Day 22

Themistocles moved swiftly on his feet, his spear planted firmly in his right hand, while Eudokia, who also wielded a weapon, instructed him.

“Lower the spear. The Ahalis are taller than you. Your goal will be to skewer them in the heart or stomach, not the head. They have much thicker skull bones than it looks. Their appearance is similar to that of a human, but they are of a completely different build. They were created referring to the physique of one of the strongest races in this world, the Syrics."

Themistocles did not train with Maximilian because he was not sure that it would not affect their relationship. They both were always on tiptoe and changing their dynamics would be the equivalent of starting to push each other. Training with Eudokia turned out to be more unexpected than he expected.

Themistocles hadn't been happy with it at first, but had to quickly change his mind. Eudokia was incredibly violent and inflexible, much more than the Londoner - she fought just like a man. "Watch your guard," the woman said before causing a fireball to appear right behind him.

The Athenian had understood from the first second that the woman's actions did not correspond to what she would say. It was the way she used to prepare him for unexpected events on the battlefield.

Three darts from the right, two from the left.

Since he had acquired all of his vision and was no longer half blind as in old age, he had trained the peripherical vision as much as possible. Themistocles rolled backwards, but diagonally. The woman sent spikes out of the ground, but the man, sensing the accumulation of magic beneath him, did nothing but put the huge shield under his feet and use it to propel himself towards her.

From the duffer bag that Maximilian had created for him he pulled out a bone shield identical to the one he had just destroyed. Matthew had learned

from him how to wield a shield in battle and the Californian, despite his speed of learning, much of which was also due to Eudokia's powerful abilities, was light years from the original. Arriving on Kome had scared Themistocles but had also made him spread his wings at the same time.

And he considered himself much wiser for that. There was a lot to fear in such a world, there was to be anxious as he had heard from other Earthlings, yet he certainly wouldn't be so foolish as to let anxiety get the best of him. Since he was a child, he could feel in his gut when something would involve a great risk. And if he had defeated Aristide and made it to the top of the

polis, the big credit went to how he had learned to manage his feelings.

He had had tutors who had certainly not been as wise as the praiseworthy Phoenix, Achilles' teacher, but still brought with them the wisdom, sensibility and knowledge of the inevitability of destiny.

All his emotions were as sharp as blades and rightly he had to wield them carefully - he certainly wouldn't blunt them just for fear of cutting himself.

Eudokia pretended to attack him from all sides with magic, and he could not avoid it, but there was no need to. The woman had taught him that when such situations arose the smartest thing would be to simply seek out the weakest mass of the attack and move in that direction with a shield at the ready.

In the case of Themistocles, the shield was a literal one.

[Hoplitic Shield]

The strength of the skill had grown as he levelled up.

The shield was covered with a white light that increased its size, until it was almost as tall as he was and several inches wider.

Themistocles threw himself towards magical darts which, by instinct, he deemed the weakest.

"Congratulations, you guessed right!" Eudokia exclaimed gleefully, "but remember: if one day you have to fight against people who know what they are doing, and not children who have escaped their bad parents, it could be much more difficult than that."

Themistocles heard the woman's words hit him as he rolled and scrambled to his feet.

Spending time training with a woman remained a strange practice for him: it made him uncomfortable, out of his element. Such a thing would never have happened in his life on earth, and certain elements of his own culture, as Maximilian had said, were not very progressive. Not even his time at Artaxerxes' court had dissipated his distrust of the Persians. And, as he had learned in Athens and confirmed in Susa, women had well-defined roles that certainly did not include handling weapons.

His way of fighting, way too unsure, showed clearly his mistrust, and Eudokia had noticed it.

“There are civilizations that have established republics. Here, I mean, among the hundreds, if not thousands, of peoples who have trampled our land."

“What do you mean?” “Your homeland was special for you and always will be, but Maximilian told me that you come from a distant era, in which your people still had a lot to learn. For example, that a woman can teach you something without you looking back with that frown.” The woman troubled him in a way that was hard to describe.

Maximilian never broke the wall between them, the one that held up their whole narrative. Eudokia, on the other hand, seemed to find the prospect of always putting a foot inside someone else's mind attractive, even before she was allowed to enter.

"It won't change much in this battle whether I like you or other people."

"Other people? You mean all the Vanedenis you still study on the sly? Or are you referring to Strith? Maximilian said you put up a lot of resistance to the idea of him making her second in command,” Eudokia’s words found living flesh.

