Reivan flexed the fingers of his recently severed left hand, thanking his lucky stars that he got reincarnated into a world where reattaching limbs was possible. Growing them back from scratch was also viable, but that took a bit more time.
'It still feels a bit strange. I probably shouldn't join the next raid just to be safe. It's not like they need me there anyway.'
Numb, wasn't the word he needed. Actually, he couldn't quite place how his left arm felt right now. Just that it didn't feel right. But he was overall fine. Besides, this wasn't his first time having a limb severed since it happened during spars every so often. When he stopped to think about it, his own wife had done it five times before they reached adulthood—which really brought home the point of how brutal knighthood was behind the scenes.
Speaking of his lovely wife, she was currently sitting on a moth-eaten settee instead of the sofa he'd prepared for her. The abandoned building they chose for their temporary hideout didn't have much in the way of furniture, so he offered a piece from his personal collection. But she was still a bit cross with him for the risks he took in his last run, so she was rebelliously using something else to park her perky butt on.
More than a full day had already passed since that incident, but she still hadn't forgiven him.
Of course, he understood that his antics had truly worried her. And he knew that she understood why he even took the risks in the first place. That was why he wasn't really complaining about it and just letting her anger pass. No fisherman went out to sea on a stormy evening, after all—they waited until the clouds were a little clearer.
Maybe she was starting to warm up to him again because she came over and hooked a finger on the collar of his tunic, taking a peek inside. Now, one would have interpreted this as a wife's intimate actions toward her husband, but Reivan knew that she was checking the youngest part of his body.
In other words, the part that had just gotten regenerated.
"Move. Let me see." Helen tugged, seemingly unable to get a good look at it.
Reivan obliged, taking off his tunic entirely. His skin was a healthy white, but some parts on his left shoulder had a pinkish hue. That was often how it was for newly regenerated flesh and skin. From experience, he was aware that it'd take another day before the color blended in with the rest of his body's skin tone. It was miraculous from the perspective of someone from modern Earth, but the cool part was how even this was slow. If a priest was present, there wouldn't even be any pinkish parts nor would he feel the need to give his reattached limb time to fully settle.
"Look, it's so soft," he said, trying to lighten the mood. With a smile, he urged her to take a poke at the pink parts too. "C'mon. Don't be shy."
"Alright." Helen apathetically pressed her finger hard on the pinkish parts, making him hiss in pain and surprise.
"Hey, go easy on me..."
"You should've gone easy on yourself. By going in and out like you said."
"But I did, no?"
"You overstayed. And you made too big of a scene."
Reivan scratched his head sheepishly. "But I rescued a bunch of captives, you know? And it wasn't my fault that they had someone weirdly perceptive. Like, what the hell even was that guy...?"
Helen crossed her arms. "Don't blame the enemy's competence, always your own lack of it. I'm sure you were taught this too."
"You're right..."
Looking at him with barely concealed exasperation behind her stoic face, she sighed. "I want to support your decisions, but you're making it really hard for me..."
He chuckled awkwardly. "I'm really sorry for worrying you. But relax, it was fine. I still had a bunch of cards I could've played if things got really tricky."
Opening his [Chaos Origin] was one thing, despite the dangers of doing so. The resistance it offered him may not have been very useful but its offensive boons were. In hindsight, Reivan had focused too hard on defending against Axion's javelin throw, rather than focusing on attacking it. He still did it near the end, but it hadn't worked out. If the javelin somehow turned around after piercing through him to skewer him again, then he really would have pulled out all the stops.
'There's [Intent] too, but...'
Reivan internally groaned. He'd been trying hard not to be alarmed by it, but one of the abilities he'd been depending on in the past had been getting steadily weaker.
One of his special abilities, [Indomitable Willpower], had a sub-skill called [Intent] that evolved temporarily if his emotions were riled up enough. What it changed into depended on the emotion he felt at the time, but Reivan could generally expect an increase of one hundred to two hundred percent of his base Might when it did, along with some other boons like momentary extra skills or buffs to aspects other than Might.
But as he grew stronger, the percentages seemed to get smaller.
