Tail
Tail
The Master of Combat had been buried alive.
Word spread quickly through the War God's forces and Count Warpol's territory. Too many Warrior Monks had witnessed the collapse at the tomb, and Count Warpol's soldiers had watched from a distance.
The Master of Combat was entombed alongside the Master of the Spear, Count Sholukund. The tomb had collapsed. Whether there was a way to dig them out, no one could say, but no path was visible.
Even if there had been, the enemy would not permit it.
The Warrior Monks recognized the opportunity and moved the moment they saw it.
The civil war ground on. Only two days had passed, yet the front lines buckled without pause.
The defensive line that should have held near the Tomb of Bolen the Erased One had crumbled under the Warrior Monks' relentless assaults.
A broken line meant retreat. And every retreat gave the Warrior Monks ground to push harder.
Even in this lightless, hopeless theater, those who held command did not break. That was entirely due to the Masters Aslan had brought with him.
Thud—boom!
A flight of arrows shredded through ancient trees and slammed into angled shields, deflected downward to bury themselves in the earth.
Dust bloomed. Through it came the Warrior Monks, advancing behind their shields.
"Press forward! Avenge your kin!"
The largest among them bellowed from behind the shield wall, and the rest hammered their shields in answer.
From above, Tiyamal watched, nocking an arrow. He clicked his tongue and shook his head.
Two days since Aslan had vanished inside that tomb. Two days only, and already the battle was slipping away.
Tiyamal had been forced to overdraw again and again against the sheer numbers. Ereta and Fay were wounded. The only ones still on the field were Tiyamal himself—whose arms were too wrecked to shoot straight—and Angie.
While Tiyamal fought through aching shoulders and numb fingers to loose another arrow, Angie was elsewhere in the chaos.
"—ghk."
She rolled across the ground. Dirt sprayed. She barely arrested her momentum before a blade came for her head and she raised her arm to meet it.
Crunch.
Sensible doctrine said to dodge a weapon aimed at your skull. But Angie's Constitution was ten. Her skin, her muscle, her bones all exceeded common sense. Her body was armor.
Factor in regeneration, and Angie's habit was to absorb blows that were not instantly fatal rather than evade them.
The blade bit into her forearm and stopped. The Warrior Monk wielding it flinched, yanked the weapon free, and drove a kick at her.
The man's martial skill rivaled his axework. Angie blocked the sharp kick, but her small body lifted off the ground and slammed into a dead tree.
Crash.
"Hhk—"
The tree snapped and fell. Blood spilled from Angie's mouth.
She looked ruined. Her clothes were soaked and torn to rags. Her boots had been shredded down to the ankle bindings. Her eyes were sunken with exhaustion, her hair a matted tangle.
Constitution ten or not, she was wrecked.
And she was not alone in that. The Masters were strong. Angie was strong. But fighting massed Warrior Monks was never a matter of individual strength; it was attrition.
Without Aslan—without the man who knew the Warrior Monks inside and out, who understood their weaknesses and directed every engagement—the Masters could not leverage their full power.
Warrior Monks were stronger than ordinary humans to begin with. Armed with formal martial training, they were formidable. It had only ever seemed easy because Aslan had been there, guiding and supporting them in person.
Even when the Masters gathered their strength and held, the underlying problem remained: the Warrior Monks' numbers did not diminish.
A tide of superhuman soldiers pressed forward in wave after wave. The Masters' combat strength was whittled down, stretched, and finally dispersed. Ordinary troops could not fight Warrior Monks wherever they appeared. Every flashpoint demanded a Master.
Ereta had pushed too hard and been wounded. In pulling her out, Fay had been hurt as well. Tiyamal was still standing, but no one knew when his quiver would run dry or when his body would give out.
Angie was no exception.
High Constitution or not, the fatigue was carved into her. She had been cut so many times she could barely feel it anymore. She could not hide it, either.
She rose, gasping. The gash on her arm was already closing, but her eyes were clouded. She set her stance, but her fists trembled faintly.
The Warrior Monk who had struck her down looked at her and felt pity.
"Do you mean to continue, last remnant of the ancient gods?"
Angie did not answer. She steadied her breathing and tightened her fists. Her expression was blank, but exhaustion was written across every line of her.
Watching her, the Warrior Monk thought of a life he had known before becoming what he was now—of a family, of a daughter who would have been about this girl's age, had she lived. He studied the girl quietly.
"The Master of Combat is buried in that tomb. There is no way out. Even if one existed, five of my brethren now stand guard over it. So why do you not yield?"
He could kill her, of course. If the War God willed it, he would. This was merely a whim before the end.
"Surrender. If you do—"
Ptuh. Spit struck the dirt, streaked red with blood, and the Warrior Monk fell silent.
The girl wiped her mouth, and the fire in her eyes rekindled. She raised her fists. The mere act of clenching them produced a sound that crept under the skin.
"Hm."
Persuasion was futile. Yet he had no wish to cut her down without cause. The Warrior Monk's compound eyes glittered, and he sighed.
