With a loud gasp and heavy, ragged breaths, Rayne jolted awake from the worst nightmare.
He was submerged in a small, swampy pond, spitting foul-tasting mud from his mouth as his mind scrambled to grasp his surroundings. His chest heaved, taking in deep, continuous breaths of the humid air. His body screamed with exhaustion, and his unruly red hair was matted with grime and sweat, a testament to days without a bath.
That particular problem was somewhat solved now, considering he was sitting in the middle of a shallow pool in his tattered clothes. But there was another issue: he didn't remember how he had ended up here.
As his sleep-deprived eyes finally adjusted, focusing on the massive silhouette looming over him, a dry croak escaped his throat.
"Thank you, Petra."
The vicious beast of a monster tilted her heavy, armoured head. A remarkably glad expression softened her terrifying, reptilian features as she leaned down, her rough, sandpaper-like tongue dragging across Rayne's muddy face. Her thick, obsidian claws dug deep into the soft swamp earth as she let out a low, rumbling purr.
Petra was an Earth Dragon, a majestic and brutal creature standing much larger than a heavy warhorse. She possessed no wings, but she had absolutely no need for them. Her biology was a masterpiece of desert survival, built with interlocking, streamlined scales that allowed her to run and glide over shifting dunes with the terrifying speed of a sandstorm. She wagged her heavy, spiked tail like an obedient puppy, a stark contrast to her lethal nature. Rayne patted her snout, feeling the familiar, coarse ridges of her scales. He had raised her from a hatchling, right at the beginning of his hellish training under Thane five years ago. They had bled together, starved together, and survived together.
It seemed that days of continuous fighting in the scorched, unforgiving deserts bordering the western Roric Kingdom had finally caught up to him. He was in a desert somewhat near the borders of Zenithar Kingdom. He hoped not to cross the border, nobody wants another battle to break out in this heat. Dehydration was the true enemy. Finding a single water source in that endless ocean of heat and sand was a miracle, and if not for Petra carrying his unconscious body on her back to this hidden oasis, he would have been vulture food by now.
He dragged himself out of the mud, drinking deeply from the cleaner edge of the pond. It was time to head back and finish the mission. He came here to cull the Gigantic Redtail Scorpions. Their numbers had exploded to a terrible degree, and the nearby villages were suffering a devastating loss of human life.
A few seasoned mercenary groups would have been sufficient if these were normal beasts, but these creatures demanded a Knight. The Redtails were larger than adult humans. Their venom was instant death, and their thick, chitinous hides could snap standard iron blades in half. After all, the world was not fair enough to restrict Numen only to humans; many species of animals had evolved to use Numen as an inherent, biological weapon.
But Rayne was not a standard mercenary. He had undergone five years of rigorous, mind-breaking training under one of the strongest Knights in the kingdom.
After filling his cracked leather waterskin and washing the worst of the mud from his weapons, Rayne vaulted onto Petra's back. The bond between them made such restraints unnecessary.
Petra roared, a sound that shook the palm leaves of the oasis, and surged forward. As they hit the desert border, her heavy claws flattened out, her muscular legs driving her forward in a mesmerizing, slithering gallop. She didn't sink into the sand; she glided above it, a predator returning to her hunting grounds.
They didn't search the open dunes this time. Rayne directed her toward a towering formation of high cliff terrain where space was drastically limited. It was an intentional trap. They climbed the narrow, winding stone paths specifically to lure the monsters out of the deep sand where they held the advantage.
Within an hour, the clicking of mandibles echoed off the canyon walls. A horde of Redtail Scorpions poured out from the crevices, their massive, venom-dripping stingers raised high.
Rayne dismounted, standing at the absolute narrowest choke point of the cliff ledge. His clothes were little more than dirty, tattered rags, making him look like a starving beggar. But the moment he drew his weapons, the illusion shattered. In his hands rested two perfectly forged iron axes, heavy, pristine, and entirely lethal.
There was no desperation in his strikes, only the cold, elegant precision of a seasoned warrior from a great, ancient clan, only that he wasn't from one. He stepped inside the creature's guard, his axes flashing in a blur of deadly geometry.
