Above the South Wall, reality was unraveling.
What had once been a battlefield was now something else—something grotesque, something wrong.
The inferno devouring the West Camp clawed at the sky like a dying god. The roar rising from within the mine was no longer the sound of battle, but of something ancient and buried finally breaking free. It was not a feint. It was not a distraction.
It was a judgment.
Knight Rodon felt it in his bones before his mind could accept it.
The truth struck him not as realization, but as violation.
His breath hitched. His vision trembled. For a fleeting moment, the world tilted, as if something fundamental had been ripped out from beneath his feet.
Then came the rage.
"BASTARD!!"
The scream tore from his throat, raw and inhuman, shredding whatever composure he had left. His gauntlet seized his adjutant by the collar, fingers digging in like iron hooks, crushing, choking.
"We've been played… like animals…!"
His voice cracked, splintering under its own weight.
"The South Gate—nothing but a corpse dressed up as a threat…! Their target—those wretches in the West—those things we chained—!"
Spittle flew. His face twisted into something feral, something stripped of all pretense of nobility.
"Move! MOVE!! Take three hundred—no, take everything you can rip from this wall! Go through the central passage! Burn them! Tear them apart! I want nothing left breathing!"
The adjutant stumbled away, gasping, half-strangled, half-dead already. He ran because not running meant dying here, now, under Rodon's hand.
But the truth was simple.
Running only changed where he would die.
The Central Passage waited in silence.
It stretched like a throat between the East and West Camps—long, narrow, and dark. In peace, it carried supplies, men, orders.
Tonight, it would swallow them.
Three hundred soldiers were driven into it, stumbling over one another, dragged forward by fear and command. Their armor clattered. Their breathing came sharp and uneven. No formation. No discipline.
Only confusion.
Only dread.
They could not see the darkness above them.
They did not know they had already been chosen.
On the rooftops, the night shifted.
Shapes peeled themselves from shadow—silent, patient, inhumanly still until the final moment.
Colin stood at the forefront.
The firelight from afar licked across his armor, turning it into something pale and cold, like bone pulled from a grave. Behind his faceplate, his eyes did not burn.
They did not rage.
They simply measured.
Below him, the mass of men compressed into the perfect shape. Close. Dense. Helpless.
Exactly as he had envisioned.
He did not speak.
The sword in his hand tilted forward.
A gesture so small it barely seemed to matter.
A gesture that ended everything.
The night screamed.
"Hum—!!!"
The sound of mechanisms snapping into motion tore through the passage like the shriek of something metallic and alive.
Then—
Death descended.
A storm of steel erupted from the darkness above.
Bolts fell like rain. No—faster than rain. Denser. Each one humming with purpose, each one seeking flesh.
There was no time to react.
No time to understand.
Bodies jerked. Collapsed. Crumpled.
Men fell mid-step, their momentum carrying them forward into death. Mouths opened—but the screams never came. Steel filled throats before sound could escape.
Armor shattered.
Bone gave way.
Life ended without ceremony.
The front ranks simply… ceased.
Where there had been men, there were now heaps of twitching meat.
For a single heartbeat, silence returned.
Then it broke.
"AMBUSH—! ABOVE—!"
The survivors screamed, voices splintered with terror. They surged backward, forward—anywhere. Nowhere. They trampled one another, crushed beneath blind panic.
They still could not see the enemy.
Only death.
"Reload."
Colin's voice cut through the chaos.
Flat.
Unmoved.
The Wolf Guards obeyed without hesitation. Their hands moved with practiced precision, mechanical, detached. Empty magazines dropped. New ones locked in with a clean, final click.
The sound echoed like a coffin sealing shut.
"Fire."
The second storm came.
Closer.
Crueler.
More deliberate.
Bolts punched through shields, through bodies, through the desperate illusion of safety. Men hiding behind corpses were pinned to them, flesh stitched together by iron.
Those who tried to run died.
Those who tried to fight died.
Those who hesitated died worst of all.
The passage filled with the wet sounds of dying—choking, tearing, collapsing into something unrecognizable.
And then—
"Mo."
The command was soft.
The impact was not.
The massive wolf dropped from the heavens like a falling star, slamming into the mass below with bone-shattering force. Bodies were flung aside, broken instantly, reduced to obstacles beneath its weight.
A space opened.
A wound carved into the living.
"Kill."
Colin moved.
Not fast.
Not frantic.
Inevitable.
His blade traced pale arcs through the dark, each swing clean, effortless. No wasted motion. No resistance that mattered.
Blood followed him like a shadow.
Where he passed, men came apart.
Not defeated.
Erased.
The Wolf Guards descended behind him.
Fourteen figures.
That was all.
But in that narrow corridor, it was enough to become extinction itself.
Wolves tore into flesh. Blades carved through bone. The passage became a grinding maw, chewing through everything that entered it.
There was no formation left to break.
No morale left to shatter.
Only the slow, suffocating realization—
That there was no escape.
By the time it ended, the passage no longer resembled a road.
It was a trench of bodies.
A river of blood.
A place where sound had died along with the men who made it.
Colin reined in his mount.
Silence returned, heavy and absolute.
Blood dripped from his armor, gathering beneath him in dark, steaming pools.
He looked toward the East Camp.
There was movement there. Panic. Confusion.
Too late.
Far too late.
The artery had been cut.
The body would follow.
The mine was no longer a battlefield.
It was a sealed grave.