A Perverted Path to Victory

Sara Brown

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Her knees had mostly stopped wobbling by the time she’d gotten dressed for the event. Psychic sex-god powers or not, there was only so much work your thighs could do before they started to give out, and she was no slacker. Sara had been giving Mui her all. Besides the fact that he was adorable, she’d needed the stress relief before this brewing shitshow.

As always when she ventured into the realm of blue-blooded politics, the way she’d dressed for the evening was as much a statement as anything she said. More important, arguably, because it would be the only way she could communicate her values to anyone she didn’t speak to. She’d wanted to take the easy route of showing up in her armor, declaring herself as a soldier first and foremost, but Evie and Hurlish had vetoed the idea. Evie because it was, after all, the easy way out, and it was the tack taken by those in the Imperial army who had only begrudgingly attended an event. That was at cross-purposes to her entire reason for attendance, in which Sara was supposed to be finally ‘happily’ playing their political games. Solid enough reasoning. Hurlish, meanwhile, had vetoed it with an even more fairly persuasive argument:

“I spent like two fuckin hours sitting on my ass waiting for the tailors to finish that goddamn thing. You’re going to wear it and that’s final.”

Seeing as the decision had already been declared as final, Sara was left with no choice.

She wore a thick cloth overcoat, dyed deeply purple, that had sleeves which went all the way to her wrists. It was itchy and boring-looking, a single silver button keeping it pinned shut over her breast with the aid of a belt at her waist. The reason for the simple design? It was a slightly fancier version of what Imperial hunters wore to protect themselves from bruises and scratches as they went through the brush, and, as one of the few even vaguely armored getups accessible to the common man, it was what reserve militia troops would wear in the event they were called up for battle. Unlike those purely utilitarian garments, however, the belt cinched in place around her hips was a bandolier that sported two dozen paper-wrapped blackpowder cartridges, ready and waiting to be dropped into a musket that she, obviously, wasn’t actually carrying. Weapons weren’t allowed into high-society soirées, but as she was at a military function, their implication was expected. Evie had even commissioned someone to create gold-leafed floral patterns to go over the cartridge’s white paper. Stupid. It would ruin any shot she might try to fire with the cartridges. But it looked good. At a distance, you’d think she was wearing a golden belt, only for closer inspection to reveal she was wrapped in half a pound of lethal blackpowder.

Her outfit’s translation? That she was a military woman slowly adopting Imperial customs. At the last of these functions she’d pretended to give a shit about, she’d worn a northern hunter’s leather buffcoat, toeing the line between civilian and military while deliberately insulting the very idea of displaying her wealth. This coat was an evolution of that, taking an Imperial equivalent of the hunting gear and spicing it up with the fact she was willing to spend a good deal of extra coin on expensive embellishments. The coat said to the viewer, “I may be a rough-and-tumble northerner, but I’m starting to warm up to all this Imperial stuff.”

She wasn’t, of course. Everyone knew that. But it was the politically expedient lie to tell.

Her hair, meanwhile, had been more of a compromise than Evie would have preferred. The true elites of Imperial society, at least among the non-militant mortal women, wore absolutely ludicrous hairstyles. They wove locks of hair around bent metal rods to create peculiar, bobbing loops that extended for a foot or more in every direction— a style that Sara always wanted to make tentacle porn jokes about, much to Evie’s frustration. Some other women went so far as to construct literal towers of hair, threading their long black strands through one, two, or even three stacked rings of gold, creating foot-high monoliths of wealth. The most ostentatious of them embedded crystals into their hair, glowing bright enough to guide themselves down a midnight walking path.

There was no fucking way Sara was doing that.

She’d allowed Evie to comb her curls straight and wrap them up in a bun behind her head, one which had as its sole embellishment an interesting little spiral pattern visible only if you managed to look close enough. On Earth, it would have been an oversized office worker’s bun, but here it was something that middling Imperial nobility might wear to a more casual function. It was still, by the barest technicality, appropriate for someone of Sara’s elevated station. It was also tight enough to pull irritatingly at her scalp, and she knew she’d have a headache before long.

