Bannegurd’s thoughts were filled with the patch of forest nestled in a tiny valley high up in the peaks of his mountainhold home. Where he had learned to harness his class-less power.
Of tall pines with trunks thicker than a spire. Of pleasingly scented green boughs that dusted him with white powder. Of the crunch of fresh snowfall. Of the silence of deep winter.
Calm thoughts meant greater strength and he had never been calmer, nor had he ever been able to hold it for so long.
Finding and holding it in his center in the heat of battle had never been easy.
Not only did he have to fight his emotions, but his body.
Natural reactions… faster heart, faster breaths.
The fight affected all living things beyond their conscious ability to control.
And yet?
He fought long minutes past his record through the enemy fortified town with cooling crimson on his hands and splashed across his face.
His heart pounded thunder in his ears.
Thick plumes of white mist bloomed from his nose like an angry woolly trihorn.
A knife hand gored through an enemy warrior like said horn.
“Death’s Revenge Slash,” the warrior gurgled.
Enchanted steel shattered on Bannegurd’s forehead, leaving nothing but an angry welt.
He flicked the huge warrior off, knocking two others many meters down the street.
That Skill sounded like a Level 30, maybe even a Level 40.
He traced the line on his forehead.
“Already healing…”
Faster than before.
Something had changed.
And he didn’t understand.
The thought left him uncertain, which had never been good for his inner calm.
And yet?
His thoughts remained of the tall pines, the dusting of powder and the crunch underneath his feet.
His body remained shrunken down to the size of a youth. Not a boy anymore, but not yet a man.
Bannegurd leapt above the buildings.
His true fight was still ahead.
…
Lord Kelvinjo di’Astrea woke up to the blaring of the wall alarms.
He blinked.
His head felt heavy and muddled.
The thin book of Lord Superior’s adventures lay on his chest, crumpled.
He groaned.
“It’s a first printing.”
Oh, well, he just to buy another.
“Alarms, alarms… where?”
He rose and yelled at his magic orb on his desk.
It responded with a ghostly map of the town, showing the location of the alarms all across the southern wall.
Strange?
The barracks hadn’t yet called him to action.
Perhaps, they didn’t need him?
He was still sleepy. And cold… despite the fire.
“Huh?”
Only smoldering embers remained.
Hadn’t it just been roaring?
How long had he slept?
The frosted windows still showed darkness, but the fire looked as if it had burned all night.
It was hard to think, like he had spent hours at one of the taverns or brothels drinking with the common soldiery or an adventurer team. Descending to depths beneath him as his noble family’s matriarch and patriarch liked to warn against.
He eyed the bottle of wine on the tiny side table next to his reading lounge chair.
Not even half empty.
Regardless, it took an entire barrel to get him drunk.
He thought about going toward the alarms even without being asked.
As an Emperor’s Champion that was part of his duties.
But, then again, it was freezing outside and he absolutely hated being cold.
But, then again, again, he was an Emperor’s Champion and he need to be exemplary if he wanted any chance of getting his stupid exile commuted early.
“Needs must… wants…” He shook his head. “Why am I drunk? Eh? Probably those blue savages throwing shit at the walls.”
Not that he had ever seen them, let alone seen them doing that.
Perhaps, those had merely been taller tales told by the mercenaries and adventurers?
Then again, lesser beings did throw their shit.
The young lord willed his power to life.
Better than having a class as far as he was concerned.
White hot magma began to extrude from his pores, burning his expensive lounging clothes—
“Damn it to the underworld!”
He had forgotten to disrobe in his drunken state.
Steam filled his tiny house as the magma rapidly cooled into craggy, irregular black armor vaguely in the style of a knight from two hundred years ago. Thin cracks glowed red with his inner heat.
He cursed the blue barbarians for ruining his night off.
Then, his house exploded.
…
Wall, Emperor’s Champion, Wall.
Bannegurd punched through in that order.
The black-armored champion tumbled across the freshly fallen snow, digging a deep trench despite the frozen ground.
The armor burned Bannegurd’s fingers, but he held on to the collar, landed a blur of punches to the helmet before planting, spinning and hurling the champion through another wall into the barracks.
He moved too fast for the slow to rouse soldiers to react to as he grabbed the champion by the neck and groin to use as a battering ram into one of the larger buildings.
