Chương 224: 36. Sacrifice 2

Our greatest enemy right now wasn't the Yanxia Empire. It wasn't the sea dragon clans either. It was time. Nobody told me that. I worked it out for myself somewhere in the middle of running up and down Drake Tower until my legs stopped feeling like mine. After the Harbor Defense Commander threw his life and his fleet into the outer sea, the whole Port of Isca Apubra turned into a beast roasting alive that still had to drag itself along and run. Every street was retreating.

Every warehouse was being stripped or burned. Every order given had nothing to do with winning — only with getting as many people as possible out before the loss got too ugly to survive. Right after Ignicia handed Drake Tower's abandonment sequence to Lei Lian, I received a brand-new job title of my own. Runner.

Honestly, I doubt that if this went on another half a day, even I would remember I was here as the Kingdom of Eckhaus's ambassador — and not some temp the harbor command had drafted as errand boy, courier, general gofer, and high-altitude-death candidate.

I ran back and forth between Drake Tower and the princess, carrying whatever the moment demanded — sometimes a spoken order, sometimes a folded scrap of paper, and sometimes an officer would just grab my shoulder and pour information that could get someone killed within the next minute straight into my ear, then send me off to see if my two legs could outrun death.

"Cedric — second wave of wounded on the north line, reroute through Stone Vault Alley!"

"Cedric — tell Lei Lian to strip three of the crystal lamps off the tower top first, leave the last two for the very end!"

"Cedric — get Her Highness to rule on whether to light the southern barricades ahead of schedule!" I ran until my lungs threatened outright mutiny, and somewhere underneath all that gasping, one very simple thought surfaced. Turns out that when a real war breaks out, the lofty title of "Ambassador" is functionally indistinguishable from a slightly more dignified mop. I went to find Jessi and Alvira first.

They were helping Yozora pack — or more precisely, helping her sort everything she owned into two tidy categories: take it now, and leave it another quarter-hour and watch it burn. Alvira's movements were crisp and efficient, the kind of precision you'd expect from someone laying out the effects for a very respectable funeral. Jessi, meanwhile, never stopped talking while she worked, as if she genuinely believed the harbor couldn't fall for good as long as she refused to shut her mouth.

Yozora stood off to one side in that deep, near-shadow cloak of hers, quietly inventorying the people and belongings she meant to bring. Her expression stayed calm — but it wasn't the calm of composure. It was the calm of a paper-thin blade held too close to a flame: not melting yet, just enduring the heat, over and over. Jessi spotted me, tossed her bundle aside, and arched an eyebrow.

"Aren't you leaving, young master?" I answered without thinking.

"Obviously. I don't exactly suffer from a martyr complex." She laughed.

"What a coincidence. Neither do I."

"Just not yet," I added. The amusement on Jessi's face dimmed by half, though she didn't try to argue me out of it. She rarely wasted breath on that sort of thing at times like this — everyone was already too busy to be properly afraid; even fear had to wait its turn in line. Alvira shoved a rolled map into a crate without looking up.

"Then you'd better finish delivering your messages before you get yourself killed."

"Thank you for the blessing," I said.

"I feel truly cherished by the elven race right now."

"I'm simply conserving manpower," she replied, without a flicker of warmth. Only then did Yozora finally lift her eyes to me.

"You're staying to the end," she said quietly.

"Is that Ignicia's decision?"

"Half hers. Half my own treacherous legs, for not managing to outrun this in time," I said. Jessi couldn't hold back a snort of laughter.

"How very ambassadorial of you."

"Shut it. Finish packing and fall back with the first rear-guard line. Yozora doesn't get hurt. And Alvira — don't blow yourself up inside that tower along with everyone else." Alvira glanced up at me — the look on her face doing some quiet arithmetic on whether it would be more efficient to simply knock me unconscious with her staff and spare everyone further exposure to my doom-mongering. Jessi, to her credit, gave a proper nod.

"Understood, young master," she said.

"Go do your thing. If you really must die, do it somewhere far away — I just finished organizing this luggage, and I'd rather not get blood on it."

"You really do have a gift for comfort, you know that?"

"You're welcome. Pure natural talent." I had at least two more retorts loaded, but a courier was already waving frantically at me from the far end of the corridor. I managed only a quick wave to the three of them before turning and plunging back into the endless night of firelight and orders. After leaving them, I kept shuttling between both ends of the chain. Drake Tower's abandonment sequence was moving fast — but not fast enough to outpace the enemy's advance.

