Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 908

Capítulo 908: Things beyond reason

With a cloth mask covering his mouth and nose, Alpheo stepped into the tent toward the side project he had ordered to be studied.

The stench was what hit him first, forcing him to breath through the mouth. A sour, metallic rot, the smell of open flesh and boiled bile , it clawed down his throat and settled into his lungs like smoke. His gloved hand instinctively rose to tighten the mask. Even through the linen, it did nothing to dull the reek of death and medicine.

Bodies lay open on long wooden tables, their skin peeled back in neat lines that turned men into diagrams. Organs glistened in bowls, floating in yellowed liquid, each tagged with small parchment slips.

Alpheo forced himself forward, boots squelching on dirt gone dark with spilled fluids. Whatever disgust twisted in his gut, he buried it , he had ordered this. And now he needed answers.

No matter the hollow ache in his chest, no matter that the sight reminded him of the blood still drying on his own hand, this was no longer a matter of grief.

This was a matter of state. Gone was the man, welcomed was the prince.

He needed to know what those creatures were , the things that had screamed through arrow and fire, that fought until their limbs gave out and still dragged themselves forward.If such horrors could be made, then they could be remade.

And in his hands, turned into weapons that no coalition of princes could stand against.

He found Agalosios, his chief physician, standing stiff beside a line of opened corpses. The man’s face was pale, his hands trembling behind the stained apron that reached his knees.

“So,” Alpheo said, voice muffled through the mask, “what was so urgent that you summoned me here?”

Agalosios flinched at the tone. Despite years of familiarity, he could not meet the prince’s eyes. Perhaps because he knew he had failed to save Egil, failed to prevent another loss. Any other ruler would have ordered his head for such a thing. But Alpheo… he knew better. Even the finest physician could not conjure blood where none remained.

They had no way, after all, of knowing a man’s blood group in a reliable way.

He exhaled through his nose, the foul air burning his throat. “I do not have all day, Agalosios.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” the physician stammered, hurrying toward a large earthen urn on the far table. “This…. is the reason for your presence.”

He pried the lid open, and an oily, putrid stench rushed out , so thick it seemed to crawl. Alpheo staggered back, eyes watering. “Fucking hell!” he hissed, turning his head aside, fighting the urge to retch behind his mask.

Inside, something glistened black-green in the candlelight.

“This, Your Grace,” Agalosios said, voice trembling as he reached in with gloved hands, “is the stomach of one of the… patients you provided us.”

He lifted the organ from the jar. It was heavy, swollen, with dark lumps showing even through the skin.

Alpheo’s brow furrowed. “What is that?”

“Obstructions, Your Grace.” Agalosios took up a thin scalpel and sliced into the flesh. The cut oozed a foul blackness,— thick and tar-like. “Tumorous matter. Solid. Resistant to any tool.I spent a good amount of time cutting a piece out.”

He scraped at it, but the knife merely screeched against the hardened tissue.

Alpheo turned his head sharply away, his stomach twisting. The smell was unbearable, the sound worse , like metal on bone.

“Are all of them like this?” he managed, voice hoarse.

Agalosios nodded, visibly shaken. “Yes, Your Grace. Every one of them we carved up.”

For a moment, disgust gave way to something colder in the prince’s mind. A flicker of fascination.

“What about the other things I asked you?” Alpheo asked the question, simple but the weight behind it was heavy enough to bruise.

Agalosios dipped his head and, to Alpheo’s quiet relief, nodded. He moved to a carcass suspended from a hook, slid a gloved finger into the dead man’s cracked mouth and fished out a blackened scrap of leaf or cabbage?. He held it up between two fingers “We found these in the camp stores,” he said. “Matches what we dug from the teeth.”

“Then you have it,” Alpheo said, hope tightening his voice only to have it loosen when Agalosios’ face did not match the claim.

“We have a piece,” the physician corrected. He closed the corpse’s jaw with a disgusted motion. “Only a piece. We fed samples to prisoners. The effect is obvious , for a short while the subject is utterly fearless, pain is dulled as if by iron, they will walk through wounds like a drunk through a storm. But the mind… it blunts. They become infants. Unable to form orders, words, unable to coordinate.

The state lasts under an hour, then comes a sweat, a spasm, and withdrawal. It is wildly addictive like oppium, perhaps even more?”

Alpheo’s jaw set. The problem leapt at him with a clarity that made blood run cold: they had a drug that made men into living battering rams, but not soldiers.

