Crownless Tyrant-Chapter 39: Children of the Sun

The Ironveil marched at dawn, and at the same moment, two hundred soldiers moved in rows while three commanders positioned themselves at the center and rear.

Their banners were held high in the grey morning light.

Alistair watched from a low rise east of the route, and his scan tracked the formation’s approach while correcting for the offset automatically.

The Ironveil had been watching Sun Harvest’s visibility grow since the Sovereign Record coverage, and they had clearly decided to move before the faction grew any larger.

The morning air was cold. It bit at the exposed skin of his neck as he waited.

It was a reasonable calculation, and Alistair could respect the logic of it even as he watched it fail.

Due and Elara had been in position since before dawn.

Due was on the ridgeline above the route the Ironveil’s formation had to take, and at the same time, his hands worked at their settling gestures as he mapped the obligations accumulated across this stretch of territory.

He had spent two weeks tracing debts owed between settlements and unresolved threads from a dozen minor transactions.

He had positioned those invisible threads along every natural chokepoint the way someone might lay rope across a path in the dark.

Elara was beside him, and her sight line covered the entire formation from the ridgeline’s edge. Her Favor was running constantly and invisibly.

Alistair didn’t participate, and instead, he sat on the low rise with his Rune Sword across his knees and watched.

The commanders started dying before the soldiers understood what was happening.

Due’s obligations reached them first, and at the same moment, accumulated threads pulled tight around individuals who hadn’t known they were carrying debts.

Compulsions arrived from directions that had nothing to do with the battlefield.

A commander stumbled mid-stride, and his body answered an obligation his mind hadn’t registered.

His soldiers looked at him, and Alistair saw the man try to speak. Nothing came out. He went to his knees like a man remembering something terrible he’d forgotten to do, and eventually, he was down in the dirt.

The second commander turned sharply toward the ridgeline, and at the same time, his own soldiers grabbed him in confusion.

They tried to understand why their leader had just broken formation.

However, the confusion was already spreading.

Soldiers looked left and right for instruction and found none, and the chain of command developed gaps that shouldn’t exist.

Following that, Elara’s Favor hit those gaps.

The formation’s instinct to reorganize closed ranks around failing command, but the coordination was redirected toward nothing.

Soldiers turned to look for leadership and found absence where certainty should have been.

The coordination that holds an army together dissolved from the inside, because the people maintaining it suddenly couldn’t remember why it mattered.

The third commander went down without a sound.

Within minutes, the entire force broke, and soldiers dropped their weapons while running in every direction.

Some of them stood in place with the blank expressions of men who had trained for every kind of threat but had never once trained for the threat of not knowing where to look.

The banners fell across the field, and some dropped where they stood while others were carried away by retreating soldiers who held onto them out of reflex rather than purpose.

Nobody from Sun Harvest had drawn a weapon.

Alistair was honestly unsettled by what he’d just watched. It wasn’t the result that bothered him, but the efficiency.

Two people on a ridgeline had broken a force that should have taken hours to defeat in open combat, and they’d done it without anyone on either side understanding exactly what had happened until it was already over.

’This is what Sun Harvest looks like now. We aren’t a faction that fights armies, but a faction that ends them before they begin.’

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that yet, though.

***

Due joined him on the rise afterward, and his hands were in their settling gestures at the slower rhythm that had become normal. He adjusted his collar twice before he spoke.

"I didn’t enjoy that," Due said.

Alistair looked at him, and at the same moment, his jaw tightened. "You looked like you did."

"I was focused," said Due. "That looks similar from the outside."

Alistair clicked his tongue. "You just love to complain."

Neither of them said anything else for a while, and the field below them remained empty except for the fallen banners and a few pieces of equipment left in the dirt.

The Ironveil had scattered completely, and the morning was still young.

Elara came down from the ridgeline, and she looked tired.

Her hands were steady, but her expression was complicated.

"The commanders," she said. "Were they—"

"Two dead," said Due. "One alive, and he ran with the soldiers."

Elara nodded, and she didn’t say anything else about it. Alistair noticed she didn’t look back at the field.

’She helped take apart an army without drawing a weapon. And now, she’s trying to decide whether that makes her useful or frightening.’

He didn’t say that either. There were a lot of things Alistair didn’t say these days, and most of them were about Elara.

However, the Oasis of Grain decided how it felt about the result faster than Alistair expected.

Word spread through the settlements within two days, and the region started speaking about them differently.

They weren’t just the faction that held off a thousand soldiers anymore, but something worse.

Alistair’s scan picked up the change in the settlements nearest their territory.

People who had been neutral were moving closer, and at the same moment, people who had been cautious were asking questions.

The Oasis of Grain was recalculating, and Alistair watched the balance of power shift as nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of the new equation.

On the second evening, Sera appeared at the base. She walked in without announcing herself, and she looked at all three of them with a complicated expression.

"Good," she said.

She turned around and left, and Due stared after her.

"Was that it?" Due asked.

Alistair looked at the empty doorway. "Apparently."

Hearing this, Elara made a sound from across the base that might have been a laugh if she hadn’t caught it in time.

Due’s brows rose slightly, but he didn’t comment.

The Ironveil’s banners were still lying in the field where they’d fallen.

Nobody had come to collect them, and Alistair thought about that as the evening settled.

A faction’s symbols were lying in the dirt because nobody was left who cared enough to pick them up.

He looked at the Sun Harvest banner hanging inside the base. It was a yellow sun on red, and it was Elara’s design.

He looked at it for a long time. Eventually, he spoke lowly:

"The Children of the Sun."