Mitigating Risk

by Blaise Corvin

  I was really starting to get the feeling that Muffin didn’t like me much. The world faded to black with random bursts of colors.

  ***

  When I woke up, the first thing I registered was that I was lying on something hard. This made me feel grateful for the armored tunic that protected my back. The second thing I realized was that Chris was shaking me awake.

  “Nora, one of the guards just said we are getting close. You should wake up.”

  Oh that’s right, he came along, I thought. With a muttered curse, I levered myself up and stood. I was riding in a wagon, or trailer of sorts being towed by one of Soron’s four magic cars. It was absurd for such a small town to have so many magic cars, but their rich benefactor had been busy indeed. Each magic car had six wheels and could travel about as fast as a galloping horse over uneven terrain.

  Each towed cart had four wheels and fairly awful suspension. I was amazed I’d been able to sleep at all, but it was good that I had. I’d really needed the nap. Traveling in the morning, getting to Soron, fighting the guards, and meeting with Chris, it had all been surprisingly tiring. Plus, I had wanted to be ready for my first real battle. That thought was sobering and brought back the low level of anxiety that I’d been able to escape with sleep.

  I’d fought before. Rot, I’d killed before. But a big battle like I was heading for now was new. The biggest skirmish I’d taken part in back in Bittertown had only had about ten fighters per side. The larger our groups got in Bittertown while fighting other gangs, the faster the guards had come.

  This time, I was riding with a combined force of over sixty Soron guards and a few other last-minute mercenaries like me. My vague plan that I’d have to hang at the rear of the fighting had been thrown out the moment we’d started moving. One of the guard sergeants had explained that I was expected to fight at the front. I was a powered fighter, and getting paid well for it. She explained I would be expected to carry my weight.

  Well, shit. The memory made me react again the same as when I’d first heard it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fault the logic.

  I checked all my gear after I was fully upright again. As I stood with my arms on the side of the cart, I glanced at the countryside flashing by. I turned my attention to Christopher. “We’re close?” I asked.

  “Yes, we’ve been following tracks. The guards can communicate between the carts somehow. A sergeant just filled us in. Guard!” Chris waved to get a guard sergeant’s attention. As he did, I studied him.

  He looked much the same as he had before, but now he wore a pack and carried a big stick. I shook my head and watched the guard sergeant working her way through her fellows to get to us. She was young, dark-skinned, and her face was too open, too friendly.

  I immediately assumed she had not been involved in the fighting the night before. She didn’t give off the aura of someone that had taken lives or seen them taken.

  The young guard sergeant got close. The magic car and the cart were fairly loud, and she was small, so she yelled into my ear. “Your friend told us to let you sleep. I hope you’re worth what the town is paying for you to be here!”

  “That’s not really your problem, is it?” I shot back. “What do you have to tell me?”

  The guard gave me a flat look. “Call me Sergeant Kayla. I know your name is Nora. We should come up on the slavers as they are fleeing. The plan is for all of our heavy fighters like you to spread out and quickly advance to the front of the formation. Then the rest of us will all—”

  The entire world flashed, and I felt myself become weightless for a moment. The world spun around me, everything happening quickly, adding to the disorientation. Then I crashed into the ground in a heap.

  I must have passed out for a while because when I actually realized that I’d been blown up, the battle was already in full swing. “Nora, get behind cover!” someone screamed at me.

  My entire body felt made of rubber, but I owlishly turned my head. The guard sergeant I’d been talking to before, Kayla, was taking shelter behind a tree, motioning me back towards her. What the hell is going on? I turned and caught my breath, most of my confusion evaporating.

  All of the magic cars were wrecked. A couple carts, including the one I’d been on, were overturned, scorch marks along their sides.

  I caught glimpses of fighting through the trees. It looked like some small groups were battling each other while others ran around. Groups of guards sprinted from place to place, scrambling to help their comrades. Crossbow bolts and sizzling blasts of magic shot from the forest on the other side of the clearing I was lying in, one nearly clipping my head.

