The Mist and the Lightning. Part 13

“Kors?” Nikto was standing on the threshold of the bathroom, Kors turned around and suddenly jerked convulsively, vomited water and gastric juice on the floor next to the bathroom, and the help of two fingers was not needed.

Nikto, without changing his face, said calmly and even somehow kindly:

“Come on, I'll cure you.”

After vomiting, Kors felt a little better, but his head was still dizzy with weakness. They returned to the room, he sat down on the bed. Before his eyes, everything was floating:

“Reds… assault…”

“Not yet. But they will start soon,” Nikto answered and gave him an injection.

And Kors felt released, as if Nikto poured life into him. He felt good, strange where the strength came from.

“Look,” Nikto raised a syringe in front of his face, showing him, “see? It will be yours now. Ver marked it with blue paint. Do you see the blue stripe?”

“I see. Why blue?”

“Well… like your stones,” Nikto looked at Kors’ gold cigarette case lying on the floor. “Isn't your colors blue and gold? Is your banner not blue and gold?”

“Yes. How do you know? You can't distinguish colors.”

“I see your bright blue color,” Nikto smiled and gently stroked Kors on the head, on the gray strand.

“This is the color of our family,” whispered Kors, “sapphire…”

“Yes…”

Nikto approached him, kissing him on the lips, very gently and carefully, but at the same time with pressure, taking his lower lip into his mouth, sticking his tongue into his mouth. And Kors felt the half-blood marks scraping his parched lips. He responded with a kiss, suddenly thinking that Nikto saw how he just vomited in the bathroom, that he didn’t brush his teeth, but it seemed that Nikto wasn’t embarrassed. And Kors wondered if Nik himself often cleaned himself up. “What am I doing?” Kors thought again. “I didn't wash, I slept in my clothes, I just lay on the dirty bed with them, without even taking off my boots. And they, too, obviously did not wash or change their clothes, and they are not even going to do this, and there will be no time. They only take the time to get the shot, not brush their teeth or comb their hair, and I do the same. I'm as dirty as they are, mentally and physically now too. He marked me with his filth, his absolute depravity, his body and mouth odor. I smell like him.” And disgust from himself and from Nikto’s lifestyle was replaced in Kors with a strange courage and delight that he was now the same, in an insane unity with them, devoid of concepts of human rules and laws that threw them away, as if they had already died and everything did not matter, for some reason gave Kors an incomprehensible pleasure and a feeling of freedom. He felt their desperate doom. World with other people was out there somewhere, and were are there. And there was no turning back for them. “There is still for me,” thought Kors, “they accepted me into their flock, and now I am one of them, I am at the bottom, I am an animal, but I will not completely lose touch with the world of people, as they did,” so thought Kors while still kissing her filthy Demon and enjoying it.

Loud alarm sounds forced them to break the kiss. The illusory peace of their little world, limited by this room, was over, and it was necessary to return to the world of war. But Kors was now ready to fight.

4

Power

Take care of your own strength and inner stability. Fortitude will help you overcome problems.

“How long will this continue?! For two days we have been fighting off a five-thousandth army, look, here are the lists, many have died, there are fewer and fewer of us!” Lis nervously walked around the room from corner to corner, and the weapon with which he was hung tinkled on him.

“And of them too,” Nikto answered him calmly.

“You said we had won!”

“Have we lost? Have we surrendered? Is the fort captured?! Lis?” Nikto raised his voice too.

“Do you perfectly understand what I mean, how long will we last?”

“We have enough reserves.”

“And the soldiers? Do we have enough warriors? The siege will drag on, who will remain? Who are we going to Ore town with?”

“I’ll go along the mouse hole, I’ll come to a high mountain,” Nikto said thoughtfully and as if to himself.

“What?”

“There are many mines and underground passages in Ore town, all the land under Ore has been dug up.”

Lis stopped for a second, as if pondering the words of Nikto:

“Nik, if the siege drags on, there will be two or three hundred of us left. And the red ones will call for help. You understand?!” Unable to bear it, he screamed again. “Or will you lead the unclean ones through the Port?”

“I cannot lead an army through the Port and you know it.”

“How then to act?!”

“Hold the defense, Lis, motherfucker!” Nikto also shouted. He swore in unclean language, insulting Lis, very rudely indicating who he thought he was and what Nikto thought of him. Lis paid with his own coin and swore at Nikto in red and black at the same time, remembering all the Demons in general and him in particular. Lis didn’t pay any attention to Kors, and he sat down, realizing that they were really deep in shit.

