Page 47 of Blood Red Woes

Her words hit me in the heart. That girl… stupid, but brave. Much braver than I am, standing up to a soldier that’s more than double her size, in front of everyone, so steadfast in her belief. In her belief in me.

“If you protect the demon, you will die as well,” the same female’s voice comes out of the soldier. The soldier brings down the ax to cut down both Prim and Frederick.

I react instantly. My tattoo flares to life, golden magic flowing out of me like a whip. I fling the magic toward the handle of the ax, and it curls around it, a living snake of golden sparkles, and I jerk it to the side by pulling my arm back. In doing so, I save both Prim and Frederick from the ax’s path and cause the ax to come down into the stone beside them.

Everyone around me gasps and steps back, giving me and the soldiers a wider berth. No one here is from the upper district. It’s just the poor. The destitute. The refugees who came to Laconia with nothing. Of fucking course these soldiers would attack them and not those in the upper district.

“I think you’re looking for me,” I say, straightening out as the magic curled around the ax’s hilt fades.

“You!” The other soldier points its great sword at me, the same voice that came out of the other one emanating from under its helm. “Demon! You dare go against me? You will pay the price for your treachery!” The soldier slashes its great sword through the air, and an immediate gust of wind nearly knocks me off my feet.

Okay, that was magic, and that tells me an empress is behind this. Question is, which one?

While I can stand against the wind, the people watching can’t. Some are knocked off their feet, while others tumble over each other in an attempt to get to shelter, someplace to hide. Frederick stands and looks at me, a worried look on his face.

“Get her out of here,” I tell him. Her meaning Prim, the little girl that means well but shouldn’t be here, in the middle of a fight, where the enemy is all too willing to put a blade through her just to make their point.

Frederick takes her by the hand and drags her away. Prim doesn’t want to go; that fierce look still glimmers in her eyes, but she’s too small to put up a fight.

And just like that, the marketplace is cleared of helpless civilians, and it’s just me and the two impossibly large soldiers.

They walk in opposite directions, and I watch them with a bored expression. “Who’s behind this?” I ask. “Is this Empress Gladus or Empress Krotas?”

The one with the ax lunges for me as the woman’s voice shouts, “You have no right to say her name!” It swings the ax and only misses me because I jump back. The other soldier comes at me from behind, and I duck and roll, using reflexes I never had before thanks to Rune.

“Whose name?” I ask, though I don’t really care. Anyone who would kill a little girl for standing up for what she believes in is a villain in my book, and most of the time the shit villains say is twisted.

“You come here, believing you are different, that you are the savior of the realm,” the woman’s voice hisses from underneath both helmets this time, “but you are a liar. A deceiver! You are the bane of humanity, the viper in the grass. You are everything we stand against!”

They attack me again, and this time I push them back with a strong wave of golden magic. “That’s funny,” I say, “because tome, it sure looked like you were going to kill a little girl just to make a point. To me,you’rethe damn viper in the grass.”

My right hand curls into a fist, and I punch the air, aiming at the soldier with the great sword. A large, golden fist sparks into existence in the air, growing larger and larger until it collides with the soldier’s chest with a force so hard it dents the chest plate and knocks the impossibly tall soldier off its feet.

Man, woman, monster; whatever they are, they can be beat—and Iwillbeat them.

The woman speaking from their helmets doesn’t appreciate what I said. They both attack me with their chosen weapons, using wind to try to catch me off-guard. I dodge what I can, and Rune throws up a shield when I don’t quite get out of their reach in time. They’re big, sure, but they can’t lay a finger on me, and they know it.

The market stalls around us get trashed with the strong gusts of wind from their blows. The sky above us turns dark, but not dark like the scourge is coming. No shadowstorm forming here. No, this darkness is natural, a true storm building over our heads, with thick black clouds that look as though they can unleash inches of rain in mere minutes.

I send a ball of light into the helmet of the soldier with the sunken-in chest plate, and the magic knocks the helmet straight off… and also reveals the soldier has no head. The armor falls to the floor, dissipating into ash that soon turns into nothing.

Wait a damn minute. Does that mean there’s nothing under this armor, for either of them? No body, nothing? I’m fighting fucking air?

Thunder rumbles in the sky above, and the remaining soldier with the ax lifts it toward the clouds. Lighting shoots down, momentarily blinding me, and when I open my eyes, I see the soldier now has wings made of lightning. An electrical current coats its large ax, sizzling.

“Well,” Rune says, “that complicates things!”

I take a step back, not liking the look of that lightning-coated, double-sided ax. All around us, the wind picks up, whipping along with the storm over our heads. Random bolts of lightning shoot down every few seconds, blasting the stone ground so hard the stone turns black. One of the bolts hits a stand in the markets, catching it aflame.

“You have to stop it before it destroys the whole city,” Rune tells me what I already know.

“You,” the same woman’s voice comes from the helmet, “think you are the righteous. You think you know all. Omnipotent, omnipresent.” The soldier swings its ax at me, and I narrowly avoid its reach. “You will fall. You will all fall!”

Two hands on the ax, the soldier lifts it high in the air as it leaps, its legs pushing it to an unnatural height. It soars ten feet in the air, aiming right at me, wanting to bring down that lightning-coated ax into my skull.

It moves fast. Rolling to either side won’t bring me out of its path, so I roll forward, using magic to propel me along. I roll beneath its trajectory, and behind me, I hear the soldier’s metal boots land on the stone with a hard thump.

The sky is near pitch-black above us, lighting bolts surging down around us. Bolt after bolt, and soon I’m trapped in a large cage made of lightning—trapped with the ax-wielding soldier. The circular space is no bigger than twenty feet wide. A second passes, and the lightning cage grows smaller by a foot.

---