The red moon cast ominous shadows on Sara’s skin when she awoke. Unlike most days, Tilly and Reck didn’t wake her. They were snuggled close to her head, still dreaming little leeta dreams, enjoying their slumber. It was peaceful—a rarity in the life of Lady Reece. The last month, in particular, training the heroes, was stressful and sensitive. So getting rest was welcome.

Without overthinking, she glided out of bed and looked out the window. From the vantage point, she could see Lemora, tall and proud, with large cathedral-esque buildings and tiny shops. It looked like it was asleep, but she knew that bakers were up, kneading loaves while farmers milked animals and prepared for the last harvest of the year. Winter was coming, and with it, a slowdown of everything to come.

When? Sara thought—when were they going to attack? She didn’t know. All she knew was that war moved slowly, but it came sooner than expected.

Reck reeahed on the bed.

“Don’t make me bathe you.”

He put his head down.

Sara smiled and petted his long, furry ears. “I’d burn down a kingdom for you,” she said lovingly. “Do you know that?” Reck reeahed, and Tilly stretched her limbs, waiting for her compliments. “And I’ll destroy Dantal for you,” Sara said. Tilly purred. “Love you guys.”

After a cute hug, Sara destroyed all positive emotions in her life by working on her body constitution. Body constitutions were mana circulation techniques that wired the brain and body’s healing system to build a new body. It created a blueprint, and when a person’s body healed, it followed the new structure instead of the current one. The problem with body constitutions was that if a person’s bone structure didn’t align with the constitution blueprint, they had to break their bones uniformly. It was a risky type of magic that required considerable resources to do evenly, but Sara had everything she needed.

Sara drew a bath with water magic and added Tresa Root, also known as bone break. It was a substance that rapidly made bones brittle to the point of cracking. Then she dipped her right leg into the water slowly, soaking it. At first, it felt relaxing—

—but her mind soon gave way to panic when her joints started popping, and her bone marrow ached.

“This is the worst,” Sara said, but she sat still in the water for another hour before pulling her leg out—and that’s when the horror began. As if an earthquake had occurred, simply sitting up made her leg fracture into deep fault lines. “Son of a bitch!” She immediately lifted her hands and started chanting, healing her leg. Yet it felt like it would turn to dust. “Why the hell’s this so…. God.” Something was wrong. The amount she used shouldn’t cause serious damage, but her bones were breaking apart like a sand castle. “I should call Emma….”

Sara could survive this alone… but she didn’t need to anymore. Not in this life. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath.

“Get Lady Cole!” Sara yelled.

The guards protecting her door responded and rushed away with panicked steps.

“Fuck me,” Sara thought with shame as she looked at her leg, which was bending like a full jello cup that had tipped onto its side and was slowly oozing out with the weight of gravity.

2

Sara sighed as she limped to the training grounds with Emma next to her. The redhead was huffing as she examined the limp.

“You’re making me look incompetent,” Emma pouted.

“It’s because the bone’s longer,” Sara winced. “The fact that I’m walking proves that you’re a miracle worker.” The leg she healed was in its ‘perfect’ form, fully aligning with her body constitution’s blueprint. Now, it was exponentially stronger, smoother, and taller. Yet that only caused her groin to stretch every time she stepped with her left foot at an angle, and her hip felt like it was ready to pop.

“Why would you even do this alone?” Emma frowned.

“It was an accident,” Sara said.

“How is this an accident?”

“The last time I did it, I did deep bone temperings,” Sara explained. “I didn’t do that this time because I was just planning to break them. I didn’t account for that when I measured the Tresa Root.”

Emma puffed out her cheeks and then looked at Sara’s limp with pity. “When can we do the other leg?”

Sara prepared to decline and say that she’d adjust the amount of Tresa Root, but she didn’t know how long it would take for her left leg to become uniform with her right. The process should’ve taken weeks, not a morning. “When are you available?” she asked.

“I’ll make time,” Emma said.

“Tonight?” Sara asked.

“After this morning?” Emma looked confused, and that was natural. Sara was screaming on the ground an had an hour ago, holding her leg in place like it was a water balloon, genuinely wondering if Emma could fix it. Doing that twice on the same day felt insane. Yet she just wanted to get it over with and walk straight again.

“Yeah,” Sara said.

“We’ll do it in a few days,” Emma said.

“Okay.” Sara continued limping for a few minutes in silence before looking over at Emma, whose face was gaunt and rife with evidence of sleep deprivation. Her eyes had deep bags that color corrector and concealer would struggle to hide.

“How are the dreams?” Sara asked.