It had been hard to truly notice because growing up, most of the combat he'd been exposed to involved sparring against allies or fighting nightmare spawns with Valter—or someone who had equal or greater strength—around to bail him out if he couldn't do it. Reivan naturally wanted to win on every single occasion, but the low stakes wouldn't have pushed him to his true limits. Also, he'd grown more confident in the strength he cultivated and the skills he'd built up, so victory almost always felt within reach, so to speak.
That was how he rationalized [Intent] providing practically no buffs to his Might.
However, the recent raids on the imperial army and the infiltration he performed confirmed many things for him.
Reivan had never been as close to death as the past few weeks. He didn't have a silver bell to teleport him to the heart of Aizen if he was in danger, no Saintess' gift to undo a fatal attack, and no Ascendant bodyguard to safeguard him against most threats or at least help him escape. And unlike in the Spirit Tower, he wasn't posing as a newbie battlemage that was seen as harmless by all the big hitters around.
In the battles against Argonia, Reivan was fighting as himself—which meant that all of his enemies were foaming at the mouth to kill him. He was also without anybody greater than him to truly cover for him. Sure, there was Helen, Gwen, and Sir Xander, but in the end, they were mortals just like him. The gap in ability between them, if it existed, was surmountable. And that meant the enemies they could face were similar too.
With that in mind, Reivan had every right to expect the 100 to 200 percent increase in Might that he received when he was younger. That would have all but ensured that he could wreak havoc within enemy lines like a fox in a hen house. His base Might was at 1200 flat now, so just a hundred percent increase would boost him by another 1200, on top of the boons from qi reinforcement, perfect magic power application, his soul armament, and his [Beast Gate].
In total, he would have expected at least a Might of 4800. Even if that Prince Axion guy was strangely strong, Reivan could have flattened him with his boot or blown him away with a fart.
But instead, during the raids, his [Intent] only boosted him up by five percent. And against Axion and countless imperial vanguards, it had only boosted him up by a measly ten percent.
Reivan couldn't help but admit that he felt a little cheated.
Sure, nowhere in the sub-skill's description did it mention that he'd get any buffs to his physique at all, yet it still happened. But growing up, he was really counting on that boon. And now he finally realized that he would have to go on with life without it.
"Ah." Reivan was snapped out of his thoughts when his tunic was thrown at his face. It seemed his wife was done examining his half-naked body, so he promptly put it on. When his head popped out, he saw that she'd walked over to the window. "See something?"
Helen shook her head. "No. I'm just wondering what we're going to do from here on."
"The imperial army is retreating, so we can either keep on harassing them or just let them. Those are pretty much our only options."
Reivan leaned back in his chair as he thought about what happened after his not-so-smooth dip into the enemy camp.
Though he had successfully extracted hundreds of captive Arkhanian women, there were undoubtedly a few that he missed. It was unfortunate, but he could only give up on them. The only silver lining was how the hostages' low numbers meant the empire likely didn't see them as leverage for negotiations. Yes, their situation was still dire and probably lethal. But at least they wouldn't be publicly defiled or tortured just to put on a show for the empire's enemies.
Just as he'd heard when eavesdropping on Axion's meeting with some other imperial bigwigs that day, the army no longer had the necessary supplies to continue their assault. This was not only because they hadn't expected knights to appear so quickly, and hence weren't prepared, but also because a significant portion of their supplies were blown to kingdom come in Samsara's initial raid.
An army demands a staggering amount of resources, especially when marching from place to place. For the imperial army that had numbered close to a million people at the start, the required supplies were mind-boggling.
To put it into perspective, the average adult consumes two liters of water per day. This, of course, can change depending on various circumstances, like whether the individual is performing strenuous tasks or working under intense heat where they sweat a lot. The imperial soldiers were marching in areas with blistering weather, so they would need to consume even more water. But for simplicity's sake, two liters was a good baseline.
The imperial army had close to a million people at the start.
