"The Loyatan army is a few hours from here," Aaliyah-al-Ydaz stated as a matter of fact.

  This surprised many of the sultanzade as they expected to have more time. Personally, I did not know what to expect any longer. I only knew that the Sultanah ordered us to march out at that moment and we obeyed.

  The sun had come out already, but it was that moment of the morning that it had yet to heat up the sands and dispel the coolness of the night. That is to say, we moved fast this early.

  The war machine is almost a wonder of nature, we had had a fully-fledged encampment for nearly a week yet in a single hour it was fully disassembled and we were on the move.

  Forcing the sultanzade's heads out of their asses, the Sultanah sent her sons and daughters to act as scouts. By all means, it is a solid strategy. Cultivators were faster than normal troops and had a higher survival rate than common scouts. And because they were employed as scouts, they would not have a high chance of dying, to begin with.

  With all of this, I mean to say that I was not present for the following hours. The youngest sultanzade present were valued as the best scouts as we were not meant for battle. Or at least, if a battle were to break out our best assets would not be away. Better to have the oldest sultanzade on site.

  Unless you want to hear about how I cleverly moved through the terrain, I will fast-forward a bit my narration.

  It was past noon. My legs were a bit numb from dashing through the highlands, but I was not exhausted. The regeneration stance is a heavensend, especially if you are used to bringing yourself to exhaustion bordering collapse. I had spotted a secondary Loyatan army that had split from the main one to catch our main force on a pincer attack. Ignoring the futility of such a strategy, I was going to return to our marching army when I was ambushed.

  My senses might have been dulled from the speed stance, but I was quite keen by default, so I avoided the dagger that came flying to me.

  This was what I was waiting for. What I was itching for.

  Truth be told, I had never fought assassins before, but I had been informed of their capabilities. Yet I instantly knew that I was not fighting a common assassin. I am not talking about those high-ranked assassins like Shadows, Masters, or Grandmasters. But a whole new thing: an assassin-cultivator.

  It was their eyes. I could see it in the way they were focused like a cultivator wielding the sense stance would, even if their body was occluded by the thin layer of shadows that assassins commonly boasted. Why someone would use the sense stance in battle was beyond me, but I did not stay still.

  I unsheathed my tulwars and rushed at the assassin. They disappeared from my sight, I had been expecting that. I do not know if you are aware that…

  Oh, so you are? Interesting.

  So, yes. The assassins can become shadows and teleport wherever they are looking. A mighty ability, if it was not because you can just follow their eyes.

  As I turned on my hip, a tulwar before me, the assassin materialized from the shadows. They were too far away for my blade to strike true, but either way, they tried to dodge. Their reflexes were top-notch, but their spatial sense seemed to be a bit distorted. That was when I remembered that even if they were wielding the sense stance, they had to be high out of their minds to use Enlightenment.

  The assassin vanished into shadows and instead of turning again, I ducked toward the ground. No attack came, but dodging was not my objective. The assassin failed to comprehend that as they lunged at me now that my guard was low, only for me to turn and throw sand at their eyes.

  Pocket sand, one of the best weapons out there.

  The ambusher reacted hastily, but their body betrayed them. Instead of closing their eyes, they opened them in surprise; directly getting a fistful of sand on their corneas.

  The assassin grunted heavily, revealing their gender as male, and I lunged at him. One of my tulwars lay on the ground, but I did not need both. He tried to open his eyes to turn into shadows, but his body fought against him as they instantly shut close. It took me only two heartbeats to ram my blade into his neck.

  I might have not been wielding the strength stance, but speed can still make weapons can pack quite the punch.

  He dropped to the ground, growling and drowning in his blood a moment later.

  Legends and fiction often depict battles as colossal endeavors that take a lot of back and forth, and whilst that might be the truth for high-vitality cultivators, people can die just in a blink.

  Just in case, I took a few steps backward and switched to the sense stance in case there were other ambushers or this one was alive, but thankfully my paranoia was not justified. Once I approached the assassin again, he was already dead.

  I inspected his body in search of any intelligence, but of course, the scout did not carry anything of importance beyond his drugs.

  With a deep breath, I rushed to the main army.

  No, this was not my first time killing. I had been sent to a frontier skirmish before going to Sadina as a scribe.

  Yes, I was fifteen. Why does it surprise you that Aaliyah-al-Ydaz was a bad mother? I felt like we have clarified that many times over already.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  I came from the mountains, so by the time I reached my army, they were already preparing for a confrontation by seizing the high ground and creating supply depots.

  "There is a secondary army coming from the south," I told the Sultanah the moment I saw her.

  "Numbers?" She asked with disinterest.

  By now Aaliyah-al-Ydaz had donned armor, though it was more decorative than anything else. Her skin was tougher than stone without even wielding the defense stance, after all. She looked more regal than ever with those red ribbons on her body, and those big, feathered pauldrons. Pauldrons always make people look bigger and more intimidating, and that held especially true when you were a woman towering at more than two meters of height.

  I will not bore you with details, but what followed was a quick exchange of military jargon. It could be summarized in a single sentence: there was a legion with cavalry waiting for us south.

  "The blood?" Aaliyah-al-Ydaz commented out of nowhere, which confused me.

  It took me a moment to realize what she was talking about, mainly because she had never bothered to look at me.

  "I have been ambushed by an assassin using Nurture, but I have disposed of him." My mind was exhausted from the previous days of battle and the recent ambush and I failed to notice that perhaps I should not have shared that Nurture tidbit with my mother.

