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  Chapter 1

  The streets of the city were already slick with blue elven blood.

  Even before I led the charge toward the garrison of elven guards, I heard the City of Slaves fill with the screams of all the elves who had drank the wine. Their screams were followed by the sounds of ripping flesh as they tried to tear out their own throats to try and ease the burning of the nightshade poison, but it was already too late.

  Blood poured out from their eyes and from their torn throats and spilled across the stone streets, until the nightshade poison consumed every elf who had swallowed the temple wine to celebrate the start of the equinox festival.

  Of course, the moment that I pushed open the door into the streets, I saw that there were still plenty of elves who hadn’t drunk any poisoned wine, so our blades would still have plenty of elves to gut open themselves. Some of the elves had seen their friends drink the poison and start to turn purple at their throats, so they quickly threw their wine onto the ground, but a number of elven guards at the festival also hadn’t consumed any since they were technically on duty.

  Either way, they wouldn’t be alive for much longer.

  I glanced over my shoulder at my friends who were there to lead the charge with me, and I knew that we were all as ready as we could be. Dar looked nervous but excited, Clodia seemed eager to fuck shit up, and Penny and Ava looked equally fierce with their hair braided for war and their weapons drawn.

  All over the elven empire, our other human guard units would strike this morning, too, but all of their success wouldn’t mean shit if we weren’t able to conquer the City of Slaves before the elves could recover and lead a counter-attack. But my human banner fluttered above our headquarters, and as I raised my battle-sword up high to lead the charge, I knew that we had prepared for this, we had trained for this, and now we were actually about to do this.

  After all, the lives of my future children depended on it.

  Ava and Penny both briefly touched their bellies, as if they wanted to remind themselves just for a moment about the stakes of our battle today, and then they looked up at me with fire in their eyes.

  “Ready?” I whispered to my four friends.

  “Fuck, yes,” Dar said as he held his long dagger up to attack.

  “We’ll follow at your word,” Penny said.

  “And we will destroy anyone who stands in our way,” Clodia added.

  “Lead the way, my king,” Ava said with a smile.

  “To the garrison!” I called out, and then we raced forward into the chaos.

  As I ran forward to lead the charge toward the elven garrison, I felt the last human king’s crown rest securely on my head. His armor fit me as perfectly as if it had been made just for me, and even though the armor was sturdy, it somehow only seemed to make me run faster. I hoisted the round shield up with my left arm, raised the massive sword of the last king up high, and swore to my father and all the generations of humans before him that I would do them proud.

  Then we met the first wave of elven guards.

  They had been posted by one of the equinox festival stations, but at first, they didn’t even see us coming. They were too focused on the purple-throated, bloody-eyed corpses of the poisoned elves who had fallen at their feet, and they seemed terrified that the poison might be in the air, and that any second now, they might drop to the ground next.

  There were a dozen of them at the street corner directly ahead, but they still only noticed us when Ava notched an arrow and released it at the exposed throat of one of the guards. It split his windpipe right open, and as blue blood bubbled up to the surface, the rest of the elven soldiers all whirled to face us.

  By then, I was more than prepared for them.

  I didn’t even hesitate to see whether or not the Opalstone amulet was ready. Instead, I just flung my hands out toward the soldiers, and instantly, they all froze in place with their weapons half-raised toward us.

  A second arrow from Ava dropped another elven guard to the ground, and by the time the rest of them regained consciousness a few seconds later, we had already reached them, and my sword had already pierced the armor and then just carved right into the stomach of another elven soldier.

  His intestines spilled out of his abdomen and dripped all down my sword, but I just thrusted the blade in more deeply until I felt it scrape against his ribs. Then I twisted the sword, pushed it through until it came out right beside his spine, and then jerked it out again in one graceful motion.

  The rest of the guards had all recovered by then, but there were now only nine of them and five of us. And since Clodia and I could both use magic, and since Ava was the best assassin in the goddamn empire, and since Penny and Dar were some of the fiercest fighters that I’d ever known, I figured that those were pretty damn good odds.

  The elves all launched themselves toward us with their swords and spears in hand. The moment one of the elves hurled his spear at Penny, Clodia threw a ball of blue energy at the weapon to knock it out of the air before it reached the redheaded pixie. Penny just barreled forward like the spear had never even been there, and since the elven soldier was so surprised by Clodia’s magic, the red-haired thief was able to slice her dagger straight across the bastard’s wrist.

  As the soldier cried out and clutched on his hand, Ava followed up Penny’s blow with a stab of her curved dagger straight into the elf’s eye socket. Then the blonde assassin shoved him right back toward Penny so the pixie thief could finish him off with an arrow shoved into a weak spot in the elf’s armor.

  Another elven guard targeted Dar with his short sword, but the halfling just ducked and rolled right between the tall elf’s legs. When he popped back up on the other side, he thrust his dagger up beneath the elf’s armor and straight into one of his kidneys.

