Sorry it took so long to post my third chapter…been distracted lately. Anyway, I'd like to say thank you to my reviewer's encouragement so far and for Gundam Nightshade for adding me to his C2. This is the second of my stories that's been added to a C2 and I'd just like to ask…what is a C2? Could someone please explain this to me? If it's something good then I'm honored to have my story involved but if it's something bad…I'll wait till I find out. Don't want to say something I'll regret. Oh, and yes, Phoenix Lord, I will explain where his save everyone attitude comes from. Well, thank you for reviewing and waiting. Here's chapter 4, Delthan's Signal.

Delthan's Signal

"What's wrong with me?" Aeneas asked in desperation. Since he'd entered the tower, a plague of exhaustion preyed upon his mind and body, subduing him to one of Karll's minions that now stood before him. Clasped in each crossed hand were long blades that curved with his arms, their tips just inches from his own shoulders. To Aeneas's fading vision they seemed as bladed wings.

"You like them"? Aeneas's assailant mocked. His voice was slightly muffled due to a handkerchief tied around his face to cover his mouth and nose. "The spores I mean? They're Kaiser Mushroom spores. Inhaling them causes you to lose strength. The disorientation I'm sure you're feeling is a mere side effect." The masked man lifted one of his oddly shaped weapons, mimicking a fatal strike. "This, of course, makes it all the easier to finish you."

Aeneas's shuffled backward, abandoning his heavy lance as the mushrooms effect continued to assault his energy reserves. He rejected the idea of standing for it was his loss of equilibrium that deposited him in his current forlorn position. His opponent continued to cackle as he slowly stalked his crawling prey, obviously taking great pleasure in his sadistic hunt. Panicked sweat dripped from Aeneas's face, realizing his folly of tactlessly charging through the door. As he reached the wall, the man made to strike him down but paused as he noticed a slim sword rested on his shoulder.

"You're dead my friend." Jiro appeared behind him wearing the blue flag piece over his face in imitation of the guard's handkerchief. The vicious soldier lowered his head with a comprehending grunt. Before sheathing his sword, Jiro yanked the handkerchief off his now defeated opponent's face. With great haste, he dropped his weapons and used his now empty hands to replace the mask. Giving his discarded blades no second thought, he dashed out the western door that Aeneas recklessly demolished as he entered.

Jiro sheathed his sword and forced his comrade up, offering his body to lean on. Aeneas proved to be heavier than Jiro had expected, but he calmly guided his charge through the doors and out into the fresh, untainted, air. As soon as they emerged under Delthan's punishing rays, Jiro slid his friend to the dirt and, relieved of his load, plopped backward onto the path beside him.

Aeneas's body convulsed in short bursts as his sapped energy slowly returned to his muscles. He could feel Jiro staring at him, most likely with irritation. He couldn't blame him though; he acknowledged the fact that he made a neophyte's mistake. Caution was necessary when entering enemy territory. Slowly, his ragged breath normalized, and his spasms also abated, allowing him to push his face out of the dry earth. As his lungs remembered the taste of clean air, his hyperventilation stopped completely. His hands still trembled and fatigue continued to blur his vision, but he regained control of his muscles and pushed himself over so he faced the sky above.

Jiro lowered the blue cloth covering the lower half of his face and poured water over it to wash it of any spores that may have adhered to it. When he finished, he repeated the rinse with the handkerchief he took from Karll's soldier. He then rung them both out at the same time and started to take a sip from the skin when he noticed Aeneas eyeing it. At first, Jiro was unsure why he was staring at him. Then a surge of stupidity filled Jiro as he finally understood Aeneas's gaze. Jiro smiled, nodded, and handed the water skin to his obviously parched partner. He then, went behind Aeneas and lifted his head up only to have Aeneas shoot up into a sitting position. This caused a new flood of exhaustion so it took him a few minutes to finally drink from the water skin. After almost completely depleting its contents, he handed it back to Jiro and failed an attempt to stand.

Jiro, just now realizing it was missing, asked, "Where's your armor? Not that I'm complaining, I mean I never would have gotten you out with it but…what happened to it?"

