Free Web NovelChapter 24: Audacious Woman
He tossed the rusted sword back into the wooden crate.
If he tried to channel all of his power into a swing with that blade, the raw force generated by his own expanding muscles would snap the cheap iron in half before it even touched a monster’s hide.
’Why the hell is it even weaker than the last one... the rations were good, doesn’t that mean that the weapons should be good as well?
He needed dark-steel or at least a better weapon... Caius needed a weapon capable of conducting a lot of force without instantly shattering into shrapnel.
Aurelia had followed him.
She stood directly beside him, looking down into the crate of pathetic iron gear.
The serene, devoted smile completely vanished from her flawless face as her brow furrowed in disgust.
She was the Crown Princess of the Solis Empire. She had grown up entirely surrounded by mastercrafted mythril, flawless dark-steel, and weapons forged by the greatest, most expensive artisans on the continent.
Even in her strict temporary isolation, her containment cell had been reinforced with high-grade, enchanted metals so she knew the difference between a weapon and scrap.
She looked at the rusted garbage meant for her "beloved," and a deep possessive fury violently flared within her chest.
"This is garbage," Aurelia stated.
Her voice dropped and Caius felt like it was freezing all of a sudden.
She didn’t look at the gear; she looked at the concept of the Empire daring to offer it to him. It was a personal insult to her mate.
"You cannot wear this into battle," she declared with absolute finality. "It will not protect you."
Caius sighed, rolling his broad shoulders.
"It’s penal issue, Aurelia. It’s all we get. The Empire doesn’t hand out dark-steel to disposable infantry so I’ll just have to rely on my agility to avoid taking direct hits."
"No."
The refusal brooked no argument... It was not up for debate at all.
Aurelia suddenly reached out. Her soft, pale hand firmly grabbed Caius by his thick, uninjured left wrist.
Her grip was surprisingly strong, fueled by protective stubbornness.
Caius looked down at her, raising an eyebrow.
"What are you doing?"
Aurelia’s glowing crimson eyes looked up at him.
"Come with me," she ordered.
Without waiting for his response, she violently turned and began dragging the muscular noble directly toward the leather curtain of the dugout.
The freezing, sulfur-choked wind of the Carrion Front violently whipped through the trench, carrying the sickening scent of dried blood and pulverized obsidian.
Caius could have easily planted his boots.
With his newly evolved strength, his dense muscle fibers were essentially bolted to the bedrock.
If he didn’t want to move, a stampeding Siege-behemoth would struggle to displace his center of gravity.
He could have firmly stopped the delicate Villainess dead in her tracks but the absurdity of the situation and the fact he didn’t want her to get mad made him allow her drag him along.
Aurelia Solis, the walking weapon of mass destruction, the Mad Sun of the Empire, was currently dragging him through ankle-deep slop by the wrist with a scary smile on her face.
Caius allowed himself to be pulled forward.
He yielded entirely to her momentum with his heavy boots making loud squelching sounds as he was towed through the mud.
’Where exactly does she think we’re going?’ Caius thought, completely bewildered.
He looked down at her slender hand wrapped around his thick wrist.
She wasn’t looking back at him.
Aurelia was marching with singular purpose with her golden hair swaying aggressively with every determined step.
’Let the Mad Sun lead, Champion...’ Ereba cackled in the abyssal depths of his soul.
The ancient Goddess of the Void sounded thoroughly entertained by the dynamic. ’She believes she is outfitting her mate and she is actively rejecting the Empire’s garbage on your behalf. This is going to be incredibly amusing to witness.’
’Mate? You make it sound like we’re animals.’
Caius sighed, rolling his broad bare shoulders.
The freezing wind bit at his exposed skin, but his body was warm and it entirely nullified the chill.
’Do I have a fever or is it you, Ereba?’
The trench around them was a hive of frantic activity.
The surviving penal troops and the fresh piss-soaked recruits dragged from the capital’s dungeons were desperately trying to stack heavy wet sandbags against the collapsed sections of the palisade.
Men were frantically running whetstones over chipped spears with their hands trembling so violently they were carving fresh cuts into their own thumbs.
