Blood and Mud

Chapter 25: Chapter 25

Moving a military force of five hundred souls across five hundred kilometres was something that, even in my old life, was not easy. Still, if fuel was mostly the concern back then, now everything represented a problem: blisters, horseshoe injuries, fevers, finding the right place to camp.

In my past life, I had studied logistics extensively. Soldiers liked to talk about tactics, but professionals talked about supply chains. The 5th Cohort required thousands of pounds of grain, salted meat, and clean water every single day. The supply train—a lumbering caravan of heavy wooden wagons pulled by draft horses—dictated our pace. We crawled across the landscape at a agonizing twenty kilometres a day, enduring the friction of broken axles, lame horses, and the endless, sucking mud.

The landscape stretching before us was achingly beautiful but relentlessly hostile. It resembled the wild, untamed moors of an Irish painting: endless expanses of rolling green hills, jagged outcrops of grey stone, and vast pastures of tall, wind-whipped grass. The sky was a perpetual canvas of bruised grey clouds, bleeding a constant, freezing drizzle that seeped through our boiled leather armour and chilled us to the bone.

Riding on a sturdy roan gelding near the vanguard, I spent the march analysing the command structure of the Empire created. Beneath the captain there were three lieutenants, the operational backbone of the cohort.

All three were Swelled Buds.

In the rigid meritocracy of the Empire, magic was bound to biology and time. If a soldier did not awaken their Ember and push it to the Swelled Bud stage before their twentieth winter, their vessel’s potential solidified. They missed the age cutoff for the Imperial Academy, and without that specialised, esoteric training, they could never advance to the catastrophic power of Bud Burst. They were permanently capped. But what they lacked in raw, apocalyptic magical potential, they made up for in decades of sheer, bloody survival.

Lieutenant Alysia rode the left flank. She was a hardened woman in her early fifties, hailing from the logging districts. Her face was scarred with violence: one thick, jagged scar slashed across her forehead from right to left, while another brutal line dragged from her right ear all the way to her chin. She carried two heavy, deeply curved scimitars across her back, weapons designed to cleave through thick wood and bone alike. With her menacing glare and absolute silence, she looked like an executioner. Yet, over the weeks of marching, I watched her secretly slip extra rations to the younger recruits and personally re-wrap the blistered feet of the infantrymen. Behind the terrifying exterior, she was the protective mother bear of the cohort.

Lieutenant Yuni commanded the rearguard. Born on the Eastern border, he possessed striking, sharp Asian features, jet-black hair tied in a practical topknot, and obsidian eyes that never stopped moving. Though in his early thirties, he moved with the lean, coiled grace of a viper, his short thrusting spear resting lazily across his saddle. Yuni was always looking around, either to detect a threat from him or for the cohort. I recognised the look in his eyes immediately: he was a mercenary in an imperial uniform. He weighed every interaction, every risk, in terms of personal survival and profit. He would not throw his life away for glory, which made him an exceptionally reliable tactician.

The centre line was held by Lieutenant Kaelen. Sourced from the deep mining districts, Kaelen was a literal mountain of a man in his late fifties. His chest was as broad as a barrel, and his arms were thick as tree trunks. He eschewed standard cavalry swords for a massive, square-headed war hammer and a heavy iron shield. He had zero political filter. He cursed loudly, drank heavily from his hip flask, and treated everyone—from the lowest recruit to Miklas himself—with the same blunt, abrasive honesty.

As the days bled into weeks, the picturesque green hills began to scar.

We rode past the charred, skeletal remains of border villages. Blackened timber, collapsed thatch roofs, and the bleached bones of livestock littered the muddy pastures. These were the fresh wounds inflicted by the Mud and Blood Coalition. The barbarians had struck quickly and retreated, leaving nothing but ash in their wake. The recruits, who had been loudly boasting in the taverns of Shepfold, fell into a suffocating, terrified silence as they marched through the graveyards. The reality of the frontier was settling in.

That reality violently tested us on the eighteenth day of the march.

As the cohort navigated a narrow pass between two steep, rocky hills, the trap was sprung. They weren’t barbarians, but a desperate swarm of over a hundred bandits—deserters, murderers, and starving refugees driven mad by the frontier. They poured down the rocky slopes, screaming, armed with rusted swords and stolen axes.

”Shield wall!” Miklas roared, drawing his broadsword.

The 5th Cohort didn’t falter. The recruits locked their shields, and the Lieutenants unleashed the terrifying reality of a Swelled Bud.

Kaelen didn’t even draw his weapon. He simply drove his heavy iron shield into the ground. His Ember flared, pushing a wave of kinetic force through the earth that shattered the bandits’ footing, sending dozens tumbling down the rocky slope. Alysia was a blur of steel. She leapt from her horse, her dual scimitars spinning in a deadly, fluid dance that severed limbs with mechanical precision, her face a mask of cold fury. Yuni didn’t waste energy on flashy movements. He stood at the edge of the formation, his short spear darting out with blinding speed. Thrust. Retract. Throat. Heart. Eye. Every strike was a calculated kill, minimising his own physical exertion.

The skirmish was over in less than four minutes. The bandits broke and fled, leaving forty bodies bleeding in the mud. The cohort suffered only minor cuts.

When night fell, the convoy shifted into camp mode.

Five hundred men meant fifty campfires, fifty cooking pots, and a perimeter of sentries that had to be rotated every four hours. I sat near the command fire, nursing a bowl of thick oat and salted pork stew. The heat from the flames felt like a godsend against the biting, pervasive dampness of the Irish-like moors.

From the infantry fires a few dozen yards away, a low, rhythmic baritone voice began to sing. Slowly, dozens of other soldiers joined in, their voices carrying over the crackling logs and the howling wind.

The sky is grey, the stone is cold,

The Empire’s blood is bought and sold.

The rain comes down to drown the light,to leave us shivering in the night.

But deep below the mud and mire,

We keep the coal, we stoke the fire.

The storm can howl, the world can turn,but still we burn.

Oh, still we burn.

I listened to the lyrics, staring into the orange embers of our own fire. It was a song of endurance. It mirrored the magic inside us—the Ember. We were expected to take the worst the world could throw at us, to be drowned in blood and rain, and simply refuse to go out.

”They sing well tonight,” Alysia noted quietly, sharpening one of her scimitars with a whetstone.

”They sing because their bellies are full,” Yuni corrected, not looking up from the small ledger he was updating by the firelight. ”Wait until the supply lines freeze in winter. We’ll see how much they want to sing then.”

”Let the boys have their fire, Yuni,” Kaelen grunted, taking a massive swig from his flask. He looked over at me, his thick beard catching the firelight. ”What about you, little girl? You’ve been quiet. You staring at the flames, or are you looking for the monsters in the dark?”

”Both,” I answered flatly.

On the twenty-first day, the rolling hills finally broke, giving way to a massive, rushing river that roared with white-capped fury. This was the natural boundary. The physical edge of the West Border. From there started what the Empire called the west border region, twenty-five thousand square kilimeters stretching from the north to th south of this side of the continent that where in a perpetual state of war, the Empire claimed it was their and continue to sent settlers, pioneers and field it with a massive standing army while the Coalition felt threatened by us and continued to send thor discarded warriors to plunder and destroy the region. Even if the Rural District was not, in effect, the empire’s border, it was the first fortified region between the Coalition and the Crown of the Empire.

And guarding the crossing was our new home.

The fortress of Trivi did not look like a traditional castle. It was carved directly into the sheer face of a massive stone hill. It resembled a miniature, truncated version of legendary citadels from old fantasy tales, built entirely from dark, unyielding grey rock.

The lower tier rested at the edge of the roaring river, protected by a massive semicircular wall lined with iron ballistas and trebuchets. A heavy stone bridge spanned the violent water, leading directly to the fortified iron gates. Above the lower tier, carved deep into the hillside itself, was the second level, housing the command structures, the barracks, and the armouries. There were no decorative banners, no pristine white marble. It was a fortress designed for one singular purpose: to ensure that nothing crossed that river alive.

”Welcome to the edge of the world, Elvit,” Miklas said, pulling his horse up beside mine as the wind whipped his crimson cloak. ”Welcome to Trivi.”