If all their fucking jabbering doesn’t cause it first. She took a deep breath and held it. Just focus on the end goal, she reminded herself. Dad’s right. You don’t have the time to start a revolution here. You need to push these upper-crust fucks into making the changes slowly, post-Napoleon Europe style. You promised him you’d give it a shot.

Hard to internalize. Damn hard. She let her lungs empty with a low, whistling exhalation. Even by the jungle’s standards, it was a warm, humid night. She and Hurlish were walking through the camp’s winding alleyways, occasionally tossing polite smiles and waves to the common soldiers who spotted them. Evie was with them too, of course, but she was in her customary place atop Hurlish’s shoulders, eyes and ears carefully sweeping their surroundings for any possible threat. She probably would have been walking herself, but she’d still been worked up when they got back from Mui’s tent, so Hurlish had fucked her into the floor while Sara got dressed. She was still recovering from that, too wobbly-kneed to be making her own way around. Thus Hurlish was carrying half of their family, Tahn in her arms, Evie on her shoulders.

Evie was dressed to the nines, of course. She was wearing full Imperial noble garb, with piles of airy silk drowning in floral patterns of every color, texture, and style. Wealthy Imperials did not do humility, and before meeting Sara, Evie hadn’t, either. Her neck was heavy with strings of pearls, her blonde braids were infested with glowing gemstones, and she wore jangling bracelets of gold, silver, and finely-spun copper. In keeping with the tradition of military nobility wearing symbols of their weaponry, she sported empty twin holsters off her hips, their plain leather beautified by a decorative layer of sheer silk. Her classical, physical beauty was easily complimented by the vivid styles of the Empire, and Sara thought she’d rarely looked better. At least with her clothes on, anyway.

If anyone was sharp enough to notice that almost all of Evie’s clothing and jewelry had seen the hands of tailors and jewelers who’d resized everything to fit her, Sara seriously doubted they’d realize why. Sara might have publicly disavowed looting, but that was only because there was no way to guarantee the rich and powerful would be the practice’s only victims. Thankfully, she had her own precision instrument at hand. Over the short time the army had spent in Ta-Tomo, Ketch’s nighttime escapades into wealthy homes had probably knocked a dozen percentage points off the city’s total net worth. Last she’d heard, Ta-Tomo’s elites were at each other’s throats, accusing one another of taking advantage of the regime change’s chaos to loot indiscriminately. Since none of Ketch’s victims had been trusted to accompany the army, there was no risk of anyone recognizing the stolen jewelry on Evie’s wrists.

A glow filled the night ahead of their trio, soft white light rising above the tents. With her Blessings piggybacking off Evie’s superior hearing, Sara became aware of the clinking of glasses and light laughter. There was no official start time for a night party in a society organized mostly by sundial. Many party-goers had already arrived, while others might take another hour or two to show up. As they approached the ring of empty tents that had been set out to establish the event’s perimeter, Hurlish lifted Evie off her shoulders and set the smaller woman on the ground.

“Feeling good?” She asked with a rumble. It almost didn’t sound smug.

“Feeling good was a key cause of the problem, I believe.” Evie took a few testing steps, tail swishing where it sprouted from her dress, and then nodded to herself, satisfied. “But yes, I am steady on my feet. Thank you.”

“For the ride or the banging?”

“I see little need to specify." Then Evie swatted Hurlish’s side in playful chastisement. “And I certainly see no need to bring up those activities in front of Tahn. Even if I appreciate that you didn’t swear.”

Hurlish laughed her usual boisterous laugh as they reached the party’s perimeter. Sara chuckled alongside her, but it was more a force of habit than genuine amusement. She was too busy staring at the rows and rows of empty tents that made up the event’s perimeter.

I wonder how many soldiers are sleeping three or four to a tent tonight so these bastards could have a little privacy for themselves? Her lip curled into a sneer as she caught a glimpse of the party through a gap in the canvas wall. I wonder how many more barrels of food could have been carried if porters weren’t busy hauling kegs of beer and bottles of wine. Probably enough to last a few days longer in a siege, if it came down to it. But no. The putrid little fucks just had to have their—

“They are veterans.”

Evie’s comment snapped Sara out of her stormy thoughts.

“What?” She demanded.

“The people you are glaring at.” Evie gestured widely. “They are veterans. Soldiers. Some of them have only ever commanded in battle, never personally fought, but they have all seen the face of war with their own two eyes. These are not the fools you’re thinking of them as.”

Sara scowled. “I don’t think they’re stupid. Just rotten.”

“Perhaps they are. But they have the power to enact the changes you seek.” Evie stepped up to Sara and put a hand to her coat’s single silver button, using the edge of her sleeve to meticulously polish it as she spoke. “Recall your own logic that led to you agreeing to this event. Revolution would be devastating, would it not?”

“Meaningful change often is,” Sara snapped back, easily raising the points of debate she’d been honing since she’d dropped out of highschool. “A better world can’t be made without effort, sacrifice, and—”

“During the fourteen years of the Taiping Rebellion,” Evie sharply cut her off, “approximately twenty million men, women, and children died. Do you wish that upon the people of this Empire?”

“What?” Sara shook her head, utterly taken by surprise. “The Taiping Rebellion? Wasn’t that, like… China? In the seventeen-whatevers? How do you know anything about that?”

“It was indeed China, but the conflict lasted from 1850 to 1864, not the seventeen hundreds. As for how I know of it, recall that I am the one that carries the crystal connected to your father, and you and I only share most waking moments, not all. Perhaps you have noted that Professor Brown has a fondness for teaching that nearly equals my interest in military study?”

“Regardless.” Evie stepped back, satisfied with her polishing of the lone button, and looked up at Sara with hands on her hips. “While this Imperial conflict and the culture it consumes is very different from the China of your world, the number of citizens involved are not dissimilar. The death toll, should it come to that, will be comparable. Worse, perhaps. An immortal emperor and his cadre of unfathomably powerful soldiers are threatening to personally end the conflict, and the fear of this eventuality is primed to turn two hundred years of half-hearted squabbling into a blackpowder-fueled conflagration.” Evie nodded to the circle of tents. “Those ‘rotten’ sycophants in there? They are your opportunity to prevent that. If this war ends in the next few years, you will have decades to subtly influence and bring about the liberation of commoners within the Empire. If the war carries on, however, or if an Elven fist comes crashing down, your words will fall only on the scant few survivors of a holocaust.”

In the night, Evie’s eyes reflected the glow of steady crystals and shimmering stars equally. She had delivered her argument in calm, reserved tones, the same way she spoke of logistical shipments or taxation by-laws. But there was a rigidity beneath that tone. Something that couldn’t be compromised nor argued against. More maddeningly to Sara, Evie was right. It was the exact same argument Sara had used to convince herself to agree to this in the first place, now refined with evidence and emotional appeals that rendered it even more effective.

“Damn,” Sara muttered, glancing away from her wife’s piercing stare. “Alright. I’ll go in, but—”

“Don’t swear in front of Tahn.”

“—but you can’t expect me to really give in to acting like a socialite. I couldn’t stomach it, and they wouldn’t believe it. They know me too well by now.”

Evie stared. Waiting. Sara sighed.

“And I’m sorry for swearing in front of Tahn.”

“Good.” Evie held a hand out, limp-wristed, like the daintiest daughter of the Sporaton court. Sara took it with only a small roll of her eyes, causing Evie to chuckle lightly. “A few hours spent biting your tongue instead of freely spitting every insult that comes to mind won’t kill you, dear.”

But it’ll make me want to blow my fucking head off. Deciding that voicing that thought wasn’t a great way to prove that she was capable of keeping her thoughts to herself, she bit her tongue and smiled instead. Bending into a graciously precise half-curtsy, she kept Evie’s palm perfectly in hers as she affected an elegant accent.

