Chapter 104. It Had Begun
The battle was as swift as it was decisive. In a mere night, the Empress overwhelmed the Academy and flattened everything within. Although it sounded as if she bowled over the Academy and showed off her military might, it wasn’t much of a fight, truth be told. The Sword Saint had been summoned to the border, and the rest of the faculty, powerful mages, and even promising apprentices had beaten a measured retreat not long after the banquet, leaving a husk of a city behind. History would mark it as the beginning of the Empire’s invasion, but aside from that, there wasn’t much to say about it. There were no heroes, no bold final stands, no ferocious battles with life and death on the line. The Empire hammered the city from afar, then swept in afterwards to collect the refuse.
And it was refuse that remained. The unprivileged, the weaker mages, those without connections or backing, and the flotsam of a dozen small schools who hadn’t gotten the notice to retreat in time; that was what was left. The sacrificial lambs, too weak to protest their own fate, were swept up by the Empire’s wave and dragged out to sea to die. They would be forgotten, naught but the nameless victims of a faceless war, their names wiped out from history, no more than a footnote’s worth of statistic.
Those who survived, for some did survive, were dragged before the Empress. Forced to their knees. Faces pressed against the battle-stained deck of her warship. And, one at a time, the Empress harvested them, reaping the cores out of their body like ripe fruits from the vine, storing them in the raging heart of her warship, in the depths of her vault, or gifting them to her most loyal soldiers. The remains, now doubly refuse, were thrown into the mines. They no longer had cores, but they still possessed their powerful, resilient mage bodies; compared to true mages with cores, they were nothing, but compared to civilians, they were a powerful labor force, where one mage could perform the work of ten mortal laborers—a hundred, if their Tier had been high enough, and they’d invested enough into reforging their body.
At the Empress’s side stood her trusted lieutenants and one young man, who had only just recently taken third place in the tournament. One after another, he watched as the mages he had battled against days earlier were forced to their knees and divested of their cores. No expression showed on his face. His uniform was neat, and his hair was perfectly tied back. There was no hesitation in his body, not an ounce, and why would there be? This was the way the world should be. Righteousness was being reasserted, the wild savages brought into civilization. There was no reason to hesitate, when there wasn’t a single shadow on his spotless conscience, when he was the force of good, the power of light, fighting back this primitive shadow.
Thump. Another mage, driven to their knees. But for the first time, the young man’s expression shifted. He almost made to take a step forward, then halted, visibly restraining himself.
The Empress paused. She looked at her young protégé, a ghost of interest on her face. “You know this one?”
“Ma’am! He was a worthy contestant in the tournament!” Laurent barked, snapping a salute.
“Is that so? Worthy of becoming one of my soldiers?” the Empress asked. She reached down and gripped the mage’s chin, lifting his head. A passable face stared back, a bland smile on its lips.
“In my unworthy opinion… yes, ma’am.”
She turned to the mage. “What do you say? This is a rare opportunity, and shouldn’t be taken lightly. I won’t give you a second chance.”
Rhys let out a dry laugh. “With all due respect, ma’am… I’m nothing but trash.”
Rhys wasn’t particularly loyal to his school, or the Alliance. What he was loyal to, was his freedom. Looking around him, at the white-coated white-haired soldiers who were given their cores by the Empress, who lived only to serve the Empress, he saw no freedom. He could remain a mage, but he would lose his soul, and that was a price he was unwilling to pay.