“She was raised as a man, but she remains an uncontrollable child even for her warrior people. She knows how to hold a weapon in her hands until she begins to fight: then she shakes it without logic, as is the case with women who do not know how far they can go. Giving her the lead is an invitation to create chaos. She has no strategic notions. The Vanedenis may trust her, but I don't think she is able to— "

“To manage troops as well as you do? To think about the supplies for future military campaigns you have been complaining about so much? To set up an attack force in a perfect way? " Eudokia said with a big smile on her face. “The men - or women, for what it's worth - in whatever story they have been in, have been much better at being pathetic than heroes. Humanity has almost always been full of figurines filled with meanness, with a few exceptions. And the thing that I find most amazing, but also disgusting, is the difficulty that great people like you have in recognizing this greatness within others and pushing it away.

"It is as if you dragged the meanness of your people into even the best elements, as if you could excel only in part, and were destined to remain pawns of fate on the other."

Themistocles was about to argue. Almost. Eudokia's face was very telling about the fact that it wasn't his turn yet.

“You are cruel to those who can help you excel. Except for a few peoples, from whom I would perhaps exclude the Vanedenis, people hate to see others succeed. Even those who might benefit from their success hate the strongest ones. Aren't you doing exactly that? Aren't you preferring to set aside an excellent resource that could contribute to your cause, rather than push for her to become your own best warrior? Stop treating Strith like a burden. You seem almost jealous of Maximilian, as if you were a man cub who has to share his favourite trinket with other offspring."

Themistocles said...

Nothing.

He didn't say anything.

Eudokia's speech was a speech in front of which an intelligent person would only have to be silent. And something told him, in fact, that he not only had to shut his mouth, but that he had the moral obligation to treasure these words.

They stung to the heart, on exposed nerves, on trust issues that he had inherited from his past, probably. In Athens, all the politicians had been hostages of the citizens. It took little to overturn the opinion of the crowd, a shapeless mass more fearful than the seven-headed hydra.

And he had been the protégé of the people, one of the people who had most collected the honours of the crowd, the praises, the laurels.

But he was then banished from his homeland, stabbed in the back by the same people he'd allowed to live under Athenian rule instead of the Persian one.

And perhaps, perhaps, that was the problem. He was acting like a politician rather than a warrior. He didn't have much to prove to Maximilian and the others. Everyone trusted him, no one had questioned his orders, his strategies. Tukker himself had grunted a couple of times about how surprised he was that his plans were much better than the idea he had had.

Themistocles nodded slowly and turned his back on the woman to ponder the matter at hand better.

Eudokia, evidently satisfied with his reaction, preferred not to continue training and left.

Themistocles was left alone, silent, frowning, and looking downward. He had been humiliated for the first time in a long time. And by a woman.

When he raised his head the sky was crossed by a row of clouds, close to covering the sun that was preparing to begin its descent. Just then, a bird appeared to him - it looked like an eagle - high in the sky, clutching in its talons a snake, huge, bloodstained, alive, still writhing; and it did not give up the fight: he bit the eagle on the chest, near the neck, while the eagle kept holding him, leaning back; eventually, pierced by pain, the eagle threw it to the ground, letting it fall in the centre of the clearing, and then flew away screaming, along with the blowing of the wind.

He shrugged.

Wasn't that the same message Zeus had sent to the Trojans to dissuade them from attacking the Achaean ships?

If that wasn't a bad omen, then Aristides had been the greatest genius ever born in the whole Hellas.

…

Day 28

The last training Strith needed was magic resistance.

For this Maximilian had taken her to the first floor of his tower, where he was building some artifacts, and tested combinations of spells using them against the girl.

Strith frowned. As Maximilian threw the Enchantment at Strith, he looked at a duffer bag, one of the magical bags that could hold dozens of times their volume. He threw it in the corner of the room, along with other failed creations.

He had emulated the design from Tukker's one. Obviously, he hadn't told the [Captain]. He had come to him with a dozen of those artifacts, promising to give one to each soldier so that everyone could carry the potions, darts, and scrolls he was preparing as well.

The surprise effect had been downright hilarious. Moreover, like any good self-respecting magician, he needed to maintain a certain mystical and mysterious aura.

He noticed that Strith, now sitting next to him - he had told her that at some point she would have to learn more than just hitting hard - was watching his work.

He had no idea what he could understand, given the extreme complexity of the magic that Maximilian did not feel the need to vocalize.

I'm not a jukebox, cunt.

“Ahem. Yup?"

He could feel the question growing in the girl's chest, barely held back.

"Were your parents [Necromancers]?" she asked.

Maximilian retraced his memories and realized that he had not specified enough that magic did not exist on Earth.

