He got the bolt out on a sandbar two miles downstream.
It took three tries. The first time, he grabbed the shaft and pulled and nearly passed out. The second time, he bit down on a strip of Marta's coat and pulled and got it halfway. The third time, he didn't think about it at all. He just did it.
Then he lay on the sand and stared at the bloody bolt in his hand until his breathing slowed down.
His Vitality was 18 now. He didn't know exactly what that meant, but by the next morning the hole in his shoulder had closed into an angry pink scab. By the day after, he could lift his arm over his head. On Earth, a wound like that would have put him in a hospital for a week.
He kept walking south.
***
He thought about Ogawa every single day.
He thought about her when he woke up, cold and stiff in a ditch. He thought about her when he stole a loaf of bread from a windowsill in a village with no name and left the knight's silver belt buckle in its place. He thought about her while he walked, mile after mile, with the hills getting lower and the sky getting bigger and the smell of smoke getting stronger on the wind.
Thirty days.
He'd gone over it a hundred times. Kanzaki had said it calmly. Kanzaki said everything calmly. On Earth, Ren had watched the man stand up in court and recite six false statements as fact, because he believed every word. Kanzaki wasn't a liar. He wasn't the type.
But Kanzaki was also a hunter who'd just watched his prey float away down a river. And he'd waited until the last possible second to say it.
Ren didn't know. He couldn't know. That was the whole point. Kanzaki had picked the one thing Ren couldn't check and thrown it at him from a distance.
So he did what he'd learned to do during the worst year of his life. He set aside what he couldn't know and looked at what he could.
If he went back to Solenne alone, he'd die. That was certain. Ilvane would kill him in front of the whole city, and then she'd hang Ogawa anyway, because Ogawa had broken the law and Ilvane didn't make exceptions. Going back didn't save anyone. It just added a second body to the scaffold.
If it was a lie, going back was the dumbest thing he could possibly do.
If it was true, going back alone was the second dumbest.
The only way it ever ended with Ogawa alive was if Ren came back to Solenne with enough power that nobody could stop him.
He needed an army.
He kept walking south.
***
On the tenth day, the land started to change.
The orchards stopped. The farms stopped. What replaced them was flat and black and empty, field after field of burned stubble, with the stumps of trees sticking up like broken teeth. Villages with no roofs. Stone walls knocked flat. Wells with something dead floating in them.
The front line.
Varenhal had burned everything. Ren could tell by the way the destruction faced, all of it spreading south, all of it fresh. Burn the crops so the Empire can't eat them. Burn the villages so the Empire can't use them. Leave nothing between the armies but ash.
He passed a column of refugees heading north. Women, kids, old men, pushing carts piled with blankets and pots. They walked with their heads down and didn't look at him. One little girl was carrying a chicken under her arm like a cat. Her feet were bare and black with soot.
Nobody in the column was going south.
On the twelfth day, he saw the camps.
He lay on the top of a low hill in the dark and looked down at a valley full of fires. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. White tents in neat rows, banners with the gold sunburst snapping in the wind, the low roar of an army settling down for the night. The Holy Kingdom of Varenhal, dug in along a line of hills.
And south of them, across a mile of churned black mud, another set of fires. Fewer. Spread out behind a wall of red stone with square towers at the corners. Red banners on the walls, with a black device on them he couldn't make out from here.
Fort Calder. The Empire had taken it in the spring. Aldric had said so, his voice rising, in the chapel.
Between them was nothing. A mile of mud and ash and broken wagons and things Ren didn't want to look at too closely. The soldiers on both sides had a name for it. He'd heard it from the refugees.
The Burnt Mile.
He waited until the moon went down. Then he went into it.
***
He was halfway across when he heard the fighting.
It came from his left. Short, sharp sounds. A crossbow snapping. A man shouting. Steel on steel. Ren dropped flat in the mud and crawled toward it, keeping low behind a burned wagon, until he could see.
It was a small fight in a big dark. Five figures in dark red cloaks, Imperial colors, backed into a ring against the wreck of an old cart. Around them, closing in, twelve men in gray. No tabards. No banners. Just short swords and spears and the careful, quiet way of men who'd done this many times before.
The chapter was taken from the author's official publication without consent, and reading the published version supports their work.
Varenhal raiders. Hunting scouts in the dark.
Two of the Imperial soldiers were already down. The other three were fighting back to back. One of them was a woman with short hair and a crossbow, swinging it like a club because she was out of bolts. One was a boy who couldn't have been older than sixteen, holding a sword in both hands like a baseball bat.
Varenhal Raider · Level 14Varenhal Raider · Level 16Varenhal Raider · Level 13
He stopped reading after that. It didn't matter.
He thought about it, for maybe a second. He could go around. He could cross the Burnt Mile somewhere else and walk up to the walls of Fort Calder alone with his hands raised. It would be safer.
The boy with the sword went down with a spear in his leg.
Ren stood up out of the mud and walked into the fight.
The first raider never saw him. The second one turned just in time to see the sword coming. The third one shouted, and the rest of them turned around, and Ren said "Kneel" to all of them at once.
It didn't drop them all. It wasn't strong enough for that. But four of them stumbled, and two of them went down on their knees in the mud, and the Imperial woman with the crossbow didn't waste the chance. She caved in one raider's head with her crossbow stock and grabbed his sword out of the air as it fell.
After that, it was ugly and fast.
When it was over, Ren stood in the mud with eleven gray bodies around him. The twelfth had run. He could hear him crashing off north in the dark.
Level up. Level 13.Level up. Level 14.
The woman with the crossbow pointed a raider's sword straight at his throat.