“Lis! You are a rotten commander! What the panic, damn it, how are you fucking me up with your tantrums!” Nikto hit his forehead with his palm, closing his eyes, and obviously trying to calm down, but he could not succeed. “Fuck, not only are you a noise-head, you have regular tantrums, like girls have their periods! Stable! No wonder you fucked everything up in the past, with your eternal fucking attitude! Do we have people now?!”

“Yes!” Lis snapped.

“We’re inside, reds are outside, right?!”

“Yes,” Lis replied grimly.

“Then what? What the fuck is the problem now?! We must hold the defense further! I am not omnipotent! Keep up the defense! Keep up defense, fuck you, motherfucker! What are you as a commander to do now?!”

“Hold the defense!”

“So hold it! Don't fucking give up like an asshole!”

“I don’t give up!”

“Well done! Do what you must and don't panic! Do you understand me, you red-haired bitch?!”

“Well, okay,” said Lis, seeing that Nikto was wounded, and deciding, out of harm's way, to slow down, “I will do everything in my power, and you are responsible for your words.”

“I am responsible! You want to show me now that I am not responsible for my words?!”

“Not now.”

“Then fuck you!”

“Here are the lists for you, I put them on the oak stump!” Lis threw the lists of the dead onto the table. And he left, slamming the door loudly.

Kors shook his head.

“As you speak, it is unacceptable. For Alis it is okay, but don't answer him like that, don't stoop to his level, Demon.”

Nikto just looked at him gloomily.

“Alis is furious, he's going to cripple Karina!” Kors worried.

“He won’t. He will get stones and that's it.”

“She will fall under his hot hand, he will take out all his anger on her.”

“No, she won’t fall under his hand, she perfectly knows how not to shine at such moments. Don’t be afraid for her.”

“And you don't be fooled by his provocations, answer him coldly, politely and with contempt.”

“I can't do that. He turns me on.”

“Yes, damn it, you are mirroring what they put into you,” Kors thought, “we need to somehow untie you from him emotionally. Have you and Lis been lovers for a long time?”

“We are together now,” Nikto answered gloomily.

“When do you have time?!”

Nikto was silent.

“You're upset. You let him yell at you, now you sit sad. Maybe I don't understand something? After all, he is also your slave, you just have to order, and your Lis will bend down in front of you.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn't you bend him over now? Didn't show him who is in charge? I don’t understand!”

Nikto didn’t answer anything.

“Do you, perhaps, love him?!”

“Yes.”

Kors shook his head in disappointment.

“Oh! This redhead drove everyone crazy. Karina, you… He does what he wants, considers himself the coolest, how does he do it?”

“No way. He's really cool.”

“Bullshit! And don't love him, he doesn't deserve it! He doesn't care about you, he uses you, he also demands: “Where is my victory?” He is completely insolent! He doesn't love you, Demon!”

Nikto was sitting sad and silent, and Kors physically felt how he yearned for Lis, regretting that he was gone. He wanted his love and recognition.

Kors was stunned by it:

“No-no, I won't leave it like that! I promised to help you, and I will put something else in you, the right thing. I'll squeeze out all the shit that Lis put into you. Firstly, it is unacceptable to talk and communicate like that, and I will take care of your upbringing, your culture of speech. And secondly, I will explain to you that you should not love those who don’t reciprocate and just use you. This is not the case! Do you agree with that?”

“Yes,” answered Nikto indifferently.

“Do you understand that Alis doesn't love you? He probably doesn't love anyone at all!”

“I understand everything,” Nikto quickly touched his face with his right hand several times in a row.

“Maybe he only loves himself,” Kors continued, “and even then, I doubt it very much, looking at how he fights, this is not even courage, it’s some kind of suicide, he doesn’t think where he is going.”

“He thinks,” Nikto tightly grasped his left wrist with his right, trying not to make uncontrolled movements.

And Kors saw it, the way he tried to calm his hand:

“I will help you, Nik, to get rid of this splinter, human weakness.”

Nikto didn’t object, and Kors was inspired:

“You will forget about him, and when we return to the Black City, by this time I will teach you, you will speak normally, because we need this to fulfill my Mission, do I understand correctly? After all, my Mission will clearly be associated with the Upper City, and not with the Lower, of course. What should I do in Lower? This means that you will need to learn to speak the way we, the Supreme Sirs, talk among ourselves, and not the way you, illiterate commoners, talk. I'll teach you, okay?”

