Technomancer ReGenesis: Chapter 17 Ashbringer I
"We're dead."
The words slipped out before the boy could catch them.
He was crouched behind a shattered wagon, cheap spear in a death grip, iron shield raised so high it almost covered his eyes. The canyon shook and screamed around him—stone grinding on stone, men yelling, horses shrieking as the ground itself turned against them.
Dust burned his lungs. The air was full of grit and the metallic stink of blood.
"We're not dead yet, lad."
The voice beside him was steady, almost bored.
The sergeant was built like a barrel wrapped in chainmail, a dented shield propped on one knee, a thick mustache twitching every time he talked. His face was a map of old scars, the kind that said he'd seen worse than this and somehow walked away.
A boulder slammed into the far side of their wagon, splitting what was left of it in half. Splinters and stone chips stung the boy's cheek.
He flinched. "We're not Knights," he hissed. "We can't cast. We can't reinforce. They told us this was a bandit sweep—ten scrawny thieves in leather, not—"
The canyon answered for him. A section of the cliff face above the vanguard sheared off and crashed down, flattening men and horses alike.
The boy gagged. "Those are Noble Earth mages, Sergeant. Baron-tier—third-circle earthwork. We marched to fight bandits. This is—this is—"
"A mess," the sergeant agreed mildly. "Keep your shield up. Don't show the rocks your pretty face."
The boy risked a glance through a crack in the shield wall.
The southwest cave—their original target—was gone now, swallowed by the mountain. The entrance had flowed shut like melted wax solidifying. Fifty men and two Knights were sealed inside.
Between that tomb and the main body of the army, chaos reigned.
Stone spikes jutted from the ground at insane angles. The earth dropped and bucked in waves. Pillars of rock shot upward, flinging men into the air. Arrows went wild, their trajectories ruined by sudden tremors.
And at the center of it, near the toppled Blackfyre banner, Lord Reitz was on one knee, one hand clamped to his side, armor dark with blood.
The boy swallowed hard.
"Sir Allister stabbed him," he whispered. "I-I saw it. Slipped it right under the rib. He—he was supposed to be his shield and he—"
"Eyes down," the sergeant snapped, shoving the boy's shield higher with his own. A fist-sized stone smashed into the iron a heartbeat later, ringing like a bell. "You want to live long enough to piss yourself in your bunk tonight, you don't gawk."
The boy trembled. "We can't win this." a desperate tone in his cry.
The sergeant spat into the dust. The gobbet sizzled on hot stone.
"I don't know about you," he said. "But he?" The sergeant confidently, not with a prideful confidence, but a calm and composed tone, it was almost boring. It was as if this was a normal farming job.
He jerked his chin toward the kneeling figure by the banner.
"I doubt he dies today."
**
Reitz's fingers were slick with his own blood.
He kept his palm pressed against his side out of habit more than necessity now. The stab had been deep, angled deliberately. He could feel the wrongness under the armor—heat where there shouldn't be, liquid where there should be solidity.
Each breath was a small theft.
That bastard knew what he was doing, some distant part of him observed.
Another part—louder, wilder—wanted to laugh.
Steel shrieked against steel to his left.
Captain Ashen had abandoned formation entirely, charging Sir Allister with a roar that came from somewhere in his boots.
"You treacherous wretch!" Ashen bellowed, his sword wreathed in a thin, hard shell of mana. "You dare betray Lord Blackfyre for a bunch of lowborn bandits?!"
Their blades met with a crash, sparks spraying.
Allister's face, under his helm, was calm. His stance was perfect. He parried, slid, answered every furious blow with a cold economy that made Reitz's teeth itch.
Reitz's lips curled.
"Not bandits," he said quietly but his expression started to change steadily.
The traitor Knight's eyes flicked over for a heartbeat. "Sharp as ever, Milord," he said. "Shame you saw it this late."
Another tremor rolled through the canyon. Stone pillars punched out of the ground in front of the archers, blocking their angle of fire. A chunk of rock the size of a carriage wheel smashed into a cluster of men-at-arms, leaving nothing but red smear and twisted iron.
"Milord, stay back!" Ashen shouted, locking blades. "Blackfyre Guard! Form around the Lord! We can still break out to the north face!"
"Who bought your honor? Allister? The primarchs, the magistrates?," Reitz roared.
"I wouldn't be foolish enough to answer that," Allister spat.
From the ridges, the Earth mages continued their work, hands on stone, faces hidden behind featureless masks. It was systematic. Measured. Not the wild flailing of desperate thieves.
