Juliette III, Jamal I

PA 0

Juliette

‘This is karma, isn’t it?’

There was a kind of irony in getting attacked while she was away attacking someone else. The thought didn’t do anything to weaken the burning rage that was filling her chest, though.

Currently, she was crouched beneath the undergrowth, finishing off the last of her preparations before the battle.

Last time, she had attacked during the day. Mostly, it was because it was their first battle in unknown territory—maybe the enemy had set up traps that they would walk into in the darkness, or her people would get lost and start attacking each other. The darkness was on her enemy’s side the first time.

Now it was on hers.

This was her territory, and her people knew it well. So instead of attacking immediately when they got back, she had had them settle in as close as she dared, and they waited for nightfall. Once it got dark, her soldiers—with eyes used to the darkness and rage in their hearts—would charge the village, and fucking murder the bastards that dared hurt her people!

But that still meant waiting. They were going to wait until an hour after the sun set, but that was as long as everyone was willing to hold off. They had been antsy and pissed before they had settled down to wait—now their collective rage had simmered down into a cold anger, and hell itself would be following them.

But not yet. They still had some time left, so Juliette was taking the time to finish up some last-minute preparations.

“You two, stand guard. You two, start the fire, we’ll need it soon enough,” she told the soldiers around her. She had four other soldiers with her right now, while the rest were hiding in two larger groups on the other side of the village, waiting for her signal. In total, she had forty-eight soldiers at her command. Of those, fifteen were from the village she conquered—and they really needed a name, she was starting to have trouble differentiating them in her head. Maybe… Sam…ians?...ish?...ites? Hm. Samites. Good enough—fifteen of them were Samites.

She didn’t trust the Samites yet. At least not with something as important as a battle. So, she had split up her army into twelve groups of four, with one or two Samites per group. The goal there was to make sure none of the Samites were in a position to turn against her, or at least to mitigate the damage that would happen because of it.

Once the groups had been established, she had set them to encircling the village—once the signal went off, they would swarm the village, attacking the enemy from all sides.

Hm. She probably needed to come up with a name for her enemies as well. Dicks? Bastards?

No, no, that might confuse people. She needed something that wasn’t just a curse word. What was a synonym of bastard?

…English. She’d call them the English.

She let out a snort, a tense giggle forcing its way out of her.

She shook her head, focusing back on the matter at hand. Her group was in position, but she had one last thing she needed to do

She was currently underneath a massive, gnarled old tree, digging a small hole. She used her bone dagger to mark the tree itself with an X, in a way she hoped wasn’t obvious. The reason was that this was going to be where she hid her soul-orb (‘sorb? No Juli, stop naming things‘). She wasn’t about to bring it into battle, and her recent… altercation with the other king made her realize that leaving something so important out in the open was fucking stupid.

So she was burying it beneath a tree, and praying that nobody else would find it.

Sometimes you’ve just got to deal with things as best you can.

With a sigh, she stood up, noting that her soldiers now had a small fire going. ‘Excellent, we’ll be able to start soon.’

Why were they starting a fire, you may ask? It’s because they were bait.

Of course, then that asked the question of why they needed bait if they were planning a sneak attack. The answer was, they weren’t. They had no idea what was going on in the village. Perhaps all of the enemy soldiers were awake; perhaps they were all asleep, and they could just walk in. Did they set up traps? Does she have more soldiers, or do they outnumber her five to one?

There were too many unknowns for her to simply charge in. Sure, a sneak attack might be the best option, but she wouldn’t know that until after the battle. For now, she was playing it safe.

Which brought her back to the idea of bait.

The four soldiers helping her grabbed makeshift torches and lit them on the fire. From there, they began walking over to the trees, tying the burning torches to the trees at approximately chest height (while making sure they didn’t accidently burn down the forest in the process). Once that was done, they’d come back to the fire, get more torches, and add them to their growing lightshow.

The idea was to make an illusionary army. Since they were dismissing the original sneak attack plan, the new plan was to get their attention with a fake army. As the forest lit up, it would (hopefully) look like an army was returning home, torches lit to help them find the way

Once the forest was lit up, they would split up, running over to the other groups to tell them to attack.

Now all they had to do win. So, no pressure, right?

--

Jamal

Jamal was grateful he didn’t need to sleep.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to sleep—rather, it was that, with the stress of waiting for the (likely violent) return of Queen of this village, he wouldn’t be getting any sleep anyway. So, instead of being exhausted and paranoid, he was just paranoid.

