The smoke was visible from the western quarter.
Everyone could see it. Black columns rising above the canopy line, lit orange at the base — the marketplace was burning, and the people standing in the square of the residential part knew it, and none of them could do anything except stand there and know it together.
The crowd had gathered without anyone calling it. Thirty people, then fifty, then more — spilling out from doorways and climbing down from the rope bridges to stand in the firelit square, speaking in low urgent voices that layered over each other into a single wall of noise.
"My brother went to the market this morning—"
"How many got out? Has anyone come back?"
"The spears — I heard them from here—" "Are the children—"
"Don't say it. Don't."
Nobody had answers. The people who had answers were on the other side of the village, and the fire was between them.
A woman pushed through the edge of the crowd.
She was moving fast, looking at every face she passed, her eyes already doing the searching her mouth was about to do.
"Has anyone seen my daughter?" Her voice came out high and thin, not quite steady. "Small. Brown hair. She had a flower basket — she was selling Dan Dan at the east market — has anyone—"
People shook their heads. Looked away. Nobody could tell her what she needed to hear.
She stopped in the middle of the crowd, and her face crumpled.
"Please." The word came out broken. Both hands pressed together in front of her chest. "Please, someone — my husband is there too, they were both there — please, someone help them—"
The crowd shifted, uncomfortable with her grief and unable to absorb it. Some people looked at their feet. Some looked at the smoke rising above the trees.
Nobody moved.
Oliver came around the corner of the meeting hall at a near run and stopped when the crowd filled his vision.
He read the situation in seconds — the smoke, the faces, the woman weeping in the centre. The particular silence of people who were frightened and waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
A young hunter near the front saw him and stepped forward. The boy's voice cracked on the first word.
"Master Oliver — the r-raiders — they attacked the marketplace. The spears came from the sky. There are people still in there. Children are still in there—"
Oliver raised one hand. "Everyone. Please. Stay calm."
The crowd didn't go quiet so much as it condensed — everyone pressing slightly closer, orienting toward him, the way people do when they need a centre, and someone is standing in the right place.
He looked out at their faces.
Mothers. Farmers. Hunters. The elderly. Children holding onto adults who were trying very hard not to look as frightened as they were. He knew most of them by name. He had grown up alongside half of them.
He looked at the smoke above the trees.
"Stay calm." He had just told them that, and it was the right thing to say and also completely hollow, because he was not calm. His hands were steady by habit, and his voice was even by practice, and underneath both of those things, his mind was doing something closer to falling.
He knew what these raiders were.
Not ordinary bandits. Not even organised mercenaries. He had seen the marks they left once before, years ago, when he was still learning to hold a bow. The Illuminate Order didn't raid for goods or territory. They raided because they were building something, and they needed materials of a specific kind.
Living ones.
"Where is the chief? Is she fine? Is she also there?" someone called from the back of the crowd.
Oliver's jaw tightened.
Amelia.
She had gone to the eastern part with Alice. Before the bell. Before any of this.
His sister was on the other side of the fire, possibly there.
I couldn't protect Charles. The thought arrived without invitation, the way old wounds do. I couldn't protect him, and now I might lose sis, too. Every time. Every single time, I'm not enough.
The weeping woman spoke again, her voice steadier now, forcing itself into steadiness the way grief sometimes does when it has no other option.
"The chief is pregnant." She looked around the crowd — still wet-eyed, but composed in the way that only mothers can be composed when they have decided something. "She has given everything to this village. Her husband. Her parents. All of them are gone so that we could still be standing here." Her voice didn't shake. "We cannot ask her to fight tonight. But we can fight for her."
Silence.
Real silence, this time — not the silence of people waiting to be told what to do, but the silence of people who have just heard something true.
A hunter near the back straightened. Then another. Then an older man who had been holding his grandchild's hand let go of it, gently, and passed the child to the woman beside him.
"We are hunters." The voice came from somewhere in the middle of the crowd — not loud, but clear. "We survive by killing. That has always been the way."
"Then this time," said someone else, "we save the village."
The crowd shifted again. Different, this time. The fear was still there — it didn't go anywhere — but something had settled over it, the way a hand settles over a wound. Not healed. Held.