Aeneas took a few more breaths before answering in an effort to stall as he formulated a decent answer. Finally he said, "I left it behind." Jiro raised an eyebrow to the short motiveless answer and began to question him further but deemed it pointless so he switched the topic.

"You okay?" he asked with genuine concern. Based on his earlier encounter with, he assumed, Kaiser Mushrooms, he wasn't sure Aeneas would be able to continue for a little while. This thought haunted him. If this was true, his plan might not come to fruition, and he would be left to attack Karll's rear guard alone; he wouldn't bet on his chances of succeeding alone.

"Swell," Aeneas breathed with a chuckle. "I always hated mushrooms." Jiro couldn't help but laugh at this preposterous battlefield conversation. "The thought of eating something that eats dead things just never quite appealed to me." It seemed to Jiro that he might have underestimated his friend's stamina. If he had the energy for such random topics in the heat of battle, he could most certainly achieve victory within, he judged, forty minutes. Perhaps he was over dramatizing the situation, but he was quite desperate at the moment and Delthan wasn't dawdling.

Jiro noticed something else missing from Aeneas's equipment and he only hoped he hadn't left that behind as well. He asked slowly, perturbed by the missing weapon, "And…your lance is…where?"

Aeneas raised his head and peered back into the sullen darkness of the tower. "I dropped it inside." His cranium vanished between his arms as the shame of dropping his weapon berated him expected criticisms. It wasn't his only weapon, but the knife belted to his pant's leg wasn't crafted for combat; its primary uses were hunting and flaying the meat.

Jiro smiled wearily, relief warming his body more than Delthan could. He patted his comrade on the shoulder and assured him that he would collect the long weapon when he returned. The youthful tactician handed his friend the damp cloth he tore from the enemy soldier inside the stronghold and retied the flag piece around his head before he disappeared in the looming darkness.

Aeneas sat there in the dirt for a while simply staring at the handkerchief as many more thought fragments dashed through his mind again. These made more sense to him however, many of which arguing the fact that knights were trained to protect their commanders. What events just occurred proved to Aeneas that he was apparently unable to accomplish such a task. Their roles as commander and knight had been completely switched. Jiro had come to his rescue when it should have been quite the reverse. No. Even insisting that they switched positions was a fallacy in its own respects. Aeneas had given no orders therefore becoming unfit for the title commander. In reality, Jiro had stolen his responsibility while keeping his own in unison, leaving Aeneas to feel like some incompetent civilian or peon.

Anger surged through Aeneas: rage at the thought of his training going to waste as he would surely fall back into society as a worthless noncombatant, fury at Jiro for robbing him of his position and status, and an uncontrollable wrath at the absurdity of his own thoughts. All this he saw in the wet cloth he now crushed in his hands.

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Jiro had finally reached the roof and succeeded in switching the flags which determined who held its domination. He then pulled the spyglass from his pouch once again and guided its lens toward the final tower they had to capture. Well, technically, they didn't need it at all. However, Jiro thought it to be a strategic stronghold. In all honesty, he and Aeneas could just as easily return to the eastern stronghold and attack Karll's northern headquarters from there. He however, wanted to split Karll's attention by attacking from two separate directions. Besides, if they were to ignore the tower to the west, the guard there could return to Karll's base of operations and act as reinforcements.

Though his exhaustion requested the easier, albeit potentially destructive plan, his rational pushed him to return to the bottom of the tower so the siege of the final tower could begin. As he reached the bottom of the final ladder, Jiro eyed the strange blades Aeneas's ambusher had been using. He had never seen weapons such as these before and he intended to question Girardot about their origins once the mock battle was over. Next he headed to the spot he knew Aeneas's lance laid. However, when he looked down, he realized that the lance had been removed.

Confused, Jiro studied the ground where the lance should have been. He noticed some skid marks in the dirt floor that he assumed were created as Aeneas dragged himself to the wall he had found him leaning against when he neutralized the man with the curved blades. Scrutinizing further, he discovered a light set of broad footprints heading from the outside toward that location. Directly next to them was another set of the same footprints though, these were heavier set, leading from the spot Jiro now kneeled back out into the blinding light of the sun.

