And so the promised Sideshow Saturday has come.
Btw, before you read this, please take note of the dates of the stories in comparison with the main story(which started in 293 AA)
Two sides I
Elladan POV(271 AA)
Elladan looked around him as he stood in the paved parade grounds of the Varangian barracks. Many of the people there were just like him, standing alone and looking around at the other recruits as they waited for their instructor to get here, though here and there, a small group or two chatted amongst themselves. They were most likely old comrades that had decided to apply together.
What they, and Elladan, had applied for was the one and only chance to be a part of Lord Commander Mercury Iridium's Varangian Guard; a Guard that stretched further back than the Alliance, further even than the old Kingdom of Damocles.
It was a Guard that had been known for two primary reasons; unquestioned prowess both on and off of the battlefield and undivided loyalty to its founder, Lord Commander Mercury. It was a Guard unit that was said to be able to turn entire battles around, even from before they had hit their growth spurt after the Third Rebellion of Atkins.
It was said, and generally with good reason behind it, that if you became a member of the Varangian Guard, you would be exempt from any authority other than the lord commander's and that you could take command of lesser units in an emergency. Hell, even the Tribunal was said to be unable to directly command you if you joined the Varangian Guard.
The pay and perks of being a member of the Varangian Guard was also said to be extraordinary, and judging by the starting figure that Elladan had seen on the contract that he had signed earlier, the pay that he would receive fresh out of training would be more than quadruple of what he currently earned as a senior Decanus in the Alliance army.
This did not mean that just anyone could join the Varangian Guard however, as you not only had to be among the best to simply pass the physical entrance exams, but also had to pass a psychiatric evaluation to even be allowed to begin training.
You also had to sign a contract stating that you would never utter a word of what happened during your training to anyone outside of the Varangian Guard, under penalty of being charged with treason if you broke your contract, and to top it all off, you only had one single shot at making it through training.
If you for some reason, no matter what reason, were discharged from training, then you would forever be barred from trying again. And yet, despite all of this, people still flocked to join the Guard every time they announced that a new class was being started up.
New classes were not exactly something that came at a scheduled interval, as they only came if the Guard lost enough members to warrant using the resources to start a new class or, as in this class's case, Lord Commander Mercury needed to stock up on his Guard before going to war again.
As Elladan looked around at the two hundred or so that had made it this far, he knew that less than a tenth of them would end up actually being in the Varangian Guard, but he also knew that he needed to be among that small fraction that passed, no matter the cost.
The reason for this was quite simple; Elladan needed the pay-check that came with the job for his family's sake. He had actually been able to support them fairly well with his old wage, but if he wanted his two sons and one daughter to get into a higher institution of learning and advance further in life than he ever could, then he needed more money.
He had already tried and failed the entrance exams for the Special Engineering's Corps, or simply SEC, as it was commonly called, three times, but their entrance exams were even more gruelling than the Varangian Guard's. They had both physical, psychiatric, intelligence and ingenuity exams before you had to stand before a committee and find a solution to whatever problem that they asked of you.
The people that made it into the SEC were not only paid even more than those of the Varangian Guard, but they were also given five years' worth of training and education before they even had a chance to graduate.
After that however, you would be set for life, not to mention contracted to be in the SEC for at least 30 years before you could even begin to consider retiring sometime in the future. It was not entirely unfounded however, as by the time that you had graduated, the government would have spent more money on your education than an average worker would earn in his entire lifetime, and that was before he subtracted all of his various expenses.
The guys in the SEC were not only trained to build various stuff for the army, but they could also be deployed to an active war to solve strategic and tactical problems that arose. Their extensive military training with all kinds of weapons, and without any for that matter, was done purely to extend their life expectancy, even though they were only ever allowed to participate in the fighting if all escape paths had been cut off and fighting was the only option left.
Elladan had during his early years in the service heard that the lord commander had once been asked for aid by one of his supreme commanders, which he had sent to war, but which had been stopped dead in his tracks by the enemy.
Instead of sending the extra Swords that the supreme commander had requested, the lord commander had sent a small group from the SEC to fix the problem. Despite the supreme commander being furious at, as he had said it, only getting the breadcrumbs when he had asked for the entire bread, there was nothing that he had been able to do about it.
The Varangian Guard might have been able to take command of lesser units to protect the lord commander, but the SEC was fully allowed to take command of all but an entire Sword. They could not commandeer a commander, but there was also very little that a commander, or even a supreme commander, could do to reprimand them if they took control of his forces outside of active battles and which did not endanger them to the enemy.
So to get back to the story; the group had shown up inside the camp, spent one day on resting and deciding what to do, before they had commandeered half the army to build a bridge over the nearby river under their guidance.
That river had actually been what had stopped the supreme commander, as the single other crossing of it was guarded by the enemy army, and trying to attack it would have been like funnelling his men into a bottleneck to watch them get slaughtered.
The reason why no one had constructed a river before, as quite a few regular trained engineers were always imbedded within each Sword, was that this river was not only half a kilometre wide, but also 10 metres deep at its deepest and it was flowing quite fast.