“Then I can only hope I’ll have the pleasure of your company through the evening, My Lady.”

“Ugh,” Hurlish shuddered. “It’s creepy to see you lie that good.”

“Imagine how it feels to do, then,” Sara grumped, straightening. Intertwining her arm with Evie’s, rendering themselves the picture-perfect image of foreign nobility, she tossed a look over her shoulder and whistled sharply.

The four green-cloaked guards who’d been following at a respectful distance clanked forward, taking up their usual grid positions around Hurlish. Kissing wife and child goodbye as they parted ways, Sara stepped toward the light that was spilling out of the party’s entrance.

A stone-faced guard inspected them with a quick flick of his eyes, then held out a hand for an invitation. Allowing herself one last act of petty rebellion for the night, Sara spread her coat open far enough to give him a good view of the cleavage she removed it from, dropping it into his bare palm without a word.

He was a stalwart professional. Probably assigned this duty after many, many years as a loyal House soldier. That was why it was so gratifying to see his adam’s apple bob, a nervous sweat breaking across his brow as he flipped it open to read and confirm the contents. Handling divine titty sweat definitely wasn’t his idea of… well, anything. Considering the religious role of Chosen within his society, it’d been impressive enough that he’d remained stoic as Sara and Evie approached. He’d probably been fighting the urge to drop in absolute supplication the whole way through.

Still, he waved them in, placing their invitation in a pile with many other, noticeably less soggy pieces of thick cardstock. Sara knew it might have been rude to do, but in her defense…

Okay. Yeah, it was pretty rude. But fuck it. She could get away with it. And who knew? If he was the right kind of guy, that might end up being the best tip he’d ever gotten. He could take it back to his tent and slobber over it for as long as he liked for all Sara cared. It gave her one last laugh before she was drowned in finery.

Looking around the gathering, which stretched across the bulk of the road’s width and traveled perhaps a hundred meters along it, she could see all the accoutrements of wealth and influence. The poor quality of cheap, lightweight, easily carried materials were hidden beneath white silken tablecloths, around which sat or stood a collection of important individuals. Heavily stuffed padding in the chairs did their duty of protecting noble posteriors from the indignity of learning what crappy wooden chairs felt like, while glossy paint did the work of shielding their eyes from the terribly distasteful balsa. Many meals were being bandied about on the arms of darkly dressed porters, who wove between the shimmering greens, purples, and golds worn by their so-called betters. The meals were incredibly meat-heavy, a symbol of status preferred by the Imperials, seen in the way most of the elites shoved aside the thin vegetable offerings that encircled the rim of their porcelain plates. They were using true, literal silverware, which had always struck Sara as insultingly gaudy. Silver coinage was the primary currency of the Empire. It was like using utensils made of $100 bills, or using your platinum credit card as a way to shovel food into your mouth. A single one of those forks cost half a year of a soldier’s service, and there were hundreds of them laid out, many going entirely unused.

Sara felt like something might just pop in her skull when she had to put on a pleased, polite smile, but the aneurysm that could deliver her from the agony didn’t come. There was no grandiose announcement of their arrival like there would have been at a similar Sporaton event. It didn’t matter. The arrival of the Divine Chosen and her Feline wife could not go unnoticed. The hum of conversation, the clink of glasses and the scrape of silverware against plates, it all fell into a lull as attention turned to her.

Sara filled her lungs slowly. Focused inward, her free hand tucking a thumb into her belt to brush against the Hurlish-forged pocket knife that lay concealed there.

If you’re gonna do this, might as well go all-in.

With all focus turned inward, Sara cast her spell.

