Chapter 41 Bonus Chapter: Noore The Terrible, Part 1

Today had been a good day. The hastily assembled Utsnil militia hadn’t stood a chance. Noore had anticipated that they’d keep their reserve forces in the grassy hills to the north of the city, and had instructed her archers to start several strategic fires around them. In the dry season like this, they had spread quickly. The alluring scent of grass smoke and burnt flesh played nicely on her senses. It smelled like victory.

The untrained and undisciplined smattering of wannabe soldiers had quickly panicked and scattered to the wind in a vain attempt to escape. Her men were already prepared, and had surrounded them to kill and capture as many as they could. A few among them were local lords, and businessmen. They could be ransomed. The rest could be sold off. The Ordenian Empire paid its mercenaries well, but Noore knew that the winter would be coming soon, and her people would need to hunker down. No war would mean no coin, and they’d have to be fed somehow. 

All in all, it was another textbook victory. All that would be left now would be capturing the city itself. She was sure that their better trained soldiers were still hunkered down within its walls. The reserve forces were a weak attempt at an ambush, waiting in the wings for once her men had surrounded the city walls and prepared for a siege. 

Perhaps she could save everyone some time with a duel?

It was a common matter of honor in Ordenia and its neighbors that a duel could decide the fate of the battle, if each side was confident enough in their champion. There was always the chance your opponent wouldn’t honor the terms, but it typically was a far cleaner option than an all out battle. Less homes would be burned and looted, less good soldiers would needlessly fall to the blade. If your opponent was amicable enough, it wouldn’t even need to be to the death. 

“Signal to the city that I’d like to meet,” the mouse waved to her aid, and donned her helmet. “After a routing like that, they may be amicable to a quicker and less bloody solution.”

“Right away, Commander,” the man saluted and marched off to raise the flag of negotiation. 

The city walls had theirs raised even before hers was to half mast. 

Noore and her captains were at the front of their forces in no time, in full armor, waiting patiently for the losers to make their appearance. The gates never opened, instead a rope was thrown over the edge for a single man to clamber down. Noore supposed it was smart. There was always the odd chance of a dishonorable attempt at slipping through the gates during parley, not that she would ever allow her own mercenary company to be caught doing something so dishonorable. Typically, though, cities would send a full diplomatic party for parley. Who was this?

He strode up to the mercenaries without hesitation, as casually as he would a market stand. Coming closer, she recognized him as a jackal. He was quite far from the sunny savannas and rocky mountains of the south. “You there,” he pointed to Noore with a challenge of a smirk, “you’re Noore the Terrible, aren’t you?”

Her lips curled into a cruel smile at the epithet. Her reputation preceded her, for a thirty five year old. “That would be me. What business do you have?”

“A duel, madame,” he bowed like a true gentleman. “I understand it is your habit to spare bloodshed by a show of your prowess, is this not correct?” 

Noore tilted her head at the curious man before her. He came to her alone, unarmored, and apparently armed only with a stunningly large ego. “Yes. If you would send your champion out, we can settle the matter quickly. Are you authorized by the city to negotiate a surrender?”

“Yes, yes,” he waved a hand dismissively. “If I win you become my prisoner, and your men leave. If you win, the soldiers of the city will leave behind their arms and leave, and the city will become the territory of the Ordenian Empire.”

She would be his prisoner? That was an unusual term for these duels. Typically the loser would die, or be carried away and tended to until they could serve again. “Would you become my prisoner if you lose?”

“No, madame, I am afraid not. I can offer you… say, fifty gold instead. It should be roughly equal in worth to myself.” He shrugged.

Fifty gold? That was more than she was being paid to take the city in the first place. Who the hell was this guy to carry that kind of cash? “Money on the table first. Name the location, and arms.”

“Your choice of arms, and how does inside the burning village that you destroyed today sound?” The man’s tone turned unexpectedly dangerous in an instant. His gaze hardened, and for a moment Noore doubted her chance. No, not even a moment, an instant. She wasn’t going to lose. She never had before. 

“You have a deal. I will meet you there in one hour’s time.” She gestured to one of her men, and he came forward with a pair of glaives. “Your weapon,” she tossed one to him, handle first. 

“Very good.” He tossed a pouch of coins back in return. “The fifty gold. Do see that I get it back when you lose.”

“No need. It’s as good as ours,” she smirked, and retreated back into her camp to prepare. 

Noore hadn’t realized the fire had spread this far, or that there was a village on the edge of the lake. Her reports hadn’t indicated that there was anything this far from the city. All that was left now were blackened husks. The fire had spread so wide and so quickly that it seemed the residents had been cornered by the blaze before they realized anything was. There was a small dock on the edge of the water, now burned, but there hardly would have been enough boats to evacuate an entire village of two hundred people. 