“Basically, my parents worked as parasites. Without magic, though. There is no magic on Earth. Or rather, it wasn't there for practically anyone. Just a couple of people throughout history have had access to it. And only one of them got decent. That is me."

"Parasites? Is it a class?" Strith became pale: she had never heard of it, but she feared it was destructive.

"What? What are you saying? I told you there is no magic on Earth. They were parasites in the sense of people who never did anything at work. Let's clarify: my mother and father also wanted to work harder, but being both employed at the Post Office, what would you expect? House inherited from my grandparents. Or rather, three houses in total inherited between my father and my mother, two of which are near the centre. They earned more with rent than with work."

"This Post Office ... is the equivalent of [Couriers], right?"

Strith had heard several stories from the man, but still had a hard time distinguishing the oddities of his world from one another.

“More or less, they're about the equivalent of the entire courier guild. Not just those who deliver the letters. Their job was to run two post offices. They were managers, that is", Maximilian realized that he had used a word that Strith probably did not know "I mean they..."

“I know what managers are. I'm not that ignorant."

For a moment Maximilian had forgotten that the language of the Earthlings was being translated from their original language to the one the Vanedenis spoke.

Strith was tired enough, and Maximilian could see it clearly. During the seventy-two-hour training, it had been his skills (and Eudokia's, but no one knew this) that allowed the soldiers to fight for so long. Using that trick for a whole month would only consume them deeply.

The [Necromancer]'s eyes flashed for a moment.

[Hero - Level 13]

Strith hadn't levelled up much compared to the other people in the village. Still, she had already acquired incredible power. Her class, in fact, was simply too strong; although she levelled up more slowly, there were huge long-term gains.

There was a gulf between Strith's class at level forty and a normal class at the same level.

I suppose it's a difference between people's potential? That the class of heroes go hand in hand with the potential expressed? While mine at the same level can still show vastly different people.

The man broke his train of thought to address the girl, but he wanted to change the subject. Her parents hadn't loved her; indeed, they had physically and verbally abused her. She had never been enough for them. Maximilian couldn't really understand. His parents had always been there for him, a rock. A normal family but who had loved him like few other people ever did. Strith hadn't had his luck and continuing the conversation with her didn't seem right.

“Listen, Rambo, what do you think of the battle? In a few days, it comes. I've already shown you how strong the enemies are, right, bollocks?"

Strith frowned - an expression she seemed to have a monopoly on - and pursed her lips.

“We are fucked, in a direct confrontation. Our levels are not enough. They have six warriors, wizards and assassins for each of our warriors. We don't have real magic support. Our counterintelligence unit”, she had heard that word from Maximilian, “is made up exclusively of Todd. The rest are soldiers accustomed to an army, not a guerrilla."

"So?" laughed the man.

“So, it's a question of how many of them we can kill before they all exterminate us. Despite the elaborate plans, there is no chance of victory. There is no real collaboration between Ankon's strongest people and we have too little time to create and test real strategies."

Strith had to stop talking for a moment. Together with Maximilian, she was training to seek an inner calm, to put a leash on all the anger she felt.

The Londoner had told her that on earth they had different terms for people like her, including psychiatric patient, dysfunctional person and scum.

Her movements in battle were swift and sinuous, but as she spoke with Maximilian she felt like a tree flexing its branches in jerks, awkward.

“Excellent analysis. Quite doomed, the end of a ice-cream in the sun. No miracle to believe in though, bollocks?"

Strith dug her nails into her palms.

When she got so angry, she had to force the words through her throat, because it was as if the fury was strangling her.

"No. Not even the great Heroes were fools. They launched into feats that seemed impossible, but they always had a plan, a strategy to win. When Lakaner of Marigolds dived into the ocean waters along with thousands of [Gardeners] and [Druids], he exploited the marine flora to strangle the inhabitants of the seabed. He killed a kraken with the same skill he used in the garden to get rid of parasitic insects. A kraken. He was such a high level [Gardener] that it's impossible to even imagine."

Strith felt the full weight of her ancestors, people who had accomplished great deeds before her. The idols of his people had been madmen, certainly, but not fools.

"If neither you nor Eudokia enter the battle, we will be slaughtered."

It was the girl's laconic answer.

Maximilian shrugged and nodded with a grimace on his face. There was not much to argue.

"Other plans, something that might give you a chance for victory?"

Maximilian, to be honest, had some ideas, maybe even a couple of concrete answers, but he knew that it was not his job to provide them. In his previous life, perfectionism had been the crucible where he had smelted the tools with which he had tortured himself. He had promised himself that he would never be tempted again.

