The door slammed open, and a blonde woman wearing a long purple cape rushed into the room, out of breath and in apparent distress.

“JOHN! HURRY WE NEED TO- Wha?!? What are you doing?!?” She screamed.

Shit

It only took him a moment for his hamster wheel to spin up enough to realise this was Jaina Proudmoore, the former host of this body’s ex-girlfriend. Underneath her cape, she was wearing a loose fitting pair of white pants and a white crop top shirt that was barely hiding her ample D-Cup breasts. She stood at about five and a half feet tall, with golden blonde hair and deep ocean blue eyes that looked rather striking. Well, they appeared to want to kill John at that moment, but that didn’t detract from their beauty.

“I am having a bath? Wait, that doesn’t matter. You ran in here like the town was on fire. What is the emergency?” He said, releasing his grip on Sylvia’s neck.

“Right…It’s Lord Uther! He is…” She said, then reiterated the situation they had uncovered in Hearthglen, and how he ordered her to teleport back here to find John, and bring him to the Capital to assemble an army.

An undead army that numbers in the hundreds or more?  And I have to travel all the way to the capital, then back to Hearthglen? Even with her teleporting me to the capital, according to the map Sylvia showed me and talking with the merchants, that is still over a week’s travel. Not to mention the time it would take to assemble them. 

“Did he say anything else?” John asked, a sinking feeling in his gut. 

“Well, he said if you can save them, he would forgive you your indiscretions, but didn’t elaborate on what those were. I can clearly see what one of them might be. How could you do this to me?” She said, starting to get hysterical again.

“We broke up. You wanted to study magic, and I have to be the king someday. If there is more to it than that, Jaina, I am sorry, but I have forgotten. Took a couple of blows to the head recently and some things in the past are a little foggy.” He told her. He wasn’t sure what their relationship was supposed to be, but with Uther and a whole town’s population’s lives on the line, this was not the time to worry about feelings.

“Yes, but- You were my first and only! I…I promised I would never deny you my love, John. It was your idea for us to break up and see where things landed in the future… I thought…don’t you still love me?” She said, tears running down her cheeks.

John felt a torrent of emotions going through him, wanting to stand up and comfort this woman whom his fragmented memories said he loved. He also wanted to just rip the band-aid off, end things with her, so he could move on with this world’s story that was obviously unfolding as he sat here in his bathwater. The man whom this body thought of as an uncle and a mentor was in trouble, and sent away one of the most powerful mages in all of Azeroth to find John and bring back reinforcements. Reinforcements that had no hope in hell of arriving in time.

“Damn it, Uther… you did this for me, didn’t you, not knowing…” he muttered to himself, then gently pushed Sylvia off of him. To her credit, she hadn’t said anything yet, the baroness letting the two of them handle their apparent relationship quarrel. He stood up and got out of the bath, then walked towards the crying Jaina. He placed a hand on her shoulder and spoke softly. “I am sorry, Jaina, my memories are fragmented from our time together as teenagers. I- we need to have this discussion at another time, okay. Uther needs us now.”

“John… Are you…Are we…” she continued to cry, unable to get herself under control.

John pulled her into a gentle embrace. “Shhhh… It’s okay. We can talk about this later. Right now, I need to get dressed and gather my men. Can you be strong for me? We… we are not through, but we need to have a serious discussion. About this and other things… plus I think we should get to know each other again before we decide anything, it has been a long time.” He said, extending her an olive branch. 

“Okay…”She whispered, holding onto him tightly. 

He reached over her shoulder to grab a towel hanging on the rack behind her, then cast a weak waterball spell on it, soaking it down. He pulled away from her a bit and started cleaning her face, wiping the snot and tears that had leaked out. 

“Since when could you use arcane magic?” She asked him, a surprised look on her face. 

“A couple of weeks now. Still trying to get some of the basics down… I might need a teacher sometime if you’re up to it.” He asked, happy that she had stopped crying. 

“I didn’t know you had an aptitude for it; I thought you only had potential as a paladin and the holy magics?”

“I am a jack of all trades, milady. Now, Lord Uther sent you to me to come and reinforce him, right?” He said, trying to steer the conversation to what was important, saving the people of that town.

“Right… John, you’re naked?” She said, the surprise in her voice made him think she just now noticed that.

“Tends to happen when you take a bath. Focus…Jaina? Hey, Jaina?” John said, trying to get her attention.

“It’s bigger than I remember. A lot bigger.” She said, looking down at his crotch.

“Oh for the love of…” He grabbed a dry towel and wrapped himself up “Jaina, snap out of it, there is a town of what, five thousand people or so to save? You can stare at my cock another time!”

“Right. Right. He sent me here to teleport you to the capital.”

“No, no, he didn’t, Jaina. He sent you here so you didn’t end up dying in the battle.”

“What, but why?”

“He knows you mean a lot to me, so he sent you to safety and to let me know what happened. Otherwise, he would have sent you directly there with a letter. You are not unknown in the castle, and they would have mounted an offensive with or without me.” John said, making what he thought was a reasonable deduction. Uther was intent on this being his last stand, to give Lordaeron more time to prepare. He was positive about that. 

The question remains, what do I do about it? I’m positive the lore of this story has something to do with this fight, so do I go and fight it? Or do I go to the capital? Which is the right decision?

