Ruthless V4Ch9-Casualties of War

This is an old version of this chapter.

James slept for a full eight hours, missing most of the day after the battle.

When he woke, Mina was lying next to him.

As he stirred, she rose up, left the room, and brought him a tray of food.

When did we get that? he wondered silently.

But he ate and quickly forgot about the question of where the tray had come from.

“I was starting to worry you were the last casualty of the battle,” Mina said, trying to sound light and funny. The humor fell flat, because she clearly meant what she was saying more than she had intended to let on.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said slowly, making eye contact as he spoke. “I just tired myself out—”

“Saving people, yes, I know,” Mina said. “I can still worry. You didn’t say anything about this beforehand.”

“It was sort of impulsive,” James admitted. “Alice told you about it?”

She shook her head. “No, Rotter. He visited half an hour ago to check how you were. I told him you were napping peacefully.”

“Rotter?” James frowned. “How does he even know?”

Mina gave him an amused look. “I think he makes it his business to know things that might be of interest to you, but you should understand, this isn’t a Rotter thing. Everyone knows what you did. They’re all talking about it. The miracle worker.” Her lips curled into a playful smile. “Even those religious folks we just welcomed. They’re apparently talking about you like you’re the Second Coming.”

“Is that so?” James asked. He smiled and tried to affect modesty “I guess I should have known.”

“People here are always interested in what their leader is up to lately. Couple that with what happened in the forest last night. A fresh crisis, post-Orientation, after they thought they might be safe. The good thing is that you combined both topics and changed what would have been a tragedy into a story of hope.”

“The way you say it, it’s very nice,” James said. “Anything from the people whose friends or family members actually died in the forest?”

Mina’s smile slowly drooped. “No, not yet. Not many people died, though, you remember. Of those who did, not many had family members. According to Rotter, among the people who had family members that we know of, there are only three people to talk to. The other two are in a coma.”

“Okay.” James nodded, then sighed. “Thank you for the update.”

I look forward to having those conversations…

“Guess I’ll go and revive some more people,” James continued.

Mina shook her head. “Wait until tomorrow, skapi. Let your body recover. While you were out, Yulia tried to use healing magic on you. It didn’t do anything. So you have to be careful using your blessing this way.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go back in the morning. This has to get done, though.”

“You’ll get no argument from me. The people want their savior. I just don’t want you to die so they can have him.”

She smiled at James, then, but it seemed to him there was little joy in it.

In the morning, James got up, ate breakfast, slowly revived twenty people, and was helped back to the apartment.

Several days passed, in which this became the routine.

His blessing was effective each time he used it. The only flaw was that the process of blessings was slow and energy intensive.

A few people were intubated by Gupta and Zirndorf, but most of them did not have to be. Regular infusions of healing magic seemed to delay the onset of starvation, and with James ‘miraculously’ waking a score of sleepers each day, the population in the community center had soon shrunk to a manageable size. While James was sleeping off the effects of his energy expenditure, Mina ran the Kingdom.

Fortunately, there was little that needed to be decided during those few days. People were licking their wounds, slowly recovering from the battles James had led them into, trying to find ways to contribute to the Kingdom.

The only break from the routine of waking, eating, healing, and sleeping again was when James went to see his mother.

She had erected a small building just after the battle. The exterior was covered in strange runes that made him feel slightly uncomfortable when he looked at them.

Nevertheless, he needed an update on what had happened since he asked for Zora’s help, so he knocked.

James had to knock several times, increasingly loudly each time, before his mother finally opened the door.

“I’m glad to see you’re all right, Your Majesty,” she said, her eyes twinkling with mirth. “I heard you’ve been napping a lot. When I heard that, I was worried at first, but then I remembered, that was how you were as a baby, too. Quiet, sleeping a lot, conserving energy.”

“I’m surprised you’ve heard anything, Mom,” James replied. “I was under the impression you hadn’t been out of here much since you went in.”

Or since you suddenly built this place.

“Nice work on the building, by the way,” he added.

“Oh, thank you!” Zora said. “My natural affinity was for earth magic, you know, before I adopted my particular specialization.” She looked around at the outside for a moment as if scanning for anyone who might be watching them. “You should come in, son.”

James walked inside the dark building. Inside, it was lit only by candle light and by mystic runes dug into the wall that glowed with unwholesome energy.

He could still tell that the interior was larger than it looked on the outside, because the bulk of the structure was underground.

Though he did not walk down any steps initially, she led him down a dark hallway with a downward sloping floor. He recognized that they had quickly moved below ground level.

