The North Gate of the forward camp creaked on its massive iron hinges, the sound swallowed almost instantly by the biting wind. Antares stood just beyond the threshold, his boots sinking into the virgin snow that had fallen during the night. He didn't wait for his escort. The restless energy in his veins — fueled by a cheer that bordered on childish excitement — made sitting still feel like a slow death. He looked out toward the southern horizon.
There, rising from the mist like the jagged teeth of a forgotten god, was Stagfall Forest. Even from five kilometers away, the scale of the trees was staggering; they looked like ancient pillars supporting the sky itself.
The wind whipped across the plateau, a bone-chilling gale that would have frozen a lesser man's marrow. But to Antares, it was intoxicating.
The cold hit his face and lungs with a refreshing sharpness, clearing the last traces of stew and campfire smoke from his mind. As he stood there, watching the snow swirl in lazy eddies, a strange, long-dormant impulse stirred in the back of his mind. The Earth-born soul within him looked at the pristine white drifts and saw more than just a tactical obstacle.
"I could do it." he thought, his blood-red eyes tracking a particularly deep bank of snow. *A snow angel. Or a snowman. Hell, I could even build a small fortress out of ice.*
He imagined the look on Yajin's scarred, red-skinned face if the "King of the Ant Tribe" was found rolling a giant snowball or flapping his arms in the slush like some overgrown kid. The mental image brought a genuine, hidden smirk to his lips. For a fleeting second, he wanted to abandon the "King" persona entirely, to let the inner Harry Waterson — the guy who once fed ants and played strategy games until dawn — play in a world that hadn't yet been stained by blood and conquest.
But then he felt the weight of Eos against his hip. He felt the gaze of the sentries on the wooden battlements behind him. He was a symbol now. A symbol of strength, of survival, and of impending conquest. A King did not make snow angels. A King made empires.
He straightened his posture, his heavy bear-fur coat billowing in the wind, and buried the impulse deep.
High above on the camp's wooden ramparts, two figures stood like statues cast in iron and shadow. Yajin and Velas watched the lone figure of their King standing in the white waste.
"He is impatient," Velas remarked, his voice a low gravelly rasp. He adjusted the strap of his twin daggers, his eyes never leaving Antares. "He stands there as if he could leap to the trees in a single bound."
"He has the fire of the youth," Yajin replied. The leader of the Ashfang clan stood with his massive arms crossed, his heavy cloak damp with frost. "But he is reckless. We should have gone with him, Velas. My instincts tell me that something is wrong with all this."
Velas shifted his weight. "He ordered us to stay. To prepare the trade mission. If we defy him now, we undermine his authority — and you know Lord Alexis wouldn't have liked that." He paused, his gaze softening as he watched the group of warriors finally emerging from the gate to join the King. "Besides… your son is with him, together with the best hunters and warriors."
Velas placed a massive, heavy hand on Yajin's shoulder — a rare, silent gesture of solidarity between two men who had spent years as rivals. "Have faith in the King, Yajin. And have faith in your boy. They are the new generation. They are meant to accomplish great things. Maybe we are just too old to understand their need to prove themselves."
Yajin nodded slowly, the two old warriors standing in a rare moment of friendship as they watched the procession depart.
---
"We are ready to depart, my Lord," Yanrid announced as he reached Antares's side. He had brought a specialized unit of forty Antmen. Twenty were veteran hunters — lean, agile scouts armed with longbows and vials of paralyzing toxins. The other twenty were heavy warriors, their iron plates polished and their serrated blades gleaming. Among them were Levi and Eli, the twin guards, their eyes sharp and expectant.
"Let's go then," Antares said, his voice clipping the air. "We've wasted enough time."
The five-kilometer trek was a study in transition. As they descended from the rocky plateau, the ground changed from barren stone to thick, frozen peat. The air grew heavier, filled with the scent of damp wood and thawing earth. Yanrid walked half a step behind Antares, his voice a constant, low drone as he briefed the King on the ecology of Stagfall.
