They want to make a myth out of you, take you from being a person and turn you into something hateable. I won’t let them.

  Breath, yelling, and explosions of magic. I hunch forward, supporting myself with hands on my knees, gulping in a lungful of air while my head tries to tear itself apart. A waterskin drifts into my vision, offered to me by one of the five ranged strikers in the group I have been positioned in.

  “Thanks,” I choke out, taking the skin and sucking down a gulp of water.

  Handing the water back to Jaelin, an elvish man who uses a longbow, I look around. We stand atop a cylinder of rock created by one of the guardians in the mixed group, the valley spreading out a dozen or more feet below. The corpses of the massive termites lay everywhere, the ichor of their blood soaking into the churned mud below. No matter how many we put down, there is an endless amount more.

  Eighty feet northward, sixteen men and women form a line to hold against the oncoming tide of monstrous insects spilling from the western hive. To call it a line would be generous; the adventurers fighting close to the monsters move through the seemingly endless tide of the beasts rushing toward us, never stopping, the light of the sun flashing in the swing of their weapons or off of the rare clean spots on their armor. My friends are out there among them, only Jor’Mari standing out due to being over nine feet tall as he rips through the oncoming tide of monsters with an invisible mace. The bugs lay smashed or cut to pieces for hundreds of feet around the slowly shifting line of the battle, but they never stop spilling out of the holes born into the tower of dirt that is their hive. Only the blue and black termites seem to bother contesting our push into the valley, the red hive leaving us completely unmolested as we make our assault.

  For half a mile, similar skirmishes like ours play out. The army, divided into seven parts, has set the line in front of the western hive, all of those fighting in close range down below in the general melee, ranged strikers and mages like me positioned well enough behind to be away from the danger. Far to the rear of any fighting, five people linger, three healers and two whose abilities bend toward support. Guarding them is one of the three rank-threes the 4th army possesses, Illigar himself. The man stands on the trampled upslope out of the valley, imperiously looking on at the spectacle of violence with his arms crossed over his chest. The other two of our high-rankers make up the ends of the army’s line, turning the tide of bugs away from surrounding us with their advance, pushing them back toward the center.

  “You should take a break,” Jeremy, the elven archer, says after taking a pull from his waterskin. “You have been over-exerting.”

  “I’m fine,” I say, reaching for the dagger on my hip.

  My finger runs over one of the runes engraved into the hilt, and a surge of mana flows into my arm. With my reserves so drained already, my full concentration on the veins of mana coursing through my body, I see the connection the enchantment makes with the tip of my finger. My inner eye marvels as a flood of blue energy pours into the network of channels running through my body, restoring nearly five thousand points of mana in the span of a few seconds. Adding that mana-storing enchantment to the dagger when I made the weapon is probably the best bit of enchanting I have done to date.

  The pounding in my head refuses to leave, but I feel strength return to my limbs.

  “I can keep going,” I tell him.

  The man looks at me doubtfully but doesn’t protest, returning to the edge of the stone cylinder we are on top of before retrieving an arrow from the quiver on his back. I catch one of the other mages on the platform with us cracking open an eye to look over at me, but the moment our eyes meet, they return to their meditation. All three of them sit on the pillar, their breathing regular and unstrained. As soon as the battle commenced, we unleashed magical hell upon the insects we called out of the mounds, but it wasn’t long before only Jeremy and I were the only ones continuing to fire.

  The other three, with their mana almost fully drained, retreated into a sort of meditation, focusing on replenishing their mana as quickly as possible. A few questions revealed that the meditation is almost exactly like what I have been doing by focusing on the network of channels my mana runs through. I don’t know how doing such increases the rate at which mana regenerates, but figuring it out in the middle of a battle seems like a poor idea.

  The world comes to life once more as I call upon my power, pouring orange flames into the head of my moonsilver staff and building the charge. I watch as my friends fight against the charging bugs far ahead, feeling helpless to do anything as the power in the staff continues to build.

  A haze of colors spreads out ahead of me, the ever-present mixing of dozens of auras on top of each other painting the world in a vomit of colors. Even with my aura spread to its maximum range, mine is not nearly the largest in the valley. The real power of the army comes from the overlapping of soul presences, Illigar’s being the chief among them. The man’s soul reveals itself as one made for command. Everyone within the vast area of his silvery veil finds their movements sped up, their fingers dancing just a bit more gracefully, somehow unable to lose the location of any other ally within the reach of his soul. This effect alone vastly empowers the army, but he is not alone in the utility of his presence.

