I was on my feet the second that the dawn sun peeked over the horizon, pacing back and forth a mile or so away from the waterfront. Strategy would dictate that I should probably try to take them as they forded so that they would have a harder time with mobility, but that raised a whole other issue of political ramifications– they wouldn’t have technically crossed the border yet– and besides, it felt cheap. Not to mention it would poison the water supply.

The pacing probably looked anxious; wasn’t the best impression to be sending to the enemy forces if I was still hoping to get some deserters, but no one was likely to run once the first sun had risen anyway, and I had too much energy to sit still any longer.

There was really nothing quite like a battle, and it had been a while since so much had been on the line. I had forgotten how much stronger the rush of adrenaline was when there was a real possibility of things going wrong, of bad consequences. I had forgotten what responsibility tasted like.

It was still some time before I saw movement in the camp across the river, and even longer after that before the movement started to be in my general direction. It would probably be hours yet before they actually made it into Ildanach territory– moving that many soldiers was no easy feat. As I kept watching, however, I noticed something odd– only the Aeron flags were moving. Only the Aeron banners swayed, only the Aeron armor was coming towards me; the Tirnaog emblems were staying right were they were, stationary on that side of the river.

I almost laughed aloud. General Coyle had taken my words to heart– he wasn’t going to let himself be beat by me twice. I could imagine the conversation that had been held, with Seria screaming at him to mobilize his troops and his simple answer.

“If you are as good as you say, you’ll beat him easily. He is, after all, one man. Once he is gone, we will happily join you on the other side of the river to live up to our bargain and to continue our conquest of Ildanach,” leaving fully unspoken the “however,” and the flip side– if she and her army lost to one man, no one would blame him for having had the wisdom to see the incompetence of her troops and see to it that he didn’t lose any men over it. He saved face either way.

And either way, I was facing approximately half of the number of soldiers that I had been the day previously.

Of course, that number was still hundreds against one, but everything was looking a little brighter anyway.

The fording had begun midmorning, and several hours later approximately half of the Aeron troops had slogged their way through the rushing river, taking a great deal of care with specific weapons that could be damaged by the water flow.

I approached with weapons sheathed but was of course immediately met by wet and frightened soldiers pointing their rifles at me as I grew closer. I held my hands up. “I’m just here to talk to Lady Seria again.”

“I told you it was General,” she spat, storming out of the ranks of her men to face me, seething. Either something was going very poorly with the fording, or Coyle had had some extra words for her that I hadn’t included in my mental rendition.

“And I told you how I felt about that title,” I said chipperly. “Everything alright?”

Seria scowled at me very deeply. “Everything is fine,” she hissed, “although it will be notably better when I have your head on a pike.”

“I feel like a lot of people’s days would improve,” I agreed casually. “What if I offer you one last chance? You face me– or send a challenger, I don’t really care. One-on-one combat, all the enhancements you want. If you win, I’m dead. If not, you turn around.”

“Or I could kill you right now, and no one would ever be the wiser on whether or not it was on or off the battlefield.” Seria glared down at me, the armor giving her a fairly decent height advantage, hand straying to the heavy laser gun at her side, similar to the kind Hector used. They had a tendency to shatter all shields and blow people into too many pieces to count, disliked for the general lack of identifiability of the bodies they left behind.

“Act of cowardice in front of your men, though,” I pointed out in a low tone.

There was a long moment, and her hand remained firmly on the handle of her gun. Finally, though, she removed it and straightened. “Unless you are here to surrender, I suggest you remove yourself from my camp,” Seria informed me tightly.

“I’m trying to save the lives of your men,” I tried one last time.

“Get out!”

Holding my hands up in surrender of the conversation, I sighed and headed back to my waiting place a little further away, waiting patiently for the rest of the army to make it across the river, waiting for them to organize and set themselves up in their neat little lines.

As they started putting what looked to be the finishing touches on their advancement intent, I started glowing very faintly. It wasn’t enough to be terribly noticeable, although in a short amount of time, the violet, sparking Rift energy that was leaking off of me built up under my coat as a form of smoke and started branching out behind me, as though I had a train. My swords crackled with their normal energy, but this was far more than that, the energy releasing off of me in waves– not heavy enough that it couldn’t be from sliver enhancements, but far more than my normal energy usage.