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It had been damn hard to study old Champions. Sara and Evie had been attempting it off-and-on very nearly from the first week they’d met. Knowing what to expect from Sara’s powers, what path they might take and how they might manifest, could be critical. Yet they’d struggled. Stories were unfathomably common, yet reliable sources were inversely hard to find. Outside singular collections held in universities or personal ownership, the concept of a library was non-existent, and important information, while not formally controlled by writ of law, was still greedily hoarded, sold only at a king’s ransom. The search had been marginally eased by their arrival in the Empire, where it wasn’t uncommon for cities to contain elves who had already been ancient when the last Champion had visited their lands, but it was still a struggle. A lot of what had been written down had been lost in the 1,200 years since the elves last saw a Champion, leaving only living witnesses remaining, and it wasn’t like Sara was going to scrape and bow to their sensibilities to get an interview. That the prior Champion had been of the Pantheon of Order, what the Sporatons would call the Goddess Otarion, rendered even that scant information dubiously valuable.

Still, common threads were obvious. Champions shook the world. Enemies fell to their blows, allies knelt in their presence, and their voices shook the sky. It had been the better part of three years since Sara had come to this world. After spending that long here, the last Champion known to Sporatos, a mage of Talavan, had been closer to a force of nature than a mere man. Armies turned and fled at the mere rumor of his approach. Those few forces that stood their ground had been lifted, choked, and tossed aside.

Literally.

Like, that was an actual thing he’d done. He’d cast some kind of spell that grabbed approximately fifty thousand people around the throat, choked them until they passed out, and when they’d woken up he’d politely suggested that they surrender. Shockingly, they’d agreed. And that wasn’t even the most insane thing he’d done. A few years later, he’d just… grown a mountain range. Like, the one that now partially divided the eastern and western coasts of the Sporaton continent? That had just shown up around then. Most records said it was because he’d decided to build his retirement home around there when he’d finished his Divine Quest, but quickly became irritated with people showing up to pester him for favors. He’d decided that if they wanted to knock on his door for help, they should at least have to work for it, dramatic quest style. His solution? Brewing up a fucking mountain range. A whole range, too, not just one mountain, and not small ones, either. He’d achieved that about six years after he’d shown up in the world.

Suffice to say, Sara was behind the curve.

But what did that height of power look like for the Goddess of Diplomacy? Sure, Amarat was in charge of emotion and communication as a whole, but the gods all had a lot of jobs. When they’d met, Amarat had billed herself as the Goddess of Diplomacy for a reason. Sara had, (in retrospect, very naively) picked her because she wanted to find a peaceful solution to war, and Amarat, at least outwardly, had approved of that. So what was Sara’s Class supposed to be capable of?

The obvious version of perfect diplomacy teetered at the edge of some sort of mind control. The goal of diplomacy was to get the other person to do what she wanted, so if she told people to do things and they did it with unhesitating obedience , sure, that’s definitionally perfect. But Amarat clearly knew Sara wouldn’t use that power if she’d had it. So instead Sara was going to have… what? Well, she could already listen to an entire city. She was doing it constantly, without effort, and she remembered every last word she’d ever heard, a catalogue of spoken words that was approaching the billion mark. It took no effort to recall it in its totality, either. Yet insane as that was, it still wasn’t the equivalent of casting a single spell to chokeslam an army. She had to keep her eavesdropping Blessing under wraps because it could be countered by something as simple as remembering to close the window or speak in a whisper. Sara and her cadre of closest advisors, her dad, Evie, Hurlish, Garen, Ketch/Sellie, and Vesta, had unanimously agreed that she wasn’t as powerful as she should be. That was the most compelling of King Sporatos’ justifications for the coming invasion: that if they didn’t do something about her soon, Sara would end up transforming into something unstoppable. But she wasn’t on pace for that. Picking a diplomatic Class and then using it to wage war was not, it turned out, the best way to get new Levels.

