The armies of Boston put an end to the Green Man horde that night.

  It wasn’t a neat and tidy destruction. By the time the field was vacated, tens of thousands had been slain. The fields beyond our city walls ran red with blood. Without their tanks to support them, with the mass of their poorly armored bodies bared before our guns and cannons, they were fodder. Their organization dissolved and they stopped being a horde and became a hundred thousand individuals. They stopped being fighters and became rabbits, scattering before us. The cavalry did the bulk of the butchering. I think we lost more horsemen to accidental injury than we did to combat itself.

  The survivors, and there were of course survivors from such a vast host, scattered across the lands. The Boston horse would spend days chasing them down and eradicating them, and even with that it was likely we would see bands acting as brigands for years to come.

  We continued without Order. With no priests left in the city it was impossible to reverse the slaving of our Tower to that of Buffalo for the time being. Jacob was able to interact with the oracle sufficiently to communicate directly with the Buffalo Tower.

  Olaf reported that Racquel was okay. She was on her feet and capable of assisting with the cleanup. Magneblade as well was close to full strength. Olaf took a risk, instructing the Buffalo priests to reactivate Danefer’s artifact long enough to strip the disabled Buffalo Griidlords of their armor. The priests were able to recapture the mystorium and house so that it would not return to its owners. Snowfang, Jythorne, Bonefrost and their scepter were locked up. Perdinger too. It suited me that they had all survived. They were more useful to me alive than dead. Especially Perdinger. I had a promise to fulfill regarding Perdinger.

  I spent a few hours in my pod while Balthazar saw the cleanup of our own battle. There would be a gigantic operation clearing the field of bodies and gore. There was the question of what to do with the claimed tanks we had just won. It was a mighty force, but employing something so Order dependent was a challenge. Danefer had been at the end of whatever his grand plan consisted of, and he had been burning our Order to deploy the tanks. Under normal circumstances the weapons would be so Order expensive they would be difficult to utilize.

  The tank operators had indeed been professional soldiers from Buffalo rather than barbarian green men. The majority of them did surrender.

  As we made our arrangements for the journey to Buffalo, I found I hardly knew myself. I was level 47. Somehow, I was not just a better-than-average Griidlord, I was a being of rare power. I could feel it in every step I took, every clenching of every fist. In three more levels I would garner another skill. It was dizzying to have grown so much.

  Evening was falling when our procession arrived at the walls of Buffalo. I brought them under my footfield, Alya remaining in Boston. Balthazar came with me. Two hundred knights, with Lance at their head, trotted behind, a show of force, a show of the seriousness of our visit.

  I released the footfield before the walls of Buffalo. I could see the spot where I had fought the knights during the storm the day I had chased Perdinger and saved Dirk. It seemed years ago now. The war that had been waged, the deaths that had been died, the levels gained, the new focus in my life, it all spiraled around me.

  Enki had been completely silent since the battle with Danefer, and it was silent still.

  I don’t know what I had expected when we reached Buffalo. I knew what I’d hoped for. What greeted me far exceeded even my wildest dreams.

  The people surged around us. Crowds of them, thousands and thousands beyond counting. Every house had been vacated to meet us. Banners and flags waving, faces lit with an enthusiasm that made any greeting the people of Boston had ever given me seem pale and grey.

  The air was thick with the sounds and the smells of them. I could hardly hear Balthazar as he shouted in my ear, the cheers and screaming so intense, so full of happy abandon.

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  His words roared into my HEARING. “It seems you are the people’s champion. But those people are not restricted to the walls of Boston.”

  I looked among the faces. It was ecstasy I saw there. Danefer and the Green Men had been a curse on the city. We had been the cure. We had saved them from the oppression they had lived under for these long months. We had saved them from the presence of those brutish creatures that would take, rape and kill as they needed to. The people of Buffalo had opened themselves to the Green Men at first because they suffered under a leadership that served them poorly. They had turned to the Green Men as an answer. Danefer had decapitated the leadership of the city, but the new head had been worse than the last. I found myself standing before a city of around a million people that were without leadership. A million people who desperately needed leadership, good leadership. A million people, seeking a new prince, who adored me for cutting off the head of the snake.