She could see the bodies from the hill above. 

“It’s the city’s fault for not evacuating, Commander,” her aid stood at attention behind her. It was customary to bring a second to the duel, to both ensure the rules were followed, and report back on the results, should she lose. She wasn’t exactly in the mood for his presence, though. 

She actually felt… pity, or a spark of it at least. No… no, not pity. It was some other unfamiliar sensation. There was some familiar feeling stirring in her that she couldn’t quite place. She had been given an assignment from her employer, and she had completed it. That should have been all there was to it. So why didn’t she feel right about this?

“Commander?” The wolf nudged her again.

She snapped without meaning, her blade at his neck before she knew what she was doing. A trickle of blood ran down its length, having stopped herself at only the last second. “What. Is. It. Captain?”

“I- I- you seemed distant, I was-”

“You were what?” She drew the weapon back and shoved him away. “You were questioning me?”

“No, Commander! Never!” He shot to attention, removing his hand from his bleeding throat. “I see the city’s champion approaching.”

“Mmm… stay your tongue, Captain. I’ll take it from here.” She spun the blade and wiped away the wolf’s blood, before beginning her march down into the village. The mysterious jackal was approaching from a perpendicular angle, in the opposite direction of the city he was defending. It had taken her nearly the entire two hours to hike out here, and he had gone even past their meeting place. There was something to this opponent that she was missing. 

“Well hello again, Noore the Terrible,” he put particular emphasis on the epithet, as if he thought it might hurt her. He was a fool if he thought so. The title was an honor. Being a terror upon her enemies was something she had wished for since beginning her training as a child. She’d had enough of being afraid. Fear was a weapon she desired to wield, not defend against. 

“Who do I have the honor of defeating today?” She stopped just short of the edge of the village, and planted the haft of her weapon into the charred soil. “If you are anyone of note, your name will join the songs sung in my name.”

“You may call me Yarterex.” He clasped his hands together over the haft of his own lent weapon, and hung them down in front of his hips, holding the glaive horizontally. “Shall we begin then?”

“Let’s.” Noore took a fighting stance and pointed the weapon at her foe. 

“Ah, no, I would remind you, our duel is to be held within the village.” He opened up his arms and took a step back, as if inviting her to examine the destruction. 

“What are you trying to do here?” Noore growled and brandished the polearm. “I had a job, and I completed it. Do you intend to rattle me?”

He simply shrugged his shoulders and smiled innocently at her accusation. “Perhaps it was my plan, but if you truly have no qualms with what you did to these people, then I suppose it will be for naught.” 

It was a shame this duel was not to the death. Noore wanted his fucking head on a pike. 

She took her first steps into the village, and felt as if she was going to be sick. She’d been through countless battlefields. She had felled hundreds by her own hand in battle, thousands more through her strategy and orders as an officer. She had marched over the corpses of dozens of battles. 

So why did this village give her so much pause?

It was true that she rarely found herself in villages like these. Most battles were focused around larger population centers that were too strategically valuable to destroy utterly, and the surrounding villages were at best supply lines to cut off. They had never been necessary for her to visit after a battle.

“Are you coming or not?” Her stupor was broken as Yarterex goaded her again. 

By Tiamat’s fucking tail, she was not going to let these feelings rule her. She shot forward, charging into a full sprint down the hill and into the village. There was only a thirty foot gap. She covered it in five seconds at most, and swung with all her power, aiming to knock the smug champion off balance, or at least put him on the back foot so she could push him into a disadvantageous position. 

It was unlike her. She normally waited for her opponent to make the first move. 

As she made her first swing, she planted both feet, and roared as loud as a dragon. 

Yarterex caught the haft of the weapon with his free hand. He didn’t even flinch as the wind from her strike washed over him. “Now now, I had heard you were a tactical genius. A perfect weapon of war, for whoever has deep enough pockets. You expect me to believe that’s you?” With an infuriatingly neutral expression, bereft of his smiles from before, he released her weapon and shoved her back. “Try again.”

He was right. That could have been an easy win for him. She was fighting like a fucking rookie. If she didn’t get control of her emotions now she’d be short of fifty gold, a spotless reputation, and her freedom. After backing up a few steps, she began to circle. She needed to examine him, find his weaknesses, strike when he was not prepared. No more obvious charge attacks. She was Noore. She was a terror. She just needed to remind him of that.

The jackal moved first. He thrusted the glaive toward her center mass, with a slight swing towards the left. She couldn’t block as confidently from that angle, instead stepping back, moving inside his guard while he was extended, and swinging her blade down at his legs. He leapt back, flicking his weapon in her direction, which she barely blocked in time. 