Emma swallowed hard. “What dreams?”

Sara didn’t answer; she offered instead. “Mine are terrible,” she said. “I don’t shoot awake anymore. The moment I realize it’s a dream, I just go back to feeling numb. But it wasn’t always that way.”

Emma’s eyes widened, and she turned to her, listening with rapt attention.

Sara sighed and looked into the distance through the thicket, seeing the start of a meadow and the outline of buildings. There was also an ambient, drowning sound of a river in the distance, soft yet immersive like the sound of grasshoppers in a dead field.

“Bad experiences are like tattoos,” Sara said. “The first one really stands out because you can still see your healthy skin around it. But….” Sara closed her eyes. “Eventually, once they stack up, the healthy parts slowly disappear.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Emma paused, and tears welled in her eyes. “So it won’t ever heal?” She wiped her eyes with her forearm, surprised when she saw her arm glazed with glistening liquid. “Sorry.”

Sara shook her head. “No, it doesn’t heal, but….”

Emma looked up at her with puffy eyes.

“… when your mind’s tattooed, bad things can’t hurt you anymore,” Sara said. “You can see people die, and it doesn’t traumatize you. You can lose people, and it won’t keep you in bed for a month. It’s awful, but….” She swallowed. “It makes you stronger.”

“That….” Emma laughed caustically. “That sounds awful!”

Sara looked at the ground and leaned against a tree for a moment, taking deep breaths. Then she looked Emma in the eye. “What other choice do we have?”

Emma’s eyes widened.

“We don’t have one,” Sara whispered. “If you think this is bad—wait until you see Drantal.” She paused. “The things there…. You need tattoos before you get there. Because you don’t want those ones to stand out.”

Emma trembled and gripped her forearms, hugged her chest, and then released her arms, turned away, and then turned back, uncomfortable no matter where she was.

“Come on,” Sara said. “There isn’t much time.”

3

Training had progressed beyond Sara’s expectations. Will had become proficient with sharpening arrays, and Andy was leading Darius and Wiles in building bridges with earth magic. Will summoned the earth magic to create the bridge while Darius worked to create the array. They could make the array work, but the problem was that when Will created the bridge by lifting the ground in the water, the water from the river flooded over the top and sides. Then, they couldn’t finish the array, and Sara always needed to destroy the bridge to prevent the whole area from flooding.

The team was getting creative, though. They had started creating large walls of earth and stone and toppled them over the river so the water continued to pass through. That was the best solution so far, but removing the dirt and rock from the ground destabilized the area and caused the river to snake. That caused problems of its own, so Andy kept shaking his head and going back to square one. Yet they were progressing quickly and learning the ins and outs of problem-solving. It was major progress.

Emily was already in the medical tent, healing citizens with heroes who decided to join when they realized that they wouldn’t have to fight. She was slowly becoming accustomed to dealing with twenty people at once and learning how to prioritize and pace herself. Things were going well.

As for the mages, they were still doing mana manipulation exercises, but last week, when she let them use magic—and they saw the profound difference—they restarted their training with new vigor. They were growing powerful.

Raul walked up to her and looked at her leg before looking at the other heroes. “When do you think they’ll attack?”

“This week,” Sara said.

Raul whirled to her. “This week?”

Sara chuckled and shook her head. “What do you think war is? Battles?” She looked at Helen—Andy’s partner—who was watching from the sidelines. It was her day to watch and learn. Then, she’d report Sara’s teachings to the dissidents, who trained alone. “There are many ways to wage war.”

“I see….” Raul said. “I’ll keep my eyes open.”

“Please do.”

He walked away, leaving Sara to watch Helen. Her relationship with Andy made her neutral toward Sara, but her crowd wasn’t. The dissidents had created a tribal us versus them approach, and they were becoming unstable. They were only held together by Tara’s prudent leadership. She was a firm dissident, but she focused on a wait-and-see approach. Yet some of the others were becoming restless, and their faction was splitting in half, one for Tara and the moderates and another with the hardliners. It wouldn’t hold long.

Sara looked to Andy, who was proving a competent leader, and then at Helen. If Helen became her enemy, Andy would be forced to choose between them, causing a rift between the groups. It could turn nasty quickly.

Choose carefully, Sara silently warned Helen. Then she turned back to the heroes, praying that the bonds she was forming would survive the impending fallout—and wouldn’t leave deep scars.

4

King Lemings sat at a table with King Quell and Queen Markon in his council chambers. The atmosphere was grave. King Quell drummed his fingers against the table. Queen Markon tried to finish her glass of wine, but when the king rapped all of his digits against the wood table, she slammed her glass down. “Can you stop?”

