Chương 265: 52. High-Altitude March 2

Once we were airborne, I understood something very quickly. Whatever image I'd carried in my head when I heard the word expedition — banners snapping, blood running hot, everyone surging forward together with a single triumphant roar — had absolutely nothing to do with the reality.

The real thing looked more like this: some people flying overhead, some people running on the ground, someone in the rear frantically calculating rations, someone up front frantically calculating how many days they personally had left to live, and me wedged somewhere in the middle of it all, face gone numb from the wind, wondering whether I counted as the commanding officer or some kind of high-grade mascot for an extremely demanding labor force.

Within the first hour, the army had made one thing abundantly clear: this is not a field trip. Lei Lian split the six hundred Dragon Cavalry into several segments. Up front, a high-speed scouting element pushed out along the coastline to the northeast, confirming wind, terrain, and whether anything ahead was foolish enough to get close. The main body held the middle, keeping an altitude that let them dive into support at a moment's notice.

A rear guard trailed behind, watching the Logistics Corps and the supply line — making sure no one straggled, and discouraging anyone with ideas about our rear. As for the Logistics Corps on the ground — that wasn't a column. It was a serpent.

An iron-dark serpent made of grain wagons, fodder carts, spare bowstrings, dragon saddle fittings, water barrels, tents, cooking pots, wooden crates, stretchers, medicine, and every category of military necessity that gave me a headache just to look at, crawling slowly forward along the coastal road. The grind of wheels, the calls of horses, and the shouts of soldiers all blurred together; seen from above, the whole formation looked like a dark scar pressed into the coastline, inching its way north.

But the single most striking thing in the entire formation was never the Dragon Cavalry. It was Ignicia. The most dangerous flying unit in the army. Her massive crimson form swept low over the column. When her wings spread fully, even the wagon train on the road below seemed to shrink beneath her shadow. Her scales caught the sunlight in a dark red-gold, like a sheet of iron dragged through the forge one time too many.

She flew deliberately low — close enough to read the ground signal flags and track the vanguard's movement — and with every bank of her wings, every low rumble from her throat, the cavalry ahead and the couriers below would adjust their pace as if they'd all understood the same order in the same instant. Put simply: Those in the sky who could fly served as the army's eyes and its blade. Those on the ground who could only run were hauling the army's stomach, lungs, and lifeblood forward, one step at a time.

And Ignicia was the red-hot nail driven straight through both, pinning them to a single shared rhythm from one end to the other. Sitting in the saddle, looking up at that streak of crimson cutting across the sky, I felt something quietly settle into place. This wasn't an adventure. This was a piece of the state's own machinery, forcibly dragged out onto a battlefield. And the fire dragon princess flying above everyone's heads had clearly grown used to that particular weight long before I ever showed up.

Near midday, the coastal air currents began to break up, and the ride grew noticeably rougher. The lead riders flashed the signal to hold formation, and the whole column dropped a layer in altitude. That was when the enormous cage, slung between the two dragons, finally began to demonstrate its true character. At first, it only swayed. Then it started rocking side to side. Then, eventually, it stopped flying altogether and began instead conducting a deeply disrespectful experiment on the very concept of balance.

From a distance, I could see Jessi locked onto the frame — not so much holding on anymore as attempting to weld herself to the structure through sheer force of will. Alvira was still upright, feet braced front and back, expression sour but nowhere near actually being sick. Yozora sat in the middle, staff laid across her knees, quietly murmuring to stabilize the working while patiently keeping the other two from fully parting ways with their souls. A quarter-hour later, Jessi finally broke.

"Ce—dric—!" Her voice tore through the wind in fragments, sounding as though it had been trampled by seagulls.

"What?!"

"I finally understand what it means to place your life in the hands of the heavens—!"

"Congratulations on the new life experience!"

"This is an experience I would very much like to return, unopened—!" The cage lurched again. I would swear, under oath, that I watched her soul nearly leave through her mouth. That was when a massive shadow dropped over everything. Ignicia swept down from above, the pressure off her wings flattening the air and, for one merciful heartbeat, steadying the pendulum the cage had become.

The red dragon lowered her head, gold-red slit pupils sweeping over its occupants with the exact look of someone appraising three pieces of luggage they'd personally packed and found sorely lacking. Then she spoke, still in dragon form, her voice a low roll of thunder moving through cloud.

"One more sound and I'll gag you."

"Your Highness, this would be the appropriate moment for some basic comfort!"

