The forest erupted.
It wasn't a gradual thing; one moment, there was relative stillness beneath the Canopy, and the next, reality itself seemed to tear open. The explosion tore through the perimeter with the force of a collapsing mountain, sending dirt, stone, and charred wood skyward in a column of black smoke. Trees that had stood for decades snapped like kindling, their trunks splintering under the concussive blast.
When the dust settled, the devastation became clear.
The mercenaries, cheap hired muscle, the disposable soldiers, were scattered like broken toys across the scorched earth. Some were still moving, groaning, trying to push themselves upright. Others weren't moving at all.
Vega stood amid the chaos with the stillness of a monument. He was a mountain of a man, easily over two meters tall, with a frame that suggested he'd been carved from stone rather than born from flesh. His face was a study in controlled power, a strong, prominent jaw, eyes like flint, not a single wrinkle of concern etched into his features. Around him, his actual subordinates, five members of Cerberus, the core of this operation, remained largely intact, their discipline evident in the way they'd braced themselves for the blast.
One of the subordinates approached, his face darkened with soot, but his expression was professional. "Sir. The secondary charges in the western district have detonated as scheduled. The military is fully engaged."
Vega gave a single nod, then turned to face a small, circular mirror he'd produced from his cloak. The surface rippled, and a voice emerged, calm, feminine, carrying the weight of authority even through the magical transmission.
"You heard that?" Vega asked, his deep voice like grinding stone.
"Yes," the voice replied, "Just as we agreed. You will have your reward later. As for now, you're free to go."
The mirror went silent.
Vega shifted his gaze from the explosion they'd just conducted to the dark line of forest beyond. His instincts, honed through decades of combat, sent a warning through his nervous system. Something was coming.
"Search the perimeter," he ordered his subordinates, his tone leaving no room for debate. "Look for anyone trying to sneak in or spy. Move."
The Cerberus members scattered, moving with the efficiency of trained soldiers. The mercenaries, still dazed and disoriented, began to follow suit—
The world exploded again.
A figure burst from between the trees, ascending into the sky with a velocity that defied natural strength. In his hands, held aloft like an offering to some violent god, was a boulder. Not a small stone, a massive one, easily twice the size of a man's torso, its surface rough and irregular, pieces of earth still clinging to it.
The figure, Paul, a huge, muscular man with the bearing of a soldier, hurled it downward with casual power.
The mercenaries didn't have time to scream.
The boulder crashed down into their midst with the force of a meteor strike. Bodies were crushed, pulped, and scattered across the ground like discarded dolls. The sound was sickening, wet and final, and the dust cloud that rose seemed to hang in the air like a monument to sudden death.
When the dust cleared slightly, Paul stood atop the slowly settling stone, his massive frame silhouetted against the smoke and flame. His eyes swept across the field, cataloguing the destruction, trying to recognise the few bodies that remained relatively intact.
Behind Paul, soldiers emerged from the forest, approximately ten of them, his second half of the platoon that he'd kept with him during this push. Their uniforms marked them as Imperial military, their faces grim with the exhaustion of a long and brutal engagement. They fanned out across the clearing, weapons raised, eyes fixed on Vega and his four remaining subordinates, along with the few surviving mercenaires.
The numbers were barely equivalent now. The advantage had shifted dramatically.
Vega's expression didn't change. If he felt surprise, disappointment, or any other emotion, it didn't show on his carved stone face. He simply turned to his subordinates and spoke in a casual tone.
"The idiots died like worms." His gaze swept across the field one last time, cataloguing his losses with the dispassion of a ledger keeper. "There's no need for extra unpaid work. We extract ourselves."
"HEY! BIG GUY!" Paul's voice cut through the chaos like a whip crack.
Vega was already moving, but Paul was faster. The moment Vega turned, Paul charged across the field with the careless confidence of a man who'd won a thousand fights. When they collided, the impact sent a shockwave outward that scattered loose debris and made the remaining mercenaries stumble backwards.
The rest of Paul's soldiers, seeing their commander engage the enemy leader, sighed collectively, a gesture born of long experience and a deep understanding that Paul rarely made tactically sound decisions when he was this fired up, and turned their attention to Vega's subordinates.
