The campaign took fifteen days, and the reason wasn't the scarcity of the Narkals.
Solmara's surrounding territory had been their unchallenged hunting ground for months, and their numbers had grown accordingly. But fifteen days was what it took, and when it was over, it was over completely.
Ashen ran the army in three rotating columns, each feeding momentum to the next. The formation he used was his own; something assembled from his time reading in the vampires' grand library, from texts no living human had laid eyes on in generations. He called it nothing. It didn't need a name to work.
What it needed was Mana Authority threading through every unit, his Riven Convergence setting the tempo, and Spear Harmony translating the whole thing into something the men could feel in their bodies rather than think about. They didn't need to understand it. They needed to move when he moved, stop when he stopped, and trust that the space between was being managed.
Most of them trusted it by the third day. The rest came around by the fifth.
It wasn't the Riven Formation. He knew that without having to compare them side by side. The Riven Formation moved like a single organism; his version moved like men who had started learning to listen to each other. The gap between those two things was measured in years, not weeks.
He had seen the pride army. He had seen what it looked like when that gap was closed; the ferocity, the synchronized devastation, the way a unit at that level stopped being a collection of people and became something closer to weather. His men couldn't display a hundredth of that.
Not yet… but they were trying.
That was what he watched between engagements; the soldiers who rotated back from the front lines doing so without complaint, the unit leaders checking each other's flanks without being told, the small adjustments accumulating day by day into something that looked, from a certain angle, like the beginning of trust.
It was a long road. He knew that too.
Before his eyes had witnessed the pride army, he might have been satisfied with this. Now, he could only keep going and hope that one day he too would lead an army of such ferocity and loyalty.
Seraphine wasn't absent from this. She moved through the columns like a current. She was attached to no single unit; she went where the need was sharpest, and the soldiers had learned within the first day that the blonde woman at the lord's side was not decoration. She kept them on their feet when the marching hours stacked up and their bodies started registering objections. She mended what needed mending fast enough that the army never had to stop.
Without her, two weeks would have taken four.
Alice and Lucia did not come.
That had been decided before the march began. Readying a territory for a lord's extended absence required someone who could actually run it, and both of them were better suited to that task than a field campaign. They were delegating, planning, preparing the steward's instructions and the contingency frameworks and the hundred small arrangements that would need to hold while the people who mattered were elsewhere.
He left that to them without a second thought.
On the fifteenth day, the Solmarian army came home.
The gates opened, and the citizens were already there. The cheering started before the first column cleared the entrance. Flowers came from the upper levels; he had no idea where they had found flowers, but they had found them. The soldiers who had marched for two weeks without a night off walked into that sound and briefly forgot their tiredness.
Ashen let a small smile find his face, but it didn't last long.
'Now that this is taken care of… I have to meet Cornelia.'
The Sin Lord was non-negotiable for what came next. The prospect sat in his chest with a particular unease. It would go according to his plans or it wouldn't; he wouldn't know until he was in the room.
But before that—
'I have to find that brat.'
***
Swoosh—
CRASH!
The neck parted cleanly. The Narkal's body took another step on momentum alone before gravity did its job, and the creature's mass hit the blood-soaked ground hard enough to send a tremor through it.
Lapis was already moving.
"That's fourteen, yosh! Boys, keep up, keep up, pow pow~!"
She wasn't the only one. Behind her stood a battalion of soldiers from the territorial regiment.
Their duty was to catch any stray Narkals that slipped past the Bloodwall and eliminate them before they could cause harm. For the first couple of hundred years after the regiment was founded, they had fulfilled that duty diligently. But nowadays, as long as the monsters did not cause any major trouble, such as assaulting a city, they were content to turn a blind eye.
Why risk their lives for such a thankless job? The Narkals that slipped through were hardly a threat anyway, with their numbers so low.
Or so the lower-ranked soldiers told themselves, so they could sleep soundly at night.
The truth, which the senior soldiers already knew, was that those "low numbers" had long exceeded anything that could still be called low. In some places, there were even full-blown tribes of Narkals thriving.
