***Sasha Honnuken***

Sasha watched in horror as the hail of solid steel arrows arced high through the air, glittering in the sun before they fell, tearing through the ranks of the Alakesh like paper.

Sasha couldn’t help but imagine a brutal spike descending from the sky and perforating her. She the phantom taste of blood spread through her mouth as the Alakesh re-organized their ranks. The peaceful farmers had a minimal presence on the battlefield, hiring mercenaries to fight in their stead, so the Alia among their ranks were varied, but weak.

Mostly Scarred and Aflame, which did little to stop the deadly hail.

The Alakesh formation should have recovered, but for some reason, it continued to deteriorate, even after the hail of arrows ceased.

“What is going on?” The grizzled Bloodied captain muttered, peering through his spyglass.

“May I?” Sasha asked, holding out her hand. The man, bearing a bloody sword on his tabard, glanced over at her, his gaze drifting down to her house symbol. He scoffed and put the spyglass back to his face.

“Save your pretty head for the wounded.”

Son of a- Sasha resisted the urge to punch the ass. In the middle of a battle it was more than a lack of decorum, it was insubordination, and even a Honnuken could receive punishment.

As little as lashes would do to her, she still didn’t like pain.

Fine.

Sasha hooded her eyes with her hands, as if she was shielding them from the sun, then she carefully, ever so carefully, expanded the size of her right eye, making the lens rounder, flattening the retina, more like what an eagle would have.

I’ve never been quite so thankful for those disgusting anatomy lessons.

It wasn’t easy, or entirely safe, messing with something as sensitive as an eye, which was why Sasha only did one, and only made minor, easily reversible changes.

Still, it was plenty. Less is more.

The distant battle popped into sharp relief. The figures were still tiny, but Sasha didn’t care. She could make out the food stains on their uniforms, bad teeth and receding hair.

It seemed as if the Alakesh mercenaries were fighting each other?

It took Sasha a moment to understand what she was seeing. It wasn’t until she caught the glint of a steel arrow sticking out of the head of one of the aggressors that she understood exactly what was going on.

They’re dead. The dead are coming back to life and attacking their former comrades! Under her gaze a mercenary stabbed a fellow in the heart, who then rose to his feet a moment later and began attacking more of the living.

She’d heard stories of the purge of the Ku’leth, how every loss made them stronger. Gave them another soldier on their side. A battle of attrition where the other side could only gain. Sasha had been twelve at the time, but her uncle had returned home from the purge with a haunted look, saying it was a miracle they’d won at all. He’d disappeared shortly after. It was only now that Sasha realized he’d been on ‘vacation’ as a different person.

Engaging in sex-tourism.

Sasha scowled and thought back to the young man creating intricate circles around the corpses on the beach, flooding them with power from a fist-sized lump of gold.

Sasha didn’t know much about how Ku’leth raised the dead, but she would have to assume that doing it in bulk would necessitate more infrastructure: I.E. A bigger circle, and a bigger gold cylinder to power the ritual.

There has to be some kind of circle and lump of gold….doesn’t there?

Sasha’s gaze scanned the battlefield before settling on the Vith ‘fortification.’ It was an eight-foot tall curved wall made of piled stone that the Vith intended to use to blunt a charge from the front gate.

Except it’s not really meant for that, is it? Sasha thought, eyes widening. The curved wall was fifty feet wide and just tall enough to conceal a large swath of land from the vantage of the distant wall. About fifty feet.

It’s gotta be there!

“They’re using Ku’leth techniques!” Sasha blurted, tugging on the sleeve of the captain like a child in her excitement. “That wall there is concealing the ritual, it’s the only place it could be!”

He lowered the spyglass with an exasperated sigh. “Listen young lady, there’s no - Ay Kathbenath!” he shouted as his gaze landed on her massively engorged right eye.

“Oh, sorry, I forgot about that,” she murmured, bringing her eye back to normal size. “As I was saying –“

“Immortal, forgive my earlier impertinence,” The portly captain said, bowing deeply. “Do you wish for us to arrange a charge?”

