Chapter 31

So, wind equals danger ... got it.

The sun beat down, the breeze kissed cooly at the warm skin on my face and ruffled my hair as I stood atop the mighty curtain walls that ringed my city. Across the vastness of the mindscape, I could see the enemy armies approaching. This wasn’t the frenzied onrush I had seen during the duels at the party; there was no menagerie of beasts and cartoon characters, no competitor was standing on the city walls opposite mine, wildly waving their hands around, and there was no watching crowd. This was a battle to the death, not a spectator sport, and the thirteen armies were slowly, methodically advancing toward me. All to that backdrop of that almost pleasant gentle breeze.

No, not toward me ... toward us.

So why, then, was there a howling storm when Sterling attacked me on his own, but now there is only a gentle summer breeze when thirteen of these fuckers are here? Fucking metaphors are never gonna make sense to me.

“You think Toussant could pick a few of them off for us while we hold our ground?” I asked nobody in particular as I squinted out into the distance.

“Unlikely,” Uri answered as he rolled his neck and loosened his shoulders, looking like a champion prizefighter about to step into the ring. “There is too much power in the mindscape; the time dilation effect has to stretch to contain it all.”

“It ... what?”

Jeeves nodded. “He’s right, Sir. Although it is technically possible that Toussant will be able to help us out, time is running at a rate of approximately one second in the real world for every four and a half hours in here.”

“Shit, so even if he shoots one of them, we would have to wait in here for an hour or more just for the bullet to actually hit them.”

“That’s right,” Uri nodded as he started to pace back and forth behind me. “And these things rarely last that long. We must hold them here.”

I frowned out at the approaching armies. Every time I had been in the mindscape with another person, their city had shimmered into existence a few hundred yards away from mine. It would only take a few minutes at a gentle jog to traverse the gap between my walls and theirs. But the concept of the mindscape ‘stretching’ to accommodate the power being held within it - mine and theirs - seemed to be an apt one because there must have been two or three miles of open space between my city and the armies advancing on it. It’s not like that distance made a huge amount of difference in terms of seeing them; simply focusing and concentrating a little let my eyes ‘zoom in’ - for lack of a better term - and see the enemy with all the nerve-wracking detail I’d always done.

“So you have done this before?” I arched a hopeful eyebrow at Uri. I held all his memories, but it was not like having access to my own, where I instinctively and naturally knew things. His w more like a library; I held the knowledge, but I would have to consciously look through them to find what I needed. I simply hadn’t had the chance to do that since I had drained him.

“Nope,” he shrugged back.

Faye giggled. It was an oddly out-of-place sound, given the circumstances.

“Well, that’s helpful.” I rolled my eyes. If Uri’s need-to-know mentality had come with him into my mind, this was going to be a very long ... Eternity ... or, I supposed, looking out at the oncoming hordes, a mercifully short one.

“We have sort of trained for it, though,” he offered as if reading my thoughts. “The conclave would do something similar to what they are doing to take down another Evo if they had broken the law. But...”

I waited for him to finish, then turned and arched an eyebrow at him when nothing further was added. “Dude, seriously? But what??”

“Well, I was over there in my training,” he nodded out at the enemy with a shrug. “I was always one of the people training to take down the errant evo. I’ve never been on this side of the fight.

“Well, that’s better than nothing. Any ideas?”

Uri hummed thoughtfully and gazed out onto what would no doubt soon become a battlefield. “All I can tell you is how we did things in the Conclave, but it is safe to assume that they would do things differently because they would have always planned to fight other Evos, and most of them would have learned their combat skills with us.” He had the decency to continue after only a short pause and before I felt another urge to prompt him - or punch him - again. “In the Conclave, we would combine forces into a few, much larger armies. One person would be in charge of attacking from range, another would be responsible for trying to storm the walls, one would try to tunnel beneath, one would try to sneak past you like Neil did in the duels, and so on. One large multi-faceted attack, and maybe three or four of those armies all hitting from a different direction. It made countering it very, very difficult.”

