B5 Chapter 4 – The Killing Fields

“You done, Worthy?”

“Aye, I think we’ve finished up on this side. Well, as finished as it can be.”

Trenan nodded and wiped the sweat from his brow as best he could. Despite his physique, enhanced by the Unseen beyond the limits of human physiology, he was still exhausted. A level of fatigue that sank deep into his bones and seemed to take root there. He’d need a few days to recover from all this exertion.

“You look like I feel, lad,” Worthy Steelarm chuckled, eyes knowing beneath his shaggy brows. “No need to worry, we’re done for the time being. Let your team know they can start packing their gear once we get back to camp.”

“I will. Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t ‘sir’ me. I’m a Slayer.”

The Hammer Warden nodded and turned to head back to his team. The Gold Rank Slayers would be even more worn out than he was after the heroics they’d performed over the past week, and the months prior to that. The number and strength of the kin that roamed these plains was like nothing Trenan had ever heard of back in the Empire. As much as he wanted to contribute, at Silver rank, he was much weaker than people like Worthy, who did the vast bulk of the fighting.

As he approached, his two comrades looked up from their efforts digging for cores.

“We’re packing up and going home,” he told them. “Once we get back to the camp, grab your stuff and we can leave straight away.”

“Finally,” Arthur sighed in relief. Face and robes covered in dirt and gore, the man looked like he’d been put through a grinder.

His wife, Chol, somehow managed to maintain her cleanliness even on the battlefield. Perhaps it was her dark skin tone, or perhaps her nature magick that made the difference, but she never looked as filthy as Trenan and Arthur. She stood, hands pressed into the small of her back and groaned.

“A good thing,” she said. “Another day and I might have fallen to sleep in battle.”

“You should have said something,” Arthur frowned, worried. “If you’re too tired to fight, let me know.”

“I will, dear heart,” she said, smiling. “This time, I did not, because I had strength in me still.”

“Save it for your own house,” Trenan grunted, already walking away. “Leave the cores, we’ve got more than we can use from kin that size anyway.”

It’s not like they were getting paid for them. Money wasn’t much of a thing for those who had fled the Western Province. What would be the point of coins, after all? Everyone was desperate to survive, and there weren’t enough resources to go around.

Well, they were swimming in cores and materials butchered from kin, but short on food and fresh water. Thankfully, those were rationed and dispersed freely.

Chol and Arthur, also at the limits of their strength, or perhaps just sensing Trenan’s lack of desire for talk, remained silent on the long trek back to the camp. Underfoot, shards of crystal mixed with the sandy soil shifted, crunching and crackling like shards of glass as they walked. Despite two years of looking at the blasted wasteland that was the former lands of Granin, he still wasn’t used to it. The lack of green, the tactile hum of magick in the air, the cloying heat, it was an alien landscape that he couldn’t quite believe was part of his own world.

Just how far had the realm fallen for so much of it to be covered in this terrain? All his life, he had wanted to fight to hold back the rifts, never knowing that war had been lost centuries ago.

“Trenan? You alright?”

He snapped back to himself, shaking off the morose thoughts and realised he was on the outskirts of the camp. Tents, fires, figures moving and laughing, Slayers all. Somewhere, a hammer was ringing on steel, bringing a sense of normalcy to the wasteland, and he relaxed a hair without even realising it.

“Yeah. Sorry, Arthur, just got lost in my thoughts. Can you do me a favour and pack the gear? I’ll go report to the higher ups and then we can leave together. Alright?”

“Sure thing, boss.”

“Shutup.”

Stolen story; please report.

Wearily, he trudged to the centre of the camp where a bright, roaring fire could be found, people sitting and discussing around it, warming themselves by the flames.

It almost didn’t bother him anymore that the whole thing was fuelled by magick rather than wood. There was an almost infinite supply of arcane energy just floating around in the air out here, he’d been told. Pumping it into a collection of flame crystals was a heck of a lot easier than finding a tree out here, that was for sure.

“I think we’re getting close to the rift in the north,” Trenan heard a deep voice rumble. Somehow, Worthy had gotten back ahead of them. Not surprising, really; the man could run like the wind itself when he wanted to. “The kin are getting thicker and stronger. I think I was right on the edge of the Broken Lands during our last fight.”

“Be careful near those fucking rifts,” another voice warned him. “They’ve been running wild for hundreds of years; who knows how large and dangerous they are at this point?”

As he drew closer, Trenan found Worthy and the former leader of the Slayer rebellion, Rurin Wilkin, talking together by the fire. Slayers being who they were, they didn’t seem to care who overheard their discussion. As far as the higher ranked Slayers were concerned, they were all there to do the same job, so why bother keeping secrets from each other?

“I heard the same warnings you did,” the Hammer Lord replied. “We’ll need some careful planning before we run in there, we all know that. Clearing one of these rifts is going to take a lot of people, Rurin, so try and free up your schedule.”

“Me?” the old Slayer squawked. “I’m too old to be fighting colossal class monsters on the edge of a gods-knows-how-large rift. We have hundreds of golds; send some of them.”

“We might need all of them,” Worthy replied flatly.