These are trained, Reitz thought, in some far-off corner of his mind. This was planned. The village was bait. The caves were bait. I was the target.
Another image pushed its way in.
Ezra.
Not as he'd been in the crib, brow furrowed, or babbling around a beaker-bottle. Not walking too early or staring too sharply.
Ezra failing to ignite a single spark.
"I am sorry to disappoint you, Father."
The wound in Reitz's side flared. Something inside him twisted in time with it.
No.
Not here. Not like this.
"Captain," Reitz said.
His voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
Ashen heard him anyway. He slammed his shield into Allister to buy a half-step of space and flicked a glance over his shoulder.
"Milord?"
"Pull them back," Reitz said. "All of them. Formation two. Behind me."
Ashen's eyes widened. "Milord, you're wounded. If we leave the front, the men—"
"Ashen," Reitz said, and this time the word was a weight.
For a heartbeat, the entire battlefield seemed to hold its breath.
"That is an order."
Ashen's jaw clenched.
"Blackfyre Guard!" he roared. "Fall back to secondary line! Men-at-arms, disengage and move! Archers, cover the retreat!"
Shields turned. Boots pounded. Training reasserted itself over panic.
Allister pressed forward, trying to capitalize on the moment of disarray. "How noble," he sneered. "Ordering them to die farther away."
He ducked another blow from Ashen, boot sliding on loose gravel. "You won't make it out of this canyon, Reitz."
Reitz watched him.
The pain in his side was a bright, white-hot thing now. It should have narrowed his world, made it small and panicked.
Instead, the world… thinned.
The screaming, the falling stone, the pounding blood in his ears—all of it receded.
A laugh bubbled up in his chest.
"Heh."
Ashen froze. "Milord—?"
"Heheh."
Reitz bowed his head. His shoulders shook.
Allister stared at him. "What are you—"
Reitz threw his head back and laughed.
"HAHAHAHAHAHA!"
The sound tore down the canyon like a physical force. Men flinched. A bandit-turned-soldier on the ridge miscast his spell, the half-formed stone spike crumbling at his feet.
The laugh wasn't joyous. It wasn't even angry.
It was manic.
It was a man standing on the edge of his own grave and finding the depth… insulting.
The boy felt it before he saw it.
The skin along his arms prickled. The air pressed down on him, heavy and hot, like someone had dropped a forge into the canyon.
"Sergeant," he whispered.
"I know," the older man said quietly. "Keep your head down."
The boy didn't.
He peeked over the lip of the shattered wagon.
Mana roared.
It wasn't a flare, not a glow—it was a pillar. Fire blasted upward from Reitz's body, a column of orange-white plasma that punched thirty feet into the sky. The dirt at his feet blackened, then glowed red, then sagged into molten glass.
The heat hit them a heartbeat later, a wave that made the boy's eyes water and his skin feel too tight.
"Gah—!" He ducked back down, shield up, heart hammering.
"What is that?!" he gasped.
"A very bad day," the sergeant said sourly as he tucked his head beneath the shield. "For them— and a headache for us," he added, as if the whole ambush were nothing more than a particularly annoying chore.
Within the pillar of flame, a shape coalesced.
The fire clung to Reitz instead of consuming him. It wrapped his limbs, his torso, his head, flowing into plates and ridges like molten metal poured into an invisible mold.
A helmet formed first, snapping into place over his features—a close helm of pure flame, visor shaped into a snarling, demon-faced mask with narrow eye slits.
Broad pauldrons grew over his shoulders. A breastplate folded across his chest, the Blackfyre sigil etched in lines of brighter heat—a dragon wrapped round a sword. Gauntlets encased his hands, each finger ending in a blunt, burning claw.
In seconds, the man was gone.
In his place stood a knight of living fire.
"Blackfyre Guard!" the thing bellowed, voice distorted through the helm, layered with a low, echoing rumble. "Great Flame Formation—fallback line and hold! No one moves past you!"
The command snapped like a whip.
The sixteen elite guards responded instantly, peeling away from scattered skirmishes to form a tightening crescent behind their Lord, shields raised, faces grim.
Men-at-arms stumbled back through them, dragging the wounded. Archers scrambled to new perches, eyes wide, glancing from their Lord to the ridges where the enemy earth mages had frozen mid-gesture.
Finally, Reitz moved.
There was no shout. No warning.
One heartbeat he was twenty feet away. The next, he was inside Allister's guard.
A spike of flame erupted from Reitz's knee like a spear, slamming up into Allister's gut. Chainmail hissed and parted. Leather and flesh charred in an instant.
Air left Allister in a shocked grunt. His shield dropped instinctively toward the pain.