Terrain was the only thing we still had left to squeeze any advantage from. If the Yanxia Empire's fleet wanted to force its way into the inner harbor of Isca Apubra, it first had to pass through that long, narrow, winding channel — bent like the neck of a gourd. The outer harbor was where the Harbor Defense Commander and his three hundred ships had burned themselves alive to buy us time.

The inner harbor was what everyone was now trying to protect — or at least squeeze one more quarter-hour of use out of before giving it up too. The trouble was that no matter how narrow that bottleneck was, it wasn't an impassable wall. It could only force the Imperial fleet to squeeze through in a single column, keeping them from swallowing us whole in one gulp — it couldn't hold them back forever.

Given enough time, the enemy would eventually press all the way to the inner harbor mouth, look up, see Drake Tower, and very naturally decide they wanted it for themselves. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. And time was exactly the one thing we didn't have. When I ran back to Ignicia again, she was standing over a spread map, the lamplight carving her profile into something thin and dangerous.

Two officers who'd just fallen back from the north line stood before her, both covered in soot and blood — men who looked like they'd been dragged out of one fire only to be shoved straight into a pile of orders and told to keep breathing. She saw me and simply held out a folded slip of paper.

"Take this to Lei Lian." I reached for it. Before I could turn, she added a spoken order.

"Once you're there, cooperate with Lei Lian." I paused, looking at her.

"... Cooperate to what extent, exactly?" Ignicia raised her eyes. Those gold-red irises were quiet in the firelight — the kind of quiet that offers no reassurance whatsoever.

"You've always had a habit of overthinking things," she said.

"Not this time. You'll understand when you get there." A deeply ominous feeling bloomed fully formed in my chest. In wartime, when someone tells you "you'll understand when you get there," it never means dinner's waiting. It means you're about to be useful in a way you won't particularly enjoy. As it turned out, my instincts only ever bothered to be accurate at the worst possible moments. I found Lei Lian on the western platform of Drake Tower, re-checking the evacuation sequence.

A handful of garrison officers stood near her while figures streamed in and out of the tower, piling up stripped crystal lamps, relay plates, and dismounted ballista parts everywhere. The mid-sized blue dragon crouched at the platform's outer edge, fine threads of lightning flickering between its scales — like a storm cloud that had been forcibly stuffed into the shape of a dragon and was deeply unhappy about the arrangement. I held out the note. Lei Lian took it, opened it, read it.

Her expression didn't change at all. Then, right in front of me, she held it over the brazier and burned it. The edges curled, flame licking quickly across the paper, eating every line Ignicia had written until barely any ash remained. Watching the fire, I couldn't help saying, "I'm suddenly very invested in the hope that wasn't my transfer order." Lei Lian didn't take the bait. She tapped the last burning corner into the brazier, then turned to look at me.

"Mister... Cedric?" she asked. Being addressed that formally — first name and honorific stitched together like that — sent an inexplicable chill down my spine.

"Uh. That's me." Her gaze traveled from my face down to my boots, then back up, like she was calculating whether I could actually be useful in the next few minutes, rather than simply adding to the falling weight.

"Have you ever ridden a dragon?" she asked. The first thought that surfaced in my head was: Aside from your princess, no, I can't say I've ridden any other dragons. Naturally, that thought stayed strictly behind my teeth. Out loud, powered by an admirable will to keep living, I said, "Do you mean riding as in skill, or riding as in not dying in the process? Those are very different disciplines." Lei Lian studied me in silence for two seconds.

"So you've ridden one."

"... Isn't that conclusion a little hasty?" She ignored me entirely, walked to the wall, and pulled a fresh harness from a row of spare equipment — her movements as practiced as a tailor fitting a man about to be thrown onto a battlefield.

"Come here," she said.

"Her Highness assigned you to assist me." I looked at the harness in her hands. The ominous feeling in my chest finally finished growing a complete set of teeth.

"Assist you... with what, exactly?" Lei Lian tossed the harness into my arms, then lifted her gaze toward the sea still burning in the distance and the enemy lights drawing steadily closer.

"Buying time." She said it in the exact same flat tone you'd use to say "move that crate" — and yet it landed heavier than any order I'd heard all night. I understood. The Harbor Defense Commander had just clawed an hour and twenty-three minutes back from the sea. Ignicia was slicing every one of those seconds into pieces and spending them. Drake Tower hadn't yet reached the moment it needed to come down — not quite yet.

Which meant that before the tower could finally fall, someone had to grab hold of whatever time remained and drag it a little further back. And unfortunately, this time, I was one of the poor souls drafted to yank on time's tail. I stared down at the harness, let the silence stretch, and finally sighed.

"If I told you right now that I have a serious fear of heights, is it too late?"

