Souta Matahashi: 5 Days Prior

  Blood runs down my stomach. A sharp pain twists into me—metal squeezing my guts. The wild, dark haired predator slavishly hounds after me. He spins that awful chain and creates a terrible song with his rage. His lightning is terrifying.

  He transforms into an even worse monster while I convulse on the ground—a worm burrowing into my skin, panic heightening.

  Everything in my body begs for me to run. This man is not…human.

  He looks at me, but his crimson gaze judges me as worthless. A mere ant for stomping.

  Then, he looks at my Uncle…

  And…

  I wake up screaming—clawing out at anyone and everything, scrunching up into myself.

  “Souta! Souta, it's me! Souta!” a severe man with salt-and-pepper hair shakes me by the shoulders. He is strong-boned, yet tall and lean—not overly muscular.

  Masaru.

  “Uncle,” I wheeze. “Where—where am I?”

  “You are safe,” he says in Kanil, a dialect of Mandil that’s uniquely Sorayvladian. It's also a dialect that’s out of style now. He only uses that language when we’re alone or talking about sensitive subjects. “You are safe my son. It is over.”

  “I… Was turned?” I stare at my arm—at the hole that should be there, drilled through by one of Thraevirula’s plague worms. But it is healed over, the skin still pale as the moon.

  “The witch did her magicks to **** you.”

  My grasp of Kanil isn’t perfect, yet I can at least infer what he meant by ****. Cure.

  Since he’s so insistent on speaking the language, I try to match him. “What about ‘slave’?” His eyebrows furrow in confusion for a moment, trying to dissect my broken grammar.

  But then he growls. “Fled like a coward. He could not handle us. We won, Souta,” he says now in Common. “We beat them bloody.” My uncle hugs me at that moment and whispers his praise in Kanil—phrases that wouldn’t even exist in Common. He’s the most proud I’ve ever seen him.

  Yet, as I peer past his shoulder to see the outside slit of our tent, witness our armies merge together once more, and spot a faint shade of red hair waiting by the entrance—as I look down at my hands and then at my stomach—as I close my eyes and remember only the fear that compelled all of my actions during that terrible duel in the sky…

  Well, I certainly don’t feel like I’ve won.

  …

  “I see the young shogun has woken from his slumber,” Thraevirula says as I emerge from the tent a day later. She wears a beautiful black dress with hems of deep, royal purple—a very Catolican style. The witch makes an exaggerated bow, never taking her eyes off of me. “How was your beauty sleep?”

  I ignore her query, instead, rolling my shoulders of the fatigue and twisting my hips. The wind whistles through the hole in my ear—which still remains, the only part of my body unhealed.

  I point to it and glare at the witch.

  “Why hasn’t this been healed?”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  She stands straight and tilts her head, as if noticing it for the first time. “Oooh, that’s quite a manly war wound. It’ll make all the girls swoon over you—”

  “Thraevirula.”

  She giggles. “You’re too easy Souta.”

  When I don’t reciprocate her joy, her face goes dead serious and her high voice drops. “I don’t know. Ask Baroth—he’s the one who healed you.”

  “Baroth?”

  “Oh. Right, I suppose you wouldn’t know his name. Take a guess.”

  The Elk. Either that, or the silvery weapon which helped me as well—but the eldritch animal makes more sense. He could speak. And he’s the one who revived me from the brink of death.

  My eyes rove over our army, which somehow seems stronger than before the battle. The pitched clash with Saegor’s spirits must have wetted our green soldiers. And now, with the back half of the vets finally joining back up with our army, we have truly become a kingdom-toppling force.

  Another change is that we are no longer moving into the briars, but rather, moving parallel to them. Which confuses me—because I thought the whole point was to destroy the Catolican fortress at Havenmarch and then move on North to invade the greater Catolica.

  Instead, we’ve begun marching South.

  “Soutaaaaaahhhh. Are you ignoring me? That’s so meaaaan Souta. You’re so mean, you know that?”

  “Please, leave me alone.” I just want to get some fresh air. Some peace and time to think. I start moving away from her.

  “Oh but I can’t Souta. After all, don’t you want to know how you lost? How you utterly and completely lost to Raiten, the slave with no formal training? You, who had been preparing your entire life, who had an endless supply of amulets to your name, lost to—” she starts cackling. “A literal nobody in a one on one duel when you had the plagued to help you and—”

  I draw my blade and level it at her neck. The wakizashi is the last remaining sword I have. Cracks pock the steel’s center. Yet, it still has enough reach to kill her.

  It's strange how much I despise this woman. I don’t even hate Raiten this much. But with her, it's so easy. I can imagine pushing forward now and driving the blade through her skull. The tall grass swivels at our ankles—bending West at one moment, then East at another as the winds battle for dominance.

  The witch looks at the blade—sees her reflection in the metal—and makes that infuriating blood-red smirk at me.

  “Touchy aren’t we?”

  “You don’t know the half of—”

  CLANG!! A sharp rattle of metal on metal as, in the blink of an eye, Thraevirula unsheathes her own raw iron sword and bats my blade aside with it. I dance back and take a fighting stance.

  Yet, instead of pursuing, Thraevirula tosses her sword at my feet.

  “This one’s better. It won’t break like yours.”

  I stare at the weapon, then back at her.

  “Why?”

  “Because, little shogun, I’m on your side. And surely, despite your Uncle’s words, you don’t believe that you actually won against Raiten, do you? Because, if you do, well then…” she laughs. “There’s no hope for you.”

  I let my own sword fall. Then, I bend down and pick up her blade.

  “So what would you have me do?” I mutter bitterly.

  She approaches me and puts a hand on my shoulder, squeezing like a taloned bird.

  “Tonight we will slumber together—”

  “Not interested.”

  Her grip tightens. I wince in pain. “Not like that, silly. I mean, I will go through your mind, pick it apart, and show you what mistakes you made on the battlefield. Then, we will train in the wee hours of dawn and in the darkness of night—in your own plane of dreams. It will be tiring. It will be brutal, little shogun. But you have a lot of catching up to do.”

  She searches my face, not with amusement, but with actual calculation. Assessment of the task ahead and my qualifications for it.

  “Can you handle that?” Thraevirula asks quietly.

  I think about it for a few moments. Then, memories of my duel with Raiten flash in my mind like red phantoms of death and I just slap her hand away.

  “When do we get started?”