Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 822

Chapter 822: Baptised by fire(5)

Cain the Mad. Cain the Cripple. Cain the Misfit.

They had a thousand names for him along with a thousands way to hurt him.

A thousand little daggers they used to prod him for thousands of different things that was wrong with him.

He knew what he was not, what he could never be was there need to remind him of that each time?

He sometimes told himself he didn’t care, that the mutters and jeers were nothing but the noise of flies buzzing about a corpse. After all, had not Blake himself endured the same when he was clawing his way up from nothing? The people sneered at his brother once too, doubted him, mocked him, until he drowned their laughter in blood and made them kneel before his strength.

Cain admired that. Gods above, he envied that.

After the disaster at Rock Bottom House, when most of their house’s strength lay shattered beneath the waves along with the Confederation fleet, Cain had thought it was the end. Of fifteen proud ships, only three limped home, torn and battered, with ghosts clinging to their hulls. And soon even that meager number crumbled, one of their captains renouncing their banner, unwilling to follow a house with only a young boy and a cripple and a half-mad dreamer into the abyss.

But Blake did not falter. He seized the reins of a dying house, pulled it from the ashes with his own hands, and piece by piece, raid by raid, oath by oath, he rebuilt it. And now? Now their sails shadowed the Buush river, and his brother stood on the cusp of a glory none had dared dream before.

Cain both loved him and hated him for it.

For beside Blake, he was nothing but dead weight, seeing his brother so strong made him understand just how weak he was.

He could feel it every time Blake looked at him, not pity, never pity, but an anger borne from the acknowledgment that Cain was broken and he could neither fix him nor throw him away.

That Cain could never stride across the deck or storm a wall as Blake did, axe in hand, drenched in fire and blood. That unspoken truth was worse than all the names the world had given him.

He hated the names. He hated Mad most of all.

Because he wasn’t mad. No, he had never been. At first, he thought the visions, the whispers, the strange shivers in his bones were curses, the Sea-God mocking him, stripping him of the strength that should have been his by right and leaving those as pity. But over time, he had come to understand. They weren’t curses. They were gifts. Gifts that only he had the clarity to grasp.

Mad? No he was not, at least that was not a curse .

He hoped to have been blessed.

It was those gifts that had led him here, following Blake’s black shadow into Azania’s heart. It was those gifts that warned him of storms before they broke, that showed him flashes of what might come. And it was those gifts that told him his brother’s fire, glorious as it burned, would soon blaze so high it might consume them all, even himself.

Cain loved him. He loved him enough to follow him into this madness, enough to pray for him even as he despised his own weakness. But he also loved him enough to know he had to try to stop what was coming.

Hence why he now walked where he should never have set foot.

A battlefield was no place for a cripple after all.

The screams of the dying clawed at his ears, rising and falling in a chorus of steel and agony. Smoke drifted low across the harbor, stinging his eyes, making the world blur like some nightmare dreamt in fever. He saw their enemies swarming, pressing with numbers they should not have been able to withstand, yet his brethren hurled themselves into them like sharks into a bleeding tide.

Fangs bared, eyes wild, they cut and tore and died without care, like sharks.

Cain sometimes wondered if it would have been better had the sharks taken him after Rock Bottom. To sink into black water, torn apart, and be done with it. No more shame. No more names. No more waking each day in a body that betrayed him.

But no. The Sea-God had spared him. Worse…He had marked him.

Cain cursed himself for wasting thought when every heartbeat mattered. He had to be near Blake. He did not know when it would happen, only that it would. His brother’s fire would blaze too high, the gifts had told him that much. And when it did, Cain had to be there. He had to be useful. Just once.

Once in his entire life.

Surely the Sea-God would not have touched him only to make him nothing. Surely He had not lifted Cain out of the wreck of Rock Bottom only to cast him back into dust.

He could not be that worthless. Could he?

He stumbled forward, dragging the cursed foot that had doomed him from his second birth of the sea-womb . That twisted, shriveled thing his mother once stroked as he convulsed, whispering to him with the gentleness of someone who knew her son would never be whole again.

They had been too poor then for servants or healers, too poor for anything but prayer. Later, when coin flowed, they had bought him quiet instead; opium poured down his throat night after night. Enough to keep him from screaming, enough to keep the sheets dry when his body betrayed him.

But it dulled him. It dulled everything.

He had thrown it away at last. Better to wake drowning in piss than to live in a fog, grinning like a fool while the world moved past him.

He may have been dull of body, but he would not curse even the mind.