Soldiers tried to scatter as Bannegurd turned wood and brick into deadly projectiles.
Screams and blood showered down on him while he painted the champion’s steaming black armor red.
Seconds.
That was all it took to ram through the barracks and dozens of soldiers to emerge out the other side.
He raised the champion over his head and slammed him into the frozen ground sending a wave of snow scattering out in a circle like when he practiced tossing boulders larger than him into a pond.
He rained blows on the champion’s craggy black helm, driving his enemy deeper into the crater
Cracks appeared, glowing red hot.
The heat and strength of the armor hurt his knuckles, but his calm remained unaffected.
Chunks began to fall off the helmet, revealing eyes the color of the fire rivers deep beneath the mountains that provided warmth and power to the Holds.
The champion smiled, revealing the glowing heat of forge furnace.
Bannegurd had a sudden thought.
He obeyed it, jerking back just before a gout of liquid fire erupted from the champion.
He had another thought, so he obeyed it.
Bannegurd booted the champion between the legs, turning him into a siege weapon’s projectile flying out of the town.
…
The young lord couldn’t remember his name over the flashing stars in his vision and ringing in his ears.
However, he had trained extensively since he was a child. Fought all manner of people and monsters. Fought in brutal crucibles to earn his place among the emperor’s champions, fought even more to keep it.
His mind might not be working too well, but his body would never forget how to fight.
He crashed through snow-covered boughs.
Powder turned to steam in a wide area around him.
He hit the ground hard, rolled, grabbed a tree and ripped it out of the frozen ground before he could think.
The strangely small blue savage came crashing down after him.
He swatted the savage out of the air like a ball, sending the shit-flinger through a line of trees.
He hurled half a tree, leaping behind it.
Thunder exploded the woods.
Fists crashed against bodies.
Blue on black.
Black on blue.
The young lord blocked a murderous hook on his left arm with the armor shaped to mimic the punch shields the duelist-brawlers his city-state was known for.
“Are you a child?” he grunted as he followed up the savage’s broken hand with a cracking punch with a right hook of his own.
Spikes over his knuckles tore the blue cheek open.
Was he going to beat a child to death?
The savage was a savage and therefore a lesser form of human.
If their blue skin, brutish features, hairiness and unnatural size wasn’t enough evidence.
But… still?
The savage was the same size as him.
Definitely a child… probably?
“Ah!”
Why was it so hard to focus?
“Violet— huh?”
Why’d he think of that?
Further thoughts were driven from his head by a flying kick.
…
They brawled further and further north as the minutes turned into hours.
Curious monsters kept their distance, which was curious to the observers watching through the distant towers topped with a pair of golden eyes that moved so like the real things.
An unfortunate herd of woolly trihorns were sucked into the brutality as the black-armored Emperor’s Champion used them as throwing and bludgeoning weapons.
Bannegurd neared the limits of his calm and his body.
Wounds no longer healed a few seconds after they were created.
His body slowly grew back to his normal, gigantic size.
The Emperor’s Champion vomited a gout of liquid fire that had the Blue dead to rights until a serendipitous mountain of ice and snow cascaded down from an ancient ancestor tree.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Big as a skyscraper with branches and boughs as strong as steel. A single one could hold up tons of snow and ice.
Steam erupted on contact.
Bannegurd erupted out of the steam to pummel the suddenly slow and sluggish champion.
A large, frozen pond lay in the distance just behind that copse of trees. The squat kind with twisted branches, naked in the winter.
He leapt with the champion in his chokehold, diving the both of them through the ice and into the freezing water.
…
The young lord stared up at the blue-skinned savage.
Somehow, he knew with certainty that he had lost and that there was no longer a reason to fight.
Dawn broke over the eastern horizon.
It seemed to him as if the sun’s first rays took on a physical form he could briefly see.
Or he had a concussion, which was probable.
The fact that a small figure appeared as if riding the sun light didn’t point to a concussion.
He was familiar with head injuries and hallucinations, at least for him, weren’t the usual.
The savage stepped back to allow the small—
The young lord would’ve recoiled at the green-scaled face and the vaguely ape-like mouth on the lizardwoman.
