Chương 164: Day One Hundred And Sixty Three

Dear Diary, Apparently I've been misinformed my whole life. I always thought that Heroes were the ones with the big bedroom body count, and Villains were the ones with the big battlefield body count. What? My bedroom body count is four, two if you only count since I've been Isekaid. My battlefield body count is now more than a thousand times that. This does not bode well for my desire to remain lime-green free. So, slept well. Same dream as before, but now the itchiness? Completely gone, like it never had been.

Psychedelic tadpoles everywhere, like they'd hatched from every itchy spot and were trying to figure out how to get back to the wet patches. Worst part about that is that all the new ones seemed to favor titillation rather than the soothing the ones in the lake had switched over to. With the lack of itchiness, I kinda flopped out along the lake shore in that direction, reveling in the lack-of-itching.

The rocks ran kinda close to the shore at one point, and there was another wet patch on the ground, but not itching felt too good for me to complain about anything that trivial. I just lay there, watching the stars and vibing. Woke up to my head in Saffron's lap. She stroked my hair out of my eyes and said, "hey there, sleepyhead. Welcome back."

"Did I go somewhere?" She laughed, and I glanced around to see the interior of Lancaster's command tent.

"Only to sleep the clock round, almost."

"Oh, shit! Is everything okay? Is Isnomi okay? What happened to the 'Damn Army, and..." I trailed off as she kept smiling at me, gently shaking her head.

"Isnomi is with Marie; I picked her up and dropped her off while you slept. As for the Army of New Amsterdam and Newark? You happened to them. Don't you remember?" The whole time she kept stroking my hair, like I'd been the one who nearly died. When she asked about yesterday, images flashed through my head. Maiming Oliver. Quartering Octavio. Turning some random Mage into bloody sculpture. Above all, countless images of death and blood. So much blood.

Mana Blades usually cauterize, but with enough cuts, enough heat, the cauterization ruptures from the inside as the poor bastard's blood boils. I desperately wished I could forget how I learned that. I wished I could forget the faces, some shocked, some angry, some without any expression at all, but most terrified beyond reason, just frightened animals trying to escape a trap. Trying to get away from a slaughterhouse. With the exception of a few 'Damn Heroes, I hadn't fought anyone. I'd just killed them.

"Shh... shh... it's okay. Isnomi's fine. Marie's fine. I'm fine. You saved me." Her voice trembled a little at that, her eyes widening just a touch.

"You're afraid of me now." She shook her head, "No! No, never that, love. I'm afraid for you. I..." she paused, took a deep breath before continuing.

"I watched you die. I changed into my clerical garb because my uniform had bits of your skull and gray matter splattered on it. I watched you die." She shuddered to a stop, her eyes going closed. I smiled up at her, trying to be comforting. I realized she still had her Midnight Dress on, and I still wore The Dress. Blood and mud and bits of gore were gone, and my cuts had been healed, but I couldn't look at it without remembering.

"It's okay, Kitten. You know me. I'm too stupid to die when someone kills me." She snorted out a half-hysterical laugh, her eyes shooting open after. She flicked my forehead once, sharply.

"I don't like it when you call yourself stupid, Goof."

"I'll try to remember that. I'll probably forget, but I'll try." I looked around. I lay on a cot in the middle of Lancaster's big tent; the strategy planning table stood off to the back, and the few other pieces of furniture ringed the sides. The closed flaps meant I couldn't see anything else.

"Where is everyone? Why are we in the strategy tent?" She shrugged.

"There's not much need for strategy at this point. The soldiers who didn't die? Fled. About half of the runners from this battle wound up in the river, since they were in no shape to deal with our troops, who moved forward when they heard the impact that squashed the negotiation tent. Some of those didn't make it out of the freezing water. After being routed like that, I doubt any of them will pick up a weapon again. The situation with the City's Heroes is even worse.

Three quarters of New Amsterdam's Heroes are dead, and almost all of the rest are maimed. Soul burned."

"Oh, god. I did that." Given their treachery, they deserved it. I appreciate the vote of confidence, Boss, but... As I trailed off, Saffron leaned down and kissed me.

