Chương 1314: 1344 - Pressed On All Sides

After several days, the healer's bay in Storm Herald had somewhat cleared out. The healers assigned to Leon's flag ark were some of the best in his entire Kingdom, and they efficiently handled most of the injuries that came in. A few people lingered, however, and one was of particular concern to Leon. Anna had been stabilized, and her aura had started to return, indicating that her body was starting to regenerate its lost magic.

The healers confided to Leon that things might have been different if he hadn't given Anna the tau pearl, but as things stood, she was likely to wake up soon. Leon decided that she could use a bit of help in that regard. As a result, he'd prepared the White Dragon scale by healing several others in the bay. The scale immediately proved its power, erasing their grievous wounds with little trouble.

Leon was able to sense that its power wasn't limitless, and it couldn't generate a shield out of light magic as the tau pearl could, but when it came to healing—to the power of life, borne by the Great White Dragon—it surpassed even the Clear Day's pearl. With several healers beside him ready to intervene if things didn't go well, he summoned the scale. So luminous was it that even the strongest healer in the bay, who had been standing at Leon's shoulder, had to take a few steps back and shield his eyes.

Leon, however, found it brilliant, but not unbearably so—he even felt himself relax with it in hand. It gave him other thoughts about how to apply this power, but for the moment, he banished those thoughts until his current aim was achieved. He extended the palm-sized scale toward the sleeping Anna and let its power spill from between his fingers. Warm white light reached down to her, and for a moment, a thin shield halted it in its tracks.

Leon blinked, thinking the tau pearl was going to try and 'defend' Anna from this healing magic, but instead, the scale's power felt like it was only amplified by the barrier rather than stopped by it. Color returned to Anna's skin almost as soon as this amplified magic touched her. Her breathing, which had been shallow and instinctive for the past few days, steadied and deepened. Her face twitched a few times with visible pain, but quickly relaxed before Leon could cut off the flow of power.

In just a few seconds, Anna had gone from stabilized to practically healed, at least as far as anyone could tell from her appearance. Leon didn't assume too much, though; he knew better than most that soul realm injuries could be damned hard to recover from. When Anna began to stir, Leon cut off the flow of power, and the healers beside him rushed to her side. Her eyes cracked open, her eyelids fluttering almost as much as her aura.

"Mmm?" she hummed in confusion.

"Relax, Dame Anna," the lead healer insisted. He, however, was only an eighth-tier mage, and Anna was eleventh—though injured, she was still far stronger than he. With little effort, she pushed him aside as she tried to sit up. Leon walked over and pressed down on her shoulder, pushing her back into the bed.

"You've been injured, Anna," he said.

"Let's get you checked out before you start trying to get up." She blinked several times as his words sank in.

"How… how badly…?" she rasped, her throat sounding as dry as a desert.

"Quite severely," Leon said as the healers began their scans.

"Most thought you were dead. That you lived at all shows that your Ancestors must favor you quite a bit." Her breathing intensified as recollection flashed through her eyes.

"That woman…" she murmured.

"She came at me in the light…"

"She thrust her spear into your chest," Leon said.

"Your Adamant barely saved you. Had Antipatra pushed just a little farther, or spent just one more second attacking you with her power, your heart would've been destroyed utterly. Lana and Graniton did what they could for you in the moment. They likely saved your life." She looked around, her face turning red from the effort.

"Where… are they?"

"Preparing," Leon said.

"We beat Antipatra in that battle, but she and most of her forces managed to retreat. We've been repairing our arks and recovering our fallen and wounded in the days since."

"Days…?" Leon nodded in confirmation. She began trying to rise again, saying as she struggled, "I need… to prepare, too!" The healers jumped in, the lead healer almost panicking as he said, "Please, Dame Anna! You are not fully healed!"

"She isn't?" Leon asked, concern once again making its presence known in his expression.

"I've found some troubling signs that the connection between your body and your soul realm is still frayed," the healer said to Anna.

"You are in no condition to fight like this." Anna turned her eyes to Leon, almost pleading for him to do something. But Leon shook his head.

"Rest, Anna."

"I need to be ready!" she insisted, a single waver the only sign that her strength hadn't fully returned.

"To be ready, you must be fully healed," Leon said.

"If you head out to battle injured, you'll only be putting the rest of us in danger." Reluctant though she was to accept his logic, she still let herself be pushed back into the bed as the healers finished what they were doing and backed away, silently conferring amongst themselves for a minute or so.

"Well?" Anna insisted, though from her expression, Leon thought she already knew what the healer was going to say.

"I've not seen damage this bad done to someone's heart ever reversed," he admitted.

