Sylvia gave a short, rigid nod. She didn't speak. The cold, calculating fury returning to her pale violet eyes said enough. She expected her shadow to do his job, and Revan had no intention of dying in this frozen wasteland.
He turned and vaulted through the jagged opening in the carriage wall, his boots hitting the icy ground outside.
As he landed, a sharp, stinging protest flared through his ribs and thighs. He was nowhere near his prime condition. The lingering side effects of the elixir he had consumed last week had forced his cells into a state of continuous, agonizing regeneration, leaving his core vitality completely drained. To make matters worse, the brutal beating he had endured just two nights ago still echoed deeply in his bones.
Elara's healing magic had mended his torn flesh, but his internal Aura flow remained fractured and highly unstable. His muscles felt like overextended bowstrings, ready to snap at the slightest misuse.
'I can't play the speedster today,' Revan analyzed, his breathing shallow.
'Extracting Aura for a high-speed blitz will tear my muscle fibers apart before the enemies even touch me.'
He was no longer the blunt instrument he used to be. Today, he had to be a scalpel.
The Ashenmoor Corridor had turned into a slaughterhouse.
The surviving Vespera guards had formed a desperate half-circle around the derailed train, firing short-barreled carbines to hold back the tide of black-armored attackers pouring down from the ridge. The air was thick with the smell of gunpowder and fresh blood.
Revan dropped into a low crouch just as a stray bullet whistled toward his head. In a move that would have looked like a blur to any onlooker, he didn't dive for cover. He simply tilted his head by a fraction of an inch and whipped his blade upward.
Clink.
The mundane steel caught the lead projectile mid-air, shearing it perfectly in half. The two fragments whistled harmlessly past his ears. It wasn't a move of brute power, but of terrifying, economy-of-motion precision.
'Don't waste a single heartbeat,' he told himself.
Revan didn't sprint; he flowed. He moved through the chaos like a ghost, his dark eyes cataloging every threat.
Near the front, Marshal Dain was an engine of destruction. The scarred giant wielded his massive broadsword with terrifying momentum, cleaving through armor, flesh, and bone in single, sweeping strikes. A few yards away, Cassian Voss moved with a bored elegance, crushing throats with his pristine white-gloved hands.
'The frontline will hold,' Revan noted.
But as his eyes scanned past the chaos, he noticed a smaller, highly disciplined squad of attackers detaching from the main assault force. They were sprinting silently through the shadows, completely ignoring the VIP carriage. Their target was the sealed cargo wagons at the very rear.
They were carrying heavy, hexagonal breaching charges.
Revan didn't shout a warning. He simply intercepted them.
The first saboteur raised a rifle, but before his finger could even squeeze the trigger, Revan was already inside his guard. There was no flashy dash, just a single, perfectly timed step forward. Revan's blade flashed—a silver line drawn in a blink—and the man's throat opened before he realized Revan had moved.
Revan didn't even look at the falling body. He was already spinning toward the second.
The second attacker lunged with a heavy trench bayonet. Revan didn't try to block the heavy strike head-on. He simply pivoted his hip, letting the blade brush past his coat, and used the man's own forward momentum to guide his sword tip straight into the narrow gap of the helmet's visor.
One breath. Two deaths.
His movements were hauntingly quiet. He wasn't relying on the explosive speed he usually used to overwhelm opponents. Instead, he was reading their intentions before they even fully formed. He cut through the air only when necessary, his blade moving in the shortest possible distance to find a lethal mark.
To the guards watching, it looked as if the attackers were simply running into Revan's blade and dying.
A third saboteur roared, thrusting a heavy spear toward Revan's chest. The impact of the parry vibrated painfully up Revan's strained arm. These weren't common bandits; their physical strength was highly trained.
The spearman advanced, unleashing a rapid flurry of thrusts. Revan retreated two steps, his eyes entirely focused on the rhythm of the weapon. He waited for the spear to fully extend, then sharply struck the wooden shaft near the tip, diverting the weapon straight into the frozen dirt.
With the attacker's guard thrown wide open, Revan stepped in close and slashed his blade across the man's neck.
