Eighteen-year-old Nicholas Hammerstein is at the cusp of finishing high school in his hometown of Los Alamos, NM. He has a seemingly ideal life and is blessed with loving parents, a cute baby sister, and great friends. Nicholas is a gifted student and martial artist who has dreams of leaving for college at the end of his senior year. But, living in a world of Emergent humans, he will soon find his life turned upside down as his life and the fate of a kingdom hang in the balance. His future and theirs will be determined by how he navigates the drastic changes in his body and the magical and superpowered Mergent population he joins.

---

---

 

---

 
The Legal Stuff: Emerald Princess © 2016-2023 By Sofia Hammerstein
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016-2023 By Sofia Hammerstein. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.
 
 
Caution: Violence is contained within this chapter, reader discretion is advised.
 
 

Chapter 55: Come and Take It!

I WATCHED AS men began rushing to the edges of the newer inner wall. The bridge over the moat was quickly closed, and I felt a thud in my chest when the granite block slammed down to seal the ramparts up. I jumped when there was a loud crack as the valley’s southern wall collapsed in a cloud of dust and rock!

“Get the Citadels to target those tunnels!” I said.

“Do it!” General Slane told someone. “Have our trebuchets target the areas they’re regrouping to. The outer castle wall will be surrounded soon, have them continue firing on their troops no matter what! Don’t let them form up ranks!”

I watched, horrified, as the valley began filling up with troops from the two tunnels. Then a distant figure used magic to push away the rubble and clear an opening the size of the road flat. As soon as he did, men began rapidly traveling toward us.

“How many men do they have left?” I asked.

“We think about fifteen thousand now,” he said, “those special forces troops helped push desertion levels and ambushes. Their forces also wasted a lot of lives on the wall in the past weeks.”

“Us?”

“About eight thousand within these walls,” he said and pointed to the walls where I could see on the scrying mirrors that men were side by side atop the ramparts. Within the yard, troops were gathered in ranks. Archers seemed to be set up to volley arrows over the walls but waited for the orders. Meanwhile, I watched the trebuchets continue flinging their own barrages.

The Citadels did everything we could have hoped for! There was even some luck on our side as they managed to cause landslides that sealed off the tunnels from additional troops coming through! Just as we cheered that victory, Citadel Four activated their self-destruct function to prevent the vantage point from being taken by Camulus’ troops. His men had been scaling the cliffs and would have captured it. The mushroom cloud explosion looked like a small nuke had gone off, and chunks of the citadel flew into the air and fell amidst their troops, still trying to form up ranks.

I felt myself squatting for a second and realized I had just pooped my diaper. I sighed and looked at Caireen, who was talking to a few men for a moment before she noticed me and wrinkled her nose. “Come on, Princess,” she said to me. She carried me to a nearby dining room and said, “Look… Sweetie, I don’t know what’s going to happen today, but I want you to know I love you as the daughter I’ve never had.” She hugged me tightly, “With that being said, it’s time for you to be a big girl today. Go ahead and change your own diaper,” she told me.

I sheepishly looked at her, feeling scared and needy. “Do I have to…?”

She smiled and performed a spell, “Okay, I took care of this one. Until we’re done with this war, you’re on your own with changes. Go ahead and use the spell, and you’ll be fine.” She sighed, “You’re also allowed in the real world now.”

I hugged her tightly, “I love you.”

“I love you too…” she told me. “Now, let’s feed you one more time, and then I suspect we will have our hands full!”

I looked at her face, marred with streaming tears, as she brought me to her breast. She bounced me gently as I nursed from both breasts. I looked into her face and teary eyes as she gently bounced and cooed at me soothingly. Before I knew it, she was burping me and placing me back on my feet. “Now, my little Princess, it’s time for us to go to the wall and meet that bastard. Hold nothing back; today, we are fighting for our survival.”

