The Wargon surged forward like a phantom through the mire, its enormous wheels churning through thick fog and treacherous earth. Blackwater slicked the rims. Mud groaned beneath the pressure of its monstrous weight. All around, Bleakroot Fen whispered with the language of damp rot — the croaking of unseen things, the slosh of hidden currents, the far-off weeping of wind through trees that looked more like twisted limbs than flora. The mists clung like wet gauze, slicking everything in cold breath.
Above them, the moon was little more than a half-dead scar, peeking in and out of the sky's tattered canopy.
Behind them — ever behind them — the monster gave chase.
Its form crashed through the fen's warped forest like a thunder made flesh. A malformed creature — reptilian in spine and scale, draconic in silhouette, yet far too grotesque to belong to any natural lineage. Two legs bore its bulk with unnatural agility, while arms, too long, too muscular, were tangled with overgrowth and rotted sinew. Its hands — if they could be called such — bore writhing masses of tree roots and meaty vines, soaked in a glistening variety of blood that didn't all look like animal.
Every few minutes, it lunged.
And every time, Nymei's smoke surged.
The Vel'kyren had abandoned a human for this. Its body — a roiling vortex of living vapor — coiled around the Wargon like an intelligent storm. Each strike, each explosive convulsion of corrupted biomass from the monster's limbs, was caught in the swirl of Nymei's defense and compressed — alchemized — reversed into kinetic retaliation. That fury, spun into air-blades, detonated with sonic speed, battering the beast back in bursts of screeching force.
But still it came. Undeterred. Unrelenting.
And atop it — unmoved through it all — stood the man.
He hadn't flinched once.
The knight on its skull stood like a grotesque effigy against the misted sky, his hooded helm an amalgamation of grotesquerie: a silver mask overlaid with stretched human face-flesh, pinned crudely to the front like some crude mockery of identity. The dried tissue fluttered faintly in the wind — as if the face tried to breathe.
His armor was... wrong. It wasn't metal. Not wholly. It was tight and sinewed, muscle-forged — a layer of sculpted red, pulsing faintly, sinews twitching under the outer skin as though the suit itself lived. No outer plating. Just exposed structure and imitation flesh, tight to the bone. Veins pulsed like twitching strings across his shoulders, wrapped around his spine like parasitic threads. His entire body gave the impression of something flayed and walking.
In his hand — a single, serrated blade. Too long to be human-wielded. Shaped like a surgeon's scalpel dragged into greatsword dimensions. And yet, he held it one-handed, the blade loose at his side. No strain in his arm. No tremor.
Just stillness.
When Nymei's air-bullets struck the beast's shoulder and shattered bone beneath the barkflesh — the knight groaned.
Just a sound.
Low. Irritated. As though the unraveling of its flesh was merely a bad itch on an inconvenient day.
He hadn't moved. Not once.
One day passed. Then another.
Time lost all feeling inside the Wargon. The world outside was ceaseless movement — the crashing thuds of the monster's pursuit, Nymei's breathy, whirling defense, the mist, the darkness. But within their walls, the silence was claustrophobic. A slow, suffocating weight.
Kairo sat stiffly, his back pressed against the interior frame, dagger clutched tightly in his fist. Every so often, his fingers twitched, knuckles whitening. Sweat had dried on his skin, replaced by a cold sheen of anxious anticipation.
How long can this last? he thought. How long before the beast tires — or we do?
Then the voices came.
A sudden flicker — like wind rustling through petals.
"Ohhh, look at that thing!" Lalula's voice danced, manic and delighted. She sounded almost drunk on the chaos. "So many moving parts. All that rotten meat. I want to kiss it, Kairo, kiss it right on its stinking mouth."
Kairo flinched slightly. "Lalula... stop."
"Now's exactly the time, darling." Her voice rippled, sweet and thorned. "This is life happening. Don't miss it."
Then came Lurue — distant, cold, with his signature adolescent rasp.
"You should've never come here in the first place." A sound like wind sliding off frozen metal. "But here we are. Death knocking again. You're lucky you look good in dirt."
"Charming as always..." Kairo muttered, exhaling slowly.
Then came the final voice. The slowest. The oldest.