A fist went up.
Then another.
Then thirty.
"HAIL DOMHAN. THE LORD IS WITH US."
The words came from everywhere at once — old and familiar, the hunting call, the rally that had brought Southwoult through every hard season and every difficult winter. It rose above the smoke.
Oliver looked at them.
The tightness in his chest didn't disappear. But something shifted in it. His bow was on his back. His quiver was full. He was a hunter, same as they were, and this was his forest, same as theirs.
"Alright." His voice came out steady. "We fight. Every hunter to their post. Archers to the high platforms — if they come through the trees, they come through our trees. Everyone else, stay tight and stay in pairs." He looked at the woman still standing in the centre of the crowd. "We bring them back. All of them."
She met his eyes and nodded once.
Oliver opened his mouth to say something else.
Then every rope bridge in the village swayed at once.
From the treeline — from every direction, north and south and east and west, from the dark between the trees where the firelight didn't reach — figures emerged.
Indigo cloaks. Weapons drawn.
The Illuminate Order had been patient.
They had simply waited for the western quarter to gather in one place.
The village was surrounded.
Suddenly, a man from the crowd noticed them.
"They're here!"
The shout came from the eastern edge of the crowd — and then the world became noise.
An explosion ripped through the centre of the square. The pressure wave knocked people off their feet, sent loose boards and debris spinning through the air, and punched the breath from every chest within thirty feet. Before the smoke had cleared, the Illuminate Order was already inside the village perimeter — not charging, not rushing, walking, the cold, steady advance of raiders who had done this before and knew they had already won.
Except that the villagers didn't run.
The call went up from three directions at once. The crowd split like water around a stone — mothers grabbing children, elderly hunters pushing the young ones toward the rope bridges leading to the high canopy shelters, the evacuation running on pure instinct and muscle memory from drills that everyone had hoped they'd never need.
The fighters stayed.
The hunters moved to elevated positions — platforms, thick branches, the high walkways — with the practised efficiency of people who had spent their lives learning that the ground was not always the safest place to stand. They nocked arrows and drew mana through their strings.
Not ordinary arrows.
Mana arrows — the technique had no elegant name in Southwoult, just the gesture: two fingers hooked around the bowstring, mana drawn from the chest and funnelled through the arm and into the draw until the string itself glowed. The arrow of light that formed was not an arrow of wood and feather. It was a compressed line of force, faster than sound, hot enough to char stone.
Oliver raised his bow.
Around her, fifteen hunters raised theirs.
"We fighters of Strelok race," he said, his voice carrying through the smoke. "We are born to kill." His eyes were fixed on the line of advancing raiders below. "God gave us this power for one reason."
The bowstrings were stretched.
"To protect what we love."
"THIS IS OUR PURPOSE."
"HAIL DOMHAN!"
Fifteen mana arrows screamed down from the platforms.
Six Order members dropped. The others dove — scattering behind the cover of mana shield and overturned carts, shouting to each other in short clipped sentences. On the ground, Southwoult hunters who hadn't evacuated were already moving — using the smoke for cover, flanking, drawing the Order members into narrow alleys between the tree houses where numbers mattered less and knowledge of the terrain mattered more.
The Order hadn't expected resistance.
The pause in their advance was brief — ten seconds, maybe less — but it was real.
And for people who had spent the last raid hiding and dying, ten seconds felt like a gift.
"Last time, it was easy to kill them," one attacker said to another. They were scared and confused.
Then a muscular, hooded man arrived.
He came from the tree line like a wall that had decided to move — enormous, hooded, the kind of body that had been built by years of combat rather than vanity, each step shaking the ground slightly. He stopped at the edge of the square and looked at the hunters on the elevated platforms with mild, insulted interest.
His name is Artem. One of the masters of the Illuminate order.
His hands came together.
CRACK.
The clap was not a sound. It was a force — a shockwave of compressed mana that rolled outward from his hands and hit the whole square like a wall of air, staggering everyone within fifty feet, knocking two hunters from their platforms to the level below. He channelled his mana.
The sound hit the older hunters like a cold bucket.
They knew that sound.
