Day 162 of Summer, Year 9050 by Unic Reckoning. Yatha – outskirts, Gidha

  Bore didn’t know what was happening inside the tent. Nor did he know what was going on around them, but he was certain something was happening. On the nearby hill, figures moved in formation — soldiers, from the look of them. Across from them, someone’s scouts crept forward clumsily. Or maybe they weren’t as clumsy as they seemed, but the Black Mage had set her wards far enough out that nothing escaped her ruthless gaze. The third side was eerily quiet. Too quiet for his taste. From a fourth side there was a cliff dropping straight into a churning sea. A good spot to build a fortress, but a terrible one for defending against forces far larger than their own. The thought gnawed at him. He wasn’t the only one uneasy.

  “Death by the sword or drowning,” Toothie whispered nervously, chuckling to himself.

  No one had a bite like that poor bastard. No one. Crooked teeth were one thing, but his? They defied belief.

  “It won’t be that bad. We’ve got the Black Mage on our side.”

  “Oh, sure, very reassuring,” Toothie scoffed. “The Black Mage will protect the Commander and Skin. The rest of us? We’re expendable unless she’s told otherwise. Why did we even set up camp here?”

  “The Commander knows what he’s doing.”

  “Or he doesn’t, and we wouldn’t know it, because he’s good at keeping up appearances.”

  Bore shivered. Some things weren’t meant to be said aloud. Ever.

  “He knows what he’s doing,” Clemens hissed, appearing out of nowhere. “And if you want to keep breathing, shut your damn mouth and stop spewing that nonsense. He’s got ears everywhere. You haven’t been with us long enough to see what he’s capable of.”

  “And you have?” Toothie snapped, his temper flaring.

  Bore held his breath. Clemens was one of the oldest among them, a man who had seen things the rest of them couldn’t imagine. He rarely spoke of it. But if he chose to share now...

  “I have,” Clemens growled, grabbing Toothie by his collar and pulling him close until their noses nearly touched. “And you know what? I pray I never have to see it again. I was at Krus Deremis. I was at Ousterus. I was at Nissanuss. I know where the Black Mage gets her threads. I know what they are. I know what’s coming. And I know one more thing — I haven’t seen the Brothers for two days. Something big is brewing, and I’m too damn old for it.”

  Toothie raised his hands in surrender, his face pale. The terror etched across his features struck the Bore as slightly exaggerated. Sure, the veterans could be cruel, but...

  “She weaves her threads from death, pain, and suffering. To create a single strand, she needs about a hundred agonizing deaths,” came a sudden voice from behind. It belonged to the old man the Black Mage had named Igor. “The more they suffer, the more terrified they are, the longer they linger before death — the stronger the threads. Massacres can’t go on forever, so she carefully measures and preserves each one. Without them, the Company would be far weaker.”

  He paused, observing them with cold eyes before adding with a thin smile:

  “And you’re right about one thing. The priority is to protect the Commander, Skin, and the Brothers. The rest of you? For her you’re just mobile raw materials. Nothing more.”

  Clemens nodded begrudgingly. Whatever the grizzled son of a bitch had witnessed must have been horrifying. Bore made a mental note not to ask about it. He liked his bones intact.

  The old man wandered off. Clemens let go of Toothie, who quickly backed away. Bore did the same. It seemed safer.

  The meeting in the tent didn’t last as long as expected, but long enough for Bore to tally the camp’s current numbers. Squads usually had fifteen to twenty people after a split. Once sent off on missions, they recruited along the way. By the time they returned, they sometimes numbered in the hundreds. Or so he’d been told. The most he’d ever seen was a hundred. The Commander’s current squad comprised fifteen trained soldiers and thirty fresh recruits just beginning their training. Not an encouraging figure. Two weeks ago, there had been nearly eighty of them, but many recruits hadn’t survived the last mission. Bore wasn’t surprised. He was more puzzled by his own uncanny knack for survival.

  “My luck’s going to run out one day,” he muttered.

  He didn’t regret enlisting. He regretted some things he had done since, but never the decision to leave home. He liked this life — the fighting, the certainty that someone else made the decisions. But the thought of dying with a slit throat and leaving nothing behind haunted him. No one left the Nameless Company. There were no retirements or permanent dismissals. You signed on, you lived, you died. And deserters? The Brothers always found them. Always.

  A sharp whistle broke his dark thoughts. Only Kapi could produce such a sound. The meeting had ended, orders were distributed, and now each leader was responsible for ensuring their squads wouldn’t trip over their own feet. Not an easy task with so many recruits.

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  Bore found Mustang, who had already begun gathering their group. Mustang did a headcount before leading them a bit away from camp to speak without interruption.

  “We’ve got orders,” Mustang began, his voice tired. “You’re not blind. You can see something’s brewing. Officially, we’ve been paid to draw out and fight the prince’s enemies in a pitched battle. Prince, or whoever they have here.”

  “Ksi Artus. He’s the ksi of this trento,” a young recruit murmured.

  Mustang gave him an unimpressed look before shrugging.

  “Call them what you want. The guy’s not popular and has enemies. Our job is to crush his opposition and keep him on the throne.”

  “We don’t have thrones. In our culture—”

  “One more word, and I’ll sew your fucking mouth shut,” Mustang snapped, grabbing the boy by his collar. “And I’m a lousy tailor.”

  The kid went pale and shut up immediately.

  “Let it go, Mustang. Get on with it. I need to take a shit,” Stump grumbled, scratching his beard with the delicate female hand the Black Mage had grafted onto him.

  Oddly enough, it worked. Mustang released the boy and resumed.