  One of the healers far to the rear has an even further reach to her soul presence than I do, the soft yellow light of her soul covering most of the army and helping to regenerate everyone’s vital energies by a substantial amount. Another man in the second group to the far left can encapsulate nearly half the force with his presence, somehow increasing the resilience of all his allies while decreasing that of the enemy. The third-ranker to the far right of the army’s line can keep the enemy in check with almost the power of his presence alone, causing any bug that comes within fifty feet of him to spontaneously go berserk and start attacking its brethren. In our section of the army, Jor’Mari stands out in the crowd as a bulwark to find a reprieve among the fighting, almost half of the insects entering the field of his insidious purple soul turning around immediately and fleeing in fear.

  It isn’t as if everyone in the army contributes to the wall of auras our enemy charges into. Magicians like Dovik and Jess have hardly any reach to their presences, and more than a third of the army aren’t even magicians to begin with. Most of the non-magicians are endowed nobility, their physical aspects astounding, allowing them to outpace almost anyone on the open battlefield when it comes to the speed of slaughtering the enemy. There are a few others as well, those that I don’t know how to categorize.

  One woman seems to have no magic other than an immensely powerful staff she bears, the weapon itself carrying enough power to place her into the silver rank. Another is the strangest man I have ever seen, he would look human if it weren’t for his almost glowing blue skin. Monsters that approach him begin to shriek, some collapsing to the ground while others have their entire heads explode. I never see a hint of magic come from him. Like with the endowed nobles, my eye gives me no hint as to their power. Every time I see more of the world, I learn just how small and ignorant I am.

  At the end of the day, the power of this army comes from the congregation of presences, but I find the overlapping of souls stifling. Inside the thrumming field of dozens of overlapping auras, any attempt to control my black sand is pointless. Inside of this army, I feel so powerless, reduced to a simple mage sitting on a tower and firing blasts of fire. I don’t even dare to spread my soul presence to its limit; the chaotic flood of information assaulting me from even a small part of the battlefield is too much to concentrate on. The aura of red and gold stays centralized to our part of the battlefield, hampering the monsters by making them heavier and slower, easy pickings for the men and women down there and fighting.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  A line of orange streaks away from the head of my staff, colliding with one of the termites and causing an eruption of fire. The plume of fire is a brilliant spot that stains a part of my vision for a moment, an echoing sound of pain and anger answering the calm following the explosion. The bug I hit limps from the flash of smoke, two of its legs missing and its carapace charred on one side, and swings its claws at Jess.

  She effortlessly catches the strike on the edge of her huge chakram, turning the attack away. My eyes can barely track the instant following her parry, how she flows like water to the side of the huge bug, hammering the injured spot on the termite’s side. Even with her incredible power, it takes her nearly ten seconds to cut into the monster. From there, her chakram seems to catch the edge of the wound, and with a grunt, she rips the entire side of the monster wide open in a spray of gore. It doesn’t last much longer than that.

  Throughout the whole day, from when the assault first started, I have only managed to kill two of the monsters with a single strike of dragonfire. No matter what affix I try, it seems as if these monsters were made specifically to withstand me. One blast of power after another rips through the swarm pouring from the hive. The sound is cacophonous, each blast and the echoing screech vibrating through my soul and shaking up my spine.

  A hand reaches out, grabbing the fabric of my jacket. I want to turn and shout at whoever it is, but I find even the idea too exhausting. There is a tilt to the world, one that turns into a sense of vertigo as someone pulls me away from the edge of the stone platform, guiding me to sit. My staff trembles in my numb fingers as I fall back on an elbow. I find my mana almost gone, one of the mages in my squad looking down at me with concern.

  “This is extreme exhaustion,” she says.

  I want to refute her, but even that is too much effort. The archer, what was his name again, tries to hand me some more water, but my fingers don’t close properly around it. He dribbles some of the liquid in my mouth, laying me back on the smooth stone. The sky is such a pretty blue, far too nice for all the death and char in the air.

  The next time I blink, I am somewhere else, moved away with a different woman looking over me. She says something to me, but I can’t catch the words. When was the last time I was tired this way? On that snowy slope with a heap of dead bears slowly climbing up toward me. That time had been so similar to this now, hadn’t it? Except, I had been useful then.

  Sleep comes and goes. The sky blue has changed to the more pastel color of the late afternoon before I realize it. With a groan, I sit up on a cot beneath a ragged canopy of torn brown cloth. A hole has been burned straight through it, turning the roof of this little patch of misery into a stripped sheet that can’t even keep the sky out.

  The back of my eyes still ache as I look around, finding myself not too alone here. Of the eight little cots set aside beneath the cloth, five are filled. Two women in similar robes to mine linger on the straw mattresses, jugs of water set near them. Sweat stands out on their foreheads, but there are no injuries as far as I can see, not like the last two. A woman with bandages tied around her throat and torso lies in one of the far cots, her eyes tracking me as I sit up in the bed. Spots of red peek out from the bandages wrapped around her as she tracks me, strong hands working at turning a lump of wood into some forest creature. Near the entrance of this little medical station, a huge earthspeaker man lies across two cots pushed together to accommodate him. His entire face is covered in white linen cloth; the only sign that he is alive is the slow and rhythmic rise and fall of his chest.