"I love you. Whatever may come. No matter what, so long as I am, I will stand by you in spirit and in flesh." I grimaced, "isn't right about there where you drop the Bad News?" She shrugged again.

"There isn't that much to say. General Lancaster and Marshall duBois want to debrief you once I tell them you're fit to talk. Hero Potami wants to thank you personally. I think everyone in the Army would like to thank you for, y'know, doing their job for them. One or two might gripe about losing some combat pay, but if I've learned anything in life, it's that some people go through life looking for something to complain about." I curled up, rolling over a bit to keep my head on Saffron's lap.

"I wanna lie here for a little bit. I need to get yesterday out of my head." She went back to stroking my hair.

"I understand. It's not every day that you die and live to talk about it." I shook my head a little.

"It's not that. I mean, yeah, that happened a few times, and that might need its own dealing with. It's the killing." She kept stroking, her voice gentle.

"You did what you had to do."

"I don't deserve you." She smiled down at me, still stroking my hair.

"Of course you do. You deserve me and anyone else who catches your eye. You're a Hero, the genuine article."

"I'm a murderer." Her hand paused, and then she tugged my hair, painfully.

"You. Are. Not. A. Murderer." With her grip on my hair she turned my face to her.

"You didn't even start the battle. They attacked us, you defended. Decisively."

"But..." She pulled my hair again, shutting me up.

"Had you not done as you did, Hero Castro would have led our forces onto the field, and without the General or Marshall leading them, she likely would have lost. They'd pulled far more levies onto the field than we realized, because of the 'Holy War'."

"Heroes save people. They don't murder them." Still holding my hair, she flicked my forehead again.

"Again with the 'murder' thing. You didn't murder anyone. You killed soldiers on the field of battle. Armed, mostly armored people, who intended to do harm to you and yours."

"I wasn't thinking about that at the time." At her raised, questioning eyebrow, I said, "all I could think of was that they'd taken you away from me." She blushed and shook her head.

"For me, you destroyed an army. Two armies, if what Bill told me is correct."

"Is everyone in Camden okay?" I realized with a start that while Saffron had ended the fighting here, no one but me had been aware of the attack on Camden Yards. She just shook her head, but in an exasperated, affectionate way.

"Bill and Angel saw some of what you did. The army that fought here might be a quarter of its former size, and all of that levies, but the army that attacked the Yards? It's gone."

"I murdered..." Saffron flicked my forehead again, and I continued, "killed all of them?" She shook her head again.

"No, but you routed them. From what Bill tells me, they were breaking when you fell upon Oliver Orange, and when they saw you not only defeat a High Priest of Ares, but tear him apart like he was nothing? That routed them completely. They went from a retreating army to a mass of panicked, terrified former soldiers running for their very lives in that instant." My eyes started watering.

"I shouldn't have killed so many of them." She stroked my hair some more, and I sighed.

"Okay, fuck the Oranges, and fuck their Heroes, hiding behind the cannon fodder looking for the easy win, but I shouldn't have killed the common troops." She sighed at that point.

"Maybe you could have stopped the battle without doing so. Maybe you couldn't have. The New Amsterdam troops had already been ordered to attack our army, our walls, and without orders? Armies tend to keep doing whatever they were ordered to until enough of them die to break them. That might not have happened at all here, and it certainly wouldn't have happened in the Yards. Armies without orders who take a City?

Tend towards pillaging and raping whatever they can find, and setting fire to whatever and whoever is left. Honestly, armies with commanders like Oliver often do that anyway. But you, and you alone, stopped all that." She stopped and held my face in both her hands, then leaned down to kiss me. When she came back up for air, she said, "I've been waiting to do that for nearly a day.

If you absolutely must insist that 'Heroes save people', then count yourself as having saved every soldier in our army, and every person in Camden Yards, because none of either group would have lived out the day unscathed without you doing what you did, how you did it."

"But..." I trailed off, because I couldn't think of anything she hadn't come up with an answer for.

"Ultimately, you're responsible for Marshall duBois and General Lancaster being alive, so you saved both of them, and you saved Hero Potami, and you saved me."

"Am I a bad person because the only one of those that I feel at all good about here," I tapped my chest, "is you?" She smiled, laughed, and shook her head.

