Born for War

Cover Credits

Line art by: Paulo Barrios

Colors by: David Delanty

Short Story Cover: Xiao Jin or Asterisk

Chronological Order

ARK-007 Betrayal

ARK-010 Awakening

ARK-011 Rebirth

ARK-015 Stalking

ARK-016 Naming

ARK-017 Hunting

ARK-022 Learning

ARK-023 Migraine

ARK-024 Apathy

ARK-001 Carnage

ARK-005 Meeting

ARK-006 Family

ARK-008 Alliance

ARK-009 Declaration

ARK-013 Assault

ARK-014 Champion

ARK-012 Enemy

ARK-018 Cleaners

ARK-002 Negotiator

ARK-003 Thief

ARK-004 Collector

ARK-019 Pretender

ARK-020 Superhero

ARK-021 Failure

By Story Arc

Wraith: Year One

Remember that kid in class who looked at you like you weren’t there. This is why you don’t mess with that kid.

ARK-010 Awakening

ARK-011 Rebirth

ARK-015 Stalking

ARK-016 Naming

ARK-017 Hunting

ARK-022 Learning

ARK-023 Migraine

ARK-024 Apathy

Resistance Revolution Revenge

Sometimes we fight for ambition. Sometimes we fight to defend others. Sometimes we fight for justice. Sometimes it matters. Sometimes we just fight.

ARK-001 Carnage

ARK-005 Meeting

ARK-006 Family

ARK-008 Alliance

ARK-009 Declaration

ARK-013 Assault

ARK-014 Champion

Searching for a Symbol

Every army needs a standard, every nation needs a flag, and every legend needs a symbol.

ARK-002 Negotiator

ARK-003 Thief

ARK-004 Collector

ARK-019 Pretender

ARK-020 Superhero

ARK-021 Failure

Stand Alone Chapter

Some stories stand alone.

ARK-007 Betrayal

ARK-012 Enemy

ARK-018 Cleaners

Other Works by this Author

Fantasy

A Rising Knight Volume One: Everything that has an End

He was a killer by fifteen, a warrior by sixteen, a revolutionary by seventeen, a legend by eighteen, he won't live to be nineteen. These are Steps Vlad will take to define his destiny. He will spit at the feet of god and slay his angels.

Erotica

Olympic Perfection

She can contort her body in ways most people can’t imagine, she can get into positions most wouldn’t dare. Frederique Chinloo is about to compete to prove she’s the best in the world, on the grandest stage of them all. Win or lose she’s going to show her lover and best friend a few things she’s picked up by being a world class gymnast. Have you ever wanted to be someone’s personal balance beam?

Seven Deadly Sins

The Seven Deadly Sins, embodiments of all corruptive evil in the world, have been unleashed for the first time in centuries. Lust will consume, Gluttony will feed, Avarice will take, Sloth will rest, Wrath will rage, Envy will steal and pride will glory. Will they prove to be mankind’s destroyers or their saviors? Every chapter in this seven story Anthology series features a new facet of sex, from orgies to bondage to rough sex.

www.ARisingKnight.com

ARK-013 - Assault

-Never let the enemy set the rules by which you play the game

August 19th 3:16am (Local time) 1 Year 1 Month 2 Weeks 6 Days since first contact

54 degrees. Minor cloud cover. Hearthstone the city of earth is perhaps the most alien of the five. Buildings that look like dense forests or immense single trees grow out of the island of Kratos. Stone of every hue and variety is used in their construction. Plants of a hundred thousand nuances grow as leaves on the buildings. They fill wide plots of earth running down the center or each street and drape from every window. The air is always pregnant with the rich scent of growing things. Every genus and strain is cultivated in the city itself and surrounding environs. Being the only one of the five to lack a proper wall, Hearthstone's primary defense is the life that grows around it. The Green Death. Wizards in Lightning strike have been warily looking at the sky for a month.

An arc of blood soared through the air, gushing from the torn throat of a man Wraith had just killed. His first barrage of spells had chilled the room far below freezing and even fresh blood could not hold on to its heat. Droplets froze to glittering rubies in midair and shattered when they hit ground.

Wraith released his grip on the man’s hair and let the body fall to the ground. The blade he’d taken out of the man’s hand and used to kill him clattered to the floor after him. He stood alone in the blasted conference room, I Will Not Bow1, playing in his ears. That was the last of the Hunters in this room.

Eleven other bodies were strewn haphazardly around the room. Some lay like broken dolls, no marks visible on them other than trails of blood running from their eyes. A few slumped over sparse utilitarian furniture, hideous gashes exposing their innards. A greasy stain trailed down one of the walls to a wreckage of flesh and bone slumped on the ground beneath it. Hoarfrost and points of ice slowly spread across everything, tucking the massacre in under a blanket of white. The shadow mantel of the Wraith played with those points.

If not for that blanket the abattoir sent of death would have threatened to choke him.

Putting this off had been a bad idea. A month had been too long. The Hunters hadn’t known he would be coming to this particular outpost. They had been prepared for the possibility regardless. Orders had been given. When fellow officers started to die around them, those yet among the living raised an outpost wide alarm. An entire fortress worth of Knight Hunters was marshaling against him at that very moment. Even worse a signal had probably gotten out to their temporary headquarters. Reinforcements would be on their way. Fuster cluck.

At least this first strike had been successful. The commander of this outpost as well as most of his highest ranking officers lay at his feet.

If he were smart Wraith would leave now. Tonight wasn't about smart, however. He’d made a bold claim and punctuated it with a direct attack on Knight Hunter headquarters. If he followed that up with small bites at Blackblade’s flanks he would lose momentum. The people would forget him. Revolution as distraction would only work if Blackblade could think of nothing else. He could not be allowed to notice Jack and Olga's underground railroad. That meant another big strike on the heels of the first. Prove he wasn’t a one hit wonder. He’d chosen the division headquarters for the Knight Hunters in Hearthstone3.