“I will if you stop drinking the wine,” King Quell sneered. The overweight man had chubby cheeks and a temper that was running thin.

“It’s already gone.” Queen Markon finished her glass and pushed it toward him. It was a bold gesture that had no excuse. The thin, gaunt monarch lived on wine rather than meat. That was clear by her lucid speech patterns despite having two empty bottles of helshma in front of her. That tolerance proved that she wasn’t drunk—she was just unbearable by nature. “Now stop.”

King Quell slapped his hands on the table and tried to stand, but King Lemings stood first. “Stop this…..” His face scrunched in, trying to maintain tact. “Bickering. We’re here to discuss war, not….” He sat down and shook his head, leaving the rest unsaid.

“Yes, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing,” Queen Markon said.

“What do you want from me?” King Lemings asked. “I’m not—“

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. “It’s me,” a teenager said.

“Finally.” King Lemings opened the door, and his grandson strode into the room, sitting at the table without introduction. It was so brazen that the king looked at the young boy with his mouth open and his eyes narrowed. “Can you explain why you’re three hours late?”

Halter snorted. “Forgive me, Grandfather. I forgot to bring my silver glider.”

King Lemings’s face scrunched in, and he almost backhanded the boy for his sarcasm. The border was closed, and if Halter traveled openly, Lady Reece’s troops would shoot him down. There was no trial for a bastard prince—only death. The precariousness of Halter’s traveling was the only reason that King Lemings hadn’t beaten the boy senseless.

“Why didn’t you leave sooner?” Queen Markon asked.

Halter looked away and took a deep breath. “Do any of you understand the severity of what we’re facing?”

“Don’t speak of us as if you have our backing,” King Quell warned.

“Then die alone,” Halter said.

King Lemings took a sharp breath. “Say one more word—“

“Listen!” Halter yelled. “The people we’re fighting aren’t from this world.”

“Wait… what?” King Lemings asked sharply.

“Father summoned people from another world.”

Queen Markon furrowed her brow. “Why would he—“

“To obtain pure cores,” Halter said.

The atmosphere turned deathly still.

“You get it now?” Halter asked. “He was a fool, but it doesn’t change the fact. There’s over twenty of these people, and they’ll all be stronger than your prized fighters. Lady Reece fought General Sullsburg in her first month here. It’s been two years.”

King Lemings closed his eyes and took deep breaths. He couldn’t believe that King Escar had summoned weapons from another world and had not shared it with his blood allies. The man was treacherous, and his son was worthy of death. Yet… the direness of the situation was beyond his imagination.

King Lemings looked Halter in the eye. “Are any of them as powerful as Lady Reece?”

“No,” Halter said. “Lady Reece is on a different level entirely. My father believed she was a prophet. Now, we have reason to believe she’s from the future. Either way, she’s a threat that must be dealt with immediately.”

King Lemings looked at the other monarchs.

“If it’s true, we must act at once,” King Quell said decisively.

“Can they be swayed?” Queen Markon asked.

“They can,” Halter smiled thinly. “I just made contact with them. There’s a group that’s dissatisfied. We believe we can bring them to our side.”

“Then do it,” King Lemings ordered. “And do not withhold information. The rest of us will deal with Lady Reece.”

“With whose army?” King Quell asked. “If she is that powerful, it won’t be mine.”

King Lemings clenched his fists. “We won’t face her head-on,” he said. “We’ll lead her away and then attack. Divide and conquer, just like it’s always been. But it’ll only work if we strike as one.”

Queen Markon rolled her eyes but pondered it before saying. “When?”

“Spring,” King Lemings said.

“Spring? Are you mad?” King Quell asked.

“We’ll be unprepared, but so will they,” King Lemings said. “They’re still dealing with a revolution.”

“That’s a fair point.” Queen Markon grabbed her wine glass and spun it in her hand over and over and over before stopping. “You can count on our support.”

King Quell sneered at Halter before turning to King Lemings. “With conditions.”

“We’ll discuss them later,” King Lemings said. Then he turned to Halter with a warning gaze. “Take that tone with us again, and Alecov will remain king.”

Halter looked at the other monarchs. They were staring at him murderously. “Understood,” he said hesitantly.

King Lemings nodded and got approval. “Bring them to our side,” he ordered Halter. “Whatever the cost, we’ll pay it. Resources. Wealth. Status. Land. Just make it happen.”

Halter nodded. “Yes, Grandfather.”

5

A light knock on Tara’s door woke her from her sleep that night. If she understood the implications of their visit, she would’ve never answered.