The night before the trap was a held breath.
Jin walked the perimeter of the camp one last time, the Commanding Flameaura radiating from him not as a blaze, but as a steady, banked heat—a promise of shelter and strength. Soldiers straightened as he passed, their eyes no longer hollow with fatigue, but sharp with the focused glint of the hunt. He had given them the wolfpack's patience. Now, they would need its teeth.
At the command tent, Serena was waiting, her silhouette framed by the map-lantern's glow.
"The scouts confirm it," she said without preamble, her finger tracing a line on the parchment.
"They've taken the bait. Their forward battalions are massing behind the Willow Gate, ready to chase our 'retreat.' Their commander is Vex, one of Molana's personal hounds. He's aggressive, arrogant… and predictable."
"Good," Jin said, his voice low. "Arrogance makes the best prey. Kaelen?"
The archery general stepped from the shadows, his face grim.
"The Shadow Volley teams are in position along the Blightwood Ridge. They have a clear line of sight to the kill zone. But Jin… the traitor, Commander Ferron. He's been asking pointed questions about our fallback coordinates. He's making his move."
Jin's jaw tightened. The betrayal was a splinter in his side, festering. "Let him. Have Riven's quietest wraiths watch him. I want to know who he signals, and how. When the trap springs, we spring ours on him."
Serena placed a hand on his vambrace. "Be careful. A cornered rat is most dangerous."
"A rat," Jin agreed, meeting her golden eyes, "is still just a rat."
Dawn. The Feigned Retreat.
It began with a perfectly orchestrated stumble.
Jin's front line, the Phoenix Wall, gave ground with convincing desperation. Shields splintered under a renewed barrage from the city's mages. Men cried out, falling back in ragged unison. From the walls, a triumphant roar went up as the massive Willow Gate groaned open.
Vex led the charge, astride a nightmare steed wreathed in the same black mist as his cavalry. He smelled blood in the water.
"They break!" he bellowed, his voice carrying on enchanted wind. "Crush them! Leave no one for the crows!"
Like a black tide, Molana's elite guard poured onto the plain, chasing Jin's seemingly routed forces into the funnel of the valley—the kill zone.
Jin, watching from a camouflaged vantage point on the ridge, felt his pulse steady. The first piece was in play.
"Now, Kaelen."
The archery general raised a single, rune-etched arrow. He drew, and the hum of gathering energy was like a hornet's nest stirred to life. He loosed it not at the enemy, but high into the air, where it burst in a silent shower of violet light.
The Huntsman's Lure was sprung.
From the ridges on both sides of the valley, the world went dark. Not with shadow, but with a sudden, swallowing absence of light as Kaelen's elite archers activated their cloaking runes. One moment, the slopes were bare. The next, a thousand bowstrings sang as one.
This was not a volley. It was a culling.
The Shadow Arrows lived up to their name. They didn't fly in arcs; they slithered through the air, bending around raised shields, slipping between armor plates, finding the gaps in the cursed mist with predatory intelligence.
Enemy cavalrymen toppled from their saddles, not with cries of pain, but with choked gurgles as darkness filled their lungs.
Vex's charge faltered, momentum turning to chaos.
"Shields! Magical wards!" he screamed, but the precision was devastating. His lines were not just attacked; they were dissected.
Jin raised his sword. "Phoenix Wall, reform! Riven, hold the gate!"
The retreating soldiers, their discipline flawless, pivoted. Shields locked. Spears leveled. The living fortress solidified, not in front of the enemy, but behind them, cutting off their retreat to the city.
From the ground before the still-open Willow Gate, the earth erupted. Riven and his company of spectral warriors rose, silent and terrible, their ghostly forms solidifying into a second, unbreakable wall of ancient steel and colder fury. The gate was shut in the enemy's face.
The trap had closed. Vex and his vanguard were caught in the jaws of the wolfpack.
In the Camp: The Traitor's Gambit.
As the battle crescendoed on the plain, Commander Ferron moved. He'd seen the violet signal. He knew the trap was closing on Vex. His last act of sabotage had to be now.
He slipped into the siege engine park, where the great ballistae and shield-generators hummed. His target was the Aegis Ward Generator, the device protecting the camp's command post from magical artillery. He carried a small, crystal vial—liquid shadow, a gift from his true mistress.
He never saw the wraiths.
Two of Riven's most silent specters melted from the air behind him. Cold, ethereal hands gripped his wrists just as he raised the vial to smash it on the generator's core.
"The General," a voice like grating stone whispered in his ear, "would like a word."
On the Ridge: The Counter-Trap.
Jin allowed himself a fraction of a second of grim satisfaction. The strategy was working. Vex was surrounded, his forces crumbling.
Then the ground beneath the command ridge lurched.
It wasn't an explosion. It was a violent, swallowing collapse. A fifty-foot section of the ridge, directly beneath Kaelen's primary archery nest, dissolved into a sinkhole of churning darkness and shattered rock. The screams of archers were cut short as they vanished into the pit.
"Sappers! Earth-mages!" Serena yelled, already firing arrows down into the emerging tunnel mouths.