  “They’ve got about two thousand troops, including two hundred elite cavalry.”

  “That’s a lot for a rebellion,” Bore remarked.

  “Doesn’t add up. Command thinks it’s exaggerated. I think so too. The Brothers estimate fifteen hundred at most. No cavalry. Most of them have probably never fought, because they can't even hold a weapon. But they were sent for something. And they’ve got sappers. Someone arrived in a carriage. It is secured and masks the magic field. We suspect a mage. The Black Mage can’t determine what’s inside. Could be a bluff, but the Commander’s taking it seriously. Kapi will handle that. The so-called cavalry? Lice’s problem. We’ve got the third front — the sappers. We’ll wait for more intel. The brothers went on a little reconnaissance, Balck Mage sent out her crows. If they find out something and decide to share it with us, that’s when we’ll step in. Until then, prepare your gear, eat, sleep. We start at dawn.”

  “This is suicide,” one of the recruits - a man whose name no one had bothered to remember - suddenly said,. “How can we beat two thousand...?”

  “Fifteen hundred.”

  “...trained”

  “Unlikely.”

  “…soldiers...

  “More like disguised peasants.”

  “...armed and ready to fight on open ground? And we’ve got a cliff at our backs? This is certain death”

  At that moment, a boy raised his hand timidly. The same one Mustang had silenced earlier. This time, he was allowed to speak.

  “Ksi Artus has five hundred soldiers. Ksi Ursel has around seven hundred. Ksi Ashan four hundred. That’s sixteen hundred in total. But if someone wants to overthrow Artus, his troops shouldn’t be counted. Ursel hates Artus, but Ashan is at war with Herosel, so he wouldn’t send anyone. That leaves seven hundred. Our law prohibits training to use weapons without the lord’s permission, so we don’t have many bands available for hire. It’s not our people. And if it is, they don’t know how to fight.”

  Mustang nodded, patting the boy’s shoulder.

  “See? If you want to, you can actually make some sense. So, peasants...”

  “Or well-trained mercenaries,” Bore interjected, eyeing the enemy’s poorly concealed forces.

  “If you’re right, I’ll cut your fucking head off myself,” Stump growled.

  Bore sighed. Being average didn’t mean being stupid.

  “Even if they’re just peasants, there’s too many. They’ll drown us in sheer numbers...” another recruit began.

  Mustang rolled his eyes.

  “That’s all. Dismissed,” he barked, subtly signaling the trained soldiers to stay.

  The rest drifted off, but a few lingered, pretending to chat about whores and gear. Mustang joined them moments later.

  “I don’t like this,” Stump muttered, loudly adding a remark about the oral services offered in the nearby town for cover.

  “They’ll drown us in numbers,” Bore said.

  “The Commander has a plan,” Mustang whispered. “Reinforcements are coming.”

  “What kind?”

  “Don’t know exactly. But they’ll be here. Keep it quiet. Let the recruits think we’re caught off guard.”

  They nodded, listening intently to the Commander’s true orders.

  Before dawn broke, Skin had already dragged them out of their beds. As usual, she managed it without uttering a single word. If she ever spoke, it was only when necessary and only as much as was absolutely needed. A shame, really. Bore had always thought she had a beautiful voice. Warm and pleasing to the ear—sharp, but delicate. And, truth be told, he admired more than just her voice. She was unlike any woman he had ever encountered. Tall, lean, and well-built—physically perfect for a soldier. Her sharp features and focused gaze only added to her character, and the long, thick braid contrasting with her shaved sides gave her an air of controlled wildness. Then there was that armor of hers—he’d never seen anything like it. It looked savage, yet mesmerizing, accentuating her fluid movements. It was a pity she wore it so rarely.

  “Did you see that?” Mustang asked as he approached Bore. “Skins's wearing her armor. Something's going down.”

  “She looks good in it,” Bore replied dreamily.

  “Man, that’s a dude in disguise. No tits, no hips, no ass. Just muscle and a knife obsession.”

  “She’s wild and beautiful.”

  Everyone knew Bore had a thing for Skin. Everyone. Even the Black Mage picked on him because of that. Skin knew, too, but she never addressed it. She treated Bore the same as everyone else—with complete indifference. It was so obvious it hurt to watch him, but what could he do? The heart wants what it wants, as his mother used to say while nursing a black eye from his father. Maybe it ran in the blood—this masochistic need to be hurt. He didn't know, but he was painfully aware that Skin wasn't the woman for him. Still, that didn't stop him from daydreaming about her in some a secluded place.

  “Bore, you fool, you're drooling. Stop staring at her,” Mustang warned him quietly.

  “What's up, you motherfuckers?” Stump called out, joining them with a steaming cup of what was supposedly coffee. “Bore's creaming his pants again because Skin's in her armor?”

  “He says she is wild and beautiful.” Mustang said with a mocking grin.

  Stump stared at the Bore incredulously for a moment before shaking his head.

  “Yeah, she's wild. That's true. But she’s not wild like a horse you break, saddle, and ride. She's wild like a fucking forest fire, a goddamn sea storm, or a bloody earthquake. She’s destruction incarnate.”

  “Exactly,” Bore agreed. “That’s what I mean. She’s beautiful.”

  “If the enemy doesn't kill him, I will,” Stump growled in disgust.

  “Do us all a favor. I’ll back you up with the Commander later.” Mustang said, patting Stump's shoulder before heading off to gather the rest of his team.

  Skin entered the Commander’s tent. Bore sighed in disappointment, watching with envy as Mustang and the others went to hear reports from the Brothers. How he wished he could be in there...