Finally, they emerged into a vast, dimly lit room that reminded James of the interior of a morgue—or what a morgue looked like on network television, at least. The space was larger and more open than a morgue—perhaps because Zora did not need to put the bodies away anywhere. They lay out in the open, resting on stone slabs, in various states of modification.

None of the corpses, James noted, had begun to noticeably decompose. None of them gave off any odor. It was obviously unnatural, as if they were in a state of suspended animation.

“I’m impressed you were able to dig such a large basement in Florida without hitting an underground aquifer or something,” he said, avoiding the topic he had come here to discuss.

“Magic finds a way, son,” she replied. “If you’re interested, maybe I can show you one of these days.”

“I’m not a Necromancer,” James said.

“Not yet,” his mother said. “You haven’t tried it. Even if you don’t learn any Skills from reading the book that I’ve been using, your wife could pick up my abilities by watching me, and she could trade them to you. That’s how her Quick Study works, right?”

James nodded, his eyes still moving from corpse to corpse. There was a strange quality to the atmosphere around him. It wasn’t just that it was creepy being in the presence of all the dead bodies. He had seen far too many cadavers before to be as bothered as he might have been pre-System.

Rather, he had the distinct impression that something else was in the room besides himself and his mother. Some presence inside of one of the bodies, or perhaps more than one. His instincts could not tell him for certain. Nothing moved within the room. That, he would have sensed.

But something made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

“Did you come for an update, then?” she asked.

James realized he had stood staring at the bodies for a few seconds now, while his mother stood waiting for him to answer her question. He wondered if he was making her uncomfortable. He guessed she already felt how prone people were to judging her Class.

“I did,” he said. “I wanted to know if you’re able to do anything with the dead, to help them in any way, and if not, I’d like us to get ready to bury the bodies.”

“I’ve been working on them, but I hit a roadblock. To create intelligent undead—undead who have some degree of personal dignity, rather than being mere puppets—”

James nodded. This was exactly what he had asked for.

“—you need special items or Skills to bring them to life and keep them alive,” she finished.

“I guess you don’t have those yet,” he said.

She shook her head. “No such luck. I could afford to buy a couple of the items from the System Store, but I was going to ask you if you had some spare credits I could use to increase the number. Otherwise, most of these bodies aren’t going anywhere except the ground.”

“How are you keeping them, um, in such great condition?” he asked.

“It’s this place. The magic runes. Keeping the souls from escaping. Preventing decay. That was my first task, and I’m proud that I accomplished it for most of them. I can’t tell for sure which ones I might have failed with.”

“I see. Well, at least you have your workshop set up for future purposes,” James said.

He could see the disgusting and abhorrent side of what his mother was doing, and the very nature of her Class probably would have creeped him out if it was not someone he loved and trusted implicitly.

But Zora was one of the people he trusted most in the world.

“How many System Credits do you need?” he asked.

She told him.

The amount was more than he had left, and he said so.

But he agreed to give her as much as he could.

Money was worthless except to improve people’s lives, after all.

If he did not use it to keep some of his loyal citizens in the world of the living, a better use of his money was not likely to come around in the future. His wife had already said, quite directly, that she did not want to be raised from the dead if she were to fall.

He transferred the money to her and left his mother to her own devices once again.

The pattern of days continued until James’s Blessing of the Fisher King reached level five. At that point, he unlocked Mass Blessing of the Fisher King, a much less energy-intensive way of doing what he had been doing.

James woke the remaining coma patients in just two days with that Skill.

There was much rejoicing, much talk of the miracles that James had performed, and great appreciation for his performance as King, though he could not honestly say he was certain that he deserved it.

James went to see his mother again, and Zora reported that she had succeeded in raising just over half of the fallen from death, creating fourteen new Vampires. They would remain underground with her until James figured out how to reintroduce them to the community—or how to use them outside of the Fisher Kingdom. He knew this was something he would have to play very delicately.

With the dead either raised as monsters or finally, definitively dead—some had apparently refused to come back, by Zora’s account, while others had willingly returned to their bodies—and the other survivors all finally awoken from their coma, life could move on.

There was no longer a reason to wait to hold a military funeral for all those who had permanently died.

Fortunately for James, the ones who had refused to come back were among those dead whose family members had made themselves known to Rotter and Mina during James’s long sleeps. He had been mentally preparing to have some difficult conversations. He would not have to answer any awkward questions, at least not by family members, if they saw their dead kin walking around in a few weeks.

Things had settled themselves relatively neatly, for now.