"The forest's ecosystem is very interesting — as it is deadly, Sire," Yanrid explained. "Because the Iron-Oaks are so massive and packed together, I suggest we hunt on the outer layer of the forest for safety purposes."
Antares listened, his eyes scanning the horizon. "And the serpents you mentioned?"
"The Stonefang Serpents," Yanrid said, his expression darkening. "They are the reason the Goblins never pushed further south. They aren't just snakes; they are living siegeworks. Their scales are as hard as stone, and they hunt in groups, crushing their prey with sheer weight. If one lands on you, the weight alone will crush you and make you one with the ground before the fangs even touch you."
Antares hummed, his hand tightening on the hilt of Eos. "I look forward to meeting one."
An hour later, they reached the outer layer of Stagfall Forest. The transition was jarring. One moment they were in the bright white glare of the snow-covered plains; the next, they were swallowed by a world of emerald twilight. The Iron-Oaks were even more majestic up close — their trunks the size of small towers, their bark a deep stony grey, and their purple leaves forming a canopy so thick it choked out the sun.
Snow still covered the forest floor, but here it was different — it hung in heavy clumps on the massive branches, occasionally falling in "snow-bombs" that thudded against the mossy earth with the sound of a fist hitting a drum.
Antares stepped into the treeline, his boots silenced by the deep moss. The forest was eerily quiet. There were no birds, no insects — only the distant, rhythmic creak of the massive trees swaying in the wind.
"Stay here and coordinate the perimeter," Antares commanded Yanrid, his voice echoing slightly in the stillness. "I want to see the scale of this place for myself."
"Sire, I would advise caution—" Yanrid started, but Antares was already moving deeper into the woods, his senses dialed to the maximum. He marveled at the robust nature of the trees; they made the redwoods of Earth look like mere saplings. The shortest among them easily topped 130 meters.
Ten minutes of walking yielded nothing. No beasts, no tracks, no sounds. The silence began to grate on his nerves. The "wild beast" within him grew impatient, demanding action, demanding a foe.
*If they won't come to me,* Antares thought, *I'll go to them.*
He triggered his mana circuits. With a sharp, metallic clack, his insectoid wings unfurled from beneath his bear-fur coat. They hummed with a high-pitched vibration, glowing with a faint red hue. With a powerful thrust, he launched himself straight up. He blurred past the massive trunks, the wind whistling through his armor. He climbed fifty meters, eighty, a hundred. He wanted to see the top of the world.
He reached the 120-meter mark, nearly at the top of an Iron-Oak, when the silence was shattered.
From a thick, horizontal branch that he had mistaken for part of the trunk, a shadow detached itself. It was a movement so fast and so fluid it defied the laws of physics. A massive reptilian head the size of a carriage swung through the air, mandibles wide, fangs dripping with clear, viscous venom.
It was a Stonefang Serpent.
Antares's heart hammered against his ribs. He was in mid-air, his momentum carrying him upward, while the beast was lunging downward. He was a fly about to be swatted.
"SIRE! DOWN!" a voice roared from below.
A streak of brilliant icy-blue light cut through the dim forest light. It was a spear — not of wood or iron, but of pure condensed frost. It whistled through the air, trailing a wake of freezing mist.
**Thwack!**
The spear struck the serpent directly in its left eye. Upon impact, the mana destabilized, triggering an Ice-Burst. A sphere of jagged frost exploded outward, flash-freezing the side of the serpent's head and sending a shockwave of cold through its skull. The beast shrieked — a high-pitched grinding sound like stones rubbing together. The momentum of its strike was broken, but its massive body still collided with Antares in its frantic fall.
The impact was like being hit by a falling building. Antares was sent spiraling toward the forest floor, his wings buzzing frantically to stabilize his descent. He crashed through several smaller branches before slamming into the deep moss and snow at the base of an Iron-Oak.