What followed was a brutal dance of coordinated combat.
The Cerberus members were professionals, that much was immediately apparent; they moved with synchronised precision, their attacks flowing together like water, their defences covering gaps in each other's positioning. One of them, a woman with ice affinity, began casting intricate patterns that froze the air itself, creating barriers that the soldiers had to work around. Another, a man with earth magic, was constructing walls and pillars that fragmented the battlefield, breaking the soldiers' formation.
The third subordinate wielded a sword with the grace of someone who'd trained with it since childhood. He moved through the soldiers' lines like a knife through cloth, each strike finding its mark, each parry redirected incoming attacks with economical precision.
The fourth and fifth were support, one with fire magic that bloomed into sudden bursts of heat designed to disrupt concentration and magic casting, the other with wind affinity that could knock soldiers off their feet and scatter their formations.
Paul's soldiers were good. Military training showed in the way they adapted, the way they worked together despite the chaos. But Cerberus was what happened when you took talented people and turned them into weapons through years of brutal conditioning.
One of Paul's mages, a young fire caster named Torres, stepped forward to engage the ice mage, his flames meeting her frozen barriers in a contest of elements. For a moment, they were evenly matched, their attacks cancelling each other out, creating spirals of steam that rose into the already-choked air.
But Torres was flagging. He'd been casting since the bombardment began. His reserves were depleting faster than he could replenish them.
The ice mage seemed to sense this. Her next spell came faster, harder, less defensive and more aggressive. A spike of frozen water launched toward Torres's chest—
He managed to dodge, but barely; the ice spike passed close enough that he felt the cold radiating from it, felt the air crystallising around him. He threw up a wall of flame as a defensive measure, buying himself precious seconds, but his breathing was becoming laboured.
Meanwhile, another soldier, a swordsman named Kaine, was locked in combat with the opponent swordsman; they moved across the scorched earth in a lethal dance, their weapons ringing against each other with the clarity of bells. Kaine was good, Paul wouldn't have kept him on the roster otherwise, but his opponent was no joke. Each exchange saw Kaine being forced backwards a few steps, bleeding small cuts that accumulated like a death by a thousand wounds.
The earth mage, meanwhile, was causing problems for an entire squad. He was creating terrain that made it impossible to advance, walls that crumbled and reformed faster than the soldiers could adapt. One of the younger soldiers, trying to push through the shifting ground, lost his footing and fell hard, the wind knocked from his lungs.
The fire support from Cerberus, a lean man with wild eyes, was keeping the soldiers scattered; every time they tried to form a cohesive unit, another burst of flame would force them to break formation and scatter.
The battlefield became a slow, grinding series of tactical retreats. The soldiers were losing ground, not dramatically, not yet, but the trend was clear. The enemy was winning through attrition, through superior coordination, through the fact that they'd arrived prepared for exactly this kind of fight.
One of the soldiers, a mage with water affinity, managed a successful engagement. She caught the fire support specialist with a surge of pressurised liquid that drove him backwards, and he stumbled over debris and went down hard. The impact knocked the wind from him, and the soldier pressed her advantage, another wave of water crashing down—
But the enemy's wind mage intervened. A sudden gust sent the water spray in a completely different direction, and when the fire specialist recovered, he was still breathing.
That was when one of the Vega's subordinates, the one with earth magic, suddenly stopped mid-combat, his movements became sluggish, and his breathing came in ragged gasps.
For just a moment, one of Paul's soldiers thought they had him.
Then the subordinate reached into his tunic and produced a vial, the liquid inside seemed to shimmer with its own internal light, colours shifting across its surface like oil on water. The glass itself seemed to glow faintly, pulsing with a rhythm that reminded one observer of a heartbeat.
The subordinate uncorked it and drank.
The effect was instantaneous and shocking.
The exhaustion that had been weighing on him like a physical burden simply vanished. His slumped shoulders straightened. His breathing, which had been coming in desperate gasps, became steady and controlled. The tremor in his hands disappeared. When he raised his hands to cast again, the earth responded with the vigour of someone who'd just awakened from a full night's sleep.
