The map did not stop moving.
Even after General Ignis stepped away, even after the room's lights dimmed into night-cycle calibration, the hologram of Assembia continued to breathe. Red zones pulsed softly, irregularly, as if reacting to something beneath the surface—something unseen, but inevitable.
I stood beside him still.
Neither of us spoke for a while.
The hum of the Monitoring Center filled the silence, layered and constant. Researchers rotated shifts without announcement. Tactical officers exchanged data slates. Somewhere behind us, a containment alarm chimed briefly before being silenced. Life continued—not because it was safe to do so, but because stopping would mean acknowledging how fragile everything truly was.
I watched the red territories creep by fractions of a unit.
It was barely noticeable.
But I noticed.
"Sir," I said quietly, breaking the stillness. My voice sounded thinner than I expected in that vast room. "Does the Mythril Empire… have alliances outside Assembia?"
Ignis turned slightly, his expression unreadable.
I swallowed once and continued, forcing the words out evenly.
"Contacts with other continents. Bastions beyond this territory."
My eyes remained on the map.
"Particularly," I added, "the Sunspire."
For a moment, nothing changed.
Then Ignis exhaled slowly through his nose.
"Months ago," he said, "we managed to establish long-range Axiom resonance contact."
My pulse quickened.
"With Sunspire Bastion?" I asked, already knowing the answer I feared—and hoped for.
"Yes," he said. "An alliance."
The word landed heavier than I expected.
"We're still negotiating certain terms," Ignis continued. "Bureaucracy. Resource commitments. Military jurisdiction. But thanks to Eeza—" he waved a dismissive hand, casually speaking the king's name as if it belonged to a drinking companion rather than a ruler, "—we managed to bridge the gap. Sunspire acted as a relay. From there, we reached another continent's bastion."
Another.
My fingers curled slowly at my side.
"We're in the process of contacting more," Ignis added. "It's slow. Dangerous. Long-distance Axiom communication attracts attention."
Blight attention.
"I see," I said.
The words were neutral.
My expression was not.
Something inside my chest tightened—not fear, not relief, but something colder. Sharper. Calculating.
Sunspire.
The name echoed in my skull, heavy with memory and unfinished ghosts.
This was not coincidence.
One step closer.
Ignis glanced at me from the corner of his eye. His brow furrowed—not in suspicion, but curiosity. A veteran's instinct catching a shift in posture, a tension that didn't belong to a cadet simply absorbing information.
He studied me for a heartbeat longer.
Then he looked back at the map.
"Tomorrow will be a busy day," he said quietly.
His gaze rested on a cluster of red-lit zones near the frontier, their edges fraying.
I followed his gaze.
Part of the map pulsed, then returned to its normal light.
I didn't think too much of it and walked towards back to my cadet group.
—
SOUTHERN FRONTLINES ID. 0473 — 1900 HOURS (7pm)
The camp was loud.
Steam hissed from Axiom-powered engines as armored trains prepared for departure, their massive iron frames trembling under pressure. Conduits glowed a strained blue as engineers shouted readings to one another, hands flying over valves and glyph-etched control wheels.
Stretchers lined the gravel pathways.
Some carried wounded soldiers—men and women wrapped in blood-soaked bandages, eyes glassy with shock, breaths shallow and uneven. Medics moved quickly among them, pressing runes to torn flesh, injecting stabilizing Axiom compounds, murmuring reassurances they themselves did not believe.
Other stretchers did not move.
Bodies lay still beneath tarps marked with unit sigils. Boots protruded. Hands stiffened in final positions—some clenched, some open, as if still reaching for something that had already slipped away.
Supply crates were being loaded in frantic rhythm—purification charges, rations, ammunition, spare Axiom capacitors. Everything that could be salvaged was being salvaged.
Everything that couldn't was being abandoned.
This wasn't a deployment.
It was a retreat.
Soldiers stood near the perimeter with several officers, watching the chaos unfold. Orders were being shouted, repeated, rewritten mid-sentence as conditions changed faster than plans could adapt.
Then—
The air screamed.