"This is somewhat new territory for me. What we've found is… troubling, to say the least." Anna leaned forward, pushing the boundary of what she could do without them getting upset. With an expectant look, she demanded, "… Then tell me! Stop delaying and just out with it!" With only a light grimace, the leader healer said, "Your soul realm is, indeed, damaged. I'm afraid that I cannot say how long it might be before you're back to 'healthy', if you ever get there at all."

"This may be… permanent…?" Anna asked, her eyes flickering downward in a sure sign that she was inspecting her body from within. Her look of dismay confirmed to Leon that while she hoped what she felt was wrong, she knew it to be true.

"I cannot say," the healer repeated more strongly.

"We'll do what we can. For now, my King, Dame Anna may benefit from continued use of the tau pearl, and perhaps of that scale. But she is not in fighting shape right now."

"We'll do what we can," Leon said as he extended the scale again. He was willing to use it until Anna was healed, or it crumbled into dust. As valuable as it was, and as much promise as it held, he valued her higher. Unfortunately, the effect it had on that specific injury was less than what anyone hoped for, but not insignificant. After an hour, Leon was convinced that, given a few years, perhaps a decade, Anna could be fully healed. Until then, however, her duties would have to be limited.

At the very least, she had to spend a few more days in the healer's bay, and she wouldn't be returning to the battlefield any time soon. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. As he was wrapping things up, Leon was intending to leave her with a few encouraging words, but his comm slate began blaring in his soul realm with the code for an emergency message. Wasting no time at all, Leon pulled it out and found Anshu on the other end.

"Leon!" the Fleet Admiral said without preamble, his professional demeanor barely holding up under the weight of whatever it was that he had to say.

"Artorion has been attacked!"

As he stared at the projection before him, Leon felt scorching hot rage. His blood boiled within his body and howled in his ears, while his heart raced and his hands shook, both with the almost undeniable urge to rise from his seat, take to the Void, and fly home, killing everything that dared to stand in his way. It wasn't a particularly productive feeling, but it was better than the stomach-churning worry that had set in immediately after Anshu's message.

Fortunately for him, an hour had passed, allowing that worry to be consumed by the subsequent rage like dry grass before a wildfire. It was a grim projection, one that put everything that Leon had ever built in danger. He saw projected before him an image of the portal that led into the Nexus that his people controlled—until now, apparently. A fleet had taken up position there, and the defensive platforms and arks that Leon had left there were little more than floating debris.

Leon looked around the room at the highest officers in his fleet, all of whom looked some combination of somber and seething. Even Red-Knuckle was there, and the dreadnought and carrier Captains that served under him. All had taken their lashes with some measure of dignity, though a few had seemed defiant enough that Leon would have them watched. He was hardly thinking about their insubordination and subsequent punishment right then, though.

"Those are the same kinds of arks that we saw plying the waves off our western coast," Anshu growled. Leon felt that statement hit him right in the heart. He'd been expecting to have to deal with Anax Alderion at some point; he'd hardly even considered an attack from the Ocean Lords, though, given his alliance with Miuna.

"Communication with Artorion went out for a couple days," Anshu continued.

"Hardly surprising given how far out we are from the relay points. But it came back just long enough for us to know that this isn't the extent of the attack: arks from this unidentified Ocean Lord smashed through our defenses around Queenfall, then surged southeast to seize the Lion's Portal and cut Artorion off from the northern vassals. Last we heard, a massive fleet of nearly five thousand arks was flying south along the Blue Feather River, razing every settlement they came across on the way to Artorion."

Leon barely held his composure. Elise, Cassandra, his mother, and so many others were all back there. He knew that every officer in the room likely had friends and family either in Artorion or along the Blue Feather River, given how much of it had been settled.

"We must turn around," Xanthippe bitterly said.

"I yearn to throw the head of Menander's killer at the foot of our Tribal Totem, but we cannot abandon our Tribe under such pressure. Artorion isn't defended well enough…" Leon felt the weight of everyone's gaze hitting him, judging him. He had decided to pull arks from his Kingdom's defenses to strengthen this punitive fleet. It might have been that decision that allowed this enemy fleet to break through.

'No,' he thought before his thoughts could bring him too far down that road.

'A fleet like this would've gotten through anyway…'

"Then we must—" Anshu began before the door was practically thrown open, a runner stumbling in.

"Your Majesty!" the young officer sputtered, almost collapsing under the weight of so many stronger mages turning their attention to him. He barely managed to choke out the words, "The scouts! They report that Antipatra's fleet has been reinforced by around two thousand arks!" Silence descended upon the room like a funeral shroud. Combined with the rest of her fleet, that meant that she outnumbered them around two-to-one—numerically, at least. Everyone knew it.

They'd failed to recover enough to mount another attack in time. Xanthippe restated something that Leon imagined many of his Captains now agreed with.

