Displaced

Chapter 97

Tehlmar lurched to his left, just barely avoiding the tip of an Ubran spear coming toward him from his front. His right arm lashed out, the crimson blade in his hand batting the spear shaft away just as another spear came for him from the front-left. That one glanced off the small shield he managed to construct just in time from the blood flowing from his left palm, but the force of the hit was enough to send him staggering back and to the right. The other three Ubran royal guards pounced, forcing him to jump away, his constantly shifting blood barely keeping death at bay.

Tehlmar very much did not want to be here. His goals had been simple ones: find Arlette and get her out of this mess before she got herself killed. The former had turned out to be easier than expected; the latter... not so much. Though heavily injured, she insisted that they not leave the battle, claiming that she knew where the Emperor was hiding.

Tehlmar had given serious thought to just having his people carry her away unwilling, but like a fool, he'd still held hope that they could patch things up and doing that to her would have surely widened the divide between them even more. So instead, he'd gone along with her insane idea. After all, what were the odds that she not only truly knew the Emperor's location but that she'd be able to find the specific tent within the sea of identical bland, unremarkable tents amidst this chaos?

The answer, against all expectations, was "depressingly good", and it presented a problem. Now that the elderly Ubran ruler stood literally just paces away, he couldn't just run. The opportunity to effectively end the Ubran invasion in a single stroke was just too important to pass up without at least taking a shot at it.

Arlette surely thought so. He knew that look in her eyes. He'd seen it before from people willing to sacrifice anything, even their own lives, to accomplish a goal. Luckily, she was too injured to fight, so she was hiding nearby and letting the rest of them handle things. But if things got worse, he wouldn't put it past her to do something stupid instead of running away with him like a sensible person. He'd always known Arlette to be a fairly sensible person, one who was willing to take some risks for what she felt was right, but never something so absurdly suicidal as this. Had the Ubran conquest of her homeland, Gustil, really hurt her that much?

In the moment, it didn't really matter. What mattered were the Ubran soldiers in front of him and his own troops, who were dropping like flies. The Emperor's attack had turned a hard but doable fight into a nightmarish one. The dead and dying from both his and the Emperor's guards littered the area, but one did not need to be a scholar to realize that more Drayhadans were down than Ubrans.

Not that each Ubran, royal guard or not, was equal to their elven counterparts. Tehlmar, especially, could take down all five of his opponents at once if he needed to, but to do so would use so much blood that it would tire him out to the point of uselessness afterward. For all its adaptability and lethality, the strain Tehlmar's fighting technique put on his body was a huge weakness that could not be ignored. Fighting with much of your blood outside of your body would wear down anybody, and it put a time limit on his effectiveness.

He needed Palebane's help to salvage this situation. The Chos was currently having the time of her life going one-on-one with the Emperor's powerful bodyguard, Taras. If she didn't finish her battle soon and come help, he'd have to start looking for a way to give up and retreat safely with Arlette. Given Arlette's leg injury, escape would not be easy.

"The Emperor!" the farthest of his opponents cried out, causing all of his adversaries to screech to a halt. In a gap between them, Tehlmar spotted Arlette on the far side of the Emperor's hiding tent, standing over the presumably dead body of another royal guard.

A litany of questions flashed through his mind. What in the world was she thinking? How had she gotten over there without being noticed? Where had the Ubran Emperor disappeared to?