The Stonefang Serpent hit the ground twenty meters away and was already recovering. It wiggled and coiled like a worm poured on salt, the ice on its face cracking and falling away in jagged shards. Now that it was on the ground, Antares saw the true horror of it. It was nearly fifty meters long, its body thick with compact muscle. Its scales were hard, cracked plates resembling weathered granite — slate-gray with veins of mossy green. Along its spine ran jagged, blade-like spikes — true natural armor. Its head was a nightmare of angular bone and sharp ridges. Its remaining eye glowed with fierce, amber-golden intelligence.
Antares scrambled to his feet, his vision swimming, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He was visibly shaking — not from fear, but from the sheer force of the impact and the surge of adrenaline.
Yanrid was sprinting toward him, another ice spear already forming in his hand. Levi and Eli were just behind, blades drawn, faces masks of pure focus.
But Antares's attention was fixed on the beast. He reached for the hilt of Eos. As his fingers closed around the grip, the weapon responded to his rage. The blade began to glow with a deep, pulsing crimson light, the Knight Force bleeding into the steel.
"Let's dance," Antares hissed.
The serpent didn't wait. It launched itself forward, its body coiling and uncoiling with terrifying power. It didn't slither — it bounced, its rock-hard scales grinding against the earth.
Antares met the charge. He flared his Knight Force, his aura expanding until he looked like a crimson comet. As the serpent's head descended, Antares sidestepped with a burst of speed that left a crater in the ground. He swung Eos in a wide horizontal arc. The blade struck the serpent's neck, but instead of the wet sound of cutting meat there was a deafening clash like two swords meeting. Sparks showered the snow. Eos had bitten into the stone scales, but the serpent's natural armor was incredible. Antares felt the vibration travel up his arms, threatening to numb his grip.
The serpent whipped its tail around, using it as a massive spiked club. Antares leaped, using his wings for a momentary hover, and watched as the tail shattered the trunk of a nearby tree in an explosion of splinters and purple leaves.
"Yanrid! Stay back!" Antares roared as he saw the scouts closing in. "This one belongs to me!"
He dived. This time he didn't aim for the scales. He aimed for the fractures. He channeled his mana into Eos, the blade extending a few inches in a tongue of pure energy — a skill he had learned while training with the twins. He thrust the spear-sword into a gap just behind the serpent's skull. The beast roared, its body thrashing wildly. Antares held on, his boots dragging through the mud as the snake tried to shake him off. He twisted the blade, unleashing a burst of Red Knight Force directly into the wound.
**Crr-ack.**
The stone scales around the wound shattered. Black, foul-smelling blood sprayed across Antares's armor, steaming in the cold air.
The serpent, realizing it was in danger, reared up, its amber eye glowing with desperate light. It opened its jaws to unleash a spray of corrosive venom, but Antares was faster. He kicked off the serpent's chest, somersaulting in the air, and brought Eos down in a vertical overhead strike.
"DIE!"
The blade caught the serpent right between the eyes. With the full weight of his falling body and the concentrated density of his aura, Antares drove the steel through the skull, through the brain, and deep into the earth beneath. The serpent gave one final, violent shudder — its tail lashing out and shattering another tree — before falling limp.
Antares stood atop the carcass, his chest heaving, his armor covered in gore. The white snow was now a macabre blood-red carpet.
His senses jolted. A primal instinct screamed at him to look up.
He slowly raised his head.
On the massive branches of the surrounding Iron-Oaks, they were waiting.
Eight pairs of amber-golden eyes stared back at him. They were larger than the one he had just killed. Some were covered in moss, suggesting they had been dormant during winter; others had spikes so long they looked like crown-ridges. Smaller ones slithered among them — Antares didn't bother to count.
They didn't hiss. They didn't move. They simply watched.
One by one, they detached themselves from the canopy.
**Thud. Thud. Thud.**
The ground shook as the eight Stonefang Serpents landed in a circle around the blood-stained clearing. They moved with synchronized grace, their stony scales grinding like tectonic plates.
