It had been a long time since Alarion had been challenged.
The Eastern District infestation centered around Periai had taken months to cleanse, but the true struggle there had been one of logistics and timetables. That monstrosity had been subjugated by work shifts and grid squares, through a hundred clashes and ordered rotations. It was industrial slaughter, a battlefield built around metrics, not men, but the fiends there had never threatened his life. The challenge there had been the same as the one he’d faced during the initial clash at Ikeda—keeping his men alive.
He’d succeeded, for the most part.
The 238th had taken six casualties during those early months as they found their footing as a cohesive fighting force, but those were the last combat deaths they’d suffered—the last ones they would suffer, if Alarion had any say in the matter.
They’d fought no shortage of battles in the months since, but as the 238th sharpened into competence, the need for oversight steadily faded—and with it, any real opposition.
Alarion kept up with his training to avoid another plateau like the one he’d fallen into after the Trinity Massacre, but there was no substitute for genuine conflict. He could only spar with Kali so many times before suffering diminishing returns—especially as the gap between the two began to close—and there was no one else among the 238th who could keep up with him, at least not physically.
Or rather, there hadn’t been.
“Seventy-two,” Anastacia announced as she slipped past a wild swipe of claws, pivoted with fluid precision, and swept her saber through the torso of her would-be attacker. The cut was so clean that the creature still managed half a turn before the force animating it flickered out, and the corpse fell bonelessly in her wake.
Anastacia continued forward without breaking stride. “Seventy-three.”
“You do not have to—” Alarion swallowed the rest of the sentence, redirecting the edge of irritation toward yet another of the swarming fiends. The thing was a nightmare of exposed anatomy: slick pink flesh glistening wetly in the dim lighting, splinter-like bones jutting through its hide at odd angles, and a maw lined with uneven teeth. It looked like it should be screeching in agony, but the only sound the monstrosity made was the scrape of its talons and the whoosh of air as it lunged at him.
It didn’t even cry out as he struck it.
Alarion caught the creature mid-leap with the head of his mace, then slammed both into a nearby wall with enough force to fracture stone. The fiend writhed in its impact crater—not in panic or rage, but in impotency. Its instincts were immutable; it wanted—needed—to kill him, but its shattered body was not up to the task. It twitched and thrashed, one cheek grinding against the mace as though trying to pull itself just a little closer.
It was the exact sort of stubborn defiance Alarion would have exhibited were their roles reversed. He wondered what that said about fiends. Or about him.
“Seventy-four,” Anastacia announced from further down the tunnel.
Alarion crushed the fiend’s core with a single jerk of his shoulder. With only seventy-seven kills to his name—seventy-eight, now—he didn’t have time to waste on introspection.
That narrow margin annoyed Alarion more than he wanted to admit, and it left two thoughts battling inside him.
On the one hand, she was a Vitrian scion. He knew full well the terrible rigors of her training. It was only to be expected that a woman who’d had every advantage in the world should be able to keep up with the best that the Auxilia had to offer.
But on the other, she was a Vitrian scion. This girl had grown up with a silver spoon in her mouth. She’d never wanted for anything or struggled as he had. She’d never watched a comrade die. This was her first subjugation, and she was keeping pace with a man who had an advanced [Fiend Bane] feat of strength.
“Seventy-five.”
Alarion’s jaw clicked as he ground his teeth in annoyance. He was more competitive at heart than most of his friends realized; he just rarely got the chance to compete and almost never lost. And to have it this close already felt like a moral defeat. Alarion could see dozens of minor improvements in her stance, strokes, and footwork that would have pushed her clearly into the lead. She was sloppy, and she was still keeping pace with him.
“I am on your right,” warned Alarion, a second before his mace, Isha, swept past her, pulverizing the bodies of two low-rank fiends.
That was just one more nod to her inexperience. The Vitrian forms were excellent at teaching a person how to fight—as Alarion could readily attest—but were a solitary affair. She’d practiced fighting groups, but never fighting in a group. She didn’t know how to trust someone else to cover her flank or to get out of the way without being warned. That sort of flaw was to be expected.