“Themistocles idea is very valid, perhaps the only thing that can somehow avoid a huge slaughter. There are civilians who cannot fight, or who, even if they did fight, could not do much. I have a proposal for Themistocles, I hope he listens to me."

Maximilian stopped looking at the duffer bag and started sucking his lip like an idiot. He rolled his eyes and thought how the Athenian would be ready to listen to a proposal coming from the girl.

"Let's hear it."

…

Maximilian had to admit he was impressed. The girl had fused the best skills of their people with the tools at their disposal. She had taken everyone into account, even though Maximilian had to play a role in his plan, however, his involvement was limited enough to warrant the intervention.

Besides, Strith was right. Without Maximilian and the terrible woman with obsidian hair, they could never have won.

The man put his face in his hands and sighed. He wasn't tired, not in the traditional sense of the word. But being as he was trying to be and at the same time working on all these projects generated a sort of paradox in him.

It couldn't be a walking miracle and a jerk at the same time, or at least it wasn't as easy as he made it seem.

“Some fish, just a bit. Maybe two chips ... "

Strith was almost worrying that Maximilian seemed much more taciturn than usual in those days, but those words made her regain hope.

They couldn't afford to lose the one man who could have reversed the conflict with a snap of his fingers - literally a snap of his fingers, he did it together with some of the most devastating magic. It added a dramatic effect, according to him.

"How's the armour coming along?" Asked Strith. She had been silent about the question for a long time, but now she could no longer contain herself. If there was one person who could bring out the curious child she had never been, it was Maximilian. There was never an end to the great feats he could accomplish, but above all to the incredible objects he could create with disarming ease.

Maximilian had a duller look, but he smiled at her anyway.

There was something in the air, a negativity, an evil energy that seemed to absorb everything and make it empty.

The Londoner felt the same feeling deep in his stomach that he had tried to repel for countless years, which had threatened to tear away his humanity.

“All done, practically finished, the dye should have dried. Do you want to see it?"

Strith almost humper from her chair. Eudokia had given her one of the greatest artifacts in the history of her people, if not the artifact of her people. Maximilian, on the other hand, as her master, had promised her a gift of the same magnitude.

Eudokia had laughed at the man's declaration and Strith would have sincerely wanted to strangle her; but she hadn't. She hadn't done it because she still had to wait to be able to do it. She hadn't given up, just postponed.

How that woman had dared to make fun of Maximilian was ...

"Oi, Armstrong, yer mam's speaking, come down from the moon."

Maximilian disappeared for a moment, teleporting himself to another floor of the tower and returning a few moments later with a purple cloth wrapped around a long and sinuous shape.

“I found the materials very deep and I tell you right away, bollocks, be careful because we risk not only pissing off Eudokia, but also an entire race. From what I understand, the Ahalis sometimes do these things here. The warriors among them carry only the armour of creatures that they were able to kill with their own hands. And, at the higher levels, there are crazy people who dare to wear armour like this."

Strith's mouth was open, but not the same incredulous expression as when Eudokia had brought her Scarlet Lightning during the training in the storm. The man slowly revealed a reddish armour, with a bloody sheen. He slowly handed it to Strith and she took it reverentially.

Maximilian was waiting a few moments before revealing all the artifact's capabilities.

“Those are scales that have been subtly fused together, it has no exposed spots. It binds itself through tendons that I have engineered on purpose."

Strith saw the different pieces, so soft and fluffy that she felt like she was holding a silk dress, not semi-legendary armour.

“The Ahalis do not have the techniques to work these materials without making them stiffen. Their armour becomes nothing more than a very hard hide. They can be repositories of incredible Enchantments in any case, but nothing like what I did."

Maximilian rubbed his hands and said: "Put your palm on the armour and stay still." Strith was as if in a trance and did nothing but obey. In her head only a word echoed.

[Dragon Slayer]

The famous class of the most fearsome warriors among the Ahalis. After a few seconds with the armour in her hands, she sensed something extremely strange. The armour ... seemed to be pulsing? She looked up at the Londoner, looking for explanations.

“Each piece is attached to the other. There are no gaps, because the armour opens like Iron Man's, basically. Then, the tendons close it again. You can put it on in a split second and, with a simple mental command, order it to unfasten."

Maximilian had to admit that he had exaggerated. The more he thought about all the armour's functions, the more he realized how slowly he was falling back into the bad habits of the past.

The fact that he had helped the Vanedenis so much had prompted him to revisit a part of him that he had tried to forcefully hide from the world and, above all, from the people he loved.