  The elf spun around to try to catch Dar before he ducked away again, but the halfling just dropped back down and kicked the bastard’s knees right out from under him. As the elven soldier plunged to the ground, Dar tackled him from the back and ran his dagger across the guard’s throat, until blue blood gushed out in a spray that coated the front of Clodia’s red-leather vest.

  The elven guild master didn’t seem to be the least bit bothered by the fact that another elf’s blood now stained her clothes. Instead, she just grinned, gathered another energy ball of blue fire into her hands, targeted two elves who had started toward me, and then threw it at both of them at once.

  As soon as the blue fire hit them, the air filled with the smell of burning hair, and the elves screamed and tore off their helmets to try to pat the fire out. But by then, the fire had scorched their hair all the way down to the roots, so while they panicked, I followed up Clodia’s attack with one of my own.

  I swung my massive sword at the first one, and even after so many years of disuse, the blade was still as sharp as when it had first been forged. It sliced right through the neck of the first elven soldier, but I pulled it back to make sure I had a clean swing at the second guard as well.

  While the head of the first guard toppled to the ground, followed a moment later by the rest of his body, the second soldier knelt down in front of me like he wanted to surrender. But in the position that he had taken, not only could I see the top of his singed head, I could also see the dagger that he was secretly trying to unsheathe from
his side.

  “Not today, asshole,” I growled, and then I toppled his head from his shoulders, too.

  As I turned to attack the next closest soldier, I glanced up ahead to see that more guards had started to run down the street toward us. I nodded at Clodia to go slow them down, and then I turned my attention back to the remaining guards right in front of us. Ava had already killed two more, Dar and Penny had just tag-teamed a third, so there were only two left.

  “Go help Clodia!” I ordered Ava.

  The blonde assassin didn’t hesitate. She just spun away from the fight, pulled the bow off her back, and fitted another arrow to it. After she fired two arrows at the elven soldiers down the street, Ava sprang forward to go finish them off, just as a wave of blue fire erupted out from Clodia’s fingertips at the oncoming guards.

  Since the two of them seemed to have the new soldiers under control, I immediately brought my sword down toward the arm of the closest elven guard. He blocked it with his own sword and followed it up with a quick stab at my side. My shield rose up to deflect the blow almost before I realized that my left arm had started to move, and even though I was too close now to swing my sword toward him with my full momentum, I just raised the hilt of it instead and brought it down onto the elf’s forehead.

  It was enough to stun the soldier and make him stagger backward, but before I finished him off, I glanced at Dar and Penny to make sure that they had their last target well in hand.

  The halfling and the pixie thief had the last guard pinned up against the wall, and even though the elf was too fast for them to take him down with a single blow, they just took turns stabbing different vulnerable parts of the soldier, until finally Dar knocked his helmet loose, so then Penny could stab her dagger straight into the elf’s ear.

  His eyes went crossed and uncrossed as the blade scrambled his brains like a chopped bowl of pasta, and then he slumped down to the ground to join the rest of his dead companions.

  “Go join the others!” I ordered as I moved toward the last guard at this station to finish him.

  While Dar and Penny ran ahead to catch up to Clodia and Ava at the next stage of our fight, I advanced on the last elven soldier on his feet. He suddenly seemed to see me for the first time, and his gaze went immediately from my face up to the human crown on my head.

  “Look familiar?” I smirked.

  “That’s impossible,” the elf hissed. “That’s… but you’re just a human.”

  “Damn right, I am,” I replied.

  The next time I swung my sword toward him, it slammed into his own weapon and sent a jolt up my arm, but before the elven soldier could recover, I moved in with my second weapon… my shield. I rammed it into the elf’s shoulder to drive him back toward the wall, and his gaze fell on the shield emblem now instead.

  The design on the shield was almost the exact same as the design on the human banner that fluttered in the wind behind us. On top of a simple white background, there was the image of a red dragon. I knew that this emblem hadn’t been seen in the elven empire since the last human king was defeated by the elves, but I planned for it to be the last thing that this elven soldier ever saw in this life.

  I pretended to aim my sword at the guard’s left shoulder, so when he twisted to block the blow, he left just enough of an opening for me to move in. I slammed the edge of my shield into the side of his skull to rattle his brains around, and then I swung it toward him two more quick times to beat him senseless. As he plunged to his knees, I drew my sword across his throat to make sure that he stayed down, and then I looked up from the pile of corpses in front of me to see how my friends were doing.

  More elven soldiers had rushed forward to join the others, but at the same time, there were also more fighters now on our side. I recognized the armor, weapons, and even a few of the faces of the human guards who now spilled out into the streets with centuries of anger to fuel them in their attacks against the elves.

  I knew that the majority of the human guards in the City of Slaves had been poised to attack the main garrison itself, but I had made sure that a few units would be deployed throughout the city to help clean up all the guards who had been stationed in the streets for the equinox festival.

