The ridgeline ahead was quiet. Too quiet.
Nyzekh stood beside a broken column at the trail's edge, eyes fixed on the tree-thick slopes below. Bruga stood next to him, checking the pressure seals on his gauntlet. Steam hissed as he adjusted the vent lines.
Their mission was simple: scout and confirm Nerathil activity near the ruins west of the city. The Stormguard needed confirmation before committing the full army for the final push to Orûn-Mal.
But there was nothing, no blood trails, no tunnel breaks, no shadow residue, no disturbed ground, no air distortion, no heat ripples, no fresh decay, not even crows.
Bruga peered down the slope.
"They've pulled back?"
"No," Nyzekh replied. "They're somewhere else."
Bruga scanned again. One hand rested on his axe.
"This close to the ruins and they're not moving through it? They don't pull back. Something's drawing them."
Then the sound came. Faint. Carried by the valley.
It wasn't thunder or wind, but something sharper, repeating in bursts: drum signals, weapon strikes, the sound of a fight.
Bruga stepped forward. He paused, then nodded to himself.
"Southwest rise. Close. A battle."
Nyzekh didn't hesitate.
"Blacktide forms on me. Moorfire takes descent angle two. Move to intercept."
Bruga cracked a smile.
"Finally."
The order moved without shouting.
Behind them, black-armored soldiers shifted into columns. Boots locked. Shields set. No words. Just the sound of gear tightening and formation control.
Nyzekh glanced once toward the treeline.
Then he moved.
The columns advanced without pause. Blacktide took the lead through the ridge switchbacks while Moorfire spread into flanking position along the slope. By the time they reached the upper plateau, the battle came into view.
High above the ridge, where the sky met the jagged horizon, the Blacktide and Moorfire stood in watchful silence. From a plateau wrapped in volcanic mist, two wardens surveyed the battlefield. Nyzekh, arms folded, motionless in his dusk-iron helm crested with ash-feather. Bruga, broad-shouldered and shifting with the weight of heat-bound armor, eyes locked on the chaos below.
Their presence was quiet, but it bent the air around them.
Nyzekh spoke first, his voice low, toneless.
"Let's go."
Bruga didn't hesitate. He turned, cloak snapping in the ash-wind, and bellowed down the ridge like a siege horn.
"Blacktide. Moorfire. Advance. Take the ridge."
Movement surged at once. Cohorts began to deploy. They descended not as scattered reinforcements but as blades honed for a single purpose.
Their weapons gleamed with filament-threaded sigils. Each falcata bore Altan's firework, blades threaded with moorfire alloys that pulsed with latent heat. Their armor was not ceremonial. It was dense with rune channels and reinforced plates, forged for resilience, not shine. Vambraces vented qi across the shoulders and into the chest harness. Their crested helms absorbed the sulfur light like black mirrors. No emblems. No colors. Only the dull sheen of ash-treated steel meant to withstand bile and corrosion.
And now, under Bruga's command and Nyzekh's silence, they descended.
The ridge exploded in light and motion. What the Flame Maidens thought was mist above them split like torn cloth. Black-armored figures descended through it in staggered formations. No shouting. No horns. Just movement and fire.
Therya stood on the edge of the broken slope, blade seared to its hilt, her breath heavy. They had been holding the pass for hours. Holding and dying. Nerathil war-beasts had clawed through every line they built. They'd run out of clean flame. Most of the newer sisters were either dead or dragging the wounded. She had one more burn left in her sword. Maybe two. Then she would go down swinging.
But something had shifted.
The line didn't break. It bent. Then something hit the enemy harder than anything she had seen in her life.
Black-armored troops tore through the flank. Their movements weren't elegant. They were exact. Blades swung without waste. Shields rammed forward with bone-breaking force. Falcatas punched through soft spots in Dreadblade joints like they had mapped the enemy's anatomy in advance.
Then came the two.
The first one dropped into the heart of the battle like a landslide in armor. He didn't run. He marched. Each step sent tremors through the stone. His frame was wide, plated in segmented lamellar that hissed with vented heat. Red-hot qi vented from his backplate, streaking upward like pressure leaks from a forge. His axe was massive, too thick to be carried one-handed. It glowed along the spine. Emberstone vents hissed, then flared.
