Chapter 6: The Ghost of the Northern Bridge
Time seemed to freeze, then stretched into a horrifying eternity.
For Theo, the world had narrowed to a single point—the cold glint of a descending sword blade, accompanied by the cruel sneer on the face behind it. The air felt thin in his lungs. This was the end. A nameless death on a forgotten border, carrying out a mad command from a prince he didn't even know.
He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable impact.
KLANG!
The deafening sound was not that of tearing flesh, but the violent clash of two steel blades, so fierce that the resulting sparks briefly illuminated Theo's pale face. He snapped his eyes open.
Before him, between himself and his attacker, a figure had appeared.
He hadn't come from the left or the right. He seemed to have grown from the shadows on the ground, a manifestation of darkness that had suddenly become solid. The figure wore the jet-black robes of a traveler, his hood pulled so low it shrouded his entire face in an artificial night. He was not toweringly tall or heavily muscled; his build was lean, yet his presence radiated a cold aura that seemed to freeze the air around him, chasing away the warmth from the torches.
The Kaelos soldier stumbled back, his eyes wide with shock, his sneer vanished and replaced by total confusion. The arm holding his sword still vibrated from the force of the impact. Where had this person come from? He had heard no footsteps, felt no disturbance in the air.
The battle around them paused for a heartbeat. The beleaguered Vaelmont soldiers and the superior Kaelos attackers alike froze, trying to process the anomaly that had just ripped through the logic of the battlefield.
Then, the figure moved.
He didn't run; he glided. His movements were so fluid, so efficient, they seemed unreal. He surged toward the nearest group of attackers, his jet-black sword held low, ready to reap.
For Theo, still sitting on the ground with a hammering heart, what happened next was not a fight; it was a silent, methodical, and terrifying slaughter.
The Wolf's Fang Formation... Kaelos never changes, the figure thought, a cold disdain in his mind. Full of aggression, minimal defense on the left flank. They attack with fury, not with thought. Fools. They are always fools.
His sword, an unadorned blade of black steel, danced in lethal arcs. He used no grand, sweeping swings, only short, precise movements of the wrist, designed for maximum efficiency. One nearly invisible twist, and a Kaelos soldier fell with a choked grunt, the artery in his neck severed before he could even raise his shield. Blood sprayed, blackening in the moonlight.
Two other soldiers, snapping out of their shock, charged him from the sides with enraged shouts. The figure didn't parry. He tilted his body slightly, allowing both swords to pass mere inches from his cloak, their whisper through the air audible. At the same moment, his blade swept low in a single, graceful, and merciless horizontal motion. There was no clang of metal. Only the horrific sound of tearing fabric and flesh. Both his opponents stopped short, staring at him in confusion, before collapsing to their knees, howling in agony as blood poured from their severed Achilles tendons.
Captain Philip Hanssen stared in disbelief. He was a highly skilled fighter, the top graduate of his academy. He could follow the movements of an ordinary combatant, predict their swings. But this figure... his movements had no "beginning" or "end." Each action flowed into the next, an unbroken chain of death. He wasn't just fighting; he was solving a problem. And the problem was every Kaelos soldier still standing.
He saw the figure surrounded by three enemies. Instinctively, Philip wanted to shout a warning, but the words caught in his throat. He could only watch, mesmerized by the horror.
The three Kaelos soldiers attacked in unison from three different directions—a pincer maneuver that should have been impossible to counter. But the hooded figure seemed to split into three. One shadow ducked under a horizontal slash, the blade passing over his hood. A second shadow stepped aside, avoiding a thrust aimed at his heart. And the third shadow—the real one—was already behind one of the attackers, the tip of his sword plunging into the gap in his back armor with a surgeon's precision. The other two fell before they even realized their comrade was dead, their swords slashing through the afterimage the figure had left behind.
To Theo, it was magic. It was an illusion. He saw with his own eyes the figure parry an attack on his right, yet at almost the same instant, an enemy to his left staggered back with a stab wound in his chest. It was as if there were an echo to his every action, a shadow that struck a split second before or after his actual move. He was a ghost dancing amidst death.
The Kaelos soldiers, once so confident and disciplined, were now gripped by pure panic. Their formation was shattered. Their discipline evaporated, replaced by primal terror. They were no longer fighting a weak platoon of the Vaelmont Guard; they were being hunted by an incomprehensible entity.
"THE BRIDGE!" Captain Hanssen roared, his voice hoarse, seizing the moment of total chaos. "COMPLETE THE MISSION! NOW!"
The shout snapped Theo and the remaining soldiers back to their senses. They scrambled back to the bridge, now moving with a renewed, desperate vigor. Their enemy was too busy trying to survive the black phantom to stop them.
With trembling hands, they poured the rest of the oil and lit the fire.
The time-weathered, dry wood of the northern Echo Bridge caught fire quickly. Flames leaped from pillar to pillar, devouring the wooden planks with a satisfying roar. In moments, the bridge became a giant bonfire, illuminating the night with an eerie orange glow, casting long shadows from the strewn corpses. The heat washed over the edge of the gorge.
The surviving Kaelos soldiers didn't wait. Their courage was broken. They screamed in terror, turned, and fled headlong into the darkness of the forest, pursued by the shadow of the impossible swordsman.
A heavy silence descended once more, now filled only by the crackling of the fire consuming the bridge and the low moans of the wounded Vaelmont soldiers.
"Fall back! Defensive formation!" Hanssen ordered, his voice strained as he tore a strip from his cloak to bind his bleeding arm. "Find the survivors! Get a headcount!"
The soldiers moved stiffly, their minds still reeling, as if waking from a nightmare. The mission was a success. Somehow, the mad mission was a success.
Philip Hanssen then turned, his eyes scanning the edge of the forest, searching for the figure who had saved them all. He wanted to ask. He wanted to thank him. He wanted to demand answers.
But there was no one there.
He walked to the edge of the gorge, peering into the shadows of the trees. Empty. The hooded figure had vanished as if he were a part of the darkness itself. There were no footprints. No sound of a broken twig. It was as if he had never been there at all.
Leaving Captain Hanssen and his trembling men with a burning bridge, a dozen enemy corpses, and a mystery colder and deeper than the chasm before them.
Who was that? Or... what was that?
And how could... how could Prince Eldrin Vaelmont have known he would be here?