Chương 286: 59.Fort Louis 3

Fort Louis. Before Midnight. That night, Fort Louis never truly went quiet. The siege line Ignicia had severed with a single breath continued to glow in scattered patches beyond the walls, deep into the dark. The fires out there weren't a single solid wall—they lingered like unresolved malice hiding in the shadows, flaring back to life every so often.

Occasionally, a delayed scream or the dull thud of a stone slamming into stonework rode the wind into the fortress, a constant reminder: Just because the sky's gone dark doesn't mean the war has gone to sleep. It hadn't. War is a lot like a debt collector. The more you hope it comes back tomorrow, the more enthusiastically it pulls up a chair beside your bed tonight. I sat on a stone step along Fort Louis's inner wall, holding a bowl of soup that had long since gone cold, not drinking it.

Calling it "soup" was generous. The flavor profile was best described as everything still remotely edible thrown into a pot and politely asked to negotiate a drinkable compromise. It had salt. It had grease. It also had, for no discernible reason, a bitterness that had no business being there. Drinking it felt like receiving a personal, deeply irritated editorial from some minor kitchen deity on the subject of wartime famine. But I had no right to complain.

From the dive, to the landing, to the report, to inspecting the walls, reading maps, tracing supply lines, and issuing stopgap orders—by the time I finally sat down, whatever was happening inside my skull could no longer be called thought. It was closer to a pot of gruel that had been aggressively stirred with a wooden spoon a dozen times too many. Being able to sit was already a victory. Being able to sit without someone dragging me into another midnight war council bordered on a miracle.

I stared down at the bowl and suddenly felt a strange kinship with Fort Louis itself. Holding it together on the surface. Everything inside stewed nearly to mush.

"That expression suggests you're debating whether to pour that soup over the enemy troops outside the wall." Ignicia's footsteps were, as always, quiet—but her presence never was. She'd shed a few pieces of armor, her crimson hair tied loosely back, a dark coat draped over her shoulders. She'd come off the battlefield only a short while ago, and yet she still looked unreasonably clean, save for a faint dusting of ash along her cuffs and hem. I strongly suspected this was some kind of draconic racial privilege.

Everyone else comes off a battlefield looking like they've been dragged through soot. She comes off a battlefield looking like she walked through the fire, found it beneath her, and left it behind. Absolutely rigged.

"I'm contemplating a serious tactical question," I said with complete sincerity.

"What question?"

"Whether throwing this bowl of soup at the Yanxia Empire's Dragon Cursemasters would legally qualify as biological warfare." She gave me a flat look.

"It seems you still have energy left for nonsense."

"That's because it's the only function I have left," I sighed.

"Past a certain threshold of exhaustion, the brain voluntarily abandons dignity and switches to running on pure garbage as a survival mechanism." Ignicia didn't dignify that with a response. She simply sat down on the step beside me. The wind came in off the wall-walk, lifting the edge of her coat.

Distant firelight caught the side of her face, making her already sharp features look unusually quiet—not a soft quiet, but the kind belonging to a blade returned to its sheath, fully aware it can be drawn again at any moment. She looked out at the darkness beyond the city for a while before speaking.

"You handled things well today." I turned my head toward her.

"Is that a compliment?"

"I'm stating a fact," she said evenly.

"You arrived to that mess and didn't start flailing, and you didn't rush to prove anything either. That was better than I expected." Coming from her, that was practically a decoration ceremony. From anyone else, the equivalent would be "good job." From Ignicia, it translated to: "You arrived and somehow didn't immediately make everything worse." Technically an insult. By her personal standard, genuinely tender. I looked down and smiled.

"Hearing you say that, I'm almost moved."

"You're welcome to cry."

"I'll pass," I said, eyeing the cold bowl.