He only had that, that was his decision.

And what had that rebellion given him? Nothing. He was still a cripple. Still a shadow. Still nothing beside his brother.

His mother had tried to save him from that truth. If not the sword, then the ink. If not war, then words. She had tried to shape him into something less shameful. A scholar? In the conferation of the isle?

A woman’s craft, pressed into his hands because steel would never suit them.

But was he even a man?

He thought of her now, the lines of her face, the weariness in her eyes. Perhaps this march, this limp across the blood-slick stones, was not for Blake at all. Perhaps it was for her. Perhaps he could not bear the thought of her left alone, with only a broken son to her name. She deserved better. She deserved a son that was…normal.

She deserved at least one good son.

Cain straightened his back, tried to walk with the dignity of those around him, tried to force his body to obey, but it betrayed him, as it always had. His limp turned into an awkward lurch, a half-hop, half-stumble that made him look like some twisted thing mimicking men.

Each step jarred through his bones, each step screamed his difference to the world.Why was he even there?Blessed a cripple like him?Wasn’t that the jest of the century…

He clenched his teeth until his jaw ached, hating the sound of his own gait, hating the sight of his shadow as it jumped across the bloodstained stones.

He could not even walk like a man. He could only hop and stagger like a mockery of one.

Like a cripple.

Like a fucking monkey.

But the shame had been worth it. He had dragged himself, limped and stumbled, until he was finally close enough to see his brother clearly.

His brother.

Was he even his brother anymore?

Cain stood transfixed, mesmerized, as the man before him carved through flesh and iron like a reaper in harvest.

An angel clad not in white, but in red and without their five wings. His axe rose and fell with sickening rhythm, biting through necks, splitting skulls, hacking limbs from bodies as though they were stalks of wheat.

Sometimes he didn’t bother with the axe at all. Sometimes he simply seized a man by the throat and dashed him against the stones until his bones snapped and his body went limp, discarded like an empty wineskin.

And the men cheered him for it.

Every swing, every kill, drew a roar of savage approval. Their voices carried above the clash of steel, feeding the frenzy, urging him to fall further into whatever abyss had already claimed him. Cain heard them , wolfish howls, voices cracked by bloodlust , and his stomach turned.

Blake was drenched in blood. It painted his armor, dripped from his hair, soaked his beard. Every inch of him shone wet with it, yet Cain knew it was not his brother’s own. It was the proof of his triumph, the price of his ecstasy. He advanced and the enemy fell back, a tide driven before him.

And he smiled.

That was what struck Cain most , the smile. A great, foolish, blissful smile, wide and unashamed, like a boy stumbling drunk on festival wine. Cain had seen that expression once before, every time he stared into water after his nightly dose of opium dulled his mind and left him floating, senseless and empty. That was the same smile on Blake’s face now, only made monstrous by blood.

Why did they cheer him for it? Why did they lift their voices in worship of a man who was not rising, but falling? Could they not see? Could they not feel the abyss opening beneath him? Cain’s heart thundered , he was falling fast, tumbling headlong into something no man should become, and they applauded it.

Were they blind? Were they all blind?

Or was he the only one left with eyes? The only one sane enough to see the truth? The only uncrippled mind among them?

He had to act and save him . He did not know how, did not know with what strength or what plan, but he had to move. Now. Before Blake was lost completely.

Cain fixed his eyes on the angel of blood and forced his ruined body forward, step by halting step.

Then movement flared at the edge of vision. From Blake’s right , a defender breaking through the chaos, spear leveled, the iron tip darting straight for the exposed gap in his brother’s side. Cain’s heart seized.

“Bl—” His cry cracked, strangled in his throat, but he thrust himself forward all the same, raising his spear in some half-conscious reflex.

The warning never finished.

Something slammed into him from the left, a heavy shoulder, a rough shove. Cain stumbled, reeled, and went crashing to the stones. In that instant, through the blur of shock, he caught a glimpse, a tanned face.

The man’s thrust had been checked by Cain’s shield, no skill in it, no intention, just blind fortune dragging him once again from the jaws of death.

And he realized that what pushed him was not a shoulder but a spear aimed at his neck.

Saved by accident.

He tried to rise, strained, but the weight pinned him, mocked him. His crippled foot kicked like a child’s, jerking, failing. His arms trembled with the effort. The battle raged above him, and he could not even stand.

Perhaps this was the truth he had been running from all along.

Perhaps he was finally learning why the battlefield was no place for cripples.

Not even when the cripple was blessed by a god.