Yeah, okay, that did sound kinda terrifying. It would only take one of the thirteen Evos to get into the city unopposed or unnoticed to do a truly staggering amount of damage.

“The problem is,” he went on, his eyes still fixed on the enemy. “They are not doing that, at least not on the scale that we did. The only thing I can think of is that they mean to surround your city completely and hit it from all sides at the same time, probably from range, then charge your walls, all while undermining or sneaking as well. But instead of three or four concentrated forces, they have them all completely spread out. But there does still need to be a focal point.”

I ground my teeth again as he stopped talking, but Uri wasn’t paying attention to me. He was squinting harder out toward the horizon. “Uri, I swear to fucking Kermit! If you don’t start talking, I’m gonna...”

“Thirteen armies throwing themselves at the same time sounds dangerous, but in reality, it’s no different from them attacking one at a time; you could just pick them off. Divided, their forces still couldn’t breach your walls. In fact, looking at them, I doubt most of them would even be able to break my old walls. The whole point of doing this is to combine their power to a level that could beat you. And there has to be a focal point, a commander, whatever you want to call it, around whom all that power is concentrated. He is the one we need to find and kill.”

“What?? How does that make sense? How does it make a difference if thirteen of the fuckers are attacking all over the place or in a single spot? There are still thirteen of them!”

“Really?” Uri turned to me. “Which is the highest number, five or one?”

“Fucking hell, seriously?” He held my eyes. “Five, obviously!”

“Five?” repeated himself, holding his hand up with his palm facing me, “or one?” he clenched his fist.

I blinked at him. The wheels were starting to turn in my head a little better now. “Okay, so we have to look for the guy who seems to be in charge, the one with all the power. And then what? We kill him and...?” I waved my hand out at him, gesturing for him to fill in the blanks.

Uri opened his mouth but paused. I could almost see that the realization that he was having to teach me this shit on the fly was just dawning on him, and I was not going to be the easiest student; plus, given the armies still bearing down on us, time was a factor.

“Do you play chess?” he asked and waited for me to nod before continuing. “You need to think of their commander as the king, as in, taking him out is the way to win. Except in this case, taking him out doesn’t automatically win you the game, but it will shatter any efforts they are making to ... be ‘one.’” He waved his fist at me again. “Taking out the others will be quite simple without him coordinating it all.”

“Ohh, so he is like the command center for an army?”

“Yes, sort of.” Uri nodded. “He doesn’t just give out orders, though; he regulates the flow of power as well ... every shred of energy they use comes from him, It’s like he controls their combined wells. So there are two targets.” He stepped forward to look out at the enemy and nodded to the oncoming masses. “Most of those are decoys; they have enough power in them to make a lot of noise, do a bit of damage, and generally keep you busy. But one or two of them will contain the combined weight of power of all of them. That is the danger. The king, the commander, is the one feeding the power to that army. If you destroy the powerful army, the king has to start again, but if you kill the king, then all of them do.”

“And while they are all disorientated from the shift in power and getting themselves set up again...” I started to smile, finally getting the idea of what was going on.

“We unleash holy hell on them.” Uri smiled back.

I nodded and turned out toward the field. “Okay, so how do we find the king?”

“With great difficulty,” his smile turned into a frown almost immediately. “They know that he is their most valuable asset, so like the king on a chessboard, they need to defend him. But if they make that defense too obvious, they are essentially shining a big spotlight on him and highlighting our target for us. The King is out there,” he gestured again to the enemy, “but he is hidden in plain sight. We need to draw him out.”

“And how do we do that?”

“To borrow a phrase from the lovely Faye...” he almost bounced his eyebrows. “We fuck shit up.”

I blinked at him.

Fay giggled again. I glanced at her standing next to me, bouncing with what looked a lot like excitement on the balls of her feet. She looked like she couldn’t wait to get at our attackers. She seemed to know what my look meant as she met my eyes. “What? These are tha bastards that shot me in ma face! An’ they’re picking on ma man! Yeh just try and hol’ me back, Sonnie!”

I rolled my eyes but couldn’t help but smile at my warrior goddess.

