The stone in Markelo's hand blazed radiant. The glow pulsing from it was a deep, heavy blue—the color of water seen from below.
He completed the final syllable of the rune, and the structure unfolded around him like something was waiting inside the stone for a very long time.
It was transparent and reaching. The radiance converted into arms of cold light extending outward from a central mass that hovered at his chest, each one finding its mark among the worshippers. They were crouched in the brush, and it latched to them with a heaviness that sank into their bodies.
The blue light enclosed each of them in turn. Valric straightened slightly as it touched him, his grip on the halberd tightening with a sureness that had not been there a moment before. Salm's breathing slowed and deepened. Mari rolled her shoulders once, checking that the weight of the quiver now felt right.
One tendril stretched further than the rest. It crossed the gap between the brush and the clearing and found the hobgoblin still raging at the Star Soldier line, still swinging, still burning through its last reserves.
The blue light touched the hobgoblin's spine, and the roar that came from it was different from everything before—lower, more deliberate, the sound of something getting its freedom.
Markelo maintained the tendrils. His rear remained open as he believed it to be safe.
The scent of something reached Zaemon before anything else did.
Magic masked the scent particles, reducing their potency, but Zaemon's nose detected the smell of salt and rot.
It was similar to something that had been kept in darkness near the sea—preserved in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons. It did not belong in the forest air.
His olfact skill had been recording the environment since the gates opened, building its baseline of smoke and blood and churned earth, and this was not part of that baseline.
He turned his head.
The movement was small and automatic. The kind of change a person makes when something at the edge of perception resolves into a question rather than background noise.
His two guards, who were responsible for him, noticed his changed demeanor. They'd split attention between the hobgoblin ahead and Baron's son behind. For Zaemon's guards, when Zaemon's head moved, theirs followed.
The arrow that came from the left would have found the first guard's throat, but instead it found the edge of his pauldron. The arrow deflected badly, cutting a line across his upper arm that bled freely but did not stop him. The guard stumbled half a step and planted himself.
The second guard closed the gap between them without being told.
Zaemon had seen the arrow. He had registered it. He had not moved. In the sky above the treeline, something ignited—a signal flare climbing on a column of dark smoke, visible for a fraction of a second before the chaos beneath it made it irrelevant.
Herald did not look at the flare.
He looked at Zaemon.
The moment the light went up, he was already turning, already reading the scene—one guard with a bleeding arm, two figures in dark robes moving through the treeline toward the platform, more movement in his peripheral vision completing an arc he recognized as encirclement.
His hand found the warhammer's haft the way it always found it, without deliberation, without looking down.
"Guard!" The word came out at a volume that was not less than monstrous.
The Star Soldiers who had been pressing the hobgoblin knew the word. They had drilled with it many times. It did not tell them what was happening, but it told them what to do—lower the stance, close the gaps, and brace.
The ambush that had been designed to catch them mid-engagement hit instead a wall that had already hardened.
Herald held his warhammer high to drive it into the earth.
"Archers hold the attackers," he ordered as the hammer came in contact with the surface.
It was not enough to stop the ambushers. But it was enough to slow them.
The purple light that burst from the impact was not the pale glow of an imprinted spell working on a standard draw. It was the full expression of a high affinity ignited without restraint—a concussive wave that tore through the ground and air simultaneously, rattling teeth and disrupting footing and making the approaching worshippers stagger mid-stride.
Two of them caught themselves. One staggered, and the other went on one knee. Both were shot dead by the archers.
The hobgoblin, now anchored by the blue tendril and no longer purely its own creature, absorbed the shockwave differently—it did not stagger; it redistributed, and when it came back to its full height, it flung two soldiers away like ballast. They hit the ground hard but rolled, trained instinct carrying them through.
The line fractured at two points, but the center held.
Shara intercepted Herald's path before he could reach Zaemon.
She was not large. She moved with the economy of someone who had learned long ago that size was a liability when speed was available. The curved blade she carried was dark at the edge in a way that suggested it was coated with something.
Herald adjusted his grip and met her head on.
At the platform, Valric and Salm reached the two guards simultaneously—a coordination that suggested they had drilled themselves the way the Star Soldiers had drilled their responses.
Valric's halberd burned high, forcing the injured guard's shield up and straining the arm that was already bleeding. Salm circled low on the second guard, an ice shard shooting straight, trying to create an opening between them.
The guards held. Both of them had specially crafted shields that absorbed mana of the user to form a mana shield that could extend larger than the shield itself. But they were holding, not advancing. Their attention was fully consumed.
Zaemon stood between them.
He had unsheathed his sword and also moved his shield to take the stance without his conscious instruction—the body running its own emergency protocol while the mind went somewhere else entirely. The sword was in his tight grip.
He did not remember doing either. His training had taken over.
He had trained against boars. He had trained against goblins. He had run the overclock simulations until the movements were muscle memory and the responses were instinctive.
None of that had accounted for this specific sort of danger—not the abstract threat of combat but the particular and immediate group of adults with weapons who had come to this location specifically for him.
His body was a seven-year-old's and understood the danger before his mind did. The freeze lasted four seconds.
He counted the freeze afterward from the gaps in his perception.
On the fifth second the firewall did what it had been built to do—caught the flood at the limbic threshold, held it, and presented the question. Not what you are feeling. What are you doing?
He was standing in the open.
He moved. Not toward the fight, but behind his guards, into the narrower space between the two, where the openings for an incoming arrow were difficult and any attacker would need to go through armored bodies to reach him.
He kept the stance. He did not know what he would do with it. He kept it anyway.
His optic skill caught Markelo in the treeline—robed, standing, the empty hand still raised in the aftermath of the rune with his back completely exposed.
His olfact skill confirmed the scent source, and the haptic skill mapped the pressure displacement of bodies moving around him.
He was observing everything and decided to file all of the information even if he was helpless in providing support to the soldiers.
Corin watched Burca absorb the blue light and felt something he rarely felt and had learned to distrust entirely, and that was his rage.
It was not the cold, managed fury he had directed at Burca—that had been a tool, sharpened over months and used at exactly the right moment. It was the other kind. The kind that arrived without permission.
Burca was supposed to die here. Not reinforced. Not repurposed.
The plan had been his masterpiece, made from months of observation compressed into a single outcome, and these robed humans had walked into his plan and used his prey to their advantage without asking.
He found Markelo in three seconds. The man who had cast the spell was standing behind everyone else with nothing between him and the treeline. The shining man had left his rear unguarded.
Corin's spear left his hand. It was a good throw. The arc was right, the weight was right, and the target was stationary and unaware. It should have ended the shining man and the spell together.
But the amulet at Markelo's throat flashed once—a single pulse of stored energy exhausted in one use—and the spear deflected sideways into the brush with a sound like a branch breaking.
Markelo turned, and he looked at the treeline, surprised. His expression changed from surprise to the face of a man recalibrating a threat assessment in real time.
He wasn't able to recalibrate fast enough. The first stone from the sling caught him above the left ear. The injury was not lethal, as the range was too long for it to be lethal with a sling, and Corin had been using slings since before he could form a complex thought. It was intended to interrupt.
He scanned the canopy, searching for the source.
The blue structure flickered. At the center of the clearing, the tendril connecting to the hobgoblin dimmed. The creature's movements lost the deliberate quality the spell had given them and returned to pure animal aggression — powerful but no longer coordinated.
The Star Soldiers pressing the hobgoblin sensed the change immediately. The ground they had lost in the two seconds after the signal flare began to come back. They bombarded the monster with their imprinted spells.
Corin did not load the second stone. As he knew, he was marked. He fled from his position towards the forest.
Markelo was already moving, pulling back into the brush, one hand pressed to the side of his head. He did not run—he retreated with the controlled movement of someone who understood the situation. It was time for their contingency plan.
