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Thirty minutes until sunset, Rin crouched low amid the sorghum stalks. The smell of oil hung heavy in the air—the two thousand men behind her held dripping torches, ready to light at her signal.
The Southern Coalition’s soldiers had been trained to fight in the darkness as they had at Khudla. It hurt their visibility, yes, but the psychological advantage was significant. Troops under ambush in pitch-black night reacted with panic, confusion, and cowardice.
But tonight, Rin wanted the battlefield well lit. The Mugenese might fall back on the civilians in the chaotic dark. She needed to draw them out into the grain fields, which meant she needed to show them precisely where their enemy lay.
Are you ready, little warrior?
The Phoenix crooned in the back of her mind, eager, waiting. Rin let the old rage leak in, familiar and warming as a hearth fire, let it seep into her limbs while visions of destruction played in her head.
Oh, how she’d craved this fight.
I’m ready.
“Rin!”
She whipped around. Souji pushed his way through the sorghum stalks, red-faced and panting for breath.
Her stomach dropped. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be on the eastern flank with his Iron Wolves, poised and ready to attack.
“What are you doing?” she hissed.
“Hold up.” He doubled over, wheezing. “Don’t give the signal. Something’s wrong.”
“What are you talking about? We’re ready, it’s time—”
“No. Look.” He rummaged in his pockets, pulled out a spyglass, and tossed it toward her. “Look carefully.”
She raised it to her eye at the township walls. She struggled to make anything out in the dark. “I don’t see anything.”
“Move to the west. Just over the fields.”
Rin moved the lens. What she saw didn’t make any sense.
Mugenese soldiers clustered around the township walls. More poured out with every passing second. They knew about the ambush. Something—or someone—had tipped them off.
But they weren’t charging forward. Their blades weren’t pointed outward. They weren’t even arranging themselves into defensive formations of the kind Rin would have expected from an army under attack.
No—their weapons were pointed at the city gates. They weren’t preventing the attackers from coming in, they were keeping the residents from coming out.
Then Rin understood their strategy.
They weren’t going to fight a fair fight. They weren’t planning to engage the Southern Coalition at all.
They’d simply taken all Leiyang hostage.
Rin grabbed the arm of the nearest field officer and hissed, “Find Kitay.”
He sprinted back toward the camp.
“Fuck.” Rin slammed a fist against her knee. “Fuck—how?”
“I don’t know.” For the first time, the confident swagger was wiped from Souji’s face. He looked terrified. “I’ve no idea, I don’t know what we’re going to do—”
What had given them away? They’d prepared this ambush with twice their usual caution. The patrols couldn’t possibly have seen them; they’d worked around the guard schedule with clockwork precision. Had someone seen her and Souji leaving the township? That was possible, but then how would the Mugenese have known when the ambush was scheduled? And how did they know it would come from the north?
It didn’t matter how. Even if there were spies within her ranks, she couldn’t solve that now; she had a more pressing problem to deal with.
The Mugenese were holding Leiyang’s civilians at knifepoint.
A small contingent of Mugenese soldiers started moving toward the ambush line. One of them waved a red flag. They wanted to negotiate.
Rin worked frantically through all the possible ways this could end, and couldn’t come up with one where both the civilians and the Southern Army were safe. The Mugenese would have to secure a guarantee that Rin’s troops would never come back.
They were going to demand a blood sacrifice. Most likely they’d massacre Rin’s troops, one for every civilian kept alive.
Rin didn’t know if she could pay that price.
“What’s going on?”
Kitay, at last. Rin turned toward him, trying not to slip into a panicked babble as she started to explain what was happening, but the moment she twisted around she saw Souji’s expression morph into horror as he lifted a finger, pointing, toward the village.
A second later, she heard an arrow shriek through the air.
The Mugenese flag-bearer dropped to the ground.
Instinctively she whipped her head around, searching the ranks for a raised bow, a twanging bowstring—who’d done it, which absolute idiot had—
“My gods,” Souji murmured. His eyes were still fixed on the village.
Rin turned back around and thought she was hallucinating. What else explained that great column moving out of the township gates, a crowd nearly the size of an army?
She raised the spyglass back to her eye.
Qinen. It had to be. He’d mobilized his resistance band—no, from the looks of it, he’d mobilized the entire township. The column wasn’t just the fighting men of Leiyang; they were the women, elders, and even some of the children. They held torches, plows, field hoes, kitchen knives, and clubs clearly made from legs torn from chairs.
They charged.
They knew their lives were the price of this battle. Rin’s attack couldn’t proceed so long as they were held hostage. They’d known the Mugenese would force her to choose.
They’d made this decision for her.
The Mugenese archers turned toward the township to commence the massacre. Their commander signaled an order.
Civilian bodies fell from the front of the column in a clean sweep. But the villagers kept marching over their dead, pressing inexorably forward like ants bursting forth. Another round of arrows. Another line of bodies. The villagers kept marching.
The Mugenese soldiers couldn’t shoot quickly enough to keep them at bay. This was a clash of steel and bodies now, an utterly mismatched comedy of a melee. Federation soldiers cut the villagers down as quickly as they came. They knocked the weapons out of their hands, pierced them easily in their necks and chests because their victims had never been trained to parry.
The villagers kept marching.
The bodies piled up on the field. Rin watched, horrified, as a blade went clean through an old woman’s shoulder. But the woman lifted her trembling hands and clenched the wrist of her attacker, held him still long enough for an arrow to find his forehead.
The villagers kept marching.
Souji’s hand landed on her shoulder. His voice came out a strangled rasp. “What are you waiting for?”
She reached into the back of her mind, through the channel of Kitay’s soul, to the god who lay patiently waiting.
Avenge this, she ordered.
Whatever you ask, said the Phoenix.
And Rin strode forward through the sorghum fields to rip the world open with fire. She killed indiscriminately. She turned them all to ash, civilians and enemies alike. Leiyang’s civilians welcomed her flames with smiles.
This was their choice. Their sacrifice.
Her troops surged forth around her, blades glinting in the fiery night. They’d broken formation, but formation didn’t matter anymore, only bodies, blood, and steel.
