***Nadia***

“Stop!” Nadia gave a ragged scream, her arms lashing up at the monster looming over her.

Grant caught her strike with a practiced hand.

“Princess, it’s me. You’re fine now, I drove the delegate off.”

Nadia blinked. The monster looming over her wasn’t some horrifying monstrosity, it was the disgusting monstrosity. Grant was sporting a black eye, and seemed a bit tense as Nadia looked at him. Less respectful tension, and more tension like watching a wild animal that might bite at any second. Interesting.

The room she was in…

Marble, red Gadveran silk drapes. Large open window, damaged. Full lamps. The Gadveran Palace?

“Did we win?” Nadia asked, doing a self-check. There was no more pain in her arms and legs, and…

Those black snaked must have made it six inches into my chest. There’s no way I could be feeling this good.

And she did feel good. She felt like it was the morning of the best day of her life. Her whole body sang with energy, and she wasn’t hungry, sleepy, short of breath, needing to pee, itchy, or any of the dozens of minor annoyances that are indicative of being alive.

So I’m trapped in an illusion, then? Is the creature some kind of Mnemonic sorcerer too?

“Yeah, we won,” Grant said, and Nadia could tell he was lying.

That’s interesting. I wouldn’t be able to tell he was lying if this was a Mnemonic illusion, unless they’re using Grant as a red herring.

“Thank the gods,” Nadia sighed, relaxing back into bed as she started figuring out her escape plan.

Grant seemed to relax a bit, standing away from the bed.

Okay, obviously this scrub can’t read my thoughts, so I’ve got a shot. I need to break out of the illusion then use a Royal order to… Nadia’s last memory was the Royal order not working so great because of her collapsing lungs. She needed something with more heft to it.

Unless you’re dead already. A tiny voice whispered in the back of her mind, but she shook it away. Always plan as if you’re alive. What’s the point of doing otherwise?

Nadia thought for a second. She would trigger Crystalline Mind to break the illusion, then use Invade Mind. It would give her a shot at lobotomizing the creature and possibly jumping ship if her body was beyond saving.

Might lose my body-hopping virginity younger than I expected.

Ilethan royalty didn’t do it often, as it rarely worked. The current record for successful transfers was twice, but she didn’t really have much of a choice. This was her only shot of living through this encounter.

Nadia took a deep, steadying breath, readying herself to return to the horrifying reality of the monster invading her chest with its black tubes. Let’s see how you like getting invaded, Cuntbag.

Nadia closed her eyes and reached for her Bent.

Crystalline Mind

*ERROR*

Chained Spirit is a Bent construct, incapable of processing Bent.

Nadia frowned. What in the Abyss did that mean?

Break Control.

*ERROR*

Chained Spirit is a Bent construct, incapable of processing Bent.

Nadia leapt out of bed, the heavy wood creaking under her legs as she caught Grant in the throat with a sucker-punch before swinging around onto his back, putting an arm around his beefy neck.

“What is a Chained Spirit?” She demanded, giving Grant’s neck an encouraging squeeze. “What really happened? Don’t you fucking lie to me.”

“Cal-vin..” Grant croaked.

“What?” Nadia demanded, hearing the name of her sworn enemy.

The door creaked open and the young man came in.

“Well, crap, we got so much further that time,” He said as he entered the room, casually eating a pastry.

“This is what you get for thinking with your dick,” A massive Genosian girl said, following him in, studying Nadia with a disapproving scowl. “Always choose an ally as a Chained Spirit, for the control over them is…limited.”

“I wasn’t thinking with my dick, Ella. She’s got valuable information on the Ilethan Royal family, and she’s an eighth Break Legend. If we can find a way to get past all this…” He motioned to Nadia with his jelly-filled roll. “She’ll be incredibly useful.”

“What do you think keeps tipping her off?” Calvin said, taking another bite of his pastry, giving Nadia an insolent look.

“The last thing she remembers is getting killed,” said a third…Nadia’s eyes narrowed as she saw her dusky-skinned counterpart, who had the audacity to take the boy away from her, claiming him as her own. “She’ll be impossible to work with as long as she keeps starting from that point.”

“What are you talking about?” Nadia asked.

“Remember that promise about tormenting you for the rest of my life?” Calvin asked.

A horrifying, sinking sensation began to build in her stomach. Keeps tipping her off? They’ve been doing this to me for a while, and I don’t remember any of it.

“Can’t….breathe.” Grant wheezed as Nadia’s arm tightened around the general’s neck.

In a desperate bid to escape, Nadia shoved Grant toward the other three and made a dash for the window, jumping through the shattered hole in the glass.

