The ancients always said that Hector of Troy would beat any human on the face of the earth.
In truth, it was said that his power was such that even the best general in the world, with twice the experience, would be killed before managing to draw his own sword. It wasn't a poet's exaggeration. It was a technical description.
But the gods were cunning.
And they understood, long before any mortal, a simple truth: in a fight against a being who was practically immortal to any human, only something divine would be capable of killing him.
That fight was described, later, by his own reaper.
And he admitted it was the hardest battle he ever had. That he needed to use his own divine powers — not to win, but simply to not die.
In the end, the victory came without flavor for the bards and for the poets.
Because the strongest man humanity ever saw fell on the battlefield. And not by the hands of another equal to him. He fell by the hands of a demigod — someone who shouldn't even have been there, and who, in the end, stole his glory and erased his name from history forever.
The story of Hector and Achilles was one among so many others, told as tragedy in the middle of one of the most beautiful ancient narratives. Of course, to me, that was always much more than romance.
It was a warning.
Humans, however capable they might be — stubborn, brave, experienced — were, in the end, nothing before gods.
That was always a hard truth to swallow.
✦ ✦ ✦
Thousands of years later, that was exactly how the first humans felt fighting against the other races of the Oasis. They say the first pathfinders took no time at all to understand how incompetent we were in relation to practically everything that existed in the universe.
In the end, the reality check against giant, powerful, and magical creatures was the fastest way for us to learn what our ancients had already understood as tragedy: being king of a pale blue dot means absolutely nothing in the immensity of the universe.
It was there that our impassable walls fell.
And, just like the Trojans, we quickly understood that, against certain races, all that remained was to pray.
At least, that was how we should have acted.
But there I was, standing.
Not out of courage. Out of lack of alternative — which is where nearly all the courage I've ever seen in this world comes from.
A human standing in the middle of his own destroyed gate, with a caved-in rib and a right arm patched three times in the same night, facing a creature that would have made Hector look like an errand boy.
The difference between me and the Trojans is that they had somewhere to retreat to. They had real walls. They had ten years of siege before the end.
I had none of that. In truth, I hadn't even managed to hold out half the time remaining until my towers came back.
Six hours.
Six hours separating my kingdom from becoming ash on someone's map — or, at best, from a narrow victory. And, between me and that clock, a single creature who smiled like someone who arrived late to a party and still found drinks.
"Come, you son of a bitch… Show me what your race is capable of."
✦ ✦ ✦
The Burman advanced — and an enormous axe appeared in his hand.
It wasn't drawn from a belt. It wasn't taken from a ring, with that characteristic glow every stored item produces upon coming out. It simply appeared, as though it had always been there and the world had only decided to tell me in that instant.
Honestly, I didn't even see the weapon until the last moment. Maybe it was some kind of ability. Maybe I was too tired to have noticed. In that instant, the difference between the two things didn't matter in the slightest.
The shield I raised sank.
It sank against my own chest while I held it with both arms — and I felt the ground yield a few centimeters beneath me, my feet burying into the sand like badly driven stakes.
It was like trying to hold up a falling mountain. And the mountain wasn't even in a hurry.
I needed to take a single blow to understand one thing.
That son of a bitch was in a completely different league.
It wasn't a question of training, nor of technique, nor of accumulated experience. It was a question of rung. There are enemies you beat by being smarter, and there are enemies against whom intelligence serves only to choose the shape of your own death.
"Interesting… I expected to crush you. What an intriguing shield."
The great Burman's blow didn't seem to be anywhere near his strongest.
And, even so, I felt as though I had stopped one of the mounted creatures — not a Burman. That Lord was, clearly, stronger than the tyrannosaur I had brought down at the gate. And, unlike the creature, he knew exactly what he was doing with all that strength.
The cough came out of my mouth before I could contain it, and the blood dirtied the interior of the helmet.
It wasn't only blood. There were pieces of something along with it — and I decided, right there, that this wasn't a good moment to think about what they were.
I rolled quickly to the side, already preparing for the next blow — and my eyes flew to the enemy, who was standing still. Calm. With the axe resting on his shoulder in a completely unpretentious way.
"Well… I hope you entertain me."
Entertainment.
The word kept spinning in my head like a splinter. All the dead of that night — and, to him, all of it was a pastime.
That was the word. Not war, not vengeance, not even conquest. He had crossed a continent, sacrificed an entire Belt, and spent a legendary item — and, in the end, what he expected from that was distraction.
✦ ✦ ✦
Soon the great Burman advanced, running in my direction.
And pushed two of his own soldiers out of the way, hurling them toward the gate — where they were killed by Pegasus before touching the ground.
He got close and attacked with the axe from below upward.