"Incredible," he breathed, his voice carrying genuine amazement and something that might have been greed. "I've never felt anything work this fast. We should have gotten something like this months ago."
The other Cerberus members, seeing their comrade's sudden rejuvenation, quickly followed suit. Each of them produced their own vials from concealed locations, in boots, in sleeves, tucked into armour, and drank deeply.
The transformation was immediate across all of them.
The ice mage suddenly accelerated her casting, her frozen barriers becoming more complex, more aggressive. Torres fell back, coughing, completely overwhelmed.
The swordman moved with renewed speed, and Kaine suddenly found himself on the defensive for the first time, his superior training no match for raw speed amplified by whatever was in those vials.
The earth mage's terrain attacks became faster, more unpredictable, the ground shifting with barely a moment's delay between constructs.
Fire and wind support resumed with doubled intensity.
The soldiers looked at each other with dawning horror.
"They restored their mana!" Torres shouted, his voice cracking with disbelief and fear. "How is that even possible?!"
"Fall back! Fall back to—" another soldier tried to give orders, but there was nowhere to fall back to. They were surrounded. The Cerberus members pressed forward with predatory efficiency, suddenly moving with the speed and power of fresh combatants, and the soldiers found themselves being pushed backwards, losing ground meter by meter.
Panic rippled through the platoon like a physical wave.
One of the mages looked toward Paul, still locked in combat with Vega at the centre of the battlefield, and felt despair settle into his bones like ice water. Their commander was injured; they could see it even from a distance, the way he was moving slightly slower, the blood on his face, and if he fell to Vega, the rest of them would be slaughtered like animals.
But they had to hold, they had to keep Paul alive long enough for him to finish his fight.
Even if it meant pouring their remaining strength into attacks that would leave them vulnerable afterwards.
The soldiers steeled themselves and launched new spells, desperate, powerful, leaving mana veins straining at their absolute limits. The magical backlash burned through their bodies as they drew on reserves that were already nearly depleted; some of them coughed blood as the strain became too much, their vision swimming, their bodies screaming in protest.
But they kept casting, kept fighting, kept refusing to give ground.
The sound of their determination, the crackle of magic, the ring of steel, the wet sounds of injury and the defiant shouts of soldiers refusing to break, filled the clearing like a final stand.
At the centre of it all, Paul and Vega fought.
It was a pure physical confrontation, both men refusing to rely on weapons beyond their own bodies. Paul had initially preferred to keep his sword sheathed; he wanted information, wanted Vega alive and able to talk, but as the fight progressed and Vega's raw power became apparent, that restraint began to erode.
Vega was strong, inhumanly so. Each punch he threw moved with the velocity of a battering ram; his defences were almost flawless, his footwork precise despite his massive frame. He moved like someone who'd trained his entire life to be a weapon.
As for Paul, he was a platoon leader who'd survived combat situations that should have killed him a dozen times over. He understood leverage, timing, and the brutal efficiency of knowing exactly where to place force for maximum effect. He was injured, his left side screamed with pain where a stray spell had caught him earlier, his eyes were half-burned from the surrounding fire, his muscles screaming from exhaustion, but he was alive, and that's all he needed.
They traded blows across the battlefield, their fight creating its own small zone of destruction around them. Debris scattered with each impact. The ground cracked beneath their feet. Blood, Vega's and Paul's, both painted the scorched earth.
"You still want to keep up?" Paul spat out blood from his mouth, his smug smile still in place despite his injuries, his half-burned eyes glinting with dangerous amusement. "Your face started to look completely different after all my punches."
Vega didn't respond to the taunt, at least, not verbally; instead, he simply reached up and grabbed his own shoulder, which had been dislocated in one of Paul's strikes. With a movement that would have broken most men's arms, he popped it back into place. The sound was sickening, bone sliding across bone, but Vega's expression remained unchanged.
"There is also a good surprise coming to you," Vega said, his deep voice steady, almost conversational. He tilted his head slightly to his right.
Paul's attention flickered for just a moment toward the movement—
A severed head landed at his feet.
