Tom woke up to the sound of screaming, and the smell of smoke.

Nema was out of bed faster than him, leaping across the room in a single bound to peek out the hut and see what the emergency was.

Tom, his brain half-addled from sleep, had come to conflate getting woken up in the middle of the night with emergency healing, so he staggered away from the door and towards the healing crypt, which rested on the wicker shelf alongside the other three crypts.

It saved his life.

A blast of fire from the entrance knocked Nema backwards with a cry of pain. She used the door as partial shelter as the flame swept past her and flooded the hut with skin-melting fire in the blink of an eye.

Tom’s skin blackened an instant before his vision cut out, eyes seared to a crisp by the flames. The adrenaline that absolutely flooded his body in response seemed to slow time to a crawl, giving him plenty of time to think about how close to death he was.

Tom, if you ever had an important decision to make, this would be the time: Raise both your arms and fall forward.

In his mind’s eye, (still unburnt) Tom could picture where the healing crypt and the ghostwalk crypt were on the shelf. That final burst of light had illuminated them good.

Tom stretched out and fell forward.

He felt a jostle in his shoulder, where some nerves were still alive, and he thought he clenched both fists around something.

Heal heal HEAL!

Tom’s vision came back as his eyeballs reconstituted themselves.

He saw Nema looking over at him with panic, a receding tide of fire moving past her temporary shelter under the door, moments before he tumbled through the side of the wall.

Everything was chaos.

A phalanx of men in shiny steel armor were holding their own against the hit-and-run tactics of Vith warriors. Despite the Vith warrior’s superior strength and speed, their stone spears tended to simply shatter against the steel plate of the men shielding the casters.

The casters were also wearing armor, but they were easy to make out, because they were coalescing bombs of compressed fire before unleashing them on huts, lighting them like torches in the night.

Vith women were picking up their children and…hustling like a superhuman running back, topping thirty miles an hour, easily.

The effect might be comical if stuff wasn’t on fire.

Focus. Tom shook his head and glanced down at the crypts in his hand.

What can you do right now?

Tom glanced behind him at his own hut, lit up like a roman candle.

I can think of a few things.

Tom triggered the ghostwalk crypt and leapt back into the hut, grabbing the other two crypts on the way through , kicking the burning sheet of leather off Nema and helping her to her feet with his forearm.

He snagged a pair of pants on the way through with his toes.

Multitasking.

“We’re under attack!” Tom shouted, throwing his pants on after putting the crypts in the pockets.

“Really!?” Nema shouted back over the roar of the fire. Tom squinted his eyes, unsure if Nema was sassing him or not.

Doesn’t matter. Gotta help any way you can, and right now you’re kitted out as a healer, so do what you gotta do.

“Find any civilians you can and tell them to bring wounded to me!” Tom shouted. Mathematically, any warrior he could put back in the fight was a full fighter that could be attributed to him. It just didn’t feel as…glorious.

“Where will you be!?” Nema asked.

“At the beach!” Tom responded without thinking. He had no idea which direction these people came from, but they were attacking from the east, so the beach was as good a place as any, and it was away from the fighting.

Hopefully.

“Okay!” Nema nodded and broke into a run. Tom went the opposite direction, feeling like a coward.

Mr. Fluffybottom intercepted Tom, lowering himself down to where Tom could climb on. The giant lizard’s run cycle was kinda weird, but Tom didn’t have time to be a run-cycle connissuer. He just held on.

Scared. Suzie projected from atop Mr. Fluffybottom’s shoulder.

You and me both, Tom thought, teeth clenched.

Suzie, once we get to that rocky part just before the beach, I want you to hop off and blend in with the rocks. Nobody is gonna try burning down a bunch of rocks.

Okay, Suzie projected, moments before the familiar hopped off into the rocky terrain, her skin shifting as she blended into the stones. The village was still easily within her range, so Tom could profit off any deaths that happened inside it.

He scowled at the thought, unable to stop himself from picturing childrens soul’s being squeezed through the wringer.

Damn.

Mr. Fluffybottom dropped him off into the sand, a few hundred feet away from where his heat-resistant furnace was still curing.

It started slow, with Nema bringing him a single warrior with a horrific gash in his stomach. She carried the man over her shoulders without visible signs of effort.

Vith people are tough.

Tom patched him up and sent him back out.

