07/29/2020 Snippet, TRADE NEGOTIATIONS.

The Tom Vargas story is now a novella, and won’t be ready this month. But TRADE NEGOTIATIONS is almost done. One more real scene after this, so no worries. We’ll put this up — after renaming it.

It helped if you thought of mind-controlled soldiers as something like less smelly, but better-armed skeletons. Adventurers knew how to fight people, sure. They could even learn how to do it without getting broken inside. But it’s just easier to get in the right mindset when fighting monsters, because then you don’t have to feel bad when you break them. Besides, in this case Jimmy didn’t even want to break them; he was after the mage.

It was him and three other guys against twenty-four, looked one way. Looked another, it was four against one, with the one having twenty-four bodies to try to sort out on the fly. And in yet a third way, it was him against the mage, only the mage was getting distracted by the way that Jimmy’s three companions kept switching attacks and pushing her slave-soldiers around. It wouldn’t work for long, but Jimmy didn’t care about ‘for long.’ He cared about getting within sword range of the mage controlling the fighters.

And he did.

Afterward, he whirled the mage’s blood off of his blade and shook his head at the waste. The slave-soldiers had been set to go wild at the mage’s death, as usual; the problem was, they were mostly going wild on each other. Not completely — one of his crew was down, and it took a few moment of brutal sword-work to keep the now-feral soldiers from ripping out the throat of a second — but it was more butchery than fighting. Jimmy always hated these scenes, hated feeling like he was a murderer. But what could he do? The Dominion refused to give up cruelty, even in its death throes.

But the mages still died, at the cost of ‘only’ half of his troops dead or too wounded for full duty. That was apparently a really good score for a military operation against Dominion mages, as far as Jimmy was aware, but Adventurers operated under less forgiving rules.