Did you like my present? Oh, well, at least you accepted it. I felt your conscience would rest easier knowing there was someone babysitting your protégé.

  Anyhow, where was I yesterday? Ah yes, I was talking about how Aaliyah-al-Ydaz did not like at all to be left in the dark. There was a plan written by the hand of the assassins and she couldn't decipher it, which irritated her to no end.

  After the Sultanah had stepped up as the head of the offensive, all sultanzade were put into the field and none protested, but we were not as helpful as we had initially thought. We were used to fighting in equal numbers, but this was a war, and if we pushed a bit too much, we would get surrounded. Now, most sultanzade could wield the strength of twenty men easily, and whilst that can be devastating if you land a blow, they were not twenty men. The tactics of the Loyatan army were simple, encircle a sultanzade with common troops to distract them, then use assassin operatives to try to land a killing blow.

  They were not precisely successful.

  Some of the youngest sultanzade did die because they got too cocky. Ten Haya is not an unsurmountable amount for a single common soldier to get over if the cultivator is distracted, and they would be swarmed by many soldiers. It took the death of three of my closest siblings in age for the rest to start taking things seriously. The first they dismissed as a weakling. The second they started asking questions. And the third they finally understood the tactics our enemies were employing.

  Some of my siblings were just that thick-skulled.

  I have talked about swarm tactics, but it was a fact that we had more soldiers than the Loyatans. And unlike them, we had the logistics, the manpower, the quality, and the home-field advantage.

  Which made the impasse even more degrading.

  Most of us discovered the limits of the regeneration stance during those early days of battle. It could starve off the exhaustion related to one's stamina, but certainly not the strain on your muscles and bones. If the rest of the sultanzade had taken the war more seriously in the earlier days, they would have never had to reach such levels of exhaustion.

  The assassins did have some tricks under their sleeves to keep our foot soldiers in check, yes. Especially the camelry. Enlightenment has some curious synergies with Nurture, and one of them made the fire technique of the flowing stance really easy to use.

  Fire does not kill people, on most occasions, it is the carbon dioxide that gets you.

  Carbon dioxide? Oh, I guess we did not have that term back then. Sometimes I forget when some things were discovered and I just think I have known them all my life. We called them bad air back then; carbon dioxide is the scientific name.

  But going back to the technique, it did not matter that the flames hurt the soldiers. As I told you before, morale is really important in a war, and whilst cultivators can be scary with their preternatural physical abilities, summoning fire out of nowhere hits that part of the brain more viscerally. A cultivator might kill you easier and faster than those flames, but your brain fears the latter more. An unconscious reaction that many people cannot fight. Let alone the camelry.

  Yes, we could not use camelry because the assassins would just pop out of nowhere, summon flames to scare the mounts and vanish as if they had never been there. The problem with those flames is that they could linger for a while with no apparent fuel.

  It was not as much of a problem as it could have been, though. Our greatest unit of mounted troops, the mounted dwellers, were ineffective on this rocky terrain, and camelry did not have as much kick as their war horses.

  We were gaining terrain, and our footing was solid, yet morale kept dropping. When you had been educated and told all your life you were superior, and we still were, yet you reached an impasse it hit you hard. We were not losing, but that had never been an option. Yet the fact of a standstill was denigrating.

  That was especially true for Aaliyah-al-Ydaz.

  I have said this before, but as intelligent as my mother was, she took the words of superiority closer to her heart than anyone else. I do not blame her, she was truly superior in every single aspect. As it would seem, intelligence and emotional intelligence were very different things.

  Aaliyah-al-Ydaz finally caved after a week of meaningless losses. Defeat was not part of her dictionary, so she meant to take things by her own hand.

  All the sultanzade were gathered the next day. By now, most of my siblings had arrived at the battlefront, and those who were not present were either too young or occupied acting as high-speed messengers. A cultivator could be way faster than a messenger bird, and it was not as interceptable and could transport more information.

  So there we were, nearly three dozen cultivators gathered in one spot. Because Ydaz was so big and we, the sultanzade, always took positions of power, we seldom saw each other. Even when taking into account yearly meetings of state affairs.

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  "This farce has gone for far too long," Aaliyah-al-Ydaz announced to us with her potent voice. "This is not a traditional battle, nor a traditional war, so we will not abstain by the limitations of these. Today you all will charge into battle alongside me. I want but the complete extermination of their forces. Understood?"

  We all nodded, even if it was stupid to assume so. If we were really going to make a carnage – which was not a strategically sound plan, to begin with – on the field, the enemy soldiers would break formation and flee before we had a chance to exterminate them.

  Yes, we did not hesitate at the word 'extermination'. We had been killing each other for days. At this point, it did not matter to us if they surrendered or not. And even if they did, we were not common soldiers, we were sultanzade.

  Also yes. The Sultanah commanded every present sultanzade to join the fray, which included Rani too. However, my half-sister failed to engage in battle even once. I already told you; she is a coward through and through.