The right axe shattered the joint of a massive pincer; the left axe cleaved through the scorpion's faceplate. He was dismantling them methodically, carving through the monsters like a butcher dismantling a roasted boar on a dinner plate.
Beside him, Petra was a force of pure, primal violence. Her jaws snapped shut around the thorax of a beast, crushing its thick shell with a sickening crunch, while her obsidian claws tore another limb from limb. The narrow cliff prevented the horde from surrounding them.
Petra turned around, her massive jaws dripping with ichor. She sat amidst a ring of dismantled Redtails, swinging her tail in a surprisingly cheerful rhythm, her amber eyes locked onto Rayne like a hound awaiting its master's approval.
Rayne's cold exterior cracked just a fraction, allowing a faint smirk to surface. Petra was the only living creature who didn't look at him with either terror or disdain.
"Good job," he called out, wiping a splatter of venom from his own cheek. "But you ripped them apart completely. We need their carapace intact, and you're crushing the poison sacs. Kill them without turning them into paste."
Petra let out a low, vibrating huff, turning her massive head away and deliberately avoiding his gaze, looking thoroughly offended by the critique.
Watching her sulk brought back memories of his own brutal corrections. Rayne had endured hellish conditioning in the jagged peaks of Alvery City. He had spent hours every single day, his hands bleeding and calloused, literally altering the mountainous terrain with nothing but his bare fists. He still wasn't sure what sense it made for his master to have him carve a massive crater into a mountain, but he had learned over the last five years that questioning Thane Cladaron invited a punishment far worse than the labour itself.
'And to be honest', Rayne thought, his grip tightening on his axes, 'I'm still too terrified to ask him the reason, especially after I failed to meet his standards in the tournament last year.'
His education was a jagged dichotomy. From learning to butcher men with an axe to holding a noble's sword, from tracing the alphabet in the dirt to memorizing the complex legal codes of the kingdom, he had come a long way from the mud-stained slave he used to be. But the scholarly progress was entirely thanks to Jorek, a trusted knight of the Serpent's Maw. Jorek possessed a bottomless well of patience.
'At least Jorek doesn't shatter my ribs when I mispronounce something', Rayne mused.
Thane, on the other hand, was always in a violent, manic rush to teach Rayne, driving him to the absolute brink as if preparing him for a cataclysm only the Captain could see.
The other knights in the Serpent's Maw viewed Thane as a ghost, cold-hearted commander who cared for nothing and no one. When veteran squad leaders approached Thane with detailed reports, the Captain would walk past them without breaking stride, offering only a dismissive wave or a single, crushing syllable of rejection that left grown men trembling. He never attended the officers' banquets, never shared a drink, and never engaged in idle conversation.
Yet, this same person spent hours every single day locked in the training with Rayne, beating the boy into shape. The other knights harboured a deep, quiet resentment toward Rayne for this exclusive attention, completely unaware that it was less a mentorship and more a daily execution.
Every time Rayne completed a gruelling, impossible phase of training, dragging his broken body off the dirt, he would look up and he would find Thane staring down at him with dull, indifferent eyes—a look of profound disappointment, as if analyzing a defective weapon.
"At this rate, you will never be ready," Thane would mutter coldly, turning his back and walking away, leaving Rayne bleeding in the dust without a single instruction on what to do next.
Rayne had developed a rigid habit of only moving on orders. When left to his own devices, a vast, hollow silence consumed him. His assigned quarters in the headquarters were impeccably clean, and entirely bare. The grey stone walls held no tapestries. His small wooden desk held no letters, no received parcels. There was exactly one chair. He knew the precise number of floorboards between his cot and the heavy oak door.
His entire personal inventory consisted of two books resting perfectly aligned on the desk. One was 'The Song of Water,' a gift from Jorek to help him practice reading. It appeared to be a whimsical children's collection of a river's encounters with animals, though Rayne read it religiously, finding heavy, unspoken truths in the simple fables. The other was a far grimmer tome gifted by Thane—a massive, leather-bound registry of the kingdom's most violent criminals and their execution methods. Rayne had read both books so many times he had memorized the exact shape of the ink stains on page forty-two.