"No, Goof. That doesn't make you a villain. That just makes you, you." Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"And I'm not a Villain?" She laughed and shook her head again.

"NO, Goof. You are not a Villain. Just a woman who will do whatever it takes to keep her loved ones safe. And one who, failing that, will see them avenged. Which, in itself, makes them that much less likely to be targeted. Tell me; if you had seen me alive immediately after that big hunk of rock killed you, would you have still done what you did?" I thought about it for a second, then answered, "No?"

"There you are then. Someone killed you through treachery, you thought they killed four other people, one of them your spouse, and you sought vengeance. That is not the action of a Villain."

"It's not?"

"No." She leaned down, kissed me thoroughly, and when she pulled back a fraction of an inch for air, she breathed, "not that I would leave you, even if you were." I heaved a sigh.

"So how do I know you're not just telling me what I want to hear?" She shook her head, smiled, said, "now you don't trust me?" then kissed me before I could reply. When she pulled away, she finished with, "I would convince you more thoroughly, but tent flaps are notoriously unlockable." As she said that, someone knocked on the tent pole through the fabric, followed by Marshall duBois asking "Aetos? Is Diaz awake yet?" She looked down at me, and I nodded, pushing myself up out of her lap as I did.

When I'd got myself upright and next to her, she called out, "Yes, Marshall. She just woke up a short while ago." He pushed his way through the tent flap, followed by General Lancaster.

"Would have been nice to know then."

"I wanted to make sure she was awake and coherent enough for the debrief," Saffron replied. The General nodded, "that's more than fair. No point wasting our time coming to talk to someone suffering severe Spell Shock." DuBois shrugged, chuckled, and said, "you mean like we've done with every 'Damn Hero we've managed to catch?"

"Point." The General turned back to me, "Cadet Diaz, are you ready to be debriefed regarding the battle yesterday?" I shrugged and tossed my head.

"As ready as I'm likely to be any time soon."

"Excellent. Report." I thought about it for a couple seconds while Saffron and I pushed ourselves to our feet; just before Lancaster spoke, I started.

"I was scrying on my wife as part of my Devotional Duties to my Patron. I saw a large projectile heading toward the negotiation site and Co-Located myself to warn her. After the impact of the projectile, I believed her and the Grand Army's command staff to be dead, and I saw attackers coming from the gates of Newark and the woods north of Camden Yards. I engaged the enemy. I destroyed their siege engine as they were loading it.

From that point on I preferentially targeted their Heroes until I found members of their command staff I remembered from," I paused for a breath, hoping they didn't think it was me scrambling for an excuse to know what Saffron saw in the previous meeting.

"Scrying on Saffron's last meeting with them. I engaged and neutralized their command staff. Before I could continue any further, Saffron returned to the battlefield, kicked two breaches in the enemy's walls, and called for them to surrender. I engaged all remaining hostile forces and neutralized them." I paused again, then shrugged.

"That's about it." Lancaster looked a little sour, but the Marshall poker face broke down a half second after I'd finished, and he laughed until he collapsed into one of the chairs in the room. It might have had a chance if he'd just sat down, but it fell apart under the impact, spilling him onto the floor, which he apparently found even more hilarious, since he laughed even harder for a bit. When he finally stopped, wheezing, he held a hand up to General Lancaster.

"Oh, come on, Leonard. You can't tell me that's not one of the best 'I just did the bare minimum required of me, sir' understated debriefs you've ever heard." Lancaster just stared at his hand for a full five count before reaching down and helping the Marshall up.

"Be that as it may, it does leave several questions." I shrugged.

"Ask away, Sir." Credit where it's due, he took a moment to sort out his questions before beginning.

"Scrying on your wife is part of your Devotional Duties to Loki?" Marshall duBois nudged the General with an elbow, "c'mon, Leonard. Don't tell me you've forgotten Loki was originally a God of Home and Hearth? My Patron's from another Pantheon and even I know that." Lancaster rolled his eyes.

"I did not forget, William. I simply wished confirmation of what she'd told us."

"It is sometimes, Sir. I suspect he uses the times I'm worried about her to work on my scrying skills. But he has directly supervised me on each occasion I've done so." Lancaster sucked at his teeth a bit, clearly still annoyed at the Marshall, but only said, "fair enough. Gods will be Gods. You saw enough of New Amsterdam's leadership to recognize them during a battle?"