By now, unfortunately, there was no need to cry over spilled milk. He just hoped there would be no repercussions on his psyche ahead of the battle. He felt more and more cold and detached, but he also knew that, sometimes, it was not strange that this would happen to him. Perhaps he was worrying too much for nothing.

“Now, moving on to the important things, it should be noted that when I say that Eudokia could kill you, I'm not kidding. I kept her in the dark about the project because, if I have interpreted her society correctly, I am 98% certain that this is one of the highest forms of blasphemy for her. It is quite plausible that you consider it an abomination to be destroyed."

Now Strith was very confused. But she was also smart enough to understand the subtext of the conversation.

Eudokia was a dragon. And Maximilian had just created an armour with dragon parts. The missing piece was this: what was so deeply wrong with such armour to make him say that? If Strith was right, the experiment with Mummer had also involved dragon bones. There was no other reason why man now emanated a natural tyrannical aura, however subtle, that he was unable to control.

The fact that the man was dragging on began to make her lose her patience, of which she was not rich to begin with.

“There are some things about this armour that, yeah, bollocks, aren't exactly super mega legal. I mean, don't be a cop now. I could have done little if I hadn't used my highest quality..."

Maximilian seemed to try to elicit an answer, leaving his words hanging. But Strith simply looked at him with an air somewhere between bewildered and angry.

“Nothing, huh? Your head is so useful that if we empty it for Halloween maybe it will become better. Well then. My class is [Necromancer], right, no?"

Strith nodded slowly.

"Well, so what you're going to wear is a ..."

"An UN-DEAD?"

She was not as sensitive to tales on Mauser as the rest of her people, but the thought of having an undead creature in her hands disgusted her.

"Thing? No! He is not an undead. Damn. The [Necromancers] are the lords of death, not the undead! Bollocks, how much I hate the bad name of [Necromancers]. Who the fuck was that idiot who said Oi, cunts, let's make some undeads and tell everyone it's the main feature of our class. Herd of brain-dead, with no offense to mentally impaired people."

"Maximilian, be clear!” Strith couldn't stand it anymore and kicked the table the [Necromancer] was working on. The wood shattered into a thousand pieces as the girl pulled her sword out of its sheath. On most occasions, the young woman would try to hold back her fury, but when it was too much it was too much for her too.

"Oi, Van Damme, give my laboratory another kick and I'll put you on a cross you next to the dick that's painted on the tower."

Strith swore she had rarely felt so much irritation running through her veins.

A third voice peeked from the door of the room.

“It's is not an undead. Maximilian has created an unnamed abomination, a creature that feeds on mana and converts the normal energy of the world into its life energy. It also seems to absorb the heat lost from the environment; I suppose it has to do with your famous physics. If I had to guess, it absorbs the energy dispersed by the person wearing it, together with the surrounding mana, and seems to have a complex network of nerves, which allows you to react with great control..."

Eudokia already had the armour in her hand. She held it with two fingers, an expression of deep disgust on her face.

“On all the vital functions of the wearer. It can respond to pressure, how much blood is inside your body, and the material it's made of shouldn't even have been present on Kome. Maximilian has found some black dragon scales and..."

She looked at the man with a confused expression, then waved her hand and the armour disappeared in mid-air, as if it had entered an invisible pocket.

Strith could no longer keep up with everything, but looking at the stupid smile on the man's face and the extremely stiff posture, he had to admit that he seemed genuinely terrified of what might happen next.

“And he stole other scales that, in theory, no one would be able to combine with each other. Half of the body of this creature is made of black dragon scales, the creatures that have the strongest body, the other half are made of golden dragons, virtually extinct creatures, the greatest masters of magic among dragons."

"Maximilian."

"Eudokia, honey."

Sparks came out of the woman's mouth, who was visibly trying to calm down before tearing the man to shreds.

“Maximilian, I have lived for many years. And I guarantee you - I've seen things that would make a [Saint]'s skin crawl. The creation of the Ahalis was one of the saddest chapters in the history of my people."

Eudokia turned to Strith.

“He didn't create an armour. This is not a weapon. This is a living being devoid of a true soul, possessing only a set of survival reflexes that will be related to your well-being. This armour is an abomination of nature, but it is also one of the most powerful and cursed things you will ever wield in your life. None of the enemies that appear the day after tomorrow will be able to scratch this armour. It will somehow slow your growth as a warrior but, if I've ever seen a great insurance that will keep someone from dying, it's this armour."