  Okay, yeah, rot this, I thought. I hugged the ground, and when I noticed a break in projectiles flying back and forth across the battlefield, I hopped up and air skated back towards my allies.

  I flopped down next to the sergeant, underbrush scratching my cheek. My body was sore. Almost as sore as I’d been in Dingeramat. A couple guards lay behind us; one was wounded, her arm a ruin. Someone had put on a tourniquet on her stump and had probably saved her life. She whimpered to herself, her eyes tightly shut. The other guard was obviously dead, and I blinked as I recognized Trend. His nose was still red from where I’d hit him earlier. My heart stuttered, but I focused on the task at hand.

  I could think about the dead later. If I survived.

  “What the hell happened?” I groused, my throat raw. “How long was I out?” To one side of the clearing, a patch of bushes suddenly caught fire, and a guard came running out. She screamed as several arrows hit her all at once, and a blast of frozen water magic catching her on the side of the head. She went down in a heap.

  Sergeant Kayla ducked down lower behind the tree. She’d lost her helmet at some point. The guard’s eyes were wild, her hair burned and in disarray. “I thought you were dead! You took most of the shockwave when the cart got blown over. Creator, you are one tough bitch!” The admiration in the young guard’s voice was real, as was her shock.

  I didn’t want to be anyone’s hero, not again. “What happened?” I repeated.

  “We were chasing the slavers. Nobody thought they would stage an ambush. It seems there are about three times as many of them as there are of us. Our intel was bad. This is bad. This is bad!” Kayla yelled. In the distance, I heard screaming.

  “Where is everyone else?” I asked. My earlier confusion was quickly replaced by calm as the situation became clear to me. I forced myself to think.

  “Captain Mourad took a group with her to the rear, and they are preventing the enemy from flanking us. They’re the only reason we are still alive. Other groups like the one I led are scattered all over. Most of us have some sort of projectile weapons since battles like this can be so random, but most of us aren’t very good with them. The slaver mages just keep picking us off, too!”

  The guard sergeant was near to tears, so I put a hand on her shoulder to calm her. I noticed that her bronze sword was stuck in the dirt, ready to be used, and an arrow was nocked on her bowstring.

  I suddenly realized I’d lost my new traveling companion. “Where is Chris?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “The man who came with me.”

  “He got blown off the trailer with you. I don’t think he was badly hurt, but I did see him earlier crawling around. I don’t think he knew which way he was supposed to go.”

  “Where was that?” I demanded. I shifted and realized that I had somehow hung onto my spear. Since I was in the middle of a battle, I unwound the cloth from the blessed steel blade.

  Kayla’s eyes widened when she saw the shining steel, and then she swallowed. She answered my question by pointing ahead of us and to one side. Damn, I thought.

  Before I did anything else, I needed to make sure Christopher was safe. My entire mission would fail if he died. Damn him for coming here! I yelled mentally. I gripped Eneus tightly and ground my teeth.

  “What will you do now?” Kayla asked me. I knew what she wanted. She needed direction, som
eone to lead her. I had my own problems, though. Maybe I could help out a bit, though.

  “I am going to find Chris,” I said. “You need to go link up with the others that are holding the line. You aren’t doing anything useful here.”

  “What about Tratvia? She’s wounded?” Kayla pointed at the woman on the ground.

  “Leave her for now,” I shouted over a nearby whoosh of magic fire. “Tell her to follow you. If you leave, she might die. If we lose the battle, she’ll die for sure.”

  Kayla’s eyes widened, then narrowed. She set her jaw, grabbed her weapons, whispered something in her fallen comrade’s ear, and ran away towards the sound of heavier fighting. My respect for her grew.

  Now I was alone except for a badly wounded guard and a corpse. I needed to get moving too. Finding Chris was not going to be easy, and I had no idea what to do about the battle. I was getting paid, but I didn’t owe any of these people anything. If not for my task from Enheduanna, I might have already been leaving.

