Gaius groggily shook his head, trying to clear his head of the high-pitched whining and ringing in his ears. Something had just happened, he was sure of it, but the pounding in his brain was preventing him from remembering just what it was.

Minutes passed as Gaius tried to open his eyes. He had no idea what was around him, but he wasn’t in the proper state of mind to truly care. It took what seemed like an eternity before the ringing in his ears began to fade, and he heard the faint sounds of screaming as if something terrible had just happened in the distance.

But as the ringing continued fading and the screaming became louder, Gaius began to pay more attention, his mind slowly clearing of fog and haze to vaguely recall a thunderous blast and scorching lightning.

That memory of the flash of lightning and searing pain jolted Gaius back to reality, his eyes quickly opened, and he took stock of his surroundings.

He saw a scene not too dissimilar to the one he saw during the first attack just a few hours ago; the orange glow of fire in the distance, screaming and running around from the lower-ranked knights and their subordinates, alarm bells, and rain.

It took Gaius a moment to find his balance, but he managed to struggle to his feet. He wasn’t too injured, but he’d been lying on Marius Balbinus and Victoria Vitellius, whom he’d been thrown into by the blast of lightning that tore through the Count’s tent…

‘The Count!’ Gaius thought to himself in panic as everything finally came back to him. He wanted to help the other two knights, who were beginning to stir out of unconsciousness, but Gaius’ priority had to be the commander of the army and the rest of the command staff that had been in the tent.

Gaius hadn’t been moved after falling, as the panic and lack of leadership ensured that the camp was taken by the iron grip of chaos and no one had seen to him or the other two knights. As he turned his gaze to the remains of the command tent, he could easily see why.

The tent itself was long gone, incinerated by the heat of the lightning or simply blown somewhere by the wind after being knocked loose from its anchors by the blast. Massive stone spikes had erupted from the center of the fortified platform the tent had stood upon, impaling many of the senior knights and raising them into the air for all to see. Most of them had been horrifically burned by the lightning, though nearly all were still recognizable. The Count of Tarsus himself was easily located, being near the center of the blooming flower of stone spikes, impaled upon the largest petal and raised more than thirty feet into the air.

No one was even trying to bring the knights down or do anything about the spikes. Gaius himself could only stare at the grisly scene, and as his eyes flit from one impaled knight to another, he realized something else that sent a deep chill running down his spine.

He was in charge, now, assuming the chain of command still meant anything.

The Count had made him second-in-command to curry favor with his father and older brother; it was also an acknowledgment that, as the son and younger brother of a Duke, Gaius possessed a greater social rank than everyone else in the army, even the Count himself. However, while it was official, it wasn’t truly supposed to mean anything. The Count hadn’t intended to fight on the front lines, so logically speaking, Gaius shouldn’t have ever been in a position to exercise much of that authority. Most of the leadership in the army knew that and understood the Count’s decision.

Now, most of them were on the spikes at Tarsus’ side.

Gaius, coming to his senses, quickly ran around the ‘flower’ of spikes, identifying each of the knights and nobles impaled upon them. His accounting was bleak; by the time he was finished, he realized that only himself and a handful of other knights were left who were of high enough rank to command the army.

Two of those knights had awoken and pushed themselves to their feet behind him—Marius was the son of a somewhat influential Baroness, and Victoria was a high-tiered mage from a long line of respected hereditary knights.

Gaius felt his noble upbringing surge within him, urging him to take charge, douse the fires, and pacify the camp. He immediately walked back to them and ordered, “Return to your forces! Get them under control! If we let this chaos continue, the army will disintegrate around us!”

Both knights looked like they wanted to argue with him, perhaps even to question his ability to give them orders. However, the shouting, burning, their own minor injuries, and general chaos of the rest of the camp was too pressing to ignore.

“We can discuss… things later,” Marius promised as he turned and ran into the twisting paths of the camp, shouting at everyone he could see to calm down and regain order. Victoria did likewise, though she barely even glanced at Gaius before sprinting off to assist in getting the Count’s personal forces back in line.

Gaius sighed, then turned back to stare at the stone spikes. ‘I can do this… I can do this…’ he thought to himself.

—

It took hours for the camp to be brought back under control. Luckily for Gaius, it didn’t take nearly as long to pull down the corpses of the Count of Tarsus and the rest of the impaled knights. He had to grab about a dozen young squires from nearby tents to do it, though, since nearly all of Tarsus’ attendants and servants had either fled in the wake of the attack or were scattered around the command tent in pieces.

