Bjorn stood before all the rebels and civilians who stayed at the University of Koinelia.

Since the destruction of the North bridge, more rebels had come. Katla and her warriors were being held in the city along with other merchants, so she had also joined up with them. Bjorn hadn’t been upset, but he was still uncomfortable around the Northwoman.

The Emperor had made a declaration that he would not fight the Twelve and instead try to cooperate with them, which sent several hundred of his Praetorian guard into the arms of the uprising. While the guard was a few thousand at first, they took extreme losses at the hands of the Bane Knights when they tried to fight their way in.

“Alright.” He projected her voice. “I know what you’re all thinking. One of our exits is down. The others are swarming with Bane Knights. We’re running out of food and our biggest source of water was poisoned. It’s clear we can’t stay here anymore. So I have come up with a solution. I want your thoughts.”

He stuck a roll of parchment into a wooden wall with two knives. It was a map of the city.

“The gates aren’t an option.” Bjorn said, “Nikan guards man each one and I have no doubt they’ll be able to easily get reinforcements to each of them. But there is one defense that’s shaky. That’s the naval blockade just outside the harbor. They’ve been out there for three weeks now. Eventually, those ships are going to have to come into the harbor to resupply. When they do, we strike. We light up whatever artillery and explosives they have and destroy the ships. We can hijack whatever merchant ships and personal vessels are docked and make an escape to anywhere in the Mesogeonian.”

“Bjorn!”

He glanced up from the gathered rebels to a young man who had rushed into the campus gardens.

“What is it?” he asked.

“There’s a Qahtanad man here who claims to be a friend of yours. Calls himself Najeem.”

Bjorn blinked, “Who?”

His chest fluttered with elation. Bjorn hadn’t known whether the Koini army had been defeated and if their allies were alive. If even one was still living, that tipped the scales in their favor.

“Let him in.” Bjorn said.

The young man ran from the gardens and reappeared with a Qahtanad man clad in black with a scimitar at his hip in tow.

Bjorn made his way through the crowd of rebels to meet with Najeem.

“Gods and Demons. I thought you all were dead.” Bjorn sighed with relief, “It’s good to see you.”

Najeem nodded. “Same here. But no need to worry. We’re all alive. Ruhak, Orhan, Cecile and Peng stayed behind to help the army. The rest of us are coming with a legion to make this a proper fight.”

“A whole Legion?” Bjorn asked. “How are you going to get into the city?”

“That’s why I came ahead. We need one gate to be opened and unattended. So we need you guys to cause a distraction big enough to draw most of the soldiers guarding the gates.” Najeem said.

Bjorn nodded, “Well...we were going to destroy the blockade on the outside of the harbor. But I wouldn’t bet on that drawing too many reinforcements.” Bjorn perked up. “You know what would draw a lot of attention? Hijacking the blockade.”

“If we just destroy the ships, sure they won’t have defenses in the harbor. But if we capture their ships and use them as our own, not only does that give us infinitely more strategic possibilities, but they would see it as a humiliation.”

Najeem nodded, “Excellent. Is Taya going to help?”

Bjorn’s smile fell from his face, “Er...no. She’s...she’s sick.”

Najeem’s eyes widened. “Sick? With what?”

Bjorn sighed, “We thought it was just a fever at first. But new symptoms are rising. I think she has the Plague. The Scars that kill people.”

_________________________________________________________________

Cecile’s arms were caked in blood all the way to her elbows.

For the past two days, the Nikan had attacked with a ruthless ferocity, using their soldiers like living ammunition the way they threw themselves up the walls and onto Koini spears to hurt anyone they could.

Besides that, the garrisons of each other village arrived here in Emesa hours ago, with thousands of wounded. Legate Sergia’s numbers were culled significantly.

The wounds some soldiers came into the medical tents with looked more like animals attacked them rather than other humans.

How could Ruhak and Iustinianus look at war like some kind of art? It was just savage murder that leeched off the services of doctors and surgeons who genuinely wanted to help people to sustain its continuation. There was no artistry to it.

That being said, perhaps if one considered the maulings some soldiers suffered art, she could understand. Some of these wounds…

Cecile’s mind was a typhoon of information. She had to note how much time each of her patients had left, what herbs she needed for what salve, who she needed for certain operations and how skillful they needed to be.

She had to tend to fifty patients at once, with more always coming in the moment she finished treating one.

As she tended to some, she tried to brainstorm how to deal with others. Some had been barely holding their organs inside their bodies. Others had wounds from hand cannons, with projectiles she couldn’t take out like an arrow. Others suffered damage in their lungs or on their skin from gas, to which she had no remedy.

There was nothing she could rely on to help these people. The Nikan Empire’s new weapons were damaging bodies in ways she’d never seen.

There was no height of war. No essence to achieve. It simply changed and adapted to suit however it was fought and grew to be more and more deadly. And as war grows, so to do its demands on those who heal the wounds it causes.

And here she thought she was at her peak. What arrogance.

Bjorn was right. She thought to herself. I’m being punished for my complacency.

She wished Taya was there to give her advice, but she wasn’t. Just like all her years of studying medicine. She’d wasted her time before and now paid the price for it. Hundreds, maybe thousands of young men could’ve been saved by her hand had she just continued her progress rather than being complacent.

That’s why Bjorn and Taya never let up. So that way, they could use everything at their disposal to accomplish their goal. And if they failed, at least they would have gained knowledge and grown.

Cecile, in her manic, exhausted state, would learn nothing about how to help these men with each one that died. Her time to do that had long passed.

That’s not necessarily true.