  One of the human guard units joined us now, and as I raced down the street to join my friends, several of the humans looked up and spotted me.

  “The king!” one of the human women shouted. “Protect the king!”

  The human guards all fanned out across the street to block off any chance of escape that the elves might have. Since there was no way for them to retreat back to the garrison now, the elven soldiers all threw themselves into the attack against us, but by the time I reached them, I knew that we would destroy this round of soldiers even more easily than the last round.

  The human guards all advanced toward the soldiers like we had taught them, while Ava, Dar, and Penny charged into the fight and dropped one elf after another. The elves were incredibly strong and fast, but we had the advantage of numbers on our side now, plus we had the magic of both Clodia and myself.

  As the rest of our forces met the elves blow for blow, Clodia spun ball after ball of blue fire toward any elves who tried to use magic of their own. A few of them were able to conjure a sphere of light, but any time Clodia couldn’t bring them down in time, I froze the magic fire mid-air and then just directed it right back at the elf who had tried to use it.

  I had finally realized that it didn’t matter whether or not I knew exactly how my magic worked. All that mattered was the fact that I could use it to protect myself and my friends, so every time one of the soldiers got too close to one of my people, I could use their own magic against them.

  After all, I was the king, so I wouldn’t let anyone stop us now.

  For one brief second, I let myself wonder how the other human guard units were doing across the rest of the empire, but there was no real time to think about that just yet. We had trained, armed, and prepared them as much as we possibly could, so for the moment, there was nothing to do except focus on our own battle and make sure that we conquered without any real losses to our side.

  Besides, I knew that Leif and the Elite would come through the portal to join us, just as soon as my home town was under human control again. It shouldn’t take them long, especially since the captain of the guard there had left town on my instructions and wouldn’t be there to rally his troops into action. Of course, even if Golierian had still been in town, he would have stepped aside and let the human guards take over the whole city, anyway.

  But once Leif had led a successful takeover of the Capital, then he would bring my Elite soldiers to me, and once they were by my side, there would be nothing and no one that could stand in our way, even if I had to personally go to every city in the fucking empire to make sure that the elves were finished.

  The next time an elven soldier conjured up a ball of magic fire in his hands, I didn’t even let him throw it before I acted. I finished swinging my massive sword through the throat of another soldier, and then I focused on the energy ball in the elf’s hands. I froze it where it hovered just above his palms, and then I forced it to explode right in front of him.

  The elven soldier shrieked as flames burned into his eyes and melted his lips right off of his face.

  As a human guard moved forward to finish him off, I carved my sword through the shoulder of another elf, and it moved straight through his armor like it was made of butter instead of tough elven metal. As soon as my sword melted through the armor on his shoulder, it kept going until it completely tore through his entire arm.

  When his arm just dropped off of his torso and flopped around on the ground for a few seconds until the nerves all finally died, I didn’t know who was more surprised, me or the elf. But I did know that I was the first one to react, so as the elf just looked down at his severed arm, I rammed my shield into his chest hard enough to knock the breath out from his lungs.

  The soldier stumbled backward, but befor
e he could recover himself, he staggered right into Dar’s blade where the halfling shoved it up into his ribs. A few more quick stabs brought the elven guard down, so I nodded my thanks to my halfling friend, and then we both hurled ourselves toward the next closest elves.

  I wasn’t sure how much time passed, but eventually, the elves on this street all laid dead at our feet, too, along with all the elves who had ingested the poison when the equinox festival first began. I could still hear sounds of fighting from the rest of the city, but the majority of the noise seemed to come from the direction of the elven soldiers’ garrison, so I knew we would have to make our last stand there.

  “With me!” I called out to the human guards all around me, and then I raced forward to keep heading toward the fight at the garrison.

  “To the king!” the human guards cried, and they followed me forward like a wave.

  Clodia charged just ahead of me on my right to keep the path clear, while Penny and Dar flanked me on either side to protect my back. Every few seconds, I caught sight of a flash of blonde hair from an alley up ahead or from a rooftop above us, and it was always followed immediately by the scream of some elf that Ava surprised with an arrow to the throat.

  A few human guards behind me slipped on the blue blood that stained the streets now, but they recovered themselves and hurried forward over the purple-throated bodies of the elves that we’d poisoned. If it hadn’t been for the king’s armor I wore, I might have slipped, too, but instead, I just plowed ahead like there was nothing that could stop me from getting to the garrison.

  Because really, there wasn’t anything that could stop me.

  Not when we were this close.

  I didn’t know what the situation was in the rest of the empire, but at least in the City of Slaves, more elves had ingested the wine than I had expected. Maybe it was because they had all toasted each other at the same time, or maybe it was because they had all been so focused on themselves that they hadn’t seen their friends start to choke until it was too late.