Visitors from the Mist

The mist churned, but what burst from the depths of the Gray Fog was not the Demon Beast they had expected.

Amid a jumble of heavy hoofbeats, some forty or fifty riders stumbled into the edge of the Sacred Flame's glow.

Their horses blew great clouds of white foam from their mouths and noses, their legs all but dragging through the mud.

The knights in the saddles were in even worse shape. Their heavy breastplates were caved in and cracked across broad sections, and deep gashes beneath the curled metal edges still bled down to the bone.

Fabien narrowed his eyes. His gaze passed over their blood-smeared faces and settled on the tattered cloaks fluttering behind them.

"Lower your crossbows. They're from Shattered Stone Fief, not monsters."

He swept a cold glance over the battered survivors but saw no sign of the arrogant viscount.

The knights were quickly disarmed and stripped of their ruined armor, then marched like prisoners to the raised Sacred Flame platform in the square.

The Knight Commander leading them, a man of the Resonance Realm, buckled at the knees and fell into a pool of mud streaked with black blood.

Facing Shien on the platform, he haltingly recounted the nightmare of the previous night.

Viscount Thomas might have been a fool, but he had not been wholly unprepared. Shattered Stone Fief had erected a standard Caltrops barricade along its perimeter overnight, and the knights had formed a Tower Shield Formation.

The Rat Tide they faced had been less than a third the size of the one at Blackpine Fief. No Composite Demonic Beast above the Third Tier had appeared, either.

It should have been a battle of attrition they had every chance of surviving.

But at midnight, everything changed.

Unlike the platform at Blackpine Fief, Shattered Stone Fief's Permanent Sacred Flame Platform had been lit without trouble. But its base's drive shaft, corroded by years of Bloodrust, seized at the worst possible moment.

With a shriek of breaking metal, the White-Gold Sacred Flame dimmed for more than ten minutes at the darkest hour of the night.

"Just ten minutes..." The Knight Commander buried his face deep in the muddy water, his voice full of despair. "The Rat Tide outside went mad and smashed through the eastern Caltrops barricade."

"We could still have held... The shield formation hadn't broken. The spearmen could still thrust..." His mouth twitched at the memory. "But our lord... he broke."

In those ten minutes, thousands of Bloodthirsty Rot Rats poured through the shadows into the inner ring.

When Viscount Thomas saw the Demon Beasts' drooling fangs, fear tore his reason apart.

He ordered his personal guard to abandon the flank and escort him away.

With their commander fleeing and his guards pulled from the line, the already shaky defense collapsed in an instant.

Panic tore the once-solid shield wall apart from within. In a few breaths, an orderly defensive battle became a slaughter.

Only forty or fifty knights had fought their way through the Rat Tide and the Ghouls, trampling the bodies of their comrades to escape.

As for Viscount Thomas, the Demon Beasts had most likely swallowed him up. He was probably dead in some muddy hollow on the wasteland.

When the Knight Commander finished, he lifted his trembling head, hoping to find some comfort in shared suffering at this camp that had survived.

Instead, he saw heaps of Corrupt Rat bones and Primordial Blood Crystals piled almost as high as the ruined walls.

At the heart of the defenses, a Tier Three Mutant Giant Rat as massive as an armored rhinoceros lay on its back in the mud, half its body charred by the Sacred Flame.

The Knight Commander swallowed hard. He had assumed they were all green recruits cast aside by their families, and that their circumstances could not be so different.

Only now did he realize that the Rat Tide and High-Tier Demonic Beasts Blackpine Fief had faced the previous night were more than ten times as terrifying as anything Shattered Stone Fief had endured.

Under any ordinary lord, this territory would have fallen last night.

His gaze climbed slowly to the platform.

Before the white-gold pillar of light that pierced the heavens stood a silver-haired boy of only fourteen. He wore a dark lord's cloak stained with blood. It stirred slowly in the wind, while golden light traced the sharp outline of his silver-white hair.

The Knight Commander pressed his forehead hard against the flagstones soaked in black blood and laid both hands flat in the muddy water.

Then the survivors of Shattered Stone Fief prostrated themselves in the mud and offered Shien their submission in the name of the Eternal Night Wall.

Shien looked down at the forty-odd desperate men. There was no fellow feeling for survivors in his eyes, only the cold detachment of someone inspecting corpses.

"Sacred Flame Wartime Disciplinary Code, Chapter Three, Article Seven." Shien's voice was as cold as a verdict. "A commander who abandons his formation and flees the defensive line shall be warned by fire sacrifice."

The Knight Commander below held his breath. His eyes briefly lost focus with terror.

Shien paused, letting the weight of his words settle over them.

"By law, every one of you should be bound to a Burning Stake with coarse rope and burned alive to ashes. Your souls should be branded as Heretics and cast out from the Sacred Flame forever."

The unvarnished sentence struck harder than the roar of the Tier Three Mutant Giant Rat the night before. The knights who had just carved a path through the monsters felt the warmth drain from their bodies.

The last embers of hope went out. Their heavy bodies slowly sagged.

The silence was suffocating. Around them, Blackpine Fief's Crossbowmen quietly tightened their grips on their crossbows. Leather bowstrings rubbed softly, making faint, dry sounds.

Shien turned to look toward the distant Blood Mist that had yet to disperse.

"But we're short of men. I'll give you a chance and suspend your wanted status for now. From this moment on, you are assigned to Blackpine Fief's Deathwatch Battalion.

"As for your final punishment, I'll record everything truthfully in the battle report I submit to Bishop Castian. He will decide."

When he finished, he looked down again at the trembling high-ranking knights below.

"As for the coming Blood Moon... go to the front and fill the trenches. Cut off enough Demon Beasts' heads. If you kill enough of them to atone for your crimes, I'll personally ask the Bishop for documents granting you a pardon."

No one beneath the platform spoke.

The Knight Commander closed his eyes and pitched forward. His heavy helmet struck the flagstones.

Thud!

The forty or fifty knights behind him followed almost at once, slamming their foreheads against the ground.

The dull impacts sounded together and echoed through the ruins.

They made no oath and shouted no thanks, but that single bow said enough. Their submission was complete.

Shien's expression remained unchanged.

Yet to his eyes, colors began to leap wildly above the forty or fifty bowed heads below.

The values did not linger at gray-white or pale green. They shot straight to a vivid, dazzling emerald.

Reward Value flooded into Shien's reserves like water through an opened gate.

A single conversation had brought nearly fifty Third Tier fighters under his command.

More importantly, these Third Tier knights from different disciplines expanded the limits of his Skill Replication Library.

The heavy-armor formation tactics they had honed on the battlefield, their methods of deflecting force with shields, even the Battle Aura circuits they used in desperate last stands...

In his mind, they were all laid out like goods on a shelf, waiting for him to claim them.