“Aaand there she goes again,” she heard Calvin’s voice fade into the background of street noises as she hurtled toward the palace courtyard.

Nadia hit the ground in a crouch, surrounded by glass and a couple shreds of Gadveran silk. That wasn’t me, I jumped through the hole in the window. I didn’t touch anything on the way out.

Her heart began to hammer as her mind shrieked in panic when she realized that her feet had come down in divots in the stone that had been there before she jumped, fitting into them perfectly, as though she’d jumped down from that great height…more than once.

No, no no no no no.

Nadia leapt to her feet and sprinted full speed toward the palace gate, ignoring the footsteps in front of her that mirrored her panicked pace.

No, it’s a trick. I’m going to jump over this wall, and disappear into the crowd. I’ll find my way out of the city and re-connect with the Ilethan forces, then-

Nadia # 36 ceased to exist.

***Nadia***

“Stop!” Nadia gave a ragged scream, her arms lashing up at the monster looming over her.

Grant caught her strike with a practiced hand.

“Princess, it’s me. You’re fine now, I drove the delegate off.”

Nadia blinked. The monster looming over her wasn’t some horrifying monstrosity, it was the disgusting monstrosity. Grant was sporting a black eye and a bruised neck, and he seemed a bit tense as Nadia looked at him. Less respectful tension, and more tension like watching a wild animal that might bite at any second. Interesting…

***Calvin***

“Well, that was a failure,” Calvin said, finishing the last of his jelly roll as Nadia number thirty-seven jumped out the window. He glanced over at Grant who was coming to his feet, rubbing his bruised head.

He dismissed the summon.

“Looks like I’m going to have to raise Chained Spirit to level ten and grab Continuity before we have any shot at a meaningful dialogue.” Nadia was just too savvy and wild to pin down in one try, and somehow she was clued in that something was wrong no matter how much care they took to keep her calm.

“That was an option?” Grant asked.

“Yep, get ready for the next one, we’ll start it in the dungeon.”

“Why? You already know she’s not going to remember anything.” The big man demanded, scowling at him.

“Because, we are working out a map for the first encounter she does remember, and we are going to rehearse it until you dream about it. We’re only going to get one shot. Come on, lieutenant, the dungeons await.”

“Andra’s got a sick sense of humor, making that conscription official,” Grant growled, stalking after him. “You know I outranked you in the Ilethan army, right?”

“Is that any way to speak to your C.O.?”

“I could kill you in the blink of an eye.”

Calvin shrugged, glancing around the room, and ran a thumb over the row of vials hanging on his belt. “I mean, so could I, but you don’t see me bringing it up.”

“I’m three times your age! I’ve been leading men since before you were –“

“Shhhh, shhhhh.” Calvin hushed the blustering man. “That experience makes you very valuable, but not so valuable that I won’t turn you into a meat-puppet like your princess.”

That shut the Ilethan general up. The man didn’t know that Calvin was out of slots for Chained Spirit, and Calvin didn’t intend to inform him of that.

“You kill me, Andra kills you. You don’t work with me, you get the Nadia treatment. Learn to work within your new reality, a’right? This isn’t a permanent arrangement. After I’ve learned everything I need to know from you, I’ll send you to Andra with a letter of recommendation, and you can be a general again. Call it…five years.”

“You’re no boy, you’re an abomination.” Grant said, glaring down at him.

“So I’ve been told,” Calvin said, rolling his eyes. if he had to worry about everyone who thought he wasn’t acting like a normal teen, he’d never become a Wizard-King.

“Let’s go, I’ve got enough Bent to go three more rounds.” With spare for another five spells if someone tries to kill me. Calvin turned away and headed for the dungeons, deep in his thoughts.

He needed Nadia working on his side as soon as possible. Having a disposable soldier that strong would be supremely helpful, not to mention her intimate knowledge of the enemy country.

Calvin had gotten a field promotion since he put out the fire engulfing entire city – with some embellishing storytelling from Kala – preventing millions of Stones in damages and making him the youngest Captain to ever exist in the Gadveran army.

That girl’s trying to pull a full-on Griffith with you. Just make sure you wait to tell her dad about last week until his deathbed, M’kay? What he don’t know won’t get you executed.

Calvin continued his train of thought, ignoring the monster spouting the obvious coupled with nonsense-phrases in his head.

People were starting to pay attention to him, and he needed to maintain that if he wanted to be a household name.

Hypothetically, if someone said, ‘Calvin, that kid no one heard of from Deinos is going off into the wilds to carve out a kingdom’, how many people would follow?

If someone instead said, ‘Calvin, the youngest general in the history of Gadvera and savior of its people, is going off into the wilds to carve out a kingdom’… that would field an entirely different response.

