The blazing sun hung high overhead, scorching the earth beneath a cloudless sky. It should have been a perfect day for a picnic, with birds singing and flowers in full bloom.
Yet the brilliant sunlight fell across the central square of Kadia Village, illuminating a scene of carnage: bodies strewn across blood-soaked ground, rivers of red seeping between them.
Ten armed retainers lay scattered in pools of blood, their fine steel armor stained a deep crimson. Blood seeped through every joint and seam, crawling across the ground to form wide, gruesome puddles.
The air hung thick with the stench of blood, mingled with the rank odor of mountain beasts, nauseating to breathe.
The villagers of Kadia gripped their bloodied wooden spears, chests heaving, eyes blazing with the savage light of those who had just tasted killing.
Then their gazes landed on the adventurers of the Ice Hawks Company, and settled on Felix.
What struck them first was his hair, radiant as burnished gold.
Then came the face beneath it, perfect as sculpted marble, luminous in the sunlight.
Even unconscious, Felix radiated an innate nobility, an aura so commanding it inspired something close to reverence.
His features were as finely wrought as a work of art, his garments rich and exquisitely made, every detail crafted from the finest materials by the most skilled hands.
The villagers stared at the unconscious Felix, and the wooden spears in their hands began to tremble.
"Is that... is that..." one villager stammered.
"A noble! That's a noble's son!" another cried out.
"Could he be... a scion of Viscount Malford?!"
These mountain folk had never once left Kadia Village in their lives. Their world was narrow, their knowledge limited, yet even they could see at a glance that this young man was no ordinary person, no one they could afford to offend.
Decades of conditioning had made nobility something sacred and untouchable in the minds of these common villagers.
From birth they had been taught to bow, to obey, to show absolute deference, and never the slightest disrespect. The innate grace Felix carried, that quality of blue blood that even unconsciousness could not conceal, stirred a deep, instinctual awe within them.
Even now, having just cut down ten armed retainers, they found fear rising like a tide when they faced Felix.
The villagers exchanged uncertain glances. Their spears would not fall.
"What do we do?" someone whispered.
"He's a noble. Can we really kill him?"
"But Grandfather Theodore said..."
Hesitation. Fear. Unease. These emotions twisted together in the hearts of the villagers.
In that brief moment of wavering, the only chance they had to kill Felix slipped away forever.
A thunderous crash erupted from the direction of the village gate, staggering everyone where they stood.
In the next instant, Raygore's massive frame rose beside Felix like a mountain, the pair of eyes beneath his black visor burning with cold, murderous intent.
He said nothing. He reached back, drew his great black sword, let his muscles snap taut, then hurled it with full force.
The blade tore through the air with a shrieking howl, dark as a thunderbolt, sweeping across the central square toward Theodore like the swing of Death's own scythe.
Theodore saw only a black shape hurtling toward him. His aged body had no time to react.
A wet, sickening sound. The sword struck true, its keen edge driving diagonally through Theodore's midsection, splitting him cleanly in two.
The sound of flesh tearing turned the stomach. Theodore's body divided in an instant, blood erupting like a geyser. Two halves of him flew apart, trailing a grim arc through the air, and crashed heavily to the ground.
The blood pouring from the two severed halves painted a long, spreading trail across the earth, mixed with shattered viscera and fragments of bone. It was a scene of such raw, terrible violence it seemed torn from the depths of hell.
"The village chief is dead!"
"Grandfather Theodore is dead!"
Cries of horror rose from the villagers. Someone broke into wailing sobs.
It was plain to see that Theodore had been the spiritual pillar of every soul in Kadia Village, a steadfast elder who in their minds had always been there to protect them.
Now that pillar had fallen, and with it came the collapse of what remained of their composure.
But something strange followed. After only a brief surge of grief, the expressions on the villagers' faces began to change.
Their breathing grew ragged and rapid. Their skin flushed a deep, violent red.
Within seconds, the fear in their eyes faded and was replaced by something feral and frenzied, the wild blankness of beasts. It was as though Theodore's death had thrown some invisible switch, unleashing the most primal savagery buried inside each of them.
"Kill them!"
"Avenge Grandfather Theodore!"
"Kill all these outsiders! Throw them in the pot!"
Like rabid dogs with no fear of death, the villagers raised their sharpened spears and surged toward Raygore, Ronald, and Felix.
Raygore watched the mob descend. Behind his iron mask, his cold gaze held not a trace of fear.
He thrust out one thick arm like a battering ram and swept it in a wide arc.
Three heavy thuds rang out. Several villagers who had charged to the front were caught full in the chest, launched off their feet, tumbling through the air like sacks of grain to crash into the people behind them.
As they fell, their own crude spears pierced their companions. Blood burst free. The impaled villagers convulsed and screamed, and then went still. The blood that sprayed from their chests rained down on the faces of the surrounding villagers, yet rather than frightening them, it only drove them into greater fury.