She was older than he'd thought, maybe forty, with a hard, weathered face and gray in her short hair. A sergeant's knot on her shoulder. There was blood all down one side of her face.
"Who are you?" she said. "You're not one of ours."
"No."
"You're not one of theirs either."
"Not anymore."
Her eyes narrowed. Behind her, the boy with the spear in his leg was trying to sit up. The other surviving soldier, a skinny man with a broken nose, had his crossbow trained on Ren's chest.
Ren looked at them. Then he slowly turned his sword around and held it out, hilt first.
"I need to talk to whoever's in charge of that fort," he said. "Take me there."
***
It was a long walk back across the Burnt Mile with a spear in his back.
The sergeant, Brisa, walked behind him with the point of the raider's sword never more than a foot from his spine. The skinny soldier with the broken nose walked in front with his crossbow. Between them, Ren carried the boy.
His name was Pell. He was fifteen, it turned out, and he'd been in the army for nine days. The spear had gone clean through the meat of his thigh. Ren had pulled it out and tied the wound off with a strip of the boy's own cloak, and Pell had screamed the whole time and then thanked him and then thrown up.
Now he was hanging over Ren's shoulder like a sack of rice, mumbling.
"You talk funny," Pell said.
"I'm not from here."
"Where are you from?"
Ren thought about it. "Very far away."
"Further than Kharos?"
"Further than that."
"Wow," said Pell, and passed out again.
They walked on. Every few minutes, Brisa told them to stop, and they crouched in the mud and listened. Once, a long way off, they heard horses. Once, closer, they heard someone crying in the dark, and Brisa listened for a while, and then said, "Leave it," and they left it.
"Why'd you help us?" Brisa asked, during one of the stops. She said it quietly. "Truth."
"The boy went down."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
She was quiet for a while. "You know what we'd have done, if it was the other way around? A Varenhal patrol, getting cut up by our raiders?" She didn't wait for him to answer. "We'd have watched. Maybe cheered."
"I know."
"So why?"
Ren looked down at the mud. "Because the people who'd have watched are the ones I'm trying to get away from," he said.
Brisa didn't say anything to that. But the sword point at his back dropped an inch.
They reached the outer ditch of Fort Calder as the moon was setting. Up close, the walls were huge, dark red stone streaked black with old fire. On the towers, the banners hung limp in the still air. Now Ren could see what was on them. A black flame on a field of red.
"The Ardent Empire," Brisa said, following his eyes. "First time seeing it?" This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
"Yes."
"Here's something you should know before you go in there." She stepped up close behind him and spoke low, right by his ear. "In this army, nobody cares who your father was. Doesn't matter if you're a lord's son or a pig farmer. You win, you rise. You lose, you're nothing. That's the only rule."
"That sounds fair."
"It's not fair," said Brisa. "It's just simple. There's a difference."
A voice called down from the gate tower, demanding a password. Brisa gave it.
The gates began to open.
***
They took his sword. They took his coat. They took Marta's son's boots, which made him angrier than anything else had all night, but he didn't say so.
Then they marched him through the gates of Fort Calder with a spear at his back and chained him to a post in the middle of a big canvas tent.
He'd been there almost an hour when the officer came in. A thin man with a neat beard and a captain's red sash. He carried a small round stone, gray and smooth, about the size of an egg.
"Sergeant Brisa says you saved her patrol," the captain said. "She says you killed eleven raiders with a sword and a word. I'd like to know what kind of word does that." He held up the stone. "Put your hand on this."
Ren looked at it. It looked like a very small Crystal of Calling.
He put his hand on it.
It turned black.
The captain went very still. He looked at the stone. He looked at Ren's face. Then he looked at the stone again, and his face went the color of old milk.
"You're him," the captain said quietly. "The one they're talking about. On the other side."
"Probably."
"The Demon Hero."
"That's what they call me."
The captain backed away toward the tent flap. He didn't take his eyes off Ren, and he didn't turn his back. At the entrance, he stopped.
"There's a standing order in this army," he said. "From the throne itself. Any summoned hero of the Holy Kingdom found on Imperial soil is to be executed at once. No questions. No trial." He swallowed. "I'm going to send a rider to the Marshal. I suggest you pray."
He left.
Ren sat on the dirt floor of the tent, chained to the post, and didn't pray.
He thought about Ogawa. He thought about the boy with the spear in his leg. He thought about how many standing orders a man could break in two weeks, and whether this one would finally be the one that stuck.
He waited.
The torches burned down. Outside, he heard boots, voices, a horse coming in fast. The camp settled. Somewhere far off, a dog barked and kept barking.
It was nearly dawn when the tent flap opened again.
It wasn't the captain. It was a woman.
She was tall, almost as tall as Ren, in black armor with dark red trim. Her hair was black and cut blunt at her jaw. Across her back hung the biggest sword he'd ever seen, a flat, heavy, square ended blade as long as she was tall, with no point at all. The kind of sword that wasn't made for fighting.
The kind that was made for one job.
She walked over and looked down at him. Her face was calm and a little tired.
Ren opened Read the Field.
Seo Hana · Headsman (Epic) · Level 47STR 88 · AGI 61 · VIT 79 · INT 30 · WIL 72Title: Summoned (Ardent Empire)
He stared at the last line.
Summoned.
"You're the one who killed a Sword Saint on his first day," the woman said.
She said it in Korean.
And then, when he only stared, she sighed and said it again in rough, slow, heavily accented Japanese.
"The Empress sent me," Seo Hana said. She reached over her shoulder and drew the massive blade with one hand, as easily as if it weighed nothing, and laid its flat edge on his shoulder, right beside his neck. "I'm supposed to decide whether you're worth keeping."
The steel was cold.
"If you're not," she said, "I take your head."