The Last [Mage] King - Chapter 38: - By Fire, By Shit (Patreon)

“Die, you Bessi, whore!” The Sorcerer screamed, pointed his hand forwards, and sent rapid bolts of shaving-sharp icicles leaping from them, chasing Sasha’s life.

She ducked, slamming her form against the snow, but not before an icicle cut through the flesh of her arm, leaving a gash of red to stain the greys of her uniform. 

She was on her feet within moments, hands stretched outwards, “Roar of Gnev: Stream!” Sasha screamed and the fire listened. It washed over the forest with a hunger, turning trees and leaves to black ash as it raced towards the Voin Sorcerer.

The man slid underneath the orange heat, and covered the distance between him and Sasha before she could angle it down at him. He grabbed her by the wrists, splayed them apart and kicked her in the stomach.

The impact shut her legs off, folded Sasha over and left her perfectly vulnerable for the man’s fist to connect with almost textbook precision. The world spun, she met the snow, and felt a mad pounding in her skull. If female Mages had one advantage, it was that they inevitably already knew what it was like to fight a more powerful Mage—a much stronger opponent—physically. That wasn’t feeling so advantageous now though. 

Above her was the Sorcerer. A man in his twenties perhaps, and with more power than Sasha could hope to match. She ran through the encounter from start to finish and found that this was the only outcome. That brought answers, but not satisfaction, never satisfaction.

She tensed for death’s arrival, and when it came, it was not her the veiled lady took. A river of fire washed over the Sorcerer—first from the right, then the left, and finally from what seemed to be all directions. The man’s last sounds were desperate pleas and terrified screams. And then the Sorcerer’s magic cut out as death claimed him, without that protection he was ash in moments more.

Slowly and with deliberate motions, Sasha rolled into a sitting position, resting her back against the tree. Around her were four Mages, all of which she recognised. Most were teenaged men, the oldest was her Captain, Pushkin, and he had the wrinkles of a man in his late thirties. 

Behind them was a snow filled forest littered with the corpses of Sorcerers. 

“That was a close one, Osin, you need to start watching your back. We can’t always be there to protect you. You need to start pulling your own damned weight.” Captain Pushkin warned, eyes burning with contempt.

“Understood, Captain.” Sasha nodded, and winced at the effort it caused her. She did not mention that she had taken out another Sorcerer before this, and that the only reason why she was vulnerable was because the rest of her squad—excluding the Captain of course—was busy taking on one Sorcerer when they should have been covering her flank. Such a thing would only anger both the man and her teammates who already did not like her.

The Captain saw it as a humiliation that he was given the task of leading new Mages, and saw it as a further humiliation that one of said Mages lacked a cock. The boys just hated the fact that they were paired with a girl, and seemed to resent her for the great crime of saving them from horrible death.

“Get up!” The Captain roared. “I have an announcement to make back at camp.”

And so they did, gathering their things, marching through the snowing forests and finding their way back to camp. 

It was a small thing, in truth—more suggestion than structure. A ragged clutch of canvas tents nestled in a shallow clearing, half-swallowed by frost-bitten trees and the constant muttering of wind. Smoke curled from a battered field stove at the center, its heat doing little more than carving out a breath of warmth in the frozen air.

Rifles were stacked in pyramids near the supply sleds. Blankets hung stiff on lines, crusted with ice. The men’s boots sank into churned slushes of old snow, ash, and mud that passed for solid ground. The horses—those that hadn’t yet been eaten or requisitioned elsewhere—stood hobbled at the edge of the tree line, tails twitching against the cold.

It wasn’t much, and in truth it hadn’t been what Sasha had thought serving in the military might look like, but she had never had any delusions of luxury when she’d made the decision to serve. She just saw that the Mad Sorcerer King had decided to come after everything she loved, and decided she would do something to protect her country.

The unempowered soldiers they walked past stopped whatever they were doing to briefly to salute her squad—to be a Mage was to be the true firepower of the Republic, each one of them was greater than any one weapon the Republic had ever created, and so when they walked they were met with respect. All but Sasha that was—many just glared or stared at her, others avoided her gaze entirely. It wasn’t like she was the first female Mage to ever exist, even right now Mikhailovna the whirlwind still served at the front lines, cutting through Voin men like blades of grass. That didn’t prevent Sasha from being seen as no more than an oddity however, and it seemed she would be for a while.

“Alright, gather up!” Captain Pushkin called out. He was standing outside his tent—a rather big thing, fit for a Mage Captain. Soldiers trickled in and out of it, the latter carrying boxes of various shapes and sizes with them. “Men, I’ve been reassigned,” he said with no small amount of relish in his tongue. It was no secret that Mage Captains often hated being tasked with raising the magnitude of a newbie squad.  Most squads tended to involve only one fresh recruit but distribution errors or logistical restrictions tended to result in at least a few being made up of majorly sapling Mages. Sasha’s was one such. “As my last act, I would like to introduce you to your new Captain.”

As if on cue, the tent behind Pushkin flapped open and a large-bellied man with a balding head, mole on the left of his chin and eyes that seemed sunken into his sockets emerged.

“Mages, welcome Captain Sergei Vlasenko,” Pushkin declared. 

“Hello men,” Sasha’s new Captain said, with a face, a voice and a cadence that she recognized well. How could she not? It was the one man who gave her a chance to be [Mage]. “I’m certain we’ll get familiar with each other as the days pass. For now, you can recuperate from your encounter with the Voin hostiles until summoned.”

Her squadmates and previous Captain scattered a moment later, but Sasha found her boots rooted firmly to the ground. Good news. She’d never thought she’d get any, certainly not in this camp. She made her way towards the man, lips arching into a grin. “Captain! I was wondering when you would check on me, but I was expecting a letter or something y’know. Getting yourself reassigned is a bit much no?”