Which meant they consumed two million liters of water per day. That was more than two thousand tons worth of water, down the drain every single day. For the most part, they had to carry that with them because locally sourcing that in Arkhan's current state was impossible—small bodies of water had dried up, while the ones that avoided that fate were contaminated by ash. With how long they had been marching, the imperial army was like a massive sponge that soaked up a ridiculous amount of water. One could produce a lot of it through elementalism, and the empire certainly had a few, but only an Ascendant with the [Water] affinity could produce that much water for that many people.
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If it were just mortals, hundreds of water elementalists would need to exhaust themselves every single day. And Reivan was sure that the empire didn't have many with elemental affinities. Some abnormally powerful ones might be able to do the work of dozens, but that seemed farfetched. Perhaps enchanted artifacts were in play as to how they managed to sustain their army, but that wasn't the point.
That was just water.
Food naturally had to be taken into consideration. Additionally, long marches were cruel to footwear, so the army had to prepare plenty of replacements, though soldiers usually kept these on themselves rather than pool them together as they do with food. Spare weapons too, would have to be brought along—especially because the empire's warriors really liked chucking their weapons at the enemy.
Sir Xander had blown up various supplies that would have sustained the million-man army for months. It was a staggering amount, and if it had happened to Reivan, he would have cried at the effort wasted to gather it all. The imperial army could have kept on going if they had secure supply lines to receive additional rations from their allies up north, but they probably didn't have enough to protect a relief convoy from two hundred raiding knights.
No matter how much the empire had in their secret stash and no matter how much they managed to salvage from the explosions, they could not continue the march southward.
That was why they were retreating.
'That piece of shit wanted to blackmail me using the hostages and my reputation... Good riddance.'
Reivan sneered to himself, remembering Axion's plans to force him to choose between a good reputation among the populace or a bad one. Because he'd taken the risk of infiltrating the enemy camp, he no longer had to choose, but it would have been troubling if he hadn't. Loathe as he was to admit, but Reivan would have moved exactly as the imperial prince predicted.
The few hundred thousand Argonian peasants with mundane strength that his current forces could take out by hounding the army weren't worth the potentially perpetual hit to his budding regime's reputation. Axion had been correct in that a hundred thousand peasants wouldn't change the result of the war. Even if a few thousand legionaries and hundreds of imperial vanguards accompanied them to the afterlife, it still wouldn't be fruitful.
'The avoidance of loss matters more to the majority of people than the prospect of gain, huh...?'
Reivan didn't know whether Axion came up with the concept or heard it somewhere else, but he felt bitter about admitting that he was included in the "majority of people". He would much rather keep all the family members he had right now than risk any one of them for the chance to gain two more. In a way, that sounded like he was against childbirth, because of how it risked a woman's life to birth another. But with recent advancements and the help of Sormon Priests, giving birth had become a much less risky affair—he was all for it, even though he knew that he would be extremely anxious when it came time for one of his wives to give birth.
In any case, because the imperial army didn't have any hostages anymore, they couldn't do shit. And Samsara's strike force could openly carve away at them as the Argonians tucked their tails between their legs in retreat.
"Hm?" Reivan raised a brow when he noticed that Helen wasn't looking out the window anymore.
When he followed her gaze, he found a pair of children's shoes. From the ribbon-like designs on it, the pair was obviously for a girl. Children varied greatly, so he couldn't quite tell what age they were meant for, but he was sure the girl who left it in this abandoned house wasn't older than ten.
Reivan couldn't help but wonder where that child was right now, though he could think of a couple of places. Naturally, he wanted to think that she managed to escape to somewhere safe and somehow ended up in Lageton.
But more likely than not, she was in chains somewhere on the way to Argonia.
Some innocent girl, one that he didn't know and likely never would, was in chains somewhere in the world. Reivan had long convinced himself that his own family lay above the rest of the world in importance, but that didn't mean that he wanted everyone else to suffer. As long as they weren't enemies or in the way of his interests, then he wasn't stingy with kindness. He didn't think so, at least.
And so, thinking about the faceless little girl who owned the shoes that lay forsaken in this abandoned house, Reivan felt something bubbling up from within him.
'I think I fucking hate Argonians...'
