Blood and Mud

Chapter 36: Chapter 36

Logically, moving nearly five thousand heavily armed soldiers through dense, rain-soaked forests required strict adherence to marching columns and precise supply timetables. In my past life, I had studied the movement of entire mechanized divisions.

The night before we broke camp at Trivi, I had sat in the command tent by the light of a single oil lamp, drawing an immaculate,flawless map of our designated route. I had calculated optimal chokepoints, vanguard rotations to minimize fatigue, and mapped perfect retreat routes in case of a sudden barbarian ambush.

Naturally, the entire plan fell apart exactly two hours into the march.

The logging trail I had relied upon had been washed out by a sudden flash flood, leaving a river of brown sludge in its wake. When a massive supply wagon carrying half a ton of salted pork sank up to its axles in the mire, the entire 5th Cohort plunged into a catastrophic bottleneck. I spent thirty minutes stubbornly trying to organize a pulley system with ropes and draft horses, my mind insisting that physics could solve the problem. Instead, I ended up covered in freezing mud, yelling at a panicked horse that simply refused to move, while the rest of the column piled up behind us in the freezing drizzle.

”You are overthinking , Elvit,” Miklas rumbled, riding his massive warhorse effortlessly through the muck beside me. The Captain looked entirely unbothered by the miserable conditions, his crimson cloak heavily stained but his posture immaculate.

Miklas snorted, a low, rumbling sound of amusement. ”Logically speaking, if you dismount a dozen Dormant Bud heavy infantrymen and tell them to lift the damn wagon with their bare hands, it moves faster.”

He barked the order. Twelve legionnaires splashed into the sludge, their internal Embers flaring, and physically hauled the massive oak wagon out of the ditch by sheer, brute force.

I reached over my shoulder, my fingers brushing the diamond-shaped pommel of my newly forged bastard sword. The faint, static hum of the Mystic Runes of the Sky vibrated through the wet leather, grounding me. I had to stop acting like a quartermaster and start acting like a soldier.

When dusk finally bled the last grey light from the sky, the 7th Legion transformed the damp wilderness into a sprawling, temporary city of canvas and iron.

The air grew thick and heavy with the acrid smoke of hundreds of campfires burning damp pine wood. The rhythmic, metallic shhh-shk of whetstones sliding against steel echoed from every direction, blending with the low murmur of exhausted men, the nervous snorting of warhorses, and the bubbling of massive cast-iron pots boiling hard root stew.

My own body was also fearing not so much better .The frantic marching had aggravated the condition Miklas called the ’fever in the marrow’. My bones ached with a deep, crushing pressure, my biology screaming for the growth spurt of puberty while the Ember in my chest violently compressed my cells to maintain a static vessel. Every step felt like walking on bruised heels, and my joints throbbed with a sickening, hot ache.

I needed rest.

I wandered away from the 5th Cohort’s perimeter. If I couldn’t sleep, I would gather field intelligence.

I approached a large campfire near the center of the encampment, surrounded by legionnaires wearing the dark blue insignias of the 3rd and 8th Cohorts.

”Room for one more?” I asked casually, dropping a small leather pouch of dried apples onto a nearby log as a peace offering.

A heavily scarred spearman with a greying beard looked up, eyeing my command tunic and the heavy bastard sword on my back. He assessed me for a moment before giving a slow shrug.

”If you don’t mind the smell of wet dog and cheap tobacco, Lieutenant,” he grunted, shifting to make room. ”I’m Decimus. 8th Cohort.”

I sat down, wrapping my dark cloak tight against the biting chill. ”Elvit. 5th. My cohort is currently drowning in a mixture of mud and complaints. I wanted to see how the other lines were holding up.”

”The 3rd is fine,” a younger, sharp-eyed soldier named Ignatius muttered, aggressively poking the fire with a wet stick. ”Captain Valerian doesn’t let us complain. The man doesn’t even yell at us when we break formation. He just uses that acoustic Ember of his to project his voice directly into the center of your skull. Gives me a blinding migraine every time we miss a step. I’d rather be flogged than have a Bud Burst demigod whispering disappointment directly into my brain.”

”Better a migraine than frostbite,” a tall, muscular woman from the 8th Cohort countered. She was methodically running an oiled rag over the blade of her shortsword. ”Captain Lucilla had us marching through a flooded, waist-deep ravine this afternoon. She didn’t want the wagons getting stuck, so she just walked ahead and froze the entire river solid. But the cold radiating off her... it’s unnatural. The woman has no blood. Just pure, absolute ice.”

