Is it just me or does anyone else feel that we have focusing on this particular siege for quite some time now?

A day of reckoning II

Loivissa POV
It had been 10 days since Irisweld had finally been subdued and nine days since they had begun their march southeast again. The last time that they had heard news from Mercury was six days ago, which had not exactly made things easier for Loivissa to function as Mercury's emissary, since that report had not painted a very positive outlook on how long they would be able to last, and then there was the fact that a new report should have been sent to them at least two days ago, but it had apparently never even arrived in Ottaviano, nor had any of the supply ships returned.

Almost all of Anax Manin's entourage had advised him to suspect the worst and accept that Mercury had been beaten, which would make it null and void to continue their forced march to try and reach him before it was too late, and although Loivissa could see how they would come to that conclusion, she knew with absolute certainty that Mercury was still alive.

The reason for this knowledge was not a sentimental one, as many of the advisors had suggested when Loivissa had first told them of her knowledge, but rather the fact that she could not yet feel the strain on her ability to reach her magic that she was sure would have come if Mercury had died and she had taken over his role as Naina's guardian.

Of course, she had not been able to divulge that particular information to the advisors or Anax Manin, as she could only guess what would happen to Naina if word ever got out of what she could do, but she had been able to base her argument on this by stating that when Mercury really died, she would know it instantly as she would inherit his responsibilities, but with enough vagueness to not let anyone know just what those responsibilities were.

In the end, it had been Anax Manin that had made the call to put his trust in her this time, as it could be possible that Mercury's forces were still holding out and that it was just the supply ships that had been stopped from returning.

So they had continued their forced march, which had actually managed to cut off two entire days off of their previous estimated travel time. Soon, the main army would reach the outskirts of where Mercury had made camp, but Loivissa, being anxious to confirm with her own eyes that Mercury was indeed not dead yet, had flown just a little ahead of the rest.

We are nearing, dear, Adûn's voice told her, and there are no smoking pillars yet. That is a good sign, is it not?

Not if they burned out days ago, Loivissa replied grimly.

You would have felt it if he had died, Adûn assured her for what felt like the hundredth time, just remember to keep your head clear when we get there, so that it does not end with him having to save us, instead of the other way around.

I know, thank you, Loivissa poured her gratitude across their link at his reassurance.

There was still so much left to be said and done between her and Mercury for her to reach him only to find out that he was already dead. That would have been an unusually cruel twist of fate if that was to happen, or even worse; if she arrived just in time to see him get killed.

Since the pair was flying high up in the skies, everything on the ground looked so small and miniature that Loivissa could easily forget that those small green dots down there were in fact fully grown trees and not small bushes.

Still, when the camp finally came into view, she was sure that it had looked differently when she left. First of all, she was pretty sure that Mercury had not nearly had enough troops with him to have to set up camp outside of the palisade walls around his previous campsite nor to afford to have so many strolling around on the slope leading up to the lake, but the thing that had changed the most was the lack of any outer walls.

We are too late!, Loivissa realized with dread as she finally comprehended that it was the Ra'zac Empire that had set up camp on the hills.

In order for them to have set up camp like that, they had to have been there for a few days at the least, which meant that Mercury's defences must have fallen several days ago, but that he must have made it out somehow.

Perhaps not, dear, look up at the lake, Adûn directed her gaze up towards a small spot beside the lake that was about a fourth of the way between the river to Terzigno and the river to Ercolano.

It only took a moment for Loivissa to figure out what he meant, as she too spotted the half-circle of soldiers that stood taller than those around them and which was slowly but surely shrinking in on itself. How these troops had managed to survive until now when the Ra'zac Empire had clearly felt safe enough to set up camp in their very base was a question for later, as right now, they needed a rescue, fast.

There were only a few lethrblaka circling in the air, so few in fact that Loivissa had no doubt that she would be able to take them on, but the main problem for the shrinking circle seemed to be the mass of enemies that kept converging on their position.

Adûn!, Loivissa requested wordlessly, knowing that Adûn would know what she meant, as she drew Aiedail from its sheath and gave a final check to both her physical armour and the wards surrounding the pair.