“Kelvinjo,” she spoke with a hiss. “You’re our prisoner. You will be ransomed. But, until then you shall learn. You shall learn the truth of the Empress of the Frozen Eternities. Of the way of life everlasting in the Eternal Ice. You shall return to your empire as among the first heralds of her new Calamity.”
That didn’t sound good at all, but for some reason he couldn’t muster the courage to fight to his dying breath as he had been trained to do his entire life.
…
Garvrun listened to his sudden thought and turned down the alley to his right.
The rest of his warband, all senior to him, followed without hesitation.
He didn’t question this strangeness.
A youngblood like him was supposed to follow, not lead.
He listened to instinct as it guided him through twisting streets and narrow alleyways avoiding further battle even as the frigid air filled with the shouts and screams of the killing and the dying.
He rounded a corner and came face to face with a dark-skinned imperial.
Small as a child like the vast majority of the empire human’s were.
Dressed for warmth in a thick, furry coat, a woolen cap and face wrapping that only left the eyes uncovered.
Instinct told him to smash the man’s head with his dragonbone mace.
The man’s eyes flashed like the faint twinkling of the stars in the dark sky.
Pain and confusion stabbed the inside of Garvrun’s head like a handful of needles.
He nearly dropped like the rest of the warband behind him, clutching their heads and leaking red out of their face holes.
The man turned and sprinted back the way he had come.
Garvrun listened to the voice in the back of his head and hurled his mace.
He had never been the most athletic or coordinated, but somehow the dragonbone mace flew true.
Crimson painted the street and structures as the impact magic obliterated the man’s head.
The body stumbled forward a few more steps before toppling.
“Get up! Hurry! We must burn all of it!” one of the warband said.
They were all up and rushing to the twitching corpse as if nothing had happened.
Garvrun felt a deep sense of accomplishment and satisfaction as he and his warband poured alchemical concoctions on every centimeter of the dead man’s body and even the splattered blood.
The Golden Palace, The Golden Moon, Suiteonem III, 20137
The end of Sixty-eight’s first year was marked with a feast during which each of the one hundred demigod children were allowed to take turns ascending through the Golden Doors to speak with their father for the first time.
She remembered nothing of the journey across the vast void the moment she stepped through the shining doors and out of the shining doors.
Her father’s palace was said to cover the entire moon’s surface and extend deep, all the way to the core.
She saw nothing of the details of its architecture except to know and realize on an instinctive level that she was small and insignificant when put next to the simplest of her father’s decorations.
He was tall and broad.
The largest man she had ever seen up close.
Just being in his presence saw the red-gold curtain descended over her vision.
He waved a hand instantly sapping it from her before she could give in to the urge to attack.
“Follow.”
His words echoed the power of a God’s rage.
She had to jog to keep up with his strides.
His radiance was a palpable, painful thing to endure this close.
“You are half mortal. So that is expected. But you are half God, so be better than your lesser half.”
She couldn’t speak even if she dared to.
A fist around her guts clenched tight, while a hand around her throat slowly squeezed.
“Good. You have not earned the right to speak in my presence.”
His steps echoed like the tolling doom bells in the stories.
“Your performance has been adequate. You do not run from your anger, but you guide it. This pleases me for I do not make mindless animals of my seed. I have enough of those in my service. My child, you are meant to be second only to myself. You must be as intelligent and wise as you are strong in my rage. Your brothers and sisters have been emperors and generals in my service since the beginning of time.”
She stumbled, legs suddenly feeling as heavy as if she ran from sunrise to sunset.
“Continue to master your true self. There shall no longer be tolerance for failure. Your youth is not a shield. All my children shall be measured equally. Your youth is an opportunity to rise from deeper, which grants greater strength if you prove worthy of my gift.”
What gift?
“Let me tell you a story about the greatest of my children. A brother to you. Separated by many worlds and a millennia. To inspire.”
She continued to jog as her father spoke.
He weaved a sprawling, thrilling tale of her half-brother, Suiteonemiades, and his many deeds to bring honor and glory to their father.
His golden voice drew her in, making her forget her leadened legs and the gasping pain in her sides.
She could see the blood of vanquished enemies on her half-brother’s hands. Hear the wailing of conquered nations. Smell the smoke and iron wafting in the air over battlefields that stretched from the horizon at her back to the horizon in front of her.
The blood red rage tinged all of it.
