AO 6 Ch 2

"Test everyone?" I echoed the guard’s words and tried to buy myself a moment of time to figure out what I should do next. I decided to try a joke. "Well, if we're going to test everyone, then who knows, maybe my maid will turn out to be a mage. Do you think she'll still work for me?"

The soldier did not laugh. Tough crowd. "I'm sure you're a wonderful employer," he replied without a hint of humor. "Now, if you'll bring out the rest." He held out the testing device meaningfully.

The soldiers coming down the road fanned out like a net around the village, an ominous feeling settling deep within my gut. 

"Of course, of course. Let me just poke my head in the end here.” I started to turn.

“Oh, and don't tell them about the test," he took a step forward, only for Aurelia to step between us.

"Well, that includes me, doesn't it?" she asked, holding up her hand as if she was just stepping up to be tested rather than blocking him.

The guard placed the glass sphere in her palm, and it gave a dull, white light, as would be expected from an anchor.

I knew she was helping buy time. She was not the concern. They rest of my party would be outed as anchors and Eva a mage.

What other reason than being a spy would someone have to run around pretending not to be a mage? They would draw those swords on us in a flash.

I poked my head inside and flashed my most concerned face with my back to the soldiers. "There’s a few soldiers wanting folks to come outside. I guess a patrol's come. They seem to be looking for someone." 

Maribelle was halfway down the steps with a bag of our belongings. The majority was still in the carriage. We had only brought in what we needed for staying in the inn.

"Oh well, that's exciting." Maribelle came out first, a bundle of bouncing curls before she bowed to the soldiers. "With men like you protecting the roads, I feel much safer." 

The soldier grunted and held out the testing sphere. "And I would feel safer if you complied with the testing." 

Maribelle glanced at the sphere, but her eyes didn't even so much as waver. For a second, I wondered if she realized what would happen when she touched it, only for her to confidently step up and hold her hand out.

"Sure. I haven't tested since I was a teenager, but if you insist, who knows, maybe becoming an anchor comes out as you get older." She smiled broadly.

Her voice carried, and I felt more confident that Eva and Emlyn would know what they were walking out into.

The sphere dropped into Maribelle's hands, but nothing happened besides her face becoming vacant for a moment as I felt her soul slip back into mine, maintaining the barest of connections to her body.

She blinked and pouted and handed it back. "Seems you don't become an anchor as you age. Shame.” Turning her back on the man as if she was done. “Sir, would you like me to bring these to the carriage?" She asked, holding up the bag. "Or do you need more from me?" She ignored the soldier, waiting for my answer.

The man shrugged.

"That'll be all." I dismissed her, though my eyes were drawn away from him to the soldiers that continued to fan out around the village. Given the mass amounts of farmland, the village took up quite a bit of space. Certainly more than I thought they would be able to cover. But the people coming down the road did not seem to have an end. The soldiers quickly swallowed the village. 

Thankfully, all of our reactions were well in line with the actual villagers who were starting to sweat bullets and look back and forth nervously, trying to find a way out of the encirclement.

Those who had been in their dwellings emerged, wide-eyed and full of concern. The soldiers were not being discreet. They hacked through crops and smashed fences as they plowed through any obstacle in their path to complete their full encirclement of the village.

That wasn’t what soldiers who were just going to move on would do.

"Excuse me, what's... what's happening?" The old man from the inn emerged, gripping the door frame as he wobbled down two sets of steps. "What are all these men doing?" 

The soldier I had been speaking to was rolling the sphere in his hand, looking past me at my group. "Did you say one was with the horses? Is she not back yet?" 

"I don't know, maybe she's having trouble with the horses. I'd be a little spooked too." I tried to crack a joke, but the soldiers remained stone faced. 

Another soldier waved his hand, and suddenly the net of soldiers collapsed. Chaos erupted as someone screamed in the distance.

I held my hands up. "We have nothing to do with what's going on here. I'm afraid we've got caught up in something." 

"Doesn't matter," the old man sighed. Ranks fell in around him and advanced on me. 

Maribelle disappeared from walking away from me, only to appear before the ranks of soldiers. "Please stop," she said, pretending to be the best maid ever, only for a soldier to thrust his sword directly into her gut. To Maribelle's credit, she didn't even flinch.

The soldier frowned, staring down at his sword as if to check it was where he’d just stabbed her. 

"Why?" She demanded.

The gruff old soldier looked on without a shred of emotion. "Since we can't find the perpetrators of Fargo, we're just going to drive them into the Badlands. Sometimes, you have to burn the brush to scatter the rodents."

“Thank you.” Maribelle tilted her head and grinned wide only to disappear and reappear behind the first row of soldiers, three heads in her grasp, blood dripping from the stumps.