He didn't swing often. When he did, bodies broke in half.
A Dreadblade lunged at him from the side. He turned his shoulder, absorbed the impact, and drove his fist—just a gauntlet, not even a weapon—into the creature's sternum. There was a pop, then a boom. The entire front of the Nerathil detonated outward in a cone of meat and bone shards. Pyroclastic burst.
The blast radius took out two more behind it.
Some kind of area technique. But not wild. Controlled. Anchored. A smoldering radius of impact surrounded him. Nothing inside it stayed standing.
The second figure moved differently.
Thinner. Colder. He walked where the fighting was thickest, but nothing touched him. He didn't even seem armored at first. Just cloaked in layers of black that bent the light. She couldn't see his weapons clearly. Just a flicker of movement, then something fell. A creature would charge, and it would stop. Split across its middle, limbs scattered, unaware it had already died.
He didn't leave a trail of gore.
He left absences.
One Flame Maiden near Therya whispered without meaning to. "He cuts without touching…"
Where the first was heat, pressure, and eruption, this one was subtraction. Stance-less. Style-less. His enemies collapsed mid-motion, as if memory itself forgot they were there.
At one point, a Hollowhand reached him. Massive. Two-handed cleaver ready. He didn't dodge. He stepped forward. The creature screamed. Then, it stopped existing from the waist up. There was no sound. No resistance. Just vanishing.
That one didn't breathe like a man.
It moved like void given legs.
Therya didn't know what they were. Reinforcements, yes. But not from any legion she recognized. Their armor bore no marks, their movements gave no signals, their arrival brought no warning, and for the first time in hours, the Flame Maidens stopped dying and started watching.
From the center of the black wave, a voice emerged. Deep and measured, spoken by a warrior clad in sleeker blacksteel armor. His helm was darker than the rest. Sigils faintly alive across his chestguard. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.
"Sweep the perimeter," he instructed, addressing the more lightly armored members of the formation who moved with a different cadence. Auxiliaries by posture and task. "Do not overextend. Burn any corpses that move. Kill all plague-wounded."
The command spread through the ranks without pause. The auxiliaries moved into arcs, fanning out with precision. One paused only to drive a spear into the eye of a still-twitching Crawlborn before stepping past its convulsing body.
They wasted nothing. Their movements were exact, each strike aimed for joints, necks, or vitals. No flourishes. No excess. Blades turned at the right angles. They killed with the kind of precision that came from repetition, not rage. Brutal, practiced, and efficient.
The Flame Maidens watched in silence as the Nerathil were driven back, their flank shattered, their advance reduced to a heap of burning dead. The black-armored warriors said nothing more as they continued their grim task.
They had done this before.
Far too many times.
As the last Nerathil corpse collapsed into ash and bile, the battlefield fell into a grim, smoldering silence.
Captain Therya Ralin stepped forward from the scorched ridge, fireblade lowered but still lit. Her armor bore deep scoring, the scent of scorched blood clinging to her like a second skin. Vice Captain Varess Dova moved beside her, limping slightly, one vambrace shattered and hanging loose from her forearm.
They approached the black-armored formation now reassembling at the treeline. Disciplined. Intact. Nearly untouched.
Their eyes found him at once.
The man who had cut through the thickest part of the melee without contact. The one whose cloak dragged shadow with it. Who left no echo in the field around him. Light itself seemed to dim in his presence, edges fading where he walked.
He hadn't removed his helm.
"Captain Therya Ralin, Flame Maidens," she introduced. Her voice was steady, but strained. "Vice Captain Varess Dova."
The man said nothing at first. Only turned slightly in acknowledgment.
"We assumed you were the commanding officer," Varess said, her tone less formal. "The way your troops moved. The way you moved."
Still, silence.
Then, finally, he spoke.
"I'm sorry," he said. His voice was cold and precise, distorted slightly beneath the helm's filter. "But we don't have time for pleasantries. More will come back, and we don't have much time."