"Too late," Lei Lian answered without a shred of hesitation.

"Figured." She turned her head and made a hand signal toward the blue dragon. The dragon rumbled low, lifted its head, its gold-blue slit pupils bright in the dark like two electrified blade-tips. It stepped forward once, breath carrying heat and the metallic tang of a coming storm, and I instinctively matched it with half a step back. Honestly, I'm rather proud of my survival instincts these days. Managing only half a step back in a moment like that ranks among my life's finer achievements.

Lei Lian had already started adjusting the buckles and straps on me, her hands moving with the brisk efficiency of someone doing a final tie-down check on cargo that was necessary but not entirely trustworthy.

"Listen carefully," she said, checking a clasp without looking up.

"We're not going out there to slaughter the enemy. We're not going out there to see who has more nerve than the Imperial fleet, either."

"Then what are we doing?"

"Assault reconnaissance," she said.

"Confirm the advance speed through the bottleneck, the position of their vanguard, the spread of their dragon-warlock flags. If an opening presents itself, we hit them on the way. Drake Tower only comes down when it's worth the most — not a second early, not a second late." If an opening presents itself, we hit them on the way. She said it with exactly the same tone you'd use for "pick up some vegetables while you're at the market." I blinked, and finally understood exactly why Ignicia had thrown me at her.

Lei Lian needed someone who could take orders from both the tower and the princess at once, remember them, run them, and — ideally — not be stupid enough to leap off a dragon mid-flight. And looking across the entire harbor command, I happened to be the only unlucky bastard who checked every box. In other words, through some extremely questionable stroke of luck, fate had once again singled me out for a job with zero room for error.

"You know," I muttered, clicking the last strap into place, "I actually came here to be an ambassador." Lei Lian gave me a brief sideways glance.

"Now you're a runner."

"This is a very strange career trajectory."

"Survive first. Complain later." With that, she turned, pulled a small, heavy cloth pouch from a nearby crate, and pressed it straight into my hands. The moment it landed, my wrist dipped with the weight.

"What's this?"

"Thunder-bombs." Lei Lian's tone stayed as level as if she were warning me about a puddle.

"Hold onto them tightly. Otherwise we'll die before we manage to kill anyone." Wonderful. I'd thought I was just here to serve as a breathing notepad. Now I'd been issued explosives. Apparently the scope of my ambassadorial duties was considerably broader than I'd ever imagined. Lei Lian swung herself onto the dragon first, the motion so clean it was obvious she'd never had any long-term plans involving the ground.

The blue dragon lowered its body slightly, front talons braced against the stone, the saddle on its back sitting there in the dark like an answer that flatly refused to accept "no." Lei Lian held out her hand.

"Get on." I looked at her hand, then past the tower's edge into a darkness that looked fully capable of swallowing a man whole without so much as an apology. I took one sincere moment to mourn myself. Then I grabbed her hand and stepped up into the saddle. The dragon's scales were cold, but the instant my palm pressed against them, I could feel something pulsing faintly beneath — the restrained heartbeat of something enormous and dangerous holding very still.

By the time I'd finally strapped myself in securely enough to be reasonably confident I wouldn't be flung off at the first wingbeat and end up as the Imperial fleet's most unexpected mid-air snack of the evening, Lei Lian glanced back at me.

"Hold on."

"That phrase never precedes anything good."

"All the more reason to hold on." The words had barely left her mouth before the blue dragon snapped its wings open. The next instant, the entire tower and the platform beneath us seemed to drop away all at once. No — more precisely, we shot upward. The wind slammed into my face like a wall, nearly rearranging my features on the spot.

I clamped both hands around the harness on pure reflex, hugging the bag of thunder-bombs to my chest like a family heirloom, and only had time to spit out a curse creative enough to make a priest wince.

Trailing lightning and night wind, the blue dragon cleared the top of the tower, and the entire Port of Isca Apubra unfurled beneath us all at once — the retreating streets, the flickering fire-points, the still-burning outer sea in the distance, and that long, winding, gourd-necked channel leading to the inner harbor, glowing in the dark like a map slashed open by a blade.

Lei Lian's voice carried back to me on the wind, calm enough that it didn't sound like she was taking me to wrestle with time — more like she was giving me an extremely unpleasant guided tour of the view.

"Sit tight, Cedric," she said.

"From here on, follow my lead. And don't die." The wind made it hard to even keep my eyes open, but I managed to force out a reply.

"That last part sounds like the hardest one." The blue dragon let out a low roar, wings beating once more. Straight toward the sky above the bottleneck, we flew.