Beside Theodore's mutilated remains, a burly hunter's eyes went bloodshot. He roared a command: "Go for the noble behind him! He has no plate armor!"
The hunter's tactical thinking was sound. Raygore, clad head to toe in full plate, was cutting through the spear-armed villagers like a tiger among sheep. Their crude wooden points could not penetrate his heavy armor, and any direct attack was turned aside with ease. But Felix and Ronald still lay unconscious at his back, and Felix was unarmored. If they kept pressing attacks toward him, they could tie Raygore down.
A volley of wooden spears hissed through the air, a dozen at once, their sharpened tips catching the sunlight in cold, glinting flashes.
Raygore's gaze went colder still. He swung the great black shield from his back and planted it in front of Felix without a moment's hesitation. His movements were steady and unhurried as a mountain that cannot be moved. Shield and plate turned aside every spear that came.
Dull, rapid impacts drummed against the iron, one after another, yet not a single scratch was left behind.
Then an earsplitting detonation rang out from the direction of the village gate.
It was as though a great siege cannon a full meter across had fired. A massive figure launched itself skyward like a cannonball.
The hunter felt it before he saw it: a sudden, piercing killing intent driving down at his skull from somewhere above.
He wrenched his head back. Against the glare of the sun he looked straight up.
His pupils shrank to points.
A figure was falling toward him, both hands wrapped around a great black halberd, growing larger in his vision with terrifying speed.
Before the stunned eyes of every Kadia villager, a dark shape plummeted from the sky and landed directly on the hunter's head.
The impact hit like a meteorite striking the earth. The shockwave radiated outward in a visible ring, sending every villager staggering, nearly knocking them all off their feet at once. Every structure in Kadia Village shuddered from the blow. The force drove pain through their eardrums and nearly stopped their hearts.
A column of dust and debris exploded upward like a blast, blinding half the square in an instant. The shockwave fanned outward, sending chunks of rubble and scattered debris hammering into the surrounding walls.
When the dust began to settle, what remained of the powerfully built hunter was exactly what one would expect of a beetle caught under a falling stone: a burst, spreading smear of pulped flesh and matter. Blood and viscera splattered in all directions. A reeking crimson mist hung in the air. The mountain villagers stared, faces frozen in blank disbelief.
Where the hunter had stood, a black-haired, dark-eyed young man crouched in silence, his expression cold and impassive, both hands gripping his halberd with its head buried deep in the crater it had made. At the bottom of the depression: a few pale fragments of broken bone, and a mass of blood and ruin that was all that proved a man had stood there moments before.
Orum rose from his stance like a god of war descended to earth, every inch of him radiating a killing intent that chilled the blood.
"Are every last one of them out of their minds?"
He swept a look around him. Every villager in sight had flushed a dark, violent red, moving with the senseless frenzy of mad animals. The brief shock his landing had caused was already fading from their eyes. In its place came the same sightless, blood-hungry madness as before, all reason gone, as if each of them were a puppet on someone else's strings.
Orum glanced toward Raygore, who stood guarding Felix and Ronald. Their eyes met across the chaos.
Raygore gave a slight nod. The situation was under control. Orum dipped his chin in reply. The message was clear without a word between them.
With Raygore holding the line in front of Felix and Ronald, Orum was free to fight without watching his back.
The cold in Orum's eyes deepened to something glacial. His killing intent uncoiled and flooded outward like a storm surge, and his entire presence sharpened to a single point, a drawn blade aimed at the sky.
Halberd in hand, he swept his gaze across the howling, spear-waving mob of Kadia villagers pressing in around him.
His fingers tightened on the thick black shaft. The halberd head tilted up and back. In one fluid motion he dropped into the opening stance of Sword Dance, his body sinking slightly, his center of gravity rooting him to the earth, the muscles of both arms coiling like steel cable.
Immense force gathered into the halberd's body. It built like a river swelling toward a dam, converging, pooling, ready to break.
The halberd hummed against the air, a deep, threatening resonance. The charging stance of Sword Dance was complete.
The next moment, everything that had been building was released.
Combat Skill: Sword Dance.
Orum blurred. A canopy of halberd-shadows erupted outward, blanketing every Kadia villager within reach. The shadow-strikes fell like rain, each one tearing the air with a shriek, each carrying the force to split stone and shatter mountains, weaving together into a net of death with nowhere to run.
Before it, the spear-wielding villagers were paper. Whatever the halberd-shadows touched was ripped apart instantly. Their bodies could not hold together against such force; they simply burst, dissolved into red mist. Some had their skulls crushed open, grey and red scattering across the dirt and crumbling walls. Some had their chests torn wide, organs tumbling free in a wash of blood, the smell of iron thick in the air. Some were cut cleanly in half at the waist, their two halves twitching briefly before going still.
In moments, everywhere Orum passed became a field of the dead. The square was a slaughterhouse within seconds, limbs and wreckage covering every foot of ground, blood soaking into the earth until it would hold no more.
Some villagers had taken cover inside or behind the surrounding buildings. Pressed against walls, driven wild, they hurled wooden spears at Orum in a last, desperate defiance.