Just as they flew above the unsuspecting lethrblaka, Adûn angled his wings for a steep dive and let loose a mighty roar to both announce their entry into the battle, as well as to give courage to the struggling dökkálfar soldiers below.

The lethrblaka furthest up in the sky did not even have time to turn its head upwards to find the source of the roar, as Adûn slammed down into it, grabbed a hold of the joints where its wings were connected to its body and used these as handles to throw it downward and into another lethrblaka, which it collided with, with enough force to make both creatures fall out of the sky and down upon their own campsite.

Before the two creatures had even hit the ground, Adûn had already moved to begin incinerating a ring around the entrenched dökkálfar soldiers, before he made a quick turn out over the lake to lose their new pursuers over it, as Loivissa knew from her education that ra'zac and lethrblaka were afraid of deep water.

Surprisingly, and more than a bit confusing to Loivissa, the two remaining lethrblaka did not veer off or even seem the least bit apprehensive about pursuing them over the water, even though Adûn was practically skimming the surface of it.

I think the one on the right is going to strike in a moment, Loivissa warned Adûn as she checked all of his natural blind spots and fed the information to him.

On it, prepare to get wet, Adûn warned her back right before he dropped the last few metres into the water, which caused massive waves to form around the pair as a result.

The lethrblaka that Loivissa had warned him about had already begun its attack when they had hit the water, but it managed to straighten up from its collision course just before its claws could reach the pair.

I do not think that they will risk coming this close to the water, Loivissa assumed as the two lethrblaka began circling above them with the occasional feinted strike that would always veer off before the creature even got close to the water.

I think that you are right, Adûn agreed with her, they may not fear the water, but they still seem to know that they cannot survive in it.

The pair kept swimming around in the surface with the two lethrblaka circling above them like vultures, as neither party was capable of moving on the other without severely risking their own lives. Loivissa and Adûn could not get up in the sky again because the lethrblaka would strike from above the second that they tried to do so, and the lethrblaka could not reach them in turn because attempting to do so would endanger them of becoming trapped in the water.

They were at a stalemate, but considering that it was unlikely that it would be Mercury's group that prevailed if things kept remaining as they were, a stalemate was not a good thing for them.

Take a deep breath, Adûn suddenly instructed, which Loivissa only just managed to do before he dived below the waves and headed in a random direction once fully submerged.

The water resistance as they moved forward at a tremendous speed was a lot stronger than the air resistance of a similar speed would have been, and it had in the beginning nearly forced Loivissa to empty her lungs from the sheer pressure alone.

Adûn, I cannot hold my breath for much longer, Loivissa mentally told Adûn as she began to feel an overwhelming urge to exhale and then inhale, despite knowing that doing so under the current conditions would mean that she would be inhaling water.

Alright, I am going up, Adûn acknowledged and changed his direction to an almost vertical ascent.

When they broke through the surface, water splashed all around them like an explosion had gone off, but even as Loivissa heaved breath after new breath, she still managed to observe that they were now near the south-eastern end of the lake, while the two lethrblaka were respectively circling above where they had dived under and above the north-eastern end.

This ensured that Adûn now had time to flap his wings and ascend to an equal height as the lethrblaka before they managed to get near the pair. As the aerial manoeuvres commenced again, it quickly became clear that Adûn would end up on top, despite it being two to one.

With a dive, a roll, and a quick straightening out, Adûn managed to get below one of the lethrblaka with his belly towards its belly, before he grabbed its feet and used them as handles to throw the surprised creature around and down into the lake with a high-pitched screech emanating from its beak, before he turned his attention towards the other one.

The other one had seemingly lost all resolve to continue the fight after seeing its kin and last remaining ally get dragged down to certain death, as it immediately turned around and tried to flee towards the southeast, despite there not being anywhere where it could flee to if they were defeated here today.

We cannot let it get away, Loivissa commanded, although Adûn was already hot on its tail when she said it.