Old Champions had the ability to alter continental geography. She’d get there some day, but Sara didn’t know what Amarat’s equivalent of it would be. Until the possibility revealed itself to her, she’d have to keep fumbling around in the dark, using what she had in the most creative and effective ways possible. She’d been working with Garen to hone her spellcraft, learning how to maximize the Blessing-boosted spells she’d been given. She constantly trained with Evie and the Powdered Lead, straining to see just how many different sets of eyes her otherworldly senses could track in the midst of a harried battle. She and Hurlish set off into the jungle with experimental rifles on their shoulders, hunting meat for the horde of children Hurlish had taken under her wing. She kept pushing and prodding at her limits, working to figure out what she could do and what she couldn’t, and when she found something that wasn’t possible, she sat back and picked it apart until she either managed to do it or figured out why she couldn’t. She’d been making progress. Lots of it. She couldn’t get an entire army kneeling at her feet, not yet, but she was still a Champion.

Thus: the spell she’d been preparing for this evening. It had been Garen’s suggestion, his attempt at synthesizing a combination of all her proven talents thus far. Cramming them together in one place, then pushing that new amalgamation to the stops, was a good way to see what she was really capable of.

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With Evie on her arm, Sara walked straight into the party, heading for the cluster of chatting socialites that enveloped General Borek.

She also stepped left, heading for a cadre of military mages sitting around a fire basin.

And she stepped right, flashing a paralyzingly brilliant smile to the gaggle of officers of such minor importance that this was likely the first such party they’d ever attended.

Her image had shattered. Not-quite-illusory copies of herself branched out like splitting tree limbs, three becoming six, six becoming twelve, and twelve becoming twenty-four— only for the last four to fizzle and disappear, an icepick digging into her skull. She’d stretched herself too far. Twenty was the limit. Twenty copies of herself.

She began talking. Greeting people, explaining the bizarre sight of her multiple forms, simultaneously and smoothly ingratiating herself into a dozen conversations.

Garen had been right to encourage her down this path. He was an archmage for a reason. She’d known for a long time that she could comprehend more information than should be strictly possible, and the wyvern raid on Tulian had proven she could cast different sentences across actual miles, while her experience with illusory replication of complex machinery had told her that there were very few practical limits on what she could conjure up. Combining these lessons, making a coherent whole of them, had produced this spell. It hadn’t been easy.

But… it hadn’t been super difficult, either. It had taken less than a month of practice, an hour or two a day before bed, checking in with Garen occasionally for a bit of advice. Seeing her rocketing progress on the brand-new creation, he’d quickly agreed with her long-held belief:

Champion powers were bullshit.

From Sara’s perspective, there was very little distinction between her “selves” as they went around the gathering. It had been a long time since she’d relied on paltry senses like sight and hearing to navigate meetings like this. Her mind was always drinking down enough data to drown a supercomputer. She was innately aware of things like sightlines, pupil dilation, sweat pore activation percentage, blood alcohol content, muscle tenseness, catfolk ears twitching toward certain sounds, and a dozen other objective metrics, but it didn’t stop there. More intangible qualities flowed into her as well. The emotions of the space draped across her skin like a sheer curtain, shifting with the wind blown from every thinking mind. When she heard a claim, she knew with bone-deep certainty whether or not the speaker considered it to be truth, lie, or somewhere in between. She could correlate that against their heartrate, pore dilation, blinks per minute, and a thousand other datapoints, achieving instant consensus not only on the emotion that had been felt by the speaker in the moment, but also the undercurrent running beneath their conscious mind, prying open the deeper, more impenetrable sense of what had truly driven their choice of words. Most of the time, she understood their motivations better than they did themselves.

Later, when she would focus on her memories of the evening, Sara would have a shockingly easy time remembering what had happened. The fact that she was participating in twenty simultaneous conversations barely mattered; there were forty thousand people in the army, and she’d spent months listening to every conversation they had on the march. Sensation-wise, it felt like she was remembering each of the twenty conversations as having happened in sequential order, one after the other, even though she could dig a bit further into her recollection and know that they were technically happening simultaneously. There was no struggle to parse it, no confusing overlap, no mis-matching of what one person said to the wrong individual. It was… effortless.

Almost like this is the type of shit you were supposed to be doing from the start. The self-chastisement came to her in the sarcastic rumble of Hurlish’s voice, naturally. And imaginary-Hurlish was right. Managing twenty conversations at once? For the Champion of Amarat, this was proving to be far easier than dueling even a single opponent.