“Sorry, didn’t have much of a choice,” the man hissed rather than spoke, hard, hot eyes set on Sasha where she had expected warmth. “I spent the last several months being sent from one shit assignment to another. My fault it seems, I nominated you against the wishes of my superiors, and got exactly what I told you would happen if I did. I suppose it’s only my fault then isn’t it? I deserve to lose my comfortable desk job and be sent to the most dangerous places in the country if it means you get to live your dream, don’t I, Osin?”

Sasha felt her words betray her. She opened her mouth to speak but found nothing on her tongue. “I—”

“—You’re on latrine duty,” Captain Vlasenko ordered. “Hope it's everything you wished it would be.”

###

Waiting truly was the worst part of any mission, not the fighting, never the fighting, just the waiting—the steadily mounting anticipation for what was about to come next. It was part of every assignment, and this one despite its deeply unorthodox form was no different—perhaps the familiarity should have brought her comfort, but the result was far from it.

So Sasha paced across the floor, counting the minutes as they passed—waiting for King Exia to return. 

“I always knew there was something off about you,” Duke Krutoyarov hissed from his bound position in the chair. He glared up at Sasha with magma in his eyes and venom on his tongue. “Upstart whore Mage—tell me, did you use your cunt to trick the King into—” The Duke accelerated his face into Sasha’s fist, nose crunched, body lurched, tipped over, and went crashing down into the floor, screaming, cursing and swearing.

Huh…she wondered why men often did that lately.

###

“Legacy,” Exia said, and the door slid open.

He handed his gloves to the doorman as courtesy demanded, stepped past him, and into a room built like a theatre—dimly lit, filled with chairs and hosting a spotlight-bathed podium in the center. 

Judging by a glance, the room could fit roughly three hundred at once, and nearly all of those seats were already filled with people—chattering, laughing, and muttering—and all with either a high class or noble Bessmertnyy tongue. Oh, I’m going to fit right in.

Exia slid into one of the few free seats, and found himself sitting between two old wrinkly men. One was a former Major Governor, he was sure, and the other he did not know. 

His eyes scanned the crowd, and he found himself seeing the same trend there as well—many of the guests were either nobles, (who often held land but not constitutional power), former officials, (who now held little to no constitutional power but retained social clout), or nobodies whom Exia didn’t recognize—likely because they were here in place of someone who actually did hold formal power.

“What a dashing young man, you are,” the former Governor said, eyes bright and kindly. “Can I have your name? My granddaughter would be lucky to have a lad like you.”

Exia smiled warmly. “Fuck no. Now don’t talk to me, I'm busy.”

The man nearly jumped at his words, eyes widened, jaw slackened, but thankfully he did not talk anymore, so all things considered, Exia reckoned he handled that well.

The rest of the room kept on with its chattering however. It went on for quite a while really—benign prattle about nothing and everything—and Exia found himself giving thought to grabbing a pistol and ending his suffering right then and there. He was tempted to do so purely based on how hilarious it would be to permanently traumatize the idiots around him who would be sprayed with brain bits. But then he realised he would need to die for that to happen and found himself dissuaded from that course of action. Oh what if I shot someone else through the head and covered the crowd in their brain bits? No, that was wrong. It would be much more productive to shoot several people through the brain and cover even more of the crowd in brain bits. Wait, what if I shot everyone through the br—

“The Republic is in need of change!” A voice called out, a familiar voice, from a time long ago in Exia’s past. His eyes drifted to the stage where Twin Consul Leonid Dragomirov now stood before its podium, arm raised to the sky, eyes burning into the crowd. He looked a lot like he had when he and Exia had last met, draped in red and gold and almost twinkling with all that jewelry. His hair was different now. The deep, natural brown had been dirtied with dye, as if someone had tried to paint over mud. What should have been a rich black came out uneven and splotchy, like ink spilled on thinning velvet—with some patches too dark, others barely touched, and a faint brown halo at the roots that betrayed the attempt. It was an amusing sight, denial betrayed through colour.

Regardless of the Consul's frankly ridiculous appearance, his presence still commanded attention. The theatre was as silent as the grave, and everyone looked at the Consul in frightful anticipation of what he might say next.

And he spoke. “Every day we lose ground, every day we are defeated, humiliated, and disgraced on the battlefield,” the man said, pacing around the room with an intensity and intent that allowed Exia to understand how such a fool had become Twin Consul; Volkov was a man of action, Dragomirov one of words, and he used them wisely. “Gentlemen, I will not bore you with talking points,” he said as he visibly prepared to give them those talking points. “I will just state a fact. This is not the Bessmertnyy that was promised to us,” he declared, leaving out the fact that he was one of the people who had promised said Bessmertnyy, and the crowd seemed to eat it up, slamming fist against chest in agreement. “This is not the future that we wanted for our children!” Another slam. “And I am here to deliver that future…” No slamming, just anticipation now, and Dragomirov milked said anticipation, letting it rise, and rise, and rise—waiting until even the most disinterested of men was just about to impatiently demand that he tell them what it was, before speaking. “Tomorrow morning, you will send word—whether to your superiors, your subordinates, or those you claim to represent. Begin pressing for the mobilization of all reserve forces toward Lyubov. We will carve through anything in our path, and we will not stop until Volkov kneels.”

More beating of chests, a lot in fact. The crowd got to its feet and the roars of defiance carved through the air. Exia was on his feet as well chanting and roaring so as to not easily be singled out as a traitor or worse.

Dragomirov joined the chest pounding, arm raised and eyes burning with ambition. “Bessmertnyy has suffered through Kings! It has endured Consuls! It is time that it is elevated into its past glory, by an Emperor!”