"It's a kind of symbiote, like Venom," Maximilian muttered to himself, proud of his creation.

“And if I know the madman who gave life this… thing, I don't exclude anything from its possible functions. But remember that you are fighting a war because some fools between my people believed they were playing at being creators of life and justice. As long as it comes to soulless abominations, I can't say much, but the line between that and a monstrosity of unimaginable proportions is very blurred. Wear it aware of the enormous weight you will have on your shoulders and knowing that this armour can feel pain."

"So ... is it alive?"

Strith didn't even know what to say. What Maximilian had just done was… unimaginable? It was ... It was ...

“Then, to be exact, it can't feel pain. But there are pressure stimuli that change the configuration of his circuits and activate certain abilities. The electro-mechanical reflexes were all programmed by me. Then..."

Eudokia motioned him to be quiet.

“You've been working on that bag for three weeks. I can't imagine how much time you've spent on such armour. In fact, I'm surprised it didn't take you years. The complexity of this abomination is incredible. Creating the Ahalis has been a decades-long process, if not more. You gave birth to a monstrosity like this, making an entire race your enemy. Maybe I should end your life before you get out of control."

Strith felt a terrible pressure in the room. And the most incredible thing was that the armour reacted in response, leaping at her like a leech.

"Uhm, you activated it."

The girl tried to throw the monstrosity to the ground, but all parts of the armour began to mould to her body and Strith found herself wearing it against her will.

Maximilian and Eudokia watched the girl try to tear off the helmet, which had closed over her face. There were only two cracks - no they weren't two cracks. Above the eyes there was an almost transparent membrane, practically invisible. The "slits" for the eyes were triangular in shape, bent upwards, similar to the mask of the costume that Maximilian was inspired by.

No need to invent everything all over every time. Learn from the best.

The "mouth" of the armour moved along with Strith's and her screams.

The rest of the armour, however, was a new concept, more fascinating than the dragon scales it was made of; even a member of the great race of dragons should have recognized his horrifying charm. The scales, in fact, formed a multi-layered diaphanous mesh, which mixed red with shades of blood and golden reflections.

Although Strith was trapped in it, the armour remained a magnificent construct.

As Maximilian was about to resume talking to Eudokia, to negotiate his sentence, he heard someone banging hard at the door of the tower.

“Maximilian, Maximilian! A man had a heart attack!"

It was Matthew banging hard on the [Necromancer]'s door.

Matthew waited for several seconds behind the door, continuing to bang hard against the wood, before Eudokia went to open it. Inside the room he found Strith, trapped in her armour, and the woman with the obsidian hair.

Eudokia smiled to him.

“Maximilian has teleported to the village. Don't worry, at this point he will already be able to revive him."

…

Arriving on the scene, Massimiliano saw a crowd of Vanedenis grouped around the man's body. Todd was trying to give him a cardiac massage, while Neri and Anna tried to contain the villagers. Nobody wanted the Texan to touch one of them, they feared it would kill him.

“Shit, everyone back! Back!" Maximilian shouted. He had a very bad feeling. "What happened?"

"The gentleman collapsed on the ground clutching his left arm," Valeria informed him, watching him kneel next to the man. “We immediately understood that he had a heart attack and we sent Matthew to call you. Some of the Vanedenis gave him a potion, but it didn't help.” Maximilian tore off his jacket and stopped to look at his chest.

Not only was he not as master of lightning magic as he would have liked, but controlling electricity so tightly would have been extremely difficult.

"You will save him, right, Maximilian?"

Valeria's voice faded into the wind.

Everything around Maximilian disappeared, reality and the people around him vanished, becoming nothing more than bags of putrid flesh. His brain took over.

His abilities as a [Necromancer] already made him feel the energy of death within the man.

He raised his hand up, sending a shock wave against everyone present, sending them flying out of their position.

He wasn't sure what was going to happen.

His hand pierced the man's ribcage, and he grabbed his heart with his hands. Half of him began to perform compressions directly on the heart. The other half of him began to make calculations. He hadn't had enough time to set up such powerful magic. Giving an electric shock and restarting the man's system was impossible without frying it. Maximilian had already done it on the first day, but on himself. A rush of magic passed through the man's body. Leurer.

He remembered his name, of course, but that didn't change a thing. It was just a fold on another page in life. He had begun to recirculate the blood inside the man's body through the magic and mechanical force generated by his hand. And he didn't feel much, neither in the dead body in front of him nor in his chest, as he heard screams of pain shatter the space between himself and reality.

“No, no! I'm sure Maximilian can save him!"

