"..."
"..."
The tent was engulfed in complete silence the moment the Lust Lord left.
"I didn't know you gained another mom, Ashen."
In the end, it was Lucia who broke it, looking at Ashen with an amused expression.
"...And when did you turn into a mama's boy?" Alice added in the same amused tone.
'I've always been one, dear Alice…' He grumbled inwardly, but he did not want to dwell on this.
"You two…" he heaved a frustrated sigh. "Now is not the time for this. We have more pressing matters, such as taking control of the army."
It was clear that he was trying to dodge the subject, but the two women played along.
"Alright. How do you want to do this?" Alice asked as she took a seat beside Lucia.
He let out a relieved breath before focusing on the present, forcing Lola's shenanigans out of his mind.
"First, we need to know what we are working with. For that, I will use dream parasites on the generals of my army for now. But..."
Ashen looked at Lucia. "I don't think I'll be able to focus completely on leading the army if I'm drowning in that much information. Lucia, can you help me with that?"
"Of course." She looked mildly offended that he'd felt the need to ask at all, as if using her required permission.
"Alright. But instead of handing you physical information, I was thinking of having you access their minds on your own." Ashen grinned.
"How am I going to do that?" She tilted her head curiously.
"I'll be assisting you using dreamweaving, of course." He said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "If I were to give it an analogy, it would be like a computer processor. You will be the sub-processor, and all I have to do is give you access to the main engine."
"I understand."
"Good." Then he turned to Alice. "Love, for you, I'm going to have you follow me around as my right hand. I need you to get used to leading the men alongside me, and for them to get used to you leading them."
"I can do that." Alice crossed one leg over the other and nodded simply. Leading men had never been a problem for her. Even a million of them didn't faze her.
"I'm guessing you're freeing yourself from command down the line so you can join the front lines?"
"Exactly." Ashen crossed his arms. "Someone of my capacity for death and destruction being stuck barking orders is a monumental loss, don't you think?"
"You, on the other hand, can do both, since you're mostly a ranged attacker."
Alice found his argument logical and faintly smiled. "Hmm. We'll do as you say. Right now, we're your subordinates anyway, aren't we, dear Marshal~?"
"That's right. You two had better obey my orders, or punishment will be in order." Ashen nodded with mock seriousness, playing along.
The two just rolled their eyes simultaneously.
***
***
***
The respite at the border lasted three days.
Then the horns sounded down the length of the formation, theater by theater, and the army began to move.
The land changed before the war did.
For the first two days, they marched through what had once been farmland. Furrowed fields gone to weed. Irrigation channels dry and cracked. The skeletal remains of windmills standing over nothing, their blades long since rotted away.
Pride Domain had been the breadbasket of the inner territories once. Now it was just dead land.
On the third day, they found the first city.
It had no name anymore that anyone in the army knew. The walls were down on two sides, not breached so much as eroded.
Inside, the streets sat empty. Old bones, mostly. Rusted weapons scattered where they'd been dropped. Here and there, the shape of a building that had burned so completely only its stone skeleton remained standing.
A young mercenary near the front of Ashen's column stopped walking, staring up at what had probably been a temple once. One of the older soldiers nudged him forward without looking at him. Nobody said anything. The city was already saying it louder than words could.
***
Contact came on the fifth day, two hours before dawn.
It reached Ashen the way it always did now: a flicker through one of the dream parasites threaded into a forward scout, the man's mind snapping from drowsy alertness into pure animal panic in under a second.
Ashen was sitting up before the scream reached anyone else.
Movement. Northeast. A lot of it.
"Alice." He didn't need to raise his voice. She was already awake, sitting up across the tent, expression sharpening the moment she caught his tone.
"An attack?"
"Yes. A big one."
She was out before he finished the second word, and within a minute the horns started; not the long, rolling signal of a march, but the short, sharp triple blast that meant contact, form up, now.
By the time the sun cleared the horizon, the swarm had closed enough to be seen clearly, and seeing it clearly didn't make it better.