The soldiers went from an orderly march to a scattered yet practiced formation of encircling her and trying to pin her in the center. It had the effect of focusing all of the nearby soldiers on her.

Maribelle gave a bloodied smile and spun, flinging the heads into the crowd. She came out of the spin with their swords in her hand, turning into a whirling dervish of blades. She cleaved through the soldiers like a hot knife through butter. 

I threw my hands outward, the ground rippling, pushing a wave of soldiers back before a small wall rose up around me lifting me until it became a miniature castle turret. 

Zuri darted out of the shadows, scooping Eva up and planting her on top of the turret with me. Her bow came out of a cloth and she snapped it out to its full length. 

"Emlyn," Zuri shouted, tossing my first anchor's bluesteel sword her way.

The girl I'd grown up with my entire life snatched the weapon out of the air, clearly happier to have it on her as she unfurled the cloth around it letting the weapon gleam in the sunlight.

Lightning coursed through her body and exploded out of the tip of her sword as she slammed into the column of soldiers that had been advancing down the road. They drew their own swords, but Emlyn’s skin took on an earthen sheen and their blades bounced off her harmlessly. Her own strikes treated them like wet parchment.

It was a completely one sided slaughter. My anchors weren’t normal. Three of them had given up their bodies, anchoring their souls into Soulgard and able to directly draw on the fount of magic that was my soul.

They said that the more in-tune a mage and anchor were, the stronger the connection. Which must be why we didn’t even need to talk to know how to fight together at this point. 

Aurelia stayed by the base of the tower, her bluesteel axe twirling in her hands. Fire spat off of it, threatening anyone who came near. Those unwise enough to try her, found themselves charred and limbless. 

At first, I didn't have the heart to start killing all of these soldiers. They weren't really to blame for the war between our two countries. But seeing them box in the entire village and begin to cut down the villagers tore at my heart strings and ripped my reluctance to shreds.

Ice blossomed from my fingers, transforming into half a dozen manticore claws that spun and whizzed through the air completely under my control. They tore through the soldiers' ranks, creating several large holes, enough for the villagers to rush through and escape. 

The veteran soldier who I had spoken to in the beginning watched everything that was unfolding with little emotion. Several more powerful figures joined him. A Garrish mage with six mage-forged watched us fight, while a few anchors rallied behind them. I had noticed throughout the rest of our trip through Garrish, that mages and anchors were becoming increasingly rare for the country.

They had likely thrown many of them at the war, but that didn't account for the complete loss that I had seen thus far. Only the experiments under the supply depot had really started to paint the full picture.

The entire country's magical talents were being devoured in this war, either on the front lines or in the back where the king of their country was secretly devouring the precious resource. What we found in the supply depot would give me nightmares for years to come. 

It was no surprise that when my manticore claws spun back around towards this group of elite soldiers, the anchors intercepted my magic, their swords clanging off the hardened ice and shattering the claws.

While that happened, I was already working another bit of magic. I quickly sank a large amount of earth magic into the ground beneath them, opening up the ground like Freddie’s mother’s maw, rising to take a bite from them. 

Several of the anchors were quick enough to react, and the mage-forge grabbed their mage with varying degrees of success. Three of them and the mage reached the other side, but four anchors and three mage-forged fell into the maw of earth, only for me to twist it and crush them and grind them to bits like an earthen blender.

A twisting spiral of darkness stabbed up from the mage's shadow as he landed, piercing through his heart before it spread out like a grappling hook and rip out a chunk of his chest with it. 

Eva smiled at her success. The princess wasn't half bad at magic herself. "What is the point of this?" Eva said, flinging out more dark magic, piercing soldiers and going for those that appeared to be in charge. 

I held back on using fire, worried I would scorch what remained of the village. I doubted the villagers would return, but I hated destroying their homes. So instead I used ice and earth, using both to tear through the soldiers. 

"Exactly what he said. They want to drive us to the badlands," I shook my head and my tone going flat. "And apparently they want to do that so much that they're going to slaughter all of the innocents." 

Eva glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. "It's not your fault, Ard.”

“What if I weren't here? They would have still done this?” I asked, flinging out more magic.

“Probably. This is probably happening elsewhere. This is war, Ard.” Eva reminded me, but I needed no reminder as I killed the men in front of me.

In the short time since I had become a mage, my life had turned upside down, and something like war wasn't even that peculiar. It wasn't like fighting a pirate armada or facing down the mother of all wyrms. War was longer, dirtier in a way that no one could walk away clean from.

As I thought that, smoke started rising from the edge of the village’s field as the soldiers stayed back. Those fields would burn and it wouldn’t stop there, the village was done for. 