It was Matthew's voice; the boy seemed to believe he was invincible, yet Maximilian knew the truth best of all, the pathetic truth. Looking at the lifeless body, he sent a small burst of energy through the muscles, but apart from a brief tremor there seemed to be nothing more.

"Have you seen?! He moved! He saved him! "If Maximilian had been in another condition, he would have stopped immediately. The more time passed, the more false hopes everyone had. Leurer was already dead, at least cerebrally.

He hadn't had a heart attack, but a huge aneurysm inside his brain: this was what Maximilian read in the blood stream, which kept pouring into the skull and compressing the brain. The damage had already become so great that it was irreparable.

He tried to do two calculations and concluded that if he had been beheaded, it would probably be easier to revive him.

In a world where potions and geniuses existed, and races were a real thing, it seemed that none of this could save this man. He took the opportunity to quickly examine his muscle mass, bone density and the rest of his body. The heart itself seemed to have thicker walls than normal, not in a pathological sense, though.

There was a hypertrophy not only of volume, but also of density of fibres which, if he had been in a research laboratory, would have led him to study what new fibres had developed in these people.

He felt someone shake him from behind and realized he had been in a trance for several minutes, continuing to squeeze and circulate the man's blood.

“Maximilian! Maximilian!"

Matthew screamed his name a few centimetres from his face.

Maximilian came back. He looked around and saw the Earthlings looking at him with their eyes still full of hope. He saw Mummer and Tukker and also Strith and Eudokia, who had left the tower, await his verdict, announce the resolution of the problem.

They were there to see a show they never expected to see. On stage there was a new actor, another Maximilian, one who… no longer felt emotions. He looked around and saw the absolute nothingness, a disgusting grey pallor that aroused no sensation in him.

He stood up and said, “He's dead. A blood vessel inside his head has exploded. He was already dead when I arrived. Trying to revive him did nothing. There was nothing I could do."

And he turned on his heels. He needed to be alone.

"Damn, Maximilian, damn!" Matthew shouted at him. "You can always do anything and when it comes to finally saving a life you are ... useless!"

Eudokia joined the Londoner, keeping away the crowd that now seemed to be pawing.

The [Necromancer] was only tolerated because his power was useful. But now, in everyone's eyes, his failure was comparable to having directly killed that man.

…

Themistocles saw Maximilian go away in silence. He hadn't made any cruel jokes, had spoken very little and concisely, had spent whole minutes with a heart in his hands doing absolutely nothing, and then he had gone away, leaving the corpse to cool with the heart resting in the torn chest.

The Vanedenis were shocked by the sudden death of one of them. Leurer, a worthy soldier of their ranks, had suddenly lost his life as he strolled through the village streets. He was on his way home. It was a warning of their frailty, a divine seal of what they would always be: mortal and weak. He turned and saw something more terrible than death in the eyes of the people around him. Maximilian had always been a beacon in the dark, the magical and invincible being, whose strangeness was nothing more than another sign of his incredible uniqueness.

But now something in him had changed. A wave that was too large had engulfed him and extinguished the dim light that guides ships in the darkest of nights, and the truth struck Themistocles as if he had been punched in the stomach: Maximilian was not a god.

…

Strith hadn't been able to get off her armour before she left the tower, but that wasn't her primary concern. Her eyes looked troubled. She no longer knew what was happening. The same person who until a few moments before had given her an artifact capable of frightening Ahalis and dragons at the very sight ... had not been able to save a man.

Never before had Maximilian seemed to her so mortal, so fragile.

So imperfect, but not as he had always wanted to be, but in a profoundly different way.

If before his master had always been foolish on purpose, it seemed that now, with his cloak embracing her figure as he returned to the tower, he had abandoned something of himself, that something that made him special.

Matthew held in his arms a little girl who was crying bitterly. It must not have been easy to see his father lying in a pool of blood, his chest open and his heart still exposed to the sunlight. The girl screamed and screamed, kicking his armour, trying to go and hug her father. Matthew, however, made no sign of letting her go.

He did it for her own good - or for his own, he didn't really know. Once again Maximilian had tried, for the first time he hadn't succeeded. What a terrible discovery, the awareness of the fallibility of the human being.

…

Todd had left Maximilian with the task of saving the man and stepped aside, joining the ranks of Earthlings. The Londoner had not worked his magic and had left in an unusual way, too seriously, not from him. At that moment Todd realized that Anna, in a moment not properly defined, had squeezed his hand tightly.

The Texan had his heart in his throat.

