Collin liked to think himself a veteran. He probably wasn’t, being fair, even his father’s Rangers only ever accepted that denotion after their fifth battle, not their second. Still, two was two more than most men fought, and two more than a great deal of soldiers survived. If nothing else, Collin had considered himself a man inured to the shock and horror of seeing undead roam about a battlefield. He had, after all, fought them often enough.
Silenos Shaiagrazni taught him differently.
There wasn’t really a way of describing Collin’s contribution that made it even sound like he’d fought, because he really hadn’t. Oh he’d gotten a few bastards early on, put arrows in Knights and nobles and such, but he’d been made redundant around the first time one of those giant tentacled undead slammed into the enemy formations.
Not easy to break a shield wall, certainly not one made by veterans with hours of training and a shade of Vigour in their muscles. Collin had seen trebuchet boulders break against those overlocking slabs of wood without wounding the men beneath.
Shaiagrazni’s monster hadn’t even looked like it noticed them as it walked through the formation. Just lumbered over, broke it apart, then waddled off to find something more to kill. Collin had almost been too shocked to start headshotting officers before they reformed.
Then things had really kicked off.
Collin had heard tales from his father about his earliest battles, before he’d spent the time needed to train his Vigour up to its natural potential and enter that wide realm between unnoticeable superhumanity and the power of a Hero. He’d told of frantic, desperate, chaotic battles where every slight movement was a threat. Collin had never known one like that, he’d gone into his first fight with the strength of twenty men and the speed of a mantis. The flesh monsters had shown him a new empathy.
He ran around, screaming, swearing. Desperately changing directions wherever he saw a tendril about to impact or a building about to fall. At one point he gladly sprinted straight towards a ballista rather than face the rampage of a monster at his back, and barely survived the business.
By the time he was done, Collin had found himself thrust into a rather profound state of ego death. A sort of zen state, his consciousness ascending past the trappings of humanity. He was unshackled by greed or loathing, ambition or rage. All that was left was the primal, simple instincts of a rat, scurrying around and mindlessly fleeing from whatever had made the loudest noise most recently.
It kept him alive, if nothing else. That was a damn sight more than could be said for most of the enemy.
All told, Collin beheld the final butchery of it all with rather a heightened perspective. Nothing would empty a man’s mind- and his fucking bowels- quite as much as a fight he had no control over, and he’d never controlled one less than this. He watched as the giant, reanimated mountains of flesh tore apart the remnants of noble forces, raining blood down on the cobbled ground around them and striking Collin dumb with the brutality of it all.
Undead. He was fighting alongside undead. Collin waited for the disgust, the revulsion, the loathing. None of it came. He only smiled.
About time we use the Dark Lord’s tricks against him, here’s hoping I can see one of these grab a hold of that cock Venka.
For that matter, he was hoping he kept managing not to knife the things’ eyes out on reflex whenever they came within range. Old habits died hard.
Collin stepped in something, looked down, and realised it was someone. He couldn’t tell which bit of the man it had been, one bodypart looked rather the same as any other when they’d been squeezed into mulch. It made him feel plenty sick all the same. His gaze turned back to the battlefield, guts squirming with sickness, and Collin turned altogether. He started marching through the city.
There was no particular destination in his mind, anywhere would have done. Even a street caked in sewage was one caked in mashed up people.
Kaltan was growing used to revolutionary wars. It was a sorry state, but it was the state of Collin’s city. Its people had all taken cover with an almost practised organisation, and its streets were empty. He studied them as he moved.
Years ago, when his father first took power, the city had had much of its wealth redistributed, but the old trappings of aristocratic greed still remained. This close to the remaining noble’s homes, everything was still pristine, smooth and fucking expensive. Dangerous, too, for Collin. That much occurred to him only once he’d turned his first corner. Plenty of folks around this part of town would be all too happy to see his throat opened up.
Then again, he’d be even happier to open theirs. And if they were any good at killing, he reckoned they’d already have been popped by one of Shaiagrazni’s freaks. Collin kept walking.
Unfortunately, he found battle damage present as he moved. Sometimes a roof or wall stoved in by stray siege stones, sometimes impacted instead by someone doubtless thrown by one of Shaiagrazni’s monsters. In other places he saw sure signs that there had been deliberate looting and destruction, which tended to hit the wealthier areas whenever the city found itself washed by a great violence.
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Criminality liked cover, after all, and there were few forms of cover more effective than a fucking war happening elsewhere. Collin only hoped none of the younger ones had been hurt, child aristocrats were about the only kind he’d ever found himself caring for.
The streets warped, degrading as Collin moved. Kaltan’s class discrepancies were not so pronounced as they had been five years ago, and the differences of five years ago were shrivelled compared to what they’d been the decade earlier than that, but there was still a palpable change as Collin transitioned from the area of the rich to that of the mode modest income wielders. It was, he supposed, not to be helped. Probably the city would remain plagued by its economic parasites for another ten years, even fifty. Perhaps he’d still be fixing rather than maintaining it if he ever took over from his father.