Just in case there was any possibility of confusion, James ordered that the dozen truly dead bodies be sealed in closed and unmarked coffins. Officially, this would prevent anyone from observing the corruption that might have taken root in the bodies. In practice, it allowed him to bury additional coffins that did not contain human bodies alongside those that did, filling in the empty space with enough dirt to mimic a human body’s weight.

Though he had made the decision to try to save some of the dead from the unknown of the afterlife, James was uncertain when or if he could actually face the consequences of announcing this choice publicly. For now, it would remain a tightly held secret.

The day after the last of the coma patients woke up, they held the funeral.

James conversed with Mina in a room behind the community center stage. He was set to go on and speak to the sacrifices of the dead. But he was still unsatisfied with what he had prepared.

“I wish I’d had a Jefferson, Hamilton, or an Adams to write a proper eulogy for the dead,” James said. “I think whatever I say, as the person who sent them to their deaths, is bound to be inadequate and self-serving.”

He said this, and believed it, despite the fact that he had more than his share of public speaking-related Skills—and every reason to believe that the public still approved of his handling of the Haunted Forest invasion.

“I loved your speech when you rehearsed it for me earlier, skapi. But I think they’ll be able to tell that you’re speaking from the heart no matter what you say.” She gestured to the door to indicate where the citizens were waiting. “People don’t go to funerals to hear eloquent words, outside of Shakespeare. They go to feel that someone else shares their pain. And you convey that perfectly. You could probably just go out on stage and speak off the cuff, if you wanted to. Not that I’m advising that, when you spent so much time on the speech… Is this really about the eulogy?”

“Something Dave said before the battle has gotten to me a little,” he admitted. “He sort of suggested I was using him and his forces as a distraction. He said he would understand if I was, but I denied it. Now I’m feeling a little bit guilty. Because maybe it was true.”

And they’re my tools both before and after death, too.

“Don’t forget why you opened up that front in the fight,” Mina said emphatically. “It was so that your mother, your sister, and I could go and invade the Wraiths’ territory somewhat safely and put an end to the enemy once and for all. The plan we worked out together was the best one we could possibly have formulated, given the circumstances. And I still think it was a good plan. Yes, you put your soldiers’ lives at risk. That’s their job. To risk their lives. They knew what they were getting into, and you did everything you could to protect them. You distracted the Ruler and let her—let her torture you, with those visions you still don’t want to talk about, so that your people would have more of a fighting chance.

“After you defeated her, you went in and saved them. When the battle was lost, you rushed in and changed the outcome. I’ve heard how they talk about it—and about how you revived all the people possessed by the Wraiths when the Healers couldn’t do anything. The survivors of the battle are calling you everything from a miracle worker to a god on Earth. No one blames you. And every single one of the people who was lying in a hospital bed after the battle owes you their lives. They probably wouldn’t have recovered without you. So don’t you start to doubt yourself now. Right now is when they need your leadership the most. They need to know how to respond to loss in this new world we’re all getting used to—where we have every reason to believe it will be much more frequent than it was before. Everyone will look to your example.” She finished with a slow, deep breath, and James looked up to see that her face was bright red. She was barely holding it together. Just like him right now.

Mina is also looking to me for strength, he thought. Stability. I have to be strong for her, more than anyone else. More importantly, she’s right. I can’t give up. This is no time to doubt myself. Wartime leaders don’t resign just because some people died under their command. That’s the nature of my role. People are going to die fighting for me. As long as I don’t throw them away like pawns in a game of chess, I have nothing to be ashamed of. If I decide that I’ve done something wrong, it diminishes the value of their deaths anyway. By suggesting that they died for a mistake, instead of acknowledging the truth. They died to protect their friends and family, their loved ones, who were safe behind the lines of the territory.

“I love you, too,” he said.

He opened the door. Then James and Mina stepped out onto the community center’s stage, facing the crowd. Mina took her position standing to the side and just behind her husband.

James evaluated the crowd.

There was an excited energy in the packed room, almost as if they were not there to mourn twenty-six dead people. Most in the crowd had not lost anyone they cared for.

Some of them had not been touched by the battle, except that they had been haunted by Sister Strange. Some of them had not even experienced the hauntings. Among those who had fought, only a few had lost someone they were close to. They had gained levels or experience, and there was an obvious camaraderie about the crowd..

James saw Dave and knew that he had felt the cost of the battle more than most.

The two men locked eyes for a moment. Dave gave him the smallest smile and a nod.

I’ll imagine I’m giving the speech to you in particular, James thought. It was the last bit of encouragement that he needed.

James straightened his posture, pressed close to the podium, and began to speak.