"If I start now, this soup is going to think I'm holding a funeral for it specifically." She let out a low sound. Almost a laugh. We sat in silence for a while. Fort Louis was still in motion all around us. Patrols moved along the wall-walk at intervals. Below, men hauled timber. Further off, metal struck metal and the wounded groaned. The whole fortress felt like someone gravely injured who refused to be allowed to collapse, surviving on sheer willpower, treating every single breath as an order to be carried out.

Watching that, I spoke without quite deciding to.

"This afternoon, you asked if I was really going to do it." Ignicia didn't look at me. She just made a soft sound of acknowledgment.

"My answer's the same," I said.

"I don't want to." Saying it out loud made something in my chest fractionally lighter. There are things you can know with total certainty and still find impossible to say out loud to anyone—not because there's no one to hear it, but because the moment you say it, you have to admit it isn't a passing feeling. You're actually thinking about it. And I was actually thinking about it. Thinking about what I'd do tomorrow, if I reached Thornhold and found exactly who I expected to find.

If things had truly rotted to the point where there was no option left but to act. I let my gaze drift back to the fires flickering beyond the walls and spoke slowly.

"Honestly, it's been a long time since I thought of them as brothers."

"They didn't treat me like one either, when they threw me out."

"But even so…" I paused. The wind came in from beyond the wall, carrying char, and beneath it, the particular damp chill that only exists deep in the night.

"Even if I have to do it with my own hands… it still makes me sick." That wasn't a noble sentiment. It wasn't heroic hesitation. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. It was simply, plainly, nausea—the kind that comes from swallowing something you know you shouldn't have to, but have no choice about. Lodged in your throat. Refusing to go down. Refusing to come back up.

"Because you're still human," Ignicia said. I looked at her. She was still facing outward, her voice carrying the same unhurried weight as someone stating the obvious.

"Feeling sick about it means you still understand it was never supposed to be ordinary."

"That isn't weakness." She paused before continuing.

"The truly dangerous thing is when people kill enough times that they stop feeling anything about it at all." I was quiet for two breaths, then let out a tired, bitter laugh.

"Doesn't the persuasive power of that statement feel a little compromised, coming from a dragon who incinerated several thousand men's worth of siege line this very afternoon?" She finally turned to look at me.

"You're comparing me to a human?"

"…Fair point. You were never operating under those terms to begin with."

"Cedric."

"I retract the statement entirely. Her Highness is wise, magnificently compassionate, and gloriously endowed with the virtue of fire. My previous remark was a momentary lapse in judgment."

"The fact that you've survived this long is a testament to other people's tolerance."

"I agree with that completely and without reservation." She watched me adopt my most appropriately chastened expression, apparently decided I wasn't worth arguing with further, and reached over to take the bowl from my hands. She sniffed it once. Her brow furrowed immediately.

"What is this?"

"I told you. Biological warfare." She shoved the bowl back into my hands, her disgust entirely unconcealed.

"Drink it."

"Why?"

"Because you need to be alive tomorrow when we go to Thornhold."

"That reasoning sounds perfectly sound. The execution feels a lot like abuse."

"You're free not to drink it," she said flatly.

"And then tomorrow you can spend the whole flight dizzy, weak-legged, and vomiting on my back." … Right. Down the hatch it is. I looked down at the bowl of soup, then looked back up at her. In the end, I could only accept my fate and choke down a mouthful.... Right. Confirmed. This wasn't soup. This was an act of vengeance against life itself. My face nearly collapsed into itself from the sheer assault on my senses.

I held it together on nothing but the last surviving shred of my dignity, forcing the mouthful down through sheer brute determination. Beside me, Ignicia watched, and the corner of her mouth finally curved upward—just slightly. This woman. No—this dragon. She always looked a little too energized whenever she got to watch someone suffer.

"What are you smiling at?" I asked, my voice thick with grief and indignation.

"Nothing," she said.

"I'm simply confirming that anyone who still has the energy to make that face probably isn't going to die."

"Your way of showing concern is exactly like a field medic poking a wounded soldier with a stick to check for signs of life."

