The ringing bell pulled Alexios from his dreams and returned him to his aching body. Clad in heavy, uncomfortable armor and clothes that stank of sweat, he lay on his shield beneath a blanket spread on the citadel’s hard floor. Basil and Kassia were dozing beside him, so tired they’d neglected to wash up before bed. Fires glowing in the hearths lit the stone pillars that rose into the ceiling.
Sleeping people surrounded Alexios, but the ringing bell made them scramble to their feet. A distant trumpet screamed in the distance. Miniature basiliks cracked. Someone shouted that the Latins were attacking. By then Alexios had woken Kassia and Basil and ordered them to stay in the citadel. They nodded with their eyes shut, so tired they could hardly stand, though they were soon walking quietly through the doors along with the other children, whom Queen Tamar was guiding. Alexios met her eyes, and she nodded to him.
“I’ll watch over Kassia and Basil,” she said.
“I don’t know how this is going to go,” he said.
“I’ll guard them with my life until you get back.”
Alexios thanked her, then hugged Kassia and Basil one last time. They only grudgingly submitted to his embrace; Anna’s children were still awkward with him.
Can’t blame them, he thought.
Then he was with almost every amazon in the city en route to the western wall, many so tired they were moving before they knew what they were doing. As before, Trebizond had trained for this.
In the event of an attack, all soldiers move to the walls, he thought. The elderly and children head to the citadel with the assistance of the workers, most of whom then remain in the city on fire duty, helping the soldiers as best they can.
He jogged through the dark city with the amazons. There was little illumination for the geometric stone buildings in the Upper Town, aside from the stars and moon shining in the cold black sky, but Trebizond by now was like an extension of Alexios’s body, and he knew his path without thinking about it.
The western wall blazed with torches—all held away from the black powder and naphtha—and the few amazons on guard duty were picking up primed miniature basiliks leaning against the battlements and firing them down into the darkness on the other side. Alexios and first artillery squad gathered around their basilik without speaking. Dekarch Ra’isa peered over the wall, but something snapped against her helmet; she fell back clutching her head, from which blood was pouring. A red arrow clattered onto the walkway. Alexios and the two amazons asked if she was alright; she ordered them to lift the basilik and aim down at the moat directly below the wall.
“We must go fast.” She wiped the blood from her eyes. “Or iron ball falls.”
She rushed to retrieve one of the torches. By the time she returned, Alexios and the two amazons were ready to lift the basilik. Ra’isa ordered them to proceed. The moment they groaned and hauled the heavy weapon into the air, she touched the flame to the firing hole.
It was impossible to cover their ears this time, and the basilik exploding beside his face made Alexios’s ears ring so loudly he could hear nothing else. In the flash of light he saw the ground below covered with thousands of armored soldiers, many of whom were carrying ladders. A pillar of fire and dust erupted from the ground, carrying some of these soldiers—flailing their arms and kicking their legs—far above the heads of their comrades. Then they all vanished into the night.
He gained 25 artillery XP from this. 75 XP remained before he leveled up to Intermediate (5/10). There were also now just six large iron balls left in the city.
First artillery squad set down the basilik—the metal barrel was hot—and wheeled it back from the battlements. Before the squad could start rearming, Dekarch Ra’isa grabbed their shoulders, and—shouting, though Alexios heard only the ringing in his ears—she pointed at the nearby naphtha siphon. Alexios was the only member of the squad strong enough to carry the iron tank on his shoulders. This was connected via a short hose—made of leather stitched together—to an iron tube mounted to a wooden stock.
Prone to catching fire or exploding, Alexios thought. Like pretty much everything, more or less.
Once Alexios had strapped the medieval flame thrower over the shield that was still hanging on his back, Dekarch Ra’isa lit the rope fuse at the front of its barrel. Alexios shoved the tube between the battlements, aimed down, and pulled the trigger. This released the pressurized fuel that had been pumped into the tank, which then flowed through the hose and out the tube, igniting into a curtain of blazing fire which Alexios waved back and forth over the enemy soldiers. The shrieks that rose into the night were so loud that he heard them over the ringing in his ears.
He was only an initiate with the flamethrower, since he had barely ever practiced with it. But killing so many soldiers rapidly increased his skill to beginner and then novice.
I should feel bad about this, Alexios thought. But if these guys didn’t want to get burned to death in a fire, maybe they shouldn’t have attacked our city.
