The first lights of the sun, interspersed among the clouds, were the harbinger of the battle.
The Burmans had a kind of war call — an item that, to many, resembled a horn. And it was funny to think that, even being another race, from another distant galaxy, they had arrived, over time, at the same things humans used.
In the end, it was as though every intelligent creature in the universe, at some point in its own history, stumbled upon the same solutions.
Of course some races evolved — became sentient and technological civilizations, like the Travellers. But others, despite being just as old, seemed to maintain almost medieval customs. Which made me think that, despite time, evolution happened so slowly that it looked more like crawling.
Maybe it was the low life expectancy due to some disease or custom. Maybe the culture geared toward war and honor. Maybe something more intrinsic and hard to decipher.
All the races of the Oasis were particularly fascinating. But some managed to be even more so. And the Burmans were the perfect example of an ancient civilization that not even time managed to make more rational.
And, nevertheless, there they were — a race of medieval customs that had just maneuvered me with a political skill I found hard to believe. Maybe that was my mistake: confusing technology with intelligence. The axe doesn't need to evolve when the hand that holds it already knows exactly where to strike.
"Lord… are you going to stay on the wall?"
Morgana pulled me from the stupor.
And that was exactly what I was doing: even in that critical moment of life and death, I still caught myself thinking about things that wouldn't help at all in that war. It's strange, but my mind always did that. When things really tighten, it goes off on a tangent and starts thinking about ancient civilizations — as though, by understanding the world, it could convince me that I was still part of it.
Or maybe it was just fear. Fear in curiosity's clothing, which is its favorite disguise.
"Sorry… I'm staying. I'm going to protect you all."
✦ ✦ ✦
"I believe the Firewood, upon approaching, will try to focus on the mages. Everyone: try to eliminate the fairies first, and only afterward the rest. Mages, pull back to the periphery of the wall — your job, when they reach the wall, is to prevent the climb from the inside."
I didn't need to shout.
My orders would reach my own regardless — that was one of the few luxuries of being a Lord. But the adrenaline made me do as the ancients did. Maybe it was more for me than for them.
The weight was different from what I felt against the Tyrin.
Against the Tyrin, it was firing at random and watching the enemy be slaughtered. There, there was malice. There was strategy. And my mages could die if I made a single slip.
"Livina, summon your Treebeards. Let's try to gain as much time as possible."
"Yes, my Lord."
Livina summoned five Treebeards and sent them to the gate closest to our position.
My idea was simple: hold the enemy as long as possible and, mainly, prevent any Burman from making a rapid advance toward the gate. Honestly, even with my wall at level five, I had no idea how many blows it would withstand from any of those Lords.
What I needed was time. Enough time to at least manage to act.
Five trees against an army. Written that way, it sounded like a joke. But Treebeards didn't exist to win — they existed to get in the way. And, at a narrow gate, getting in the way was worth more than killing.
✦ ✦ ✦
And, while I thought about that, my eyes returned to the Temple of Heroes.
Zaridan was there. Smiling at me.
It was clear he couldn't see what was happening on the other side of the wall — but, even so, that smile made it clear that he understood my situation perfectly. Maybe from my posture. Maybe from the movement of the troops. Maybe because creatures like him simply recognize the smell of someone cornered.
He had waited entire eras inside a prison. Then, a few more months inside my Temple. For something like Zaridan, time wasn't an enemy — it was a tool. And, the worse my situation got, the higher the price he would charge.
"Stay calm, my Lord. We're going to manage to get through this."
Morgana felt my nervousness.
She perceived, better than anyone, my conflicting feelings regarding Zaridan. Because, despite seeing that the Oasis seemed to have total control over that hero, I still felt he could betray me at any instant. Even now, with the tension of the battle rising up my back, I felt uncomfortable turning my back on the one who was once the terror of the universe.
He was my card up the sleeve.
Unfortunately, it was a card I didn't want to use.
✦ ✦ ✦
And, while my mind reflected on that, my towers finally began to pour out magic.
The Magic Tower — the one I built at such cost — was, clearly, the most potent of all. Fire, ice, water, and wind coming out in sequence, feeding the other towers along the way, transforming that stretch of open field into a meat grinder with a scheduled time.
The explosions and screams began to fill the horizon.
And it was then that I saw something sinister.
The Burmans didn't advance.
They stayed still. Absolutely still — while the Belt's army died with each explosion in front of them.
My mind fired off trying to understand that play. It made no sense. From the beginning, I believed they would use their own allies as a front line and a block of flesh — that was the obvious reading, the reading any commander would make. But they seemed totally uninterested in that.
"My Lord… the Burmans seem to be standing still?"
Morgana's confusion was clear, even while she fired her own darts without missing a single one.
And, this time, I had no answer.