“Okay,” Nikto answered.

Kors nodded in satisfaction and took the lists of the dead from the table.

“Oak stump…” He shook his head. “Expressions of the poor, who don’t even have a table, but instead of a table there is a wooden stump!”

Nikto was silent. Kors began reading the lists, bitterly recognizing the names of his warriors.

Nikto pulled his mute Arel to him and hugged him to his chest the way an upset child hugs his favorite toy to be comforted. Kors lifted his eyes from the lists and looked at them, it touched him. And he also really liked the fact that Nikto argued with him, and it seemed he didn’t mind reaching out for knowledge. Kors thought that the devilish cunning was simultaneously combined in Nikto with some childish naivety and a lack of understanding of what was bad and what was good. This clarity of Nikto in the seemingly most ordinary questions and concepts surprised Kors: “No, he is still a little mentally retarded,” thought Kors, looking at such a sincerely upset Nikto. “That's really, really, hellishly wrong, wrong combination of Demon and man. Such a crooked, flawed symbiosis, but by the way, it's even cute!” Kors remembered how Nikto talked in a rather primitive way, although he said the right things: “Okay, I'll teach him, he doesn't seem to mind, he probably understands that he needs it.”

Nikto pressed Arel closer to him and kissed him. Arel immediately responded to the kiss, they were sucked in front of Kors that he felt uneasy. He thought that he probably needed to leave and didn’t leave, didn’t want to leave, continuing to watch Nikto and Arel kissing, how Nikto stroked Arel’s face with slightly crooked fingers of his right hand, very tenderly, and Arel hugged him. Kors realized that now their kiss would turn into something more, and jealousy stirred in him, gnawing at him, but he threw those thoughts away. “Nikto is alien to human notions of morality,” thought Kors, thus reassuring himself. “He's not doing this to make me jealous, offend or spite me, no. Nik also loves me, he is kind and affectionate with me. He just wants to be with Arel now, they have been together for a long time, but this doesn’t mean anything. Nik listens to me, and reaches out to me, he just doesn’t understand now that offends my feelings, and it is indecent to squeeze Arel in front of my eyes. The demon knows no shame, and doesn’t understand human concepts. This is the reason for his behavior. And he didn't tell me to leave. I should not be jealous and offended, Arel is his lover and we are one.” And Kors, explaining to himself everything that was happening, continued to watch how Nikto undressed Arel, began to breathe heavily, pressing against him with groans, and Kors felt that he too was getting up, despite jealousy and resentment. Arel bent over to meet him and clung to his beloved so much, their movements were so complementary to each other, just like in battle, they were one. The action of one smoothly flowed into the movement of the other. Kors now felt not jealousy, but rather envy, realizing how awkward and mediocre his sex with Nikto was. He looked with all his eyes, trying to understand how Arel did this, how such harmony is formed between them. This was beautiful. And one could look at it endlessly, like at fire or flowing water. Nikto fucked Arel for a long time, he moaned, and Kors seemed to be there with them.

He sat at the table, stroking his dick and, swallowing hard saliva, watched how Nikto’s ass smoothly moved back and forth, as he bended over Arel, and he, on the contrary, rose to him, and they sucked again, and blond hair of Nikto mixed with Arel’s dark hair and obscured their faces from Kors. “I fucked him too,” Kors thought. “Our hair was also blended, it's so beautiful.” He tried to hear what they were thinking now and didn’t hear, but not because he could not, but because they weren’t thinking, either one or the other. Kors was amazed at it, their kind of trance and not a single intelligible thought, only a spontaneous flow of pleasure. Kors tried to resonate with them and stop thinking, so he even shuddered when he clearly heard the thought of Nikto, addressed to Arel: “I allow you to come”, Nikto thought, and Arel groaned, trembling in ecstasy. “Oh, that’s how they…” Kors realized, almost cumming with Arel. He saw now how Nikto, with his knees slightly apart, slowly moved up along Arel’s body, fell on his face and, realizing where Arel’s mouth and lips were, seeing Nikto then sitting on his face harder, then rises, resting his hands on the headboard. And Arel, whose tongue has now been freed from the metal cover, caresses Nikto with it, holding his buttocks with his hands, licking, moving his head back and forth, sticking his tongue deep inside, forcing Nikto to moan, and closing his eyes, threw his head back, gasping for air. “Gods, I want that too! I want this damn prince to do me the same!” Kors thought, seeing how Nikto squeezed his cock and came onto Arel’s forehead, sitting deep on his tongue. And Kors came too.