The Sara that went with Evie to join General Borek and his groupies wasn’t the one she was most interested in. Not right away, at least. At that level of social grace, there was too much beating around the bush, introductions and greetings, polite questions batted back and forth. It would be a while yet before anything of worth came out of that conversation.

The first conversation to produce something of actual value was, as she’d expected, the small collection of middling officers. Freshly-promoted lieutenants, mostly, each in charge of around ten squads of twenty soldiers apiece, though there were a few lower-ranked individuals, namely those that were seen as potential candidates for developing into Warriors. They were clustered like a school of fish warding off stalking predators, standing near no particular table or fire basin, their backs to the party as they barely sipped glasses of wine. Sara, of course, knew them all by name, and could recall thousands of hours of conversations they’d had with others over the last few months, but she couldn’t reveal that. Only a select few of them had actually spoken to her, and it was one in particular that she chose as her entrance to the conversation.

“Lieutenant Siongh!” She called, raising a sloshing wineglass that didn’t actually exist. “I’m glad to see you here. I was worried I wouldn’t have anyone truly interesting to talk to!”

Lieutenant Siongh was a vanara man that Sara had, very briefly, verbally sparred with before the battle of Ta-Pet. Though he’d been working directly counter to her own goals when he argued that artillery alone couldn’t overwhelm the enemy’s defenses, in doing so he’d bravely given voice to a view widely held amongst his fellow officers. He’d been a bit brusque by Sara’s standards, (which translated to being catastrophically, apocalyptically rude in Imperial culture), yet he’d been the only one brave enough to actually argue with her. However wrong he’d actually ended up being, he’d stuck to his guns. Sara respected that. Enough so that she would have remembered him even without her Blessings. That he had an unusually pale grayish coat for a vanara, making him look old beyond his years, and often kept his tail hugging his waist like a belt, only left him more distinct in her mind’s eye.

“General Brown,” he greeted with a light bow, alongside a general murmuring of similar acknowledgements from those nearby. Raising himself, he licked his lips, glancing across the rest of the party— which was about ten percent Sara by volume at that point. “My congratulations on your development of a uniquely fascinating…” He groped for a word, unsure if this was spell, Skill, or something exclusive to Champions. “Ability,” he eventually decided. “I haven’t heard of its like before.”

“Neither have I.” Sara offered a humble, single-shouldered shrug. “I’m certain that others will replicate it in the coming months or years, of course. I’m far from an archmage.”

She’d chosen her words carefully. It was meant as a freebie, a piece of information he could leverage if he was clever enough to catch it. She’d revealed to him that her multiple selves were the product of a spell, not unique Divine power, and that meant others could replicate it. If he was smart, he could sell that knowledge dearly. At the moment, however, he seemed not to catch its importance.

“Still,” he mused awkwardly. “It is… truly impressive.”

The conversation broke down then. Practically before it had truly started. Sara allowed it to. The collection of officers who had been busily chatting but a few moments ago now shuffled in place, glancing at one another in nervous silence. Only a few glanced her way directly, Lieutenant Siongh amongst them.

Sara let the moment linger, a light, happy smile on her face, as if she were perfectly ignorant of the awkwardness. The nervous energy built and built, quickly causing some to divest themselves from the group entirely with a murmured excuse, while those that remained could only suffer through the building pressure.

As she’d anticipated, Lieutenant Siongh’s patience was the first to break. “You said you were eager to speak with me?” He asked suspiciously. “I wasn’t under the impression our last meeting ended gracefully.”

“Of course it didn’t!” Sara let out a sparkling tinkle of elegant laughter. It was alien and fae in its beauty, more musically enchanting than the finest of harp players. “But it did end with you not only convinced that you were right and I was wrong, it ended with you still willing to say as much aloud. That’s quite a rare thing in the Empire, I’ll have you know. Worth appreciating.”