I walked beside her, joined by General Slane and his entourage, leaving the main castle. It was a solid building that might hold up against a small raiding party. Still, a force the size of Camulus’ army would only be slowed for a few minutes by the walls and wards of the main castle. We strode across the main entrance area, past the beautiful fountain, and walked the two hundred yards to the base of the wall I had formed. Even though I hated stairs, I climbed the hundreds of steps to the top myself and stood beside an opening in the wall. All of us looked down at the massive army attempting to regroup below.

The two remaining Citadels were taking advantage of the forces forming into tight ranks – explosive jars were constantly flinging from their trebuchets! I watched as five men caught fire and attempted to put themselves out. Several men who tried to help them also caught fire before Camulus ordered archers to kill all of them. It was an act repeated across their lines over and over.

Inside the walls below us, our sixteen trebuchets were firing everything they could get their hands on. From steel to stone, to statues, if it could be flung, it was! Each impact took out at least a few dozen to a hundred men depending on what was being launched. From across the valley, I could see the massive wooden structures and ladders they’d attacked the wall with were now moving toward the castle.

A white flag went up from the back of the ranks, and Caireen commanded to pause the efforts from within the castle. Then, on a tall black horse in gaudy golden armor, King Camulus trotted up to the wall. Seeing Caireen and me, he shouted, “Surrender! You cannot possibly hold out forever! I have more men, and we will overrun you all soon!”

I felt the silence, and the people around us obviously lost their own hope. Looking around, I felt my stomach plummet as I saw a thirteen-year-old boy standing in full armor that looked almost too heavy for his frame. The crossbow he held looked bigger than he was. I looked down and saw women stationed beside the trebuchets, helping to reload them.

Looking up at Caireen, I smiled, “May I?”

She looked at me, “Your decision.”

I looked out at King Camulus, “Camulus, our response is this, COME AND TAKE IT! We will not surrender!”

At my shout, I heard thousands of troops gathered on the wall and below a shout, “Come and Take It!”

The battle cry had been shouted in battle first in ancient history with Leonidas, then again in the American Revolution, and more well known in Texas’ own war of independence. ‘Come and Take It’ again took place in people’s hearts! It became a rallying cry, and Camulus almost looked stunned.

“No rules, you said?” I asked Caireen as his horse reared up in fright from the shouts.

“No rules,” she agreed.

With that, I decided he didn’t deserve a white flag of truce! The ground from under his horse began crumbling, and he decided to retreat from the front. I started shooting off magic at the front lines of his troops even as they began rushing the castle! “Fire!!!” I heard up and down the curved wall, and our bowmen began firing arrow after arrow. It looked like there were clouds in the sky as our arrows flew, and I watched men drop as they were struck by them. Explosions rained down on the men from Caireen, and I personally obliterated a whole line of troops that neared the moat by covering them with a fountain of water and freezing it. The rank behind them fell to fire as they tried to trample past them.

The wall was completely solid now with the granite piece that had dropped in place. It was held in place by the same kind of magical key as my treehouse. I turned curiously and saw my personal play space in the distance, ‘I hope someday this can be a place to play again...’ I thought, distracted for just a second. Then, I snapped out of it and watched as the first troops tried to jump into the fifty-foot-deep moat I had formed. I’d ensured it wouldn’t cause seepage problems into the castle. The tall walls descended in one granite piece from the top to about a hundred feet below the moat and into bedrock. Caireen had cast an illusion, making it seem like it was only a few feet deep.

Within moments the first few hundred men jumped in, hoping to muck their way across the shallow moat. Instead, they discovered they were drowning with their heavy armor, dragging them to the bottom. Letting them be forgotten for the moment, I tried targeting spells at the catapults they were setting up across the battlefield. Obliterating them wasn’t necessary. Just taking care of breaking axles, or baskets, was enough to keep them from being used against us. I was frugal and only used a few ley lines of power in each spell, but I also didn’t hold back the blasts from continuing through the ground. Rapidly the back of the enemy lines, where they tried to organize the war engines, was becoming a pockmarked mess.