What he couldn’t understand were the little unforced errors.
Alarion had spent much of the last year expanding on Kali’s initial lessons. While far from true mastery, Alarion’s understanding of the Inva Maie—the Killing and Living Distance that lay at the core of his fighting style—had grown tremendously, and with it his ability to see the mistakes of others.
Anastacia had shown an immaculate understanding of spacing, aggression, and timing during the hour they had spent killing their way toward the True Heart. It was clear to him that she knew what she was doing. She knew when to advance and when to retreat, when to strike and when to defend—but she kept over-committing.
A rapier was a thrusting weapon, meant for poking holes in an opponent at a comparatively safe distance. Alarion had never liked them, given his obvious preference for more devastating attacks, but he understood and respected the danger posed by a weapon that could strike three or four times before he could bring Isha through a full sweep. They were deadly in the right hands, especially when combined with skills or spells that applied on-hit effects, and it was clear Anastacia understood how they were meant to be used.
But every so often, it looked like she was trying to shove her hilt guard through her opponent’s face.
It was hard to even describe the problem, let alone pinpoint its source. There was no particular malice behind any of the aberrant thrusts, nor any sudden jolt of panic, nothing that would make her lash out harder than normal. It was like she kept momentarily forgetting her own combat style in favor of overwhelming brutality.
“Seventy—”
“Could you stop?!” Alarion finally snapped.
“I can, yes,” Anastacia replied with the sly smile of a woman who was this close to correcting his choice of grammar before a particularly aggressive fiend saved them both the indignity of a petty argument. She parried it three times in rapid succession, each earning her a little bit of extra room that she soon spent on a fierce counterattack. The point of her rapier pierced the fiend’s eye and came out the back of the monster’s head, but failed to kill or even slow it. The carving blow of her saber, on the other hand, split the thing into two messy halves—one of which wrenched the rapier from her grip as it fell. “This has to be the last of them.”
“This wave or the next,” Alarion agreed. The True Heart had been throwing bodies at them by the dozens, and a Heart this fresh simply didn’t have that many bodies to throw. The last few in particular had been the dregs of its arsenal, freakish even by the standard of fiends. Some were missing limbs, others organs or parts of the clear, thin membrane that passed for their skin. These were not just newborns, but premature births thrown desperately into the fray. “Without a Revenant to guide it, the Heart won’t hold anything in reserve.”
“Small mercies.”
Alarion reached down and gripped the blade of the rapier where it was wedged in the fiend’s skull. It came loose with a sharp tug and an unsettling crunch, and Alarion handed it back to her before stomping down on the fiend’s chest.
You have slain [Fiend – UCL 67]
“Eighty-one, by the way,” Alarion said, trying not to smile.
“Oh, that is cheating.”
“It is a lesson.” For just a moment, he was somewhere else, standing amid sick trees and dead fiends, a fresh wound in his belly as Sierra barely held in her laughter. “A nicer one than I was taught. Always confirm your kills.”
Anastacia seemed ready to argue, but that distant look in his eye caught her up short. She studied him for a moment, both of them still panting from the recent battle, then nodded.
“Duly noted...” The girl paused, chewing her lip before she said, “Alarion?”
It felt almost ridiculous, that hopeful lilt in her voice as she sought permission—or begged forgiveness—to use a name rather than a rank. She sounded like a teenager with a crush testing the waters, not an Auxilia lieutenant addressing her subordinate. He found it charming in spite of his best efforts, but put his foot down all the same.
“Orphan, if you please.”
Bergman could call him Alarion. Lily, and Kali, and ZEKE—Valentina, if he ever saw her again—but not this Vitrian stranger. To them, he was only ever a rank or a number. Master Sergeant. Two-Thirty-Eight.
“Orphan.” The satisfaction in her smile lasted only a few seconds, bleeding away into a distasteful scowl as they heard the sound of talon against stone echoing down the corridor. “Mothers help me; this had better be the last of them.”