The knightly host began to set up camp around forty-five miles from Ironford—barely a day’s march on good terrain, but in the hills and forests it would take them more like three days to reach the city walls. They hadn’t harassed any villages along the way, nor had they made to secure any of the small castles owned by the local Barons. In fact, they seemed to be going out of their way to avoid these places.

This in and of itself didn’t change much in Leon’s view, but it did imply that the force had all the supplies that they thought they needed. They weren’t pillaging, they were simply marching as quickly as they were able through the forested valley.

The valley itself was about five miles wide, more than large enough for these movements, and certainly big enough for Leon’s much smaller unit to move undetected. They were like shadows clinging to their quarry but never drawing close enough to be seen. This wasn’t too difficult to maintain, since, in their seeming arrogance, Octavius’ knights didn’t deploy scouts on their flanks and neither did Leon ever feel the touch of magic senses. It wasn’t until the knights began to make camp that they began to scout out their surroundings, but by then, Leon and his people had safely pulled back into the hills.

There they waited for several hours, resting as best they could for what would come later that night. Leon and Anzu flew over the camp a few times, but with the tree cover, he couldn’t see much. What he did manage to see, however, was encouraging—the knights hadn’t decided to build walls around their camp, perhaps because it was simply too big. In this broken landscape, the camp stretched back for miles in a long, thin line, and to build walls around the entire thing wasn’t something that could be easily done, though Leon did note that their higher-tiered mages cleared some land and set up some earthen ramparts and short stone walls on top of them around some of the larger tents, which Leon guessed housed either their more important knights or their supplies.

Probably both.

Needless to say, Leon now had his targets, and he was going to severely punish his enemy’s arrogance and lack of caution.

His people were ready by the time the sun fell, with the most powerful of the two-hundred-strong force equipped with some of Leon’s strongest spells, and his less powerful spells passed out to the rest to tie to their arrows. Some of the other knights had even brought spells of their own, so Leon’s stash wasn’t completely depleted, leaving him some of his more destructive spells in reserve.

It was a warm night, and dark—the sky was completely overcast, blocking out the moon. Leon could feel the familiar sense of an upcoming storm, but it didn’t affect him nearly as much as it had when he was weaker. All he felt was a rush of energy, but no compulsion to train to try to get rid of it. All-in-all, it felt like a good, beautiful night to him, even if others would disagree.

“This doesn’t bode well…” Grim muttered as he stared up at the cloudy sky, the last remnants of the sun’s light long since faded away below the hills and mountains.

“Talking about the weather?” Leon asked, to which Grim nodded. “Hm. I actually think this is a good sign. We’ve got the element of surprise, and their weaker men-at-arms and squires won’t be able to see us coming. If it starts raining, it’ll even dampen the sounds of our approach. I couldn’t think of better conditions for our operation.”

“We’ll also be uncomfortable. And wet. I don’t like being wet.”

Leon lowered his gaze from the clouds to Grim, an incredulous look in his eye. Alix, who was standing just beside him—as was the rest of Leon’s ‘retinue’—shared his look of disbelief.

“Aren’t you a water mage?” Leon asked.

Grim looked back at the younger knight and shrugged. “Well… yeah, I am, but… I just don’t like the rain. And besides, I mostly use ice, not water. I may be a water mage, but that doesn’t require me to like the rain!”

Leon blinked as he tried to wrap his head around this, and he and Alix shared a look as if both were rhetorically asking what in all the hells Grim was on about.

“We’re ready to go!” said the male fifth-tier knight as he ran over to report in to Leon.

“Then let’s get going,” Leon said as he glanced up and down the line of knights, happy as he was to let the matter with Grim go. He loved the rain, and he couldn’t fathom why a water mage wouldn’t share that joy.

At least Anzu seemed eager, as the griffin was pacing like a caged tiger just waiting to sink his claws into his prey. Valeria was much calmer and stood close to Leon with an utterly inscrutable expression on her face. She was as calm and cool as ice, with only a few subtle twitches in her hands indicating her eagerness to set out to battle. Lapis, on the other hand, was completely still, frozen like a stone statue as it waited for Leon’s word.

Leon spared a few looks for the rest of the force, who were assembled in a long wedge formation ten across and twenty deep. For the most part, Leon didn’t see anyone who seemed hesitant or overly apprehensive, which he took to mean that they were as ready as the fifth-tier knight had claimed.

“Let’s go,” he said, and he and the rest of the command structure spread out across the formation, with Grim and the fifth-tier knightess taking up a position at the rear while Leon and his retinue went to the front. The fifth-tier knight, meanwhile, was at the center.

It was a fairly short march, only lasting about an hour. By the time they reached their rally point about a thousand feet away from the camp, the storm that had been brewing had arrived, though the rainfall wasn’t as intense as Leon had hoped it would be. Still, it covered what few sounds they made as they moved that the forest’s ambient noise didn’t already cover, and for that, Leon was grateful. An added benefit was that without moonlight, Anzu’s bright white fur and feathers had practically blended into the dark background.

As the group converged on their rally point, Leon separated each individual squad with quick hand gestures either to his left or to his right, and the long wedge instead became a thin line, and all of the knights quickly unlimbered their bows and prepared to fire their arrows. Taking most of his cues from the mission that Leon had gone on during the siege of Fort 127 where a large number of soldiers at the fort led a preemptive strike on the besieging Valemen, Leon ensured that every one of his people had at least one explosion spell, either from him or from one of the other knights that had brought spells, and that they were ready to retreat at a moment’s notice. He didn’t want a single casualty on this mission.