I was just getting ready to attack what looked to be the final catapult that had made it into the valley when I watched Camulus himself approach the moat. Several crossbows and archers fired at his position, but his men stepped in with massive shields and protected him. He reached the edge of the canal and began working a spell.

He wasn’t attacking the top of the walls. Instead, he was firing small spells and poking thousands of tiny holes below the water line in the wall’s granite. I stared for a moment, trying to figure out what he was doing.

Then, I snapped out of my stare and used my own magic to stop him when I realized his plan.

It was brilliant…

He instantly froze the moat into one massive piece of ice.

The little holes had filled with water and acted as thousands of little wedges to break apart the wall. With those and one massive piece of ice caught between two immovable walls… it was just simple physics at work. When I heard a ‘crack’ from the wall below me, I yelled, “Shit!!! Get off the wall!” I cried out to the men around me. People around me used the fireman-style poles I had stationed about the walls for a quick retreat. We were all gliding down the escape route even as the ice began to crack the walls where I had just been standing into hundreds of smaller boulder size pieces. Another spell he performed brought the rock down into the moat, and it now became a land bridge for his troops to cross.

I drew my sword as the first soldier came at me. I parried, sidestepped him, and stabbed him in the side where his armor was weak. My sword passed through just below his rib cage and killed him. I had no time to dwell on it, though, as hundreds of troops began to press and advance our broken lines. I fought alongside twenty other troops that circled me with swords and spells before one said, “Your Highness, pull back to a better position at the castle!”

I wanted to argue, but he barely blocked a sword meant for me right then. I managed to retreat back fifty yards before a shape flew in front of me and turned into Rosemerta holding her own sword. “Miss me?”

“Not really,” I told her. “Miss being dead?”

“You’re going to pay for that!”

She stepped forward to try and grab me. I sliced at an angle and managed to cut her leg almost cleanly off above the knee with a blow from the exceptionally sharp sword. I didn’t have long to wait before she performed a counterattack on me, and I felt a searing cut on my left arm. I used magic to attempt to freeze her, but to her credit, she wasn’t being fooled by the same trick twice. Round and round, we went before I managed to gather enough manna out of five ley lines to do something with. I debated what to do, but when she forced me next to the fountain, I decided I’d take Camulus’ lead and let the water do most of the work. I suddenly flash-heated the water in the fountain and tripped her good leg, shoving her inside.

She screamed as her flesh was being boiled off! She knelt upright and tried to crawl out of the fountain. But, from past experience with her, I knew better than to count her out! I leaped up to stab her through the heart with my sword while simultaneously blasting her with seven lines worth of a fiery blast. I heaved in fatigue as she disintegrated again in front of me.

The clang of battle continued around me, but an odd sound came from my right. ‘Who’s clapping?’

I looked over and saw Maponus. He looked younger here. Clearly, the human he’d been connected with back home was older than here, but the bloody sword he held in his hand told me he was probably more capable here. “Nice show, little girl. I think we’ve established this little dance in both worlds now. You kill her, I come after you. You know, since you killed my vessel in the other world… I think it’s your turn. I’ll enjoy seeing you dead in both worlds!”

 
 

Thank you for reading! Please press the ‘Like’ Button if you’ve enjoyed it! We’re coming to the home stretch of this tale, with less than ten chapters remaining! I would really really really appreciate it you would leave one! I do really appreciate the Kudos button, but please consider leaving a comment if you’re reading? Some of you are doing a fine job of commenting, and I really do appreciate it! Please keep up the good work! New commentators are always loved too!!!! I will fully admit to feeling neglected when there’s none…? (Pretty Please? With a cherry on top?!?)

I am now posting this on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday for the remainder of the chapters.

If you're someone who must finish a good story 'now,' consider purchasing the full book on Amazon Kindle! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTBTTGX1 I will be posting a chapter about every other day until the complete 62 Chapters and the Epilogue are reposted.