”At least your Captains actively participate,” Decimus grunted, taking a bite of a dried apple. ”I saw Captain Vespasian of the 2nd Cohort yesterday during that skirmish with the barbarian scouts. He didn’t draw his blade. Just stood on a ridge watching his vanguard bleed, taking notes on a piece of parchment about our ’tactical inefficiencies.’ The man views us as statistics, not soldiers.”

I laughed, a genuinely witty, bright sound that immediately made the tense soldiers relax. ”Well, logically speaking, if Captain Vespasian kills everyone for you, how will you ever learn to enjoy freezing in the mud?”

The soldiers chuckled, the heavy tension breaking. For the next hour, I sat quietly, just observing while they talked. I absorbed the intricate, politics of the 7th Legion. The ten Captains were not just military officers; each wielding their Bud Burst power with terrifying, highly precision. To the normal Dormant Bud soldiers, they were monsters to be feared just as much as the enemy.

Eventually, the pain in my bones forced me to move. I excused myself and walked toward the command sector of the camp.

The pavilion belonging to Commander Erula Fion Buros stood on a slight rise, surrounded by a perimeter of elite, silent sentries. I found Myra sitting on a stack of wooden supply crates just outside the pavilion’s heavy velvet flaps.

She was staring blankly at a sprawling map of the swamplands, illuminated by a single, flickering oil lantern. In the harsh, dancing light, she looked incredibly fragile. Her skin was deathly pale, and she was aggressively rubbing her left collarbone with a wincing, rhythmic motion.

”The fever in the marrow?” I asked softly, stepping out of the shadows.

Myra jumped slightly, her hand dropping instantly from her collarbone. The cold, emotionless mask she always wore in front of Erula slipped for a fraction of a second, revealing the terrified, hurting girl underneath. She gave a small, defeated nod.

”It started two days ago,” Myra whispered, her voice tight with suppressed agony. ”My joints feel like they are packed with shattered glass. I... I think my body is trying to change. My hips ache, my chest hurts. But the magic is burning it away. It’s compressing my bones.”

I sat on a crate next to her, dropping my sunny facade completely. With Myra, I didn’t need the shield. ”I have it too. Miklas says it’s the Ember fighting our biology. The magic wants a static, unchanging vessel. If we can push our internal power past the Dormant Bud stage, the pain stops. The magic will release the lock and force our bodies to mature into adult forms instantly.”

Myra looked down at her small, trembling hands. ”If we survive long enough to evolve.”

”We will,” I said automatically, though my internal monologue immediately began listing the terrifying statistical improbabilities of that statement. ”Have you been practicing your spear forms? Once your body evolves, you will have the reach and the leverage, but you’ll need the muscle memory to back it up.”

Myra slowly shook her head. ”Commander Erula doesn’t let me touch a weapon. She confiscated my spear the day we marched out of Trivi.”

I frowned, my struggling to process what seemed to be a fatal error. ”Why? You need to defend yourself in a melee. If the lines break...”

”Because the Commander believes martial combat is for peasants,” Myra replied. For a second, her voice echoed Erula’s chillingly flat, aristocratic tone. ”She says that swinging a piece of sharpened steel is an admission of failure. True power isn’t about blocking a strike with a shield; it is about standing on a hill and turning the air in your enemy’s lungs to ash before they can even draw a blade. My training is entirely tactical and metaphysical. I am learning how to command the Ember to alter the very fabric of the environment, not to fortify my physical muscles.”

I reached over my shoulder, my fingers brushing the heavy pommel of my bastard sword.

Logically, Erula was right. I had seen the reports of what Bud Burst mages could do. I had seen Miklas call down lightning. Compared to the absolute elemental tyranny of the high command, my sword—even with its magical electrical charge—was a primitive, desperate toy.

Was I wasting my time swinging steel in the mud? Was Miklas’s physical, aggressive approach inherently inferior to Erula’s detached, godlike destruction? I was a brilliant mind, but I was preparing to fight this war like a common foot soldier.

”Logically, she has a point,” I admitted, my voice entirely lacking its usual witty edge. ”But magic runs out, Myra. It drains the body. And when the Ember fades, and a barbarian is standing three feet away with a rusted axe, I would rather have a piece of steel in my hand than a metaphysical philosophy.”

Myra looked at me, a rare, genuine smile touching her lips, making her look fourteen again. ”You always were the stubborn one, Elvit. You need to control everything.”

”And you always were the smart one,” I replied softly.

We sat in silence for a long time, listening to the crackle of the campfires and the distant howling of the wind. We were two young girls suffering in the dark, caught between the brutal steel of the vanguard and the cold magic of the aristocracy, preparing to march into a swamp that would burn the world.