“Alright, Jeeves?” I turned to the quiet, aged-looking butler. “Any idea how powerful they are compared to us?”

No, the “us” in that question wasn’t lost on me either. This was more than just a fight for my own safety.

“I’m afraid not, Sir,” he replied with a calm shake of his head. “They were blocking the entire time we could sense them in the real world, and with all the manipulations and redirection of power in the mindscape, not to mention the heavy use of decoys. It is hard to get an accurate idea of what we are dealing with. It is safe to say, however, that they should be considered a potent threat.”

“You do have a few things going for you, though,” Uri added as I turned back toward the approaching armies. They were at least a mile closer than when they had started by now.

“Oh yeah?”

“First of all,” Uri went on as he nodded. “You are ridiculously powerful. I don’t think anybody, not even you, really understands how powerful you are. You didn’t just drain my power and download my memories when you performed the last rites on me; you downloaded my entire consciousness. Do you have any idea of how much power that would have taken?”

I didn’t. I didn’t have the first clue. I didn’t even realize I had done it until a few minutes ago.

But Uri went on. “The fact that you were not only able to completely undo all of the Praetorian’s defenses against you but do it easily and secretly is a testament to that. They are working on the assumption that you are a normal, albeit very powerful Evo. I can tell you categorically that you are something else entirely. Your power plants alone make you far more dangerous than they have accounted for. You can produce and hold more power than I can fathom, and you can regenerate it as fast as you can expend it. In a situation like this, that makes you lethally dangerous.”

“Yeah, but surely Marco told them that ... although based on how these fuckers were treating me, I’m not sure he understands the details

“I don’t think he does. In his defense, he was only here for an hour or so. I have been in your city for three months, and even I am struggling to comprehend the full measure of your power, so let’s not judge the old boy too harshly for his mistake.”

Faye, Jeeves, and I all just blinked at him.

“I grew up watching movies about the Battle of Britain. I’ve always wanted to call someone an old boy or a chap. It’s a very British thing to do. This felt like a good time.” he shrugged. “But anyway, they have underestimated you at every step, so it’s fair to assume they are about to do it again. If you play to that assumption, you can lure them in close and then strike when they least expect.”

“Okay, that’s as good a plan as any. Anything else”

“Yup.” he let the grin on his face grow a little wider. I must admit, Uri looked fucking weird with a grin. “They don’t know about us!”

“Marco knew about Faye.”

“No, he didn’t,” Uri’s grin somehow grew a little wider. “Marco thinks that Faye is an echo, a glorified city ghost, a byproduct of your bonding. She isn’t. You have downloaded her, too.”

“What is the difference?”

“We can wield your powers; an echo can’t.” He rubbed his hands together. “They think they are dealing with just you. Instead, they are gonna find three of us here.”

“Four,” Jeeves corrected.

“You can...?” Uri’s eyes widened before that grin returned. “Oh, these fuckers are about to have a really bad day.”

“Careful, Uri.” I chuckled. “You are running the risk of making me like you.”

Uri barked out a laugh and, like Faye, started bouncing almost comically on the balls of his feet

“Alright,” I huffed out a breath and stepped closer to the edge of the parapet. “Let’s get this party started with some good old-fashioned psychological warfare.”

Sound is a physical force. When emitted with enough energy, it causes the molecules in the air to vibrate, even to move. With enough power, it can form a wall of air not dissimilar to the shockwaves given off by explosives. That is why you feel it in your chest when you stand too close to a concert speaker or why your eardrums can be damaged by loud enough noises. It isn’t just an excessive vibration but a change in the air pressure caused by those vibrating and moving molecules.

So when the wall of sound hit the enemy ranks hard enough to knock some of them off their feet and make the rest of them stumble backward, it must have come as something of a surprise to the Evos controlling them.

My voice, with all the power of a sonic boom, echoed over the field in a wave of incomprehensible power that shook the very ground on which my enemy stood

“TO ALL MEMBERS OF THE PRAETORIANS.

