"Very well, Your Majesty," Verdant said, dipping his head. "It was I that brought these traitors into your walls. Forgive . I will see them properly dealt with, then I shall return, and wait for your punishnt."
"Captain Blackthorn," Oliver said, turning to the woman at his side. "Do you wish to join them?"
The Lady paused a second to contemplate it, before shaking her head. "Soone ought to guard you. I will allow Verdant his want, and stay by your side in his place."
"Very well," Oliver said. "Good luck to you, General!"
Blackthorn shot him a toothy grin. "Luck?" He snorted, before going back to organizing his n for their departure through the gates. The Erson soldiers were already set to retreating at a handso speed. The cavalry at a trot, and the infantry at a jog. There wasn’t an awful lot of ti to waste – or at least, there shouldn’t have been, if not for the confidence that Oliver had forced of them.
"Let us go," Oliver said to Blackthorn, seeing that his soldiers needed no more from him. He still had a more important, and perhaps more difficult, duty to attend to, in seeing the city secured from the flas.
With the wind blowing, those flas were only continuing to spread. Turning to look back towards them, Oliver felt a pang in his chest. A brief mont of weakness, as he begged the forgiveness of the fallen General Blackwell, for the tornt that he’d allowed to be inflicted upon his city.
"Alright," he said, gathering himself with a breath, before plunging forwards.
A fast jog was what he took to. Just fast enough so that Lady Blackthorn could still comfortably keep up. It didn’t entirely matter the speed with which he got there, he knew. He still didn’t have a solution to the problem.
They quickly found themselves rushing down burning streets, with a wall of fla to either side of them. So streets were completely accessible, with wooden timbers fallen atop them, and burning in a grand blaze. Much of the shops of the rchant street were completely engulfed in fla already. It was only the older centre of the city that seed to be surviving, with the stone buildings not giving much in the way of fuel to the fire.
It was contained mostly towards the west gate, where the battling had been occurring. One had to think that was done on purpose, to allow the largest amount of pressure to be put on the troops fighting there. A strategy that was conceived in a room hundreds of miles away, and still in enacting it, that strategy had managed to cause an awful lot of chaos.
That was not to say the rest of the city was free from harm. Five lots of fires had been spread, with three of them being concentrated towards the west, and another burning just past the centre of Ernest in the east, and a last one burning towards the north. It was only really the south of the city that seed free from harm, but that would quickly change with the blowing wind. It was coming bearing down from the mountains, pushing the flas to the south-east. In other words, exactly where Oliver least wanted it to go.
He frowned at that, and almost muttered about the misfortune of it, but managed to hold himself back.
With the assistance of his Fragnts, he kept his senses peeled for citizens as he ran, and found more than a few isolated individuals that had found themselves lost amid a maze of flas. It was difficult to know where to run to when the world was on fire. It had taken Oliver almost the entire duration of his run to finally identify the south as a relative safe-zone, at least so far. When he was busy doing his battling, it had simply seed like one great big mass of fla to him.
"King Patrick!" A middle-aged woman shouted to him, as he rushed past, already with a group of five beside him. "King Patrick! Where do we run?" A distraught cry, from an already soot covered face. She had a nasty burn too on the right arm that she was cradling. From the looks of her, Oliver wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d been caught by so of the falling fla-covered debris and beco disoriented.
He rushed over to her. "Towards the south," he told her gently. "The flas haven’t spread there yet. We’ll find you treatnt for your arm there too. Are you still well enough to run?"
"I am," she said confidently, but Oliver wasn’t so sure, seeing her staggering on her legs.
"I’ll see you carried," he said.
"I will," Blackthorn intervened before she could, and tossed the woman over her shoulder, as if she was nothing more than a sack of potatoes.
"...A little gentler would have perhaps been better," Oliver said ekly, though from Blackthorn’s empty expression it seed as if the woman couldn’t tell what the problem was.
"Only a little further," he told the rest of them behind him. "We’ll see ourselves freed from the smoke. If you feel yourselves getting dizzy, shout for , and I’ll co back for you."
He’d had them all cut off a bit of cloth from their clothing to cover their mouths with, assisting those who needed it with his dagger. There was only the smallest group of them that he’d managed to find as he ran, despite casting his senses as far as he could. That almost made him give in to worry. With the city plunging into fla as suddenly as it had, he had expected to find a far greater number of displaced individuals. The logic in his mind said so, despite the feeling in his chest declaring otherwise.
’Nila could have done it,’ he tried to tell himself. She was cool and calm under pressure, and a good hunter regardless. She could have tracked down those that needed help, and seen them gathered. But it seed impossible that she could have managed to do it so quickly.
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