Chapter 13 : The Fang Tests
The scream didn't come from a human throat.
Livestock—cattle, from the pitch and the raw terror of it—and the sound ripped across the valley at the third watch, carried by a wind that smelled of smoke. I was on the keep's rampart reviewing Mathis's river-barge material estimates when the orange glow bloomed on the southern horizon, and my stomach dropped before my brain caught up.
The Breck farm. South of town, closest to the ridge where Sera had mapped six Crimson Fang observation points. The farm that produced a third of Ashwick's grain and all of its cattle.
"GATE!" Harlan's voice cracked across the courtyard below. "ALARM! Southern fires!"
I pulled up the Lord System's mini-map. Crude at this range—the town was a cluster of blue markers, the farms a scatter of dimmer blue beyond the wall. The fire registered as an amber bloom south of the Breck position. And moving among the blue dots, from the southern ridge: red markers. Six. Eight. More appearing as the System's detection caught up to events.
[Threat Detected: Hostile Force — Southern Approach]
[Estimated Count: 12]
[Estimated Rank: Novice to Apprentice (mixed)]
[Engagement Status: Active — Civilian assets under attack]
Twelve. The number Sera had estimated for a probing force. Not a full assault—a test. Steal what they could, burn what they couldn't carry, and time the response.
They're timing us. This is a clock test. How long from alarm to armed response at the point of attack? That data tells them everything they need for the real raid.
"Sera!"
She was already moving—armored, sword drawn, appearing at the gate with six guardsmen behind her. She'd been sleeping in her armor. Of course she had. She'd been sleeping in her armor since the scouts appeared on the ridge.
"Twelve hostiles. Southern farms. The Breck property is burning."
"Harlan takes four men to the eastern approach in case this is a feint. I take two to the Breck farm." She didn't wait for confirmation. She was gone, boots striking stone, her two guardsmen running to keep pace with a woman who moved like a weapon with legs.
I stayed on the rampart. My hands gripped the stone parapet—the same stone I'd gripped on Day One, shaking, staring at three alien moons. The shaking was different now. Not weakness. Rage.
They're burning Tomas Breck's farm. The man who stood up at my first assembly and asked what the lord planned to do. The man who nodded—who finally nodded—after watching me fish and dig and build for six weeks. His grain. His cattle. His family's survival.
The mini-map tracked Sera's blue marker moving south at a speed that no normal human could sustain. Her two guardsmen fell behind within minutes. She didn't slow.
---
The report came at dawn.
Sera stood in the keep's hall with blood on her sword arm—not hers—and delivered it with the clinical precision of a surgeon describing an operation.
"Twelve Crimson Fang. Mixed quality—nine barely Novice, two solid Apprentice-rank, one Journeyman who led the rear guard. They hit the Breck farm first, then swept east toward the Voss homestead. I intercepted at the Breck property's south fence."
"Casualties?"
"Three of theirs. Dead." No inflection. Three lives ended, filed under operational results. "The remaining nine withdrew south when I engaged. They had a prepared retreat path—horses tethered at the ridge base, a half-mile south. Professional extraction."
Professional. Not random thugs. Someone planned this—the approach, the timing, the exit route. The Crimson Fang has competent leadership.
"Our losses?"
"No dead. Harlan took a knife wound to the left forearm during the eastern patrol. He did not report it for four hours." A pause—the Sera pause, which contained more disapproval than most people's speeches. "I have addressed this."
"The farm?"
"Hay storage barn destroyed. Three cattle taken—driven south ahead of the retreat. Approximately two months of stored grain seized from the eastern granary annex. The main farmhouse and primary granary are intact."
I closed my eyes. Ran the numbers.
Three cattle. Two months of grain. The hay barn. That's not catastrophic—the fishing operation and the planted fields buffer the food impact. But morale just took a hit that no amount of fish can fix. People came to Ashwick because they had nowhere else to go. If nowhere else starts looking safer than here, they'll leave.
The System confirmed:
[Morale Impact: -4 (raid on civilian property)]
[Food Supply Impact: -8 days (grain loss + livestock loss)]
[Current Morale: 24]
[Current Food Supply: 86 days]
"The Journeyman. You engaged?"
"Briefly. He tested my reach with a feint and withdrew when he recognized Expert-level response. Competent assessment. He will report to his superiors that Ashwick has a defender who outclasses their best."
That's the information they wanted. Not just our response time—our capability ceiling. Now they know Sera exists. The question is whether that deters them or makes them bring more people next time.
---
[Breck Farm — Morning]
Tomas Breck stood in his burned hay barn.
The structure was a skeleton—charred posts, ash where the roof had been, the smell of burned grain thick enough to taste. He stood in the center of it, boots in ash, arms at his sides, and his face held the expression of a man who had seen this kind of loss before and had learned that the only response was to keep standing.
"Lord Ashwick."
"Tomas."
"They took the brown cow. The one my daughter raised from a calf." His voice was level. Stone-flat. "And the stored grain we were saving for the lean weeks before harvest."
"I know."
"The alarm reached the keep in what—fifteen minutes? Your commander reached the farm in twenty. The bandits were here for twelve minutes before that." He turned to look at me. "Twelve minutes is enough to ruin a family."
He's not blaming me. He's educating me. And he's right. Twenty minutes is an eternity when someone is burning your livelihood.
"I'm redesigning the patrol routes. Signal fires on three hilltops—" I pointed south, east, southwest "—with permanent watch positions. Overlapping coverage so no farm sits in a dead zone for longer than ten minutes. A fallback protocol that pulls the closest patrol toward any fire or alarm within five minutes."
"And when they come with forty instead of twelve?"
"Then we fight from the wall with Sera at the gate and every able body on the rampart."
He held my gaze. The same test as the assembly—measuring, evaluating. But different now. On the common yard platform, he'd been measuring a lord's words. Here, standing in ash, he was measuring a lord's resolve.
"My daughter raised the alarm. Ran barefoot from our door to the keep gate. A mile in the dark."
I looked toward the farmhouse. Lena sat on the step, wrapped in a blanket, her feet bandaged. She'd run a mile over rough ground, in darkness, with fires behind her. Nineteen years old and she'd done more in twelve minutes than most people do in a month.
"I know," I said. "She saved lives."
Tomas looked at the ash. At his burned barn. At the fields beyond it, where green shoots pushed through dark soil—the crop rotation planting I'd introduced, growing in earth his family had worked for generations.
He nodded. And this time, the nod wasn't evaluation. It was commitment.
Three Crimson Fang bodies cooled in the frost where Sera had left them, and the knowledge settled in my chest like iron: twelve bandits was a probe, not an attack, and the real test was coming.
Get Early Access to New Chapters
Thank you for reading. For those who want to skip the wait, my Patreon is currently 21 chapters ahead of the public sites.
Schedule: 7 new chapters released every 10 days.
Benefit: Gain a significant lead of 7 to 21 chapters depending on your tier.
Support the project and start reading the next arc now: Patreon.com/IsekaiStories