"I've seen these things before..." Xuran murmured, his voice thick as peat, slow and deep as roots shifting beneath centuries. "In a different war. A different forest. This kind of hunger... always ends badly."
Kairo clenched his jaw. "If you three have advice, give it. Otherwise... shut up."
But the voices didn't respond — at least not in words. Just the sound of petals rustling against bark in the back of his mind.
Across from him, Liora sat with her spear resting against her shoulder. She wasn't trembling — not exactly — but her muscles were coiled so tightly beneath her skin, they looked carved in stone. Her eyes darted toward the window slits again and again. The noise. The presence. The pressure. It was dragging old instincts from her bones.
And Vivy... silent, yet no less alert. She had positioned herself by the window, crossbow resting on the sill, gaze locked on the pursuing silhouette. Her shoulders rose and fell slowly, her lips pressed into a hard, flat line. Occasionally her thumb ran along a notch on the weapon's grip. Not nervousness — calculation.
Luke, at the helm, was nothing but motion.
His hands gripped the beast's reins with brutal tension. His arms stiffened with each command. He could barely hear what happened behind — only the shrieks of air splitting under Nymei's defense, the roars, the pounding, the impossible rhythm of pursuit.
He didn't dare look back.
Only forward.
Through the mist. Past the swamp. Toward whatever waited beyond Bleakroot Fen.
But even without looking, he could feel the shape behind them.
The knight's gaze. Locked.
Watching.
Judging.
Waiting.
Why?
What did he want?
What was his purpose?
Was this monster merely a vessel — or was the real danger not the beast but the rider? The mind behind that motionless helm?
Kairo felt those questions, too. They churned in his head like smoke with nowhere to go.
He inhaled.
Exhaled.
Then pushed the thoughts away.
None of that matters. Not now. Survive first. Then wonder.
And the Wargon pressed forward into the dark.
The black canopy of the fen hung over them like a sorrowful shroud, broken only by the pale fracture of moonlight slicing through the crooked branches above. The mist thickened around the Wargon, swirling like veins of breath through the dying night. A tension—tight as wire—threaded through every heartbeat.
Luke sat hunched forward, hands clenched white around the reign-leathers looped around the beast's horns. His eyes glimmered not with fear, but with something stranger—a kind of fervent desperation, almost joy. His beast's breaths came in heavy gulps now, shuddering with fatigue, the sheen of sweat glinting faintly off its sinewed flanks. Every footfall shook the Wargon slightly, the lurching rhythm betraying its exhaustion.
But then—there it was.
A fissure in the dark.
A line of pale, luminous clarity on the horizon—the forest thinning, the mist unraveling. The border of Bleakroot Fen.
"The end," Luke muttered, voice barely a whisper, swallowed by the wind. "We're almost out..."
He wasn't the only one who saw it.
Kairo had been crouched near the rear, one hand on the edge of the Wargon's side, the other wrapped around his dagger's hilt. At first he didn't believe his eyes. Then he blinked—and the light was still there. A tremor passed through him, an exhale that sounded more like disbelief than relief.
Liora's shoulders lifted, her spine straightening as though the weight she carried lost a portion of its burden. Her grip on the long-hafted spear eased, and she allowed herself a breath.
Even Vivy, whose brows had been a knot of calculation for hours, finally eased her crossbow's tension. Her lips parted—almost a smile.
And Nymei, now in its Vel'kyren form, billowing like smoke along the Wargon's rear, let out a low, amused murmur.
"Almost there," it cooed, its voice too soft to trust. "Would be a shame if—"
A sound cut the world in half.
A groan. Low. Deep. Mechanical. No, worse—organic and deliberate.
It came from the knight.
Atop the back of the beast that had given chase for days, the figure finally moved. Slowly. Like rusted iron creaking to life after centuries of stillness.
The knight.
His helm—twisted, stretched, with taut, stitched skin pinned grotesquely across the visor—tilted down ever so slightly, locking onto the same escape line the others saw. Beneath him, the monster's strides faltered. The pulpy flesh around its wounded shoulder sloshed unnaturally. And then—he moved.
With a sound like leather snapping under water, he shifted his weight.