“He fights in my name on a Terminus World as we speak. Can you even aspire to touch such heights?”
She could not.
A thousand years of heroic and mighty deeds?
It seemed impossible for one so small and weak as her.
“He was once much like you. Filled with tears and regrets of the past life I had freed him from. The weakness of mortality is time made finite. It took years for him to learn his proper place at my side. Will it take you as long?”
She couldn’t speak.
Not that he needed her to.
“He sought to flee at every turn.”
Her father told her another tale.
Of pain, suffering and death.
Not just of her half-brother, but all those he had enlisted in his vain attempt to escape from their God’s service and gain vengeance.
“There is one truth in my pantheon. You, my children, can never win. Your defeat was written into your very genetic code from the moment of your conception.”
Defeat?
Him?
She had never thought that possible.
Hadn’t bothered to entertain it.
All she wanted to do was go home and be with her family and friends.
“You have displeased me in one respect. Do you know what that is?”
Her guts roiled.
The hand buried deep inside twisted.
Another test among an endless number of them.
But this was her father.
Her God.
She suddenly knew without a doubt that he could snuff her out like the tiny flickering candle she was next to the cosmic fireball in the center of the system.
She suddenly knew that he knew.
Silence reigned for a long time as he walked leisurely while she jogged to keep up.
The stitch in her sides turned into painful needles.
“I want to go home,” she whispered.
“You are home.” He laughed. “Know this. I may find your attempts entertaining. I may also find them enraging. For I can be a fickle God. And as a father, I may find a child’s desire to return to lesser mortals insulting. And such a thing must be repaid with a God’s pride. Test it only with the full knowledge that they won’t escape the consequences of your actions.”
The threat was plain in his words.
In the story of young Suiteonemiades and the long trail of suffering and death he left behind him in his defiance.
She couldn’t do that to those she cared about.
Mother, father— the mortal she would always remember as her real father, siblings and everyone else in their household and the nearby villages and towns.
Such a happy, carefree life it had been.
If only she could’ve lived it longer than a mere decade.
Thoughts of home and the hope to see it again one day died as the demigod child toured a Golden Palace on a Golden Moon.
Suiteonem Prime, Aasin Bay, Apolakan, 213918
“Fu—!”
Ragay saw the shadow on the ground first, but it was Tagge who had the quicker reflexes to turn and see the falling stone first.
She saved him by tackling him out of the way of the hairy stone.
It rolled into a shop front, scattering glass and coral.
“Empyreal Guard!” one of the warriors he and the other potentials had linked up with roared. “We must overwhelm! Shiver Skill: Swarm Bites!”
They charged into the broken shop front.
Battle shouts, clashing weapons and an iron tang filled the air.
It happened too quick for him and the others to even react.
The difference between them and leveled, seasoned warriors.
None of which availed his people.
The empyreal guardsman stepped out of the ruined shop with a blue-gray arm in his mouth like a sea dog with a fish.
He spat and grimaced.
“Always wondered if you fishies tasted like sushi.”
His guttural voice sent a lance of fear through Ragay’s gut.
“Not even close.” He regarded the four of them with an appraising eye. “You her little kiddies? Got them fancy fishing staff-things. With the water ball and everything. Yeh, figure you’re them. How about it? Wanna quick scrap before I get back to that fishy bitch?”
He flexed huge, hairy arms bulging with impossibly large and defined muscles.
Ragay thought the guardsman’s bicep was about the size of his head.
The guardsman was even bigger than Sings Too Loud.
“What about you, boy? You look big and strong. You wanna try a clinch? See who’s stronger.” His eyes darted to Gossamare. “You one of them weird jelly people? Down in the trenches? How bout I crack your shell open to get that sweet, sweet meat.” Then Tagge. “Ha! Otterfolk! I’ve been on a handful of planets and this one definitely takes the worse spot with all the different beastfolk. You’d all be right at home in that big ass tree. Fuck… you level up enough or get strong enough, you might by one us!” He proudly thumped his barrel-sized chest. The sound echoed like a one ton stone dropped from the top of a tree.
Tagge snarled.
“You’re calling us beasts? Look at you! Hairy and you’ve got fangs and claws!”
