The Iron Gate, a formidable structure that had once served as the last line of defence against the invading Trolls, now lay in a state of utter disarray. Its heavy wooden beams, once sturdy and imposing, were splintered and broken, scattered chaotically across the battlefield. Jagged shards of iron, once part of the gate's protective bars, glinted menacingly in the fading light, echoing the chaos of the recent assault. Dust mingled with the smell of sweat and fear as the three formations stood ready, their resolve weakened by the troll leader's horrifying display of strength.
The false bravado Adar had carefully nurtured in the apprentices—a facade of confidence and courage built through countless training sessions and challenges—suddenly evaporated like a wisp of smoke, revealing their inexperience.
More than half of the apprentices were completely frozen in shock as the Knights assigned to their respective formations fought hard to hold the trolls who were flooding in through the missing gates back.
"Fight or die!" bellowed one of the knights positioned on the right flank, his voice echoing through the chaos of the battlefield. He strained to rouse the apprentices from their fear-induced paralysis, his own determination tested as a single troll completely overpowered him, pushing him back towards the frozen apprentices.
Some of the apprentices heard the desperate roar and snapped out of their freeze response, while those who didn't faced gruesome deaths. Henry, still positioned behind the center formation alongside Adar and Camden, who were waiting for the B-rank troll leader to make a move. The troll hadn't shifted from its spot next to the gate since smashing it.
The battlefield was a ghastly sight; The sheer power and unrelenting brutality of the trolls were far beyond anything Henry had ever dared to envision. Shattered weapons and remnants of armor littered the scorched earth, while the air was thick with the sickening, metallic scent of blood that clung to his nostrils, twisting his stomach in a vice of revulsion. The cries of wounded apprentices echoed in the near distance, mingling with the trolls' guttural growls, creating a haunting symphony of despair and carnage.
Aprentices were being slaughtered like chickens; some were bludgeoned to death with huge hammers, the sound of their skulls being pulverized ringing out like that of wood being snapped as their brains splattered with a thud in every direction. Others were being cleaved in half by abnormally sized axes, their spines putting up minimal resistance, their intestines spilling out of their destroyed, twitching corpses.
Henry's first encounter with genuine violence sent a chill down his spine, the instinctive reaction of his body betraying the turmoil within. He understood, in that moment, the steep price that came with weakness. Just as he began to grapple with the weight of his realization, he caught sight of Adar and Camden exchanging worried glances. It was clear they had reached their limit; their expressions reflected a shared resolve not to wait for the troll leaders' movements.
"Stay back!" Adar yelled, his voice hoarse as he lunged forward. He didn't check to see if Henry had obeyed; his attention was on the Knights, whose swords were dulling from parrying the trolls' hefty hammers. A few apprentices remained, but they had lost the will to fight and were being hunted down like dogs by the trolls. "If anything happens to me, run! Get to Sinclair Gate, or you'll be dead!"
The combination of Camden's auxiliary wind magic and Adar's dance-like fighting style, focused on speed and precision, proved lethal. The speed at which Adar moved, with Camden's wind buff, was barely visible to Henry.
A troll's hammer pulverised the earth, but Adar was already gone, a streak of lethal motion fueled by Camden's winds. He spun behind the creature, his sword tracing a low, shimmering crescent that bit deep. The troll's Achilles tendons gave way like frayed rope, and it crashed to its knees with an earth-shaking thud. Adar didn't break his stride; he used the momentum of the spin to bring his blade upward in a blinding horizontal strike. The decapitation was so clean that the troll's eyes were still blinking as its head hit the dirt.
Just like that, the first of the fifteen total trolls was eliminated, giving a spark of hope to Henry and the other knights who were barely holding on to their lives, exhausted from fighting enemies so much stronger than themselves.
Sensing an enemy who could pose a threat to them, the two nearby trolls who had just ripped two apprentices to shreds bare-handed rushed over to Adar.
Adar was no longer a hunter; he was a ghost trapped in a storm of iron. One of the trolls with a jagged axe swept low, seeking to shear him at the knees, while the second troll brought a massive hammer down in a vertical arc that threatened to turn the very earth into a crater. The sheer displacement of air from their weapons, even without a direct hit, threatened to knock the wind from his lungs. He could no longer easily target a throat or a tendon; every ounce of his focus was spent in a frantic, blurring dance despite his magic-enhanced speed, his boots skidding through the gore as he dodged blows that could pulverize a stone wall.