He had hoped to provoke her—anger her enough that she would charge and he could end it with a cleaner conscience. That was why his words had sounded like a taunt. Enough despair, and she would surrender; not enough, and she would attack.
But the girl neither attacked nor surrendered. She simply held her stance and watched him, calm.
The Warrior Monk studied her. Then he settled into his own stance—round shield thrust forward, arming sword braced above the neck, body coiled to drive through that unnatural toughness with full force.
The girl stood with her fists raised. The Warrior Monk, far larger, held sword and shield, wary of her. The standoff stretched.
Longer than expected. Long enough for the Warrior Monk to think.
'Wait.'
A dissonant note struck him. He looked closer.
That composure—it was not forced. It was the composure of someone who still held hope.
"What is this? How can you be so calm?"
He sensed the shape of the answer, and it puzzled him.
The situation was hopeless. The girl showed no sign of resignation. She simply stared him down, steady and unblinking.
"Your companions and your soldiers are surrounded as we speak. My brethren press the lines inward, little by little. There is no way to break this."
At that, the girl smiled. It was not the expression of someone cornered. Had she lost her mind? The Warrior Monk continued.
"Your leader, the Master of Combat, has been buried alive. No way out. So why do you still fight? Does nothing frighten you?"
The smile lingered as the girl closed her clouded eyes.
"I'm afraid."
The Warrior Monk had been ready to exploit an opening and lunge. The words stopped him. She opened her eyes again.
"All the adventures. All the stories. Everything I saw and heard with my own eyes—everything I shared with Aslan. I'm afraid it was all a dream. That's what I'm afraid of."
Her gaze passed beyond the Warrior Monk, toward the empty air. Her blurring vision showed her a different landscape: the slums of Belus Alpen, where she had been born and raised.
"That any moment I'll wake up back in that damp, filthy Tail District. That the strength I've earned will vanish. That everything wrong with this world will still be wrong, and I'll be powerless to do anything but watch. That's what I'm afraid of."
The Warrior Monk understood, late, that her words were not an answer to his question. They were rambling, half-delirious, and utterly sincere.
He understood, and he wound his body tighter for the strike.
"But the fear taught me something. I think I understand now how incredible Aslan is. How incredible it is that he keeps fighting through all this pain."
She looked down at the ground. Beyond the spit, the blood she had shed before her wounds closed had stained the earth crimson.
Geladrion was the color of blood.
It was not like the world Aslan had come from—the world he had once lived in. She could only imagine the torment of a man who fought for a world not his own.
"So when I think about the faith Aslan has in me—that I can help change this world—it makes my heart race."
She had seen two worlds. She was the only one among those who lived in Geladrion who could say that. Even if she had seen only fragments of Aslan's past, she had seen a world entirely different from this one.
Aslan said even that world was imperfect. She did not agree. To a girl from Geladrion, where survival was never guaranteed, Earth had looked flawless.
Witnessing firsthand the vast suffering that pervaded Geladrion, she had made up her mind.
"I'm going to change the world."
Aslan's goal had become her dream.
"I am Angela Tail."
Light crept back into her eyes, and they burned with the will to fight. The eyes of someone resolved to battle to the end and seize whatever lay beyond death.
The Warrior Monk clicked his tongue and lunged. As he closed in, the girl murmured:
"If Aslan is the head, I'm the tail. I watch his back."
With Aslan gone, her duty was simple: hold his place no matter what.
That was why she had fought without sparing herself. She had thrown herself forward, swung her fists, battered shields, taken a descending blade on her shoulder to deliver a kick.
She hammered the Warrior Monk's body until he vomited blood. She drove a knee into him, forced him to his knees, and pounded his face with her fists.
The Warrior Monk, who had held back because of the daughter he remembered, was now forced to answer in earnest. Angie's onslaught raged like a guttering flame about to go out.
The Warrior Monk's huge fists battered her small body. Her small fists shattered his carapace. They broke each other without mercy, screaming.
Her assault halted a moment later.
Smack.
The Warrior Monk's insectile body—modeled on the bug, borrowing some of its functions—expanded. A folded limb snapped outward and slammed into the girl's head.
A blow that would have pulverized any ordinary human skull. Even with Constitution ten and superhuman durability, the girl could not withstand it.
As her body toppled backward, an arm caught her.
She felt it, the arm braced against her back. Her vision was a blur, but she knew that warmth.
"You—how—?!"
While the Warrior Monk stammered in shock and terror, Angie looked up through hazy eyes into a pair of teal pupils.
"What took you so long... I waited..."
"I'm sorry I'm late."
A gentle voice. An apology in that gentle voice. It was so clear, even through her dulled senses and fading vision, that Angie laughed despite herself.
Crying, or saying something girlish, wasn't like her. She was Angie, not Angela.
Which meant there was only one thing to say.
"Go... wreck them for me, too."
Through the blur, she saw Aslan nod. She felt herself lowered gently to the ground, and she let her eyes close.
Just before consciousness slipped away, the last thing Angie saw was the white-burning flame of the Ancient God.
The hope she had been waiting for.