It belonged to one of his soldiers. Paul recognised the face even through the death mask, a young fire mage who'd been fighting one of Vega's subordinates just moments before, the eyes were empty, the expression frozen in an instant of shock and pain, after the head came the two remaining subordinates, moving with the desperate speed of soldiers who knew they were losing but still had one last move to play.
"I see... What a surprise," Paul said quietly, his smug expression hardening into something colder, something more dangerous. His hand moved to his sword hilt and drew the blade in one fluid motion. The weapon caught the firelight, its edge reflecting the flames surrounding them.
He was locked in now. The last restraints had fallen away.
"You should have accepted my offer," Vega said, his tone carrying a hint of what might have been mockery. "How unfortunate."
"I think you missed something," Paul raised his sword, his eyes, despite the burns, despite the exhaustion, suddenly sharp and focused with lethal clarity. "You are the one who missed his opportunity—Your life ends here."
The two mages attacked simultaneously, their elements, fire and earth, converging on Paul like a vice closing. Flames bloomed in brilliant orange crescents, and the ground beneath Paul's feet liquefied into mud that threatened to swallow him whole.
"Unfortunately, I don't have time for you" Paul didn't try to dodge; instead, he charged.
He ran straight through the fire, his skin blistering as the flames clung to him, and his sword came up in a vicious arc that caught the fire mage across the chest, the blade bit deep, and the mage's scream was swallowed by the roar of his own magic going chaotic, his concentration shattered by the sudden, agonising wound.
The earth mage's attack came a fraction of a second too late. Paul had already moved past the flames, his momentum carrying him forward, and he brought his sword down in a devastating overhead strike that cut clean through the stone walls the mage had been forming. The blade continued its trajectory and found flesh.
Paul yanked his sword free from the earth mage's chest, blood spraying across his half-burned face. His eyes, despite the damage to them, locked onto Vega with absolute clarity.
"I expected a rather stronger reaction," Paul said, his voice carrying the flat tone of a man operating on pure survival instinct and will.
"Nah, not at all," Vega replied, his voice still disturbingly calm. "These things are too easy to take care of."
The fire and earth mages, seeing their leader walk casually away from Paul's devastating strikes, seeing Paul emerge from the flames, broke and ran. They sprinted across the battlefield toward the forest, their discipline shattered, their will to fight evaporating in the face of something that seemed less like a soldier and more like a force of nature.
Vega didn't spare them a glance.
His focus remained entirely on Paul.
What followed was a blur of desperate combat. Paul, driven by something primal that had burned away all his restraint and caution, pressed forward with reckless aggression. Vega, seemingly unbothered by the loss of his subordinates, met him blow for blow, their confrontation becoming less a fight and more a test of will and endurance.
Paul could see the end of this fight approaching. He could see it in the way Vega's punches were coming slightly slower, in the tiny hesitation before each movement that suggested even this machine of a man was beginning to run out of energy.
It was now or never.
Vega swung his right arm in a massive haymaker, the movement carrying enough force to liquify Paul's skull if it connected. Paul saw it coming with the clarity born of desperation, saw the power coiled in that movement, saw the certainty of death if that punch landed.
At the last possible millisecond, he moved.
Not a dodge, exactly. More of a fall to the side, a controlled stumble that happened to move his head just far enough out of the way. Vega's fist screamed past him, missing by centimetres, and the force of the missed punch was so great that it tore through the ground, leaving a trench in the scorched earth.
Vega immediately tried to recover, tried to pull back and reset his stance—
But Paul was already moving. His right hand shot out and grabbed Vega by the hair, the only thing he could reach from this angle, and for a moment, the great stone of a man was off-balance, his momentum still carrying him forward, unable to fully retreat.
Paul's eyes, despite the damage to them, blazed with something primal and absolutely savage.
"If taking 'those things' is as easy as you claim..." His voice was low, guttural, barely human. He raised his right arm, and sparks, actual sparks, flew from the raw emotion in his eyes. "THEN—GIVE—THEM—BAAAAAAACK!!!!"
He rammed his fist into Vega's face with everything, everything, he had left.
