Brendan Moore rode his guar in the rear of the line as the palisade came into view. On top of the grazing lizard, he was able to spot a peculiar dark cloud in front of the temporary fortification. The cloud seemed to hold its own against the wind from the ocean to the west.

“Hold up.”

“HOLD UP!” his lieutenant bawled.

Brendan rubbed his ringing ear while the cry was taken up by the sergeants and the five thousand men ground to a halt.

He pulled a spyglass out of his saddle and eyed the distant walls. The dark cloud seemed to be comprised of millions of flying insects.

Brendan had heard the stories from the frontlines. A Gadveran wizard had figured out a cost-effective spell for summoning and controlling wasps, unleashing them on the battlefield to devastating effect. They called the faceless wizard responsible The Wasp. Go figure.

Until this point, summoning had been limited to the very few remaining Malkenrovian mages that still wandered free, able to summon demons from the other side of the Warp.

Brendan recalled a battle some ten years ago, where a mercenary mage had unleashed half a dozen demons on the battlefield and watched them tear through the Ilethan line like wet paper, flooding the battlefield with Warp.

These were obviously not demons, but just as obviously not natural…

The Crown would pay well for the secret behind these.

“Get me Charlotte, and ready the sin-eaters.”

“Ready The Sin-Eaters!” his lieutenant shouted before scurrying off to get his contingency plan.

Didn’t think I’d be using these so soon. Ah well, I suppose it’s good to test it sooner rather than later.

Sin-Eaters were a special kind of Support unit that required a rather complicated process to bring about, and were therefore rather rare, except in a recently conquered city like Surrak.

Their duty was to take damage meant for their charge. One could spot beautiful Sin-Eaters in flowing robes accompanying greying aristocrats in the capitol, always ready to save the life of their owner. It was a very respected, influential position.

Out here, thought, they weren’t quite as pretty, or respected.

A chain-led troupe of some hundred male and female Gadverans connected via chains linking their collars stepped forward.

Under his gaze, the hundred Gadverans ate the blood of some five Ilethans each, some more reluctantly than others. Brendan folded his arms over his saddlehorn while watching one of the mud-skinned women turn her face this way and that like a petulant child trying to avoid their most hated food.

In the end the administering Veteran simply rubbed his blood on the inside of her gums, to Brendan’s amusement.

“Let’s get this over with. What do you want?”

Brendan glanced over his shoulder and spotted a young blonde woman of maybe twenty years. She had a slim figure and a face that the uninitiated might call ‘cute’. She was wearing long white robes and blue wrist-wrappings that marked her as a sorceress. She scowled up at him, as if he were personally responsible for her current situation.

Which is true, Brendan admitted.

“Please, a little decorum in front of the soldiers, Charlotte.”

“Don’t try to sugar-coat it, this whole ill-conceived campaign to Surrak was to disrespect me. Call me by my title, or you can kiss your sorceress,” – She kissed her fingers and tapped them on her butt – “Goodbye.”

“I’m your superior officer.”

“Tell that to your mom.”

Brendan sighed and massaged his temples.

“Aunt Charlotte, Those – “

“Great Aunt, and a please couldn’t hurt.”

The leather of his saddlehorn creaked under Brendan’s grip.

“Great aunt Charlotte, would you please find a way to rid us of that swarm of wasps?”

“Wasps, what wasps?” Charlotte demanded.

“It takes about a hundred stings to kill a man in his second Break, five for a Veteran.”

Brendan pointed emphatically at the cloud covering the wall in front of them.

“That is a lot more than five hundred wasps.”

“Hold your guars,” the crone muttered, taking Brendan’s spyglass without permission and peering through it. “Eyesight isn’t so good these days.”

She was constantly complaining about her age, but she looked the same as she did when Brendan was a boy. Even then she was hiding her age.

Brendan looked down at the young woman beneath him, studyin her features untouched by time. Illusion, Mind-slave, or did my Great Aunt find the key to eternal youth and refuse to share it with anyone like the callous bitch she is?