But he looked back once with anger, toward the branches where the goblin had been. The branches were empty.
The Star Soldiers finished the hobgoblin as the blue light surrounding it died. They went to support others despite their exhausted condition after using their spells. Star Soldiers engaged the worshippers who were kept at bay by the archers. Some archers were having difficulty standing.
The Krakan worshippers saw the situation changing, and they started to act on their contingency plan. Valric, who was engaged with the injured guard, pressed forward with more force as the heat also increased from his spell just as they had planned before. Salm followed with his ice shard.
Shara held Herald for one additional exchange. Both of them used their advantages against each other; Herald used his gravity magic to strengthen his attacks, while Shara used her wind magic to increase her evasion.
When she dodged the strike, she smirked at him, which angered Herald, as he wanted to reach Zaemon instead of wasting time on her.
Herald's whole body got cloaked in gravity magic, and his body weight was cut by one third. Shara was caught off guard due to his increased speed and took the impact of the hammer in her abdomen from the side. She tried to resist as she took the strike.
But the impact by hammer, even with one-third reduced weight, caused her to spit blood, and her vision blurred. She grabbed the hammer between the impacted site and her left arm, but her right wrist was grabbed by Herald to stop the dagger charging at him. Her grip on the hammer faltered from the damage. He pulled the hammer free. She stumbled as he releases her wrist.
As her vision returned, she saw fire in Herald's fully opened mouth. He released his fire breath, and it hit her face. She was caught completely off guard. By utilizing this opportunity, he used his freed weapon, and with a swing of three hundred sixty degrees, struck her head.
Herald didn't stop; he moved towards Zaemon and saw two hands rising from his shadow, and one had the dagger.
He knew their intentions of taking him hostage, so he decided to ignore his tolerance, but as he was going to start, he saw Zaemon spin with his sword at a downward angle towards the hands; he successfully parried the attacker, who by then emerged out of the shadow. Mari staggered a few steps; both of her eyes were wide open.
Zaemon's haptic skill sensed Mari's approach, and due to his training, his body reacted on instinct, but the unconscious movement failed to deliver any injury to the attacker. He saw the warhammer getting past him.
Due to the staggering of Mari, Herald got the time to reduce the weight of his weapon by eighty percent, but the impact it caused was not sufficient as Mari folded her hands to protect her chest. Herald unsheathed his sword and got in a fight with her.
Shara saw the whole thing unfold with her one eye open: Herald and Mari traded three exchanges, neither gaining ground. Mari had failed to secure the child.
She started to chant to Lord Krakan incomprehensibly; a surge of new power pushed her to stand and let her forcefully channel mana into her mana channels. Her hands began to move to form a construct in the air. A storm formed around her hand, and she felt her core stressed, channels burning. She then directed her mana in the construct despite the excruciating pain.
A storm formed beneath Zaemon's feet. The haptic skill started to cause sensory overload. He quickly switched off it and attempted to change position but failed as he was trapped in it. Soon he started to get uplifted in the air. He shouted for help. Zaemon felt overwhelmed as he was for the first time facing the world's dangerous side around him. He saw all of them becoming small as he got uplifted.
The guards, as well as Herald, moved but were blocked by Valric, Salm, and Mari. Both sides were equally unhappy with the situation. The injured guard pumped the shield with mana, turned around, and threw it towards the storm. Valric thrust his burning halberd in his back as the guard completed the throw. The collision between the two caused the storm to destabilize.
A sudden shrill cut through the chaos, and every head turned. A large bird, its beak straight as a needle, banked toward the airborne Zaemon. Archers without a second thought tried to attack, but the bird dodged. It allowed Krakan worshippers to inflict damage to the Star Soldiers. The bird claws closed on Zaemon's arms and flew away. From the height Zaemon saw smoke rising from the direction of Star Fort; his chest tightened.