But even knowing that, they did not make a move. And unlike their junior counterparts, the seniors had a far more primal reason.
Fear.
That fear had been swept aside by the charisma of a certain Lapis Hart.
It had started subtly. Tasks that should have been difficult for someone of her level were done with ease, and no matter how much they tried to make the newcomer struggle, all they got in return was the same bright feline grin as she completed them anyway.
That alone was enough to make the veteran soldiers drop their petty bullying and start taking her seriously.
But they had been impressed too soon, because Lapis still had far more to show.
When she was given her first company of soldiers, she cleared more than a hundred Narkals on the first day.
When she got promoted to leading a hundred soldiers, thousands fell within the week.
And finally, when her accomplishments earned her command of two thousand men, protests began to spread.
How could a little girl lead that many men after spending only a couple of months in the army? It was outrageous.
The answer was simple. She kept accomplishing even more outrageous feats.
With only two thousand men, she wiped out a tribe of Narkals.
When she returned with barely any losses and her usual cheerful grin, something finally changed.
The faces that had once looked at her with displeasure began to melt into something else. It was almost like hope.
Either way, after that, it was no longer clear whether the soldiers had been won over by her charm or by her accomplishments. All resistance faded bit by bit, until the region she operated in became a comical sight.
If someone from Esperra had seen hulking soldiers gushing over a young woman the way nerdy fans gushed over their idols, their eyes would probably have fallen out from the sheer absurdity of it all.
The region might as well have changed its name to Lapis's fan club.
But if one asked Lapis why this had happened, she would not say it was because they found her charming or because they were foolish. She would say that the soldiers, deep in their hearts, still wanted to fulfill their duty.
They just needed a guide to walk ahead of them, a little breeze to stoke the fire of their courage.
And she was that breeze.
That was what made what was happening now make any sense at all.
The usually laid-back Bloodhounds, the men who always found a thousand reasons to slack off, were unbelievably displaying more fervor than the Bloodwall itself, ferocity in their wake as they marched after their new guiding light.
The formation moved at her pace. She read the field as she rode and did not have to shout adjustments; Jenna handled that.
"Cluster, thirty degrees right." Jenna's voice carried the calm of someone reporting weather conditions from the rear. "Fourteen, minimum. Lead one has armor."
"Got it, yep yep~" Lapis pulled her horse left to find the angle she wanted, darkness already bleeding from the flat of the blade. "Itta-masu!"
She hit the armored one first.
The darkness coating the katana didn't care much for metal; it sank into the gap at the Narkal's shoulder joint and the Hungering Cut took over, widening the entry from the inside with patient, relentless hunger. As she saw the creature wither, Lapis was liking this new path skill more and more.
The ones behind it scattered.
The cavalry caught them.
"Boys, harvest time~"
"YEAH—!"
From the rear, Jenna tracked the formation's shape, identified which Narkals had begun to understand that the woman at the front was the threat and which were still routing toward the infantry flanks, and fed the information forward in short, precise bursts. She had learned early that Lapis processed quick, specific information better than strategic overviews mid-fight.
"Flanking pair, your left."
Lapis turned without checking. The darkness from her blade extended in a thin arc before the pair had closed half the distance; Feast did the rest, and they went down, stamina bleeding through the darkness' touch.
"Bestest clean-up on this side of the wall, right, Jen?"
"Adequate," Jenna replied.
"Pffftt! Adequate, she says! Guys, our morale officer strikes again!"
A wave of exhausted laughter moved through the unit.
Jenna's lips curved, just slightly.
***
As they wreaked havoc in the Narkal tribe, the BloodHounds were greeted with the arrival of a Great Beast at the end.
The last hundred Narkals had been shedding numbers with each engagement until they converged on a single point and stopped. What they had converged on explained why.
It stood at the center of the remaining horde, twice the height of the Narkals around it and a different category of problem entirely. Rank-wise, it bracketed a dozen fifth-step pathwalkers. The soldiers behind Lapis faltered for a brief moment upon seeing it, then one of them remembered who was at the front.