He released the trigger, raised the barrel into the air, and risked peering through the battlements. Below was a vision from hell. Dozens of men were already charred black and unmoving, though many little fires were still searing the flesh from their bones, and smoke was rising from their exposed intestines. Other men looked as though they had merely fallen asleep; a few had died clutching at the air in agony, their faces transformed to skulls draped in half-cooked meat. The heat was so intense that it scalded Alexios’s face even from this distance, making the moat gleam with meltwater. As flames burned on the vanishing snow, the enemy’s ranks broke and fled once more. When they stopped and turned back to look at the city, their eyes glowed in the night, reflecting the inferno like those of a pack of wolves watching a bonfire from a dark forest. The worst part, however, was the smell: it was like cooking charred ham with gasoline.
Vegetarianism here I come, Alexios thought.
As his hearing returned, the enemy’s trumpets blasted again, and other men screamed at the Latin soldiers in a language that was somehow familiar and unfamiliar to Alexios at the same time. The enemy soldiers reformed and marched past their dead comrades, some stumbling over their bodies as the light faded. Reduced to dim shades in the glow of the fires on Trebizond’s walls, the enemy soldiers were soon running. Alexios allowed them to set up their ladders on the slippery moat and even start climbing before he emptied his naphtha tank in their faces—building his skills with their deaths, and killing more as his skills increased to apprentice.
Men threw themselves from the blazing ladder rungs, crushing their brothers below and spreading flames everywhere. Glancing along either side of the western wall, Alexios saw amazons likewise unleashing naphtha; it seemed that dragons had taken up residence in Trebizond. Some amazons were still blasting their miniature basiliks or loosing arrows while others were hurling naphtha pomegranates into the masses of the enemy; this was what the other members of first artillery squad had been doing while Alexios was firing his flame thrower. A ceramic pot would crack open in the darkness and men would bawl for all they were worth.
Though Alexios was by no means religious, he now found himself praying for their souls, and wished Trebizond would have peace. Fighting a real war was so much worse, in every way, than the films he had seen in the old world. Even the most gruesome war movies failed to communicate the mixture of emotions he felt upon seeing a man die in battle—a man who, moments ago, had been trying to kill him, a man who had been thirsting for his blood because society had twisted his mind into a grotesque mockery of the gift of god.
In a sense we aren’t individuals, he thought. We’re just appendages of society, no more individualistic than a hand or a finger. My language insists that I exist, but what am I except a collection of cells, a gathering of atoms, an expression of billions of years of evolution, a product of physical laws, something that vanishes almost as soon as it comes into existence? How can this ‘I’ be separated from society? How could it survive on its own? It would be like severing a limb, and expecting it to survive and thrive without its body, without any assistance of any kind. And yet the body couldn’t exist without its limbs, either. We are individuals. The individual is defined by society, and vice-versa.
At this point, the Workers’ Army was running out of ammunition. Amazons were pushing ladders back with wooden poles or spearing men as they climbed up. One ladder slammed against the battlements in front of Alexios, and shifted back and forth and creaked and even squealed as men climbed it. Alexios dropped his flame thrower—the tank was empty—and pushed the ladder back. Another ladder struck the wall to his right; a third came to his left; both shook as men climbed up as fast as they could.
Alexios hauled his shield over his back and onto his left arm. With his right hand he drew his Gedara sword and illuminated it with his farr, its green Axumite symbols glowing with power.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
No change without sacrifice, they read.
Behind him, metal scraped against metal; first artillery squad was drawing their own swords and shields. He stepped back to their left flank. Dekarch Ra’isa stood to his immediate right, and raised her own shield to protect him as the first enemy soldiers leaped onto the wall from the ladders.
Alexios and the three amazons moved as one, stabbing forward and then heaving their shields into the air and stepping back, just as the warrior Qutalmish had trained them. An enormous muscular Varangian covered in chainmail swung a gigantic iron hammer onto Alexios’s shield, knocking him down and numbing his left arm; but as the Varangian struggled to raise the hammer back up to deliver the death blow, Ra’isa stabbed her sword forward, caught the Varangian in the gut, and twisted the blade. Blood poured through the chainmail links and splashed the ground; that awful metallic reek of blood filled Alexios’s nostrils. The Varangian groaned, dropped the hammer, clutched his wound, and fell to the walkway. Two more men leaped down from the ladders after him, but they tripped on his body. Ra’isa stabbed their backs, then hauled Alexios to his feet.