Because Adûn was faster than the lethrblaka, they soon caught up with it, though they had left the lake behind a while ago, and before it had time to react or do anything to defend itself, Adûn stroke down on it and put his teeth to its neck, before he crunched down and broke through the hard exoskeleton.

As the lethrblaka fell limp, they dropped it and was about to head back to the fight, as Loivissa was sure that Anax Manin had to have arrived on the scene by now, but as they turned around, Loivissa suddenly found that she could hardly breathe and that her heart was pounding erratically at what she had just learned had happened.

"No…", she meekly whispered.

Mercury POV
Mercury looked into his executioner's eyes as the man raised his sword to strike down and separate his head from its body, when suddenly, a loud familiar roar split the air. His opponent faltered for a moment to look up to see what had made the sound, but Mercury already knew who had made it.

I suppose that it would be useless to die now of all times, Mercury mused with a slight grin as he seized the opportunity and grabbed at his distracted opponent's legs, before he roughly yanked them away from under him.

The black-armoured man went down with a scream of surprise, while still clinging on to both his sword and his shield, which prevented him from using his arms to try and soften his landing. He hit the ground with a loud thud and a clank of metal, but before he had time to realize what had happened, Mercury had already deployed his right arm-blade and jumped up on top of his chest, like a cat pouncing on its prey.

As Mercury landed with his knees on the man's stomach and his left arm supporting his body on the man's chest, the last expression that he saw from his opponent was a combination of shock, confusion and fear, before he, with all of his strength and a snarl on his lips, plunged his right arm-blade down in between the slits in the man's helmet.

Just as Mercury's blade could not go in any deeper because the helmet would not allow his hand to move past it, a ground-trembling shock rushed across the plains, but before Mercury could even begin to pull out his arm-blade and begin concentrating on somehow making it back to his remaining men, a new and unsuspected danger suddenly presented itself.

Adûn had begun incinerating a ring around his men to try and help them against the incoming hordes, but unfortunately for Mercury, he was currently located on the path that would soon be incinerated. Though Mercury could certainly see the irony in Loivissa arriving just in time to save them all, only to then incinerate him by accident, he did not like the idea of burning to death all that much.

He only had a split-second to get to safety, which was not nearly enough time to actually get out of the blast radius, so he did the only thing that he could think of; seek cover. That entailed that instead of pulling out his blade from his previous opponent's skull, he let it be inside as he twisted the body on top of himself, so that it would take the blunt of the fire instead of him.

The impromptu shield worked, to a degree at least, as Mercury was not directly seared by the flames, but they did heat up the metal of his meat-shield's armour, which then seared Mercury's left hand, since it was the one holding the corpse up on top of him, while his right hand was still stuck in the skull that prevented the flames from actually hitting Mercury's head.

As he laid there on the ground and waited for the torrent of flames to pass, Mercury had the disgusting pleasure of having to endure the blood and whatnot that flowed from the hole in the head and down Mercury's arm-blade and into his right arm, as well as dripped down upon Mercury's face, though the face-mask prevented most of it from immediately connecting with his skin.

Still, all things considered, it was a far better outcome than what could have happened otherwise, and when the torrent of flames finally passed by, Mercury did not even waste a second before he pushed the body off of him and finally drew back his arm-blade from his well-done meat-shield's head.

All around him was a desolate wasteland of blackened corpses and burning grass and bushes. That would have been his fate if he had not been as lucky and as fast as he had been, but now was not the time to dwell on it, as Mercury clenched his burned left hand to stop the searing pain, at least momentarily.

A few enemies still surrounded the place where Mercury's expected his men to be, as Adûn had not incinerated the grounds immediately next to his men to avoid hitting them in the crossfire, and it was in their direction that Mercury quickly began a light jog.

When he arrived there, both parties had still yet to notice him, but when he stabbed both his right arm-blade and his newly deployed left arm-blade straight through the backs of two men obstructing his path to safety, that changed.

"My lord!?", Vardo exclaimed astounded as Mercury came into view after having drawn back his blades and let the bodies fall to the ground, "I thought that you were over with Datia and the others!? Wait, were you caught in the fire!?"