An ascending blow. The kind of attack that, if it hits, doesn't knock you down — it opens you.
This time I wouldn't try to stop it. I preferred to use the sword to deflect the angle of the cut — and even that was extremely difficult.
Because, with each exchange, I felt my bones scream. My muscles seemed about to tear from the bone itself. But I didn't care. The armor held my body upright, and the healing magic kept me active.
I couldn't die.
Not out of pride. Not out of fear. It was simpler than that: if I fell there, everything else would fall in sequence. Morgana at the north gate. Livina behind the lines. Arachne defending her children. Two hundred and forty warriors who existed only because I existed.
A Lord doesn't die alone. He takes the entire kingdom with him — and, honestly, I didn't think that Burman would deign to leave my heroes alive.
Unfortunately, in that situation, my healing wasn't something that could be used limitlessly. Even while the magic ran through my body, I felt my own mind weakening — a tiredness that wasn't of the body, but of something deeper.
Each healing I cast left me a little slower. A little more distance between what my eyes saw and what my hand managed to answer. And, against someone of that level, half a second of delay is the difference between parrying and being opened in half.
"This is what a Burman is capable of…? Ridiculous."
Fortunately, the great Burman didn't see my face.
He didn't see that I spoke with difficulty, spitting out each word between torn breaths. The helmet hid my condition completely — and I was sure of that, because my words made him furious.
He advanced much faster this time.
And, in place of the axe, he kicked the shield protecting my body — hurling me a good few meters away.
While I flew, I took the chance to push the sword against the enemies I used as a wall on landing.
"If you keep this up, I'm going to think you're fighting on my side."
Another provocation. But that one came out more cadenced, slower — because my chest burned in a way that made even organizing a sentence difficult.
✦ ✦ ✦
Fortunately, the moment was opportune.
Because Pegasus was already at his side. And he hadn't noticed.
The claw went through the great Burman's flesh, and he screamed — and immediately punched Pegasus with a force that made the Cockatrice pull back. And, by his expression, something was wrong: Pegasus seemed surprised at not having managed to cut him in half.
"Pegasus!"
My words tore a smile from the enormous Burman's face.
Because I had shouted. And shouting a creature's name, in the middle of a battle, hands the enemy an extremely valuable piece of information: it hands over what you're afraid of losing.
He was more irritated than hurt by the damage to his hip. And, despite the cut having been clearly deep, it was nowhere near similar to the separation of bodies Pegasus performed on the other units of that same army.
"Your creatures are interesting. A pity they won't live to adulthood."
The great Burman advanced toward Pegasus, who was still trying to get up.
"FIREWOOD! FIRE ATTACK!"
I shouted to the enormous owl-bear, who remained gripping the top of the gate.
He had already noticed the situation — but I shouted anyway, because I needed him to be fast. I advanced running in the same instant, and the great Burman finally reached Pegasus's back, ready to cut him in half.
Before he managed to, an enormous ball of fire covered his body.
Unfortunately, he managed to parry a good part of the power using his own axe — but that gave me enough time to arrive from behind and bury the sword in his back.
It wasn't strong enough.
The blade didn't penetrate to either of the two hearts.
Two. That was the cruel joke of their anatomy: even hitting one, there was still the other to keep the creature standing long enough to kill you. It required piercing deep, and in the exact place, and having the strength to cross a layer of skin that behaved like treated leather.
✦ ✦ ✦
Compared to the Burman I fought in the Purge, that one was, without a shadow of a doubt, at least ten times stronger.
Besides having a skin that looked more like a natural armor.
And, in truth, it made sense. I still remembered perfectly the difficulty I had penetrating the skin of that Burman from the Purge — if it weren't for the Aquamarine's gravitational power, I would never have killed him. Under no hypothesis.
The difference is that, that time, I had the help of one of the strongest races of the Oasis — and of an ability that doubled the world's own weight on top of the enemy.
This time, I had a wounded Cockatrice and an owl-bear with less than half his mana.
And, if I were honest with myself in that moment, I would have admitted the complete truth: there was no possible combination among the pieces remaining on my board capable of bringing down that creature.
But honesty is a luxury for those who have time to be depressed.
I only had the next blow. And, after it, the following one.
"Seems you're as cunning as I am… Die."
He grabbed my sword by the blade while I tried again to penetrate his skin.
With his bare hand, squeezing the steel, with the obvious intention of preventing me from using the weapon while he advanced — and, as soon as he tried to hit me with the axe, I covered myself with the shield, trying again to redirect the blow to the ground.
The impact exploded earth and force in every direction — and my left arm, the one holding the shield, simply stopped responding for two entire seconds.
But it gave me the opening I needed: I unmade the weapon caught in his hand and transformed it into a spear, using the ground itself as a point of support.