“Oh dear, oh, my.” She collapsed the spyglass and fed it through one of his guar’s buckles.

Brendan yanked it out of there and put it back in its case as she addressed him.

“I see why you wrote me.”

“There’s been –“

“You wouldn’t believe how delighted I was,” She cut him off, throwing a dramatic hand over her face. “There I was, faced with another tedious evening at the theater, my noble form stricken down with ennui, slipping into an eternal malaise that I feared I may never recover from, when Gerald – my Machengan butler slash fuckbuddy – came to me with a letter from my dearest, darlingest great nephew.”

“Yes, I realize – “

“I thought, what a wonderful blessing, My nephew that I haven’t seen hide nor hair of for the past fifteen years, has suddenly thought of me. Surely it’s because of how much he misses me and not because I teach at the D.I.”

She gasped, touching a trembling hand to her lips. Brendan watched silently, fighting back a yawn. She glanced up at him, and he simply tapped his fingers on the saddlehorn, waiting for her to finish.

“But alas, you only needed me for a professional matter, me, who shared a womb with your grandmother, who helped babysit you when you were an itty bitty little thing, running around with shit trailing behind you.”

She put a hand on her cheek.

“So adorable.”

Brendan kept waiting, depriving her of opportunities to upstage him like a farmer deprives a virulent weed of water and sunlight.

She kept glancing up at him, waiting for him to speak, until after a good two minutes, she finally lost her patience.

“Alright, what did you want?”

“Done?”

“Consider it postponed.” She said.

“That,” he pointed, “Was done by a Gadveran Wizard we’ve taken to calling the Wasp. Care to guess why?”

“I feel like leaning into that statement in either direction is a waste of my valuable breath.” Charlotte said.

“Right. I need –“

“You would appreciate. Don’t confuse wants for needs, Brendan.”

“I would appreciate it if you could neutralize their wizard and his wasps for me, and thereby save many of my valuable Sin-Eaters for resale, along with the soldier they’re meant to protect. From what we can see, that camp can only hold about two hundred men. Without the insects, they’ll be easy prey.”

“On one condition,” she said archly.

“We’re doing conditions, now?” Brendan asked.

“I will be taking this…Wasp back to the Den for study. I want credit for the spell when I pry it out of the old mud-skin’s brain. Nothing gets me hard like slapping a new spell-cock all over Michelan’s face.”

Brendan eyed his great aunt, whose speech seemed to waffle between faux elegant and dockside whore.

“Right, that was never in question. You’ll have custody.”

“Oh, goody,” the blonde woman said, clapping her hands like a child.

She snagged his spyglass again and peered at the shifting mass of insects blocking their attack.

“Hmmm. How close together do you think each individual bug is?” she asked.

“Pretty close, from what I can see.” Brendan said.

“Excellent.” She closed the spyglass and put it in the wrong spot again. “A large Transference Spell with Norrick’s Chain manually attached should do exactly what we need.”

“What do you need?” Brendan asked. His follow up question died on his lips as Charlotte dropped to the ground and began contorting her body at awkward angles, her hands digging into the ground.

“Gotta limber up,” she said by way of explanation, twisting her arm around her shoulder. “Helps me focus, especially if I have to do a spell manually.”

“What do you need?” he repeated himself.

“About fifty gallons of lamp oil.” She said.

“You can have a quart.”

His great Aunt gave him a calculating look. “I suppose I can add Riehart’s Mod to Norrick’s Chain to increase the efficiency. It’s not going to be easy.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means have your men start moving. I’ll take care of your bug problem.” After a minute, Charlotte stood and received a quart of oil in a leather skin from Brendan’s lieutenant, along with a torch.

“Ready them for a charge.”

“Form a line!” the lieutenant shouted at the top of his lungs, the long train of soldiers arranging themselves into a long line, ready to overwhelm the defenders. At the very front were five hundred shock-troops, Veterans whose wounds would be taken by the Sin-eaters until they no longer drew breath, allowing them to overwhelm the pathetic Gadveran picket with contemptuous ease.