She stopped to recollect, and returned to circling after that little exchange. He had done that with one arm, and the force of it was enough to briefly knock her off balance. No one should be able to wield a weapon of this size that easily. He couldn’t be a regular mortal, like her. Could he be a rider? But where was the dragon?

While she attempted to discern the true nature of her opponent, he gave her no time. He moved in with a wild flurry of thrusts and swings, and she barely protected herself under the assault. There was no wind up time to his swings, and the force behind them was enough to leave her joints sore on every block. 

Even mid assault he taunted her, “do you even care about the loss of life?” There was no breathlessness in his words. She was straining to move in time with him, but he didn’t seem strained in even the slightest. He might as well be taking a stroll down the road with her for how even his breathing was, making strike after strike with no gaps for her to counter, or even to breathe. “These weren’t soldiers, they were farmers, fishermen, families!” He made another swing, harder than any of the previous, and finally cleaved through the haft of her weapon. 

Noore attempted to reposition and recollect, hoping to find a new angle. There could still be a chance, if she could just-

Yarterex didn’t hesitate. He gave her no chance to act, or disengage, as he had at the start of the fight. He drove his glaive up into her stomach, piercing through her gut, and straight up into her chest, before lifting her up off of the ground, and slamming her back down. So much for her being his prisoner, she thought, as he pulled the weapon free from her innards, spilling them out over the soot as his feet. She was sure it would be her last thought. 

Fire. Smoke. Screams. The sound of marching boots. 

So this must be the part where her life flashed before her eyes. 

She’d seen this scene before, many times, in her dreams. It had truly taken years to make sense of it. She really was too young to understand the events when it had happened. 

The little mouse was in the hills, above the village. They’d had enough warning to get the children out, and anyone not confident with a weapon, but there was no time to take them anywhere. Her father had come home with a sword that day, and her mother with a bow. At first she thought it was for a game. The older kids got to play with toy swords. 

She wanted to play fight, too, but her parents always told her she was still too small. Maybe she was finally old enough, and they’d brought home new toys for her! The warm bronze sheen of the sword called to her so, but father had only yelled at her when she grabbed for it. Maybe it was for her birthday next month.

Her mother had given her to her older brother, and told him to take him into the hills. There was an argument. He didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay and play swords. Even though Noore had seen him play swords before, with the other teenagers, they wouldn’t let him. They yelled and yelled, and mother began to cry. Why was it so wrong for him to stick around, she wondered. She started crying too, trying to convince her family to stop fighting. For some reason, that seemed to convince her big brother to take her into the hills. Maybe he didn’t want to leave her out?

As her big brother carried her, she had merely idly sucked on her tail. Everyone was making such a big deal out of this game.

Maybe it wasn’t a game?

Big brother managed to get her comfortable, wrapped up in her favorite blankets, and did his best to hide out in the trees. For a moment she thought it might be hide and seek, but then she heard the screams. Those weren’t happy screams. They kept coming, yells of anger mixing in. The entire town below was bathed in flickering hues of red and gold, and smoke began to billow up from below. She couldn’t even see her house anymore with all the smoke. 

Now big brother was crying. 

They stayed put all night. At some point she drifted off, and in the morning he fed her some bread and fruit he’d stored in his bag, before taking her and hiking back down to the village. It didn’t look like there was anyone there at all. Why were they going? She didn’t want to go. She hated the smell. She begged and pleaded to leave. The smell burned her nostrils. She cried and threw fits, even as he did his best to calm her down. He kept saying she needed to be quiet, but she didn’t understand why. She wanted her mother and father, and they clearly weren’t here. Where were they?

They were so busy bickering that they didn’t even notice that they’d been surrounded. Someone came out from behind one of the buildings and hit big brother with a huge stick, and then again, and again, until he was curled up on the ground, begging for mercy. One of the other strange men picked Noore up, and as she was being carried away she saw them tying him up, and carrying him away. She never saw him again. 

Noore jolted awake, hand reaching for a weapon that wasn’t at her side. She was alive? A hand reached down to her stomach, where she’d been impaled, and found only intact flesh. There wasn’t even a scar. Had the fight been the dream? No, that felt too real. So where was she? And where was the wound?

Sitting up further, she examined her surroundings. She was in some kind of tent, a large, and very nice one. Water and food had been set out for her, and the shattered pieces of her glaive were piled up in the corner, wrapped together with a thick leather strap. 