"I'm still letting you live, aren't I?"

"That is not a form of comfort!" Alvira added, flat, from the side: "You haven't fallen yet. Be grateful."

"Not you too?!" Yozora offered, with great gentleness: "Miss Jessi, please hold on a little longer. If you're sick now, it'll blow straight back into the wind."

"That sentence is somehow worse than no comfort at all!" I nearly laughed myself right off the saddle. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. The next moment, the dragon overhead turned one eye toward me. Just one glance. But I had an extremely clear, extremely specific premonition: laugh any louder, and I will personally deposit you in that cage to keep her company.... Right.

Even in dragon form, her capacity for menace remained perfectly intact — not diluted in the slightest by the increase in size. Toward evening, we made camp on the coastal highland.

"Made camp" makes it sound orderly. What it actually resembled was taking an entire small, breathing town, dropping it out of the sky and off the road at the same time, and forcing it to grow a functioning skeleton within half an hour. Ignicia came down first. The sun hung low, the sea burned into a shattered field of gold and red. When the red dragon dove from altitude, her wings seemed to gather all of that evening light straight into her own shadow.

She didn't circle down to slow herself the way the Dragon Cavalry did. With an almost arrogant steadiness, she swept over the campsite once, reading the terrain, then snapped her wings shut and dropped hard onto the ground just outside the designated center. The impact shook the earth. Loose stones bounced. A hot gust wrapped in dust rolled outward, rattling pot lids that had only just been unloaded and nearly costing a couple of cooks both dinner and their composure in the same instant.

The next moment, flame and scaled shadow collapsed inward. Ignicia walked out of the not-quite-settled dust. The instant she shifts back to human form always produces a specific kind of dissonance in me. One heartbeat, she's the crimson dragon capable of pressing an entire army into obedience from the sky. The next, she's a woman in a travel cloak, boots on solid ground, red hair lifting slightly in the evening wind.

But the weight of her presence doesn't diminish in the slightest — if anything, now that she has a mouth back and can lecture people directly, having a mouth back made her more dangerous than before. She didn't pause to catch her breath. The instant her boots hit the ground, she started issuing orders.

"Lei Lian. Push the outer perimeter further northwest. The sea wind turns tonight."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Move the archers' tents to the second line. Don't crowd them against the dragon roost." Alvira nodded and walked off at once.

"Yozora. Check the water source."

"Understood."

"Jessi—" She paused. Her eyes finally landed on the enormous cage, only just now being lowered, still swaying faintly.

"... If you're alive in there, stop playing dead." Two seconds of silence from inside the cage. Then came Jessi's voice, so drained it sounded like her soul was in the middle of filing its formal resignation.

"I am currently withholding judgment on the question of whether I am, in fact, alive..."

"That means you're alive." Ignicia delivered the verdict, ice-cold.

"Get yourself out." I stood watching the ground crew slowly unwind the cage, and felt a sudden, absurd realization settle over me. Other expeditionary forces, on their first night in the field, probably rang with valor and blazing morale. Ours spent its first night confirming whether the scout had been shaken into a liquid. When Jessi was finally let down, her legs gave out the second they touched solid ground.

She wobbled like a newborn fawn, gripping the cage frame, her face pale in a way that had its own strange artistic merit, eyes as hollow as someone who had just finished watching the complete highlight reel of their own life. I tried to hold it in. I genuinely tried. But her expression — I hate the sky, and I hate whoever invented flight — was simply too convincing, and the corner of my mouth betrayed me anyway.

The instant she spotted me, she grabbed my sleeve like someone lost in a desert who's just found the last bottle of water.

"Cedric."

"Yeah?"

"If I throw up in a minute, make sure my face isn't pointed at the crowd."

"... Your commitment to dignity, under these exact circumstances, is remarkably specific."

"I can die. I will not be ugly doing it."

"That is extremely on-brand for you." She shot me one last glare, then — right on schedule — turned and dry-heaved into a nearby crate. Well. At least she still had the energy to glare. Alvira completely ignored her. The moment her boots hit the ground, she seemed to shed whatever part of her had gone faintly green inside that cage, grabbed her bow, and headed for the archers, already correcting people before she'd finished walking over.

"You two — pull that guy line straight. Are you pitching a tent or setting a trap? And move the arrow crates away from the fire, unless you're eager to personally test how far you can fly at midnight." She sounded so practiced I began to suspect she kept her blood circulating primarily through the act of yelling at people. Yozora belonged to an entirely different world.