The spears came with feeble force and barely a sound, none of them reaching him before the halberd knocked them to splinters midair.
The mud-brick walls offered no real protection against him. When the heavy halberd came down with the force of a collapsing cliff face, the walls burst apart as though they were paper-thin, sending bricks and dirt flying in all directions. Anyone sheltering behind them was crushed and torn with the rubble, flesh and earth mixed together in mounds of red-soaked mud.
Orum moved through Kadia Village like a storm of annihilation. In his wake the number of living souls shrank with each passing second. No one could withstand even a single strike. All the frenzy and savagery these villagers had worked themselves into counted for nothing before his absolute, overwhelming force.
At the center of this catastrophe, at the heart of the blood and ruin drenching Kadia Village's central square, the wooden idol with its carved face long since defaced stood where it always had. From the cracks running across its surface, a faint, silent light seeped outward, pulsing softly.
The glow was fragile against the carnage surrounding it, like a candle flame at the edge of going out, struggling through its final moments.
This fragment of Corindola's will, though destroyed in the spiritual realm by Bonsar's divine power, still clung to the wooden carving in what remained of it, less than a tenth of what had been there before.
Now even that remnant was fading fast, the light flickering with it.
Through the idol, Corindola could still perceive what was happening outside.
She watched Orum tear through Kadia Village like a maddened dire dragon, every sweep of his halberd bringing another eruption of blood and screaming, the entire settlement drowning in the shadow of his slaughter.
It was not what she had anticipated, and yet, it still fell within the scope of her plans.
She had not foreseen that Orum would be this powerful, that he would have such formidable backing, that he would shatter her illusion this quickly. But she had always known how this would end for the mortal villagers of Kadia. She had made arrangements.
In the script Corindola had written for Kadia Village, destruction had always been the final act. The villagers would follow where Theodore led, sinking step by step into madness, until they walked off the cliff's edge themselves and found no graves waiting below.
She had given them power. Let them taste what it felt like. Then guided them, steadily, toward the abyss.
All of it had been a game decided from the start. Every villager, every adventurer, every merchant and knight had been nothing more than pieces placed on a board for her own amusement.
The only pity was that she had not managed to break Orum.
A small flicker of regret moved through what remained of Corindola's will.
It would have been so satisfying to watch him rage and despair, cornered and helpless, his composure stripped away.
Then a gaze cut through the blood and chaos and found her, sharp enough to feel like a blade's edge.
It carried a weight of hatred, raw and undisguised, aimed directly at her lingering presence.
Corindola looked down.
She found Theodore.
The man had been cleaved through the middle, more than half his abdomen ripped open, organs bared to the air, his chest caved in, nearly every drop of blood already gone from him. He was dying, and he knew it. His life was the last flicker of a candle in an open wind.
In the final moments before death took him, Theodore forced his eyelids up and turned his gaze toward the wooden idol. What was in his eyes now was nothing like the devotion and submission of before. It was something Corindola had never seen from him: a hatred so pure and so personal it was almost unfamiliar. It burned with the quality of a curse rising from somewhere beneath the soul.
"You..." His lips barely moved. His throat produced something raw and barely audible. "You damned... goddess."
Theodore spent the last of what he had forcing those words out. Every syllable was soaked in venom wrung from the very marrow of his bones.
Corindola went still.
She had not expected this. She had not expected to find something like this in a man so small and so completely in her power: resistance, real and burning, hatred that did not flinch.
Perhaps it was the surprise. Perhaps it was simply that this was something she had not written into the script, a final scene the wretched old man had improvised entirely on his own.
Without quite meaning to, Corindola laughed. It was a soft sound, laced with faint amusement and something cooler underneath.
"You're right," she said, her voice carrying a strange, clear calm. "I am a damned goddess."
From the cracked surface of the idol, one last faint wave of magical light breathed outward, the weakest imaginable pulse of something still alive, and it wrapped itself around what was left of Theodore.
Then the idol shattered. It came apart in an instant, collapsing into scattered pieces of wood.
The light was gone. The divine presence was gone. Only the most ordinary fragments of timber remained. Within seconds, even those began to rot, as though decades of decay had been compressed into moments. A damp, bitter smell rose from the pieces as they crumbled.
Under the touch of that fading magic, Theodore's body went numb. His pupils lost focus. The last thread connecting his mind to the world snapped quietly.
His body stopped moving. Every bit of pain simply ceased.
Without a sound, without a struggle, the deeply guilty village chief of Kadia closed his eyes. His face settled into something peaceful.
A clean wind came down from the mountains above Kadia, and the trees along the slopes answered it with a soft, whispering sigh.
Theodore lay with his back against the earth of the central square.
In that last moment, he was somewhere far away, back in an afternoon many years before, the day his father placed the mantle of village chief upon his shoulders.
That afternoon, his father had given him a small apple as a reward.
That afternoon, the sun had been warm and clear, and the grass had been very green.