That’s one, Tom thought, glancing at the crypts. They were ticking up at an alarming rate. When Tom was pretty sure the healing crypt was full, he moved Suzie’s connection over to the shield crypt, then the ghostwalk crypt, and finally the black hole that was the debt repayment crypt.

The way Tom saw it, since none of his crypts could store more than fifty soul pulses inside them, why not put the excess toward his loan? It was, in a sense, a way of saving soul pulses that he wouldn’t have to spend later.

Word spread fast, and soon, Tom was up to his elbows in wounded Vith – sometimes literally – of which he redeployed about eighty-five percent, while the rest were simply DOA.

It took one to three soul-pulses to heal a man depending on the severity of his wounds, which meant that, on average, one dead enemy or ally could redeploy four fighters, which was a damn good deal. If you fight harder, Tom can patch you up even more.

When Tom explained this to the Vith warriors, their eyes lit up with fatalistic savagery.

Vith people are tough.

At first, the Vith were being pushed back, gradually losing ground in their newly claimed territory as man after man was burned too badly to fight and dragged away by his brethren, reducing the strain on the attackers.

But Vith caused their share of casualties, too. The warriors took to throwing stones rather than spears, using the extra mass of heavy rocks to simply crush or brain the attackers, regardless of their armor.

There were healers among the attacking Alia, but they focused on rehabilitating other alia, rather than the wall of meat keeping them safe. Tom assumed that implied some kind of inherent value structure in the empire that put Alia above non-alia.

The enemy shield wall gradually grew thin as the Vith counterattack continued without abating like it should have. Eventually the empire troops were forced to retreat, the flame Alia putting out a combined wall of fire that covered their asses as they marched back to the southwest, post-haste.

Some of this, Tom got word of mouth from burned and sliced Vith warriors, while some of it Tom saw for himself. It was hard to miss the column of flame that marched down to the beach only a couple hundred feet away, where the light of their defensive magic illuminated a massive ship with the snarling face of some beast carved into the front of it.

Like a british navy vessel with a viking decoration on the front.

Just…weird.

Tom hadn’t even seen it, and apparently they hadn’t seen him, clearly within eyeshot from where the ship was resting, albeit unlit, because Tom didn’t wanna attract attention to the beach where he was keeping the Vith in fighting form.

It seemed that decision probably saved his life.

Fog of war is a real thing, Tom thought. He could probably throw a rock far enough to hit the enemy boats. Tom had been as close to right under their nose the entire battle as it got.

The boats began rowing away from the beach, heading back to the mother ship in droves as they went back to their unassailable position out in the middle of the ocean.

Vith didn’t have boats, after all.

The Vith took to the beach, screaming at the top of their lungs, dancing and making vulgur gestures toward the retreating empire.

“Well done!” chief Gunn shouted, coming up beside Tom and slapping him on the shoulder with his remaining hand. “We never would have won that one without you.”

Tom felt a moment of pride.

Gunn waggled his hand. “Of course they never would have known where we were staying without your blasted smoke-signals, either, but I’ll take the win.”

That moment of pride went down the drain, replaced with horror.

“You knew?” Tom asked, his eyes drawn inexplicably toward the seven dead Vith warriors laid out on the soft sand of the beach.

“Nearly everybody knew. We planned around it. Sure, I thought they would send a smaller raiding party that we could ambush without casualties, but they saw fit to send an entire battalion.”

Gunn’s expression soured as he followed Tom’s to the dead Vith.

“I’ll have to tell Bruk’s mother. Bones, that’s not a conversation I’m looking forward to.”

“So it’s over?” Tom asked, his gaze landing on the distant boats, where a fire mage stood at the helm of each of them, a gout of flame above their heads lighting the way, looking for all intents and purposes like Washington crossing the Delaware. Except cooler.

“For now,” Gunn said, nodding. “They’ll regroup over the course of the night, take inventory, and decide whether or not to continue this fight in the morning but my bet is that they’ll slink off with their tails between their legs. We got them pretty good, because of you,”

He clapped Tom on the back again.

“So we’re not going to chase them down?” Tom asked.

“With what boats?” Gunn asked. “And even if we had boats, they’d see us coming all the way from shore and be able to light our boats on fire from a distance. And even if we got on board, we’d be fighting them on their own ground, disconnected from any support you might be able to provide.”

