Leon, Valeria, and Alix all shared a suite of small apartments in the castle since the latter two were in the former’s retinue—Valeria as Leon’s de facto second-in-command, and Alix acting as an unofficial assistant. Unfortunately, said suite had neither a bath nor a shower, and so all three had to visit the castle’s large bathhouse.
Said bathhouse was rather small compared to others that were built in Legion fortresses, but it was still relatively luxurious—or, at least the baths set aside for the knights were. There wasn’t much marble or white stone, and the walls weren’t painted, but it was clear that whoever the mages were who built the place were quite enthusiastic about their task, for there were quite a few carved friezes covering the walls and decorative columns.
Not that Leon, Valeria, or Alix really noticed the decorations; all three were tired and dirty and just wanted to go to sleep. They hadn’t felt so drained when they arrived at the castle, but by the time they started to get settled into their assigned rooms, the week of constant motion with little rest came back with a vengeance.
Valeria and Alix naturally parted ways with Leon when they arrived at the bath, making their way toward the smaller female baths—given how few women joined the Royal Legions or pursued the path of knighthood through battle, the baths set aside for them were positively tiny compared to those for the men.
As they washed, neither of the ladies spoke much. They practically had the entire female section to themselves, but Alix and Valeria still washed and then sat back in the baths next to each other. Valeria still maintained a respectful distance, but Alix was far more relaxed about the situation.
After a while, though, the silence grew to be too much for Alix to bear—Valeria was more than comfortable with it, but Alix wasn’t so much.
“Soooo,” Alix awkwardly began as she desperately tried to think of something to say and silently cursing her mouth for moving before her brain was ready, “I noticed you at Leon’s villa a couple times when I was there… How did you two meet?”
“Knight Academy,” Valeria tersely responded. Her brilliant blue eyes were closed, and she was leaning back in the large bath as she relaxed.
“Ah… and Lady Elise? You were at her birthday party…”
Valeria was quiet long enough that Alix felt like she wasn’t going to reply, and she said, “I’m sorry if I’m prying, but we haven’t had much of a chance to talk to each other in the past week, and—”
“Elise and I are old friends,” Valeria said, interrupting Alix’s apology. “We met when my father brought me to the capital and the Heaven’s Eye Tower. We hit it off well when our parents left us to play while they handled some business on His Majesty’s behalf, and we’ve been friends ever since.”
“Ah,” Alix said. She hoped that Valeria might ask her some questions in order to keep the conversation going, but it seemed she was going to be disappointed if she labored under those hopes; Valeria asked her nothing in return.
Alix shrunk down into the bath, submerging everything underneath her nose and sulked a bit. She was hoping that Valeria would be a bit more friendly and willing to talk as if they were going to be a part of the same retinue, then they’d be working together quite a bit. She didn’t want that working relationship to be too awkward, and simply running around a forest shooting arrows and then taking a bath together wasn’t going to ensure a healthy friendship in her mind.
That her relationship with Leon essentially started off with the same circumstances wasn’t lost on her, but in Leon’s case, he made some small efforts to engage with her, whereas Valeria didn’t seem to want to bother.
The young brown-haired woman could only shrug, resign herself to silence, and try to get a bit more comfortable in the water as Valeria stretched her body out next to her as if she were getting ready to fall asleep in the bath. Alix resolved to stay awake, but a mere five minutes later, her own eyes began to feel heavy.
However, rest would not come for either lady—at least, not yet. As they dozed, the water began to ripple and churn as if something large was about to come crashing up from below the castle. It started slowly, with a few tremors here and there, but as it became more and more intense both ladies snapped awake and began looking around in confusion.
“What’s… what is that?!” Alix wondered aloud.
Valeria’s fourth-tier senses were stronger than Alix’s, and after a few seconds of listening, she managed to pick out the sounds of shouting and clashing swords coming from somewhere outside.
“We’re under attack!” she shouted, springing out of the bath.
Alix followed suit, jumping out of the water as quickly as she was able, and then followed Valeria back into the changing room where they began to throw their clothes on as quickly as they were able.
A thunderous roar suddenly ripped through the air outside the bathhouse, answered a few moments later by the distinctive sounds of actual thunder.
“Sounds like Leon’s fighting,” Valeria matter-of-factly observed as she swiftly finished pulling her clothes back over herself. Alix was only a moment behind her, and the two sprinted for the bathhouse doors. Neither had their weapons, but that didn’t matter, they ran to help where they could anyway.
As soon as they burst out of the bathhouse door and into the small pavilion beyond, they found it completely obliterated. Almost every stone tile paving the ground had shattered, the pavilion itself was in shambles with most of the columns destroyed and the roof collapsed, and in the center of the pavilion were about a dozen knights all locked in combat, Leon among them.
On one side of the ruins of the pavilion, other knights were gathering around something that neither Valeria nor Alix could see, but they could hear the sounds of fighting. Given Minerva’s warning that the Central Consul was trying to tunnel beneath the castle, it wasn’t too much of a stretch for them both to guess what was happening.
Leon’s group was flashing with magic power—bursts of fire, lightning, and other elements were sending shockwaves through the earth and the air. The other group was fighting with more conventional weapons, but conventional weapons Alix and Valeria did not have.
Alix glanced at Valeria and asked, “What should we do?”
“I… don’t know,” she admitted. With Leon indisposed locked in combat with a Legion knight, she had to step up. After a few moments of thought, though, she started running for the group that wasn’t throwing around elemental magic. “Over here!” she shouted to Alix.