"Zuri, get in the carriage. Head towards the Badlands," I told her and focused back on the battle, calling more and more of my magic into my soul as I prepared for a larger spell. If they were going to lay this all to waste, why shouldn't I help push them into the fire they made? 

Fire wasn't usually my preferred choice, and it was an even more precarious choice in Garrish, where the often dry landscape would go easily up in flames. But here, against an army this size, perhaps it's exactly what we needed. I only felt bad about everything the villagers would lose, but as Eva had said, this was war. 

I called on my magic and grew a larger and larger ball of fire in the sky, continuing to feed it. Focusing, I created a loop with my soul to flow the magic back and forth and remain in control until I was ready.

Once I built the ball to be nearly a second sun in the sky, I launched a rain of fireballs down from it, each one creating a crater the size of a person as they exploded on impact.

It rained fire down onto the soldiers, my anchors, collapsing back towards me and keeping me safe so I could focus on my magic. Hundreds of little balls of fire consumed my every thought as I held each one together until they became a whole and the imagery of a firestorm came to life and solidified into a single image and single spell for me.

The result was devastating. I turned the entire swath of land the village had been built on, as well as several miles up the road, into a burning, crater-filled horrorscape. Even the amount of damage I was able to do myself terrified me.

The village and the grasslands and the surrounding vegetation all turned into a great blaze, sweeping through and catching any soldiers that my ladies had spared.

I could only hope that the villagers would manage to outrun the blaze, but we didn't have time to check. With a wave of my hand, the small turret that I had built collapsed in on itself and lowered us to the ground before I parted the flames with a simple gesture. "Wagon now. We need to get out of here." I declared.

Emlyn didn’t even give a snarky reply, which made the situation feel even more intense.

We rushed towards the wagon. Maribelle was cracking the reins even before we were all seated. Aurelia jumped into the doorway, holding onto the frame as the carriage took off and watching for an attack by soldiers we might have missed.

"This is ridiculous," Eva spat, staring out the window at several slain villagers laying in the fields as everything began to slowly burn. "It's the kind of strategy a mad king would employ," she frowned.

"Mad or brilliant," Zuri commented. "After all, it worked. Ard is going to run headfirst into the badlands.”

“Look how much they're sacrificing," Eva gestured at the fields. “It isn’t worth it.”

"They'll be feeding many fewer people as the war goes on," Zuri commented. "Their losses have been particularly heavy. We both know that.”

“That doesn’t make this okay." Eva snapped.

"I'm just saying, the food in the fields won't be as important a strategic item as you might be suggesting. The longer the war goes on, the less food they need for their country. It's just math. Grim math, but math." Zuri replied.

I chuckled, some nervous laughter creeping in. “The math ultimately goes to zero, even I can see that.”

Eva turned to me. "How can you laugh at this?" she asked.

"How can you not? After all, when something this absurd is happening, it feels like laughing is the only thing that will keep me sane." I tried not to look out the window. Nothing good was going to come of observing the horror happening outside.

A thought occurred to me. "Shit, we didn't get to plant the message. It’s likely burned up in the blaze."

The dark-skinned anchor gave me a lazy look. "I don't think that's our biggest concern, Ard. Besides, I think Lord Valken will get a message of sorts when he comes to find the village in its current state."

"It was my first secret message. It's kind of a big deal." I pressed.

"Do you see what I have to deal with?" Zuri asked Eva.

"I do. Is it too late to back out now?" Eva asked.

"Yes," I answered loudly. "Besides, you knew who I was before you joined up. Don't pretend like you didn't." I shot back, trying to lighten the mood.

"If anything, it's reassuring that Ard's okay," Emlyn offered. "After all, as long as he's trying to crack jokes, especially the bad ones, we know he hasn't hit his head."

"Har har." I gave her the reaction I knew she was looking for, rolling my eyes and getting a small rise out of each of them. I noted Emlyn and Eva's lips tugging at their corners, despite what we'd just been through.

"So, the badlands," I gestured forward. "What exactly is out here, besides horribly poisonous everything?"

I waited for an answer, glancing at those more worldly than I, primarily Zuri and Eva. I would have asked Maribelle what the textbook said, but she was driving the carriage.

"Nothing really. People don't live out here. Even monsters as big as humans don't exist, because there's simply not enough for them to eat. Instead, there are poisonous birds, the kookaroo, as well as dozens of venomous spiders and scorpions. Not to mention the lizards.”

“Got it. We'll just consider it a camping trip." I nodded. “As far as water's concerned…” I condensed a chunk of ice floating on my fingertip. "I should be able to cover that. And I can build a shelter. Camping with me will be a breeze." I tried to convince myself that it wouldn’t be so bad.