The spear penetrated deep into that enormous creature's chest.
It was the best blow I've ever landed in my life. Perfect timing, perfect angle, perfect support — that was the answer of months understanding my ability with the mark, condensed into a single movement.
But not even that was enough. Not even close.
In truth, the only thing that happened was the scream that came out of the Burman — a mixture of rage and of incomprehension. Probably he was still trying to understand how that had happened. How a fly had managed to inflict damage.
"YOU SON OF A BITCH… ARGHHHHH!"
✦ ✦ ✦
It was then that his fur began to rise.
And what seemed like an electric discharge crossed that entire body — making it explode in strength and in size.
I recognized that at once.
Not by the appearance. By the sensation.
Because it was exactly the same principle as my Blood Magic: trading intellect for raw power. A deliberate loss of control, in which the creature gives up its own mental clarity in exchange for a strength the body, under normal conditions, would never sustain.
The difference is that, when I used it, it was a resource of desperation.
He was using it like someone taking the collar off a dog he raised from a pup and that knows exactly where to run.
And there was something profoundly dishonest about that. An entire race built to be stronger than mine — faster, more resistant, with two hearts and skin that dispensed with armor — and, even so, with an extra lever kept in its pocket for the days when all of that wasn't enough.
While the creature still screamed with rage and grew larger and larger, I kicked the enormous Burman backward — and Pegasus, who finally seemed to have recovered control, appeared over him. He drove his claws into his back and began to peck: the neck, the ear, any part it was possible to reach at head height.
With a violence I had never seen in him.
He still tried to turn. But another ball of fire hit him, coming from FireWood — and I noticed, by its reduced size, that the owl-bear was reaching the end of his own reserves.
The ball ended up hitting Pegasus too. And he seemed simply not to care.
I took the chance to transform my weapon into a crossbow.
It wasn't the right weapon. A crossbow is a distance weapon, and I was less than ten meters from a creature that was growing. But it was the only way I had to concentrate force into a minuscule point — and piercing was the only thing that still seemed to produce any effect on that skin.
I got close enough to touch his skin near his belly and fired the first shot. The great creature's skin exploded at the point of impact while the dart penetrated deep, before dissolving inside him.
It did absolutely nothing.
And I saw, on FireWood's face up there, the same calculation that was running in my head. We're spending everything. And he isn't diminishing.
✦ ✦ ✦
Because, however much damage we caused, he seemed not to care.
I reloaded the crossbow and fired again. And again. Each shot opened a smoking hole that closed behind new muscle, as though his own body were growing faster than I could destroy it.
He kept growing. He kept screaming. And each new wound seemed to be absorbed by a body that was, with each second, less concerned with being a body.
Three meters. Four. His shoulders tore his own leather armor, and the axe, which before was enormous, began to look proportionally small in that thing's hand.
Until something changed.
His face — before unrecognizable in the middle of the scream of pain and fury — transformed.
Into a smile.
A disturbing smile. Wide, calm, and absolutely conscious — the last kind of expression that should exist on a face taken by a power that, supposedly, erases reason. And, in that instant, I understood everything too late: he wasn't losing control.
He had been charging the entire time.
The same way a creature holds its breath before diving.
Every blow we agreed to land. Every ball of fire. Every dart. Every peck. All of that was time he let us spend — time he used filling that body to the brim with something I had no capacity at all to measure.
"Son of a…"
There was no time to shout an order. Nor to pull back. Nor to push Pegasus away.
An explosion of power came out of the Burman's enormous body and threw me into the air.
My mind came undone in mid-air. Exhausted by a limit I had broken countless times that night — and that, even so, proved useless before that creature.
I felt my body rise. I felt the heat. And I felt, somewhere down below, the thud of something large hitting the ground — and the only thing my head managed to produce was the hope that it wasn't Pegasus.
I tried. I swear I tried. But, however much I fought against it, I couldn't keep myself awake. The edges of the world went out first. Then the sound. Then the rest.
I was blacking out.
The last thing that crossed my head before the complete dark wasn't fear, nor pain, nor regret. It was a practical, almost administrative question: who would be holding that gate while I was down?
✦ ✦ ✦
When my mind finally went out, I found myself floating again.
Without weight. Without pain. Without the taste of iron in my mouth. Without battle.
In that immensity of darkness and cold, with no up nor down, with nothing beyond me and the nothing itself.
The same void as always — my void. The one not even I knew how to explain, and that now seemed colder than in any of the other times. And, in the middle of all that nothing, something appeared right in front of me — the voice of something ancient that, even so, I recognized.
"How were you capable of taking my power… and, even so, losing to such an insignificant creature?"