“~”

Sasha opened her mouth to correct the man, when the words died on her tongue. Her uncle had been gone for five days. That meant he’d either fled, been imprisoned or killed. If he had fled, no one would ever know, and if he were killed or imprisoned, the culpable party would never admit it in order to expose her.

In short, there was very little chance of being exposed as not being The Immortal, save death, which really didn’t matter to her afterwards.

What’s the alternative, being treated like an idiot again?

“Prepare a charge of heavy Vith-blooded knights. Set their task to disrupt the ritual that lies beyond the Vith wall.”

“Right away, Immortal.”

Sasha tapped her fingers together nervously as the lump in her throat refused to go away.

“Will you be leading from the front?”

Oh yeah, my uncle’s cavalier attitude towards danger and penchant for ‘leading by example’. I forgot about that in the moment.

“Of course,” Sasha squeaked.

She coughed, lengthening her vocal cords.

“Of course,” She said, in a more masculine, confident manner as she set about restructuring her face to look like her uncle.

Thank the gods I have the same eye and hair color. Those are impossible to change. How Uncle does it is nothing short of miraculous. Hair is dead, for god’s sakes!

***Tom***

What is he just sitting there for!? Tom thought, eyeballing the bastard hanging in the sky high above them, watching everything like an omnipresent god. He could pop Tom into space again at any time, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

Yet. Tom was struck with a burning desire to reach that height himself, if only to slap the bitch out of Raze.

Tom inwardly cursed at assigning Raze the ‘omnipresent’ moniker in his own head.

Tom didn’t get any more time to sweat about instant death floating above him, as the castle gates began to rattle open, revealing a blonde man followed by three plates of solid steel marching toward them at a trot.

A snake-like formation of about a hundred knights were headed their way, wearing armor that was impossibly thick, wielding shields that seemed more like vault doors. Vith-blooded knights.

The blonde had light armor, though, almost suicidally light, and wore a tabard with the Honnuken flowing moon symbol on the front. A splash of blue against the dull steel approaching them.

“Is that gonna be a problem?” Tom pointed.

Nema picked up her steel bow that weighed half as much as she did, snapping off a solid steel arrow that flirted with the sound barrier.

The arrow ricocheted off the lead knight’s shield, leaving little more than a scuff mark.

“Yes, that’s going to be a problem.” She said with a shrug.

“You see problems, I see opportunity for bloodshed.” Carol said with a grin, hefting a gigantic steel hammer ‘liberated’ from a forge they’d ransacked on the way through the Dinamore stretch. It was a gigantic lump of steel not meant to be wielded by anything other than a water wheel.

Carol made it work.

“The way I see it, we’re probably gonna lose the circle. These fuckin’ tortoises are slow but they’ll be a bitch to stop. Can you bring the undead here to slow them down?” She asked, pointing at the undead in the distance, wreaking havoc among the enemy lines.

“No,” Tom shook his head emphatically. “They’re completely uncontrolled, mindless undead. Freshly spawned, bargain-basement spirits who haven’t even achieved full consciousness yet. It’s the only reason we were able to pull this off.”

Matter of fact, each of the low-grade spirits cost about eight soul-pulses to bring into this world, giving them a tidy profit of two soul pulses per corpse, which was beginning to add up to some rather high numbers.

I need more gold. Tom thought.

A Wratz’got, the species Carol was from, was roughly the equivalent of an experienced Vith-blooded knight.

The idea that no less than a hundred Carols were currently marching across the grassy field towards their position gave Tom chills.

A Wrat’zgot cost around two hundred and fifty soul pulses to summon into a corpse. Tom could store enough soul pulses to summon three of them, but he didn’t have any corpses, nor did he have the summoning circles set up to do such a thing.

And four against a hundred was problematic.

“How effective will the Keth’zar be?” Tom asked pointing at the gargoyles hidden behind the wall. Maybe he could summon more. They were fairly reasonably priced.

“They’ll surprise ‘em, but their claws will work for shit against armor that thick. Keth’zar are good against sneak attacks and light to medium armored units.”

“So what do we do?” Tom asked.

Carol stood there, considering, with a look on her face like she’d sucked on a lemon.

“I heard you made a big boom at Burrok castle?” she asked.

