I staggered out of the saved portal back into the camp, and then charged through the mild snowstorm for the small pond that existed behind the command tent. I thought I heard someone calling out my name behind me, but in my current daze, I paid it no attention.

  When I got to the pond, I saw that the top layer had frozen over once more, so I smashed through it with stabs of my knife, then plunged my blood-soaked hands into the freezing water. The water ran red, but it didn’t seem enough to wash the evidence away. I saw that more blood still stained my shirt, and I splashed more of the cold water over my head and face.

  I’d killed an innocent. I was no better than the Players. Their blood really did run through me. My body retched, willing to throw up once more, but there was nothing left in my stomach.

  Firm hands grasped me by the shoulder, pulling me back from the pond and away from the freezing water. They threw me to the ground.

  Lore and Val stood over me. I hadn’t heard them approach. Neither said anything, but the fear on their faces was plain as day.

  My wife crouched down at my side, placed a hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes. ‘What did she do to you?’ she asked.

  Because it had to be my mother who’d done something to me, and not something that I had done. I couldn’t have been the guilty party; Val had moved beyond such ideas. How could I tell her the truth?

  I looked down at my blood-stained hands. I’d tell her the truth because I had to. I’d tell her the truth because some part of her already knew. ‘I…’

  ‘Lore,’ Val said, ‘fetch some towels, will you?’

  Was this just good timing, or had she sensed that whatever I was about to say, he shouldn’t hear it? I bit my tongue, and seized the opportunity to tell Val alone. ‘I killed someone,’ I said.

  ‘That’s nothing that you haven’t done before.’

  ‘A kid. A… teenager.’

  My wife swallowed, her face neutral, painfully so; she was definitely making a conscious effort to keep it that way.

  ‘My mother attacked me. She was invisible. I was confused. I didn’t mean to…’

  Val responded by clutching me in her arms and squeezing me tight, reassuring me. The pond water dripped from me, drenching her clothes and long black hair. She’d been so quick to assume that I was blameless in this scenario. She thought too much of me.

  ‘I don’t deserve this,’ I said.

  Her tone was soft. ‘It was an accident.’

  But it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t just the killing of an innocent that bothered me. That, I could live with, at least in times of war. What bothered me was that if I had to, I’d do it again. If it meant saving my friends, if it meant saving the world, I’d kill another innocent. I’d kill more than one.

  Just who was I becoming? Certainly not a hero. I’d though I’d been getting through to my mother—and maybe I had been—but it seemed that she, too, had been getting through to me.

  ‘I won’t become one of them,’ I told Val, but even as the words left my mouth, they felt hollow.

  My wife didn’t reply. Did she see through it too?

  * * *

  A little under two days remained until the towers would have drawn enough magicks for the ritual. Though our sources seemed to agree on this timeframe, we weren’t going to risk being too late. It was time to move the camp north, to the Aurician Meadows. From there, we would stage our attack.

  We still had far too few soldiers in our army. Our goal had been to amass an army of thirty thousand before we launched our attack on the Goldmarch capital. We had four thousand. It wasn’t even close, and yet what else could we do but smile and pretend that everything was going according to plan? We needed to keep spirits high, even in the face of our inevitable deaths. It was something that was far easier said than done.

  There were not enough horses for all of us, so we used them primarily for transport, leaving our soldiers to walk the half a day’s journey to the Meadows. That was another reason to leave a day early; we wanted our army as fresh as possible for the attack. We would eat the last of our food over the next day, and this was enough that it was a feast. Hopefully, we would also make sure we got enough sleep, but I thought that was far less likely.

  Our caravan was beset by monsters on the road. The closer we got to Auricia, the more trouble we found; it wasn’t just groups of one monster drawn towards the activated towers, but all kinds of enemy. I wish I could say that we didn’t lose any soldiers to these attacks, but we did. Again, all we could do was pretend to our army that we still stood plenty of chance of success.

  I ended the penultimate attack on our army by levelling up Worldbending to level 90, and of course had an ability selection to make to go along with it. It was hard to believe that one person’s ability upgrade could make the difference between victory and defeat, but I was still comforted by it. It couldn’t have come at a better time.

  There were only two choices on this particular occasion.