His neck was bare.
A blade of fire burst from the outside of Reitz's right hand, sprouting from the knuckle of his thumb and extending in a straight, deadly line—a sabre of coherent plasma.
Reitz's arm flicked.
The Flame Sabre passed through Allister's throat as if through smoke.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then Allister's head tipped backward and slid off his neck. The cut was so clean, so hot, there was no blood—just a ring of cauterized flesh.
Reitz caught the falling head by the hair.
The helm toppled away, exposing the traitor's dead face, eyes still wide, mouth frozen half-open as if to finally answer the question he'd refused.
Reitz looked into those eyes.
"Useless," he said.
Fire flared in his gauntlet.
The head crumbled to ash between his fingers, drifting away on the superheated wind.
He planted his boot on Allister's chest and pushed and spat.
Flame surged down his leg. Armor, flesh, bone, and dirt all burned together. A breath later, there was nothing left of Sir Allister of Blackfyre but a vaguely man-shaped smear of glassed earth.
Reitz turned away without a second glance.
He raised his flaming sword and pointed it at the ridges.
His laughter rolled out again, jagged and wild.
On the ridges, the masked earth mages faltered.
**
"Scared yet?" the sergeant asked, still watching.
"Y-yes," the recruit admitted.
"Good," the older man said. "You should be. That's how you know you're not stupid."
He shifted his shield, settling it more comfortably against the rock.
"But you asked how I could say he won't die here."
The recruit nodded, unable to look away from the living furnace down in the canyon.
The sergeant smiled, though there was no mirth in it. Only memory.
"It's because this isn't the first time they've tried to bury him," he said. "And it isn't the first time he's decided to burn his way out."
He drew in a slow breath.
"There was a ravine," he began. "Far out west, near the old border forts. Before you were born. Before Blackfyre had a castle of his own. Just a boy then. Younger than twenty. Barely a Lord in name, not in land. They sent him and a handful of green conscripts to 'scout' a position the Primarchs didn't want to waste real soldiers on."
The recruit glanced at him.
"A trap?"
"Of course it was a trap," the sergeant snorted. "They walked into a bowl of stone. High ridges all around, no cover, no exit. And then the sky lit up."
His gaze went distant, following something only he could see.
"Eighty," he said. "That's the number I keep hearing. Eighty Arcanists. Fire, Lightning, Earth. Maybe more. I don't know. No one who saw it from the middle came back. Only those of us who arrived too late, standing on the edge looking down."
He grimaced.
"It wasn't a battle. It was an execution. Men burned where they stood, burned in their armor, buried alive. The conscripts broke in minutes. They ran, screamed, begged. They died."
The recruit's grip tightened on his spear.
"What about him?" he asked softly.
The sergeant looked back down at the flame-clad figure, now striding forward to meet the oncoming mages.
"What do you think?" he asked. "He broke too."
The boy frowned.
"But you said—"
"Not that kind of break," the sergeant said. "Something… tilted. Snapped and then set again, wrong but stronger."
He tapped his helmet with one thick finger.
"The fire didn't wait for his hands. It came out of him from everywhere. Eyes, mouth, skin. Burned his uniform off in a heartbeat. Turned mail to slag. The men around him? They melted. The ones killing him? Melted too. He stopped casting spells and started being one."
He nodded toward Reitz, who was now a distant, burning shape moving against a backdrop of falling stone.
"Armor like that," he said. "Sabre like that. Back then, it wasn't neat. It was wild. Ugly. But it was the same thing."
The recruit swallowed.
"What happened?" he whispered.
"What do you think happened?" the sergeant replied. "Everyone died. When the reinforcements finally got there, the whole ravine was glassed. Bodies burned down to powder. Armor warped. Weapons gone. None of the arcanists were left alive," the sergeant involuntarily shuddered, "or dead. If that is what you could call them."
He smiled faintly.
"No bodies to bury," he said. "Just piles of ash blowing in the wind. And in the middle of it all, there was a boy."
He held up two fingers.
"Two things I remember clear as day. First, he was still standing. Barely. Swaying like a drunk, steam pouring off him."
He lifted a third finger.
"Second, he was crying. Not loud. Just… quiet. Tears that flashed to vapor the moment they left his cheeks. He cried for them. For those who died"
Silence hung between them for a breath.
"From that moment on," the sergeant said softly, "the Rex Imperia—may he live forever—bestowed upon him a Title."
He looked down the canyon at the man in living fire, the man who had just erased a traitor like a smudge on parchment and was now walking alone toward an army.
"The Ashbringer."