If anything, she now knew that she would do as Taya suggested and be better than the person she was a second before. But that didn’t change the fact that most of the men in her beds would suffer a slow and agonizing death.

“Cecile. Your shift’s up. I’ll take over.”

Cecile jumped as a hand landed on her shoulder. She turned to face one of the higher-ranking battlefield medic and nodded, putting down the metal instruments she was about to use to remove an arrow from a man’s face.

Upon letting go of all the patients she handled, a wave of exhaustion hit her, causing her to stagger as she exited the medical tent. She smelled something other than iron and burning flesh for the first time in several hours.

She stripped off her leather gloves and stumbled over to a designated wash bin and started scrubbing the brown dried blood off her arms. Her chest felt heavy with tiredness and regret. She looked down as though the weight was physically dragging down from her bust. Her work had splattered the bloodstains of a serial killer across her light blue dress.

Cecile sighed and looked down onto the battlefield from the medical tent’s elevated position.

She furrowed her brow at a small group of people she saw away from the fighting along the village’s walls.

It looked like they were breaking some kind of stone flood barrier along the river. Cecile’s eyes widened. The Nikan were climbing up to get to the village. It was flood season, so the river’s tide was high. Ruhak was going to try and wipe them out with a flood.

With one powerful swing of some polearm, the dam burst open. The soldiers got themselves to safety just before a giant wave crashed through the lowlands.

The fighting paused between both sides as the water washed away a good chunk of the Nikan forces.

It was actually somewhat impressive when she wasn’t the one trying to save the lives of people who’d been affected by a move like that.

Hoofbeats slowed to a stop just outside the medical tent.

More injured.

“Cecile.”

She snapped her head around to look at Orhan.

“The remaining divisions of the Nikan army, including Guanyu, are heading this way. They’ll be here by sunset. This is our chance to escape before we get trapped in a full scale siege. Have everyone get ready to go.” he said.

“What? Orhan, we have thousands that can’t even walk.”

“We’ll have to leave them. It’s either all of them or all of us.”

“Leave them?”

“Any soldier worth his sword doesn’t expect to come back alive and well. We can’t let those who are already lost die in vain because we gave up our victory to save a few lives.” Orhan said, “Pack up. Direct orders from the Legate.”

With that, Orhan rode off.

He was right, but...gods, she really had to let go. Being in the Relentless Stride was about moving forward, Taya had said. In any form it takes.

After giving the news to the medics, they appeared they would share her sentiment if they weren’t forcing themselves to be apathetic.

It was hard to remember that all these men had a reason they were dying. Most of the time that reason existed so men more powerful than them could get more powerful, but this was a war to deter a nation who thought it right to massacre regularly and that they weren’t beholden to any treaty they signed.

Within a few hours, the army was ready to march again.

The problem was that they had to go west. The north was still under attack by what was left of the quarter of a million soldiers that had besieged them. They wouldn’t give until all of them were dead, meaning more hours of fighting they couldn’t afford. And the south east was where the other three-fourths of the army were coming from.

The west, however, was where the massive Koini River flowed. The river was too wide, too deep and too fast for them to cross by foot. They didn’t have time to make rafts for everyone.

Cecile stood staring at the behemoth of a waterway with Ruhak, Orhan, Peng and Iustinianus.

Three horn blasts signified that the civilian units of the army had a visual on the Nikan army.

“Sarfan,” Iustinianus said, “Ruhak tells me you can control water to a certain extent. Could you…” The Legate became less sure of his own words as he spoke them.

Cecile gave him a horrified look. There was no way in hell she could even touch the thing that sated the thirst of nearly every Koini city in the heartland. Just looking at it made her heart sink.

“I understand.” Iustinianus said.

“We can’t tie rafts, but perhaps we can dismantle some carts and scavenge for wood panels we can use.” Ruhak suggested.

Cecile looked back at the river.

Wooden panels? They couldn’t pull that off.

It’s just water. Water. Your domain.

“N-no.” Cecile said before she even had a chance to think, “I can do it.”

“You sure?” Peng asked.

“Don’t overexe-” Ruhak started.

“I said I could do it.” Cecile declared staunchly.

She took a step forward and a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment to focus.

Another horn blast signaled that the army was now within range to fire arrows.

“It’s just like controlling any other body of water. Just bigger.” She muttered to herself, holding her palm out and summoning the chill energy from her Plague Scars, “Much, much big-no. No, you can do this.”

She tensed her muscles, causing her power to flow out of her and influence the water, but it only held back some of the river’s flow.

She could give it more.

“True Weakness,” she whispered, “Is stagnation.”

Coldness ripped through her body as pain tore into her side, spreading up her breast and down her abdomen. But the pain was nothing compared to the explosion of power and focus in her mind.

The Koini River lurched.

Millions of pounds of water stopped in its tracks. Her Shedim emerged and started speaking, but Cecile shouted over it.

“GO!”

The army started marching as fast as they could through the barren river floor as more and more water built up. But so long as these extraordinary reserves of power flowed through her, she could keep it up.

As the last of the civilian units fled across the river, she felt the chill of her power start to lessen in intensity. She was running out of time.

She ran into the river herself and followed up the civilians. She climbed up the other side just as the Nikan cavalry, which had been sent ahead, entered the river. They would’ve caught up with her, had she not released the water there.

The tower of river water slammed down onto the Nikan cavalry and surged through the barren river channel. It spilled over onto land, flooding the area further as the Koini army got to higher ground.

Cecile, drained of every ounce of energy, collapsed onto the dirt just above the floods. But she fell as the day’s hero of the Koini Legions and as a new woman from the one that inhabited her flesh mere minutes ago.