Simply put, it had been considered impossible to build a bridge with the materials at hand and within a reasonable timeframe, so when a 10 metre wide sturdy wooden bridge had stood ready not two weeks later, the enemy had yet to realize what had happened.
The supreme commander's entire army had crossed the bridge just before sundown the very same day, and during that night, they had attacked the enemy encampment from behind and utterly crushed them, ensuring an end to the war not a week afterwards.
It was said, though mostly unofficially, that the supreme commander had been quite reluctant to let the small group go afterwards.
Anyway, to get back to Elladan's own story; what motivated him to join the Varangian Guard was also what might have inhibited him from actually joining them. It was rare for members of the Varangian Guard to have families, and those that had them had always gained them after they joined the Guard, as the family was thought to be an obstacle for someone to sacrifice himself in the line of duty if it was required.
That was why Elladan had discreetly asked his family to lay low for a while, as he was sure that if he could just get into the Guard, then there would at least be a chance that he could remain there. Strangely enough however, the family matter had been the only thing about his past that he had needed to hide.
Elladan was actually a human from the province now known as Artaxia, though its name had once been, Lofia. It had only been annexed by the Alliance a few decades ago, so Elladan still remembered how it had been before.
Lofia had been a country with a king at its head, but the church as its ruler. Everywhere you went, you knew that you had to pay a small tribute to the local church to pray for safe passage and to help the poor, though Elladan was unsure of how much of the gold had actually been spent on either.
After it had refused all attempts by the Alliance to peacefully join it, or at least become a protectorate, the Alliance had announced a shocking declaration that stated that the neighbouring country and long-time enemy of Lofia had agreed to be assimilated by the Alliance in exchange for the opportunity to finally settle the rivalry between the two countries, and after ensuring that the king of the neighbouring country's daughter was wed to the lord commander.
Lofia had not expected this even in its wildest dreams, so when the combined forces soon after swooped over the border, the kingdom had quickly fallen. Though the kingdom fell and had its name changed, the church still retained its power, as the Alliance until then had continued to believe that it had been the king that had been in power.
Instead of trying to reclaim their old country, the church had sent out missionaries to the other parts of the Alliance, which had not been problem as freedom to believe in whatever religion had been guaranteed by law in the Alliance' Charter.
As Elladan had later understood it, those missionaries had gone beyond simply trying to convert the native people in the rest of the Alliance, as they had apparently begun to burn some at the stake after watching them perform a long-honoured ritual of theirs.
The incident had been seen as nothing major and the missionaries had been rounded up by the local authorities and convicted guilty of murder, but that had been when everything had gone south. The church in Artaxia had long been accustomed to simply being able to get its members out of whatever mess they had become embroiled in by claiming that it was their gods' will and then demand their release.
They had tried to do so with these members as well, but the Alliance was not built up like the church's old country had been, and the request had been waved off without much thought and the perpetrators had later been executed in accordance with the law.
That had not gone over overly well with the church back in Artaxia, and they had then begun stirring up the populace under the pretext of the Alliance being a heinous country run by heretics and devil worshippers. It had actually escalated into a full on rebellion within Artaxia, which was when the lord commander had taken control of the situation.
He had swooped in with his personal First Sword, as well as the few that were already stationed on the continent, and had subsequently crushed the uprising with brutal efficiency. After the whole thing was over, the church had thought that it would not be sanctioned, as it had never actually participated in the fighting, and had also sent several coffers full of gold to the lord commander as appeasement.
He had sent them back, along with army units instructed to round up all the priests and church officials that had been confirmed to have helped instigate the rebellion, before he had had them all publicly executed in a brutal yet efficient show to the people of Artaxia that the church was no longer the one in control.
Though it would have been much easier to wipe out the entire church, the lord commander had taken the time to only single out those that had actively participated in the rebellion, so there had still been some people left to rebuild the church after that, though those people had been fairly low ranked previously and had since chosen to reinvent the church into the peaceful humanitarian organization that it was today.
The reason why Elladan had been nervous about whether he should try to hide his Artaxian past or not was that his grandfather had been one of those that had been executed, so it would have been a fair assumption to make that it should have banned him from joining the very Guard of the one that had ordered the execution, but it had turned out that it did not matter who your ancestors were when you applied for any kind of job in the Alliance.
"Alright recruits, stand in line so that I can see your faces!", one of the men that Elladan assumed would be their instructors, shouted, "after tonight, your very lives will belong to me! You will run when I tell you to, you will fight when I tell you to, you will sleep when I tell you to, you will piss when I tell you to and if any of you ever have a problem with doing anything that I say, I want you to take a good look at the gate over there!", the instructor shouted and nodded towards the gate leading to the outside world, "take a good look at it, because on the other side of that gate lies the freedom from the hell that I will put you through, and it is always open on this side!"
Everyone took a good look at the gate, though Elladan's was hardly any more than a quick cursory glance, as he already knew that the only time that he would leave through it was when he had made it through this training.
Atanalcar POV(270 AA)
Atanalcar was a middle-aged unmarried human lord currently living in Artaxia. His influence currently did not stretch that far, but that was something that he was working on changing.