As the fight continued, every missed swing of the heavy iron was a debt the trolls couldn't repay; their movements grew sluggish, their abnormally sized weapons dragging through the dirt for a heartbeat too long. In contrast, Camden and Adar moved like two halves of a single, predatory mind. The wind magic no longer just trailed Adar—it anticipated him, catching his heels to pivot him into openings before the trolls could even pull back their guard.
The axe-wielding troll was flagging, his chest heaving like a broken bellows as he hauled his weapon upward for another swing. But as the iron began its descent, Camden struck. He slammed a localized burst of pressurized air directly onto the flat of the rising blade. The sudden, invisible resistance buckled the troll's grip, its momentum dying with a sickening jar to its shoulders. Adar didn't hesitate; he lunged through the stall, his blade precisely thrusting into its chest. Before the hammer-wielder could even roar in protest, Adar was gone—stepping over the collapsing mountain of flesh to face the hammer-wielding troll on equal ground.
The hammer-wielding troll didn't just attack; it charged in a blind, screaming frenzy, its boots churning the gore of the fallen apprentices. As it lunged, Camden struck—not at the troll's chest, but at its planted right heel. A focused, invisible hammer of air slammed into the creature's ankle mid-stride. The trolls' balance vanished. Its massive bulk tilted forward, the laws of physics turning its own weight into a trap. Adar met the falling monster halfway. His blade was a silver flash, shearing through the thick bicep and sending the hammer-gripped arm spinning into the bloody dirt. Before the troll's chest could even hit the ground, Adar's steel was already buried to the hilt in its heart, pinning the creature's lifeblood to the dirt.
The silence of Adar's third kill was swallowed by the wider, hollow roar of the massacre. Henry finally tore his gaze from the wind-assisted dance of the Adar and Camden, his hope dying as quickly as it had ignited. The courtyard was a graveyard of broken youth; not a single apprentice remained standing, their bodies scattered like discarded kindling across the red-slicked floor. Of the proud eleven knights, only five still breathed. In the center of the formation, Lance and William stood back-to-back, a tiny island of steel drowning in a sea of four trolls. They were flagging, their armor dented into their very flesh, clinging to life by nothing more than raw, desperate instinct.
The remaining three knights clung to life by a horrific technicality. They hadn't been killed outright, but broken—each systematically dismantled by pairs of trolls before being hurled across the courtyard like discarded armor. They lay in the periphery of the slaughter, their breathing shallow and wet, their limbs twisted at angles no human frame should endure. They were alive, but only just; their bodies were ruinous heaps of dented plate and shattered bone, left to watch the end of the massacre from the floor.
The six freed-up trolls lacking a target decided to make their way to Adar and Camden, trusting the other four trolls who were already slowly wearing Lance and William out to finish the job. But before they could close the distance, a sound tore through the mountain air—a guttural, chest-vibrating roar that silenced even the screams of the dying. From the shadow of the mountainside gate, the Troll Leader emerged.
It didn't lumber like the others; it moved with a predatory, deceptive fluidity that mocked its massive bulk. Every stride covered yards of gore-slicked earth, its shadow stretching out like a dark shroud over the battlefield. It wasn't just coming to fight; it was coming to end the defiance that Adar and Camden had dared to show.
Henry's heart hammered a frantic, irregular rhythm against his ribs. Adar's parting command—run to Sinclair Gate—echoed in his mind like a funeral bell. He shifted his weight, preparing to bolt, but his instincts forced a final, desperate tally of the field.
Fifteen. Adar had put three in the dirt. Seven more, led by that mountain of a troll leader, were closing in on the Adar and Camden. Four were currently grinding away at Lance and William's endurance.
Three, seven, four. Fourteen.
The realization turned the blood in Henry's veins to ice. The chaos of the mountain gate, the sight of the mangled dead, and the thunder of the leader's approach all faded into a sharp, ringing silence. He scanned the periphery, his eyes darting over the mangled "chicken" remains of his apprentices and the broken heaps of his fellow knights.
'Where is the last one?'
The grisly arithmetic of the battlefield wouldn't stop screaming in Henry's head. Fourteen. For a desperate second, he tried to convince himself he'd miscounted in the chaos—that perhaps the slaughter had only begun with fourteen.