“Can it be made?The complete formula?” he asked.

“We are working toward that,” Agalosios said. “We think we have the base compound, and parts of a process. But the recipe is incomplete.

More troubling, we have no way at present to separate the fearless stupor from the mental dulling. If anything the current mix produces compliance, not direction. We may yet use this during operation to calm the minds of patients.We would have to of course, find the right dose…”

Alpheo did not hear the rest. He pictured a hundred battalions of men who felt neither pain nor fear but who could still obey a single will.

Perhaps it was better they didn’t have that? No, they needed it.

“Make it your life’s work,” he said at last, voice cold with a command that left no room for sentiment interrupting whatever Agalosios was trying to say. “I will fund whatever you need.Do not stop at dulling pain. Find the balance that keeps their minds intact while stripping away fear and hesitation. Find a way to spike the violent impulse without wrecking cognition. If you do that, you will have given me a weapon that ends wars before they begin.”

As Alpheo finished speaking, he caught a flicker pass over Agalosios’ face, like a ripple across still water. The physician’s lips pressed together, his fingers twitched against the edge of the dissecting table.

The prince said nothing. He merely waited. Silence stretched between them, broken only by the slow drip of fluid from some opened corpse. Finally, Agalosios broke.

“Your Grace… there is one last matter concerning the, ah, patients,” he began, his voice low and hesitant. “I had been reluctant to bring it forth until now.”

Alpheo’s brow arched. “Speak plainly, doctor. You know how little patience I have left today.”

Agalosios swallowed. “From the accounts of prisoners and survivors we questioned, it appears those men , the ones who charged upon us without fear, for most of the day during their marches behaved as I described earlier: numb, fearless, yet dull-minded. But that day… something changed.” He looked down, his gloved hands twisting nervously. “Those who were near them said that a man stood among the ranks, cloacked from head to toe, chanting words none could understand. He raised his hands over them as if in a prayer or a curse… and then, Your Grace, they went mad, when they were given the paste.”

A tense silence followed. Alpheo stared at him, eyes narrowing, searching for even a trace of deceit or superstition. Then he exhaled slowly through his nose, his expression hardening.

“So,” he said at last, his tone edged with weariness and contempt, “you would have me believe the Usurper has a witch in his service? A sorcerer whispering to his troops?”

“Your Grace, I do not claim to understand it,” Agalosios said quickly, “only that those who witnessed it swore upon their lives that they heard the chants, saw the man’s arms rise, and the madness follow.”

Alpheo pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head, the gesture somewhere between irritation and disbelief. “We already live in a world of mad priests and zealots preaching stars and salvation, doctor. Let us not invite demons into it as well.

Whatever happened that day, there is a reason behind it that drove those men into fury. You’ve already found that they were dosed with this… substance. Find what triggered it. There is no magic, only what has not yet been understood.Do you not remember all of our lessons?”

The physician’s eyes darted briefly toward the hanging corpses, as if half-expecting one to twitch in agreement. “As you command, Your Grace,” he said, bowing deeply. “But…” he hesitated, “if we find that there are… influences beyond—”

“Then name them something you can measure,” Alpheo cut in sharply. “You are a man of science, Agalosios. Leave the ghosts to priests and their game. If I hear you speak of witchcraft again, I’ll find another physician who dissects the truth rather than fears it.”

Agalosios bent his head, the reprimand stinging but accepted. “As you wish. I shall devote all effort to uncovering the mechanism. We will find the missing ingredient.”

“Good.” Alpheo turned toward the tent’s exit, the torchlight flaring briefly over his pale, tired face. “Inform me the moment you have results. If I come across anything that might aid your work, anything the enemy left behind,I’ll see it sent to you. You’ll have all the bodies and means you require.”

The doctor bowed low but somehow weakly. “It shall be done, Your Grace.”

With that Alpheo strode out into the cold night, the stench of the dissecting tent still following him, clinging to his cloak like the memory of a sin he had just committed.

He did not look back. Behind him, Agalosios lingered a moment beside the corpses, staring into the hollow eyes of the dead.

He told himself the prince was right,and there must have been an explanation.

And yet, as he turned back to his instruments, he could not shake it.

For the first time in his long and rational life since he was in Alpheo’s service, Agalosios wondered if reason alone could stand against explaining everything of the world, from the light….to the dark.