  Unfortunately, lying low would probably be a really bad idea. If all the Soron guards died, that would be sad, and Creator knew I had no love for slavers. But Chris and his friend Jessica’s lives were my highest priorities.

  The battlefield was pure chaos, and the battle lines were not even clearly drawn. Groups of fighters darted between the trees like wraiths. On top of that, I needed to find Chris before he got himself killed. Luckily, I had an idea.

  Premeditated

  I faded back into the forest to think, something that struck me odd I could even do. The loamy soil was a strange thing to notice while I knew men and women were fighting for their lives not much more than a stone’s throw away. I had never been in a large battle before, but I didn’t really feel like this fact had changed.

  The fight around me seemed to be more like a few different skirmishes going on than what I considered a real battle. Thinking about it, I figured that neither side had the numbers to really force an open, straightforward fight. In fact, the ambush by the slavers didn’t make a lot of sense now. The Soron guards were all split up and would take a long time to be defeated—unless that was not really the goal.

  I thought about it carefully, remembering some of the business lessons my father had given me when I’d been young. While most of them were fuzzy over time, I could still remember one thing my father had always repeated: To counter your enemy, you have to understand her objective.

  The Soron guards were trying to rescue all the people that had been kidnapped, especially the little boys. Even if they suffered terrible losses, they would most likely keep fighting.

  On the other hand, the slavers were harder to figure out. The ambush had been possible because the Soron guards had expected the slavers to run, but that’s because it had been the most logical thing for the slavers to do. What were they achieving by fighting?

  How in the world was I able to just stand in the woods and ponder while technically in the middle of a battle? It didn’t make sense. Also, I’d just seen a slaver fire mage burn a bush to kill a guard. Why weren’t they doing that everywhere, over and over?

  A few possibilities occurred to me based on experience fighting other gangs in Bittertown. Like, maybe the slavers had lured all the guards out to attack Soron again. But that didn’t really seem logical. Soron had not been left unguarded, and the town itself had defenses. The defenses were why the slavers had had to attack in the first place rather than just walk in and do whatever they’d wanted. When I’d arrived, even I’d been watched.

  Nothing the slavers were doing now made any sense. If they were trying to capture all the guards to sell as slaves too, who would even be buying? In fact, why had Soron been attacked in the first place? The town was unnaturally well protected, a fact that the slavers could have easily discovered.

  I was definitely missing something crucial somewhere. Maybe if I were a more devious person, I could have figured it out. As it was, I decided that I’d spent long enough centering myself. I was lucky to be alive. A fact that I’d confirmed after giving my entire body an inspection. The new armor I wore from Dingeramat had a few new marks—it had stopped both magic and projectiles, protecting my torso.

  That was impressive. If the unpowered tunic functioned so well as armor, I could only imagine how it would if I could ever figure out how to actually use it. I still wore the matching necklace and the rings, but I still had no idea what to do with them.

  I checked all my gear one last time and felt vaguely guilty as I did so. There were guards fighting right now, and they hadn’t had any respite. Some of them were dead, like Trend. Meanwhile, I was orb-Bonded, standing in the woods and adjusting my clothing. It wasn’t fair.

  But one lesson I had learned on the street was the life is not fair. You take any opportunity you can to get every advantage you can. If you don’t, you not only weaken yourself but the people you care about, too. If you are stronger, your entire team becomes stronger.

  I wanted to help the Soron guards if I could, but just charging around, getting myself killed wouldn’t help either of us. My first priority was to find Chris and rescue Jessica, though. Hopefully, Chris was still alive, but taking the time to think had been necessary. I still didn’t understand what was going on. Luckily, slavers: bad, guards: good was a good fallback strategy.

  There was no use complaining about this increasingly difficult task. I had a job to do, and I just had to do it. But right now, I needed more information. It was time to put my plan into action.