“Can you fight?” she said.
“Maybe you should be kentarch,” Alexios gasped. “I can be dekarch. Or a regular soldier.”
“Just fight!” she shouted. “Shut up and fight!”
I’d follow you into hell, he thought as he watched her return to battle—since he was too out of breath to speak, and she seemed uninterested in what he had to say.
So many enemy soldiers were on the walkway by now that Alexios, Ra’isa, Elena, and Jaqeli were all fighting back-to-back, surrounded by heavily armored Latins who were swinging at them with swords, maces, hammers, chains, spears, shields—almost any kind of dangerous object that could be grasped in a person’s hands. Yet Alexios had taught the workers about the farr, and all of them fed off of each other’s energy, lunging forward and stabbing so quickly it was impossible for the enemy to resist. Though one among the Latins knew how to use internal alchemy to channel life energy, this warrior must have, for whatever reason, neglected to teach this art to his compatriots.
Free workers cannot be defeated in battle, Alexios thought.
His blade shone with nearly the ferocity of the sun, making the Latins squint, groan, and turn their faces away. This gave Alexios time to slash at their exposed faces or bash them so hard with his shield that they fell back over the wall and struck the men waiting to climb up below—death by death, building up Alexios’s swordfighting skill to Intermediate (5/10).
There was no hope for these Latins. None of them knew who they were dealing with. So many bleeding bodies—groaning and writhing, or still and silent—were piled on the walkway that stepping anywhere meant crushing someone’s hand or face.
We’re stronger than we knew, Alexios thought. We’ve been working and training so hard that we’ve surpassed them. They can’t stop us.
A bell was ringing again for some reason. At first Alexios only heard it in the back of his mind. He was so busy fighting he could barely pay attention to anything except whoever was in front of him. Forward he stabbed to protect his comrades, Gedara buried in a man’s flesh so deep Alexios needed to kick him to pry it out—all while Ra’isa deflected blows aimed his way with her shield. Then as he stepped back, she stepped forward, and Jaqeli on her right raised her shield to ward off the enemy coming at her. Alexios hauled his own shield into the air, protecting Elena, who was now on his left.
They worked so well together, they were unstoppable. The piles of bodies surrounding them was three or four men deep. This second wall of flesh and blood was rising behind the first wall of stone.
But the bell was still ringing. It sounded like it was coming from the eastern wall. Alexios froze, but Ra’isa elbowed him back into action.
Only a few soldiers are guarding the eastern wall, he thought. Everyone’s on the western wall. What if this assault here is just a distraction from the main force coming at us from the other side? Generals love doing shit like that. They’re always attacking from two different directions at the same time.
“Do you hear the bell?” Alexios said.
“Yes,” Ra’isa said.
“We need to see what the problem is. Let’s turn around for just a moment—”
“Just one moment,” she growled.
“On the count of three,” Alexios said. “One, two, three!”
Hiding behind his shield, he looked back to the eastern wall. In the torchlight it was swarming with enemy soldiers. They had already run down the inner stairwells and opened the gate from the inside. Masses of the enemy were flooding through and cutting down the amazons in their way.
Without hesitation, Alexios blew three long notes into his whistle, the signal for first century to retreat to the Upper Town. The other two kentarchs followed his lead and issued the same order to the amazons in their centuries.
And since the nearest stairwell was covered with bodies and impossible to descend, Alexios reoriented the world in his mind—a new skill he had learned from the manual, though he was only an Initiate.
The walkway he stood upon turned down, and the wall supporting it became flat as he scrambled onto it, followed by the amazons of the first artillery squad, who used the same technique. To others it would have looked as though they were running straight down the wall, but in the immortals’ minds the wall was flat.
When Alexios reached the street, he oriented the world normally again, and spent more farr points leaping from house to house, sometimes soaring over the rooftops and then sprinting on the street. His hackles tingled; an arrow was swooping toward him; he batted it away with Gedara, which sparked and clanged. The blade was so bright it would have looked like the morning star from a thousand stadia away, flickering and seeming to dance in the sky.
Alexios was tempted to launch himself into the enemy’s ranks to cover his comrades’ retreat, but this was an individualistic action which went against their training. They needed to work together, or else the farr would fade. For as Zhayedan always said to each other:
“Don’t let the farr fade!”
