The Pride Army, in humanity's darkest hour.
Entry One: The Pride Domain's Final Stand
The atmosphere in the Pride army was paradoxical—high morale despite abysmal odds.
Soldiers sang bawdy songs around campfires, traded impossible survival stories, and placed bets on how many Narkals each man could kill before dying.
One would say that it was denial, but defiance would be more accurate.
They knew they were going to die. They simply refused to do it quietly.
"They really thought they could win?" Alice asked, reading over his shoulder.
"They knew they couldn't," Ashen replied, pen still moving. "But they fought like they could anyway. That was the point."
Two men led that army.
General Rowan Vance… the Pride Domain's shield. A man forged from steel and impossible charges, who'd led a thousand soldiers against ten thousand Narkals and somehow survived.
His presence filled rooms without effort, his commands carried absolute authority, and his soldiers would follow him into hell itself.
Because he'd lead them out the other side. He always had.
Marshal-Adjunct Shun Morikawa, Rowan's right hand. Foreign features, perpetually exhausted expression, fought like killing was just another chore on an endless list. Soldiers always talked about how he'd cleared entire divisions without breaking a sweat, as if bored by the slaughter.
Yet he followed Rowan with unwavering loyalty, never seeking his own glory despite having the strength to claim it.
"You admired them…" Alice observed.
"I did." Ashen's voice softened. "They were... everything the Pride army represented. Rowan's indomitable will and Morikawa's unshakeable competence. Together, they were unstoppable."
"...But they stopped anyway."
"Everyone stops eventually."
'You did not…' Alice left the last bit unsaid.
The Narkal tide came without warning.
Ashen wrote about the demihumans' fatal miscalculation. How they'd underestimated the threat until it was too late. How by the time they realized the true size of the tide, all they could do was die trying to penetrate the blockade to reach safety.
He wrote about Rowan's speech… how the general had killed hope deliberately, replacing it with something stronger: Pride.
"Let them gorge on our flesh and defile our corpses, but they will never touch our will to cut down one more beast!"
The words flowed onto the page, and Ashen felt a certain feeling resonate in his chest.
This was history, True history. Not the sanitized version told in textbooks, but the bloody reality of men choosing to die so others could live.
Alice was quiet now, watching him write with an expression he couldn't quite read.
The Riven Formation blazed across the battlefield.
He detailed how Rowan had orchestrated two million soldiers like a conductor with an orchestra. How the formation had allowed them to kite the Narkals, strike from unexpected angles, retreat before counterattacks could land.
How it had turned certain annihilation into merely catastrophic losses.
"The forest," Alice murmured. "That was the turning point."
"The forest bought them time," Ashen agreed. "Nothing more, but time was all they needed."
Three-quarters of the Pride army died in two days of fighting.
The number sat in bold on the page: 1.5 million dead out of 2 million.
Mountains of corpses… Valleys filled with bodies... Trees painted red with blood.
And through it all, Rowan Vance had channeled mana without rest, keeping his formation active, keeping his soldiers alive… at least those who could still be kept alive.
"He never stopped fighting," Alice noted. "But he knew it was hopeless. Few could do the same… I wonder what events had shaped him to have such a character…?"
Ashen paused, pen hovering. "For him, giving up wasn't an option. When you're the only thing standing between humanity and extinction, you don't get to quit. You just... keep going."
He resumed writing.
Four hundred thousand survivors emerged from the forest.
They'd stumbled into daylight, glowing faintly with residual formation energy,
But the reprieve was temporary.
Because in the original history, there were no demihumans that came to the rescue. Every last one of them had already died trying to breach the blockade to reach their empire.
So the humans stood alone against the Narkal threat, but with such low numbers, buying more time seemed an impossible notion.
…and just like that… despite the Pride army's best struggles… the tide had already achieved its purpose.
Cassius Asta's revenge.
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Ashen's hand slowed as he reached this part.
Writing about Cassius felt different from writing about Rowan or the Pride army. Those were tragedies born of circumstance and duty.
Cassius was a tragedy born of choice.
But that was just Ashen's perspective. He never truly knew what passed through that man's head.
The Astrologer's History.
Cassius Asta had been a hero once. One of seven champions sent to infiltrate Narkal territory and discover the source of their endless numbers.
He was the only one who returned.
What he'd seen in those territories had broken something fundamental inside him.
The Ghost, Secrets. The altar. The multicolored stone that beat with stolen faith.
And the knowledge that humanity's extinction was inevitable.
Ashen took all the scattered information and, not unlike a puzzle, pieced back together the true events that had unfolded.
"He gave up," Alice said quietly. "Unlike Rowan, he gave up."
"He did." Ashen's pen moved across the page. "He saw the future and decided it wasn't worth fighting for. So he orchestrated humanity's end on his own terms."
"...But Alice, don't forget that he had the concept of hope artificially stripped away from him, so there's that…"
Ashen reminded, not for the sake of defending the man… but because he had also experienced his hope, identity, and much more being removed from his being for short minutes.
…And the horror of those minutes still haunted him until now. He knew that it would also probably haunt him for the rest of his life.
scrib…scrib…scrib…
The Narkal tide hadn't been random. It had been summoned, guided, and weaponized.
This ensured the tide would breach through to human territories. The Pride army wasn't enough, and neither were the insufficient defenses the subsequent domains tried to muster in so little time.
Everything had been calculated.
The Pride Domain's fall… The breach of the Great Wall… The tide sweeping all the way to Paradise, capital of the Lust Domain.
Millions dead. Domains devastated. Humanity pushed to the brink.
All because one man had looked into the future, despaired, and when he looked within, he found no hope left to fight that despair with.
But he was wrong.
"The system awakened," Alice read aloud as Ashen wrote. " And the emergency protocol was activated."
"The Sins and Themas integrated forcefully," Ashen continued writing. "Every human stable enough to withstand the process was suddenly transformed into a pathwalker. Powers that normally took decades to cultivate appeared overnight."
It had saved them.
It was nowhere near complete salvation. The losses were still catastrophic. But it was at least enough to turn extinction into mere devastation.
Cassius's carefully orchestrated apocalypse had been thwarted by something he couldn't predict: the system's intervention.
He looked down at the pages he'd filled.
There were dozens of them, covered in their encoded language. Symbols and numbers that would look like artistic gibberish to anyone else but told a complete history to those who could read it.
"How do you feel?" Alice asked.
Ashen closed his eyes, focusing inward on the sensation he'd been monitoring since he started writing.
His pathway resonated… and the representation of his Sloth appeared before him as he focused on the concept inwardly.
"Halfway," he said. "Maybe a bit more."
"That's good progress for one day's work." Alice rested her head on his shoulder. "But there's still more history to chronicle, isn't there?"
"Much more." Ashen opened his eyes and looked at the notebook. "This was just the framework. The broad strokes. I'll need to go deeper, like specific battles, maybe even individual moments. In short, I'll target the smaller truths that the big picture glosses over."
"Then we'll do it together." Alice's hand found his. "Just like the cipher. Our little project."
Ashen squeezed her hand in return.
They sat surrounded by encoded history, chronicling events that had happened and hadn't happened, that were true despite being changed. Ashen took his pathway feedback as a compass to ensure the truth of history.
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