Thanks, I said, curtly, to my silent benefactor. Anything additional from my swords was the kind of thing for which I would normally need Teris in proximity. My demon companion was making an exception, and I did appreciate it.

He didn’t deign to respond.

Still, I stood and waited.

The soldiers shuffled nervously at the appearance change. It may not have been at a greater output level than a riftslivers could handle, but it was distinctly different. Slivers didn’t impact the surroundings outside of that which was directly connected to them; they didn’t generate auras.

It wasn’t going to dissuade them though. Nothing was going to turn Seria away, and, so, aside from some nervous shifting, the army remained. And then, finally, with all three suns in the sky beating down on us now, they started advancing towards me.

The biggest thing at the beginning was going to not let them get around me, not let them get behind me. That was the goal. With all the time that I’d had to sit and think about it, a person might have been inclined to think that I could have had a solution for that problem other than “just kill them really fast”, but I really hadn’t come up with anything. There was no terrain that could be used for an advantage, no naturally funneling location unless I could get them to follow me elsewhere, and I couldn’t do that. If I weren’t standing directly in their way, they had no reason to fight me.

So now the game was just to see how long I could keep them coming straight at me. Hopefully Seria would prove to be as incompetent as she was emotional, though I didn’t have a great deal of hope on that front either.

I unsheathed both blades and, when they were yet a few yards out, I started running into the army of hundreds, alone.

The surprise was palpable; more than a few people, probably including Seria, had likely assumed I had either been bluffing or somehow hiding reinforcements. The surprise bought me the seconds I needed to reach them, even gave me a few seconds to swing my blade around before they could get shields up.

It didn’t matter either way; the purely rift-enhanced blades sliced through everything– shields, armor, and flesh– like they were made of melted butter. I didn’t usually put so much energy on them, I didn’t usually radiate it around me as a crackling shield, but desperate times. Three soldiers fell in one strike, and then everything else faded away to just the dance.

I was startled rudely out of my narrowed focus when someone actually, successfully hit me.

I took a moment to fall back, somewhat surprised I had the room to do so, and assessed the battlefield. They had quite thoroughly surrounded me by this point, which was unfortunate if also expected. I was stepping on dead bodies as I backed away, and they let me, taking the moment to tighten the ring and regroup themselves. Seria was in the back, smiling at me smugly.

I glanced at my side, where someone had gotten a lucky hit with a laser and watched as it began to knit itself back together before turning my gaze to the field and looking up at the suns. Evening was approaching, but it wasn’t even close to nightfall yet. I gripped my blades tighter, the edges of them dripping with blood.

“How many men are you prepared to lose?” I called out over the army, looking directly at Seria, who was hiding again behind her armor. I pointedly nudged one of the small mounds of corpses next to me. I was pretty sure I’d killed over a hundred, and it made a more striking image with them all gathered around me like this also, since one person killing stacked infantry had a tendency to result in small pileups.

Seria didn’t answer; she only fired into the air, and the soldiers all rushed me at once, from every direction, weapons– mostly spears– crackling with energy.

There was nowhere to run.

So I jumped.

One of the advantages of lava armor was how heavy it was, how much stability it granted the wielder while also offering a strange weightlessness to the person inside. What no one really thought of when considering that advantage was how the bulk and stability could potentially be used to turn a person into a ladder.

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I landed on a soldier’s shoulders, who probably didn’t even register any weight due to the lava armor he wore, and then I just ran.

The soldiers were confused, they were unhappy, they were occasionally getting shot by their comrades as they aimed at me on top of them, and most of all, the ones in the middle were quite firmly stuck. The surprise didn’t quite carry me all the way to the end of the line, as the grouping became less dense the further out I got, so when I ran out of room to run, I jumped again and hit the ground in a roll, coming back up to my feet and spinning around.

They were all behind me now, and in a far less advantageous position than they had been when I had killed the first hundred. Seria was on the other side of the circle of unfortunately easy targets, and I didn’t need to be able to see her face to read the rage in every bit of her movement.

For the first time since the proper conflict had started, I smiled. I stopped fighting the enjoyment, the satisfaction, the smug knowledge that they were all going to die, and I was going to walk away unscathed. I’d given them ample opportunity to give up, and now this wasn’t about saving anyone anymore. This was about the slaughter.