Alix followed, but she asked, “What about Leon?”
“We help where we’re able!” Valeria replied.
They found the castle knights defending the top of a hole that descended into the earth at a steep angle, through which dozens of Legion soldiers were attempting to force their way through. The knights had halted them, but the Legion shield wall wasn’t budging.
“If anyone has extra weapons, we can help!” Valeria called out, preempting a few of the knights in the back ranks who turned around with their weapons up at their approach.
Faced with a Legion shield wall on one side of their line and a pair of unarmed ladies on the other, the knights didn’t hesitate to make their decision. Most turned back toward the hole and the Legion shield wall while one—the strongest among them as a fifth-tier mage—waved his hand and conjured a pair of spears for the ladies. Valeria and Alix accepted the weapons and joined the line.
Events moved deceptively quickly from there. Both ladies were jostled and thrown around a bit in the mass of several dozen haphazardly-dressed knights who were defending the castle while the shield wall beneath their feet rippled and flexed as the soldiers rotated in and out, yet never managing to push past the knights. Neither Alix nor Valeria moved too much, and they didn’t have much of an opportunity to fight other than thrusting their borrowed spears a few times when a large enough gap in the mass of bodies presented itself. As a result, while it felt like an eternity, in reality, it only took about ten minutes for the higher-tiered fight to come to a conclusion and for the knights participating in it to join the larger battle.
Lightning flashed past the knights, hitting the shield wall with terrible force. If it were just the one lightning bolt, the shields would’ve absorbed said force well, but immediately following it came boulders, ice, streams of fire, and blades of wind—the higher-tiered knights had finished their battle, and the castle defenders had won.
Leon himself leaped down into the hole along with several other knights. The soldiers tried to respond with their stabbing weapons, but every time Leon trusted his armor to take the damage and used the opportunity to fill the momentary gap in the shield wall with as much lightning as he was able to expend. The other knights did likewise for about half a minute until a shout came from behind them.
Watching with bated breath, Valeria and Alix watched as the knights defending the castle surged backward, while the shield wall slowly pushed forward. However, an earth mage quickly blocked them by collapsing the tunnel behind them and slamming pieces of the destroyed pavilion down into the mouth of the hole, completely sealing it and crushing the Legion soldiers who were unlucky enough to have taken the chunks of masonry.
“Sound the horn!” one of the knights shouted.
Alix, Valeria, and all the rest could hear other horns sounding off all around them, from the direction of the pass, the cliffside battlements, and even in other places around the castle. Most signaled that the assault had been stemmed in their locations, while others indicated that Octavius’ forces remained at theirs.
Leon pushed his way through the crowd of milling knights as they secured the area to join the other two members of his retinue. He clearly hadn’t bothered to completely dress as the ladies had when he heard of the fighting outside, as he revealed that he had nothing on save for a pair of trousers as he pulled his armor—which, given the almost frantic pace they’d been moving at for the past couple weeks, hadn’t been cleaned since they’d left the capital—back into his soul realm.
“You two all right?” he asked, an amount of concern in his voice that surprised Valeria.
“Yes, Sir,” she answered, though her eyes kept drifting down his body. She hadn’t seen him even partially unclothed ever since she and Asiya had briefly spied on him in the pool at the Knight Academy. He’d been quite muscular back then, but in the years since he’d filled out considerably, and she was having more than a bit of trouble concentrating with him now so close.
Alix nodded in agreement, but she was more focused on Valeria so painfully obviously checking Leon out. Fortunately for the silver-haired woman, Leon was a bit distracted with the ongoing attack to pay too much attention to her body language. Alix smiled at Valeria, nudged the younger woman with her elbow and flashed her a knowing smile, which brought a deep blush to Valeria’s cheeks.
Leon’s attention was focused on securing the pavilion since, as the strongest knight present, he was de facto in charge. He also kept glancing up over the inner walls of the castle, as the sounds of battle could be heard coming from all around them. The attack wasn’t over yet, but here and there came horn blasts signaling that the attack had been repulsed in certain places.
“Are we going to go join them?” Alix asked.
“… No,” Leon replied, though it clearly pained him to speak those words. “Dame Minerva has known this was coming for a while, and I trust her to have this situation in hand. We won’t change anything on our own, and if we run around without a plan, we could get in the way. Better to stick with this until we’re called for…”
“Are you sure?” Valeria asked, sharing Leon’s desire to get out and fight.
“Yes,” Leon hissed, though his face and posture suggested that he was anything but.
“… Very well,” Valeria muttered.
For the next half hour, Leon helped the knights in organizing the bodies of the fallen and supervising the few earth mages that were finishing up with sealing the hole. The Legion soldiers that had been trapped within when the hole was sealed had all suffocated, and so the earth mages also had to work on excavating them. Valeria and Alix helped out where they could, mostly by clearing rubble, carrying bodies, and searching said bodies for IDs.
As they worked, their anxiety about the castle gradually faded, as did the anxiety of the rest of the knights in the remnants of the pavilion, for the sounds of horns signaling victory could be heard more and more. Soon enough, the sounds of battle faded away into nothing, while signal horns were sounded from the pass to the castle indicating their status.
From what Leon, Valeria, and Alix knew about horn signals in the Bull Kingdom, they could tell that the attack had been repelled. The castle was secure.
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