"I've always had a good eye for faces, Sir."

"Apparently so. You used the word 'neutralized' instead of 'killed'. Why?"

"With the exception of Octavio and Oliver, I didn't stick around to be sure I'd killed anyone; I struck once, hard enough to injure someone badly enough to take them out of combat, then moved on." The Marshall cut in with, "how did you know they were out of combat?"

"I assumed if they'd had a limb removed, suffered similar levels of damage to the torso, or they'd been decapitated they were injured badly enough. I was both angry and busy at the time." Lancaster resumed control of the debrief, muttering, "I'd assume decapitation would take someone out of the combat as well." Then he asked, "That brings me to my next question; how are you still alive? The vision of the tent ceiling turning your head to so much mush is probably permanently seared into my mind."

"I'd like to know that one as well, Cadet," added the Marshall.

"Co-Location, Sir." To demonstrate, I Co-Located to Saffron's far side. Immediately I stumbled into Saffron; I got a feedback whine, and my vision tunneled a little, but worse than both something felt injured. Whatever part of me I used to Co-Locate wasn't broken, but apparently I'd stressed it pretty bad under the influence of rage-driven adrenaline.

"Sorry, Sirs." I muttered as I grit my teeth and pushed myself back upright.

"Still not quite recovered from the battle." The Marshall asked, "you were Co-Located, one of you died, and the other one jumped straight into a mothering great battle? I'm not surprised you're still not recovered. Hell, I'm surprised you're still alive, really."

"It hurt, but it wasn't my biggest concern at the time." The General had apparently let duBois, who obviously knew more about Co-Location and Translocation, take over the debrief for the moment.

"Cadet, I've been injured while Co-Locating. You feel all of it, even if the injuries don't show up on your other self. Are you telling me the other you felt yourself dying and you kept moving?"

"Other selves, Sir. Seven of me were on Camden Yard's north wall." He mouthed the word, 'seven', then said, "still, you felt yourself die and kept fighting?" I shrugged, "after the first time it wasn't so bad."

"The first time?" I shrugged again.

"One of me died when I destroyed their big catapult, a few of me died neutralizing their heroes. Two of me died neutralizing Oliver. But by then there were more of me to spread the load around, as it were."

"More of you. How many?" I tilted my head as I thought about it, mentally calculating powers of two.

"I'm not sure, sir? More than a thousand, less than two thousand forty-eight." The Marshall looked like he'd just swallowed something down the wrong pipe. He didn't say anything, but he had the same look on his face as Doc Roberts had when he'd said, 'what the hell are you?', but he at least had the class not to ask that particular question. Or maybe he was in too much shock to speak.

I put on my best conciliatory look and said, "if it makes a difference, I think that I went past my safe limit as regards Co-Location. I'll probably need a little time to heal." He stopped gasping, sucked in a breath, and then said, "time to heal. You injure your Soul and you need 'time to heal'?" I shrugged again, "that's what Sister Siobhan said happened to my arm, and it healed."

While the Marshall stood there, mouth working like he didn't know what to say, General Lancaster half turned to him and said, "you told me she was the most dangerous single combatant in the Academy. I based a great deal of my strategy and tactics on that fact. Yet now that she's proven you right beyond your wildest dreams, you're surprised?"

The Marshall looked at Lancaster, coincidentally looking away from me, and said, "yes, I am surprised that she's not just terrifyingly good at hand to hand combat, but can both Translocate strategic distances and Co-Locate several hundred times more than any other known practitioner of the art. The former would make her a formidable battle asset. The latter makes her a one woman army. The two combined make her the single most powerful military force in Atlantis."

He shook himself, took a deep breath, then a wry grin stretched across his face.

"Y'know, McCrae always said he hoped I had a Cadet that scared me as much as I did him. Guess I do." He pursed his lips.

"How did you intend to use her strategically or tactically if she wasn't even in the Army?" The General shrugged.