She nearly collapsed as a wave of nausea and weakness washed over her. She felt like death. Her head swam until she finally relented and collapsed back into the bedding she’d been so carefully wrapped in. She felt as if she’d lost a significant amount of blood, but there was no wound, so someone must have used magic to heal her. That settled it, Yarterex had to be a rider. Mages outside of the riders were far too rare. 

All she could do now was curse the flawed information she’d been fed on the city in question. They weren’t supposed to have a resident dragon. Their temple wasn’t even big enough to house one. No wonder she hadn’t stood a chance. Even a rider of a dragon that was only a few decades old would be nigh impossible to defeat in single combat without proper planning. They would be stronger and faster, and better trained than most other warriors on the battlefield. She should have known! She’d gotten cocky!

She clenched her fists in rage, and curled up tight, screaming in frustration. A thirty year perfect streak had been broken by one stupid mistake, and now she’d cost her men a pay day, delayed the Ordenian Empire’s expansion plans to next year at the earliest, and left herself at the mercy of some… unknown jackal. 

“There we are,” a familiar voice muttered, and the flap to the tent lifted up, revealing the smug face of Yarterex, once again. “Your man has already obeyed the terms of our agreement. Your honor is intact. My gold was returned to me, and your army has withdrawn back across the river. Nilimir stands strong another year.

“Fuck you!” Noore spit at him, attempting a lunge, but falling flat on her face, still too weak to fight. “Dragons and riders aren’t supposed to get involved in wars like that. Nilimir’s not even supposed to have a resident dragon!”

“Well, they’re talking about renovating the lighthouse, I hear,” the jackal shrugged and stepped inside to help her back into the blankets. “And I’m a free dragon. I don’t follow ministry orders, just fly where the wind takes me.”

Noore couldn’t fight back against the dragon in her wildest dreams in the state she was in. She was limp as a ragdoll as he slid her back into the bedding, and tucked her in. She was stuck on what he had said about himself. “You’re a dragon?”

“Yes. If I were a rider, where would my dragon be?” he chuckled, and sank down onto a spare cushion on the floor. “I’m a solo flier. No rider for me. Maybe some day, but just haven’t found the right one, I guess. I’m back every year to check, it’s nice to see Dad and Grandma for it too, but… eh.”

“How- how old?” She could at least get a gauge for how well she’d done against him. The older the dragon, the stronger. She wouldn’t feel as humiliated if he were old enou-

“I’ll be twenty nine come Lacus 2nd,” he informed her as he picked up the water and brought it to her lips. 

Twenty nine? She was older than he was! She couldn’t stand for this! “Why are you taking care of me? You clearly hated my guts earlier.”

“I’ve got a job for you, now drink.” He pressed the bowl to her lips, and she squirmed to avoid it.

“My services aren’t for sale! I’m under contract!”

He lowered the bowl briefly, and his gaze hardened. “Your payment will be your life. You will do this job, or I will add your charred corpse to the rest. Now, drink,” he shoved the bowl to her lips once again. 

She had a hard time arguing with that. She relaxed long enough to take a few solid swigs of the water, before collapsing back down again, already drained. “What’s the job?”

Yarterex at least seemed satisfied with the amount she drank, and sat the bowl back down. “According to the census taken five years ago, this village held one hundred and ninety three souls. Many of them are still here. The fire you started swept through and killed nearly all of them. Men, women, children, livestock, all swept up in the blaze you started to scare a bunch of farmers with pointy sticks.”

“Get to the point!” she roared, and grit her teeth, tail whipping below. 

A hand came down to grip her by the jaw, squeezing her mouth shut again. “Silence. Their blood is on your hands. Most dragons would kill you and move on, consider yourself lucky you got me instead.” He held her, and stared into her eyes, eyes seeming to flash gold for a moment, before releasing her and continuing. “You are going to dig a grave for every soul in this village that burned. I don’t mean a mass grave, I don’t mean a shallow grave, you are going to personally dig a six foot deep hole for every life you burned to ash, bury them, and mark where they rest with one of the larger stones from the lake.”

“But the winter’s coming, the ground will be fr-”

“I do not care!” He did not speak with his mouth this time, but rather his thoughts rang through her consciousness, burning a path through the very fibers of her being, and ringing as though a massive bell had rung inches from her ears. She writhed and gasped, gritting her teeth, unable to stand the agony. She’d experienced countless injuries in her life, but physical pain could not compare to the agony of one’s very mind being assaulted. Yarterex waited long enough for her to calm again, and after he had seen that her breathing returned to normal pressed onward. “Once every life in this village has been put to rest, you will be released from your service. Pray that I do not find out you returned to the mercenary life.” He stood, and pushed back out of the tent and to the outside world again. “You have one week to recuperate before your work begins!”