Ruthless: Path of Conquest

James looked down on the aftermath of battle.

He could see it all from up there, his cloak fluttering in the breeze.

I could get used to flying like this… But he couldn’t make himself smile at the thought.

The light around him was fading now.

What a disaster, he thought. But he knew it could have been much worse. If I had arrived just five minutes later, how many would there be left to save?

All around James, armored men and women fell to their knees, exhausted and relieved—or writhing and screaming as the creatures possessing their bodies were expelled and destroyed. The number of conscious, healthy humans who were simply exhausted was almost evenly matched with the number of the possessed.

James had the terrible sense that he had narrowly averted a massacre.

Some of those who remained conscious and free of Wraith control directed looks of gratitude up at him, but James barely took notice of that. He kept his gaze moving around the battlefield, trying to tally up the losses and see where his power was needed next.

Almost all the Wraiths had been destroyed, and those few that had survived were already fleeing into the darkness of the night. Even though he had wanted to purge this land of the creatures completely, he was grateful for this result. The solar energy his body had stored up from the day was utterly exhausted. He could not fire another Solar Ray if his life depended on it.

I need to level that Skill more, he thought. I was half naked for a while earlier today, so I absorbed extra solar energy, but my body’s usage still wasn’t efficient enough to destroy all these creatures. I’ll have to chase the rest down later…

Three figures floated up out of James’s peripheral vision to his left.

“Thank God you guys are here,” James said quietly. “I was starting to wonder how your mission went, considering what happened to our volunteers.”

“It was a success,” Mina said quietly, her tone grim. He could tell she was looking down at the end result of the battle with the same feeling of disquiet that James felt.

“Alice destroyed the Wraiths’ Reliquaries,” Zora said. Her tone was subdued as well, but James could hear the unmistakable note of pride in her daughter.

He turned his head to look at them and opened his mouth to thank Alice, but his wife, sister, and mother all jerked back slightly as if taken aback at his appearance.

“What?” he asked. “Is there something wrong with me?”

“James, your—” Alice began to speak and raised her hand to gesture at her own face, but stopped when Zora grabbed her shoulder.

“It’s nothing important right now,” Zora said coolly. “Now where do you need us?”

“You’re not, um, hurt, are you, skapi?” Mina asked gingerly.

James shook his head. “No, I’m fine—or at least I thought I was until you guys looked at me that way…”

He turned to look back down at the battlefield. Then he pointed.

“I think there are still a few possessed down there. Alice, could you shine some of your light magic, please? Mina and I will give first aid to the wounded. And Mom—” He looked his mother in the eyes, a slightly uncomfortable expression spreading on his face. “I think we have about two dozen dead. It’s not so many, relative to the hundreds I threw into this forest. But is there anything you can do for them?”

“You mean—”

“Don’t do anything that would make the rest of the population hate us,” James said firmly, “but I assume I can trust you to make the distinction. Death is permanent as far as we know—besides your new powers. We’ll worry about getting permission from next of kin later. If there’s a way you can save them that will leave their human dignity intact…” He allowed his voice to trail off. He believed his mother understood him well enough to know what he was asking for.

“The recently dead,” Zora said thoughtfully. “Some of their souls are still lingering, I can sense them… Okay, son. I’ll get to work right away. Keeping in mind what you said.” She floated down in a hurry, and Alice began her own much slower descent, chanting quietly to herself.

James considered next steps.

I need Healers for the ones who are still alive. The wounded and the recently possessed far outnumber those who Mina and I might be able to help. James had used up most of his Mana already, having fought in the bats’ territory earlier that day, then tangled with Sister Strange, and finally used Dominion to take control of the battlefield and dispel the aura of fear and death that still hung over it following Sister Strange’s destruction.

If we’re proactive, there’s no reason why any others should have to die, when we have plenty of Healers right next door.

He sent an announcement throughout the Fisher Kingdom.

[Attention, all Healers! After expelling the evil spirits, we have many wounded and some formerly possessed fighters. Please enter the forest as quickly as you can to provide first aid. Any non-Healers who wish to volunteer, we need physical labor as well. We will be moving those who do not recover immediately into the community center. We will need spare beds, cots, anything soft that an injured person might rest on. Jeremiah Rotter is to direct the effort to prepare the community center for habitation. Please see him for instructions.]

