when a wolf has its jaws around your throat, Elvit."

"Sfirt is not a ghost."

"They are an unknown; we did not receive any declaration of war from them." Miklas corrected, turning to look at me. His amber eyes were grave. "The Imperial Senate operates on certainty; they know the Mud and Blood Coalition their culture and what it means what just happened. The Coalition just marched thirty thousand men across our borders. That is an act of total war. The Empire cannot afford to fight a two-front war against another country while two hundred million barbarians are mobilising."

I crossed my arms, wincing as my injured bicep throbbed. "So we ignore the guns."

"We don’t ignore them. We prioritise," Miklas said, his voice lowering into a grim register. "The Emperor has decreed that the Mud and Blood Coalition is no longer a nuisance. This won’t be a series of border skirmishes, Elvit. This is a war of extermination. We are going to march into the swamps, and we are going to burn all their villages until there is nothing left to elect a leader."

A war of extermination. The words sent a chill down my spine. In my past life, I had studied war. I knew the horrific logistical and human toll it required to wipe an entire culture off the map.A certain nation tried that and it did not end well for them.

"And how exactly does the Emperor plan to wipe out two hundred million people?" I asked.

Before Miklas could answer, a low, rhythmic trembling began to vibrate through the stone beneath my boots.

"Look to the East," Miklas said, pointing toward the Imperial heartland behind us. "The vanguard you saw yesterday was just the 7th Legion, the Emperor has unlocked the cages."

I walked to the edge of the battlements and looked over the eastern plains. My breath caught in my throat.

Marching toward the fortress of Trivi was the main force of the West Border Army. It was a spectacle that defied human comprehension. Over fifty thousand heavily armored infantrymen marched in flawless, perfect squares, their steel pikes creating a moving forest of silver under the grey sky.

Behind the infantry were thousands of supply wagons, rolling field hospitals, and mobile forges pumping thick black smoke into the air.

But it was the war machines that truly paralyzed my mind.

They were not standard medieval siege engines. The Empire had merged medieval engineering with the terrifying biological reality of the Ember.

Towed by teams of thirty heavy draft horses were the Trebuchets. They were monstrous wooden structures, towering fifty feet into the air. But instead of a single throwing arm and a counterweight, they possessed three massive, interconnected throwing arms.

"How is it possible to winch something that heavy?" I whispered, my mind failing to grasp the physics. "The tension would snap the gears. No human crew could turn those wheels."

"Normal humans couldn’t," Miklas said grimly. "Look closely at the winches."

I strained my eyes. Operating the massive iron cranks of the siege engines were squads of Imperial soldiers completely stripped of their armor. Even from this distance, I could see the unnatural, glowing heat radiating from their chests. They were Dormant Bud heavy laborers, using the magical furnace of their bodies to manually crank the insane tension of the three-armed trebuchets.

Behind the trebuchets rolled the Ballistas. They were mounted on reinforced iron carriages, possessing limbs made of thick, enchanted blackwood that could only be drawn back by the combined force of multiple Knight-Mages. The bolts they carried were the size of small oak trees, tipped with explosive alchemical iron.

Riding at the absolute front of this apocalyptic procession, mounted on an armored warhorse the size of a small drake, was the General of the West Border Army. He wore plate armor so thick it looked like it belonged on a statue, a massive greatsword resting casually on his shoulder.

"General Kaelus," Miklas murmured, his tone a mixture of respect and deep apprehension. "The Butcher of the Plains."

I stared at the sheer, overwhelming scale of the Imperial war machine bearing down on our fortress. The Republic of Sfirt had guns, yes. And the Coalition had Shamans and numbers.

But as I watched the Dormant Bud soldiers turn gears, and saw the fifty thousand pikes gleaming in the rain, I finally understood the true horror of the Dilemd Empire.