Chapter 87: Fort Erica

“Good evening, General!” The huge, burly man shouted at the top of his voice as he saluted.

The sound rang down the stone corridor, and somewhere beyond the door a startled soldier dropped something metal.

“At ease.”

The General was dressed in the exclusive black and gold reserved for the Empire’s five highest military officers. Her hair, a wolf cut dyed a dim red, further complemented her bronze skin, which glowed beneath the chandelier.

“Good evening, Captain. Have you any news for me?”

The Captain stood rigid as a post, eyes straight ahead, a habit drilled into him over many years.

“Yes, ma’am.” He produced a sealed red envelope, its seal bearing the insignia of the Phoenix. The sender was pretty obvious. “A correspondence from General Rodaine, Duke of House Lithorne. Addressed to the officer-in-charge of Fort Erica, ma’am.”

General Erica frowned, rubbing her eyes in visible annoyance.

Fort Erica was a beast of a fort that sat atop a hill just past the west side of the Dry Swamp. Its walls stretched into an essentially unbreachable barrier, while tall watchtowers rose from each corner, overlooking every angle. It had been built there strategically, to prevent future enemies from gaining control of the resources of the nearby forest.

From the hilltop, the walls cast long shadows over the swamp below, and the watchtowers burned with a steady glow of mana lamps and searchlights that never seemed to dim.

Over the years, the fort’s defense mechanisms had evolved, switching from ordinary metal cannonballs to specialized equipment that shot charged-up mana particles, stronger defense runes, as the fort had been made to encompass the works of the Empire’s greatest engineering minds.

Soldiers who had served there long enough said the fort hummed at night, a low steady note of mana waiting to be spent.

How it had come to be named Fort Erica was comical. The massive piece of rock and defense had originally been named after one of the greatest minds of the human race, Sir Augustus, and so it had been known as Fort Augustus for nearly two centuries. That was, until five years ago, when a certain young peasant prodigy ascended to the Sage rank, all by herself, before clocking twenty-four years of age!

The Empire had gone mad back then, and had stayed mad until date, with even the Empress bestowing on the peasant an audience and a considerable fortune. That peasant prodigy was General Erica.

She had never quite gotten used to seeing her own name carved above the gate, and she had long since given up trying to have it changed.

The General Rodaine had been the one to suddenly push forward the idea, and the Emperor, who strangely had a good sense of humor despite his gloomy outlook and atmosphere, had actually approved it. He had gone on to make her a General immediately after being convinced of her combat capabilities.

“Your husband is someone who loves his laughs, isn’t he, General?”

That broke the thin line of gentle reason holding her patience.

“Get down and give me thirty, big guy.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He got down without complaint. “One! Two! Three!”

The floor shook very slightly with every one. He did not once lose count.

General Erica cut open the envelope. It was a request letter.

Barely three years after they had first met, she had come to find Rodaine’s quite annoying attributes attractive, and they had gotten married, with the Emperor officially blessing the union. Talk about a family favored by the Imperial bloodline.

It was a fact though that she did not like being the star.

The introductory part of the letter was filled with Rodaine’s boring, lovey-dovey gibberish, which caused Erica so much annoyance that she swore to bash his head in when next they met.

The crux of it, however, was about the lad who had come up several times at the highest of councils, the one said to have created the newest trend: the Rank Breaker!

It would seem the Empire had issued a secret order to secure the lad and bring him to the Capital for an audience with the Emperor. But the lad, irrespective of the fact that his appearance literally made him stand out amongst most others, had proved a little difficult to track down. Unknown to them, their suspect spent more time in forests and wilderness, amongst beasts and Rangers, than among his fellow people.

General Rodaine wanted to recruit Behemoth’s services to help reach Mikael.

He went on to plead, in completely formal language, offering to settle the bill for any inconvenience the Captain’s absence might cause her.

General Erica sighed. The Grandmaster-ranked Captain was indeed crucial in the running of the fort as well as in coordinating security. But the urgency and importance of the letter were evident. It even required Behemoth to move out directly from there, without any need to return to the capital city for orders.

“Behemoth, this letter says General Rodaine needs your service. Do you feel up to it?” It was a quite trivial question to put to a knight ever so willing to do anything for the Empire.

“Yes, ma’am!”

“Good. You leave at dawn.” She handed him the letter. “Your target is currently in the region. Something about convincing him to come with you.”

He saluted. “Yes, ma’am!”

The Captain’s face betrayed nothing, but his shoulders squared a little further, the way a man’s do when he has been handed a purpose.

“Got yourself another fan of your uprightness. You’re dismissed.”

The Captain left, and the door closed behind him with a heavy click. Erica turned to the window and the dark swamp beyond.

* * * * * *

The massive bell beneath them chimed loudly, indicating that it was the final hour before midnight. On the roof of the clock tower, two figures sat in the dark and gazed down on a district that was now quiet, its streets empty of people, unlike the other side of the city, where this hour meant the night was still very young.

The cold had sharpened with the dark, and their breath showed in thin clouds under the faint light of the lamps below.

Deep inside his soul, Mikael tried drawing a strand towards the scythe for just one cycle, but the strands resisted strongly, completely refusing to budge. Ragnarok’s current conversion capacity also greatly reduced his expectation of transmuting any strand tonight, so he decided to give up for the day.

He had expected as much. The strands did not refuse out of malice, only out of the same grief he had felt before, and the much more weakened Ragnarok. There was no fighting against that.

A few days had passed since the first conversion had successfully taken place, and during those days Mikael had observed what had happened in his soul. This was uncharted territory, so problems were expected.

And they did come.

The soul was made of one entity. It was not merely fabricated from different pieces to make one; it was structurally, fundamentally one, unique. But his soul, at the moment, was made of two pieces: Aurora’s essence, and Aurora’s essence transformed into Old God’s essence. They had been battling greatly for sovereignty, and this battle, as time went on, would ultimately lead to the destruction of Mikael.

It was like two rivers of different color forced into a single bed, neither willing to yield and neither able to leave.

He sighed inwardly. At least there was no immediate danger.

Time, however, was a different matter. He turned the problem over carefully and found no clean answer yet.

Kadre had decided not to ask what they were doing sitting atop a tower rather than inside their lavish rooms booked for the night. Nor would she ask about the strange cultivation ritual that had lasted more than two hours. She had tapped him after an hour had passed, but Mikael had been completely out of this world.

She had learned to wait for answers from this client, who gave them only when he chose to.

So she took out a short journal and began writing things down, completely ignoring him, his strange scythe, and the desire to disappear.

Her handwriting was small and quick, the kind that could vanish into a margin, and she wrote a good deal more than she meant to.

It was by eleven, as soon as the bell rang, that Mikael stirred, awakening from his trance.

“Are we returning to the other side?” he asked, putting away his scythe in what Kadre suspected to be a storage space.

Was his affinity Space-Time? Must be quite the hotcake.

“No need. We booked rooms at an inn across the street, remember? Our plan for this rather unusual journey of ours still needs a bit of tweaking. And the first thing we will need is credible information, as you, our client, couldn’t provide anything reliable enough.”

“We’ll head to the port city, Corinth. I have a source there for these types of jobs. The rest of the plan will be finalized after we see what information we get.”

“Good. When do we depart?”

Kadre tucked the journal behind her.

“You’re the client, you decide. Damn, it’s freezing up here.” She sneezed, and it echoed for a few seconds in the silent streets.

“We’ll leave tomorrow, then.”

Kadre nodded, rubbing her hands together, and led the way down the narrow stairs of the tower, her breath hanging behind her.

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