"As long as it works." I had no rebuttal. Because she was right. In a hellhole like this, something that actually worked already outranked ninety percent of anything that merely sounded reassuring. I drained the rest of the bowl. When I set it down, my entire body settled into a state of agonizing tranquility—the particular, forcibly reassembled calm of a soul that had just been dragged back into alignment with its own body against its will.

Still staring straight ahead, Ignicia suddenly asked:"If we reach Thornhold tomorrow, and you actually see them—what do you plan to do?" She had technically asked this question once already, that afternoon. But that time, she'd asked it from inside the frame of battlefield reports and command decisions. This time, she was asking me. I stayed silent for a long time. Long enough for the men hauling timber below to cycle through a full rotation.

Long enough for a short, sharp burst of alarm bells to sound somewhere beyond the walls and fade again. Only then did I speak, slowly.

"I'll look first."

"Look at what?"

"At how badly they've let this rot," I said.

"At whether they still treat this wall, these soldiers, this kingdom—as something worth defending. At whether what they did came from fear, from stupidity, or whether they've decayed so far through that the only way left to balance the books is with their own deaths." I drew a breath.

"If there's still something salvageable, I'll drag them back and force them to carry what they were supposed to carry."

"If there isn't…" I stopped. I didn't need to finish it. Because even the wind understood. And Ignicia understood. She didn't press for the rest. She simply laid her hand over the back of mine, where it rested on my knee. The pressure wasn't heavy. But it was steady. It caught me completely off guard. It wasn't the kind of dramatic contact that makes a heart stutter in a story. If anything, it was restrained to the point of being almost nothing at all. But that restraint was exactly what made it feel like her.

She wasn't the type to fill a moment like this with a stream of comforting words. She wasn't the type to pull someone into her arms and murmur reassurances. She was simply telling me— Alright. If it comes to that, I understand. That's all. And somehow, precisely because that was all, it landed harder than a hundred speeches could have. I looked down at her hand resting over mine and, for a moment, genuinely had nothing to say.

So I said the most Cedric-Rosa thing I could possibly say:"You know, if you keep doing that, you're going to give me the wrong idea." She slid me a sideways glance.

"What idea?"

"The idea that you're actually gentle."

"You can still take that back. There's time."

"Absolutely not," I said with complete sincerity.

"Evidence this rare doesn't get thrown away. I'm keeping it, and I fully intend to weaponize it repeatedly in the future."

"Cedric."

"Present."

"If you ever actually try to use that against me, I will drop you out of the sky."

"But didn't you say you're taking me to Thornhold tomorrow?"

"Which is exactly why I'll wait until the return trip."

"... The level of forward planning you've put into that schedule is genuinely touching." She finally laughed. Not the razor-edged laugh from earlier in the day. Not the you're such an idiot smirk she gave when mocking me. Just a brief flicker—like firelight catching for one instant in the dark. Very faint. But I saw it. And, unfortunately, my mood lifted a little because of it. Which was truly terrible. The battlefield. My brothers. This fortress. The collapsing Eastern Wall. Thornhold waiting for us tomorrow.

Not a single item on that list contained anything worth feeling good about. And yet, right at this exact worst possible moment, one tiny shift in her expression was still enough to loosen something tight in my chest. Humans really are hopeless creatures. Especially men. Especially a man fully aware that the woman sitting beside him could, in her true form, casually incinerate his entire ancestral burial ground down to something of purely archaeological interest. We sat there a while longer.

Not until the night wind sharpened and the second watch finally cycled into position below the walls did I stand, rolling out the stiffness that had settled into my shoulders.

"What time do we leave tomorrow?"

"Before dawn." Ignicia rose alongside me.

"One squad of Yinglong Guard. Not many—fast is what matters."

"Lei Lian's people?"

"Mm."

"Her expression is going to be spectacular when she finds out she's coming with me."

"Don't worry," Ignicia said.