"What gave it away?", Mercury grumbled as he pushed past his stunned guard to get inside the relative safety of the semi-circle before the enemy could regroup and attack again.

"Well, all but your chest is slightly blackened and burned at places, and then well, your cloak is also kind of on fire", Vardo nervously said as he followed Mercury further inside the semi-circle.

"Huh?", Mercury ineloquently huffed as he turned to see that not only was a good portion of the outer parts of his cloak gone, but small flames actually licked up from the seared edges.

"Here, let me help you", Vardo offered as he began hitting the burning edges to stop the fire, "it looks like you have been burned on all sides, so you must have been inside the area that was hit, but then how did you survive, my lord?"

"I found a human-sized shield", Mercury grumbled as he kept walking towards the water's edge to properly douse the flames, though Vardo still kept trying to put them out as he walked.

Just before Mercury reached the water, a horn sounded from the north, but it was not a horn that Mercury remembered had ever been used by the Ra'zac Empire during his siege, and when he stopped dead in his tracks to find the source of it, he saw the mass of dökkálfar soldiers virtually flowing up the hill, easily skipping past the burned and crumpled remains of his palisade walls.

About bloody time, Mercury mused internally, but before he could think of anything else, a splash of cold water hit his back, causing the small fires to hiss before going out completely.

Just as he turned around to glare at Vardo for drenching him in water without even warning him first, Mercury saw a sight that made his jaw drop. Springing up from the lake with water flying all around them, like some explosive had gone off in the water, came Loivissa and her sea-blue coloured dragon Adûn.

With his improved eye-sight, Mercury could clearly make out how the water bounced off of their forms in millions and millions of small droplets that each caught the light just a bit differently from the others, while Loivissa held her sea-blue rider sword out to the side and her golden hair flowed behind her like one long flowing mass of liquid gold.

"Yep, I am dead", Mercury murmured to himself, but just as Loivissa and Adûn began to duel the two remaining lethrblaka in the air, a warcry went up from behind Mercury, as the enemy attempted yet another charge, obviously knowing that if they were to have any hope of defending against the incoming charge from the north, then they had to close this front first.

"Hold the line! If they cannot break us now, then they never will!", Mercury shouted to give some inspiration to his tired troops, before he rejoined the fight, though he noticed that Vardo made sure to follow him closely, so as to not let what happened earlier repeat itself.

His first new opponent seemed to be a conscripted soldier that had simply been issued a sword and a shield with at least some guidance in how to use them, as he swung a wide swing with his sword from the side, while he defended his main body with the bulk of his shield.

It was however clear that he had never faced a dual-wielder before, not that Mercury completely fell into that category either, as Mercury easily parried his sword with his left arm-blade, before he used his body weight to push his opponent's sword to the side, so that he now had a clear angle to circumvent the man's shield, which he utilized by quickly thrusting his right arm-blade into the man's chest.

The man dropped his sword in shock and pain, as he clutched at the gaping hole that Mercury's blade had left in his chest, before he limply fell on his back and Mercury moved on to his next opponent.

There was one vital weakness that had always been there when Mercury used these contraptions; he had to get in up close and personal to be effective and prevent his opponent from being so. In an one-on-one match, this did not matter overly much, but when battles raged all around you and a different enemy could lash out at you at any given time, even while duelling another, it was nice to have some space between yourself and your opponents to give yourself some reaction time.

It was why Mercury did not like using his arm-blades in large open battles, as they were far less effective than in small skirmishes or when you were battling in a confined space, but it was not like he had much of an option to use anything else at the moment, so he simply had to make due.

Mercury managed to nearly get skewered by a spearman, after which he had returned the gesture by cutting the man's spear in half and violently stabbing him through the throat, before his immediate problem with attacks from the side was solved when Vardo and three others of his Varangian guards arrived with large tower shields and long spears to keep the enemies from trying to flank Mercury.

