Visitors from the Mist

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

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

Their warhorses blew great gobs of white foam from their mouths and nostrils, their legs nearly dragging through the mud.

The knights on their backs looked even worse. Their heavy breastplates were dented and split across broad sections, and beneath the curled edges of metal, wounds torn deep enough to expose bone still seeped blood.

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 swiftly disarmed and stripped of their ruined armor, then marched like prisoners to the foot of the Sacred Flame's raised platform in the square.

The captain at their head, a knight of the Resonance Realm, buckled at the knees and fell straight into a pool of mud thick 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 gone into the night unprepared. Standard Caltrops barricades had been raised around Shattered Stone Fief, and the knights had formed a Tower Shield Formation.

The Rat Tide they faced was barely a third the size of the one that had struck Blackpine Fief, and no Composite Demonic Beasts above the Third Tier had appeared.

It should have been a battle of attrition they stood a good chance of surviving.

But the fatal variable appeared at midnight.

Unlike the one at Blackpine Fief, Shattered Stone Fief's Permanent Sacred Flame Platform had been lit without trouble. Yet its base drive shaft, corroded by Bloodrust over many years, jammed at the crucial moment.

With a shriek of breaking metal, the platinum Sacred Flame dimmed for more than ten minutes at the darkest hour of midnight.

"Just ten minutes..." The captain buried his face deep in the muddy water, despair filling his voice. "The Rat Tide outside went mad and smashed through the eastern Caltrops barricades."

"We could still have held... The shield formation hadn't broken. The spearmen could still thrust..." At the thought, his mouth twitched. "But our lord... he broke."

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

When Viscount Thomas saw the drool dripping from the Demonic Beasts' fangs, fear shredded the last of his reason.

He ordered his personal guards to abandon the flank and devote themselves to escorting him away.

With their commander fleeing and his guards withdrawn, the already tottering line collapsed like an avalanche.

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 out from between the Rat Tide and the Ghouls, treading over their comrades' corpses.

As for Viscount Thomas, the Demonic Beasts had likely overwhelmed him. He was probably dead in some muddy hollow on the wasteland.

When the captain finished, he raised his trembling head, hoping to find some comfort in shared suffering at this surviving camp.

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

At the very heart of the defenses, a third-tier mutated giant rat as massive as an armored rhinoceros lay belly-up in the mud, half its body charred by the Sacred Flame.

The captain swallowed with difficulty. He had assumed they were all new recruits cast out by their Lineages, 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 last night were more than ten times as terrifying as what Shattered Stone Fief had endured.

In the hands of any ordinary lord, this fief would have fallen last night.

His gaze rose slowly to the platform.

The silver-haired boy, only fourteen years old, stood quietly before the platinum pillar of light piercing the sky. He wore a dark lord's cloak stained with blood; it billowed slowly in the wind, while golden light traced the hard edges of his long silver-white hair.

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

Then the survivors of Shattered Stone Fief knelt in the mud and offered Shien their submission as soldiers of the Eternal Night Wall.

Shien looked down at the forty-odd desperate men. No trace of sympathy for their narrow escape showed in his eyes, only the cold detachment of someone examining dead things.

"Chapter Three, Article Seven of the Sacred Flame Wartime Disciplinary Code," Shien said, his voice as cold as a sentence being passed. "A commander who abandons his formation and flees, leaving the defensive line behind, shall be admonished by fire sacrifice."

The captain below held his breath. His pupils lost focus for a moment under the weight of his terror.

Shien paused, letting the pressure settle slowly over them.

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

That unvarnished sentence struck harder than the roar of last night's third-tier mutated giant rat. The knights who had just carved a bloody path through the monsters felt all warmth drain from their bodies.

The last embers of hope were doused, and their heavy bodies sagged little by little.

The silence grew almost suffocating. Around them, Blackpine Fief's crossbowmen quietly tightened their fingers on their triggers. Leather bowstrings rubbed softly, making faint, broken sounds.

Shien turned sideways, looking toward the Blood Mist still lingering in the distance.

"But we need people now. I'll give you a chance. Your wanted status will be suspended for the time being. From this moment on, you are assigned to Blackpine Fief's Deathwatch Battalion."

"As for your final culpability, I'll record it faithfully in the battle report I submit to Bishop Castian and leave the judgment to him."

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 Demonic Beast heads. If you kill enough monsters to make up for your crimes, I will personally ask the bishop for a document of pardon on your behalf."

No one beneath the platform spoke when his words ended.

The captain closed his eyes and pitched forward, his heavy helmet striking the stone pavement.

Thud!

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

The dull impacts rolled together and echoed through the ruins.

They swore no oath and shouted no thanks, but that single bow marked their complete submission.

On the platform, Shien's expression did not change.

Yet in his vision, colors began to flicker wildly above the forty or fifty lowered heads.

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

A vast flood of Reward Value poured into Shien's reserve like water through an opened sluice.

With a single conversation, he had gained nearly fifty Third Tier fighters ready for battle.

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

In his mind, the heavy battle formation techniques these knights had honed on the battlefield, their methods of deflecting force with shields, even the Battle Aura circuits they used for desperate bursts at death's door...

All of it now sat like goods on a shelf, waiting quietly for him to claim it.