"She generally doesn't waste her contempt on facial expressions." Fair enough. Lei Lian wasn't the type to dress her disdain up for show. When she despised someone, she just ran it through the standard operational process and dispensed with the theatrics. I set the empty bowl aside and walked with her down toward the lower stretch of the wall-walk. The stone steps were narrow.

Torches jumped along the wall, and the siege fires beyond flared and dimmed by turns, stretching our shadows long, then snapping them short again. Halfway down, I called her name again.

"Ignicia."

"What now?"

"If things tomorrow turn out to be genuinely terrible—" I thought about it, then finished the sentence anyway.

"If I end up looking like an idiot about to throw up, make sure the Yinglong Guard doesn't laugh too loudly." She didn't even break stride.

"Don't worry." I was just about to think, Huh. Look at that—you're actually willing to save my dignity for once. Then her next sentence arrived.

"At most, they'll only laugh hard enough to stop hearing my orders."... Right. There she is. If she'd suddenly turned genuinely considerate, I'd have spent the rest of the night wondering whether the world was scheduled to end before sunrise. We walked all the way back to the temporary quarters assigned to me inside the inner keep. Guards stood posted at the door, beside two crates of map scrolls and duplicate war reports ready for tomorrow. Ignicia stopped and looked at me.

"Go sleep."

"What about you?"

"I have things to do." Coming from her, those four words were the equivalent of: I'm probably going to make one more circuit of the outer wall, work out the Dragon Cursemasters' likely night-raid angles, and, while I'm at it, make sure you don't inexplicably die before we even leave tomorrow. I nodded. As she turned to go, I reached out on pure reflex and caught her wrist. Ignicia glanced back, one brow lifting slightly.

"Something else?" I honestly didn't know why I'd done it. Maybe because of Thornhold tomorrow. Maybe because the words if there isn't were still lodged in my throat like broken glass. Or maybe simply because, in the middle of a city choking on gunpowder smoke and broken things, a person occasionally needs to confirm that some things, at least for right now, are still solidly here. So I looked at her, and in the end, said only one thing:"Tomorrow… don't get too far from me." She held my gaze for two full seconds.

Then, very gently, she drew her hand free from mine. I'd half-braced for something cutting—so you've finally learned what fear is, or a little late to realize you can't do without me now— Instead, she only said, flatly:"Keep up, and we'll see." Then she turned and walked away. Her crimson hair caught the torchlight once before dissolving into the depths of the wall-walk. I stood in front of my door, watching the direction she'd gone, and after a long moment, let out a low, quiet laugh. Fair enough.

That answer was very her, too. The Next Morning. I genuinely wasn't sure whether I'd actually slept at all. It felt like I'd barely closed my eyes before someone was knocking at the door. The sky was still dark, and yet Fort Louis was already dragging itself upright out of the darkness for the second time. In the distance: horns, the clatter of iron, orders passed in clipped, hushed voices, and the deep, resonant thrum of wyverns breathing at low altitude. I fastened my cloak and pushed the door open.

The horizon held only a thin, gray-white line. Ignicia was already waiting outside. Lei Lian and a squad of Yinglong Guard had assembled as well—light kit, short weapons, securing cables, field rations, everything trimmed down to the essentials. One look told you this wasn't a procession. It was a spearpoint, built for cutting into Thornhold at maximum speed and finding out exactly how far the rot had spread.

Lei Lian saw me coming and dropped one sentence, cold as the morning air:"You'd better be more useful today than you were yesterday." I kept walking and threw back:"Relax. I finished the whole bowl of soup last night. The evolution is complete." She frowned.

"What soup?" I paused, then glanced sideways at Ignicia. Ignicia's expression didn't shift a millimeter.

"Classified weaponry." Lei Lian looked at her. Then at me. Then she made the tactical decision not to ask any further. Clearly, she was also someone who valued her own sanity. Ahead of us, the morning mist still pressed heavy against the world beyond the walls, unwilling to let go just yet. And Thornhold was waiting for us, further north. Today's trip was probably not going to be pretty.