Tom chose his words carefully.

“You taught me that the way to win was to be as cruel as possible to the other guy. Are you telling me that the other guy is going to spend the night in our waters, sleeping peacefully when their nuts are exposed and waiting for a kicking?”

Gunn cocked his head to the side. “You sound like you’ve got an idea.”

“I got an idea. I saw it in a movie once. But first: Can those flame Alia put out fires too?”

Gunn shook his head. “Not once it leaves their control.”

“Okay,” Tom said, his thoughts brewing as he stared at the ship in the distance, the lanterns were nigh imperceptible pinpricks of light on an otherwise black background.

Suzie does your influence extend as far as that ship?

Have to move, then yes. Suzie responded.

Tom reached into his pocket and felt the sizzling energy in the three crypts in his pocket.

“Your shaman wants three of the cleanest dead imperials you can get him.”

No. We need to get meaner. Tom couldn’t afford to let those people escape if he could help it. They would deduce the presence of a healer among the Vith and report that back to HQ. Better they vanish.

“Matter of fact, bring me all of the corpses,” Tom said. “And do it fast. This is gonna take some time.”

I need a caulk gun substitute. Waterskin? That should work.

“Carve up the ugly dead and fill an empty waterskin with their fat mixed with ashes from our homes.”

“I’m liking the sound of this,” Gunn said with a grin.

“In theory, I’m liking it too,” Tom said, before looking at his hands, covered in blood up to the elbow. “In practice, it’s going to make me damn queasy.”

Suzie, get yourself in range of the ship.

***Cordus, Deckhand***

“Agh, my back,” Cordus groaned, taking a moment to rub his back in between brisk strokes of his brush on the deck. For the thousandth time, he cursed not being born an Alia. He hated them as much as he envied them, sitting relaxed in their hammocks, snoozing away as they ‘recovered’ from the ordeal of tossing fire while other people did all the actual fighting.

He’d never say that to their faces, though: They could light him on fire if he looked at them wrong. Especially the captain.

Cordus shuddered as he remembered the last guy who’d given Captain Tyrn some snark. Bobby was ashes now.

And Kase was dead too. Left to rot back in the savage’s village, after having died protecting some healing whore. I hope it was worth it, Kase, Cordus thought with a sour chuckle. He couldn’t say that out loud, either.

While Sasha Honnekun couldn’t kill him with a look, her family was vastly more influential than Captain Tyr’s, and she could buy and sell Cordus, or even Captain Tyr at a whim. Best not press his luck.

And she had nice tits, which was always a point in a woman’s favor, and likely the reason why the fool Kase had got himself killed trying to protect someone who could heal themselves from almost anything.

They didn’t call the lead Honnekun ‘The Immortal’ for no gods-damned reason after all.

Kase owed him money from gambling on the trip out, and now he was gone.

Damn fool. I already had plans on how to spend that money, too, Cardus thought as he rubbed his back a moment longer before resuming his work. Cleaning and prepping for departure didn’t do itself.

He peered out at the horizon, where the sun was just starting to make the horizon blush like a virgin fooling around for the first time.

Goddamn, I need some sleep. He’d been awake ever since the day before they’d hauled the defeated captain Tyr out of the drink along with his Alia corp. Sent packing by savages. Hah, serves him right.

The internal life of a sailor was rich with thoughts that he couldn’t speak aloud.

A bit of motion made Cordus’s gaze flicker from the blush on the horizon to the left, where a figure stood. It was still dark as Dorun’s anus, though, so Cordus was forced to widen his gaze a bit to see the figure walking toward the lantern.

As it stepped closer, the light of the oil-fueled flame lit Kase’s features.

“Kase, you son of a bitch! You made it back alive!” Cordus said with a grin, mostly happy just to see his gambling buddy alive, and partially because he could get that pay out of him now.

Kase ignored him, grabbing the lantern and carefully removing the copper-reinforced glass from the iron gimbal keeping it steady.

“Umm…Kase?”

His friend finally glanced up at him, his skin…paler than usual. His entire body was sopping wet, as if he’d swam all the way back to the ship. Cordus’s stomach sank as dread seized his body.

Kase’s eyes flickered with yellow light.

Cordus’s eyes widened and he sucked in a breath to sound the alarm. He felt a clammy hand clasp over his mouth before a sharp pain entered his body through his back.