Then he saw it.
On the far right flank, creeping through the long shadows of the mountain gate, the fifteenth troll was a silhouette of silent, crouching malice. Unlike its brothers, who relied on the thunder of their boots and the roar of their lungs, this creature moved with a sickening, fluid grace. It had looped around the periphery, using the heaps of flesh remains and shattered armor as a grizzly screen.
It wasn't interested in Adar's dance like sword style or the knights' last stand. It was hunting the only man who hadn't yet tasted the horrors of battle—Henry. The troll's eyes, yellow and fixed, didn't blink as it closed the distance, its abnormally sized axe held low to avoid catching the light.
The sneaky troll noticed Henry had noticed it as they made eye contact. There was no time to turn, no time to find a rhythm. The world narrowed down to the yellow glint of the troll's eyes and the realization that the distance between them was vanishing in a blur.
"Run, Henry, now!! Adar screamed, somehow noticing what was occurring behind him despite his own helpless situation. "Camden, leave me! Go help the young master, he can't die no matter what!"
Adar knew that he was in a helpless situation regardless, but now, without Camden's wind magic assisting him, he was heading for certain death. His world had narrowed to a singular, burning failure. He had stood before Lord Arnold and promised to watch over his youngest son.
In his arrogance, he had underestimated the extent of the danger they faced; an attack of this scale was unprecedented in the garrison's history. A group of fifteen trolls banded together was extremely rare, and the fact that they were led by a B-rank troll and the other fourteen were an average of D rank was an issue that even a count would need to take seriously, not to mention a baron's garrison that was in a training period and not at full strength.
It was a miscalculation he knew he'd pay with his own life and half his lords' fighting force.
At the exact moment Adar accepted his death, Camden made a different choice. Igniting the meager, acrid fumes left in his mana pool, he forced his magic into a violent overdrive. It wasn't a graceful flow of wind anymore; it was a desperate, jagged explosion of kinetic force.
Blood began to leak from Camden's nostrils as he redlined his own spirit, his vision blurring into a tunnel of grey. He didn't just run—he became a blur of displaced air, his boots barely touching the gore-slicked dirt as he lunged toward Henry.
As he extended his hand to grab Henry with the plan of continuing right towards Sinclair gate, the B-Rank leader, with a casual, predatory flick of its massive wrist, had snatched a discarded apprentice's blade from the muck and hurled it with the force of a ballista. The sword didn't just hit; it punched through Camden's shoulder from behind, the rusted steel erupting through his chest in a spray of crimson.
The wind died instantly, snuffed like a candle. Camden's momentum didn't carry him into a rescue; it sent him skidding across the floor.
Right as Henry's last chance of escape disappeared, his demise in the form of the sneaky troll arrived. In his desperation, Henry unleashed the only thing he knew by heart. It was the gruelling, mind-numbing repetition of the overhead downward strike—the move Adar had hammered into him through thousands of gruelling repetitions to build the endurance of a man.
He brought his blade up in a frantic, shimmering line and brought it down with the combined weight of his terror and the feelings of inadequacy he had always lived with.
The blade descended with the whistling perfection of a month of morning practices. It was a strike that would have cleaved an untrained human man from shoulder to solar plexus, but against ten feet of knotty, D-Rank muscle, it was a flea bite. The steel bit into the troll's left shoulder, but instead of the wet slide of severing flesh, Henry felt a bone-shattering vibration travel up his arms. The recoil was so violent it felt as if he'd struck a cliffside; his fingers numbed instantly, and his sword clattered onto the dirt below him, discarded by the very force of his own blow.
The Sneaky troll didn't even flinch. It looked down at the red mark on its hide with a dull, amused glint in its yellow eyes—a predator watching a toy break. With a casual, backhanded flick of its massive off-hand, it swatted Henry aside.
The impact was a dull thud that robbed Henry of his breath and his consciousness. He was launched twenty feet through the air, his body a ragdoll of dented plate, before ironically slamming into the stone side of the garrison's infirmary.
The blow had caused severe head bleeding. Henry only had a couple of minutes to live. He used pure willpower to bring himself to consciousness, watching the humiliating final moments of Lance, William, and Adar as they were toyed with before dying gruesome deaths.
After the demise of all of them, Henry no longer had the will to keep himself awake, his consciousness slipping away as everything went dark.