Thousands of them, low and fast, packed shoulder to shoulder across a front wide enough that the flanks disappeared into the morning haze on either side. Most were roughly human-sized, dark-hided, moving on all fours with a speed that ate ground faster than anything that size should.
Scattered through the mass, taller shapes loomed a full head or more over the rest. The ones the scouts had flagged specifically. The ones that meant trouble.
Ashen roused his army with precise commands, and before long, the ranks had formed, their soldiers standing ready for contact.
"Front rank, brace!" Alice's voice cut through the column, carried by one of her devices to every ear at once. "Artillery, on my mark!"
The cannons, who were her responsibility, spoke first.
A line of them, dug into prepared positions along the vanguard's edge, opened fire in a rolling sequence, BOOM—BOOM—BOOM—BOOM rippling down the line faster than any human crew could manage by hand.
Alice's automated loaders did the work no arm could sustain, and the front of the swarm simply ceased to exist in a series of overlapping craters, dust rippling outward through the bodies still running behind it.
It didn't stop them.
The survivors kept coming because that was how Narkals operated. They didn't have the part of a mind that weighed whether charging into cannon fire was worth it.
The taller shapes were the real problem. Many had survived the opening volley, and they were fast, covering the remaining distance to the line in seconds.
Ashen was already moving.
There wasn't time for running, so he skipped it altogether.
Blindstep folded the distance, and the world skipped. From an outside perspective, one heartbeat, he was behind the line; the next, he was directly in the path of the nearest of the three.
CRACK—
Riven Convergence took hold of his mana the moment he activated it. It molded it into countless thin threads and wove them across every inch of his body.
The spear's weight in his hands became almost nonexistent.
All-consuming power surged through his muscles, elevating them to terrifying heights. As he met the charge head-on, the titanic Narkal ground to an abrupt halt, its momentum snuffed out in an instant. Its head snapped back at an angle no neck was meant to endure.
The second one was already past where he'd been standing.
He wasn't there anymore either.
By the time the line's infantry closed the gaps the cannons had punched, the three big ones were down, and what remained of the swarm broke apart into smaller knots that the front ranks ground through with spear and shield. It took another hour to finish.
When it was over, the field in front of the vanguard was a long smear of dark blood and broken bodies, and somewhere behind the line, medics were already moving between the soldiers who hadn't been fast enough.
Acceptable losses, by the standards of this battle.
Ashen stood at the front of the line, breathing steady, and thought about how many more mornings like this one were waiting between here and wherever this campaign actually ended.
'I can't be in two places at once...'
It was the first time the thought had struck him with such glaring urgency, and it lingered in his mind for the rest of the day.
If he had spent that time organizing formations at the rear, countless men would have died.
Yet if he had been at the forefront instead, cutting a path through the enemy, half the soldiers who had fallen today would still be standing beside him.
***
Two weeks into the advance, the pattern had become familiar.
Contact most mornings, sometimes more than once. Ashen at the front of every breakout, every time the line needed something the cannons and the infantry couldn't handle on their own.
It worked.
The vanguard's casualty rate was, by every measure anyone could produce, absurdly low for the depth they'd pushed into Narkal territory.
What didn't work, increasingly, was everything that happened when the fighting stopped.
Ashen heard it first through the dream parasites, the way he heard most things now; a captain's voice, mid-conversation, not bothering to lower itself because the man assumed no one who mattered was listening.
— We're proud soldiers, but why is some harlot crawling here and saying she's going to command us? What kind of fresh bullshit is this?
— It's raw bullshit. That's what it is.
— But her appearance is nice.
— Who goes to war to look at someone's face? We fight to take the necks with faces attached to 'em. Even if that harlot memorized a couple of lines from an art of war manual, I doubt even small-fry officials would be intimidated by her after hearing she read some books.
— Who knows? All of our heads might go down after being pushed down by her hips and hearing her moan.
Laughter followed. Loud, easy laughter, the kind men used when they didn't think anyone was keeping score.
Ashen's expression became increasingly expressionless.