A division headquarters would hold the largest concentrations of his enemies. Right now, it was a numbers game. Other than these forts, units were kept in mobile battalions of fifty with varying levels of gear and training. Why take out fifty soldiers and one officer, when he could take out two hundred and a whole room full of officers? Blackblade might be able to cover up a few missing battalions. The destruction of an entire division headquarters would be impossible to hide.

The idea wasn't as outlandish as it might have seemed. In closed quarters their advantage in numbers meant little.

Even under his Wraith persona it sickened him to use these kinds of tactics. A knight was an instrument war not terror. Images of smoke and death flickered in his mind. Towers burning, towers falling. Images could not hold him back. He couldn’t let them. Wizards were committing the systematic genocide of their own children. These were the only kind of tactics he could use. So he would use them.

Reflection and debate could not aid him now. The now was a time for blood and fire.

Knight Hunters were exactly that, hunters. Being on the defensive was new for them. They would be gathering together in a couple of strongholds. Sweeper teams might be sent after him from those positions but they would fortify at least two points in the building. Vlad had read their manual; deviation was not encouraged. Adaptation smacked too much of their pray.

In order to hold those positions they would have to keep a significant number of their forces back. He’d already shown them a smaller force would fail. Escalation by numbers was their way. They would dig in. Fortify their positions with every shield spell they could cobble together and back that up with fire from scores of Hunters. His choice was to go straight to those strongholds or try and ambush any parties sweeping the halls.

No choice at all. Reinforcements would be here in forty-five minutes at best. He did not have time for cautious bites. This was a numbers game. The strongholds.

Better that way. Better to take them when they thought they were safe. Better to show them their strength meant nothing to him. He the thresher, they the wheat. Besides, he could use a standup fight to help settle the disgust in his stomach.

Olga had gotten him the blueprints to this place. There were a limited number of places where the Hunters could mount any kind of defense. If he hurried he could check them out and take them down before reinforcements showed up. Forty-five minutes was plenty of time for someone who moved like a Knight.

Speeding through corridors on his way to the stronghold Wraith made note of the changes to the original design. The layout had been copied from an earlier design with the decorative elements removed. Uniform gray walls and corridors met at right angles. Strips of light spells2 lined upper corners of corridors and rooms, providing cold light. Hastily vacated rooms were filled with plain, utilitarian furniture. The place had felt like a tomb before he’d ever begun to fill it with bodies.

Two floors and three corridors and four minutes later, Wraith arrived at the first stronghold.

Most people took for granted that wizards like to embellish things and forgot why. The original plans for this type of fortress called for a row of statues in a dead end corridor behind a blind turn. Those statues were intended to provide cover. Defenders were supposed to hide behind them and turn the corridor into a murder zone. Instead, the statues had been removed and the Hunters took cover behind a single line of heavy shields. Effectively they’d turned a storm of crossfire, into a wall of oncoming spells.

It might have worked if he were stupid enough to try over powering eighty soldiers at once. As it was however, this was the kind of critical mistake that got people killed. He couldn’t have survived fire triangulated from that many directions at once. But a single stream of spells coming from one location…that was a different matter altogether.

A year ago he believed the Knight state suppressed emotion. His understanding had grown. The Knight state didn’t suppress emotion; it harnessed emotion into a weapon. To be a Knight was to harness your very existence into a weapon.

He took a breath and was ready. The breath was not the beginning of the fight but it was a beginning. Drain the Blood4 began to play.

Like a streak of darkness and shadow, Wraith burst across the open end of the hall. The Broken Bolt's reaction time was excellent. Spells let fly as soon as they had a target.

Bright bars of liquid heat and bolts of lightning thundered toward him with all the fury of a hurricane. Wraith didn’t flinch; he headed straight into the deadly gale. He was a Knight. Every detail of those spells was clear to him. He could see them splitting, heating and churning the air as they came. He could see the angels and mathematics of their song. A thunder in a hundred voices. They were coming to kill him. A grin tugged at the left side of his face.

The first volley washed over him. Every hair on his body tried to stand on end even as the pressure plastered them against his skin. Shivers of power in the air made his joints ache fit to break apart. Lights in a hundred hues and a thousand thunderous echoes assaulted his senses. Grating against his mind.

Impossibly, he found a way through that barrage. He neither broke nor countered the spells coming at him. Suicide to try. No one had that kind of power without augmentation. What he did, was find holes in the firing solution. Gaps between spells that should not have been there, should have been too small to fit, should not have been passable unscathed. Nimbly, he made his way through barrage after barrage.

Forces powerful enough to warp the basic laws of the universe flowed through him like rivers of fire. Twin to the monstrous flow of the Reigh he drew down and focused into his right hand. A dance. He was a streak of shadow and mist, playing with forces that would rage out of control and rip him to shreds if he faltered a single step. He was the balancing point, the locus that kept harmony from becoming cacophony. This too, was the meaning Knight. To balance life and death.

Moments like this were what he lived for.

The Hunter’s shields were real, physical shields. Square towers of steel, three quarters the height of a man locked together to form a shining wall. The fist and broken lightning bolt emblazoned large on their curved surface. Wards on each of the shields interlaced with those to either side creating something stronger than the sum of its components. A wall of magic that could not be seen but was be felt by every wizard there. A oneway permeable barrier, allowing spells out but blocking anything coming in.

Within twenty feet of those shields Wraith was no longer able to press forward. This close to the firing point there were no openings leading forward. Forward wasn't his intent. He maneuvered close to the wall and jumped strait up, out of the Hunter's firing solution.

He kicked out and made contact with the wall. The power of the kick and the warp of