The ‘flower’ of stone spikes had erupted from a central location, with the spikes further on the edge angled more in line with the ground, while those closer to the center were thrust into the air at steeper angles more perpendicular to the ground. Those closer to the edge were thus easier to get down, but it took Gaius and those he roped into this duty with him significantly more time to retrieve the bodies in the center.

It was an experience that Gaius was sure he’d never forget. It was grisly work, only becoming more so as the sun began to rise, and he could better see the extent of the lightning burns covering the bodies and the gore that seeped from their wounds onto the rock spikes. The smell was terrible, and many dead faces had been frozen in expressions of pain and terror, compounding Gaius’ nausea and horror.

But he’d managed to complete his work not long after the sun rose from behind the Border Mountains in the east, and he dismissed the workers to assist in getting the camp back under control. The second round of fires had been luckily put out during the night—though the rain had stopped partway through, making it a little more difficult than the first time—but the hard part of reasserting control was keeping the knights, men-at-arms, and squires who had just lost their top leadership from deserting, looting the camp, or getting into fights.

It was almost noon when tenuous peace and order had been restored to the camp after the devastating attacks. Gaius and the handful of knights still left in charge gathered in a makeshift command tent to discuss what would happen next while the rest of the camp was put on guard duty. No one wanted a repeat of the previous night.

Everyone sat in a circle on stools without even a table between them. There were only seven of them left, and while Gaius was the weakest among them, he was also the one who was formally in command and highest on the noble totem pole. As such, he didn’t put too much thought into the seating arrangements.

That being said, he wasn’t about to let anyone forget that he was in charge, no matter how humbling the past few years had been. “Give me a status report,” he demanded of the entire tent, uncaring as to who would respond.

“Who do you think you are, boy?” one of the knights immediately responded. He had the appearance of a muscle-headed brute, with a shaved head to cover his prematurely receding hairline, arms like tree trunks, and a huge barrel chest. His eyes were bright blue, his jaw was strong and square, and his nose was straight and long.

“I am Gaius Caecilius Tullius, son of Domitius Aquillius Tullius and brother to Gratian Tullius!” Gaius indignantly replied, his noble pride finally showing itself after lying so long dormant. “My family rules the Duchy of Lentia, and I am a knight in the service of Prince Octavius! Who are you?”

Gaius knew that everyone here already knew that much about him. However, he had to emphasize it if he were to keep them in line. He, of all people, knew that noble pride meant that he had to assert his authority, otherwise the entire army would lose any respect that had for him and desert.

“I don’t care about who your family is, whelp! Unless you’re my liege lord then you have no business ordering me around!” the brutish knight shouted, his face rapidly turning beet red with indignation.

Gaius simply waved for one of the few survivors of Tarsus’ household attendants to come forward with a small stack of papers.

“Aaand… there we go…” Gaius whispered as he quietly wrote ‘Tanicus Nummius’ in a blank space on the first page of the stack.

“What are you doing, boy?!” the brute demanded.

“Charging you with treason, desertion, and insubordination, Sir Tanicus,” Gaius simply replied as he handed the stack back to the attendant. He knew that someone would challenge him, so he had the letter drafted before the meeting started. Being the official second-in-command had its perks, he had to admit since it made much of this so much easier. “I knew you people would have some trouble accepting me, so I went to the trouble of having a number of such orders made, enough for all of you. If this army falls apart, I will make damn sure that Prince Octavius knows who’s responsible. And lest anyone forget, I squired for the Prince for two years. If push comes to shove, I wonder who he’d side with…”

Left unsaid was Gaius’ desire to reiterate his family’s noble rank. He didn’t doubt that Octavius didn’t care for him, but his brother’s status as Duke of Lentia was influential enough that the Prince couldn’t ignore him, especially with Gaius’ father now retired and free to concentrate on ascending through the magical tiers, as well as nearly all of the other high nobles who had led the army now being dead.

The brutish Tanicus, on the other hand, was a Baron from the Central Territories, a vassal of Count Tarsus with barely even two hundred knights and men-at-arms to call his own, many of whom were back in his home Barony protecting his castle and patrolling his lands. Few in the tent, whether that was the leadership or their attendants and adjutants, had any doubts who Octavius would side with if Gaius and Tanicus were to quarrel.