“You’ve got me on the hair, furry, but I don’t got nothing on you. You look like you’d make a good wash rag for my crawler.” He brandished his claws and smiled wide. “These are just slightly-pronounced canines and I just sharpen my nails for fighting. Now, we gonna throw down or not? Don’t worry. I ain’t planning on killing ya. I know the rules.”
A sudden boom shook the sky.
A whistling sound descended on them.
Ragay and the others flinched, crouching down to make themselves as small as possible while forming hard water shells over their heads.
The massive empyreal guardsman merely smirked and raised a hand.
A shockwave scattered dust and debris.
Ragay looked up.
The guardsman held a misshapen iron disk in one hand large enough to serve as shade for three Ragays standing shoulder to shoulder.
“That’s the thing about city combat,” he sighed. “Friendly fire.”
He tossed the disk behind him into the shop with a wet thud.
“Let’s get this scrap going, kiddies while mommy’s busy.”
The guardsman leapt with a bestial roar.
A sudden giant hand of hard water caught him.
“There are rules.” Miss Karagatan hurled the empyreal guardsman out into the bay.
Then she was off again, flying through the sky blocking bright beams from the other empyreal guardsman and returning with whipping streams from the true Heart of Sinaya dangling from her staff.
“Was it always a trident?” Tagge said.
“Last I remember it was like a spear,” Sings Too Loud said.
Ragay agreed.
“No. It was like the long lanterns the anglers use to fish,” Gossamare said.
“Oh!” Tagge perked. “I remember reading about those. I’ve always wanted to see one in action.”
“You have my invitation to visit my home if I’m ever able to return.”
…
The bombardment from the Merquani ships dwindled.
Ragay didn’t know why, nor did he care too much.
He had more pressing concerns.
A heavy contingent of marines had cornered and surrounded a large number of his people in a hotel near the northern edge of the city.
They were trapped because as far as Sings Too Loud could tell with a sounding spell falling iron had somehow reached deep below the ground far enough to collapse the water tunnels.
Continued bombardment cracked the magic shields protecting the building.
“How much longer will it last?”
“If the rate stays the same. Ten minutes. That is an approximation.” Gossamare answered or rather her landsuit’s instruments gave her the answer.
The rest of the potentials had joined them.
He was relieved to see them all alive, if injured.
Abygale had lost her helmet and one side of her face was like minced land meat.
Keisho’s armor was riddled with tiny dents that made it look vaguely like a certain type of cheese. The dark-skinned landborn also had an ugly slash running straight down the gills on the left side of his neck.
Justavi’s oft-injured tail was a mass of healing cuts and bruises. His ever-present smile revealed gaps in his conical teeth where the gums leaked red.
“Are there any more city warriors?” Sings Too Loud said.
Abygale shook her head.
“I was helping their command. They ordered whoever’s left in the city to leave. The evacuated are going to need protection from monsters out there. The ones that decided to stay in the underground shelters are safer there for now.”
“Unless the Merquani filth poison the waters,” Keisho spat.
Ragay could at least allay the fears.
“All settlements have protections against that. Both magical and mechanical filtration or destruction. This is the largest, wealthiest city on this island. It’d take a really strong poison in high volume to get through.”
“This would be easier if we could sink the rest of their disgusting ships,” Justavi growled. “And don’t tell me it’s the rules!” he snapped at Gossamare, who had raised a finger. “People are dying! I say bite the rules.”
Sings Too Loud laid a massive hand on a green-scaled shoulder.
“I believe those rules may have saved four of us from an empyreal guardsman.”
Tagge snorted.
“Miss Karagatan saved us.”
Gossamare raised a finger.
“Time is moving. We must act quickly or those people will be killed.”
Ragay watched the magic shield crack further from yet another iron impact.
“Easy. If they can’t go out from there, we just have to get them to go back in to another place from which they can then go out from.”
“What about drylanders?” Keisho said.
“They should have airbreathers. It’s standard policy to have enough on hand for them.”
“But if others have come from elsewhere on the island or other islands?”
“I’m not sure. Drylanders don’t tend to live on the outer islands, at least full time. Most of our drylanders live on the larger islands near the center of Sinaya’s Gift.”
“Time,” Gossamare said.
“We’ll figure it out when we get inside.” Justavi headed for the pool, diving in without hesitation.
Ragay gave the failing magic shield one last glance before chasing after the others.