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Even though his arm wasn't in tip-top condition yet, Reivan still wanted to join up in the mini-war council after every raid. It kept him abreast of how absolutely fucked the imperial army was. And he was kind of the leader here, so it'd look bad if he didn't show up. None of the people around him could ever betray Aizen and its interests because they'd all taken a binding oath, but he didn't want to give them a reason to disdain the royal family—no matter how small it was.
In an abandoned casino, Reivan and his officers sat around a circular table decorated with green velvet.
"The Argonians have released the homunculi after extracting the supplies hidden within them," Gwen announced. "The actual army is in full retreat, expecting the homunculi to slow us down."
Reivan had initially thought that the Argonians had supplies hidden away in a bunch of spatial storage artifacts, but he'd been wrong. When Samsara's forces struck to bail him out of an overstayed welcome, the knights were forced to face off against a few homunculi, which was unavoidable because the army literally placed them all around the army's camp to help absorb pressure from the knights. In raids before that, they had avoided engaging homunculi because the motherfuckers were just far too hard to kill.
The essence of a raid was swiftness, so getting bogged down trying to finish off a giant monster wasn't optimal.
That wasn't the case when the knights were trying to dive as deep into enemy lines as possible to rescue him and secure the hostages—which he'd already saved by then, but it's the thought that counts. One of the dead homunculi had part of its stomach cut open, and everyone on the scene was surprised to discover crates of food, barrels of water, and all manner of war supplies tumbling out. Killing a bunch of other homunculi revealed that the first incident wasn't a unique case; the imperial army really had been stuffing the giant monsters with their equipment.
Such a thing had never been heard of before, so even Gwen looked flummoxed. Sir Gregory was a veteran too, and he also mentioned that this was the first time Argonia made use of homunculi this way.
Everyone on Samsara's side agreed that it was a stroke of genius.
Homunculi were artificial life forms and were just imitations of life. Sure, they had flesh and bones like normal biological creatures did. But their insides weren't similar. The internals of humans and most animals were stuffed full of all sorts of organs, compactly arranged inside their bodies. If you shot a man anywhere, you were most likely going to hit something other than skin and muscle. It may not always be lethal, but something would get hit.
That, evidently, wasn't the case for homunculi. They had a surprising amount of hollow space inside, which mostly contained some kind of gas that they ignited as a form of attack or to self-destruct.
'This has apparently been known for a long time, so it's honestly more surprising that someone only thought of this now.'
But then again, storing foodstuffs in a monster's gas chamber didn't seem like a good idea. Or maybe something else was different now. Were the crates airtight or something? Maybe they had all the gas aired out?
Reivan had a lot of questions, but what mattered was how they had to target the homunculi. Those monsters had all the army's food, after all. Samsara's strike force had been targetting the hundred or so homunculi, and they'd managed to take down twelve so far while avoiding permanent casualties and extended engagements.
"We should intensify the hunt for those things." Sir Gregory propositioned, sweeping back his somewhat haggard black hair. They had all been unable to properly bathe or take care of themselves for more than a week now. "Or at least the ones headed southward. We can just let the ones that loiter north be. They'll wreak havoc in Argonia-controlled territories."
"Just leave it to me and my people," Sir Vino the warbeast said as he drummed his fingers on the table. "Those... homunculi, they were called, have soft flesh. Our strength will make mincemeat of those ugly things. Also, us warbeasts are born hunters. We'll get this job done fast."
Gregory, House Mercer's representative, shook his head. "Your strength is indeed worthy of note, but mobility is key here. Homunculi are so big that there's no need for tracking skills. Not when every footfall creates a crater."
Gwendolyn cleared her throat, inserting herself into their conversation before it became heated. "Gentlemen, if it's mobility, then the darkin would be more fit for the job of hunting them down."
Neither Gregory nor Vino had any rebuttals to that. And the spars they had with the darkin already put to rest any doubts on the winged women's power.
"That's settled, then." Reivan smiled as he looked upon the scene. "Then the rest of us will return to Lageton."
Helen raised a brow as she turned to him. "We aren't continuing the assault on the imperial army?"