The knight's entire figure tensed—shoulders taut, sinewed red armor pulsing. The armor—there were no plates. Only cords of muscular mimicry, as if his skin itself had been flayed and redressed in a suit of sculpted agony. Every vein throbbed, pulsed with heat. Symbols—etched into the muscle-tissue like surgical brandings—flared.
He raised the sword.
It was massive. Serrated like a butcher's regret, blackened and jagged at the edge, honed to a scalpel's whisper at the center. It hummed with bloodlust.
And with a roarless motion—without fanfare—he swung.
A single arc.
The blade cut clean through the neck of the creature beneath him. The sound—flesh tearing, bone shattering, sinew unraveling—rang like a prayer made of bones. The monster's head flew, trailing a thick, blackish-red mist.
Vivy screamed.
Liora stumbled, eyes blown wide.
Even Nymei stilled, the swirling mass that was its body flattening mid-flight, as if arrested by a moment it had not foreseen.
But the knight didn't fall.
As the behemoth's body collapsed beneath him, the knight leapt—no, launched—himself through the air. His movement wasn't graceful. It wasn't clean. It was force incarnate. He crashed down onto one of the creature's thick arms, planted his boots like stakes, and swung again.
This time, he severed the limb.
But he wasn't done.
He planted his serrated sword deep into the arm—then, impossibly, lifted it.
A whole arm.
Twice the size of the Wargon. Thicker than any tree in Bleakroot. Veins still twitching. Nails like twisted oaks.
And then—
He threw it.
It happened in a second. A blink.
Kairo's mind couldn't register it fast enough—only the aftermath.
The dismembered limb soared through the mist, spinning with unnatural velocity, cutting through air like a comet of flesh and bone.
Luke barely saw it in time—just the shadow, the rupture of wind, the impact—
BOOM.
The Wargon rocked violently as the limb crashed into the ground just ahead—blocking the narrow pass. A mass of gore, bone, and clawed knuckle completely sealed the mouth of the exit path.
Silence.
Not the peaceful kind. The kind that hisses.
Kairo stumbled forward, catching himself against the Wargon's side. Liora looked back, eyes still filled with disbelief.
Vivy didn't speak. Her mouth opened, but no sound came. Her breath was gone—ripped from her lungs by the sudden whiplash of hope collapsing into ruin.
Luke's grip on the reins tightened until his knuckles went white. Blood began to pool beneath his nails from the pressure. His mouth barely moved, but he said it anyway—
"...Fuck."
the knight still stood. Still staring.
He didn't speak.
He didn't need to.
He had made his declaration.
And now—
they were trapped.
The moment cracked.
The knight—silent until now—shifted with unholy intent.
His body hunched slightly forward, as if uncoiling from long stillness, each motion drawn with an eerie grace that belied the sheer weight of the armor fused to his flesh. The taut red sinew plating flexed over his body, the pulsing cords bulging as though the armor itself had veins — and beneath it, some great animalistic tension writhed, bracing.
The air around him warped.
Not from sorcery. Not from spellwork.
From pure malice — so concentrated, so saturated, that it bent the world around it.
But then it came.
A sound. No—a wave.
Monsters. Crawling, slithering, limping, flying—descending. A writhing sea of malformed things. Some chittered on too many legs, others galloped with hooved limbs and split skulls. Jawless beasts with eyes in their torsos. Screaming avians with shattered wings, dragging themselves like puppets on nerves. Undead. Twisted. Devolved.
The knight stopped. He stood his ground.
And for the briefest instant, he didn't move. Didn't flinch.
He watched, helmet tilted slightly. Judging.
For a single heartbeat, he simply stood—watching.
Then—his armor flexed.
Every line of sinew beneath that red, muscle-fused plating rippled. The interlocking tissue plates around his chest spasmed, twitching as if breathing. His gauntlets cracked audibly as his fingers clenched tight. The thin, pale skin pinned to the front of his stretched-helm — stitched tight like a second face — flushed red. Veins writhed beneath it like worms awakening.
And then—he roared.
A bellow so deep it vibrated through the marrow of the earth.
No language. No words. Just sound — raw force, as if hate had been compressed into a scream. A thunderous, bestial, primal bellow that cracked the mist open like glass. The fen quaked. Creatures within hundred paces burst like meat balloons — their bones shattering from the force, their flesh ripping as though trying to escape their own bodies.
The roar ended, but the violence did not.