She stepped out of the cage, smoothed her skirts with perfect composure, patted Jessi's back once, then raised her staff and traced a slow circle in the air. Several pale workings rippled outward like water across a still surface, spreading along the camp's perimeter before dissolving quietly into the air.

"Wind-stabilizing and moisture-warding," she explained gently.

"If the sea fog rolls in heavy tonight, at least the insides of the tents shouldn't get too damp." Even mid-retch, Jessi managed to look up at her with the reverence of someone beholding a saint.

"Yozora... you're an angel, aren't you..."

"I'm not." Yozora offered a small smile.

"But if Miss Jessi keeps being sick, I can help contain the smell to a fairly small radius."

"... I've suddenly decided you're terrifying too."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment!" And in the middle of all of it — the bickering, the retching, the scolding, the drifting rings of pale light — the thing that actually made the camp feel like a military camp was, ironically, the Dragon Cavalry. Six hundred riders couldn't possibly cluster together in one mass, so the instant they landed they naturally split into sections. Some led their dragons toward the resting lines. Some stripped saddles.

Some crouched with brushes, working sand and salt spray out of the edges of wing membranes. Others knelt checking leather straps and metal fittings. A handful of dragons, clearly out of patience after a long haul, snorted low and disgruntled at their feed troughs — like a pack of oversized, underpaid civil servants who'd just clocked out and were in no mood to be reasoned with. Standing at the edge of the Dragon Cavalry's section, watching them work, I felt something strange settle over me.

During the day, holding formation in the sky, they looked like some moving embodiment of martial will itself. On the ground, they dropped effortlessly into the role of ordinary people — crouching to clean claws, patting necks, checking scale edges, some muttering the entire time in exactly the tone you'd use to complain about a difficult old dog back home.

"I told you not to cut hard through that wind shear. You did it anyway. Look at you now — salt crusted right into the membrane. Guess who gets to wipe you down twice tonight. Why don't you just grow yourself a pair of hands." The grey-blue dragon in question responded with a contemptuous blast of hot air directly into its rider's face. A nearby rider burst out laughing.

"She's saying you talk too much."

"Quiet, you. Your beast nearly knocked the cargo cage sideways up there. You don't get an opinion."

"That wasn't my dragon's fault. Someone inside that cage was screaming loud enough to spook the entire formation." That line drew a ripple of laughter through the surrounding group — the low, half-suppressed kind that everyone fully expects the subject to overhear anyway. A short distance off, Jessi, still mid-recovery, snapped her head up immediately.

"I heard that!" A young rider with an alarming absence of survival instinct waved cheerfully in her direction.

"Your voice really carried nicely over the water today, Miss Jessi."

"Say that again and I'll put a snake in your tent tonight!"

"You'd need to be able to stand up first."

"You little—!" Her attempt to lunge — thwarted entirely by her own legs — drew another round of quiet laughter, including from a few of the older riders. It wasn't mockery. It carried something closer to easy familiarity — the shared, unspoken understanding that a long march needed this kind of noise. Without it, orders and schedules alone would wear a person down to nothing long before the actual fighting started. I was still watching when a hand landed on my shoulder from behind. I turned. Lei Lian.

He'd apparently already finished his first circuit without my noticing, a night-watch roster tucked under one arm, armor still mostly on, only his gauntlets half-unbuckled. His face carried no particular expression, but a thin sheen of sweat had gathered at his temple — proof the day hadn't spared him either.

"What are you doing standing here?" he asked.

"Learning what actual military life looks like."

"And what did you learn?" I looked at the riders working and bickering, then at the Logistics Corps wagons rolling one by one into their assigned positions.

"That people who know how to fight still have to feed their dragons, pitch tents, set the watch, and go find a pot, once they're back on the ground." Lei Lian was quiet for a second. Then, unexpectedly, he nodded.

"Half right."

"What's the other half?"

"Making sure everyone's still here when you wake up tomorrow."... That single line pressed whatever lightness had been in the air down by several degrees. I didn't answer. Lei Lian didn't elaborate either. He simply turned and called out toward the Dragon Cavalry's section.

"Second squad — shift the roost line half a rod to the right. You're blocking the supply lane. Third squad, come get your watch rotation from me." Not loud. The entire section moved anyway. He was nothing like Ignicia. Ignicia is a blade — one glance, and everyone snaps into line. Lei Lian is a nail. He doesn't say much, but everything that needed pinning down stayed pinned.