“YOU ARE HEREBY CHARGED WITH HYPOCRISY, TREASON, AND GENERAL FUCK-MUPPETERY!!!

“ONE OF YOU KILLED MY PARENTS AND ATTACKED MY FRIEND’S MIND. AND IF YOU DIDN’T, I’M GONNA BET YOU KNOW WHO DID. I INTEND TO FIND OUT WHICH ONE IT IS, AND THEN YOU ARE ALL GOING TO FUCKING DIE.

THAT IS ALL!”

The casual flippancy and general lack of concern in my voice, especially for the ending, made it sound like I was in a Walmart calling out the day’s discounts. I was tempted to finish with “Have a nice day,” but considering the plan that was starting to form in my head, their day - if all went well - would be a very short-lived endeavor.

The hordes that were advancing across the lush, green plains of the mindscape were nothing like the ones that had graced the field during the duels. There were two factors at play there that simply didn’t exist here. The first was experimentation; it was a duel, they were practicing. And although I could argue that Sterling was a manipulative bastard who was far more experienced than anyone imagined when he fought Fiona, Fiona herself, Rhodri, and Neil were all trying new things to see what worked for them, or at least perfecting the tactics they had developed. The second factor was a simple matter of trying to one-up each other in terms of imagination. Seriously, Rhodri had sent Pokemon at me. It was funny, and in hindsight, it was a bold move, but it had no place in a real battle. It felt like a little game, seeing who could summon and then use the most obscure units in their armies.

The contrast between that and here could be summed up in a single word ... Uniformity. There was no showing off, there was no imagination in the ranks, and there was no room for experimentation. Every single unit was the same in all thirteen armies. There were World War 2 era infantrymen, there were tanks that looked a lot like German Tigers, and there was artillery which, under normal circumstances, would need to be hauled around by trucks but seemed to be perfectly capable of moving on their own here. At the back of each formation, just visible beyond the thousands of men in front of each of them, were the thirteen Evos whom I had to kill.

The sound of my voice smashed into them with the power of a sonic blast.

The effect was noticeable, and it was immediate. I may not have been a master at the art of war or psychological warfare, but a simple move like that only needed to have a simple effect. I was alone, at least as far as my enemy was concerned. Even though almost half of the original number of Evos present in the meeting room were now trying to deal with the inexplicably brainwashed Toussant in the real world, there were still thirteen of them. I should have been scared; I should have at least been nervous. Instead, I was not only confident in my ability to win, but I was practically daring them to attack me. I was threatening them. To their confused little minds, this was not how the script was supposed to go, and I could see the thirteen commanders of the thirteen armies, Evos, one and all, starting to cast worried glances amongst themselves. Their advance slowed considerably, that first inkling of fear was starting to set in, the first shred of doubt in their minds, and the first shadow of that single realization started to darken their thoughts ... I was not who they thought I was.

Good. I wanted them scared. I wanted them nervous. I wanted them to question everything. Confident men charged the gates of hell, knowing their buddies were right behind them. Nervous men hesitated.

And hesitation would be their undoing.

Uri smiled and rubbed his hands together. “Nicely done,” he nodded. “May I?”

Uri had a plan, and he had the experience to back it up. I had nothing. I was happy to let him take the lead. “The floor is yours, Maestro.”

His grin grew. This was a moment he had been waiting for for years, the chance to fight on an equal footing with his enemy. Thirteen traitors were amassed against us, and he was chomping at the bit to dish out his own brand of justice. “Jeeves, your job is to guard the wall, as much of it as you can, stop them by any means necessary, slow them down if you can’t stop them. Do what you need to do.”

Jeeves offered him a small nod but said nothing.

“Faye, you are defending the inside of the city. You deal with anyone who gets past Jeeves.”

“Aww,” she almost whined. “I wanted to fuck up some bad guys!”

“Oh, you will get your chance,” Uri grinned at her, “There is no way Jeeves can hold them all; some will get in, we’re going to let them. Your job isn’t just to kill the ones that do, but to make a mess, to send a message, make an example of them, and make it slow. We need them trapped in here and not out there fighting. You get to be creative with how you fuck them up. I want every bastard who gets past these walls to think he is walking into hell. Go nuts!”