"I suspected that Cadet Diaz would enter battle unprompted should Cadet Aetos be threatened, so I put her in position to be threatened, with the rest of my forces poised to fall upon the enemy if they took the bait." My blood ran cold, and words slipped out of both my mouths before I could stop myself.

"You used Saffron as BAIT?" Lenny Lancaster might be the biggest asshole in history, but the steel rod shoved up his ass didn't wilt at all as he met my eyes, glancing back and forth to catch all four of them.

"No, Cadet Diaz. I used myself as bait, and positioned Cadet Aetos near me. Generals do not normally, as a rule, engage in direct combat, our Marshall's hijinks aside." I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and stepped back to being one of myself.

"I see."

"Beyond any moral, ethical, or even professional considerations about putting a Cadet in danger or using the Commander of an Army as bait, one consideration overrules all that." I cocked my head, still not sanguine about Saffron being deliberately put in danger, but asked, "what's that?"

"It worked." I stood there, mouth working, listening to Saffron giggle a little bit beside me, until Lancaster continued.

"We defeated not one but two armies, all without a single casualty." He paused, considering, before continuing.

"Actually, if you sustained an injury which makes you less combat capable than you were, I suppose you count as a non-lethal combat casualty. That's still thousands to one. Possibly tens of thousands. You definitely saved tens of thousands of civilians, along with thousands of Volunteers and Heroes. While I'm sure you're not pleased with the methods or being the sole casualty, you must admit those are excellent final ratios." He paused again while I gaped, and he turned to the Marshall.

"Would you and I count as casualties? We were killed, but returned to combat capability before the end of the battle." The Marshall sucked his teeth, then drawled out, "we were stuck Underhill until well after the battle ended. I think that counts. That's what, three to thirty three thousand or so? Still fuckin' impressive." I shook my head and, before I thought better of it, asked, "so what's going to happen to New Amsterdam and Newark now?"

"That is for the Council Members to decide, and the leadership of New Amsterdam to accept. Of course, there's no point in putting forth any kind of treaty until we've met with the leadership of the Cities in question, and no one seems eager to step forward to take on that role."

"What about Octavio and Oliver?" Lancaster's head pivoted around to stare at me.

"Didn't you say you'd neutralized them?" I shrugged.

"Yeah. Didn't kill 'em. Just neutralized 'em. Neutralized Oliver especially hard."

"Then where are they?" I said, "gimme just a second?" and when neither of them said anything, stepped to the top of the tower where I'd left the two of them. Both of them still lay there. I mean, Oliver lay there, Octavio still dangled from the hook I'd left him on. I guess it's hard to move without, y'know, arms or legs. Or hands or feet or eyes in Oliver's case.

I hefted Octavio off his hook, my muscles complaining about overuse, grabbed Oliver by the collar, and stepped back to the strategy tent, where I dropped them, then stepped over to drape an arm over Saffron. I wasn't about to tell them this, but the trip back strained whatever part of me I used to Translocate, at least a little bit.

"There you go. New Amsterdam's leaders, neutralized and ready for whatever." I watched as the General and the Marshall both took a second to register what they were looking at. Oliver had heard me and was thrashing and moaning a bit, but couldn't seem to function effectively without hands or feet or sight. Octavio just wept. Both of them showed clear signs of frostbite on their exposed bits. Lancaster was the first to recover.

"I... see. Neutralized indeed."

"Ayep. I know I just woke up and all, but I'd really like to get back on a daytime schedule; do you mind if Saffron and I step back to the Academy and get some rest, if we're both back here first thing in the morning?" Lancaster was still staring as he said, "you might as well have breakfast before returning; I doubt we'll need you before mid-morning, at the earliest." Let me, love. Okay. With that, I found myself surrounded by fuzzy darkness; everywhere it touched my body felt weird.

Energized, almost like I expected my hair to be standing on end from static electricity. Saffron bent over, stood up, and then we were back in our cell at the Academy, Vulcan's case dangling from Saffron's other hand. She guided me over to the bed, then put Vulcan back in his place beside Isnomi's toddler bed, carefully propping his case open with a pair of bolts and stroking him once, murmuring, "good work," before turning back to me and sashaying over.

I wasn't quite as completely exhausted as I'd previously believed, but I certainly fell asleep pretty fuckin' quick afterward.