He was pleased to note that he kept his voice completely calm throughout the bulletin.

That ought to stop the bleeding, James thought. And I’m starting to really like this delegating thing. He could imagine a scenario where he would have been running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to perform triage while also giving orders to people directly to get the logistics of the makeshift hospital in order.

He shook his head and looked down to see where he should fly to begin applying first aid.

Then Alice’s Light Magic blinded him as he made the mistake of looking directly down at it in the moment of casting.

I guess that’s a new weakness of mine, he thought, slightly amused. If you have superhuman eyesight or hearing, it can get overwhelmed.

While he was blinking the darkness out of his eyes, Mina spoke up.

“I hope you know that I wouldn’t want that,” she said quietly.

“What?” James asked, turning toward her. Her face slowly swam into view as the darkness passed from his vision.

“What your mother is doing,” Mina said, pointing toward the ground with a somber expression.

James heard the subtext, What you asked your mother to do.

He followed Mina’s finger with his gaze. He saw that his mother had produced a handful of skeletons from somewhere and was using them to carry off the bodies of the dead. Like James, Zora seemed to have an unerring ability to tell the living from the dead with just a glance.

He could not help noticing that a few people—not more than a handful—were watching Zora work. Their expressions varied from apparent fascination to what appeared to be distrust.

I’ll have to speak with them. I need them to understand that she’s not taking our dead away for some sinister purpose. It’s just, if I can save someone, or if Mom can, why shouldn’t we do that?

“I get it,” James said quietly. “You want to die like anyone else and stay dead. It’s only natural.”

He looked at Mina and found that she was nodding.

“And I wonder how many of the dead she’s working on will feel that way,” she added.

James sighed. I know you have a point, but I’m not like you. I think most people aren’t like you. They would rather live as Vampires or Ghouls or something than accept death. I think that was why people believed in gods in the pre-System world. They wanted something beyond death. Some happily ever after that nature didn’t offer them. In a magical world, why should anyone have to accept the limitations of nature? At the same time, he knew from the visions that Sister Strange had shown him that Mina might not have a choice. She seemed to be destined for a violent death.

Unless Strange was lying to me—or I can prevent it.

“I hope you’ll change your mind one day,” he said in a tone of quiet melancholy. “After you see what Mom actually does. This is a very new world. There’s a lot we both still have to get used to. If the results of her efforts are just horrifying, I’ll be the first to tell her to stop. But I already know I plan on living forever. It could get lonely if you don’t want to join me. Maybe just keep an open mind?”

“That does sound very lonely,” she said softly. “Then again, so does the possibility that I might outlive our children. Or our grandchildren. Even if they’re immortals, they could die by some accident, or an enemy attack. This world is much more violent than the one we grew up in. It’s a lot to think about, skapi. I love you, you know I do, but—eternity? That sounds a lot longer than ‘until death do us part.’ If you’re willing to live forever, I guess I can understand that. I never imagined that for myself. Never wanted it. I just—I don’t know. I’ll try to keep an open mind. And I’ll let you know how I feel after I see whatever Zora does with those people.”

James felt dejected. It feels like the universe is plotting to kill you, Mina, and you don’t even want to come back to life if you have the option? He forced himself to remain grounded in the present moment. That’s far away, he told himself. Those people down there are in trouble now.

“Let’s descend,” he said, trying to keep a neutral tone. “Most of our soldiers are still alive. They just need healing.”

He felt his wife’s head snap towards him, trying to read his expression, but James was already descending, so he was quickly beyond her line of sight, only giving her the back of his head to look at.

He had narrowed down the area where healing was most needed, and he began using Laying on Hands as soon as he was close enough to reach the wounded, even before his feet had touched the ground.

Mina busied herself working alongside him—thankfully she had Laying on Hands too—and they performed their task in silence, each simultaneously focused on the task at hand and deep in their own inner worlds.

It felt a bit futile to James, though he did not allow that emotion to slow him. There were many wounded, and the worst injured had been bleeding for so long that they looked incredibly pale.

Still, his mind almost automatically ran through ways he might mitigate these problems for the future. I need to start giving my creatures the healing Skills I have. If I had a couple dozen monsters with a fraction of my Mana pool each, all equipped with Laying on Hands, they would mop this situation up in twenty minutes…

As it was, he began to think that they would lose more soldiers. He and Mina could not move quickly enough.