Faye’s frown vanished in an instant, replaced with an almost evil, wickedly intentfull grin. “Oh, now that I can do”

Uri then turned to me. “We...” he said, his eyes sparkling with the heat of battle. “We go hunting!”

I grinned back at him and nodded before looking out at the field. This was the part of the plan I had been most nervous about; this was where it could all go wrong. The forces massed against me could be enough to break me; they could be enough to beat me. My last moments on earth could have been filled with the contemptuous pain of my body being broken and my mind being destroyed; all played to the agonizing symphony of defeat.

But it wouldn’t be today.

Today was not my day to die.

The job of a soldier was not to die for his country but to make the other bastard die for his.

And I was going to kill every single last fucking one of them.

Nathan Beauregard, a West Virginian by birth, was only a few years old when the Great War of 1812 ended and had been awakened by Marco only a decade after that. He lasted the whole of eighteen months in the conclave before being picked up by the Praetorians. A middling rank, he detested the humans whom he blamed for the death of his father and older brother in that war and the death of three grand-nephews in the Civil War that followed some fifty years later. Humanity was chaos; the Praetorians gave order.

Over the century and a half since those fateful days, he had learned to not only embrace the order that his organization fostered, but to rely on it. Order was predictable, and predictability bred power.

So, to say that the last few minutes had rocked him to his core was something of an understatement. Inquisitors were incorruptible; that was the very core of their being, the very essence of their function. They were not only completely immune to the manipulations of other Evos, but were unflinchingly loyal to the cause. So seeing Toussant, a man the rank and file of the Praetorians referred to as “the enforcer,” smash into the conference room and start mowing down his own brethren was not only surprising, it could only have been the product of Evo manipulations and was, therefore, impossible.

Not very unlikely, not highly irregular, not just something that hadn’t happened before, but actually, literally, impossible.

It was the equivalent of a car winning the Nascar championship, only to find that it was being driven by a blind hedgehog, with a gas tank filled with coffee and goat piss and on wheels made of string cheese ... and it had driven every race backward. There were so many reasons why it shouldn’t have happened that trying to explain how it had happened was doing a pretty good job of blowing his mind.

And then there was the gargantuan scale of the task ahead of him. He glanced up again at the walls; even from this distance, about two miles away, they were enormous. More than that, they were strong, very strong, maybe even too strong. He had heard of people able to make their walls look formidable, but more than a cursory examination of them showed them to be no more or less powerful than they had been before. These walls were not like that; he could feel the power coming from them.

More curious still were the markings on the outside of them. A patchwork of lines and blocks of blankness on the otherwise pristine surface, swirling patterns and shapes, something that looked like it could have been a tattoo ... if it wasn’t, you know, attached to a 150 ft wall. The tattoo part seemed important. But his mind was too preoccupied with the part of it that looked like a dragon’s face. It was massive, taking up the entire front edifice of the colossal walls. Smoke, or at least the drawn pattern of smoke, billowed out of his fang-lined jaws, the hulking mass of shoulders, poised ready to pounce, and huge wings stretched out for hundreds of feet in each direction. All of it framed the massive, evil-looking horned head. The eyes of which seemed to be staring right at him.

And they looked fucking furious!

They looked dangerous.

He somehow managed to pull his own eyes away, glancing to his left to pick out the face of his friend. Dai Rhys was a Welshman. He had the accent, the humor, the singing voice, and the healthy dislike of the English that went with it. He had been in the cell next to Nathan’s when they had undergone their own initiation and had been brought into the Praetorian fold together. They had been working together ever since. Over a hundred years. And this was far from the first time they had been tasked with destroying the mind of an uncooperative Evo.

Dai cast a glance back at him, and their eyes met over the hordes of men and machines of war between them. Nathan could see his own nerves and confusion reflected back at him in the eyes of his friend.