They had heard it during the last raid — the one three years ago, the one that had taken Charles, that had taken their best fighters in a single afternoon. They had heard it from a safe distance while they fled and tried not to hear the sounds that followed it. They remembered who came after the sound.
Artem was here.
"Toporan," he said. His voice was low. Conversational. "Be an axe."
The mana that responded to him was orange-red, the colour of something burning at its very core. It gathered in his raised right hand and compacted — forming a shape that was less like a weapon and more like a decision — a double-headed axe of pure mana larger than most men's torsos, crackling at its edges.
He found the nearest hunters.
He moved.
The first swing was casual. The hunter dove aside, and the axe took a post clean through at chest height, the top half spinning away into the smoke. Artem turned and swung back without pausing. The second hunter managed to raise a mana shield — it lasted one impact before it shattered, throwing the woman backwards into a stall.
The archers peppered him from above.
The mana arrows hit and left burns on his cloak, and he ignored them, completely, the way a man ignores rain.
Oliver watched from the eastern walkway.
He had his bow in his hand and six mana arrows already drawn from practice, and his fingers were cold. Below him, Artem was working through the square the way a farmer works through grain — steadily, without rush, with the specific kind of violence that came from someone who had never encountered anything capable of stopping him.
Think.
"Bystryy."
Oliver cast it on himself — a speed technique, one his sister had brought back from the Modavia expeditions. He felt it take hold immediately: his pulse elevated, the world around him slightly slower, his reactions sharpened to a point. He had maybe four minutes before the mana cost hit him.
He dropped from the walkway.
His first arrow came before he landed — a red mana arrow, fired from mid-air on the left side, aimed at Artem's head.
Artem turned and deflected it with the flat of the mana axe without looking. But he turned left to do it.
Oliver landed behind a tree on the right side, already running, already drawing the next arrow. He fired it from a crouch, low angle, aiming for Artem's legs — a disruption shot, not meant to kill, meant to move him.
Artem stepped aside. The arrow carved a furrow in the earth.
"You're fast," Artem said. He sounded interested. He turned to face Oliver fully. "I killed your chief with this axe. The woman with the copper hair." He tilted his head. "You knew her?"
Oliver said nothing. He was already moving again — right this time, cutting wide, forcing Artem to track him. He fired as he ran: one arrow at centre mass, one arrow high at the shoulder.
The mana axe engulfed both individuals in its powerful energy.
But Artem was moving to follow him. That was the point.
He blocks what he sees, Oliver noted. He's strong enough that he doesn't have to be subtle. He just puts the axe between himself and the threat.
Oliver stopped running.
He stood still in the centre of the square and met Artem's eyes and loaded one more arrow. He made it obvious — the red mana gathering in the string, the long draw, the deliberate aim at Artem's chest.
Artem walked toward him and raised the axe to block.
Oliver released — not at Artem's chest.
At the ground, three feet in front of Artem's next step.
The mana arrow hit the earth and detonated on contact. The blast wasn't large — it didn't need to be. It needed to do one thing: destroy the footing.
The ground under Artem's right foot gave way. A crater of upturned soil and splintered wood, half a foot deep, perfectly placed.
Artem's step landed wrong.
His massive frame tilted — just slightly, just for a fraction of a second — and his axe arm came down to catch his balance.
Oliver was already running straight at him.
He closed the distance in two seconds, dropped into a slide under the axe's correcting swing, came up inside Artem's reach — inside it, where the weapon was useless — and pressed his bow flat against Artem's chest.
He drew a short mana arrow. Point-blank.
Artem's eyes went wide for the first time.
"Bystryy," Oliver said quietly.
He fired.
The mana tore through at full speed.
Artem hit the ground and didn't move.
Oliver stood over him, breathing hard, the speed technique already burning out at his edges. His hands were shaking now that they didn't need to be still.
Around him, the fight continued. The Strelok hunters were holding — barely, but holding. The Order members were organised and ruthless, but they had lost Artem, and that changed the weight of the square.
Oliver picked up his bow.
He remembered the faces of his parents.
Our legacy will live.
He looked at the man on the ground.
That's for all of them. I take my hero's revenge.
He turned back to the fight.