At that moment, Yanrid, Levi, Eli, and the twenty warriors arrived, forming a tight circle around Antares.
"My Lord…" Yanrid whispered, his voice trembling slightly as he looked at the wall of scales surrounding them. "We are outnumbered. We should retreat to the camp."
Antares didn't look back. His irises were a burning, incandescent red.
"Retreat?" Antares laughed — a cold, jagged sound that made the serpents hiss in unison. "We didn't come here to retreat, Yanrid. We came to remind this forest who owns it."
He pointed Eos at the largest serpent — a beast nearly eighty meters long with a scarred white underbelly.
"Hunters, stay back and provide cover!" Antares roared, his voice carrying the authority of a King. "Warriors! We don't have time nor the ability to parlay with these shitty worms. Let's kill these fuckers and go home for dinner!"
For a heartbeat, both sides remained in place — a tableau of steel and stone frozen in the emerald twilight.
Then the largest serpent let out a deafening, earth-shaking roar.
"CHARGE!" Antares screamed.
The forest exploded into violence.
When the Alpha's roar split the air, the world seemed to lean away from its sheer volume. But where a normal man would have been paralyzed by fear, Antares felt a surge of ecstatic, violent clarity. He and Yanrid became blurs of motion, their feet carving deep furrows into the blood-stained snow. Antares led the spearhead, his Knight Force flaring around him like living flame, while Yanrid kept pace at his left flank, icy-blue aura crackling along his greatsword.
They were twenty meters into the clearing when the ground heaved. A cunning serpent had buried itself beneath the frozen peat. It erupted in a fountain of dirt and ice, jaws wide enough to swallow them both.
Antares didn't flinch.
Yanrid's reaction was lethal poetry. Without breaking stride, he swung his massive greatsword in a violent low arc.
"Ice Spike," Yanrid hissed.
A massive pillar of jagged crystalline ice erupted from the earth beneath the hidden serpent. Three feet thick and honed to a needle-point, it slammed into the soft underbelly, piercing through stone-crusted spine and lifting the ten-ton beast five meters into the air. The serpent died instantly, frozen into a grotesque vertical monument of ice.
Yanrid didn't even glance at his kill; he was already scanning for the next threat.
Behind them, Levi and Eli were not content to let the King and General claim all the glory. Their bodies twitched in unison as two more serpents dropped from the high branches. With a synchronized *clack-snap*, their insectoid wings unfurled — shimmering translucent membranes vibrating into a red-tinted haze. They launched skyward, bypassing the mud and carnage below.
Levi took the lead, dual serrated daggers spinning like helicopter rotors. He dived at a serpent coiling around an Iron-Oak. The beast lashed out with its spiked tail, but Levi performed a mid-air roll, landing on its head and driving both blades into its skull with a roar of effort.
Eli followed a split second later. As Levi pinned the beast, Eli flew in a low tight circle, his blades carving a continuous spiraling wound along the serpent's length. By the time Eli reached the tail, the serpent had been practically unzipped, stone scales falling away like broken shingles. The two-headed cyclone of silver steel left the beast a mangled heap before it could even hiss.
The twenty Ashfang warriors engaged the remaining smaller snakes with terrifying mechanical efficiency. They used tower shields to pin tails, then swarmed heads with serrated spears. The clearing filled with the rhythmic screams of dying beasts.
Antares ignored the smaller skirmishes — though he decapitated one unlucky serpent that crossed his path with a casual backhand swing of Eos. His eyes were locked on the Alpha.
The massive beast realized the tide had turned. Its kin were being slaughtered with terrifying speed. It let out a low vibrating hiss and began to coil back toward the shadows, intending to slither into the deeper forest.
"Oh, no you don't," Antares growled.
He poured pure mana into Helios' Grip. The gauntlet flared with violent solar intensity. He fed his own Knight Force into the artifact, creating hotter, deadlier flames.
"BURN!"
