A low hum filled Olgerd’s carriage. The voices of Valdes and Edriac hissed through the device’s speaker.
"Iron is too dangerous," Olgerd said, breathing heavily. "If we continue with a frontal assault, we’ll lose. We need to break his concentration."
Valdes’s muffled, calm voice came from the artifact, cutting through the background noise of the battle:
"You’re right. A direct attack on him is useless. But everyone has a weakness. We just need to kill the people he cares about. When he loses his composure, his reaction time will drop."
"Excellent idea," Olgerd agreed instantly, clenching his fist.
Edriac’s erratic voice broke into the conversation through the static:
"Wait... What are you even talking about?! This completely contradicts our Lord's direct orders!"
Olgerd leaned closer to the artifact, a raw fury slicing through his voice:
"I don't give a damn about our Lord and his orders."
"Exactly," Valdes added. "We’ll finish off Iron, and then we’ll take him out too. He thinks too highly of himself, sitting in the rear and barking commands."
On the other end of the line, Edriac fell silent. Only his rapid, ragged breathing could be heard through the artifact. He froze in sheer terror at his post.
"Let's get down to business," Olgerd flipped a map sheet. "I have one working 'C14' left in reserve."
"I have two," Valdes replied. "The fuses are intact, and the unstable circuit is ready for detonation."
Olgerd barked into the transmitter:
"Edriac! How many do you have?!"
"O-one..." Edriac stammered out. "A 'C14' suppression charge..."
"Perfect," Olgerd smirked. "Four charges. That’s enough to blow all of Dornheim to hell. We’ll mine the entire perimeter and detonate them."
"Wait," Valdes frowned, studying the disposition on his tablet. "Their automated turrets are still active around the area. But we can just wait them out. They’ll run out of ammo eventually."
"No!" Olgerd cut him off sharply, his voice rising to a shout. "What do you mean, 'wait'?! No waiting! We end this right now. We push in, crush them, plant the charges, and blow it all up!"
Silence hung on the line for a few seconds. Valdes weighed the risks and let out a short exhale:
"Fine. You’re right. We can’t drag this out. Prepare the breakthrough plan."
While Olgerd and Valdes began coordinating sector routes for the assault groups via the artifact, Edriac muted his audio transmission. He backed into the corner of his carriage, clutching the fading crystal module in trembling hands.
"What are you doing?.. You lunatics... What are you doing?" he whispered in mindless dread, staring out at the smoking horizon. "Don't do it... It’ll only be worse for you later... He’s going to kill us all..."
A few kilometers away from the carriage, in Dornheim, the battle raged on without a single moment of respite. Lumon cleaved through armor, while short spatial pulses hurled the infantry backward.
But suddenly, the fluidity and speed of his movements broke.
The next dash was sluggish. Iron's left foot sank heavily into the mud, and his torso stalled for a fraction of a second longer than usual. A dry gunshot cracked from behind—a bullet that would normally have missed his dodging body by a meter instead grazed the thick fabric. A moment later, a small fire arrow from an enemy mage scorched his sleeve, leaving a smoking hole.
"What is this?..." Iron barked mentally. "Lumon, why did the movement drop?!"
At that very moment, thin streams of thick blood began to trickle from his eyes.
"The strain on the organic mana channels and circulatory system has exceeded the permissible limit. Micro-ruptures are occurring in the brain capillaries and muscles. Further use of magic and flight is now severely hindered and poses a lethal threat to the host's life."
"To hell with my health!" Iron exhaled, tasting the distinct, metallic tang of blood in his mouth. "We have to win this war! Do whatever it takes, but keep pushing them back!"
"Acknowledged. To prevent complete cardiac arrest, switching to extreme resource conservation mode."
With a heavy ringing in his ears, Iron plummeted two meters down, crashing into the ground.
Ahead, in an open area, a dense group of knights rushed into the attack. They sprinted forward, driving their shields into the earth, but they didn't even make it ten steps. With a deafening, dry crack, the planted landmines detonated right beneath their feet.
Several knights were blown to pieces; the rest slammed on the brakes in a panic right before the mined strip.
Lumon shook his head, flicking drops of blood from his eyelashes, while Iron mentally reached out to him:
"Show me the numbers."
Iron saw red digits rapidly tallying the heat signatures in the sector before freezing on a single value:
73,123
"Seventy-three thousand..." Iron growled.
In that same second, Lumon shifted his grip, taking his sword in both hands, and killed an approaching soldier with a precise thrust to the throat.
"What about the kings? Where are those bastards?! Are they even on the battlefield?" Iron demanded.
"Searching for command units," Lumon responded instantly. "Targets 'Olgerd', 'Valdes', and 'Edriac' are detected within a four-kilometer radius. However, three-layer suppression barriers and static fields are deployed around their command nodes. Direct teleportation into their sector will result in the immediate tearing of your body."
"Damn it... Fine... Redirect all remaining power to the knights and mages."
While Lumon smashed his way through the main infantry wedge, Elyria and Noah continued to hold the defense on the left flank.
Elyria hovered a couple of meters above the ground. Under her influence, thick tree trunks and tangled root masses burst from the ground. They shattered the formations of advancing knights, launched heavy infantry into the air, and simultaneously served as footholds for Noah.
Springing off the arching roots, he vaulted over shields and landed short, precise strikes into the unprotected joints of enemy armor. Whenever bullets and flaming arrows from enemy mages flew from the hostile breastwork toward the hovering Elyria, Noah instantly appeared by her side, slicing the projectiles with his blade and shielding the spirit with his own body.
From inside his carriage, Olgerd watched this battle closely through a surveillance crystallograph. Catching sight of Elyria, he narrowed his eyes and chuckled:
"Well, finally..."
Unclipping a heavy, diamond-shaped case of dark metal alloy from his belt, the king snapped it open. The construct instantly transformed, taking a shape resembling a portable terminal: the top half unfolded into a flat, dimly glowing screen, while dozens of small, backlit keys emerged on the bottom panel.
Olgerd’s fingers rapidly punched in the required sequence of commands.
Exactly five seconds passed.
Several glowing purple dots flared up silently in the air directly around Elyria. The spirit didn't even have time to turn before these points of light flashed straight through her. No wounds or blood remained on her skin, but complete paralysis seized Elyria's body. Losing control, she plummeted downward.
"Elyria!" Noah spotted her fall, instantly launched himself off the toe of his boot from a charred stump, and lunged to intercept, stretching out his arms to catch her just above the ground.
However, Valdes had already witnessed this scene through his magical artifact.
On the other side of the battlefield, Valdes pulled a square, plated module from a case. Pressing it against his forearm, the metal clicked and instantly wrapped around his arm, fusing with his gauntlet. With a cold smirk, Valdes snapped his fingers.
Right out of the earth—exactly where Noah was about to land—dozens of jagged stone spikes erupted with a violent crack.
But Noah twisted in mid-air, scraped his sole against the first point, and evaded the stone stakes.
Right behind Noah's head, a microscopic yellow dot ignited in the air. Without a sound or flash, an ultra-thin beam pierced straight through the boy's occipital bone and exited through his forehead.
Elyria’s body lay motionless, her glowing outline flickering faintly, slowly fading away.
Noah lunged forward. Reaching out, he pulled her tightly to his chest.
"Hold on... Just don't give up..." the boy wheezed.
Clutching at the charred tree trunks, Noah dragged himself toward the pillbox.
From a distance, this sector appeared empty, but the moment he got close to it, infantrymen materialized from the thick smoke all around.
One of the heavy knights, encased in full plate armor, was already standing right at the wall of the pillbox. He held a C14 in his hands. The soldier stripped off all the safety layers and activated it.
"No! Get away from there!" Noah roared, his voice cracking.
He shifted his grip on the sword and cleared the last few meters in a leap. The blade sank into the knight exactly in the armor joint between the neck and shoulder. The metal crunched, and the soldier tumbled to the dirt.
The timer on the device's casing hit zero.
For Noah, time seemed to slow to a crawl. In absolute silence, he watched as deep, hairline cracks splintered across the charge's casing. First, white light burst from them, followed immediately by scorching orange plasma.
Noah tried to escape with a quick dash, but the shockwave slammed into his back. The sickening crack of his ribs breaking echoed out. The explosion launched him. Noah flew a dozen meters, flipped head over heels, and crashed with his entire mass into the smoldering crater.
Behind him, the dome of the bunker collapsed inward with a hollow rumble.
The ground violently jolted beneath Lumon's feet.
He braked sharply, digging his bloodied boot into the corpse of a fallen knight. Jerking his head up, he saw a dense pillar of dust mixed with flames shooting into the sky over the sector where the bunker had been.
"Lumon... What is that?!" Iron snarled.
"Signal from the fortified node 'Pillbox' lost. A high-yield charge detonation has been confirmed."
Lumon bolted into the open space before the ruins. Practically nothing was left of the fortified bunker: the roof had snapped in half and caved in. Chunks of rebar, smoking planks, and the bodies of Dornheimers were scattered everywhere.
Lumon stepped onto the searing debris, stumbling as he walked. There was nothing left alive around him—only the crackle of burning support beams and the whistle of the wind.
Suddenly, a dry cough sounded from beneath a massive chunk of the wall.
Lumon's head snapped toward it. Swallowing gray-black smoke and coughing up blood, Albert was trying to crawl out from under a concrete slab. His legs were firmly pinned beneath a collapsed beam, and his left arm hung limply, but he was clawing his fingers into the dirt with all his might, dragging his body outward.
"Albert!" Iron breathed out, and Lumon surged forward, reaching out a hand to yank the concrete block away.
Less than three meters remained between them. Lumon was already leaning in, preparing to grab the edge of the slab, when a sharp hiss of compressed air suddenly rang out from the smoke-filled treeline some eighty meters away.
An enemy mage fired an ice spear.
Lumon didn't have time to throw up his arm for a block.
The ice spear plunged precisely into Albert's right temple, shattered through his skull, and drove itself into the concrete beneath his head.
Albert's fingers, which had just been clawing at the earth, went slack and dropped. His eyes glazed over, and dark blood instantly began to freeze around the embedded ice.
Lumon froze with his arms outstretched.
The world around Iron seemed stripped of all sound. The explosions faded, the wind went dead, and the ringing in his own ears vanished. He stared into Albert's eyes, and fresh streams of blood slowly leaked from his own, mixing with the dried soot on his face.
The momentary shock and numbness burned to ash in a fraction of a second, yielding entirely to rage.
Lumon slowly straightened up. He turned toward the hill where the ice projectile had come from. Realizing what he'd done, the enemy mage was already trying to back away.
Iron's voice sounded quiet:
"Lumon..."
[Listening.]
"Eliminate them all. Show no mercy."
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