Their faces changed.
"Leader—!"
"Don't worry, don't worry~" Lapis waved her free hand without turning. The darkness on her blade had already begun consolidating, pulling inward, thickening. "Big sis has got this one. You guys just look cool for me, okay? Pow!"
Dread Perception, the second new skill she had acquired, allowed her to sense the fear of others. And now, it fed her the creature's emotions in clear, vivid waves. Beneath its intimidating posture, the thing was afraid, far less certain of itself than it tried to appear.
So Lapis did not fear it in return.
She had already forced it back once.
Then twice.
By the third exchange, both sides had begun to look a little rough around the edges.
Her horse skidded to a halt as she drew in a breath, letting the beast track her from a distance it had learned to respect. Darkness was running low. She had been spending it freely for two hours already, and the reserves she had left were enough for one good thing, maybe one and a half if she was being generous. Her mana sat near the bottom as well.
One good thing would have to be enough.
The Great Beast moved toward her again.
Lapis slid from the saddle in one clean motion and landed lightly on the ground.
"A~aaah… looks like this is my limit." She said it without sounding worried. "So it's time for my favorite activity, hehe~"
The pink in her eyes darkened by a shade.
The grin changed, too. Not her usual one, bright and sunlight-bright; this one was more devilish.
She had pushed herself enough. She had spent enough. She had already crossed the line where most people would have backed off.
That only meant there was no reason left to hesitate.
Every last fragment of remaining darkness poured into the blade.
It trembled in her grip, the pressure climbing until the concentration reached its limit. The edge went past black, past shadow-black and void-black, into a color that had no right to exist in daylight, a black so complete it seemed to pull the light around it inward.
Darkness, by nature, announced nothing. The more of it gathered, the less the beast could sense her; or the blade in her hand. So it did not realize the deadly katana now vibrating in her grip.
It still came with its confidence not yet broken.
Lapis crouched into her drawing stance, blade at the hip, weight settled, breath even.
Ten meters.
Five.
Three.
Two.
Fwoosh—
The draw completed before the beast finished its step.
.
.
.
The Great Beast's lower half kept moving for a heartbeat longer. Its upper half slid away from it in a clean arc and hit the ground behind her, throwing blood and earth into the air.
Lapis straightened.
"Fuuue~ haah… haah… haah…"
She let the breath come. That last strike had taken everything; if the angle had been a degree off, if the darkness hadn't held along the edge… she didn't finish the thought. It hadn't happened. Thinking on what-ifs was useless.
"Maan~ just as I thought; breaking limits is the best!"
She turned back toward her unit, one hand raised in a peace sign, expression as sunlit as it had ever been.
"Let's go, boys! Big sis has slain the big bad! You can celebrate on the way~"
"OHHHHH—!"
"WAY TO GO, LEADER—!"
"YOU'RE SO COOL—!"
"Ah, you guys are making me blush~"
***
As the battalion moved alongside the great Wrath Domain wall on the march back, Lapis's eyes drifted without her permission. They found the wall and stayed there, following its length.
Jenna noticed.
"Curious what's beyond it?"
"Yep!"
"It was obvious from your gaze." A brief pause. "But that's for the Bloodwall army to handle. We can't meddle yet."
"What's beyond this wall is technically human territory, no?" Lapis tilted her head, pink eyes catching the light. "And as the territorial regiment, our duty is to patrol even there."
"Is that so…?"
Jenna did not contradict her. She knew, just as Lapis knew, what lay on the other side of this wall; what both of them had crossed a continent to find.
"Then… as good soldiers of the Bloodhounds…" A small smirk found its way onto her face. "We should see that we thoroughly attend to our duties."
"That's right! The Narkals think this wall would save them from this lady; how foolish can they be~"
"Pfft."
The chuckle came before Jenna could stop it.
'You mean your brother, right?'
She didn't say it. Some things between them didn't need to be.
❖⛧❖
Lapis.