  Ability selection unlocked

  Select an ability from the list below:

  Option 1: Mass Transport (Worldbending) — Passive. You may now create a portal that is five times the usual size. You may only have one larger portal active at any one time.

  You might read that and think “Oh yes, that’s a good one, and that makes sense. He must have picked that.” Wrong. What you’re probably thinking is that we still had time for some last-minute recruitment, and this would allow people to flock to our cause in droves. Well, let me tell you that you’re far more optimistic about our recruitment than I was at that particular moment. I imagined that if we aligned more soldiers to our cause, they would number in the single or low double-digits. This ability, I thought, would be useless.

  Option 2: Portal Manipulation II (Worldbending) — You may now move and rotate portals without closing them, at a rate of three yards/second. Costs mana.

  I’d just had portal manipulation I as an option on my last Worldbending level-up, and it had only just missed out to distant portals, which had been the right choice at the time. With what I knew about the battle to come, and with what I had in mind for a certain part of the enemy army, I knew immediately that this was the ability to pick. I’ll let you wonder on that, just for a bit.

  Ability unlocked — Portal Manipulation II

  Portal Manipulation II (Worldbending) — You may now move and rotate portals without closing them, at a rate of three yards/second. Costs mana.

  I tested this immediately, opening a portal in the forest and moving it with a simple gesture. Corminar, who was walking at my side, nodded approvingly.

  ‘I see,’ he said.

  I smiled in response.

  The dense forest gave way to the Meadows pretty abruptly. One moment, we were walking through trees at the head of our long caravan, and the next, we were standing on fields. “Meadows” was a pretty overblown term for what amounted really just to a bunch of farms, but that’s what the residents of the Goldmarch were like—everything had to be fancy. The farms were abandoned now, barns crumbling, houses empty. The lured monsters really had wreaked havoc here too.

  And then, beyond the farms, was the city itself, those three enormous towers looming over it. I dared not let us get too close at this stage; if we did, we might be forced into battle sooner than I wanted.

  ‘Into formation!’ Corminar roared once the last of the caravan had emerged from the trees. Our army fanned out, just as instructed. Those equipped with heavy armour, shields, or simple had huge health reserves, stood at the front. Those with ranged attackers, that is, rangers or magic users, formed the rows behind them. At the very rear were the support classes and us, the command. When the battle started, we would need to head to the front—Corminar had insisted that it was vital we lead from there, much to Val’s chagrin.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Though I prayed that they wouldn’t, if the enemy marched out to meet us, we would at least be ready. At the back of the lines, I opened new distant portals back to the Tundras and Coldharbour, to pick up any volunteer stragglers. A few came through the Tundran portals immediately, having apparently been waiting for them to re-open, but the Coldharbour portal was silent. Our efforts there had been in vain.

  With a sigh, I took a freshly unladen horse, and mounted it. My riding skill would never be impressive—I’d very quickly come to realise that—but it was enough at least for me to do a round of the army, to have my face shown. This was important, I was told.

  As I rode, I very quickly saw Reginald towering over the rest of the front line, and Ted was directly behind him. Was this coincidence or strategy? I suspected Corminar had the good idea to have these two keep each other occupied, as both could be a pain in their own ways. But it wasn’t just those two familiar faces that I saw. Towards the end of the line, at the very front despite his small stature, I saw the face of Elfric, the Player. He’d come, as promised. I nodded to him, and Elfric nodded back in kind. Nothing more needed to be said.

  I circled around the front of the army, taking greater care with my riding now that all the soldiers could see me. I hated that I was comforted by the presence of a Player in our midst, but this army needed all the help it could get. At least one of my recruitment drives had actually worked out.

  A few heads perked up from the army, looking to our left. It took me a moment to realise that those who’d moved were those with elven blood in them, those with improved senses. I knew better than to doubt them; if they heard something, then there was certainly something to hear.

  Corminar broke through the front of the line, his eyes wide, sprinting towards me at his fastest pace.

  I circled the horse around to meet him. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘An army. Riding for us. Though their horses…’

  I swallowed. ‘Then they’ve called our bluff. The battle starts—’

  ‘No.’ Corminar had furrowed his brow. ‘No, I think…’

  My ears pricked up. I now heard it too—the intimidating rumbling of charging steeds, of metal blades and shields and armour crashing together. Of war drums.

  ‘That’s not…’ I started, only to trail off when I saw Corminar.

  He was… laughing. His smile was wide, a tear trickling down his cheek. ‘It’s not friend,’ he said. ‘It’s…’

  The orcish army galloped into sight.

  There were thousands of them, all riding not on horses, but on creatures the likes of which I’d never seen before—something between the largest of wolves and bears. A wave of green and silver flooded the Aurician Meadows to the west; this was not just one clan, but dozens of them.

  I opened up a portal relay and sent it flying off towards where I knew Arzak and the rest of the command had been going over our battle plans. ‘Arzak!’ I shouted through it. ‘What is this?’

  ‘I send word to clan. I tell them about Council. I ask for volunteers.’ Arzak paused, and when she spoke again I thought I heard her voice break. ‘It look like they all volunteer.’

  The orcish army rode around the front of our own humble army, thousands of them pouring past me and Corminar in the desolate farm. Their ferocious mounts snapped at us as they passed, but did no damage—these were just snaps of warning. I thought for a second that they had come to speak with me, but then I caught myself in my hubris. It wouldn’t be me they would speak to. It would be Arzak.

  I held my hand up to our army. ‘Split the formation!’ I shouted. ‘Let them pass!’

  As our soldiers began to realise that the orcs were friends, not foe, they lowered their weapons, and some began to cheer. This wave of elation visibly passed down the lines—if morale had been an issue, it wasn’t anymore.

  Corminar hopped up onto my horse, and I rode with the orcs, my steed doing its best to stay well away from the snapping beasts. I felt the power in those strange creatures, the strength. It sent a chill running through my bones. Arzak had always implied that up in the frozen Northern Reaches there were creatures that would put even bogspawn to shame, but it was only now that I truly believed it.

  Ahead of us, the leaders of the orcish army arrived at Arzak’s side, and dismounted their steeds. Though it took me and Corminar a few more seconds to catch them up, we could already hear their booming voices when they spoke. As it turned out, Arzak was quite softly spoken for an orc.

  ‘Arzak Blorg,’ an older orc said—a woman in fine armour, whose steed was larger than the rest. ‘You call clans to war.’

  I pulled our horse to a halt outside the command tent, then made sure to hitch it; it was giving every sign of fleeing the beasts at the first opportunity. I jumped off the horse at the side of the army’s commanders. Turell nodded firmly to me, a smile on his face at the appearance of the orcs, and Val put her hand in mine.

  ‘By call us, you leave Reaches unprotected. You risk lives of our people—old, young, feeble.’

  I was beginning to realise that for Arzak, this wasn’t quite as enjoyable a moment than for the rest of us—she had a price to pay. I considered intervening, speaking on her behalf, but I stopped myself. I’d learned over the years, and besides, these were orcish affairs.

  ‘What are they?’ I whispered to Val, not needing to clarify what I meant by “they”.

  ‘Arzak said they’re wargs.’

  ‘Never heard of em.’

  ‘Me neither. I quite like them, though.’

  ‘You do seem to like ugly things,’ someone said. I turned to realise that Ted had joined us, his curiosity apparently overwhelming his ability to remain in formation. It didn’t matter; I had plans for him later. I ignored him for now.

  ‘As punishment,’ the older orc continued, ‘you assume responsibility. Each life lost weigh on your heart. Understand?’

  Arzak, her face stoic, solemn, needed in front of her fellow orc. ‘Understand, Gelik,’ she confirmed.

  ‘Then stand, Arzak Blorg, commander of Orcish armies.’

  Val staggered. ‘Wait, what?’

  Arzak stood, and the older orc—Gelik—embraced her, then kissed her once on each cheek. ‘You do well, daughter,’ she said.

  Just then, just at that pretty profound and revelatory moment, Lore pushed through the crowd, completely unbothered by the presence of the wargs.

  ‘Err, Styk?’ he said. ‘Two things. First, how many more of those mana potions have you got? We’re gonna need some more portals. And the second… the scouts have found someone. She said she knows us. And that she rode on to meet us.’

  Corminar tossed me a potion, and I snatched it from the air.

  ‘Alright,’ I said. ‘Let’s start with the portals. Tell me—what’s going on?’