An avalanche of insults originated from the stomach and was just waiting to be vomited. His class was in charge, he wanted to take revenge on one of the people who had mistreated and tortured him more than others - and now he had the courage to take his hand. Still, the warmth he felt from the hand of the girl at his side had gripped his guts and a deeper terror than his own

Cowardice pushed through him.

…

Tukker, who perhaps had relied on the image of the [Necromancer] less than all the others, did not place any responsibility on Maximilian. All in all, the benefits he had brought to the community were far greater than that single loss he had failed to avoid.

The only thing he wondered was how this event would impact the morale of the soldiers and Earthlings. Each of them had just lost something. And Tukker feared that something was just what might have made them win the war the next day.

…

Camilla had a contemptuous expression on her face, but she could not say anything, because the next moment Neri fell to her knees and began to recite a prayer to the sky.

It was hard to endure all this painful sight, yes, but he certainly didn't want to die tomorrow.

…

Eudokia closed the tower door behind her.

Maximilian wasted no time heading towards a wall on which he had written a magical theorem, which he had been working on for several days.

“There is nothing to do, unfortunately for them”, were the first words of the Londoner after at least half an hour of study.

Eudokia's blood almost froze.

"Maximilian."

"Yes?"

The man turned with a neutral expression and, after a second, as if he had remembered the right human emotions to show, he flashed a smile.

"What you were so afraid of is happening, it seems."

The man turned back to the wall and shrugged.

"I do not think so. I just need to refine a few spells, they're still not as good as they could have been. It is not good to use something so unrefined. Besides, I wouldn't even be able to sleep tonight if I did otherwise."

Eudokia had to admit that for the first time in many, too many years, something was deeply troubling her.

There was only one thing to do. She had to use a special skill, which had a very long cooldown. In the past, in her most brilliant years, she had used it mainly in battle, to animate images released from the memories of the great heroes and leaders who had fought for her.

Over the years, she had discovered that the uses were not purely militaristic. It was a skill that was created to inspire his people by looking at the exploits of the greats of the past, or simply reliving their own memories. In this way, many problems had been solved in the management of everyday life. But there was more than one chance of getting lost in sweet memories. As well as never going back. Despite the risk, it was worth a try.

[A Memory of Greatness]

Eudokia saw a faint light appear in the room and witnessed ...

…

Maximilian felt an extraneous heat, but at the same time the most familiar he would ever have felt on his skin. “You can't behave like that, Max. You know you have to be careful of other people.” The [Necromancer] hadn't noticed his heart, which had been beating at a soft rhythm since he took his hand from the corpse, until now.

Now, as he turned, he could feel it in his throat, along with the tears he could already feel flowing from his eyes. In front of him was not the woman he had known when he was young, but the person with whom he had finished growing old before losing his life shortly after hers. Wrinkles touched her white skin, still untouched by the sun and, with very few exceptions, the dark patches typical of old age.

Her hair was not gold as it had been in the past, but white, with a few strands that still persisted in its most beautiful colour.

If man had not had full control, physical and magical, over his body, he would probably have started vomiting with emotion.

"Paola. What are you doing here?"

Those weren't his words.

"You're beautiful like the day I met you."

Maximilian, in his young and handsome body, moved a lock of hair behind her ear.

"You know it's not true."

It was such an intimate moment that Eudokia unconsciously made herself invisible.

"Bollocks, if I don't know, who does?"

A smile spread on his face and Maximilian felt something rekindle inside him, a fire he had lost for so many years in his previous lives.

"A little bird told me you weren't good, you know?"

"Well, listen, tell that fucking bird that I'll cook it for dinner, got it?"

The woman put her hand on his face and Maximilian felt all the wrinkles, all the pain of a wrong life, of all the time he had wasted.

"Max?"

He gently put his hand around her waist and shrugged slyly.

"Yes, sweetheart."

"Be good, promise?"

Maximilian nodded and held her close to him.

“And don't work too hard, please. Think about family and friends. Say hello to Penelope if you see her again."

The man's voice was slightly broken with sobs.

"Do not worry my love. I have already done that shit once. I'm not a competitive [Necromancer], I promise."

Paola laughed slightly and began to disintegrate into a fountain of light, as if a million fireflies had just drifted away from each other.

He continued to hold her and gently stroke her hair until the image of her disappeared.

He looked around and found himself alone. Eudokia was gone, but he couldn't have said when.

He felt that welcoming warmth embrace him again and thanked her several times looking up, hoping that Paola was there, maybe a few million light-years, maybe in some different timeline, or even in another dimension.

And it wouldn't have mattered much, because one day he felt in his heart that he would see her again.