The Rift energy around me grew even thicker, my swords not even needing to actually touch someone now before they started carving through their armor and flesh alike, and I walked back into the trapped and uncoordinated troops, falling back into the dance.

Aeron armor of dark red and light greens faded away in my mind’s eye to be replaced by black armor, decorated with a brown falcon, vanished altogether to be replaced by civilian clothes, tunics and dresses stained with blood. It didn’t matter; they all died the same.

Another hundred fell, and they pulled back slightly, regrouping. I let them, breathing heavily, most of me completely drenched in blood at this point, standing among the piles of the dead. They weren’t turning back though, of course not. I had decimated approximately a third of them singlehandedly, but that didn’t matter. It was still hundreds against one, and I had to be getting tired, my “riftslivers” that I was using had to be running low with the amount of energy I was exerting. It wasn’t enough.

The second sun was starting to set now, the first moon rising, the world getting noticeably darker as night began to fall, though the constant, ominous glow of the purple, crackling sky remained. They weren’t going to keep falling for the same tricks though. In fact, I watched as a couple of soldiers split off from the main group, not enough to be a second force, but a reasonable number for a squad of snipers. Long distance didn’t work with ordinary troops. It was hardly ever used, and it wasn’t efficient. But I was one man, and I clearly didn’t have time to set up my own sniper perch. It was a good move.

I waited, though, didn’t go after them to try to attack them before they made it anywhere, didn’t move from my position in the middle of the road to the Highcity.

Hadn’t it been long enough yet?

The army approached me again, and we engaged for the third time. They weren’t falling as quickly this time, though, taking just a few seconds longer per person, but that was the kind of thing that made all the difference in a battle like this.

The first sniper bolt missed, sizzled against one of the Aeron shields. The second one hit squarely in the back but dissolved against the shield of Rift energy that I had been emitting for quite some time. I wondered if they realized that they had broken through it once or how that had happened; I guessed they at least didn’t know the how when they didn’t immediately replicate the method. The third shot hit around my legs, and I started tuning it out for the problems directly in front of me. I’d worry about it when they hit me.

A second moon began to rise, and I was getting quite tired– not for sleep, exactly, but for rest. The stench of blood and death was so strong, coating me and my foes, coating the entire plains. I wondered if this place would ever feel quite the same again. Most armies weren’t this big, most fights between Houses were so much smaller. They had to be: conflict was too frequent to be sustainable otherwise. But this was a siege force, and they were dying in one location. That didn’t happen. Akuma had been the exception.

Very suddenly, I had to worry about the snipers– two bolts in quick succession, high powered, and both of them hitting the same approximate place just above my knee on the back of my right leg. The shield only stopped one, the second searing into my flesh through my coat and pants, sending pain lancing up my leg.

My dance faltered, leg nearly buckling for a moment, and then I grit my teeth and regained my footing, killing the next person in line as it began to heal, though not as quickly as the last injury.

If they had figured out why that had happened, I was in trouble, but it didn’t happen again immediately. More soldiers fell around me, but my movement was clumsier now, lacking in the full range and speed. They’d hit something important, and it was taking too long to fix. I needed my mobility, and I didn’t have it.

“Finish him!” Seria yelled, and the snipers redoubled fire while the rest started to surround me again, though not as tightly, having learned their lesson.

And then I heard them.

“You should have surrendered,” I called back, and Seria had just enough time to scoff before she saw them.

Then her troops saw them, and I was suddenly very unimportant to them.

Two Riftlings were racing across the plains at top speed from the crevice that had been slightly to the south of where we’d started. They appeared to have been bears once, but now they were the size of tanks, with black fur turned to stone, every crack in the “skin” filled with the sparking violet energy of the Rifts. Their eyes burned solidly purple, and they flickered as they ran, half running and half teleporting small distances as they approached.

The soldiers started running. No command had been issued, and no command could have possibly gotten them to stay. A singular Riftling could devastate a nation– they were demons, horrifying and brutal. The only reason civilization had been able to live at all was due to the fact that they couldn’t wander too far from one of the locationally fixed Rifts. Every Highlord had a map of where they were in their territory, but those maps weren’t shared, so usually the goal was to be in a fortified location come dark. Riftlings didn’t come out in the sunlight.