Small victories, and all that.

Instead of sleeping, he was sitting on watch along the edge of the village, along with Shu, who looked about five seconds away from passing out, and Fei, who had passed out.

He sighed, staring out into the dark forest around them. There wasn’t much going on. Crickets were chirping, owls hooting, and the campfire behind him cast long, unreasonably terrifying shadows along the ground. Back at the beginning of his watch, he had been nervous, jumping at every little sound. After over an hour, he was too mentally exhausted to care.

‘I can’t believe I have to spend the rest of the night out here.’

Back deeper in the village was his ‘army’ of fifty-two soldiers. They were sitting around the firepit, sleeping in shifts in case they were attacked.

Which might not even happen. It was entirely possible the Queen lost her battle against that other village, and they were waiting for a retaliation that was never going to happen.

But he wasn’t going to take that chance.

Really, he didn’t want to be here in the first place.

Originally, his plan had been to ally with his neighbors. He had sent a messenger to the two other villages he had found nearby, and prayed that they would agree.

Unfortunately, things weren’t so easy.

The first village didn’t even have a leader—apparently that person had gone power mad almost immediately and took a bunch of the village women as concubines.

Said villagers objected to this. Violently.

Apparently, they couldn’t figure out how to kill him—he just kept regenerating, and nobody told them about the soul-orbs—so instead they just tied him to a rock and dumped him in a nearby lake.

That, while horrifying, taught Jamal a valuable lesson.

Don’t fucking piss these people off.

While that was disheartening and pretty horrifying (was that other guy even still under the lake? Was he still alive down there!?), it wasn’t nearly as immediately threatening as learning his other neighbor had decided to attack a nearby village!

It was only luck she decided to go East rather than West.

Which had led to an issue. Peace wasn’t going to be an option—it had been a week and she was already attacking her neighbors. Beyond just the unlikelihood of her accepting an alliance with him, he didn’t really want to ally with a warmonger like that either. So instead, he took a page out of her book, and raised an army to attack her village while she was away.

Honestly, he probably could have thought it through a bit more, but it wasn’t like he had anything else he could have done.

Maybe he really should have tried for diplomacy instead?

He shook his head. No, even if they did come to an agreement, there was no way he could trust someone like that.

He’d managed to take this village without much bloodshed—they had immediately surrendered once they saw his army, and the only injuries were from trying to stop people from escaping. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to completely stop them, as a couple of them still managed to make it out.

Which most likely meant that this village’s Queen knew they were here, so they were long past the point of diplomacy anyway.

He sighed, staring out into the forest. This really was a shitty situation all around, huh? Just last month, the idea of dealing with, with all this, would have been the last thing on his mind. Hell, just last month, he would have been sleeping in heated apartment as Spotify played in the background. Not… this.

Life really was a bitch like that.

Suddenly, Jamal paused in his brooding. There, was that movement?

He rubbed his eyes, and then squinted, looking deeper into the forest. ‘Is that… light?’

Yes, it was. Deep in the forest, flickering lights began to appear.

“Shit,” he swore quietly, feeling adrenaline begin to flow through his veins. “FEI! SHU! WAKE UP!” he snapped, shaking them both awake. “They’re here! We’re under attack!”

Fei shuffled around groggily, while Shu simply swore, shaking away his exhaustion and running into the village to grab the others.

“Damnit, Fei!” he hissed, “Get up! What kind of guard falls asleep on duty!”

Fei finally managed to get up, stumbling to a standing position as Jamal shoved his spear into his hand.

“Sorry—ima, I’m shorry,” he yawned loudly, scratching his ass.

‘Fucking—lazy—we’re under attack, you moron!’ he thought angrily. He took a deep breath. ‘Don’t yell at your soldiers right before battle, Jamal. Shu is getting the others, just let this go.’

“Hey, uh,” Fei began to ask, “why do you say we’re under attack?”

Jamal gave him an incredulous look. “Can’t you see it!?” he asked, pointing to the lights in the forest, which had since gotten brighter. “The lights! That’s the enemy’s army returning!”

He heard the pounding of footsteps, and a moment later sighed in relief as his soldiers began surrounding him, settling into a defensive position.

“Eh? Lights?” Fei asked, squinting at the forest. “Why would they be carrying lights?”

Jamal gave him a look, about to tell him exactly how dumb that sounded, before he paused. Come to think of it, why would they have lights?