  Thankfully, it appeared to be that someone already had been the unlucky bastard to notify her that the assassins now wielded Enlightenment and Nurture.

  "I should have killed Hassan," Aaliyah-al-Ydaz commented with the same casualness that a person would use to say that they have forgotten their wallet. She was talking about the life of her son like a nuisance.

  I am not saying that she should have killed him or not, it was a fact that this whole war was caused by the disinherited emir, but when that man was your own blood, your descendant… that tone was out of place.

  I did portray my surprise to her, but the Sultanah ignored it. Children did not mean anything to her.

  Sorry if you expected a military story about battle and bloodshed, but unfortunately, I was beaten and the only thing I wanted to do was clean myself, eat, and sleep.

  Yes, the clash was inevitable and the armies would start killing each other in a matter of hours, but resting is important in war. Do you know that the life of a soldier on the frontline is mostly spent waiting? There is a maximum for the soldiers that can engage at a time, and preferably, you do not want them to engage until they die, but you want them to be substituted so they have the chance to rest, get healed, and get into the gallows again. The unlucky soldiers only battle for a minute before they die, but the truly unlucky will fight for hours, days, and months. They will not know rest, and when the battle is over, they will feel its consequences in their body for their whole life.

  I never said war was beautiful, did I?

  Martial arts are beautiful. Training one's body is beautiful. Strategy can be beautiful. But war? Never.

  I was woken up by Aya a handful of hours later, it was late at night and I was apparently demanded to be set up as a sentry in case of assassin attacks or sabotages. Even though the new encampment was somewhat far from the battlefield, the smell of blood was powerful here either way. A lot of people must have died for the place felt a bit emptier.

  I kept watch with a normal soldier, he was somewhat young, but not a child. Nineteen, I would say. He was useless in the darkness as he could not wield the sense stance, but he was a useful source of information. The pincer attack the Loyatans had hoped for had been thwarted and the battle in the highlands had reached an impasse, it would continue tomorrow at first light.

  Soldiers do not like to battle at night, and I do not blame them.

  What was more important, though, was that there had not been any assassins present on the battlefield. We knew that they had to have many – many more than we had cultivators at the very least – yet they decided to not use their elite force. We had not done so either, but we were the winning side, we could afford to do so, they could not. There had to be something at play. And if I could see it, so had Aaliyah-al-Ydaz.

  As perverse as that woman was, she was equally intelligent. But there is this thing about intelligence that does not make you wise. Or being wise makes you logical. I always had a hard time understanding my mother.

  I remained on my lookout post for the whole night, yet not once did I doze off or let my mind wander. My duty was overwatching, and I personally knew that our enemies were sneaky bastards, so I needed to be concentrated if I did not want to have my throat slit.

  There had been no attacks that night. And whilst that could have been considered a victory elsewhere, I did not like it. And you know who did not like it even less?

  Aaliyah-al-Ydaz did not like how she was blind. The assassins were planning something, and she could not figure out what.

  You do not know this, but Rani became very temperamental when you left. I feel that at some point you stopped being a toy to her. That is the disadvantage of the charm stance, it makes you care too much, more than it makes sense or reason. With this, I mean to say that Aaliyah-al-Ydaz reminded me of Rani-al-Sadina at this moment.

  It was well known that Rani was a mirror copy of her mother, but it would seem that part of their personalities also were copies. Not fully, mind you. Rani was a coward through and through. I do not mean this in the sense of assassination and subterfuge, but there is an example to be made here. Rani would kill someone because she was potentially afraid of them; Aaliyah-al-Ydaz would kill them because they were a nuisance.

  Very important distinctions.

  Aaliyah-al-Ydaz, for better or worse, was not scared of anything.

  Most people would fear death, even from old age, but she had been looking twenty for my whole life and even before that, so even that fear evaded her.

  Yes, the Sultanah might not have feared anything, but at this moment she was very irritated and angry.

  Let me tell you, Aloe, you have never seen Aaliyah-al-Ydaz angry. You have seen her annoyed, but never angry.

  Fortunately for you, you will never have the chance.

  Unfortunately for me, I had beheld it.

  The battle at the highlands continued for a handful of days more. It looked like it could stretch for weeks even. Such slowness in battle indicated a plan of some sort, and the Sultanah had yet to sleep to guess what it was.

  We may be resistant to sleep, but Aaliyah-al-Ydaz had less vitality than us, and she was not wielding the regeneration stance, so the sleepless nights did take a toll on her humor.

  She commanded for the sultanzade that had remained in their emirates to be summoned. This was no longer a simple game, there were greater stakes at play. She sent couriers on dwellers and cultivators on the speed stance as she wanted information to travel fast.

  Her main idea was that the Loyatans would try an invasion from the north or the west, but all of our intelligence pointed out otherwise. The coalition did not have enough manpower to boast more armies. The second possible line of attack was a hit by the assassins on Asina as we had yet to see them beyond some that had been spotted as scouts or the one I had killed. But that was discarded as the youngest sultanzade and the imperial guard guarded the city. Maybe those sultanzade were just children yet to be introduced to Nurture, but we were drilled into martial arts from a young age. And even if there was no one defending Asina, the capital was Aaliyah-al-Ydaz. The assassins could raze Asina to the ground and they would have not made a dent in Ydaz. Only the Sultanah mattered.

  …Sorry, sorry. It is amusing, yes. They were very aware that only the Sultanah mattered, it was the win condition.

  They knew it far deeper in their hearts than us.