  Dirk wasn’t even here. He was at Castle Bloodsword. But his agents had been at work, were at work. He’d dipped his own fingers into the communities of the city. The Blood had been at their task, whispering in ears, singing in taverns, spreading rumor and inciting emotion.

  The city was primed.

  I stepped forward and the crowd parted. I walked through them, Moses through the Red Sea, hands reached out to touch me and I waved and touched back. It was dangerously addictive to feel like a messiah. It did nothing to ease my ego that my power had grown so much. The suit had always made me feel like a god. But now, at level 47, that feeling was of an arch-god. Only the greats were stronger than me now. I might not be a Morningstar or a Raven, but I was greater than more than nine in every ten Griidlords I could meet in the field.

  The streets I walked through, flanked by Balthazar and two hundred knights, were black with people. The lower parts of every building were completely obscured. Everything was bodies, waving, screaming, calling my name.

  “BLOOD BUTCHER!”

  “BLOOD PRINCE!”

  I moved through them like a dream. I knew to where I directed myself. The main square, beneath the impossibly tallness of the Tower of Buffalo.

  As I walked I felt the gravity of what was coming build in me. I replayed the conversation between Kestrel, Morningstar and Balthazar. The promise they had extracted from him. The not-so-veiled threat that war would be made if the promise were violated.

  He’d told them, choosing his words with care, “If we bring Buffalo to terms, ending the war, we will not force a Treaty of Slaving.” Kestrel had been satisfied, Morningstar had seen the danger. I’d thought I’d taken the reins of what we would do next, but Balthazar had planted that seed before I’d pushed this inevitable boulder into motion.

  We would not force a Treaty of Slaving. No force.

  I reached the main square beneath the Tower. Here the voices of the crowd were only more cacophonous. They echoed around the square, deafening. The streets behind us thronged as the people surged to fill the vast space. It wasn’t nearly large enough.

  A wooden dais awaited. My companions stood there, Magneblade in his powerful glory, Racquel with her enigmatic posture and Olaf, stoic and capable and somehow, though the weakest of them, the central figure.

  I mounted the steps of the dais, Balthazar behind me. Lance dismounted and followed as well. He hadn’t been invited, but I couldn’t have given a shit about what he did.

  My helmet could project my voice well, but not above this tidal wave of cheering. A microphone had been arranged. Speakers would have been set all around the square.

  Olaf stood aside as I stepped up. This was a moment. A pivotal moment. Nothing would ever be the same for us, for this part of the world, for the whole of the world maybe, after this moment had come to pass. I felt it, standing on one side of a divide. It was inevitable that I cross the divide now. Too much had been planned and invested to bring us to this point. And still, the gravity of it made me pause. I looked out on the crowd, on the faces, the rapture, the excitement, the devotion. It washed over me and filled me. It made me drunk in a way that liquor never could.

  I stepped to the microphone, melting my helm away. Showing the people the face of their Blood Prince. The microphone hissed and whined as I placed a hand on it. The crowd frenzied only louder at the sight of my face, and the anticipation of my words.

  No. No forcing would be needed here. They had chosen the path laid before them by the Blood. They would choose us.

  I had a flash of an old line I had read once, a sickly boy, trapped in his beds by the experiments ravaged on him by the man who called himself his father. The line had been from before the Fall. The Romans conquered the world in self-defense.

  I looked upon this crowd, the ocean of humanity, ready to commit themselves to being a part of what we were building. I thought of a future, a unification of the world and rewriting of the madness that we had lived under since the time of Padraig Dragonheart.

  It seemed I was about to take the first step in building an empire.

  A nearly accidental empire.