  I check my mana as I lever myself out of the cot, almost tripping over my staff laid on the floor. It is almost half recovered; I can’t have been out that long.

  “Awake, I see.” A man’s voice says from off to the side. A moment later, one of the healers for the 4th army wanders into the shade, allowing me to see him. “Mana exhaustion. You should know better by now how dangerous that can be.”

  “I know.” I snatch one of the jugs of water from a table between the cots and splash my mouth with the warm water. “It is pretty embarrassing.”

  “It should be,” he says. “I’ve had a word with the commander. You are off duty for the rest of the day and tomorrow. Use the time to recover your energy, and don’t overexert yourself again.”

  “I’m already halfway back,” I complain to the man, only to receive a skeptical look in return.

  “Out of my tent. We need this space for real patients,” he says, scooting me along.

  “It’s not even a tent,” I mutter, taking the hint and the jug of water with me as I reluctantly step out into the blaring afternoon sun. The ache in the back of my eyes intensifies as the sun tries to drill a hole in my brain, but I grit my teeth and bear it.

  The valley is gone. Well, not gone, it is right over there, the corpses of giant termites scattered about everywhere, leaving a climbing trail that approaches the encampment, ending in a huge pile of carcasses stacked at the top of the slope with a few buzzards perched on top. The third-ranker, a man named Tacit the Grim, sat in the sparse grass at the top of the rise, overlooking the valley and guarding the encampment. He notices me, sparing me a nod, as I step up and look down on the battlefield from this morning.

  A trail of carnage leads back toward the camp where I woke up, but I don’t remember anything about getting back here. An old feeling of helplessness, something I thought that I buried deep enough that it would never rear its ugly head again, starts to bubble back up in my guts. I had done nothing today, had I? Worse, collapsing like that had not only taken me out of the fight, but it forced people to have to look to my well-being. Never again.

  “I know you,” Tacit says, the man’s voice strangely deep given his wiry frame and far nearer than I expect. I just about jump out of my skin when I turn to see him standing not three feet away from me, more than a hundred feet closer than he was just a moment before.

  The man wears his black hair shaved on the sides of his head, a frock sticking into the air right down the middle of his head. I might have thought that the odd hair that defies the pull of the earth was his regalia, similar to Arabella’s, if not a considerable deal more disappointing, but this close to me now, I can easily see the black tattoos of birds on the side of his neck subtly moving and shifting. The man stares up at me, squinting for a moment before a smile starts to spread on his face.

  “I knew it, I did. You’re that lass that brutalized the noble girl, a baron’s daughter, wasn’t it?” he says.

  His words catch me off guard, and I take a step back from the man. Despite my stepping away, the distance between us doesn’t grow in the least. “I didn’t brutalize anyone,” I say. “I got into an argument with a woman, and we had a duel, that is all.”

  “Ah-ha,” the man booms. “It was you. I thought that it might have been when I watched you out there today. Looked like a girl that didn’t know how much she could chew, too caught up in taking bites. I like that kind of thing. Worse ways to get famous than by showing some prim girl that she is just a greenhouse flower, ignorant of how the world she is.” He spreads his hands to encompass the field of carnage to the north. “This, this is how the world is.”

  “I think I’m starting to see that,” I say.

  The man laughs, but there is no mirth in it. “No, no you aren’t. Maybe you have an inkling of it, but you aren’t seeing it. Give it a few days, and I will show you a part of it, but that is only half the coin. By the time you see the rest, people will be pegging you with some moniker as dour as mine. Because that is what the world is made of, blood and sadness.”

  A shiver crawls up my arm, and this time, when I take a step away from the strange man, I manage to create some distance. This time, he doesn’t follow me, deciding to continue staring out toward the battlefield. The idea of making some excuse to the man crosses my mind for a moment, but it seems far wiser to merely make my exit while he is distracted.

  Stalking back up the slope toward the biggest tent in the small encampment, I speak to Galea in my head. “I thought you were supposed to warn me when people are sneaking up on me.”

  “I’m sorry, Mistress,” she says. “You didn’t sense anything from him, and so I didn’t. Perhaps it is time to invest a bit into perception.”

  I wave the thought away. Everyone has some kind of weakness, and if mine is just that I don’t see as well as others, that is not too big of a deal. I turn my mind toward the present, toward the things I need to accomplish. There is a certain commander that I need to talk to about this issue with me not being allowed in the next assault tomorrow. There is so much from today that I need to make up for. I can’t afford to sit it out.

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