During his rare free time, he would walk through the bustling market streets, his physical balance so rigidly perfected that not a single drop of juice would ripple in the cup he held. But he never stopped at the stalls. He never lingered to hear the musicians. In the sprawling, roaring cafeteria of the headquarters, where knights clinked ale horns and shouted over shared war stories, Rayne's table was always a dead zone of quiet. He would sit at the far end of the bench, staring straight ahead, the only sound registering in his ears being the rhythmic, methodical chewing of his own jaw.
He had existed in this quiet, detached void for years, accepting the cold emptiness as his natural state. He had never paid the silence any mind.
Until recently.
Lately, the absolute quiet of his bare room had started to feel suffocating. A strange, phantom ache had taken root beneath his ribs, a heavy tightness that flared up whenever he closed his eyes—all because of the lingering memory of a certain person.
Shifting his attention back to killing those bastards, he noticed their features.
The only true danger was the tails. Arcs of red-hot, poisonous stingers whipped through the air, forcing Rayne to weave and parry with his axe handles, while Petra used her thick, stone-like scales to deflect glancing blows. If it weren't for the lethal threat of that venom restricting their movements, their work would have been over in a matter of a few days.
Instead, Rayne sidestepped another lethal strike, bringing both axes down to sever a stinger from its base. He kicked the dying beast off the cliff, watching it plummet into the canyon below. He wiped a mixture of sweat and monster blood from his eyes.
This was his third week. Three weeks of repeating this exact same grueling slaughter, day in and day out, in an endless sea of sand.
"Next!" Rayne barked, his voice echoing over the canyon as the next wave of monsters scrambled up the rocks.
As the mutilated corpses kept piling up, creating grotesque monuments of shattered chitin and oozing red venom, Rayne and Petra moved on to the next dune. Here, the numbers were far denser, the clicking of mandibles echoing like a thousand dry bones rattling in the wind. They were engaged in battle from all sides, a chaotic whirlwind of iron axes and dragon claws against the endless tide of the desert's apex predators.
Yet, Rayne's face held no expression of fear. His job of culling a thousand or two Gigantic Redtail Scorpions was not terrifying in the slightest; it was merely tedious work for a knight. What was truly terrifying was the environment itself.
The apocalyptic heat of this western desert and the complete, agonizing unavailability of water were his true enemies. The sun beat down on his shoulders like a physical weight, baking the moisture from his pores, constantly pushing him to the brink of severe dehydration.
It was a miracle he had survived this long, and that miracle was entirely due to Petra. No matter how deep into the wasteland they ventured, no matter how many wrong turns they took in the disorienting, shifting dunes, the Earth Dragon possessed a supernatural, primal sense for survival.
She could smell moisture trapped deep beneath the bedrock, somehow always finding the solitary, hidden water sources present in the vast, unforgiving expanse.
As the fight raged on under the zenith of the burning sun, Rayne felt a shift in the rhythm of the battle. The sheer number of attacks from the sand beneath them and the intensity of their enemies' appearance had diminished greatly.
Did it mean the enemy was retreating?
Rayne swung his left axe, burying it flawlessly into a scorpion's armoured faceplate, and kicked the convulsing body away.
'No', he thought, wiping a smear of toxic blood from his cheek. 'Those scorpions don't have enough brains to retreat.'
They were fiercely territorial beasts governed by instinct. They would blindly attack anything that threatened their hives until the last one was dead. The dwindling numbers meant only one thing: Rayne was finally coming close to the completion of his hellish mission.
He stood atop a mountain of awful, twitching corpses, holding his breath to block out the sickening, acidic smell of roasting scorpion ichor. He looked out over the shimmering heat waves of the desert. Through the distorted, mirage-like air, he noticed a distant figure. A small cluster of remnant scorpions was vaguely visible, their tails raised high, circling a single point.
"Just a few more, then I am done," Rayne muttered to himself, his voice raspy. He cracked his neck, the sound sharp in the dry air, and calmly began to walk toward that direction, his boots sinking into the blood-soaked sand.
But as he walked through the valley of dunes, he noticed something odd about the cluster's movements. They weren't just wandering; they were actively striking.
'They are attacking someone', Rayne realized. 'Another human? Out here?'