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Aeneas tossed the broken body of his opponent aside as he doubled over, his fatigue threatening to engulf him in a forced sleep. Small trickles of blood ran down Aeneas's left shoulder in the formation of a leaf's veins, and his body ached from the sweltering climb up through the body of the tower. His wounds were minor however, when compared to those he inflicted on his opponent. Ragged breaths sounded from behind him that were immediately muted by the unconcerned wind. Though his respiration was labored, the man lived to suffer through the agony of his shattered limbs and ribs. The remains of his squared sword lay next to him, as well as some of the four pointed shuriken he used to barrage the knight.

The foolishness of leaving his armor augmented Aeneas's growing list of frustrations. If he had recovered it, the cowardly soldier's weapons would never have pierced his skin as it would have bounced clear off his shoulder armor. Aeneas inhaled heavily as he stood, contemplating a self mental suggestion of returning for his armor. As he raised a red flag though, he decided it would be foolish as the sun looked to be only twenty minutes away from Jiro's desired location above the tower. By the time he reached the southern tower, outfitted himself in his metallic attire, and returned to his current stronghold, he would only afford himself a few minutes recovery before the planned assault.

The young knight cursed meaninglessly and lifted the handkerchief over his face once again. Leaving the crippled warrior on the roof, he slowly sank into the heated darkness once again.

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Jiro returned to the eastern stronghold in anticipation of the coming attack. As it stood now, he had about ten minutes before Delthan would rise above the western tower. For this time, Jiro planned to rest and recover his strength and energy. He was worried that Aeneas had hastily continued his objective of capturing the tower, but he was sure he wouldn't have done so if he believed he couldn't handle the strain. Apparently, Jiro had greatly underestimated his friend's recovery abilities.

For now, he was content to resting under the creeping shadows of the tower. Slowly he surveyed the scenic landscape of the plains. The large field of grass rolled softly in the eastern breeze giving way only to slender trees that were few and far between.

Aside from the trees and towers, the only objects much taller than the grass itself were marble pillars scattered in dotted clumps across the plains. These ruins reminisced of an old arena that once encompassed much of these planes in which the old Malleta Empire once ruled.

Now however, due to smaller rebellions within the ancient domain of Malleta, the once mighty continent wide empire has been reduced to a small insignificant territory inferior to the three kingdoms that now reigned. These three kingdoms were named after the leaders of the rebels that destroyed the empire from the inside out: Mighty Jordan Grandall led the rebellion and founded the empire, in which Jiro now dreamed to serve, Wise Cuthbert Dalkia, who undermined the Malleta army with legendary strategies still taught throughout the continent created the modern Dalkia Kingdom, and Minerva Halteese, the ancient emperor's own sister in law, supplied the rebels with money and equipment thus assuring her own territory now known as the Halteese republic.

These history lessons always bored Jiro in the past. However, he now finds them enlightening, as he has mastered some of the most complicated strategies of the long dead Dalkia, with this knowledge.

The time passed by slowly; the anxiety Jiro felt seemed to hold some spiritual reins on the sun. Finally, Delthan reached its mark atop the tower to the west, signaling the beginning of Jiro's timed assault on Karll and his minions. Giving one final glance at the old pillars, Jiro silently prayed to the fates that they weren't some omen of what could possibly occur in the near future. His prayer complete, he sprinted up the path toward Karll's keep, new energy coursing through his veins to the muscles in his legs.

Well, that's that. The final assault has finally begun. I'm a little dismayed by the fact that just one chronicle will take 3 chapters to complete. I hope each future one will be shorter…not likely but… Anyway, I hope you enjoyed. Trust me, the next chapter, the conclusion of the first battle, will contain much more action, especially in the last scene. Sometime within the next couple of chapters the darkness in Aeneas's heart will also be discussed as well as a brief glimpse into Jiro's past that has caused him to discover his dream of becoming a tactician. Should be interesting… Thank you for reading and please review with any comments, criticisms, or concerns. Arrivederci!