Aurelia ignored all of them.
To her, the frantic scrambling of the penal fodder was nothing more than the mindless buzzing of insects.
She marched directly through the center of the thoroughfare.
When the disgraced nobles and hardened mercenaries saw the mud-caked, terrifying blonde woman marching aggressively toward them with her crimson eyes glowing with lethal intent, they didn’t just step aside normally.
They violently threw themselves into the mud walls... They abandoned their sandbags.
They scrambled out of her path like terrified rats fleeing a wildfire as not only did they remember the blinding flash of golden holy fire but they also remembered the massacre of monsters she caused.
’But isn’t this reaction too much... Aurelia can’t be that scary, is she?’ Caius thought, Aurelia was quite cute when she was hugging him though.
Aurelia dragged Caius directly toward the reinforced sandbag-lined entrance of the makeshift command dugout.
Two Imperial Guards stood at attention outside the heavy oak door.
They were clad in pristine polished silver armor.
They held heavy runic-forged halberds designed to cleave through obsidian bone and these guards were the true elite of the Vanguard, tasked with protecting the command structure from the horrors of the Gore-Tide.
They saw Aurelia approaching and the two heavily armed and highly trained elite Knights didn’t cross their halberds like one would expect nor did they didn’t bark a command to halt.
They violently slammed their backs against the mud walls, completely clearing the path.
Their eyes widened in terror beneath their silver visors as she marched right past them.
They didn’t dare breathe...
Aurelia didn’t knock.
BAM!
She raised her heavy boot and violently kicked the heavy wooden door of the command post open.
The rusted iron hinges shrieked in protest as the thick oak slammed concussively against the interior dirt wall.
The sound echoed like a cannon shot in the confined space.
Caius stepped into the room immediately behind her with his crimson eyes quickly sweeping the dim claustrophobic space for any immediate kinetic threats.
Sergeant Vance was standing over a crude, splintered wooden table.
The veteran commander of the Carrion Front looked exhausted.
He looked like a walking corpse that had simply forgotten to stop breathing.
His heavily scarred face was completely pale, drained of all color from massive sustained blood loss.
He was sweating heavily with the freezing ambient temperature completely at odds with the feverish sheen on his forehead.
Fresh dark crimson stains were already beginning to heavily seep through the thick stark-white linen bandages wrapped tightly around his severed left stump.
The table in front of him was covered in marked blood-stained scout maps.
He had been desperately trying to calculate the logistical nightmare of plugging a mile-long breach in the palisade with a handful of terrified untrained dungeon rats.
Vance’s head violently snapped up at the intrusion.
His solitary slate-gray eye widened with shock.
His exhaustion was instantaneously overwritten by the highly disrespectful breach of military protocol.
"What in the name of the abyss..." Vance breathed out.
His calloused right hand instinctively dropped toward the heavy leather pommel of his rusted broadsword.
It was a muscle-memory reaction to a sudden threat, completely bypassing his conscious thought.
Aurelia didn’t give him a single microsecond to process the situation.
She stepped fully into the room, forcefully pulling Caius by the wrist to stand directly beside her in the flickering light of the oil lantern. ƒгeewёbnovel.com
"You will open the restricted Officer’s Armory immediately," Aurelia demanded.
She didn’t submit a formal requisition form nor did she acknowledge his rank or his decades of survival in the meat grinder.
She issued a direct uncompromising royal edict to a man who technically held unchecked authority over their miserable disposable lives.
Vance stared at her, his hand hovering over his sword, completely stunned into silence.
"He requires proper equipment," Aurelia continued.
She released Caius’s wrist and gestured sharply toward his broad chest. freewebnøvel.coɱ
Her glowing crimson eyes locked onto the Sergeant with freezing, absolute certainty.
"I will not permit him to fight the next wave wielding chipped pig-iron and rusted chainmail..." she declared venomously. "It is an insult. It is completely unacceptable. You expect the man holding your flank to bleed in peasant scrap? Give him access to the dark-steel vaults. I know you have them..."
