Aetherios System: Whirlwind

Book 2: Chapter 48: Ill-Gotten

“Where are you going? You can barely walk, meatsack,” Obby floated around his shoulders, following as he trudged along on his unsteady feet.

He left the medical tent still exhausted, body strained beyond a breaking point. But Alex forced himself to move anyway, dragging his battered body through the warcamp with the single-mindedness of a man who had nothing left to prove and everything left to win.

The ground was muddy underfoot, turned half-frozen from the northern chill and streaked with dark trails from blood, boots, and beast-gore. Every few steps sent a fresh jolt through tired bones. Something clicked in his shoulder every time he moved it too far, but he didn’t stop.

He couldn’t stop, not while the echo of his own failure still rang louder than the memories of the battlefield screams.

Soldiers still awake in the night, watched him. Whispers followed in his wake like high circling scavenger birds.

“Is that him?”

“Didn’t the prince flatten him?”

“He’s the one that fought him, the Soaring Heir.”

He didn’t look at them as he passed. He knew what they saw in him, a limping, bloodied mess of a man with a haunted look and too many scars, too many broken bones. But his eyes weren’t broken, they were locked ahead, focused on single tent.

The two sentries at the entrance shifted as he approached. One stepped forward to stop him,

Alex didn’t slow down. He shouldered past the sentry and shoved aside the tent flap with one arm, the other half-dangling at his side, and stepped into the golden flicker of lamplight.

Inside, a cluster of officers looked up from a wide-spread war map. Topographical ridges, unit markers, it was all there. Captain Tharek Drenn stood at the head, hands braced on the table.

Alex said nothing. He didn’t salute. Didn’t speak. Instead, he just stared at the man like he was trying to burn a hole through the space between them and into his skull. Drenn’s lips tightened. The silence stretched uncomfortably, then the Captain raised one finger, pointed to the officers.

“Out.”

They filed out in a silent shuffle without any argument, casting sideways glances at Alex like he might suddenly implode. The tent flap closed behind them.

Drenn folded his hands behind his back and waited. Alex limped one step forward, then another before straightening to his full height. “I need a wyvern.”

There was no apology in his voice for barging in, no explanation, just a statement made with the same intensity as a man asking for a glass of water after crawling out of a burning house.

Drenn tilted his head. “You want to ride one?”

“I want to kill it,” Alex said flatly. “I’m going to kill it for an experiment.”

The captain stared at him intensely. One could almost hear the “what the hell happened to you” behind his eyes.

“…You understand my hesitancy since, we don’t get the mount back if that’s the plan.”

Alex nodded. “I figured.”

Drenn let out a low breath. He glanced once at the map, then back at Alex. He waited for the captain to make a decision, never looking away. Eventually, he guessed the captain could see the determination in his stare, the fiery passion of self-loathing and wrath behind his eyes that Alex was trying to squelch.

“Fine. I’ll put in the requisition.” A beat passed. “But you’d better pray the quartermaster doesn’t ask questions.”

Alex didn’t smile, but a weight shifted off his shoulders. “I also need something else,” he said.

Drenn’s eyes narrowed. “More than a wyvern?”

Alex hesitated for a moment, knowing his next request even made him question his sanity already, so he knew how Captain Drenn would look at him. “This one… you’re not going to like.”

He stepped forward again, just barely managing to stay upright, and met the Captain’s gaze dead-on. “I need the body,” he said…

“… of your strongest fallen soldier.”

***

Within twenty-four hours, Alex got what he asked for, even if Captain Drenn would never look at him the same way again. He ignored that, and focused on his plans moving forward. There was so much for him to do, Alex had to write down the steps in his notebook, and even then it was hard to keep everything straight.

“No better time to get started than now,” Obby chimed in his mind. “You’ve put off every aspect of your growth to focus on the others and ensure their safety in this war. You’ve not even spent your experience points, again.”

I know, I know, okay. It’s just, there was a lot going on, lot of things on my mind. Not dying, being the biggest one.

He really had been rather busy once they set boots on the front lines. It was a constant slog of fighting, death, eating, then keeping lookout for more fighting, and more death. But, if there was one thing Alex had learned about the bloodbath that Terraxum called a war, it was good for earning experience points.

Almost reluctantly, he brought up all the past kill notification he had been pushing away since it all started. He was excited, and dismayed, by what he saw.