The Marauders seemed to have pulled everything that mattered up onto the high main settlement after the loss report in the battlefield, leaving the lower ground completely empty.
What had once been a living outer ring of their territory was now just quiet stone, dry brush, and memory.
Sol’s gaze lifted again to the switchback path and the massive shelf above it.
He adjusted the strap of the Dreadwing Blade and glanced toward Veylara, who had moved up beside him to study the same forbidding approach.
"This is where we are gonna split," Sol rasped, standing beside a grey boulder. His crimson eyes scanned the high ramparts above.
"Hmmm," Veylara nodded.
"Don’t rush up the path until the gates swing open," Sol warned quietly. "They must have heavy stone deadfalls rigged to the upper overhangs. If they drop them while you’re in the bottleneck, even Layer 3 warriors will get crushed."
"We will hold at the lower bend and draw their attention to the front," Veylara assured him, a fierce, confident gleam in her eyes. "Leave the rest to us."
Kira stepped close, her cat-pupils dilated with quiet focus as she reached out, her fingers brushing against the rough linen of Sol’s sleeve. "Be careful on the rock face, Sol."
Zeyra didn’t speak, but her dark eyes locked onto his with an unyielding intensity, her hand resting casually on the hilt of her dagger as she gave him a single, firm nod.
Sol gave a low grunt of acknowledgment.
Without another word, he turned away from the group, dropping low to the ground and slipping into the deep shadows of the eastern gorge, even though Marauders are famously lazy, but now that they have lost their Layer 4 warlords and elite warriors, they have to be attentive, even if they don’t want it, so it doesn’t hurt to be careful.
Patrols that once barely existed now could be seen moving with real frequency. Guards who once slept through half their shifts now were wide awake.
The eastern flank of the Ridge was a vertical wall of weathered granite, plunging down nearly four hundred feet into a ravine of broken boulders and thorn-choked crevices.
To any ordinary warrior, even a seasoned Layer 3 hunter, attempting to scale such a precipice without ropes or handholds would have been absolute madness.
Sol stood at the base of the wall, looking up into the dizzying height. The rock face was slick with morning condensation, offering barely a few hairline cracks and narrow ledges.
He didn’t hesitate further.
Channeling the refined essence through his body, Sol engaged the dormant Dreadwing spirit.
A translucent, sapphire shimmer rippled across his shoulder blades and down his legs, even though it was not as extensive as in the battlefield, for this climb it was more than enough, as it drastically reduced his effective weight while giving every muscle fiber a burst of explosive, silent agility.
WHOOSH.
Sol leaped.
His body shot upward twenty feet in a single bound, his boots landing softly on an inch-wide granite outcrop with silence. Before his momentum could falter, his fingers hooked into a hairline fracture in the rock, and he launched himself upward again.
He ascended with the rhythmic precision of a veteran alpinist, yet stripped of all earthly limitations.
Bolstered by his enhanced physiology and the Dreadwing’s unnatural gifts, his ascent defied gravity itself... a blurred, fluid display of momentum that would have been impossible for any ordinary climber to replicate, let alone comprehend.
Whenever he reached a sheer, unbroken section of stone where no handholds existed, the feather-fall authority of the Dreadwing allowed him to kick off the bare rock, gliding upward on concentrated drafts of air before latching onto the next ledge.
And even though he was performing such a demanding maneuver, throughout the entire ascent, he made no sound. Not a single loose pebble tumbled down into the gorge below.
Within minutes, the dizzying drop of the ravine shrank beneath him, and the rough, unfinished timber rim of the upper Marauder shelf appeared directly overhead.
Just as Sol reached the lip of the eastern plateau, a deafening sound shattered the morning silence.
BOOOOM! BOOOOM! BOOOOM!
From the western approach, the thunderous rhythm of Veynar war drums rolled across the canyon! A piercing, aggressive blast from the war horn sounded, followed immediately by the synchronized, roaring war chants of eighty Veynar veterans pounding their shields against the rocks at the base!
The distraction had begun.
Sol could have tried to cross the entire settlement in pure silence. In theory, his perception and the Dreadwing’s gifts made it possible.
In practice, it would have been far too risky.
After the disaster in the battlefield, the remaining Marauders were no longer the complacent giants of earlier seasons.
He could sense it as the Patrols moved between the mud domes.
Guards stood at irregular intervals along the open flats. Half-awake warriors stumbled out of huts at the smallest unusual sound.
A single misplaced step, a single giant turning at the wrong moment, and the entire camp would have risen at once.
Drawing their attention hard and loud toward the western path was the only reliable way to empty the rear approaches and create the window he needed.
Instantly, the already tense Marauder camp above erupted into frantic chaos.
"WHAT IS THAT?!"
"THE LOWER TRACK! THE VEYNAR ARE AT THE PATH!"
"SOUND THE ALARM! WAKE THE CAPTAIN!"
Guttural, thunderous shouts boomed across the dry flats as dozens of massive, ten-foot-tall humanoids scrambled around, their vigilance higher than ever.
Heavy feet stamped across the gravel, and the clattering of massive stone-headed clubs and crude bone javelins echoed off the cliff walls as the majority of the garrison rushed frantically toward the western ramparts to defend the choke point.
Sol used the roar of the commotion to vault silently over the eastern timber ledge, landing in a low crouch behind a stack of rotting beast hides.
His crimson eyes narrowed, sweeping across the layout.
It was exactly like the outer settlement he had mapped it during his previous scout.
The Marauder settlement was a sprawling, chaotic mess of crude mud-and-branch domes scattered without order across the open stone shelf.
Massive animal rib cages lay bleaching in the sun, surrounded by buzzing swarms of black flies.
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