The Aeron Army hadn’t planned to be here this long, though, never thought for a second that I could forestall their advance until nightfall. It was even a little early for the beasts to be out, but the amount of Rift energy I was pouring off of me was as good as sending up a flare to them. They couldn’t not come; they were animals still, and they were drawn to it.

The battle got a lot less sporting, but the fact was, I couldn’t let them get away now– not all of them, anyway. The Riftlings needed something to fight, and I couldn’t let that something be me.

So I ran after them, along the side of the army, as fast as I could, quickly outpacing them with Rift energy still boosting my strength and speed, pouring energy that I had been putting into shields into my injured leg, not even necessarily to heal it– Rift energy wasn’t particularly good at that– but just to make it functional, to replace whatever was missing for the time being so that I could run.

The Riftlings fell upon the back end of the army as they fled, and screams started filling the air. When I reached the front, they didn’t stop, running directly into me with weapons raised, but they were panicked. There was no discipline anymore, and the slaughter was easy.

They couldn’t stop, but they were trapped with no where to go, caught between me and the monsters. Obviously, all those who had a choice continued to choose me. I didn’t blame them, but they didn’t stand a chance.

Seria was in the midst of her own troops, having lost her helmet somehow in the chaos, and I could see the pure terror in her eyes. They filled with rage again when she saw me, though, and she steeled herself as she approached, drawing her blade, the edges of it sparking to life with lavaslivers.

I let a few soldiers run past me, readying my blades and stance in all the chaos as she approached me.

“You’re a monster.”

“I did what I had to do.”

Seria cried out in sheer rage and attacked me.

She wasn’t sloppy, wasn’t unskilled, but there was a certain level of stiffness, a lack of ability to adapt. She was following the sword arts she had been taught to the letter, like someone whose military existence had consisted wholly of training.

It was almost regrettable how easy it was to disarm her and send her to her knees in front of me.

“Kill me,” she spat. “Or are you going to leave me to your pets? Demon!”

“You fought well,” I said simply and then removed her head with a single stroke.

The Riftlings were running after stragglers now, chasing them nearly up to the waterfront, and more died in the stream, though the Tirnaog troops on the other side were mobilizing to try to help anyone who made it into the river at least.

I took a breath and started the cleanup work, mopping up anyone who was still left on our side of the river, killing those who had only been left mostly dead by the Riftlings to end their suffering. The battle was over.

Very few of the Aeron troops had survived, based on what I could see across the river, and the Tirnaog soldiers looked both angry and deeply frightened. The Riftlings continued prowling the area, feeding on corpses occasionally, until the middle of the night. They saw me moving about the dead a few times; each time, I felt the demon in my mind a little stronger for a moment, and they never approached. I didn’t know how he was keeping them away, but I was grateful for it.

As the third moon rose, and the midnight sun, as Khane’s purely black moon was often called, sat prominently in the sky, the Riftlings finally ambled their way back towards their home.

I still wasn’t finished picking my way through their corpses though, and I was determined that I wouldn’t leave anyone out here to die of their injuries throughout the night in horrible agony if I could prevent it. I worked until dawn.

When I was through, I sat down on the bank of the river, not washing or cleaning the blood and gore from myself, but just sitting and waiting.

The soldiers across the river from me skittered away nervously when they saw me as the sun rose, but I continued to sit, waiting.

Eventually, General Coyle of Tirnaog approached the river line. “Do you intend to finish the job?”

“Do you intend to cross the river?”

“No,” he said very firmly. “We are done here.”

“Then I’m done here,” I echoed, standing slightly unsteadily, my leg aching. “I can tell my lord the ceasefire has been called?”

Coyle scoffed softly, looking at me like I was the most puzzling thing he’d seen in years. “You can,” he confirmed. “The men have begun calling you a demon, child of Khane.”

“I liked the Hand of Cyren better, but they can call me whatever they want,” I said with a shrug.

“Why don’t you have your own house by now? Why don’t you have… more than this?”

I sighed heavily. “Doesn’t it ever occur to any of you people that maybe I don’t want it?” I asked him blandly. “Go home, Coyle. You saved a lot of lives today. My advice if you wish to save more? Tell whoever will listen that it’s not worth it. Just let Ildanach go.”

“That’s not my call.”

“I know,” I sighed. “Safe travels, General.”

He looked at me for a beat. “Safe travels.”

I started slowly heading home.