Tanicus looked like he had just swallowed a lemon, with a mix of fury, indignation, and fear written all across his face. It was a look not too uncommon among nobles who didn’t interact with those of higher rank too often. Barons could act as they pleased within their own meager lands, but outside their territory, they only outranked the landless nobility, and the vast majority were too unimportant and too rural to frequently interact with those who outranked them. Even the Earls of the Serpentine Isles were ranked higher.

In a way, Gaius was glad that it was Tanicus that spoke up first and practically volunteered to be made an example of. The Baron hadn’t the power to risk crossing the Prince, and that made things easy for Gaius. He barely managed to suppress his smirk as Tanicus grumbled something incoherent and lowered himself back into his seat.

“Does anyone else have something to add?” Gaius politely asked those in the tent as he handed the papers condemning Tanicus to a nearby attendant who promptly shredded them—Gaius had plenty more, as the stack of papers conspicuously still nearby attested. He was answered with silence. “No? All right, then. So, about our current status…?”

“We lost more than a thousand fighters in the attack, many of them knights,” Dame Victoria answered, her tone calm and even as if Gaius hadn’t just threatened the room with charges punishable by execution.

“Yeah, most of them were our leaders, too,” another knight added. “We’ve had just as many desertions as fatalities due to the loss.”

“What about injured?” Gaius asked.

“We still have several hundred being treated by healers. Two thousand were injured in the attack, but most of the damage they suffered was superficial and easily healed,” Victoria quickly replied.

“And food supplies?”

“Burned. Those who held more in their soul realms died last night.”

“Two days,” said Marius Balbinus as he subtly glared at Gaius. “That’s how long we have at our current size until we starve.”

“If they haven’t been yet, send out foraging parties,” Gaius said.

“I’m not touched in the head, of course I already sent out foraging parties!” Marius angrily muttered.

Gaius almost snapped at him, as he couldn’t afford to let such disrespect go unanswered before his authority was firmly established, but he stopped himself and decided to take Marius at face value.

“I know you’re not stupid, good work on taking the initiative,” Gaius replied, pulling out a slightly more confused look from Marius than before. “As I recall, there were a couple of small hamlets in the area—mostly small logging and mining villages. Before we move on, I want us to take the local castle and resupply as much as we can from the castle’s reserves and from those villages.”

“And who will lead the vanguard to take the castle?” another knight asked.

Gaius paused for a moment to think. The person he’d select would probably be seen as his second-in-command, and if he didn’t pick correctly, he could offend some of those who remain. Even with his threats of charging them with treason, some of them could easily take their personal knights and go home. If that happened, then the army would just fall apart, with all the knights deciding to leave. And he had to pick one of them, for he couldn’t lead the troops himself given what had just happened.

Their lack of discipline was distressing, but Gaius was going to take what he could get. As far as he was concerned, taking care of these people was his biggest responsibility, with the mission given to them by the Central Consul coming in second—not that he was planning on just giving up on that. He could see that the situation in the Kingdom was effectively already in a state of civil war, and if he could end it in the next few days by taking Ironford, then that was what he was going to do.

“Sir Marius, you’ll take the vanguard,” Gaius said, putting Marius in command of the frontline knights and giving him the responsibility for taking the castle.

Marius was stunned into silence, but no one could argue with Gaius’ choice—Marius was the second-highest ranked person in the room, after all—at least, if Gaius factored in more than pure noble rank, since Tanicus was an Baron in his own right, while Marius was only the heir of one.

Without waiting for Marius’ reply, Gaius moved on, and by the time everyone left the tent about an hour later, the knights and men-at-arms that had lost their leaders to the attacks the previous night had been temporarily reassigned to new leaders until the mission was over. Gaius couldn’t make any of them stay, as was evident by the thousand or so that had already deserted when their leaders fell, but assigning them to the surviving high-tiered knights would keep any more desertions to a minimum—he hoped.

And with all of that settled, the camp picked up and began to move again, though this time with significantly more caution and security. It was already relatively late, so they didn’t get far, but Gaius made sure that crude walls were erected and given basic enchantments to give them better defenses going forward. Tarsus’ arrogant confidence and inexperience brought them great suffering, and Gaius was determined not to make the same mistake.