This wasn’t like the modern world, or even a medieval world, where armies would carry the tools to make fires on the fly. If these people wanted to make lights, then they would have to start a fire. And if they started a fire, why wouldn’t they simply set up camp for the night? Why go to all that effort when they could just spend the night and then return tomorrow? They knew this area like the back of their hands—even if they wanted to get home early, would they really need torches to do it? Would that even be helpful?

With a sinking feeling in his gut, Jamal looked out into the forest once more. Those lights—they weren’t moving, were they?

And then a battle cry broke out behind him, soon joined by dozens more.

‘Fuck. I’m an idiot.’

“TURN AROUND!” he yelled, spinning around. “They’re behind us!”

His army barely managed to turn around in time to stop the enemy from plowing into them. They only managed to get a couple steps back into the village before the enemy was upon them, attacking from both the front and sides.

Fuck. They had lost the center of the village because of him. In a sudden turn of events, their enemy had stolen the position of the defender out from under them.

Spears stabbed into the darkness, only to be turned away by crude shields. Snapping wood and screams of pain echoed into the night.

‘Fucking—FUCK!’ he began to charge into the fray, before suddenly stopping. He turned back to the forest. He could have sworn he saw something—there! Someone was moving!

As battle broke out behind him, he could see a lone shadowy figure was sneaking their way into the village.

He didn’t know what that person was trying to do, but whatever it was, he knew he couldn’t let them pull it off.

Turning fully, he charged at the other person, leaving the battle to his soldiers.

He ran after the other person, following them as they took a long way around the tents. He could hear his heart pounding in his chest, and after a few seconds of chasing he wondered if he had made the right—the other person suddenly stopped.

Jamal stumbled to a stop behind them, as the other turned to face him. It was a woman, that much he could tell, though a combination of her fur helmet and the darkness blocked her features.

He brought his spear forward, and the other woman held a long knife in front of her.

They both stayed there for a moment, neither moving. In the background, he could hear the screams of men dying.

He flinched. He couldn’t waste time here, his people needed him!

He charged at the woman, thrusting his spear forward, but she stumbled to the side and barely dodged it. Then with a quick spin she stepped within his guard, bringing up her knife to stab him.

He barely managed to step backwards in time for it to merely graze him, but it was still too close for comfort. With a grunt he let go of his spear with his right hand, punching the woman in the chest. It didn’t do much, but it managed to knock her back enough for him to stumble away. Giving her a kick for good measure, he managed to put enough space between them for him to wield his spear again. With a snarl he spun his spear around so that it pointed at her, and thrust forward with all his strength, impaling his spear straight through her gut.

The woman stared at him with wide eyes, and for a long moment he thought that she was going to ignore her wound and keep attacking.

But then that moment was over, and she fell over, collapsing onto the ground.

Jamal let out a deep breath. Fuck, for a moment there he thought he was going to die.

He turned away, looking further into the village. He could still hear the sounds of fighting, the screams of people cursing and dying. The battle wasn’t over yet, and his fellows still needed him.

He turned back to the woman, intent on grabbing his spear before he charged in. But as he looked down at where the woman was, he froze.

She was gone.

‘What!? But where—how—’

And then sheer agony ripped through his body, the pain far beyond anything he’d ever felt before. He looked down and saw the tip of a spear jutting out of his stomach. He brought his hand up, grasping at it weakly.

It was his spear.

Then the spear was torn out of him, the pain redoubling. He stumbled forward, only for the spear to be shoved through him once more.

And that was as much as he could take. With one last pained gasp of breath, Jamal fell to the ground.

--

Juliette

Juliette sighed as she stumbled away from the dead man. She supposed she should feel something about it—anger that he had attacked her home, satisfaction that she had beaten him—but all she felt was exhaustion. She just wanted to lay down in her bed and sleep for a thousand years.

Getting impaled through the stomach would do that to you.

She shook her head. She had a mission to do. While she couldn’t be certain that the enemy king would bring his soul-orb into her village—or if he’d even have taken the time to have hidden it somewhere—but she still needed to try to find it. If she could do that, then she could do the same thing she did last time, easily winning this battle.

Emphasis on ‘if.’

With a quiet groan, she turned to start her search, only to pause. With a sense of sudden paranoia—the type that comes from having just done the thing you’re worried about yourself—she turned back to the body of the man she had just killed.

The man who was currently pushing himself off the ground.

They stared at each other for a long moment, completely silent.