He waited until everyone was in position and then fired his first arrow. Leon had kept one of his biggest spells for himself, and it detonated in a spectacular burst of white fire that seared his dark-adapted eyes. Barely a moment later, all of his people let fly their own arrows, and along at least half of the camp’s length, great orange blasts of fire ripped through tents, sleeping knights, men-at-arms, and squires. Leon’s spell, on the other hand, didn’t kill anyone but targeted one of the larger slightly fortified tents that he’d seen from the air. Huge portions of the supplies that Octavius’ knights had brought with them went up in white flame.

Like a switch had been flipped, the camp was suddenly filled with screaming and the ringing of alarm bells, but Leon’s tiny force had already melted back into the darkness of the forest.

They ran like their furious Ancestors were on their heels, for they were far too small a force to stand up to Octavius’ knights on their own. They didn’t stick around for another salvo, as nearly all of Leon’s fire spells had been exhausted in that one attack. Staying would be foolish.

Or, at least, it would be if the entire unit had decided to stay.

Upon arrival at the rally point, the group paused for only a minute, but it was long enough for Leon and Grim to meet back up.

“Are you still planning on that foolish endeavor?” Grim asked, the expression on his face matching his name. “I maintain that it’s an incredibly stupid thing to do and I would recommend that you come with us back to our camp…”

“Yeah, it’s reckless, but… yeah… I’m still going to do it, it’s our best shot at halting this army long enough for the 7th Legion to arrive,” Leon said with an apologetic smile.

Grim frowned, but he’d made his attempts to persuade Leon against this next course of action, and there was nothing more he could say.

“Just… don’t get too overconfident, all right?” he said before turning to the other fifth-tier knights and giving them a few hand signals to get the unit moving again. “I’ll see you back at camp.”

With that, he and the two hundred knights quickly vanished into the forest, leaving Leon and his four personal fighters alone in the forest.

“Anyone want out?” Leon asked as his eyes swept over Lapis, Anzu, Valeria, and Alix, though he doubted the former two would ever leave him to do what he was planning on his own. He didn’t think Valeria or Alix would opt-out, either, but he had to ask anyway.

Alix replied first, and she enthusiastically said, “Fuck no.”

Valeria whispered her agreement, “No.”

Lapis quietly rumbled in its stone giant language, “I’m with you, Leon.”

Anzu rubbed his head on Leon’s shoulder. The griffin wasn’t going to leave him.

“All right, then,” Leon said. “Let’s get this done.”

—

Gaius had trouble sleeping that night. He passed the time by sitting at a small desk in his tent quietly writing a short letter to his father that he had absolutely no intent to actually send. It was mostly a therapeutic thing where he vented his frustrations with Octavius—and now, his commander, the Count of Tarsus. It was a recent practice that he started to try and cope with the meaninglessness of his current existence, serving as nothing more than a tool between a Royal and a noble.

As such, when the supply tent less than fifty feet from his tent erupted in white fire, his eyes were open and the fire seared itself into his retinas. He felt the heat wash over him as the sound of the terrific explosion crashed into his ears, leaving him temporarily deaf. The blast wave knocked him over and it took him a moment to truly process what was happening. It wasn’t until the follow-up explosions seconds later—sounding dull and distant in his ringing ears—that he truly realized that the camp was under attack.

He tried to bolt up to his feet, but his balance was precarious at best, and he ended up toppling right over. He could see the white glow of the burning supply tent through the walls of his own tent, and the heat radiating from it was horrific enough that he could feel himself starting to sweat despite his third-tier power.

After another attempt, he managed to struggle to his feet, grab the sword next to his cot, and stumble out of his tent and into the rain, though his ears were ringing something fierce and his vision hadn’t quite recovered from the initial blast of white fire. Still, he could see and hear enough to understand what was around him.

What he found was a scene of abject horror. Dozens of tents were on fire, and unlike his, these were designed to hold six to twelve people, with six knights and their squires—assuming they had squires—or twelve men-at-arms. He could hear the screaming of men and women as they did their best to fight their way out of the collapsing, burning tents.

Some of the more powerful mages were fine, cleanly tearing right through the scorching fabric, but the weaker knights and their squires weren’t so lucky. Some of the fiery tents didn’t have any struggling in them whatsoever, showing that many knights had been killed in the barrage.

Suddenly, in the burning hellscape that the camp had seemed to become, Gaius heard a deafening roar—someone was trying to organize the knights and get some kind of response ready.

“QUARANTINE THE FIRES! HELP THE WOUNDED!” roared this person in a distinctly feminine voice. Gaius recognized it as the voice of a sixth-tier knightess serving under the Count of Tarsus.

Her roar was exactly what was needed for the knights to begin scrambling in a somewhat more orderly fashion, and her follow-up orders were more specific. She appeared from the smoke and haze and rain with a blast of water, quenching some of the fires close to Gaius.

“My Lord! Are you all right?” she asked as she saw Gaius standing in front of his tent, his eyes unfocused and a line of blood running from one ear.

However, even with his current injuries, Gaius could hear in her tone that she didn’t truly care about him. She was only asking out of courtesy to his official position as the second-in-command of the knightly army. Even with his eyes still recovering from the searing white fire, he could see the disrespect in her eyes.

“I’m fine!” Gaius managed to choke out. He followed up with, “Don’t worry about me, see to the fires!”

She raised an eyebrow in surprise, her clear grey eyes regarding him a little bit differently than the slight scorn that had filled them when she first saw him. But it was only a moment, and she quickly turned back to the people running and screaming around her. She continued to bellow orders, doing her best to get the fires under control while she used her own water magic to help where she could.

Gaius, meanwhile, turned his attention away from the fires in the camp toward the forest. There were no signs of the attackers, which was just as well since most of the knights in the camp were focused almost entirely on putting out the fires. Gaius couldn’t help but shiver as he thought about the possibilities of being attacked right now.

‘Whoever just attacked us can’t have just run away… could they…?’ he wondered.