He swept his arm out. A literal wave of scorching orange-red flame erupted from the gauntlet, fanning out in a thirty-foot cone. It hit the Alpha's tail and flank. The heat was so intense that the stone scales began to glow dull red before cracking and popping like corn. The Alpha shrieked, its retreat halted by searing agony. It turned back, amber eyes reflecting pure, unadulterated hatred.
Antares stood his ground — a terrifying sight. His bear-fur coat was soaked with black blood. His face was splattered with gore, long black hair matted with ice and red slush. He didn't look like a King. He looked like a blood-drunk butcher.
"Where do you think you're going?" Antares asked, voice low and vibrating with dangerous mirth. "The party is just starting."
The Alpha lunged — faster than the others, a lightning bolt of armored muscle. Antares didn't sidestep. He planted his feet, channeled every ounce of strength into his legs and core, and met the collision head-on.
**BOOM.**
The shockwave cleared snow for ten meters in every direction. Antares's boots sank six inches into the frozen earth, but he didn't budge. He had caught the Alpha's upper jaw with his bare left hand — the Primordial Ant Physique manifesting as external chitin armor that covered his body. The serpent's charge cracked the armor, but Antares dug his clawed fingers into the stone-like gums while his right hand braced Eos against the beast's lower throat.
The Alpha's weight was staggering — forty tons of pure muscle pressing down. Antares could hear his own armor cracking, muscles screaming. He didn't care. He only cared about the kill.
He let out a roar, his aura flaring so bright it turned falling snow into steam. With a surge of strength that defied his human frame, he wrenched the serpent's head to the side, throwing the massive beast off-balance.
As the Alpha's neck was exposed, Antares leapt onto its snout, ran up its massive spiked head, and jumped high into the air. He unfurled his wings for a single powerful flap, hovering at the apex.
He gripped Eos with both hands. The sword glowed with blinding crimson light that rivaled the sun.
"DIE!"
He dived — a vertical streak of red light. Eos didn't just cut; it vaporized the space it occupied. The blade struck the Alpha's neck at the exact point where skull met spine. Antares felt the resistance of stony scales, then the grind of bone… and then nothing.
The blade sheared through the serpent's neck with a sound like a guillotine falling through silk.
Antares landed in a three-point stance on the other side. Behind him, the Alpha's massive head slid slowly off its body, hitting the ground with a dull wet thud that vibrated through the roots of the Iron-Oaks. The body followed, thrashing in death throes, fountain-heads of black blood drenching the clearing.
Antares stayed crouched for a long moment, chest heaving, steam rising from his blood-soaked shoulders. His vision swam in red. Slowly he stood, climbed atop the massive headless corpse, and used it as a pedestal.
He looked back at the clearing.
The battle was over. The eight bigger serpents were all down — some impaled by Yanrid's ice, some butchered by the twins, the smaller ones systematically dismantled by the warriors. His men stood among the carnage, breathing hard, weapons dripping.
Yanrid approached the base of the Alpha's corpse and looked up at his King. He saw the gore-covered silhouette, eyes still faintly glowing, and felt a flicker of genuine fear.
"Sire," Yanrid called softly. "The serpents have been exterminated. Victory is ours."
Antares blinked. The red glow in his irises faded back to their normal deep red. He took a long, shaky breath, the cold air finally cooling the fire in his blood. He looked down at his hands — the blood was already starting to freeze. He looked at the massacre he had led. He had come here for a walk, for a "small hunt." He had caused a slaughter.
He let out a short, jagged laugh that turned into a weary sigh. He wiped a streak of blood from his forehead and looked at the sky through the gaps in the Iron-Oak canopy.
"Good," Antares said, his voice returning to its calm, regal authority. "Collect the valuable parts. I want the Alpha's skull mounted on the North Gate the moment we go back. Let the world know… that we are back."
He stepped off the corpse, his boots squelching in the red slush. He was exhausted, filthy, and starving. But as he looked at his loyal soldiers, he knew one thing for certain.
His conquest had begun with a slaughter.
And he was just getting started.