“Is it? I believe my companions here,” he gestured at two officer women beside him, “have told me on a number of occasions that my conduct on the day was quite the blunder, and that I should have rendered an apology to you as rapidly as I was able.”

“A blunder?” Sara asked the question in disbelief, as if the notion was spoken in a foreign language. “How could it be? You are a soldier with great experience in the conduct of sieges, and you provided the best advice you had to the commander who would be conducting no small part of an upcoming siege. You did your duty, Lieutenant, and you did it well.”

Siongh was taken entirely off guard by this. Compliments for argument and disobedience simply didn’t happen in the Empire. Sara allowed him to reel for a moment, watching him suck air through his teeth, before she continued.

“That we didn’t have an opportunity to test our respective theories against Ta-Pet’s walls was something of a disappointment, but likely better for all involved in the end. Whichever form of attack ultimately succeeded in reducing their defenses, mine or yours, it would have been an expensive effort to repair them.”

“Indeed,” he said, happily seizing the conversational lifeline she’d flung him. “That the enemy sallied forth was better for both the people of Ta-Pet and our army. City fighting is nasty stuff.” He coughed suddenly. One of the officers at his side had just jabbed him in the spine, where Sara shouldn’t have been able to see. Hurriedly, he nodded politely to her. “As, of course, I’m sure you know.”

At the dour talk of urban combat her smile darkened by the appropriate shades. “Yes. I do.” She took a ‘sip’ of her wineglass, made a show of savoring the taste and the distraction it offered her, then looked across the spectating officers. “For a war that has gone on so long, where cities have changed hands so many times, I’ve often found it curious that there remains such fanatic resistance amongst the local populace. Enough to fight from street to street, to stage rebellions once the conquering army makes its leave.” Another calculated sip of her wine, here ‘eyes’ scanning those present. “The difference in ideology between Imperial factions seems so very quaint, does it not? So why all the rancor?”

“Quaint?” Lieutenant Siongh’s fur began to rise. “Quaint, ma’am?”

If she’d been anyone less than the Champion of Amarat, Sara wouldn’t have been able to hide her shit-eating grin.

“Isn’t it?” She asked, perfectly affecting innocent curiosity. “What difference could one Adjutant have over the other?”

The dam broke. Siongh’s two handlers stepped away, as if releasing the bull into the matador’s arena, and several other members who had been wandering away drifted back, their jaws thrust forward into low underbites.

Sara did allow her illusory self to smile this time, though she hid it behind another faux-sip of wine. She’d actually been curious, believe it or not. Despite all the information-gathering tools at her disposal, the exact source of disgust between the two warring factions was maddeningly unspecific. The vast majority of peasants simply viewed the other side as “those bastards that had killed my family”, whereas the better-educated rarely, if ever, discussed it in plain, direct terms. Sara’s blessings relied on conversations that could be overheard by others. The intense political debate that likely came with the motivations of war was not, apparently, something that was freely spoken of in public. Yet there was a conflict here. A meaningful one. What it was, Sara couldn’t say.

By nature, the Imperials were too polite, too cautious to give their real thoughts to Sara. The visceral disgust that must be held for an enemy in war was there, of course, but they’d had years of experience tamping it deep, deep down. They wouldn’t express it in ways that really mattered.

Not unless she got them reeeeal pissed off.

Even as the Sara facing Lieutenant Siongh stayed stoic, another of her selves chuckled. She’d promised her Dad that she’d worm her way into their politics, true enough. But she’d never promised that she’d do it with grace and elegance. She was interested in results. Not sympathy and accolades.

Lieutenant Siongh took a deep breath, the vanara tail he usually wore as a belt coming undone to set his wine on a nearby table.

“If you TRULY think their false adjutant is capable of administering these lands, then I find it difficult to imagine how you could ever…!”

While Siongh riled himself up, Sara waited patiently. She let her real body take a genuine sip of wine, satisfied that the mountaintop pebble she’d kicked had found its hulking boulder to kick at least one conversational landslide into motion.

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