“This is disgusting,” Anastacia murmured, idly turning her rapier over in her hand. Her nose wrinkled at the fiendish ichor still clinging to the flat of the blade, but she took no steps to clean it.
Sadly, they were nowhere close to finished.
The grasslands, three days north of Ashad-Vitri, stretched out around them in a sick and trampled expanse. Bodies and parts of bodies lay scattered in grotesque disarray—fiends of half a dozen twisted shapes and sizes, their limbs bent at impossible angles, their bodies smashed and torn to reveal glistening interiors that bled black and iridescent fluids into the soil. The air stank with the too-sweet, alien reek of their insides, like candy gone rotten.
“You can sometimes—” Rather than finish the thought, Kali made a flicking motion with one of his gore-covered hands, unintentionally sending a spatter of the black not-blood in her general direction. “—but it is not a perfect science.”
“Hmm.” Her tone was understandably skeptical, though she gave the rapier a few hopeful shakes anyway. The first two were promising, but the third sent a dollop of goo spiraling down onto her pant leg.
To her credit, Anastacia didn’t yelp or scream. Instead, she drew a deep, calming breath through her nose—filling her with an entirely different sort of regret.
“I think she did alright,” Lily mused, stepping up alongside Alarion to watch as the unsteady line of Anastacia’s sudden retreat carried her out into the empty field. It might have passed for a moment of silent reflection, if not for the stiffness in her shoulders and the way her pace never quite settled. Behind her, Anastacia’s two hulking guards shadowed her closely as ever, one keeping eyes on her, the other continually scanning the area.
“About as well as you did, your first time.” Alarion winced as he watched the poor girl heave in the distance. She was going to lose it if something wasn’t done, and though part of him relished a Vitrian’s discomfort, it wouldn’t do to have the men go spreading rumors the moment they arrived back at Ilvan-Trai. “Ivor, do you still have any of those lemons?”
“I s-should.”
Nausea in the face of the sort of carnage they’d wrought in the last hour was a very human reaction—doubly so if one wasn’t used to dealing with the particular nastiness of fiendish biology. Alarion wondered what it said about him that he’d taken to slaughtering them like a duck to water back on Trinity. Nothing good, most likely, though that was hardly the first taste of death he’d been exposed to.
“Kotone, a bandage, please?”
“Yes, Miss! Yes, Miss!” his familiar chirped before happily depositing the item in his waiting hands.
“I really do not think I was that bad,” Lily remarked.
“You were,” Nessa smugly assured her, before rolling her eyes at Alarion’s scowl. “What? She was.”
“If anything, it probably helped that you didn’t have to get your hands dirty,” Alarion suggested, doing his best to move the conversation along. “Killing at range is always cleaner than doing it with your hands.”
“Why do you think I took up magic?”
“Because you were lazy and you wanted to devote the bare minimum of effort toward your combat class,” Alarion answered without hesitation.
“Now who is being rude?” Nessa chided him with a slap on the shoulder. “You have been spending too much time with Kali.”
“Probably,” he admitted. Like any sensible soldier, the Godborn Sergeant recognized there was no value in playing fair on the battlefield, but he’d never quite been able to shake his early disdain for ‘finger wigglers’ as his swordsman father had often called them. “Any levels?”
“Not with you monsters around,” Lily sighed over-dramatically. Even fighting up Rank and with the tremendous boost granted by [Meteoric Rise] and [Shared Burden] working in tandem, she had been struggling to push the last few levels to reach Rank II as a [Vitrian Pyromancer].
The System rewarded danger, but with them around, she was seldom in any. The System rewarded effort and dedication, but her heart was elsewhere. [Vitrian Pyromancer] was a means to an end, a class she’d taken to justify her position in a prestigious Auxilia combat unit. It wasn’t her calling, and the System knew that.
Just like Alarion knew that Anastacia didn’t have long.
“Bergman?”
“S-Sorry. They were buried deep,” Bergman said as he tossed the fruit over.