  Wow, I have really gotten stronger, I thought as I feather-jumped to the top of a large tree. Wearing all my gear, my weapons, and my small pack, the feat would have taken me a while and worn me out in the past. Now, it was hardly any effort at all.

  Once I had my new vantage point, I grinned. My plan had worked! Before, on the ground, finding Chris would have been almost impossible amidst all the chaos. Now things had changed.

  Using my Flight ability, I kept my weight low and jumped from tree to tree. I quickly learned that my ability had become so strong, I needed to use less power at times, and could even allow myself to weigh more to prevent overshooting shorter trees entirely.

  Down below, the fighting was still weird, still chaotic, and even more confusing. More than once, I saw a scenario where slavers could have overrun a group of guards, but had pulled back instead. At least once, the slavers even let the guards regroup. “What is going on?” I whispered to myself.

  The general uniform the slavers wore seemed to be loose, grey clothing. Some wore armor; some didn’t. They used a mix of different weapons and styles, too. Based on what I could see, most of them could not use offensive magic, but their numbers were proving troublesome for the guards.

  I wasn’t sure what kind of mages the guards had, or whether they had any orb-Bonded fighters other than myself, but they weren’t doing well. It seemed that the Soron guards had been counting on outnumbering the slavers and had been wrong.

  As I traveled, I began feeling strange as I watched the fighting. I thought about what Muffin had said to me about my natural ability and tried relaxing more as I observed. Instead of trying to understand what I was seeing with my mind, I tried using my instincts. Whether it was working or not was a mystery, but I definitely felt less anxiety afterword.

  The sensation of hopping from tree to tree was surreal like I was playing god. More than once, I saw a situation where a guard was in trouble, and I could intervene. It made me feel guilty to keep moving, but I didn’t have any particularly strong connection to the guards, they weren’t part of my pack. Finding Chris was my highest priority.

  Luckily, most times the guards were in trouble, the slavers didn’t push the attack. I saw a few deaths, but not as many I would have expected. Most of the guards that died were hit by magical attacks or overextended themselves. I winced in sympathy.

  Despite the slavers’ strange behavior, the battle would probably have been more deadly too if not for the location. So many loosely connected, smaller
fights in the forest were resulting in large amounts of maneuvering being done on both sides. The clearing we’d been ambushed in was still a killzone that neither side ventured into, though.

  I almost passed over Chris without noticing him. The man was lying down, blending in with the undergrowth. The only reason I caught sight of him was the bright orange soles of his shoes. I hadn’t noticed them before, but lying down, the bottoms of his feet were visible, especially since I was high up.

  When I lighted on the ground next to him, Chris turned at the slight sound I had made and started so hard, I worried if he’d hurt himself. He didn’t scream or make any noise though, so our position was still hidden. He clutched his chest and stared at me.

  I knelt down and whispered, “I’ve come to make sure you are okay. Follow me back.”

  Chris shook his head. “Don’t startle me like that, and no. I think I know where Jessica is.”

  He’d caught my attention with that. Maybe we could find Jessica right now, and then I could take both of my charges away! Playing escort-bodyguard was rotting terrible. Damn Enheduanna!

  “Where?” I asked.

  Chris motioned me down, and I obliged, lying next to him. He pointed through a hole in the underbrush ahead, and I saw what he was talking about. A couple dozen crude tents had been erected in the woods ahead, covered in branches and fairly well camouflaged. I could only see one slaver guard.

  The slaver was dressed like all the others, and was probably Terran, or Ludan. With no armor on, it was hard to tell their sex, but I thought she was a woman. The lack of armor made it likely she was also a mage, which might explain why there weren’t any other guards that I could see. Of course, the presence of any guards at all meant something there was worth guarding in the first place. This was probably what had caught Chris’ attention.

  “Once I knew I was behind the slavers I crawled around looking for Jessica,” whispered Chris. “I think there are two slavers here.”