Revan stood over the bodies, his chest heaving, the freezing air burning his lungs. Every fiber of his being screamed for rest, the aftereffects of the constant regeneration finally taking their toll. He wiped a streak of blood from his cheek and looked at the cargo wagon.
***
His reprieve lasted exactly three seconds.
A sharp, two-tone whistle cut through the howling wind, piercing the chaotic din of the battlefield. Revan's dark eyes narrowed. The attackers weren't mindless thugs or desperate mercenaries; they were a highly organized paramilitary force. Seeing their elite saboteurs drop so quickly didn't incite panic within their ranks. It incited a calculated tactical shift.
From the shadows of the snowy ridge overlooking the rear carriages, a fresh squad descended. Fifteen men this time. But it was their synchronized formation that made Revan's blood run cold.
Six of them dropped to one knee in a staggered line, raising long-barreled rifles to establish a deadly suppression zone. The other nine, heavily armored and wielding a brutal mix of halberds, trench swords, and thick tower shields, advanced in a tight, overlapping phalanx. It was textbook combined-arms tactics: ranged suppression covering a heavy infantry advance.
"Concentrated fire! Pin him down!" a voice barked from the ridge.
'How incredibly flattering,' Revan grumbled inwardly as the ridge suddenly lit up with a blinding series of muzzle flashes.
'I really need to start charging extra for this level of VIP treatment.'
Of course
Revan didn't try to parry a volley. Doing so would shatter his already strained wrists. He dropped instantly, rolling harshly across the frozen earth as a storm of bullets chewed up the mud and sparked violently against the steel wheels of the train car behind him. He scrambled behind the lifeless body of the spearman he had just killed, using the thick iron breastplate of the corpse as a makeshift sandbag.
Thud. Thud. CRACK.
Heavy lead rounds sank into the dead meat shielding him, jerking the corpse with sickening impacts. Revan gritted his teeth, feeling the sheer force transfer through the body and straight into his own bruised ribs.
He took a shallow, agonizing breath, his hyper-focused mind calculating angles, velocities, and distances.
'Six shooters, roughly forty yards out, staggered formation to prevent a single line of attack. Nine melee fighters closing in fast, twenty yards and shrinking. They are moving in perfect sync. The moment the shooters reload, the phalanx will charge. If I stay pinned, they'll flank and turn me into a pincushion. If I run, the firing squad will tear me to shreds.'
He had to break their synergy. He had to introduce pure chaos into their perfect order.
Revan closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, feeling the sluggish, constrained flow of his internal Aura. He couldn't afford a full-body enhancement; the Dead Zone's suppression was like a physical vice around his chest, punishing any external manifestation of energy. He channeled a thread-thin stream of Aura strictly into his calves and his right shoulder. It felt like forcing boiling water through a frozen pipe.
"Advance!" the enemy commander yelled.
The gunfire paused for exactly one point five seconds as the shooters cycled their bolt-action rifles.
That was Revan's window.
He kicked the heavy corpse forward, sending it sliding across the ice toward the advancing shield wall to disrupt their footing, and launched himself in the opposite direction. He didn't run straight; he moved in a jagged, entirely unpredictable zigzag, keeping his center of gravity dangerously low to the ground.
Crack! Crack!
Bullets whipped past his trailing coat. One grazed his left shoulder, tearing fabric and biting deeply into the skin, but Revan didn't even flinch. His pain tolerance had been forcibly recalibrated by days of brutal beatings.
He reached into the hidden folds of his coat. He had meticulously prepared for this exact limitation. His shadow storage was an artifact powered entirely by mana constructs.
Under the absolute suppression of the Dead Zone, the item was completely dead, its spatial magic crushed by the environment. Stripped of his magical inventory, Revan had relied on the most primitive, foolproof solution: physically lining the inside of his coat with hidden tactical pockets and leather sheaths.
His left hand reappeared holding four black kunai.
He didn't throw them with raw power. He used the immense momentum of his sprint, snapping his wrist in a complex, twisting motion that required absolute anatomical precision. The four blades vanished into the dark, whistling silently through the freezing air.