‘Ah,’ she thought blankly, ‘I’ve found the other King.’

Then the shock wore off, and Juliette’s eyes widened, jumping at the downed man and kicking his head as hard as she could. He fell over again but wasn’t even pretending to be knocked out this time. With a loud swear, he rolled over, the spear snapping in half where it was still stuck in his body. But he managed to stabilize himself enough to jump back to his feet with a wild look in his eyes, half crazed from the pain of the spear shaft still in his gut.

He reached down, probably trying to pull it out, but the second he did Juliette took a step forward, bringing her dagger to bear. She managed to slice open his arm as he tried to stumble back, but unfortunately that did less than nothing, as it healed a second later.

The other man—perhaps realizing she wouldn’t give him the chance—stopped trying to pull the spear out of his gut, instead bringing up both his fists into a fighting position.

Juliette held her dagger between them, contemplating on her options. On one hand, she was armed and didn’t have a spear in her stomach. On the other, none of that meant anything to a person who was immortal. The only way to kill him was to destroy his soul-orb, but she didn’t have any idea where that was.

In fact, neither of them knew where the other’s soul-orb was. Which meant this wasn’t a fight to the death, but a stalling match, until one of their allies showed up and helped them subdue the other.

Which meant she needed her allies over here before he got his. So, she could either wait and hope, or take a gamble.

She chose to gamble. Taking a deep breath, she screamed as loud as she could, “COME OVER HERE!”

The other man’s eyes widened in confusion, before he shook it off and charged her, apparently taking her shouting as a challenge.

She slashed at him with her knife, but he apparently no longer cared because he just tanked it, getting a massive gash on his chest but managing to knock her over, the two of them falling to the ground.

They grabbled in the dirt for a bit. He brought down his fists on her, blow after blow raining onto her face. She choked as one hit broke her nose, but she managed to bring up her dagger, shoving it into his side and pulling, making him scream out in pain. Using the dagger as leverage, she managed to shove him off of her, before rolling away and stumbling back to her feet.

Quickly turning back to the other man, she saw that he had managed to grab the other half of his spear. The stone tip looked barely attached, but he held his new weapon in front of him with confidence.

Confidence that probably stemmed more from his own immortality than the broken spear, though.

The two immortals squared off once more. The undying man got into a stance, holding the ‘short’ spear in one hand. Juliette held her dagger in front of her, mentally preparing herself for another round, when—

“YOU DARE!”

The man in front of her was suddenly bowled over, a large brown blur knocking him to the ground.

“YOU DARE LAY A HAND ON OUR QUEEN!”

Ah, it was Qian. Thank God.

She almost began to relax as she stared at the two men grappling on the ground, before suddenly remembering that Qian was not, in fact, immortal, and ran over to help.

Kneeling down next to them (and ignoring the fist that slammed into her jaw as she got close) she thrust her dagger forward as carefully as she could, jamming it into the other King’s shoulder. He let out another hiss of pain, but was distracted from her by Qian shoving his own knife into his face, hilting it right through his eye.

This did not have the desired effect (instant death) but instead just made the man scream, bringing up his good hand to his eye, thrashing about more.

“Qian!” Juliette shouted, trying to help him hold down the flailing King. “He’s like me! You can’t kill him this way—he’ll regenerate from anything! Just focus on holding him down and restraining him for now!”

Qian let out a loud grunt that she assumed was in understanding.

The two of them worked together after that, shoving the King over and onto his stomach. Qian got on top of him, kneeling on his back and holding both of his legs down. She got in front of him, pulling his arms in front of his head and sitting on them, using her own hands to hold down his head.

Now hopefully none of their enemies arrived and killed them while they were like this.

She stared at the defeated King on the ground. He had a broken spear through his stomach, a dagger impaled in his arm and his eye, and had Qian and her holding him down. And yet, he was still struggling.

She could (grudgingly) respect that.

“I think I know what I want to name our village.”

Qian did a double take. “My Queen, are you sure this is the time for that? Not that I don’t think it is a bad name, I just—is this really the time?” He let out a quiet swear as the other man flailed his leg, managing to kick Qian’s arm.

“Don’t praise the name before you’ve even heard it,” she sighed, readjusting her grip. “But I’ve decided. From now on, this village—this future city—will be called King’s End.”

“Ah,” Qian gave the struggling body they were holding down a look. “A wonderful name, my Queen!”

9,996 God-Kings Remain