Karina undressed very slowly, took a bath. She didn’t hear Lis come back into the room because water was noisy coming from the open tap. She lay in the bath for a long time, because she took the “restorative” and was very slow. Then she also slowly got out, began to dry herself off, seeing with bitterness that her whole body was covered with bruises, her legs were just blue. Lis didn’t remove the chastity belt from her, and of course it was very inconvenient to wash in it, as well as to relieve herself. Karina got used to it somehow. When she sat down in the bath, water poured through small holes inside the “belt”, then poured out, flowing down her legs. There was no way to wash properly with soap, a washcloth or with the hand, the hole in the front was very tiny – round, with sharp jagged edges, and you couldn’t stick your finger in, a little more behind, and also with sharp teeth. Karina asked Lis to take off her “belt” in order to go out in great need, usually only in the evening, and to wash up. He opened the lock, she went to the toilet, washed, then returned to his room, he fucked her and locked her up again. Everything suited him. She was uncomfortable. And this day Lis was in such a mood that Karina was afraid to even just approach him. She had not eaten anything for the second day, the piece didn’t go down her throat, she only injected and drank wine. During the hike, Karina lost weight again, and in recent days even stronger, and the wide metal belt with a padlock tightened at her waist no longer cut into the skin as at first. Even a finger could be stuck in. Karina slipped in a towel to wipe her belly under the metal. She saw on her waist a purple line of bruising from an iron belt, she knew that she looked thin and pathetic. Today on the wall she didn’t cope and made a small misfire in battle, blunt and stupidly substituted herself, distracted Lis, he immediately backed her up, and then just quickly and silently gave her a blow in the eye. Others saw it, they said nothing. She was, of course, to blame. Karina returned to the room. Lis, without moving, was lying on the made bed, she went to the mirror, well, so it was, her lips had not yet had time to heal completely, and now there was a bruise under the eye. Karina tried to paint over it with flesh-colored dye, she seemed to have succeeded a little. She injected herself again, a dull numbness of fatigue and stress possessed her. Lis was lying on the bed in clothes, in combat ammunition and with a fastened weapon, he didn’t even take off his boots, he didn’tmove, he probably took a drug and passed out. Karina fully dressed and gathered, lay down carefully next to him. As soon as Lis wakes up, she will immediately jump up, only she hasn’t put on her boots, this was quick and he would not need to wait for her. Fully collected, she pressed close to him, inhaling the familiar scent of his hair, and couldn’t resist kissing his cheek with oblique stripes of old scars. Lis stirred and hugged her half asleep, pressing her to himself. Karina buried her face in his chest, in a hard steel bib and closed her eyes.

After a couple of hours, he rose heavily and woke her up:

“I'm going to the position,” he said.

“I’m with you,” she quickly grabbed a handkerchief to cover her face, Lis looked at her carefully, at her smeared eye, but said nothing. Karina, already habitually tightened her scarf on her face, tying a knot at the back of her head. Suddenly Lis grabbed her from behind by the neck and squeezed her tightly, pulled her to him, forcing her to fall to the floor. He pulled out his cock, Karina knelt down, and Lis, without removing the scarf from her face, but only lifting its lower part, roughly thrust it into her mouth. She resignedly began to suck, at some point, when he breathed deeper with pleasure, raised her eyes to him. He looked at her, from top to bottom and with such superiority, his face was so smug that Karina realized that now she would get more from him, just like that, for nothing, just because Lis liked to feel complete power over her. He came in her mouth and kicked her away, but didn’t hit, as she was afraid. He tucked his cock into the fly:

“Come on, I’ve already lost time because of you,” he said.

Karina jumped up quickly. Lis ordered her to always stay one step behind him, not dare to look at anyone and be silent. She tried to fulfill everything.

5

The Fort

Help the weak, be confident and strong, and don't put up with evil.

This section of the wall was just some kind of curse: the reds didn’t calm down for a minute and hammered the dilapidated wall near the menagerie.

Kors was tired, but the attacks didn’t stop, and his hand no longer felt the sword. From endless explosions, stone chips flew off the wall and peeled off the skin from his face, sparks scorched his eyebrows, acrid smoke burned his lungs. Kors fought, already just defending himself, without any hope, realizing that even if he managed to fight back and stay alive, too little time would pass and everything would start all over again. The reds pressed, and there was nothing to breathe from their “lighters”. Kors suffocated in this fiery hell, he lost Nikto and Arel, bumping only into the corpses of his own soldiers and others, and fighting off the attackers purely on instinct. After killing another red, Kors fell to his knees with no strength, next to the prostrate body, bowing his head to the ground and breathing heavily, everything around was covered with blood and he himself was covered in blood, no longer understanding who was the ally and who the enemy.