Forty yards away, the firing line faltered. The first kunai embedded itself to the hilt in the throat of the leftmost shooter. The second pierced the eye lens of the man next to him. The third caught a shooter in the firing shoulder, forcing him to drop his weapon with a howl of pain. The fourth ricocheted off an iron helmet, but the impact was enough to ruin the sniper's aim.
The covering fire broke completely.
But Revan's forward momentum had carried him directly into the path of the nine melee fighters.
They roared, breaking their shield wall to swarm him, confident in their overwhelming numerical advantage. A massive halberd came crashing down from the right, aiming to cleave Revan in two, while a trench sword thrust upward from the left to gut him.
Revan slid on the ice, bending his knees so deeply his back almost touched the ground. The heavy halberd blade swept mere inches above his nose, the displaced air ruffling his hair. Before the attacker could recover from the massive overswing, Revan drove the pommel of his steel sword upward in a devastating uppercut, crushing the man's kneecap.
As the giant man collapsed with a scream, Revan used the falling body as a springboard, launching himself into the dead center of the formation.
Surrounded by eight armored killers, speed was no longer a viable option. His muscles were burning. This was about leverage, positioning, and absolute ruthlessness.
A swordsman thrust at Revan's side. Revan parried with the flat of his blade, stepping neatly inside the attacker's guard. Instead of striking, Revan grabbed the man's wrist, twisted it violently, and redirected the enemy's sword so that it pierced the thigh of another attacker charging from behind.
The wounded man screamed, dropping his guard. Revan didn't hesitate. He spun, his blade tracing a lethal silver arc that separated the screaming man's head from his shoulders.
Six left.
They realized their fatal mistake. Fighting in a tight circle meant their long weapons were getting tangled, while Revan, wielding a single, perfectly balanced sword, was using their own bodies to block their attacks.
"Spread out! Encircle him!" one of them yelled.
"Too late," Revan whispered, his voice cold and flat.
He stepped into the guard of the closest man, ignoring a glancing blow from a shield that bruised his ribs. Revan jammed the crossguard of his sword under the man's chin, using his left hand to grab the back of the enemy's heavy helmet, and twisted violently. A sickening snap echoed loudly over the wind.
Revan shoved the limp body into two other attackers, throwing them completely off balance. He didn't give them a microsecond to recover. He closed the distance in two precise, measured steps. A thrust through the armpit gap of a breastplate. A clean slash across an exposed throat. A brutal kick to a shattered knee, followed by a downward plunge of his blade into the falling man's neck.
Blood sprayed across the pristine white snow, turning the frozen earth into a horrifying, muddy crimson.
The final two attackers backed away, their eyes wide with sheer terror behind their iron visors. This wasn't a fight. It was an execution. They dropped their weapons and turned to run back toward the ridge.
Revan didn't chase them. He didn't have the stamina left to hunt. He let them disappear into the blizzard.
The last body hit the ground with a heavy, metallic thud.
Silence, save for the distant sounds of Dain and Cassian still fighting at the front of the train, reclaimed this section of the battlefield.
His legs trembled uncontrollably, threatening to give out completely. The localized Aura bursts had kept him alive, but the physical backlash was immediate and agonizing.
He leaned heavily on his sword, using the blood-stained steel as a cane to keep himself upright.
'If I don't get massive overtime pay for this, I'm quitting,' Revan cursed inwardly, his sarcastic inner monologue the only thing keeping his mind sharp through the overwhelming wave of pain.
He spat a glob of blood onto the snow. He slowly wrenched his sword free from the frozen mud, intending to drag his battered body back toward the VIP carriage to regroup.
But as the ringing in his ears began to fade, a new sensation replaced it.
A low-frequency vibration hummed through the soles of his boots. It was a deep, rhythmic thumping—like a massive, heavy heartbeat—and it was coming from the very end of the train.
Revan slowly turned his head.
The complex sealing runes painted in dried blood across the iron doors of the final cargo wagon weren't dormant anymore. They were faintly pulsing with a sickly, crimson light. And from deep inside the reinforced steel box, cutting clearly through the howling blizzard, came the slow, agonizing sound of heavy claws dragging against metal.
Scritch. Scritch. SCRATCH.
Revan stared at the vibrating doors, his shoulders dropping as he let out a long, exhausted sigh.
"Oh, fuck me."