“That will one hundred percent destroy the circle and cause collateral damage on our side. We’re not safely behind the castle walls this time. They are.” Tom said.

“Fuck, I hate retreating,” Carol muttered, shaking her head. “I really wish you could pull something out of your ass right now.”

“I might be able to buy something from Luz,” Tom said, glancing up at the dot hovering above them in the sky. “But I suspect anything too good is going to be stolen from us.”

Carol followed his gaze up at the Kinzena hovering high above them.

“…Shit. Pack up the essentials and get ready to run!” Carol said before pointing at some of the Vith warriors. “You guys, you’re with me. We’re gonna see if we can’t flip over some of those tortoises.”

“How will we get through the enemy line?” Suzie asked, frowning.

“You see that?” Carol said, pointing at the Alakesh mercenaries in disarray, fighting their own as perhaps an eighth of their number had become undead by this point. “They look pretty preoccupied to me. We’re gonna cut right through them, undead included, as they are not our friends.”

“Let’s move it, people! If they shut the summoning circle off, that army is going to crash down on us like a fuckin’ tidal wave of cock! Let’s be gone before it happens! You wanna give them the satisfaction of killing you!?”

Despite admitting that she hated doing it, Carol was pretty damn good at organizing a retreat. The light and strong Vith cut a precise hole through the broken Alakesh formation, their warriors taking the front and sides, while Tom trotted along with the pregnant women, old people and babies.

It wasn’t great for his confidence to jostle alongside pregnant women carrying a half-ton in supplies, but it got him out of the battlefield all the same.

It was a loud, hectic battle, filled with mud, blood and screaming, but Tom didn’t see much of it. He was too busy watching the ground, trying to keep his feet and pace, packed in tight as he was among the noncombatants.

Either the Vith had finally admitted that Tom was too valuable to risk, or, more likely, it was because they considered him as weak as a pregnant woman.

The retreat took hours of running at a ground-eating pace, and when Tom simply couldn’t run anymore, they tossed him up on top of the luggage train with the other children and non-Vith.

Then they actually moved faster.

The sun went down and was threatening to come back up the horizon before they reached their fallback position: The Alakesh Garrison to the East. Having just been emptied to deploy against the Vith, it was being run by a skeleton crew of cooks and janitors.

It was easily taken, revealing a large port tucked behind the thick stone walls.

Despite having a fruit tree as their house symbol, the Alakesh seemed to be as much seafarers as they were farmers.

Although they were farmers.

Fields of fantastically laden trees were being picked by laborers, alongside pens with hogs the size of workhorses, obviously sporting the double muscle gene.

Some kind of grain grew so thick that the grass actually made difficult terrain. Tom could reach down and grab a clump and disturbing it actually jostled the tightly packed grains in such a way that they expanded and spilled out of his hand.

My God. Alakesh the Bountiful Indeed.

There was enough food on the grounds of this small garrison to feed a city. Easily.

The Vith wasted no time securing control of the garrison and kicking everyone out on their asses, save the Alakesh heir, a young man with a sunburn, straw hat, suspenders, and cow dung up to his elbows, who didn’t speak a word Tom could understand.

An odd image for the richest house on the continent, but it was hard to argue with results. The young man’s office had a small chest filled with gold coins, enough to expand Tom’s Soul Engine even further without resorting to duping the gold, which was a bad habit to get into.

Tom immediately handed it off to his undead smiths.

There was a much larger chest of silver and copper coins. Those, Tom didn’t care one whit about, and wound up giving all the skeleton crew some hazard pay before they got kicked out.

Finally, the hubbub settled, and Tom was able to relax, leaning back in the cushy leather chair of his stolen office, grateful for a moment of peace after twenty-eight hours of intensity. Once he’d gotten a moment to himself he’d find wherever Nema had put together their bed and sleep for a few days straight.

That was when the viscous substance, the ‘space’ in front of his new desk began to compress and spin.

“Of course,” Tom muttered, dragging Jacob’s revolver out of the dusty leather holster and cocking the hammer. After a moment of consideration, Tom hid it under the desk.

If Star Wars taught us anything useful.