The mud-skinned cowards cowered behind their wall, pinned down by constant fire from the jungle.

A bit of movement caught his eyes, and Brendon tugged the spyglass out of his guar’s reigns with a growl, inspecting the distant field.

The grass is so well trimmed, he thought idly as he scanned for the movement he’d seen. Finally he spotted a single figure sprinting toward his scouts, sunlight glinting off their heavy steel armor.

Unusual choice for a Gadveran. Brendan wasn’t sure, but the individual looked particularly big as well, at least six feet tall. The individual was flanked by a cloud of insects.

Looks like they’re trying to put a stop to the archers. I’m more concerned about the mindless insects than the fighter.

Brendan’s eyebrows rose when he spotted nearly a dozen arrows ricochet off the charging warrior’s armor and shield without so much as making a dent. Some of them had to have been using Penetrating Shot. There couldn’t have been a better time to do it.

Either someone drew out all their Bent or that is a Legend. We’ll have to be careful of the jungle on our left. In the meantime, we need to move before they completely remove the threat.

“March, shields up.”

The lieutenant relayed his orders, and the line began to advance, wary of traps. It would be foolish to assume there were only

He glanced over at his aunt.

“Charlotte, if you would.”

“Aunt charlotte, if you would,” she said, dumping the oil onto the ground, eyeballing the cloud of wasps in front of them.

“Riiight…there.”

She threw down the torch, and the ground in front of her burst into flame as the oil began to burn greedily.

“Transference.”

The slender blonde woman pointed a single immaculate fingernail at the dark fog of wasps.

The fire in front of her went dead, disappearing like it’d never been.

A single wasp in the cloud of millions burst into flame, then went cold before invisible energy arced to three of its nearby kin, causing each of those to burst into momentary flame before going cold, leaving nothing but a rapidly dissolving corpse falling through the air.

The view from Brendan’s guar was spectacular, as a rapidly expanding ripple of fire shot through the dark cloud, spreading to the cloud of wasps that followed behind the Gadveran heavy, drastically reducing the threat to their scouts as they were burnt to ash.

“Thank you, Great Aunt Charlotte.”

“Anything for my cute grand-nephew.” She said with a smile.

The first dozen or so veterans stepped on false floors that gave way at their weight, spilling forward into a spike-choked trench that lined the bottom of the palisades. The trench drastically increased the effective height of the wooden wall by an extra six feet.

A veteran could jump eight feet to mount a palisade, easy, but fourteen feet through downward facing spikes? That was asking too much.

“Earthworks.” Brendan said with a scowl as he watched the Gadverans duck out of cover at the top of the palisades and fire down at the men rolling through the trenches. “It’s never easy. Turtle up and have our third, eighth and thirteenth squads cut paths through the spikes. Divide their attention with our superior numbers.”

His lieutenant carried the orders out as the heavily armored Gadveran disappeared into the treeline with his scouts.

“What’s that sound?” Charlotte asked, glancing around.

“You. Speaking.”

The old woman pinched his leg, hard.

“I don’t spend all my time with a young man shouting into my ears…well, sometimes I do, but not like you. My hearing is impeccable, and I could swear I – “

“No, I hear it too.” Brendan said, his head raising. It was a deep, grating hum that was slowly getting louder, coming from –

“Damn it to the Abyss.”

A swarm of fist-sized wasps with enough venom to kill a veteran in a single sting swept up, appearing from behind the sheer cliff face they had simply taken for granted. The wasps spread out, distancing themselves from each other by several feet as they barreled toward the rear of their line faster than a guar at full gallop.

The wasp’s controller had obviously learned to keep them away from each other. After one spell.

“Well, I don’t think Norrick’s Chain is going to work again, Sweetie.” She suddenly tugged on his sleeve. “Oh, there’s general Grant. He’s so handsome. Over here!”

She waved her hand, making little hops as the large general with the salt and pepper hair emerged from the cliffside, standing on a pair of blades.

“It’s never easy.” Brendan muttered, unsheathing his sword.