The impact was catastrophic. Vega's head snapped backwards with a velocity that should have broken his neck. Blood exploded outward in a spray, and Paul slammed him to the ground with the force of his follow-through, driving the back of Vega's skull into the scorched earth.
Paul kept hitting, once, twice, a third time.
Vega's face caved inward. His teeth shattered, fragments flying out like shrapnel. His skull cracked audibly, a sound like breaking pottery amplified a thousandfold. Blood pooled around his head, mixing with dirt and ash, creating a slurry of red and black.
Only when Vega stopped moving entirely, when his body went completely limp, did Paul's fist finally come to rest, pressing into the corpse's destroyed face with one final, crushing moment of pressure.
Slowly, so slowly, Paul's hand lifted off the ground.
His entire body was threatening to collapse at any moment. His vision was nearly gone now, reduced to vague shapes and colours bleeding into each other. His breathing was laboured, each inhalation a conscious act of will, each exhalation a sound like wind through a broken pipe.
He forced himself to move, to step away from Vega's corpse, fumbling through the body until he found what he was looking for, a small device, circular and intricate, filled with faintly glowing runes, a Visar, the communication device Vega had used to coordinate with his handler.
It might be useful. Might contain information. Paul didn't have the luxury of time to examine it now.
He took a single step, then another—
His legs simply gave out.
He collapsed inward on himself, his massive frame crumpling like a puppet with cut strings. He managed to land on his back, his chest heaving as he tried to pull air into lungs that felt like they'd been sandpapered raw.
"No... I have to move..." His voice was barely a whisper now, cracked and broken. He tried to push himself upright, but his arms barely responded, the muscles screaming in protest, the joints threatening to give out entirely. What a bad day...
He lay there on the scorched earth, staring up at the sky that was beginning to clear as smoke drifted away on the wind. The stars were becoming visible now, constellations and distant galaxies slowly revealing themselves as the chaos below finally began to settle.
I wonder if these guys have other squads nearby, he thought, his eyes tracking across the celestial bodies. But the explosions have stopped... I wonder if Commander Johan will be angry with me.
His chest tightened. Not from pain, well, not only from pain, from something else, something heavier.
"Is this it for me?" His voice was small now, almost childlike. Is this how it ends?
He tried once more to lift his arms, but they wouldn't respond. His fingers went numb. A chill began to creep through his limbs, starting at the extremities and working inward. He recognised that chill. He'd seen it before, in the eyes of dying soldiers.
Death was a patient visitor, but it was here.
One last time, Paul forced his damaged eyes open to look up at the sky above him. The celestial bodies hung there like diamonds scattered across black velvet. The constellations seemed to tell stories, ancient tales written in starlight. For just a moment, as his consciousness began to drift, Paul could swear the stars seemed deliberately arranged, each one positioned with careful, intentional precision.
...What a beautiful night... His eyes drifted closed.
...
...
The sound of footsteps pierced the silence that had begun to settle over the battlefield. They were careful, deliberate, the steps of someone picking their way through a war zone with practised ease.
Evelyn Kane emerged from the smoke like a ghost materialising out of mist. Her uniform was pristine, untouched by ash or blood, as if she'd been standing outside the battlefield observing rather than participating. Her grey eyes swept across the corpses and wounded without the slightest flicker of surprise or disgust.
She approached Paul's form without urgency, her gaze lingering on Vega's destroyed face for a fraction of a second, not in horror or revulsion, but with the clinical assessment of someone checking their work. Not that I was underestimating him, but to think he would actually win.
Then her eyes moved to the Visar, still clutched loosely in Paul's hand.
Without hesitation, without checking whether Paul was alive or dead, she knelt and carefully retrieved the device, tucking it into her uniform with the same care a merchant might use to pocket a valuable coin.
She stood, took one last look at the battlefield, at the surviving, barely alive, soldiers who were trying to stand and move, while other are either dead or unconscious, at the dead scattered across the scorched earth, at Paul's motionless form, and then she turned and walked back toward the camp, disappearing into the smoke as silently as she'd arrived.
Behind her, in the ruins of the battlefield, Paul's chest continued to rise and fall with shallow, barely perceptible movements.
The beautiful night sky continued its silent rotation overhead, indifferent to the drama below.