But these were no ordinary sappers. From the tunnels poured Molana's "reinforcements cloaked in shadow"—not cavalry, but Stone-Skin Berserkers.
Hulking, mute brutes whose flesh was fused with jagged rock, immune to arrows and driven by a single, implanted command:
Destroy the command post.
The battle was now two battles. One on the plain, where Jin was the hunter. One here on the ridge, where he was suddenly the prey.
"Serena, with me! Protect Kaelen!" Jin roared, leaping down into the chaos, his sword already ablaze with dragonfire.
He carved through the first Berserker, but the shock of the blow rattled up his arm. They were as hard as mountain roots.
His bloodlines, strained by the complex mental command of the battlefield, flared in protest. A wave of fiery anger (dragon) and cold, ruthless calculation (demon) warred in his skull. For a dizzying moment, he saw the battle not as a commander, but as a predator assessing weak points on a herd of stone beasts.
'The left knee-joint. The fissure in the rock over the heart. Inefficient to slash. Thrust. Pierce.'
Blinking the vision away, he adjusted. "Aim for the joints! The seams in the stone!" he bellowed to his guards, his own strikes becoming precise, piercing jabs rather than sweeping cuts.
The King's Hall, Capital: The Descent
Hundreds of miles away, Queen Molana received the first psychic pulse of the battle's turn. Her scrying pool showed Vex encircled, her Berserkers engaged. Her face, already pale with rage, went corpse-white.
Her son lounged on a divan, peeling a blood-orange. "See? A minor setback. Send more men."
"You fool," she hissed, the words dripping with venom. "He is not just a boy with a sword. He is a system. A convergence."
She turned from him, her mind made up. Her son was a dead branch on the family tree. It was time to burn the forest to save the land.
In the deepest, most lightless chamber below the palace, she stood before an altar that was not stone, but petrified shadow. Here, she communed with the source of the cursed runes: The Whisperer in the Deep, a fragment of an elder thing that craved chaos.
"The hunt turns against the hunter," the voice slithered in her mind, soundless and cold. "Your offering?"
"The life-essence of my line," Molana whispered, drawing a ritual dagger. Not her own—she was still useful. But she pricked her finger, letting a single, dark-drop of her royal blood fall onto the altar. It was a promise. A contract.
"The soul of my firstborn, the Crown Prince. Upon his… untimely passing."
The shadows in the room congealed, pleased.
"Then let us raise the stakes. The city may fall. But the land he seeks to save will wither before him."
A pulse of profound, sickening energy flowed out from the altar, through ley lines, towards the battlefield and beyond.
On the Ridge: The Cost.
Jin, Serena, and Kaelen fought back-to-back, a whirlwind of steel, arrow, and flame against the tide of stone. They were holding, but barely. The Berserkers were endless.
Then, a new sound. Not a roar, but a deep, tectonic groan from the direction of the Spirit Forest, far on the horizon. A plume of sickly, greenish-black energy erupted into the sky, visible even from this distance.
The System's voice rang in Jin's head, urgent and stark:
[ALERT: Cataclysmic Curse Detected. 'Soul-Blight' ritual activated. Target: Ley Nexus - Spirit Forest. Ecological & Spiritual Corruption Imminent. Time to Total Blight: 72 Hours.]
Jin's blood ran cold. The Spirit Forest. The heart of his homeland's magic. The source of their ironwood. The home of Serena's people.
Molana hadn't just reinforced the city. She had launched a final, spiteful strike at everything he held dear.
The revelation was a physical blow. His demonic bloodline surged forward, offering boundless, ruthless power to slaughter everything here and fly to the forest. His dragon bloodline roared, demanding he protect his immediate pack, his soldiers dying around him.
The conflict was too much. A searing pain split his skull. He stumbled, his Commanding Flame aura flickering wildly.
"JIN!" Serena's cry was raw with fear.
He saw the opening a Berserker saw. A massive stone fist, aimed for his unguarded head. He couldn't move.
An arrow sprouted from the Berserker's eye-socket. Not Serena's. This one flared with pure, golden sunlight. The beast crumbled to dust.
Through the clearing smoke, a figure walked. Old, robed, serene. Old Man Shenwu lowered a simple bow, his expression unreadable.
"A teacher," he said, his voice cutting through the din, "sometimes must leave his garden to prune a particularly troublesome weed.
" He glanced at the distant, blighted plume. "Your battle here is won, child. The greater war has just begun. Stabilize your spirit. Your people need their General, not a raging beast."
The truth of it, and the old man's calming presence, acted as a balm. Jin forced the warring bloodlines down, not merging them, but compartmentalizing them. The fire for his home. The cunning for his enemy. He rose, his aura solidifying, burning brighter than ever.
On the plain, Vex's forces had been annihilated. The Willow Gate was firmly in Riven's grip. The military victory was his.
But as Jin looked from the captured gate, to the captured traitor being dragged forward, and finally to the poisonous scar on the distant horizon, he felt no triumph.
Only the heavy, cold weight of the next, more terrible hunt.
"Secure the city," he commanded, his voice hollow with the weight of the future. "Bring me the traitor. And summon every general. We do not rest. We have a forest to save, and a queen to bury."