Where Vardo had gotten the spear and shield, Mercury did not know, nor did he put much thought into it at the moment, but their combined efforts managed to actually push the enemy back, rather than being pushed back as had been the norm until now.

Because of all the battle noise around him and his concentration on simply staying alive, Mercury did not notice the panicked yelling from the enemies behind those that he currently fought until he dispatched his latest foe by running a blade through his chest, only for his head to come off the moment after.

When Mercury let the headless body drop, he looked up to see the surprising sight of the Supreme Commander wielding the blade that had done the beheading. He had blood splattered over a portion of his steel armour and it ran down his two-handed sword, which he wielded in one hand with a shield in the other.

"Looks like we are just in time", the Supreme Commander said with a toothy grin as he recognized Mercury, "though you certainly look the worse for wear, I have to concede to your apprentice that she was right in believing that you were still alive".

"Actually, you are about five days late, but I will let it pass if your men can relieve what is left of mine. You see, they have not eaten at all during those five days, so they are a bit tired", Mercury openly laughed at the sight, "and trust me, I have been worse off in the past".

"It is a story that I look forward to hear", the Supreme Commander nodded, before he shouted to his men, "men! Relieve these soldiers at once while the others press the remaining enemies into the lake!"

As it turned out, the detachment that the Supreme Commander was heading had pushed ahead of the others to bolster Mercury's forces while the main portion of his army pressed the panicking enemy army closer and closer towards the water's edge.

"Beware of your sides, as they have at least set up camp on the other side of the river to the east", Mercury warned the Supreme Commander as the few hundred men that he had left were eternally gratefully ushered out through the bridge that the Supreme Commander's detachment had created.

"I understand", the Supreme Commander acknowledged with a nod, before they as well withdrew through the bridge.

After that, it did not take long for the rest of the enemy army to either try and flee across the water, which meant death for most that tried as their equipment weighed them too much down, or as many others did, simply throw down their weapons and surrender in the hopes that they would be spared.

As it later turned out, the enemy had in fact had to camp out on both sides of the rivers, so even if Mercury's forces had made it to the other river, they would have faced a similar situation as they had with the first.

Apart from the small artificial bridge on the western river, these two camps had been completely isolated from the main force in the middle, but despite not having suffered any major casualties themselves, they quickly realized that it was hopeless to continue fighting, as the fact that the new arrivals had come from the north meant that they literally had no place left to flee to, so they surrendered while still virtually intact.

The surrendered soldiers were in the midst of being tied up when Loivissa and Adûn landed near where Mercury was. In hindsight, completely enveloping her in a hug in plain sight of everyone the second that she got off from Adûn might not have been the most discreet thing that Mercury had ever done, but at least he had restrained himself from kissing her full on the lips.

"I need to show you something", Loivissa said with a saddened tone to her voice as Mercury released her from his near suffocating hug.

"Can it wait?", Mercury asked, not really paying much heed to her voice before.

"No, I think that you especially need to see this as soon as possible", Loivissa denied.

Hmm, me especially, then it must have something to do with either my duties or perhaps she has found the mass-graves of those that tried to flee, Mercury mused to himself as he followed her up Adûn's side to sit behind her, well, after not eating for five days, I suppose that an hour more or less will not hurt.

Adûn took off with a mighty flap of his wings, but both he and Loivissa kept quiet as they made their way southeast. It was beginning to get slightly unnerving for Mercury, as the sombre mood did not exactly play well with him after spending four days trapped in a dark cave with nothing but a sombre mood.

It did not take long for them to cross the lake, but just as Mercury was about to ask what it was that he was supposed to see, he saw it; Kilgharrah's bloodied and mangled corpse lay down there on the slopes of Rushno, surrounded by broken trees and more than a few lethrblaka corpses.

"No…", Mercury somehow found himself saying as he subconsciously stretched out his hand, as if to try and reach his beloved dragon.

See, I told you that the major deaths never occur right away, but are tucked away until the end, which I have to admit that I also did, twice! Firstly, when you realize that Kilgharrah died shortly after the end of chapter 33, and secondly, when his death is finally revealed.