“Vitor! Vitor!” As in a fog he heard a gentle voice, which seemed to be coming from afar and from somewhere above, Kors raised his head in shock. In the thick smoke, he saw in front of him the silhouette of his dead wife Iness, she seemed to float in the air, her beautiful and gentle face turned to him was framed by long blond hair, they fluttered as if from the wind, and beautiful white wings shone behind her:

“Vitor! Get up!”

But he could not and did not want to, indifference seized his consciousness: “if everything is so, let it be so.”

“Get up!” Iness screamed and suddenly her eyes became black as well as hair and wings behind her back. Kors felt that someone roughly grabbed his forearm, pulled him up:

“Get up!” Nikto shouted, helping him to get up, dragged him to the wall, sitting him in the destroyed arch. “Stay here,” he said and disappeared into the smoke, Kors bent over choking on a cough.

When, closer to the afternoon, exploding lighters and red warriors stopped pouring into the breaches, Kors no longer believed in good things. Noticing movement near the stable, without hesitation, he immediately jumped up, drawing his sword.

“Hey! Hush! That’s we!” They heard the voice of Lis, and he with several mercenaries of Kors, as if nothing had happened, entered the break of the wall from the side of the enemy. Unclean and soldiers from the training school of Daniel Crassus looked at them with wide eyes.

“Where are you from?!”

Lis laughed.

“We went down from the wall along their own assault tower and just drove the reds across the field.”

“Are you crazy?!”

“Why are you taking such a risk?!” Kors couldn’t resist. He lifted his head up and looked at the wall, seeing that his mercenaries were also looking at them from above. Kors didn’t see his daughter among them: dressed as a man and with a closed face, she merged with the rest of the warriors. But she was probably there and worried about Lis, hoping that he returned to the fortress safe and sound.

“Alis, why are you leaving the outer perimeter?!”

“We wanted to help you, to distract the reds…”

Lis didn’t have time to finish, at that moment, drowning out his words, quite close by, there was a deafening roar, and the ground trembled under their feet.

“Fuck! This is from Ariel's side,” Lis shouted, “they managed to blow up this fucking sewer!”

Unclean ones and people ran to the aid of Ariel Riel. Kors very clearly heard in his head how Nikto called Nija. It was a revelation to him.

“Are you mentally talking to the unclean? Can you hear each other?!”

“Yes,” Nikto answered simply.

“They can communicate mentally, bypassing conversations and unnoticed by people! A whole secret world, and we consider them stupid animals,” thought Kors with horror, “and they turn out to be stronger than us!”

Prince Ariel Riel, stunned and blinded by the explosion, tried his best not to lose his balance and stay on his feet. He was left without his beautiful, precious helmet with a golden mask, blood flowed down his temples, crimson streams framing his pale face, tense with pain. Many of his warriors were killed, thrown from the wall by a blast wave, heaped with stones, shell-shocked, but the survivors didn’t retreat. Lis with Kors’ mercenaries and the unclean ones quickly came to their aid, and no matter how hard the reds tried, they couldn’t get into the Fort. Those gaps that they managed to make in the wall were immediately under enhanced protection. For a day, the reds failed to break through the cracks of the old wall near the menagerie, although at first they threw all their main forces there. This time, deciding not to get involved with the unclean, since they only suffered losses, and the wall was strengthened even more each time, the red commanders decided to change the plan and try to blow up the sewer. But this tactical maneuver also didn’t work. The buried passage was blown out, but it was low and narrow, and the wall around and above it was strong, and it didn’t collapse, but only sagged a little, further creating the danger of collapsing on those who would make their way to the Fort along this dubious manhole and bury them under the collapse. When Atley Alis’ army of militias, mercenaries and unclean attacked Crimson Rock, the garrison inside consisted of no more than two hundred men. Lis’ cunning plan distracted them, and they simply couldn’t control and protect all points of the Fort, no matter how Digmer tried. Moreover, his opponent, and a friend in the past, knew all the weak points very well. In fact, only the village militias of Prince Arel suffered heavy losses. Professional warriors, mercenaries and unclean ones didn’t suffer so catastrophically.