Worst of all, he saw people he knew among the injured. His hands mended injuries on Ramon Rodriguez, Alan, and Mitzi, but there were many more people he recognized among the wounded. James could only heal one or two at a time, at most, and his Mana was still limited.

He forced himself not to think about it much. There was too much to do for him to allow his emotions free rein. He healed the injured one by one, with preference for those whose names he remembered, and his hands kept moving on to the next victim of the Wraiths.

Then the Healers from the Fisher Kingdom began appearing. They arrived in small groups, moving cautiously, heads turning from side to side as if they worried they might be attacked by creatures at any moment.

“Hurry up, please!” James called. “We have people near death here, and there are no more monsters in the area!”

The first batch of Healers sprinted forward in response to James’s voice. And the salvation of the Fisher Army began in earnest.

Once one group of Healers found the courage to rush in, more followed. Perhaps they had been waffling at the edge of the forest, outside James’s field of vision, but his words spurred them into motion. In any case, soon, there were two dozen Healers at work.

The anemic-looking soldiers who James had only been slowly working his way through began to look better immediately.

Yulia appeared as James was starting to run low on Mana.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

She nodded and gave him a small smile, but he could tell the sight of the piled up unconscious soldiers and the feel of the bloody ground squelching underneath her sneakers was having an effect on her.

“Of course,” she said. “I had to leave Abhi in charge, but I hope that’s okay given the circumstances.”

“Absolutely,” James said, remembering the circumstances under which they had first met Abhi and his siblings—when they were in their old apartment alone. “That little guy is responsible enough to babysit for half an hour or so.”

He sent a telepathic message to Abhi’s Clay Spider, Peter, to give to Abhi: Thanks for being the man of the house, Abhi! See you in a few hours.

It was only then that James found a moment to speak quietly with those who had been watching his mother remove the bodies of the dead. The few people who had been watching Zora were all relatively new to James—he didn’t know their names—but they were all standing close together still, too exhausted to go anywhere in James’s assessment. He pulled them into a huddle and began using Identify to get their names in case he needed to remember them later.

“Hey, you guys,” James said.

“Your Majesty,” said a man who was apparently called Inigo Sandoval. He dipped his head in a small quasi-bow.

Another, who Identify named as Henry Burke, grinned wearily at that.

“Did we do good?” he asked.

“Yeah,” James said, returning the grin. “You all did a great job. You’re the ones who held the line with such courage. You kept the Wraiths from possessing more of your comrades. You saved a lot of lives tonight.”

“Thank you!” said Burke, his smile growing more energetic.

“What are you talking about?” said Sandoval in a jocular tone. “He meant me!”

The air rang with laughter for almost a minute at that. James joined in too.

I think I might like these guys.

“Did you want to talk to us about something in particular?” asked Sandoval.

“It’s about what you guys saw the lady with the skeletons doing earlier,” James said.

“That’s your mother, right, Fisher King?” asked Derek Sievers.

“Right,” James said.

“Then we don’t need any explanation,” said Sievers. “Right, guys?”

The other four men nodded at that. James didn’t detect any reluctance. It didn’t feel forced.

Am I missing something?

“You looked a bit bothered by it earlier,” James said.

“We talked among ourselves,” Sievers said. “We all followed Dave into the forest because we trust you. We trust Dave, too, but this whole place—” He gestured at the air, the ground, and the surroundings generally—“it runs on trust of you. This seemed like a dumb place to question it.” He looked James in the eyes, and Sievers’s eyes smiled along with the rest of his face. “I don’t think many of us have had the experience of having a real leader before. None of us believe you’d steer us wrong. So we figured your mother and her, uh, skeleton crew was probably doing something good… And we decided to trust you, without asking for any explanations.” Sievers looked sort of proud, as if he felt he had found the right answer to a challenging question.

James nodded slowly. Right. This is a very new world. Being a king isn’t like being some other kind of politician. It’s not always about explaining yourself to the public. There’s something mystical to it. An element of faith.

“I will strive to always be worthy of your trust,” he said simply.

James shook each man firmly by the hand, and they found the strength to join him as he began leading the next phase of his post-battle plan: the transportation of the wounded to the community center.