A thought came unbidden, but unlike Alec’s usual words that haunted him, this one made him consider other options.

‘Well, what we do here is send you into different stories, and you either take the place of the protagonist or are a random person near them at the start of the story. You then have the creative license to change the canon’s story or follow it along to its proper course. Not that you know what that is.

The point of sending reincarnators is to change things up, make it new for us to see if you can bring peace, war, or change to these worlds in some significant way.’

“Creative license, hun. Fuck you, Alec. Enjoy this.” He said quietly, walking away from Jaina.

If they wanted a show, he would give them one. 

“CAPTAIN EH! Assemble the men! We ride at dawn!” John shouted, closing the door behind him.

Jaina and Sylvia just watched him go, not sure what he was talking about, but noticed something had changed in him.

“Jaina, just so you know, we didn’t have sex.” Sylvia abruptly blurted out. 

“Huh? Why… why didn’t you?” Jaina replied, her mind still reeling from everything.

“He gave a few reasons, but I think he is really still in love with you.” 

Jaina just blinked.

Town of Hearthglen

Dawn was about to break over the town, though the light from the burning towers was already providing plenty of illumination. Many of the outer defences were on fire, but miraculously they were still standing, repair crews of peasants swarming them to put out the blazes and repairing what damage they could before the next wave. The Alliance forces had survived the night, albeit barely.

Uther and Gerard were on the ground by one of the gates, sitting back to back, resting while they could. 

“Fuck, son, I am getting too old for this shit,” Gerard said, spitting off to the side. “War is a young man’s game. What are two grey beards like us doing this for?”

“Speak for yourself, I still got a bit of colour left in mine. Though you are right, retirement sounds good right about now.” Uther replied, laughing a bit at the older man’s Joke.

They had fought together in the first war, then met up again a few times in the second. Then one day, Gerard had his right arm crushed by an ogre, ending his long career as a soldier. It was beyond battlefield healing magics, so Uther took the man’s own axe and severed the limb cleanly, then healed him with Holy Light. That was the last time he had seen him until today. Well yesterday.

The undead had assaulted the town constantly last night. At first, it was just a handful of troops, probing the town’s defences, looking for any weaknesses. Then they began to come en masse, the ghoulish creatures looking like they had come straight out of a nightmare, razor sharp claws capable of penetrating even his heavy armour, enormous teeth capable of piercing metal. It was one of the most unholy sights he had ever seen,

The siege weapons they were using were beyond description. Wagons with massive rollers covered in spikes that would gather any corpses that it came across. It would then fling the corpses at the town’s defences with a long arm on the back, the bodies able to damage their stone towers when they exploded on impact.

Though that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was when Uther couldn’t make it to a defensive position in time to cast his resurrection spell on the fallen soldiers, the necromancers would do it for him, turning the slain soldiers into walking skeletons, which then attacked their old allies. Truly, it was a nightmare. 

“Whattaya think? Did she get the lad to the capital?” Gerard asked, pulling out a flask he had tucked away somewhere in his armour. He took a swig then offered it to Uther. The Paladin accepted it and took a drink of the cheap whiskey he knew was inside it. It hadn’t changed since the first time they shared a drink.

“Hopefully. Though I doubt they will get here in time if last night was anything to go by. Not that I really thought they would anyway, it is too damn far to travel, and even mages like Jaina can only teleport a handful of troops at a time. She would be out of mana before she had ten soldiers here. Though if she brought the Paladins, that might have been enough to hold the line until the main force arrived.”

“Too bad. It would have been useful to have a mage like that on the battlefield.”

“Yes, it would have, but the lad wouldn’t have forgiven me if I let her die a senseless death here on the battlefield. They were close once, and we all thought they would have gotten married by now, but John broke it off a few years back. She would never say no to him, but he wanted her to follow her dreams of becoming an archmage, and the duties of a queen would have prevented that. Still, the lad loves her, so I sent her back as one last thing I could do for him.”

“Ahh, to be young again.” The old man replied, then stood up, leaning heavily on his wicked looking axe. “C’mon, youngin, there are more undead to kill again.

“What?” Uther said, but was drowned out by the bell atop a nearby watch tower.

*DING, DING, DING, DING*

The watchtower bell rang, signalling the advance of another wave of undead. Uther got up and hefted his hammer over his shoulder. “You will have to teach me that trick.” 

“Become an old soldier like me, and you will get a sixth sense for these things. At least this time I didn’t catch you napping under that old nag you called a warhorse this time.” 

“One time. That happened one time, and you have never let it go.”

“Hey, you are Mister Supreme Leader of the Paladins now, and I am just a one-armed retiree with an axe and a bad attitude. I only have so much ammo from your past I can deflate that ego of yours with.”

“And that attitude is why you never got promoted to Captain.”

“Just the way I planned it, all the seniority, none of the responsibility. Now, shall we dance?” Gerard said, brandishing his axe towards the incoming wave of undead.”

“26 years and you haven’t changed a hair, have you?” Uther asked, readying his hammer. The wave of undead was even larger this time, ghouls and skeletons leading the charge.

“Course I did. We both did. You got all correct sounding, I just got saltier.”

They both chuckled at that.

Dawn had broken, and the time for battle had begun.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep