The next morning arrived clear and bright.
The sun rose slowly like a burning fireball, painting the rolling mountain peaks in shades of gold and crimson. A gentle breeze drifted through the forested hills, carrying with it the fragrance of wildflowers and the earthy scent of damp soil.
After a full day of hard travel, the Ice Hawks Company and Muller's elite cavalry had finally reached their destination: Kadiyan Village, hidden at the foot of an unnamed desolate mountain.
Even from a distance, the first impression of this dim settlement was deeply unsettling.
A ring of tall, sturdy wooden palisades enclosed the entire village like an iron barrel.
Every stake had been manually sharpened into a keen spearhead, and more than a few were flecked with dried bloodstains.
These fortifications had clearly been designed with care and reinforced repeatedly over time. They were nothing like the crude fences a typical farming village might throw up to keep out wild animals.
Atop the palisade, a powerfully built sentry was making his routine patrol. He carried a bow on his back and wore a short blade at his hip. His gaze was as sharp and predatory as a wolf's, ceaselessly sweeping every inch of the surrounding terrain for any sign of a threat.
From afar, Kadiyan Village looked far more like a bandit stronghold than a peaceful settlement content to mind its own affairs.
When the old knight Muller led his fully armed, imposing cavalcade toward the village with overwhelming force, the interior of Kadiyan Village immediately erupted into panic.
Loud, chaotic noise could be heard from behind the wooden palisade. Voices shouted, footsteps pounded urgently across the ground, and the sharp clang of metal weapons rang out.
The sentry on watch spotted the uninvited column at once and immediately sounded a piercing horn. The urgent signal reverberated through the mountains, carrying to every corner of the village.
After a few minutes of frantic commotion, the village's heavy wooden gates finally swung slowly open, and a figure came rushing out.
It was an elderly man of about sixty, his hair white as frost. Deep wrinkles covered his face like the bark of an ancient tree worn down by years of weathering.
He was thin and stooped, dressed in a coarse robe that had been washed so many times it had faded to a dull gray-white. On his head sat a tattered pointed hat, its brim pierced by several obvious holes.
The old man's eyes were as humble as his appearance. The moment he caught sight of Muller seated on horseback, his expression turned almost reverent, as though he were beholding a heavenly figure.
He trotted up to Muller's warhorse, and before he had even fully stopped, he plastered the most obsequious smile imaginable across his weathered face. Without a moment's hesitation, he dropped to both knees and pressed his forehead heavily into the dusty ground.
"Most noble and exalted Knight, sir!" the old man's voice trembled visibly, thick with undisguised deference and fear, as though terrified of failing to satisfy the great lord.
"This lowly one, Theodore, has the humble honor of serving as the village elder of Kadiyan.
To think that a man of your distinction would grace our poor village with your presence — we have failed miserably to receive you as you deserve. Please, I beg your forgiveness for this ignorant offense!"
Muller sat high on his tall, powerful black destrier, still as a statue, looking down at the kneeling old man. Not a trace of expression crossed the old knight's weathered face, yet his deep-set eyes gleamed with a cold light sharp enough to cut bone.
"Theodore. I remember you," Muller said, his voice perfectly level, each word precise as a blade. "Over the years, the taxes Kadiyan Village has delivered to the great Lord Malford have always been exact to the last coin, paid on time in full. From that perspective, you have indeed been a competent village elder."
"That is only what this lowly one ought to do, ha ha —" Hearing Muller's "praise," Theodore nodded repeatedly in agreement, yet beads of sweat had already begun forming densely across his forehead.
His aged heart was hammering wildly. Every nerve in his body was wound taut to the breaking point.
If this esteemed knight had come merely for a routine tax inspection, he would never have brought so many fully armed retainers along.
Kadiyan Village was nothing but a remote, desolate little settlement. What matter could possibly be serious enough to require a knight of the realm to ride out in person with an armed escort?
A deeply foreboding sense of dread, dark as storm clouds, settled over Theodore's heart, gripping him with a fear unlike anything he had felt before.
At that moment, Muller suddenly drew a plain-looking wooden wand from his belt. Its surface was rough and uneven, clearly the mark of brutal combat, scarred with several visible cracks and flecked with dried blood.
Without any warning, Muller raised the wand and brought it crashing down onto Theodore's skull.
A dull, heavy impact rang out. Theodore was instantly sent reeling, blood pouring from the gash torn open across his forehead. The crimson rivulets streamed down across the maze of wrinkles on his face, rendering his pumpkin-like features a grisly, horrifying sight.
"Look carefully," Muller said, his voice like a winter wind rising from the depths of some frozen abyss. "Do you recognize this?"
Theodore forced himself to endure the searing pain and lifted his trembling head. The moment his eyes focused on that bloodstained wand, his entire body locked rigid, as though he had been struck by lightning.
His expression transformed into one of absolute terror. His pupils contracted sharply, and his body began to shake violently and uncontrollably, as if he were staring at a demon that had clawed its way up from the depths of hell.
He clearly knew this wand.
"I have come to investigate a serious criminal matter," Muller said, his voice dropping even colder, every syllable driving into Theodore's chest like a spike of ice.
"I have gathered sufficient evidence that a gang of criminals, guilty of trafficking and murdering adventuring parties, has been sheltering within Kadiyan Village."
Muller paused for a moment, letting the weight of those words detonate inside Theodore's mind. Then he continued: "I am now ordering you, in my capacity as knight in service to Lord Malford: you will cooperate fully and unconditionally with our investigation and submit to a thorough search of the entire village."
"If you dare refuse, or take any action whatsoever to obstruct the truth, the entire village will be judged as outlaws. I will put half the men to death and sell half the women into slavery, to appease the boundless fury of Viscount Malford."
Upon hearing the old knight Muller's declaration, as cold and final as a sentence of death, Theodore's courage shattered completely. He nearly crumpled to the ground.
He slammed his forehead against the earth again and again in a frantic kowtow, his voice dissolving into a sobbing plea: "Merciful Knight, sir! There truly are no bandits in our village!
Everyone here is an honest, hardworking farmer. We have never done anything to bring harm to another soul! I swear this on the sacred divinity! I will do everything in my power to assist your investigation! Please, I beg you, show mercy to your innocent flock!"
Muller, however, had clearly exhausted what little patience he had for such protestations.
A broad-shouldered soldier stepped forward, grabbed Theodore roughly by the collar, hauled him up off the ground, and without the slightest hesitation, cracked a heavy open-handed blow across the old man's face.
"Enough of your babbling, old man!" the retainer snarled inches from Theodore's ear. "Start leading the way, right now, or I'll start taking your fingers off one by one!"
The slap left Theodore seeing stars, the world spinning wildly around him. He scrambled to his feet and began nodding mechanically. "Yes, yes! As you command, sir! This one will lead the way at once!"
Notably, neither Knight Muller nor the Ice Hawks Company had any intention of storming the village outright.
After all, what they currently possessed was only circumstantial evidence. Concrete, irrefutable proof had yet to be secured.
If Kadiyan Village still harbored genuinely innocent residents who knew nothing of what had transpired, launching an immediate armed assault risked cutting down people who bore no guilt.
Before entering the village, Felix turned and gave Orum, who would remain outside, a final instruction: "Stay sharp. Be ready for anything."
"Understood," Orum replied with calm certainty.
He had already secured the fearsome flame-steel halberd across his back, ready at a moment's notice to blast through the wooden palisade and fight his way in to support his comrades.
Under Theodore's guiding steps, Knight Muller and his ten seasoned armed retainers, together with the three members of the Ice Hawks Company, officially entered the enigmatic Kadiyan Village.
Exactly as the Ice Hawks' intelligence had described, Kadiyan Village was a remote and impoverished mountain settlement.
Most of the structures inside were extremely crude, nearly all single-room earthen huts with doors cobbled together from discarded planks, bare of any paint or decoration.
Those doors were riddled with holes gnawed by insects, little better than rotting debris.
What immediately drew their attention was that along the courtyard walls of nearly every household, rows of wooden spears stood upright, each carefully sharpened and coated with an unidentified green substance that made the skin crawl.
On the surface, these might have passed for standard defenses against fierce mountain predators, but anyone with real combat experience could see at a glance that they could be converted into lethal weapons in an instant.
Passing by the houses, they could see all manner of cured animal hides hanging from the low earthen walls: deer and rabbit pelts alongside wolf and bear skins, filling the air with the thick, rank odor of wild game.
The entire village was saturated with a deeply unsettling atmosphere, one that blended the unmistakable hallmarks of an isolated mountain community — its poverty, its remoteness, its rough simplicity — with the high-alert readiness of a fortified outlaw encampment.
It was as though these villagers, who should by all appearances have been nothing more than scattered and disorganized mountain folk, had been trained and armed under the direction of some mysterious military commander.
Led by the fawning, obsequious Theodore, the group made their way toward the central plaza of Kadiyan Village.
The area was relatively open compared to the cramped and dilapidated structures surrounding it, the ground packed hard and smooth from long use, clearly the communal space where the villagers gathered for meetings, deliberation, or collective activities.
Theodore reached into a worn leather pouch at his waist and produced a battered, visibly rusted bronze bell, and began shaking it vigorously.
The clear, clanging peal echoed through the mountain village in overlapping waves of resonance. At the same time, Theodore stretched his throat to its limits and bellowed the assembly order across the entire settlement:
"Every last soul in this village, men and women, young and old alike, drop whatever you are doing this instant and get to the central plaza! Emergency assembly, now!
A most honorable Knight of the realm has come and requires everyone present for questioning! No one is excused, and no one will be late! Any one of you who dawdles will get a taste of my whip!"
As that rough, commanding summons echoed across the hillside, villagers in all manner of worn and ragged clothing began slowly emerging from their crude dwellings in every direction.
Among them were elderly men and women with white hair and faltering steps, able-bodied adults of both sexes, and even a number of young people who appeared to be under eighteen.
Though they differed in age, gender, and appearance, every face wore the same unmistakable expression: tense, anxious, and shadowed by a deep, creeping dread of what was to come.
Their eyes darted unsteadily, their footsteps hesitant and reluctant. But under the forceful authority of Village Elder Theodore, they had no choice but to leave their homes and make their way to the central plaza.
As the number of villagers gathering in the plaza continued to grow, Felix noticed that Ronald, standing beside him, was looking increasingly grim.
The Lathander priest, who was ordinarily cheerful and good-humored, now stood with brows furrowed tight, his gaze fixed on the assembling villagers with an expression of heavy solemnity.
"Ronald," Felix said, keeping his voice low enough that the surrounding villagers could not hear, "using your divine sense, how many of these people carry the taint of sin?"
Ronald drew a slow, deep breath of the village's slightly stale and damp air, visibly working to compose himself against whatever had shaken him, then answered in a tone of grave deliberateness:
"All of them, Commander."
"Every single person in this village is a hardened criminal, guilty beyond redemption."
While the central plaza was filling with noise and people, Village Elder Theodore — still wearing his white pointed hat — quietly slipped away from the crowd, using the general commotion as cover.
He threaded through the decrepit, ramshackle dwellings until he came to a door that was perfectly concealed, its outward appearance utterly indistinguishable from the ordinary homes around it.
Inside stood a hunter: a man of extraordinary bulk, clad in leather armor, radiating an aura of raw, practiced killing intent.
A finely crafted longbow was strapped across his back, and his face was coarse and brutal. Both his thick, powerful arms were mapped with savage scars from violent confrontations past.
"Execute the emergency protocol. Now," Theodore said the moment he laid eyes on the hunter inside, a flash of fierce satisfaction lighting his gaze.
He dropped his voice, urgency and bloodlust barely contained beneath the surface: "Release the Goddess's forest monitor lizard immediately. Send it straight out of the village and have it tear apart that eyesore waiting by the carriage. We cannot allow them even a single opportunity to send word to the outside world."
In that instant, the mask of cringing sycophancy Theodore had worn so convincingly for every outsider melted away completely, as utterly as ice thrown into a bonfire.
What replaced it was something monstrous: a face contorted and grotesque as a demon's, radiating pure, unhinged murderous intent.
The cloudy, dim eyes that had seemed so harmless now blazed with frenzied, bloodthirsty fire. His voice trembled with raw fury as he unleashed a torrent of vicious cursing against Muller and the Ice Hawks Company:
"These damn outsiders! So we ate a few two-legged sheep — so what? They want us dead over a handful of worthless wretches?!"
"Lucky for us, the Goddess watches over us! With her supreme magic shielding this village, every last one of these outsiders is going to die right here today!"
He turned his gaze toward the deeper reaches of Kadiyan Village, an unnaturally vivid flush spreading across his face, his eyes growing glazed and fervent. He flung himself prostrate to the ground and pressed his lips reverently against the earth.
"Great Goddess above, protect your faithful. Grant us eternal fortune and unending blessings of paradise!"
Outside the village, inside the waiting carriage, Melina had once again sunk into the pain of old memories.
She was curled into the corner of the compartment, her voice heavy with sorrow: "Orum, I once had a very dear friend. We formed a party together, adventured side by side, and grew incredibly close. There was almost nothing I couldn't say to her."
"But then a handsome swordsman joined our group." Melina's eyes filled with anguish. "Out of jealousy, the person I trusted most falsely accused me of stealing her valuables."
"I had no way to prove my innocence. I nearly ended up in prison. I used to trust her so completely, to lean on her so much..."
As she spoke, tears began sliding silently down Melina's face. The crystal drops fell one after another onto the worn wooden floor of the carriage like severed pearls.
"How could she... accuse me like that..."
Orum, unable to watch any further, reached into his tin box, produced a piece of confectionery that filled the air with an enticing, honey-sweet aroma, and tucked it directly into her open mouth.
Melina choked on the sweetness that had been pushed so suddenly between her lips, and her tears stopped flowing at once.
The rich sweetness dissolved slowly across her tongue, the intense fruity fragrance flooding her senses.
"It's so sweet! It's delicious!" Melina blinked her still-wet eyes. "What is this?"
"Candied fruit," Orum answered in his usual flat tone.
Sure enough, after tasting the candied fruit, Melina's entire emotional state lifted noticeably. The heavy, suffocating atmosphere of grief that had settled over her vanished as if swept clean.
This was Orum's unique method of comforting Melina.
Whenever her mood sank and sorrow crept in, he would simply redirect her attention by force, through food. By satisfying her sense of taste and filling her stomach, he could produce a marked improvement in her spirits within a short time.
After spending this long in his company, Melina had discovered a physiological tendency in herself that filled her with profound embarrassment: every time her mood dropped, she noticed that saliva would begin accumulating in her mouth entirely of its own accord.
This conditioned reflex, completely beyond the control of her conscious will, left her feeling deeply ashamed and flustered.
Was she turning into a pet dog?
This absolutely could not continue.
Melina savored the sweetness of the candied fruit in her mouth while waging a fierce internal battle. If things went on like this, living a life where meals were simply placed in front of her, she would eventually deteriorate into a completely useless person.
She very much wanted to reject this way of being looked after, to assert her own independence and dignity, to spit out the candy then and there.
But it was simply too delicious. She could not bring herself to waste it.
Fine. Next time, she would absolutely hold firm.
Just as Melina's inner conflict reached its most fraught and unresolvable peak, her beast-ears suddenly twitched, capturing an abnormal sound from the outside world with sharp precision.
"Orum! Ambush!" She snapped her head up and called out to him urgently.
From the sheer heaviness of the approaching footfalls and the deep, rolling tremor that traveled through the ground beneath them, whatever was out there had to be a terrifying creature weighing well in excess of a ton.
Orum had clearly sensed the threat as well. Before Melina had even finished shouting, he was already launching himself from the carriage like an arrow loosed from a drawn bow.
The moment he cleared the vehicle, an astonishing sight greeted him.
The forest ahead was convulsing with violent motion.
The entire treeline heaved and swayed as though a gale were tearing through it. Dust and debris exploded skyward, the great pillar of churned earth rushing toward him at terrifying speed.
The ground beneath his feet hammered with thunderous, rhythmic booms that resonated deep in his chest.
An instant later, a colossal monitor lizard, its body an intense and vivid green, erupted from the forest. It bore down on him with the unstoppable momentum of a runaway siege engine, a force of pure, crushing destruction.
The creature matched the field reports exactly: body length a full three meters, weight no less than two tons.
Its entire form was armored in deep green scales as thick and hard as forged iron, every plate as impenetrable as a knight's shield. Its eyes burned with savage, bloodthirsty ferocity.
It clearly could not comprehend why the slight-looking human standing before it was so lacking in self-preservation instinct as to face it head-on.
Over the two dark years behind it, this magically altered forest monitor lizard had consumed dozens of helpless human beings.
The rich, intensely sanguine flavor, so utterly unlike the dull forest fruit it had once subsisted on, had bred in it a morbid craving, while simultaneously driving a dramatic surge in its physical power and its capacity for brutality.
Now, this creature that had wholly devolved into a killing machine was calculating precisely how to pulverize the human called Orum in a single collision, then devour him whole, just as it had done to every hapless traveler and adventurer before him.
Yet faced with the suffocating, crushing pressure of the monitor lizard's headlong charge, Orum's expression remained still and untroubled as the surface of a deep lake.
He reached over his shoulder and slowly freed the flame-steel halberd from its wrapping of thick violet silk. His fingers closed around the haft.
The pitch-black shaft gleamed with a cold, dangerous metallic light under the fierce sun, exuding a natural aura of lethal, bone-chilling power.
Three hundred and ninety kilograms of solid halberd moved in his hands as easily as a wooden staff.
He gripped the great flame-steel halberd steady with both hands, and brought it cleaving down in a single tremendous arc, aimed directly at the skull of the forest monitor lizard charging toward him.
"Orum! That's a giant magical beast, a forest monitor lizard! Do not meet it head-on!" Melina's voice rang out from inside the carriage in a cry of terrified urgency, her words already trembling.
She simply could not understand why Orum, facing a monster that could level a wall, was not dodging, not retreating, not doing anything at all.
Was he actually out of his mind?!
"Get out of the way!" Melina's heart had lurched into her throat.
"Die," Orum said.
A single earth-shaking impact detonated through the entire valley.
Before Melina's utterly disbelieving eyes, a scene that defied all comprehension slowly unfolded.
The flame-steel halberd in Orum's hands came crashing down and drove the enormous monitor lizard flat into the earth, as casually as someone swatting a cockroach.
That skull, the size of a large water vat, was hammered so deeply into the soil by the force of the blow that it left a visible crater.
A jet of blood erupted from the monster's jaws like a fountain, flooding the battlefield with a dense, nauseating stench of iron.
The great eyes that had blazed with murderous intent only a moment before lost all focus under that obliterating force, and the ferocity in their depths was instantly and utterly replaced by raw, primal terror.
"My... god...?!"
Melina stared wide-eyed, utterly frozen, as the scene that exceeded all rational comprehension played out before her. Tidal waves of shock crashed through her.
The terrifying power Orum had just displayed was not merely greater than that of the fearsome magical beast. It was overwhelmingly, incomprehensibly greater.
"Is he actually even human?!"