Now there was a daunting thought. Give Collin a lot of bastards to poke holes in and he was at home, but he’d rather weather a few holes himself than run a bloody city.
Somewhere along the way Collin ended up turning towards the centre, towards the second of Kaltan’s noble districts. This one was rather more established, though now the crux of its military rather than its upper classes- it was for this reason that the site of his battle not thirty minutes earlier had been renovated so hastily and cobbled so lazily in the years since.
There was always something in the air of the city’s centre that soothed him. Something that promised a hard fight to any of the Dark Lord’s underlings, whatever numbers they came in. Collin wasn’t sure he could quite put his finger on it.
Ah, no, he could actually. Pitch. They kept plenty of the stuff in half-buried stores all over the place, just in case they were ever attacked and needed some boiling sludge to help give a hard fight. It reeked even when not burning.
Military life. It was simple, blunt. Easy. And every now and then it was a hot explosion of adrenaline, savagery and glory. Collin found his fingers twitching, despite the horror he’d just scampered away from. He really could have done with a proper fight, and sooner rather than later. General Venka ought to hurry.
In through the main gates of the castle, then along through its halls. Guards saluted and bowed, which Collin ignored, and his anticipation grew. The farther he grew physically from the carnage of Shaiagrazni’s magic, the more he was able to let its implications settle.
For decades the Dark Lord’s armies had been unbeatable. Possible to inconvenience, even delay, but never truly stop. They grew stronger with each victory, and needed only to swarm along the countryside for a few days, weeks or months to bolster their ranks with ever more shambling undead. But now that advantage belonged to the side of good as well.
The more he pondered it, the more Collin started to question the reluctance of using undead in the first place.
It was distasteful perhaps, in the same way that fucking a man’s corpse was distasteful, but if Collin could free a city by doing the latter he’d have made the choice without hesitation. What was a bit of posthumous dignity to the lives of millions?
Nothing at all.
Finally he reached his father’s office, not bothering to knock before he entered, and not surprised in the slightest by what he found within. King Galukar, it seemed, was in a particularly unpleasant mood. Perhaps one day Collin would discover such thing as an actually nice one in the man.
“-A murderous savage.” The King snarled, looming over Collin’s father by well over a foot. His eyes were like chips of flint, his jaw like a boulder. Finlay Baird did not flinch before them any more than Collin had ever seen him flinch before anything. One did not cow his father.
“I am an avenger.” The Governor replied. “The people I killed were all guilty of more murders than me, they simply used starvation as their weapon rather than knives and arrows.”
Galukar stared at him.
“And what of me, then. Am I guilty of murder by starvation?” There was a dangerous note to his voice, the sort that might have deterred most men from continuing. Most men, Collin supposed, did not know themselves to be an irreplaceable cog in a world-shaping alliance.
“That really depends.” His father shrugged. “I’d need to look more closely into your legislation.” It wasn’t lost on him, the rhetorical slant of Galukar’s questioning. Apparently it was lost on the King that he was talking to a man who’d act his past out all over again, and think nothing of it.
“And that’s where it all leads.” Galukar snarled. He was victorious sounding, despite his fury, as if some great point had been proven. “A way of doing things where any leader can be accused of murder, simply for making decisions about their nation.”
Collin’s father stared at him with every bit of the contempt his moronic answer called for.
“Yes.” He said, slowly, as if fearful the King would mishear. “That’s where it all leads. Leaders should be possible to accuse of murder. That’s a good thing. It means there’ll be a lot less murderous leaders in the world.”
It was clear by the way Galukar reared up and puffed his chest out that he had no intention of letting the conversation end there. Things like total, abject moral wrongness or utter logical vacancy had never stopped a King before. Collin tuned the man out, finding his interest quickly slipping from the debate. It was embarrassing to find, as he perused the rest of the room, that he’d entirely skipped over two additional presences.
Both he’d seen before, both in Silenos Shaiagrazni’s accommodations when he’d called on him. The first was a witty, pot-bellied young man of perhaps Collin’s age or older. He had the look of one who’d seen rather a lot more of the world than he’d grown used to all at once, and appeared to be doing his best to sink into a wall. Beside him was a woman of darker skin even than Shaiagrazni himself, cyan eyes glowing with loathing as she studied the Governor and King.
Neither one was a person Collin felt much kinship with, but the latter had his blood boiling. He’d asked his father about her, who in turn had asked Shaiagrazni, and eventually managed to learn that she was one of the Dark Lord’s most trusted lieutenants. Sphera, a Necromancer. Specialising in subterfuge and sabotage, she’d probably killed as many people inadvertently as King Galukar had with a sword stroke. And not one actually deserving, he’d wager.
There were more productive things to do than walk across the room and headbutt her in the mouth, but God if it wasn’t tempting. Collin noted it down on the “maybe” list for later consideration, depending on how bored he got, and how quickly.
“You’re both stupid.” A new voice rang out, and all eyes turned to behold the sight of Silenos Shaiagrazni himself as he stepped into the room. It felt wrong to see him so unchanged, after the devastation he’d wrought.