The next step was taking back Surrak, the port city some hundred miles distant that Calvin had grown up beside…but how? The Ilethan army had finally gotten its feet under it and limped back to Surrak to reorganize, but the damage to Mujenan was far too severe to organize a unit of guar to ride them down.

That and the Ilethan fleet was still being a bitch, cutting off food and trade from Gadvera’s trading partners. Can’t take Surrak back if everyone’s starving.

A tapping in the hall caught his attention, and Calvin spotted a runner aiming for him. runners were eleven to twelve-year-old nobles-sons, whose duty was to get experience with military process before they joined it themselves. A process Calvin had unfortunately skipped, and now he was playing catchup.

Also they spied for their families a little bit. But everyone knew that.

“Captain Gadsint,” the Gadveran boy wearing the brown and yellow livery said, giving him a snappy salute. “Andra’s got orders for you, report to her office.”

Calvin glanced at the kid, then Grant, Ella and Kala, who’d been following him.

“Well, I guess you two have the rest of the day off. Make sure to pack your bags,” Calvin said, eyeing the Genosian and the Ilethan. “Could you tell Baroke to unbury himself from his groupies and do the same?”

Ella and grant glanced at each other.

“Not it,” Ella said in Gadveran before ambling toward her bedroom, where her suit of armor was waiting. The nomad had plenty to back up, the captured general on the other hand…

“I’ll grab the damn boy,” Grant grumbled, heading down the opposite hall.

As it turned out, when Baroke had gone west, he’d gone through the women’s dorms, running across several young women at the academy who’d hidden during the slaughter, and rescuing each of them from certain death.

It was kind of funny seeing it from the outside.

“Good luck,” Kala said, kissing him on the cheek in front of the gaping runner. “I’ll be making an appearance with the reconstruction team for the rest of the day.”

Kala princess-walked away, tiny steps that seemed to float her sashaying hips down the hall.

So is she still a virgin, or not?

I don’t know, I was blindfolded.

Shame, but I understand the need for plausible deniability.

Once everyone was gone, Calvin knelt down to eye level with the runner.

“Keep your mouth shut about that, okay?”

“Everyone knows the princess has a crush on you, sir,” The runner said, handing him the letter of summons. The little shit had the audacity to roll his eyes. “It’s hardly newsworthy.”

“Better not be,” Calvin said, dismissing him and tearing the letter open. Like he’d said it was a summons to Andra’s office.

Calvin followed the twists and turns of the palace until he made it to Andra’s office, where the grey haired woman was writing and signing letters at an astonishing pace, creating a clutter of paperwork that spilled over the map of Gadvera on her desk.

“Calvin, sit down.” Andra said, eying him without stopping her pen.

“What do you need, General?”

“I need security, Captain.”

Calvin didn’t know how to respond to that.

She noticed his hesitation and set her pen down in the inkwell, moving aside the letters to reveal the map.

“There’s Surrak, and there’s Mujenan, and between them are a hundred miles of undefended road big enough for an army. We can’t haphazardly launch an all-out assault on Surrak, that’ll take more time and manpower than we can muster right now, but we can’t let that go unanswered, either.”

She pointed to a narrow point in the road, three quarters of the way to Surrak, where the road was sandwiched between the side of a mountain and a sheer cliff to the coast.

“Build fortifications right here,” she said, tapping on it with a callused finger. “It will become a staging area from which to launch a retaking of Surrak. Our advantage is a shorter supply chain. Let’s make the most of it. I want lodgings for ten thousand men, a wall at least fifteen feet high, and if you’ve got spare time, hunt for game in the forest and ship excess back to Mujenan. We need everything we can get.

“How many people do I get?” Calvin asked, tallying the astonishing amount of manpower the task would require.

“A company.” She said with a hint of a smile.

“That’s…not a lot of men.”

“I’ve received a complaint from the Knick-knacks that trade with us,” Andra said. “One of their number who was supposed to have died attempting to repair the Fairweather, well, its body was never recovered. I mollified them by giving them salvage rights to a dozen of those silver monsters, no questions asked.”

“Well, I –“

“How did the Fairweather get fixed anyway?”

Calvin kept his mouth shut. Freaking nosy general was giving him the job with less people than he needed because she knew he carried extra manpower with him wherever he went.

“And now, Captain, I’m passing the savings on to you.”

She pulled out a letter, signed it with a flourish, folded it, dripped wax on it, stamped it with the thick gold ring on her finger, then slid it across the oak table, in front of Calvin.

Calvin eyed it for a moment.

“I’ve got one request.”

“Oh?” Andra asked with a raised brow.

“I’m gonna need to commission a bunch of whores.”