Twenty Evos was, by any stretch of the imagination, a huge number to take down a single man. But Marco had insisted that this Pete character was the most powerful Evo the world had ever known. Nathan had scoffed at the time; he had rolled his eyes, but - as always - he had carried out his orders. The most Praetorian Evos it had ever taken to overpower another had been four. Marco had insisted that at least ten would be needed. The Prefect, Tiberius, decided that number should be doubled, just to be sure. Twenty Evos to take down one was, in Nathan’s humble opinion, a truly staggering level of overkill.

Okay, only thirteen of the twenty had made it into the mindscape after Toussant’s inexplicable Rambo routine, but that was still thirteen of them. When he had marched his army out of his city gates, he had almost been smiling at how easy it was going to be to lay low the man who dared defy the last memories of the Roman Empire.

Now, looking between the size of those walls, the look on his friend’s face, and those burning, furious eyes, he wasn’t so sure.

The plan was the same as it had been for every other one of these missions, just on a larger scale. There were essentially three elements to it. The first was distraction; ten of the thirteen armies were spread out around the entire city, spaced apart yet suitably grouped up to make them, in fact, look like there were thirteen of them. With no variation between the aesthetic styles of the armies, the only thing distinguishing one from the other was the little gaps between them. Move those gaps around a little, and the guy on the walls would just assume that all thirteen armies were where he could see them. Dai was one of them, and Nathan was currently standing behind part of his army, making it look like he was in command of this section of the line. The job of his friends, his nine counterparts, and the masses of men before him was to keep the target busy. Throw enough pain and abuse his way to get him to focus on them.

The second element was the real attack. That was his job. His men, the thousands of them under his command, were currently a hundred feet or so behind him and were invisible. Cloaked, his younger compatriots would say, but he never watched TV, so the reference was lost on him. Their job, usually, would be to try to scale the walls of the target city, that was never an easy feat while it was under bombardment from your own side, but considering the fucking enormity of these walls, it was judged nigh on impossible. Instead, they would tunnel. It would take longer, and tunnels had the nasty habit of caving in when things were exploding against the ground above it, but as long as they took their time, and kept that Pete character distracted, getting into the city would be an inevitability.

Once the city had been breached, all of his forces would charge in, all of the forces of his comrades around the entrance to the tunnel would charge in, too, and then they would wreak havoc. But the main target, as always, was the palace. There was something oddly satisfying about watching the mind of an enemy Evo burn.

The third element was the silent one: the distribution of power. Not even he knew which of his comrades was responsible for that, only that it wasn’t him. Such was life in the Praetorians; one hand didn’t always know what the other was doing, and the fewer people who knew the lynchpin around which this operation hung, the less chance it could be given away to the enemy. Still, the power was flowing, and that was all that mattered.

Nathan was not a particularly powerful Evo under normal conditions. He wasn’t weak, but he would never set the world ablaze with his might. But now he was being reinforced by the power of the rest of his team. Each conjured soldier under his command was about four times the strength of what he would normally be able to muster. The rest of it was being filtered to his own counterpart on the opposite side of the city. Each of them would attack his own section, and the first to get through would take the glory. His section was on the city’s south side, the soft underbelly. Evos always seemed to gravitate toward the North of their walls; nobody knew why, they just did, but that meant that if there was ever a hole in the defense, it was often on the south side. It may not have meant much in terms of the actual battle, but this was the coveted “end of the line” position. It was where a good commander placed his best soldiers, meaning that in this particular endeavor, his commander was putting his faith and his trust in him.

He would love to say that didn’t give his ego a little bit of a stroke, but he would be lying.

Still, his eyes kept getting drawn back to those walls.

They were fucking monstrous. He couldn’t even begin to calculate how much power resided in the city that built them, nor could he help wondering if the plans made to take it properly took into account the inevitable increase in its defensive capabilities. But the power of thirteen Evos was stacked against it, and the men wielding that power were more than experienced in using it. Despite that, and with another look over to Dai, he couldn’t help but wonder if the record that this unit had - having never lost a man to combat in the mindscape - would still stand when the dust of this battle settled.