It was to this end that he found himself standing alone in the middle of the night in the dark reaches of a desolate wood half the country away from where his estate was located. He was waiting for his contact to arrive, and he had better do so soon, but if the information that he had been promised proved valuable enough, then he supposed that he could let the delay slide.
"Come on, where are you?", Atanalcar said as he rubbed his hands together for warmth, while also being able to see his own breath in front of him.
Perhaps he had decided not to show up anyway? No, Atanalcar had been assured that the contact was desperate for gold, and after that, it had been a simple matter of secretly getting in touch with him and promising him enough gold to clear all of his problems if he was able to dig up something damming on Atanalcar's current target.
Then could he have been stopped from coming here? If he had been, then that would mean that Atanalcar was most likely also in danger, which was something that he could not allow to happen this early into the game.
Failure was not an option when your endgame was as high as Atanalcar's was.
Bushes being pushed to the side and leaves and branches being trod on could be heard from somewhere to the side of Atanalcar, but instead of waiting in the clearing for the person to come to him, Atanalcar quietly moved back behind some foliage to keep watch over who entered the clearing.
A man fitting his contact's description soon pushed out of the forest and into the clearing, where he looked around confused, before he started tapping his foot impatiently and nervously look around as the traitor that he was.
Atanalcar let him stew there for a little while to check whether anyone had followed him, but when no one seemed to appear after a while, he slowly and silently moved out from his hiding place.
"You are late", Atanalcar said quietly from behind his contact's back.
The contact jumped in surprise, before he turned to face Atanalcar and said, "do not scare me like that! I had to wait for the others to fall asleep before I could get away, but I have what you want".
"What do you have on Earl Hilkins then?", Atanalcar asked without paying much heed to anything else.
His contact was actually one of the servants of said earl, but the man had found himself to be fond of drinking and gambling, and had subsequently ended up with a rather large debt that he could not pay, though he had somehow managed to keep all of this away from anyone's notice.
"Do you have the gold?", the servant asked cautiously.
"Of course, I always make good on my end of a deal", Atanalcar huffed as he withdrew the large pouch of gold from his belt and opened it just enough for the contact to see the gold coins inside, before he closed it again and withdrew it from the contact's already reaching hands, "information first, then you get paid".
The contact fiddled for a little bit, as if finally deciding whether or not he should actually go through with the betrayal of his master, before he finally relented to the power of gold and began to spill his guts, "look, I would be flayed alive if anyone found out that I told you this, so you cannot tell anyone that it was I that tipped you off, but my master is not as pure-spirited as he wants everyone to believe".
"How so?", Atanalcar inquired, though he was beginning to wander whether this man actually had any information worth what he was paying him.
"…He has a secluded summer home on the island of Tal Virv, you know, the tropical one to the north, the one that they call Artaxia's pearl", the informant said nervously.
"Yes, everyone knows that", Atanalcar said irritated, "if you have nothing better to give me than him cheating on his wife with the local tail on his vacation, then you can kiss the gold goodbye".
"No, no, no, no, there is more", the contact exclaimed while waving his hands in a most annoying way, "the place is not used for anything even remotely like that. The guards there would never let anyone inside that had not been double and triple-checked and cleared beforehand".
"What is it used for then?", Atanalcar asked in a bored tone to get the guy to speed up, though this latest information was actually quite intriguing to him.
What could he possibly need that much security to protect? Whatever it was, it had to be something that he would not want the rest of the world to know about, and if Atanalcar could get to know what it was, then he could use that information as a stepping stone to get closer to his real target.
"…He is conducting experiments in the basement involving sorcery and living people", the contact finally got to the point.
…No! This was simply too good to be true! Sorcery! It had been in the very Charter of the Alliance that any and all practises of sorcery were banned, and now Atanalcar found that his current target was conducting it in his very basement! Screw using it to blackmail the guy, with this information, Atanalcar could usurp him!
"Now, what about my gold?", the contact nervously inquired as he longingly looked at the bag of gold in Atanalcar's right hand.
"If this is true, then you have earned every last piece of it", Atanalcar said and extended the bag, but before the man could take it, he took it just out of reach of him and said, "but if it turns out to all be a lie, then you will find death to be something that you will come to long for".
"I swear, it is not", the contact said as he was finally given the bag of gold, though it was not without one last longing look at it from Atanalcar.
Getting that much gold had required him to dig up all of his reserve holdings and take more than a few loans from what sparse allies he did have, but with this information, he would soon be able to get his hands on more gold than that in a single heartbeat.
"So, what happens now?", the contact nervously asked as he let his greedy fingers rummage through the bag.
"We split up", Atanalcar responded, amused at the obvious fear from the man, "I go back home, you disappear to some sunny little island where no one knows you, and hopefully, we will never see each other again".
"Okay, then I guess that I better head back then", the man said and turned around and walked out of the clearing.
Atanalcar remained in the clearing for only a short while before he too disappeared back into the invisible darkness of the forest.
And so part I has ended. Stay tuned for part II next week.