"We must pull back, my King." Leon gave her a dark look that demanded her silence before he turned his attention back to the runner at the door.

"Thank you. Return to your post." The runner looked more than grateful to leave, and no one spoke again until the door was shut behind him. All of them knew that any signs of disagreement at the higher levels could undermine morale at the lower levels. Before anyone could say anything, Leon rose from his seat to lean over the table, glowering at the projected portal and the hundreds of arks that had taken up positions around it, the debris of the portal's defenders all around them.

"Do we know if they have any more arks on the other side of the portal, just waiting for us to rush back and make an assault?"

"No," Anshu immediately answered.

"We can no longer communicate with anyone on the other side." Leon's jaw locked from the effort it took not to grind his teeth to powder. His fingers dug into the table, cracking the fine wood, though no one mentioned it.

"Antipatra before us, and… Triton, maybe? Someone powerful behind us…" No one said a word as he laid the situation out with deceptive calm. No one even seemed to breathe.

"If we turn around and rush back," Leon continued, "what do all of you think will happen?" He glanced around the room, inviting others to speak. None met his gaze—none, at least, until his eyes landed on Anshu.

"Antipatra will follow," he said, his tone low and hateful.

"Yes," Leon agreed.

"For her, this isn't about protecting the Halorian Cluster from us. This is an ideological battle. She believes that anyone with an Inherited Bloodline ought to be exterminated. She will follow us if we leave. Worst-case, we'd assault the portal, reinforcements waiting on the other side would pour through, and then Antipatra would arrive behind us, crushing us between two fleets. Even if we managed to break through and get through the portal, we don't have the numbers to challenge this Ocean Lord head-on.

Even in the best-case, where Antipatra allows us to retreat, we'd be abandoning everything we've built out here in the planes to Antipatra's nonexistent mercy." His eyes grazed Zhang and Daryun.

"She could even seize Demetrion and Yun."

"We're outnumbered here, too," Anshu pointed out, his tone lightening enough for Leon to understand that he was merely prompting Leon to continue, not arguing with his logic.

"In pure numbers, yes. By tonnage? That remains to be seen. Either way… we're committed to this fight." Leon almost had to choke the words out. They tasted like ash on his tongue, but they had to be said. This was the situation he'd led them into, after all.

"We can't return to Artorion. Not until Antipatra has been defeated."

"And we're to face her with what we have now?" Anshu pushed. Leon almost smiled; Anshu clearly already knew at least some of the elements of his strategy. Only the situation kept his lips turned firmly downward.

"We have four other fleets operating out here," he said.

"And those are just the other Task Forces. Though smaller in number, we have garrisons and new auxiliaries to call upon. If we consolidate, we'll have the advantage." A ripple of understanding passed through the officers, but the flaws in Leon's strategy were fairly obvious to all of them.

"That's if Antipatra holds off long enough for us to link up with the others," Xanthippe said, speaking for the rest who hesitated to speak against Leon.

"The Void is large," Leon said.

"We can maintain distance. How long until we can link up with the other Task Forces?" His golden eyes landed upon Anshu, and his Fleet Admiral was ready with a response. He let his hands glide over the console that controlled the table projection, and soon, everyone was looking at the Great Strand of Rhea and the five corridors that the Task Forces were meant to forge.

"The other Task Forces have reached their halfway points," he said.

"Alexander and Nikolaos have gone even farther." That Marcus and Valeria were ahead of schedule would've been good news in any other situation. Now, however, Leon knew that meant that they would take longer to fall back.

"Our relays are still linked?" he asked.

"Yes," Anshu said.

"They have likely received the same message we did. I'd expect requests for orders within the next few hours."

"Order them to head to…" He paused, examining the corridor that Menander and Task Force Torfinn were supposed to carve into Rhea. His eyes landed on a point several clusters behind.

"Here: the Neether Cluster. Once they've assembled, they'll reinforce us, and we'll deal with Antipatra together." He paused intentionally to raise the drama of his next statement. His lips turned up into a shallow smile for the first time since the news of what was happening at Artorion had reached him.

"That's assuming that we don't kill her first." He was about to launch into his strategy on that front, his mind already whirring with ideas of how to approach this problem more proactively than simply hiding out in the Void, when Xanthippe asked, "And Artorion?" Leon's smile flickered downward.

"Artorion… is strong. We cannot help them right now. Not until we kill the enemy before us. So until that happens… we'll have to trust in the Kingdom's defenses. But once we're done here, we'll return. With the fury of a thousand storms, we will return! And everyone who thought to touch our people will die screaming!" His officers finally started looking more confident, though the air of despondence persisted.

Still, they stomped and shouted their approval, and when the room fell silent again, Leon began to elucidate his half-formed plan…