A pressure wave slammed into the camp, knocking soldiers off their feet as a tower along the outer watchline detonated in a flash of corrupted light.
"CONTACT—!" someone shouted.
Another blast followed.
"SIR, THE BLIGHT!!!"
The warning came too late.
The ground darkened.
The Blight rolled in like a tide with no water—reality itself thinning, dissolving into a crawling mass of gory flesh and distortion. It devoured the ground as it advanced, Axiom signatures collapsing into static as the wave passed over them.
"REPORT TO THE HEADQUARTERS TENT!" an officer screamed. "CONTACT THE GRAND FRONTLINES—NOW!"
Then the Blight answered.
Something rose from within it.
At first, it looked like debris—twisted armor, broken weapons, tangled limbs dragged along by the wave. Then it stood.
The creature was wrong.
It was made of bodies.
Not stacked. Merged.
Faces stretched across a malformed torso, mouths frozen in silent screams or open in impossible angles. Arms protruded at irregular intervals, hands fused together, fingers twitching as if still remembering how to grasp a weapon. Those armors are recognizable imbued with the fallen unit markings.
Its head—or what passed for one—tilted upward. From a split where a chest should have been, light began to condense.
Axiom.
But corrupted.
Compressed into a frequency enough to make a soldier's vision blur.
"No—" someone whispered.
The creature fired.
A lance of condensed Axiom screamed through the air and struck the headquarters tower dead-center.
The impact wasn't just physical.
The structure imploded inward, not outward, collapsing as if its internal truth had been deleted. A follow-up explosion rippled through the ruins, not with heat, but with silence.
Then—
Everything went wrong.
The communication array didn't just shatter.
It vanished.
The Axiom frequency anchoring the base to the Grand Frontlines collapsed, severed by the blast. The signal didn't drop—it inverted, folding back on itself, creating a null resonance field that scrambled outgoing transmissions and masked the camp's signature entirely.
To the main base—the data of the southern frontline base is constant, as if it is not under distress.
The Blight had cut the military frontline of reality's ledger.
"WE'VE LOST CONTACT!" a technician screamed, frantically adjusting a shattered console. "The frequency's gone—no, it's not gone—it's being overwritten!"
The wave surged forward.
Tents dissolved as the Blight passed through them, fabric unraveling into nothing. Soldiers screamed as corruption crawled up their legs, devouring Axiom from the inside out. Some collapsed instantly, bodies hollowing before they hit the ground.
Others kept moving.
Too long.
Their eyes went glassy as something else took hold.
"POWER THE TRAINS!" someone shouted desperately. "POWER THE TRAINS—NOW!"
Engines roared as engineers forced Axiom into unstable conduits. Steam vents burst open, scalding the air. The first train lurched forward, metal screaming as wheels bit into the rails.
People ran.
Some carrying wounded.
Some dragging the unresponsive.
Some simply running.
The Blight was faster.
It surged like a living thing, tendrils of corrupted flesh lashing outward, catching soldiers mid-stride and pulling them under. Screams cut off abruptly as Axiom signatures flatlined.
The creature moved again.
More of them did.
Shapes forming from the wave—humanoid outlines that broke apart and reformed with each step, bodies endlessly rearranging, adapting.
The trains began to move.
"STOP THE TRAIN! WE ARE STILL NOT ABOARD!" they screamed.
Hands pounded against armored doors as soldiers scrambled aboard. A man tripped near the platform, his leg already half-consumed. Another tried to pull him up—
The Blight surged.
Both his legs was cut-off, now gone.
The train accelerated.
The camp disappeared behind.
Not burning.
Not collapsing.
Being erased.
The red fleshy wave swallowed the last remaining lights. The creature stood amid the nothingness, its many twitching faces turning toward the retreating train.
It did not chase.
It did not need to.
The bells rang long after there was no one left to hear them.
The train thundered onward, carrying what little remained—toward the Grand Frontlines Main Base.
Toward whatever came next.
This was not a war.
This was survival on borrowed time.
And the Blight—
Had just reminded everyone who dictated the pace.