He gestured to the fallen. "Bring your wounded. Burn the rest. We can't bury them. Maybe someday, you'll return for their ashes."
It wasn't cruelty. Just reality, delivered without pretense.
Therya nodded grimly. She gave the order, and the remaining Flame Maidens began the grim task. Bodies were stacked quickly. Qi-fire ignited the makeshift pyres. The dead were sent off under a sky choked in sulfur and dusk.
The black-armored warriors didn't watch the fire. They simply turned and began their march back toward the ridge, toward the Stormguard encampment that waited beyond the pass.
Therya and Varess followed. Both limping now. Both watching the silent leader with growing unease.
"Who are they?" Varess asked under her breath.
Therya shook her head. "Not mercenaries. Not legionnaires. And not one of them broke formation. Did you see how the big one…"
"…Bruga," Varess muttered. "I heard one call him that."
They watched as Bruga fell into step behind the silent commander, grinning to himself like a wolf full of secrets.
"Why won't he speak to us?" Varess asked again.
"He already did," Therya replied.
The march continued through the ash fields toward the Stormguard's stone circle. The pyres still burning behind them. The answers left behind with the dead.
The march to the ridge was silent. No one spoke. Just the sound of armor shifting and boots striking stone.
Ahead, the Flame Maidens saw the encampment.
It wasn't makeshift.
The walls were layered with blackstone and embedded ward pylons. Not a tent or loose crate in sight. Only hard lines, sealed doors, reinforced barriers. This wasn't a camp. It was built to withstand siege.
One of the black-armored scouts stepped forward and placed a hand on a stone pillar. A sigil flared.
The silent leader turned his head slightly.
"Careful. Stay on the path, or you'll get burned."
The gates opened without a sound.
Therya looked up. On the map, this place was marked as a ruined circle. Abandoned terrain. But she'd seen a charcoal etching like this before, buried in the Fortress-Coven's archives. It wasn't just ruins.
It was forgotten for a reason.
They entered.
Once inside, the black-armored soldiers peeled off in formation. Not a word spoken. Not a single command barked. Only precision and discipline.
Then the silent leader removed his helm.
Dark elf. Virak'tai.
Pale eyes. Burn-scarred jaw. Stone-faced.
Instinctively, some of the Flame Maidens reached for their blades.
"Calm down, ladies," he rumbled, loosening his grip on his axe. Bruga, broad and soot-streaked, unclipped his mantle and shook his head. "Relax. If he meant you harm, we'd have let the Nerathil chew your bones on the slope."
Other helms came off. More Virak'tai. A few humans. No other races.
The dark elf stepped forward.
"I am Warden Nyzekh," he said. "Sorry for being rude. But it's part of our creed not to remove helmets in hostile ground."
Captain Therya stepped forward. "Captain Therya Ralin."
Vice Captain Varess added, "Varess Dova."
Nyzekh nodded. "Captain. Vice Captain. Come with me. I'll introduce you to our commander."
Another dark elf approached. Female. Lighter armor. Her expression was unreadable, her tone clear.
"I am Warden Yezari. Hospitalier Medical Detachment."
She addressed the Flame Maidens directly.
"Please bring all wounded and survivors. They will be checked. Quickly."
Therya raised an eyebrow. "We carry no rot. Our bloodline is immune."
Nyzekh spoke again, calm but firm.
"Still our protocol. If confirmed, maybe you'll tell us why."
Yezari turned without another word and began leading the wounded toward a sealed structure reinforced with black sigil plates and fire-treated stone.
Therya glanced at Varess.
"Who are these people?"
Nyzekh kept walking ahead without looking back.
Bruga just snorted again, clearly amused.
They followed Nyzekh through the inner compound. Past the ward pylons and sealed gates, through reinforced corridors lined with flame-treated stone. At the center of the command chamber, they found him.
The commander sat alone on a raised platform, eyes closed, breathing steady. No armor. No weapon in hand. Just the calm stillness of someone not more than thirty-five, seated in a meditative posture like he had all the time in the world.
He opened his eyes when they entered. He didn't speak. Not yet. But they knew who he was.