I seriously doubted they believed themselves capable of invading my walls without the help of those troops. So what were they doing?
"Could it be they just want to blame us for the deaths of everyone in the Belt?"
✦ ✦ ✦
My mind combed for an answer.
There existed many things, in the universe, that allowed civilizations to find their own executioners. What Bestaria threw on me was just one among countless other forms used by countless other races. Letting the entire Belt die by my hands could, yes, transform me into the enemy of half a dozen peoples at once.
But, even so, it didn't make much sense.
It was as though they had dread of making enemies among the races that now crashed against my wall. Only they were Burmans. They shouldn't be afraid of any of that.
Another theory: maybe they were saving strength, letting me spend mana, towers, and units on a disposable army before entering the field. But that didn't fit either — no commander lets their own front line evaporate without at least using its death to open a path.
Or, maybe, and this was the hypothesis that bothered me most… they weren't fighting me at all. Maybe they were just watching. Collecting.
And, to me, the answer to all of that was as impossible to understand as it was for the Orghaal and for the Firewood who now approached the wall with their own armies.
By their faces, it was clear: they didn't understand what was happening either.
The despair on Lord Irepia's face was clear. And the Orghaal Broxes screamed with rage — a rage that, I believed, was directed far more at what was happening behind him than at anything in front.
They had understood before I did. They weren't the front line.
They were the delivery.
And there was nothing crueler than that.
They had marched there believing they were part of a larger plan — that they would be the front line, yes, but a front line that would survive while the Burmans gained ground behind them. They discovered, with half the army already on the ground, that they were merely sacrifice. Thrown out at random, with a disinterest that would be almost comic if it weren't tragic.
✦ ✦ ✦
"Open the gate! Fola, attack from the flanks!"
I couldn't say why the Burmans simply chose to stay still.
But I wouldn't waste that opportunity.
Fola, who heard me shout, didn't take even a second: she opened the gate and advanced with the heavy cavalry. And, fortunately, she was an excellent fighter — and an even better commander. The advance caught the armies of the Orghaal and the Firewood completely off guard.
She even preferred to focus the fairies first — who, besides being more fragile in close combat, had powers capable of threatening the wall's defense.
It was clean. Fast. Potent.
The maximum of deaths with the minimum of losses. The horses — much larger than normal horses — passed over the enemies, and not even the Orghaal seemed to have strength enough to hold that advance. The terrain went filling with red while the enemy line broke under the combined weight of the towers, the mages, and, mainly, the cavalry.
Honestly, that seemed to be one of the easiest battles I had ever had in the Oasis.
And I didn't believe that came from any incapacity of the Orghaal or the Firewood. It came from the fact that that was a calamitous situation from the first second. I doubted very much that either of those two would choose to do what they were doing. Being in a situation they would never place themselves in, against an enemy who didn't care about striking as hard as possible, made that less a battle.
And more a slaughter.
I observed that from above without feeling any victory. Victory is when you beat someone who was trying to beat you. That was something else — it was clearing the field of pieces that two players at another table had decided to discard. And I was the trash can.
✦ ✦ ✦
"My Lord, the Burmans still haven't moved."
While the battle unfolded, I had asked Prince to observe the enemy.
He and the other griffins wove across the terrain — not to attack, but simply to pass me information. And the strangeness didn't make me lower my guard for a single moment. Honestly, I still expected some kind of action from those two.
But, during four hours of chaotic battle — in which only one side fell — nothing changed.
The battlefield went shrinking. And, with time, it became hard to find any of the enemies whole. There were still some alive, but most weren't complete.
And, even so, those two remained there. Firm. Too close to the wall.
It was because of them that I asked the heavy cavalry to pull back. Those two's tactic was too hard to break through, and I didn't want to lose units for nothing: while the Firewood — clearly wounded and exhausted — sustained a barrier of protection, the Orghaal, already down three arms, still managed to bring down at least twenty of Eris's cavalry.
They had a solid defense and an impenetrable attack.
In the end, I preferred to let the tower focus on them.
There was something almost dignified in that. Two betrayed Lords, exhausted, mutilated, holding a position that led nowhere — and still holding. If the circumstances were different, if the Oasis were another place, I might have tried to turn that into an alliance. But those two Burmans didn't allow me that kind of imagination.
"HOW DARE YOU, HUMAN?! COME DOWN HERE AND FACE US, YOU COWARD!"
The little Firewood's shout told me one thing: that shield of magic wouldn't last forever.
But there was another thing in her voice, and that one was far more revealing. Fear. And the enormous Orghaal, beside her, no longer seemed as excited as he had shown himself in the morning.
Both understood perfectly the situation they were in.
✦ ✦ ✦
"What shall we do, my Lord…?"
Morgana questioned me while I tried to decide what could be done.