Alarion slid a knife from his belt, neatly cleaving the lemon in two and squeezing it over clean linen as he closed the distance with Anastacia.
“I am fine,” she told him before he’d said so much as a word. “I just need to—I just need to catch my breath.”
“I know,” he said calmly, offering her the bandage. “Here. Put this over your face.”
“What is it?” asked Cyrine, the larger and somewhat more feminine of Anastacia’s Systemborn bodyguards.
“Citrus,” he said with a sigh. The next few months were going to be exhausting if he had to justify himself to her bodyguards every time he tried to hand her something. “Just hold it to your mouth and nose, then breathe. It will help.”
For a moment, it looked as though Anastacia was ready to refuse, before another wave of revulsion adjusted her priorities. She pushed past Cyrine, sucking in a breath through clenched teeth as her expression pinched and her eyes watered. She pulled the rag away as though it had stung her, then thought better of it as the smell reasserted itself.
A few more breaths and the tension in her shoulders eased. She nodded a few times, more an affirmation to herself than to him, then said, “Thank you. I did not think it would be this bad.”
“It varies. These ones were especially bad,” Alarion said with more sympathy than he expected. “I have mostly fought Ashadi fiends, so I do not have much for comparison, but I am told ours can be especially... pungent. I am not sure why.”
“Soil content,” came the grumbling reply of Cyiar, Anastacia’s second bodyguard. The deeply tanned giant leaned down and pulled a tuft of gooey, decaying grass from the earth, then rolled it between two fingers as though studying it. “The pestilence breaks down everything as it spreads, then drinks it out of the earth as part of the birthing process. Some of it is biology, other parts are local minerals.” He sniffed slightly, nose wrinkling, then added, “More sulfur here than up north, that would be my guess.”
“Lucky me,” Anastacia sighed, her voice muffled by her makeshift mask. “My apologies for being a burden.”
Alarion shook his head. “You did fine, Madam.”
Anastacia seemed to take it as a compliment, her eyes lighting enough that he didn’t have the heart to correct her.
She’d done fine—well enough not to get in the way or need rescuing—but she was far from useful to him. She was a rank amateur among professionals. A well-trained amateur, certainly, but it was clear she’d never taken a life. Fiendish or otherwise. She’d been timid and squeamish, relying on muscle memory and her two looming bodyguards to carry her through the battle.
Needless to say, Alarion wasn’t impressed. She was adequate with that rapier of hers—with solid fundamentals and a good grasp of spacing—but she hadn’t demonstrated any of the talent that she had been boasting about back in Ashad-Vitri. Then again, with such weak opponents, there was little opportunity for anyone to flaunt their prowess. Wandering fiends like these posed such little threat that they hadn’t forced Anastacia to use even a single skill or spell.
But the ones inside the lair might.
“We are about two miles from the expected center. With your permission, I would like to send some of the men ahead to locate and subjugate the boil’s entrance.”
Anastacia bristled at the implication. “I am fully capable of—”
“Begging your pardon, Madam,” Alarion interrupted. It was rude, but letting her work herself into a fit over a misunderstanding would be less productive. “It is obvious that you are more than capable, but so are my—your—men. Neither of us is required for such a simple task, and... I would like to make a proposal.”
Curiosity soundly routed irritation as Anastacia motioned for him to continue.
“They are never going to like you,” Alarion said, the pace of his words quickening as her expression soured. “You are Vitrian, they are Auxilia. Cats and dogs. But they can learn to respect you through a show of command, or a show of strength.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“This boil is young and weak. Barely even Rank II, if that,” he continued. “It would only take the two of us a few hours—”
“No,” Cyiar rumbled.
“Cyiar—”
“Your mother’s instructions were explicit.” Cyrine’s tone was more diplomatic. The glare she sent Alarion was anything but. “We are to remain within twenty yards at all times. Preferably less.”
“The four of us, then?” Anastacia suggested.
“That rather defeats the purpose,” Alarion observed ruefully. “But it will have to do. You will let us do the fighting?”
Neither bodyguard dignified the question with an answer.