Elara pushed the warhorse until its breath came in ragged, wet heaves. He didn't just ride; he clung to the beast, tearing across stone bridges and blurring through grasslands with a single-minded desperation to reach Commander Kent's stronghold.
The fire in his thigh had settled into a dull, pulsing throb. The healing potion Kent had shoved down his throat was bitter, but it worked; the jagged tear was gone, replaced by fresh, itchy pink skin. After three hours of punishing travel, the stone walls of a border village rose from the dust. He didn't wait for the guards to challenge him. He shoved Kent's royal seal into the light, and seconds later, the world blurred into the sickening, dizzying rush of a military teleporter.
He stumbled out into the castle's inner courtyard, his boots skidding on the cobblestones. The resident mages recoiled, eyes wide. They saw the Lord Commander's personal horselathered in white sweat and trembling—and then they saw the soot-stained rookie sliding off its back.
Elara didn't give them time to ask questions. Between gasps for air, he spat out the truth: the bloodbath at the river, the unarmored retreat, and the green tide of the horde.
Panic flickered through the courtyard. The mages began casting, sending unseen eyes to the border, but the news only got worse. The Vice Commander had already stripped the garrison, marching the bulk of their steel southeast to blunt an Elven incursion.
"We can't empty the walls," one mage argued, his face pale. "But we can't let the Commander die in the mud."
The compromise was reached in a blur of shouting. Four combat mages and ninety elite riders the last of the castle's reserve were handed over to Elara. They didn't care that he was a rookie; they just saw the seal in his hand. Twenty-five minutes after he arrived, they were back at the teleporter. Before the jump, every man downed a vial of high-grade speed potion. The horses were forced to do the same. If they rode like hell and didn't look back, they would hit the stone bridge just as the sun began to bleed over the horizon.
Miles away, Kent's messenger eagle had already found its mark.
Maltida Armstrong, Paladin of the Phoenix Knight Order, sat motionless atop her white warhorse. She looked less like a soldier and more like a statue of marble and steel. She was patrolling the No Man's Land fringe when the bird dropped from the gray sky, a blood-spattered parchment clutched in its talons.
She unfurled the note, her eyes scanning Percival's frantic, messy script. A small, dangerous smile pulled at the corner of her mouth.
"Well," she murmured, her voice cutting through the whistling wind. "Percival finally found a hole he can't dig himself out of with brute force."
She turned her mount, but she didn't gallop toward the river. Something felt wrong. The Greenskin movement Kent described was too loud, too heavy. It felt like a feint a giant hand waving in the air to hide the dagger moving toward the ribs.
Maltida split her force on the spot. She took a hundred heavy cavalry for the rescue, but before they moved, she gave a sharp nod. No mages were there to help; the soldiers reached down, pressing calloused palms against the flanks of their horses. They funneled their own mana into the beasts, the effort drawing tight lines of exhaustion on their faces. They downed vials of leaping draught, the magic and the potion working in tandem to coil the horses' muscles like springs.
She left the rest three hundred infantry and two hundred crossbowmen with a single order: "Turn this forest into a graveyard."
An hour later, the silence of the woods was broken by the soft, wet thud of five hundred goblin feet. They moved like shadows, trying to slip through the very gap Maltida was supposed to be guarding.
They walked into a trap that didn't feel like a trap until it was too late.
The crossbowmen were ghosts in the canopy. The infantry were stones in the brush. When the vanguard hit the kill zone, Maltida's trap snapped shut.
Twang.
The sound wasn't a single bow, but a chorus. Bolts humming with mana hissed down like a thunderstorm of glass. The goblins didn't even have time to shriek before the front rank was turned into a mess of black blood and splintered bone.
The survivors panicked, instinctively throwing their heavy iron shields upward to block the sky. It was exactly what Maltida had expected.
With their eyes and shields turned up, they never saw the infantry. Three hundred men surged from the thickets, weapons glowing with a dull, lethal light. They didn't just fight; they harvested. The disorganized Greenskins were cut down where they stood, trapped between the rain from above and the steel from the front.
It wasn't a battle; it was an execution.
As the last of the Greenskins fell, the forest returned to a heavy, copper-scented silence. Not a single human had fallen. A veteran soldier wiped a spray of black bile from his blade, looking up at the empty trees where the crossbowmen were already descending.
"The Commander's a freak," he muttered, though there was nothing but pride in his voice. "She saw this coming before the goblins even put their boots on."
"That's the Phoenix for you," his comrade replied, sheathing a mana-stained sword. "She doesn't play the game. She writes the rules."