Then—he moved.
Without blade. Without any weapon.
He didn't need one.
He crashed into the horde like a god of slaughter, a storm bound in flesh and blood-soaked armor. His foot caved in the skull of a beast the size of a bear. His elbow struck another and snapped its upper body backward like a stick. One of the beasts leapt—he caught it by the jaw, ripped it off, and hurled its twitching carcass into a swarm behind him.
Every motion was a weapon—every step a slaughter.
He tore through them.
Literally. Hands plunged into torsos and came back full of ribs. He crushed throats beneath his knees. When one beast tried to flank him, he grabbed it by the shoulder and ripped its arm off, then used it to beat two more creatures into pulp.
With every movement, his body strained unnaturally. Not like a trained warrior — no, like a thing engineered for violence. A construct of brutality driven not by strategy, but sheer compulsion.
His face remained unreadable beneath that helm of tortured steel and pinned skin, but his intent was clear.
Forward.
Through everything.
He is coming for them.
And nothing — not flesh, not bone, not blood — would stop him.
Back at the Wargon, panic shimmered just beneath the surface.
Kairo's jaw clenched as he watched the carnage unfold behind them. His dagger felt light—too light. His hands itched. His veins burned with anticipation, nerves drawn taut like harp strings. Beside him, Liora turned her spear downward, planting its butt into the Wargon's floor as she stared, wide-eyed, knuckles pale.
Vivy leaned on the railing, gaze flicking between the oncoming knight and the massive arm that still blocked the exit like a damned wall of meat and bone. Her expression was grim, calculating, yet her pulse raced so hard she could hear it thundering inside her ears. Her eyes kept twitching to the bodies of the nearby fallen monsters.
And Luke—
Luke dismounted.
The Wargon jerked slightly as he landed. His boots struck the moss-choked ground, and his cloak whipped in the rising wind. He turned to face them all.
"We can't run," he said, tone calm but sharp as a cracked blade. "We won't outrun that."
He pointed to the severed limb, still steaming, still twitching.
"So here's what we're doing. My beast and Vivy—you're taking care of that arm. We clear that path or we die here."
Vivy blinked. "I—what?"
Luke cut her off. "You can control corpses. Use that flower power of yours. Let the dead help you drag that damn thing. I'll leave my beast to assist—it can pull."
She didn't hesitate. She simply nodded once, expression cold.
"Got it."
Luke turned to the others. "Kairo. Liora. You're with me. We hold the line."
Kairo hissed in agreement, eyes already narrowing. "Finally."
Liora adjusted her grip on her spear, lips taut. "Whatever it takes."
Then Luke's eyes found Nymei.
It hovered behind them—half smoke, half shape. Its form was almost intangible now, fluid shadows coiling like ghostly silk. But its eyes were alert, glowing with that lazy mischief that always meant something deadly was about to happen.
Luke raised a hand, about to give instruction—then froze.
The knight—he was already halfway there.
A shiver rippled through Luke's spine. Something deep. Primal.
He didn't give Nymei orders.
He gave it trust.
"I'll leave him to you," he said. Quiet. Certain.
Nymei blinked—its grin deepening. "What, just me? No backup? So rude."
Luke said nothing else.
Nymei sighed. Its shadowy coils grew long. Tendrils of living vapor stretched across the Wargon like a blooming night flower.
"Fine," it muttered, "I'll entertain the knight. Hope he's a talkative guy."
It shot off the Wargon, its form stretching into a lance of dusk and wraith-smoke. It struck the ground in front of the knight like a meteor, and in that moment—everything fractured.
Luke turned away.
"Vivy. Now."
She moved. Her hand stretched toward a nearby corpse, fingers flexing. Black vines erupted from her sleeve, curling into the corpse. It stood, shaking, half-alive. Then another. Then another. A trio of broken bodies limped toward the severed arm.
Luke sprinted to the edge of the Wargon, shouting, "Go!"
Liora vaulted off behind him, spear gleaming under the moonlight. Kairo followed, his dagger already breathing with the voice of Lalula in his ear, laughing with delight.
Behind them, the world was chaos.
A knight. A storm of monsters. A wall of gore. An exit not yet earned.
And the fragile, defiant hope of escape—
held together by time and madness.