By now masses of Latins were charging through the streets; all the workers and soldiers who could flee were behind the Upper Town’s gate.
They can’t stop me, Alexios thought. But I can stop them. They’ve never seen anything like me. I am a Zhayedan.
Disregarding his orders and going against his training, Alexios dove into the wall of Latins marching along the street. He swung Gedara into someone’s neck, and blood surged into the light blazing from his blade, the droplets gleaming in the air. The man fell, Alexios’s XP increased, and another man attacked. Alexios sliced the man’s eyes, tearing them from their sockets. Blood exploded from the man’s face; he clutched his wounds and fell back, wailing in agony, and the game voice told Alexios he was halfway to leveling up to Journeyman in his swordfighting skill. The process was snowballing. As his skills increased, he killed more people, which caused his skills to increase further. The only thing holding him back was the fact that it took far more kills to level up from Intermediate to Journeyman than to level up from Apprentice to Intermediate.
Alexios sprinted on the enemy’s faces, kicking them as hard as he could as they sluggishly sought to block his blows with their shields or swords. Some were desperate enough to grasp Gedara with their hands.
Just as the enemy was surrounding him—with twenty different weapons swooping his way—he reoriented the world again, and fell up, flailing and kicking, straight into the sky. Once he reached a safe distance, he turned the world right side up and fell back behind the citadel gate—tumbling onto the ground right beside Dekarch Ra’isa, his World Reorientation skill leveled up to Beginner (2/10).
“Fool!” Ra’isa growled, spitting near him. “Showoff!”
“Wish I could be more graceful.” He picked himself up and threw his weight against the gate doors. His farr was almost depleted, but to fight alongside fellow workers recharged it, though slowly. The lamp inside him had dimmed, but now it was brightening again.
The Latins were already pounding the gate with a battering ram; one strike knocked the amazons back from the doors, and they would have fallen to the street if their comrades hadn’t caught them and helped them back into place. They were lighter and faster than the Latins, and better at striking briefly before fleeing to safety; in tests of strength, however, the amazons would fail.
Ladders clattered against the wall and men threw themselves over and leaped into the masses of amazons, who cut and stabbed them until they ceased to move. Yet the Zhayedan were getting tired. To fight a battle on foot for a few minutes would exhaust most men so that they could barely stand; with the farr Zhayedan could keep fighting only a little longer. For how much time had they even been fighting? By now, it might have been hours, but Alexios would have been unsurprised to learn that only minutes had passed. The night was still perfect, with the sky black velvet, and the stars gleaming diamonds in the folds, all unblemished by the slightest tint of dawn, a pure and flawless darkness. Only with the torches and with Alexios’s blinding aerolith blade swinging back and forth could anyone see.
Then the battering ram burst through the gate, followed by spears cutting at anyone they could touch. Amazons fell, groaning and clutching their wounds; their comrades pulled them away to the nearby People’s Hospital—just behind them on the left—or took their places.
The Latins were pushing the broken doors open. It was impossible to stop them. Many people were hiding in the Upper Town; to retreat to the citadel would mean abandoning the wounded and their caregivers in the hospital. Yet if the amazons stayed here, they might all be killed. Their only chance was to fall back.
Alexios blew three notes again, and the amazons retreated along the street toward the citadel gate not a hundred paces behind them. The Latins burst through the doors ahead and, screaming with rage, charged the retreating amazons, who were still disciplined enough to fight while remaining in formation. In his sudden terror Alexios was tempted to drop his sword and shield and pull off his armor and flee for his life, but he could never leave his comrades.
Life without them is meaningless.
So many lay dead or dying, and yet the Latins kept coming. One last time, Alexios remained behind as the amazons fled through the citadel gate, which slammed shut after them. Surrounded again by the enemy—who attacked from every direction at once—Alexios spun around like a dancer, but with his sword outstretched, moving so quickly that some lift was actually achieved, and he rose off the ground. The blade was only a molecule thick at its edge, and sharp enough to slice through reality itself. Yet there were too many Latins. They could never be stopped. With the last of his farr, Alexios leaped over the wall behind him. Lacking the energy to slow his descent, he slammed into the courtyard dust on the other side, cushioned only by his shield, which cracked under the weight of his bone, flesh, and armor.