"It'd be a waste of time." He shook his head. "Continuing to whittle down their numbers piecemeal like we're doing now isn't going to matter much considering how they can just replenish their forces once they get back home. It would be one thing if they were headed for our territory, but they're retreating now. We have other matters to take care of, though I really would have liked to take that Axion's head myself..."
After he prompted her with his gaze, Gwendolyn progressed the discussion. "Samsara's next agenda is to rescue a group of golem engineers called The Golden Gear in a secret base somewhere in Southwestern Arkhan. Lady Jiji should have the necessities ready by the time we return. And by that time, Sir... Uhm, Sir Zee will have revived, so we can deposit the rescued captives in Lageton."
Reivan held back his amusement at how Zouros just got addressed like a knight would. His serpentine comrade didn't have a gender nor did it have an official title as far as Aizen was concerned, so a lot of people who knew of Zouros' existence didn't really know how to refer to the serpent. It was a guilty pleasure for Reivan to discover what other people came up with. Seriously though, they could have just called him "Zouros" and been done with it, but calling a respected work colleague with just their name was a cultural faux pas in the kingdom unless you were extremely close.
"And who will come on this mission?" Helen asked aloud, but her gaze toward him practically spelled out her intention to go if he was going too.
"The Hierarch will stay in Lageton, as this is not a difficult mission," Gwen answered in his stead. "The Mercers and Terracattas as well. Most of the people going will be battlemages and Arkhanians. The initial plan was to go by ship along the southern coast, with the darkin offering aerial support if needed. But the darkin are perfect for hunting down the unleashed homunculi, so I will go with a few knights to make sure everything goes smoothly. We've likely received reinforcements from the motherland, so there's no need to worry about security against Lava Demons."
Reivan hummed in thought as he scratched his chin, which was frustratingly hairless despite him being literally part beast. He recalled that Axion mentioned other coalitions, and that one such coalition was about to completely conquer the south.
'Hm... This doesn't really feel like the time to step back...'
After a bit of thought, he tapped the table to get everyone's attention. "There's a risk that the location we're headed to is already compromised, or we'll have to protect the engineers from imperial forces. So change of plans—I'm going. Sir Gregory and Sir Vino, I'll leave the swift eradication of the homunculi to you and your knights. Afterward, you are to reconvene with Lageton's forces to bolster its defense. Lava Demons are still popping up, presumably because of those imperial bastards."
Reivan then gestured at Gwen. "Gwen, you'll stay in Lageton and make sure it doesn't burn down while I'm away. I trust you. And it goes without saying, but I only want the strongest battlemages on those ships. I'm going to flip a lid if I find a gaggle of young ladies with zero experience but with intentions of seducing me. This is a serious matter. I want serious people on board."
She bowed her head. "Understood. I'll make sure to communicate your intentions with Lady Jiji and have the Tower warned not to mix possible marriage candidates into the expedition."
"I will take as much of the reinforcements with me and only leave the bare minimum for defense but I will leave behind the darkin." Reivan continued. "Once Sir Vino and Sir Gregory finish with their duties and return, it should be fine. At that point, the darkin forces are to chase after the ships while flying at low altitudes. They're faster than sky arks so they'll catch up easily. I want them with me for whatever happens. Understood?"
This time, Gwen, Sir Vino, and Sir Gregory all answered in unison. ""Understood, Your Excellency.""
'Ugh... Yeah, that's gonna get some getting used to. I'm so used to highness, that anything else sounds weird...'
Reivan grunted as he remembered something. "Helen, you'll come too. Because you'll come even if I tell you not to."
"Mhm." She smiled and nodded. "Understood."
'Goddamnit. My wife's gorgeous.'
They were in a really serious discussion, so he wanted to maintain a rigid countenance. But who could blame him when his lovely wife was like this? He was a newlywed, for crying out loud.
Ending the discussion before he started grinning like an idiot, Reivan stood up and saluted the Aizenian way—the way they were all used to.
"Good luck on the next battlefield, ladies and gentlemen."
As he said so, he contemplated making up a new way for Samsara's forces to salute. If it got too difficult, he could just plagiarize it from one of his favorite manga or stories.