  But going back to the chronological order of the narration, Aaliyah-al-Ydaz listed her plan. Of course, we were not going to simply charge headfirst. We brought the army behind us, but most importantly, we had them loaded with arrows. No camelry, no spearmen, no foot soldiers, just walls of archers. The strategy was quite simple: our troops would shoot coordinated volleys of arrows, and we, the cultivators, would change to the defense stance to shrug them off.

  What do you think? If you failed to change the stance in time, you were better off dead. It is not a hard concept to grasp Aloe, for Aaliyah-al-Ydaz her children were just manpower. This was not any different from having a shield wall of soldiers raise their defenses whenever an enemy volley came. Only this time the arrows came from behind.

  So there we were, charging as if we were heavy camelry, only that on foot. Their volleys were announced by horns, and even if it clued the enemy on when to defend themselves, shields did not form part of the average Loyatan soldier's equipment.

  Soldiers fell like flies.

  The problem with ranged attacks in warfare is that you can hit your troops, so you must be aware and beware of friendly fire. And even if there were none, the enemy camelry – or cavalry in this case – could always assault you. Yet now we were an impenetrable shield and an unstoppable force simultaneously. Have you heard of the common military tactic of hammer and anvil?

  No? Well, it is the expression of between a rock and a hard place, but literally. Though in this case we were the anvil and we were protecting the hammer. Though calling the archers 'the anvil' feels disingenuous when several sultanzade caused unmeasurable destruction, let alone Aaliyah-al-Ydaz.

  Some of the sultanzade charged and moved across the enemy ranks searching for hidden assassins, others did their best to survive. We were all cultivators here, but not all of us were combatants. Namely my younger siblings and Rani.

  But the Sultanah was completely different. She kept walking at a leisurely pace, shrugging off the assault of the enemy soldiers and the allied arrows as if they did not exist. The swarm tactics worked with the sultanzade, even the oldest ones, but the same could not be said about her.

  Some poor soldiers had tried to surround her, so she simply grabbed the first one she reached from the leg and thrashed him around as if they were a club.

  And let me tell you, humans do not make for great weapons.

  Even with her strength, not all of her strikes were lethal. Most soldiers just stumbled on the ground with broken bones, but her attacks certainly destroyed their morale as she hit them with their compatriots.

  It took only a few swings before the soldier she had been thrashing around died. It took only a few more swings before the corpse's leg snapped – both bone and muscle – and the rest of the body was sent flying away. Casually, she opened her hand and let the severed leg with armor still on fall to the ground.

  She had kept her stroll speed all that time and such a bizarre image had paralyzed many of the enemies. Those still targets made for perfect new weapons.

  It was a macabre sight. This was how an enraged Aaliyah-al-Ydaz looked like. It was not a burning rage, but a cold and chilling one. The woman tearing through the enemy ranks was not thinking about strategy but simple violence. She wanted to see carnage. Wanted to make it.

  I told you, you have not seen her angered.

  I myself was not exactly fighting. I am no coward, but I also knew I was not needed. I kept myself on high ground looking for possible assassins – better to target their elite than their foot soldiers – as they had yet to make their move.

  And I was right. Several-fold.

  The assassins had yet to make their move, yes, but they had been waiting for a specific moment. One when Aaliyah-al-Ydaz's mind was elsewhere. Not scheming like she was always doing but just gorging herself on blood.

  It happened so fast.

  One moment she was surrounded by enemy soldiers. They kept themselves away from her, perhaps half a dozen meters between them and her, but by definition of the word, she was surrounded.

  Then the next moment, shadows exploded from everywhere. Assassins materialized all around the Sultanah, but for some reason, she did not move. Or rather, it seemed like she could not move.

  Even from a distance, I could know that a myriad of shadows that surrounded her were not common assassins, but those they called Grandmasters. There were almost as many Grandmasters there as there were cultivators in total. You know what I thought back then? Those must be all the Grandmasters in Khaffat. And I was mostly right. Not that it was all of them, but also a great number of them were just Master Assassins, not Grandmasters.

  But anyhow, the paralysis they seemed to inflict on my mother only lasted for a second. Yet it was more than enough for them to throw their attack.

  Several Grandmasters lunged at her at a speed that left most cultivators wielding the speed stance in shame, but either way, Aaliyah-al-Ydaz managed to react and kill multiple of them in a single blink.

  I would love to tell you to know how it happened, but I just saw red mist. This was a realm of violence and martial prowess I had yet to reach. My eyes trembled at the sheer sight of the exchange. But that did not even matter.

  No, the next sight echoed through the whole battlefield.

  Grandmaster Assassins lay dead on the ground but we, the sultanzade and the assassins, saw an image that drew us crazy. Especially us. We felt those years of mistreatment surface and boil at the image.

  A trace of the utmost deep scarlet flowing down the most beautiful visage in all of Khaffat.

  It was a sight that anyone in the court of Asina could recognize, the substance that was the literal lifeblood of the Qiraji Desert. Me and my siblings all had seen that liquid before but in a much different context. This was no longer a monarch toying with her maids making her their asses off to get a drop of the miraculous substance. No, this was a battle.

  She had been hurt.

  Aaliyah-al-Ydaz had bled.