Those two couldn't go back to the Burmans. And they also didn't have the courage to surrender to me. They were trapped exactly in the middle — in the only place in the world where no direction is a way out.
And, in that situation, there was only one thing I could do.
I looked at the horizon.
And, finally, I managed to see the two Burman brothers observing all of that with wide smiles on their faces.
That was it. That was exactly what they wanted.
"And now, what are you going to do?" That was what those smiles said. There was no threat in them. There was curiosity — the kind of curiosity one has before an experiment in progress, when the result can still surprise.
And it was then that I understood the only thing that really mattered in that moment: they weren't waiting for the battle to begin. They were waiting for ME to begin. Everything that happened in the last four hours — the deaths, the screams, the red field — was nothing more than a questionnaire. And I had been answering each question with an honesty that now gave me nausea.
"Morgana, Livina… stay here."
"What are you going to do, my Lord?"
"Don't tell me you're—"
"Don't worry… I'll be back, girls. At this moment, we need to show our worth. We need to show those two that we're not going to be as easy as they think. I don't know what they're thinking — but we have to show something surprising."
Honestly, until that moment, I still didn't know the reason for any of it.
But I felt it was time to force the enemy to act. And there was one thing I could do — a single thing — that I was certain would make those Burmans stop being passive.
✦ ✦ ✦
Without waiting for an answer, I shouted for two Inheritance warriors to accompany me.
And leapt from the wall toward the enemy side.
I could perceive, even at that distance, the smiles of the two closing — because they expected to see a coward hidden behind his own wall.
That's right. See me with more courage than you, I thought.
The two warriors landed at my side with a dull thud that made the earth tremble, three meters of muscle and metal absorbing the fall as though they had stepped down a stair.
My original idea was to show them only at the hour of the final battle — when the gates fell. They would be my real card up the sleeve. But the situation made me want to reveal them earlier.
Because the logic was simple: if those two were analyzing me, I would give them new parameters. Data that didn't fit anything they had already calculated. And, to recalculate, they would need time.
Any time I could tear out of there would be good.
And there was a second reason, dirtier, that I only admitted to myself in the middle of the leap: if they intended to study me, I wanted to choose which version of me would be studied. Not the Lord hidden behind stone, counting units. That other one. The one who comes down.
While I crossed the bodies of the enemies, I asked the tower to cease the attack.
And, when the rain of magic stopped, the fairy and the exhausted great Orghaal finally saw me approaching. The smiles they opened said they believed their own words had worked — that their challenge had dragged me there.
"So you're not a coward."
✦ ✦ ✦
The great Orghaal said that in an unpretentious way.
And, before even finishing the sentence, hurled his own weapon — an enormous axe — in my direction.
I didn't move.
Because one of the warriors stepped in front with his own body and caught the axe in the air. Like someone catching a feather.
The Orghaal's eyes — startled, confused, incapable of processing what they had just registered — were exactly what I wanted to cause. And I was certain that, far away, those two Burmans were also shocked.
Because humans shouldn't be strong like that.
Of course that Orghaal, without three of his six arms and exhausted from four hours of battle, wasn't capable of demonstrating all his own glory. But, even so, what was happening wasn't supposed to happen. Not in that universe. Not with that race.
I engraved that face into memory. Not out of cruelty — out of utility. It was the first time I saw, with absolute clarity, what Vo'ruun's blood meant in the eyes of whoever was on the other side. And, if it worked against an Orghaal Lord, maybe it would work against those who put us in that situation.
"They want you to die by my hands. You were betrayed — and you preferred to trust a Burman. I won't allow you to live because of that… but I want you to know one thing: you will be avenged."
And that wasn't the cheap comfort of an executioner.
It was a promise. Because, at the instant those two Burmans preferred to watch those two's army crash against my wall, they didn't only transform Irepia and Broxes into corpses. They transformed me into the weapon that would kill them. And I didn't like being used.
Irepia didn't look at me when I said that. Broxes did — and, for a second, something crossed that enormous face that wasn't hatred, nor fear. It was relief. The specific relief of someone who discovers, at the last instant, that their own death is at least going to charge something from someone.
Before finishing the sentence, I used the mark.
The armor closed over my entire body, plate by plate, the black swallowing every centimeter of exposed skin — and, from my hand, a great sword was born from nothing.
If those two Burmans wanted to feel out the terrain, if they wanted to know the enemy before deciding how to kill him, I would show them exactly one thing: I wasn't a common human.
The Orghaal picked up another weapon from the ground. The fairy tried to begin a magic.
I gave neither of them time.
I advanced running — keeping the warriors behind, only giving me cover in case some new enemy appeared.
It wasn't an insult. Nor a threat.
It was the only courtesy still remaining for two betrayed Lords: the warning that it was going to hurt, and that it was going to be fast.
"Clench your teeth."